A broken world (non-whateley)

I was feeling in a bit of a melancholy mood today. I hope that somebody who reads this enjoys it.
(p.s. I did not proofread this so it is more than a little rough around the edges. I think it fits the story)

Marian

---

Requiem for a dream. Those words were music once. I think. I am old now and much of what I once knew has become muddled or lost in the past. Yet for some reason those words have always stuck with me. Mourning for what might have been. There is little else I can do these days of late summer but think of what once was and look out over the fields and the lake beyond. The future is no longer for me to see.

There are very few of us originals left now, and I expect that by the end of winter there must be yet one less. The girls love and adore me and take as good care of me as they can, but the truth is that our houses are slowly falling apart over the years and are not quite up to keep the harsh winter out. Surviving the cold requires food and body fat, neither of which I have in abundance anymore. Last winter was hard on me and despite a good spring and summer, I never fully recovered.

I do not mind much though. I have lived long past the years I expected, strange as they may have been, and I am surrounded by my children, grand children, great grand children, great great grand children. Maybe even a sixth generation by now. It is hard to keep track of what happens with my mind stuck more and more in a muddled past. Compared to so many billions I have been lucky and it would be unreasonable to demand yet more.

So, I sit on this porch and look out over the fields and lake, bask in the love of all the women going about on their daily lives. Tell a story of the originals if somebody asks me though I can tell that the stories mean little to them other than fairy tales of an impossibly magical world. And when my thoughts are my own for a while, I think about the requiem for the dream we once had and hide my tears. It would upset my children to see their beloved, mystical, nana cry over what was and can not be recovered. I want their memories of me to be of love, happiness, acceptance and even a belief that we not just lost a great deal but also were offered a second chance at something better.

I still maintain that it was aliens who did it to us, humanity I mean, but beyond my first children, I can tell it is not a concept I can even begin to explain, even in terms of mythology or fairy tales. Our world has shrunk so very much in the past eighty years that the idea of there being a world no longer has any meaning, never mind of worlds beyond that. Besides, I have no evidence. Even in the early years, when we still clung to our cities and there were still radios and fragments of the internet, nobody alive had ever seen anybody or anything responsible.

Funny enough, in a twisted way, it was the alt-right that first noticed a problem. Naturally they blamed women for it and created the manosphere in an attempt to drive women out of public life and back into the kitchen. Doing a good job of it too. In those last few years before the change, I was in their primary demographic. Friends I thought I knew one by one succumbed to the barrage of videos and viral thirty second clips that were everywhere. Disappearing into conspiracies and websites that did not quite so openly advertise their hatred but to the new true believers. Friends who grew first increasingly distant and after turned hostile when I failed to be swayed by their rhetoric as I failed to grow up to their prehistoric notions of masculinity. Yet it was increasingly undeniable that men, young men in particular, increasingly less smart, less motivated. It made them easy targets for the alt-right of course, but also less useful for that movement. By the time I reached the end of my sophomore year it was getting clearer that getting them out to vote was becoming a bear of a job too. Never mind the army or police. Their recruitement numbers were abysmall yet the movement had made it practically impossible to even acknowledge the public existence of women or foreigners. Caught in their own vise things were heading to a boiling point that even I, self-absorbed as any teenager, could see coming.

I see Ruenda approach from the Enclave. My no longer so little center of teaching for the region. After my memory got so bad that I could no longer teach she took over from me, wearing the symbol of office that I used to wear. A single white feather in her long braid. We don't have ranks but the feather shows the new girls that Ruenda is the one they can turn to for help or a shoulder to cry on if they feel homesick. When I retired the teachers made up a new rank and symbol for me. A red feather in my own braid, lovingly placed there by whoever helps me get up in the morning these days.

As she approached I had a moment to ponder how over the last decades the very concept of shame had vanished. In my dimly remembered youth we covered neck to mid thigh, with perhaps a strip of belly showing if we could get away with it. Now practicality and scarcity saw us going naked but for protective feet and arm wraps. Elastics were non-existent, metal was scarce and who could waste leather on boots or gloves? We were always nursing a baby and well, the sight of a well endowed man could rob any of us of all restraint and conscious thought between one breath and the next. If I could be bothered to look for it I would probably finding a couple busy planting seed. After some years constantly tearing off clothes we just stopped bothering anymore. Though really, shame could not exists after your first sextuple in the forest that only left you wanting for an encore just to be certain you were thoroughly pregnant. Besides nobody was ogling anymore. The men did not have the brain for it and the women were all in the same boat.

