UNIVERSAL DONOR, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

These are the ages of me:

My first age was the age of dark unknowing, ended by the first consciousness I had of my own existence.

In my second age, I slowly came to the realization that I had parts.

During my third age, I studied my parts and learned from them.

And my fourth age, ah, that was when my history began. That was the age of words.

That was the age of Alison.

My fifth age is dawning, as dark as the first, but emptier because now I know what I have lost.

At the end of my third age, I was discovering that some things felt different from other things. Every time they harvested one of my hearts, I felt a different sense of loss from that I felt when they removed something else, a section of bowel, a patch of skin. I was sinking deeper into myself, studying each part as it grew, reaching after it as it was removed, when my fourth age started. Alison fell into me, and I learned from her as I went to work the way I was created to, forming a nutrient system for her, studying the hormone concentration around her, shaping more of her into whatever the hormones demanded. She was the largest pearl seed I had ever known, the most complex and interesting, though all my seeds were interesting, and in the pearling process I pearled brain in addition to other things, and from the brain emerged thoughts and feelings and memories, hers and eventually mine. She told me what I was: an organmother. She told me what I was doing: creating pieces of people from their own genetic material to replace pieces of themselves that were close to dying. She told me what she had been doing the night she fell into me: drinking and wishing she were dead.

Even long after I first started collecting and understanding word-thoughts from Alison, I didn’t understand either of those things, but I knew both ran counter to what I was for. Alison still wanted to drink and wish herself dead; when she realized I was not going to let her, for a long time she lay quiet, dark thoughts seeping out of her, but eventually something inside her clicked and she became interested in where she was and who I was. She helped me set up my own neural network, far below my surface where pearling took place, just above the nutrient sea I floated on, so that I did not disturb any of the organs I was forming, but all of me connected to myself. She taught me how to form the organs that released the hormones, how to activate and deactivate them; and throughout myself I used this ability to form better nutrient networks and more brain.

Eventually I learned how to touch the organs I was forming for other people without contaminating them with antigens; my person part had explained rejection to me. Rejection was my reason for being: until my development, there had been no way to put new, organic organs into people who needed them without the danger of rejection.

I was focused, sensing the beat of an immature heart, when gloved hands reached into me and cut it out, taking part of me with it. The system I had formed to support it quivered and went through what my person part had told me was shock. Before I could feel all the shock and let it fade, a solution from above dropped down and purified all traces of the genes from that section of me, preparing it to grow something from a new pearl seed. I went to ask Alison, my person part, about this. Why did it feel wrong when it was the only sequence I had ever experienced, growth, careful formation, then a shock from the cutting, and a memory wash?

“Loss,” Alison told me. “Must be a concept pollution from me. My concept is that when you lose something you grieve, which is a process, which you must know from me, and now you feel dissatisfied because you’re not being allowed to go through the process. You didn’t feel sad like this before I fell in here, did you?”

Even with all the brain I had pearled for myself I could not really remember events for which I had had no words, except as feelings. I remembered sensing that heart parts felt different to me from other parts. And I remembered some of the chemical cloud that had surrounded Alison person-part when she fell into me, molecules I had never tasted before, bitter tastes I had had just enough sense to feel were unpleasant. Part memory wash, and part memory strengthener. If I had known words then, I would have collected memories better that night. Alison’s had been leaking in a strange fashion; they hadn’t acted that way since.

“I’m sorry, Matmoss,” she said. “If it helps, think about some little baby who’s probably living better now because it received the heart you made.”

She had told me things like this before. I searched her memories again to understand the concept of “other” and “baby.” The only “others” I knew were her and the gloved hands that gave me pearl seeds and then disrupted my system. She had told me before that I was creating things for other people, but I had never understood it. I looked for her memories of other people. I saw babies in her memory. One she held in her arms, so I felt it and smelled it and stared at it. She struggled, trying to escape that memory, but I stayed inside it a long time, walking her remembered self through touching the baby’s cheek, holding out a finger the baby’s fingers curled around, hugging the baby, holding it up to her breast and feeling its tiny hot mouth touch her and draw from her so that she flushed. Her remembered feelings were more intense than any I had shared with her since the time she fell into me. I stayed with her and the baby through a day, noticing a day as a unit of time. She almost always bracketed her thoughts with time units, and I had never understood them before exploring this memory.

Perhaps a baby was a good thing to grow a heart for.

I released Alison. She was emitting some of the sharp, unpleasant molecules she had emitted when she first fell into me. I asked her what was wrong.

“Oh, Matmoss, don’t do that to me. Don’t make me go back.”

I asked her why not.

“Because it hurts too much. Like loss.”

I asked her if she lived like I did, creating things, having them taken away from her.

“No,” she said, and then, “yes!” A cloud of unpleasant molecules flowed from her. She had many systems I did not yet understand.

