Scully had considered returning to her former position at Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital—particularly given her own need for medical treatment—but had elected not to do so. Unassisted conception at her age might not be unprecedented, but it was statistically extremely improbable. If her body had been tampered with in any way, she had to consider the possibility that the tampering had occurred at the hospital where she’d spent so much time. Mulder more than considered it; he had even spoken of confronting the staff there, demanding answers. Scully had managed to talk him out of this largely by seeking work elsewhere, which had led her to her position with Genomica, a place that presented its own risks, but also potential.
Genomica could have easily passed for a billion-dollar tech start-up with its sleek offices and clinic, every diagnostic device state of the art. Certainly it superficially resembled many other medical technology companies, down to the fervor of its research initiatives. However, its mission was to diagnose and treat rare genetic diseases and disorders, those so rare that no national health service could afford to expend resources upon them, and no larger pharmaceutical companies would be moved to curiosity by the hope of profit. Funding for Genomica came primarily from its founder/sponsor, Troy Alexiares, a tech-bro billionaire who—between cruising the Mediterranean on his gargantuan yacht and dating various starlets—either wished to do good works or at least wanted to be known for them. Potential PR disasters vanished the instant Alexiares’s reps could release a photo of him with one of the small children whose life his charity had saved.
Scully didn’t relish her role in this whitewashing, but Alexiares wasn’t the one who mattered. The children were more important than the source of the funds needed to help them. Nor could she feel guilty about her personal motivations—even if she did have to keep them secret.
So all ought to have been well. Scully got to do the exact kind of work that she’d been drawn to at Our Lady of Sorrows, as performed with more money, more tech, more of a sense of possibility. And Genomica gave her a chance to pursue her own vital interests.
The problem with Genomica wasn’t technological or moral. It was human.
Her first patient had been Neena Prasad, age three. Neena’d had no idea that she was lucky to still be ambulatory at three years old, and she’d toddled forward happily when Scully gestured toward the foam blocks and play mat in one corner of her office. Her parents, however, had known the odds, and the weariness and fear Scully had seen in their eyes pierced her through.
“You’ve no idea what it’s like,” said Mr. Prasad in a low voice as Neena happily began stacking. His hair had prematurely grayed at the temples. “Knowing something is wrong with your child, something nobody understands, something almost never before seen in the world—”
“I do know.” Scully had kept her voice gentle as she delivered the edited version of her history, the one simple enough for patients to hear, simple enough for her not to have to dwell upon: “I had a son with extreme genetic anomalies. He’s no longer with me, but the work I do here helps other children have better outcomes.”
Mr. Prasad had looked mortified, as though he’d somehow embarrassed himself. His wife, however, simply reached her hand across the desk to grasp Scully’s. Their eyes met, and Scully had felt humbled by the compassion given by someone in so much fear and pain.
Her role in Neena’s care had been a simple one, relatively speaking: Rather than working directly in genetic research, Scully had taken a job as a general practitioner to Genomica patients—to make sure that any other medications or procedures would be compatible with the genetic treatment they received. She had told the Prasads that she’d be there to guide Neena’s care as she matured. Implicit in this was the promise that their little girl would mature, that she’d have a future, one worth protecting.
“The goal is for her to lead a long, happy, healthy life,” Scully had said to the Prasads. “That means we need to set her up for success in every possible way.” As she spoke, she’d seen the parents relax ever so slightly. This, surely, was her single most important duty: giving them some reason to hope.
Scully had sent them away at the end by handing Neena a sheet of shiny stickers. As the Prasads had walked down the corridor, the little girl in her mother’s arms, the stickers were already being applied to cheeks, elbows, even her laughing father’s forehead. Scully had smiled crookedly as she watched them go.
Two days later, the email had arrived informing her that Neena Prasad’s condition had worsened catastrophically overnight. She’d passed away before Scully even got a chance to see her, much less help. This was the other side of her job at Genomica: always, forever, watching children on the verge of death—children she had no ability to save.
