Wilderness of the human spirit, the Great Spirit. This is the only truth we know, because we forgot all the bad religions, the ones that mistreated women, the ones that had faceless prophets who saturnized their sickness onto generations to come, waging holy wars. The ultimate contradiction, the oxymoron: holy war. It is sickness; an infection of ideal. We left all that behind, because our men never grow past boyhood. How could they, our puppies, when we are immortal, and they only live for a hundred years?

I only ever wanted one man for myself, and I waited until I was a thousand years old before I bought him.

How did we create this Eden?

Our wisdom was always with you, and you are our mother, our grandmother. We know how you suffered in a world ruled by men. We live in harmony with them, they play and they live as our guests, their short lives. I am still young, but I am considered a poet - a romantic.

A thousand years a maiden - while others have forgotten so many of their boys. Yes, and that is why I am special, I do not use drugs, I do not sleep for the Dreaming. No, my dear, I dream while I am awake. My mind is open, and I will tell you how we became this way.

The human body is a miracle, you see. Look at your body, you are perfect. Now I tell you, you are still mortal, aging, dying, and that is what we changed. We do not age, our neoteny features are ubiquitous, a world of ancient girl-bodies. It is necessary, to arrest the body at puberty, and prevent the decay of the thymus. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the Serum of Everlasting Life to increase the life of a man. Instead, we make them comfortable, we care for them, and they want for nothing.

They spend their time playing games, sports, and as our lovers. Don't get me wrong, true love is always found between two women, but there is a sensation from the touch of a man that cannot be simulated by anything else. Otherwise, we would have no more purpose for them.

In fact, there are not as many men as you might think. They are almost always aborted, unless a sponsor pays for his life, and it costs a small fortune to cover his dowry. He then belongs to her, and she may choose what he has, or where he can go, or what he gets to do during his life. It is not a bad thing, as we strive to make them happy, sending him to Mars - if that is his wish. We all have plenty of money, we all own a share of all things, and the world is incomprehensibly rich.

When I turned a thousand, I was offered three different males, their mothers eager to make one for me. Oh, I get ahead of myself, I would first explain the entire process. Immortality, the history of our world and how babies are born - since it requires an interruption of our General Cycle, something that is quite a bit different than menstruation. Let me just sort my thoughts out, and summarize in my own words, I am not a scientist, and this is not a report on the Keys of Life.

It is a love story.

Ruby Fields was the first, and she was given a birth control shot that she had a reaction to. She'd had her first period, and her mother insisted on this birth control. It was supposed to be safe, and it would halt her cycle, her eggs not moving, finite as they are. Her body reacted differently than any woman before her, and after a severe allergic reaction, the doctors brought in from the Mayo Clinic ingeniously guessed that her unique body chemistry actually now needed the shot. So, her life seemingly in jeopardy - they gave it a shot. See what I did there? No, I am terrible at dad jokes, not even after studying them for a whole decade can I tell one right. Takes man for that, apparently.

Intuition played a key part in what happened next, but her body chemistry accepted the redundant injection, and she had the first-ever General Cycle. She simply stopped aging, so long as her nephritic process was stable, but when it wasn't she had the same allergic reaction. The mystery wasn't hard to solve, and the next thing was to ask for volunteers.

Oh, I am terrible at retelling this part of our history. One of our scientists could explain the way it works. One of our historians could piece it together better. One of our philosophers could tell you how we jumped to conclusions and became the next evolution of the human race. I am just saying what I've heard, and I am not doing a good job, but listen, this is how I say what happened. I am a poet, after all.

So, they had synthesized the drug's conversion in her bloodstream, to cure her. And she wasn't getting older in the six years that she suffered for it. When the serum was ready, she took it once every other year, as her nephritic process eliminated the remnants of the compound. She was healthy and fine and in her late twenties she looked like she was sixteen. Then in her late forties she still looked like she was sixteen, except her body had grown quite strong and immune, and she had no sickness, she was very athletic. In her sixties, in her eighties, Ruby Fields had barely reached the physical age of nineteen years old. She was almost two hundred years old before she fully blossomed into her physical peak.

By then, the world had already changed. As I mentioned they asked for volunteers to try the serum, and it was found that any young woman in her early twenties could survive the initial treatment and enjoy the benefits. So, the drug company, aptly named Eden, a kickstarted company, quickly overtook all the pharmaceutical companies in size and influence. There's no other drug known to us that was ever more widely used. Eden became the world, as the wealth of womankind soon bought everything. We had to, it was the only fair way to take it all for ourselves.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

When you have eight hundred years of control over the stocks, the bonds, the accounts and the markets you can simply buy out any old weed that sprouts up in your orchards. We call it Fortune Eight Hundred. Every woman alive is retired, except me, I decided to keep working until I am one thousand, and that is when I will fund a man, and he'll be mine.

Unless he divorces me, they can do that, if they want to live like an animal. It is rare, but sometimes a man simply doesn't want to live off his sponsor. He thinks he will be happy if he goes out and tries to survive in the wilderness. The wild spirit.

That was mine, but I will tell you about him soon, first I must digress.

