Michael came home from yet another complicated day of school, and looked at the envelope with the letters SCWF on it, which he had never heard of. One more layer of weirdness? It seemed normality wasn’t ever going to return now that he was a Gamma-1 known to have a future wife lined up at just age eighteen. And his parents weren’t really acting normal either lately, especially after the Ceremony of Partner Choice. His mother had been more servile and distant than ever, as if she was afraid to contradict her adult high-class son now, while his father had been quite angry for days in silence. At least today it seemed he had quieted down a bit. The only thing he had said to him when he came in was ‘There’s a letter for you, lover-boy,’ while completely ignoring him otherwise.

And then he realised that SCWF just stood for Seventh City Wife Factory, and indeed, the content turned out to be an official letter about his first official meeting with Megan, which was planned for next weekend already. It would be a supervised table talk, whatever that was, without any physical contact, gifts or any chance of ‘improper behaviour’. He read that sentence again. What did all those words even mean? And why did everything about that stupid Wife School sound so scary and sterile, even though he knew he wasn’t actually the one threatened to be made a domestic slave here? The ‘help me’ in her eyes from that night still haunted him, even in his dreams.

He put the letter back on the table. So it was really happening, and the official first meeting with his fiancée would be soon? What now? He was still unsure about the whole girls thing, and wasn’t even sure how to talk to them. The Real Man method in The Nation was to talk to anyone who wasn’t your boss with as much entitlement and domination as possible. He knew that that wouldn’t work for a lot of reasons, and that it would just not be right either towards the girl with the ‘help me’ in her eyes. He might have been taught nothing else in his life, and still it was what he was trying to get away from, even in the very act of choosing her it had been. And had had some experience already that told him there were other unexplored possibilities: that first unofficial meeting with Megan and her friend that shouldn’t have happened had been weirdly casual, in spite of all the stress and tension of the two-weekly Ceremony of Partner Choice, which hadn’t even been much of a ceremony. Even in the chaos of the fight between the other boys they just had been people talking to each other as people. It had been just a minute or so, but he knew it could be and should be possible to talk to girls like that. Which was a completely new idea to him.

Casual friendly conversation was not something people in The Nation ever considered when it came to men and women. Complete segregation of the sexes was what people needed to stop all ‘indecency’ and not fall into what The Church called carnal sins. He knew that was a lie, indecency abounded everywhere in very sad and abusive ways, and carnal sins were also very visible everywhere, even when only tolerated from Alphas and maybe high class Betas. The complete submission of women was also part of it too often, he’d seen it himself so often before, even with his mother, who had always been a complete servant to her father, and when he and his brother had grown older to them too, which had always hurt him. It was the only way in which women were portrayed in modern books of The Nation too, except when they were over the top evil villains that got destroyed in the climax of the story. There weren’t many other stories about women in the Nation, if you didn’t want to go into even worse stuff like porn, in which women were even less human and even more of an utensil, in a very dark way.

But he knew he had rejected every Nation narrative about men and women already by including Eliza in his talk, whether or not the girls had understood fully what was happening. So it had already been quite revolutionary from the start, hadn’t it? At least it had been to the completely backwards standards of The Nation that he’d been immersed in all of his life. But he was a brainie after all, and a lover of all kinds of black market books. The Nation wasn’t the only possible culture, and reading books can teach you a lot if you pay attention to the details.

He had discovered soon enough that most books written in The Nation for boys were quite dull, unrealistic and not very interesting at all. Boring stories about perfect heroes who killed all the enemies of The Nation, with swooning submissive women without any personality falling at their feet while they save humanity and drink their beer, while served by men with lower rankings too. He wondered what lower-class men felt when reading those books, or was it expected that they weren’t reading at all? The few girl books he could get his hands on were even worse, uninteresting romance stories in which men were worshipped as some kind of omnipotent demigod that should be obeyed in everything, because that’s what makes a woman happy. The narrative was quite twisted too, and he felt even more dirty from reading the girls’ books than from the books directed at him. There was none of the men or women in any of those books that he had ever identified with at all.

But luckily, as a collector he had read enough other books too, old books in weird spelling from before the Magnificent Revolution. He had found some very interesting ones in the black market circuit over the years, and they had become his favourite kind of fiction books. He had read amazing children’s books where boys and girls were just friends, as he and the other boys had been but with girls included. And he had read grown-up romance books with very complicated relationships between the sexes that he didn’t really understand, but again they just talked to each other as if it was the most normal thing in the world. So at least in theory it must be possible for humans to go beyond the sick segregation and subordination of women, and it seems that that had possibly been the case for most of the history of mankind too. His little chat with the girls had even given him hope. With the right kind of people it would certainly work, and there were at least two girls he knew that were very promising candidates for that. He didn’t know why, but he was sure that he’d be able to talk to Megan too, even if she’d been rather shut down on the evening of the ceremony. Something in her eyes had told him there could be a connection.

