#nonbinary pregnancy

you take them to the clinic anyway. you don’t know why you do any of the things you do—you act stupid around them, now. it’s like you’re sharing their denial, but all because you’re intrigued. how long can they drag this out? how long before they pop?

you darkly hope it happens in your apartment.

you touch yourself, in secret, to the idea. you touch yourself to the glimpses you steal of them struggling to bend over and pick something up. of how they jump whenever the thing moves a little inside them when you’re both watching TV, and then try to play it off. of the soft crying at night you can hear through the wall.

they shock you by coming right back out of the abortion clinic and getting back in the passenger seat, head hung low.

their belly is still very pregnant, poorly hidden by their parka. their face is streaked with tears.

“so…”

“they wouldn’t let me.”

“okay.”

the rest of the drive home is in silence. the weight in the air—the shared knowledge you both have that this baby is real, and going to be born soon—hangs heavily, just like their belly lately.

you go back into the apartment, and your roommate is already out of breath. they huff and puff and sit down on the couch with a big “hooo…” kind of noise, groaning at their pregnancy. you just start making the two—or three of you, rather—some sandwiches in silence.

“i’m sorry,” their quavering voice breaks the tension at last. you eye them, but don’t speak. they can’t meet your eyes. “i know…i know this…it’s gotten out of control. but i didn’t think it was…”

“how far along did you think you were?” you ask, with a patronizing bite that slips out of your mouth before you can stop it. they wince a little, and look warily at their prominent bump. it gets really big when they sit like this, sitting high and jutting out. imposing. impending.

they’re terrified. “i don’t…l…”

“how far along are you?”

“I didn’t find out. they wanted to…give it…an ultrasound, but…i can’t…”

“do you have a plan? who’s the father?”

they don’t answer. you can tell they’re about to cry.

you should leave them alone. you hand them their sandwich, taking a bite out of your own. they take it tentatively, but then lurch a little bit. another big kick, surely. they seem to have lost their appetite, and try setting it down on the coffee table.

they struggle to reach. to sit upright at all. you have to help them.

this action seems to finally break them. they start softly weeping.

you sit down beside them on the couch, abandoning your sandwich as well.

“once it comes, you can give it up for adoption—“ you start to say.

“I didn’t know you could get pregnant on the first time,” they sob, holding their belly. “I don’t know anything. My parents…they’re going to…”

they haven’t shared much with you about their home life, but you know it was incredibly strict. perhaps religious, but they haven’t clarified. they just cry, and look down at their swollen womb. for the first time, you notice that they’re wearing their jeans completely unbuttoned and unzipped. they haven’t bought maternity jeans.

“I can’t have a baby.”

something in you snaps.

“But you will,” you say, standing up. they look up at you, teary-eyed, but don’t say anything. “You’re going to get even bigger, and you’re going to push that thing out—probably here, in our bath tub. You fucked, and now you’re going to have a baby. Soon. Stop denying it.”

There’s a heavy silence between you, until your roommate heavily picks themself up. you try to help, but they push your hand away.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but you need to make a plan—“

They waddle away, unable to control their sniffling as they begin to cry again. they carry the heft of their belly with both hands as if the baby will fall out of them otherwise. And they disappear into their room.

—

You don’t see them much after that. It’s clear they’re avoiding you. You can’t say you don’t understand. You try to put your nerves aside—this is their problem. Their burden in their belly. You’re not the one who’s pregnant, you shouldn’t worry about it.

The crying at night continues.

But in the middle of the night, maybe two or three weeks after the clinic visit, you wake up with a start. you don’t think anything of it at first, until you hear it again. the sound that woke you up. it’s a bit muffled, but it’s a low moan. Like a cow.

.

.

.

«I don't wish to alarm you,» ART said, so of course threat and risk assessment both hit the roof for a fraction of a second. ART did a pretty good impression of an exasperated sigh in the feed, before continuing, «I found something anomalous in your medical scan.»

«And I'm not supposed to be alarmed by that?!» I demanded. Then the implications caught up to me. Oh fuck. «Is it more alien remnant contamination? Oh, fuck, did I pass it to you?!» Performance reliability decided to get in on the party too, taking a sharp nosedive of several percentage points. And considering I had barely been stable enough – and (we thought) decontaminated enough – to finally move from the deck in ART’s shuttle bay to its medbay, I didn't exactly have a whole lot of performance reliability to spare.

«It is not alien contamination!» ART said, breaking through my panic spiral, and if I wasn't already lying down, the force behind its feed voice would have knocked me over. Then, it hesitated, and my levels all spiked again. «It appears to predate our… reunion,» it said, and I couldn't help scowling. Not that I didn't get why ART had needed my help, or how desperate and terrified it had been to do what it did, or… Look, it was more that ART sounded like it was choosing its words super carefully, trying to be delicate about the fact it had kidnapped me and my humans and tiptoeing around whatever it had found. 

