Nocturnes and Other Nocturnes (9 page)

The Triumph of the Autosomes

None of this is happening yet.

You will be born in a dome. The dome will be attached to other domes by means of circular tubes. These tubes will be narrow, their width able to accommodate a large person, but no more. Distances between domes will vary. The domes will vary in size.

Perhaps these domes will cover the surface of a devastated Earth; perhaps they will constitute the only area habitable by humans on the moon or some distant planet; perhaps they will form an orbiting space colony; perhaps none of these hypotheses will turn out to be correct.

The dome in which you will be born will be a medium-size one. Several adults will be in attendance. There will be a woman, the mother. She will scream. Her feet and wrists will be tied and secured to the metal clasps protruding from the smooth cold ground.

The light will be harsh and bright. There will be men around the screaming mother with the spread-open thighs.

One of the men will stand guard, holding a long metallic rod with a firm black handle. The exposed end of the rod will sizzle menacingly with hot energy.

The mother will be naked. The men will also be naked, except for long black gloves covering their forearms, and short, thick black boots. The men will not utter a word to the mother. Occasionally they will whisper among themselves, sometimes pointing to some part of the woman’s body, sometimes not. Their flesh will not come into contact with hers.

The woman will scream.

Your head will emerge from the mother’s vagina. Your hairless scalp will contrast with the thick bush of the mother’s groin.

One of the men will cradle your head with one of his black-gloved hands. The rest of your body will follow.

Your whole body will be outside the mother’s. Having pulled you from between her legs, one of the men will poke at the vertical slit between your legs, smaller but otherwise identical to the hairless slit between all of the men’s legs. This slit will allow the urethra to evacuate the body’s liquid waste. An umbilical cord will connect the baby to the mother. One of the men will cut the cord with a sharp tool.

You will scream and cry. The mother will scream and cry.

A second head will peek out from between the woman’s thighs. Soft hair will cover that scalp. Black-gloved hands will cradle the head, ease the body’s exit.

Between the legs of the second baby, there will be genitals: a penis.

The man holding the second baby will lay her down on the cold ground between the shackled feet of her screaming mother.

The baby will scream and cry. The mother will scream and cry.

One of them will be holding you. You will scream and cry.

The men will be silent as they leave the dome, wriggling and crawling though one of the connecting tubes.

The man with the rod will stay behind.

One by one, three women – two with female genitals and one with male genitals – will step down from another tube after the departure of the men who are escorting you, carrying you. The women will have waited silently, crouched in the tube. With their bare hands, they will touch the screaming and crying baby and mother. A woman with male genitals will pick up the crying newborn, comforting her.

The women will release the mother. They will drag her and her child out of the dome, through the tunnel by which they came.

Not long after, the remaining man will receive a message. The message will say: The women are back in the enclosure. The message will be communicated through a small implant surgically inserted in all men’s brains during their adulthood ritual at age ten. The man will then leave the dome through the same tube used by the other men.

The newborns, you and your sibling, will be dizygotic twins. Nine months prior to the birth, a woman will insert her hard wet penis through the gates of another woman’s swollen labia, the one who will become the mother. The woman with the male genitals will ejaculate in the other woman’s vagina, and hundreds of millions of spermatozoa will explode into her uterus. Each of these spermatozoa will be composed of twenty-three chromosomes, of which at least twenty-two will be nonsex chromosomes, autosomes. The identity of the twenty-third chromosome will be split more or less evenly between three possibilities: a Y chromosome, an X chromosome, or a twenty-third autosome. All three types of spermatozoa will have the capacity to fertilize an ovum.

Approximately one day before the impregnation, two of the woman’s follicles will develop to maturity, each releasing its egg into her fallopian tubes. These ova will each contain twenty-three chromosomes: one X chromosome and twenty-two autosomes. A distinct spermatozoon will fertilize each one of these eggs. You and your sibling will be the living evidence of the dual impregnation’s success.

The various combinations of chromosomes will have three possible results. The successful impregnation of an ovum by a spermatozoon carrying the X chromosome will create a zygote that will mature into a woman with female genitals. The successful impregnation of an ovum by a spermatozoon carrying the Y chromosome will create a zygote that will mature into a woman with male genitals. The successful impregnation of an ovum by a spermatozoon composed of twenty-three autosomes, twenty-three nonsex chromosomes, will create a zygote that will mature into a man: a human with no genitalia.

The men attending the birth of the twins will judge that you will have matured from a zygote composed of twenty-two pairs of autosomes and one X-autosome pair. Your sibling’s penis will be evidence of her gender, of the absence of a second autosome in the twenty-third chromosomal pair.

Men will have no genitals. They will not breed. The women will breed. That will be the purpose of women’s existence: to breed more men, and to breed more women who will breed more men.

Men will have no body hair, no hair whatsoever. Women will have hair all over their bodies: on their legs and arms, on the top of their heads, and thick bushes in their armpits and groins. Some of them will have hair on their faces, on their chests, and on their backs.

Men will be able to move freely between domes. They will perform a variety of tasks. These tasks would seem meaningless to the women, if the women were ever allowed to witness them being performed. The women will be kept in a large dome – the enclosure – away from any tools or equipment. The women will breed. They will not be required, expected, or permitted to perform any other task.

The first ten years of men’s lives will constitute their childhood.

Like all men children, as an infant you will be entirely covered by a gelatinous membrane. The membrane will feed you. The membrane will extract your bodily waste and recycle it into the dome’s ecosystem. Viscous coils will protrude from the membrane and lodge themselves in your body, through the anus, through the ears, through the nostrils, through the mouth. The membrane will keep you in a perpetual dream state, stimulating your body through the necessary stages of physical development. The membrane will feed you dreams that will condition you to accept the mores of the dome society, and it will feed you dreams that will be indistinguishable from the reality of dome life.

