Rose

So this is the first chapter of a book that I've been dipping in and out of for many years now.  The project of creating the world that this and many other future creative endeavors are meant to take place in is what keeps me away....Its equal parts exciting and overwhelming.  I feel like my skills need to be honed a bit more before I dig into this one with both feet.  Enjoy and let me know what you think.

Rose

I

Rosanna hated the term biological clock. It always made her feel so...inhuman...subhuman. Kind of ironic, really, considering what was out there walking the Remnants. But no, she didn't feel like them when she heard it, as if her DNA had been mutated into some freakish entity. No, she felt like her personality, her essence, her very being was removed the minute those words left their lips, replaced by gears and rods.

Like she was reduced to nothing more than a finely-tuned mechanical device.

“30?” they would gasp, wide-eyed, feigning shock. “No kids at 30? Your biological clock must just be tick tick tickin' away.”

To her, it seemed as if these people expected that every hour on the hour a little wooden bird would burst from her mouth squawking, “Bawk, put a baby in me, Bawk, put a baby in me.”

Even as her excessively imaginative and spectacularly twisted mind dreamed up such exaggerations, the undying expectations of the remaining population wasn't the greatest of her concerns. What bothered Rosanna (Rose to her friends, of which she had few) most about the term was the fear. The gut-wrenching fright that came with the concept that they actually might be right.

Because Rosanna did want a baby.

She didn't want one because they told her she wanted one. She didn't want one because the country was reliant upon her and her uterus for regrowth. She didn't want one simply because she was lonely. So then, why was it that she did want one? Was it because her gears just turned that way? Because her body was designed to make babies, and was gradually moving out of the stage where such creation was possible?

Rose woke up that morning in October staring at the ceiling in her Eastside assignment, pontificating on these questions. She found herself doing this more and more as the year drew closer to its end, almost ritualistically now. Scratching her head, she sighed, leaving her questions open, as always, waiting for some external answer.

Why she waited was another question unto itself. She knew God wasn't there to answer, and may never have been, but there was infinitely this faint trace of hope that someone would actually hear her thoughts and respond in some way. A hope that she would at least be “given a sign.”

Jesus, you're being so childish, she told herself. If you did get a response, THAT would be even more disturbing than this constant...this regularity of waiting.

Pulling herself upright, Rose got out of her rolled out sleepmat and made her way to the shower not but three steps away. She grabbed her toothbrush and applied the sanctioned ¼ teaspoon of paste to the bristles before scrubbing it across her pearls. Humming a tune from before the War, she set her water timer and climbed in, racing to get herself as clean as possible before her minute was up.

Of course, in spite of how long she had been taking these tightly controlled speed-showers, Rose never made it, and always ended up drying off a sudsy form. Today was no different in this regard. But today, unlike all prior, she found herself staring contemplatively into her mirrored wall at her body as she ran the towel across her neck.

She was petite and extremely thin, like most Americans, owing to the strict rationing regulations among the Lawful. For a moment, she turned to the side and pushed out as much of her nonexistent gut as she could manage in a feeble attempt to simulate a baby bump. She pushed out so hard, imagining how her belly button would pop out as she grew closer to delivery, like a turkey timer in the Thanksgiving days of yesteryear. Rose pushed and pushed, imagining the feeling of trying to push something as large as a human child out of her birth canal.

The ritual was getting worse. Looking around, Rose feared the potential sight of Lawful eyes. Even the slightest hint of reproductive interest would undoubtedly bring Op-Repop recruiters to her door in no time. The concept of having a baby was equal parts intriguing and repugnant to Rose, of that there was no doubt.

But the thought of getting into the program...Rose shuddered in a downward wave.

Not even meeting the father, or heaven forbid, going with a Match.gov suitor gave her goosebumps. The needs of the many were as much a concern to her as to any number of those among the Lawful. But at her center, Rose was nothing if not a romantic. And, to her, there was no arguing that there was and is no romance in arranged marriages.

Putting these thoughts aside, Rose collapsed naked onto her sleepmat. She closed her eyes and masturbated, wailing loudly enough at her self-induced climax for the forty plus 5'-by-5' assignments on her floor to hear. When she finished, she drifted back to sleep.

In Rose's dreams of late, she imagined a world before the War. There were so many photographic and video records on file for her to access in waking life that the visual creation of a pre-War America presented little challenge to her already overwhelmingly creative mass of pink-n-gray.

There was a sense of comfort in this dream world, a true sense of belonging to the environment at least. But not the people. There was nothing like comfort with these people. Rose just always knew that there was something incredibly wrong with them. It was just the feeling that emanated from the odd humanesque creatures inhabiting this imagined world that brought a sense of sardonic unease to the forefront of her REM-state creations. It was always as if something was just...off with everyone.

Humans, like all animals have an inherent sense of survival. Under the most extreme cases of duress, humans have not only managed to avoid extinction, but actually found ways to swing the pendulum back in their favor, actually thriving more than ever at the onset of any danger. The War changed the game, so to speak, creating a new global threat that put things into perspective. Rose's latest recurring dreams were a very fine, and not to mention, very theatrical example of this perspective.

