Procreation Pt. 01: Uruk

The first sight of the interior of the Dildo was breath-taking. Nothing prepared you for its vastness, and its beauty. It really was an enclosed Eden. Well, it was more like Eden on the third day of creation, when God had just finished creating all the plants. But the only plants on the Dildo were wind-pollinated; mainly wheat, grass, pine and willow. Insects would come later.

Diana Browning, or rather 'Emma', the automated Ecological Maintenance System that she had developed, would in time populate this Eden with flowering plants, and pollinating creatures, and creatures to eat them, right on up the food chain.

Diana had showed simulations of the completed Eden to the enthralled private backers of the project, tantalising them with walk-through holos showing heather-lined hills, lakes for sailing and rivers for trout fishing. There would be sunflower fields and cherry orchards, railroads and towns with maple-lined avenues; and amusement parks. The Adams and Eves of the future could lie back on the beach by Urania lake in the shade of the lemon-trees, and maybe sip their freshly-squeezed lemonade and look straight 'up' and watch the pretty fluffy clouds skidding lazily above their heads. And they could look further up, above and beyond the clouds, and see the upside-down houses and palm trees of the elegant avenues of New Los Angeles on other side of their concave world, only a day's easy hike away along Walkway One.

That was all marketing guff. But the true Eden she was planning was, to some, even more beautiful; a perfectly self-contained temperate ecology, with space enough to house a colony of a hundred thousand people, and to nourish them with a plentiful and diverse supply of food.

The geology underneath was all fake, of course, even if it looked real enough to fool the birds, beasts and plant life there: The contours of its rolling hills were made from big piles of aerogel, which they covered with soil and grass.

Diana was out jogging and thinking, barefoot and naked, which she did every day. Her route was always the same: a direct loop once around the world, across pure, wide open grassland. She was a five-foot-six feet tall hamster in a twelve mile circumference, green-carpeted wheel. Whatever hamsters think about when they jog in their wheels, you can bet that it was not what Diana thought about. Her thoughts were strictly and uniquely human. She thought in words, she thought in pictures, and she thought symbolically. In her head, like all humans, she had a detailed model not only of the world as she perceived it, but also models of other worlds, that could be, might have been. So detailed were those models, that the little people populating her model worlds even had miniature models inside their little model heads. I'd like to say, and so on, ad infinitum, but of course that would be impossible. You have to stop the infinite regression somewhere, you have to simplify.

Inside Diana's model of the world she perceived there was a little Jonah. She'd given little Jonah and all the other little men in her model world, a very simple world model inside their heads. And she'd given all the women a different model. Then, she used symbolic thinking to work out how her little model people would interact. Diana's way of thinking, she thought in words to herself as she jogged round her giant hamster wheel, is the essence of Science.

In Diana's simplified model of the world as she perceived it, the men expended energy protecting themselves and their offspring by fighting enemies, and by hunting and farming. The women mainly raised their offspring, and helped with the farming. When food got scarce, or their backs were against the wall, the men would take charge, because there would be a lot fighting to do.

But she also had a different model, which was a model of the world that didn't yet exist, a model of how men and women would be here on the Dildo where there was plenty of food, and no enemies to fight. In that world, the men would not need to be big and tough, and the women would not need protecting. So the women would take charge, because the men would have very little to do, and would become mainly useful at fixing stuff while the women raised the offspring.

Diana had played around with her model people, and also with model animals and plants, working out how they would all interact. Although it was a simplification, it was still a pretty complicated model, and few people other than Diana would be able to work out what would happen. But Diana had practiced how to do that sort of thing, since her tenth birthday.

She realised that you had start with the right people. If you took a lot of men and women and stuck them up here in the Dildo you could end up with different types of population, depending on who you started with. Her idea was to try to end up with a population where the men fixed stuff and the women took charge and raised the offspring. It sounds simple when put that way, but it took a lot computing power to work out all the combinations. For example, if she introduced man-eating tigers into the model, things would end up very different from introducing, say, rattlesnakes, or Jersey cows, or all three of them together.

By the way, Diana never called it the Dildo. She wasn't a prude, it's just that to her, it was more like a uterus.

