‘So how is he?’ Megan asked, looking at the bottle of Viking Axe beer Eliza produced from her backpack. Eliza took a chair at the small kitchen table.

‘Honestly? He’s a complete mess, Megan. They completely broke him in that cell. He’s depressed and feels guilty for everything that happened as if it’s all his fault. He’s even afraid to see us. I think a surprise visit was the best approach with how he is now.’

Megan took out two glasses. This wasn’t good. It was true that their engagement was out of the question now, and if she was honest she was really relieved that she wasn’t going to marry anytime soon. They never had known what they would have done with that anyway. But she still wanted Micheal in her life, especially with all that she had lost already she didn’t feel like losing him too. It probably was selfish, but she wouldn’t let go of him

‘And what about me? What about us? I might need a friend too now.’ She sulked.

‘He’ll be okay, but it will take some time. He’ll be back for us, I promise.’ Eliza said.

Megan looked at her. Why wasn’t she worrying? ‘I’d rather hope so. He’d better not abandon us now that we’re left alone like this.’

‘Oh, don’t worry. He won’t. It’s clear that he misses you, and we’re more or less the only people he has left. He’s deleted from his school and family. He can’t afford losing us. All he has left now is a vintage housewife-o-matic 2.1 called Dorothy as a Wife.’

That was another thing Megan couldn’t understand in the story. ‘This rotten country is really unbelievable. They took everything away from him, and they still provide him with a home and a fake wife. Even if he got deleted. Men…’

‘It was only a soft deletion. He’s still a person officially, they didn’t take his identity, only his rating. They don’t want too many men to go feral if they can prevent it. That’d be dangerous. So they are stripped of their rating but their basic needs are still covered, more or less. They get a house and a replacement wife that can do household chores and eh, entertain them in other ways. And for they rest they’ll have to work to pay the rent, so they keep busy and won’t do to much stupid things. It’s a well-organised system and the Wifebot is a big factor in keeping them pacified. Works better than a real wife they say…’

Megan felt a lump in her throat. ‘But are you sure that he wouldn’t, you know, be happier with a robot?’ Eliza looked amused.

‘Megan, we’re speaking about Michael here. Don’t be stupid. Sure, I bet old Dorothy is doing his household chores better than any of us would do even, but he’s rather horrified by the poor thing. He refuses to call her anything but ‘it’ to begin with, and he locks his bedroom door at night. So unless you wanted to become his personal maid I don’t think you should see Dorothy as competition. He doesn’t treat her as a friend, let alone as a lover. Not even as a person I’m afraid’

Megan wasn’t convinced yet. ‘But you said they broke him in the cell. Don’t you think he’ll just give in and settle with a robot partner now that a human Wife is legally impossible?’

Eliza clapped loudly. ‘Megan! Wake up! You’re babbling nonsense. Do you know him at all? You probably weren’t the most passionate couple ever, but he was a good friend in no time. Why would he let go of that?’

‘But he’s a man after all, and you said that this whole arrangement works well to keep men pacified.’

‘If you’ve never met a woman in your life and are told you’ll never be able to meet one, I suppose it works. Combined with holo-porn and stuff like that… To make up for the missed intimacy as they call it. And they have someone to boss around with to keep their fragile ego intact. But we’re speaking about Michael, our sweet naive innocent Michael who knows actual girls, likes actual girls and the kind of real-world intimacy that he’s missing already from real girls of flesh and blood is located on the friendship level for now. He doesn’t even want to boss anyone around. Old Dorothy can be a lot of things, but she’s not actually sentient, and not friendship material either.’

‘If you say so…’ Megan drank her beer and didn’t say much anymore. Eliza looked at her own glass, and didn’t say much either. Actually Megan and Michael were more alike than they realised. They had been through a lot already, and she didn’t have the energy for too much of this kind of personal drama now. Both of them seemed hopeless at the moment, instead of seeing that with all the new problems there would be new opportunities too.

