One Giant Leap For Mankind

Jaren Langston heard a faint murmur of voices. His mind was foggy. He slowly opened his eyes but the glaring white of the room made him want to close them again. 

Where was he? Who was speaking? Why were they disturbing him like this?

Two people in white coats stood at the foot of the bed and looked at him, one male and the other female. Their reserved looks of concern made his chest feel heavy. A monitor beeped beside him, alerting all within earshot that he was still alive. He systematically tested the muscles in his arms, legs, hands, and feet. Each movement rustled the tucked-in sheets on the hospital-grade cot he was laying on. He still had all his limbs, which was good. He couldn’t feel any pain either.

“What happened?” he said. “How did I get here?”

The lady walked around to the side of the cot, holding her work terminal close to her chest. Her previous look of concern now masked behind a careful and practised air of professionalism. “I’m Doctor Schuma, and this is Doctor Horton. You had a bit of a fall. What is the last thing that you remember?”

Jaren rubbed his temples to try and clear the fog. It was then he realized his left arm was hooked up to a drip, and monitoring nodes were attached to his forehead. “I was at the excavation . . .  Vallis Capella dig site. Scans had shown some strange readings in the ground density, so they brought us in to see if there was anything . . .  you know . . .”

“Alien?” she finished for him.

He nodded. “The next thing I know is the ground collapsed underneath me. Then I woke up here. Wherever here is.”

Doctor Schuma tapped at her terminal. “You’re in the Armstrong Medical Institute at Lunar Base. You were rushed here via shuttle after your team couldn’t wake you.” 

“My team.” Jaren pushed himself up. “Is everyone else alright?”

“Remarkably, yes. No one else was hurt.”

Jaren narrowed his eyes. “‘No one else’? But I feel fine. When can I get out of here?”

“Not just yet,” Doctor Horton said. “We did an MRI and ran a tox screen while you were out.” He glanced at his terminal. “Tox showed that you were quite inebriated. Where did you even get booze around here?”

“A bunch of the geo-techs make their own liquor.” Jaren smirked. “They liked the irony of making moonshine on the moon.”

The doctor’s stern expression didn’t change. Jaren started to cross his arms but the movement tugged at the IV drip so he decided not to. “There are one hundred and fifty thousand people on Lunar Base. Surely I’m not the first inebriated patient to come through here. What’s really going on?”

The Doctors looked at each other, then Schuma turned her terminal so that he could see the screen. It looked like a cross-section of a brain with blotches of bright red and orange forming around the base of the spine.

“I’m afraid you’ve got Critical Idiopathic Apoptosis.”

Jaren’s heart sank. He looked at the screen as if he could derive some meaning from it. But he was a paleontologist, not a pathologist. All he knew of CIA34 was that it was rapidly culling the human race. People back on Earth were dying by the millions and nobody even knew what caused it or how it spread. 

“But, how? Why me?”

“Unfortunately, we still don’t know,” Doctor Horton said. “It doesn’t spread like a contagion. From what they’re saying back home, there’s something inert in all of us from the time we’re born. Something in our genes that has just started to activate in an alarmingly high percentage of the population.”

“So . . .  how long have I got?”

Doctor Schuma took her terminal back and was typing something. “Our best estimates give you around six months to live. I’m sorry.”

The words hit him like a slap in the face. He didn’t want to believe it. Other than a mild headache and a drug-induced fog from whatever they were feeding him through the IV, he felt fine. He was in perfect health. Well, perhaps his liver would disagree, but six months?

“What now, then? Do I have to stay here?”

“No, of course not,” Doctor Horton said. “We will need to see you every couple of weeks to track your condition, but other than that, there is nothing really we can do.”

“By the way,”  Doctor Schuma said with a smile. “You have a visitor in the waiting room. She said she’s your partner. Want me to send her in?”

“Claire?” Jaren grimaced. Claire was his longtime work partner and best friend. She had been his Second on more digs than anyone else he had ever worked with. He couldn't bear breaking the news to her. Not yet anyway. 

