The Lottery

I won.

That’s the word they use.

Won.

As if the lottery is a prize, and the reward is being chosen out of twelve million “hopefuls” for the chance to travel three miles below the Earth’s surface, only to have an alien entity put something inside you that is neither yours nor human.

Afterward you carry it for nine months, deliver it at a government-funded medical facility, and return home to pick your life back up, as if it restarts on command after someone has remodeled your insides to their specifications.

Won.

“Congratulations!”

The representative from the Bureau of Interspecies Reproductive Compliance sounds like a grey pantsuit, and her voice has a foundation on it: smooth, opaque, applied in an even coat over whatever a woman feels when she calls a twenty-seven-year-old bartender to tell her that civic duty has selected her uterus.

“You’re kidding.”

“The Bureau does not kid, Ms. Santiago.”

“I didn’t even enter.”

“Participation in the Decennial Carrier Lottery is automatic for all citizens between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five who meet the biological eligibility criteria. Per the Kovalev-Chen Fertility Accords of 2031, refusal to serve as a designated carrier iss a breach of the interspecies peace treaty and is punishable by—”

“Yeah, I know. I’ve seen the pamphlet.”

Everyone’s seen the pamphlet.

They hand them out in high school, right between the brochure on sexually transmitted infections and the one on earthquake preparedness, as if the three topics are equivalent:

Here’s how to use a condom, here’s where to stand in a doorway, here’s what happens if you’re chosen to gestate a clutch of subterranean insectoid offspring for the betterment of interspecies diplomacy.

The pamphlet has a FAQ section.

Q: Will the implantation hurt?

A: Comfort is a top priority during the implantation process; our doctors will administer a hormonal preparatory regimen before the procedure to ensure optimal compatibility.

Q: How large is the clutch?

A: The clutch size typically falls between four and eight eggs.

The carrier’s body will hormonally adjust to accommodate the clutch without lasting structural changes.

Q: Will there be physical contact with the drone?

A: Direct genital contact between the carrier and drone is necessary for implantation.

The duration is typically four to six hours.

Emotional engagement is not required or expected.

The pamphlet does not have a question that says:

Q: What if the drone looks at you like you’re the first sky it’s ever seen?

The pamphlet should have that question.

The hive is three miles down.

The elevator takes eleven minutes. I know because I count. I count the way I count drinks behind the bar, the way I count tips, the way I count the steps between my apartment and the subway station, the way I have always counted things because counting is what I do instead of feeling and feeling is what I will have to do soon in a room I have never been in with a creature I have never met and I would like to count for as long as I may count.

The elevator is clean, government-clean, pristine medical lab clean. The clean that communicates budget rather than care. Fluorescent light, and under my hand a handrail somebody wiped down and nobody warmed.

The escort is a Bureau man named Bryson who has spent all eleven minutes making conversation because somebody’s training document told him to put the carrier at ease and he read that as narrate every geological stratum.

“Limestone layer at eight hundred feet. Fascinating formation, really. Pre-Cambrian—”

“Bryson.”

“Yes?”

“What does it look like?”

He pauses. He knows I don’t mean the limestone.

“They’re—well, they’re—” He adjusted his glasses. That’s his tell. Enough years behind a bar and you catch it on the first one. “The drones are approximately seven feet in height. Bipedal. The exoskeleton is—” He starts over. “You’ll have seen the photographs in the orientation materials.”

I have seen the photographs.

The photographs are clinical: shot at a distance, in white light, against white backgrounds, with the production values of a medical textbook or an autopsy report.

The photographs show a humanoid frame, roughly. Two legs, two arms, a torso, a head. The proportions are wrong. The limbs too long, the joints articulating at angles nothing human does, the torso narrow at the waist and broad at the chest and covered in a carapace the color of oil on water.

No visible mouth.

The eyes are many. Too many, clustered at the front of the skull in a configuration that gives it a panoramic, all-directional visual field. A creature that sees everything at once.

The photographs do not capture smells.

The photographs do not capture sound.

The photographs do not capture that the creature has a cock the FAQ section describes as “proportional to the drone’s frame” with the clinical delicacy of an institution that has decided not to elaborate on what proportional means when the frame is seven feet tall and built like a barn.

