Though a lengthy confession is not necessary, I was instructed by the Inspector-General to write this for the benefit of the sentencing committee and you, Citizen-Prosecutor. Perhaps I write this account also to indulge myself, one who has never written anything down anywhere, that in the future others may look on my condition and future servants of the state may take pause. Note well that, though I am not human, there are many among our number who are not human either: my brothers and sisters, so I have affectionately come to regard them. Bear in mind, however, that I will admit to no remorse in the pages of this confession; I admit no wrongdoing. Perhaps that is the crux of it all: I have nothing to do but stare at the walls of my cell save to scrawl these lines on the filament pad which the Inspector-General has so graciously provided me with.
After all that, I must begin. You see, I am very bad at telling stories and so I must start at the beginning, no matter how inefficient the process may be. I have often heard it said that, long before citizens left Earth to work for the corporations on other worlds, many people were born in natural, feminine waters. When I was a child, such people were spoken about as aberrations and the result of dangerous and foolhardy adventurism. I was grown in Bay 12 of the Nuremoir Nursery, like most of the fine citizens that I have met who serve in the police force here, including, I believe, yourself, Citizen-Prosecutor. As you know, Bay 12 selects for the greatest intelligence, most charming personalities, and orthodox-revolutionary visual aesthetics. When I was in the Child’s Garden, I heard of these so-called Freeborn people and was curious. Yes, I admit I was curious and not repulsed, and that lack of repulsion perhaps became my downfall.
I waylaid my caretakers, who I remember as the Politician and the Scientist, with questions day in and day out about the Freeborn, because I kept hearing the most fantastic things about them from the little history books they gave us. For example, one of the books said that (and I am sure that even you good citizens will doubt this was ever the case, but I think it is true) those who chose to forgo the natural process of child cultivation and instead did things in the vulgar way sometimes had more than one child! Two genetic relatives in such close proximity of age, a very strange thing indeed. But I was fascinated, I must admit, Citizen-Prosecutor, by the things they taught me, for even though I was supposed to be horrified, I was not. And I found myself asking the caretakers, “Will you take another like me from the Nursery?” And this was met with those patronizing, uneasy smiles that adults always give to children when they ask questions of an impertinent nature. Perhaps they should have known by then that I would grow up to be a troubled youth, but as I try to remind myself, no one can see the future.
In the full bloom of my youth, I was aptitude tested for my career path. I must say with some embarrassment, Citizen-Prosecutor, that I cheated on that test (as I have known many to do), because I had a very special career in mind. I wanted to work in the Nursery, Bay 12, you see. For I had never had a genetic kinship with anything other than the substrata of Bay 12, and I knew from all my biology classes that, in the natural world, kinship is a very strong thing. Here, I think, you would be tempted to say my error was plainly obvious, for we are not animals. But I counter and say that we are a type of animal, as even the ancient sages like Darwin that we otherwise idolize are said to have written about. At any rate, it is an easy test to game if you know what the marks signify. I was placed in a rapid-pace track, I was a Bay 12’er after all, and by the time I had reached my 18th Year, I was a floor nurse on that esteemed Bay.
Have you ever been to a Nursery, Citizen-Prosecutor? I do not think you have, as a matter of fact, I have found that everyone I ever encountered in polite society speaks very highly of the Nursery, but has no idea what goes on within it. I tell you, Citizen-Prosecutor, that in the Nursery we are lords over life and death. Perhaps this makes my crime a bit more understandable, perhaps not. You question how lowly nurses in the Embryonic Bays have this occult power, perhaps, and so I will describe it to you.
When the embryos are brought down from the Conception Chamber, there is a process of separation. “Wheat from the chaff,” is how an old senior nurse put it, whatever that may signify. We have machines that can read everything about a prospective person like lines of computer code: Trisomy 18, mutation along the 15-B chromosome, cystic fibrosis, Trisomy 21, and so on, if it exists. Those we dissolve in an alcohol solution. As they develop, we watch them grow in the nutrient tanks, monitor them, so on. You watch their bulbous eyes and horseshoe backs develop, and suddenly you observe legs, feet, arms, hands, heads, hearts, and brains. At every step there are irregularities. These are flushed into the acid tanks, and reprocessed into nutrients for the rest. A prospect that shows promise develops a club foot, or a cleft pallate. We remove those. We also, sometimes, have too many of one specification (blue eyes for example) than what was needed to fill the demand of the caretakers, so we remove the excess. Sometimes they come awake, something in the nutrient tank disturbs them prematurely, and these we remove.
