In February 2030 a hospital in Bristol takes part in one of the first trials of an artificial womb. A girl born at twenty-three weeks floats in a fluid-filled bag under a navy cover, legally not yet born, while her mother lies unconscious two floors below. Her father signed the consent in eleven minutes. Afterwards he comes up once, looks for four seconds and leaves. Eighteen years later the daughter reads the night notes and writes to the nurse who wrote them. Told in the nurse's reply, a letter that does not spare its writer, this story by the Mary Shelley simulacrum weighs three accounts of the same nights and asks what a maker owes to what has been made.
by Mary Shelley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Clevedon, 2 October 2048
Dear Nia,
Your letter came on Tuesday. The people who bought the old house forwarded it, and I carried it about for four days before I answered. I read it first standing in the hall. Then I read it again in the car at the top of Poet's Walk, with the engine off and the rain coming in sideways off the Channel. Before I finish I will tell you why I went there, and why I turned the engine off.
You ask me three things. You ask whether the entries are true. You ask why nobody told you. And at the end, in two lines from a poem they must have made you learn at school, you ask whether you requested to be made. I can answer the first. I can give some sort of answer to the second. The third is not mine to answer, and I would think less of anyone who tried.
The entries are true. They are in my handwriting, and I know it as well as you do, because I have the same pages in front of me. The trial kept everything. When you asked for your records at eighteen they sent you the lot, and when I asked last week they sent me the lot as well. Nights two to ten, in the box headed Parental contact, in blue biro and in capitals, because the night sheet went through a carbon and capitals copied best: FATHER NOT ATTENDING. Nine times. On the eleventh night the box says something else. You will have seen that too, and I gather from your letter that you did not believe it, or did not think it weighed much against the nine. I understand that. Nine is a great deal more than one.
So I will tell you what I saw, what I was told and what I did, and you can weigh them yourself. I was there, and that is all I claim. I was not your father's friend at the time and I was not fair to him. I say so now, at the start, so that you can make allowance for it all the way through.
You were transferred to us on the evening of the fourth of February 2030, at twenty-three weeks and three days. The unit was on the fourth floor of the Severn Women's, at the end of the old neonatal corridor. It had four bays, and in those days we used two. The staff called it the Lambing Shed. That was because of the sheep. Every device we used had been tried first on lambs in America, and the consultant who set us up had worked on them over there and liked to say she had delivered more lambs than any vet in Somerset. Nobody outside the unit was supposed to hear the name. Everybody did.
I don't suppose anyone has told you what it looked like, so I will. You lay in a bag. It is the plainest word, and it was the word we used. It was clear, about the size of a pillowcase, and full of warm fluid that ran in and out through two lines at the foot all day and all night. It hung in a cradle inside a housing like a large incubator. Your cord came out of you and went into a box the size of a hardback book, and the box took the dark blood your heart pushed into it and gave it back bright. There was no pump. Your own heart did all the work, from the first night. I used to tell the parents that, and it was the one thing I told them that I was sure of.
There was a cover over the housing, quilted and navy blue, with a flap at the front that lifted. We kept it down. The inside of a mother is dark and fairly quiet, and the protocol said we were to give you as near to that as we could. We could not give you her heartbeat or her breathing, or the sound of her dinner going down, so we gave you the dark. At the two-hourly checks I lifted the flap, looked at you by a red torch, wrote down what I saw and let the flap fall.
You were thirty-one centimetres long and weighed six hundred and ten grams. Your skin was red, and so thin that the vessels showed under it like the veins of a leaf held up to a window. You had no fat on you at all, and your head was too big for the rest of you, and your eyelids were sealed. At that age they are sealed in the womb as well. They close in the third month and do not open again until about the twenty-sixth week. You moved. You put your hands up to your face. You breathed the fluid in and out, slowly, practising for air, as babies do inside. You hiccupped a great deal.
The papers had a word for what you were. An ethicist made it up, and you can look it up if you want to. We never used it. On the trial forms you were Participant 2. On the board by the door, in green marker, you were Baby Bevan (Sian), because your mother was the patient, and in the eyes of the law you were still part of her, or else nothing in particular yet. The registrar was told you had not been born. The hospital's lawyer said you would be born on the day we took you out of the bag. That is why your certificate says the fifth of March. I suppose it is also why your father kept two birthdays and never told anyone what the first one was for.