He put the envelope down. He knew he really shouldn’t be thinking about something like girls now. He had a lot of schoolwork to do. There was a test tomorrow, and all this Wife stuff was a big distraction that really shouldn’t come in between him and his studies, especially not in the last year of general school, after which he had to choose his higher education. It would depend on his grades now what he could choose to study at the university next year, so his schoolwork was important. There was a whole future to work towards, and what he didn’t need was distractions! He took his book about redox reactions and walked up to his room to study the formulas, since food wouldn’t be ready for at least an hour.

*

‘What are you doing here, Eliza?’ A red-haired girl wearing a C-badge stood in the almost empty girls dorm of the E-floor. She was holding a bag of books.

‘I could ask you the same, there shouldn’t be any C-girls here today, Annabelle.’

‘I need to bring some school books for Miss Hunter. And some others too.’ She winked and Eliza's face lit up.

They arrived?’

‘Well, not everything. You seem to have given some interesting things to the traders, seen what they gave for you though. Look, here’s the second part of “Advanced robotics”, some more math books, and I also have an old history book called “The defeat of the evils of feminism”, which I think you’ll like too if you can read between the lines. The history of The Nation that even most men don’t know.’

‘Do men even know anything at all? If I have to believe the classes I’m skipping now their brain is mostly located in their testicles, and we have to do everything to respect them at all their animal irrationality just because they are men.’ Anabelle looked around to see if no-one had heard them.

‘You should stop talking like that, Eliza, they’re going to punish you one day. How will you ever get a boy to like you?’

‘Bwah, I don’t want any of that. But I was E-28 of the whole 28 E-girls last ceremony and I still almost had a match, good that Megan caught him for me instead. Poor girl, even though he seems to be decent for a man.’

‘So it’s true that Megan is taken? The gossip was contradictory. They said the boys were all fighting, but others said that Megan was taken by a very high-level male.’

‘Yup, all of it is true, more or less. Most of the boys were a bunch of Epsilon baboons, and then there was that young Gamma-1, which is by far the highest we’ve ever seen here. When he chose her she stood there with her paper,frozen as a statue, so I gave it to him and started the talk while the fight with those baboons went crazy. They’ll meet this weekend officially for the first time, supervised table talk through the glass and all. It’s so strange that one of us is coupled now. Greystone already gave her a ring. But he seems rather decent indeed, for a man, if that is even possible. Quite unsure and insecure and not really into the whole Wife thing himself either, pushed by the parents, he said it was a birthday surprise. I don’t know if I can believe it yet, but Megan might be the one lucky Wife School girl this century has with him as a man.’

‘Hmm, if that’s your opinion of men, I don’t know whether I should give you the defeat of feminism.’ Annabelle said, looking in her bag.

‘Just give me the book, Anabelle, and bring Miss Hunter hers. And please don’t mention that you’ve seen me here.’

Annabelle nodded, and went on her way again, leaving Eliza with a head full of thoughts and two new books to devour. Her little adventure outside of the Wife School had brought a good payment already, and this was only half of what they had promised her.

*

‘Be a man!’ Someone yelled somewhere in the distance. Without even thinking Michael nodded.

‘Be a man!’ he mumbled too, to no-one in general.

‘You too, Michael, Be a man!’ Robert said absent-mindedly while eating his apple cracker.

‘Ah, sorry, I seem to be quite conditioned at answering that. Aren’t we supposed to be men anyway, being born male and all.’ ‘If that was the case they wouldn’t pick on us brainies so much I think. Technically we’re all just as much of a man biologically as those alpha gorillas. But in reality we’re not seen as men or taken seriously. Never man enough, never good enough… Always the laughing stock of the Real Men of The Nation. Sometimes I even wonder why anyone would want to be a man? It’s all so silly and irrational.’ Robert looked quite serious now.

‘What else would you want to be, Robert? A Woman? I’m quite sure their life is even worse than ours.’

‘No, I meant more like a robot or so, but then more human. Something away from this male-female nonsense. Away from hierarchy and abuse. Don’t you think that humans would be perfectly living in harmony if they had no sex or gender. Doesn’t all evil come from the way we define ourselves in opposition to the other?’

Michael wasn’t convinced. ‘You mean that if we all were asexual human clonebots there would be no motivation for all those silly games of competition? That being men and women makes us be like this?’

‘Something like that, yes. It’s all that stupid man-stuff that destroys our country and our humanity. And women make it even worse. Without sex everything would be much better’

‘How so?’

Michael was rather lost by what his friend was getting at now

‘Well, they just affirm the whole thing. They are subservient and submissive and help men to become their worst selves. All they ever do is affirm the worst version of what a man can be. Without them we’d be better people.’

Michael thought a bit about the women he knew. His mother fitted the description, sadly, but Megan and Eliza clearly didn’t, even though he had met them for only a minute.

‘Hmm, I’ve always noticed something like that too, but I’m not sure it needs to be like that, my fiancée seemed not like that at all, and her friend even less.’

Robert looked up now. ‘You haven’t even met her. How do you even know?’

