Joy, Atticus, and Catty catch up

The meetup with Juniper went as expected. She didn’t seem surprised that it took me as long as it did. Her only shock was that I ONLY had eight couplings. “Girl, you’re going to have to get faster unless you want to spend all day on your belly!”

Naturally she wanted me to describe Noah’s actions and seemed to really enjoy my embarrassment about it, although she chalked up my embarrassment to being new to this society and not this gender. She tried to get more detail about each of my couplings, but when I told her they were all ‘normal’ after Noah’s, she seemed to be satisfied with that description. Thankfully she was willing to call it a day after another cup of tea and took me home.

Once inside I located the shower and found out that even an hour spent under the hot water couldn’t clean this dirty feeling from my soul. I also found out that keeping me ‘plugged’ for 45 minutes was the acceptable time frame as the sex toy device fell out at that point.

By the time Atticus got back I was curled up on the couch, clutching my cup of coffee like it could defend me from the thoughts and memories refusing to leave my mind. For several minutes he didn’t notice anything out of sorts with me and instead sat down and described his day. Evidently, he had to take a long test that ended up declaring he was highly intelligent, which was no surprise, but not well educated. I could understand his dismay as a man who held several higher education degrees myself, but it made sense. None of us were educated with the technology or even learning methods of this time. He finally said he was to report to the local university and start an internship with a professor there in the morning.

It was at that point that Atticus seemed to recognize I was only half listening and stuck in my own world. But as he was asking how my day went, Catty barged in. Much like Atticus, she didn’t take the time to read the room before she started to describe how her day went. But unlike Atticus, her day was far more relevant to me.

Once she sat down, Catty leaned forward and looked very concerned. “Atticus, James, we’re going to have to move on from here. And the sooner the better.” Turning to me directly she continued, obviously not knowing what happened to me today. “James, you’re so lucky you stayed inside. From what I read about this place’s fertility problems, they go to great lengths to impregnate women. They are amazingly technologically advanced, and the majority of that technology is used to impregnate…”

As much as I was trying to stay calm, my face had to be telling the story of my day as Catty not only stopped talking but got up form her chair and kneeled in front of me, resting her hands on my knee. “James, you did stay inside, didn’t you?

It was the concern in Catty’s eyes as much as anything else that got me crying. Between bouts of tears and sobbing I was able to tell them about my day. From Juniper simply walking in and introducing herself, to my hours spent being coupled over and over. I didn’t add many details, but I could tell my story of being bred was affecting Atticus. I can’t blame him as I’d probably find it arousing myself if I hadn’t been the subject of the event.

Catty, to her credit, was comforting and waved off any more discussion until we all processed what we’d learned and had a meal together. Even as foreign as they were in this world, just going through the normal motions of setting a table, sharing a meal, chatting, and cleaning up, did wonders to reduce my stress. I hadn’t even realized just how much it was still affecting me until I tried to pour us glasses of water and couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.

When we re-assembled back in the living area, we picked up where we left off. Atticus explained his day, in abbreviated form, to Catty. He admitted that if we were going to stay here for any amount of time, he’d be fairly useless as most of his day would be spent learning his new job.

Once Atticus was done, I explained what I’d learned about the WINII system and economy in general. About how I’d be showered with money and was expected to live a life of luxury. And coupling. When I explained the Eileen I was currently wearing both Atticus and Catty seemed immediately interested in its extra abilities, until I explained how she had basically participated in my coupling by incapacitating me with pleasure. They grew even more concerned when I told them I didn’t know how to take it off.

Atticus moved to sit next to me and fiddle with the little pip behind my ear while Catty went back into what she learned in the library. And what she learned was frighteningly little about what we wanted and savagely much about what would happen to me. My situation was even more dire than I thought. Where my biggest fear was being **** to have sex over and over and over in this body, Catty learned that if we stayed, I’d almost assuredly get pregnant during this first fertility period. She knew of the recommendations of number of couplings per day and per fertility period, but she also found out that if I weren’t pregnant at the end of that time, I’d end up at my appointment with the fertility clinic. There, they’d put even more technology to use and try to artificially inseminate me.

It seems through many reasons, both men and women here were very infertile. Therefore, every effort was put into making every opportunity of gaining pregnancy into reality. The problem when it came to Catty and I was that we didn’t share their infertility. If I wasn’t already pregnant from my eight couplings today, I’d likely get pregnant in the couplings between now and the end of my fertility. If, by whatever grace of God, I didn’t become pregnant by then, their artificial insemination system which selected only viable sperm from multiple donors, would ensure my fertile egg was implanted.

