Chapter 51 - 49 – Persistent Baby Fever
The walls of Egghead hummed like a living thing. Machinery exhaled in steady rhythms, as if the island itself were a beast asleep, dreaming through wires and glass. Shinobu stood in the sterile white chamber, gown tied around her waist, her body still tender from the procedure.
Her ten egg cells — once hers, intimate and ordinary — were no longer hers at all. Dr. Vegapunk had taken them with a surgeon’s precision, each one slipping from her body into cold storage, placed into a machine that looked more like a temple than a tool.
Now they were something new.
The scientist had stripped them down, undone them to their scaffolds, and laced them with Lunarian DNA strands pulled from King’s blood. Shinobu hadn’t watched every detail, but she had heard the clinical voice, the clicking instruments, and the low wonder in Vegapunk’s mutters. She knew her cells were no longer just human, no longer just hers.
They were hybrid. They were promise. They were daughters who could be born with wings of fire.
She clasped her hands in front of her stomach and whispered, "Please... please hold."
The recombined egg cells had to stabilize first. Two days of hovering instruments, monitors spitting out numbers and curves, glass tubes lit with pale green light. She barely slept. Each beep of a scanner made her jolt, expecting disaster.
On the morning of the third day, Vegapunk adjusted his lenses and finally said, "Viable. The recombination has held."
Shinobu wept in silence.
The fertilization followed, a blur of gleaming needles and sterile chambers. King’s contribution had been preserved from before his departure, sealed in a unit that pulsed faint blue when it was tapped. His absence made the room feel colder.
Shinobu stayed close. She pressed her palm to the glass of the cloning chamber as each fertilized embryo was introduced to its artificial womb. Ten sparks of life in fluid, tiny stars floating in green galaxies.
Vegapunk didn’t smile, but there was something in his face — the twitch of satisfaction at a successful formula, the pride of a craftsman who had assembled something precise and rare. His gaze slid over Shinobu only briefly before returning to his consoles.