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  Inside the building, there were temporary partitions that had been put up to create spaces for cooking, eating, sleeping, and bathroom functions. It looked like about twenty-five women were living there. All of the burnt-out bulbs were on floor lamps, so he went through each partition finding and replacing them quickly. The last bulb was in the sleeping area, where the light was dim, and he was startled to see a young woman in a khaki uniform sitting on one of the bunks, back against a wall. He quickly lowered his eyes, but he had seen enough to know that she was pretty, her uniform couldn’t hide that, and that her ankle was bandaged. The lamp with the burnt-out bulb was at the head of her bunk.

  “Hi there!” she whispered. “Are you the guy who’s going to screw a bulb into my socket?” She seemed to be on the verge of laughter.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m here to replace the bulb in that floor lamp,” said Dana.

  “Well, screw away,” by now she was quietly laughing.

  Dana walked over to the lamp and began unscrewing the bulb. The woman was within arm’s length of him. He was being careful to look only at the bulb.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have a little fun? You look like a man who could use some fun,” she giggled.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, I have work to do,” Dana kept his voice flat.

  “I bet I could make you really happy, wouldn’t you like that?” He saw out of the corner of his eye that she was wriggling out of her pants, and saw the firm flesh of her thigh on the bedsheet. She unbuttoned her tunic. He saw the bottom button come loose above her white panties.

  “Ma’am, I just need to replace this bulb,” Dana was almost pleading. He was screwing in the new bulb.

  “I think, I just think, you might be interested!” And, suddenly, she put her hand between his legs. “Oh, my, yes! I believe you are interested!”

  Dana sprang back and faced her, looking down. “Ma’am, you are making me uncomfortable!”

  She continued to reach for him, and Dana sprang back another step. He had used the magic word that was supposed to stop all proceedings, verbal or physical, and she was persisting. “Ma’am, are you aware that my neck camera and mike are recording all this? You are taking a big risk!” Her cleavage was visible above her bra and very disturbing.

  She suddenly seemed angry. “A big risk!” she whispered. “A big risk! So what? In less than a week all of us in this platoon will be dead somewhere in Texas! What can they do to me, put me in the brig? I might get to live another week if they do. I just want to live a little before I die. You’re my only chance, big boy. Now, would you please, please, take off your pants and get on the bed with me?” She paused. When Dana didn’t move, she whispered, her voice trembling a little, “We can be quiet. The lieutenant will never know. Please?” She said the last word with real pleading in her voice.

  Dana raised his eyes and looked at her face. There were tears streaming down now. He had not seen a woman cry since he was taken from his mother. It was awful for him then, and at least unpleasant now. He felt pulled to comply with her wishes. And, he wanted so much to find out what it was like, if the whispered stories among the boys were true. But, he knew he would be electrocuted if he did. Sex between a man and a woman was rape, by definition, and that was a capital crime. “I’m sorry ma’am,” he said, and fled from the bunkroom.

  “Asshole!” she whispered as he left.

  Now Dana didn’t know what to do. He was shaking again. The microwave still needed servicing. He wanted to leave, right now. But, if he left the job undone, there would be questions. On the other hand, if he stayed, she might come after him again. And, whether she did or not, she might file a complaint against him for sexual assault, a terrifying prospect. Then, he remembered that his neck video and audio would clear him if he was careful. If MC didn’t have her actions on video, though … he hated to think what would happen if she complained. She would be believed, and he would probably be dead, or close to it. He looked for the kitchen area, and realized it was in view of the Matron/lieutenant. So, he was probably safe.

  Nonetheless, it felt like a nightmare to consider turning the old microwave oven around, taking off the back plate, and begin diagnosing with his multi-tester. He prayed that whatever was wrong could be fixed by the components in his workpack.

  His workpack! It was back in the sleeping area!

