Shareetha gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. He was born with a full head of hair and his skin was the same color as his mother’s. He had his father’s scowl, Shareetha saw it as he squirmed and yelled, but there was something about the shape of his face that allowed her to see more of herself in him.
He was a beautiful baby boy despite the strange patterns on his lower body. The patterns were visually stunning, he had dark brown skin and there were lines that looked to be painted onto the surface of the skin in a rainbow of colors. The lines seem to run the seams along the bounds of his skin cells and the intricacies if the lines were so acute that it looked as though the baby was born in chainmail that covered the lower part of his torso and down to his feet. The lines were shiny, but not metallic as they appeared and they were hard to the touch, rising from the surface of the newborn’s skin. A nurse tried to slide the multicolored lattice from the baby’s bottom half like it was a pair of pants the baby wore, but the lines were as much a part of the baby’s skin as the dark brown parts.
When Shareetha held him, she looked at him with pride, tears streaming from her one good eye, the other was covered with an eye patch. Even with the strange markings on the lower body, Shareetha thought her baby was the most handsome thing that was ever born. Even if the markings never fell away – and it wasn’t likely that they would, they would grow as he did and they could come to encase him completely – he would have plenty of years with his blemish free face and that alone could give him white collar jobs that she, and most others like her, had been denied because of visible deformities.
She even admired the intricate patterns on his lower body. They were elaborate, beautiful even, and despite the appearance that the lattice would lock his lower body into place, the elaborate pattern moved with him as he moved.
“My beautiful boy,” she whispered to him as he nestled against her chest. She has removed the blanket that swaddled him and when she held him close to her body, at first the intricate lattice was cool to the touch, but it warmed against her body. He breathed heavily in sleep and with each breath he exhaled, he seemed to melt deeper into her, like he was completely relaxed.
“I’m gonna call you Gabriel,” she said.
Shareetha was allowed two hours in her room after giving birth, and it wasn’t too much of a hassle for her to leave before the next woman was wheeled in to give birth. Before she left the room, her baby in a car seat that her husband had left with her when he dropped her off at the hospital, she looked at the panicked face of the woman on the gurney about to bring a new life into the world. Her face was a mix of a natural tan skin tone with plates of shiny primary colors on her cheeks, forehead, and her chin. She only had one arm, and the stump of the missing one was capped with a shiny blue. Shareetha knew the panic on her face, she’d felt the same way when she found out she was pregnant and when she’d arrived at the hospital in labor earlier in the day. She was afraid of what she would give birth to and she could only hope things would go smoothly; giving birth in the 2100s was fraught with dangers for anyone despite the advanced technologies that existed in other avenues of life. Not only did all automotives self pilot and navigate for passengers, but many had submarine capabilities and could fly through the air. The internet was completely contained in the minds of people and one had to opt out to avoid automatic connection to it on a daily basis. There was no longer poverty, homelessness, or hunger for humanity; all of the problems of the previous century had been largely solved. These advances, however, did not extend to motherhood and childbirth.
In many ways, childbirth became more dangerous as the human race persisted on Earth. Despite advances in medical sciences, the rates of death associated with childbirth have not improved. The dangers faced by women giving birth are not the same as a century before, a time when the infant mortality rate was about 85 deaths for every 100,000 births in a given year. The infant mortality rate increased by a factor of almost a hundred and was reported in the early 2100s to be 130 infant deaths for every 1,000 births.
These numbers didn’t describe every class of society; richer inhabitants of the planet Earth could afford better medical care, but more importantly, they could afford to live in the few parts of the world that have not been saturated by plastics.
Humans had been digesting, inhaling, incubating in plastics for over a century and eventually, that plastic altered the bodies of humans. Humans are highly adaptable, and if a child born in the plastics area can survive to ten years old, they are likely to attain the average lifespan of humans that has been extended to 120 years.
Shareetha took the bus home from the hospital, her husband hadn’t been able to get off work to take her home as he’d hoped, so she had to carry the baby all the way home in the car seat. When she made it home, she put the car seat on the kitchen table while she cooed over the handsome boy.
She removed her eye patch. Where an eyeball should have been, there was a shiny pool of red plastic in the socket with spreading veins reaching to her nose, cheek, eyebrow and temple. She wanted him to know her face, even if she hardly showed anyone what was underneath the eye patch. The baby seemed to smile at her and touched the mass of plastic on his mother’s face.
“My Gabriel,” she said and kissed his forehead. She prayed that they would have the privilege to celebrate his tenth birthday.
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