Even worse, children like Neena made her recall her own lost little boy. That morning, in the Genomica coffee room, Scully could not prevent her thoughts from focusing not on the present, but on the past. What might William have been like at that age? Would he already have been noticeably different from other children? If so, had he known himself to be set apart, believed himself strange? Or would he have been as merrily oblivious as Neena had been, smiling up at his mother as she held him close—
“Come back to Earth, huh?”
Thank God, Scully thought. She’d needed the interruption before that train of thought went much further. Turning, she saw a smiling woman with dark skin entering the break room, wearing a lab coat and a brightly colored hair wrap that, upon further consideration, proved to be an artfully tied Hermès silk scarf. Dr. Karen Jones was her closest work friend; they were currently circling the space in which that might become actual friendship, as well as pursuing their own personal project. Scully said only, “I’m here on Earth. I promise.” There was a strong chance that this had not always been true.
Jones glanced around as she poured coffee into her Le Creuset mug. “Might be a good time for us to take a few minutes and talk about book club.”
The supposed selection of the book club was Where the Crawdads Sing, as it had been since Scully and Jones had formed their pact, and as it would be until someone finally asked about it—if anybody ever did. They could change the selection when necessary for as long as they needed cover, which Scully suspected they would at least until her due date, and possibly even beyond it. “Sure,” she said, carefully casual. “I’ve got the time.”
They went into Jones’s office, first the comfortable front room designed to welcome patients and donors, and then the back room, where work actually got done. As soon as Scully shut the back room’s door, Jones’s demeanor changed. “Okay, I’ve been thinking about Project Dairy Aisle—”
“Dairy Aisle?”
“Where we find fresh eggs,” Jones explained. “Seems like as good a name for our investigation into your fertility as anything else. Unless you prefer Project Chicken Coop?”
“Dairy Aisle is great,” Scully said. It wasn’t, but Jones was doing her a significant favor, one worth putting up with a few bad jokes.
Jones took her seat at her computer; the screen shone brightly in the otherwise shadowy room. “Okay, so, you turned up pregnant after fifty—not impossible, but unlikely. You say you have cause for believing that you could have been treated for infertility without your knowledge. Which, I have to be frank, sounds impossible. Doing IVF involves giving yourself, scientific estimate here, seventy jillion injections.” The school pictures of Jones’s twins smiled at them from the silver frames on her desk. “But I trust you when you say you have your reasons for wondering, and if I got spontaneously pregnant at that age, I’d be looking for causes too. So I’ve been putting some thought into possibilities.”
“Have you come up with anything?” Scully asked. One hand drifted toward her abdomen, but she stopped herself from caressing the small bump, still mostly hidden from view.
Jones tapped on her keyboard, bringing up an academic paper. “Well, if you wanted to get a woman of your age pregnant, without her participating or knowing about it, you’d be interested in looking at tech like this.”
Scully bent down to read from the screen. “…Gametogenesis?”
“Also known as IVG,” Jones said. “The production of gametes outside the body. Functional human ova or sperm could be created from, say, skin cells. Researchers are looking into it for a number of reasons. For instance, the technology would essentially obliterate the upper age limit for female fertility. Same-sex couples might be able to share biological parentage of the same child. But the tech also could be problematic.”
“Because skin cells, hair cells, can be easily collected without the subject’s knowledge,” Scully said. Her mind had already raced ahead to the worst-case scenarios. “Which in turn could lead to conception without consent.”
Jones nodded. “Keep in mind, gametogenesis is still very much in the theoretical stage. Accomplishing something like that—it’s a greater technological leap than, say, humankind traveling to Mars. And even if somebody were able to create an ovum this way, it still raises the question of how they could’ve put that ovum inside you without your knowledge.”
“But it’s a possibility we now have to consider. What steps do we take next, Karen?”
“We do some in-depth checks on your ovaries. Eliminate the possibility of an organic conception, if we can. While we do that, I figure out whether there are any identifying marks of an IVG pregnancy.” Jones glanced away from the computer screen, though its light still reflected off her rectangular reading glasses at an angle that obscured her eyes. “This won’t endanger your pregnancy, but it might be invasive.”
