Chapter 1: The Big Snip

It was called the Big Snip. That was coined by a journalist, who said it looked like someone had snipped the marionette strings of all men.

I saw the videos and indeed it did look like all males had collapsed like their strings had been snipped. One of the more famous ones was a Japanese pitcher in a baseball game winding up to throw the ball. Mid-throw, he collapsed on the mound, dead.

Autopsies showed that a virus had viciously attacked their brain stem. Their deaths were instantaneous.

The Big Snip didn’t hit all the world at once. Unfortunately, North America was hit first; but on the up-side, it did hit in the wee hours where most men died in their sleep. Only a few airplanes fell out of the sky, and a few trucks crashed into buildings and other cars. Other parts of the world were not so lucky.

Within twelve hours, all but a few men were dead.

About a dozen men were in the right place and had the quickness of mind to quarantine themselves. They lasted about a week. It turned out the Big Snip virus was very hard to totally eradicate. The first exchange of food or water into the quarantined area led to their death. In the end, it didn’t much matter whether it was the food or water or even both as there were more important survival matters to worry about for the surviving female scientists to be studying by that time.

After that, the only men alive were the three in orbit aboard the ISS. They lasted until the first replenishment rocket arrived. The cargo had been thoroughly sterilized. The interior of the rocket, not so much. The last human males died.

You can’t blame the sloppiness of the ground crew. Things were quite hectic on Earth and most of the experienced personnel had been men.

The first few weeks were dedicated to disposing half of the world’s population, to prevent the spread of other disease. Many people who had funeral plots could not be buried there. There were just too many bodies and not enough staff. Only the rich, powerful, and famous got traditional funerals.

Lots of women buried their loved ones in their backyards.

Some cities, next to an ocean, tried to bury bodies at sea. But there were too many corpses. It took too many trips hauling corpses to deep water. Even then, thousands of bodies got washed back on shore.

Most cities used their sport stadiums as mass graves. They heaped the field and seats with dead men. If more space was needed, the bodies were burned to make room. Finally, the mass grave was covered with dirt and cement, primarily by controlled implosion of the stadium. The former arenas became memorials to the fallen.

Smaller towns used vacant lots and public parks as graves for thousands of men.

Even before the grisly chore was finished, women fell from grief into despair. With no men there would be no more people. The sperm banks were almost immediately protected by the local or federal governments. But what good would it be? All the male babies were dying as soon as the umbilical cord was cut. Some were dead in the womb.

Then, a month after the Big Snip, the first live male baby was born. The child’s mother had passed her immunity to the virus on to him. It was a miracle that rescued humanity from the brink.

I was that baby. My mother appropriately named me Adam, Adam Ford. I was the first male baby to survive the Big Snip. The Chinese say they had a baby boy born before me. I consider it a tie.

After me, more boys were born. At first, the survival rate was ten percent. At the nine-month point, it was almost one hundred percent. In the end, about one hundred thousand boys world-wide survived.

After a few months, an investigation was started on the cause of the mass extinction. Circumstantial evidence pointed to an old Cold War era spy satellite. It traveled in a polar orbit and covered the whole surface of the earth every twelve hours. It was at the right place for it to spray the world with the virus. Its orbit had degraded and broke up in the atmosphere two days after the incident.

Why a virus like that would be on the satellite was anyone’s guess.

Having only half the world’s population was both a help and a problem. The need for food and resources was reduced.

On the other hand, there were many businesses that were male-dominated, and needed women to take up the slack. Businesses, like trucking, construction, and even waste disposal, were desperate for women to work for them. They paid big bucks for new employees to come to work as trainees.

Crops rotted in the fields, as too few were around to harvest them.

The fact that there were no new babies being born meant that the world’s population continued to decrease. But the fact that in about fifteen years, a new crop of men would be back to help repopulate, prevented panic.

Until then, the world’s governments continued to ration the vials of sperm in the sperm banks. They usually inseminated women who had no children and were close to menopause. They were the ones who could not wait fifteen years.

Growing up as one of the three thousand boys in the US was not easy. From my earliest memory, I was impressed with the fact that I was humanity’s last hope.

Three times, someone had tried to abduct me. The first time was when I was just a day old. A grief-stricken woman in the hospital, who had just lost her son, claimed that I was her child.

The governments debated how to protect this valuable resource. Some of the countries, with a more totalitarian culture, planned to take the boys away and be raised by the state. The all-female population would not have any of that. Even dictators cannot rule without the consent of the masses. Those governments wound up taking the boys’ family into protective custody.

The US initially tried to let the mothers keep their life as usual, but have a Secret Service officer live with them,

I am grateful for that agent’s presence. She stopped my second and third abduction attempts, almost before they began. The agent assigned to me rotated on a regular basis, so I didn’t get too attached.

My mom, Judy Ford, was not your stereotypical mother. She had gotten pregnant with me at age sixteen. Even before the Big Snip, she had broken up with my father.

Before the Big Snip, she worked at a Hooters, until her pregnancy started to show. After that she worked at a phone sex line.

Eight months pregnant, she worked as an excavator, digging mass graves. She learned how to operate the equipment as she went. She was not too worried about protecting me. She did not expect me to live.

As I grew up, I was the center of attention everywhere I went. Women would look at me with envy and/or awe.

During my grade school days, my mother grew my hair long and dressed me as a girl. I went to classes under the name Amanda. My classmates did not know I was a boy, though my teachers did. We were in the last class of our grade, as there would be no more school children after us for about fifteen years.

When I turned ten, my treatment changed. The government gave up on the attempt to keep our lives ‘normal’ and voted that we, the last males, should be protected. They moved us, and the rest of our family into a secure compound. We were not given a choice.

Other countries were much more restrictive. Some boys had never seen the sun or sky.

Our mothers could go outside to their jobs, but we boys were not allowed to leave the compound. They let us go out on excursions, but only under heavy guard. Not the best incentive to have fun, but I did get to get my hair cut.

There were hundreds of small compounds around the country. I was in Dodge City, Kansas; one of three in the state.

Only one other boy was there with me, a part American Indian named Tom Hart. He was two weeks younger than me and lived with his mother, Liza, and twin sister, Hope. Liza, who was in her early forties, had lost three sons, triplets, along with her husband in the Big Snip.

Tom had black hair and a swarthy complexion. While I tended to be more serious-minded, he was more mischievous. Tom always had a joke or quip.

We all lived in an old motel. They put up a big security fence around the two-story building. Although there were twenty rooms, the HHS put us together in two adjoining rooms next to the old office. Both rooms had two double beds. The doors connecting the rooms were open most of the time.

Both rooms had a kitchen in them. They were the only two in the motel. I guess that is why they had us sleep in them.