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Mummy Loves May

Mummy is known to the rest of the world as Rachel Kratz, MD, PhD, SJD

Late at night, the dark thoughts come, piling on as the possibility of sleep evaporates in the white-hot race of her mind. Genius. Prodigy. Polymath. These are the labels they've applied to her over the years. But inside her head, nothing is ever lost. Never diminished or dampened down by the passage of time. Every instant of her life, every fact she's ever learned, every word she's ever heard are all there in a dizzying array of stimulus that threatens to overwhelm at any moment of not held at bay by a laser tight focus on the moment and the problem to be solved.

Since graduating from Cambridge at sixteen, a child prodigy, she has created many of the miracles that power day-to-day life in the twentieth century. She started her own company at twenty-one, a biotech research group -- Betazoid Technology -- and within five years had contracts with armed services on three continents to provide advanced bioengineering upgrades for front-line soldiers. Nano-technology injected into muscles that enhanced strength and speed. Always with a built-in decay protocol that degraded the performance increase over time. Planned obsolescence -- a concept almost as old as marketing. And she had no illusions about what she was doing. She was making money. Fuck the politics. Screw the ethics. If her enhanced soldiers were fighting one another on opposite sides in an endless series of micro wars around the planet, all the more cash flow for her.

But she did have one personal desire. She wanted to have a child. Someone who would love her unconditionally and to whom she could leave everything she was building. Not that she wanted a family. Far from it. Some grunting, pawing man who thought he had the right to touch her whenever he felt like it. The very idea made her shudder. No. Invitro fertilization was the path to motherhood for her. And her own technology allowed her access to all of the DNA analysis she needed to select the perfect sperm to match her own ovum.

Months of searching, weeks of evaluating, and the choice was made. A spectacular union of limitless potential, dividing a multiplying in the petri dish at a most satisfactory rate. One last procedure. To implant the girl. Of course, it was a girl. Duh! And then 40 weeks of nurturing, gestating, ripening her perfect child in her ever-expanding womb. She bore the discomfort with stoic purpose, using the time to buy and ready a house for she and her child to live in. A renovated stone cottage in the Cotswold Hills, charming and functional. Minutes from a high-speed rail line and the motorway yet hidden within its own valley as bucolic as a pastoral scene by Huet.

The birth was painful. She eschewed drugs and observed dispassionately as her body forced her daughter, her Memento, into the cold, bright world. The last of her lingering fears was dispelled by a lusty scream and the smile from the doctor.

But all was not well. By the time May was six weeks old, it was clear that there was a problem. She did not thrive. She fretted. She puked and pooped thin bile constantly, and her pediatricians all shook their heads in pity. Her internal organs were just not developing. They remained in an almost embryonic stage. The cause was not clear, but the diagnosis was certain. The girl would not last three months.

True to form, Rachel herself discovered the cause of her daughter's illness. An extra set of chromosomes. Forty-eight instead of the allotted forty-six for normal human beings. And while this spontaneous mutation might yield unexpected benefits for the child if she were able to grow, at this stage in her life, it was killing her.

Unacceptable.

Now that Rachel understood the problem, she set about solving it. She couldn't restructure her child's DNA, not fast enough to let he live, but she could do something about those internal organs that needed to change, to grow, in order for her daughter to be able to digest her food. The same nano-technology she had sold to special forces to enhance their warriors could be modified to assist her daughter's stomach and spleen and kidneys. They needed to be modified, for sure, but part of the jury-rigged modifications allowed them to be re-programmed in situ. And none of the microscopic devices Rachel injected in tiny May's body would ever decay after a fixed period of time. On the contrary, they were programmed to self-repair and replicate in the event of failure.

And contrary to her physicians' dire predictions, May thrived. She git well and she started to grow. And Rachel came to hate those doctors who had condemned her child to die. Each time she saw them, their smiling faces, their wondering exclamations over how well little May was doing, she wanted to hurt them. Smash those faces. Wipe those smiles away forever. For their crimes. Against May.

It took months. One by one each of May's pediatricians contracted weird diseases and withered away. Each condition was different. No thread connected them. No hint of foul play or motive was ever suspected. And Rachel and May moved on with their lives.

In the garden that her mother had created for her, May grew like a weed, strong and tall, fast and brilliant. By the time she was four, she was reading. By the time she was six, she was writing sentences and corresponding with educators online who had no idea how old she was. If ever there was a task that May had even the slightest difficulty with, Rachel would spend a few weeks in her lab in the old stone barn and then tweak the programming on the nano-bots coursing through May's blood.

As the child moved into her pre-teen years, Rachel realized that the combination of local church school and homeschooling was not enough to suit her glorious daughter as she became her own person, and she enrolled the girl in a well-regarded boarding school where she could immerse herself in a social environment more suitable for her ever-expanding curiosity about who she was. While May was away at school, Rachel went back to work, taking many of the inventions she had created for May and applying them to the bio-military tech her firm was selling on a pretty much open market in these days of no good guys left in the world.

While sales had been good while the founder was focused elsewhere, they rebounded and soared higher and higher when she came back to her corner office overlooking the River Thames and the Tower of London. The stockholders cheered. Her firm became a darling of the blue chip set. May's report cards and weekly hand-written letters to Mummy were all glowing with praises. Rachel breathed a big sigh of relief.

Until May showed up on the doorstep of her London townhouse at four o'clock on a rainy morning, dripping wet and shivering. Her shirt, underneath her school blazer, was soaked through with blood. Frantically Rachel searched for the wound. Until May stopped her.

"It's not me that's hurt, Mummy," she said, stripping naked in the front hall and discarding the clothes in a wet pile. "It's Peter. He touched me, even though I told him not to, and then he tried to push me into an empty room. So I killed him. I stabbed him in the eye with a pencil and he died almost instantaneously. Like I knew he would."

She told the story very matter of factly, and Rachel listened, equally dispassionate about the boy's fate. He'd threatened May and if the girl had not taken care of him, her mother would have found another way to destroy him. Perhaps more painfully than May's approach. But the girl has acted effectively and swiftly with the tools at hand.

Now the issue was, how to protect her daughter from any repercussions.

"Did anyone see you?"