After the Great Shift, population numbers were in severe decline. It wasn’t just the people who perished on Shift Day or those we lost in the months of chaos afterwards, it was the birthrate - about a third of what it had been before the Shift.
It was understandable. Practically every existing relationship in the world had been ripped asunder, partners dispersed across the globe (with many millions still trying to find their way back home) or placed in bodies completely incompatible with their ex-spouses. Reforging those broken pairings and forming new ones was slow. Half of men were now women, and half of women were now men, and -for the most part- sexualities had been unaffected, rendering around half of the population technically gay overnight.
Then there were matters of age, religion, culture, and language, all of them scrambled. The awkwardness and generational divide of dating a smoking hot, teen blonde with the personality and values of 90-year-old Sudanese man. Finding common ground was hard these days.
It wasn’t that babies weren’t being conceived - with sex being one of the few universal cultural touchstones we still had in common, there was plenty of it going on (too much if you ask me), but few males had the nurturing instinct that a lifetime of hormones and cultural programming instilled. Most ex-males avoided pregnancy like the plague.
Ultimately the state intervened once it became clear how dire the situation was. The Compulsory Coupling Draft, the government called it. My blood ran cold the day they announced it. Forced breeding. We - everyone with a functioning uterus, female-born or not- was to be assigned a partner. A stud. We were to be bred like animals! Me! A respected surgeon and father of four! Given to some man to be impregnated again and again like some puppy mill. I was only just coming to terms with the fact the uterus between my legs might actually be mine, and now I was being told it was actually property of the state.
The man I was given to, Cathlene, was a thug and a brute. Testosterone psychosis. By all accounts, his body had been an affable family man once and his mind that of a sweet grandmother. Some women don’t cope well with being thrown into a brain with foreign, male impulses, which can run unchecked, making monsters out of the mildest ex-women. Even if I could escape the draft, there was no escaping Cathlene once he discovered the delights of breeding me. When I tried, the beatings began.
I’ve been lucky so far. I’ve yet to fall pregnant, though not for lack of Cathlene trying. The state monitors all fertiles closely, knows precisely when they’re ovulating. This month, it hit at work. There’s a special breeding room the hospital sets aside for staff-use, lilac-painted and decorated with photos of babies. I strip, lie back and stare at the ceiling. Cathlene spreads my legs eagerly and has his rough way with me.
“Perhaps this will be the month,” he croons, and I try not to flinch as he strokes my abdomen. The thought of my belly swelling with this man’s child makes my skin crawl.
I stifle noises of discomfort as he mounts me, knowing he hates anything other than my fake orgasms. His leering face is red and sweating as he rocks above me, growing in pace and intensity until he’s practically berserk, slamming me against the bed as he all-but foams at the mouth. A sticky warmth blossoms within me and I shudder, turning away. Suddenly he grabs my neck, squeezing. “You didn’t say ‘thank you’,” he snarls.
“Thank you,” I croak out.
“Hngh. Good girl.”
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