Chapter 1

The world mourns a fertility crisis: No baby has been conceived in twelve years. Then one average teenage boy is discovered who can father children. From slow and romantic beginnings, his sex life gradually takes off to try to meet the world demand.

I slowly woke. She was snuggled up against my side, her hair a bit disheveled, breathing softly. It was still dark out. Delphia's smell was delicious, her sweetest charm. I felt the glow spread between my legs as my penis got harder with each pulse of blood. Still half awake, I turned on my side to face her. She stirred a little and opened a sleepy eye. I lifted her top leg a little and she wriggled a little to adjust, so as I pressed my pelvis upwards, my penis slid right into her warm, wet, silky vagina. It felt like heaven. I pumped about ten times, faster each time, and felt my semen shoot into her as a pleasant, sleepy orgasm took over my brain. I stayed pressed inside for a few more seconds, watching her smile at me sleepily, and then slid out and onto my back. She kissed me briefly on the nose as she got up and padded to the bathroom. I heard the brief, gentle whirring hum as I drifted back to sleep.

When I woke next, it was light. Kathy was the woman beside me now, dozing, but she awoke easily. She was naked, and had about as perfect a body as I could imagine. I kissed her and brushed my hand along her cheek, down over her right breast, through the curve of her belly to her pubic mound, and sliding over the top I massaged her labia gently, my penis hardening. Her breath caught and she flushed a little and she smiled. In all of ten seconds she grew restless, spreading her legs wide apart, but I teased her a little. I kept rubbing slowly instead of rolling on top of her. Her breathing conveyed desire and readiness, and as the seconds went on she stuck out her tongue at me. Then I laughed and rolled over on top of her and as I pressed forward and down her fingers guided my penis into her again. I thrust about four times and she cried out softly with an orgasm. I could feel her vagina pulsing. I kept thrusting, and after a minute she shuddered as another one came over her. I started thrusting more urgently, and as I pressed in as far as I could go, I shuddered too as I came way up inside her, and she came too. I collapsed on top of her, feeling lazy. My weight wasn't really on her, but after ten seconds she started gently trying to get out from under me. I raised my head to look at her and sighed, though we both smiled. So I rolled off as she got up and went into the bathroom. That whirring hum again as I dozed off.

When I came to after a few minutes she was gone. I took a few steps to the bathroom, and after my morning urination looked in the mirror. My name is John Smith. I look about fifty, an average man with an average man's body. I lifted my penis to look at the scrotum underneath, with two ordinary-looking testicles hanging innocently within. Ordinary-looking, but the very future of the human race.

On the counter was the device. It consisted of a handle and at right angles to it a smooth plastic cylinder with rounded end, about the width and length of a small penis, with small openings all along it. Protruding from the spot where the handle met the cylinder was a glass vial about the size and shape of a C cell battery. Many empty vials stood on the counter. My eyes drifted to the wall, where there was a trough with a glass cover. I took out the empty glass vial and put it in the trough. When I closed the cover, there was a barely detectable whooshing sound as the vial disappeared. During the night, as I was drifting off to sleep to the sound of the quiet whirring, Delphia had put the cylinder up in her vagina, where it gently collected the fluid from inside her. She had then removed the vial with its little blob of milky liquid and put it into the wall. Kathy did the same thing a little later. My semen was on its journey to replenishing humanity.

The beginning

I was only two years old when it happened. Human reproduction ceased; women no longer became pregnant. Pre-natal clinics noticed it first, as there were no new appointments being made, and within a few months its worldwide scope became clear. Scientists found that the problem was at the moment of fertilization. They put together in a petri dish donor eggs, looking just as usual, and sperm, looking and acting just as usual. The sperm swam vigorously and pressed against the egg, but they just never penetrated it. Everyone hoped at first that it was a passing curiosity, that science would understand it and fix it. But as time passed and those hopes were not realized, a profound unease set in. Life continued much as it had before -- what else could people do? Church attendance was up. Plenty of righteous preachers swore it was vengeance from God for sinful living, though there was little chance to feel superior, as all groups were affected.

Attitudes towards sex softened. Many people hoped that they might be a part of solving the worldwide infertility problem. Everyone stopped using contraception. Established couples stepped up their sexual activity. Single people began sleeping with each other with less caution. Gay men and lesbians discovered latent bisexual tendencies. Teenagers became more active, and children who had barely begun puberty started experimenting as a matter of course. There were epidemics of STDs which dampened enthusiasm to some extent. A new kind of condom was developed with a hole in the end to let semen out instead of keeping it in. This did little to protect the woman, but it did protect the man quite well, and as fewer and fewer men were infected women got fewer infections from them.

The only source of new babies was the embryos that had been set aside for later implantation as part of fertility procedures. There were several thousand of them in the US. The government seized them. They would now be implanted in the most fertile women available, to maximize the chances of success. It was a matter of vigorous debate just how fast to use them. They did deteriorate with time, but the later in the future these babies were born, the greater the chance they could still be fertile if a cure was found in the future.

I lived with my parents and an older brother in Secaucus, New Jersey. I started going out with Amy when we were both fifteen. We were both shy, neither particularly popular, and we got a late start on sex. Our dates featured some talking and walks, but it was the end of the evening I was really looking forward to. The first date ended with a kiss. She invited me to her room on the second date, but that did not end with going all the way. She was happy for me to fondle her breasts, but activity below the waist was limited to the outside of her jeans. On the third date she took her jeans off, and I was terribly excited putting my hand down the front of her panties. She was clearly excited -- as for me, I got an erection each time as we were walking up the stairs to her room and never lost it in the hour we were making out.

