A Fertility Lab Shows A Father Three Versions Of The Son He Hasn't Had Yet, And He Sees Himself In Each One

Sam is forty-five. He has a wife named Annie, a self-driving car, and an appointment at a fertility lab called Vitek where his wife has already done most of the work of setting up what comes next. The appointment is not about whether Sam and Annie are going to have a child. That has already been decided. The appointment is about who their child will be. Vitek is a near-future company that offers prospective parents the ability to specify a child the way Sam's self-driving car specifies a route: traits brought forward, traits pushed back, a curated genome assembled from the parents' material and engineered toward an agreed-upon endpoint. The endpoint Vitek has prepared for Sam and Annie's hypothetical son - whom the lab has named Daniel - is offered in three projected lives, each rendered as a three-act play.

Daniel One is the happy child, the one whose life from earliest infancy through old age is a life of contented temperament. Daniel Two is the iconoclast - the child who marches to the beat of his own drum, whose life is interesting and singular and his own. Daniel Three is the achiever - the child whose path to a successful adulthood is unobstructed in the way that lives almost never are without the kind of engineering Vitek is offering to do for him. The lab's representative, who has shepherded the file through the projections, presents the three Daniels with the care of a real estate agent showing high-end listings. And then, in the course of the pitch, he makes a remark about Sam and Annie themselves. Annie, the representative observes, is in the second act of her life. Sam has been stuck in his third act for fifteen years.

That observation is the story. Everything that comes after is Sam trying to figure out what to do with it.

A 3.0 reflects: a strong central image that earns its title's double meaning, a middle section in the bar that does the heaviest emotional work of the piece, a writer best known for very different books trying his hand at speculative material with mostly successful results, and real reservations about how much of Towles's signature warmth survives the trip.

The Bar Section

Sam does not, at first, come back to Annie with an answer. He leaves Vitek without choosing a Daniel. He drives - or his car drives him - to a bar named The Glass Half Full. He starts drinking. He gets to talking. The bartender's name is Nick. Another regular at the bar, a man named Beezer, gets the story out of Sam in the way that strangers at bars in fiction tend to. Beezer has his own theory about Vitek. He thinks the company is a front - a quietly held division of Raytheon, the defense contractor, in the business of building the next generation of national defense by way of who gets born and what they are made for. He may be a crank. He may not be. The story does not adjudicate. It does, however, take Beezer's question - what is genetic optimization actually for, when you remove the language of parental love that is selling it - more seriously than the Vitek pitch did.

The bar section is also where Sam's life as Sam stops being subtext. The forty-five-year-old's three-act problem - the one the Vitek representative diagnosed in passing - is now in front of him, in a bar, being articulated to a stranger. Towles handles this with the kind of dialogue precision he is known for. The conversation does what bar conversations in literary fiction do best: it moves the protagonist closer to a decision he was not expecting to have to make about his own life rather than his unborn son's.

The Sample

The final move of the story is Sam going back to Vitek and demanding the return of his sperm sample. He gets it. He walks back into the bar with the vial. He sets it down. The image is not subtle. The man who has just been told he can manufacture a future son rather than father one with everything fathering involves has chosen to carry his unaltered material out of the building with him. Whether the gesture is hope, refusal, midlife crisis, or the genuine recognition of what the Vitek pitch was actually proposing is the question the story leaves on the table.

The title earns its double meaning here. The voice that says you have arrived at your destination is a GPS voice, the self-driving car's voice, the algorithm's confirmation that your route is complete. It is also the question Sam is, by the end of the story, finally asking himself.

Why a 3

The strengths: a strong premise that earns its title; a central observation about life's acts that is doing real work; David Harbour narrating the audio version with the kind of weariness the protagonist requires; and a bar section that demonstrates Towles can write a contemporary dialogue exchange in a near-future setting without losing the registers he is known for.

The reservations: this is not the same Amor Towles experience as A Gentleman in Moscow or Rules of Civility, and a reader coming to it on the strength of those books will notice the absence of the warmth, character density, and historical specificity those novels depend on. The short form does not let Sam's three-act problem develop the way Towles's novelistic version of the same theme might. The Beezer conspiracy beat is a touch on-the-nose. The ending is more gesture than resolution. As an idea-driven short story it lands. As an Amor Towles experience it is partial.

A 3.0 means: a good short story that demonstrates a literary novelist trying his hand at speculative material with mostly successful results. A reader who wants the full Towles register would be better served picking up one of his novels; a reader who wants ninety minutes with a sharp premise rendered in literate prose will be well served by this.

Rating: 3.0/5 ⭐

Perfect for: Amor Towles readers curious about his speculative work, readers interested in designer-baby ethics handled in literary rather than technical register, anyone who likes a story that takes a corporate sales pitch and turns it into a mirror, fans of David Harbour's narration.

Skip if: You want the warmth and character density of Towles's novels, you want a designer-baby story that resolves rather than gestures, or you find midlife-crisis-by-way-of-bar-conversation a tired structure.