In all of this, the temptation, especially as the process drags on, is to personify. This, so I was told, is an error. The first judgement of the Nurse’s code is this: “Personhood is a socially negotiated good.” It is, in other words, a privilege bestowed on the worthy. Again, this is a confession of a crime, I must remind you, so I must place myself in an unreformed perspective. I simply did not feel that this maxim was true and, even now, I have a hard time believing it.
Though I received my immunization against freebirth very shortly before I came to work in the Nursery, nevertheless I found that criminal instinct reared its head again and again. And in my work, as I said, I began to personify the prospects. It made my work tiresome, debilitating almost. Though I had long since departed from my caretakers’ house, I sought out their advice, even though their knowledge of Nursery work was dim at best. The Politician said there should be laws enacted to protect the mental health of the workers: for example, screens to hide the tanks when a prospect is flushed into the acid. The Scientist suggested that I was being squeamish. Surgeons also see the dreadful fleshy bits of human tissue, and yet they press on and do their duty and feel no pang of guilt, but actually take pride in their work. After all, she suggested, I do nothing but tend tissue cultures until spontaneous personhood. All this advice and consolation, I must confess, did nothing, nor did the drugs that the psychiatrist prescribed me. Thus, as an aside, I cannot claim insanity because I was regularly receiving all the best treatment that our great state can provide. I must confess, the crime was mine and mine alone.
But I turn too many circles, now I must tell what it was I did and why. One day, I was tending the tanks. True to my caretaker’s word, a law had just been enacted and screens would drop over the nutrient tanks as we flushed them into the acid bath. Before I removed one of the prospects, I chanced to look into its face and noticed something: it looked just like me. Though diminutive and pink, it was the spitting image of a younger self of mine. I pulled the chromosome file, and my own file, and sat them side by side. They were identical. That is to say, I and this prospect were identical twins: though there was no call for a prospect with blue eyes at that moment. This was my sister, a real sister, and a bond of kinship stretching back to the first amoeba in the primordial soup gripped me. This was, as my perhaps diseased brain imagined it, a creature made of my bone and my flesh. My fingers faltered at the controls, and I could not force my hands to do my duty, to do my sacred and all-important duty for the state and for the race. I could not.
Perhaps, Citizen-Prosecutor, you have heard of this phenomena wherein the criminal experiences their deed in a disembodied state. This is how it was with me. I saw myself reach for the surgical cleaning knife on the nearby table, the one that we use to clear away any tissue debris left in the nutrient tanks after removing a prospect. I watched myself approach a nurse, and stab them to death: one quick thrust, from the back, past the ribs, into the heart. The room was still and quiet and before the other nurses had seen what I had done, I watched myself stab another, and slash at them wildly with the long knife, and I watched the red blood spatter in great streaks all over the clean, sterile, white Bay, with the prospects looking on with eyes that seemed to me living, and perhaps they reveled in the revenge. Ah, there is a flight of fancy I have thought of just now. I laugh just thinking about it, Citizen-Prosecutor, though I’m sure you think it macabre.
That is my crime. Before the peacemakers arrested me, I had hunted down and stabbed six nurses and a technician, seven persons all and all, although to me they were not people. “Personhood is a socially negotiated good,” I remember saying to myself, almost sing-song, as the knife went here and there, and I had ceased to be a member of our society by my grizzly crime, and in so doing I was no longer bound to respect the socially negotiated goodness of their personhoods. Whatever personhood they may have had, they have it no more. They have taken the acid bath of death, and that is my crime. You may ask me, Citizen-Prosecutor, whether or not I feel remorse. Surely, it will influence the sentencing committee against me, but I do not care to ever rejoin the moral community. Not this one. Not now, not ever.
Was not expecting that ending, yet it makes all too much sense!