*

The sun shone down on two orange-clad figures walking home from the trash sorting centre. It was a Saturday afternoon, but weekends had no special significance in the life of most working non-Wives.

‘Woman! Everything is so boring lately. Stupid robots sorting out stupid trash.’ Angela said.

Samantha nodded. ‘We’ll need to get our excitement elsewhere, don’t you think?. Did you hear anything about M-boy yet by the way? Life is boring without boys.’

‘Eliza has found him. Zeroville apartment as we thought, including an antique Wifebot. But he’s depressed and doesn’t want to see anyone. Not even Megan, who seems rather depressed too. So I would give him some time. He’ll be back.’

Samantha shrugged. ‘So that means no men for now. As it used to be in the old days. It’s good that I’m looking for other things to do then. Actually, I’m going to the Ghost Town tonight to talk about some volunteer work for them. I need to see something other than those trash robots from time to time, and do something more meaningful. ’

‘Volunteer work? The farm you mean? Pamela said they needed workers there.’

‘No, I mean the hospital. Don’t you think I’d look sexy in a nurse uniform?’‘That’s unexpected. But white is probably better than always this boring orange. Although there will be even less men to flirt with for you in an all-women community.’ ‘Bwah, I’m giving up on men anyway. I’m growing up from that nonsense and I’m getting serious. I'm an adult now. And they call it volunteer work but it’s paid in farm produce. The women at home will be very happy with it.’

‘Like the chicken meat? That was very good stuff!’

‘Mostly vegetables, they don’t slaughter animals that often, but they really have great stuff in their vegetable fields. And I might learn something new that’s more interesting than watching robots who do their trash sorting, and if you get promoted you oversee more complicated robots sort even more trash. I needed something more.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve been reading a lot of books from Eliza lately, but I need something more to do with my time too. But I’m tired from everything that happened lately too, I don’t feel like I can handle more change for now. Life is exhausting.’

‘So did Eliza find a job already? And Megan?’ Samantha said, changing the subject.

‘They’re trying for administrative work. But that won’t be easy. But Eliza’s a hacker who can hack her way into anything if she wants.’

‘I wish I had her gifts, and her access to Loverboy.’ Samantha said dreamily.

‘You need to get into the administration and then you can find the address.’

‘That’s not what I mean. Nevermind… Why do they warn us to stay away from men because they will want us just for being female, and then I can’t even get him to notice me?’

‘They warn against the worst kind of men because those are dangerous. You don’t want to be noticed by those either. And I’m quite sure he’s noticed that you’re female already, you’ve been advertising it enough. But he was engaged and suddenly surrounded by a lot of girls who are all female. He’s just not that into you and Eliza’s friendship project is more his style anyway.’

‘Stupid curly greeneyes will be the one to catch him permanently in the end, and he’d kiss you before he’d even consider seeing me as a woman.’ Samantha said darkly.

‘Don’t say stupid things, Sam, I’m sure he’ll just get back with Megan when things are sorted out. And he certainly isn’t interested in me like that either.’

‘Oh, deep blue eyes, why are you all so clueless? And the problem is that he is the worst of all you clueless idiots. Cute little monogamous idiot with no interest in the real fun!’

‘Maybe you should stop being frustrated all the time, and stop insulting all your friends, Sam. It’s no-one's fault that there are so few decent men in this rotten country, and he can choose only one of us in the end, at best. Maybe not all humans are monogamous, but I’m quite sure he is, and a harem wouldn’t really work for him anyway, too complicated. Plus, you were giving men up, you just said that.’

‘But a woman can dream, can’t I?’

Angela sighed while she looked for her keys, they were almost home.

*

Maria Adams dusted the empty room, deeply lost in thoughts. She could have asked the new maidbot, but she felt like she had to do something with her own hands to distract her. Maybe she shouldn’t have done that with this room, which used to be the room of her former middle son. Why had her husband bought her a new robot after his disappearance after refusing to do so for years? Did he want to compensate for something? Or was he just imitating Sam who seemed to be building a whole collection of them lately? She didn’t know. She’d never understood him and it had only gotten worse over the years. But it could come in handy anyway, she was getting tired faster lately, and even if the machine was not really human, she was much better company than the actual human living in this house with her. There were some glitches in the conversation programs, but at least ‘Rita’ would pretend to listen without shutting her down, getting aggressive or insulting her.

