©Brogan 2007

BREEDER

Chapter 1

ACROSS A CROWDED ROOM

I'm a breeder. One of the lucky few who have been blessed with the ability to keep the human race alive. Less than five percent of all humans walking the earth are breeders now. The rest are clones or sterile.

I met one of my clones by accident. It's rare, but occasionally it does happen. The governors try to space the clones out geographically so that interaction between the clones and their breeder is statistically low. From my clone's dropped jaw and wide eyes, I realized she was more shocked by the encounter than I was.

I had missed my transport appointment and was forced to spend the evening in Los Angeles. I was sitting in a popular gossip bar having a late night snack when she came in with some friends. They were dressed for a night out on the town and, judging from the laughing and non-stop talking, they were having a good time. I didn't want to scare my clone, so I tried to remain as quiet as I could. I have to admit that I kept sneaking glances at her as she ordered her drink. I know it sounds snobbish, but even though she was clearly younger, I think I'm better looking. At least, better dressed. Despite my efforts to stay incognito, one of her friends spotted me. It was the brunette friend with the eyes too close together, that started staring at me. Then the brunette's boney little finger came up and pointed in my direction, I saw my clone look over and turn white. I smiled and waved. She collapsed back into the chair and one of her friends held her hand as she recovered. I retrieved the bill, paid it, and tried to walk out, but my clone ran after me.

She pulled on my arm frantically and with a nervous quiver asked, "Are you a clone or the breeder?

I knew I was going to hurt her feelings, but she seemed to sincerely want to know. "Breeder, I'm the breeder," I said looking down at my new Tarlin-Garfield shoes with the cushion air-electro soles.

I didn't have to look at her face. I could tell by her posture that she was deflated by the answer. The last thing a clone wants to do is meet their breeder. It's a reminder that they won't be contributing to the gene pool, that they're simply here as fillers on Earth.

"Oh." There was a pause and I thought I should leave, but she pointed to her friends and said, "Please join us. We're all clones. I'm sure they'd like to ask you questions. Would you mind?"

I had another three hours before I could try the transport as a standby, so I shrugged my shoulders and joined her table of friends. The bar was geared for talking. The lights weren't too low, the music wasn't too loud and the value units for drinks were just right. It was the perfect place to gossip with your friends.

They all stared anxiously at my clone, waiting for her to tell them.

"She's the breeder."

"Oh!" They said collectively. Then the table went quiet.

Many of my friends are clones, so I tended to get along with them. In fact, some of my best friends are clones. I must admit it was easier for me to be around breeders, because we understand each other. We are afforded more perks than the clones which meant that the clones often envied us because of the perks. One of the perks was that we are given the best jobs, the very cream of the careers. In fact, I rarely told anyone what I did for a living, it tended to make them go nuts with questions.

"Does it hurt to be a breeder?" my clone asked cautiously.

Why clones always asked that, I don't know. I suspected that there was some crazy rumor going around that we got all the perks because it hurt so much to be a breeder. "No, we're given Platazine when they collect the ova. It's all rather pleasant."

They all nodded.

"How often do you donate?" The boney fingered clone leaned forward for the answer to her question.

"Once every three months." I answered.

"Have you ever seen a man?" My clone asked in a whisper of a voice.

I had to smile. "Yes, I've seen several. I've done research in one of the colonies."

They were all impressed. It was one thing to see a man, it was even more impressive to have worked in a colony of men. I knew what was coming next.

"Is it true that they smell and fight with each other?"

I nodded. "They definitely smell like the bottom of a dirty clothes hamper, and they seem to always be pushing each other around or starting fights. The male clones are the worse." I said this but had no real idea of what a dirty clothes hamper smelled like, it was just a turn of phrase we all used to describe an unpleasant smell. We didn't use hampers, we recycled our clothes immediately when they were dirty. That is if we wore clothes. Most of the time we went without them.

My clone asked me, "What's your name?"

"123265."

"Wow. 123265! That's really impressive."

I had to agree, I had a fairly high designation and my name was a dead give away. To end their suspense, I immediately informed them, "I'm part of TOP."

That received a huge nod of approval and admiration, as I knew it would. One of the clones, another brunette with a fairly intelligent look, turned to me, "Is it true people slip?"

I thought about it. I remembered the first time someone slipped after I had joined TOP; it scared the hell out of all of us.