"Eldest," Ruenda interupted my aimless train of thought and drops in a deep curtsey. I never should have told them about the gesture all those years back, nor could I have expected them to remember to revive it. Like the title I do not care for, it matters a great deal to everybody in the Enclave to show me the respect they feel my long life deserves. I have learned to stop protesting because it upset them for me to do so.

"A lovely day Ruende," I answer, inclining my head as far as I dare to show my own measure of respect for the woman. Not one of my children but the brilliant teacher that all agreed was the best suited to follow me to be mother for all who live and study here.

"It is good to see you out of that cot and enjoying the sun"

"It is good to be able to. And rarer these days," I admit. Feeling keenly a sense of mourning for the dreams that were lost 80 years ago I feel some of my old fire return. "I have been dreaming a lot lately of the past and the future, and I would tell you a story if you permit, about a confused child and why their life carries my hopes and fears for the future that I must soon now pass wholly unto your hips to bear."

Ruende's smile broadened.

"I apologise in advance if I told some or all of it before. I feel I can tell it today in full for maybe the last time."

Taking a deep breath, not waiting for Ruende to acknowledge or deny, I began.

* * *
When the event happened. I call it an event because there is no word for it that makes sense and does not sound pretentious. I mean the Covid disease was a pandemic and from what I was told when I was still very young it was horrible. What then do you call a disease when entire metropolises fall ill within days. There were panicked news broadcasts every hour of every day until those too fell silent. Towns and villages quarantining themselves only for the disease to appear out of nowhere in their midst. As if it had been dormant in everybody long before only waiting for something to cause it to become active. I don't remember when it reached us. I remember, very vaguely, going to bed. My parents and my baby sister were all terrified out of our wits, waiting by that time for the inevitable.

I woke up in a different place, in a world that was unrecognisable, with no memory of how any of it had had gotten there. I was in a city some thirty miles over from our little village. The tall buildings a few blocks over were easily recognisable from the times we had visited. Very few adult men were around. Not many adult women either. And while there were a horrifying number of corpses strewn through the streets, there were not nearly enough to account for all the missing.
Yet, that was not why I believe it was aliens. I am sorry that the word means nothing to you. Remember we live on a world near the sun that gives us warmth and life. Now understand that each star is another sun that is distant beyond comprehension. Stars that also may have a world near it to give life and warmth. We never knew for certain but we imagined people may live on some of those worlds who are strange to us. And like strangers from a distant village they may be polite guests if they come here or rude. Or perhaps like the cities they would see us and want something from us without asking.
Anyway, it had been only days that I was missing. The terrified broadcasts from more distant corners of the country were still ongoing so it was easy enough to keep track of the date. But the surviving teenage boys had changed. I did not know how exactly right away but enough to realise something was different. Girls too, though their change was more subtle and we did not understand until later. The boys though had become dull that was obvious immediately. The high fever had burned out something in their brains I think. Or the disease itself had damaged them. No telling what had really happened with no doctors left. Over the next years they grew up fast and musclebound on little food even. All of them. Even with what little I knew then and now of biology, that was not something a disease could cause. Especially not in they boys who were born after. It was too precise for a disease that only tends to destroy.

This is weak evidence, I know, but I never spoke to anybody who saw an actual alien. Oh, I already mentioned that.
Anyway. Myself I am much stronger evidence. When I woke up I was one of hundreds upon hundreds who had been careless discarded in the streets of the big city. We were all bald all over and naked. Except for plaster like diapers. It covered a searing agony in our abomen that we did not understand until several months later when the plaster started dissolving, just as we finally started to be able to move around a little without passing out from the pain. I wasn't the first, so I already knew what I would find when I felt the hard substance getting softer and softer. Fully developed labia, vagina and, unseen but very much present, a functional womb and everything that came with that. Functional because the apparent trigger for our release of sorts was when we started out first period ever. A period we should not have been able to have since all, well all who were not catatonic or so deep in denial they lost all contact with reality, admitted that only a handful of months before they had been male and happily so.

