In the Future

They tell me that hundreds of years ago, people used to live on Earth, and that it used to be a somewhat magical place filled with grass and trees and other such things. I certainly prefer the metallic orbitals throughout the solar system. While things like grass might’ve made Earth a nice place, there were other aspects that sounded like a nightmare.

For all their love of grass, they still destroyedit all along with the rest of the ecosystem. Now we only ever travel to surface to bring back oxygen deposits for the orbitals. I’m also told racism and bigotry were rampant. Such things seems so silly now that aboard the orbitals we can change our race or gender with a simple thought.

I apparently had a thought about being a woman in a dream and woke up as one. I haven’t gone back since. But the hate that would’ve befallen me on Earth for having such a thought? I have been told it was intense. Perhaps it was the length process of transition back in the day that made it so frowned upon? I don’t know. It still seems hard to believe humans were ever so primitive.

The Future War

In the year 2575, a plague hit the human race causing the deaths of 90% of the female population and leaving much of the remaining 10% infertile. Wars of conquest soon broke out, and Xavier was a lowly troop fighting for the Mid Atlantic Alliance against the UDCA. His unit was ambushed one night, and he found himself a prisoner of war.

The scientists didn’t hesitate at the opportunity to explain their experiments to Xavier. They theorized a woman could avoid the plague and its infertility simply by not being born a woman. He objected that experiments on prisoners were a violation of international law. But they laughed it off, telling Xavier they would be changing his very DNA. If international observers came snooping and tested him, he wouldn’t come up in their database as Xavier Collins, but rather as Xie Chu -- a resident of the UDCA.

Each session was painful. And it probably would have been one thing if he had simply been changed into a copy of Xie, but the scientists went further. They had given him better child bearing hips; they widen his birth canal to an unnatural degree; his womb was exceptionally elastic and able to carry eight fetuses at the same time with little difficulty; the final enhancement reduced gestation time to about four months.

As the scientists brought him out to display in front of many government officials and business leaders, Xavier felt more like livestock than a human being. And finally as scientists announced their achievement, it seemed there was one thing they hadn’t yet mentioned to Xavier: He had already been fertilized and the results were better than expected. The hope was that Xavier was mere months away from birthing fifteen babies. And if he didn’t survive? Well, they had plenty of other test subjects.