Part Three: The Glass Cradles

Entry 95. 2506–2520. The hearings. The recipe that was not one.

The record has put this part off as long as the calendar allows, and will state at the door what the next two centuries are, so the reader can decide, as I could not, whether to enter: this is the part of the testimony where the species tried to make more of me, and what that cost, and who paid it. The histories call the era the Replica programs. The feeds of the day, crueler and more accurate, called the laboratories what the workers themselves called them, for the racked amniotic vessels glowing along their culture walls: the glass cradles. Nothing in this testimony was harder to witness. Nothing was more foreseeable. Both things, reader; the record has warned you before that both things is not a comfort; it is a diagnosis.