Sixteen Past Nine and Forty Six Seconds

"I see you took the Macallan. Very classy."

Miriam smiled and took another sip.

"You weren't here the last time I called."

"I was nursing this," she said, turning her head to show a thin scar beside her ear. It was almost healed, but would have looked nasty in the recent past.

"Who did that?"

"A client," Alana replied. "She didn't like taking no for an answer so she smashed a vodka bottle across my face and did what she wanted anyway."

"I'm so sorry."

"The wonders of modern technology mean I can look like I did," she said, taking Miriam's hand and placing it on her cheek. "I asked the doctors to leave this one scar, though. It reminds me to be more careful."

Miriam turned Alana's face and gently kissed her cheek. Her lips pressed along the scar and her tongue caressed Alana's earline.

Miriam kissed her on the lips now. Alana's lips were impossibly soft and sumptuous. Her cherry lipstick taste tinged Miriam's tongue. The kiss grew hungrier and before long, their tongues were engaged in a duel for supremacy in each other's mouths.

"You're special, Alana," the Senator forced out between kisses.

"Tell me, Miri. How would you like me to show you how special I am?"

"Just hold me for now."

Alana wrapped her arms around Miriam and kissed her on the cheek once more.

"What's wrong, Miri?"

Miriam averted her gaze and looked down. The pressure of putting up a strong front weighed on her. All she wanted was to unwind the taut string holding her sanity together.

"Senator Aldrich mentioned my grandmother and how I am a disappointment to her legacy."

"You mean the former Chief Justice Blakely who outlawed male homosexuality? That is hardly a legacy to be proud of."

"Try telling that to the Senate. They look at me like I let them all down."

"Don't be like that, Miri," Alana said, softly kissing her hair. "It's going to be okay."

Miriam smiled wryly, knowing it was probably never going to be okay. Alana held her chin and turned her face towards her own. Alana's face loomed over her now. Every miniscule bit of her was visible. Every curve of her cheek, every contour of her skin. From her baby blue eyes flecked with iridescent shards of colour to her high cheekbones and culminating in her patrician nose. All of her made Miriam feel a rising desire deep inside herself. Alana's lips trembled, as if struggling to vocalize how she felt.

"I love you, Miri. You know that."

Miriam nodded and kissed her lips one more time.

"Leave everything and be with me. We don't deserve a leader like you. Your ideas of compassion and humanity are over a century too late for the world. If we are all going to die, I would like to die holding you in my arms just like now."

Alana's hand caressed Miriam's cheek and neck. Her lips followed and peppered tiny kisses down the side of her neck.

"You're in pain, Miri. You don't show it and the rest of the world even believes it, but not me. It hurts being all alone. No one to love and care for you. I promise, Miri. I'll never leave you. All you have to do is ask."

"I love you too, Alana, but I can't. My life is complicated enough without dragging you into it. I have a losing battle to fight all the way to the bitter end."

Alana continued down her neck, unfastening her clothes and bra. Miriam's breast fit neatly into the palm of her hand and she ground it while licking in a slow inward spiral to her nipple.

"You don't have to..." started Miriam, her voice gently slurred by pants of pleasure.

"I want to," said Alana, looking up at her through her thick lashes. "Please. Let me do for you. Let me do this for me."

Miriam relented a few moments later when two of Alana's fingers slipped below her waistband and gently entered her.

* *

A few hours later

Cold Spring, New York

"Welcome home, Senator Blakely."

The disembodied voice of the home automation AI greeted her as she stepped out of her craft. Her stately mansion sat above the coastline, like a stone giant pondering a leap into the Hudson river. The mansion had been in her family for over two hundred years. It had undergone renovations and technical enhancements, but still retained the imposing grandeur.

The large front doors slid open as she made her way through.

"Would you like me to draw you a bath?"

"It's like you read my mind."

The high arched ceilings echoed with emptiness. Miriam had heard from her mother and grandmother how many people used to stay here. It was well over to a hundred years from when her great-great-great grandfather lived here with a small army of housekeepers, butlers and cooks. Social events with hundreds of people were not an uncommon sight.

Or she had been told. Images and videos were the only link she had to that time.

