Juliet enceinte

Juliet

By Diomedes | Robert O'Reilly | 27 Dec 2023


I resume my unfinished novel, after a long intermission caused by a string of unforeseeable sublunary vicissitudes.

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We spent the next month at Juliet’s bedside, now wheeled into our laboratory, designing an embryonic sac that could gestate a human fetus. We knew it would require a flow of blood, which right away necessitated a heart and lungs, but not so large as ours, as they didn’t have to one-tenth the flesh of a human body. Ted designed a heart, a pump, the size of an acorn and each of two lungs to oxygenate the blood the size of packs of cigarettes, placed inside the newly expanded breasts, with two skin hidden, porous vents to inhale and exhale the air, which expanded and contracted them exactly as if you were watching a live woman, shirtless, breathing.

The blood vessels were short and succinct, installed just under the skin from the breasts to the embryonic sac with the tiny heart, the pump placed right above it, inside the chest. It was a beautiful design, an architectural wonder, mirroring nature herself. The best part of it was that Juliet sensed and could monitor and control the heart, giving her the most human sensation of being alive. This wasn’t ‘Paradise regained’ but it was close to that, mortality regained, and she felt it the moment we turned it on.

Now she had a mission to perform, a purpose to maintain herself and betoken a new life, totally dependant upon her. It elevated her in stature, in her own computational mind and in everyone else's eyes, to the rank of divine motherhood, a creator, almost a goddess for whom one steps aside and bows to, as surely any civilized being would.

She was fully conscious as we performed all these operations upon her and explained in detail exactly what we were doing. The fact that she was bedridden made her the perfect host for this experiment. But we weren’t using her handicap against her will.  The opposite was true. She wasn’t unwilling. She was the most grateful and encouraging of every cut we made, every implant, and as each piece came online to her consciousness, she was ecstatic as if she was developing into a new, higher being.

 

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Diomedes
Diomedes

B.A. in Latin and Greek from U.C. Berkley. Writer, Blogger and retired Electrician.


Robert O'Reilly
Robert O'Reilly

I am educated in the Western Classical Tradition, B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in Latin and Greek, English major, one year at U. of Toronto, studied under Alain Renoir and Northrop Frye, read most classics full time for many years after university in French, English, Latin and Greek to the modern day. I am interested in the near future of technology, what changes it imposes upon our heritage and character as humans. Short stories and Essays are my medium.

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