The Birth Mark - NaNoWriMo 2013

Ten

The trip was only a year on the time-line but the playground looked different when she materialized at night.  Somehow rather surreal in the shadows and pale in the artificial glowing light of the street orbs that hung in the air like ghostly spirits of past online videos she remembered from how many hundreds of years ago? 

She stumbled through the park under the cover of darkness in this strange futuristic city.  The streets were so alien to her, so clean, paved in an unknown plastic material that glittered with its own very subtle internal light source.  There was no litter (or bins as far as she could tell), no shops as her husband had told her this was all done via the vids online or through the electronic house butlers’ internal ordering system.  Most of the streets were covered in a slightly tinted plastic type ‘roof covering’ like giant plastic sails flying over the streets, not open to the elements as the UV rays from the sun were so dangerous and the weather so unpredictable.  The whole environment looked like a vast mall but with no shops only houses; clean, strange alien houses.  Even the doors had no locks that she could see.  Even the transport system was like nothing she’d ever seen before.  A tube system ran all through the city and the bigger apartment blocks and institutions like schools, health units etc. had the system running right through the community blocks and straight into such buildings, dropping their passengers off at their doors or in the lobby.  The few personal cars that were parked in this giant city sized mall were strange little plastic pods with no wheels.  She only had a vague knowledge of their power source, again from what her husband had told her; it was a hybrid solar and electromagnetic mix, clean and highly efficient.

She tried to take deep breaths and moved as quickly as she could, stopping when a contraction came and leaning against a wall or fence (all also made from some unknown materials).  She didn’t know where she was going, only that she wanted to find a quiet place to give birth, with no possibilities of a surveillance camera catching the event.  She tried to act as normally as she could, considering she was leaking amniotic fluid and stopping every ten to fifteen minutes to work through her contractions and she tried to stand in an unobtrusive place at these moments as she wanted to avoid being discovered.  Luckily the city was deserted at this hour and she could only hope there were no computerised eyes on her.

She didn’t know if the future she had seen was set in stone and her child would indeed be adopted by that awful woman and installed with a genetic marker, all she knew was that she was going to try her hardest to make sure that didn’t happen.  She had seen this contemporary world through her husband’s eyes, it was clean and sterile, emotionally and socially, as were the streets in this better corner of the city.  She knew the only hope her child had was if she found the help of someone else without a marker and she knew that only criminals in the so called ‘Skivs’- the modern slums – would have the possibility of not being marked.  ‘Prostitution’ after all was not a government issued job!  Neither was ‘Simmie Dealer’ or ‘Time Thief’ – those shady characters her husband had been associating with – illegally Time Jumping to steal ‘antiques’ to sell to the wealthy collectors.  She cried as she thought of her husband, unaware he was so close.  He had been searching for her the whole time she had been jumping trying to lose the Agent chasing her but she didn't know where he was - he had disappeared from her life nearly 600 years ago.  She knew he was in this city somewhere but he might as well have been on another continent for all she knew where to look.

Her contractions were coming quicker now as she moved from Community One across an invisible border into Community 4.  There was an actual physical line on the floor but she couldn’t see it in the dark.  It was the checkpoint, which registered a person’s marker as they passed over it.  The Mayors of each community (the one left and the one entered) were notified on a “Checkpoint Clock” who had passed the checkpoint and when.  If they were not supposed to be there, the appropriate authorities were notified. 

The streets were still sterile, the houses still alien to her but there were tell-tale signs of poverty here.  Most of the houses didn’t look as new or as large.  The only businesses here weren’t grand institutions like posh schools or butler run apartments; there were a few run down banks (if you could call them banks) – they were labelled as “Credit and Security Units” and there was the odd café but not the sort of café she was used to in her own time, these were called “Infusion Houses”.  She didn’t know what an “infusion” in this context was but she was pretty sure it wasn’t something she would want to indulge in.  The further on she walked through the strange streets, the dirtier and more run down it became.  Even the UV coverings were cracked and broken and she could imagine that during the day this would be quite dangerous. 

 Finally her contractions started coming fast and furious and she could barely move.  The urge to push was now overwhelming and she was crying and moaning softly.  If she had been marked the emotion monitors all around her would have been flashing at her condition alerting every authority in the community of her condition, but unmarked women did not get any medical assistance in this way!  She found a kind of alley-way between two infusion houses that was in near total darkness and she felt grateful that it was before dawn and the streets were empty.  There she found a dark, quiet corner, as clean as possible in this neighbourhood to give birth and she squatted just in time to start pushing her baby out.