First, a History

To be honest, it was a relief when the last man finally dried up. For a while, I had nightmares of watching my Freddy crumble into a mound of flaky skin and bones. But we moved on. We had no choice. And we quickly realized this wasn’t a tragedy, but a godsend! We could finally throw off the chains of the patriarchy and reform the world in our own image. We could fix the world men had so badly broken.

Oh, how naïve we were.

The first decade went about as well as we had hoped. After the initial confusion and hesitancy wore off, national borders were torn down. We saw global cooperation that lead to the One Nation, headed by our first Front-Woman, Eliza Kalendi. 

Established in 2045, three years after the Drought began, the One Nation government brought about a drastic reduction in carbon emissions, safe and free healthcare for all, quality education for every woman, wealth equality, compassionate elderly care, meaningful work for all able-bodied women, and a dramatic increase in life expectancy. We created a fair and equal society, where crimes were dealt with swiftly and compassionately. Gone were the days of man’s petty, punitive punishments.

The one thing we didn’t have was more children. Not yet. The men had left us more than enough seeds in the sperm banks to keep the human race going for another millennia, but when the Drought began, we recognized what a precious commodity it would be. Even before One Nation came to power, any existing local governments had already cut off access to the sperm.

Everyone was agreed: no one would be given the right to motherhood until our utopia was firmly established and no man could bring it down.

When our youngest daughters, my Frederiika among the youngest of them, reached the age of 13, Front-Woman Eliza announced that we were sufficiently established to begin mothering again.

That’s when the cracks in our utopia began to show. As we founded the quarterly lottery, granting five hundred interested women access to in vitro fertilization, we saw unrest increase. That first year, violent protestors and mobs filled the streets of Cleopatra, One Nation's capital (formerly Ashgabat, Turkmenistan). Homicide spiked nearly 400%. Dozens of sperm banks were ransacked and burned. And many other tragedies besides.

We were stunned at how polarizing the issue of handling the seeds of life was. Regrettably, we, in the upper echelons of One Nation, laughed off these issues at first. We figured it was a mere anomaly that could easily be addressed by our flawless system.

Three factions quickly formed: the Populists, who believed all women should be given free access; the Privilegists, who believed motherhood was a privilege that should be regulated; and the Futurists, who believed we weren’t ready to bring children into the world.

The heart of the issue had nothing to do with men or their seed, and everything to do with government restricting how women used their bodies. Many women still bore trauma from the men’s reign of abusive control over our bodies. When we failed to release sperm to all interested women, they saw One Nation as worse than the men, because we acted under the pious notion of enlightenment. 

Each faction disagreed vehemently on this issue, and from there, other issues were brought to light and debated ferociously. So heated became the discourse, that no one in any faction would even dare to compromise with another faction over anything.

Thus One Nation ground to a crawl. Our system, thought so perfect, was collapsing around us. Fifteen months after the first lottery, the Privilegist Front-Woman Eliza was assassinated by a Futurist. Four months later, her successor, Populist Front-Woman Georgina was found dead in a park in Cleopatra. The following year, the third Front-Woman, Aisha, another Privilegist, disappeared without a trace while traveling to Beijing.

During this upheaval of leadership, we began to notice a troubling pattern: of the five thousand women who had been selected by the lottery (and several hundred more who had been impregnated illegally), not a single male was born.

Now, as the newly inaugurated Front-Woman, I face not only the fate of my predecessors, but the potential extinction of our entire species.

19 October 2057

Cleopatra, One Nation

I watch the woman approach, her glasses askew. She wears the same skirt as yesterday, now heavily wrinkled. Papers spill from her bag like a volcano, leaving a trail of harmless, white magma behind her.

“Beatrice,” I begin, removing my own glasses to rub my eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you not to sleep here? You have a home—use it!”

“I know, Front-Woman Giulia, I know. It’s just—”

“Yes, yes,” I waive dismissively. No matter how often I try to force my staff to take time off and rest, they rarely listen. There are far too many crises to deal with, and far too few hours in the day to cope with them all. “What do you have for me?”

Beatrice falls into the plush chair across from me, setting her bag beside her with a thunk. “Very little good news, I’m afraid.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Kahirupan Labs just sent me an early draft of their findings.” She rummages in her bag briefly, pulling out a creased memo. “They have successfully inseminated a thousand eggs with Y chromosome sperm cells; however, once the egg is reintroduced into the woman, all the Y chromosomes turn to dust.”

“What happens?”

“Well, nothing. Without two viable chromosomes, the eggs fail to replicate and the pregnancy fails.”