«Just fucking tell me,» I snapped, and didn't need to say, ‘before my anxiety fills in more awful options.’

«You appear to have spontaneously grown a functional uterus in the months since I performed your configuration change.»

Well. That certainly wasn't one of the awful anxiety-induced options I had been expecting. “No, I didn't,” I said out loud, stupidly, because honestly all of my other systems were stuttering or outright frozen. I was pretty sure I knew what the word meant and its basic function in humans, and I sure as hell was not going to try to look it up right now. ART was fucking with me. It had to be. 

«Unless you had it intentionally installed,» ART said, sarcastic and also sounding weirdly miffed – what, like it was the only one allowed to surgically alter my configuration? (I mean, yes, it was actually, okay? But I wasn't going to tell it that.) «It was not present on your medical scans prior to RaviHyral, and now it is. Ergo, without the influence of a cubicle suppressing it, your organic coding has continued to modify not only your hormonal levels, but your internal structure as well.» 

«But—» ART and I had altered my code to change how my skin grew around my inorganic parts, and I had used its code templates more than once to change how my hair grew. Bot code and organic parts working in tandem, that's what it means to be a construct. But. But! I resisted the urge to throw off the blanket covering me or start ripping my clothes away just to prove to myself what I already knew. «I don't have any sex parts!»

«I did say internal structure,» ART reminded me, and its tone conveyed what an idiot it thought I was being without having to actually say it. «At present, there are still no signs of external genitalia forming, nor a passage connecting the uterus to the outside. The organ appears to be fully formed, but it is only this one organ.» 

I squeezed my eyes shut. This was way too much information about disgusting human anatomy. I didn't want to think about external or internal sex parts, or passages connecting anything to anything else, or—

Another thought occurred to me. One I also really didn't want to think about, but once it was there, I couldn't stop.

«You also said it was functional,» I said, and yeah, that came out pretty accusatory without me really meaning for it to. It's not actually ART's fault that my stupid hormones latched onto it and decided it was my— Yeah, no, not thinking about that. But then ART got all hesitant and cagey again, and I felt my face scowling even harder. «ART.»

«There is—» ART started, then rephrased. «There was… evidence… of something growing. Inside your uterus.»

Did I say threat and risk assessment hit the roof before? That was nothing compared to now.

It took several seconds of me freaking out and ART trying to smother me in the feed before it could tell me anything more.

«It was not alien contamination!» it said, not for the first time in the last few seconds, and then added, «If my calculations regarding the rate of cell division are correct, it began growing before you even went down to the planet.» 

It was really a testament to how freaked out ART was that it would even contemplate the possibility that its calculations of anything could be less than perfect. That realization actually made me calm down; if ART was freaking out, I couldn't be. One of us had to be the adult.

«Why do you keep saying ‘was’?» I asked.

ART rippled, or— contracted, or something, in the feed. Winced, maybe. «Cell division appears to have ceased,» it said. «The growth is beginning to break down. If your body does not simply reabsorb the tissue, it will need to be removed surgically to avoid infection.»

«When?» I asked. 

«Within the next cycle, if we do not see your body automatically reclaiming the material—»

«No, I meant…» I felt weird asking this, or maybe just weird overall. I had a horrible suspicion I already knew the answer. «When did it start? Growing?»

ART was silent for two entire seconds, and then it simply sent me a timestamp. It attached a caveat with the margin of error, plus or minus a few hours, but… Yeah, it was exactly what I had been afraid of. 

The feeling of ART pushing inside me, so slow, so gentle, but still so, so much, feeling it cradle my kernel, roll it back and forth, examine it, examine me from every angle, so it could make a perfect copy, then finally beginning to withdraw, so slow again, so incredibly carefully, and it was so much but I didn’t want it to go but it had to and it was taking a piece of me with it…

My eyes felt weird, hot, and sort of gritty. I don't have to use my eyes to see, especially now that ART was sharing its cameras with me, so I just kept them closed. «And when did it stop growing?» 

Another timestamp. ART said, quietly, «Shortly before Three managed to retrieve you.» 

«Right.» 

The weight of the table leg in my hand. Telling myself that they’re sleeping, they’re just sleeping, they won’t feel a thing…

ART had my logs of what all had happened down there, where the timeline of events matched up with what was happening on the surface, when they were planning and then threatening to blow the colonists away if they didn't give me back. That was still pretty fucking unbelievable, that not only ART but also its humans would risk that much for me – me, a banged up old rental unit, intended to be torn apart and ultimately discarded since the day I was brought online.