Between April 16 and May 14, 2024, every woman of childbearing age who wasn’t already expecting became pregnant. This included three children as young as 9 years old in the Republic of Congo, and a 68-year old woman in Ukraine. I ovulated on Saturday, April 20 and became pregnant with my twins, Rebecca and Angela. My next door neighbor’s 17-year-old daughter, Stephanie, conceived her twins Edward and Jacob (yes, named after the characters in Stephanie Meyers’s books) the same evening, so we had concurrent delivery dates: January 11, 2025. Half the newly-pregnant women on earth carried twin boys; the remaining 50% bore twins girls, like my own. This, of course, caused pandemonium when it occurred.

No one knew why or how this happened, or who was responsible. Millions of theories abounded. As you can imagine, most include the man upstairs, or the one below in the subbasement. Neither had a direct hand in the matter, nor did aliens, the third most popular culprit. I alone, of all residents of Earth, know the truth. I am cursed with that knowledge.

My memory of April 20^th ceases at 6 PM. The same for Stephanie, who spent the night partying. I didn’t blank out; according to my husband and Tricia, 10 years old at the time, I remained conscious and in good spirits all evening long. Of course, no one knew I was being made pregnant at the time. Stephanie claimed that she remained perfectly sober that night and engaged in no sexual activity at all. I believe she was high as a kite and drunk, almost certainly doing what any partying 17-year-old did on a Friday night. Not that her activity was to blame in any way. Millions of other ovulating 17-year-old’s conceived that night also. She was far from alone.

My husband was furious. Before the awareness something stupendously horrifying had occurred--and was still occurring—any number of wives, girlfriends, significant others and partners were accused of infidelity. I burst into tears the night I confessed to Jeff that I was three weeks along with child. He grabbed me by the arms, shook me violently before storming out, something he’d never done before. Many women got worse. Children were berated by parents and ostracized by their friends. It was a very difficult time to be female, in any respect.

The twins—every pair of them--were perfectly normal. Amniocentesis performed on millions of fetuses showed the babies derived half their DNA from their mothers, as normal. The DNA of the father was indeterminate; appearing to be different in every case, not one strand identified as belonging to any living male. How in God’s name could that be? Scientists were baffled; husbands outraged. Billions of women carrying babies not made by their loved ones, forced to deliver someone else’s offspring. This bothered Jeff, more than it did me.

The health profession was overwhelmed immediately and remained completely overwhelmed. The first of the babies would deliver in January and continue in a never-ending flood for two months afterward. Most would be delivered at home, or in hastily erected community delivery centers across America and around the world. No dollar amount was ventured at the enormous cost to the world’s economy. I personally estimated it in the trillions of dollars, but what did I know?

An estimate I did hear was that 135,000,000 of us became pregnant in the US during the one-month period. That’s 40% of the population. It included millions of children ages 9–17 (horrible) and women too old to be getting pregnant in my opinion, but again, what do I know?

We would almost double the population of Earth.

Millions of pregnancies were terminated in the months following the initial discovery. Every abortion was remedied by another pregnancy during the woman’s subsequent ovulation. No form of birth control proved effective. Women who should have died for nothing more than statistical probability were found to be healthy. To my knowledge, no woman who became unexpectedly pregnant died of that pregnancy. Not that millions of woman didn’t die. You know what I’ve talking about. My otherwise gentle husband tried to shake me out of my pregnancy. I need to get off this subject before I explode.

I had dreams of my conception night; we all did. I’d be on a shiny stainless steel surgical table twice my size and surrounded by faceless, nameless creatures 10 feet tall. They were silver also, with a satin sheen reminiscent of woven silver. My feet were in stirrups and spread humiliatingly wide, leaving me exposed to all present, many with no business being at a delicate conception procedure, I imagine. Not that the procedure was delicate in the dream. A creature simply stuck a silver hose up my vagina, penetrating my cervix, and filled my uterus to overflowing with disgusting goop that spewed right back out while I screamed in agony. Another creature attached suction devices to my nipples like you would to a cow’s udders, and began to milk me, even though I was not yet pregnant and charged with milk producing hormones, much less producing milk. Another creature carefully examined my belly button, wanting to know its use.

“I don’t know!” I screamed at him. “Will you please let me up!” He then inserted a device with two stubby prongs into my navel and exposed a flesh colored plug I didn’t know was there. I immediately began to spew goop straight into the air like a gushing oil well. Despite my horrible leakage, I began to bloat up, becoming more pregnant by the moment. My areola darkened and thickened, as did my nipples; my breasts swelled and began to produce milk; my stomach developed the telltale Linea Nigra down the middle, and then I was given an enema, hoisted vertically and told to defecate my insides down a huge, galvanized steel funnel while all these creatures watched and discussed what they saw. I always awoke, sitting straight upright, holding my belly. Nice dreams.

