Shay - Delphine AU | Part 21* (Rough Draft)
Could Shay and Delphine have been a thing in a different universe?
Prev: 1-5 (edited), 6-8, 9*, 10*, 11*, 12*, 13*, 14*, 15*, 16*, 17*, 18*, 19, 20*, 21*
"A bit empty in here, wouldn't you say?" Aldous remarked upon the state of the Old Wing laboratory as he unpacked supplies at a cleared and sterilized laboratory counter.
Cosima swept a confused eye around the room. "You provided everything I asked for."
"I meant with just you and Delphine," Aldous said, laying out cotton and alcohol, syringe and bottle, nitrile gloves and rubber tie. "You don't have any requests for additional personnel?"
Cosima rolled her eyes. "Being put in clone jail doesn't exactly encourage socializing and vetting the other DYAD staff." She tilted her head at a considering angle. "Although if you can recommend a sequencing tech, I could use one."
The hint of a smile, like a flag of victory cautiously run up above the line of the trenches, nudged Aldous's lips. "You would take my recommendation?"
Cosima looked wryly into his face. "You're not giving me a lot of options here. Besides, anyone I pick would be subject to your approval anyway."
"As per our agreement," Aldous said in a gentle reminder.
"As per our agreement," Cosima confirmed, voice far harder.
Delphine, observing them from a seat behind Cosima, was struck by the almost familiar rhythm in the back and forth of the barbed exchanged. The assumption of a confrontational attitude, the calculated feints and the verbal thrusts, were established parameters between the two of them. Yet Delphine knew they didn't cross paths frequently in the time since Cosima had come to DYAD--Aldous regulated Cosima's access to him through Delphine. Which suggested meetings between them had taken place before Cosima's arrival at the DYAD. In what context, Delphine wondered. When she watched them now, as Aldous disinfected the injection site and prepared the syringe under Cosima's nervous eye, it was easy to see how the other woman's animosity extended from her mentor to herself. That Cosima saw her as Aldous's tool and puppet.
Delphine had a difficult time finding fault with the assessment.
In a few seconds the entire process was over.
"There we go," Aldous said, as if soothing a child. "Now we see how your body responds."
"Yeah, so if my arm falls off, then we know," Cosima cracked. Delphine hid a smile behind a hand, but she couldn't determine if Cosima's bravado was an effort to conceal apprehension or a fragile hope. Clearing her throat, Cosima leaned toward Aldous, voice lowering, "So, um, Dr. Leekie. In light of what you shared with us, we have a proposition for you."
Aldous's expression became grave immediately. The "we" hung in the air, encompassing no other person in the room. It was strange the thoughts that surfaced triggered by a seemingly innocuous word, the amorphous "we" conjuring like-faced women who bore no other defining details except maybe names like Sarah or Alison, or a stray disconnected realization intoning, Ah. Perhaps this was why Cosima went immediately and without comment to her apartment last night. To speak with her associates about what she'd learned.
It made much more sense than that Cosima had given her space following their conversation. Why would she have done so anyway? Out of consideration? For her?
Of course it made sense Cosima had been eager--and preoccupied with the need--to update her friends.
Aldous granted Cosima his full attention. "I'm all ears."
Ignored and circumscribed outside of the exchange, Delphine found herself straining to hear.
"We want to know . . ." Cosima stalled, surveying him, "you like to drink beer?"
Aldous's flummoxed reaction channeled Delphine's confusion. Cosima grinned.
"No?" Cosima asked, tongue poking between her teeth. "Maybe you should try it. Tonight. There's a place I know where you should go. Say, around eight? I'll write down the name for you."
Aldous studied Cosima, hesitant to conclude that she spoke in earnest. But Cosima did as she promised. When she handed over the slip of paper, Delphine glimpsed the name she'd written in legible, blocky handwriting: Bobby's.
*
With the injection deposited in Cosima's arm and unobservable interactions underway, the remainder of the day passed slowly, as time was prone to lag when suspended in the anxious, anticipatory state of imposed waiting. Both of their attention seemed fixed on the site of Cosima's upper arm. Cosima touched it absently now and again, seemed to think better of it each time, and ended up fidgeting in her subsequent attempts to ignore it. As the hour bled from mid-afternoon into late-afternoon, Delphine admitted to herself that nothing much was being accomplished--or that there was very much to accomplish.
"Why don't we call it a day?" Delphine suggested.
Cosima glanced over. "You're free to head out if you want. I'm not going to enforce holding you here from nine to five."
Delphine cocked her head. "You're giving me permission to go?"
Cosima flashed her a feral, lopsided smile. "You mean as opposed to you giving me permission to go?"
They squared off in a spot of silence.
"As far as my understanding goes," Cosima said, swiveling in her chair, "this is my lab."
Delphine nodded slowly. "Okay. But I was going to ask if you would like to get dinner."
"What? Like just you and me?"
"I did say once that we could get dinner if we managed some work," Delphine said. "I think we've accomplished a lot since then."
"And here you are asking me out to dinner in person," Cosima drawled. "Alright, Dr. Cormier, you're on. Let's go."
