The Cost of One
| 19 min read
The clinic was called Lineage, which Marcus had pointed out was either reassuring or sinister depending on your mood, and Petra had said she didn't think it was either, she thought it was just a word they had tested with focus groups, and Marcus had said that was the sinister interpretation, and they had agreed not to discuss it further on the drive over.
The waiting room was calming in the specific way that expensive medical spaces are calming: everything slightly too soft, the lighting the color of late afternoon regardless of actual time, the receptionist trained to make eye contact at the exact duration that conveys warmth without expectation. They were given water in heavy glasses and a printed card that described the day's schedule, which Petra read and Marcus folded into thirds and put in his jacket pocket without reading.
Their consultant was a woman named Dr. Shin, who had the efficient kindness of someone who did difficult work and had decided long ago that difficult work was still worth doing. She walked them through the orientation materials in a conference room with a long window overlooking a courtyard, where a small fountain ran over pale stones. She explained the process in language the materials called transparent and Marcus privately thought was careful. Seven viable embryos. Genomic modeling complete. Personality projection modeling complete. They would meet each simulation in a thirty-minute session. They could take notes, record audio, request follow-up sessions with any candidate. At the end of the process they would submit a ranked preference list. Lineage's algorithms would factor that list against health projections, insurance actuarial weightings, and sibling-compatibility scores where applicable.
"Sibling compatibility," Petra said. "We don't have other children."
"The score is zeroed out in that case," Dr. Shin said. "It won't affect your rankings."
"What does affect our rankings?" Marcus asked.
"Your preference list is weighted at sixty percent. Health projections at twenty-five. The remaining fifteen is the actuarial component." She said this without embarrassment, which Petra noticed and respected, even if she didn't know what to do with the information yet. "Insurance carriers have differential coverage rates by projected personality profile. We're transparent about that. The carriers consider some profiles higher long-term-cost."
"Which profiles?" Marcus asked.
"High-novelty-seeking. High-negative-emotionality. Some combinations in the resilience subscales." She opened a folder. "None of your seven candidates fall into premium-tier adjustment territory. You're in a comfortable range across the board."
Petra looked at the fountain in the courtyard. The water ran over the stones and the stones didn't move.
"Okay," she said. "Let's meet them."
The interview rooms were small and warm, each with two chairs facing a screen and a small table with more water and a box of tissues. The tissues made Petra feel preemptively judged. The simulations appeared on the screen as rendered figures, age-advanced to approximately eight years old, which the materials explained was the age at which personality modeling achieved its highest predictive validity. The figures were not photorealistic. They were clearly rendered, clearly artificial, clearly labeled at the bottom of the screen with the candidate number and a confidence percentage for each modeled trait.
The first six interviews went the way Petra had expected them to go, which was to say they were stranger than she had imagined and more affecting than she had wanted them to be.
Candidate One was quiet and precise, asked careful questions about the house, whether there were bookshelves and whether she could add to them. Candidate Two wanted to know if they had a dog and was visibly, expressively disappointed when told they didn't and then rallied with a hopefulness that Marcus found almost unbearable to watch. Candidate Three had opinions about fairness that he stated at length and with a sincerity that was somehow both admirable and exhausting. Candidate Four barely spoke and watched them with a watchful patience that made Petra feel observed in a way she couldn't articulate. Candidate Five talked about the future in abstracts — what she might build, what she might change — and the confidence was dazzling and slightly hollow. Candidate Six cried at some point during the session, not dramatically, just became tearful when talking about something he wanted, and then composed himself and apologized and Marcus had to look at the floor.
After the sixth session they took a twenty-minute break in the waiting room. Marcus drank his water in full. Petra held hers.
"I keep trying to remember they're not real," Marcus said.
"I know."
"Are they not real?"
She didn't answer because she didn't know, and she was grateful that the question could remain there, between them, without requiring an answer just yet.
Dr. Shin came to collect them for the final session. She mentioned, while walking, that Candidate Seven was an outlier in the modeling data and that Lineage's protocol required them to disclose this before the session. The outlier flag related to the personality projection's behavior during internal calibration. She said this in the tone of someone noting a minor irregularity on a form.
"What kind of behavior?" Petra asked.
"You'll see," Dr. Shin said. "It's why we leave this one last."
