Perry smiled – respectfully – and shook his head.

“You know, there were stories about this. Science fiction stories.”

“We know,” the doctor said. She did not return the smile. “Had you read them?”

“I read about them, more than I read them. Many were old. I do remember one movie. Are you – familiar with them, yourself?”

“About as much as you are, it sounds like.”

“Well. Of course there always had to be a setup for how it had happened. Sometimes the Y chromosome just failed. In other stories, the women gained control and intentionally – ” he searched, then shrugged – “drove the men to extinction, basically. Decided they’d be better off without them.”

He paused. She said nothing, and neither did any of the other four staff who were gathered in the room, all of them women.

This struck him as an odd time for a pause. All five of them just looked at him, waiting for him to continue. He was in bed, while the women all sat in chairs. He felt alert, but weak after his long coma.

“Or perhaps it was an alien species,” he said. “A species which was very close to being human, or slightly altered humans, something like that. But all female. Or space settlers who had evolved that way. But then regardless of the setup, the drama of course was in how the man, or the few men if it was a group, would relate to the all-woman society. It wouldn’t do to just have a happy ending, in fiction. The man couldn’t just – mix himself in and be done with it. The women often had to attack him, or cast him out, or something.”

He stopped talking, and the room was silent.

The woman who had done the talking so far seemed older than the others, perhaps in her upper forties. None of them was particularly old, he noticed. Or at least they didn’t seem so, to him; he guessed it was possible that in the future, no one would ever really look old.

The other four included a tall woman in doctor’s white, a young one wearing a suit, another in the blue of a nurse, and the last one, a blond woman staring at him, again in a suit. The one talking – and taking notes – looked more like a laboratory researcher, in a long white coat.

They all had very attentive eyes, and all five had their eyebrows slightly raised. He wondered if he were in Scandinavia, or just somewhere other than the U.S., and this was just a cultural trait. But they all spoke what he considered unaccented American English.

After some moments of silence, he resumed:

“So, can you tell me why it has happened here?”

“You said you had seen one movie about it,” the doctor said. “Do you remember it?”

“Yes, pretty well.”

“What happened in it?”

“Well, in that one the women were not able to reproduce by themselves. They hadn’t been without males for very long.”

“But what had happened to the rest of the males in the first place?”

“I don’t remember the back story in that one. It almost doesn’t matter, you know? Like with an apocalypse movie. Often it doesn't really matter what causes the apocalypse. Caused the apocalypse.”

He caught himself:

“Not that I’m saying this is an apocalypse here. Whatever happened.”

That probably did not sound great, he thought to himself.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The women just continued to stare at him.

“Anyway, in this movie, they wanted to get him to father some children; but the drama was that they were very controlling. It was all on their terms. They were enslaving the guy, basically.”

“And how did it end?”

“He ended up running away. With his dog.”

The lead looked down to write something in a notebook again.

It was a paper notebook, and she was using what looked to him like just a regular ink pen. This surprised him somewhat because they had indicated, earlier, that at least two hundred years had passed. But they still used pen and paper.

He looked over their lab whites and other work wear again.

“Clothes haven’t changed much,” Perry said. “Assuming you’re a doctor and you’re a nurse.” He nodded toward them.

“They have changed, and must have come around again,” the leader said.

“Can you tell me,” Perry tried again, “what happened here? What happened to the men? And the boys?”

“Well, the boys” – she emphasized the word, oddly – “were the first to depart, of course. They aged into men. But then the men – were not replaced.” She looked to her left, at the blond woman who was still staring at him.

“I don’t believe we’re going to explain it,” she said.

“No,” agreed the blonde.

“Tell me, Perry. What would you do here? Out in our society?”

“What would I do?”

He was alarmed that this was phrased as a conditional. He pressed ahead:

“Well. I would – I will – try to earn a living. Take care of myself. I was an archaeologist. Still am, I would say. So I’d look for that sort of work, if it’s still around. And –” he shrugged. “Live and learn, I guess.”

None of them responded.

“I didn’t ask to come here,” he said. “I don’t even remember being put into that device. I didn’t come here to – interfere. You know, you’re starting to scare me a little. I’m not sure why. I’m feeling like you’re upset with me for some reason.”

Even to this they made no answer.

“Anyway, like I said, I’d be glad to just – mind my own business, here. Find something to do.”

The leader snapped her notebook shut.

“It doesn’t matter if you asked to come here or not. You have an inflated sense of your own agency. As if your motives matter to us. As if your attitude is anything we care about. You will ‘try to earn a living here’ – as if your effort would make a difference. In reality you would either succeed or fail based on our decisions. You are shockingly arrogant. I don’t know if this is due to the epoch in which you were raised, or if it’s due to – ”

She frowned, and Perry thought she tilted her head, just barely, to indicate his crotch.

She then said:

“You’re going back.”

“Back where?”

“Back into that case.”

“I don’t think it travels backward in time.”

“It certainly does not,” she said.

“And I’m not sure it will turn on again.”

“We can turn it on. Do you think we don’t understand how it functions? We’re not murdering you.” And she shook her head, dismissively, as if he were a grade schooler who had come up with a ridiculous idea.

The five of them all stood; he did too. He half expected them to call in guards to pin him, then, but they did it themselves. He took steps backward, but they came at him; and in any event they were positioned between him and the door so he had nowhere to go.

He thought about trying to crash straight through them, but his legs felt too weak.

The one who seemed to be a doctor grabbed one of his arms, and one of the two in a suit took the other. The nurse-looking one stepped behind him and put her arms tight around his ribs.

The one who had done the writing then produced a syringe and injected him in his upper left arm.

The shot, whatever it was, turned him limp but did not knock him out completely. He was aware of being dragged down the hall a short distance to the stasis device. He was aware of the women lifting him up and holding him horizontally. Then he felt the wet of the gel as they pushed him into it.

The lids of the device came down; first the transparent one, and then the outer one that turned everything dark.