The Time Bubble Box Set

by Jason Ayres

By the time he had finished speaking, Josh realised he wasn’t dealing with a natural-born male at all. This ‘man’ was transgender and had clearly had surgery at some point. While his features were undoubtedly male, he didn’t have an Adam’s apple. What he did have, was a slim, almost effeminate figure.

  “Oh no, I’m not transgender,” protested Josh. “I’m a real man,” he added. After he said it, he winced, thinking this might have been an incredibly offensive thing to say, but the man didn’t seem fazed by it.

  “Oh yes, that’s what we all say to try and pull the girls,” he said. “They know it’s not true, of course, but it works for me.”

  “Well, it’s true for me,” said Josh. “Where are all the men?”

  “Come on, you know as well as I do they’re all dead. Don’t you?”

  The man peered closely at Josh. “Oh my God,” he said. “I think you really are a man. Here, girls,” he said, accosting two passing young women. “This guy reckons he’s a real man – what do you think?”

  Josh was starting to feel rather uncomfortable as the two women stared at him as if they were examining a specimen in a zoo.

  “Ooh, he looks real, doesn’t he?” said one of the girls.

  “Come on, then, ‘Mister I’m a real man’, show us your bits,” said the other, and they both cackled coarsely.

  “Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I am a real man,” protested Josh, slightly irked at having his masculinity brought into question. “I’m not about to whip my tackle out in the street to prove it, you’re just going to have to believe me.”

  Unexpectedly, one of the women reached forward and grabbed at his crotch, giving his meat and two veg a good squeeze.

  “Ouch! Do you mind, that’s my bollocks!” complained Josh. That had really hurt – she had given his left one a right bruising.

  “EEK!” screeched the woman who had groped him, excitedly. “I think he really is a man!”

  Then she shouted at the top of her voice, “Girls, girls! Over here! It’s a man!”

  Suddenly there was an excited crowd of screaming women rushing towards him from all directions. This was getting seriously out of control. There was only one thing he could do now – run.

  Any hope he had that sprinting away from the scene would be an end to the matter was swiftly dashed. As he ran up the High Street towards Carfax, he could hear the crowd screaming behind him. Now he knew how Lennon and McCartney must have felt. This was like some sort of Beatlemania.

  He tried to figure out what was going on as he ran. All the men were dead, that guy had said. So did that mean Josh was now the only natural-born male left on the planet? It certainly looked that way from the reaction of the crowd.

  As he ran, all he could see was a sea of women. There were plenty of women dressed up as men, and quite a few with varying degrees of transgender, certainly far more than in his own world. But he was pretty certain there were no actual men.

  Some might consider this a fantasy come true. The only man left on Earth, in a world full of billions of horny women? It didn’t feel much like a dream right now – more of a nightmare if anything.

  He wasn’t going to be able to outrun the pack: that was abundantly clear as they began to close on him. He may have the advantage of a male body that was in theory faster than the average woman’s, but that was cancelled out by being fifty-three years old compared to many of his pursuers who were half his age.

  Desperate times called for desperate measures. He tried to avoid committing crimes on his travels unless he absolutely had to. Even when he did, it was mostly victimless crimes like defrauding cashpoints or not paying in chain restaurants. Unfortunately, this was an emergency situation. Spotting a woman on a bicycle waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing, he ran over to her, shoved her off and began peddling for all he was worth.

  “Sorry!” he shouted behind him to the poor woman whom he had roughly manhandled to the ground, and he genuinely meant it. “My need is greater than yours.”

  With pedal power, he turned into Cornmarket Street and weaved his way along, trying to keep his head down to avoid any more unwanted attention. As the sound of the crowd began to fade behind him, he upped his pace, passed Debenhams and the Randolph and continued on into St Giles’.

  There was no point going to the college, as the Professor wouldn’t be able to help him, being dead, but he had to find somewhere to lie low. He couldn’t possibly stay out in the open after what had just happened, but where could he go?