“Does it cause any lasting damage to the woman?”

Beatrice quickly scans the memo, looking for the answer. “In a few rare cases, it looks like less than two percent, some level of infertility has been observed. This is very fresh data, though. It’s impossible to know what the consequences will be.”

My heart aches for even those two percent. What am I forcing them to suffer just so we can create a new male, the very half of our species we had fought against for millennia? Not for the first time, I bemoan the fact that the human race is the only species to have suffered the Drought. 

“Why do our bodies only attack the Y chromosome?” I muse for the umpteenth time. “Have they had any luck growing the embryo within another animal or a synthetic?” I ask.

Beatrice rummages in her bag again before passing me a creased paper. As I scan the document, she begins to summarize it: “Andador has been looking into that, but with no success. Any human comparable uterus, whether bioengineered, animal based, or purely synthetic, either ends up killing the egg within the first two weeks or causes the withering. It doesn’t look like there is any viable method to keep or grow a male child.”

We sit in silence for several minutes, her last words hang heavy in the air between us. I stare at the report in my hands, but don’t read a word of it. The implications are clear: within a century—two if we’re lucky and start rationing again—we will die out. 

Andador and Kahirupan had been our last hope, no other lab, government or private, had been able to do half as well as they had, and yet, in the end, they too had failed. 

A sudden pounding on the door breaks me from my depressed reverie. Before I have a chance to decide whether to tell them to leave me alone or come in, the door bursts open. My secretary, Elena, charges into the room like a tornado. She’s rarely calm, but I have never seen her this excited and at a loss for words. 

“You have to see this!” She says. She taps her watch and the wall across from us bursts into color. I immediately recognize the familiar Privilegist news channel LRN. The headline across the bottom reads: Hurricane forming in Land-Locked Asia. 

My mouth falls open. That shouldn’t be possible, don’t hurricanes need warm ocean water to develop and survive? The pictures on the wall clearly seem to show something that looks like a hurricane.

“We have been monitoring a cluster of storms forming in the regions Kazakhstan, South Russia, and China,” the weather reporter is saying. “As you can see, the clouds appear to be drawing together in the typical spiral formation and eye wall we would only expect to see with a hurricane. It is currently only a category one hurricane, with winds of eighty-three miles per hour, however we expect the storm to continue strengthening over the next few days.

“It’s unclear what kind of weather this storm will bring with it. There appears to be little rain or flooding at this point in time, but our reporters on the ground tell us they are seeing high winds and constant lightning. The storm appears to be heading in a south-westerly direction. If it continues on this same path, we expect it to reach Cleopatra in three or four days. 

“No word, yet, from Front-Woman Giulia or her office on what kind of protections or preparations we can expect from the One Nation leadership. We will continue monitoring the storm as it progresses. If you are in the path of the storm, we recommend stocking up on emergency supplies and preparing for the worst. A storm this unnatural could do anything.”

The reporters drone on, but I turn back to Elena and Beatrice. “Well, they just started a mass panic.”

“Crazy, right?” Elena practically shouts. “And it’s coming right for us! This is so exciting. I wonder what it’ll look like being underneath a land hurricane. I mean, it must be ama—”

“Elena,” I cut her off. “Please shut up, and go find Zadie.”

“Right, yes, sorry Front-Woman.” She looks slightly abashed, but her enthusiasm never wavers. I can practically see her bouncing as she walks out the door.

A few minutes later she leads Zadie into my office. Unlike Beatrice and Elena, Zadie walks carefully, not a hair out of place, her dark suit neat and starched. “Good morning, Front-Woman,” she says, every word careful and deliberate. “What can I do for you?”

“Zadie, why is this—” I motion at the wall “—the first I’m hearing of this storm?” I try to keep my tone even, but I can feel the stress and frustration of being blindsided by a news report leaking into each word. “As head of the Office for Climate Change, I would have expected you to hand deliver a report on this storm cluster yesterday! How am I one of the last to hear of this. It’s heading straight for Cleopatra for God’s sake.”

“Yes, Front-Woman, we have been monitoring the storms for several days.” She remained calm and deliberate with each word, despite my rising anger. “However, it has been changing and evolving each day. It only began spiraling this morning and the eye wall can’t have formed more than twenty minutes ago. I’ve been on the phone withs several of our weather research labs trying to figure out what’s happening. Unfortunately, the private weather forecasters have access to all the same information we do, and they aren’t beholden to the Double Verification Standard before speaking publicly.”

“Well, they’ve called me out specifically for not releasing a statement yet. What is our plan?”