The parking garage, lit as ever by dim fluorescent lights, echoed forlornly with their syncopated footsteps. They sequestered precious, valuable, and sensitive items--laptops--into the trunk of her car and with an air approaching practiced circled around to their respective sides. Once they were on the road, blinking into the natural light of an overcast day as they emerged from the structure, Delphine glanced at Cosima in the passenger seat, gazing out the window, and couldn't help but feel that Cosima was beginning to look habituated and commonplace in the spot.
Was being a glorified chauffeur just part and parcel of the job of a monitor? Delphine could almost hear Aldous chide her: Whatever was necessary and effective.
Delphine didn't ask Cosima what she might like to eat and when she parked the car a street down from their location, Cosima didn't ask or volunteer a preference. She simply exited the car and followed Delphine, right up to the moment Delphine reached for the restaurant's door. As if coming to her senses, Cosima straightened up, alert, and backtracked a few steps to the edge of the sidewalk to behold the name of the establishment above the door and glance into the street-front windows. Delphine held the door open for her.
Cosima delivered no comment until they were seated and left to their own powers of culinary literacy. Cosima flipped the menu open, flipped it closed again. "Thai is your first choice?"
"It was what first came to mind as we were leaving," Delphine admitted.
Cosima tapped the cover of the menu, eyes narrowing in speculation. "Did Shay bring you here?"
Delphine managed a little half smile of bemusement. "I brought Shay here. Well. I made the suggestion that we have dinner here." She lifted an eyebrow. "What made you think Shay had a part in this?"
"Thai generally offers lots of vegetarian options," Cosima remarked absently as she conducted a quick page-turning overview.
Which was, in fact, why Delphine had picked it, then and now.
"Though tofu isn't everyone's thing," Cosima remarked idly as she scanned down the lists. She nodded to herself as she traversed cover to cover, raised her head and appraised the restaurant, dim and intimate. "Not a bad first date spot."
"Excuse me?"
Cosima met her eyes. "I said this wouldn't be a bad spot for a first date. Though spicy food might be a little dicey or adventurous for some."
"But not for you?" Delphine wondered and then vaguely regretted it.
Cosima flashed her that toothy smile. "I'm up for anything, if the company's good. But DYAD knows that--right?"
Delphine sucked in a short, sharp breath. "Perhaps." She rolled in her lips, gave the smallest shake of her head. "I don't know. The truth is I don't know about your previous monitor--the details about her."
Cosima nodded absently, one hand pushing up her glasses frames as she ducked her gaze back into the menu. "You don't know because they don't tell you or you don't know because you don't want to know?"
Delphine evaluated the question. Cosima let her. The way she asked hadn't carried the sharpness Delphine had come to expect from her. It occurred to Delphine that Cosima might have been asking out of genuine curiosity.
"Dr. Leekie . . . can be very particular with what he shares and what he doesn't. You saw that yesterday." Delphine breathed out slowly. "But on the subject of your previous monitor, I haven't asked. I don't know if he would tell me or not."
Cosima looked at Delphine over the top of her frames. "Why wouldn't you ask? Is this part of the whole compartmentalization of the project thing? Or is that you're not interested in what kind of person can get close to me?"
"From what I understand," Delphine answered softly, "relations with your previous monitor did not end well."
Cosima fidgeted in her seat. The movement, Delphine realized, derived from the agitated, frantic bounce of a leg. "So then why not get the details and take away the opposite example?"
Delphine studied the white tablecloth. "Because to me it doesn't seem like what repelled you was her personality, but what she was." She lifted her eyes with some caution, but Cosima wasn't looking at her. "What you can't forgive is that she was your monitor." Delphine leaned back. "And in your eyes, your monitor is the only thing I am."
Cosima's jaw worked with tension. Her eyes flashed in the low lighting when she assessed Delphine. "You know what they did, right? They--"
A waiter materialized.
Neither was ready to order, but, pulling herself together with remarkable speed and assuming a pleasant, if not exactly cheerful, air, Cosima asked for an iced tea and, almost as an afterthought, requested wraps as a starter.
The atmosphere lay upon them unsettled, ambiguously defused. Delphine waited.
"They spied on us," Cosima said, with commendable calm, speaking to the tabletop. "And they let people into our homes. They let these people examine us in our sleep. They lied to us--" Cosima's eyes drilled into Delphine. "--and they didn't even know why. They had no idea about the whole clone thing; they just went along with the secrecy, no questions asked." Cosima shook her head, one hand stroking her chin. "You know, it's weird, but--it didn't bother me much, at first. When we figured out all this monitor shit, I'd already broken up with my girlfriend and moved halfway across the country. I didn't bring anyone with me, so there was no one who could be spying on me. Maybe one person, but he was barely even a friend, just a guy in my classes, someone I talked to in the lab."
Cosima leaned forward and placed her forearms upon the table. "A clone trial actually sounds really cool when you first hear about it. You just think about--" Cosima threw up a hand. "--all the possibilities. They achieved human cloning in the eighties! Right beneath everyone's noses. Dolly? Nineteen ninety-six. I was born in nineteen eighty-five. We preceded Dolly by more than a decade! That's--that's totally crazy! And I lived my whole life without getting even a hint that I was at the middle of something so . . . so scientifically unfathomable!
"And what was the big deal about the monitors? I figured: in a way, we sorta chose them, right? Beth's boyfriend--total beefcake. Not to my tastes, obvs, but I totally got why someone would want to sleep with him." Cosima shrugged.
