But despite that, I still believe in science. I believe in its power to change the world for the better, as long as our ethics can keep up with our invention. We are responsible for what we create.

And that reminds me. There’s something else. I’m ashamed of what I did, but it was such a long time ago … When I was working with mice at the university, I found a small risk of fatality towards the end of term. It wasn’t there at all to begin with, but it started to appear after two or three generations. Then it stabilised. It was unrelated to any previous illness – there were no signs anything was wrong. And the same two mice could go on to have perfectly healthy offspring. So I knew it wasn’t infertility, or any kind of inherited inability to reproduce or survive to term. But it was a risk, a small statistical risk of unexplained fatality … and I wasn’t completely honest in the way I presented my data. I thought it was just a mistake I was making, in my experimental procedures and so … I only published my results from the healthy births, talked of error bars arising from our equipment and our interpretation. But I never admitted that I’d seen a mouse die during the birthing process for no reason that I could explain. You see, the results were so exciting. People were listening to me! I was going to change the way we lived! We moved on to primates, built a huge research group, everyone wanted to be involved; my invention was encased in a private company as quickly as possible.

At first it was wonderful. I pushed aside any doubts I’d had. After all, we’d assembled the best team of scientists in the country, perhaps in the world! The technology worked without fail for the primates, and we moved on to human trials. The university was out – this was FullLife now. Sylvia was in charge.

Then things started to change.

I thought we were making the pouch available to the general public too soon. I thought we needed to slow down our expansion, have a more robust vetting process before deciding which parents could use a pouch. But FullLife had no intention of slowing down. I was pushed out. They threatened me, you see, with my early research. Said they would discredit me if I spoke out against them. That was one of the reasons I left. But it wasn’t until years later that I started to think … to wonder how much Sylvia was hiding … to suspect that humans might develop a small risk of fatality towards the end of term as well. Maybe my mice weren’t an aberration caused by my mistakes at all. I’d always told myself that my methods must have been flawed – but perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps my results were showing a fundamental truth.