The box was composed of flesh: living, human, maternal.
And, inside the box, a scattering of molecular confetti, sourced from two parents, swirled and shimmered, collided and collaborated, in an innumerable array of unprecedented arrangements: every way, and no way.
To create... a birl.
And it was a president and a CEO, with more power than a god, and a beggar, starving in a dumpster, and a soldier, bleeding in a ditch, and a professor of mathematics and a philanthropist and an impressionist painter and a sociopath and a hospice nurse and a bureaucrat, chained to an anonymous desk. And an Olympian and a sexual criminal and a celebrity, famous for fame, and a murderer and a scientist, weighted with Nobel Prizes, and a voice--The Voice--the voice of a generation, and a social pariah, eternally lonely. (And a thing and a thing and another and another, for which--yet--there existed no words.)
But then, on the screen, the box was opened, and these simultaneities condensed and narrowed and became unalterably discrete--the map of something singular.
"It's dead, actually," observed the sonographer gently.
The End
This story was first published on Thursday, January 3rd, 2019
We hope you're enjoying
The Quantum Womb by
Rachel Rodman.
Please support Daily Science Fiction by becoming a member.
Daily Science Fiction does not have a paywall, but we do have expenses—more than 95% of which are direct payments to authors for their stories. With your $15 membership, less than 6 cents per story, we can continue to provide genre fiction every weekday by email and on the website to thousands of readers for many years to come. You may also choose to support us via patreon.
Tell me more!
Support Daily Science Fiction
Please click to rate this story from 1 (ho-hum) to 7 (excellent!):
Please don't read too much into these ratings. For many reasons, a superior story may not get a superior score.
4.0 Rocket Dragons Average
Please join our mailing list and
receive free daily sci-fi (your email address will be kept
100% private):