The Keys of Life is the process by which a pregnancy may occur in much older women than myself. During the end of her General Cycle, the mother might become pregnant, if one of her eggs is in position, after so long. We take hormonal drugs to influence the gender, preferring a daughter. If it is still a male, we just abort it. Unless, of course, the mother has a buyer, some woman who wants a man and will raise him and keep him and care for him.

There are plenty of men to go around. The same man might have any number of encounters with different women, if he is allowed to be unfaithful. Some women, myself included, would prefer he spend his whole life only with me. Sometimes it depends on her mood this century, or of his character. Or he cheats, that happens too, and it is quite amusing to watch one of these little bastards running all over the place like he thinks we aren't all watching him the whole time.

On occasion, she'll murder him and be required to live alone until she can prove her remorse. It can take a while. My girlfriend Cassandra murdered her man when he was only fifty-two, because he stopped 'finding her attractive' and started masturbating to spite her, because she kept him locked away from other women so he couldn't cheat "even in his eyes" as she was quoted to say. She spent twenty-seven years in isolation until she convinced us she was sorry for killing him and wanted back into the graces of Eden. She'd aged terribly.

There's lots of other instances where a woman murdered her man. Someone actually compiled a whole book with a chapter describing every time it has ever happened in Eden. This would be starting with the Genova incident, and not going back before that, because it is generally agreed that is the first one that counted as the first murder of our world. Really wasn't our world before that, since we hadn't yet eliminated the right to vote for men yet. They can't own anything either.

Wild men do occasionally get hunted for sport, but that is super rare, and it might just be an urban legend, since there's no record of any such thing.

I was going to tell you all about Michael, but I can't seem to mention him.

The cat is out of the bag - my favorite words. Michael was mine, I chose him for his dark complexion and his intelligence. I wanted something special for my first, and I planned to be very kind and generous to him. I'd let him do anything he wanted, but I hoped he would only want me. It is hard to think about how hopeful I was.

Some women don't cry anymore. I still do. I guess I am not a big girl yet. I guess I am just a silly poet.

I watched him growing up and I was very proud of him. When he was seventeen, I introduced myself to him. He had never met a woman before. I'd arranged for him to go to boy's camps and he'd met grown men already. He was delightful, and for half his life before then, he wanted to be a drone. I couldn't allow him to become a drone, genderless people, for that was not his purpose. Instead, I had him conditioned to aspire to manhood. Perhaps he was just going through a phase, and it was my impatience that ruined him. He liked me well enough and accepted me as his girlfriend.

I chose to be submissive towards him, and that helped his masculine ego also. He had a very strong masculine ego, the conditioning had worked too well. He was even capable of sexual aggression, which was so rare that it got the attention of Eden. They wanted to know how I'd made a man who was capable of sexual aggression. I'd proven he was capable of it when I denied him routine intercourse and he ignored my refusal. It was one of the most watched encounters ever, me saying 'no' to him and winking at the pixe.

I'd staged it, of course, because I already knew he was like that. The trouble is that after he'd done that he changed. He didn't want me anymore, he was done with women. Something in him had snapped, broken, and he wasn't innocent like the other men. Playfulness and kindness made him unhappy. He craved brutality and difficulty.

He didn't want more of that, our final encounter, whatever that was like for him. No, he just wanted to be alone. Michael divorced me, possibly he discovered that our encounters, especially the last one, were a matter of public record. I am not sure what made him so different.

I could tell he was unhappy. He stopped playing his games, stopped his sports and his male bonding. He wouldn't look at me, wouldn't respond to me.

He just said: "I didn't mean it." and then he left me.

I was heartbroken. We had shared so much, he was very intelligent and creative and poetic, just like me. I had loved him my whole life, long before he was born. In my eyes he was perfect. How could I not be perfect for him?

I followed him obsessively for the rest of his life. He went out into the forests and the deserts and learned to survive out there. When he needed something, we made sure he found it. Sometimes he rejected our gifts, suffering in vain. Everyone loved him, I wasn't alone out there.

What I mean is we had our pixe spying on him, keeping a vigilant surveillance. None of us actually went out there and bothered him. He was happy out there.

When he was in his late forties the rugged lifestyle had taken its toll on him. He had a prion in him, and half a dozen other fatal diseases, loads of parasites and wounds that had never healed right that caused him endless pain.

He went where the hummingbirds go, that extinct species. He was looking out at a sunset, over the ruins of an ancient factory. He had his bone tools, his iron biface, his bow and the rest of his dried meat arranged around him. He owned those things, technically.

I let him see my pixe, hovering in front of him. In all his years out there he'd only worn a scowl, but when he saw my herald, my personal markings, he recognized it. He smiled strangely at me, and my heart leapt for a moment, because it felt like he was telling me that not only was he happy out there, but he still loved me.

No, I know he loved me. When I retrieved his remains I found the locket I had given him when we first met. That also, belonged to him.

There is one more thing he had, of mine, that will always be his.

I think you know what that is, and there are no words I could say to describe it.

It was mine, but it rests now in my memory of him.