by Amira Rain
Every now and again, some new fashion or food will become all the rage, but then everyone just seems to revert back to things that were the norm before the war. Even the couple of thousand actors and directors who make movies and TV shows tend to make them in a style fairly similar to movies and shows that were popular pre-war.”
After the party, Irene said she’d escort me from the hospital to an apartment where I’d now be staying, since Celeste couldn’t be found. “Probably off shooting her damn bow and arrow somewhere.”
Once I’d changed into a pair of jeans and a plain, long-sleeved, cream-colored top Irene had brought me, we exited the long hospital hallway through double doors and stepped into an elevator bay. I was ready, though I didn’t even exactly know what I was ready for. Something different, something new, maybe. Some surroundings that weren’t the hospital.
On our way up, Irene explained that the top floors of The Arch were reserved for very important people, such as Commander Wallace’s generals and their families, and Commander Wallace himself.
“And you, too, of course, my dear. You’ll be staying in a luxurious apartment just one floor beneath Commander Wallace’s penthouse on the seventieth, the very top floor.” With her honey-brown eyes sparkling, she paused, studying my face. “That way, the two of you can visit each other very easily.”
My face flamed. I had some serious questions about those “visits,” and all the nonsense Irene had said days earlier about me having a baby with Jackson. It sounded so outlandish and strange that I wondered if it was possible that in my sleepy haze, I’d just misheard or misunderstood her. But something told me that I hadn’t, and I knew I needed to get some answers about everything. But just then, the elevator came to a stop, and the doors opened.
While we exited into some kind of a lobby full of people, Irene spoke in a low voice. “This is where we transfer to the private elevator that only goes to the VIP apartments. People are going to look at you; they’re just curious. Just smile your pretty pearly smile, and you’ll be just fine.”
As we crossed the wide, long lobby, where at least a hundred people of all different ages seemed to be waiting for other elevators, I did smile, and received many smiles in return. The buzz of conversation soon seemed to hush a bit, and I was able to hear a female voice whispering from somewhere to my right.
“Gorgeous, of course. She’ll have Commander Wallace eating right out of her hand, baby or no.”
Even while a little thrill of something indefinable rippled through me, I realized I really needed some answers about this whole baby thing, and immediately.
Once we’d crossed the packed lobby, Irene and I boarded an elevator flanked by two tall, muscular men wearing the same kind of all-black uniform that Jackson wore. Wordlessly, they stepped aside to let us pass, both of them dipping their heads in a courteous nod before resuming their previous positions, gazes up and forward and hands clasped behind their backs.
A short while later, we exited the elevator and walked down a short, white marble-floored hallway to a heavy wooden door surrounded by lush green potted plants in gilded urns.
Irene opened the door and gestured for me to head on in. “Welcome home.”
I stepped inside and gasped. When she’d said my apartment would be “luxurious,” she hadn’t been kidding. A marble-floored foyer opened up into a living room with high, gold-framed windows, vaulted ceilings dripping with glittering chandeliers, and two large fireplaces bigger than any I’d ever seen.
Several small tables around the room appeared to be groaning under the weight of massive fresh flower arrangements in multifaceted crystal vases that sparkled in the sunlight streaming in through the windows. Or, maybe the vases were made out of pure diamond. It wouldn’t have surprised me.
Though, despite all this opulence, there was something about this living room that actually struck me as cozy. On one side of the spacious, but not too spacious, room, a long French blue couch and several overstuffed chairs had been grouped around one of the fireplaces. A polished coffee table piled with books, and a few honey-colored wooden end tables holding small lamps completed the homey-looking scene. It struck me as being like a living-room-within-a-living-room of sorts.
Still standing in the foyer, I turned to Irene, smiling. “Can we take a tour of the whole apartment?”
She smiled back and started to say what sounded like “sure,” but the word was cut off by the sound of her phone ringing.
“One moment, dear. Just let me get this.” She answered and listened for several moments before responding. “Oh, yes, Commander Wallace, she’s right here. I’m getting her settled into her new apartment right now.” After a long pause, Irene continued. “Well, yes, I think she’d love a visit from you. Five minutes, did you say? I’ll make sure to be gone by then, so you two can get right to it.”
*
Irene soon pocketed her phone, already backing up to the door. “You’ll find a brand-new wardrobe in your bedroom, makeup, jewelry, everything you could ever need, including a cellphone, which I’ve already programmed with Commander Wallace’s, Celeste’s, and my numbers. Oh, and just press one for your own personal maid, and two for your cook, and they’ll both come running. Let me know if you need anything else at all, and I’ll come running, too. Enjoy your visit with Commander Wallace.”
For some reason, I wanted to tell Irene to just wait a minute, but before I could even get the words out, she’d backed through the doorway and had closed the door with a winky little smile.
I just stood for several moments, wondering what I should do. It didn’t make much sense to start on a tour of the place when Jackson would be arriving very soon. But at the same time, I’d feel stupid just standing at the door for several minutes just waiting for his knock. Ultimately, after a minute or two, I decided to head over to the living-room-within-a-living-room, have a seat on the couch, and thumb through a book while I waited.