You will turn ten years old. The membrane will retract its coils from your body. The membrane will grow brittle, and you will be released from its embrace. Immediately, you will be surrounded by several men. They will lead you to another dome. This dome will be filled with cold, shiny metallic machines and instruments. There will be a table in the middle of the dome. The men will tell you to lie on it. You will do as they say. They will strap you to the table. They will not administer anesthetic. A laser will cut through the skin on your head and into your skull. You will feel pain. You would scream, but your mouth will be covered with black adhesive tape. One of the men will insert a syringe needle into the tiny hole. He will press down and squeeze the contents of the syringe into your skull. The men will dance around the table, laughing and hooting and pointing at you.

The fluid from the syringe will contain nanomachines that, once in your skull, will build an implant that will embed itself in your brain. The implant will allow the dome computer to relay messages to you. It will allow you to communicate with the dome computer and ask it to relay messages to any other man with whom you wish to communicate.

You will be assigned surveillance duties. You will watch monitors. You will watch for accidents, conspiracies, rebellions, breakdowns, and damage. You will not witness any of these.

You will become twelve years old. Increasingly, you will watch the screens that monitor the women’s enclosure. You will often watch male women thrust their penises into the orifices of other women. During your sleep, you will dream of the women. You will imagine rubbing your body against their alien body parts: their penises, their breasts, their hairy chests, and their hairy crotches. Immediately after waking from these dreams you will feel great pleasure, but it will only be a fleeting sensation. As the details of the dreams unfold themselves to your waking mind, you will be seized by self- loathing; you will throw up.

You will become obsessed with the idea of touching women. You will want to press the palm of your hand against their strange bodies. You will try to imagine the taste of their flesh in your mouth.

You will not mention any of this to the other men.

While on monitor duty, you will notice one woman, a young woman whose face and body you will find particularly attractive. You will dream of her every night, you will dream of feeling her penis thrust inside you between your legs. You will wake up and feel the moistness between your legs, on your thighs. The moistness will not smell of urine. It will be an unfamiliar smell, one you never encounter in the world of men.

The woman on the screen and in your dreams will be your sibling. You will not know this; you will not recognize her. In any case, it would not mean anything to you. “Sibling” will not be a concept in the dome world of men.

Perhaps you will request guard duty and be equipped with an energy rod. Perhaps your familiarity with the monitor system will allow you to steal a rod and sneak into the enclosure. In any case, you will have a rod and you will go to the enclosure, among the women. You will have shed the black gloves usually worn by men.

You will smell the women. You will stare at their bodies.

The women in the enclosure will be frightened by the appearance of a man, you.

Usually, during men’s excursions into the enclosure, the women will suffer violence. They will be shoved, beaten, struck, and kicked. The men will always come in groups. The women will not be able to hide in the open space of the enclosure dome. Sometimes, the men will capture women. They will always take away any woman in an advanced state of pregnancy. Usually, these women will be returned to the enclosure, after their pregnancy has come to term. Sometimes the men will capture unpregnant women, for reasons that the women will never know or be allowed to question. These women will never come back.

The sight of your naked hands will temper some women’s fright. Those women will find in your naked hands the revelation of a certain vulnerability. The sight of your naked hands will increase some women’s fear. Those women will find your naked hands obscene, an indication of a more direct brutality. Other women who will notice your hands will find no meaning in their nakedness. And there will be women who, out of anxiety, boredom, or numbness, will fail to notice your hands.

You will seek out the woman of your dreams. You will dismiss the cramps in your abdomen. You will believe them to be caused by mounting anxiety. You will be too focused on your objective to notice the blood trickling down your thighs. You will find her.

You will be alone, surrounded by women. You will confront the object of your lust, the woman who, unbeknownst to you, is your sibling. She will cower from you. You will run toward her and touch her with the sizzling energy rod.

She will fall to the ground. She will be shaken but not unconscious.

You will push her down completely, her back to the ground. You will hold your weapon close to her face while fondling her testicles. Her penis will grow erect.

You will feel the moistness spreading between your legs. You will take your hand away from her testicles and probe the swelling between your legs. Inside the slit between your legs, your fingers will encounter two labia, a hymen, and a clitoris. There will be blood on your fingers, pain in your abdomen.

Men will have no genitals. Inside the slit between their legs, there will only be the opening of the urethra. You will have genitals like a woman – a breeder – but you will be hairless like men. Your twelve-year-old body will have the angular appearance of a man’s body. Perhaps your hips will curve subtly; perhaps your breasts will possess a budding plumpness.

You will slide her erect penis into your vagina. It will pierce your hymen. You will be unable to distinguish between pain and pleasure. The two will seem to be different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

The women will crowd around the siblings. They will watch the abnormal spectacle of a man – or someone they believe to be a man – having sex.

Despite her terror, your sibling will be overcome by the needs of her penis. She will move her hips to facilitate its stimulation. She will reach orgasm. You will reach orgasm. The jerking of your bodies will throw you from her.

In the wake of sex, your senses will be more acute. The smells of the enclosure – sweat, piss, shit, sex – will assail you. The harsh light will hurt your eyes. The touch of your sibling’s flesh will linger on yours.

You will reach between your legs. Your fingers will be covered in blood, vaginal fluids, and semen. You will throw up.

You will be filled with a rage fuelled by self-loathing. You will attack your sibling with the energy rod. You will beat her and kill her.

You will scream: “I am not a woman!”

What will become of you?

There’s no need to worry.

None of this is happening yet.

Go to sleep.