IVF surrogates and armchair numerologists - Part 19
Boyer learns of the Governor's surprising promise to the Bishop
At any other time, she might have felt like a queen. Or at least one in waiting. From the moment Boyer stepped into the Governor’s residence, it was like she was transported into another realm.
The cold air that nipped at her in the dark Alberta night was shut out behind them. The air in the expansive lobby of the mansion smelled of lavender and sage. It was light, subtle, but present. Her mind immediately felt sharp.
The Governor’s coat was still over her shoulders, but she no longer needed it. The air wasn’t warm or cold, it was immediately comfortable. She felt as though she’d stepped out of the land once known as Canada into a Mediterranean villa. The lighting was set so it seemed it was daylight on a slightly overcast afternoon. The gathering area was expansive.
Boyer’s mind worked well spatially, she could always fold and shape things with her hands or her mind. She had a habit of imagining placing unlikely objects in empty spaces to guess at their size. It was a game she played with her mother, a smart survival tactic her mother gave to her on the Beast to pass long hours, to forget.
How many chico could you fit in that man’s backpack, hija? And Boyer’s mind would turn from the misery around her to imagine the problem. She had guessed the small bag could fit 27 of the oval shaped fruit could fit in that man’s backpack.
Later when the man jumped off the train before it stopped, his bag got caught on the metal rail. The man scrambled out of it and hit the ground, rolling. But the bag tore and he left it hanging. She could still see his face as he reached for it in the night. All his worldly possessions moving further toward the border without him. Boyer had imagined the chicos spilling out. The brown, scruffy fruit hitting the ground, creating a sort of trail he could follow to retrieve the bag if he ran fast enough.
“You could lay down a Starship in here, tip to tail,” she said under her breath, without thinking as she turned left then right in full circles. She stopped only when she saw the Governor smiling at her.
“It’s a converted rocket storage shelter,” the Governor said. “We used to store them on their sides here. Easier to transport. Easier to service without a massive scaffold. That was before we had the help of so many droids.”
Boyer nodded. She had met the Governor before, but had never been alone with him.
“This way,” he said. They walked for a few moments in silence, the width of a football field. The ground below them, the ceiling and the walls looked like one seamless stone, as though a master craftsmen had scooped out a granite centre like a perfect rectangular bowl of ice cream. The wall they walked towards was mostly opaque glass that glowed the same gold tone as the visors of the droids that had taken the twins away.
“I used to entertain here. It has great acoustics. Follow me.”
The Governor didn’t slow down as he approached the glass, he kept walking. Just as it seemed he might step right into it, a section disappeared. Boyer stopped in surprise. The gold glow of the glass-like surface remained intact on either side of them.
“We’re working on some new tech here. This is a phospholuminescent barrier that can be as opaque or porous as we want it to be.”
“A forcefield?” Boyer asked, amazed.
“Something like it. We think it could really transform the off-world effort and change the habs on Mars. We want to go live with it at Terminus next year. My engineering team wants to kill me over it.” He kept moving and guided her through a short series of passageways, halls of concrete about 10 feet high and just as wide.
They made a series of turns. Boyer made a map in her head to plan her exit: ten feet then left, thirty feet then a right. Ten more feet then another left, then thirty more feet and the Governor stopped. He tapped his right index finger on the panel set in the concrete beside the door. At a prompt, he leaned forward for a retinal scan.
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Boyer was within arms reach of him, so she took a step back. The Governor spread his arms and legs out so the infrared camera could scan him.
He noticed her gape. “No one is above the law.”
She smiled, carefully. He laughed at his own words. The green light gave the all clear and the door whisked open. “You will have every comfort during your stay. Stay as long as you like.”
***
Boyer thought about her walk with the Governor from the large lobby to the intimate setting of his living quarters as she soaked in the bath. Her heart had pounded when they stepped through the door.
It was an elegant space, but spartan. Huge windows, about three stories tall, looked over the Bow river. “The rockets were on barges and floated up through a series of water locks,” he told her. “I never tire of this view.”
“The windows are as high as poplar trees,” Boyer offered in the room that smelled like cigar smoke and aftershave and hummed with the sounds of air circulating through the ventilation high above them.
She didn’t know which Governor would be revealed behind the door. The visionary or the tyrant. The playboy or the humanitarian. A man or a monster.
“Your Bishop loved trees,” he replied. He folded his hands behind his back, a habit often seen on camera when he attended events, looked over crowds after speeches, watched his rockets launch to the heavens. “I should plant some out on the balcony, in his memory.”
“You knew him well?” Boyer asked. The Bishop was careful with what he shared about the Governor, and with whom. Even her. She knew more than she let on, but she’d play it carefully.
“More than most.” He was quiet for a moment, looking out the windows at the night sky, at some far-off memory. “But, not as well as others.” He looked at her when he said it. She looked away.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said. “Whatever they say about me. Whatever you think.”