  Dana walked gingerly back to the floor lamp in the sleeping area. The woman was still sitting on the bed, pants on the floor, with her arms crossed over her chest, eyes still shining with tears. Her bare legs, bare stomach, and cleavage drew his eyes. “Forget something, asshole?” She asked.

  Dana ignored her, picked up his workpack, the dead bulb, and its box, and left.

  It turned out that what he had in his workpack would fix the microwave, but it took 45 tense minutes. He made some mistakes because he was so rattled. He could not stop thinking about her body. Even his breathing technique didn’t help much. Then, he told the Matron/lieutenant that he was finished and walked back to his dorm. He tried desperately to keep thoughts of the young woman out of his mind, because he might get an erection, which could be spotted by anyone passing by. For the most part, he succeeded, by thinking of his most difficult problems in diagnosing appliances. But, now and then, he could not suppress the thoughts of her, and only imagining the pain of electrocution would bring him down. On the way, he looked at his step count on the wrist display and realized that he would just make it under 9000 steps. It had been one terrible day.

  When the lights went out in his dorm for the night, leaving just dim nightlights for the neck cameras, Dana took the opportunity to masturbate into his sock. He still didn’t have a roommate, and he could be quiet and relatively still. He badly needed the release. He was still left wondering how it felt with a woman rather than a coarse cotton sock.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Two days later, Dana woke and looked at his wrist display and saw, “DONATION DAY. NO WORK ASSIGNMENTS. REPORT TO DONATION CENTER AT 11 AM.”

  He had forgotten which day exactly he was to donate. He had realized it was close because of his reaction to the woman in the barracks. The suppressor drug was always administered right after the donation, because it took about a month to wear off. He realized that, until the incident with the woman in the barracks, he had been feeling pretty good over the past week. He felt stronger, lighter on his feet, more energetic. It was an effort to keep his head down and shoulders slumped. He wanted to throw his head up, shoulders back, and take big, forceful strides. He wanted to climb the hills to the southwest. He wanted to run as fast as he could. He always felt something like that as donation day approached. Then, he would get the suppressor injection, and a cloud of depression would descend that debilitated him for the rest of the day.

  He was always faced with the problem of what to do with his morning before the donation. It took less than 30 minutes to walk to the donation center. There was nothing to do at the dorm, nothing to read except repair manuals for the 50 or more appliance models he repaired. He knew that vast amounts of knowledge, news, and entertainment were possible to obtain through a viewscreen, which could come in any size. In fact, he had seen some that were no bigger than his wrist screen, and some that covered walls two stories high. All of them could be folded or rolled like a handkerchief or sheet. Somehow, voice commands or touching the screen could be used to obtain whatever sort of information or entertainment a woman desired. But, outside of Marjorie’s house, he had never seen a viewscreen in operation. He knew he never would.

  He wasn’t about to take a walk to pass the time. That would look suspicious. His spare set of clothes were washed, and he had taken a shower the previous night. The dorm had been cleaned by all 5 of the men the previous Sunday, as usual, each one taking a separate area of the dorm under the Matron’s supervision. Nothing remained to be done. So, he got dressed, and just sat on the bed. He turned his mind to the puzzle of escape, and got nowhere. At 10:30, he walked to the donation center.

  There
was always new staff at the donation center. He had never heard the same voice twice. He walked to the desk, which was behind a glass shield with a speaker hole in it. “Name?” asked the nurse. She appeared to check off his name on her viewscreen, which he couldn’t see. She opened a door in the glass shield and shoved out a short, wide heavy glass cup with his name and a code number written on a piece of white tape on the glass. “Room Two,” she said. Was she sneering at him? Or was that his imagination?

