It Doesn't Make You Male

You suddenly find yourself propped up in a hospital bed, dressed in a hospital gown, still female, and with your belly swollen. The space is made from curtains and flimsy-looking walls. There's no window. The ceiling is high above you. The floor is glossy wood and has a red "RS" painted on it. On the wall nearest you hangs a whiteboard that proclaims "BREEDER: Doe" and has some other stats written in below it.

You gesture with your hand to try to get the holographic display back, but nothing happens. You start to move your leg to get up from the bed.

"What are you doing?" exclaims a female voice. "Do you want them to strap you down?" You look over and see a young woman in another bed, also apparently pregnant. There's a whiteboard near her that says "BREEDER: J. Nguyen."

Before you can say anything, a masked man in scrubs walks in through a curtain. It takes you a second to realize he's probably a doctor.

"Feet up," he says, pointing to the stirrups attached to the end of your bed.

"I'm not supposed to be here!" you insist.

"You have a working womb, don't you?" he growls. "You're supposed to be here."

He performs a quick gynecological exam, proclaims that all your babies seem healthy, and does the same to your roommate.

After he leaves, another masked man brings in food trays containing what looks like high school cafeteria food.

Later in the day, yet another masked man brings you a breast pump. Jessica -- your roommate -- eventually talks you through using it, after a lot of dialogue along the lines of, "What are you trying to pull? You've been doing it for years," and, "You know you're going to be a breeder no matter what you say, and come on, you {I}don't{/I} want to be a breeder in an insane asylum."

You eventually manage to piece together most of what's going on. Some event in the not-too-distant past, probably a pandemic, resulted in a female population of only about 780,000 worldwide. Most nations have imprisoned women in breeding centers. There have apparently been all kinds of experiments with artificial wombs and other methods, but you're just in a repurposed high school gymnasium, in a continual cycle of artificial insemination, pregnancy, and birth.

It's probably going to be a number of generations until things get back to normal. All you really have to look forward to is menopause, when you will be taken out of the breeding center and instead employed in a child care center to raise other people's children.

The only hope you really have is that, somehow, the World Pop app will appear in this version of reality and fall into the hands of someone who will try to alter the situation.