The red light above the camera blinked on, and the world leaned in.
I sat upright on the delivery bed, sheets already damp beneath me, my hands trembling not from fear but from the weight of being seen. Millions of eyes. No escape. No edits. Just truth and blood and breath.
“My name is Iris Thorne,” I said, my voice thin but steady. “Tonight you’re watching the result of forced pregnancy. You may also be watching me die.”
The chat exploded. Numbers climbed so fast they blurred. Faces from every corner of the planet stared back at me through a single unblinking lens.
Behind the camera, the volunteer doctors moved with quiet urgency. They had come knowing the risk—knowing this birth was wired, watched, and potentially fatal. No one here was being paid. That mattered more than anything.
The hackers gave me a nod.
The screen behind me split into fragments of hell.
Autopsy reports. Six women, officially listed as heart failure, organ collapse, complications. The truth scrolled beside them in cold clinical font: ovarian hyperstimulation, internal bleeding, forced extraction. Then Caspian—young, terrified—strapped to a chair while Aldrich injected him, annotating symptoms like a proud parent marking a growth chart.
Emails followed. The senator’s name. Aldrich’s replies. Phrases like genetic purification and acceptable loss ratios. A buyer list surfaced—familiar surnames, powerful faces.
I watched the comments shift. The hunger for spectacle curdled into horror.
Then the pain hit.
It came sharp and deep, like my body tearing itself open from the inside. I screamed, unable to stop it, fingers digging into the sheets. The diamond uterus burned, a living cage tightening as if it knew what was coming.
Aldrich’s face appeared on one of the monitors, smug even from miles away. “Terminate the stream,” he ordered calmly. “You’re destabilizing valuable assets.”
I laughed, wild and broken. “You already did that.”
The monitors screamed.
A warning flashed red—DIAMOND UTERUS FAILSAFE ARMED.
The doctor swore. “He’s triggered the self-destruct. If the fetus exits—”
“—it explodes,” I finished. I’d read the specs. I’d helped design earlier versions. Of course he’d add that. Control to the last molecule.
Then chaos cracked open again.
“Iris.”
I knew that voice before I saw him.
Caspian stumbled into the room, pale, thinner than I remembered, but alive. Blood bloomed through his shirt where the stitches hadn’t fully healed. In his hand was a drive, shaking.
“My father,” he gasped. “Before he died. He told me Aldrich keeps everyone’s insurance in one place. Kill-switches. Codes.”
The hackers swarmed him. “We need the biometric override,” one shouted. “It’s keyed to Iris’s genome!”
My vision tunneled. The pain came in waves now, contractions tearing through me, breath leaving my body in sharp, ugly sounds.
“Your mother,” Caspian said, kneeling beside me, gripping my hand. “She built the cipher. It’s not numbers. It’s memory.”
And suddenly I knew.
I closed my eyes and hummed.
A song she used to sing when I couldn’t sleep. Soft. Off-key. Each note tied to a genetic marker she’d hidden in my cells. A lullaby turned into a lock.
The system paused.
Then disengaged.
The scream that tore out of me wasn’t fear—it was release.
“Push!” the midwife cried.
I did.
Life burst into the room.
A boy first, crying, furious, lungs announcing his arrival to the broken world. Then the girl—silent for half a second that felt like eternity before she gasped, small and defiant.
I smiled through tears and blood. “Hi,” I whispered. “I’m your mother.”
Then everything went wrong.
The diamond uterus ruptured.
Pain vanished, replaced by cold. Too much blood. Hands pressed down, voices overlapping, alarms shrieking. Someone yelled that the blood supply wasn’t enough.
“I’ll donate,” Caspian said immediately.
The doctor hesitated. “His blood could kill you. His condition—”
“Do it,” I whispered, my mouth filling with copper. “If I die… let it be because someone chose me.”
The needle went in.
Warmth spread.
Something shifted.
I felt it—not pain, not healing, but recognition. Like two broken codes suddenly aligning. My cells surged, rewriting, repairing. Caspian gasped, color flooding back into his face.
The world faded.
The last thing I heard was his voice, raw and fierce, speaking to the camera Aldrich was still watching through.
“You lost,” Caspian said, holding our children against his chest. “Life always finds a way.”
He pressed the button.
And somewhere far away, Aldrich laughed, his image flickering in fire. “Are you sure, Caspian?” he whispered. “Check the girl’s genome.”
Darkness took me.
But I was still breathing.