With a nod from Jaren, the doctors filed out of the solitary hospital room and the door hissed shut behind them. He looked out the window, or at least, the screen meant to look like a window. The image on the Ultima Supreme 64k display had golden sunlight washing over a soft rocky moonscape. In reality, the landscape of the moon was drab and grey. Harsh shadows cast by the sun, no atmosphere to scatter the light, and a million cart tracks that never faded away.  

Claire bounced into the room and threw her arms around him. The force nearly upset the balance of the cot, but she didn’t seem to care. 

She released him and sat down on the side of the cot. “I’m so glad you’re alright! When we couldn’t wake you, I . . .” 

“It’s alright.” Jaren forced a smile. “They’re releasing me today.”

“It’s not alright. You scared the crap outta me! I told you that you need to ease up on the moonshine.”

He nodded gravely. She looked like there was something else she wanted to say, something she couldn’t contain. Like she had won the lottery or something. 

“What is it?” he asked, squinting his eyes like there was a joke he was missing out on.

Claire’s fists were clenched, her eyes wide and wild with excitement. “We found something in that cavern you fell into. We found fossils! On the moon!”

~ ~ ~ 

They rode the Tube from the hospital out to the spaceport. From there it was a thirty-minute sub-orbital shuttle trip to the excavation. Jaren felt better now that he was back in his own clothes, but the news of his imminent demise still loomed in the back of his mind like a dirty secret. Claire sat in the window seat of the Tube-pod, looking out at the sprawling city. Lunar Base had grown significantly in the last ten years since humanity had first set up an outpost on the moon. It was now a completely self-sustaining colony.

Jaren reviewed the images from what they had uncovered so far. “This thing is massive. Thirteen feet long? What do you think it could be?”

“A dinosaur?” Claire said, curling her light brown hair around her finger.

“I’m pretty sure there were never any dinosaurs on the moon,” Jaren smirked.

Claire shrugged. “Those bones might prove otherwise.”

Jaren instinctively reached for the flask of moonshine in his coat pocket, but it wasn’t there. He wondered if he had lost it in the collapse or if the nurses confiscated it when they had changed him into a standard-issue hospital gown. Claire was looking at him with an amused smirk.

“What?” he asked, mimicking her expression.

She shook her head. “This discovery is going to change everything. You’re going to be famous.”

“We are going to be famous,” he said. “We’re in this together.” 

They held each other's gaze for what seemed like an unusually long moment until the pod door screeched open. 

It was like a stage curtain falling away to reveal an audience of eager reporters, hungry for the scoop on the first people to discover proof of life on another world. 3D cameras flashed, and thumb-size microphones were thrust into Jaren’s face as he stepped onto the Tube platform. A tidal wave of questions hit him all at once. 

How did he know where to look? What sort of creature did the bones belong to? Was this a hoax? 

He looked back at Claire with uncertainty. She was right behind him, a smile on her lips and a glimmer in her eyes. She squeezed his hand reassuringly.

The station security must have called for reinforcements, who were already hard at work pushing back the crowds. Jaren raised his hands in the air and, to his surprise, the crowd went quiet. He took a deep breath. All eyes were on him. Everyone there wanted to know what he had found, where it had come from, and what it all meant in the grand scheme of things. Jaren had no idea what to tell them. He hadn’t even really seen it yet.

“I understand your excitement,” Jaren said. His voice echoed through the station, amplified by someone’s mic. “We still need to do some tests to verify that this is the real thing. Once we’ve had a chance to examine the find, we should be able to dig further. And as soon as we know more, we’ll let you know.”

The crowd erupted once again with more questions. One voice cut through the rest. A man at the front of the crowd holding a mic in one hand and his terminal in another, said, “Is it true you have CIA?”

Jaren’s heart skipped. Everyone around them fell silent again in anticipation.

“No comment,” Jaren grumbled, then pushed through the sea of reporters and onlookers.