Who benefited from this? Imagine the millions of car seats and billions of newborn outfits produced worldwide. Formula. Bottles and nipples. Disposable diapers. Wipes. Exterior clothing--January is when we started popping, remember? Billions of tubs and jars of 1^st Foods. Spoons. Pacifiers. Toys--millions and millions and millions of toys. Hats, gloves, bootwear, jimmies--the list goes on and on. The top ten valued companies in market capitalization were all baby goods companies.

I was out with my neighbor Casey, baby-clothes shopping one afternoon. The offerings were sparse, but becoming better weekly as the industry geared up for the tsunami. She was two weeks behind me, due January 25th. Her twins were girls, also.

“Do you think... ?” She hesitated, biting her lower lip. “Do you think it’ll happen again, Jess?”

No one knew. No new auto-pregnancies had been reported since August, but since it was unknown why they had started and why they had stopped, it was impossible to tell if it would occur again. If so, I whispered, I wanted twin boys this time. Three girls were enough. I rubbed my belly, thinking.

“I have a better question. Who do you think the father is?”

She looked at me blankly. No one knew that.

“I had a dream last night,” I said.

She rolled her eyes in commiseration and rubbed her own swelling belly.

I looked around, not wanting to be overheard. I barely noticed the plethora of us pregnant women anymore. All of us were pregnant. Every single one of use. Even those previously incapable of bearing children, short of having had their uteruses removed. An aisle over, a mom with her preteen twins, one pregnant, one not, examined winter coats. I wondered if mom and daughter carried the same sex twins, but considered that unlikely. The breakdown was thought to be exactly 50/50, within decimal points. I was unaware of any two-eligible family, or multiples of two, carrying the same sex.

“This was not the usual, put something up me and fill me with goop, dream, Casey,” I said softly. “In this dream, one of these creatures talked to me.”

She jerked, startled. The creatures never talked in the dreams. Never. They communicated telepathically.

“It talked to you, actually moved its lips?”

I nodded, just as surprised as Casey.

“What did it say?”

I looked around again. “You can’t repeat this to anyone, Case. I don’t want people descending on me from all directions, or people accusing me of lying. If it comes back to me, I’ll deny it.”

Looking slightly offended, she nodded curtly. “OK. What did it say?”

I leaned close. “It wanted to know what I thought of my pregnancy, and if I liked carrying girls rather than boys.”

She looked at me blankly, but at the same time startled.

“What did you tell it?”

“I didn’t. I asked what right he, or they, had in making me pregnant. I was very angry in the dream.”

“I imagine so,” she said. “What did it say to that?”

“I was told I had no say in the matter, like everyone else, I was carrying my twins at the directive of some government office—he told me the name of it, but I forget now, some gobbledygook or other. Anyway, I should be happy to be delivering healthy twin girls in January, he said. I was one of a select few who was impregnated with the sex of my choice.”

She jerked again, startled. “It told you that?”

I held up my hand. “Jeff and I were trying at the time and we wanted another baby girl.” I laughed, feeling rather skittish about it. “I got my wish. In duplicate, I guess. I’m sure that’s why I dreamed it.”

“Maybe,” she agreed uncertainly. “Did it tell you anything else?”

I hesitated. I wished now that I hadn’t brought this up. I had, though, so I forged ahead.

“He said I could switch sex anytime I wanted to. Or abandon them completely. Not abort them—which I would never do under any circumstances—” I hugged my belly protectively. “—but put them up for...” I hesitated again. “Adoption? I’m not sure exactly what he meant. He touched my belly—I was naked, of course, those stupid suction thingies on my nipples, my feet in the stirrups, but I was alone with him. And...” I blushed a little, revealing this: “I was sexually aroused. Extremely aroused.”

I ducked my head and glanced around swiftly. The woman and her daughters had drifted away and we were completely alone in this corner.

“He had a machine attached to me down there and I was having a very hard time concentrating.” I shivered convulsively. “I don’t think arousing me was the machine’s purpose. The creature kept making adjustments to the contraption and tapping on a keyboard close by. I think it was measuring me inside, examining me, testing my organs with probes. I kept feeling little prods and pokes and little electric tingles everywhere, including up my butt.” I laughed, embarrassed. “I was getting an actual anal probe, Casey.”

Casey laughed guiltily. “I’ve had one of those before. And not by any alien creature, either.” She wiggled her eyebrows and we both laughed. I checked our surroundings again.

“And then it did something else no alien’s ever done to me in a dream; he touched me sexually. Fondled my breasts.”

Casey looked scandalized. “I hope you told the fucker off!”