Delphine studied her. There was a carefully constructed indifference in her mien, but Delphine could hear anger under-stitched into her tone.
The iced tea arrived. They paused to both nod at the waitress who brought it.
Quietly, knowing she was wading into dangerous waters, Delphine asked, "What made you see the monitors differently?"
Cosima shook her head, lost in thought. "My ex showed up in Minnesota out of nowhere. She told me she wanted to get back together. I told her it was over, that I didn't want her moving or abandoning her degree for me. That it wasn't worth it. She said I would change my mind, that she was in town for a few days, that she wanted to see me, that we could talk about it. Well, one of those days, I went home early--and I found her in my apartment." Cosima gave Delphine a look of disbelief. "She broke into my apartment. Like she picked the lock on my door--I didn't even know she knew how to do that! That wasn't even the craziest thing. She had no idea why she was there! She was snooping through my things, but she had no idea what she was looking for." Cosima's voice dropped. "But you know what she did know? Leekie. She kept saying this Leekie guy ruined our relationship, that Leekie must be in town because of me, that he'd torn us apart, that she'd never wanted to leave me, she only wanted to protect me."
Cosima leaned closer. "'From what?' I asked her." Cosima leaned back with a shrug. "She didn't know."
The waiter reappeared, hovering more anxiously. Neither of them had revisited the menu, but both put in orders. Delphine settled on the dish she'd had when she'd first come with Shay. Cosima seemed familiar with Thai cuisine in general.
Left alone, Delphine ventured, "And that's what made you look at her differently?"
"No," Cosima declared in a bland monotone, "it was the shit that hit the fan afterwards." Cosima shook her head, jaw twitching in agitation. "She must have found something. Christ, she probably didn't even know she'd found something. The double blind. That was maybe the saddest thing. She just--had no idea."
"But she wanted to protect you," Delphine pointed out.
Cosima scoffed. "That is some really mighty fucking double think. She wanted to protect me, so she lied to my face the whole time and acted behind my back? Tell me you see a problem with that picture."
Delphine swallowed. "Would you have listened to her if she had one day suddenly told you everything?" Delphine shook her head. "Wouldn't you have been just as angry?"
"Not as angry as I was uncovering the truth myself. What she did was shitty from the beginning, but she didn't even have the decency to come clean."
"She was afraid of losing you," Delphine said. "The lie was too big. To tell you was to . . . risk destroying everything."
Cosima spread her hands. "Well, that's what happens when you screw people over. They get angry at you and they stop trusting you." Cosima pressed against the back of her seat, arms folded. "Then there's you. And this." Cosima cast her gaze around the restaurant. “I get it. Even if I don't get you yet. “
Running her tongue over her lips, Delphine weighed her next words, then threw caution to the wind. "Do you want to 'get' me or is it easier not knowing?"
Cosima eyes narrowed. The wraps arrived. Picking one up, Cosima transferred it to her plate and spooned some peanut sauce atop it. She bit and chewed. After some consideration, she nodded her approval. While she waited, her question still suspended between them, Delphine followed Cosima's example.
Cosima dabbed at her lips with a napkin. Without looking at her directly, Cosima said, "Before, you said something that . . . implied you didn't know what you were getting into."
Delphine inhaled deeply and released it slowly. This was something she had told no one. Because there was no one she could have told. "I was at first assigned to screening work. We were combing the genome for potential markers for any number of diseases. For example, a predisposition for cancers. As you know. the project is compartmentalized and normally someone in my position wouldn't have been told the larger purpose of the work."
"But you were," Cosima followed. Delphine nodded. Cosima took another bite of the wrap. When nothing followed, Cosima asked, "Why?"
Delphine shook her head. "A whim?"
"You mean Leekie's whim?" Cosima said casually, studying the wrap's vegetable stuffing.
"Yes," Delphine said simply.
Cosima scrutinized Delphine's face, then made a little sound in her throat, almost smiling to herself. "Then you were . . . promoted?"
"Yes. To the team working on Jennifer." Delphine nudged the wrap on her plate with a fork, one neat bite missing from an end. "I knew there was a clone project. I'm not sure I really believed it until I met her." She smiled ruefully to herself. "Though I suppose I didn't have proof there might really be clones until I met you."
"You were Jennifer's monitor?" Cosima asked, tone policed into neutral.
"No. Assisting physician."
"But you became my monitor."
"And primary physician," supplemented Delphine.
"And Leekie go-between." Cosima nodded. "There, the straightest line we could have drawn through the dots." She reached for more peanut sauce. "Why DYAD?"
"You mean why did I go to work for the DYAD?" Delphine asked, mind switching gears.
Cosima nodded around an effort to chomp through a wrap.
Delphine's eyebrows lifted with negligence. "They're a renowned multinational, conducting cutting-edge research. I did an internship and it became a full-time position. It seemed like a natural progression." Delphine studied her dinner companion. "You know. You've done your research."
"Oh yeah," Cosima said, nodding, not quite done chewing. "They've got some interesting stuff hidden behind closed doors."
"I mean their public profile," Delphine clarified, a little exasperated. "They're a high-profile corporation."
