With such a high-risk pregnancy, Carina’s offered a brain-computer interface to decode her unborn child’s neural signals and transmit them to a bracelet.
“It glows green for pleasure and yellow for displeasure,” the doctor explains. “Watch out for red—that’s distress.”
Carina’s child likes when she hums showtunes but hates her office chair. His favorite thing is afternoon naps rocking in the palm-shaded hammock.
Flashes of red precede preterm labor, but when the ambulance arrives, the paramedics are ready. When Carina’s son is laid on her chest, he turns toward her voice, and her wrist glows a brilliant, palm-frond green.
Wendy Nikel’s fiction has appeared in Martian Magazine, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and elsewhere.
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