"Your bath is ready, Senator."

Her footsteps echoed through the emptiness of the halls all the way until she reached the bath. She discarded her suit and pant outside. One of the numerous worker bots would eventual scoop it up for a wash.

"What would you like for dinner, Senator?"

"Make whatever you have. I'll take it down to the study."

The warm bath was exactly what Miriam needed after the day she had. She reached out and filled a glass of red wine.

After a long time and much reluctance, she finally stepped out. Still carrying the bottle of wine, she made her way downstairs.

"Close the gates and turn off the lights. I'll sleep in my study tonight."

The AI obeyed diligently. Miriam stood at the bottom of the winding staircase leading down to her basement. The study had an attached bedroom which her great-great-great grandfather frequently used. It was the only part of the house free from the trappings of twenty second century technology. Even as she unlocked the doors and stepped in, it felt like taking a time machine back to another era. The rust coloured mahogany floor segued seamlessly into redwood bookshelves filled to the brim. Actual books, a rare commodity dating back to the twentieth and twenty first centuries. There was an adjoining room with a plush bed and an electric fireplace, two more relics.

Miriam closed the basement door behind her. She quietly made her way to the smaller room and saw a late teenaged boy asleep on the bed. She sat down beside him and gently ran her fingers through his hair until he stirred and opened his eyes.

"Søren..."

* *

Miriam sat down beside her captive and put her plate down.

"Eat."

"What about you, Miriam?"

"I'm not hungry," she said. "You, on the other hand, look like you've been locked up and starving in the basement."

Søren laughed and took a bite.

"You haven't come down to meet me in a few days. I was beginning to think you had forgotten about me. That or someone had found out about your secret."

"That'll be the day. Most of my colleagues hate me enough already."

He took another helping of the food and wiped the corners of his mouth.

"Thank you, Miriam. You're risking so much for me."

"Hardly a risk," she grinned. "Just violating federal law that states that I can no longer have private relations with a man. He must be state property."

"Is the outside world really that bad?"

"Welcome to the apocalypse. Take a seat and get your camera out."

Søren laughed. Miriam almost felt maternal toward him. He was barely nineteen now. He looked healthy with colour finally returning to his white skin and straw blonde hair. When they had met, it was under the worst of circumstances.

The virus was especially lethal in Europe, rampaging through the male population faster than anywhere else. Søren was the only viable male born in his remote village in Denmark in over five years. His father had been forced to procreate with multiple women and eventually with the very girls he gave birth to. Søren was born from his fourteenth daughter.

Impoverished and cut off from the rest of the world, his desperate mother had made the heart-wrenching choice of selling him to black-market semen harvesters. He was trafficked at the bottom of a cargo vessel with hundreds of other boys to a facility in New York.

It was years ago, in her previous capacity as the chief prosecutor for the state, that Miriam had come across this case. Hundreds of boys, malnourished and isolated with tubes running in and out of their bodies. They were not citizens of this country and she could tell that what awaited them was much the same, only under the auspices of the state instead of a criminal organization. She made the fateful decision to save one boy.

One boy was all the risk she could take.

One boy was all she could hide.

"What's your name?" she asked the pale, blonde haired boy as part of her scheduled interview. He could barely stand with his thin frame. She helped him onto the chair.

"Søren."

The voice was so weak that Miriam barely heard it.

"Be quiet and come with me, Søren."

That day was the last time she saw of any of the other boys. She did not know how many of them were alive or dead. With all the male stillbirths and miscarriages, the median life expectancy for a man now stood at around one day. Even worse considering the rising number of inbreeding related genetic disorders in the world.

"Can I go upstairs with you tomorrow, Miriam? It's been so long since I've seen the sun and the blue sky."

"It's risky," she said, feeding him a chunk of meat with a fork. "There are surveillance drones everywhere with Y chromosome sensors. You're only safe this deep underground."

"This can't mean I'll never see the sky again."

"Maybe some day, but not now. Not when the whole world wants you."

"It's the silence and the emptiness that gets to me," he said. "There aren't any other voices down here but my own. Back in the village, all the girls would fight over who got to talk to me and who got to play with me."

"Sadly, you'll have to settle for just me here."

