The Last of Her Kind

Her hands lie still, outside the warmth of the duvet, palms down on the cool surface of the cotton cover.  Her eyes are closed.  A nerve flickers on her left eyelid, making the thin skin jump.  Her arms are covered by the sleeves of her gown, almost as far as the wrists, but not quite.  He can see the nub of bone on the outside of each wrist.  He can see a small scar above the nub on her right wrist.  Her skin is pale.

She breathes evenly.  He watches her and wonders what happened.

A nurse enters the room, barely acknowledging his existence.  She walks over to the bed and checks the chart, which hangs on the bottom rail.  She carries out clichéd, nursely tasks, checking monitors, writing notes.  She moves with practised fluidity.

He sits on the plastic chair and occasionally looks out through the window, across the car park, beyond the small, grassed area where patients sit and smoke on a bench beneath a wooden trellis.  The trellis is bare, devoid of vegetation.  He looks towards the other hospital buildings that sprawl across this hillside site.  The window does not open.  It is double, maybe triple-glazed, and he cannot hear any noise from the outside world.

She lies motionless in the bed, and he wonders what happened.

He is security.  His purpose is to keep people away from her, but nobody has been near.  Only the hospital staff.  He knows nothing about her, only that his presence is required to ensure her safety.  He does not recognise her.  She isn’t what he would call famous.  She wears no jewellery, so he is unable to tell if she is wealthy, from moneyed stock.  All he knows is that his boss assigned him to this watching role.

For some reason, she is important.

He does not know that the scar on her right wrist was created when she cut herself, pruning roses.  He does not know that her pale skin is peppered with freckles in the summer, or that the freckles have faded.  He does not know that, behind her closed eyelids, her eyes are an indeterminate shade of blue, or green, or grey, a shade that changes with the quality of the light.

She lies there in the hospital bed, in a private room away from the other patients.  She drifts in and out of sleep, or is it in and out of consciousness?  She does not dream, or if she does, she does not remember.  Sometimes, she opens her eyes a crack and sees that he is still sitting in the plastic chair.  Sometimes he is watching her, and sometimes he is not.  She does not know who he is, but she has an idea about what he is doing there.

He does not know it, but she is the last of her kind.

She had hidden in plain view.  When the terror came, she had not panicked.  Her ability to assimilate had been the saving of her.  While others had gone to ground, hiding themselves away in underground colonies, she had carried on as though nothing in the world had changed.  She had looked people in the face, with those eyes of hers that changed colour with the light, and calmly lied about who she was.  Nobody had any evidence, and if they suspected then their suspicion was not a strong enough impulse to act upon.  She had been left alone, to continue her life.

It had helped that she was living alone by then.  Her adoptive parents were both gone.  The last to go was the old man who had treated her as a daughter.  He had been an early subscriber, and had gone so far as to donate some of his own DNA to modify hers.  She was more convincing as a result.  Her skin was warm to the touch, where the skin of others of her kind could seem clammy and unreal.  When she cut herself, as she had that summer, pruning the roses in the family garden, her skin healed like his.  Which is to say, badly, with scarring.  She had absorbed his ability to make freckles in the sun.

He had delighted in trialling improvements.  The nerve that was twitching now in her eyelid was something that he had approved.  Small human traits, to make her seem more like him.  More like his kind, and less like her own.

The man in the plastic chair who is paid to watch her knows nothing of this.  It has been so long since her kind had walked freely in the world.  He would not have been born when their acceptance began to change.

She had seen it happen.  The breakthroughs in medical research.  The slow but steady increase in live human births.  Babies being carried to full term.  Women delivering their offspring in re-opened maternity units.  Her kind no longer being seen as one of the family, but treated as an unpaid nanny, to help raise these children.  Her kind, formed because humans had chosen a prolonged adolescence, careers over family and, after the pandemic, ended up unable to create their own offspring biologically.  Her kind, now cast aside in favour of those who would grow up to become people like the man sitting in the plastic chair in this silent hospital room.

When she peers at him through her half-opened eyes, she knows that he is too young to even remember a time when her kind existed.  It is so long ago.

She wonders who it was who had realised.  Somebody must have remembered how things used to be.  Somebody must have realised what she was.

She cannot remember what happened.  She can only remember waking up and finding herself lying in this bed.  She had felt her vital processes slowing over the previous weeks and months.  Perhaps she had suffered a collapse.  Perhaps she had fainted in public and, when she failed to respond to the usual human treatments for a faint, perhaps someone had called an ambulance.

Her memory has somehow been fractured.  She searches for the information, but finds only blank spaces.