She’d actually been very lonely lately. Even her housewife friends didn’t seem to want to mourn the loss of her son with her. Everyone here in this Alphaville neighbourhood just found it logical to cut off such an unworthy son, but had Michael really been so unworthy? A tear came in her eye when she realised that he had actually tried to get a better relationship with her recently, something she hadn’t even realised at that point, not until it was too late. In one of their last conversations he had even been talking about having contact with his sister again, who was 15 now, and hadn’t been visited by anyone since she’d left for John Manfred Wife School. Not that that was unusual, and David had always said it was the proper thing to do now that she was getting a Wife training at Wife School. In three years Anne could be chosen by a man to become his Wife, and then she would belong to another family anyway.

But it still felt wrong deep down, just as the whole story with Michael felt wrong. Somehow she knew that defending a girl was a good thing to do, even against an Alpha-2, but David and the police officer and the men from school had all been talking about how scandalous it had been, an insult to manhood everywhere, and that people like him shouldn’t be allowed in school. All of them had found it so normal that she’d felt wrong for not agreeing with them. But anyway, she was just a woman and they were men, some of them high-rated men even, so her opinion didn’t even matter. Michael was deleted and she better got used to that.

That also meant that she wasn’t going to have a new daughter-in-law. Sure, the Megan girl had been very young, just as Michael was quite young, and she’d seen her only once, but if she was honest she’d really been looking forward to having another woman in the family. Maria had heard the fight between her husband and Michael about choosing an E-girl, but after she’d seen the girl and had heard him she’d slowly started to understand why her son had chosen her. Sure, David would not understand it and he’d probably get even angrier if he did, but her son had managed to find someone who was quite like himself. Two of them even, that chaperone girl had certainly looked like part of the conspiracy too. She’d never seen a girl like her, so stubborn and fierce, even if she was just an E-girl. But that was all in the past too. The poor girls, even though they were innocent, they were kicked out of Wife School, which meant that they had to live like a non-wife in a Zeroville woman house from now on. Maria shivered when she contemplated such a horrible fate.

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She looked around in the empty room. Rita was a good addition to the house also because there wasn’t much left of her family now. The only of her three children that they were still in contact with was her eldest, Sam, who was exactly like her husband. He was the pride of the family as an Alpha-3, and David always had treated him much better that Michael, even if Sam’s life choices were also quite worrying for Maria. Her daughter-in-law Natasha seemed to have the same kind of marriage as her too, but she was shy and fearful, and would never say anything negative about her husband to any other man. Nation girls were taught to never be negative about the men in their life from a very young age on. But Sam wasn’t really okay now. His new obsession with guns and hunting feral men for example gave her nightmares. In her dreams she saw Sam, with an evil demon face and a big gun ,hunting down Michael while Anne and Natasha were held in a big birdcage.

She sat down, and felt something hard in her back pocket. It was the remote control of the maidbot. Luckily it wasn’t broken. In a few seconds she went back to her doom scenarios. She knew that technically he still had his identity, and they should have given him a place to live and for some weird reason even a Wifebot, something she didn’t even want to think about at all with her son. But would he be able to find a job? She knew that if he got in trouble one more time he’d actually be deleted in the more thorough way, and the only way to survive then was to go feral. And then it was really possible that her two sons would kill each other. And in such a scenario it wasn’t likely that Michael would ever be the winner.

She snapped out of her daydream nightmare when Rita appeared. ‘Do you need some assistance, Mistress?’

‘Could you bring me some coffee, Rita, and then finish dusting this room. If you’re done you can lock it, and keep the key somewhere far away from me. We won’t need it anymore.’