  Getting off the main streets, he turned left down Little Clarendon Street where it was quieter, and then right into Walton Street. It was an area he knew very well. Being there reminded him of a place close by where he might just find a friendly face and sanctuary.

  Abandoning the bike outside the Phoenix Picturehouse, he walked, head down, the last hundred yards or so to the flat where in his universe, in 2022, Lauren used to live. By keeping his head down and not making eye contact with anyone, he managed to avoid being identified as a male by anyone else.

  Ringing the bell of the flat, he kept saying to himself over and over again, “Please be in…please be in…”

  “Thank fuck for that,” he exclaimed, as Lauren opened the door. She looked exactly like he was hoping she would – right hair, right clothes, and all-round right version, for once. He immediately pushed his way in, adding, “Am I glad to see you!?”

  Unusually, he didn’t have to explain himself, as Lauren recognised him almost straightaway.

  “Wow!” exclaimed Lauren. “I can’t believe it’s you. We’d pretty much given up all hope of you ever coming back.”

  “You recognise me, then?” said Josh, a little surprised.

  “Of course,” she replied. “I take it you found the cure, then?”

  “The cure?” asked Josh, a little perplexed.

  “The cure you went into the time bubble to look for about a year ago?”

  “My memory’s a bit hazy,” said Josh. “You’ll have to fill me in.”

  “You must remember,” said Lauren. “You promised you would go to the future, find a cure and bring it back to save all the men. Unfortunately, you’re a bit late…they’re all long dead. And by the look of you, it’s taken a hell of a long time to find a cure. How old are you now, exactly?”

  “I’m fifty-three,” replied Josh. “Now, look, I think we’re at cross purposes here,” said Josh. “Why don’t you stick the kettle on and make me a nice cup of coffee.”

  “Bit sexist, that isn’t it?” she replied. “Asking the girl to make the coffee? Still, it’s a long time since I had the opportunity to make a man a cuppa, so I suppose I can forgive you this once.”

  Josh glanced around the flat, noting it was in the usual messy state he had come to associate with Lauren. They had lived together briefly in this very flat for a while, and he hadn’t been able to stand her slovenliness.

  “You live here by yourself, then?” he asked.

  “No, I have a partner,” she said.

  “I thought you said all the men were dead,” said Josh.

  “They are,” replied Lauren. “It’s a female partner.”

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” said Josh. “From what I recall, you were quite partial to taking the occasional sip from the hairy cup, even when there were men around.”

  “You cheeky twat,” said Lauren, laughing. “You’d be surprised how many women have revealed their Sapphic tendencies since men became extinct. And just to correct you on your earlier comment, it’s not a hairy cup. She shaves.”

  “Who is she, then?” asked Josh. “Is it Kaylee?”

  “Gosh no, of course not,” said Lauren. “That’d be like incest. She’s practically a sister to me. I’ve been a shoulder to cry on since she lost Charlie, but that’s all. However, you do know her – or of her. It’s Seema.”

  “The newsgirl?” asked Josh.

  “The very same,” said Lauren. “We met years ago, that time Kaylee disappe
ared. I bumped into her again when she was here in Oxford reporting on the virus when the men started dying and we sort of hit it off then. We’ve been together ever since.”

  “Where is she now, then?” he asked.

  “She’s down in London for a few days, covering The Queen’s Speech and the State Opening of Parliament. You wouldn’t believe the mess all of this left the Government in. With over half the MPs dead, not to mention the Prime Minister, it’s taken a good year to get it all sorted out. Thank goodness The Queen’s still alive. She’s been the one constant through all of this.”

  “But all her sons are dead, presumably?”

  “Correct,” replied Lauren. “Princess Charlotte is next in line to the throne, can you believe? She’s going to be the youngest monarch in centuries. Now look, enough chit-chat. Why are you asking all these questions? It’s like you’re completely unaware of all of this. You knew what was happening when you went in that bubble, so what’s the story? Have you got amnesia or something?”

