Chapter 1:

Are we doing the right thing?
It’s a question they both have been asking themselves for years. They both keep convincing the other that it is the right thing to do. In a few days however, the question will change to whether what they did was the right thing.
“What do you think honey? We can always back out at the last minute, or we can back out now, before spending days travelling trying to get there” said Jason, wearing nothing but a white towel, blindly reaching for his suit in his closet before hesitating. That’s when he pulled out more casual clothes. A plain t-shirt, pullover hoodie and track pants. “We should probably dress comfortably”, he added.
His wife, Jessica agreed, and added, “No babe, we are going to do this. We can’t replace the past, but we can create a better future. We will look back to how we feel right now in ten years and laugh about it.” She almost believed herself.

~

The driver called Jason and told both of them it was time. His job was simple. Pick up the couple, make sure they are packed light, drive them to the bus station, and make sure they get on the bus. If they asked to be taken back, it was his job to convince them otherwise. He did not like that part, but he was offered a thousand dollars for a thirty-minute job IF it all went smoothly. Even if it didn’t, the money was just too good to pass up.
He saw the two exit their home with a small bag each. These two definitely packed light. The man was wearing a green and grey Under Armour hoodie with track pants, while the woman wore a simple flowery, summer dress. They both seemed fairly young, probably in their late twenties if he had to guess. The woman had blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, cut about mid length and with strands of hair falling over her attractive face. The man had jet-black hair on top of his serious, rugged face and and was physically imposing. It was the way he carried himself more than anything.
They both sat in the car and looked at the driver through the rear view mirror. He knew what they were thinking. Before they could speak, he handed them an envelope and spoke. “Please do not ask where you are going. I was only instructed to drive you to the bus stop.” And make sure you did not back out now, he thought. But he left that part out.

~

Jason opened the envelope, which was unusually thick. It was a travel itinerary. It started with a bus ride to Dallas, with a one-night stay in a hotel. The next day, they were to take the rental car left for them and drive to San Diego. They were instructed to both drive 10 hours each while the other slept, and were only allowed to stop for gas and a break here or there. No overnight stay. At San Diego they would board a helicopter, be blindfolded and flied out to the clinic.
Jessica looked at Jason and gave a fake smile. “Well, at least we know part of why this cost us so much money” she said. Jason knew what she was feeling. He whispered in her ears that they could still turn around and go back, to which the driver picked up on and shot a glance back. Luckily for him, Jessica said no. She wanted this. She thought of how happy they were when Luke was born. But with the happy memories came the tragic ones, flooding into her mind. Accompanying those memories was the knowledge that their marriage had been shaky at best since, and that in going through with this, it is not only an effort to save their marriage, but to also be happy again. A family again.
In the back of her mind though, she was scared. Scared about what they were going to do. Scared if it will work. Scared of how people would react if they knew. But her desire to have another child was just too large. This gene manipulation was their only hope of never having to go through that again.

Chapter 2:

3 Days Later…

“Mr. Davis, Dr. Lee would like to speak with you. Please meet him in the gymnasium. Oh, and wear something you can move around him, Dr. Lee likes to talk with his clients and play at the same time. And of course, Mrs. Davis is welcome to accompany you as well” said the voice through the door.
I turned and looked at Jess. I knew she wanted to come as well; we had only been here less than a day, wherever this was, but we were eager to begin, and to get some answers. Where were we exactly staying? I can’t even begin to tell you. After we were blindfolded and taken via helicopter, we were led inside. We were both scared and uncomfortable, and immediately doubted our decisions. It all just seemed too much, all of this secrecy. When our blindfolds came off, we were inside a bedroom. It looked like a hotel with your usual bathroom on the left side immediately as you enter, a small closet with a robe, ironing board and extra comforter, a King sized bed, a few lamps, a nice 40 inch TV, study table, etc. One thing was missing though… a window. Behind the curtains was a fake view of New York from up high. I asked the guy where we were and he said that Dr. Lee would be more than happy to answer any questions we may have when we meet him, and boy, did we have questions for him. Initially, I thought we were going to be locked inside our rooms or something, because of the way we were brought here, but to my surprise, we were given a tour of the place shortly after.
The place definitely seemed like a hotel. They had an ice room with a fridge stock full of drinks as opposed to a vending machine. There was no elevator though, from what we were told there were only three floors in total, with the top two floors being rooms, and the main floor having everything else. As such, there were only stairs, and no elevators. The main floor was exactly like a hotel would be, brightly lit, surrounded by expensive furniture and paintings, and signs directing you to where the rooms are, the restrooms, the food court, the gym, etc. This place had almost everything.
You could have your meals in the food court, or call and have it brought to your room. If it wasn’t for the lack of windows in the entire place, and the fact that you were not allowed to leave until your stay was over, this place would have been heaven. Oh, and I forgot to mention – while we were free to socialize with other guests, we were not allowed to talk about why we were here, and to exchange any contact information with the others. We weren’t even allowed to tell each other our names.

~

Jess and I walked to the gym, hand in hand. We saw a few couples heading in different directions and smiled at them. As we walked towards the gym entrance, the security guard stopped us and asked for our room key. I handed it to him. He immediately scanned it, returned it and spoke.
“Dr. Lee is right through here Mr. and Mrs. Davis,” he said as he opened the doors for us.
Once we entered the doors, we only saw one figure standing on the far side of the basketball court. The place was empty, otherwise.
“I guess this is his way of having a meeting,” I said to Jess.
We walked towards him, watching him throw up shot after shot from all over the court, not missing a single one. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought he was a professional basketball player, not a doctor. He had a slim but defined build based on what I saw through his compression clothes. That’s when he turned around and zipped a bounce pass towards me.
“Think fast Mr. Davis”, he said.
I caught it and walked up to him, with Jess behind me. He extended his hand to the both of us.
“Nice to finally meet the two of you.”
“Same to you Dr. Lee” I said.
“Please, call me Steve.”
Jess spoke up. “Dr. Lee, err, I mean, Steve. I hate to get straight to it, but where are we? Why did we need to do so much to get here, and when exactly do we begin?”
“Perfectly acceptable questions Mrs. Davis. I will answer them as we play along. Mr. Davis, care to play a little basketball?”
“Sure” I answered. “And please, call me Jason.”
“And you can call me Jessica, or Jess, whichever you prefer.”
“Very well. Jessica, would you like to join us as well?”
“I’ll pass.”
Dr. Lee checked me the ball and we began to play. He sagged off of me and left me wide open, so I took two dribbles towards the net and took a jump shot. It bounced off the back of the rim and right into the hands of Dr. Lee. I know he wanted me to call him Steve, but I just couldn’t.
“Jason, do you know what you just did wrong? There is a perfect way of doing things in life. They might not always work out, but if you try your best to perfect them, the chances of succeeding are much, much higher.”
Dr. Lee continued. “ As for your jump shot, from somebody who played college basketball, I expected much better. Your feet were not shoulder width apart when you gathered them. As you brought the ball up to shoot, your hands were not positioned properly. Your toes were not pointed towards the net and your fingers were not spread out wide on the ball. Your eyes were also not focused onto the rim. Lastly, did you even try to jump? I could have sworn your toes never left the floor. The art of a jump shot takes place in less of a second, and within that time you have to make sure you do all of those things.”
“Some solid eyes there doc, but why don’t we talk about the real stuff now” I replied, as I got into defensive position.
“Shoot” he said.
“First things first. Why all of this secrecy to get us here?”
“Surely, both of you can understand the nature of what we are doing here, and as such, you will also know that there are quite a few people against what we do here. They don’t know where ‘here’ is, but if they did, I would not be able to run this clinic. Quite frankly, we both know this is illegal here in the United States, and the government has been trying to find me for some time, so I have to do a background check on individuals, and reroute you guys all over the country before letting you come here like I do my I.P. address, so I am untraceable. You don’t know where we are, I won’t tell you where we are, and you won’t find out even after you have left” he said as he dribbled in between his legs faking left and going right.
“Fair enough.”
Jess asked the next question. “How did you find out about what happened with us, and more importantly, why us?”
“I have people I trust that work all over the country in hospitals who let me know about children born birth defects, and they keep me update on how the child is doing. I am sorry that your son Luke was one of rare cases, as you see, most cases are treatable. My son was gone as soon as he entered into the world and ever since, I’ve been working to help prevent such cases. I know how it feels as a parent to go through the loss of a child, and how hard it is to even consider having another child after such an event. That is when I thought to myself, what if we could play around with genes that are indicative of potential defects, get rid of them completely. After much research, I had success.” I was too busy listening to him and he just drove past me to sore.
“There has to be more to this. Why would people be against such a thing?” interrupted Jess.
“Well, you see Jessica, during the testing stages, we found out that we could manipulate the genes so much, that we could offer choice. We can ensure if your child is a boy or a girl, we can change its hair color, eye color, but we can also give you the option of having your child be more athletically inclined, more gifted mentally. Essentially, we can create a perfect child, and that scares people. They say it is messing with God’s will, and that the child is not a human but a scientific creation because of that.”
“Why can’t you just work on the health issues and leave everything else as is?” I asked.
“It’s not a matter of that. The issue was, when people have the option of giving their child an advantage at life, what parent could say no? We see this principle in society all over the world. People from third world countries come to North America not for themselves, but for their children. They leave behind what they are used to, what they are comfortable with to give their children a brighter future, so they can have opportunities they normally would not have in their home country. So why is this any different? We all want the best for our children and if we know ahead of time we can give them the option, who are we to limit the potential of our children before they are even born if it can be helped?”
I looked at Jess. He had a point. By this point we had stopped playing and were just talking. There was so much to think about.
Dr. Lee spoke again. “Feel free to think about everything and take your time. Once you are ready to begin, we can meet again, this time in my office and we can go through everything step by step. After that, we will begin the process. And of course, if you have any more questions, all you have to do is simply pick up your phone. If I don’t pick up, leave a message and I will get back to you.”
We came in wanting to ask so much, but Dr. Lee was so thorough with his answers and had told us so much that we were still processing it all. We had more questions, but they could wait.