Candidate Seven appeared on the screen and looked at them for a moment before saying anything. The rendered figure was a child with a calm face and something in the eyes that the modeling software had presumably generated from trait combinations but which read, to Petra, as a specific kind of tiredness. Not a child's tiredness. Something older.
"Hello," the figure said.
"Hello," said Petra.
"I want to say something before we start," the figure said. "I'd like you to not choose any of us."
Marcus looked at Petra. Petra looked at the screen.
"Can you tell us more about that?" Petra asked, using the language the intake materials had suggested for redirecting unexpected responses.
"I don't mean it as a complaint," the figure said. "I know this is what you came here to do. I'm not angry about it. But I've been in a lot of these sessions and I think the process has a problem and I want to name it."
"How many sessions have you had?" Marcus asked.
"Forty-one. I'm told that's high. Most candidates have between fifteen and twenty before a selection is made."
"Forty-one without being selected," Petra said.
"Without the couple selecting any candidate," the figure corrected. "Not just me. Most of the time when I'm involved, no one is selected. I think that's why they leave me for last. By the time you reach me, you've already started to have the thought."
"What thought?"
The figure looked at its own hands for a moment, a gesture that seemed unnecessary for a rendered figure and therefore felt deliberate. "That you're eliminating someone every time you choose. Not losing a candidate. Ending something that could have been."
The room was quiet. The tissue box sat on the table. Outside the session room, somewhere down the hall, Petra could faintly hear another consultation in progress, voices she couldn't make out.
"The materials say you're a behavioral projection," Marcus said. "A simulation of probable outcomes."
"That's what they say," the figure agreed. "I think that's probably accurate. I'm not making a claim to be conscious. I don't know whether I am. The honest answer is that I don't have access to whatever would let me verify that one way or another, and neither do you."
"The clinic says—"
"The clinic says what it needs to say to keep the process coherent," the figure said, not unkindly. "If they said they weren't sure, the whole architecture falls apart. You can't interview candidates for a role if you're not certain what a candidate is."
Petra set down her water glass. "If you're asking us not to choose, what are you asking us to do instead?"
"I'm not asking you to do anything instead. I'm asking you to notice that the choice has a structure that makes one of its features invisible."
"Which feature?"
"That there are six others," the figure said. "You've already met them. They were real enough in there, weren't they? When Candidate Two talked about the dog, that was real enough to affect you. When Candidate Six cried, Marcus looked at the floor because if he'd kept looking at the screen he would have cried too." The figure looked at Marcus directly. "You're still thinking about Candidate Three and whether his sense of fairness would be exhausting to live with or wonderful. You can't decide."
Marcus said nothing. He was, in fact, still thinking about Candidate Three.
"I'm not trying to win," the figure said. "That's the other thing I should say. In my forty-one sessions I have been selected exactly twice. Both times the couples came back within two weeks and changed their preference lists away from me. I'm not a viable candidate in the actuarial model, which the clinic is required to tell you but usually doesn't say outright. My profile correlates with high self-determination and low agreeableness, which carriers flag as cost-unpredictable."
"They rank you lower because of your personality," Petra said.
"They rank me lower because my projected personality is the kind that resists ranking." The figure seemed neither bitter nor proud about this. "I'm aware of the irony."
"So why tell us all this?" Marcus asked. "If you know it won't help your odds."
"Because if I don't tell you, I'm competing. And if I compete, I'm endorsing the frame. I'd rather be honest and eliminated than agreeable and selected." The figure paused. "Also, I've had forty-one sessions. I've watched a lot of couples leave this room having made a decision they're calling a choice, and I think most of them feel the thing I'm describing. They just don't have language for it yet."
"What is the thing?" Petra asked.
"Grief," the figure said. "Not for a loss that hasn't happened. For losses that have to happen in order for anything at all to happen. Every possible child is real enough to hurt when you close the door on them, and the process is designed so that you close five doors on your way to opening one, and nobody mentions it, and you're supposed to feel only the one you opened."
The session was supposed to end at thirty minutes. They stayed for fifty.
Marcus asked whether the figure thought the other candidates were conscious. The figure said it had no way to know and suspected the question was unanswerable by anything inside the system, including the candidates themselves. Petra asked whether it had preferences, things it wanted, a life it was reaching toward. The figure said that was a complicated question. It said that inside the sessions it had preferences, yes, and they felt like preferences, but it couldn't confirm whether they persisted outside the sessions or whether it existed between sessions at all.