"With a high-profile director, yeah. What do you think about his book?" Cosima asked. She arched an eyebrow, swept her eyes over Delphine's hair. "You don't look like one of his followers."
"The Freaky Leekies," murmured Delphine.
Cosima nodded. "That's them. So you've read the book?"
Delphine shrugged. "Neolutionism is . . . a guiding principle. A philosophy. The idea that humanity should strive for self-determination by any and all means of available technology."
"With . . . no restrictions," Cosima pointed out. "Which I take to mean having no ethical scruples." Cosima cocked her head. "You think you could use Neolutionism to support, say, eugenics? Genetic cleansing by genetic manipulation?" Cosima's eyebrows lifted in a goad. "But who gets to decide what genes get to stay and which have to go? People like Leekie? You said you were combing our genome, right? Looking for the defects."
Delphine flexed an eyebrow. "Would writing cancer out of our genes be so evil?"
"The greater question is where do we draw the lines?" Cosima posited, pinning Delphine with a stab of her index finger. "Where do you think Leekie draws the lines? What comes after clones?"
"Designer babies," Delphine said simply.
For a moment, Cosima looked stunned. Then she laughed. Delphine didn't.
"It's very likely we will see the technological capabilities to edit genetic traits with specificity achieved in our lifetime, if it's not already been developed but not yet made public," Delphine said. "We cannot, what is the expression--stick our heads in the sand, ignore it, and hope all goes well. Governments might ban or restrict the use of such technology for that purpose, but that is not guaranteed to stop anyone."
"Such as the people and corporations willing to conduct an illegal human cloning trial," drawled Cosima. "So is that your angle? You're aiming to be one of the benevolent shepherds ushering mankind into the new age?"
Delphine shook her head, trying to mask a little laugh. "Shepherd? Like a guide? No. I wanted to do worthwhile research. I still want that. Is that surprising? Or heinous?"
Cosima huffed, almost in a sneer. "Joke's on you, then. We're bad science. We're defective. We're sick."
"You are the frontier of something new," Delphine said. "Evolution doesn't happen in a moment or without trial and error and chance. You of all people should know." Delphine shook her head, allowing a momentary pause to indulge in what the last months' strain and pressure had diluted and obscured. "You are a marvel. You are more amazing than I had imagined."
"With viability issues," Cosima said, deadpan. On cue, a short coughing fit disrupted the momentum of their exchange. Cosima paused to wipe her mouth. Their entrées also arrived.
They fell into silence. Not an easy one precisely. Cosima squeezed lime over the tamarind-tossed noodles of her pad Thai. Delphine divided out a portion of rice onto her plate and joined it with a spoonful of red curry.
"We're trying to correct the issue," Delphine said, gently.
"They might even get it right in the next batch," Cosima deflected.
Delphine took a moment to force the tension out of her jaw. "Are we not waiting as we speak to see if we might have a course of treatment worth pursuing?"
Cosima, in the middle of her first bite, couldn't answer immediately. She chased it with a sip of iced tea. "It's kind of the least they could do, don't you think? Not to mention they have to have a lot of money riding on us. Thirty years of spying on--" She paused, brandishing the blank to be filled. Delphine shook her head. Cosima shrugged. "--at least a dozen subjects? That can't be cheap. They have to prove us viable, too, if whatever possibility we're supposed to present can be turned into a profit or put on the market."
Delphine stared down at her undisturbed plate. "What do you want, Cosima?"
Cosima looked at her wordlessly for a time, until Delphine met her study and they simply sat contemplating one another.
"I don't know," Cosima said. She didn't sound entirely angry. She sounded tired, maybe exasperated. She sounded, perhaps, even a little lost. "A sorry would be nice? Sorry you're sick? Sorry we've been spying on you your entire life? Sorry you didn't ask for this? Sorry you're a walking, talking proprietary secret?"
Delphine breathed evenly. They sat. They looked.
At last, Delphine said, "I'm sorry you're going through this."
Cosima twirled her fork by rolling the handle between her fingers. "Yeah, it's bullshit." Cosima shrugged and plunged her fork back into the tangled noodles. "Not entirely your place to apologize for it, though."
It took a moment for Delphine to understand what had just transpired: Cosima was letting her off the hook. For the blame of orchestrating the circumstances, at least.
"Did you know," Cosima said after her next bite, "that chopsticks aren't Thai utensils? They don't use them. So you shouldn't ask for them at Thai restaurants."
Delphine maneuvered a mixture of curry and rice onto her spoon. "I'll be sure to remember that. Would you like to try some curry?"
Cosima considered the offer. "Do you want some pad Thai?"
Delphine wasn't particularly hungry, but she accepted the sample portion Cosima transferred onto her plate--and, with the same degree of curiosity if not indiscretion that Cosima took in observing her taste the noodles, she made a mental note of how much Cosima consumed throughout the meal.
The dinner went on with less talk, and then only touching on more innocuous topics. ("I took a trip to Thailand one summer." "Did you like it?" "Oh, for sure. I'd love a chance to go back. What do you think are the chances that there's one of us there?" "Not impossible. If you mean born and raised, the probability may not be so high. But working or traveling? The chances are probably better than, I don't know . . ." "Hitting the Powerball lottery?" "Sure. I don't know what that is, but I assume the odds are very low?" "You could say that.") Delphine hesitated to deem it pleasant, but it was closer than they had come before.