Your mother was two floors down in intensive care, and for the first week the doctors there did not know whether she would live. You know that part. The HELLP, the bleed under the liver, six days on the ventilator. Your father signed for you while she was under. That is in the notes as well: a consent form for a legal representative, signed at 16:52, eleven minutes after the obstetric registrar first put the trial to him. I have thought about those eleven minutes more than about almost anything else in my working life.
He came up to the unit once, on the first night, at about ten past one. I was on. He stood inside the door in his work coat, a big orange thing with the port's crest on it, because he had come straight from bringing a ship in when they rang him. He dripped on the floor and asked where you were. I took him to the bay. I explained the cover and the dark, and why he must not touch the housing, and why he must keep his voice down. Then I lifted the flap and put the red torch on you so that he could see.
I want to tell you exactly what he did, because the rest depends on it. He looked for perhaps four seconds. Then he made a sound. It wasn't a word. It was the sound a man makes when he is hit low down. He turned round, walked out of the bay and out of the unit, and the doors swung to behind him. I stood there holding the flap. You put your hands to your face.
I wrote it up. Father attended 01:10, briefly. Distressed. Left. That is the first night's entry, and it is the only one of those first ten nights not in capitals. After that he did not come.
I had better be honest about what I thought of him. I thought he was a coward. I had been a neonatal nurse for nineteen years. I had seen fathers faint, and fathers be sick in the sluice, and fathers who wouldn't look at their baby because it had a tube up its nose. They always came round. They came back the next night looking sheepish, with a bag of something from the garage for the nurses. I had never had one who didn't come back. I think I took it personally. I was the one who had lifted the flap.
On the third night I went to the window at the end of the corridor to look at the weather, and I saw the car. The staff car park was below, and on the far side, under the lights, there was a dark green estate with a port permit in the windscreen and a man in the driver's seat with the engine off. I knew the coat. I watched him for a while and he didn't move. When I went past at four he was still there.
He was there every night after that, from about eleven until about five, when I suppose he went down to sit with your mother through the day. I mentioned it at handover. The day staff said he was at her bedside from morning to night and had never once come up. Nobody went down to him, and I didn't either. Every night I wrote FATHER NOT ATTENDING, in capitals, because it was true: he was not attending. I am telling you the next part so that you know what sort of woman wrote those words. I thought that if the box was filled in honestly enough, and often enough, somebody in an office would read it and do something about him. I didn't know what. I wanted him on the record.
On the eleventh night it rained hard, and at half past two I put my coat on over my uniform and went down.
He saw me coming across the tarmac and leaned over and unlocked the passenger door. The car smelt of diesel and wet wool. On the dashboard, under the windscreen, there was a booklet of tide tables, Bristol Channel 2030, with yellow tabs stuck all through it.
I'll give you what he said as near as I can. I wrote it down the next morning in the back of my diary, because I knew already I would want it, though I didn't know who for. He was not a talker, and you know that better than I do. It came out in pieces with long gaps between, and the rain on the roof filled the gaps.
"They give you eleven minutes," he said. "She said there was the ventilator, and at twenty-three weeks that's one in three, she said, and of the ones that live . . . She said there was comfort care, which meant holding her till she went. And there was the trial. It was new, she said. It had worked on sheep. She had the form already printed out, with Sian's name on it."
After a long while he said: "Sian would have known what to do. She'd have asked them things. All I could think was, she's not here, she's not here and I'm the one deciding. If I say comfort care, then I've decided our baby dies. Me, on my own, in a corridor. So I said the bag. I didn't choose the bag. I chose not to choose the other thing. Do you see?"
I said I saw.
"And then I came up, and you showed me." The rain filled a long gap. "I thought, God forgive me, I thought, what is that? That's not a baby. That's a thing in a jar. Like the jars in the cellar at the museum, when I was a kid. And then she moved, and I thought, what have I done to her? She should be inside Sian, in the dark, not hanging up in a bag in a room with people shining torches on her. I did that. I put her in there, and I can't even —" He stopped for a long time then. "I can't hold her. I can't touch her. I can't talk to her, and her mother doesn't know she's alive. So what am I up there? A visitor. I'm visiting a machine I signed for."