Scully had been subject to more invasive procedures than Dr. Karen Jones could imagine. These, at least, would be conducted at her request, for her knowledge.
“I’m ready,” she said, steeling herself to make it true.
Mulder was steeling himself as well, though what he had to endure was far different.
The generic résumé line Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a lot of doors. Explaining precisely what he’d been investigating all that time closed most of them. As he once told Scully, “Hunting UFOs is a nontransferable skill.”
However, one role he’d held at the FBI had a glamour that attracted attention across the board: profiler.
Hunting serial killers was also a nontransferable skill. Yet Mulder had been sought by an organization that thought they had an innovative new use for his talents, one eager to sign him up as a consultant. The rate of pay convinced him to give it a try.
But for some jobs, there wasn’t enough money in the world.
Jason Deeks, the founder/CEO of a startup called InsightEye, had wanted to “open a dialogue” with Mulder. As said dialogue was to take place over lunch at a Michelin-starred restaurant, there had seemed to be no harm in accepting some top-notch free food. But this meant Mulder had to listen to Deeks—an opportunist who oozed jargon—while trying to tuck into his coq au vin.
Deeks began at the top of the spiel. “You may be asking yourself—what is ‘corporate profiling’?”
Mulder’s expression remained completely blank. “I’m definitely still asking myself that.”
“Corporate profiling uses the same techniques FBI agents use to create in-depth psychological profiles of people in business—whether that’s the individuals you’re hoping to hire or promote, or the competition you’re trying to take down.” Deeks’s smile was intensely white, distractingly so. Earlier in the meal, Mulder had been informed that the man’s dissatisfaction with the results of teeth-whitening procedures had led him to get veneers brighter than any shade a human tooth could naturally be. Mulder had not asked. “You want to know which way your closest corporate competitor’s going to jump? That means you want to know that CEO. We want to tell our clients that we can give them that edge, thanks to our brilliant former FBI agent—who can tell you more about that person than any profile in Fortune or the Wall Street Journal.”
Deeks gestured at Mulder as he spoke. It was not unpleasant to be referred to as “brilliant”—it made a nice change from his Bureau evaluations during the X-Files days—but the spiel made him want to cringe. “You’re laying that on a bit thick.”
“Am I? Your record speaks for itself, Agent Mulder. If we skip over the, you know, the stuff that’s a little out there, and concentrate on the murderers you caught? You’ll more than live up to the marketing.”
“People are going to hire us just so I can tell them stories about catching serial killers.”
“So what?” said Deeks, loosening his silk tie as he gestured toward the waitress for another round. “As long as they write the check!”
Mulder imitated a smile as best he could.
He could sign on for this gig. Become a “corporate profiler,” even if that provided questionable value at best. (The habits and patterns of a serial killer or other violent criminal revealed a great deal about their innermost psyche precisely because they represented such an extreme deviation from the norm. CEOs, however hard they tried to package themselves as “innovators” or “disruptors,” were utterly predictable; thus their habits told Mulder next to nothing.) He could tell himself it didn’t matter. If corporate fat cats were willing to waste some of their egregiously overpaid salaries on his services, why not whack that piñata as hard as he could?
Because he’d feel like a windup monkey, doing nothing more than making meaningless noise. Reason enough.
Mulder went back to work on his excellent lunch, even though by now he knew he’d have to offer to split the check.
At that moment, an email was appearing in a select few inboxes at FBI headquarters. The subject line read X-FILES MEETING, and as soon as the email was opened on either computer or phone, a two-hour block for the next day was marked as busy in the recipients’ various calendars. A decision had been put off as long as it could be; as little as anyone involved liked it, the next step had to be taken.
On one of those screens, the arrow floated over to mark the meeting as the highest possible priority, then minimized the email screen to look at the files stored most prominently on their desktop. The arrow hovered over the folder titled MÍSTICA, AZ.
It wasn’t yet time to share that folder’s contents…but the day would soon come.