  “Not exactly,” he replied, “But I don’t remember things the way you do because I’m not the same Josh you grew up with. I’ve come here from a different universe.”

  With that, he began once again to relate his well-worn story, showing her his notes of his various trips through time and the damaged tachyometer. When he had finished, Lauren gave him her version of events.

  It seemed that everything here corresponded with events in his original universe, including all of their adventures with the time bubble. That was up until just over a year ago, when a new and lethal virus had swept the globe, killing all of the males, adults and children, in a swift and brutal manner. They had died in agony in a matter of hours, internal organs literally melting from within.

  It had taken just two weeks from the first case being reported in Russia, for every male human on the planet to be declared dead. The world had been in chaos, the remaining 50% of the population having to keep society from completely breaking down. The first and most grisly task for the survivors had been disposing of the bodies.

  The heartbreak hadn’t ended there. In the months that followed, male babies born to women who had been pregnant at the time of the outbreak suffered the same fate.

  “So the human race is going to die out?” asked Josh. “After all, if there are no men, how can we reproduce?”

  “Well, that might not be the case. Wherever the virus came from, there’s evidence to suggest it’s gone. It may have killed all the babies whose mothers were exposed during the outbreak, but a couple of weeks ago, a woman in America gave birth to a male, a baby boy. He was created using artificial insemination from sperm frozen before the virus spread. That boy is still alive.”

  “He’s going to be popular at school,” said Josh, remembering his experience of being chased down the street by a crowd of sex-starved women a couple of hours earlier.

  “Well, if the virus is indeed gone, they’ll be able to create a whole new breeding stock of males from the sperm still in storage.”

  “I hope the virus is gone,” said Josh. “Because I don’t fancy having my internal organs turning into a puddle in the manner you described.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Lauren. “Do you feel OK? It comes on very quickly. Within an hour or so of exposure you start getting flu-like symptoms. How long have you been here?”

  “At least two hours,” said Josh. “And I feel fine.”

  “I’m very pleased to hear it,” she said, “I’ve got the only man left in the world in my flat; I don’t want him dying on me.” She gave him a look he recognised all too well, leaving him in no doubt as to what she had in mind for him.

  Ignoring her blatant hint, Josh tried to keep the conversation on track. “You haven’t told me yet about this plan I had to go the future to find a cure,” said Josh.

  “Yes, well, it was a variation on a theme really. You’ll remember Peter had the same idea in order to cure his leukaemia. Well, your plan was to go to the future, find a cure for the virus, and then try and find some way of travelling back in time with it. You didn’t have that ability at the time, but you were convinced you would do eventually.”

  “Which I did – in my timeline, anyway,” he replied.

  “On the day you left the virus had arrived in the UK, but there hadn’t been any cases in Oxford yet. Peter was due to emerge from the tunnel that day so you went to meet him. He agreed to swap places with you and stay here, in the hope you’d come back with the cure.”

  “And presumably I never did?” said Josh.

  “No, you didn’t. Until now – except that it isn’t even the same you. And Peter died, along with all the others. Hannah was inconsolable.”

  “I wonder what happened to the other me?” pondered Josh. “I’ll probably never know. There are so many other versions of me wandering around the multiverse now that I’ve lost track of them.”

  “Well, it’s clearly too late now, even if he does come back. Which just leaves you – and what are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I was hoping I could lie low here for a few hours,” replied Josh, “just until the tachyometer recharges.”

  “And then you’ll be off again?” she asked.

  “I think I’ll have to,” said Josh. “This isn’t my world, and what’s it going to be like, being the only man here?”

  “You could lie and say you’ve had a sex change,” said Lauren. “You’d be amazed how many are. They are hugely popular with women who aren’t quite sure about their sexuality. There’s a whole sexual revolution going on out there.”