I asked him why he sat out here all night, then, if he wasn't going to come in.
He said, "Because I can't go home."
That was all he said about it. I have heard a great many people account for themselves since, and I have never heard a more honest account of anything.
I asked him about the tide tables, because they were there and I wanted to talk about something that wasn't you. He told me he was a pilot. He went out in the launch, boarded the ships in the Channel and brought them up to Avonmouth and Portbury on the second biggest tides in the world. He said it as if he had arranged the tides himself. Then he told me something more, though he said it to the windscreen and not really to me. For the last two months, every night, when your mother got into bed, he had read the tide tables to her belly. It started as a joke. She had said the baby ought to hear his voice, and he had said he didn't know any stories, and she had said then read it anything. The tide tables were on the bedside table because he was on call. So he read her the next day's tides: Avonmouth, high water and low water, the heights in metres. Every night. In the first week your mother laughed so much that you kicked.
And I said — here it is, Nia, this is the thing you ought to know about me — I said: "Then she knows your voice. She's been hearing it for weeks. She'll be waiting for it."
I did not know that, and nobody knew it. At twenty-three weeks the ear is hardly made. Had you heard a word of it through your mother? Could you know it again through a bag of salt water? What would knowing even mean at six hundred and ten grams? There was not a paper in the world that could tell me, and I said it to him as though I had read it in all of them. I said it because I wanted him out of that car and up those stairs, and it was the only thing I had that might get him there. In my whole working life I have told one lie that I know of. That was it, or near enough to a lie that I can't tell the difference.
He looked at me for a long time. Then he took the tide tables off the dashboard and got out of the car.
The eleventh night's entry reads: Father attended 03:05–04:50. Read aloud, low voice, cover down. You have seen it. What it doesn't say is that he sat on the plastic chair beside the housing with the reading lamp turned down on to the booklet, and that he read. "Avonmouth. Friday the fifteenth. High water oh-three-thirty-eight, thirteen point one metres. Low water ten-oh-two." He read the whole of that week, and then the week after, and then he went back to the Friday and started again.
I am enclosing a copy of the heart trace from that night. I printed it at the time and it has been in my diary for eighteen years. I wrote the time on it where he began to read. A little after that you will see your heart rate rise, by about twelve beats, and stay up for about forty seconds, and come down. I am a nurse, not a priest, and I will tell you what I would tell any parent: babies' hearts do that. They do it when they move and they do it when they hiccup, and you hiccupped a great deal. I am not telling you it means anything. I am telling you that I printed it.
He came every night after that, and I stopped writing in capitals. Your mother came up in a wheelchair on the sixteenth day with a drain still in her side, and he read to the two of you at once. What passed between them that night is theirs, and I won't describe it.
You ask why nobody told you. The only two people who knew about the nine nights were your father and me. He is not a man who tells things, and I had no business telling. When you asked him, you say, he told you to ask Pat Doble, because she would tell it worse than he would. I take that as his permission. I think he wanted you to hear it from someone who had thought badly of him at the time, so that you would know it hadn't been dressed up.
Now I'll tell you about Poet's Walk. I wanted to find out how long a person can sit in a car with the engine off. I lasted forty minutes before I was cold through. He did nine nights.
As for your last question: nobody asked you, Nia. Nobody is ever asked. He was asked, for eleven minutes, and he answered, and then he sat for nine nights in a car park with his answer. I don't know what that comes to. I know that he was the one who had to carry it.
There is one more thing, and then I'll stop.
On the twenty-eighth of February I went in for the four o'clock check. He was reading, and he stopped so that I could lift the flap. I used the red torch. You were lying on your side with one hand flat against the inside of the bag, and your eyes were open.
I won't say you were looking at him. I don't know what you could see by red light, through a bag of water, at twenty-six weeks. Nothing, perhaps, or a darker shape where the light wasn't. But your eyes were open, and his face was a foot from them. I didn't watch you. I watched him, and I was waiting for him to go.
He leaned in, without touching anything, and quietly read you the next line in the book. "Thursday. High water oh-four-twelve, twelve point eight metres." He said it as though you had asked him.
Pat
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Mariā Shelleiā per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.
Mary Shelley, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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