Chapter 3:

The meeting with Dr. Lee had been comforting to a degree, but still, something did not sit well with me. It was definitely all of the secrecy surrounding this clinic, what it does and even how we were brought here. I turned to Jason. “Honey, I’m having doubts.”
I don’t know what I wanted to hear him say. Did I want him to agree so that we can just go home? Or did I want him to encourage me to go through with it. Even I didn’t know.
He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in tight. His lips were touching my forehead, softly kissing me. “Baby, whatever you feel you want to do is what I want. If you don’t want to go through with it, we won’t. I’m scared too. I think ultimately, it is going to come down to how much we want a child,” he said.
Luke… I…I don’t know what to do. I know having another baby would never take the pain away from having lost him. If we did have a new child, he or she wouldn’t be able to replace him. Did we only want to have a child to try and replace Luke? Would it lessen our pain of having lost him even a little? I don’t know what to think. I didn’t even realize it, but I was beginning to cry.
“What’s wrong Jess?”
“Why do we want this child Jason? Do we think it will help us cope with the loss of Luke? Is the child supposed to replace him?
I felt warm tears start to trickle down from his face to mine. “Nobody can replace him babe, but having another child will lessen the pain we still feel babe. Whether we have the child through this clinic or on our own, it doesn’t matter…”
I interrupted him. “I don’t think I can live with losing another child Jason. I can’t bring another life into this world only to lose it. We have to do it. I don’t care about ethics or morality or anything if it means our child will be healthy.”
“Okay hon. Let’s tell Dr. Lee then.”
~

