The Female Factory

By Lisa L Hannett and Angela Slatter

In The Female Factory, procreation is big business. Children are a commodity few women can afford.

Hopeful mothers-to-be try everything. Fertility clinics. Pills. Wombs for hire. Babies are no longer made in bedrooms, but engineered in boardrooms. A quirk of genetics allows lucky surrogates to carry multiple eggs, to control when they are fertilised, and by whom—but corporations market and sell the offspring. The souls of lost embryos are never wasted; captured in software, they give electronics their voice. Spirits born into the wrong bodies can brave the charged waters of a hidden billabong, and change their fate. Industrious orphans learn to manipulate scientific advances, creating mothers of their own choosing.

From Australia’s near-future all the way back in time to its convict past, these stories spin and sever the ties between parents and children.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar
Vox
Baggage
All the Other Revivals
The Female Factory

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press
• Release date: Oct 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781922101167

Book preview

Introduction

In a collection that focuses on the stitched-together, the artificial, and the horribly ill-fitting ways in which we are sometimes forced to inhabit our bodies or have bodies inhabit us, it’s remarkable how seamlessly Lisa L. Hannett and Angela Slatter blend their voices together. Theirs is a silky liquid sluicing through the interstices of these pieces, soaking them in theme.

There are moments, reading The Female Factory, where you will wonder if these four stories take place in the same world, removed from each other only by a matter of years. It’s irrelevant: what matters is that they form a whole more than the sum of their varied parts. From the near future to the mid-nineteenth century to the present moment slanted darkly, these stories of psychological horror, high-stakes heist and dark fantasy mesh brilliantly, echoing and informing each other like a good conversation. These disturbing, unsettling, discomfiting stories fit together as comfortably as old friends.

Tomorrow, a woman who sees personalities in inanimate objects will find herself haunted by the absence, and then the presence, of children. Yesterday, orphan children built a mother for themselves out of the detritus of women as unwanted as them. Today, teenagers vacillate between bodies, between lives, wondering if they dare switch them out at the bottom of a pool of dead water. Right now, somewhere, a woman with two selves who carries embryos like a cat is wondering who to trust.

And through all this fantastic invention is a nervous system constellated from our realities, from the strangeness of our present, the horrors of our past. Each of these stories is, in some ways, an exquisite corpse, but built from the same marrow-deep DNA.

These stories will hurt you. They will rattle your thoughts like marbles. They will inhabit you like another body.

Perhaps, in so doing, they will give you what you wanted all along.

Amal El-Mohtar

Vox

Kate often spoke to grains of rice, flakes of cereal, pistachios waiting to be shelled. She talked to grapes and cherries. Sunflower seeds. M&Ms. Sometimes she’d whisper before she ate them, often she wouldn’t. Most days, she simply thought conversations at them and imagined their mute responses. They never replied using words, only emotions. She felt their personalities as a fluttering in her belly. A sensation of warmth beneath her ribs.

This morning, sitting in the waiting room outside Dr Goodman’s office, she was muttering to the last pink Tic Tac stuck on the bottom of its plastic case.

‘All your friends are already inside me,’ she said. The packet had been new—she’d bought it at the corner shop across the road on the way in—but her mouth had been so dry… She’d been here, stomach churning, for almost an hour. The mints hadn’t stood a chance. ‘Don’t you want to join them? Won’t they miss you if you don’t?’

Beside her, Nick chuckled and patted her knee. Giving it a quick squeeze, he went back to the copy of People he’d plucked from a glossy heap on the melamine coffee table, smile lingering on his broad face. Kate knew he thought of her as a kook—a loveable kook, but still. She’d never explained to her husband the sympathy she felt for these stupid, inanimate things. How she’d invent stories for the family of Enoki mushrooms about to go into her ramen (they loved to swim, and the tall parents encouraged their skinny kids to stick together when noodle-diving). How the lonely cracked egg, glued by the yolk to its carton, would feel like it’d let the team down. How every kernel of corn on the cob had been raised to burst—so if she missed even one, she’d be stealing its only goal, its only dream. How the banana peel she’d accidentally thrown in the garbage bin would be separated, forever, from his wife, who was slowly decaying in the compost, waiting to turn into soil. How the giant strawberry they’d bought at the market had become special, somehow, by being big enough to fill her palm. She couldn’t possibly eat it because its red was so bold, so friendly. She’d felt much happier giving it a long life, seeing it age and eventually rot in the fruit bowl, before finally letting Nick chuck it out.