  “So I’ve seen,” said Josh, recalling the transgender man he had spoken to earlier.

  “Of course, being a real man, you’ll never want for female attention,” she added.

  “But I’m married,” explained Josh. “I haven’t met my wife yet in this time, but she’s waiting for me in my own time, in my own universe. I can’t give up trying to get back to her.”

  “Maybe it’s time you did,” said Lauren. “You said already you’re running out of options. Yes, this world might seem a little strange, but at least it’s not been destroyed by nuclear weapons or still in the Dark Ages. You could make a life here. I’ll help you.”

  Josh was finding all of this quite exhausting. It was only early afternoon but his earlier exertions during his escape from the sex-starved mob had tired him out.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “In the meantime, do you mind if I get my head down for a couple of hours. I’m absolutely knackered.”

  “Be my guest,” she said, ushering him through to the bedroom. “I’ll join you if you like.”

  “Do you ever think about anything else but sex?” asked Josh.

  “Everyone has to have a hobby,” she replied, grinning. “And it’s always better if it’s something you’re good at.”

  “You know, there’s one thing that’s consistent about you in every universe,” said Josh. “You’re always a slapper.”

  “Wouldn’t want it any other way,” she replied.

  “Well, I really need to sleep,” he said. “We’ll talk later.”

  It was teatime when he woke up. He could hear the TV in the living room, and decided to stay put for a moment and think things through.

  He thought about what she had said. Could he stay here? The idea of repopulating the species did have its appeal, but would it really be that fun? What if the Government took him prisoner, poking him, prodding him and taking endless vials of blood from him to try and find out why he was immune to the virus?

  What if they decided that letting him fertilise one woman at a time was a waste of sperm? What if they strapped him down and milked him like a cow to get the sperm they needed to fertilise millions? That didn’t sound like fun at all.

  The other alternative was to stay hidden in Lauren’s flat forever, but what sort of life would that be? He had tried living with her before and she had driven him crazy in the end. Yes, the sex had been amazing, but the relations
hip hadn’t. They realised quite quickly that they were better off as friends.

  And what about her girlfriend? Would she just casually drop her now she had a man to play with?

  He had made his decision. He was going to have to move on. He might as well tell her now, there was no point in putting it off. Dressing quickly, he wandered through to the living room, where she was watching the news.

  “Hey, come and look at this,” said Lauren, excitedly, as she heard him enter the room. “You’re on TV.”

  Josh looked to see some shaky mobile phone footage that was unmistakeably him, wrestling the woman off her bike prior to peddling his way to freedom earlier in the day. The coverage then cut to interviews with various bystanders, giving their opinions on whether he really was a man or not. This included the transgender man he had spoken to before it had all kicked off and the rather brassy young woman who had grabbed hold of his balls.

  In addition, a brief interview with a young policeman, a PC Trafford, revealed that male, or female, he was wanted by the police for assault and bicycle theft. The news then moved on to the sports bulletin which was all about the upcoming women’s football World Cup, which had assumed a whole new level of importance since the demise of the male version.

  “Looks like you are going to have to lie low here for a while,” remarked Lauren. “Still, I’m sure we can think of a few things to do to pass the time,” she added, winking at him. To his shame, and with a feeling of disloyalty to Alice flooding over him, he felt an all too familiar rush of blood to his loins. He had been travelling for weeks now without any intimacy, and his body was responding to his base needs.

  He had to try and fight it.

  “Look, Lauren, you know I would love to roll in the hay with you, but I can’t stay here. You saw what they were saying on the TV. I’m like some sort of freak show – a real man with real bits. Who knows what they’ll do with me?”

  He walked over to his backpack and started to rummage through it, looking for the tachyometer.

  “That’s exactly why I want you to stay,” replied Lauren.

  “Where is this damned thing!?” he exclaimed, unable to locate the tachyometer in his pack. Had she taken it?