//
Next
Prev: 1-5 (edited), 6-8, 9*, 10*, 11*, 12*, 13*, 14*, 15*, 16*, 17*, 18*, 19, 20*, 21*
"A bit empty in here, wouldn't you say?" Aldous remarked upon the state of the Old Wing laboratory as he unpacked supplies at a cleared and sterilized laboratory counter.
Cosima swept a confused eye around the room. "You provided everything I asked for."
"I meant with just you and Delphine," Aldous said, laying out cotton and alcohol, syringe and bottle, nitrile gloves and rubber tie. "You don't have any requests for additional personnel?"
Cosima rolled her eyes. "Being put in clone jail doesn't exactly encourage socializing and vetting the other DYAD staff." She tilted her head at a considering angle. "Although if you can recommend a sequencing tech, I could use one."
The hint of a smile, like a flag of victory cautiously run up above the line of the trenches, nudged Aldous's lips. "You would take my recommendation?"
Cosima looked wryly into his face. "You're not giving me a lot of options here. Besides, anyone I pick would be subject to your approval anyway."
"As per our agreement," Aldous said in a gentle reminder.
"As per our agreement," Cosima confirmed, voice far harder.
Delphine, observing them from a seat behind Cosima, was struck by the almost familiar rhythm in the back and forth of the barbed exchanged. The assumption of a confrontational attitude, the calculated feints and the verbal thrusts, were established parameters between the two of them. Yet Delphine knew they didn't cross paths frequently in the time since Cosima had come to DYAD--Aldous regulated Cosima's access to him through Delphine. Which suggested meetings between them had taken place before Cosima's arrival at the DYAD. In what context, Delphine wondered. When she watched them now, as Aldous disinfected the injection site and prepared the syringe under Cosima's nervous eye, it was easy to see how the other woman's animosity extended from her mentor to herself. That Cosima saw her as Aldous's tool and puppet.
Delphine had a difficult time finding fault with the assessment.
In a few seconds the entire process was over.
"There we go," Aldous said, as if soothing a child. "Now we see how your body responds."
"Yeah, so if my arm falls off, then we know," Cosima cracked. Delphine hid a smile behind a hand, but she couldn't determine if Cosima's bravado was an effort to conceal apprehension or a fragile hope. Clearing her throat, Cosima leaned toward Aldous, voice lowering, "So, um, Dr. Leekie. In light of what you shared with us, we have a proposition for you."
Aldous's expression became grave immediately. The "we" hung in the air, encompassing no other person in the room. It was strange the thoughts that surfaced triggered by a seemingly innocuous word, the amorphous "we" conjuring like-faced women who bore no other defining details except maybe names like Sarah or Alison, or a stray disconnected realization intoning, Ah. Perhaps this was why Cosima went immediately and without comment to her apartment last night. To speak with her associates about what she'd learned.
It made much more sense than that Cosima had given her space following their conversation. Why would she have done so anyway? Out of consideration? For her?
Of course it made sense Cosima had been eager--and preoccupied with the need--to update her friends.
Aldous granted Cosima his full attention. "I'm all ears."
Ignored and circumscribed outside of the exchange, Delphine found herself straining to hear.
"We want to know . . ." Cosima stalled, surveying him, "you like to drink beer?"
Aldous's flummoxed reaction channeled Delphine's confusion. Cosima grinned.
"No?" Cosima asked, tongue poking between her teeth. "Maybe you should try it. Tonight. There's a place I know where you should go. Say, around eight? I'll write down the name for you."
Aldous studied Cosima, hesitant to conclude that she spoke in earnest. But Cosima did as she promised. When she handed over the slip of paper, Delphine glimpsed the name she'd written in legible, blocky handwriting: Bobby's.
*
With the injection deposited in Cosima's arm and unobservable interactions underway, the remainder of the day passed slowly, as time was prone to lag when suspended in the anxious, anticipatory state of imposed waiting. Both of their attention seemed fixed on the site of Cosima's upper arm. Cosima touched it absently now and again, seemed to think better of it each time, and ended up fidgeting in her subsequent attempts to ignore it. As the hour bled from mid-afternoon into late-afternoon, Delphine admitted to herself that nothing much was being accomplished--or that there was very much to accomplish.
"Why don't we call it a day?" Delphine suggested.
Cosima glanced over. "You're free to head out if you want. I'm not going to enforce holding you here from nine to five."
Delphine cocked her head. "You're giving me permission to go?"
Cosima flashed her a feral, lopsided smile. "You mean as opposed to you giving me permission to go?"
They squared off in a spot of silence.
"As far as my understanding goes," Cosima said, swiveling in her chair, "this is my lab."
Delphine nodded slowly. "Okay. But I was going to ask if you would like to get dinner."
"What? Like just you and me?"
"I did say once that we could get dinner if we managed some work," Delphine said. "I think we've accomplished a lot since then."
"And here you are asking me out to dinner in person," Cosima drawled. "Alright, Dr. Cormier, you're on. Let's go."
