Middle 5
Adam placed the folder back on the table as he sat down at his desk in Sanctuary. The one person he felt sure would have dissuaded him from offering the treatment to Shalimar and Emma as an option had all but encouraged him. Now there was only one more thing he had to do before going ahead with it. One more reality he had to face.
Opening the folder he reached into the back cover and pulled out two disks, one labelled 'report' and the other labelled 'data'. The height of technology they may have been, the floppy disks were almost completely obsolete now. But pulling out an old external floppy drive and several attachments he linked it up to his computer and placed the disk labelled 'data' into the drive, putting the other to one side.
A folder appeared, full of the raw data and readings taken from Rachel during her pregnancy. It was sad, impersonal information, which made Adam wonder at how easy it was to lose a friend in figures and charts. Hidden inside a folder inside a folder, buried where it was thought no one would bother to look, a folder entitled 0036 held what Adam was searching for.
Every patient that Adam had ever worked with at Genomex - whether it was one meeting or a long period of treatment - had one of these files embedded in their data folder. It had been his own way of making sure these people and their children were more than just numbers. He skimmed over the first few pages "Rachel came in today full of excitement, the treatment has worked, she's pregnant." "Amy's positively glowing, telling me about all her plans." "She's experiencing morning sickness quite badly." "She's going to make a wonderful mother." "She's being as supportive as she can." and moved to later notes. Three months in came the beginnings of the nightmare. Nothing big, or hugely unusual, but then it hadn't been a usual pregnancy.
"Rachel fell today as she walked into my office. Amy almost caught her, but was just too late, and the laughed it off as if it was something not at all unusual. I had never seen her lose her balance like that before and so I asked and Rachel explained that she'd been having some trouble with her balance over the last few weeks. I may have lost my temper with her a little, but I couldn't see how they could both brush this off when they had been SPECIFICALLY told to phone me if anything unusual showed itself. I took as many tests as I could think of that might help find out what's going on and I'm waiting on the results. It might be nothing, (a change in Rachel's balance due to the extra weight that she hasn't had a chance to compensate for?) but it is worrying."
Adam skipped forward a way. He knew the results of the tests. The child was drawing all sorts of unusual resources from its mother, at only three months. Most specifically the infant was removing thyroid hormones from its mother, and almost directly, causing problems with her balance and co-ordination that only got worse as the pregnancy progressed. It was unheard of that a foetus could do that. But it was happening. All he could do was watch.
"Rachel is beginning to look quite round now and she's looking very tired. I think some of that might be due to Amy's limitless energy stores. Maybe I should have a talk with her about toning it down a little. She's much to excitable at times. Recent results suggest the baby might need treatment when it's born, there muscle structure that it's beginning to form is strangely arranged. We probably won't know more about this until it is here with us, we can't risk scanning further without damaging it. It is also growing faster than is normal. It's possible we may have to deal with a premature birth. The complications are mounting, but they both seem to be safe at the moment. I'm upping the frequency of the check-ups, I don't want to miss anything."
At least they would both be nearby, Adam thought, angry at his stupidity at the time. To blame Rachel's tiredness on Amy instead of seeing it for what it was. The facts were right there in the data he had collected. The signs. A problem. A real problem. "She WHAT? Bring her in NOW! I'll meet you at the front gates." A terrible problem what he could never hope to fix. He sat back in his chair, unable to see the screen any more through the haze of tears that were clouding his vision, the scene playing out before his eyes. Their fight. Rachel's fight. Defeat. A silent infant with wide brown eyes. Amy's face. "I'm so sorry."
"Adam?" Shalimar.