  Dana already felt dirty and ashamed as he walked into Room Two. It was a bit smaller than his work cubicle, with a tattered cloth easy chair, a small plastic trash can, a low table, and a small door on the opposite wall for placement of donations. No decorations on the beige walls. On the table was a box of tissues and a folio. When he opened the folio, the usual pictures were there. Pictures of women in swimsuits, lounging in various positions, their faces blurred. The pages were laminated, but covered in dirty fingerprints. Some of the pages stuck together. He had seen these pictures so many times over the past 4 years he knew them by heart, and they did not excite him much. Instead, he thought of the young woman in the barracks and imagined removing the rest of her clothes and making love to her, however one did that. Those images were enough for him to successfully masturbate and fill the glass cup about a third of the way.

  He quickly pulled up his pants – the door did not lock – and placed the cup on the shelf inside the little door. Somehow, the staff knew that he was finished, and in less than a minute, a nurse appeared holding a small hypodermic needle.

  Dana knew he had an hour to get back to the dorm before the crash hit. When it did, he was already in bed. Gloom fell on him like a cloudburst. He slept.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  He settled back into his routine as full summer began. He would return from work with his shirt covered in sweat, and found a cool shower refreshing.

  One evening, he came back to his room and discovered the opposite bed made, and the laundry basket under the bed filled with spare clothing. Shortly, a swarthy man about his age and size, with curly black hair, walked in. He walked with a confident step, breezed in, and sat down on his bed facing Dana.

  “Hey. My name is Blake. I’m replacing the fellow who ran. You’re Dana?” Seeing Dana nod, he continued, “My occupation is the same as his. I’m a viewscreen repairman.”

  This was interesting! Rowan had never talked about his work, and he had no cubicle on the first floor. Dana pretended he knew more than he did.

  “So, you work in the same place?”

  “Yep. The gray building with no windows six blocks north. I was working in Dallas, but everyone got evacuated there, so here I am, in this little town.”

  “I hadn’t heard that Dallas was evacuated,” said Dana.

  At that point, Blake raised his thumb to point at his video camera and mike, and they both put fingers over the lenses and microphones. If you didn’t do that for more than a little while, no one would probably say anything.

  Blake continued. “Well, you wouldn’t, would you? It’s not like they post notices on the walls when they’re losing battles. They put the news out on the viewscreens, but men never find out. Except for those of us who got out before the missiles hit. And, the ones who didn’t get out and got blown up. If it wasn’t for the war, I would have spent the rest of my life in a little corner of suburban Dallas, but a truck came and picked up the guys in my dorm and drove us north during the night. Imagine that, six guys together in the back of a truck for twelve hours, trying to find undamaged roads. Alarms are supposed to go off at the nearest Male Control office if more than two men are too close together, but we had six guys crammed together in that truck, and if any alarms went off somewhere, nobody cared. All the Rules went out the windows.”

  “There were windows?” asked Dana.

  “Not on the truck, my man. We couldn’t see out. At least they did that according to the Rules. It was hot, stuffy, and two of the guys were motion-sick. Potholes and broken pavement the whole way, even around here. What I meant was, they broke a lot of their own Rules, like no more than two men together at a time. Two women army drivers – we weren’t supposed to outnumber them, even though they had control boxes and military zap guns of some kind. They only let us out to pee, poop, drink, and eat those disgusting yellow nutrition bars.”

  Dana was beginning to like Blake. He talked more than anyone he had ever known, and all of it was interesting. “Yeah,” said Dana, “They are disgusting. Except ours are grey. Are you really supposed to be talking about all this?”

  Blake made a face. “Look, I don’t think Male Control is really that much in control any more. I think the war has forced a lot of women into the military, and everything else is getting stretched a little thin. As long as we don’t say or do anything treasonous, or obviously against the Rules, I don’t think we’re going to get video-audited by MC. I don’t think they have the people to review all the audio and video that gets screened by AI, even though there are only around ten million of us men.”

  This was the first Dana had heard of the number of men in the country. He was very surprised. Of course, he never saw very many men. “How do you know that?”

  Blake grinned. “I hear things.”

  “How many women are there?” asked Dana.

  “Around two hundred million, I’m pretty sure,” he said.

