It had been a moment of weakness, but one that pursued him like a plague. He stared into the shard of mirrored glass he kept in his tattered sleeve. Unable to move about freely, to access his encrypted savings account, he'd lost a good deal of weight, most of it in his cheeks. The face that stared back at him was almost unrecognizable. Certainly, it had something to do with the way his skin seemed to cling a little too tightly, but more so because he could see in his eyes the result of one frayed nerve too many.
**
It had been sixteen years since the world ground to a sudden, deafening halt. The planet's hulking economic apparatus lay in disrepair, abandoned and withering ever since human male fertility fell below one thousand. Its rapid plunge had been foreseen and foretold, but largely ignored until critical. People around the world always seemed to fall back on vague self-assurances:
We'll fix it. We'll invent a solution. We put a man on the moon...we can do this, too.
It used to be you only heard about someone who'd had it happen. Then it was someone you knew, a neighbor, a couple guys from work with whom you weren't well acquainted. Later, it rattled then rocked then decimated entire towns. The 24-hour news cycle focused on the counter that had been erected in London when world male fertility fell below one million. It seemed as though one could hardly turn on the television without seeing its precipitous tumble—the numbers shedding like leaves from a maple tree after winter's first hard freeze. On the day it reached one thousand, the world of man came to a standstill. A dull reality began to set in like a hangover we couldn't shake. The human race wasn't going to win this one.
It was only then that the matriarchal power structure acted as swiftly as any bureaucracy can. Where ongoing scientific sequestration had so far been voluntary in order to control as many variables as possible while searching for clues as to why this was happening, suddenly mandates rolled out giving authorities permission to seize fertile men off the street, tear them away from families and friends, and quarantine them without notice. Forced laboratory procreation became the norm.
Simply harvesting sperm from a healthy male did not stop whatever was causing the pestilence. Entire refrigerators full of specimen could turn up useless. Whatever it was, it was deeper than researchers' penetrating gaze via microscope.
An elaborate draconian system grew up like a bitter weed almost overnight, pairing fertile men with as many women as the new police-state could wrest control of. Of course pregnancy wasn't simply going to solve the problem. The hope, however short-sighted, was that a large enough baby boom might buy us some time to stumble upon a miracle. But even that was of little avail. Nine out of ten boys were infertile by puberty. And by the time they were even old enough that researchers became privy to this fact, it was too late. There were fewer than fifty known fertile men left.
**
He eyed the old wound on his wrist. He may as well have left the barcode unblemished, for all the good it did. The bumpy off-color scar tissue was just another way of saying,
I am tagged.
Volunteering those fourteen years earlier had seemed one's patriotic duty. It was only now, years removed, that he could finally see how the propaganda machine had spun its noose so effectively. Everyone had been in sheer frenzy at the possibility that the human race would simply age itself out within the next eighty to ninety years. That rushing out to be tagged was supposed to be a noble thing, responsible and self-sacrificing. Gazing down at the blemish he cursed himself for the umpteen thousandth time. Here he was, squatting in an old furniture store, forced to lay low because his tag—genetically programmed to fade when a subject became infertile—had never lost its freshly inked sheen.
**
It wasn't as though people stopped having sex. The world's urge hadn't subsided to any real extent. Sure, there was the initial shock over learning that the final generation was now in diapers, and for some time, volumes of people were simply too stunned to do anything worthwhile. Sex was the least of what suffered because of it. Who'd have imagined that losing the impetus for
working toward a better tomorrow
would cause people to suddenly realize that their jobs were of little meaning, and so to stop going to work? What no one understood until it was too late was that without the promise of tomorrow's generation, motivation was dying.
The government encouraged those willing and able not to give up on sex for the purpose of procreation. Something could change. Heck, they said, the body might just figure things out on its own. So the infertile masses went about their business, some of them returning to work, while many more simply turned their back on the great big economic mouse wheel altogether.
For the fifty known men left on the planet who had not yet succumbed to a similar fate, they would come to know the ultimate sacrifice. Most were rounded up and secreted away to top secret research installations. The story told to the masses was that these men were doing their utmost to contribute to our scientific salvation. And indeed, the public saw numerous photographs and videos of these famous fellows posing and working with doctors and researchers. After a while, however, details emerged of a frightening reality for those remaining men. Tales of living dissections, erectile injections and forced procreation for eighteen-hour periods leaked to the public by unknown whistleblowers.Suddenly, people got a very uneasy feeling that the matriarchal government had become desperate.
**
