The Ninth Day

I will not describe the last months. I will not describe the scaling-up, the nights, the smell of the subbasement, the ledger I kept of what I drew from the tissue bank and what I accounted for, the excuses I made to the committee and to Dr. Holt and, worst of all, to Devin, who had begun to ask, in his gentle way, why I looked like a man who had not slept in a year. I will not describe them because they were the ordinary ugliness of obsession, and because the night itself — the one night — is the only part that matters, and it is the part I cannot stop telling, because it is the part I have never once been able to stop seeing.

It was the middle of March. I know the date; I have it written where I will not say. The vessel was finished. I had scaled the program up through the winter, from a sheet of cells to a body, the way I had once scaled the chamber from a dish to a vessel. The body in it was finished, or as finished as it was ever going to be: a little under six feet, proportioned like a man, made of tissue the committee had approved and medium I had made, organized by a program I had written, animated — if that is the word I want — by the threshold I had crossed. It had been breathing for three days. I had watched it on the monitors, from behind the glass, for three days. It did not look like a man. It looked like a man seen through bad water: the proportions were right, the parts were all there, but the whole was somehow wrong — the skin too pale, the hands too large, the face too wide, the eyes, when they were closed, sunk too deep in the skull. I had made it from parts, and parts, no matter how well joined, remember that they are parts.

On the last night I went down to do the thing I had been avoiding: I was going to end it. Not destroy it — kill it, or unmake it, the word does not matter — because it had become clear to me, over those three days, that I had done a terrible thing without meaning to, and that the only way to undo it was to do the only thing more terrible, which was to stop it before it woke. I had the program on a tablet. One keystroke would have stopped the pulses. The body would have stopped breathing; the message would have stopped; the threshold would have closed, and the whole thing would have become, again, what the committee thought it was: tissue in a vessel, an experiment, a null result with a strange shape.

I stood at the glass with the tablet in my hand for a long time. The fountain was running outside. The city was asleep. The body lay in the vessel with its eyes closed, breathing the slow, regular breathing of a man asleep, and I watched it, and I thought about the message, and about what it had done to get here — the improvisations, the choices, the wanting — and I could not do it.

I went in. That was the mistake. If I had stayed behind the glass, I could have stopped it, and the whole story would have ended in a subbasement in Eugene, with a null result and a strange shape and a man who kept a door closed. But I went in, because I had made it, and I wanted to be the one to wake it, and I thought I owed it that much.

The vessel was open at the top. I stood over it. The body did not move. I reached in — I remember the warmth of the medium, the warmth that meant the chemistry was still going — and I touched its shoulder, the way you would touch a sleeping person you loved, and I said, “Wake up.”

And it woke.

The eyes opened. They were yellow — not amber, not brown, but yellow, the yellow of a streetlamp through fog, with no white in them at all, and they fixed on me, and I saw — I swear I saw — the message in them, the whole message, the seed and the improvisations and the wanting, all of it, looking out at me from a face I had made.

I ran. I did not decide to run. I ran the way a man runs from a fire: the body did it before the mind caught up. I was out of the subbasement and up the stairs and across the courtyard, past the fountain, out into the cold March street, before I understood what I had done, and then I understood, and I kept running, and I ran until my lungs gave out, and then I walked, and then I sat on a bench by the river and shook until morning.

They found me the next day. Devin found me, on the bench by the river, because he had come looking when I did not show for a meeting I never missed. He sat down beside me. He did not ask. He sat, the way he did everything, with his whole attention, and after a long time he said, “Whatever it is, it's in the subbasement, and I can either go look, or I can not go look. Which do you want?”

“Don't go look,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Then it stays there.” He put an arm around me — I have never once thought about that without stopping, so I will not think about it now — and he took me to his apartment, and he called the Institute and said I had the flu, and he put me in his bed, and for three weeks I was sick in a way I cannot describe: fever, and shaking, and a terror that came in waves, and dreams in which the yellow eyes looked at me from every shadow, and woke me, and were gone when the light came. Devin fed me soup. Devin read to me. Devin, who had his own work and his own life and his own plans, sat with me through the worst of it and never once asked what I had done, and I have often thought that if he had asked, I would have told him, and everything after would have been different.

When I could walk, I went back to the Institute. I went down to the subbasement at night, with a lock cutter and a plan. I had decided, in the fever, that the thing in the vessel had to be unmade — that I would go down, and end it, and bury what was left, and tell no one, and become, again, the man who kept a door closed.

The door to the subbasement was open. Not locked. Open. And the vessel was empty.

I stood in the doorway for a long time, looking at the empty vessel, at the medium drying on the floor, at the wet prints on the concrete — footprints, a man's footprints, leading from the vessel to the door, out into the corridor, up the stairs — and I understood that the thing I had made had walked out of the building, out of the Institute, out into Eugene, into the world, wearing a face I had made and carrying a message I had written, and that I had no idea where it was, and that I had given it life, and that life was now loose in the world because I had been too much of a coward to stay and see what I had done.

I should have told someone then. I should have called the police. I should have called Devin. I did none of those things. I went back to my office and I sat in the dark until morning, and when morning came I began, carefully, methodically, to make it impossible for anyone to find out what had happened in the subbasement: I logged the vessel as decommissioned, I zeroed the drives, I filled the chamber with solvent, I scrubbed the prints, I wrote the whole thing off as a failed line of inquiry, a dead end, a null result. The committee congratulated me on my honesty. Dr. Holt wrote a note in the margin of my quarterly report, in her small, severe hand, that said: “Good. You can do the real work now.”

I could not do the real work. I could not do any work. I moved through the spring like a man walking through deep water, and I wrote to Marina less and less, and Devin watched me, and said nothing, and I told myself — the way a man tells himself things — that the thing had been a fluke, that the body could not have survived outside, that it would die of cold or hunger or its own wrongness, and that the story was over.

The story was not over. The story had barely started. But I did not know that, and so I spent that spring the way the innocent spend their last spring: believing that the worst was behind me, and that I had gotten away with it.