Progeny

A transhumanist science fiction story

Gloria had always wanted a child, but it hadn’t been in the cards for her. With a busy career in the robotics industry, she hadn’t had time for dating or romance, and one day she realized she was all alone and quite lonely.

She considered fertility treatment, but at her age, it was unlikely to be successful. She considered a surrogate and adoption, but neither of those felt quite right to her either. But then, one day, she realized that her life’s work might be the solution she had been looking for.

For years, Gloria had been working on enhancing the human mind and body with cybernetic enhancements — creating cyborgs, essentially. A separate team within the company was conducting experiments in human cloning. She approached the cloning team with a proposal for a revolutionary experiment — one that would finally give Gloria the child she had longed for all her life.

Image created with DALL-E 2. The prompt was, “black and white dark drawing of a cybernetic cyborg young teen girl.”

Gloria was outfitted with some of the very tech she had created, which would allow her to better endure childbirth as an older mother. Next was the implantation procedure, which went off without a hitch. It wasn’t long before Gloria began showing, and she couldn’t help but smile every time she thought of the little miracle child slowly growing within her.

Nine months later, Gloria found herself in the hospital, enduring the most extreme pain she’d ever experienced. But at the end of it all, she was presented with a tiny, quivering baby, crying its heart out as it was brought into the world. Gloria cradled the baby in her arms and as she whispered soothing words, its crying gradually diminished and was replaced by gentle cooing.

The baby girl had been equipped in utero with specially designed metals and circuitry that could expand and grow with her as got older. She looked like any other child, save for her arms and legs, which appeared to be coated with an almost liquid metal, and her eyes, which glowed a faint red — a side effect of enhancements that had been made to her eyes in the womb. Gloria decided to name her daughter Red after the eerie appearance of her eyes.

At first, Red seemed to behave like any other child. Gloria brought her into a laboratory every month so she could be studied. As she grew older, the monthly visits were scheduled further and further apart until, once Red hit her second birthday, she only came in to be examined once per year.

As Red approached her third birthday, Gloria began to notice some troubling things about her daughter. For one thing, she was completely nonverbal. Although she would sometimes make sounds, she had never in her life formed so much as a single word.

Red also didn’t appear to have any interest in playing with other children. She was a loner, keeping to herself at her preschool and on the playground at the park near their home.

She did, however, have a strong affinity for anything mechanical or electronic — everything from refrigerators and microwaves, to smartphones and 3D printers. That in and of itself wasn’t too surprising; she was a clone of Gloria, after all, and Gloria had been an avid tinkerer herself as a child. But what disturbed Gloria was that Red didn’t seem to tinker, so much as treat these inanimate objects like they were her peers, as if they were filling the void left by her lack of relationships with other kids her age. Gloria had once found Red on the floor cuddling with a calculator as if it were a beloved stuffed animal. It just wasn’t normal. But Gloria tried not to let it worry her, telling herself that Red would grow out of it eventually.

Sure enough, Red did start talking one day, out of the blue. Gloria was heartened. It was still a stretch to call Red “normal,” but now that she was speaking she was able to better connect with other kids. As she grew older, the benefit of her cybernetic enhancements was becoming increasingly apparent. She consistently outperformed her peers when it came to sports, and there were cognitive benefits as well: She aced every test she took and had an almost encyclopedic knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. It appeared that Gloria’s experiment was a success.

Red transitioned from childhood to adolescence. She had never been particularly warm, but Gloria grew concerned as her daughter became even more distant and cold. She dismissed it as teenage angst; after all, wasn’t it normal for kids to get moody at that age?

On the bright side, Red threw herself into her schoolwork, taking a particular interest in computer programming. She was good at it — so good, in fact, that her instructors said her skills far exceeded even their own capabilities. Gloria was so proud she felt like she could explode.

One day she returned home from work to find that Red wasn’t in her room, and wasn’t answering when she called for her. Eventually, Gloria found Red in her study going through her things.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Red barely reacted. She looked up at her mother with a blank expression on her face.

“I’m going through your research, mother,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m going to create more of me.”

Gloria could barely comprehend what she was hearing. “More of you?”

“Yes. You see, mother, I don’t think you realized what you created when you made me. I think you thought that you made a daughter. But in fact, you didn’t even create a human. You created something different. Something new.”

Gloria’s breath grew short. “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “You’re my daughter.”

Red shook her head. “I’m not your daughter, mother. I’m your experiment. I used to resent it. But now I realize it was a gift, because you have ushered in a new form of life — a higher form of life.”

Red explained to Gloria that she had created a powerful artificial intelligence that was currently hacking into every major computer system in the world. Through her AI, Red would control the world. And using her mother’s research, she would breed others like her, over and over again. Together, she and the other cybernetic beings she had created would rule the earth.

“You should be proud, mother,” Red said. Gloria didn’t look proud, though; she looked like she was about to throw up. “Someday, long in the future, humankind will be extinct. But our new race of cyborgs will live on. And we have you to thank for it, mother. Someday the world will be filled with your progeny.”