Don’t You Cry

Even when I was a child, when this country’s surface was still cool enough to walk on barefoot, I didn’t get on with other children. Mother and Father’s friends, relatives and neighbours would pay visits, bringing with them their droppings, pudgy lifeforms incapable of moving in a straight line, that I was expected to entertain. To form immediate bonds with all, merely owing to being of similar ages. To host tea parties with teddy bears and dolls. To this day I am disgusted whenever I see a toddler trailing a doll behind her – evidence some dim-witted breeder has already decided the caregiving path for their offspring. Passing on the blueprint of the human multiplication process suffocating us all. Using the discreet equipment issued by my employers, I capture the data and send it over to be processed.

I would play along with these cousins and school chums for as short a time as I could get away with, then leave them counting backwards from five hundred or not seek them when they hid or entrance them with an animated film, then I would sneak into the living room and listen while the grownups talked. I let the gentle murmur of their voices lap over me, so unlike the abrasive squeals of my peers, which often threatened to drown me.

When I was a teenager Mother bought me make-up and hair styling tools, the subtext unuttered but as painfully evident to me as the glittery dusting of aquamarine Mother coated my eyelids with, assuring me the powder would ‘make my eyes pop’. Her eyes would have sprung right out of their sockets, may she rest in peace, if she’d known what her daughter was to become.

Throughout my twenties and my thirties I focussed on my chosen career, an endeavour I won't bore you with now. The few female acquaintances I knew spoke of the difficulties of juggling their work lives with their love lives and I nodded along, empathetically I hoped, knowing I would never sacrifice my free time and money bringing a tiny pair of carbon footprints onto the planet. I dutifully held pictures from baby showers and christenings (at arm’s length) and uttered the expected words of congratulations, empty rehearsals almost choking me on their way out as I envisioned every birth as another weight added to the scale that was going to topple the Earth from its precarious balance.

When the agency summoned me in my forties it came as little surprise. It was the destination my train of thought had been chugging me towards ever since I was born.

I first started hearing rumours of the agency’s existence five years after Europe’s one child per couple policy had been implemented. Their too little too late way to tackle the overpopulation destroying the planet. People – idiots – cycling to work, buying energy saving lightbulbs, having showers instead of baths or adopting meat-free Mondays was nothing against the yawning wombs threatening to swallow Earth whole. The agency does what the official legislators secretly wish they could do, but cannot. The rulers need the votes of the liberals who bray about ethics and eugenics and who would shower birthers in all the taxpayers’ funds if they had their way.

I started the training a month after I received the phone call. The agency allows new recruits the opportunity to work the usual leave one is required to give an employer. Helps not raise suspicions, you see. The aim is to reduce the number of tongues, not set them wagging.

All new employees are required to live at the headquarters for one month, in which they will undergo intense training and rigorous testing. There is the psychiatric testing where the subject is presented with images of newborns and monitored for reactions. There is the physical training, where subjects are taught how to subdue a parental unit should the kidnapping be bungled. My least favourite part was learning to negotiate with a child; to win its trust. I eventually learned through roleplay with abductees whose memories were later wiped, the tones and mannerisms to make a child respond favourably. Hunkering down to be on the same level as it, how to make cooing sing-song noises while suppressing the bile that threatened to rise in my throat. My face ached from forced smiling by the end of these sessions. I’m rubbing my jaw right now thinking about it. The agency pays for the best dental care for its troops, by the way, so we can shine the beams of our smiles onto our victims, freezing them to the spot. Just one of many perks.

What the agency does with the children before terminating them is a closely guarded secret that not even I am privy to. There are rumours, of course. Along the lines that scientists are seeing what fuel they can extract from their bodies so we might power what’s left of the planet without overheating it. Or that they are being sold to the highest bidders, who then enter them into arenas and make them fight to the death while taking bets on the outcomes. I’m sure you’ve heard all these theories and a great many more.

There are the field agents such as myself who go out into the wildfire, as we call it, to pick off extraneous infants and deliver them to the laboratories scattered around the country, masquerading as cosmetics warehouses and such. Then there are those whose skills lie in backroom subterfuge; infiltrating online message boards for example, armed to the hilt with arguments for remaining childfree or manufactured evidence demonstrating spouses to be unfaithful and supplying details of reputable divorce lawyers.

Whatever you end up doing with us, I hope you value your time with the agency as much as we value you, all our new students gathered here today, and the important work you are about to set out to do.

So that’s the ‘welcome to week one’ begun. Marianne is handing out goody bags on the table to your left you’ll see as you make your exit. There is a free period now for refreshment and do please introduce yourselves to each other. But don’t go getting too friendly now, as we all know what that can lead to! Just a little bit of agency humour there. I’ll see you all back here to continue your induction at two o’clock.