‘I talked to them a bit in the chaos when the ceremony went wrong. A bunch of Epsilons started fighting, and everyone was busy with them so I asked the girls for the document with her data. And those two really were nothing like the stereotype. Just as we are nothing like the stereotype of men as brainies. Maybe all the stereotypes are nonsense that is projected into us all the time, and that destroys us if we follow it. Makes us destroy each other if we follow it even…’

Robert looked at him suspiciously and changed the subject completely.

‘So, is she pretty?’

‘Who? Megan?’ Michael looked at his friend, confused.

‘That’s her name? Megan then. You like her? I can’t imagine what it is to have a woman.’

‘I don’t have anyone yet, and I think I like how she’s the opposite of everything else I saw in that damned Wife School. But what do I know about marriage and stuff? I hope we can at least find out how to be friends and hack the system or so to find a way out together, or something like that.’

‘You’re speaking in riddles, Michael. How can a woman ever be anything to a man but a Wife? How can you ever be anything but a Husband when you grow up and get married? We don’t have any choice at all. If we even get the choice. Not all Gammas get the chance to choose a good wife like you did.’

‘Hey, you beast of a man, what have we heard?’

They were joined by John and Don, two high Betas who came back from gun training. John slapped Michael on the back.

‘Ah, our youngest husband. Congratulations Mr. Class one male! It’s not fair that you’ll be the first one in our year to have sex, man.’

Robert seemed to fade in the background, and Michael wished desperately that he was somewhere else, no matter where.

‘So please tell us all the details when you get the chance to try her out.’ Don winked dirtily.

‘What are you even talking about? It’s at least a year before I can get married.’ He stammered.

‘Ah, but you will have dates before that, not? Or are you one of those religious idiots who still believe in the whole no sex before marriage stuff from The Church? You know no-one really does that in this day and age, I hope, dear Michael. Everyone has sex from the moment they get the girl out of Wife School, whenever they can. Don’t tell me you’re not looking forward to that. Man, I would be killing to have a wife already. So much things you can do with them, and so much you can make them do for you, and to you.’ He grinned dirtily again.

‘Eh, Our first meeting is a supervised table talk in her Wife School, and shouldn’t I know her a bit more and know how to talk to her before such things.’

Don erupted in laughter. ‘Talk? To a woman? Man, what world are you living in? No, you have to train her, and make her do what you want, from the first meeting. So that from the first time outside with her you can make her do whatever you want. You want to prepare her to be a proper wife, not?’

‘Eh, I think I would have another approach…’ Michael tried, but Don laughed over his response.

‘Come on dude, you don’t even know how to handle women, and you are getting a Wife, what a waste! I would certainly know what to do with a woman.’

Michael looked away, and wished he was far from there. Robert had become completely silent, and seemed to be looking for a way to disappear from this conversation too.

‘There’s a lot you can do with women if you train ‘em properly. But isn’t the most important thing that she can cook and clean your house? As a man you have to think of your future too, and about serious adult stuff, not only sex.’ John said. ‘No, she definitely needs to be sexy and good in bed. That’s the first thing about women’ Don said, and he made some obscene gestures.

Michael thought of the distance he had felt while in the Wife School again. But now it was here in between him and his classmates too. At least Robert was a bit critical sometimes, but like almost everyone else John and Don seemed to be completely fine with the whole arrangement between men and women in this world. They were the majority, and the orthodoxy of The Nation. And it made him feel so extremely lonely, and empty and wrong, and very dirty.

‘I have some things to do.’ He said, and he disappeared before Don and John could react in the direction of the robotics lab. He knew they wouldn’t follow him into such a brainie stronghold. Just five minutes and they had made him completely depressed. Don and John had brought him back to the reality of what it actually meant to be a man in The Nation. He, and Robert, and maybe a few other dudes he knew were the outliers, the aberrations. Reality was that men dominated women, wanted to be served by them, and didn’t even care to talk to them. Just get from them what you want, that’s all.

If he came to think of it, the world he lived in was quite dark, and he had always been the alien. He had never really found his place, even when the brainie department of the university had been better for him than anything else. This world just wasn’t healthy, and even after all he’s been through he’d been relatively lucky. Or probably extremely lucky compared to all the girls he’d seen in the Wife School. What do you do when you feel left out for not being like the rest, but you also feel that the rest is a bunch of creeps that no rational or emotional being can join? He thought of some of the black market books he had read over the years, with oldschool dystopian fiction. Did he really live in a dystopia of sorts? It wasn’t as extreme as 1984 or Brave New World in The Nation, was it? People were not brainwashed and killed for wrong ways of thinking. There was no constant destruction of information and rewriting of history. No police state or anything. And still…

No, he decided. People in The Nation were still free. There was no dictator or extreme controlling government. There wasn’t even a government at all, since the Magnificent Revolution they had been led by the Central Computer, which knew how to rule a country much better than humans did. Its representatives were only executors with not much personal contribution to the actual policy. There was no suppression of truth or confiscation of black market books, even though they were not part of the official economy no-one was punished for having them.

No, everything considered he didn’t live in a dystopia at all. There were some problems in The Nation, but didn’t every culture have its own problems?