Ellie Quin Episode 5: A Girl Reborn by Alex Scarrow

Ellie,’ said Mother. ‘These are just vat-grown bodies. No minds, no consciousness. They are not ‘someone’; they’re just a suite of replacement parts.’
    ‘But…I’ll have a mismatched hand, won’t I?’
    Jez nodded. ‘That’s a point. She doesn’t want you to attach some big hairy man’s hand to the end of her arm!’
    Mother’s cartoon avatar cocked a brow. ‘We have male and female cadavers, Jez.’ Her eyes swivelled back to Ellie. ‘The skin tone may differ slightly though. You really have quite a pale colour, Ellie.’
    She wondered if having a different coloured hand would be a problem for her. She’d probably get used to it, but…there was another thought…
    Won
’
t that make me easier to identify?
    As things stood she was average looking, unremarkable in appearance and she was finally beginning to think of that as a blessing. Whereas Jez turned heads in any room, Ellie seemed to slip by unnoticed. Being on the run, as they were herbeing wholly unremarkable was a
good
thing. Anything about her that stood out, a noticeably different coloured hand for example, wasn’t going to help.
    ‘What’s the third option?’
    Mother smiled. ‘Well, of course, my dear, we could just regrow your own hand in-’
    ‘Huh? You mean? Oh, God, I…I don’t want to go inside one of those bowls of-’
    Mother sighed patiently. ‘You won’t have to go into a fabrication pod. We will take some stem cells from you and grow it in an incubator. Then we’ll have it surgically attached as we would with option two.’
    ‘So….’ Ellie looked at her stump. ‘It’ll be like it was.’
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘That’s the option I want then.’
    ‘It will take a while to grow the hand from cells, though. We could fabricate it, that would be much quicker, but it might not be exactly right.’
    ‘I guess I can wait.’ She sighed. ‘We’re stuck here for six weeks, right?’
    ‘Five weeks and two days now.’ Mother corrected. ‘You were in the pod for four days. There was some internal bleeding abrasions and bruising to your internal organs, three clean breaks and a number of hairline fractures to your-’
    ‘How long will it take to grow me a new hand?’
    ‘A week, Ellie. I will make sure your hand is my top priority.’
    ‘A week?’ She looked at her stump again. ‘Well…I guess we’re not going anywhere any time soon, are we?’
    A week without a left hand?
She decided she could cope with that. Perhaps it would even be educational; to live in the shoes of someone handicapped for a while. It might even be good karma-trip for her….to learn to appreciate what she had; a healthy body unplagued by genetic mutations. She recalled a docu-videe she’d watched on the toob once, about poor people who had mis-growths and tumours caused by insufficient radiation shielding on some of the early-stage worlds.
    ‘Gross-i-o freakos!!’ Ted had guffawed. Dad had told him not to be so bloody rude. That they were all so very lucky to be able-bodied and unaffected that way.
    ‘Okay, I can cope with that.’
    ‘Thank you for being so understanding, Ellie,’ said Mother. ‘On behalf of the company, and Shelby and Graham, I really am very sorry for what happened to you. And I will look into what went wrong with Jez’s creature design.’
    Jez finished helping Ellie back into her clothes and they left the infirmary. Ellie wanted to find Shelby. There was something she wanted to discuss with him. She’d been sedated for four days. It might already be too late.
    *
    ‘What?’ Shelby’s apologetic demeanour vanished in a heartbeat. A moment ago he’d been repeating Mother’s ‘official’ apology on behalf of the company. But now he was simply bemused.
    ‘I said…I don’t want my creatures recycled.’
    The world had been left untouched since the emergency override several days ago. Pheromones had flooded into the atmosphere and knocked out all of the fabricated creatures. They were, in effect, sleeping and