This chapter is non-erotic (but, like, pretty cool anyway)
***
Chapter 14: The Academy
The image of Tara and Philip moaning through sweaty, obligatory sex -- in front of several watching people including herself -- preoccupied Ellie to the point that her vision clouded as she followed Tad to the front door of Recruit House. Ellie struggled to overcome the sensory overload. She thought about the two women on shameless display; visions of their cum-slicked pussies blocked her sight. She stumbled loudly as her toes hit one of the poufs in the living room and she nearly lost her balance.
Tad looked around. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, sorry," said Ellie. "I'm... processing."
"Do you need to take a break?" asked Tad. "You can take a seat and have a moment if you need."
"No, I'm fine," said Ellie. "Let's go."
Tad nodded and proceeded to the door with Ellie in pursuit.
She noted Tad's lack of explanation or apologies for what Ellie had just seen. He had offered no comment in the room either; had let Tara and Kelsey speak for themselves when Ellie asked questions. And through the bizarreness, the wrongness of it, Ellie strangely admired Tad's lack of comment on a burden that did not affect him the way it affected the women. Ellie half expected him to follow up with "So this is okay, right?" or else seek some kind of validation from Ellie that she wasn't alarmed. But he did not. He showed her, he let her ask questions, and then he kept walking.
What threw her the most was Tara's and Kelsey's cavalier attitudes. The way they spoke about the topic of their own mandatory breeding was as if Ellie had walked in on them practicing golf swings. It was deeply confusing and difficult to square with; she searched for a way to figure whether Tara's and Kelsey's easy demeanors were merely a product of brainwashing. Consent was important to Ellie, and compulsory sex ran against everything she believed.
To her own surprise, she wasn't running yet. She found herself following Tad to the next stop of the tour. And the indignation and rage that she expected against the idea that women in this place were saddled with such a burden... It didn't quite arrive.
"This is a job. They need me to have babies. We're doing something here."
And then Ellie remembered Riley's comment on the plane:
"It's a really powerful feeling if you let it be."
She struggled with disbelief that these women would merely accept their roles as broodmares to this Reset generation. And yet, she realized, their presence in this community was self-evident of their acceptance. Multiple people had corroborated their freedom to leave with all of the financial support in the world if they chose not to participate.
Ellie thought about all of her impassioned discussions with friends back home on the injustices around sex work; the lack of safety that prostitutes faced doing valid labor in a needlessly criminalized environment. Though she was never shy about speaking up on these topics in Pete's presence, he generally maintained a polite, if somewhat prim and disapproving, silence.
Why, Ellie had often appealed to her college friends in drunken rants, can't we respect sex work like we respect any other work? She asked herself now what the inherent difference was between traditional sex work and the breeding program she had just encountered.
Her own willingness to participate, she supposed.
Pete's voice floated into her head again: You shouldn't have to degrade yourself in this way.
He had spoken in reference to selling plasma.
Ellie had always thought Pete's use of that word, degrade, was filthy. She hadn't been selling her blood to vampires; her plasma was used to make medicine for people with auto-immune diseases. Pete's dismissal of the needs of others when it came to sacrificing one's own comfort was always something that chafed Ellie. This was perhaps no small part of why they broke up.
Were these women degrading themselves?
Ellie supposed it all came down to whether... It... was true. Was the end of the world in fact bearing down? Were these people suffering en masse under the delusions of a mega-wealthy mad man? Or did true circumstances necessitate their bizarre way of life? If the latter, Ellie allowed that the children these women produced were in fact crucially important.
IF it wasn't all lies, then --as Riley had said-- their uteruses might as well be solid 24-karat gold.
She hoped desperately in the moment that Riley was wrong.
Ellie panted again with the effort of following Tad higher up the hill. Just as with Hannah, she was embarrassed to notice Tad's breathing did not labor like her own. The modern campus above (The Eden Acadamy, Ellie now understood) bore down on them now, its observatory standing tall and gleaming white above like a great, sleek castle spire. She thought this building must be visible for miles around.
"How do you keep this place a secret?" breathed Ellie.
"You are surrounded by highly restricted federal land and airspace for about a hundred miles in all directions," said Tad. "Air traffic does not fly past here, and to trespass on this land is a felony. I presume you are aware of Groom Lake?"
"No," said Ellie.
"Area 51, as it is more commonly referred."
"Oh yeah, like with the flying saucers," said Ellie. "Yeah."
Tad laughed again; his bark traveled across the hillside. "If you like. Well, as you know, nobody can get near it and its radius is highly guarded. Same applies here."
"But I know Area 51 exists," said Ellie. "I've never heard any rumors about this place."
"Because nobody is paying attention," said Tad. "Groom Lake is no longer a well-kept secret. In fact, I suspect our government encourages the public fixation on it to prevent curiosity from wandering to other places -- like here. Between that and the rather loud display Fyodor makes of building rockets to Mars to draw the eye, we are gifted with a healthy obscurity."
Ellie felt silly for asking: "Do you know what's happening at Area 51?"
"No," chuckled Tad. "I wish. Security clearance is given on a need-to-know basis. I do not possess any government secrets that I do not need to do my job, and I suspect that is true across the board."
The ground leveled out, and they now stood at the beginnings of a space that had nearly nothing in common with the cascading mountainside village below.
The grass here was monoculture and manicured. It was crisscrossed by paved walkways that Ellie found familiar, resembling the campus sidewalks at her own community college. The key difference, however, was the obvious lack of regard for expense in the buildings themselves. This campus had clearly been built to the tune of tens of billions.
Closest to their left was the smallest building that must have been the clinic; it resembled the suburban, 3rd-party stand-alone emergency rooms sprinkled about Ellie's neighborhood back home. To the right, Ellie observed a far more massive building, windowless, unapologetically brutal, and more than large enough to house a football stadium.
Directly ahead stood the observatory, identifiable from the airport when she had arrived. Its base was wrapped in chunkier sections of building, but the predominant feature was its whitewashed skyward shaft. An enormous telescope lens protruded from a slit across the dome up top.
Ellie clocked a persistent, soft hum traveling through the earth and the air around her -- almost more of a vibration than an actual noise -- and she realized that the top of the observatory was not a stationary structure. The dome itself rotated clockwise, very slowly to the point that the movement was almost imperceptible. She had to squint at the base of the dome to be sure that it was moving at all. In lock-step time, the lens at the top creeped skyward with equal subtlety.
It was quite phallic, and Ellie wondered if that was intentional.
She walked with Tad, gazing around at these impressive surroundings. Tad bore right suddenly and Ellie nearly walked into him.
"This building houses our space training facilities," said Tad, indicating the massive, brutal structure that he now led her towards. "At the risk of boasting, I must say that it is quite a place to behold."
A revolving door was set in the front of the windowless facility. Tad went through first, Ellie occupying the compartment behind him.