*

Shirley looked out of the window of the classroom again, at the flower garden above which a few cabbage white butterflies hovered. She really couldn’t focus on whatever Miss Hunter was saying today, and she wasn’t in the mood for the whole please-your-husband curriculum at all either. From time to time she looked at the empty desk in front of her, where Megan and Eliza should have been. Nothing was the same without them, and she’d never expected to lose them like that.

‘Shirley, you’re zoning out again. That’s not like you. Come on, tell us about the ways in which Manfred described men as superior to women, and how we need to take that into account when interacting with our husband.’

Eliza would have made a very snarky remark to that, but she wasn’t Eliza. And she had forgotten what Manfred had said about women. He’d never said anything flattering anyway, and it was quite easy to reproduce the gist of his ideas.

‘He said that women are too emotional, and not rational enough, so we should always let our husband explain things to us, and never contradict him.’

‘Hmmm, he said something like that too, Shirley, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. I expect more of you. Even an E-level girl should know those things, we have a quality standard to keep up with the Wives we provide to young men.’

A month ago she’d have nodded and agreed, but now she felt her stomach turn. Once she had believed that everything would be okay if she’d get married, but now she was just afraid for the future. Okay, she had learnt that there were good men in the world beyond anything she’d been taught, at least one of them, but the whole story with Megan and her fiancé had also shown her that most men weren’t good at all in comparison to the clueless Michael. And now the reality of what Miss Hunter had actually been saying for years was seeping in slowly, and it made her fear more for the future with each day. Her whole worldview was falling apart and she was all alone now. She didn’t even have her two best friends around anymore, who could have helped her with this whole deconstruction experience.

‘So, Shirley, remember that men are superior. Their will is our law, and we should never question whatever. We women just cannot understand how they work, and we shouldn’t ever contradict our husbands, they always know better.’

She nodded, but inside everything screamed that this was madness, and that she had to get away from this place as soon as possible. But that was impossible, wasn’t it?

*

Lady Martha looked around at the green central square of Seventh City Ghost Town. As an outlaw community it wasn’t actually part of Seventh City, but more like a whole squat town made in an abandoned pre-Nation village very close to the city itself, and if you knew the way between the fields and ruins it was still a walking distance from several important places within Seventh City. If they would let you in that is, because like every Ghost Town it was walled and heavily guarded against any intruders, with secret and mysterious weapons. No man had ever entered her community, but sometimes more poorer and lower-ranked women of the city came to trade food and stuff, and she had some people coming to work too. The cooperation with the city non-Wives and certain activist groups was better than ever.

Things were going quite well in her community too. She’d been a leader here for more than 30 years, and during that time her community had grown, both in numbers and in possibilities. The farm was bigger and more productive than ever, they had special technical workshops and a hospital now, and also better versions of the “secret weapon” that they used to defend their place. The communication between Ghost Towns in The Nation also became better with the year, and for a few years there was a loosely organised union of Ghost Towns, who were looking together to find an alternative to the heavily patriarchal official life of The Nation. The only problem seemed to be that bands of feral men had become more aggressive lately, but the defence of Ghost Towns had gone up too and the feral men never were very organised or strategic.

She looked at the chapel of the Angel of the Earth, the main place of worship in her ghost Town, where her partner Ruth was the village priestess. She supposed that Ruth was in there, but she didn’t want to disturb her, that was why she was standing here outside the building lost in thoughts.

A flock of grey rock doves flew over, and everything was quiet. It was a beautiful evening, and she was blessed to live in such a beautiful and peaceful place, especially because most of The Nation was the opposite of those two things. Her thoughts were broken by Ruth, who indeed came out of the chapel with a box of tools and ends of wood.

‘I have to finish the altar for the Angel before I can finish for today. I’ll be a bit later.’

‘Okay, I will go on with my business then, love. I have some other work to do, but there was something I wanted some input from you on.’

Ruth noticed that Lady Martha held a paper and looked questioningly at her partner.

‘I received a Pen Pal message as they call it. Eliza wants to use the printing engine again this week.’