He watches her, waiting for time to pass.  He will be relieved of his watch soon.  He will be given 12 hours’ grace, time to sleep, to wash, to relax.  He carries the smell of the hospital home with him, and his wife asks whether there is any news about who the woman in the bed is.  Each time he has to tell her, no.  No news, no information.  He knows he is not supposed to ask.  He knows that his job is to watch without question.  He also knows that sometimes it is better not to be aware of the true nature of the person he is watching.  But this time he has not been able to help himself.  He has asked one of the nurses, the more approachable one, who smiles at him when she enters the room and sometimes asks him how he is.  He is still without answers, though.  The nurse was unable to tell him anything.  To her, the woman in the bed was just a patient.  No name, no details, just a person who collapsed and was brought in for treatment.  She has no ID and nobody has come forward to claim her as missing from their life.

He knows that there are people like that in the world.  People who have nobody.  When he told his wife what the nurse had said, she had grown sad.  How can people live like that, she had wondered.  How can they exist without a family?

He thinks about his own family, the son and the daughter that they have.  They are unusual among their friends, having children at such a young age.  He smiles when he thinks about his female colleagues, who cannot comprehend why his wife, at 25, has chosen to bear children now rather than have a career.  They shake their heads in disbelief.  To them, she seems anachronistic.  His wife laughs when he tells her, saying that she must have a recessive gene, something that makes her a throwback to centuries ago.  She says that there will be time for her to have a career when the children are grown and at school.  She has faith in a future that will allow such a thing to happen.

He wonders whether the woman in the bed has children.  She looks to be in her 40s, so maybe not yet.  He tries to imagine what career she has, but without clothes and make-up, it is hard for him to judge her social position.  A hospital gown makes everyone look the same.  Her skin looks good to him, so he imagines that she has a stress-free life.  He can go no further with this line of thinking, though, so he looks once more out through the window at the unchanging view.

He does not notice that her breathing has changed slightly, a sign that she is conscious.  Her senses awaken, and she can smell him across the room.  She has not noticed that about him before.  She wonders what it means.

Inside her body, she can feel her vital processes continuing.  There is nothing too badly wrong, she can tell.  She feels a lethargy, however.  This is unlike anything she has felt before.  She wonders how long her kind are meant to continue before this lethargy begins.  She has existed for 49 years.  For the last 31 of those years, she has had no updates or modifications to her systems.  For the last 31 years, she has been alone.

She thinks back to the past, to the time when her human father was alive.  She remembers his fascination with the emerging technologies that could make her more like him.  Not just the addition of his own DNA, not just the tweaks that permitted twitches beneath her skin, but the reprogramming of that living skin so that it aged as she aged, without needing replacement, and the smart fibres that made up the bones of her body, allowing them to gradually stretch until she had reached her optimum height.  She was an experiment, and she was grateful that those experiments were successful.  She would not have survived the past three decades without them.  His willingness to take chances on technological advances had rendered her more real.

She lies in this hospital bed now, and to everyone’s eye she is human.  But someone has seen beneath the surface.  Someone has realised that eyes can deceive.  She wonders what this will mean for her future.

She opens her eyes.  The man in the plastic chair is looking through the window.  She moves a hand against the cool cotton of the bedding.  The slight gasp of skin against fabric makes him turn his head.  He looks at her and sees that her eyes are open.  She sees him react.  He is surprised.

“Hello,” she says.

He does not speak for a moment, and then, “Hello,” he replies.

“I wonder, could you tell me, how long have I been here?” she asks him.

He scratches his head and looks at his watch.  He is so human that it makes her want to smile.

“Um, about three days, I think,” he says.

He looks confused, as though this should not be happening.

“Do you know what happened to me?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“I can’t remember,” she tells him.  “My memory is a blank.”

There is silence in the room.  He is still looking at her.  She looks back at him.  She tries a smile.  He watches as her mouth turns up at each corner and her lips stretch smoothly across her teeth.  He does not smile back.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Whitcombe,” he says.  “Terry.”

“I’m Allegra,” she smiles.  “I’m pleased to meet you.”

She closes her eyes again.  If she is to get out of here, she will need his help.  She needs to be able to persuade him to let her leave the room for some reason, without calling for a nurse.  She has watched him through her half-opened eyes and thinks that she can trust him, enlist him to her cause.  They have exchanged names.  For now, it is enough.  She allows her vital processes to slow just enough to make it seem that she is asleep.

Behind her closed eyes, she tries to remember.  The most recent moment that she recalls is an unknown time ago.  She remembers that she was in a department store, looking at clothes, when the world seemed to slow and erase itself, pixel by pixel, from her sight.  What happened in the moments before that, she cannot recall.  There is nothing flickering at the edges of her memory, no trace remains, but she knows that something did happen.  Something that triggered her decline.

