A Good Male

by John Knych

part 1

I am an XY on the run.

My wife and I were in our own, private hydroponic gardens in City 13 on continent G when the snap occurred. Our five-year old was in the adjoining tent, playing with toys. My wife was peeling légumes when she asked me to pass her a knife. I was daydreaming and contemplating the sky through the transparent plastic.

“Jig, are you listening to me?”

“No, I didn’t hear—”

“I said get me a knife.” I reached into a nearby, rusty bucket and pulled it out.

“No, not that one, the other one, the bigger one.” As I handed her the machete-like knife, which I had never seen in our garden before, I saw a look in her face that told me the tide had turned.

“In the past,” she said, the machete-knife trembling in her hand, “I never gave men warnings. But you’ve been good, Jig, real good. I’ll let you get a head start.”

“How much time do I have?”

“Forty minutes. Mother is arriving soon. She expects to find a dead body. We’ve already made an appointment at the disposal facility.”

I worked at the disposal facility, where dead, male bodies were taken for recycling. I realized that my colleagues must have received an order-request from my wife to receive my carcass within the past eight days but had never said anything. No wonder they were acting so bizarre this past week. Fatherfuckers.

“Goodbye,” I said. “I loved you.” I walked out of the gardens and looked into the adjoining tent, seeing my daughter playing with the engineering puzzle toy I’d bought her the previous weekend.

She looked up at me, her cherub face dappled by starlight, and smiled. “Bye, Daddy,” then went back to her magnetic blocks.

I held back a sob. I had the passing urge to fight my wife to the death then go on the run with [REDACTED], but that would be futile. My wife’s hand-eye coordination with a knife was exemplary. Other women would find my daughter and me within a few hours. The experience would be traumatic for [REDACTED], and I didn’t want her last memory of us to be fleeing in extremis.

Due to my suspicion that my wife was planning murder, I was able to make some plans. I’ve only been able to reach this ripe old-age of thirty-four due to my perspicacity in judging women’s feelings and for when they’re about to turn. In my couplings before with significant others, I left before they could make a lethal move, but with my wife and I had signed a contract to stay with her indefinitely. I thought she was different from the others.

When I sensed her feelings beginning to change, I surreptitiously connected with a group of men on the dark-net who were living undercover in the unprotected zones and who had agreed to take me in if I could find their ever-shifting headquarters.

Women tolerated these secret societies in the unprotected zones for various reasons, the primary one being hunting. There was a subset of female society who considered “male-hunting” a sport. They recorded and broadcast these bloody games. I had watched a few hunts with my wife. They were exciting.

In our bedroom, I grabbed my backpack from beneath a floorboard, prepared with a survival kit, then climbed out the window. I couldn’t risk that my wife would take back her promise of a grace period and try to kill me at the door.

The jungle of flora and fungi around our dwelling pulsed and shivered as I made my way quickly down the beaten path. Tentacles hanging from the trees wavered and brushed against my hunched-up shoulders. Perhaps they sensed that I was leaving and never returning. Even though scientists had deemed these fungi and flora unconscious, I felt like they were saying goodbye. The urge is strong to anthropomorphize when lonely and terrified.

A nearby waterfall pounding against sedimentary rocks with swirling, rainbow layers created a rushing and whirring background static. Insects resembling old Earth’s water striders were gliding across the roiling ripples. Along the shore, mobile tubes with purple spikes slithered through the lush, pungent soil, emerging from the ground near my footfalls. Extravagant flowers with curving pedals covered in splashes of red and orange fluttered around rapidly peeling trunks. I would miss this whispering, organically seething place.

I pulled out of my backpack a recording device and stuck it to my neck. I recounted the previous five minutes out loud, telling the A.I. to redact my daughter’s name in all entries and to create relevant scenes, when possible, using camera footage.

My plan was for my journal to be remotely uploaded to an encrypted, hidden part of the archiving R.O.A.M., which would be arriving in six hours. If my daughter someday desired to learn about what had happened to her father, who he was, what he believed, I would leave behind a trail of virtual breadcrumbs that only she could follow. I had already created the beginnings of this trail.

