1. The Press Conference
Marriage had changed Megamind. The whole city agreed. He still rose to the challenge when the city needed a hero, and he could still be seen with Minion playing airborne laser tag on hoverbikes above the lake from time to time, while a dozen brainbots held large balloons to provide cover and played lifeguard, ready to fish out bikes and riders as needed. The frequency of his public appearances, however, had been dwindling, as had the once-steady flow of new inventions. There had been a burst of acquisitions of new laboratory equipment, but then nearly three years in which he understandably turned his focus inward, toward the home he had created for himself, Minion and eventually Roxanne in the three stories he added to Metro Tower when he rebuilt it after its decapitation by Titan.
Then invitations went out for a press conference. The invitees were mostly science journalists and eminent reproductive biologists, with a handful of representatives of the popular press, all reporters who had done Roxanne favors in the past.
When the first of the attendees arrived, Megamind and Roxanne were already at the front of the room, on a dais behind a table with a black tablecloth hanging nearly to the floor so that the two of them were only visible from the waist up. Minion checked off names on a list. Roxanne's colleagues came up to chat with her and surreptitiously get a look at her belly; they went back to their seats texting "Roxanne Pregnant" to their editors. Only when the last expected attendees arrived did Megamind stand, so abruptly that all conversation in the room stopped, and pick up the microphone.
"We are here to announce," he began, "that Roxanne is expecting the first cloned human child. The due date is September 17th" - about eight weeks away - "and her name will be Lisa Ritchie." At this point, Roxanne rose, too, and all the cameras in the room got to work. "Questions? Professor Delacroix." A white-haired man in a sweater rose.
"I just want to know whether, for the construction of the zygote, you used O'Malley's method or Yang's." Megamind's answer was long and technical and left the professor nodding with a why-didn't-I-think-of-that look on his face. The next was a senior woman journalist who had helped Roxanne when she was new.
"Will you be trying again using both your DNA?"
"That's what we tried first. I created five zygotes, each using a little less of my genetic material. All five spontaneously miscarried in the first trimester." (He pronounced it "trimister", with an overemphasis on the first syllable.) "Only when I put a muzzle on my ego and went with all Roxanne all the time did we succeed. The child has reached viability. If Roxanne went into labor today, Lisa would live. That is what's important." Even as he spoke, Roxanne was picking up the second microphone.
"Peggy? Miscarrying a wanted child is gut-wrenching. Five times in two years? Let's not go there." Megamind called on a young woman from Scientific American.
"What about the international agreement by the scientific community not to develop human cloning?"
"It's all the fault of that Aldous fellow. What was the rest of his name, Roxanne?"
"Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, is a science fiction novel depicting a future England," Roxanne said, "in which all human beings are manufactured in laboratories and raised in government schools with no knowledge of their parents, in order to crush out individuality and keep the population easy to control. We believe that the international agreement was created out of an unrealistic fear of that kind of future. We're just trying to start a family. Kareem." And she pointed to another of her colleagues, a man with a salt-and-pepper mustache.
"Wouldn't it have been easier to use donor sperm?"
"The problem with that," Megamind responded, "is legal. There are people in this country who, for reasons of their own, do not want me to have children in my life, and some of them have money. With this money they might track down the genetic father and persuade him to go to court to try to take the child away from us. That's another place we don't want to go. You there, from theJournal of Embryology." A young man with a high-fashion haircut rose.
"I just want to say congratulations." The room rose in applause. Megamind just stood there blinking - this kind of thing still tended to take him by surprise - but Roxanne knew what to do.
"Thank you," she said, sidling up to him She put an arm around him and up the back of his neck, and pulled his face down for a kiss. The cameras worked some more.
2. A Special Moment
The video opens with a head shot of Roxanne in a fuzzy bathrobe, standing against a white tile wall. Her hair is uncombed and she is without makeup.
"This is Roxanne Ritchie. It's three-sixteen in the morning, October twelfth, and this is a very special moment in the Megamind household." She looks to her left and down and the camera pans there until it is looking down at Minion sitting on white tile with two-year-old Lisa, in a pink nightgown printed with unicorns, standing in his lap, leaning against the cyborg shoulder and pressing her hands and all her attention into the side of the clear dome. Minion looks up eagerly into the lens.