The parking garage, lit as ever by dim fluorescent lights, echoed forlornly with their syncopated footsteps. They sequestered precious, valuable, and sensitive items--laptops--into the trunk of her car and with an air approaching practiced circled around to their respective sides. Once they were on the road, blinking into the natural light of an overcast day as they emerged from the structure, Delphine glanced at Cosima in the passenger seat, gazing out the window, and couldn't help but feel that Cosima was beginning to look habituated and commonplace in the spot.
Was being a glorified chauffeur just part and parcel of the job of a monitor? Delphine could almost hear Aldous chide her: Whatever was necessary and effective.
Delphine didn't ask Cosima what she might like to eat and when she parked the car a street down from their location, Cosima didn't ask or volunteer a preference. She simply exited the car and followed Delphine, right up to the moment Delphine reached for the restaurant's door. As if coming to her senses, Cosima straightened up, alert, and backtracked a few steps to the edge of the sidewalk to behold the name of the establishment above the door and glance into the street-front windows. Delphine held the door open for her.
Cosima delivered no comment until they were seated and left to their own powers of culinary literacy. Cosima flipped the menu open, flipped it closed again. "Thai is your first choice?"
"It was what first came to mind as we were leaving," Delphine admitted.
Cosima tapped the cover of the menu, eyes narrowing in speculation. "Did Shay bring you here?"
Delphine managed a little half smile of bemusement. "I brought Shay here. Well. I made the suggestion that we have dinner here." She lifted an eyebrow. "What made you think Shay had a part in this?"
"Thai generally offers lots of vegetarian options," Cosima remarked absently as she conducted a quick page-turning overview.
Which was, in fact, why Delphine had picked it, then and now.
"Though tofu isn't everyone's thing," Cosima remarked idly as she scanned down the lists. She nodded to herself as she traversed cover to cover, raised her head and appraised the restaurant, dim and intimate. "Not a bad first date spot."
"Excuse me?"
Cosima met her eyes. "I said this wouldn't be a bad spot for a first date. Though spicy food might be a little dicey or adventurous for some."
"But not for you?" Delphine wondered and then vaguely regretted it.
Cosima flashed her that toothy smile. "I'm up for anything, if the company's good. But DYAD knows that--right?"
Delphine sucked in a short, sharp breath. "Perhaps." She rolled in her lips, gave the smallest shake of her head. "I don't know. The truth is I don't know about your previous monitor--the details about her."
Cosima nodded absently, one hand pushing up her glasses frames as she ducked her gaze back into the menu. "You don't know because they don't tell you or you don't know because you don't want to know?"
Delphine evaluated the question. Cosima let her. The way she asked hadn't carried the sharpness Delphine had come to expect from her. It occurred to Delphine that Cosima might have been asking out of genuine curiosity.
"Dr. Leekie . . . can be very particular with what he shares and what he doesn't. You saw that yesterday." Delphine breathed out slowly. "But on the subject of your previous monitor, I haven't asked. I don't know if he would tell me or not."
Cosima looked at Delphine over the top of her frames. "Why wouldn't you ask? Is this part of the whole compartmentalization of the project thing? Or is that you're not interested in what kind of person can get close to me?"
"From what I understand," Delphine answered softly, "relations with your previous monitor did not end well."
Cosima fidgeted in her seat. The movement, Delphine realized, derived from the agitated, frantic bounce of a leg. "So then why not get the details and take away the opposite example?"
Delphine studied the white tablecloth. "Because to me it doesn't seem like what repelled you was her personality, but what she was." She lifted her eyes with some caution, but Cosima wasn't looking at her. "What you can't forgive is that she was your monitor." Delphine leaned back. "And in your eyes, your monitor is the only thing I am."
Cosima's jaw worked with tension. Her eyes flashed in the low lighting when she assessed Delphine. "You know what they did, right? They--"
A waiter materialized.
Neither was ready to order, but, pulling herself together with remarkable speed and assuming a pleasant, if not exactly cheerful, air, Cosima asked for an iced tea and, almost as an afterthought, requested wraps as a starter.
The atmosphere lay upon them unsettled, ambiguously defused. Delphine waited.
"They spied on us," Cosima said, with commendable calm, speaking to the tabletop. "And they let people into our homes. They let these people examine us in our sleep. They lied to us--" Cosima's eyes drilled into Delphine. "--and they didn't even know why. They had no idea about the whole clone thing; they just went along with the secrecy, no questions asked." Cosima shook her head, one hand stroking her chin. "You know, it's weird, but--it didn't bother me much, at first. When we figured out all this monitor shit, I'd already broken up with my girlfriend and moved halfway across the country. I didn't bring anyone with me, so there was no one who could be spying on me. Maybe one person, but he was barely even a friend, just a guy in my classes, someone I talked to in the lab."
Cosima leaned forward and placed her forearms upon the table. "A clone trial actually sounds really cool when you first hear about it. You just think about--" Cosima threw up a hand. "--all the possibilities. They achieved human cloning in the eighties! Right beneath everyone's noses. Dolly? Nineteen ninety-six. I was born in nineteen eighty-five. We preceded Dolly by more than a decade! That's--that's totally crazy! And I lived my whole life without getting even a hint that I was at the middle of something so . . . so scientifically unfathomable!
"And what was the big deal about the monitors? I figured: in a way, we sorta chose them, right? Beth's boyfriend--total beefcake. Not to my tastes, obvs, but I totally got why someone would want to sleep with him." Cosima shrugged.