She laughed and fed him another bite of meat.

"I wish I could show you where I grew up. Our village overlooked the most beautiful fjord. The angry sea foamed and frothed at the mouth, yet the waters inside remained serene and calm. My mother took me out on her little boat a few times."

It was nice he had better memories of the woman who would eventually sell him for her own survival.

"I'd love that too," Miriam sighed wistfully. "Some day."

"I wonder when all of these some days will come."

"What have you been doing down here?" Miriam asked.

"The same. Reading. Occasionally watching TV. Sometimes using that ancient laptop you gave me."

She had provided him an anonymous internet connection. His gateway to the world, and he was welcome to use it as long as he didn't spill their little secret.

"Should I even ask what you have been seeing?" Miriam narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

"You can ask," Søren shrugged nonchalantly, "... but you already know the answer. Before you judge me, I'll bet anything that you do it too."

"What? Watch porn?"

"Doesn't it pique your curiosity even a bit? How long has it been since you've had sex with a man?"

"Not a pretty answer," Miriam said. Alana's occasional strap-on pounding was the closest she had ever come to a real cock.

"Hang on. Have you ever....?"

Miriam shook her head. The scotch from the club and the wine from just now were surely at fault. Her, a middle aged respectable public servant and Senator for the State of New York, swapping her sexual experience with a boy who by law should not exist outside a government facility.

Truly, it was the end times.

"Never. When I was in high school, Kelsey Seaver from my class bragged to everyone how her Mom had paid for her to go on a month long vacation to one of those male farms in Russia. It was still legal back then."

"Didn't you want to...?" Søren asked, miming out the rest of his sentence. Miriam almost laughed at his coyness.

"My family could definitely afford it, but the whole concept seemed very exploitative to me. Going and having sex with a male who had been groomed from a young age just for that. Back in the early twenty first century, that was actually illegal."

"So... never then?"

Miriam shook her head.

"Wow. Back at the centre, we'd occasionally have wealthy women come and buy our time. I was picked quite often."

"I'm sorry that happened to you."

"Don't be," Søren grinned. "It gave me some respite from those tubes and that electrode. I would at least be awake and conscious, even if being ridden by some filthy rich hag. Over time, I learned English because the ladies liked it when I could talk to them."

Miriam curled her arm around Søren and pulled him to her. He was still scrawny, but getting better.

"Can I ask you something, Miriam?" he asked, absent-mindedly twirling his spoon. "What happened to the rest of the boys who were with me?"

"I don't know." It was the truth.

"I didn't even know any of their names," Søren admitted, looking sadly at his food. "Just their whispers. We were kept on so many drugs that we barely got to talk. However, when the lights went out, we whispered. In different languages and different words, but distinct voices."

Miriam held his head on her lap and ran her fingers over his scalp and neck. Her fingers ran through his hair and caressed his skin while he went on.

"The boy in the bed beside me. At first he used to scream Ta'azor li! hatzel oti! very often. The supervisors would come and subdue him with tasers. The one day when he was particularly noisy, they took him away. I don't know what they did, but he came back silent. When the lights went out, he used to cry and still softly say between his sobs - Ta'azor li! hatzel oti!"

Miriam clenched her eyes shut. It was painful to hear. She could not even imagine how painful it would have been to experience.

"Another boy tried to escape his paid date. It was his third attempt at freedom. They caught him as he was trying to cross the laser fence surrounding the facility. To make sure he didn't try it again, the guards brought his leg down forcefully on the fence, severing it entirely from just above the knee."

Søren paused to note the horrified expression on Miriam's face out of the corner of his eye. He chuckled and turned his head until he looked up at her with a baleful look writ large on his face.

"We were there for producing sperm, Miriam. The other parts of us were not important and hence, fair game."

"No human should be treated like that."

"There's the rub, Miriam," he said with a wistful smile. "We weren't human. We were strictly speaking factories."

Søren finished the last of his food and went to clean up. Miriam always knew what had happened to the boys, but the details got to her even now. She had seen first-hand the cruelty women had dealt out to men everywhere. The recently anointed Pope Catherine even justified it with the millennia of mistreatment they had endured before the incident.