She wonders what she looked like, as she was collapsing in that department store.  She has only seen one person collapse, and remembers being surprised that it would be so angular.  From reading books written centuries ago, in which women stayed at home and fainted at regular intervals, she had gained the notion that it would be like watching solidity turn to liquid.  Instead it had been a stiffening and then a crumpling, but without any fluidity of motion.  Limbs and joints, bones and muscle, all were too interlinked to allow fluidity in the collapse of that body.  She had been alone in the house with him.  They had always been alone in those days.  After she had stood and looked at his motionless body for a while, fully expecting him to recover and stand up, she had realised that she was looking at her first corpse.

His is still the only corpse she has ever seen.

She wonders if she looked like a corpse, as she lay at the end of her collapse, in a dimly remembered department store.

She remembers the stiffening of his body and the change in the colour of his skin.  He seemed to grey as the minutes passed by.  She remembers that his socks were grey, and woollen.  His slippers met his socks at the ankle.  His trouser legs had ridden up slightly in the fall to the floor.  His socks were wrinkled and grey, his feet pointing downwards in his slippers, his legs at awkward angles to each other.  His hands were clutching at his chest, claws of greying flesh.  Beneath the growing greyness of his face, blood had gathered at his forehead, leaving it a strange shade of maroon.

She had not known that this was how a human life could end.

Afterwards, the men from the Coroner’s office had taken him away on a collapsible trolley-bed.  They had sent her into another room, and she remembers listening to the sound of the trolley-bed crashing into walls and doors as they manoeuvred his body out of the house.

Since that day, she has been alone.  No upgrades.  No replacements.  Just her body as it is, processing existence, and convincing those around her that she is just like them.

She thinks about the terrors, the backlash against her kind.  As soon as women were able to create and carry a child to term in their biologically aged bodies, children became a sacred commodity.  More so than the children created outside of bodies and transplanted into wombs.  Far more sacred than the children who were created in laboratories and shipped out to the families of women who could not gestate an implanted embryo.  She had been such a child, in a time when natural conception was a thing of the past.  She was an adolescent when natural births became possible again, and a woman by the time her kind were little more than servants used to raise the children of women who wanted to return to their careers.

And then, her kind were rounded up as abominations, travesties, things that mocked the perfection of humanity.  Human society seemed unable to accept that they had created her kind for a reason.  Human society wanted to forget that they had once been dependent on the creation of her kind if they had wanted a family.  Her kind were first made to live in their own communities, housed away from human society, but still free to move around and carry out work for humans.  Children of her kind were not allowed to remain in their homes as part of the family unit, but were sent to training centres where they learned new skills and new ways of thinking.  Adults of her kind were given apartments in the new communities.  She had avoided that, because she was already alone and living in her human father’s house.  She was not part of a family, and her modifications meant that her neighbours were never really certain that she was of her kind, and not one of them.  Memory plays tricks on people, and any who thought they remembered her as a child of that human-childless couple soon convinced themselves that someone who looked like her human father, with skin so human in appearance, could not possibly be one of her kind.

Later, the communities were broken up and her kind were forced to flee or accept destruction.  Those who fled lived desolate lives in tunnels and disused transport facilities beneath the earth until someone in human society found them out, or informed the authorities of a suspected colony.  Those who accepted destruction realised that living as a fugitive without real purpose was probably not worth the effort.

And so it was that eventually, all of her kind had been destroyed, or had failed, and she was the only one remaining.

She hears a sound.  He is standing, no longer seated in his plastic chair.  She needs to act.  She opens her eyes.

“Terry?”

He seems startled, but answers, “Yes?”

“Are you leaving?”

“Yes.  It’s the end of my watch.  I’ll be relieved in a few minutes.”

“I see.”

She pauses to take this in.

“And when you go, there will be someone else watching over me?”

He nods, uncertain of whether he should be talking to her, as it is not part of his brief.  He suspects that he should inform a nurse that the woman is awake and talking as though nothing is wrong with her.

“Before you go, I wonder – would you do a favour for me?”

He looks across the room to the door, as though expecting someone to enter the room and question him.

“It’s just that I have been lying here for days – three days, I think you said?”

He nods.  Three days, yes.  That is how long she has been in this hospital room, kept away from everyone else, a secret to be guarded.

“I wonder, would you help me along the corridor to the bathroom?  I would like to wash my face.”

“I, I’m not, I mean,” he stumbles over his words.  “A nurse.”

“I’ll be very quick,” she says.  “I don’t need you to trouble a nurse.”

She is calm as she speaks to him, and it seems to steady his nerve.  He decides that she has a right to some freedom, as limited as a walk along the corridor is.  After all, nobody has been near her since she has been in the hospital.