On the fourth date she was ready for intercourse, though as virgins we were a bit clueless. The tip of my penis got into her hot and wet labial region, and I started penetrating her, but it didn't go very far in. In fact I came within about twenty seconds of trying. After consulting some books before the next date, Amy realized she needed to tilt her pelvis up more so the angles were right, and then my penis slid in all the way, to my great relief. I knew girls took longer to come, so I was proud of myself for holding back so gallantly for a full two minutes, by which time surely she had had a quiet little orgasm, but of course I found out later that she hadn't. I was ecstatic at having gone all the way, achieving what I had been craving for years. After consulting more books and friends, she taught me how to stimulate her with my hand, and hold back for a full ten minutes so she did come, and I then let myself go and came within a minute.

We had been exclusive from the start -- it was hard enough for me to get up the courage to ask out even one girl. For a few weeks we met every evening for sex, but then the reality of other commitments started intervening and we limited ourselves to weekends and an occasional evening. I soon started sleeping over at her house, which was common enough and not a source of particular concern to her parents. When her period came we abstained.

She missed a period three months later, and then missed another. She started feeling sick to her stomach. We didn't think much of it, but just in case she went to the doctor to see what sort of ailment she had. Pregnancy was not on anyone's mind, since it was in the category of a disease that had been eradicated -- a dozen years before in this case. The treatment plan for the time being was to wait and see. She missed another, and started getting hungry, and started feeling irregular twitching in her intestines. This called for more careful ultrasound, and the results were stunning. A human fetus was distinctly visible, and it moved, which was the twitching Amy felt. A dozen specialists examined her, but the diagnosis when you see a baby is not really so hard to make. She was pregnant.

From the beginning of the missed periods we had kept quiet about this, Amy especially wanting to avoid jokes at her expense at whatever weird condition she had. As soon as her condition was confirmed, we were given discreet Secret Service protection, and all agreed that our privacy was easier to assure if our identities remained unknown. Her mother's job mysteriously transferred her to Stamford, Connecticut. We were too bewildered to object much to being separated, especially as her interest in sex had disappeared and that was frankly the main bond we had.

Once Amy delivered her baby, she would be further tested and go through many variants of the egg donor procedure to see if she was the key to this miracle. But my potential could be evaluated much more quickly. I provided a semen sample, and when mixed with donor eggs it produced some embryos. They were implanted in carefully-selected women. Some of them became pregnant. A brief statement was released saying that three pregnancies had been achieved in the US from the sperm of a single man whose identity was being kept secret. The brief announcement translated into screaming headlines and tumult worldwide. It provided a much-needed sense of hope to a world which had not seen a newborn baby in a dozen years.

My family was whisked off to Langley, Virginia. I basically never left the house we occupied; actually it was more a compound than a house. A large and shifting bunch of people were assigned to help me, and I thought of them collectively as "the pros". I was grappling with what this new role meant for me and for the world. I happily provided semen samples, usually twice a day. This was masturbation with a noble purpose. The doctors made the most of the fluid I produced. Hundreds of donor eggs were placed in a single small jar, and my semen set loose among them. Soon my sperm was making two hundred embryos in a day, which were carefully divided and implanted in two hundred young women of peak fertility each day. This was not going to solve the huge demographic dislocation facing the world, but it was a start.

My father's and brother's semen was tested, as was that of more distant male relatives. No embryos emerged now matter how many gobs of their semen were put in with jars of eggs. I was it. Amy was given lavish incentives later to have a great many partners, on the chance that it was something about her that had triggered my fertility and that she might trigger one of them, but nothing came of that.

Then slowly my fertility started dropping. I produced just as many sperm as before, all as apparently healthy as before, but they just weren't doing the job. The number, density, and quality of my sperm cells were not relevant measures of success. What mattered was the number of embryos emerging from a controlled sample of eggs and semen. Various drugs were tried, to no avail, and whenever there was an unpleasant side effect, my fertility dropped to zero.

Humanity figuratively worshiped at my feet, which made me happy but also gave a great sense of responsibility. As my effectiveness was dropping, I felt uneasy and couldn't always provide the semen samples on demand. The future of the world was me, and I was failing. The pros stopped telling me how effective I was being, hoping that might help, but it didn't. They then tried lying to me, saying things were great, but the power of positive thinking didn't help in this case. When this subterfuge later came out, I was quite upset and the embryo count also dropped to zero for a while. They promised they would not lie to me again, and naïve as I was at the time I believed them. My effectiveness returned to its previous anemic levels and continued a gradual decline.

I was offered just about anything on earth that I wanted. First I wanted Amy back. So she flew in to live with us in the sprawling quarters my family and associated professionals were now occupying. She was just a little in awe of me. She was part of the magic first pregnancy, but I was the special one, or at least the one who had been shown to be special. She would do anything I asked, but my tastes were pretty simple. I loved sex. Penis-in-vagina sex. She was quite far along, and we couldn't have sex very well face-to-face over her large belly, but I could mount her from the rear, doggy style. I found that very exciting at first. My fertility from the semen samples had a large spike, back almost to its peak. Although I was delivering lots of my sperm into Amy, I had quite a bit left over for samples.