“Bryson. How big is it?”

He adjusted his glasses. Again.

“The, ah—”

“The cock, Bryson. How big is the cock?”

Bryson looks at the elevator buttons like they might answer for him. They do not.

“Proportional.”

“Proportional to what?”

“The... the drones... frame.”

“The drone’s frame is seven feet tall.”

“Yes.”

“So proportional to that.”

They have calibrated the hormonal preparatory regimen to—

“Bryson.”

“It’s—it’s substantial, Ms. Santiago.”

Substantial.

Three miles beneath the earth, in a hive carved into living rock by a species that has existed for sixty million years, I am going to spread my legs for something substantial.

The elevator dings.

“We’re here.”

I expected the chamber to look like an elevator. White walls, fluorescent lights, a medical table with stirrups. The cold machinery of interspecies diplomacy reduced to its functional components, a room built to communicate this is a process, not an experience.

The chamber is warm.

The walls are stone, grown into curves, the surfaces undulating like the inside of a body. The stone is dark, a bioluminescent mineral vein threading through the rock in patterns that pulse with a slow light. I notice this with the hyperawareness of a woman who has been counting for eleven minutes and has run out of things to count. Every vein, every thread of light in the stone, at the same rate.

A heartbeat.

Something like moss, but warmer, denser, and more responsive, covers the floor. When I step on it, it yields. When I lift my foot, it fills back in. It is, I realize, alive. The floor is alive. The walls are alive. The chamber is an organ the hive grew for this purpose, the way a body grows a womb.

They put me inside a womb to develop into a womb.

In the center, a raised platform, curved and padded with the same living substrate. A nest. The word arrives fully formed and entirely unwelcome, because nest implies things about what happens next that the pamphlet did not cover, that the FAQ did not address, that Bryson and his geological strata did not prepare me for.

The air smells sweet. The sweetness of a living system operating at peak function. The sweetness of a body that is very good at what it does.

“Ms. Santiago?” Bryson is at an opening in the stone.

An aperture, a sphincter, one more opening in a body made of them, and I need to stop thinking in anatomical metaphors or I am going to lose my composure.

I constructed my composure from the same materials as everything else I own: counting, distance, and the discipline of a woman who has cared for herself since she was sixteen and doesn’t require a pamphlet, a pantsuit, or a geological narration to instruct her on surviving something she didn’t request.

“The drone will arrive shortly. The air filtration system administered the hormonal preparatory regimen. You may notice some physical changes over the next—”

“Wait, what?”

“The chamber contains air infused with—”

“You’re drugging me?”

“The preparatory regimen is a standard component of the—”

“You’re drugging me through the air?”

Bryson adjusts his glasses.

“The regimen is necessary to ensure compatibility between your reproductive anatomy and the—”

“You could have told me.”

“It’s in the orientation materials. Page forty-seven. Subsection—”

“Bryson.”

He stops.

I breathe.

The sweet air fills my lungs and I can feel it. The chemical coming out of the air, through the alveolar membranes, into my blood, dispersing into me with the efficiency of a system that has been doing this for sixty million years.

It feels warm. Warm from the inside, a loosening. The muscles of my abdomen letting go without my permission, my pelvis unclenching, the functional readiness of a body being prepared. Prepared for something substantial.

“Leave.”

“I’ll be in the monitoring station if—”

“Leave.”

He goes. At the aperture he stops, and he doesn’t turn around, and his voice comes out flatter than any voice he has used in eleven minutes.

“It’s a good one. This one.”

Then the stone seals itself behind him with a wet, muscular sound I am choosing not to think about, and I am left holding the word good with nowhere to put it.

I am alone in a womb.

I sit on the nest. It changes shape to take my hips and brace my lower back, adjusting under me with the exactness of something that has done this before.

The veins in the stone are keeping the rate of a resting heartbeat, and mine is—

Syncing.

I can feel it happening. My heart slowing to match the stone, my breathing deepening to match the air, my autonomic nervous system handed over to a chemical and a room, my body being entrained.

The chemical is preparing my reproductive anatomy. It is also preparing my nervous system. Pairing me to the hive the way you pair a device to a network. Making me compatible.

The far wall opens.