Diana had finished her run around the world, and was sitting on a wooden bench outside her house when they arrived, smiling in welcome. Above her door was a wooden sign with her motto in carved letters upon it: "Understand, Love and Respect Gaia". She led them inside, past her untidy office, littered with screens and whiteboards, where she spent most of her time. She showed them to her big homely, rustic kitchen, and bade them sit at the long wooden table, on which she'd prepared a pot of herbal tea. This was obviously going to be an important meeting; all the biggest decisions were made round Diana's kitchen table.

It was to be a tribunal. Jonah sat on one long side of the table, the women on the other.

They all waited for Captain Hussain to speak. She launched straight into it.

"Jonah wants to go home. Isn't that right, Jonah?"

Jonah cleared his throat. "Yes, sir."

He watched them over the rim of his mug as he took a sip of his tea: The Queen and her two Princesses. He'd had sex with two of them in reality, and all three of them in his head. His first time with Alia had been incredible; she was amazingly passionate and sensual, and surprisingly sweet and gentle, considering her outward manner. Jonah to his own surprise became completely smitten by her after that, but kept his feelings hidden, partly because it would ruin his reputation as 'Jonah the Boner', the happy-go-lucky stud.

They'd fucked a few times subsequently, but then she'd called it off abruptly and without explanation. She'd had other guys before him, and a couple since him, so he assumed he meant less to her than she did to him.

But Diana, now: She was the Prize, out of reach to everyone. Slim, tall and supple like a birch tree, sixty years old but with the toned body of a dancer. And she was the boss, and it made her sexy as hell. She could sweet-talk the world's toughest military man, General Blackman, and persuade him to let her make the inexperienced and low-ranking Captain Hussain her second in command. She'd managed to sway the heads of the world's governments and global corporations into bankrolling the quadrillion-dollar venture. And now she lived in a big ivy-covered house on a hill named after her, in a world of her creation a quarter of a million miles from earth.

Diana spoke. As usual her speech was measured and calm. "We'd like to ask you some questions, which may seem a little strange, personal, and not germane to your request."

"Go ahead, sir." His eyes were, as usual drawn downwards to her breasts by the eye-catching blue and green opal pendant she wore on a fine, long silver necklace. The opal was perfectly circular, and large; it appeared to glow, and its patterns seemed to move and swirl. It was just like a miniature Gaia, suspended between her breasts. He tore his gaze away back up to her face, but she was looking at Annie, waiting for her to speak.

Annie asked him, "How would you feel if you woke up from hypo to find that earth wasn't there anymore?"

"What? I hope that's a hypothetical question."

"It is," said Diana. "But please answer it."

"I guess I'd try to find out where the hell it went."

"Why?"

"Why? Well, for one thing, it would be damn strange."

He had no idea why, but his answer seemed to please Diana. She asked him, "Would you care if none of your sperm ever fertilised an ovum?"

"You mean do I want kids?"

"Yes."

"No, I don't care. I don't think I'm that important."

Diana leaned forward and looked hard at him. "What is important to you, Jonah?"

The intensity with which she asked the question pierced his soul. He paused, and in his head his entire life replayed, as was claimed to happen when you were about to die. He felt suddenly lost, unanchored and without purpose. Watching him intently, Diana's own countenance changed, mirroring and expressing his own anguish, as though she'd read his feelings, and shared them. Finally, he said slowly, "I don't think anyone, I mean any one person is important. Nor is one cell in your body, or one blade of grass. Or maybe even one planet. But altogether, all of it taken together, is important, because it, because..." he faltered.

"Because what?"

"Because it has to get better. I believe that, with time, the universe is heading somewhere good."

Diana straightened up and said, "Ok, I've heard enough. Ladies?"

"I vote yes," said Captain Hussain immediately.

"Seconded," said Annie Albright.

"We want you to spend the next five hundred years of your life in hypo," said Diana.

"Jesus, I just told you I wanted to go back. There's no need to... Oh, sorry, you're kidding me." But they were not laughing.

