Ethan meets them on the showroom floor before the doors have finished sliding shut, which Patrick takes as a bad sign.
“Folks. Welcome in. I’m Ethan.” He shakes Patrick’s hand first, then Elizabeth’s, and steers them toward a glass desk beside the display. “Just browsing today, or are we getting serious?”
“Browsing,” Patrick says. He keeps his coat zipped to the collar, the way he did at the last three places.
Elizabeth sits on the very edge of her chair, as if someone might come and take it back. She is already looking at the display: a white pod the size of a carry-on suitcase, lit from inside like an aquarium, turning on a pedestal under the skylights.
Ethan uncaps a pen and draws a cross on a sheet of real paper, four boxes. “Humor me. I’m old-fashioned.” He taps the top-left box with the pen and leaves it empty for now. “So you’ve seen the ads. What the ads leave out is how easy this is. One pinprick.” He holds his thumb and forefinger a hair apart. “From each of you. That’s the whole procedure on your end. We take those cells and walk them back, all the way, to before they made up their minds about being skin or blood. Then we let them make up their minds again. Together.”
“And it all happens here?” Elizabeth asks.
“On site. Visit any time during the build.” He tips his head toward the pod. “Most couples come Saturdays. Some bring a picnic. Delivery’s nine months from signing, give or take a week, and we don’t miss windows.”
“What’s the failure rate?” Patrick says.
“Lower than anything else you’ll ever buy. Including the car.”
“And the price?”
Ethan writes in the top-left box and slides the paper across. It is a number with more digits than Patrick’s mortgage. Patrick looks at it long enough to measure it against his salary, then longer, to measure it against both of theirs.
“That’s sticker,” Ethan says. “Nobody pays sticker. Here’s how I want you to think about it. This is an eighteen-year investment, minimum. You’re going to put more into the next eighteen years than into anything else you own, so the front end is the smallest part of it.” He fills the second box. “Two hundred sixteen months. Point-nine percent for qualified buyers, and I’m looking at the two of you and I’m seeing qualified.”
Elizabeth laughs. Patrick doesn’t. “What comes in the base model?”
“Everything that matters ships standard. Full screening, zero hereditary flags, clean title.” The pen moves to the third box. “Now, a lot of couples look hard at the Horizon Package. Allergies, gone. Nearsightedness, gone. Adds a few inches, if height matters to you.”
Elizabeth turns to Patrick. “Does it?”
“I’m five-nine.”
“And look how you turned out,” Ethan says. He caps the pen. “I can see you want to talk it over. Let me do this. Let me go see my manager about that rate, because the promotion ends Sunday and I’d hate for you to walk out on a technicality.”
He leaves the paper on the desk.
The pod turns. Somewhere behind a frosted wall a phone chimes and someone cheers.
“We said we were ready,” Elizabeth says.
“We said we were looking.”
“We’ve been looking for two years, Pat.” Her heel drums against the leg of the chair. “Your mother asks me at every dinner.”
“My grandmother had my dad in a bed at home,” Patrick says. “No pod, no package, no manager.”
“And she nearly died doing it. You’ve told me that story.”
He has. He looks at the exit.
Ethan comes back with a fresh coffee he doesn’t drink. He crosses out the point-nine and writes a zero above it. “He’s never done that before. I want you to know that.”
Patrick’s coat stays zipped. Ethan watches the zipper for a moment, then sets the pen down and pushes the worksheet aside, out of the conversation.
“Can I talk to you straight? Off the paper.” He lowers his voice, though nobody is near. “There are still people who do it the natural way. I respect that. Some of my customers, their grandparents did it that way, and those folks are here, so it can work. But I can’t sit across from you in good conscience and recommend it. Nine months with nobody watching. No screening, no Horizon, no idea what you’re getting until you get it. And then the delivery itself.” He glances at Elizabeth, then back to Patrick. “They used to lose mothers to that. Regularly. You’d be doing the whole thing with no warranty, and if something goes wrong in month four, there’s nobody to call.”
Patrick looks at Elizabeth’s hands, folded white on the glass, and then at the pod.
He unzips his coat. Elizabeth sits back in her chair for the first time since they came in.
“What do I sign?” Patrick says.
Ethan turns the worksheet over to its blank side, writes both their names across the top, and slides it back with the pen on it. Patrick signs. Elizabeth signs under him, her letters bigger.
Ethan stands and puts out his hand. “I always like to be the first one to say it.” He shakes Patrick’s hand, then Elizabeth’s, and holds hers a beat longer.
“Congratulations on your new baby.”