"See this little fish in here with me?" Point of view pans around to show, from above, a smaller fish swimming in place, as close to Lisa as it can. "This is Lalli. She's my clone. She hatched out about five months ago and I've been raising her in here ever since. Boss, get a face shot. Go over Lisa's shoulder." Point of view moves until it is looking over Lisa's shoulder and between her hands to reveal Lalli, a perfect miniature of Minion, gazing out in delight, overlaid by the reflection of Lisa, who is gazing in with the same expression. "Now, notice," Minion continued, "that she isn't looking at me at all. She's just locked onto Lisa and Lisa's locked onto her. This is exactly what's supposed to happen! I was afraid with a human kid it wouldn't take, but it's taking perfectly! So now I got two choices."
The camera pans back to him. "Either Lisa spends the next three days hanging onto my suit, or we get Lalli her own bowl. I got the bowl right here." The camera moves to a glass globe, open at the top, sitting in the suit's mechanical hand. "It's got the water in it already. Now it's time to pump down and open up." The camera returns to Minion's dome, in which bubbles rise and the water level sinks down until it appears empty. The other mechanical hand reaches up and throws back the dome like a hood. Lisa leans forward to look down into the water. The camera moves until it's over the opening, looking at the back of Lisa's head, which completely hides Lalli except for her moving tail. Minion, on the other side of the frame, looks fondly at them both. Roxanne's hands appear, pulling up Lisa's sleeves until they are above her elbows.
"Lisa?" says Roxanne's voice. "It's time to move Lalli. Put your hands in the water and pick her up." Lisa scoops and lifts Lalli cupped in her two hands. Water runs out between her fingers. When it's reduced to dripping, Roxanne continues. "Now turn over here. Here's the new bowl." The camera turns as Lisa does until the new bowl is visible. In the background are the sounds of Minion's dome shutting and refilling. The child drops the little fish in without being told. As Lalli makes one turn around her new home, a blue hand reaches into the frame, sets the lid on, disappears, then reappears holding a small black object with a blunt cone shape. The hand touches the tip of the cone to the edge where the bowl and its lid meet and the spot glows orange. The hand runs the cone all around the edge of the lid. Where the orange glow has been, the lid is now sealed to the bowl as if they were always one piece. While this is going on, Roxanne's hands come into the frame with a towel and dry Lisa's hands.
"Now it's time to go to bed," says Roxanne. The little girl picks up the bowl and walks away, through the door and out into a carpeted hallway. Three voices call "Good night, Lisa. Good night, Lalli." The little ones ignore them as Lisa turns left and pads out of sight.
"Boss, it worked!" Suddenly the camera is panning wildly all over the white tile bathroom to a soundtrack of delighted laughter and whoops of victory in two alien voices while Roxanne's is saying "Honey? Honey, the camera!" After a moment the noise dies down and Minion appears, his cyborg body now standing slightly bent to put his dome eye level with the lens.
"Those two will be in the phase they're in now, where they're oblivious to other people, for two-three-four days. After that they'll just be inseparable. I got one other thing to say. Now that there are two of us, you people out there need a name for us, and it's not 'talking fish'. There have been other kinds of talking fish before and there could be again. Our species is called opuulu. So remember it, okay?"
"I will." That was Roxanne's voice. The camera went back to her. "I didn't grow up with an opuulu, so I guess I'll never completely understand, but I know my little girl has a friend for life. Roxanne Ritchie, signing off."
A few days after the release of the video, Minion posted this little text note on the website:
"We got a bunch of nitpicking emails wanting to know how the clone of a male could be a female. The clone is supposed to be like the original, right? Well, here's the truth. We opuulu don't reproduce sexually, so we don't have males and females. You air-breathers do. In fact, you build it into your social structures. Everybody's gotta be male or female, one or the other, or you can't deal with them. So for your convenience, we make one up. Mostly, when one of us bonds with one of you, we take on your gender for social purposes. Not physical. Not part of the DNA. It's no more built in than our names.
Oh, and where Lalli got her name? Lisa named her. She looked into the tank and said 'Lalli' and that was that."