The short journey from the Tube station to the spaceport felt like running a gauntlet. They just put their heads down—didn’t acknowledge anyone—and kept on moving with the aid of the security, who helped them cut through the crowd. 

Finally, they made it onto the sub-orbital shuttle. Claire sat quietly next to him, but her body language seemed vastly different. The barely contained excitement and cheery optimism were gone. Sucked out like air in a vacuum and replaced with the unspoken questions that hung between them. Invisible and impenetrable. He wanted to say something, to reassure her that it would all be okay, to apologize for not telling her at the hospital. But the truth was, he didn’t know how to say any of that. So instead, they spoke tersely about what they needed to do once they got back to the excavation.

~ ~ ~ 

Vallis Capella was host to the collection of modular prefab buildings that made up their dig-site village. Jaren and his team had only been there for three months but it was already beginning to feel like home. 

A large industrial elevator took Jaren, Claire, Pierre, and Zeph down the one-and-a-half-mile vertical shaft to where the bones had been discovered. That deep underground, they could seal off the naturally formed caves and fill them with breathable air. But all the recent activity had made them dusty and thick.

The team stood on a temporary work platform overlooking the giant bone with spotlights shining on it from all directions. It was bleach-white and twice the size of a person. Thicker too.

“It looks like a Proximal Phalanx,” Jaren said, rubbing his chin.

“Yes. That’s what we thought, too,” Zeph agreed. “We did some GPR scans and it looks like part of a giant hand.” 

Claire’s wide-eyed expression mirrored his own astonishment. “Are you suggesting this thing could be humanoid?” she exclaimed.

Jaren raised an eyebrow. “If one bone of its finger is thirteen feet long, and if all the proportions were the same as a human, that would make it— “

“Around six hundred and fifty feet tall,” Pierre finished for him. 

Jaren crouched down as if getting closer to it might help him answer the string of questions stampeding through his mind. “This doesn’t make any sense. How did it get here? How could something this large even exist in the first place?”

“It’s gonna take a lot of digging to start answering those questions,” Pierre said.

“We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves,” Claire cut in. “Have we got the results of the carbon dating and genetics yet? Is this thing for real?”

“You bet it is,” Zeph replied. “The carbon dating puts these bones at about nine million years old.”

“It’s a baby by dinosaur standards,” Claire remarked. But everyone else was silent, the implications of a person this big and this old still sinking in. 

“This being—whatever it was—had already existed for three million years before the first iteration of humanity even crawled out of the primordial soup,” Jaren said. “Now, at a time when the entire population of Earth is facing extinction from a mysterious disease, we just so happened to stumble across a burial site that suggests we weren’t alone in the universe?” Jaren realised he’d never dug up anything even remotely close to six hundred and fifty feet long before. The largest dinosaur remains ever discovered were only one-sixth of the size. 

It was the find of a lifetime, and Jaren’s time was almost up.

~ ~ ~ 

When the dig team finally emerged from the depths of the excavation, Claire gave him a warm smile, that didn’t quite conceal the sadness in her eyes, and promised to see him in the morning. Then, on his way back to the prefab module which served as his office and accommodation, he stopped by the labs to swipe a bottle of moonshine.

His chair creaked as he slouched down in front of his work terminal. He spun the cap off the bottle of liquor and took a swig while his messages loaded.

“THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT MESSAGES”, his terminal told him.

This had to be some sort of joke. How was he supposed to reply to all of these enquiries? He took another swig from the bottle, skimmed over the titles, and started deleting anything that looked like an interview request. Eight of them were job offers from universities and publishers. He flagged them as important, remembered that he probably wouldn’t be around long enough to explore those opportunities, and then deleted them. The next one that caught his attention contained the subject: “YOU HAVE UNCOVERED THE BONES OF GOD”. There was a video file attached, so he opened it, expecting a good laugh. 

