Reassignment Day

I woke up in my cube with a terrible headache and stomach pains. The feeling was familiar. It just meant that it was Reassignment Day. It was the one day a year you’d be assigned a new job, and you’d get a new body fully capable of handling said job. It was one of those things they did to ensure fairness and limit boredom with the repetitive nature of human labor. I couldn’t believe it had been a year since the last one already.

My last job had been supervising the AI cleaning robots. It was a pretty sweet gig as far as jobs went. The shifts were a mere 12 hours and mostly consisted of watching the robots to make sure they didn’t miss a spot, mopping up in the rare event that they did. The bots never once missed a spot for the entire year, so it was entirely just watching.

But looking at myself this time, it was sheer horror to discover that I know clearly had one of the worst jobs there was: A Breeder. It was one of two jobs responsible for furthering humanity, along with the Seeders. I had never seen either of them in person before, but I had heard stories. Seeder was arguably the best job you could ever get. It was a few minutes of work each day to seed the breeders, then however it took you to recover until you could seed again. Breeders just had to take as much seed as they could until they were full. I’d been told this would cause their stomachs to expand until a new human could be cut out of them.

I fit the description of everything I was told about Breeders. My nails were red, just as people had told me of Breeders -- though I did notice the color seemed to be just painted on. My chest was swollen, just as I was told Breeders’ chests are. My legs lacked hair -- removing it was something done to Breeders for some reason. And then there was the lack of having anyway to pee. There was just nothing there. I reasoned that Breeders still had to pee; I just couldn’t figure out how. I was sure it would be outlined in orientation, which I wasn’t looking forward to. Heck, I wasn’t looking forward to this entire year at all.