Anyway, FullLife didn’t tell anyone about my earlier work, even though they had all the data. Their research teams published outstanding success rates and their advertising implied certain guarantees … They claimed perfection. Scientists should have known better. And so should I. So in the folder I’ve put my original data about the number of stillbirths in mice, and extrapolated that to primates and humans. Like everything in our world, technology is not perfect. Sometimes things go wrong during natural birth, and maybe one day something will go wrong during pouch birth as well. I think perhaps it is nature’s way of evening the playing field. We don’t get to create perfection. Sooner or later, we’ll find the cure for everything – cancer and heart disease and meningitis and HIV – but in their place something new will arise, because we are living creatures and we cannot beat death.

I could be wrong. It might never happen. I hope it will never happen. But with all this information combined, you should be able to make FullLife look pretty bad, if you want, and me along with them. I guess I’ve not been very responsible, but I’m telling you everything now, and you can use it in any way that you choose. No one would have believed me anyway – one rogue inventor against their teams of scientists? But I am passing my suspicions on, and I’m an old woman, and I think it is the best I can do.

Besides, society does seem to have got better, over the past fifty years. My invention has brought about some change. Maybe I did well. Maybe I did something good. Or, something that was complicated, but that had the potential to be good. So that’s what I wanted to tell you.

That, and the fact that I’ve decided that not everything has to be a fight any more. Not for me, anyway – I have finished with fighting. Despite what’s in that folder, perhaps there is more hope for humanity than I used to think.

I had to say goodbye to my beautiful indigo hamlets. That’s OK, though. I have something better now. It seems that I prefer not to live entirely without other people, after all.

But I wouldn’t want you to make the mistake of thinking this is a happy ending. The nights are dark here, and the wind is vicious out to sea. Sometimes, when storms are wild enough, I find myself out beyond the lighthouse again … scrambling over the brittle rocks and knowing the feel of a twisted ankle, a knee cracking into stone. I find myself standing at the unapologetic end of this fractured piece of land, and at the same time I am standing in a room, in a basement, with dark wood all around. I can smell chemicals in the sea salt and hear men singing hymns beneath the resonating hum of the wind.