Stepford Surrogates

Lois Lane blinked, as the door closed and locked behind her. It felt like she had stepped backward in time. She stood in a brightly-colored living room with a sunken conversation pit. Gold and yellow floral wallpaper on the walls, couches and plush chairs those odd shades of yellow that Lois associated with the 1970s. There was a large, modern flatscreen television on the wall, but it was contained in a golden picture-frame.

The reporter stepped gingerly forwards. Her feet sank into plush yellow carpet.

"Just a minute!" A cheerful voice came from somewhere else. Lois raised her head to stare down a yellow hallway. There were doors leading off of it...and four women emerged from them.

They were dressed conservatively; color-coded in green, red, blue, and orange dresses that hugged breasts and hips. Gold flashed at ear and wrist, pearls about their throats. Their hair in bouffants and buns. Lois felt whorish in her revealing dress, especially when she noted their perfect makeup, lipstick color-coded to their dresses, and when they smiled their teeth were white, even, perfect...

Lois could name each of them. Diana Reynolds, 19, reddish copper hair and green eyes, literature major. Mara de la Cruz, 20, short and heavyset, dark of hair and skin, art major. Tonya Wong, 21, jet black hair with blue highlights, business major. Jenny Dunlap, 22, blonde, slim, athletic, tall, almost flat-breasted, majoring in modern dance.

Except these women were...different. Their breasts were bigger, Lois noticed that at once, and it wasn't just wonderbras; Jenny Dunlap looked to be at least a D-cup now, and the cleavage on display didn't show any of the bandages that implants would leave. Lois hadn't seen any pictures of their asses, but she noticed that each derriere was round and full, hips wide and swayed provactively. Their posture was perfect, the smiles constant, the manners impeccable...yet...

"Hello!" Diana said. Her green eyes fixed on the reporter, and Lois could see they were dilated wider than normal. "How are you? I'm Diana, but you can call me Di..."

The smiles never wavered. The tones were friendly. The women took Lois on a little tour of their "home." Color-coded bedrooms and bathrooms. A shared kitchen, dining room, laundry facilities. A nursery. Lois noted, dimly, that while there were four women there were five of everything else...an empty room (violet as Lois Lane's eyes), five chairs and place settings at the table, five cribs in the nursery.

Each woman responded to questions when asked. Their stories were all the same. Lost in life. They decided to look for a job. Fell into sex work. Blaze offered them a way out...and they came down here. Yet it always felt like there was something missing. The women smiled, but didn't emote. Their answers couldn't have been pre-recorded, but they felt rote, or maybe as if they were reading them off a screen.

When Lois asked about the surrogacy, the women all placed hands on their midsections at the same time as they stood next to their color-coded cribs. Lois couldn't see any bumps there, but then the women had only been missing a couple of weeks...

"Did...did Angelica Blaze impregnate you all? Lois asked.

The women sighed.

"It's too soon to tell. But she visits us. She's really very considerate. We're so lucky to be surrogates for her. She takes care of us so well. We don't lack for anything."

Lois stared around at the living room, where they had ended up again. She frowned. One thing she had noticed was that there didn't seem to be any entertainment at all. No books, no computers or smartphones, no sources of music, no arts and crafts, no games...nothing except the great flatscreen in the living room.

"What do you do for fun?" The reporter asked.