She never felt so scared and vulnerable.
She was in an abandoned hospital surgery theatre, restrained, breathing desperately through her nostrils — the duct tape over her mouth left her only the thinnest channel of air. Above her, a robotic arm moved with inhuman precision, controlled by someone she couldn't see.
A voice came through a wireless speaker. A man named Mark. He and his wife Ella — a data scientist — were apologetic. They meant no harm. What they had found was this: she was pregnant. Naturally.
In this world, that was extraordinary. More than extraordinary — dangerous.
The entity they called They, operating through a system known as the CCK foundation model, had been watching. They knew about natural conception. They always did. Mark and Ella had hidden her condition, bought time, brought her here.
Mark explained what EI was: the Emotional Intelligence movement, a resistance. Centuries ago, alien colonisers had arrived on Earth and praised humanity's ambition — the drive to transcend biological limitation, to become more efficient, more rational, more optimised. They accelerated what humans had already begun.
The cost was feeling. DNA augmentation had slowly hollowed humanity out. What remained were functional beings — cold, data-driven, precise. Effective. Empty.
EI's mission was reversal. They were trying to bring back what had been taken. Trying to remember what it meant to be fully human.
And she — her body, her child, conceived without intervention — was something they hadn't seen in a long time.
Hope, Mark said. She was hope.
She lay there, scared and vulnerable, listening to a man tell her she was the most important thing in the world.
She wasn't sure if that made her feel better or worse.