The first girl — but really the second — wasn’t discovered until midway through the second trimester. She was sequestered right away, of course, questioned by both her parents and the authorities.

When she professed ignorance as to her current predicament, the boy was consulted. He testified that they had not done anything that was prohibited. They had both been educated. Human Sexuality in the Age of Advanced Aquarius was required reading in secondary.

It was classified as an aberration, one to be studied, buried, forgotten. Then a second girl vomited in Quantum Optics. A third started to barter, then steal, protein credits from her classmates. They too were whisked away to be gawked at by their families, probed with latex fingers.

At Embrionix, thirty men and women sat in a conference room five miles below the planet’s surface and analyzed all the available data, consulted 21st-century textbooks the way their ancestors once gazed upon hieroglyphics.

“We haven’t even seen one yet,” said one of the newest members of R&D. “Maybe it won’t even be viable.”

There was a lot of encouraging talk about the dangers of indiscriminate breeding before a willowy woman stood and cleared their screens.

“Let me remind you that we currently own 67.9% of the creation market. Our quarterly report is in three weeks.” She twisted her lips shut with an imaginary key but then had to explain herself when the reference was lost.

Containment ultimately proved impossible. Half of the girls were now missing from US 238. Those remaining were quarantined and the boys assigned Portnoy’s Complaint for a mandatory reading circle.

News was rumor and rumor was news. The official channels claimed it was contagion, the fringe squawked it was a government plot. There was fear and confusion and a demand for an answer to the question that no one knew how to ask.

The first girl — the true one — was largely unaware of all the chaos. She lived in her head, always had. She was considered to be unfortunate, nearly invisible, even by those who might have been considered invisible themselves.

No boys for her and no friends, only a mother who spent as much time as she could on the surface, scavenging for materials until the solar winds scarred her face and wrecked her voice. She had forbidden her daughter to accompany her but the girl devised a plan to ascend anyway, staying in the pod when the weather was especially brutal. Opening the hatch when it wasn’t.

It was there, in that plastic bubble, curled in upon herself that she first felt the fizz in her abdomen, the subtle disturbance that now consumed her. Her belly was full and hard and still entirely hers as she gazed upward with her hands upon it.

When she first saw the star winking on and off through the soupy sky she thought she must be mistaken. People had quit wishing on them long ago. But there it was, just as the thing inside her was, simply waiting for the slightest provocation to alight.