* * *

Jig historical entry #811

As humanity migrated across and through the galaxy, settling on habitable moons and exoplanets via anti-matter drives, wormhole manipulations, and transmitted consciousness uploads along black hole horizons, various social systems were tried and tested. While communication across these vast and warped distances was distorted and limited, a general picture containing the scattered results of humanity’s colonization efforts, across millennia, began to emerge.

The first discovery, or un-discovery, was that we were alone: consciousness was an astronomically unlikely accident, by no means the natural and necessary end-point for evolution. All potentially habitable planets visited were either dead or contained life forms that were in the same, existentially reticent classes such as viruses, bacteria, plants, or fungi.

More often than not, a ship of valiant explorers would be left orbiting the barren planet for the foreseeable eternity or before a return voyage to their origin system could be voted on, prepared, then launched. Since the uninspiring life down below them was either incompatible with their biology or unaccountably resisted terraforming, they were stuck in their cramped stations and frequently passed lifetimes in virtual realties.

Logistics and disappointments of our spatial explorations aside, the discovery concerning our social progress was terribly bleak. It seemed that each colonization attempt, while beginning with noble ideals, meticulously vetted participants, and ample resources, had all, sooner or later, degraded into following Earth’s own, historical patterns: generations after arrivals, men took power, destroyed ecological or life-support systems, subjugated groups, dominated, and started wars.

These conflicts even took place amongst the linked realities of the virtually-inclined and amongst those in the outside, orbiting communities who were maintaining the data infrastructures. In both worlds, the male urge and impulse to devour was insatiable. Earth’s history of these recurring cycles should have been enough to warn humanity that these dominating processes would only be repeated, ad infinitum, amongst the stars.

The desire to explore and put our flags into distant sands, disproportionally proposed and led by the male sex, was inextricably entwined with the desire to command and throttle. In fact, it seemed the enormous resources and effort it took to reach a desolate planet only stoked the flames of man’s pride and arrogance.

Since cooperation and a balanced community are essential for surviving long-term in deep space, extraterrestrial societies rose and fell perpetually. What was to be done, if humanity were to endure?

On the edge of the jungle, at the border of the desert, I took an elevator down to the transport tunnels. I caught a public vacuum tube. Inside the capsule, women stared at me suspiciously: it was rare for a man to travel alone, especially one leaving the protected zones.

I was slightly apprehensive that my wife had already registered a “public hit,” but I settled my qualms with the hope that she would desire to kill me herself. If you married a man but grew tired of him or had a child grow past the age of three, it was custom to take the murder into your own hands, and it was frowned upon to contract out. But if too much time passed, my wife would likely become impatient and register my illegal wandering for anyone to bring me to justice for a nominal fee.

Being a man, you expect to be beaten irrationally throughout your life, you expect to be ridiculed for your inferiority and brute nature, you expect to die for minor, petty reasons. My experience is riddled with witnessing men murdered on a whim. Most men do not live past the age of thirty, since it is believed that children should never learn to know their father. I should be grateful. But I desired to see my daughter grow.

* * *

Jig historical entry #812:

As humanity failed to develop a sustainable society, as it was believed that men would always crave power and be destined to dominate any new system until annihilation, The Sisters of E.S.P. (Equality, Sustainability, and Peace) was established. By this point in human history, galactic citizens were willing to try any plan to see if humanity could settle elsewhere and not eliminate itself.

Plans were proposed within a wealthy historical society in our third-origin solar system, colloquially referred to as R.O.A.M. — the Retrieving, Orbiting, and Archiving Mission — whose main purpose was to scavenge and search space for lost societies that had ceased contact and likely self-destructed, to learn the causes behind their extinction or archive anything valuable left behind.

The R.O.A.M. almost always found empty, star-powered tombs containing decayed virtual realities, code that had been corrupted by initial programming errors, a failure to update, or eaten by steadily-accumulating software bugs. It was the R.O.A.M. who contributed the most to our galaxy-spanning, social histories and who gave the most funds to the Sisters of E.S.P to attempt an experiment: settle a newly-discovered, habitable exoplanet with only women or a strictly limited quantity of men.

Once there, if males were ever allowed to be born, women would be given the inalienable right to murder their species’ counterpart. They hoped that this would keep the violent half of humanity in check. They hoped that such drastic measures, in the same, bloody vein as ancient France’s Revolution, a Reign of Terror in which the aristocracy was systematically butchered, would usher in a new, more enlightened society. While it was said an eye for eye will make a world blind, it was believed that a female eye for a male eye would make a world flourish.

