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by Andy Betz
I have never seen one. Not in person. Not even a picture. It is almost as if it were illegal to ask. I’ve heard of their existence and their extinction. My mother won’t tell me their stories. My grandmother looks at me as if I will be the last of my kind. I believe her to be correct.
On August 27, 2145, they released the toxin. It disrupted human reproduction. It tagged (alkylating with multiple propyl and iso-propyl substituents) the Y-Chromosome, rendering it too massive for the shuffle during meiosis. The mosaic loss accelerated the inevitable. In a nutshell, the rapid rise of the Mashad Imperium caused the equally rapid decline of the human male gender. Was it an act of terrorism? Was it an act of God? Those were questions for theologians and politicians to ask in the closed, darkened recesses they both frequently populate. For the remaining 3 billion female humans, life had to go on. Not for long and not as well as before.
Since the panics, riots, wars, and nuclear exchanges, reducing human population to half a billion, most remnants of civilization fell into ruins. For the survivors, vengeance took a back seat to survival. Birth rates fell to nearly zero. I attend school alone. I walk among the hastily created graveyards populated with names of lore of a time when such names were common. They are all males here. Not a single female. This is as close as I get to meeting one. I am 14 years old. Not much to look forward to.
My grandmother is 50 and very sickly, most likely from exposures during the wars. I am fascinated with her not only because I look so much like her, but she acts so much like me. She tells me not to worry. I want to believe her. By next week, I will grieve at her funeral, never knowing what I should be learning.
I ask my mother, now an elder in her own right at age 32 for guidance. She only speaks about a future I cannot see. I also look like her, but rarely act or speak as she does.
“Be patient. Someday, this will all change. You just have to wait.”
She utters this mantra, hoping I will finally stop bothering her. She tells me I am lucky to even have been born. I don’t see how. I don’t understand how.
“Who is my father? What was he like? How did he survive the toxins? Why won’t you tell me?”
Silence. Nothing but silence. I want to run away, but where would I go? Outside is filthy. There is no food, no water, and no safety. Between the wild animals and the stories of the semi-survivor’s cannibalism, I cannot take the chance of escaping.
Thus, I am affixed to the soil of this compound. No better than an indentured servant. No better than a prized piece of livestock.
Someone has a plan for me.
In the next two years, I will watch my mother grow old. Her health will fail quicker than my grandmother’s. This is the fate of all who live here. This will be my fate. During her funeral (I had to dig her grave), I surmised this to be so.
Now, at age 16, I have no family, thus, I am alone. The few remaining women of the compound all wait for their death.
Everyone except for me.
By age 17, one of the few elders delivered a package. She will fall to what she calls old age (she is only 42). Her daughter, age 27, looks as bad as her mother.
She will not live to see age 20.
In the package lies one key and one book. The book has instructions as to what I need to do should I be my family's sole survivor. The key unlocks the room to where I am to do this task.
It only takes me an hour to find the room in the building. The key fits perfectly. I enter with the book and an intense curiosity, for I have never been here, not ever heard of the place. I switch on the power (must be from batteries for no generator activates) and proceed to the only console with a chair.
The book tells me to read the written instructions that await me. They seem cryptic, but understandable. I am glad I worked during school so I could read and understand what was asked of me. I learned a few more details of the extinction of man. According to this, there will not be any more human births. There would, instead, be a series of cloning to perpetuate the species. If I agreed to be cloned, I simply had to insert my arm through the aperture for the machine to take a blood sample. Someone would be notified and months later, deliver to me an exact clone of myself.
This is how I was born (poor choice of the word, copied is better). This is why I look like my mother. This is why my mother looks like her mother. We are all clones since the day of the toxins. This machine wants me to acquiesce and continue the cycle.
What the instructions failed to explain was that when you make a copy of a copy, each new copy degrades accordingly. I am a third generation clone (possibly a 4th or a 5th). My grandmother died young, my mother died younger. I may not live to see 30.
Why would I want to share this curse with another generation?
The sun rose on the remains of my mother’s compound. I am not strong enough to dig the grave that will keep her intact from the wild animals I must hide from. I am nearly 10 years old and will have to leave the only home I have ever known. While packing what I can carry, I came across a strange package containing a key and a book.
Andy Betz has tutored and taught in excess of 42 years, lives in 1974, and has been married for 33 years. His works are found everywhere a search engine operates.