Chapter 2

“So, you’re the sleeping beauty, are you? Mr. Nick Radescu, is that right?” I heard a voice as someone entered the room while I watched the global news.

“That’s my name. Don’t wear it out,” I cracked an old-fashioned joke, which had the owner of the voice a bit puzzled.

“I’m not sure how I can exhaust an intangible, citizen, an abstraction such as a name,” the confused nurse remarked.

“Oh, that was a joke, Nurse,” I chuckled a bit.

“Well, I’m glad that you retain a sense of humor, or rather regained it so soon after you became conscious again. My name is Lorraine Schmidt, and I’m originally from Berlin, in fact,” the nurse explained, her skin tone a bit paler than April’s.

“Nice to meet you, Lorraine. I would ask if you were dating someone or married to anyone, but evidently, those are quaint customs these days. I’d also worry that April might get jealous, but that’s also a bit anachronistic, too,” I mused as she laid the smoothie in front of me.

“Brunch is served, Herr Radescu. As for jealousy, marriage, dating, and such, don’t worry your handsome head about that. I’ve already determined to fuck you as soon as I can arrange it. No obligations, trust me. Women nowadays don’t have to pretend an excuse for sex. It’s not a commodity anymore. We like sex for its own sake, just as men do.

“Incidentally, that’s a raspberry banana smoothie, but it also contains vitamins A, B, D, calcium, protein, iron, beta-carotene, etc. It even has HDL cholesterol to help control your LDL levels, my friend,” Lorraine elaborated with pride on the quality of nutritional smoothies in the twenty-second century.

“How old is one when they lose their virginity, anyway, typically?” I wondered now.

“What is virginity? Oh, yes, I forgot, the strange notion that one is physiologically distinct from other people simply for the absence of sexual history. This tradition of yours from the past just doesn’t make sense to me or anyone else that has been told of it from my own experience. Typically, as you asked me, though, it’s normal to ‘lose’ it, as you say, between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Anything younger than that would be a crime under our statutes, so I would hope not!

“The most common experience is for an older, more mature partner to initiate one, so as to have the benefit of that person’s mentoring, if you will. For instance, my English teacher, Heinrich Schulmann, initiated me, much to our mutual delight. I was fifteen. My favorite part was anal intercourse, which remains my most preferred sexual act of all to this day. He prepared and lubricated me sufficiently and manipulated me in the most correct fashion for that purpose,” Lorraine stunned me with this news, as what she described would be statutory rape in my time.

“From your astonishment, it is clear that such behavior would be socially censured or perhaps even expose one to criminal sanction, but in this century, it is more than a little commonplace. The opportunities for the sort of abuse of authority that might constitute your concern are rather limited in this day and age. We do not worry about power imbalances as such, as they are very miniscule compared to what they would be in the past. It’s just not that kind of problem anymore,” Lorraine explained as she stared at my package.

“Because no one is really poor or rich or anything like that, am I correct? Social classes don’t really exist nowadays? That is still a radical concept in itself for me, but it seems to have dramatically transformed society for the best. The pressures, divisions, resentments, and hierarchies of my own generation and aeons before it seem to have been entirely erased, at least from what I can tell.

“I suppose that this was what Karl Marx really intended, but others, such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, the Kims, and Honecker, etc. truly undermined such a vision for a long time, before it could bear fruit. A writer named Edward Bellamy envisaged a world not that dramatically different from this in some ways, at least on the economic side of things. He put down his utopia in a book called ‘Looking Backward,’ as it happens. That was in the nineteenth century, in fact,” I observed, raising Lorraine’s eyebrows now.