In this morning's Mind Matinee, Rose found herself inhabiting the body of a man. Not just any man, but the President of these great United States, at least he was at this time, just minutes before Zero Hour. In the mirror, President Jameson straightened his tie, then looked back at the reflection of the young female form wriggling behind him...she could have been a secretary, or intern...Rose wasn't sure which. The professional woman pulled a pair of white lace panties onto her body beneath the tight skirt she wore, never once shifting her gaze back to Jameson.

Rose felt his urge to walk to her, kiss her deeply and ask when they could do this again, but in the end she realized that she didn't want to. And as Rose's knack for the most basic lucid dreaming made her the helmsman...the director of this film, he couldn't move until she said so. And when she said so, when Rose told Jameson to move, she certainly wasn't going to waste his movement on this hussy. She wanted to see the world when she was in here, inside her mind. See what everything was all about, actually experience events, as if this dreamscape was somehow far more accurate than any archived books or films in The Library.

Jameson threw himself out of the room into the blinding light of the sun. Rose recognized the location as a hotel, and the land surrounding it as a desert. Outside, Jameson was looked upon by two tall men dressed to the neck in finely-pressed black suits with little translucent cords going into their ears. Looking between the two men, Rose felt her own wicked grin spread across his face as she took him sprinting to the nearest set of stairs.

His feet skittered past one another blindingly as he descended the concrete steps, taking two at a time. The second Rose decided to make him run, she knew the two men would undoubtedly be in tow.

“Catch me you fuckers,” she made Jameson yell over his shoulder.

Even as she said it, she knew how utterly hilarious the whole situation was. This fat, balding politician trying to outrun his two best gun-toting, grizzled, military-trained guards, goading them with challenging curses. She knew they could catch him, of that there was no doubt, but that was not what they were hired to do. Instead they set a jogging pace behind Jameson's full sprint as he set out across the parking lot and into the street, occasionally uttering an uninspired protest of his actions.

Jameson, the president of the United States of America, one of the most respected and revered men in the world, now ran parallel to a desert highway, looking behind himself frequently at the men pretending to chase him, laughing maniacally. Just as Rose felt she saw one of the agents smile, the ground began to tremble beneath Jameson's feet.

Simultaneously, the three participants, actors in Rose morning entertainment, came to a dead stop. Slowly their heads raised together. They took turns shifting their gaze from one another as the trembling became a violent shake. Rose opened Jameson's mouth as sections of the earth began to rise slowly in front of him. Time slowed to a crawl, and in a blinding flash disappeared into a blanket of white.

Rose dreamed of this white for what seemed like hours. The hours turned into days, the days into weeks, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Waking up after noon was not uncommon for Rose, especially as her lucid dreaming had to take place in the daytime. Her work with the ReAg department didn't officially start at any time in the day, so she could just show up anytime she felt like it, or sometimes not at all if she didn't...feel like it. Today she felt like it, but just not quite yet. Right now she had an overwhelming urge to visit The Library and see what sort of wait time she might have on a terminal. The Net was calling for her right now, inviting her to drink of it, to quench her thirst for knowledge.

Or at least whet said thirst.

Getting to The Library required a trip across a residue front, so her Regulation suit was a must. No civies today, she thought to herself as she thumbed past her favorite “vintage” tees to a full-length body-shaped mass of glistening material. Pulling the Reg suit from the tiny confines of her locker she squeezed into the metallic form, smiling at the crinkling sound it made as she rolled it up her legs.

“Like dressing in a bag of potato chips,” she said to herself.

After retrieving her black, messenger-style bag from the floor next to her sleepmat, she bolted through the unlockable swinging door of her assignment and into the safety of the Lawlands surrounding.

The sun would have been blinding when Rose stumbled out into the street, if not for the obligatory fog that blanketed the sky. It was warm enough at least inside the suit to spite the snow-covered streets surrounding. It was warm to the point of producing a steady sweat in the few short minutes it took for Rose to cover four city blocks on foot. No one seemed to be out today, although the few that were seemed to be in exceedingly good spirits.

Rose passed a bearded man as he checked his Geiger counter nodding fervently in his direction, smiling a crooked smile as she was wont to do out here among the few remaining civil beings. He nodded back, not bothering to look up from his faintly crackling machinery. This reminded her of the coming need for such equipment in her travels as the wall of residue drew nearer.

She slid her right hand smoothly along the flap of her bag, drawing it back and swiftly rooting around the contents within without so much as removing her eyes from her plotted path. Her deft hand pulled a mask and a small wristwatch-style Geig from within, tightening the latter first while grasping the former tightly in her active hand.

The watch began to click and pop incessantly as she moved on. Stopping, she looked on into the misty abyss that stretched out before her eyes. Taking one deep and meaningful breath, Rose pulled her mask on and made her way into the residue front.