The Time: The year 2100. Actuaries had predicted the United States would have a population between 400 and 500 million.
Instead, it's 80 million.
A century from now, it's expected to be 14 million.
It wasn't a natural disaster - over the consequences of climate change and the usual seasoning of war and disease. Actually, elsewhere in the world, things are largely as the forecasters expected.
Only in America has future history taken a very peculiar turn.
Look around you - a modern Southeastern city. Men going to work - because men and only men are once again the breadwinners. Boys going to school together - that, too, has returned. Everyone in suits, in uniforms, in the livery of the Reconserved Age.
If there is poverty, it lies outside the gentrified walled city-states, the old freeways turned on their sides to form the foundations of very effective walls. There are airports - men fly among the principalities (those, too, back). They engage in commerce, sports - all the martial and masculine virtues.
Civilization goes on.
Yet it goes on maimed. The world at large is dying - America a great bit faster than its former rivals, now vastly more powerful.
For they did not outlaw being female.
...
It did not start this way. It had started as all patriarchial movements too - well-meaning, just ill-advised. Wanting to return the man to the center of decisions that were never a man's to make in the first place: What to place, where, and when and for what purpose, even whether or not the placement was pleasurable or painful.
In was, in short, about power. The Sexual Revolution had taken place; the Reconservation had yet to do so.
The speculation to outlaw contraception had seemed like a comic sideshow to the 2012 Presidential Election. It had outraged women - a clear threat to their standing.
However, there was a hidden force to this threat: Most women who aligned with the conservatives at this time were past childbearing age. The most common form of birth control among conservative women was sterilization.
In other words, talk of defunding contraception in general was like schools for parents whose children had graduated from high school - not their problem.
The Republicans of that time had it down cold: Republican women would, when push came to shove, NOT abandon their party. They had nowhere to go. If they did go, they would never come back.
The levers of social standing and security turned out to be effective enough.
So the laws passed, inexorably, first state by state, then nationally.
There were allusions to Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale; the reality was vastly worse.
Younger women, of all backgrounds, reacted - first slowly, then in much greater numbers, with the one thing they could, in the only way they good.
The followed the example left to them by their conservative sisters -
They had themselves sterilized.
Gradually, the laws were tightened. Life began not only at conception, but with ovulation. To deny this was murder, too.
Again and again, the male allegories to the concern were simply ignored.
Ligations were illegalized.
It became a capital offense to obtain a hysterectomy, full or partial, for any reason, before menopause.
The standard for having obtained menopause was to be determined by rigorous medical examination.
Suicide rates among fertile women soared.
Since this, too, was by extension murder - by now, the potential to ovulate was considered sacred, women were effectively reduced to breeding stock.
The emphasis rotated from legal prescriptions - to psychological remedies.
Then a group of prayerful physicians had the obvious solution:
Women were girls who matured to adulthood.
The critical function of woman was to act as vessels for procreation.
There was no need for vessels to have independent thinking.
A process was developed to apply ultrasound to emergent nerve centers once the gender of the unborn fetus was identified.
Male fetuses were not given this treatment.
Female ones were.
The crashing birthrate stabilized, for a while.
However, outrage at the new practice prompted a wave of violent resistance - the Freethinker War. Men - lovers, husbands , brothers and sons of maladjusted women fought. They were defeated, of course -what man by any valid definition would join such a cause? This is what we are taught. What we have been taught for four generations.
Still.... it is an empty world, getting emptier.
From time to time, I will approach the huge hatcheries - they were once hospitals for all varieties of illness but with the decentralization of medicine, the huge fortress-like structures have but one purpose now - warehousing the sisters we never had.
Yet we are missing something... something essential. We know it. We can see it clearly in the failing fertility rates in the never-waking daughters of never-waking mothers of never-waking grandmothers. This cannot continue.
Outside, the rest of the world despises us, aghast at what America has become.
They fear our wrath yet. Mostly they go their own way, despising us.
They cannot touch how much we hate ourselves, for what we have done to our sisters.