The video was centered on a man with dark skin, a white head of hair, and a long wispy beard. “Hello, my name is Phillima, High Priest of Amunkettep. We are an ancient order, older than any other religion, from a time before humans even used words to tell stories. There is a temple, in a place that most people have never even heard of. The Amun Temple. It has great stone walls covered in intricate carvings that tell the story of our creation, evolution, and development of society. They tell us of our God, Amunkettep. A healer who walked among us, looking down on us from his giant and mighty stature. Until one day he ascended into the heavens to sit on his throne—a great ball in the sky—and watch over us for the rest of eternity. But that’s not all . . .”

Jaren rolled his eyes and leaned forward, about to hit the stop-playback button, when Phillima held up a photograph of one of the stone carvings. He squinted at it, moved in closer. The image appeared remarkably like the brain scan the doctor had shown him back in the hospital.

“The murals also show the future: A great plague that threatens humanity. But on the brink of our demise, a hallowed disciple partitions for Amunkettep’s divine intervention and is the savior of all mankind.”

Jaren shook his head and then took another swig. His head was starting to buzz, but he wasn’t even sure if it was from the moonshine. This had to be some kind of stitch-up . . . or the guy was mad.

“I believe that you are our saviour, Jaren. You have found the bones of God and you must seek the cure. The fate of humanity rests in your hands.”

Phillima put his hands together in front of his face as though he was praying and the video ended.

“Hate to break it to ya, pal,” Jaren said to the blank screen. “But your God’s been dead for a few million years.”

A new message came through with a priority flag, which meant it could only be from the small handful of people who Jaren considered to be his inner circle. He selected the message icon and a white box filled the screen with the words “MEET ME IN THE BOTANY GARDEN?” 

The message was from Claire. He looked at the bottle, still uncapped in his hand. Half-empty. He must have been taking some pretty large swigs.

Jaren changed his shirt, then checked his reflection in the vanity unit. He realized it must have been at least three days since he had last shaved, then wondered why it mattered. He looked back at the bottle sitting on his desk, inviting him to take one last swig—or better yet, take it with him. He thought the better of it and left his one-room module to meet Claire.

It was a five-minute walk through sealed corridors over to the botany garden, the only dome-shaped building in the entire village. It was also the second-largest structure, dwarfed exclusively by the massive drill complex used to tunnel down into the depths of the moon. Wherever people went, it seemed they took their plants with them. It helped to supplement their food supply and oxygen, but Jaren thought it was more than that. It was the need to feel connected to nature, especially in a landscape as baron as the Lunar surface.

Two sets of doors cycled independently to let him in but also made sure he didn’t bring any contaminants. As soon as he stepped inside he was greeted with the musky herbal smell of plants and soil. It was also more humid than the corridors had been. The triangular panels that made up the dome’s structure could shift to either amplify the sun’s light or block most of it out. They were currently dimmed to simulate the night cycle, but it wasn’t too dark to find his way around the large indoor garden.

The ground was soft underfoot and the grass rustled as he stepped on it. The place was packed with trees and plants so he didn’t have a clear view of the entire complex, but he knew where Claire would be. In the center, there was an open area with tables and chairs for people to congregate, with a pond nearby if people wanted to swim. Jaren pushed through the leaves, and sure enough, there she was sitting on a swinging rope seat near the pond.

“Hey,” she said casually as he approached.

“Hey,” he replied. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“Ha! How could I sleep at a time like this? It’s not every day you discover the bones of a nine million-year-old giant on the moon . . . oh, and find out your best friend is dying.”

Jaren approached the rope seat and Claire shuffled over so he had room to sit next to her. This close, he could see the tears that had rolled down her cheek in the soft white light. “I, um . . . I’m—”

“It’s alright.” She shook her head. “I understand. If I found out I was dying I wouldn’t know how to tell anyone either.”

“They’ve given me six months.”

Claire let out what sounded like a cross between a laugh and a sob. Jaren put an arm around her and, almost to his surprise, she wrapped her arms around him; her head resting on his shoulder. “I don’t want to lose you,” she said gently.

