Automaton Babies

"We're having a baby," my wife says to me. She's sitting at the computer in the living room and looking at something. A glass of wine nearby. I'm not unhappy with the news, but I'm confused. My wife has already had three miscarriages, and I can't recall the last time we had sex. "Don't worry," she says. "I didn't have an affair, if that's what you're thinking." She laughs a little at this.

I nod, then smile, walk over to her. "She'll come in the mail," she says and points to the screen. "We have to build her." I don't know how to respond to this except to look at the screen, to see what she's pointing at: a child. She says, "We'll have to input some of our biological data so we can make her all ours. And then love it until it grows and can become independent. We'll have to take her into the store for periodic adjustments, extensions." When she says this, her tone seems to shift, as if she's not telling me but just sort of reading the text out loud to herself as if hearing the words "We're having a baby" might mitigate what prompted this web search.

She clicks one of the tabs at the top of the screen, and I look more carefully and see what looks like an outline of a child. Next to the image of the outline are blueprint schematics, which suggests the child is an object, a thing, not real. Then she clicks on another tab, and I see what looks like an evolutionary chart with text that reads "from baby to adolescent to teenager to adult." I've read about this recently somewhere, I think. Online, some familiar headline in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep, worried I'd somehow done irreparable damage to my reproductive abilities by riding a bike and resting the laptop on my lap all these years. These babies were an option for childless couples, single people wanting to become a mother or father, workaholics with limited time. I never thought we'd become parents this way, though.

"She's beautiful," my wife says, but I don't think we're looking at the same child or envisioning what the future might hold for us as parents. "And look," she points again, then clicks another tab. "We can customize her." I nod again, unsure how to respond. I'm not against the idea, but I don't know what it means to become a parent in this way. "How can we parent this child?" I ask. "If she's, you know, not real." My wife smiles a little, then says, "Easy. We can decide which predispositions she'll have, how much or how little care she'll require. Then we'll know what treatment to get her. They have all these options depending on how busy we are or want to be. They even have a medical section in the store where we can take her when she gets sick."

Options, I think, unsure how to respond. I figured we'd adopt a child because we hadn't been successful naturally. As adopted children without histories ourselves, it seemed the most natural thing to do. But, adoptions are long and expensive and sometimes never materialize. "Messy," is what my sister, who already had four kids, had said to me recently. "You could wait five years before you even get a chance to see your baby. And by that time, your baby is suddenly a child with a formed impression of the world without you. I had a friend give up after ten years. That's when she decided to get one of those automaton babies. She seems very satisfied." My wife clicks yet another tab, then what looks like a new patient file comes up and a little basket icon at the top right of the screen flashes, indicating one item. "What should we name her?" she asks, taking my hand.