‘Do you not feel anything?’ he said, regretting it as the impatience in her eyes turned to shock. She was still in control though – she had accurately sectioned the pouch into the pale green outer skin, the secondary and tertiary bio-membranes that shimmered in the fluorescent light, and the darker pink lining of the inner womb.

‘I have a six-month-old, do you know that?’ she said.

He hadn’t known that, and so he shook his head.

‘I could never have carried a child in the past,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t born with the necessary anatomy. But that was what I wanted: to carry a child. If it weren’t for the pouch, my baby might not even exist. So yes, I feel many things. Like gratitude.’ She placed the scalpel down, waiting as the last of the fluid drained from the membranes and was collected into the vials distributed around the table. ‘A lifetime’s career as a scientist and dissecting a pouch freaks you out? Grow up, James.’

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I’m not …’

His voice sounded unsure, unstable.

‘Look, I understand,’ she said. ‘It’s awful that a baby has died.’ Her voice was quieter now, though everyone was listening – there was no other sound in the lab. ‘It’s awful that several babies have died. Heartbreaking. But what the pouch means for so many of us … for hundreds of thousands of people … It has changed everything. It has made my life possible. So don’t start getting squeamish—’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK. I’m sorry.’

‘Forget it,’ she smiled, a little too brusquely. ‘Just help me, would you?’

He nodded, tried not to sigh again, adjusted his latex gloves, and set to work.

He chose to begin with the attachments, the various ways that the pouch could be connected to the outside world – they were his inventions, after all. The nutrient feed was still intact, so he cut around it with a scalpel then carefully removed it from the pouch’s surface, blood from the incision seeping onto his gloves. He isolated each of the tubes that transported nutrients from the feed around the womb, severed them from the feed itself, and sliced them open along their length. The inner and outer substrates of the tubes were composed of different cells, so they needed to be separated. Then he peeled away the thin membrane from inside the audio bio-socket. It functioned a bit like an eardrum, sharing voices and music with the baby inside. It should have been beautiful. He put the thought out of his mind. Bit by bit, the pouch ceased to be a pouch and became a lab full of carefully ordered and labelled samples from all of the components.