“What if . . . what if there was some way to find a cure?”

Claire looked up at him, her expression was a question.

“I don’t know,” he continued. “Maybe it’s nothing, but I got a call from this whack-job religious guy, and it got me thinking . . .”

~ ~ ~ 

The alarm buzzed and Jaren rolled over to hit the snooze button. Then he remembered. He sat up, pulling the blanket. Claire protested and tried to claw it back. 

“Coffee,” Jaren said looking around his cramped little room. 

Claire stretched. Her hair was a tangled mess. She opened her eyes and gave him a smile that warmed his heart. Then she looked at the time. “What’s got you rousted so early?”

Jaren found the single-portion instant coffee and shook it to trigger the chemical reaction which would bring it almost to the boil within a matter of seconds. He waited, then flipped the top off and took a careful sip. “Today, that specialized team of geneticists arrives from Earth. Oh, and that High Priest guy, Phillima, with a bunch of his followers. Between the lot of ‘em, hopefully, someone can find a cure.”

Claire snatched the coffee off him and took a deep breath in through her nose, eyes closed, and smiled. Then she took a sip of her own. “Let me get dressed. I’m coming with you.”

They walked arm-in-arm towards the shuttle pad and Jaren reflected on how much his life had improved in the last month since they’d discovered the giant’s remains. Sure, he’d been given a terminal diagnosis and knew that even at this very moment, his own DNA was plotting against him. Gathering strength at the intersection of his brain and spine. But as a result, he had made a conscious decision to drink less and truly cherish the little time he had left. There was something else though, something unspoken, that made it a little easier to smile; it was the hope that this discovery could provide him—and the science community at large—with answers. Answers that could lead to a cure. 

There was a window at the receiving module, a real one, which allowed them to see the almost invisible thrust plumes from the shuttle as it touched down on the pad. It looked like a fat little bird. Four thrust engines poked out like legs that followed the curve of the hull up to a pointed nose at the top. The aerobridge extended and attached itself to the shuttle’s airlock as part of the automated landing procedure, allowing the passengers to disembark.  

The science team emerged from the temporary walkway first. All the bags and equipment they could carry slung over their shoulders.

“I’m Doctor Greg Anderson,” the first man said. “This is my team; Doctor Sarah Mills, Doctor Sarvesh Kashyap, and Doctor Jia Lang.” Each of them nodded their greeting in sync with their names. All of them exchanged smiles and handshakes. 

“Thank you all so much for coming,” Claire said. “We’re really excited to be working with some of the world’s best scientific minds on this.”

“Well, there’s a lot at stake,” Doctor Anderson said. “Anything we can learn from these remains could be vitally important in stopping the extinction of our species.”

“You put too much faith in your gadgets,” Phillima said, butting into the conversation. He held out a long necklace with beads that looked like they were made of polished gemstones and placed it ceremoniously over Jaren’s head. “A gift, for the chosen one.”

“How was everyone’s trip?” Claire asked.

“It was most exhilarating,” Phillima announced. “It would have been sooner, too, if we didn’t have to wait for the scientists to make all of their unnecessary preparations.”

Doctor Anderson shook his head. “The trip was fine, but we’re all anxious to see how much progress you’ve made over the last couple of weeks. Have you located the skull yet?”

“Yes,” Jaren said. “We’ve had mech crews working round the clock. Once we got a better idea of the positioning and orientation of the hand, we were able to narrow down the most likely directions. What we found, as we initially suspected, is that the body is laying in a prone position with its arms crossed over its sternum.”

“My team and I will get settled in, then we’d like to see it.”

“Of course,” Jaren agreed. The flicker of hope he felt in his chest was becoming a flame.