“I was too shocked. He removed the suction cup from my right nipple, and then my left, and wiped them dry with a silver cloth. It was very soft and silky feeling. Then he purposely fingered my nipples into hard little points, making me squirm. I asked him why he was doing that—I wasn’t used to be touched sexually—and he just shrugged and smiled, kind of embarrassed, like.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. “I sound just like my daughter. ‘Like.’” I shrugged. “It got weirder from there.”

“Do you think...” She trailed off as a pregnant mom and her teenage daughter approached—the teen wore an adorable pink and white Beam Me Up Dr. Who maternity top—and continued when they’d passed. “Do you think this may have been a, you know, a standard, non-alien dream?”

“I wondered that too. But this stayed with me all the way until this morning before it faded, the way all our dreams do.” I shook my head. “This was definitely a conception dream.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

I shook my head.

“I wouldn’t, either.”

And that ended our conversation as Casey made it clear she considered my dream too controversial to comment on or hear the rest of. We moved on to less unsettling topics such as had our Linea Nigra appeared yet—mine had, hers hadn’t—and whether we intended to breastfeed our twins. Casey had already scoured every store in the area for formula. I intended to breastfeed Becca and Angie, as I had Tricia. Old fashioned, like my mom.

A few days after the first, I had a second unusual dream. I was on the table, with my heels in the stirrups, the infernal milkers attached to my breasts. But I was alone, no one in the surgical suite but me. I pushed up and looked around, guardedly curious. As always, my wrists were captured in padded restraints, I was naked, and the contraptions were draining me of milk. The thing between my legs was back, imbedded in me again, taking measurements and probing. I yipped and yelped with each poke or electric prod. Most humiliating, I was aroused again.

“Hello?” I called out. Above me on a screen an alien head appeared and shushed me rudely and then disappeared again. “Well, sorry,” I muttered sarcastically.

The wrist restraints were padded inside with the same soft silver cloth the alien had wiped my breasts with, so it didn’t hurt when I sat up, or struggled to free my hands. But then one of the twins kicked me in the ribs, and that did hurt. “Pesky little varmint,” I muttered lovingly. Even in my dreams, I cherished my twins. I looked down and was disgusted by all my paraphernalia.

“This is so unfair!” I yelled. “I’m not a cow, and I’m not someone’s crash test dummy to be tested in minute detail! I’m also not someone’s blow up sex doll that you can put a mechanical cock in, any time you want to!”

The irritated head returned and shushed me more forcefully this time. He looked to his side and down, punched something and I yelped in alarm and shot up off the table. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God Oh, my God!” I hissed wide-eyed and horrified. “Stop that! Stop that right now! Pleeeesssse!”

The current ceased and I banged down to the table again, panting. It had gone directly into my clitoris and right out to the rest of my nervous system. I can’t begin to describe it. I don’t know how to describe it. Imagine your body lighting up inside like the National Christmas Tree.

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the twins. That was difficult. Then with a start I realized that I had never been pregnant with the twins in one of my dreams, not normally pregnant, not 6 months along. Then I realized I knew I was dreaming and my eyes shot open.

Was I dreaming? This didn’t feel like any dream. It felt like I was in a monitor suite in the secret underground facility beneath Philadelphia. How did I know that? And how would I know the facility was immense, almost 200 square miles, roughly L-shaped because of the area’s subterranean requirements. And how many suites were there? A lot. Day and night, they supported women on stainless steel tables like mine, being periodically monitored, as I currently was. And we were monitored a lot. This was my third time this week, and it was only Thursday.

I understood the size of the table now. One size fits all. Almost into my 7^th month, I weighed 149 lbs, sopping wet. There were women three times my weight and it was impractical and expensive to equip suites with different size tables. Hence the one-size-fit all option.

The room was surprisingly like my dreams, roughly 10’ wide by 15’ long, with shiny silver equipment everywhere. I saw windows in every wall, all silvered and vaguely reflective, giving the room a larger-looking aspect. No doors, though I knew the creatures had to come and go somehow. A silver bubble like a huge closed circuit camera bubble was centered in the ceiling and I knew this monitored the room and all that went on inside. I knew these things because I’d overheard conversations in my other appointments.

Appointments? I wondered

The equipment attached to me all served a purpose. The “milkers” as we had all come to describe our monitors did not perform that function at all, but maintained the health of our breasts, ensuring their interior workings were within prescribed parameters. I was aware that every woman received this monitoring, and that following the births of our twins, all would be expected to breast feed. So much for the option to choose, I thought.

The contraption between my legs monitored my internal functions, making whatever minute adjustments were necessary to insure perfect health, both for me and the twins. I knew from overheard conversations that no mother-to-be would die of complications from her pregnancy or childbirth; every eventuality was monitored and corrected as necessary. For instance, I knew that a genetic abnormality that made me susceptible to polycystic ovary disease had been corrected and a precancerous grouping of cells in my right breast eradicated, as well as various other minor conditions, including a tendency to develop exasperating hemorrhoids. Every woman on earth was maintained in perfect heath for the benefit of her twins. That both outraged and warmed me in a most mother-to-be manner.