Delphine studied her. There was a carefully constructed indifference in her mien, but Delphine could hear anger under-stitched into her tone.
The iced tea arrived. They paused to both nod at the waitress who brought it.
Quietly, knowing she was wading into dangerous waters, Delphine asked, "What made you see the monitors differently?"
Cosima shook her head, lost in thought. "My ex showed up in Minnesota out of nowhere. She told me she wanted to get back together. I told her it was over, that I didn't want her moving or abandoning her degree for me. That it wasn't worth it. She said I would change my mind, that she was in town for a few days, that she wanted to see me, that we could talk about it. Well, one of those days, I went home early--and I found her in my apartment." Cosima gave Delphine a look of disbelief. "She broke into my apartment. Like she picked the lock on my door--I didn't even know she knew how to do that! That wasn't even the craziest thing. She had no idea why she was there! She was snooping through my things, but she had no idea what she was looking for." Cosima's voice dropped. "But you know what she did know? Leekie. She kept saying this Leekie guy ruined our relationship, that Leekie must be in town because of me, that he'd torn us apart, that she'd never wanted to leave me, she only wanted to protect me."
Cosima leaned closer. "'From what?' I asked her." Cosima leaned back with a shrug. "She didn't know."
The waiter reappeared, hovering more anxiously. Neither of them had revisited the menu, but both put in orders. Delphine settled on the dish she'd had when she'd first come with Shay. Cosima seemed familiar with Thai cuisine in general.
Left alone, Delphine ventured, "And that's what made you look at her differently?"
"No," Cosima declared in a bland monotone, "it was the shit that hit the fan afterwards." Cosima shook her head, jaw twitching in agitation. "She must have found something. Christ, she probably didn't even know she'd found something. The double blind. That was maybe the saddest thing. She just--had no idea."
"But she wanted to protect you," Delphine pointed out.
Cosima scoffed. "That is some really mighty fucking double think. She wanted to protect me, so she lied to my face the whole time and acted behind my back? Tell me you see a problem with that picture."
Delphine swallowed. "Would you have listened to her if she had one day suddenly told you everything?" Delphine shook her head. "Wouldn't you have been just as angry?"
"Not as angry as I was uncovering the truth myself. What she did was shitty from the beginning, but she didn't even have the decency to come clean."
"She was afraid of losing you," Delphine said. "The lie was too big. To tell you was to . . . risk destroying everything."
Cosima spread her hands. "Well, that's what happens when you screw people over. They get angry at you and they stop trusting you." Cosima pressed against the back of her seat, arms folded. "Then there's you. And this." Cosima cast her gaze around the restaurant. “I get it. Even if I don't get you yet. “
Running her tongue over her lips, Delphine weighed her next words, then threw caution to the wind. "Do you want to 'get' me or is it easier not knowing?"
Cosima eyes narrowed. The wraps arrived. Picking one up, Cosima transferred it to her plate and spooned some peanut sauce atop it. She bit and chewed. After some consideration, she nodded her approval. While she waited, her question still suspended between them, Delphine followed Cosima's example.
Cosima dabbed at her lips with a napkin. Without looking at her directly, Cosima said, "Before, you said something that . . . implied you didn't know what you were getting into."
Delphine inhaled deeply and released it slowly. This was something she had told no one. Because there was no one she could have told. "I was at first assigned to screening work. We were combing the genome for potential markers for any number of diseases. For example, a predisposition for cancers. As you know. the project is compartmentalized and normally someone in my position wouldn't have been told the larger purpose of the work."
"But you were," Cosima followed. Delphine nodded. Cosima took another bite of the wrap. When nothing followed, Cosima asked, "Why?"
Delphine shook her head. "A whim?"
"You mean Leekie's whim?" Cosima said casually, studying the wrap's vegetable stuffing.
"Yes," Delphine said simply.
Cosima scrutinized Delphine's face, then made a little sound in her throat, almost smiling to herself. "Then you were . . . promoted?"
"Yes. To the team working on Jennifer." Delphine nudged the wrap on her plate with a fork, one neat bite missing from an end. "I knew there was a clone project. I'm not sure I really believed it until I met her." She smiled ruefully to herself. "Though I suppose I didn't have proof there might really be clones until I met you."
"You were Jennifer's monitor?" Cosima asked, tone policed into neutral.
"No. Assisting physician."
"But you became my monitor."
"And primary physician," supplemented Delphine.
"And Leekie go-between." Cosima nodded. "There, the straightest line we could have drawn through the dots." She reached for more peanut sauce. "Why DYAD?"
"You mean why did I go to work for the DYAD?" Delphine asked, mind switching gears.
Cosima nodded around an effort to chomp through a wrap.
Delphine's eyebrows lifted with negligence. "They're a renowned multinational, conducting cutting-edge research. I did an internship and it became a full-time position. It seemed like a natural progression." Delphine studied her dinner companion. "You know. You've done your research."
"Oh yeah," Cosima said, nodding, not quite done chewing. "They've got some interesting stuff hidden behind closed doors."
"I mean their public profile," Delphine clarified, a little exasperated. "They're a high-profile corporation."
"With a high-profile director, yeah. What do you think about his book?" Cosima asked. She arched an eyebrow, swept her eyes over Delphine's hair. "You don't look like one of his followers."