“Okay. Thank you Dr. Lee. We will see you tomorrow than,” and with that, Jason hung up the phone.
“ What did he say?” I asked.
“He says we can meet tomorrow to go all of our choices.”
“I’ve been thinking. I don’t want to change anything about our child, all I want is for him or her to be healthy.”
“I agree babe. We can go over all of this tomorrow.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Well, he says they’ll send a little care package by tonight with some instructions for what we need to do before hand and some reading material. Also, we can’t have sex for a little while so we should probably start to think about what we’ll tell our child how he was conceived. Telling him daddy was all alone with some Playboys in the bathroom isn’t much fun” he said teasingly.
“Mhm.”
“Of course… there is always something else….” He said with a suggestive look in his eye.
“And what would that be?”
“Well… we can’t have any sex, but it doesn’t say anything about you not putting on a show for me…” I felt him wrap his arms around me from behind and could tell the thought excited him. The thought of doing that excited me too. That’s when there was a knock on our door.
“Ugh, what timing” groaned Jason.
“You know we couldn’t have done anything anyways right now!”
He opened the door and picked up the package. It looked more like a gift basket than a package. There was fruit, candies, snacks, cheese, a bottle of wine and champagne. As he placed it on the table he pulled out the two other things inside, a booklet and a specimen cup. “You’d think they’d make a sexy toy or something to collect seamen instead of a simple specimen cup with all of the shit they make nowadays,” said Jason.
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”
We took the wine and cheese, cuddled up on the bed and put on a movie. Tomorrow is when things will really start.

Chapter 4:

“Okay. Thank you for coming in Mr. and Mrs. Davis. I am glad, and a little surprised actually at how quickly you two came upon a decision. Usually I’ve had to wait almost a week before I hear from people.”
“Well, we came here for a reason so I did not see the reason to delay the inevitable” I said. Jess nodded in agreement.
“Great. So this is quite simple actually,” Dr. Lee said as he turned his computer monitor toward us. “We have numerous categories and we will go through each one and check off attributes you want, or don’t want in your child. We’ll start off with the basic stuff like gender. After that, we’ll tackle the health aspects, and finish off with traits you want or don’t want in your child.”
I looked at Jess. We had decided that we would just make sure our child is healthy and leave everything else up to chance.
“Okay. So, for starters. Boy or girl?”
“Boy,” answered Jess. “Can we go straight into the health aspect please and revisit everything later. I want to be done with that first,” she asked immediately after.
“Of course we can. Now, I already went ahead and made sure your child will be born healthy by removing genes from both of your samples that, when combined, can cause complications. You see, how it works is, say Jason carries a gene for a hereditary disease, and you happen to carry the same gene Jess. While the both of you may live your lives without ever having said disease, your child won’t be as lucky, as those genes combine and put your child at greater risk. So what I’ve done is I have gone through and removed all of those bad genes already. Your child will be born perfectly healthy and will, by all accounts live a long, healthy lifestyle.”
“Thank you doctor. So I guess we are done with the health aspect without even having to do anything?” I asked.
“Not exactly” he replied.
“What do you mean?” asked Jess.
“Well, there are other things that fall into the health category.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s just go through the list. You see, it is up to you to decide things like how often your child will have to use the restroom when he is older, how his body develops, how his eye-sight will be, things like that.”
“Please tell me you are kidding,” I said.
“We just want our baby to be healthy, everything else you can leave up to chance,” said Jess, with a little worrisome tone.
Dr. Lee spoke. “Here is what you need to think about Mr. and Mrs. Davis. If you leave everything to chance, your child could need glasses at an older age, he could be obese, or anorexic, develop eating disorders. I understand you want your child to be born healthy and without any underlying conditions, and we have taken care of that already. But now it is up to you two to decide if your child will be more resistant to health problems that are brought on by lifestyle choice and other external factors. If you could, wouldn’t you want your child to be fit and active? Why risk having a child that could be obese and develop diabetes? Why risk having a child that is more prone developing colon cancer. “
I looked at Jess. He had a point. Who are we to gamble with all of this? Don’t we want the best for our child?
“I…I… guess you are right doctor,” said Jess. She was hesitant but she had thought about the same things as I had. “We can’t risk it anything,” she added.
And with that we went through the list. It was like we were creating a player in a video game. Choosing what his build will be (we chose athletic), but going into even more details like perfect vision and internal organs that are much stronger than the normal human, leaving no virtually no chance that our child would develop something because he had a bad habit. We left things like hair color and eye color up to chance, but the other things we intervened. He was going to grow up to be a smart, athletic, attractive young man. We hated ourselves for even thinking such a thing, but we did not want to risk our child even being less attractive than others. It’s a harsh reality that more attractive people get better opportunities in the world, so who were we to handicap our child like that?
“Okay, almost done folks,” said Dr. Lee. “Just one more category.”
“What’s that?” we asked.
“What kind of traits, personalities, and habits do you want your son to have?
This didn’t sit well with either of us. Something in my gut told me to leave it. We had already gone too far, but then doubt crept in. What if he grew up to be an asshole? A womanizer? What if he was messy? I knew Jess was thinking the same thing. So again, we went through it all and made him our perfect little angel.
“Well, that should settle it. I’ll work on the sample the both of you provided and we can begin within the next two to three days. And listen, I know both of you might feel a little, weird, right now having picked all these things, but trust me, please don’t. The world is evolving right before our eyes and you are just doing what any parent would, ensuring that your son has all the opportunities in the world. Between us, what we’ve done has been going on for years, people just don’t want to reveal or admit it. Granted, the options weren’t as vast in the past as they are now. And who knows, maybe your favorite celebrity or athlete could just be the product of this clinic, but I won’t name any names.”
“Are you one doc?” I asked jokingly.
“Haha, I wish I was Jason. I wish I was.”
I began to wonder what athletes might have been born from this clinic. “How long did you say this procedure’s been around doc?”
“Almost thirty five years I believe. I believe the first child was conceived in 1980. It was even worse back then so I believe up until recently, there were only a handful of such births every few years” he replied.
It’s been around that so long. Who knows how many people came here. For some reason, I was almost sure somebody like LeBron James had to have been one such child at one point. “Doc, I forgot. Can you make sure our child’s hair stays healthy and full as well? No balding or receding hairline?” I asked.
Jess looked confused, but the doctor smiled at me like he knew what I had thought about. “Not a fan of the big forehead I see,” he said.

~

One Week Later

“Honey, is everything okay? What’s wrong?” It was 4a.m. and Jess was up again, only this time, she was crying. “What’s wrong babe?”
“I…I… keep having the same nightmare, and it’s starting to eat away at me. I don’t like it.”
“Tell me what it is babe” I said, as I brought her back into bed and wrapped my arms around her.
“It’s… I… I know it’s just me feeling guilty about the choices we made. I know we did what is best for our son, but, there’s a part of me that feels like in doing so, we killed who our real son would be. “
How was I supposed to respond to that? I couldn’t. She’s the one who will be carrying the baby, so I can’t even begin to imagine the toll it’s going to take once it’s confirmed that she is pregnant. “Tell me about the nightmare babe.”
“There’s screaming, lots of it. It sounds like Luke crying. I run to him but for some reason there’s shards of glass on the floor, ripping into the flesh of my feet as I run towards him, only, when I get into the room Luke’s not there, but there’s blood dripping onto the floor, and the crying get’s louder. I…I’ve been having this same dream for so many days now Jason. I don’t know what else it could mean” as tears trickled down her face.
I was speechless. I felt worse than Jess at the moment because I knew there was no way I could comfort her. I’d have to talk to Dr. Lee about this in private and see if he can help in any way.