But before I even made it halfway there, a fairly loud, confident-sounding knock sounded at the door. I froze, then ambled back over slowly, smoothing a few strands of flyaway hair, not wanting to answer the door too quickly, lest he think I had been standing by the door waiting for him the whole time. Despite the fact that, of course, I just about had been.
After a deep breath, I answered the door, trying to prepare myself for the butterflies that I knew would erupt in my stomach the moment I saw Jackson. There was really no preparing, however. There was no avoiding the butterflies, anyway. It felt like a thousand of them began flapping there wings all at once the moment I saw his near-unbelievably handsome face.
Suddenly warm-faced and feeling inexplicably shy, I managed to greet him without looking away from his navy blue eyes. “Hello.”
A bit of a grin curving his full lips told me that maybe I wasn’t the only one experiencing a few stomach flutters.
“Hi. May I come in?”
I nodded and stepped aside while he entered, then somewhat awkwardly led him through the foyer and over to the cozy part of the living room to sit down. It simply felt strange to usher a guest into a room that I myself hadn’t been in yet.
Jackson held two large paper cups with lids, and when we’d both had a seat on the French blue couch, he handed me one. “Light roast, one cream, one sugar, and one pump of vanilla syrup.”
Earlier, at my hospital-discharge party, I’d recalled just how I liked my coffee. And that way was just as Jackson had described.
I took the cup from him, smiling. “Thank you. Are you a psychic, or did you ask Irene exactly how I like my coffee?”
He now grinned a bit bigger than he had at the door. “Well, as impressive as it might be to claim psychic powers, I’m afraid I must admit that I only used good old-fashioned detective work in determining your coffee preferences. I did ask Irene.”
For the first little while, our visit was nice. We bantered a bit and discussed our respective coffee preferences. Jackson liked his coffee black, no sweetener of any kind, no flavorings, no
cream or milk, no anything. Which, for some reason, didn’t surprise me. A bold, straightforward choice suited him.
Little by little, as Jackson told me about some of the various coffeehouses and restaurants located within The Arch, my butterflies seemed to settle down a bit, the sensation becoming replaced by a feeling of all-over warmth, from my head to my toes. Part of this warmth might have been the result of covert little peeks I was taking at his body, specifically his long, muscular thighs, which were no more than a foot away from my legs.
When he’d visited me in the hospital, because of the height of my bed and the guard rails, I really hadn’t been able to see his thighs very well, or fully appreciate what a pleasant experience glancing at them at them was.
But once we’d nearly finished our coffee, I realized I had some questions to ask, starting with just what exactly had happened to me to make me wake up freezing cold and completely devoid of memory in a hospital, and ending with why exactly Irene had said I was to have a child with him. I set my coffee cup on an end table before facing Jackson again, not really knowing how to begin. Fortunately, he seemed to sense this and spoke first.
“You have some questions, no doubt.”
I nodded, relieved. “Yes. I’m sure Irene has already told you that I’ve remembered a few things about who I am, and where I come from, but I’m nowhere even close to remembering everything. And there are two major things I need to know. The first is why I woke up with amnesia, and nearly freezing to death, and the second is... Well...” Swallowing, I trailed off, suddenly a bit embarrassed, or maybe anxious, or a strange blend of both. “Well, First question first, I guess. What in the heck happened to me?”
With his lazy grin now long gone, Jackson set his cup on the coffee table and turned to face me on the couch, putting one well-muscled arm on the back of it. “You’ve been waiting so patiently, and you don’t deserve to wait a second longer to hear the answer to that question.
You were put under sedation and then cryogenically frozen over three centuries ago. You were one of only a few hundred women on earth proven by medical testing to be completely fertile. You were one of only a few hundred women on earth who were completely unaffected by the nuclear blast.
For reasons not even the most brilliant scientific minds of the day could figure out, and our top scientists still don’t understand it. But that’s why you were frozen—because of your fertility.”
I sat mute for a long moment or two, just trying to wrap my mind around what he’d said. “So-so, was I forced to be frozen or something?”
“No. It was completely your choice, as it was for all the women who were frozen. Once the tests were conducted on every last adult female still left on earth, ones deemed fertile were told that they might be the key to saving all of humanity and ensuring that the human race would endure.
However, another group of women, a group of thousands, had been deemed ‘possibly fertile,’ essentially meaning, ‘possibly able to conceive, though likely not without great difficulty.’ Some of the scientists thought it might be wise to initially leave the task of reproduction up to this group. And for the future, try to freeze as many ‘completely fertile’ women as possible in preparation for a possible population crisis at some point later on.
But, in the end, it was strictly voluntary. Some of the fertile women wanted to remain with their families and loved ones, and understandably so, particularly women who were in long-term relationships. Women who were married or who already had children at the time weren’t even asked to consider being frozen, for obvious reasons.
