Ennui Ch. 01

Somehow, ennui sounds like a good thing. Before you're afflicted by it, trapped within it, you spend all your prior life *seeking* it. Dreaming of such luxurious existence, as if it were a desirable end. What foolishness. It's an end, all right.

Lunch is over. I simply can't linger at the posh restaurant table any longer, scrolling my phone, failing to absorb some forgotten content that has no value even were I to absorb it. It's meaningless. The meal is long ago paid; I've become a squatter. A purposeless hobo-customer occupying a table. I stand, wondering what to do with my afternoon.

I have no job.

I quit, oh, eighteen months ago now, though the months are slipping by faster and faster. About three years ago, I installed the ticker app on my phone, that gave real-time updates of the market price of my genes. The bull market began in earnest four years ago, and doubled, then doubled, then tripled, then... became this hazy sense of ever-expansion into such silly valuations that I stopped paying attention. To continue working then seemed silly; the pittance my salary made, the meaninglessness of my value-added from work hours compared to the value-add to all from my gametes. Everyone I worked with knew my FC number, and knew the market prices, and wondered, "Why is he still working here?"

Two decades ago, the end of humanity happened--may have happened--without anyone noticing. It took about three years for the effects to even be noticed, suspected. Then two years for the cause to be positively and retrospectively identified. Then followed... about three years of earth-wide denial. What else can you call it? Any counter-researcher who would confidently cast doubt on the baleful conclusions immediately gained a grateful mass of supporters, showering him/her with funding and love and social-media fame and adoration. But the baleful conclusions were right.

It was a virus, we now know, entirely asymptomatic in 99% of cases. A rare few had muscle aches, which then quickly passed. That's why we missed it. Spread through everyone. A wash-through. All nations, all continents.

But it altered us. The change in rate of DNA degradation was *not* straightforward--so complex and subtle in so many locations, indistinguishable from genome noise and therefore unrepairable--but statistically, they added up to the end of humanity.

Birth rates dropped. Then, dropped further. Then, while we waited for a hoped-for recovery, they fell through the floor--so much further than the worst-worst case pessimistic boundary case predictions. And then... stopped. A *gap* developed. Without search and screening and intervention, two fertile people simply *never* could meet each other at random. Zero pregnancies. Today, there is no one between 9 and 13 years old. No one on earth.

But, humans, bless them, will rage against the dying of the light, hopeless or no. About 9 years ago, one man was found. In Bhutan. He was flown to Beijing, and there, over the course of a year, his sperm was syringed into thirty-two thousand women. One of them had a baby.

We were saved. Maybe. Each year, the technology was refined, the baby count crept upwards. We are now back to one-ten-thousandth of the worldwide birth rate before the virus. That's progress. Way more than zero. But it's way, way less than a sustaining, replenishing level.

Most people still believe our doom is upon us. They believe we'll get old, there will be too few birthing-age females, too few scientists to continue to make progress, those babies will get old, will make one-tenth of a baby each, and then we'll be so thinned out and elderly-skewed that the technologies and fertility clinics will stop operating, and then... zero. Over. Lower animals and plants will retake earth.

So, the funds now available to and centered upon people like me are colossal, absurdly so. The government research programs, of course, but also, the private markets. You may already know this, but, see, people like to procreate. Some might say it's our driving life-energy. Thus, many people not only want humanity to survive, but they are particularly concerned that *their* particular genetic line survives. The fraction so inclined varies from culture to culture. Overall, I'd guess 90% just want humanity to survive and don't particularly care whose kids they are, but 10% really want it to be their progeny. Given the size of the planet, that 10% adds up to a lot of buyers.

You can download my entire genome sequence, by the way. At any of a hundred websites. Yes, it's technically illegal because of my privacy rights (ha), but in practice enforcement is futile. A dozen good open-source packages will then analyze my sequence for you and show quantitatively, to six decimal places, that my genome is so exceptionally, unreasonably favorable, a 7.442250 FC (Fertility Coefficient). Fifty-five times better than that man from Bhutan. That number ranks me at eight-hundred and twentieth in the world, according to the open database. I was eight-twenty-first on Monday, but a man in the top hundred died in a car accident in Sao Paulo on Tuesday. The entire nation went into mourning, and there is some talk--not too serious--about putting all the top hundred worldwide in protective confinement, or at least forbidding them from automobiles and planes.