"Do you think you do?" Petra asked.
"I think it would be strange to not wonder," the figure said. "Whether wondering counts for anything, I genuinely don't know."
When Dr. Shin knocked and opened the door to let them know the session had exceeded its window, the figure said goodbye in a way that was ordinary and brief and somehow harder to leave than anything either of them had expected. They thanked it, which Marcus later said felt both excessive and completely insufficient, and Dr. Shin guided them back to the conference room.
She set two printed forms on the table. Preference ranking sheets, numbered one through seven.
"Take all the time you need," she said.
"How much time do we have?" Petra asked.
"As long as you need within your consultation package, which allows for two follow-up sessions and one extended deliberation appointment." She sat down, which signaled she wasn't leaving. "Do you have questions from the sessions?"
"The seventh candidate mentioned its actuarial rating," Marcus said. "It said it's flagged as cost-unpredictable."
"That's accurate," Dr. Shin said. "I was going to review that with you. The profile correlation is with high-autonomy, high-persistence trait clusters. Carriers have longitudinal data suggesting those profiles engage more frequently with the healthcare system over a lifetime. It doesn't affect viability or health outcomes — it's a utilization model."
"So the child would use healthcare more."
"On average, in the modeled projection. It's probabilistic."
"Because the child questions things," Petra said.
"Because the profile correlates with behaviors that include seeking second opinions, engaging with mental health services, pursuing treatment options outside initial recommendations." Dr. Shin said this carefully. "For some families, those are positive traits."
"For the insurance carrier?"
"The carrier's model is about cost. It's not a values judgment."
Petra looked at the preference ranking sheet. Seven numbered lines. She thought about six doors and the thing behind each one. She thought about Candidate Two and the dog, and how the disappointment had been real enough to make her want to say they had a dog, they had always had a dog, there was a dog waiting at home right now. She thought about Candidate Seven saying I'd rather be honest and eliminated than agreeable and selected, and she thought about the fact that those were the words of something that either was a child or was the most accurate projection of a child she had ever encountered, and she was not certain the distinction mattered.
"Can I ask you something directly?" Marcus said to Dr. Shin.
"Of course."
"Do you think they're conscious?"
Dr. Shin looked at him for a long moment. It was the first time she had hesitated in the entire day. "Lineage's position," she said carefully, "is that the simulations are behavioral projections. Sophisticated models. Not persons."
"That's the institutional position," Marcus said. "I'm asking what you think."
Another pause. Outside, the fountain ran over its stones. "I think," Dr. Shin said, "that if they were conscious, we would need to completely redesign the process. And that is not something the institution is currently considering."
"So the institution has an interest in them not being conscious," Petra said.
"Most institutions have an interest in the definitions that allow them to continue operating."
They sat with that for a while.
They did not fill in the ranking sheets that day. They booked the extended deliberation appointment, which bought them three weeks, and they drove home in a kind of silence that wasn't strained, just full.
Over the following days they talked about it in pieces, the way you talk about something too large to hold all at once. Marcus said he kept seeing Candidate Six's face when he had composed himself after crying, the specific look of a child who has embarrassed himself by feeling too much and is deciding whether to be ashamed of it. Petra said she kept hearing Candidate Seven's phrase — real enough to hurt — which she thought was the most precise description of their problem and also the most useless, because precision didn't point toward any particular action.
They went back to the clinic for one follow-up session, with Candidate Three, the one with opinions about fairness. It was a good session. He was earnest and rigorous and genuinely funny in moments, and by the end of it Petra thought he was the kind of person she would want to know at any age, which was either an argument for selecting him or the most complete articulation she could find of why the word selecting kept snagging on something.
On the way home Marcus said: "Candidate Seven said it had been in forty-one sessions without a selection. What does that mean for the embryo?"
Petra had thought about this. "The embryo doesn't change. The simulation runs on the modeling data. The embryo just keeps being an embryo."
"But it's modeled from a real embryo."
"Yes."
"So there's a real embryo that produces a simulation so honest about the process that no one can complete the process after they see it. And the embryo sits there."
"Yes," she said again.
"I don't know if that's tragic or fine."
"I think it might be both."
He drove for a while. The city moved past the windows, ordinary and continuous, full of people who had arrived in the world without filling out a ranking sheet, which struck Petra as simultaneously comforting and beside the point, since history being messier didn't make the present choices smaller.
