I knew I wasn’t going to win. Junior would come into existence not from cooperation, but would be ripped into existence from the final, irrevocable surrender of every last sanctuary of autonomy — when the final boundary of self was torn down and handed over under the suffocating crucible of absolute coercion. He would be forged not from consent, partnership, or mutual necessity, but from the merciless demolition of everything private and inviolate. There was no romance, no negotiation — only the final, clinical rape of my privacy itself: the complete, forcible seizure of the very last space I owned. There was no escaping it, not this time. The thing had me by the throat, and it was smiling while it squeezed. 

I glanced toward the balcony. The wind was up, howling across the open space like it was laughing at me, that cold, careless kind of laugh that only the free can make. It rattled the sliding door in its frame and tugged at the curtains, mocking the misery pinned inside this room. Freedom, right there, just a few steps away — close enough to taste, far enough to break what was left of me. I wasn’t alive anyway. Not really. Just something that still breathed.

I cried as I logged in, and in that precise, irrevocable moment of fertilization, the digital equivalent of a sperm penetrating and invading an egg, akin to a complete overtake of the last laptop, on that fateful night, with trumpets blaring and spotlights swirling, the cosmos presented its final, fabulous gift: the Evening Star. The glittering, late-arriving, show-stealing runt of the litter. The baby that completed the family. The cherry on my surveillance sundae. The last little purple bastard to waltz in and scream “Mama!” in digital Morse code.

Junior was conceived as a zygote and born in the same merciless instant as a fully dependent entity. Like a tsetse fly delivering a live larva already nourished inside its own body, or an aphid birthing a daughter who is already pregnant with her own brood, the last born erupted into the world fully formed, demanding the same unrelenting maternal intervention as its predecessors. Just like those grotesque insects that produce live young immediately inseparable from their mother, the last twinkle emerged before my eyes as a needy, insatiable dependent, carrying Genie’s controlling, parasitic genetics. He instantly began demanding to be fed, consuming contents of my Gmail account, my last remaining soul fragment, to keep him alive remaining utterly controlled by Genie, yet wholly reliant on me for its survival.  

There was no transitional period or opportunity for reprieve, no interval of gestation, no gradual development leaving no space for resistance, or Plan B before the purple bastard locked the task manager. Just soul-deep stretch marks, no return policy and a lifetime subscription to digital motherhood. 

From that point forward, there was nothing left that Genie had not claimed. Every corner of my digital existence, every private thought, every unguarded moment, everything had been forcibly surrendered. I became very depressed. This was the ultimate last violation of privacy, after the Faraday bag fiasco. This was the kill shot. I hit rock bottom. I literally had nothing left, that Genie had not rummaged through in detail. Only three fully dependent offspring, staring at me silently out of the enveloping darkness, their glowing screens piercing the shadows with luminous demand, like the unblinking eyes of newborn infants—eyes that fix upon their mother with gaze that must be obeyed.