They were right. The experiment was a resounding success. In the last 20,000 years, no other non-virtual society — since living in virtual realties was made illegal by The Founding Mothers — has endured and prospered longer than the women-controlled planet of Kepler 618b. Of the population of 2.3 billion women there are currently 180,000 men, whose lives are strictly surveilled, belittled, and controlled. In the last 5,000 years, a tradition has arisen in which women are socially pressured to kill their husbands once their child passes the age of three.

Amongst the Founding Mothers, the members who made landfall on planet Kepler 618b, there were extremists who believed no men should ever be allowed to exist. But there were critiques against this uncompromising proposal. Some women simply desired men around for entertainment and aesthetic purposes.

And while the Founding Mothers had brought along a gargantuan sperm bank, these sperms would someday degrade. They needed to replenish them through natural births. A few women suggested that they raise men in captivity until they were in early adolescence, then harvest their sperm and kill them. This was deemed messy, problematic, and inhumane, so men were allowed to live.

* * *

They let me pass the border into the unprotected zones without a hitch. I caught another vacuum tube to the underground city of Hivingo. I was going to meet Gamsey, my contact and only friend on the dark net.

Hivingo was a sprawling maze of tunnels and burrows with limited satellite access. I navigated my way down into the planet, where natural Faraday cages existed due to the high quantity of nickel and copper in the crust, and where Hivingo residents, mostly men, hid and illegally plugged themselves into virtual realities.

Gamsey was waiting for me at a secret entrance, a door camouflaged by the rock. His underbite, pale-grey skin, and protuberant eyes made his face resemble a grouper. I attempted to shake his hand, but he held out a scanning device.

“Credit.” I pulled out of my backpack the transfer-key and made the exchange. He nodded vigorously. “It’s to appease the others.” He put his bony hand affectionately on my shoulder, tapped the rock, and the door slid open. “But I believe in you.”

I was first struck by the smell inside the cavernous space: Feckstin, the most commonly vaped substance on Kepler 618b. It grew rampantly in the unprotected zones and was imported into Hivingo. It was extremely dangerous to harvest, emitting a poisonous gas when picked, and it was impossible to domesticate. None of the scientists knew why, but when the plant was attempted to be grown in a lab, it perished after blossoming for a day outside of the seed, as if it could sense something in the air the female botanists couldn’t replicate. The molecular composition of the plant was a mystery, but it was not hostile to humans. Vaping the plant created aggressive tumors in the lungs.

Through the diaphanous clouds, I saw men huddled in groups and other men in virtual reality capsules. Disconcertingly, I also observed two women in the far corner with red ponytails and orange face paint, fashion symbols of male sympathizers.

I started to leave, when Gamsey grabbed my shoulder. “What are you doing?” he croaked. I saw disappointment in his eyes.

“There are women here. I cannot stay. I told you that there could be a public hit.”

“These women are vetted. Online access here is limited. Trust us, brother.”

“That does not matter. I do not feel safe.”

“If you leave, we will not let you return. How badly do you want the access codes to the R.O.A.M.? How badly do you believe in your mission?”

“Badly.”

“Then stay. I believe in what you are doing.” I had no place to go. The risk was necessary.

Gamsey and his crew explained how I could upload my information to the R.O.A.M.’s Cloud from an abandoned observatory on the summit of a mountain. There was a transmitter there that could access the Cloud when the archiving ships passed through the planet’s atmosphere.

I explained to them new additions to my plan to leave a virtual trail of breadcrumbs for my daughter, which included historical entries, and they gave helpful suggestions. New members, who hadn’t been informed by Gamsey of my mission, seemed unusually moved by my desperate quest. Few men live for anything beyond survival and hedonism.

Throughout the conversation, I kept my eye on the women in the corner. One of them received some kind of message, twitching as her exposed implant beeped on her temple. She looked up at me and squinted her eyes. I read sadness and fear in her face.

“There is a public hit on that man,” she announced. “Hunters are coming. They will be arriving any second.”

A boom erupted outside of the cavern. Before I could react, rock crumbled and men shouted. A cord whipped towards me, encircled my neck, and dragged me across the floor. I blacked out from the pain.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...