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“As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.” – Arthur C. Clarke
Date: 12.23.2098
Earth – Kansas City, Missouri
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“You want me to go where?” Edith Hainey set down her notes and stared at Scott Dorns, the head Virologist and her immediate superior, in shock.
He had the decency to look uncomfortable.
“It isn’t until after Christmas,” he replied, “Obviously with your family situation at present, you...”
Edith didn’t need a reminder of her family situation. She lived it every day. Baby Jessica was a handful, after all, one of those children with two settings, blissfully asleep or awake and screaming. At forty-five years of age, Edith couldn’t help but feel she was caught between two settings herself, the one that insisted she respond to a screaming child in the middle of the night and the other that demanded she leave the parenting to her unrealistic seventeen-year-old who had dreamily announced she was keeping the baby no matter what Edith said.
This same girl could sleep like the dead while her baby screamed in the very same room. This did nothing but wake up Edith at the far end of the hall. Edith was convinced she was the most unwilling and resentful grandparent who had ever existed.
“What about the conferences?” she asked.
She had been scheduled to attend two conferences in January already, one in London the second week of the month and one in New York at the end of the month, and now this?
Between the sleepless nights, Tom’s lawyer calling her during the day with demands that she sign the paperwork or face being hauled into court again, and her son Tommy devolving into a petulant frat boy who was failing half his classes – Edith was well and truly beside herself.
“Oh, don’t worry. You will be in and back out of there in no time.” Scott said, smiling just a little too brightly, “Just four days in China, a few days back to report on the situation and then off to the conferences.”
This wasn’t how life was supposed to be, Edith reasoned. She had done everything right. As a child she had followed the rules, always received high grades, went to college and even worked part-time on campus to cover her living expenses. It was during her college years that she had met Tom. At first, it was perfect. They had met at a cattle ranch –– she was finishing her training in gene therapy and was working on her Master’s thesis. He was the public relations rep for a nearby branch of EcoNu, a genetics and food production company that had recently expanded from Europe to the United States.
He later admitted that the job offer she received just a few months before graduating had more than a little to do with him. He had bent the ears of a few key people. Edith began working at EcoNu that fall, and they were married a year later.
Edith ignored Scott’s foot tapping out a nervous rhythm on the floor. He could wait. Let the weasel sweat it for a moment or two. She knew how terrified he was of air travel, and his aversion to it was what had taken her away from her family and marriage at crucial junctures, helping to ensure its demise.
She had done everything right – even kept her career in the Hybrid Genetics division of EcoNu through the births of all three of her children. She had been faithful, even if Tom had not, and worked equally hard at her career, family and marriage.
But when the middle-aged spread had caught up with her, and Tom’s extra-marital adventures came in the form of calls from random women in the middle of the night, even Edith had to admit that the marriage was dying rapidly. The killing blow had been their middle child, sixteen-year-old Liza’s bombshell that she was pregnant and determined to keep the baby. It was all the excuse her husband needed to blame Edith, who was still reeling from her mother’s death the year before, and exit their sham of a marriage stage right.
Scott looked increasingly nervous. “I can see about getting you an extra week of vacation and make sure everything is first class, the whole way there and back.”
Edith stared at her computer, the lines on the page blurring. On top of everything else she needed new glasses, these old ones just weren’t cutting it.
Scott shifted, nibbling at his lower lip. “Perhaps a mid-year bonus?”
Edith was sure he had a long line of excuses, including an intact family, the nerve damage in his back that limited his ability to travel long distances, and more to explain why she was the perfect person for the job.
While she was stuck going to China. China. And not the civilized section, oh no, some backwoods hell, one of the poorest parts of China, some place called Guizhou Province.
Scott had long thin fingers which were currently shuffling several documents around on the table next to him. Edith could see that there was an itinerary, travel documents, the works. This wasn’t a question or even a polite request to think about it, this was a “we are shoving you on a plane whether you like it or not” kind of talk.
Edith sighed wearily, running her hand through her prematurely gray hair. It was feeling shaggy and irregular; she really needed to get it cut. She had missed the last appointment, just completely forgot it after a particularly sleepless night and then a fight with Liza over diapers or formula or God knows what. By the end of the fights, she really had no idea what had been the issue.
Liza was experienced at verbal repartee, having learned it well at Tom’s knee. He had been such an excellent teacher, and Liza such a quick study. She could run circles around Edith, argue everything from how the sun and the moon orbited the earth to somehow twisting Edith’s simple request to please throw the diapers into something other than the kitchen trash into a scorching attack on her own shortcomings as a mother and wife. She blamed Tom for this; he had been a spectacular role model at making Edith look like the unreasonable one.
Edith was worn out - from the divorce to the fighting at home and the endless crying of her tiny granddaughter. She was tired of arguing with Tommy over his grades and trying to convince him that studying was more important than girls and guitar solos. Perhaps a break from it all was just what she needed, even if it meant heading for some backwater hell. Just a few days for Edith to breathe and be able to forget that her life was a mess despite her best efforts.
She reached out and took the documents from Scott, sighing again, “Fine. Fine.”
She ignored his rushed departure from her office, staring at the travel schedule. At least, she didn’t have to worry about Joey. At twelve years of age, next to her, he was the most mature person living in the house. His grade card had arrived two days ago, straight A’s and a note from one of his teachers extolling his virtues. She held onto that thought, one small warm light in the dark mess that was her life.