“Are they lies?” she asked and couldn’t believe she’d asked it.
He moved his hands from his lower back into his pockets and looked at the floor. He seemed sad, small. “I’m not sure of everything they’ve said. The sheer volume means some must have to be.” He smiled at this. “But whatever I am and whatever is true about what they say about me has nothing to do with why you need not fear me.”
“And why is that?” Boyer asked.
“Because I promised the Bishop as he was dying that I would watch out for you.”
They looked at each other. The memory of the Bishop and all he was gave her courage to meet the Governor’s gaze, helped her to see him as a man and no more.
The God of the universe knows you by name, listens to your every word. Be not afraid. The first words the sweet old man had spoken to her, when she was a girl with no hope. When he wasn’t so old as he became.
“Some promises cannot be broken,” the Governor said. He reached out to her, placed his hand on her chest. A gesture that would have startled her when she was younger, before the Bishop had placed a crucifix around her neck that became like a shield. The Bishop ran his finger from the top of the cross to the bottom, from the left side of the beam where the arms of Christ were pierced to the right. The sign of the cross.
“You carry his fire. I can see it in your eyes. It’s alluring. Frightening.”
A cloud came over him then. Darkness, rage, regret. She felt it all. An emptiness you could fit an entire rocket ship—a red and turning planet—within. She felt a feeling toward him she’d never felt before. Mixed within the natural and necessary fear was something else, something like pity.
Boyer slipped further in the tub and let the bubbles foam around her chin. She lowered her head underwater so that only her eyes and nostrils weren’t submerged. She hadn’t had a warm bath like this in a long time. After he said those words which had startled her to the core, he snapped his fingers and out of nowhere a household droid appeared. “My personal chef will make you a meal, whatever you wish. But I insist you clean up and let my medical team look at that shoulder, and you must spend at least one hour in hyperbaric.”
She was led to the room, the medical droids, a private wing where there was a steam shower, sauna, and the bath. A hundred jets pulsed and massaged the tension out of her muscles. It was the first time she felt at ease in weeks, a thought that she knew should trouble her since it was a moment she should most be on her guard. But Boyer believed him. No matter how little she should trust the Governor about anything else, she knew she could trust him in this.
He wouldn’t touch her, if that’s what the Bishop asked.
She couldn’t deny the relief that immediately washed over when the Governor relayed his promise. While many women hoped for a moment alone with him, the chance to be brought into what chatrooms called his digital harem, an ever growing group of women whose wombs he cultivated to fulfill his mission to bring life to every corner of the planets. His incentives for the people behind the walls to multiply, championed not only by him, but the brain trust of Corridor West, were a key antidote to the decades-long declining birthrate .
The world had experienced such a rapid decrease in population. While many of the elites before the blackout who vied for power had emphasized how dangerous population growth was, the Governor had always had different take. The planets could never reach a maximum human capacity was his thesis, and he pushed back against the climate activists who thought the earth’s populations needed culling.
There was much speculation about just how many children he had sired, and just as much speculation about how the Governor sired them. A popular rumour circulated that he was a closet Mormon seeking to bring the afterlife to the here and now through a surrogacy baby boom. His goal seemed less about pleasure and more about efficiency. He didn’t enter marriages, he created surrogate stipends and fathering contracts. He was a hi-tech Genghis Khan, who wanted to put a stamp on the DNA of the human future.
Women who met certain criteria could bear his children and were incentivized to be healthy. They received huge tax and breaks from their tech-quota to raise healthy kids with, and were given the best properties and security. There was a long line of women willing to offer their wombs, but they were sworn to secrecy and signed detailed NDAs. Talk and you lose the money and the baby, was the gist.
Truth Surge ran an article that went viral around the new world with some evidence that the Governor liked to keep forty nine women pregnant at any given time. A signal to the recurring number that the culture and the conspiracy theorists couldn’t avoid. The location of the governing headquarters, the length in days of the blackout, the number of Phos. Arm chair numerologists always found other examples of the number to prove out doomsday scenarios, reveal secret knowledge hidden by God or brought by alien agents, or new messiahs.
It was one Boyer imagined could have some truth. But he could keep his hands off Boyer her and still father her child. That was the problem.
Boyer held her breath and completely submerged below the surface of the water, hidden by the bubbles. If she stayed under long enough, she imagined a droid would appear and haul her out. She needed to think free from any lens or sensor, even for a moment. Water always helped her quiet her mind. Holding her breath also helped.
There was another group of women, she knew, that were always kept close at hand by men in power. In Corridor West and every other corridor where power flowed from the top down, from the strong to the weak. It was a hierarchy where women like her always landed at the bottom.
Now she was within arms reach of some of the most forgotten and vulnerable women on the planet. The Bishop still protected her, like he had from the moment he found her.
She exhaled and slowly sat up, like a Navy Seal emerging from water on a clandestine mission. She would not rest until she found them.