Jae Hee Kim

09.15.17
IB Literature Year 1
Ms. Proud

Rationale

In the novel, The Handmaids Tale, society is faced with several problems, such as infertility. My
creative piece is about an alternate society, where such problems have been solved in another way. In
Handmaid, the government enslaves fertile women called handmaids in order to create an ideal society.
In my creative piece, the government decides to produce babies in a laboratory in order to do so. These
groups of people, referred to as Generations are distinguished by their biological parents. A large
amount of sperms and eggs are retrieved from a pair of a man and a woman, who volunteer to become
parents, and these sperms and eggs are put in an incubator, or an artificial womb that looks like an
incubator but functions exactly the same, or even better, than an actual womb.
The story starts off with a woman checking in in one of the laboratories in the lab, where there are
a bunch of these artificial wombs inside the room. The children from these laboratories are not to exit the
room they are in until they reach a biological age of 17, in which they are released to society to
become workers. The reason for why I am empathized biological age is because it is implied in the
story that human beings have come up with a way to artificially stimulate the growth of the body,
resulting in a more effective way to control population. Those children with defections in their body, or
get to know anything about the society are killed immediately, which is why the girl at the end is dragged
away, and later killed, by the government robots.
This piece of creative writing is written in a present-tense, 3rd-person point of view, but the point
of view is not omniscient. I decided to write it this way, so that the audience reading the piece would feel
like theyre just a person, standing outside of the scene, and looking at the scene in an objective way. The
audience does not know what the woman is thinking in the narrative, or what the children, or the child
that is taken away at the end of the passage has in her mind, as she is being dragged away. This was to
make the story more horrifying that it could actually be, making the audience feel as if theyre taking a
part in the scene by following the woman around, but not being able to do anything about it, much like
they are watching a play, or a movie. This is the same reason for why I have left some parts of the
narrative unclear, such as when the woman talks to someone over her walkie-talkie, but only a muffled
reply is heard.
Writing Warning really lead me to think over many of the problems proposed in Handmaid, and
made me think of how many possibilities there would have been for another Gilead, or even worse
society, might rise when faced with problems such as infertility.

Warning

There are several incubators in the room. No, not several. A more accurate description would be many.
Too many. Tens. Hundreds. The room is large in width and narrow in length, and it is also extremely
white; the ceilings are white, the floor is white, and the tables are white. One would call the room a
laboratory. With a lot of incubators.

A woman walks into the room. She is wearing a white lab coat, and her jet-black hair is completely pulled
back with a black pin. The woman stops, and moves her head, running her eyes over the incubators. Then
she pulls a black device out of her pocket, and walks over to the incubator on the far right of the room.

On closer inspection, it can be seen that there is a fetus, the body of an underdeveloped human baby,
inside each incubator. These bodies are floating in the midst of a yellow liquid, which is what the
transparent, plastic tube is filled with. A series of air bubbles rise up from the human baby every 2
seconds, indicating that the baby is, in fact, alive.

The woman, who had walked into the room earlier, walks around the incubator on the far right of the
room, and nods her head. She presses the green button on the device she had been holding. She moves on
to the incubator besides the former one. She starts walking around this one, as well. And then she stops.
She sticks her head out, closer to the tube, to inspect it closer.
The fetus in this tube is different; it happens to have a huge, red spot on where his thighs would
respectively be, if it were a completely developed human baby. The woman shakes her head, and presses
the red button on her device. In the matter of a couple seconds, the yellow liquid in the tube is made red.

The woman repeats this process until she arrives to the other side of the room, during which she has
pressed the red button a total of three times. Then she marches out of the room, the sound of her high
heels click, click-ing on the floor echoing across the room as she does so.

There is a white hallway outside of the room. It is, just, a long, seemingly endless, hallway with a
seemingly endless number of white doors, labelled in different numbers. The one the woman had just left
had read 349-7.

The woman takes a sharp turn to the left, and opens the door labelled 350-7. It is, at a first glance, an
exact replica of room 349-7, except for the fact that the incubators have been replaced with children.
The children, or rather, teenagers, all look similar, as if they were biological siblings. As the woman
closes the door behind her, the teens all turn and look at her.

The woman frowns slightly, as if she is uncomfortable with the attention she is receiving. She retreats out
of the room, and quickly pulls out the black device she had stored earlier in her pocket, and presses the
green button. She brings the device close to her mouth and whispers, Generation 350-7 seems to be
ready to be released into society. Maybe next week might be the best.

A muffled reply comes from the device. There is a brief pause before the woman begins to talk again.
No, they shouldnt see their biological parents. It has never been done before. They will be released to
society as workers next week, and they will, most likely, not see each other ever again. Some more
illegible words are heard from the device. The woman sighs before responding. Yes, I will check on
Generation 351-7 next. Theyre still biologically 7 years old, though, at least three more months until they
turn 17. Besides, Im pretty sure 351-7 is taking morality classes from nine to twelve.

The woman throws the device back into her lab coats right pocket, and takes a step forward, and then
screams when she feels a hand pulling on her coat. When she looks behind her, a short, chubby girl with
fair hair is looking at her with watery eyes.
What What do you mean by releasing us? That Im not going to see my siblings again? the girl
sobs. She is wearing a black shirt, with the letters 351-7 written in big, red letters.

The woman doesnt even bother to reply. She reaches into her pocket, and presses the red button on the
black device. A few seconds later, a pair of black robots are dragging the girl down the hallway. The girl
is screaming, but the woman doesnt give her attention. She turns her back to her, and marches down the
hallway, as if nothing had just happened.

(Word Count: 800)