"The Freaky Leekies," murmured Delphine.
Cosima nodded. "That's them. So you've read the book?"
Delphine shrugged. "Neolutionism is . . . a guiding principle. A philosophy. The idea that humanity should strive for self-determination by any and all means of available technology."
"With . . . no restrictions," Cosima pointed out. "Which I take to mean having no ethical scruples." Cosima cocked her head. "You think you could use Neolutionism to support, say, eugenics? Genetic cleansing by genetic manipulation?" Cosima's eyebrows lifted in a goad. "But who gets to decide what genes get to stay and which have to go? People like Leekie? You said you were combing our genome, right? Looking for the defects."
Delphine flexed an eyebrow. "Would writing cancer out of our genes be so evil?"
"The greater question is where do we draw the lines?" Cosima posited, pinning Delphine with a stab of her index finger. "Where do you think Leekie draws the lines? What comes after clones?"
"Designer babies," Delphine said simply.
For a moment, Cosima looked stunned. Then she laughed. Delphine didn't.
"It's very likely we will see the technological capabilities to edit genetic traits with specificity achieved in our lifetime, if it's not already been developed but not yet made public," Delphine said. "We cannot, what is the expression--stick our heads in the sand, ignore it, and hope all goes well. Governments might ban or restrict the use of such technology for that purpose, but that is not guaranteed to stop anyone."
"Such as the people and corporations willing to conduct an illegal human cloning trial," drawled Cosima. "So is that your angle? You're aiming to be one of the benevolent shepherds ushering mankind into the new age?"
Delphine shook her head, trying to mask a little laugh. "Shepherd? Like a guide? No. I wanted to do worthwhile research. I still want that. Is that surprising? Or heinous?"
Cosima huffed, almost in a sneer. "Joke's on you, then. We're bad science. We're defective. We're sick."
"You are the frontier of something new," Delphine said. "Evolution doesn't happen in a moment or without trial and error and chance. You of all people should know." Delphine shook her head, allowing a momentary pause to indulge in what the last months' strain and pressure had diluted and obscured. "You are a marvel. You are more amazing than I had imagined."
"With viability issues," Cosima said, deadpan. On cue, a short coughing fit disrupted the momentum of their exchange. Cosima paused to wipe her mouth. Their entrées also arrived.
They fell into silence. Not an easy one precisely. Cosima squeezed lime over the tamarind-tossed noodles of her pad Thai. Delphine divided out a portion of rice onto her plate and joined it with a spoonful of red curry.
"We're trying to correct the issue," Delphine said, gently.
"They might even get it right in the next batch," Cosima deflected.
Delphine took a moment to force the tension out of her jaw. "Are we not waiting as we speak to see if we might have a course of treatment worth pursuing?"
Cosima, in the middle of her first bite, couldn't answer immediately. She chased it with a sip of iced tea. "It's kind of the least they could do, don't you think? Not to mention they have to have a lot of money riding on us. Thirty years of spying on--" She paused, brandishing the blank to be filled. Delphine shook her head. Cosima shrugged. "--at least a dozen subjects? That can't be cheap. They have to prove us viable, too, if whatever possibility we're supposed to present can be turned into a profit or put on the market."
Delphine stared down at her undisturbed plate. "What do you want, Cosima?"
Cosima looked at her wordlessly for a time, until Delphine met her study and they simply sat contemplating one another.
"I don't know," Cosima said. She didn't sound entirely angry. She sounded tired, maybe exasperated. She sounded, perhaps, even a little lost. "A sorry would be nice? Sorry you're sick? Sorry we've been spying on you your entire life? Sorry you didn't ask for this? Sorry you're a walking, talking proprietary secret?"
Delphine breathed evenly. They sat. They looked.
At last, Delphine said, "I'm sorry you're going through this."
Cosima twirled her fork by rolling the handle between her fingers. "Yeah, it's bullshit." Cosima shrugged and plunged her fork back into the tangled noodles. "Not entirely your place to apologize for it, though."
It took a moment for Delphine to understand what had just transpired: Cosima was letting her off the hook. For the blame of orchestrating the circumstances, at least.
"Did you know," Cosima said after her next bite, "that chopsticks aren't Thai utensils? They don't use them. So you shouldn't ask for them at Thai restaurants."
Delphine maneuvered a mixture of curry and rice onto her spoon. "I'll be sure to remember that. Would you like to try some curry?"
Cosima considered the offer. "Do you want some pad Thai?"
Delphine wasn't particularly hungry, but she accepted the sample portion Cosima transferred onto her plate--and, with the same degree of curiosity if not indiscretion that Cosima took in observing her taste the noodles, she made a mental note of how much Cosima consumed throughout the meal.
The dinner went on with less talk, and then only touching on more innocuous topics. ("I took a trip to Thailand one summer." "Did you like it?" "Oh, for sure. I'd love a chance to go back. What do you think are the chances that there's one of us there?" "Not impossible. If you mean born and raised, the probability may not be so high. But working or traveling? The chances are probably better than, I don't know . . ." "Hitting the Powerball lottery?" "Sure. I don't know what that is, but I assume the odds are very low?" "You could say that.") Delphine hesitated to deem it pleasant, but it was closer than they had come before.
//
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