  “Why are there so many more women?” asked Dana.

  “We’re breeding stock, my man. They are breeding us to have certain characteristics, like not being very big, but having the genes to make larger and more powerful women.” He grinned again. “I don’t think that second part is working for them. The men without the right genes haven’t been allowed to breed for quite a while.”

  “Are you sure it’s OK for us to know this?” asked Dana.

  “I’ve talked about all this before with the guys in my dorm, one at a time, and never had any problems,” said Blake.

  “With the war, won’t Male Control be concerned that guys will try a rebellion here? I’d think that would make them do more auditing, not less,” said Dana.

  “Like I said, I hear things,” said Blake. “I happen to know that a lot of MC officers are being moved into the military. They think that the few guys who escaped to start the rebellion were an anomaly, and that the rest of us are under good control with all our hardware. If they had to, they could use a powerful control box to disable every one of us in a 30 kilometer radius. So, they’re going to concentrate on anyone they think is a trouble-maker. I know they don’t think of me as a trouble-maker, and you wouldn’t have your occupation if they thought you were.”

  Dana was skeptical that Blake really knew as much as he said, but he decided that was over a decade of indoctrination talking. He would take the risk. “What was the countryside like on the way up here?”

  “Dunno much. It was pretty dark. I think most towns and buildings were blacked out, because the first time they let us out, about three hours on, there were no lights anywhere, although we could see flashes of explosions to the south. There were some big hills just before we got here this morning, otherwise it was mostly flat. When we got out of the truck, we could usually make out trees, sometimes close by, sometimes at a distance. Didn’t see any rivers or lakes, but there had to be some, somewhere, because there’s plenty of grass and bushes. The truck would sometimes stop when we heard aircraft overhead, but I think the women up front could tell when they were ours by the sound, and didn’t always stop. I think we were safe a couple of hours before we hit those hills, because the truck sped up quite a bit, and we could hear a lot more traffic on the roads.”

  “So, you couldn’t tell how often there were buildings and places with people?” Dana really wanted to know.

  “Sorry, I just got glimpses in the dark. If there were buildings, they were blacked out.”

  Dana decided to switch topics to something safer. “So, you’ve been to work today?”

  “Yeah, there was a big back
log of busted viewscreens, and a lot of them were made in Texas, so production is down. Everyone needs theirs repaired. I’ve got a stack of them a meter high next to my table, and that’s a lot of viewscreens,”

  Dana said, “I didn’t know they let men repair viewscreens. Rowan never talked about his work, I think he was worried it might get him in trouble. They’re electronic, aren’t they?”

  “Yep, men repair viewscreens. It’s an all-male occupation, as far as I know. I don’t think we design them, and I think most of the manufacturing is robotic, but we repair them. No one ever explains how they work, though. The manuals just show us where all the little tiny chips and wires are embedded on each model, how to test them, and how to replace them. Dunno what they do. At least one of them must receive signals, and another one must receive and translate voice commands, but I can only guess which ones. And, how the images appear on the screens, I’m not sure. Each screen has a border all the way around that is a little thicker than the rest of the screen, and I figure that sets up a matrix on the screen, so that each tiny part of the screen knows what colors to display at each moment. But, that’s about all I know.”

  “So, do you get to turn the viewscreens on?” Dana wondered if that’s how Blake knew so much.

  “Sure, but there’s no signal inside the building. That’s why it doesn’t have any windows. They must have put shielding in the walls so that no signals can get through. If we want to see if a viewscreen works, we have a signal inside the building that just shows the same things – empty street scenes, the insides of dorm rooms, even a copy of the Rules, with some woman’s voice reading them. No news, no entertainment, of course.” Blake paused. “Damn, I get tired of seeing that stuff!”

  Dana though of Rowan, and made a connection. “So, Rowan figured out how to get his hardware off. Is that something a viewscreen repairman would know how to do?”