Molly June is an arvie, and she is legally dead. Well, she's alive in the way most people today would define it, but she lives in a futuristic dystopia where life is defined as the period between conception and actually leaving the womb, whereupon people are legally dead. She is now no more than a human body with everything about her scientifically modified that will be used to carry around a Citizen (a person who was found to be genetically promising upon conception and was therefore given all the neurological enhancements necessary to provide consciousness and life while arresting development before the first trimester).

For Molly, her passenger is Jennifer, who is now seventy-years old and has done, like most other typical Citizens, many wondrous and spectacular things with their enhanced brains and society's advancements (traveling space, writing operas, etc). With Molly, she's decided that she wants to give birth—she wants to experience childbirth, being a mother. This is incredibly unprecedented, and after she announces it she gains much notoriety as she gives interviews saying the most shocking things possible and starts major debates about the ethics of this in a society where birth is considered death.

Molly gives birth from her second womb containing the baby while Jennifer experiences all her feelings from the first womb just a few membranes away. For the first time in her mostly drugged and content life, Molly feels pain through the apathy as she goes into a violent labor. By the fifteenth hour, Jennifer has come to many enlightening conclusions about life and birth and motherhood. She has become bored with the pain, so she turns off her inputs and starts checking messages. She misses the actual birth and doesn't really care—she is installed in a new arvie that very day, not even bothering to lay eyes on the baby before heading off on a trek across Antarctica. All she had wanted was a few months of an interesting experience, because all life was for was to fill with adventures.

Molly is marked for compassionate disposal, but the baby has some value as a kind of oddity due to its remarkable gestation and birth. She is sent to a habitat in Ohio, a museum, where she grows up in a nursery and then is placed in an advanced cage on four acres of land with a two-story house. She is cared for by a different arvie almost every day, as a long line of Living seek to experience child-rearing for fun. This results in the poor eight-year old being subject to any range of care, from "compassionate to abusive." She often wonders about her mother in this cruel environment and life.