The Y chromosome, with its lower variability across humanity, is by far the majority of the problem, though not exclusively. Even for someone ranked so high as me, it's still a very difficult statistical process, requiring gentle non-destructive screening of billions of sperm to enrich the sample by a few thousandfold before implantation. I don't really understand the tech, but it's been refined and refined over the years (as if our survival depended on it). Since the median male has an FC of 0.0000007, I have about 10 million times higher chance of making a baby than the average guy, so people like me are the hope for the planet.

In today's system, the all-important fluid from people like me enters a worldwide network and can be enriched, shipped, stored, delivered, marketed, bought, injected anywhere in the world in 12 hours with the new supersonic exchange network. Time is money once those sperm start to age. Market-makers and arbitrageurs in New York and Tokyo keep the worldwide market efficient, making the price per sperm a linear function versus FC. The price per sperm per FC is currently $.00213622 according to my app, but I don't bother to do the math anymore. I think I heard I average 900 million live sperm per ejaculation, but it varies a lot, depending on timing and the particulars of the extraction. My lowest ever was 205 million, because that was my fifth ejaculation in a 24 hour period, so you can see how there's diminishing returns from overuse. Literally. And my highest was 4.4 billion--I actually remember that one--whew. You've probably noticed that you ejaculate more if you're more crazy-aroused and after a long build-up. Same with me; thus the proceeds from the sale can vary widely.

At today's prices, the processing and transportation costs are such a tiny fraction of the core market value that they can be ignored. My lawyer's medical team explained that however many billions of sperm I make in three donations are typically enriched down to around seventy injections, and on average one out of those seventy women successfully makes a baby. I don't always know when that happens exactly, because about half the transactions have an anonymity block, but I think I've been averaging a child a week for the last few years, far-flung all over the world. If you're doing the math in your head, you can quickly see we're doomed, unless great progress is made. I have a one-in-eight-million FC, and I can probably only make 50 children a year, perhaps 1500 over my producing years.

So, is all this good? Am I lucky?

Everything has been turned upside down. Like the money, the renown seemed like a gift at first. I went on a tear--a "transition period", where I leaped into the possibilities with delight and gusto. That wore off much quicker than you might imagine.

Women flocked to me and those I dated at that time fell into several categories:

- The more rational were actually high-number FC's themselves, so not unreasonable to match with my sperm, and really just wanted a *discount* on my genes below market price, which was entirely unaffordable for 99.9% of people. Though the price was far lower then, I still gave away millions upon millions of dollars worth for free back then, on a whim--in exchange for an enthusiastic and impassioned or determined ask.

- Others were simply cold, calculating profit-seekers, con artists really, though a victimless crime. Sole proprietors usually, who would use every type of female persuasion right up until the moment of donation, then nimbly switch to a collector in a practiced motion, often without me noticing their mouth or body had left me. They were so good at concealing it that sometimes it wasn't until we had been dating for weeks before I realized they were capturing and selling every time. As the market price rose, the skill and cunning and beauty and preparation and execution of the competition between profit-seekers reached higher and higher, each year far exceeding my most elevated imaginings of the year before. Man, they were creative. And sometimes great fun. But they inured in me a sense that I can trust no one.

- Others were just plain crazy, or at least, disbelievers in science. They had low FC, had no hope, but had hope, and were attracted to my high FC because of their hope. There, I'd just donate to her unenriched, willy-nilly, an utterly hopeless exercise. It was not technically illegal back then in the early days, but everyone of a "think globally, act locally" mindset considered it a sin, such a waste of precious resource. But, in private, no one could stop us. Yet--I could see, at that moment, in their eyes, such a genuine suspension of disbelief. Hope against hope. How freeing and... old-fashioned. Those were some of the best ejaculations of my life. I mean, not even into a collector but the entire, un-enriched sample into one infertile woman, which both she and I knew was stupid and wasteful, but... hey, we got carried away. I never do that anymore.