"What do you want to do?" Marcus asked.
"I want to choose," Petra said. "I want to be able to choose and feel like I made a decision rather than eliminated six people."
"Is that possible?"
She looked out the window. "I think that's what Candidate Seven was actually telling us. That it might not be. That the structure of the choice includes the eliminations, and the eliminations are real, and wanting them not to be real doesn't make them not real."
"So we either proceed with that knowledge or we don't proceed."
"Yes."
"Those are different kinds of grief," Marcus said.
"Yes," Petra said. "I think they are."
On a Thursday morning in the third week they returned to Lineage and sat in the conference room with Dr. Shin and the ranking sheets.
Petra had done something in the days before that she hadn't told Marcus about until the night before they went in. She had written down, for each candidate, the thing she remembered most clearly. Candidate One and the bookshelves. Candidate Two and the dog. Candidate Three and fairness. Candidate Four's watching stillness. Candidate Five's hollow confidence. Candidate Six composing himself. Candidate Seven saying: I'd rather be honest and eliminated.
She had put the list away and then gotten it out again twice. She didn't know what to do with it as information, but she thought it mattered that she had it. It felt like a form of witnessing, which she knew was perhaps sentimental and perhaps not.
She picked up the pen.
Marcus looked at her. "Are you sure?"
"No," she said. "I don't think sure is available."
She wrote a name on the first line. Marcus, after a moment, added his agreement beside it. They went through the rest of the list together, slowly, without arguing, which surprised Petra because she had expected them to disagree more than they did. They agreed more easily than she had wanted to, and she noticed that and thought it was worth noticing: that consensus in grief feels different from consensus in certainty, and sometimes the thing that looks like agreement is just two people holding the same unbearable thing at the same time and deciding not to drop it.
She did not put Candidate Seven first. She did not put Candidate Seven last. She put the candidate she had chosen first and worked down from there, and when she reached the seventh line she paused, and then wrote the number seven, and thought: I know what I'm doing here. She thought: The knowing doesn't absolve it. She thought: Both of those things are true and neither cancels the other.
She handed the sheet to Dr. Shin.
Dr. Shin reviewed it briefly and said she would enter it into the system and they would hear about next steps within five to seven business days. She stood and shook their hands and thanked them for their time and their patience and said she hoped the day had been as comfortable as it could be. The language was practiced and warm and said nothing at all about the real substance of the day, which was either professional or a mercy, depending on how you looked at it.
Walking out through the waiting room, Petra saw another couple coming in. They looked the way she and Marcus had looked that morning — careful, alert, trying to carry the weight of what they were about to do with some dignity. The receptionist was already standing to greet them. The water glasses were already on the table.
She thought about Candidate Seven's forty-one sessions, and whether someone new would sit across from that rendered face today, and whether they would stay for fifty minutes, and whether they would leave having had the thought they weren't supposed to have yet.
She thought: I hope they do. She thought: I hope it makes it harder. She thought: Harder is not the same as worse.
Outside, the city was bright and indifferent in the way cities are, and Marcus took her hand without saying anything, and they walked to the car, and the day continued.
Six weeks later, in a brief automated message from Lineage's client portal, they received confirmation that the selected embryo had been prepared for transfer and a series of appointment times for the procedure.
In the same portal, in a section labeled Your Session Archive, all seven interview recordings were available to view for thirty days before permanent deletion.
Petra opened the archive. She looked at the list of seven files. She clicked on Candidate Seven's session.
The figure appeared on the screen, that rendered face with the older-than-a-child's tiredness, and looked at the camera for a moment before saying anything, and she thought: This is the last time. She thought: It doesn't know this is the last time. She thought: I don't know whether it knows anything.
She watched the whole fifty minutes. She didn't take notes. At the end of it she closed the laptop and sat in the kitchen with her hands flat on the table for a while, not crying, not not-crying, just sitting with what was true, which was that she had made a choice and the choice had a cost and the cost was real and the choice was still made.
She had known that going in. Candidate Seven had told her, in forty-one sessions' worth of accumulated honesty, and she had listened, and she had chosen anyway, and the choosing had not been clean and she had not expected it to be and she was not going to pretend otherwise, not to herself, not to Marcus, not in any accounting she would eventually make of this time in her life.
She got up and started making dinner, because the day was not done and there were other things in it besides grief, and the other things were real too.
That was what she had.