TOP is the Time Observation Project. It was the offspring of the original program, TAP, Time Alteration Project. When time travel and observation was first discovered, we were naive and thought that we could go back and change it without any thought to what we were really doing. We wanted to save the human race from the devastation that The Scourge would bring. But the more we sent people back to correct the problem, the more we altered our own history and made it worse. We had thought that we could control the disease after it had already spread, but we soon realized that we were causing it to recombine and mutate into so many variants that we couldn't begin to find a vaccine for it. We were taking the wrong approach. It was during the second phase when we developed the Time Gate, Phase II, that we learned we didn't have to actually participate in the time stream to observe it.

We discovered that time was like a river and that we could either slip into it and possibly alter it in ways that were detrimental to the human race, or observe it on the side which we referred to as, "the banks." Once we realized that we could travel around the time zone we wanted to observe without participating, we didn't send anyone into the time stream itself, unless absolutely necessary. Observation from the banks was more constricting. It meant we had to take more trips back. But it was worth it to prevent alterations in history that we couldn't control. These days, Surveyors only slipped into time when something went wrong with our time gate or there was a power surge. This happened an average of one out of 2,311 observations from the banks.

We made trips to try and find the vector, the very start of The Scourge. It had taken three lifetimes and we were still tracing the disease back in time. We were hoping that once we had traced it to the original vector, we could then send someone back into the time stream itself, destroy the vector and wipe the disease out of our history.

I was both a Geneticist and an Epidemiologist, which made me an ideal candidate for TOP. It didn't hurt that my biological mother had also been a TAP researcher and a brilliant one at that. I had never met her, she had been dead over five decades when I was conceived, but I heard a lot about her and received a holo-tablet that had her biography on it.

"On occasion, we slip, but not very often. Not as often as the media would like you to believe." I said.

"Have you ever slipped?" My clone asked.

"No, and I've made over 1,000 observation surveys. So you see, it's very rare that it happens.'

"Have you ever seen it happen?" the brunette asked.

I didn't like sharing that information, but I hated lying even worse, "Yes. I've seen it happen, twice."

"Did they live?"

"One did," I said truthfully. "The other fell into the time stream on a rocky shore when they slipped." I thought about Jasper. She was beautiful, funny, and my friend. When the power surge hit last year, she was on the banks of time in New England. She slipped, her body entering the time stream naked and at a height of over 50 feet. She fell straight onto the rocky New England shore, her body broken into pieces on the rocks below a seaside cliff. It had sobered us all up and from then on out we Surveyors weren't so cocky.

They all winced and groaned. 'What happened to the other?"

"Surveyors receive a liquid tracing substance before each survey. It lasts seventy-two hours. If we slip into time, we can be traced and pulled out. It may take some time, but usually, it's done within 45 hours of the slip."

"But I heard that some people come back years older?" My clone was more inquisitive than the others.

"That's true. That's because they're living in the time line they slipped into and it may be years that they live in that time zone before we find them, but it's only minutes, hours or days to us."

They all shook their heads as if it was hard to understand. "Sounds complicated. What do they do when they slip?" A pert redhead, obviously the youngest of the group asked.

"Generally, there's a period of confusion and some memory problems. They have a hard time connecting the fact that they've slipped with what's going on around them. We often find that in the time zone they've been living, they end up in psychiatric institutions for the insane. The people around them think that they're delusional because they keep talking about The Scourge, the decimation of the human race, and time travel. No one believes them. Eventually, they acclimate and adapt, but by then they've already been labeled crazy."

There was a chuckle from the group. I looked down at my chrono and realized that I still had two hours to kill. I ordered another drink and prepared to answer more questions.

"Have you found where The Scourge started?"

"No, not yet. We've gone back a long way, though. I've been as far back as 2086! We have some evidence that it may have started even before then, somewhere on the east coast. I'm scheduled to make a survey of Princeton, New Jersey in the early 21st century. We feel like we're getting close so we've decided to try and hit a time period we believe is before the first vector of the original strain. Or at least we think is a time period before the original vector."

They were quiet, each one staring into their drink. I excused myself to go to the restroom. When I got up, I turned and saw them all staring at me as I crossed the floor. I knew that they would be discussing me, I had one of the most interesting jobs on the planet coupled with the fact that I was a breeder. It made for excellent conversation. I smiled, knowing that my clone would receive an immediate boost in status after I left because everyone would know that her breeder was high up on the food chain!