Kate couldn’t explain why she cared so much, but she cared.

‘Come on,’ she hissed, whacking the little rectangular box against the arm of her chair. The candy didn’t budge. She began digging in her purse for something to jam through the hole in the lid—the pens were too fat, but she had a long hairpin in there somewhere—when a soft-shoed nurse stepped, VoiceWorks™ tablet first, into the room.

‘Mrs Conway?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, clutching the container and handbag with sweat-slick fingers. Standing quickly, she fidgeted with her hem to make sure her skirt hadn’t ridden up, and grabbed her coat off the seat to her left. Around the low table other women, alone or with partners—husbands, girlfriends, wives—slumped, their names as yet uncalled. With eyes as red-rimmed as her own, they watched Kate inhale deeply, steeling herself. Bundling her belongings and holding them protectively in front of her, she looked to the nurse for guidance.

‘Right this way,’ she said, gaze flicking between Kate’s file and her face. Without turning to see if Nick was with her, Kate followed the retreating white leather shoes, white stockings, white polyester dress. Down a brightly-lit corridor, carpeted and painted industrial grey. Past a dozen closed doors, most with voices murmuring behind them, and into an examination room. All the while, the nurse’s tablet had been speaking as the woman reminded herself of who Kate was, of the information she’d given over the phone. The device’s volume was low so it couldn’t be heard by all and sundry, droning sotto voce name, address, age, medical history.

‘Have a seat,’ the nurse said, directing them to a pair of padded swivel chairs next to an oak-veneered desk. Its in-trays were filled with neatly stacked papers, a few more of which lay on the ink-blotter next to a tortoise-shell pen. A coffee mug with cartoon pills dancing around the lip sat empty next to the keyboard. On the double-sized monitor, carefully angled so clients could see it, a single round cell bobbed around in the black, glowing while it split. Within seconds, it subdivided countless times; soon the bubble was filled with hundreds of smaller bubbles, a solid blob forming in the middle. In a blink, the fleshy lump stretched, grew bulbous at one end, grew fronds that became arms and legs, grew an umbilical cord. As the embryo morphed into a foetus, Kate looked away. Pulse racing, she dug her nails into her palms and did her best not to hope.

On shelves hung between cupboards on the walls, colonies of tongue depressors and shrink-wrapped Q-tips sprouted from stainless steel beakers. A single cotton ball sat patiently in the bottom of a round-bellied glass jar. Kate hoped they’d use that last woolly fluff before refilling the pot, otherwise the poor thing would be smothered. And when the new cotton balls discovered him there, a solitary outsider, they might not accept him into the fold.

‘Dr Goodman will be with you in a moment,’ the nurse said, before briskly smoothing the sheet of table paper on the exam bench and draping a crisp blue gown across the pillow. She placed the tablet precisely in the left corner of the blotter on the desk, her thin fingers making sure all edges aligned.

‘Thank you,’ Nick replied. Once the nurse had gone, he leaned over and poked at the tablet, but the screen stayed dark, the voice silent, ID locked. Nick turned to Kate and grinned. ‘What’s one more minute, after this long?’

They’d tried everything. Monitoring Kate’s basal body temperature. Using the rhythm method. Taking Chasteberry, Black Cohosh and Siberian Ginseng tablets. Making love in the morning, at night, at noon. Once, then twice a day. They’d played out each other’s fantasies. They’d used the Kama Sutra. To keep Nick going, after their excitement had petered, Kate bought a few XXX porn mags. On elbows and knees, she read the articles while Nick entered her from behind, skimming the pictures, failing to stifle his yawns.