As horrifying as that was, Catty continued to explain, it was only the reason that they had to move on quickly. She learned that changing genders was something they’d perfected almost a century ago. Evidently it was the technological envy of the world, and a technology that they shared very sparingly. And while they were more than happy to swap a non-fertile woman into a man, and almost demanded they swap any man into a fertile woman, there was no record of them ever changing a fertile woman into a man. We’d have to move on to another nation if we were to change me back. And the only one she heard of that shared the technology was a place referred to by its acronym. The AoMP.

As much as it was horrifying, I agreed that I’d be willing to give up my masculinity if it meant saving our world. To prevent the nuclear war. But that was the final straw. As advanced as this society was, and as meticulous as their history was, it only went back to just before their industrial revolution. They had vague records of a time spent in shelters, but they didn’t have records of the war that pushed them into the shelters, let alone what caused the war. Catty’s searches ended when one of the librarians explained that they’d never shown any interest in the past and were always simply interested in improving their present and trying to make the future possible.

I tried to keep the disappointment out of my voice as I summed up what we’d discussed. “So, even if we stayed, even if we accepted Atticus getting stuck as their equivalent to a graduate assistant, even if I accepted remaining female and possibly getting pregnant, we still wouldn’t be able to find the information we’re looking for.”

Catty nodded in response “That’s the conclusion I came up with too. And what makes this even more frustrating is that learning about other civilizations is forbidden to most people. As I’m on record as coming from the Eastern Coalition, I was able to learn about them, but I didn’t get much further than finding out the Eastern Coalition is where our eastern Europe is and that they’re far more xenophobic than the Free Union of Western Nations is. It’s unlikely they’d let us in, let alone let us poke around for information.”

At that point I stopped paying attention to what Catty was saying. Instead, my attention was drawn to one of Eileen’s information pallets that popped up suddenly and occupied almost all of my vision. “Warning, unauthorized attempt at EILEEN device. Security measures activating in 5, 4, 3…”

As the numbers counted down it took me a moment to realize it must be talking about Atticus’s work at getting the pip off from behind my ear. “Atticus you have to….”

I was too late in my warning. I felt a slight buzzing from around the pip, but it must have directed quite the surge into Atticus. He immediately froze, his muscles all tensing up as he cried out behind a forcibly clenched jaw. When I turned my head to look at him, pulling the pip from between his fingers, Atticus relaxed completely and passed out on the couch next to me.

After Dr. Rodriguez and I made sure Atticus was okay, she went about getting a pillow and blanket for him as even together we’d have a hard time moving his **** form into the bedroom. While she prepared the couch as his bed I focused on Eileen. “Eileen, are you okay?”

Eileen answered in her standard pleasant voice, even if her answer was a bit cryptic. “I am fine Joy, thank you for asking. Full security measures have been implemented. You will not be able to remove me until you visit a store and get me re-set. Would you like to set up an appointment for this?”

I almost answered yes, but when I remembered that would involve me going outside, I shook my head no. “No. But I don’t understand. I couldn’t remove you before. I tried, when Noah was… well, when he was… you remember.”

Eileen’s answer was frustratingly obvious, “You were trying to physically remove me without informing me you wanted me to be removed. You must inform me of your desire to physically remove me before I can be pulled from your skin. This ability, as a security measure, is now removed entirely and I cannot be removed until you visit a store and get me re-set.”

I try my best to not scream in frustration. Of course, all I had to do to remove the pip was mentally tell it I wanted it removed. And now that I tried to bypass that… I couldn’t remove it. It just fit in with the line of luck I was experiencing.

When we had Atticus set up, Catty and I moved into the bedroom to give him some privacy. She sat down on the bed while I took the chair and we both started doing research on how to get out of the country. Between her speaking to her WINII and me internally speaking to Eileen we slowly found out just how difficult this would be. Not only did the Free Union of Western Nations let very few immigrants in, it specifically did not allow fertile women to immigrate out without special reasons. As two newly immigrated fertile females, we couldn’t find any reason they’d let us leave.

While looking at ways we could leave without going through official channels we both found out that they didn’t have air travel. No jets, no planes, no airports. Their train system, however, was vast and all encompassing. It only made matters more complex as we couldn’t seem to locate a map of the country. Even the train maps themselves didn’t show political or physical borders, just the tracks, the stations, and any transfers to different lines.

After hours and hours of scouring through different train lines, different stations, and different timetables we figured out that any internal travel within the Free Union had no security checks or even tickets. You could simply walk onto a train and ride it anywhere. Trains leaving the Free Union, however, all had security checks of one kind or another. Except for one.

With the train station, line, and timetable up on an informational pallet in front of me I turned and looked at Catty, excitedly saying “I think I have it! There’s a train leaving that has no security checks. It’s the only one I can find that doesn’t require a scan or ticket or anything. But it only travels once a week and it’s leaving in…” I glance at the timetable again and compared it to the current time “…thirty minutes. If we leave, like right now, we can make it to the station we came in on and catch the next train to…” I double check the name of the destination “…Gilead.”