I returned to find them all locked in conversation and unaware that I was close by. I heard one of them tell my clone, "You ask her."

"Why me?"

"Because she's your breeder."

"Ask me what?" I took my chair at the table.

The clones all looked at each other. I knew what they wanted to ask. "You want to know why you can't donate– right?"

They all nodded.

"To be honest, we don't know why clones and most people born from ova are sterile. As you know, when The Scourge hit, we lost 79 percent of the female population and 98 percent of the male population. Out of the remaining female population, only six percent currently produce ova-the breeders. No clone has produced any viable ova, which means you can't donate. Out of the male population left, only five percent produce any sperm. And of that five percent, only two percent have a pre-The Scourge sperm level. Most of the males that can produce sperm produce very few. The men who can make sperm are electrically stimulated every day to produce semen for cultivation and harvesting. Unfortunately, once we fertilize a donor egg from a breeder with one of these sperms, only 35 percent of the female embryos make it to birth and less than three percent of the males survive. The only way we can sustain a viable population to run the current facilities on earth is to clone from the breeders."

"Can't they do something genetically to make the males produce more sperm?"

"We did genetically alter them so that their testes would be larger and produce more semen, but that hasn't produced any additional sperm. We've developed and tried all types of vaccinations, but the disease mutates and recombines around the vaccine. This disease has had over 1,000 different variants, more than any other disease mankind has known. We still have people working on a vaccine or cure, but they're the most frustrated group of scientist you every want to meet."

One of the clones spoke up, "I saw a male once. He was traveling with a breeder in San Diego. She had him on a leash, thank God, so we were able to get close to him. He had hair on his face!"

I nodded. "Yes, they grow hair on their face, their butts, their legs, their abdomens and just about everywhere."

There was a collective, "Ewwww."

I nodded again. "Yeah, they're pretty disgusting. They tend to look at your breasts when you talk to them. Some of the women who work in the colonies have started to wear clothing during the summer just to keep the males from getting agitated."

"That must be hot." the little blonde said.

"Very. Especially in the Bisbee Copper colony. I can't imagine wearing clothing in 100 ° F weather. It would be so sticky."

I asked the bartender for another drink and she gave me the thumbs up to let me know it was coming. I waited to see if they had any other questions. My clone had one.

"Have you ever been in the Great Hall of Records?"

"Many times."

They all looked at each other. I doubt that they had ever met anyone who had been given access and probably would never meet one again. "Everyone in TOP has access because we have to do homework on the period we are observing. That includes geography, topography, biology, fashion, social nuances, literature, music, anything that may help us decipher and analyze what we are surveying."

"What's it like?" My clone leaned forward. Everyone was curious about the Hall of Records.

"It's incredible. It's filled with media from as far back as scrolls from the Roman Empire, from Livia and Mary Magdelene's time. I didn't tell them that there were books that talked about relationships between a man and a woman. They wouldn't believe me anyway. The history of sexual attraction and reproduction had been erased to protect everyone. Even I had limited access to those records. I was only allowed to read accounts of men and women getting married and having children. I could have read one rather explicit book, or at least that's what the librarian said, "Carnal Knowledge," but she advised me against it.

"It's crude and disgusting what they do to each other."

I took her advice.

There had been a dark period, just after the third pandemic wave of The Scourge swept the earth. People were committing suicide because they missed their spouses or partners. It was decided that future generations would be protected from this emotional devastation. As a result, all literature or media that referred to love or coupling between a woman and a man was banned. Occasionally you would hear of someone turning up with a contraband copy of a Shakespeare play or a Hemingway novel, but it was rare. These works had not been completely destroyed. There were still the originals or copies in the Hall of Records for special purposes.

I answered questions about my life and the TOP project for the next hour and then called the server over to bring my bill. My clone stopped me and said that they would pay for it, it was the least they could do. I thanked them all, grabbed my overnight bag, and made my way to a portal to get to the transport. I was praying I could get a standby seat that someone had reserved and then canceled. There was a good chance, there were lots of transports between Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where I lived. People frequently booked and then caught a different transport. I was in luck that night, there were more than a dozen cancellations and I was second on the list. I got home, fed my dog, Katmandu, and went to bed. It was good to be home.