Ruth looked at the mysterious paper. ‘Sent through that Pen Pal network? The one for young people that uses the combined black markets of both sexes? The one that can connect girls and boys in their schools too? From young Eliza? Wasn’t she one of the inventors herself?’ Ruth asked.

‘I think it more was that boy she’s in contact with even.’

Ruth nodded. ‘Eliza the man-hater and her boy friend. I heard about him. Sounds like an interesting case. He’s behind the unsegregation movement in cafés and restaurants too. He just wanted to talk to a Women are Human activist girl, and so he opened a table without sex segregation, and it caught on. Fascinating story if you think about it.’

‘Oh, was it not to be able to talk with his Wife School match and Eliza?’ Lady Martha asked.

‘They certainly used it for that too.’

Ruth looked thoughtful. ‘So what do the other Ghost Town elders think of the unsegregation thing? It sounds like an extremely dangerous idea too in a way.’ Martha nodded.

‘The elders are cautious, but some are optimistic too. But I think we should not close the door directly if a bridge is offered to us.’

‘Bad mix of metaphors, Martha, but you might be right. We’ve always prided ourselves on being on the side of all life. Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate whether at least some men can be considered part of that too. And with Eliza as one degree of separation from one of them I think there is one candidate that we’ll have to consider soon.’

‘You mean, opening contact with that Michael-boy?’ Martha asked.

‘I’ve never seen a better candidate in my life, but still… Can we really go that far?’ Ruth said.

‘He deserves some support from our side now I’d say. That incident with Eliza that had her leave the SCWF was because he defended the two girls against two high-rated predator males. And he was deleted for that, after being locked up for days in a police cell. Shunned by his family even,’ Martha said.

‘Even if he’s a male, no-one deserves to be punished for something like that. It was honourable what he did. The male world is a horrible place, see how they eat their own. Did anyone find him back after that?’ Ruth asked.

‘He’s relocated to a Zeroville appartment with a Wifebot. The usual way of preventing men to go feral. They can be rather cruel and very unsubtle towards any man who doesn’t fit in.’

‘Poor boy. He was doing good work. The first man in ages that I hear about that could maybe give a woman a decent marriage is married off to a robot? Really, they are becoming more idiotic with the day. What happened to her by the way? The ex-fiancée?’

‘Oh, she’s living with Eliza in the woman house now. I invited Eliza to come live here, but she declined. I think we’ll still see her more regularly, she doesn’t only use the printing engine but also the robot workshop, and she comes to get vegetables sometimes. I hope her to be part of our community one day. She’s a technical genius and a good networker, with a network that expands even to the male side of The Nation.’

A silence fell.

‘People like Mildred aren’t going to be happy with it. You know how she hates men.’ Ruth said.

‘She hates everything, and I don’t really believe that she would be so nonviolent as she claims if it wasn’t a basic idea from our community. We can’t really listen to people like her if we want to get anywhere at all.’

‘So do you actually want to invite the boy and talk to him, love? Do I hear that right?’ Ruth asked again.

‘My noble predecessor Lady Leona always told me that both The Nation and the Ghost Towns would not last forever, and that in a better future the sexes wouldn’t be enemies anymore, and that I should look out for signs for a better time. I think those signs are there, in both the Pen Pal network and the unsegration movement, and are both connected to him. The male world might have spit him out now, but his creations are here to stay, as is his connection to people who are connected to our community. So why not talk to him?'

‘If you put it like that.’ Lady Ruth said. ‘But I still have some altar making to do now. We’ll talk about it later. And maybe you could talk to Eliza herself about it and see what she thinks?’

Lady Martha grinned. ‘That young one is too naturally egalitarian. She has no concept of hierarchy, not even with me. I don’t think she has much feeling for sex segregation either. She’d just bring him in for a casual sight-seeing if she could.’

‘That would be going too far. But I think that letting in a man with her free person badge, that will swear the free person pledge will be a possibility in the future. At least this one. Mildred or no Mildred, it might be an important step.’ Lady Ruth said, and then she walked back to the chapel to finish her work.