So, many of the ‘completely fertile’ women remained unfrozen, and they, together with the ‘possibly fertile’ women, began working to repopulate the earth after the disaster. And, in the years since then, the population has been slowly increasing, little by little, decade by decade.”
“Then why were the frozen women ever unfrozen? Why was I unfrozen?”
From somewhere out in the opposite side of the spacious, sunlit living room, a grandfather clock began chiming the hour, and Jackson waited for it to stop before continuing.
“Over the past several years, the women of this nation have been experiencing fertility troubles, and none of our top scientists and doctors can figure out why. And while they continue to try to figure it out and come up with a solution, we, of course, can’t let the human race die out.
That’s why it was decided a year or so ago that we had to start trying to bring the frozen women back, including yourself. To bring you back, though, I wanted to wait a little while. I wanted the doctors to have the most experience that they could possibly have with thawing before they attempted to unfreeze you. You were actually the last frozen woman to be thawed.”
“Why?”
Looking at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, Jackson didn’t respond right away. “We have a time machine here in DC, in the building we call The Dome. It has its limitations, such as only being able to transport one person, every year or so, because of the different energies and calibrations it requires, but despite its limitations it’s nothing short of miraculous. It can transport a person back in time; it can even transport a person to a parallel universe.
And after they’ve been transported, for several weeks while they still hold the energies from the process in their bodies, a person can even travel right back here if they so choose. When our fertility crisis hit here in the UFS, which was about the same time I began to realize that I needed to get started on producing an heir, I used this time machine to travel back to the time period not long after the nuclear blast.
I went to the place where all the fertile women were being lodged until they each decided if they wanted to be frozen or not. And on the day that each woman had to state her choice and then submit to being sedated and frozen, I went into the hall to observe. All of the other women seemed hesitant and indecisive, and there were many women who decided to back out of being frozen at the last minute.
But not you. You marched right up to the head scientist in charge and said that you were completely committed and your mind was completely made up. You said you wanted to be frozen for the good of humanity.
You seemed so bold and confident... You looked completely fearless. You all but demanded that you be frozen. And that’s when I made a decision of my own. I decided that you were the one .That’s why I purchased you to bear my child. I knew you were the most courageous and the gutsiest of all the women. You were certainly the most beautiful. By miles.”
With my stomach suddenly twisting into knots, I slowly recoiled from Jackson, actually scooting back an inch or two on the couch. “Wait a second. Please back up. Did I hear you correctly? Did you actually say that you ‘purchased’ me to bear your child?”
He grimaced, raking his large hands over his face. “It wasn’t as bad as you make it sound... I had to purchase you. You see, after the freezing process had started for the women who’d chosen it, the scientists decided that any specific women could be ‘claimed’ for the future by any family or childless man willing to pay them a certain sum of gold.
But, being that the world was in quite a state of disarray at this point, not many could afford to do so; but being that I’d traveled back in time, I could. And because I wanted to make certain that you would be the woman to bear my child now, in the modern day, I did.”
A few seconds of silence ticked by. I stared down Jackson with my arms folded across my chest. He looked apologetic, and that expression seemed sincere, but it wasn’t good enough. Suddenly, I was mad. Suddenly, I was so angry that I was beginning to tremble. I spoke my next words in a voice that held a faint tremor as well.
“So... basically, you bought me like a piece of meat to come here, have sex with you, and have your child, in exchange for room and board in a fancy apartment. There are words for women who engage in these types of arrangements, you know.”
Jackson grimaced again, looking increasingly agitated. “You make it sound so ugly.”
&nbs
p; “And in what way would you advertise the arrangement you want? ‘Come to the United Free States! Rent out your womb to a man you barely even know! Rent your womb to a man who’s basically already purchased it! It’s a beautiful, romantic thing!’”
At that moment, Jackson lifted a hand and began moving it toward my face. And the second I saw this movement, the very split-second, I flinched for some reason, immediately turning my face down and to the side. Expecting what, I really didn’t even know.
When a long moment or two went by without whatever I’d apparently subconsciously thought might happen, happening, I slowly lifted my face to look at Jackson. I saw him frowning, frowning so hard his dark brows were nearly touching, in fact. His expression was one of a person deeply disturbed and maybe even a little incredulous.
I had no idea what to say, so I was relieved when he spoke first, in a low voice almost near a whisper.
“I was going to brush that strand of hair out of your face and tell you that our arrangement can be a beautiful thing. It could be. What did you think I was going to do? Did you think I was going to hit you?”
I shook my head, heart racing. “I don’t know. I—”
“Did you actually think I was going to hit you?”
“I-I guess I must have. It was just a reflex. I’m-I’m sorry.”
Jackson studied my face briefly before responding. “You apologize far too much, Vivian, and for things you shouldn’t feel sorry about.”
For some reason, his words caused a funny little ache in my chest, and I couldn’t respond. But then, the anger took over once again.
I jumped up from the couch, fighting to keep my voice at a semi-normal volume and not a shout. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did you pay for a woman who wouldn’t ever feel sorry about anything? Sorry to disappoint you.”