Wrote this for a one-hour "flash" fiction exercise -- the prompt was "delivery".

Delivery

"Doctor, she's dilated six centimeters."

"Right... thank you. Call me when she's at ten."

Outside, stark monochrome - black or white, nothing in between. Lunar mountains sharp enough to cut one's self on. Nothing in the sky, sunlit cliffs already too bright for eyes to see anything else. Deadly quiet, literally.

Inside, dim multicolored lights of instruments, the faint smell of ozone. No music playing now, though there'd been four or five blaring competitors from different labs until this morning; this morning that will take two weeks to become afternoon. Everyone tense, everyone trying not to show it, or the boredom of waiting, expecting. No absentees today, even the off-duty staff hanging around, trying not to get in the way.

It was probably unavoidable. Machinery always gains a personality, becomes anthropomorphized by the people who spend every waking minute developing it, fixing bugs, running tests. And the final shape - narrow, highly eccentric ellipse surrounding a circular orifice, so suggestive...

Now, that ellipse is itself surrounded by a glow like neon, deep purple visible portion of a range of wavelengths mostly in ultraviolet, not safe to look at without filters. Not safe to be near at all - the midwives are teleoperated, everything done by remote. The glow will soon run up past the UV, right into X and gamma, reaching to unfold hidden dimensions. In the center of the circle now, a spot blacker than any black ever seen, almost impossible to look at, even through cameras. The mind keeps trying to deny the eyes' evidence that the spot is real, and getting larger.

Clocks in the delivery room, out there on the other side of the rim wall, are noticeably slower than their matched twins in the labs. The fields are distorting the video, too. In the deep background, permeating everything without really being heard, the subsonic hum of the station's pulsed-fusion power generator. It takes a lot of juice to birth a hole in spacetime.

The call comes to the director's office, where she's been pacing alone. "Ten centimeters, doctor."

"OK, I'm coming down." By the time she arrives in the control room, the circular spot has bulged, is trying to become a sphere.

Someone says, "It's crowning." Someone else verifies, "Containment is holding." The bulging continues; the nurturing fields are ready to receive it...

A single electronic chime rings, announcing completion. Someone's crying - maybe more than one - with the break of tension, and the success. A cigar is pressed into the director's hand.

"Congratulations, Doctor - it's a baby universe."

(c) 2003, Lalo Fox