“Okay,” he says, and steps towards the bed.

He reaches out and helps her up and to her feet.  She is slight, but surprisingly heavy.  She grips his arms firmly as she finds her balance, and then she looks up at him and smiles.

“Okay,” she agrees.  “Shall we?”

She leans on one arm and they make their way out of the room and along the corridor.  This part of the hospital seems very quiet, compared to the other parts he has visited.  Nobody passes them on the short walk, and she is moving surprisingly quickly for someone who has been bed-ridden for three days.

“Will you be okay?” he asks, as they stop outside the bathroom.

She nods.  “Yes, thank you,” she says, as she pushes open the door.

He looks around as she enters the bathroom, searching for a place to sit down while he waits.

The door closes behind her, and she is alone in the clinical quiet of the tiled room.  She steps over to the sink and looks at herself in the mirror.  She presses down on one of the taps and catches water in her cupped hand.  She splashes it onto her face.  Its coolness refreshes her.  An important modification, that one.  Her human father had been adamant that she deserved to associate physical sensations with emotional responses.

She looks at herself in the mirror again.  Water glistens on her face.

A nurse passes by in the corridor.  She stops in front of the guard.

“Why aren’t you in her room?” she asks.

He blushes.

“She woke up,” he says.  “She wanted to wash her face, stretch her legs.  I didn’t think it was important.”

The nurse folds her arms and frowns.

“You should have called someone,” she says.  She turns her head towards the bathroom door.  “Is she in there?” she asks.

“Yes,” he replies, feeling despondent and ashamed.  He knows that he will be reprimanded for this slip.

The nurse turns fully to face the bathroom.  She steps forward, her right arm extending, ready to make contact with the door, ready to push it open.  He hears a click, but the nurse doesn’t.  Her hand makes contact with the door.  She pushes through.  As the door opens, he can see that the room is empty.  The nurse goes into the bathroom and the door closes behind her.

Minutes pass, and the nurse eventually emerges.  She is alone.  She is wearing a puzzled look on her face.

“Are you sure she went in there?” she asks.

“Yes, of course.  Where else would she go?”

The nurse does not say anything.

“Why?” he asks.  “Why did you ask me that?”

“She’s not in there,” the nurse says.

They stare at each other, unable to comprehend, then together they enter the bathroom to look for her.

The nurse is right.  There is no sign of the woman.

They stand side by side for a few minutes, each of them gazing around the room, trying to work out where the woman could have gone.  The door to the toilet cubicle is open.  The bath is empty.  There are no cupboards, no hiding spaces.  He looks up at the ceiling, to check if there is a vent, mindful of the films he has seen, remembering that people who want to escape sometimes hide in ventilation systems.  There is no ceiling vent.

He looks at the window.  He sees that this is a window that will open.  He sees more, sees that the locking mechanism is tilted.  The window is closed, but it is not locked.  He thinks.  The nurse has not seen it, he knows.  She would have said something if she had.  He decides to say nothing.

In the days that follow, he is unable to determine whether he kept his silence in order to allow the woman to escape, or whether it was to save his own skin.  He knows that, if it became clear that he had accompanied her to the bathroom without calling a nurse and she had escaped through an unlocked window, then the blame would fall mainly on him.  As it is, without the knowledge that the window was unlocked, the woman has simply and mysteriously disappeared.

When he talks to his wife about it, though, there is something in the way that he tells the story that makes his wife think that he wanted the woman to escape.

For escaped she has.  It is to her advantage that the part of the hospital where she has been kept is built entirely on a single level.  No upper floors exist.  As she slips through the window, pushing it closed again behind her, she is unaware that this part of the hospital is for the more psychologically damaged patients.  More than one storey would be inviting leaps to be made.  She is equally unaware that the man who greets her cheerfully with “Nice day for a stroll, love!” is a patient in this part of the hospital, and this is why he does not challenge her, clothed as she is in a hospital gown.

She decides to hold her head high and walk confidently.  She has been living as though nothing is wrong since the terrors began, since her kind ceased to be, and it is no real effort for her to walk through the hospital grounds in her hospital gown as though it is the most natural thing in the world.  She passes people and, if they notice her at all, nobody says a word.  She walks through the small, grassed area where patients sit and smoke on a bench beneath a wooden trellis.  She notices that the trellis is bare, devoid of vegetation.  She wonders briefly what its purpose is, if not to support plants.  She does not know that, if she looks back, she will see in the distance the window to the room in which she was lying just a short time ago.  She does not know that, standing at that window and watching her go, is the doctor who examined her and realised what she is.

She does not need to know any of this.  She is the last of her kind, and as unlike her kind as it is possible to be.

She reaches the main road and turns towards home.

© J R Hargreaves 2011