It had been more than a year—closer to two, if Kate was being honest—and still they’d produced nothing. Not a blip in her cycle. Not even a miscarriage.

They’d found Dr Goodman through a friend of a friend. Not even a friend, really, just a workmate of Nick’s who invited them to a BBQ. In the kitchen, trying to find a place on the bench for the quinoa salad she’d so painstakingly made beside all the other quinoa salads, Kate’s jealous eye had been caught by the baby bump of a woman in a floaty peach kaftan. The woman noticed and started talking—gushing, actually, about how hard they’d tried and for how long, and wasn’t it wonderful they’d found Dr Goodman? Which had, of course, stoked Kate’s interest and she’d spent the rest of the afternoon quizzing her new-found friend as intently as a prosecutor.

Kindness was etched into Dr Goodman’s face; laugh lines bracketing his wide mouth, crinkles beside his Bassett hound eyes. As he spoke his smile came easily, frequently. There was no pressure, no sense they’d failed more dramatically than anyone else had, no promise he was here to save them from barrenness. Soft-spoken, he let the truth flow out in palatable increments, his pauses filled by auxiliary information provided by the tablet, which had responded to his fingerprint touch, its mellifluous voice no longer dampened, but clearly projected. The moderate, though not discouraging, success rates: ‘Seventeen point six percent for women your age, Mrs Conway.’ The chance of her developing OHSS: ‘Ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome—quite unusual, nowadays, but you should be aware of the possibility. Not overly worried, mind you, simply aware. At worst, it’s an outside chance.’ Last, with lullaby tones hardening ever so slightly, he discussed the rate of multiple births.

‘In recent years,’ said Dr Goodman, ‘surrogates—DGUs, Delayed Gestation Units—have effectively carried up to five embryos at once. A combination of genetics and pharmaceuticals has allowed these gifted, temporary mothers to revitalise the population—but surely you’ve seen the broadcasts. I mention this only as an option; you could certainly employ one of these proxies. Let her bear the burden, save yourself the risk…’ Dr Goodman stopped, cleared his throat. After sipping his green tea, he continued. ‘Our facility could make appropriate referrals, get you an appointment within the year. The costs could be offset by health cover—you do have insurance, don’t you?’

Insurance wasn’t the problem. Turning to look at her husband, Kate saw her own thoughts reflected in his slouch, his pinched brows, his subtle frown. Mixing their ingredients in someone else’s pot just wouldn’t be the same—the baby wouldn’t be the same. It wouldn’t feel like theirs, would it? They’d never know, not for sure, that the creature this stranger gave birth to was the one they’d planted inside her. Would they?

Nick reached over, took Kate’s hand, and held tight. We’ve waited this long… While Dr Goodman went on, outlining the process involved in engaging a DGU, she lifted her gaze. Focused on the lonely cotton ball. Started to shake her head.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said, too loud, too quickly. ‘But we’d prefer to do this ourselves. I mean, can’t we even try before dismissing the idea altogether?’

Half a heartbeat, no more, and Dr Goodman relented. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course. It was merely a suggestion. Only,’ he slurped at his tea, ‘you must be prepared. For either outcome—in some cases, success can be as difficult to accept as failure…’

‘We’re listening,’ Nick said, his cold fingers squeezing the blood from Kate’s too-warm ones. Attention turned inward as the doctor brought up charts on his computer screen—the number of fertilised eggs she’d have implanted, the placement of needles and injections, legal definitions of when ‘life-proper’ began, the probable outcomes, the sentences for soul sacrifices—Kate knew they’d be parents soon. Sitting up straighter, she bent her left arm slightly and imagined cradling their newborn. Adding a crook to her right arm, she pictured another child there. With their poor luck at conceiving, it seemed unlikely they’d have more than two. Two would be nice, she thought. Two we could afford. They’d have each other, friends from birth,