~ ~ ~ 

Jaren sat alone on the cold, dusty ground in front of the enormous skull. The head was over sixty-five feet tall and tilted forwards as though its chin had been resting on its chest. The ominous shadows cast by the construction lights made it look like a set from an old horror movie. But as per Phillima’s instructions, Jaren needed to spend his time sitting here meditating in order to make contact with the giant God’s spirit . . . or something like that. For the most part, he found it boring. But other than coordinating the mech crews and spending time with Claire, there wasn’t much else for him to do.

The chime from his hand terminal broke the silence and echoed off the walls of the newly dug chamber. He reached into his pocket, welcoming the distraction. It chimed again; incoming call from Doctor Anderson.

“Jaren here,” he said a little louder than he had meant to. “What have you got for me, Doctor?”

“I was hoping to speak with you in person, but they told me you weren’t in the village.”

“No. I’m down at the Alpha site. With the . . . you know.”

“Yeah, about that.” Anderson sounded hesitant. “We’ve been here for two months. We’ve run every test in our arsenal and they’re all showing the same thing; this giant never even had the genes that cause CIA34.”

“Well, can’t that tell us anything? Was there something in its genome that made it immune?”

“While this giant may have looked human, its DNA is infinitely more complex. Maybe if we had the best quantum computer and several years to process the data, then I’m sure there’s probably a lot we can learn from it. But people want a cure and they want it now. That’s just not going to happen. I think we need to call it.”

Jaren’s heart sank. For weeks he had been holding on to this idea that, because this thing was so bizarre, so utterly miraculous, maybe it could be the answer. And now that it wasn’t he felt . . . empty. It was time that he—and the rest of the world—faced the reality that there was no magic cure, no pill they could swallow to make it all go away.

“Jaren, are you still there?”

“Yeah. I’ll call a press conference tomorrow.”

Jaren terminated the connection, pushed himself up off the ground and patted the dust off his trousers. He looked up at the silent skull and felt an unreasonable bitterness towards the long-dead remains. “Great lot of help you turned out to be.” He took off the necklace from Phillima and threw it away defiantly, the clank echoing as it ricocheted off the ancient bones.  

~ ~ ~ 

The green room wasn’t actually green. It was light and welcoming and looked like something out of a furniture catalog—perfectly crafted to make you want to buy the comfy couch and the oval coffee table with the thin pointy legs. It also had a large wall display that was set to what he assumed was a live feed of the podium he would soon be standing behind to broadcast their findings live to the entire population. Well, almost live, when you accounted for the one point three-second delay it took for the signal to bounce around between a bunch of satellites and then back to Earth.

Jaren couldn’t sit still. He fidgeted and paced up and down the room, waiting for them to call him up once everything was ready. Them being the news network studio at Lunar Base who were nice enough to let Jaren use their facilities. Claire sat in the chair, looking at something on her hand terminal. She had insisted that he wear a suit, which made him feel even more uncomfortable. You’re not going to deliver an important message like that to the entire population of Earth dressed like you just crawled out of a hole, was what she said. But why not? He had just crawled out of a hole.

His hands felt sweaty. The last time he had done something like this, it had caught him completely off guard. No time to prepare, just react. This time was different. Much different. This time he had to deliver bad news.

There was a courtesy knock at the door, then it snapped open, revealing a production assistant holding a work terminal. “We’re ready for you in five, Mister Langston.”

Jaren took a deep breath. Claire stood up and wrapped her arms around him. She looked stunning in her knee-length blue dress, and her hair was done up all nice. 

“You’ll do fine, Mister Langston,” she said with a cheeky smile. “Don’t forget I’ll be right beside you.” He was surprised by how well she was handling all of this.

They walked hand-in-hand out to the conference room. Cameras flashed rapidly as they made their way onto the stage and Jaren took to the podium. Phillima and Doctor Anderson stood behind him to one side, both providing visual representation for their respective communities and could jump in if there was a question he was unable to answer. Their expressions were all grave and serious, setting the foreboding tone of the pending revelation. He looked at the crowd of reporters in front of him, a sea of grey and blue suites framed by the blinding studio lights. 