“Yeoach!” I exclaimed and jumped in the stirrups. I rose from the waist to the limit my manacled wrists would allow, to discover an alien inspecting the contraption between my thighs.

“That was very rude!” I complained. It looked up at me, and I recognized him from my earlier dream, the alien that talked to me.

“How did you get in here?” I looked everywhere and still found no door.

“You are well tonight?” it asked. The words came from no mouth that I could see.

“Is it night?” I asked, settling back to the table. Though shiny metal, the table was neither cold nor uncomfortable. “And would you please release my hands so I can scratch my belly? Please?”

Incredibly, it did. For the first time in any dream, I raised my arms and looked at my hands.

“Thank you. That was very considerate of you.” I dutifully surrendered my belly to the joy of my fingernails. “Oh, my God,” I moaned. “That feels so good.” I raised my head. “Did you tell me your name last time we talked?”

“---------”

I stared at him, unsure what I had just heard. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that’s decipherable in English.”

“Call me Mulder,” it said.

“As in ... Fox Mulder? From X-Files?”

The creature nodded. I couldn’t help but smile.

“I liked that show. But my character was Dana Scully, not Mulder.”

“I am male,” it said.

I examined it carefully head to foot. It was 7’ tall, and looked like one of the aliens Fox Mulder and Dana Scully once pursued weekly on Fox. It wore no clothing—unless its shimmering silver skin was actually a suit of some kind—and bore no resemblance to either human sex. I was reminded of the robot Gort, on the horrible remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Shimmering silver instead of black. And no cover plate over his eyes. The creature had silver eyes.

“No disrespect meant, but is there something I can think of you as, other than a creature?” I asked.

I would swear it smiled at me.

“How about --------?”

“That doesn’t work either,” I said, shaking my head apologetically. “Are you alien? As in, resident of another planet?”

“I was born on Earth,” he said. “Just like you. Does that make you an alien too?”

I opened my mouth, and closed it again. A moment later words blurted out for no good reason: “Why are you talking to me? Answering my questions?”

He adjusted something and the discomfort inside me lessened. Imagine a pair of balloons inside your vagina and rectum deflating just a bit and you get the idea. A sudden tickle where I imagine my cervix to be made me jump, squeak like a mouse and giggle like a school girl. And then blush scarlet.

“Whatever that was,” I croaked hoarsely. “Please don’t do it again.”

Unwelcome heat, emanating from my cervix spread all throughout my body and made the blush on my face expand down into my chest. Monitors picked up the change and chirped interestedly. I had just experienced an instantaneous and intensely pleasurable vaginal orgasm.

“Only my husband is allowed to do that to me!” I blurted stupidly, panting. I dropped my head to the table and breathed through my open mouth. I’d bet my irises were dilated right out to their rims. My nipples tingled and itched and ached, and that wasn’t from the attachments. I coughed congestively and cleared my throat.

“Did you do that to me on purpose?”

The alien—Mulder—didn’t answer. He came around and touched each of my nipple attachments, and the one embedded into my distended navel. I wondered distractedly what that one was for. I imagined it right over Angie or Becca’s head, whoever was on top.

“That’s not...” I dropped my head back to the table. Of course not; nothing they did or attached to me would endanger the twins. “How did you... ?” I looked around the room. “I know this place is big, but...” I looked at him apprehensively. “I’m not supposed to know that, probably, but even so, how did you impregnate so many woman here, practically overnight? This is the biggest installation in the country; the rest are just like, overflow facilities, or maintenance and supply or administrative centers.” I shrugged. “I listen when you guys talk.”

I waited to see if he’d comment, and then went on. “Unless you have several million rooms here—conception suites, I mean—how could you possibly impregnate us all in such a short time?” I shook my head in mixed wonder and bewilderment.

He shook his head and somehow laughed. “You have picked up quite a lot, Jennifer. Don’t worry,” he said, patting my arm with his soft hand—it had five fingers; I’d never noticed that before. “You are one of our special mothers and privy to proprietary information. Very little will be kept from you, if you ask.”

“Why?” I asked, trying not to succumb to suspicion. I liked his honesty with me and wanted it to continue.

He laughed again, an ironic edge perfectly noticeable. “That is actually one of the question I can’t answer.”

“Why?” I inquired.

“That one too. Anything having to do with that subject. You are disappointed.”

“Well, sure.” I shrugged. “Wouldn’t you be, in my position? How many of us did you impregnate? 40% of the population, right? That’s, like 2.8 billion women. How could I possibly not be curious why I was one of your ‘special’ cases?” I looked at him in alarm, shuddering. Monitors started clicking and beeping all over the place. He immediately placed his hand on my arm.