"No, I'm not kidding. It's been the plan from the beginning. We want to see how humans will cope with space colonisation. We're hoping one day to take Artemis out of the solar system, to Ross 128. Which will take about a thirty thousand years. We'd like to know how the first five hundred years goes."

"Wow. That's amazing. Mind-blowing in scope. But I'm not right for it, it's just too damn long. I appreciate the offer, I really do, but no."

"There'll be one man for every ten women, Jonah," said Annie.

"This is crazy," began Jonah, then stopped: "Which women?"

Now they did laugh. All except Jonah.

"Jesus, you had me-" began Jonah, but Diana interrupted him.

"-Actually, we're including five thousand men. Well, their frozen sperm, anyway. And yes, we are serious."

Annie shouted, "You're a lucky bastard, you dumb asshole! This is going to be the greatest adventure in history! And we're letting you in on it! We're fucking letting you in on it!"

"The answer is still no." Jonah felt that he'd made it clear, but Diana sensed a weakening of his resolve. She said to him, quietly, "I saw you when you were outside by the shuttle, I watched you on the CCTV. You couldn't take your eyes off Gaia. You know what I'm talking about."

"Yes, I miss Her."

Diana leaned back, and looked at the ceiling. "She's dying Jonah, and you know it. You want to go and sit by her deathbed, and hold her hand, until her pulse is gone. That's why you want to go back."

Diana seemed to be speaking directly to his heart, and it was his heart that replied, "Yes. I want to help her, help her get better." Again his eyes were drawn to her opal pendant; he swam in its blue seas and floated over its green continents.

"Yes, because you care. But all you can give her is palliative care. She has cancer."

He snapped back out of his hypnotic state: "I, I'm sorry, I've lost the metaphor."

"She has cancer, Jonah, and its name is homo sapiens. The best thing we can do for her is to leave. As soon as possible. I don't know if five hundred years is too long, but the sooner we start the better."

And such was her power of persuasion, that he agreed. And for the first time in his life, he felt hope.

Over the next few weeks, the Dildo continued to empty of people. Back on earth freighters were being prepared with supplies and bio-matter for 'Day Four', the point in the project at which animal life would be carefully introduced into the ecosystem. Most of the stuff was aquatic, the tiny critters that sit near the bottom of the food chain. No human freight handlers were needed; Maisy would take care of everything just fine.

'Bed-time', the day on which the Jonah was due to go into 'EHS', extended hyposleep schedule, was now only a month away.

After that, he'd be spending six months in hypo, for each day awake, extending his lifespan almost two hundred-fold.

In the meantime, he and the team had moved into quarters at ground level in the Dildo's university campus, where Diana now spent most of her time.

Diana had chosen her final team, which was made up of just thirty women and three men. They bonded quickly, partly because most of them knew each other well, having collaborated on the project for a while, but mainly because they were united by a sense of momentous destiny. They had smugly assigned themselves a new subspecies name: homo felix - 'lucky man'. But more apt, given the gender ratio, would have been domina felix - 'lucky woman'.

Jonah became especially tight with the other two male team members. Like most of the team, all three of them were known by their nicknames, which had been acquired long before they were selected: Jonah, for reasons too obvious to explain, was simply 'Boner'; Sam 'Slam' Anderson was most the serious-minded of the three, a pure military man, tough and dependable and soft-spoken; the third was little Tommy 'Squid' Krass.

Tommy's sobriquet was born after the day he won a bet that he could free float out of the central hub with his arms and legs tied, from a stationary position. Now, in zero gravity, Newton's second law stated in effect that you can't shift your centre of gravity without pushing against something. You can change your pose, bend and twist, turn yourself around, but that's it. So they took the bet: They tied him up and got him floating perfectly stationary right in the middle of the hub, where he couldn't touch or get a purchase on anything. Tommy won his bet, using Newton's third law, the basic law underlying the principles of rocket, jet and in particular squid propulsion, by peeing himself.

The three men collectively were called by Captain Hussain the 'sluts'. She in turn was referred to as 'Captain Fuzz', but only when they spoke amongst themselves.

Diana began a series of intensive briefing talks in a small lecture amphitheatre down by the biotech lab there, for the founding members of homo felix.

