The Experiment

By Ford, Frank Bernard

She is given an entire life in four hours though programming with accelerated hormones, will die of lung cancer at equivalent thirty-one.

I arrive, late, missing the birth and more, but get to observe her gangly first kiss. Sweet. The boy too.

When she proved a whiz at math I applauded, the roboteacher waving clawfuls of A-papers, but then in college she wrote politically correct poetry, wretched by any standard, usually beginning something like

The pigs decline
to sniff the slime

and ending in the wimpiest pseudo-intellectual “romance.”

Your own aroma
redolent of these
thesis-innocent lovers
intertwined like leaves
of ancient,neglected vines.

I wanted to scream: Stop wasting precious time on this blather! There are always modes. Think! Forget what all the asshole careerists say! Embrace yourself and your ideas! I guess she was a bit sexually slow, quarter hour or so anyway, and I couldn't watch at first, uh...well I'm shy at any rate, and the knowledge she would die in ten years...well, a couple of hours actually.

I could sense he was a nice young man, though a bit macho-mouthy, and I started crying. I didn't need that.

My section leader laughed to the other ones about me and the lovers. “Such an old-fashioned display all round! Let me tell you I wouldn't trade our drop-of-the-hat screwing for anything!”

“Drop of the PANTS anyway!” - she always topped herself.

I wasn't required to watch our young woman die - though the muddy X-rays remain in my consciousness, slapped up for viewing too fast to really discern. The section leaders had ordered in beer and wanted to get to it; me, I couldn't wait to dive back into my TV-Bowl.

“You've seen pure science!” my section leader crowed as I left.

Why is it always so unsatisfactory?