“The storm began forming as a cluster of warmer than usual cloud systems above Altai on Tuesday. Despite heavy winds that night, the clouds remained almost stationary above the city, creating a high pressure bubble surrounded by low—”

“I’m not a meteorologist, Zadie,” I groan. “Just give me the basics.”

She remains unflappable, but dumbs down the material for me. “Tuesday was a stationary storm. Wednesday we began seeing tornados. Thursday the storm system began gathering closer together and the lightning began. Today we see the storm taking shape as a category one hurricane. This system has yet to produce a single drop of rain.”

“Hang on,” Beatrice says, seeming surprised to hear herself speaking. “Did you say it started in Altai?”

“Yes,” Zadie replies flatly.

“As I recall…” She digs through her bag again, pulling out and discarding a variety of documents. “Yes! Kahirupan purchased a small research lab last year based in Altai that turned out to be crucial in developing the method of forcing a Y chromosome sperm to fertilize an egg. But before Kahirupan purchased them, that lab was focused on weather research. Could this be some kind of artificial storm?”

For as long as I have known Zadie, I have never once seen her look surprised. Until now. Her eyes widen, staring at Beatrice, mouth slightly agape. Her fingers begin tapping an irregular rhythm against her leg. 

After a moment she says, “Why hadn’t we thought of that?”

“Go talk to them and find out!” I order.

“We can’t,” Zadie says slowly. “All the power has been knocked out in hundred mile radius surrounding Altai.”

“Figure it out. I need a public statement within the hour.” I stand and dismiss them. As they leave, I walk to the floor to ceiling windows facing East and look out over the glorious, gold and white city sprawling beneath me. Once again I find myself wondering why I ever agreed to lead this planet. I could be at home in the Alps, relaxing with Riika, unperturbed by storms or the inability to create new sperm. Instead… I have to deal with this.

21 October 2057

Cleopatra, One Nation

Yesterday we began evacuating the city as the hurricane became a category five storm with one hundred and ninety-seven mile per hour winds. By Friday afternoon, the storm had finally left its stationary position of Altai and began heading straight for Cleopatra. 

On Saturday, our satellite imagery began picking up odd, rectangular shapes within the clouds. They bobbed along the undulating spirals of the hurricane, clearly not part of the cloud, but what else could it be?

This afternoon, I stand at my window again. The sun reflects off the brilliant buildings below as the menacing storm front charges toward us. The evacuation trains speed like lightning into and out of the heart of the city. Beatrice and Elena stand beside me, both appearing moments ago. I half-heartedly try to dismiss Elena, but I can’t blame her for refusing to walk away from such a sinister, yet majestic view, when this could be our final hours.

After another minute, Zadie walks into the office. I don’t turn around. “Front-Woman,” she says, all business. “We have just made contact with the Altai lab.”

My stomach tightens. “Do they know what is happening?”

“Yes.” 

Beatrice and I turn slowly to look at her. Elena remains entranced by the view. 

“And?” I ask impatiently.

“They have reason to believe they caused the storm.”

“Sweet mother Earth, and they’re just telling us—what will it—how did they—are we—” A number of questions war in my mind, none making them fully formed into the air.

“It appears to have been an accident caused by an intern.”

“An intern—?”

Zadie interrupts me with a wave. “Let me finish, Giulia. Several decades back, on a whim, a few old male scientists with nothing better to do tried turning an old children’s story into reality. I believe the story was called Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. They thought they could end world hunger by making it rain food.”

I unintentionally scoffed at this. Typical men wasting time and money on such fantasies instead of actually resolving issues.

“Apparently, they were able to produce small storm systems, but they could never get the storm system to recreate or produce more food than they put into it, so after a few years the project was cancelled.

“The machines they developed to create the storm system were forgotten in a basement in the Altai labs. Last week, an intern assigned to catalog and test all the lost items in the basement discovered the machine and started tinkering with it. Nothing happened at first, so the intern reported it as an unknown broken machine. However, a few days later the clouds began to form above the lab. When the tornados appeared, the city went into lockdown, everyone was forced to stay home.

“But today, when they returned to the lab, they discovered a large supply of their Y chromosome sperm missing.”

“What?” The three of us gasp.

“Several of the units storing the sperm seem to have fallen in the high winds and shattered, however the ground was completely dry. It’s as if there was never any sperm in the containers.”

“How can that be?”

“They believe the sperm was picked up in the wind and carried into the atmosphere, where the seeds of life seeded the storm.”

“So they believe this storm will…” I can’t even bring myself to say it.

Zadie nods. “This is a male storm.”

The four of us turn to the window again just as the first body plummets from the heavens.