Chapter 55: The Breaking of the Dawn

Three months later...

Time: November 11, 8244 4:24 AM

"Six months to go," I thought as I walked briskly through my palace compound. It was the dawn of a new day and the walk would take a while. My palace was vast, and my destination was on the far opposite side from my private quarters. But my body felt desperate for some exercise. My morning walk was one of my few indulgences.

"We still have six months," I thought to myself as I half-jogged along the kilometers of the vast corridors and courtyards, searching within myself for some spark of optimism, however tiny. It would be six months before people will begin to be stricken with fatal anti-aging withdrawal. "Make every moment count Abdul Hadi, make every Holy moment count..."

The morning daybreak was beautiful, the sun rising just ten minutes before. As I passed though one of the arboretums, I looked up and admired the first rays of the golden sunlight illuminating the tops of the tall straight trucks of the monkey-puzzle trees. All around me by my feet were pretty austral bellflowers, hardy hybrids blooming profusely in the damp weather of early spring. I breathed in deeply to savor the earthy smells, then breathed out and watched the vapor of my breath form in the chilly air. It was a moment of peace in the sweet garden.

"What more of a Holy sign do you need Abdul Hadi?" I asked myself. "Life is both beautiful and enduring. Have courage! Have hope!"

Such changes in our society, deeper than I or any of my family ever imagined possible. Throughout the world, all thoughts of gender slavery and mind mutilation are completely gone. For the first time ever, Utility and High Tech and Health and the Priesthood are united in common cause. Our sole focus now is our collective effort to save our species, to create some kind of inheritance for our children, our dear and precious children.

Among the first of my sweeping changes in mid August was a royal decree abolishing the daily Prayer cycle. My speech was holocast to the world. Urging people to Pray continually while they worked, I made the point that we just didn't have the time now for formal and structured services. Every single moment we had was needed to transfer as much practical knowledge as possible to the young children, those who had still not received their first anti-aging injection.

All children now before their thirteenth year now have an A before their Citizen Level status. The oldest are the CL-A12's, the next younger year are the CL-A11's. Boy or girl, it makes no difference. And it is the girls who hold the keys to our species' slim hope of survival.

As the month of August ended and the days of September progressed, it became obvious to everybody how incredibly wasteful and stupid our former system of education had been. The young boys had been trained mostly in spiritual and physical disciplines, expecting to receive their practical training after their potentials were evaluated and scored by the Guilds at their second gate. Their lives had also been filed with eight hours of formal Prayer each day. They were very ill prepared for crash courses in how to run the complex technology of the adult world.

The girls on the other hand had had three hours of formal Prayer a day, and had spent their lives since toddlers desperately cramming as much practical knowledge as they could before their dreaded marriage gate. They were as prepared as they could possibly be to take on the frantic task of learning how to run the adult world with a single year of additional preparation. All of our world's resources are now aligned to this single effort. Every other social endeavor has been subordinated to a value of zero.

The girls worldwide responded to the challenge by first shedding their burqas and even their headscarves, testing us and seeing their old garbs as signs of their former slavery. I passed an edict that anyone passed the critical age of twelve would be executed if he or she seriously harassed any girl about this. An awful edict to be sure, but our situation is simply too critical to tolerate the old, sick hatreds.

The girls petitioned me personally, asking that I grant them permission to organize and collectively negotiate with us. In a tearful meeting with their provisional representatives, I agreed completely and praised them for their initiative.

And the girls responded in love. They have collectively pledged to build a world based on full gender equality after we are gone, to the very limits of their ability. Their forgiveness of the male gender is profound, and has touched the heart of the world. Our gratitude is frequently expressed in tears, both from the males and their eternal virgin wives.

Is it possible for our species to go on? It will be very difficult for the young children after we are gone, even to survive. They'll have vast knowledge bases at their disposal, but no adults or even teenagers to help or teach them. They'll also have the awesome responsibility of caring for and rearing children who are even younger than they are. Their tasks sometimes seem impossibly difficult, yet they are approaching the coming year with a grim determination to succeed.

Is survival physically possible? There are so many unknowns. Food production, transportation, power generation, the production of citizen staples, we are trying to automate our facilities as much as possible. But some critical functions are so difficult to automate, the numerous health services are prime examples.

Is survival physically possible? The best the young boys can hope for is to live until their twenty-third year. That's when the death trigger will take them. The girls will have an enormous advantage in longevity by living until their thirty-third year. Multiply this by the three to one birth ratio of girls to boys. Adult males will be outnumbered by adult females by more than ten to one. The girls are so kind to accept the boys as equals.

Both lifespans, the female and especially the male, seem horribly short, but they might allow just enough time to breed the next generation. Most children will probably have two mothers though, the one who births them, and a younger one who completes their rearing.

The constraints that the orphaned girls will be under will be monumental, especially with the economics of education. All males will die in their twenty-third year at the latest. Will it make economic sense to give these boys advanced training, only to have them die a year or two after graduation? I worry that the girls will be forced by the hard economics to reserve the top professional fields exclusively for women. Will slavery of the males occur next? Will our species become almost pure female, with a few captive males held as studs? It could happen. The future generations of boys are so innocent of our sins. They deserve so much better than to switch places with today's eternal virgins.

And in addition to all these hardships, there is still one final great trial before the girls. In the scant literature we have managed to save from the geneticist fires, it is suggested that the state of pregnancy in itself can trigger the early manifestation of the death trigger. If the girls later find this to be the common result of becoming pregnant, then our species is indeed at the twilight of its existence.

In the chaos of the world in mid August, five days after the end of the civil war, my wives and I and the women of Australia made a monumental decision. We decided to tell CL-28 Hani everything, all our secrets. Why? Because we were desperate for his help. The women of Australia thought the extinction crisis provided a perfect opportunity to expose their existence to the world, but we would need Hani's help to keep the cover story going.

It took a large team of heretics in 8224 to smuggle the girls from Qataban to Boddington and help them to become self-sufficient in their early years. These men were all members of the Brotherhood of the Rose, men on the lottery system for the anti-aging drugs. The only man not on the lottery system who was involved with the plan was Ammar, and after twenty years, he is the only one still alive. Currently two additional members of the Brotherhood know of the women's true origins, the two senior managers of the mine. All other men there were told a cover story for the women's presence.