Diana's lectures were more than educational; they were inspirational, and passionate. As, day after day, the team listened to the musical cadence of her voice, rapt and bright eyed, she became their guru. And they, like so many people before them throughout history, found themselves first revering, and eventually worshipping her, the Moon Goddess Diana, in her lecture hall high above the world, which was her celestial temple.

Today she spoke to them of Gaia, and then beyond Gaia, to other planets, where she had proved that life not only had emerged, but that it had to have emerged; for, she showed them, by arguments subtle and complex, yet breathtakingly profound, that the very universe itself, in its subatomic fabric and in its cosmic expanses, is alive, and is both its seed and its egg, united. And it not only lives, it evolves, and it learns.

At the end of the lecture, as his colleagues stirred and rose, as if waking from a dream, Captain Hussain called out to Jonah and the two other men in the team, "remember, sluts, we're still waiting for your joy-juice. Get it done by noon today." She handed them each a specimen bottle.

The three sluts looked at each other. "Captain Fuzz should have offered to give me a hand with my homework," Slam said.

"If you have a problem with it, you can hand my homework in pretending it was your own work, " replied Squid.

Later Jonah lay on his bed looking out the window at fields of wheat. It was raining. He stared at the specimen bottle at his bedside. For the first time in years, he couldn't get a hard-on. He felt terrible; if he couldn't perform, what was the point of him being there anyway? He felt dumber than everyone else too. Maybe, he decided, it was the damn pressure, the expectation they had of him as a stud. Or possibly it was an inferiority complex: Nobody had ever mentioned it to him, but it was in plain sight to everyone that he was the least well-endowed of the three sluts.

He sighed. Maybe he should go call on one of the women to help get him in the mood. Maybe Lucy, or Lotte. "No," he thought, "not this time." He closed his eyes, preparing to trawl his memory for a suitable wank fantasy from among the hundreds of real-life encounters he had experienced. For some reason his mind was blank.

And then, as clear and real as if he were actually seeing it, the image of Diana's pendant appeared, between the soft pink orbs of her breasts. The image grew and engulfed him, drowning him in a warm, swirling sea of blue and green. He stroked himself and moaned with pleasure, then came. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling as the orgasm ebbed. Then he turned his head to one side and laughed: The specimen bottle was still by his bed, empty.

The Big Sleep

Jonah blinked. Time was fucking weird here. He couldn't believe that his first extended hypo was already over. But no, he'd been woken: Someone was looking down at him. It was Captain Hussain. She looked different. Older. What had happened to her in the last six months?

He popped open the pod cover. She let out a silent choking sob, and breathed unsteadily. Tears welled in her eyes. The tears left her eyelashes, and drifted in the air between them, tiny glistening balls of salt water. He'd never seen her cry before.

He thrust himself out up of the pod. She flung her arms around his shoulders, pushing him and her both back down into it again, and then together they bounced upwards once more. He held her and stroked her back. Clinging to each other like drowning lovers, they floated slowly around the control deck. He kissed her silky black hair tenderly; it was streaked now with grey. Her hair grip had come loose, and her hair wafted like underwater seaweed, brushing him gently, tickling his face and arms.

His glanced at the clock as they floated by it. That couldn't be right. He'd have to check it later.

"What is it sir? Why did you wake me?" But she didn't answer.

Leaving the rest of the team in hypo, Captain Hussain led him into the elevator. As it descended lower, he saw that the trees, which had been sparsely planted saplings when he last saw them, were now a dense forest.

They travelled down to the surface, then walked in silence to the campus. Not once had Captain Hussain uttered a word. He knew that whatever had happened was so terrible, it had rendered her speechless, and now was not the time for questions.

Someone was standing by the entrance to the lecture amphitheatre to meet him. A tall white-haired old lady. As they drew closer, he realised it was Diana. She looked around ninety years old. Her posture was still erect, and she was smiling. But he could see immense suffering and tragedy in the lines of her face. She still wore her pendant, but now it rested on a bony ribcage, between her shrunken breasts. Even more beautiful than before she looked to him.