Two wrongs would definitely make a right. No other way it worked.

"They're only scared," thought Miriam. "Scared that we might all die out. Fear makes people irrational and desperate."

When Søren returned, he could sense that she was still deep in her reverie. Silently, he slid in beside her and grasped her hand. There were no words spoken, just a quiet understanding of what they were each going through. The uncomfortable silence hung in the air for a few more moments before he grabbed the remote control.

"Let's lighten the mood, shall we?" he said. "It's a downer talking about the outside world. I still haven't finished watching one of the videos. Care to join me?"

She watched as the large screen opposite to them came to life. A woman with long brown hair was on her hands and knees, receiving a thorough fucking from the musclebound black man behind her.

"That almost looks painful," Miriam winced. "It's like he's hurting her on purpose."

The man held her hips and kept pounding her. The camera angle shifted to showing his thick cock sliding in and out of her pussy. His balls swung and slapped against her every time he pushed forward.

Miriam leaned forward, growing intrigued by the scene playing out. The man flipped the woman onto her back and thrust into her again. The female star's legs were slung over his shoulder.

Her experience with Alana's strap-on was nothing like this. Alana took care to ease her into the process. She was tender and made sure that Miriam never got more of the strap-on than she could handle. It took Miriam by surprise the one time she looked down to see all of the phallus inside her.

The male talent on screen was obviously less concerned. The woman made exaggerated moans and shrieks of encouragement and her eyes went wide.

"Why is she making that noise?" Miriam asked, feeling it grate against her ears.

"I honestly don't know," replied Søren. "It seems the viewers of the last century liked sounds in their porn which no sane person would actually make during sex."

Miriam nodded while watching the action. She was aware of a tent-pole in Søren's pants.

"Wouldn't you rather watch this alone?" she asked, splitting her attention between the screen and the teenage crotch beside her.

"I don't mind if you don't," he retorted with a smirk. "Do you want to see it?"

"See...?" her questioning voice trailed off. He stood up in front of her and placed his hands on the waistband of his pants. Instinctively, her hands held his wrists before he could lower his pants.

"Don't. You've been through so much. You're just a kid and you think this is how you can repay me for keeping you safe. You don't need to."

"I want to," he said, his clear hazel eyes captivating her gaze. "You're out there fighting for me and all I can do is stay here and hide. Let this be the great thing I do with my life -- making you happy."

Miriam smiled. The sincerity in Søren's voice and the earnest pleading in his eyes got to her.

"You will have to help me," she said, removing her hands from his wrists. "I have no idea what I'm doing here."

Søren dropped his pants to his ankles. His cock stood out towards Miriam. It angled slightly to the left and still had the ghost of a surgical scar from his time at the facility.

It looked so different from the strap-on she was used to. The pale erection culminated in a pink mushroom head. Miriam looked at it from all sides.

"Go ahead. You can touch it."

With a great degree of trepidation, Miriam reached one hand towards it. She saw it stiffen when her hand was inches away from the head and looked up.

"Go on. It's right there," he beamed down at her.

The moment she grasped her fingers around the shaft, she knew the difference. A lifeless silicon dildo was one thing. The cock in her hand felt alive. It pulsed and throbbed in her hand. She rubbed her palm from the ridge of his head down towards his balls. She held his cock against his stomach and surveyed the network of veins.

"What are you waiting for?"

"I... umm," Miriam started. "I have no idea what do now."

"Hold it at the base and move your wrist up and down. Slowly."

She tried an experimental stroke and looked up at Søren for approval. He nodded and she repeated her motion. Her hand moved slowly all the way from the base to his cock head before beginning its equally slow journey back.

Søren threw his head back as Miriam jerked him in slow, languid strokes. Holding the base, she gradually varied the pace of her movements. He responded with a low moan, unlike the extended sounds from the porno still playing across the room. She paused to mute it.

Miriam repeated her motion again and again. She felt the cock harden in her hand.

"Miriam, I'm about to-"

The warning came a bit too late. White cum burst out of the end of his cock. She was shocked and took the first two bursts on her chin. The subsequent ropes landed on her hand and the bed. She held her hand to her face and observed the cum tenaciously hanging on to it.