Most of us on those streets quietly checked out over the next couple of month. By stepping off tall buildings or finding a discarded knife, or simply by just giving up entirely. There were the optimists who insisted we had to get through it together, but I could tell from the lack of conviction in their voices that this was just performance. For myself, I did not mind much and I could see the growing resentment in my fellow victims when they started realising that I was not upset about being castrated and having undergone a GRS at least a century ahead of what our best doctors were capable of. I cannot but see the hand of aliens in that.

It is not that I was entirely happy about it. I had never had any doubt about my gender. It was simply that I had always been trans in a strange way of wanting to be a girl but not having the existential certainty and need to be one. My delayed puberty had problaby something to do with it, but again, no doctors anymore. Oh, puberty sort of is when a girl can be with child and starts craving men. If was more difficult back then and considered a big deal. I did not take long to understand that my being happy with my change self would not long be welcome with this crowd who was discovering that the gender disphoria they had long denied existed was very real indeed. Sorry for the strange words. They are not important anymore like they were, with the changes rammed into our heads and all.
So I decided that I had wallowed long enough in misery and picked up the few things I thought I needed. Some of the remaining food packets scattered on the streets we had woken up in, a couple of plastic bottles with water and a kitchen knife out of a mostly intact bodega. Plus clothes from a little shop further down the street. In hindsight I was not thinking too clearly back then, but my life had been turned upside down quite a bit. And I wanted to find my parents and little sister.

It took some months, but in the end I found my sister not far from home. She had found shelter with the remnants of families from the two villages on either side of what we like to call a river feeding into the lake. She had woken up from her fever in the garden of our empty home and eventually been rescued by our old babysitter who had gone the rounds and gathered up all the abandoned girls. None of us ever saw our parents again, and I can only hope that whatever happened to them was gentle. All of us originals have long learned to not think about it. Much.

My coming home was somewhat tense at first. I had been missing for over six months and on the way I had received a very in depth education of the ways of women and men, and from my enthusiastic participation in said education I was beginning to understand how exactly girls were changed in those few days. Having a boy coming back was possible, there were enough around still. Having your brother showing up beginning to show signs of her first pregnancy was harder to accept. It took the girls some time to accept me as one of their own. Over the next years we tried to survive as well as we could. We noticed that boys when they grew to full size tended to disapppear after a time but assumed then that they had wandered off somewhere. They tend to do that after all. Being children mostly we survived on the preserves from the one grocery in our little town, but the oldest girls could see those running out. We talked sometimes about travelling to the city, where there would be many more stores with things we needed but never followed through because at the time we still did not know if this would be safe for us. The boys in the village were safe enough. Dim and obedient, and the only danger they represented is that they tended to cause us girls to lose our heads and our inhibitions.

This changed after the time of the day stars. By then even the youngest girl had had at least one child which made the idea of travelling for many weeks to the big city even harder to contemplate. But when the sky lit up with fires that burned for days and were painful to look at, and then started to fall out of the sky we knew that we were not safe in our little corner of nowhere. We had to flee with boats on the lake as fires raged all around us. And in the end most of our village, including our home for the past ten years as well as that shop burned to the ground.

I was in the group that kissed our children farewell and made the journey. Back then there were not nearly as many bands of wandering men as there are today so we managed our trip with only a couple of days of distraction. The city was a terrible place to be. I will not talk about it. It was terrible enough that the six of us had to witness. The food had long run out, and few people were left alive. All of them broken inside. So we hid and made it in secret to what we really needed. The place were old knowledge was kept. We took as much as we could carry along with some artifacts like the fire glasses and the knives, and vowed never to let anybody go there ever again. We left the old burned down village and settled here at the other side of the lake where the fires of the day stars had not reached.