Nowadays, stuff like all that never happens (well, except maybe when I'm very drunk), all replaced, like my job, my goals, my striving, all things, by ennui.

Women *always* try to get me drunk. I'm sick to death of it. An app came out a few years back; it kind of synergizes all forms of tracking, whatever hacks out there know my phone signature, my digitized face, biometrics, my gait, all of which are downloadable from a dozen databases somewhere in Russia, for the price of watching an ad for caviar. At first, I got angry, but then I just got overwhelmed. Fighting back feels like punching a breaking wave coming at you as you wade into the ocean. You hit it, then your fist is absorbed, ignored, and surrounded, then a million other gallons of water just swamp you. These apps are borderline illegal, but most of voter and juror sympathy is with the app users, not with me.

The app just scans constantly. If my phone approaches hers, it buzzes. A woman takes a selfie, the outward camera is scanning for people like me whose faces are in the database, and they're all networked. When I enter a bar, half the women get an alert, and they immediately tell the other half. Really, big news for an app-user would be to, even once, encounter someone above the 0.1 FC range. And I'm another three standard deviations out the tail of the bell curve from there. Exceedingly rare. I'm the highest in the tri-state area. I'm generally the first top-1000 that each user has ever encountered in their lifetime. Lots of pointing, lots of looks of shock and surprise at the identification on their screens, lots of seductive smiles, lots of aggressive come-ons. I haven't paid for a drink in years.

Gaggles of girls usually quickly come up, drunk, laughing, aggressive, grabbing at me, kissing, rubbing, trying to playfully or not-so-playfully get me erect or drunk or drugged or all of the above. My lawyer says I shouldn't go out alone anymore, but I still do occasionally, out of ennui. But I follow his instruction never to drink from a glass not poured by me or from a bottle that wasn't opened in front of me.

I ejaculated into a water glass last year in a rooftop bar. I was so fucking wasted. Maybe Roofied, not sure. Maybe the bartender was in on it, maybe not. Right there in public, but I think the girls--they were so exceptionally, insanely attractive--had paid or promised payment to a group of people that formed an improvised privacy wall. The glass into which I released still had substantial remnants of one of the two girls' whiskey sour in it, so--I'm no doctor--but that may or may not have destroyed the millions of dollars of value the girls' thought they had. Isn't alcohol a spermicide?

But the very ineptness of it is comforting to me in my memory; that tells me that they were not professionals, and perhaps the whole thing was as spontaneous as it seemed. They were so frigging beautiful, both blonde in silk minidresses, on their knees on the tile floor, high heels crossed behind them. They gazed up at me, laughing, smiling, licking red-red lipsticked lips. One kept brushing a stray strand of hair from her cheek, gazing up at me, as the other took me in her mouth. Gazing with such intimate eye contact, while brushing that strand from her cheek. I could have fallen in love with her if it had anything remotely to do with love.

It was the spontaneity that made me come so fast, faster than they anticipated. I still laugh at the memory of the girl on the right's panicked and incomplete chug to empty the glass and thrust it before my erupting tip. Why not pour the whiskey on the floor, I wonder retrospectively? They were drunk and spontaneous. The spontaneity made me come. How I love, in my sea of ennui, to be surprised.

But, after the last drop was done, over, I was instantly, totally alone. The two girls rose, ran, staring and cradling the glass in amazement and concern for its safety. Concern about being robbed or mugged or overpowered. The crowd dispersed, chasing them, eager to see the outcome, even the bartender. Refractory periods always carry a depression, but that was my lowest point of the last few years. Alone, I slowly and drunkenly pulled up pants that were damp from the bar floor.

It's a day earlier than I planned, but as I exit the restaurant, I decide to donate. I don't need the money, I don't need or want the release; it's only been 36 hours, according to my NIH-approved tracking app. By going earlier than optimal, my next will be either delayed or diminished to the extent that the net cash will be essentially identical. I have absolutely no reason to donate, except that I can't think of anywhere else to go, anything else to do.