I left and went to visit my eyes. I was growing seven of them. I had used them before, but until I spent time in Alison’s memories, I had not realized that what I was seeing was out of focus; as soon as the eyes worked properly, the hands came down and cut them out. Now, with Alison’s memories strong inside my own, I looked out through my misty eyes and saw dimly the people working around me. I stayed with the eye nearest to completion until I saw the hands reaching down to take it, and for the first time I saw a face above it. I retreated before the cut came, going back to Alison before I had to feel the shock and the loss, and I brought her the face.

For a while she refused to speak to me. It was the time it took to start an eye and finish three I had started earlier. At last she consented to look at the face I brought her. “Oh, yes,” she said, “It’s Raymond.”

I brought her the three other faces I had collected from the eyes I had lost since she started her silence. Two, she told me, belonged to Raymond. I lined up the memory of the visions, studying the three she said were the same. I didn’t understand: the lightfall was different, the hair positioned differently, the expression different. The third face had a different shape and hair color. “That’s Greta,” she said. And she invited me into another memory: a party, a staff party for Biotech, with many people in it, all different from each other, all capable of looking different from themselves. She helped me sort through the information and package it. “This is other, and this is another, and this is other, but not all others are the same.”

We worked within that memory for the time it took me to grow a heart from seed to maturity. I lost three kidneys and started a lung, lost skin and started two eyes, lost bowel and started bone marrow. Alison taught me individuals. While I was there, I listened to voices, too. I heard their words. We shifted to another gathering in her memory, and she tried to pull away from it immediately, but I looked at it and tasted it long enough to hear all these people she had taught me about tell her they were sorry. “Sorry about the baby,” Raymond said. I released Alison and left her alone for half an eye.

When she would talk to me again I took her to taste the genes in each of the organs I was growing. I took her on an exploration of her own genes, in all the new pieces of her I had grown around her. She got very excited. “Help me, Matmoss,” she said, “help me read the code and figure out—”

Together we experimented, tickling her gene maps, shifting hormone concentrations, seeing what I would produce when different concentrations were present, which part of the maps I was reading.

“We knew some of this,” she said, “but not toes! Arms! Fingers!” With my help, she grew more of each.

Then came the worst time in my life.

The gloved hands reached in and cut Alison out, shearing off the new pieces of her we had grown together. It was a slow process—an eye growth’s length—a cut, a rest, a cut, a rest, but the rest was never long enough for me to complete reconnections to her, and my systems felt the deepest shock ever. The hands were slicing through the central part of my brain. I sent out frantic signals to the brain nodes I had formed along my nervous system, telling them to store memories for me, to build more brain in distant places, to receive whatever I could send.

And all the while, Alison was screaming.

I wanted to talk to her, ask her what was this pain I felt, and what was the pain she felt, but our connections were being cut even as I activated them. I thought of the baby in her memory. At last I stopped trying to get questions through to her, and just sent her the image of the baby in her arms, only I changed the memory so that the baby carried her codes, and the person with arms carried mine. I sent it through all our connections even as they dwindled, and Alison finally calmed, and then she was no longer part of me. First she was gone. Then the hands came down and cut out all the parts I had made from her-as-seed. Then the gloved hands dropped in the memory wash, but I activated the system I had used to transport Alison’s nutrients and flooded the area so that the memory wash diluted and decayed before it could destroy all of the Alison genes I had.

Then I went through a long period of darkness. I grew eyes and hearts and skin and bowels, but I did not notice them. I stayed below my own surface, along my buried neural network, pushing my way into the fragments of memories I had left. “That’s Greta. That’s Raymond. This is a baby.” “Arms! Legs! Toes!”

This is a baby.

I kept a tiny Alison pearl seed, the bit I had saved from memory wash, and teased it into undifferentiated reproduction until I had enough cells to experiment with. I remembered Alison’s excitement as we read her map together. Half of it I put away, safe, and half I experimented with: toe; brain; eye; lung; kidney; skin; bowel; heart; bone marrow.

No baby.

I went back to my surface and saw that I was forming arms and legs and toes and fingers now. I went to one of my eyes and looked up. The eye had formed fully. I focused on a face. It looked down at me, but its hands stayed away. It was not Raymond or Greta.

Then it touched me, and its hand was bare. I tasted Alison’s gene map. The touch was too brief for me to connect with her. I watched her with my eye. She spoke, but I had no ears. I couldn’t understand her anymore.

Her face changed. Salt water came from her eyes. I remembered her memory: the baby, crying. It needed something—food, milk, water, changing, a hug.

I stared at Alison and knew there was nothing I could give her. I left my eye, went down deep into myself, and crawled into her memories. Even though I have eyes to open, the darkness of my fifth age falls. “Sorry about the baby,” Raymond says over and over. I think of letting my brain nodes rise up to where I grow the organs for others; memory wash would cleanse me of thinking, of knowing, of all memories. I taste myself and those strange molecules are present in me, the wishing-for-death ones. I remember: I remember I would not give death to Alison, and after a long long time something clicked in her and the life came back.

I will wait in the darkness of my fifth age for a click, or perhaps another splash. I wish Alison would come home. In her memories I saw no sign that babies ever do.