Charles Maine - World Without Men

“You’re beginning to understand, aren’t you, Aubry. They learned about Aquilegia from you, and they learned about me from her. I was one jump ahead. I managed to get away and I’ve been on the run ever since. That’s why I’ve come here — for refuge. I need help, and because of what Aquilegia was to you, I have the right to ask your help.

“You still don’t see the whole picture, do you? The man in deep freeze was the answer to the problem. I spent ten years in the secret laboratory making cytological tests on thousands and thousands of male remains, the majority no more than dehydrated skeletons. And then we found a man in a state of good preservation. He was dead, admittedly, but whole and undecayed, with a cellular structure giving for the first time a real chance of carrying out practical work on the chromosome structure of the cell nucleus.

“We couldn’t bring the man back to life. We couldn’t even bring a single cell back to life. But chromosomes aren’t living things; they are complex molecules arranged in patterns on the cell nucleus, and they operate by biochemical mechanisms. What we could do, by precision microsurgery, was to transfer the chromosomes from a dead male cell to a living female cell. In that way we hoped to create a synthetic male gamete.

“Don’t you see how, Aubry? Here you are, living in a stable society, believing that man was obliterated by nature as an unnecessary complication and was replaced by parthenogenesis. Then why should the government carry out secret experiments to recreate man? I’ll tell you why; because it’s all a lie. There is no such thing as natural parthenogenesis, and man didn’t disappear naturally; he was destroyed. Our society is founded on that lie. We are creatures of sex living by force and unnaturally in a sexless society. We’ve adapted ourselves, by government edict, and by necessity. That’s what the general adaptation syndrome is. We’ve diverted the sex instinct into other channels so that we can still achieve a satisfactory emotional outlet. But there’s one big difference, Aubry. The government tries to tell us it’s normal, but in fact it’s abnormal. We’ve become a race of Lesbians.

“You’ve never thought about it in that way, have you, Aubry? You don’t even know what a Lesbian is. You’re one, and I’m one, and you accept it as normal, because govern mental policy has made it normal. It’s all part of the pattern, the long-term pattern. Preserve the here-and-now at whatever cost, whatever perversion. Canalize the emotions, pervert the irrepressible natural instincts, and keep the women of the human race quiet and relatively happy. Build a stable social structure on that foundation and control it rigidly by ruthless laws of life and death. Enforce induced parthenogenesis and compulsory euthanasia as the fundamentals of modern economics; but all the time experiment and experiment to produce a male gamete and create a living male being to resolve the inevitable result of thousands of years of parthenogenesis. Do you know what that result will be, Aubry. Do you know what will happen if the human race continues to survive by artificial division of the female cells? The result will be a world of robots, assembly line creatures all alike, cast in a limited number of patterns, and working blindly under the dictates of an impersonal governing authority.

“Yes, Aubry, I said impersonal. You don’t know why, and yet you have worked for a government department. What do you know of the government? Not the officials and the administrators, but the real controlling authority which determines policy in all spheres of life. Have you ever met a true member of the government in this country, or in any her? Do you know who or what it is that governs our destinies? You look surprised, and you won’t believe what I’m going to tell you, but it’s true….

“Don’t look so anxious, Aubry. I’m not going to shock you or frighten you. All I’m going to do is tell you something you don’t know, something no one knows, apart from the few members of my own circle, who are regarded as subversive. You see, we believe in truth for its own sake, just as Aquilegia did. We hold that perversion is evil, whatever the motive night be, and that the modern structure of society, based as is on statistical birth and murder and on a homosexual morality, is wrong and corrupt throughout. And above all we object to the government of human beings by a…”

“By a what?” Aubretia asked.

Aquilegia (or her parthenogentic double) remained silent for some time. Her eyes, though pale and pink, seemed to have acquired an intense burning quality that made Aubretia feel uncomfortable. Indeed, the whole trend of the near-monologue had been disquieting in the extreme, and she was not at all sure that her unkempt visitor might not be insane. Nevertheless, she was faintly aware of an undercurrent of response in her own subconscious mind, an inaudible harmonic that resonated occasionally when certain things were mentioned. The man, for instance. A fiction, obviously. Men were extinct, and it was fantastic in the extreme to allege mat there was in existence a secret government laboratory containing the bodies of many men, dry and desiccated, on which experiments were being carried out to reverse the very course of nature itself. But somewhere deep within the darkness of her mind, a pallid phantom image floated hazily, the image of a white hard-boned creature of ungainly angles and unexpected hair, lying on an operating table. She could not pinpoint the image, for it was too nebulous to stimulate a definite memory train, and she attributed it to the unsettling effect of Aguilegia’s discourse.

“I think,” Aquilegia finally said, slowly, “that I’ve said enough for the present. Quilly tried to break you in, once upon a time. But since then they’ve been at work on your mind and there’s a limit to what you can absorb.”

Aubretia leaned forward earnestly. “Please tell me,” she said urgently, “about the government.”

Aquilegia shook her head slowly. “Enough is enough. Let me stay here tonight and perhaps tomorrow I’ll tell you some more.”

“You can stay provided you tell me now.”

“Well, just a brief clue, perhaps. Why do you suppose society is organized on an inhuman statistical basis, on a basis of applied mathematics? What type of government would regard human beings as integers in a vast complex equation? What kind of governing authority would regard individuals as units of productivity and scale their life according to their productive capacity?”

Aubretia shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

“I’ll tell you,” Aquilegia murmured quietly. “We are governed by a machine — an electronic brain, a computer containing more than ten billion digital counting units, with memory banks and integrating networks. In every way it is more efficient than the human brain. It can solve long-term problems of social organization and stability, but it has no soul.”

“Where is this… this brain?” Aubretia asked. “Everywhere. It has cellular units in every country of the world, and all the cells are linked together into a vast world brain. The brain is guarded by a small force of trained technicians who feed it with statistical information concerning every conceivable aspect of human existence. And with that information the brain plans the future development of society. It is soulless and infallible; and it is secret. Even to know about it can be fatal. That is why I am a fugitive and why you, too, Aubry, may become a fugitive before very long, in spite of their hypnotic brainwashing treatment. You recognize the truth of what I am saying, don’t you, Aubry?”

“Yes. At least I think I do… some of it.”

“The master brain is the supreme authority, and its computations form the basis of law and conduct, of life and death. Very few of us know the truth. The great majority of women in the world live their lives in organized peace and harmony, never enquiring beyond the erotic boundary of their own sex hormones, and accepting the mortic laws with out question.”