I won.
That’s the word they use.
Won.
As if the lottery is a prize, and the reward is being chosen out of twelve million “hopefuls” for the chance to travel three miles below the Earth’s surface, only to have an alien entity put something inside you that is neither yours nor human.
Afterward you carry it for nine months, deliver it at a government-funded medical facility, and return home to pick your life back up, as if it restarts on command after someone has remodeled your insides to their specifications.
Won.
“Congratulations!”
The representative from the Bureau of Interspecies Reproductive Compliance sounds like a grey pantsuit, and her voice has a foundation on it: smooth, opaque, applied in an even coat over whatever a woman feels when she calls a twenty-seven-year-old bartender to tell her that civic duty has selected her uterus.