“Ahh yes, hello. My name is Jaren Langston, I’m the principal paleontologist on the Vallis Capella dig. The excavation that uncovered the first extraterrestrial remains of a giant that many are now calling Amunkettep.”

Jaren thought it was strange. They could have named the giant anything; Moon Man, Space Monster, Langston's Giant . . . but instead, they held onto the name that some weird old guy from a religion no one had ever heard of had proclaimed. No one even questioned it, because they wanted to believe the story. They wanted hope. He thought about how hope had made all the difference for him before he had been confronted with the truth. His heart began to race in his chest. He looked around at all of the people waiting for his deliverance, and he knew what he had to do.

“The reason I’ve called this conference is to announce that we have found a cure.”

The room erupted with the shouting cacophony of a hundred voices.

~ ~ ~ 

“What the hell were you thinking?” Doctor Anderson demanded with a closed fist to emphasize how angry he was. They’d reconvened back in the green room, all together this time. Which was good because the walls were soundproof.

“Look, I understand that what I said is morally and ethically questionable, but—”

“Oh, really? What did you think, that just because you said there was a cure that one would just magically appear and everything would be alright? There’s no cure, Jaren. Do you hear me? There—is—no—cure!”

Claire let out a laugh. “No. I get it.” Everyone looked at her. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a real cure or not. Make something up; a placebo. Grind up the giant’s bones and put it in there if it makes you feel any better. At least the human race won’t spend its last couple of years feeling helpless and afraid.”

“But what happens when it doesn’t work?” Doctor Anderson demanded. “People will figure it out sooner or later.”

“They won’t,” Phillima said. “Because we won’t let them. The governments, the media, religions, the people. They all want this to be real. They don’t want the world falling into chaos, which is inevitable when people have nothing to live for—nothing to lose.”

Anderson’s hand went limp and he shook his head. “At the very least, maybe it can buy us some time while we try something else.”

Since everyone had agreed to keep up Jaren’s story, Phillima and Doctor Anderson went back to their hotel rooms, leaving Jaren and Claire alone again.

“I’m really proud of what you did out there,” she said.

“You really think it was the right thing to do?”

She nodded. “I also have something that I need to tell you.”

Jaren raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Well, what is it?”

Claire had the exact same look of excitement that she’d had before telling him about the giant bones. She took a deep breath and put both hands on her stomach. “I’m pregnant. We’re going to have a baby.”

~ ~ ~ 

Claire lay on a reclining chair in the dark assessment room. This was Jaren’s first time going to the prenatal clinic at the Armstrong Medical Institute. Her shirt was pulled up to show the bare skin of her belly and the nurse placed a large rectangular patch on it.

“This will allow us to take a full-imaging scan of the baby and show us everything we need to know. Are you nice and comfortable?”

“Yes, thank you.” Claire smiled. “Just nervous. This is our first time.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” the nurse said reassuringly. “This won’t hurt a bit. Now, are you wanting to find out the gender?”

Claire looked at him, a silent question. The subject hadn’t even come up and to be honest, it hadn’t even crossed his mind. He smiled and gave her a nod.

The nurse took it as approval and flicked a bunch of images from her work terminal onto a large wall screen. It was all there; a tiny little curled-up fetus, heartbeat graph, organ scans, and other technical information.

“Well, it looks like you’re having a healthy baby girl. All the readings are within expected tolerances.”

He squeezed Claire’s hand. “And the genetic marker for CIA34? Is there any sign of —“

“Huh,” the nurse said, examining the readout. “That’s interesting.”

“What’s interesting?” Claire asked, a concerned look on her face. “What have you found?”

“Well, I’ll need to take some more samples but so far it looks like your baby doesn’t even have the marker. I’m going to need to make some calls.”

The nurse left in a flurry, leaving Jaren feeling a little unsure of what to make of the news.

Claire broke the silence. “What do you think we should name her?”

“How about, Hope?”