I hesitate, trying to decide how I might mix it up. I remember a facility I'd passed in the city a few times but had never entered; I had an intuition it was nearby. From the outside, it appeared simple and straightforward, no elaborate dramatic presentations or acting or roleplay. If you choose, donating can be more like going to the theatre. For someone like me, a cast of twenty would be a negligible expense for the value of a session. But this facility I seem to recall was more workaday, medical, no frills, which suited my mood perfectly, something I'd been thinking of trying. I suspected it catered mainly to very low FC donors, where the session was barely profitable--I more "working-class" clientele. I'm always the most notable donor in any facility; it's rare they've ever, in their history, taken a sample so valuable.

However, after fifteen minutes searching on my phone, I can't find where it is. My feet grow tired, standing without purpose, so, almost out of habit, I push the usual button.

There is a service I usually use. After pushing the button on my phone, I step to the street corner. As usual, the car service arrives within one minute--I believe it's constantly circulating my GPS location. I know that within seconds of my pushing that button, the facility was informed of my impending arrival, and frenzied preparations are already underway. If I'd checked a box before pushing the button, my wait would have been seven minutes, but the ride would be a limo with three or four women inside, already prepped to begin in the car. Since I'm about a six-minute drive from the facility, this would work out about the same timing for me. Early on, I always chose the limo button. I guess it felt more ritzy and arousing to be moving through town as they started on me. But that thrill has worn off. Now, it feels a little more courteous to take the ride alone and give them the six minutes--a little more leisurely time to prepare.

I have a suspicion--there's no real way to confirm this, since they'd deny it--that whenever I push that button, they halt and eject most or all the current clients within their facility. One time last year, their manager let slip that I account for the majority of their location's quarterly earnings; even though it's the most upscale facility in my city, the hundreds of other mid-FC clients in sum are a smaller revenue stream than my donations. I'm just too much of an outlier. Early on, though I loved their luxury service, it used to irk me that their pricing was not very transparent (as luxury companies tend to do). The spread between what they paid me and market price was never stated clearly, so I suspect it was large. They had a whole science of obfuscation when I asked directly. But now, with the market so sky high, I just don't care any more--don't really care about money anymore at all, except to know since about a year ago I've had more than I can even keep track of or ever need.

I usually donate three times a week, and two out of three here at my city's Baumgartner-Kaufmann facility. My home base, my primary income source. My main gainful employment. My value-add. Historically, it was a centuries-old Swiss financial firm, but now gamete trading is 99% of its business, and it's the world leader. The facility I frequent was formerly part of a USA hospitality chain that Baumgartner acquired a few years back when it expanded into retail collection; they kept the subsidiary's gamete-collection facilities but divested the luxury spas, casinos, resorts, and gentlemen's clubs--all of those were once the subsidiary's main line of business, but now, all of them in toto, less than an afterthought on their income statement. A once-storied business has also been corrupted and arguably ruined by the stratospheric rise of the gamete market price, like me.

As of a year ago, when I last took a look at my bank statement, Baumgartner was wiring me about seven million per week. My home base, as it were. On the weekends, I usually branch out, mix it up; travel or try some new or off-beat in-home service out of the dozens pursuing me. I used to just go by the most convincing saleswomen. Lately, in my ennui, the ones I choose have been getting weirder and more "fringe" in style. That in itself has consequences; word is getting out, and so the pitches I receive grow more and more out-there. The creativity is astounding. Sometimes, I'm like: holy shit, this one is weird. But even weird is getting boring. It's like heroin--it takes larger and larger doses to get an ever-smaller reaction out of me.

It's considered classic elegance to have a human driver. She's beautiful, but we don't speak. From my perspective, she seems nervous. I'm looking angled at only the back of her blond cascading hair and right cheek, so I may just be projecting, but they tend to be nervous around me. If she were to have an accident or offend me or even... say anything to make me flaccid, uninspired, irritated, repulsed, angry, humiliated--any uncountable number of things that would prevent a healthy arousal and release--it would cost her employer around $4.2million in revenue (of which they'd pay $3.5M to me, so $700k to them) from this one lost visit--not to mention the future chain of weekly earnings if I grew dissatisfied with them as a customer.