comewithknives

[comewithknives]

The Tank

When the first bubble of air slipped from his mouth, Nahia almost lost it. After all those lonely months spent in her lab, working full time on the project, her efforts had finally paid off. A soft gurgle left her boy’s lungs when she pulled the lever down, lowering the water’s level in the transparent tank. 

The pipes growled and slowly pumped the sheer liquid from the capsule down to the partially blocked sewers. The building stood utterly forlorn and was already falling into ruin. It counted as a miracle that Nahia was even able to turn on the lab machinery and pipelines. She made use of what she could—there was no other place to conduct her research. No governmental facility would allow what she did here. 

“Come on, come on, you can do this,” she whispered, fixing her gaze on the emptying vessel which carried her long-awaited treasure. 

During the many years of her career, she would have never thought about achieving something so big. Becoming a real creator, not just some designer restrained by laws of people and universal morals. Now it all came down to her vision. Her craftsmanship. 

The body behind glass was limp, floating like a jellyfish in the ocean, completely dependent on the currents to take it wherever they desired. Yet still, it breathed. Nahia couldn’t see it now, because the boy’s nose was already above the water’s surface, but she remembered those shy, unsure globules of air seeping from his nostrils. To her, they were more than just carbon dioxide—they represented life in its gaseous form and crowned her as the god of a new era. 

This was the first time in history a human designed another human being and developed it into its adult form in a test tube. No reproductive systems involved, no real gonads—just a stem cell with heavily modified DNA, stimulated to multiply. And now... Now it fucking breathed. 

Nahia tried it for years. Six failed attempts in total, if she only counted those embryos which made it past the first month—four boys and two girls. They all grew fast and strong, but gave up along the way, and never made it through delivery. Six well-developed bodies, all internal organs healthy, yet somehow too weak to keep the vital signs normalized. As if they were dolls, empty shells, perfect on the outside but dysfunctional at the core. 

But this one... This one was alive, and it shattered all science, all philosophy, theology, and the basic world order Nahia knew. If it was only God who gave life, was she God now?

In the 22nd century, it shocked no one when a new planet got inhabited, human-like androids replaced teachers, or a new flying car hit the market, but this here was a genuine breakthrough. In the glass tank, just five feet away from her, a brand-new life bloomed like a fragile desert flower, and nobody knew where it came from. 

What was life anyway? An electric impulse, a sum of breaths? A strange coincidence? What made this boy different from his six predecessors? What triggered the smoldering flash of life to explode into a real bonfire? What made his heart pump blood, what made his lungs squeeze? 

Nahia did not know, but clearly, he was special, even though she treated him no differently from the others, tried the same formulas, and used her old equipment. Apparently, he had the light of life engraved in his flesh. 

The water disappeared down the drain alongside other bodily fluids, and the capsule filled itself with oxygen. Nahia monitored all the boy’s life functions, and luckily nothing seemed out of ordinary. The blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration were all perfectly stable. He hyperventilated a little, but that was normal for an adult who never had air in his lungs. Or maybe he was just excited? After all, it was his first day of actually living. 

Slowly, she approached the capsule and pressed her palm to the glass. It radiated with pleasant heat—clear evidence the tank maintained the elevated temperature necessary for her boy’s development. The surrounding room smelled of antiseptic, dirt, and mold—a mix you could only encounter in a run-down warehouse converted into a lab. It was fusty and made her nostrils flare, but at the same time, it smelled like home; like a place where she truly belonged.  

Finally, the water drained away. Her boy lay at the bottom of the capsule, body twisted and weirdly crunched, harmless and inert. His chest jumped up and down rapidly, in tandem with quiet beeps of machinery, marking the beats of his heart. Wet and wrinkled skin covered him like a loose blanket. He would surely need much exercise to make those muscles gain some mass and volume, Nahia thought to herself. 

He spent the last seven months in the tank, and that obviously gave him less time to grow than a regular baby had during pregnancy. It didn’t surprise Nahia that he would need a lot of attention and care after entering this world. He already looked like a man in his twenties, although no hair covered his face or body, and he was clearly underweight, almost reminding her of a wax statue — smooth-skinned and always fresh, although slightly wan. 

Her knees weakened when she pushed the capsule’s door open. Pure oxygen filled her lungs, and she suddenly felt light-headed, as if she’d just inhaled a sedative. She bent down and run a finger over her boy’s arm, keeping every move hesitant and cautious not to harm the delicate creature. His skin was cold and slimy like that of an eel, but underneath she could sense a burning fever, already circling the fragile life like a starved vulture.  

Was it because she opened the tank too soon and exposed him to unsterile conditions? Or were his immune cells too weak to shield him from bacteria once he got detached from the life-support system? She did not know, and pushed the door closed as fast as she could. 

It felt like sliding down the slippery slope again. She pulled the lever upwards, and the tank refilled with water. Was it too soon to take him out? Maybe he had to stay in for a few more days, possibly weeks? She could have waited. She could have waited another year, if necessary, but she couldn’t lose him now. 

“Stay with me, please. Don’t leave me yet.” 

Pipes spat portions of milky liquid back into the tank. Something was off. Nahia could sense it. Her whole body screamed at her to act, to rescue what was still left of her creature. He didn’t move, just floated face-down on the surface like a drowned man. Like driftwood. 

“No, please don’t go, not yet,” she cried out and ran to the opposite side of the lab, where two huge power generators stood tall like towers. Her hands trembled, tears blurred her vision, and her lips compressed into a thin line as she prepared to use her last resort. She clenched her fingers around an iron bar and pulled it with all her strength. 

Flashes of electricity ran along the wires, from the generators, straight to the capsule. The water around her boy electrified, the waves of current yanked at his body like fangs of a rabid wolf. A smell of burnt copper and scorched flesh rose in the air. 

Then, the entire building blacked out. The generators went off, every light in the lab died. She stood alone in the cold and lonely darkness, listening to the roaring wind outside. The silence mocked her and all she tried to accomplish. The steady buzzing of medical equipment was gone, just like the life that desperately needed it to survive. 

Shocked, mortified, and breathless, Nahia blindly approached the tank. The darkness smothered her; it solidified and made it nearly impossible to pass those few feet separating her from her creature. She groped the air until her hands found the door to the capsule, then pulled it open, not caring about the water that gushed out through the entrance and drenched her from head to toe. 

She fell to the ground and reached for the lifeless body splayed out in a puddle of water; cold, wet, and limp like a puppet. She cradled him in her arms, but only a shapeless mass of skin and bones was left of him. In the darkness, it felt as if she was holding a dead worm, or a piece of torn-out intestine. 

Her mind turned itself into a crazy mixture of fear, grief, and despair. The bitterness coated her heart like a poison, rough sobs shook her body as if an earthquake hit her every nerve. She tightened the grip around her boy, squeezed him, and pierced his burnt skin with nails, just coaxing him to move, to tense a single muscle, draw in a single breath.  

“Wake up, get up, do something. That’s enough for me. Just this once, just this one time, please, please don’t leave me so soon.”

Still, he lay motionless, completely unmoved by her tears and cries, soaked and lifeless like a sailor washed ashore. 

She was left empty, like a dry vessel, as though he wasn’t just a creature she kept in a tank, but her own child torn out from her womb. Regret and misery pecked out her heart and brain like a flock of crows, and her insides twisted and turned like a wrung-out cloth.

A single thought flashed through her mind like a lightning, a single thing she knew for certain: 

She was no god.