He’d been part of the team that had redesigned these cleanrooms, fifteen years ago now. They’d had to expand, but that wasn’t all – there were increasingly strict requirements and safety protocols for every aspect of their business. It was a good thing. Avigail had been absolutely right about that. He’d demanded more trials with each new development. The safety protocols could never be too intensive, the checks never too robust. They had a series of airlocks, each with pressurisation differentials, separating the outside world – the rest of the birthing centre – from each class of the cleanroom. It was soothing. The airlocks helped to separate the compartments of his life, though it struck him that it would, perhaps, take rather a long time to get out. His lab was in the centre, the highest classification. He worked in the cleanest environment they had ever achieved.

In the lab the atmosphere was tingling, static. Similar to how it had felt down in the lobby, but less excited, more anxious.

‘What is going on today?’ he asked, finally irritated by what everyone but him seemed to know.

‘Holly Bhattacharyya’s having her great-grandson,’ replied his colleague, Bethan, who always read the weekly newsletter. James fully expected her to be promoted above him at the next cycle. And he didn’t care.

‘You mean her granddaughter …’

‘Is in, right now, yes.’

Suddenly the press downstairs, the anxiety here, made sense. He took a moment, during which he sat on his lab stool and pointlessly searched for the newsletter in his messages archive. He must have deleted it. He swore, quietly and uncharacteristically, under his breath.

But perhaps it would be OK. The chances were still excellent, and the check-ups would have shown perfect health. Several months ago they’d moved all delivery dates forward by a day, just in case; that might have helped. But there was that suspicion he had – that they all had, though no one wanted to voice it yet – the connection with the generations and God he hoped he was wrong. He’d seen it though. It was there, in the emergency presentations to the research group, to the board, hidden in the comparisons between new and used pouches, IVF and natural conception, everything they could think of as they searched for the common factor. It was a blip, they said. It was something they could resolve. They had time. At first they’d thought it was just in the used pouches – that might have been containable. They’d even been looking at environmental causes, pouch mistreatment, but found nothing. Still, they had time. Just so long as it didn’t happen again. Please don’t let it happen again.