After that the world finally stopped changing so much. Men no longer vanished and they now roam the lands in larger numbers of bands. Welcoming our boys when they grow too strong to fit in the villages. And welcoming the girls who seek a little wilder times for their fun or next child. We learned from that old knowledge how to farm, how to raise goats for their milk, how to preserve our vegetables. How to melt metal and shape it anew so we have blades to cut wood, knives for cooking and plows to break the soil for planting. We can make stones to strengthen our homes. And most importantly we know how to help a mother give birth more safely, and how to treat diseases. And the things we teach here so the villages can survive come from those books of old knowledge.
But so much is lost. Had to be lost. So very much I had to ignore because I could teach only so very little to the girls seeking wisdom and guidance.

Did you know that once we could run faster than a deer? We were more fierce than the strongest bear and the largest wolf pack. We could swim deeper than any fish. We could fly! We could talk to people as if they were right next to us who were so far away you would need to walk for a year and then swim for a year to reach them. Our men were brilliant and fierce in their desire for greatness. They walked on the moon up there and were dreaming of travelling to the very stars some day. We knew so many things back then and were hoping to learn so many more. And all of those dreams were stolen from us in less than the waxing and waning of the moon.
* * * 

I looked Ruenda in the eye, trying to project the urgency I felt. "The understanding we have here, that we teach, is such a tiny fraction of what was lost. And even with us carving the words in our stones, it would be so terribly easy for more to get lost. What if girls no longer want to learn? Their lives are already so overflowing with our farms and rearing our little ones that maybe some day not enough girls want to fill their lives with yet more? How rare is the girl who wants to follow in my dear sister's path and try to understand more than we do now? Our villages are so tiny that it takes little like a drought or a bad storm for one to disappear. If a stone cracks, who can carve it anew? If we teach a girl wrong she may find her skills not working and stop teaching them to her daughters. It is all so very fragile Ruende, and I can see so many ways that the dreams in those carvings, those words, those teachings getting lost never to be recovered. I wish I know how to strengthen it but I am so sorry that this falls to you, and the ones who come after you, to hold the darkness at bay."

Suddenly tired I sagged back in my chair, already the fog started to rise in my mind again.

"I am tired now. I think I will watch the children play for a bit before I fall asleep." I said with what dignity I could muster for my failing body and mind.

Ruenda took my hands in hers to warm them and unexpectedly kissed me on my lips. "I love you Michelle," she whispered. "Since the day I arrived and until the day I will leave on my pyre. I will light a fire every day, and so will those who come after me, to show the importance of keeping the darkness at bay. To teach the stories of the old world that was lost, and the importance of their dreams and why we must not let ours get lost through carelessness."

"That's too many ands my love," I tried to say, but I not think I managed to get the words out.

Some time later I watched the children play in the setting sun, some convoluted game that required a lot of running and screaming. The young girls working in the near fields while chatting about things my old ears could not pick up. And the women returning from the far fields with the harvest that would become tonights meal. I tried to ponder a little more about how things might change for us as grew new cultures around our changed biology but I was tired and comfortable and the sun was so nice and warm.

---

Marian
 

The inspiration for this story was an idea I had for a partially botched attempt by aliens to take over Earth without invading. Originally I thought it could work in the Whateley universe with a biodivisor, but that was a dead-end when I tried to write it like that. The invasion that was somehow shut down after a decade or so worked much better both in story and in mood.

The underlying mechanism is that the invaders hijacked the influenze virus to add a little gene to the Y and a recessive gene to the X chromosome with some crispr action trigger. Then after a generation or two they only needed to release the trigger agent to topple the dominos.
With the Y chromosome addition stunting the ability to keep learning (creating passive men) while the X chromosome would boost the reproducive urge. And you would end up with a species that can rapidly produce ideal slaves for an alien species that is paranoid of (semi) autonomous robots.
Add in some other species that did not really like the notion and shut down the orbital processing centers and .. well .. we end up with a broken world.

The story itself become melancholy because the surviving humans had no idea what had happened and no possible way to ever find out. Most technology would start to fall apart within years and half the population would be unable to learn to even read, while the other half was constantly pregnant and far too busy to try to retain thousands of years of accumulated and incredibly specialised knowledge.

I know, a story where you have to explain things after the fact has failed in some way. But then I did not aim for a coherent story so much as for a mood.
I hope that I succeeded at least to some degree

Marian