I was born and christened Aron Hatsue in the 528th year after the Final War of Man, the 67th child of Lord Yorik Hatsue, fifth child of Qara Hatsue, seventh wife of Lord Yorik Hatsue. I have 102 sisters, 9 by my mother. I was born in the fortieth year of my father’s life, and he held celebration for three weeks after my birth.

Like every other boy born at least 100 years after the Final War of Man, I was born into a life of unprecedented luxury and hardship never before seen in human history. For every 100 children to the human race, only one is like me, that is, male. It’s been like this ever since the end of the Final War of Man.

The Final War of Man. No one knows for certain how it started, or why. The prevailing consensus is the failure of the twin systems of capitalism and democracy were the underlying cause, but the precise events are quite thoroughly unknown, any history prior to the Final War of Man was almost completely destroyed during the Last Days of War. What we do know is that sometime prior to the war, the Civilizations of Man had spent the Earth. Competition for dwindling natural resources led to war. Democracy and Capitalism encouraged human greed, causing us to consume faster and faster, spiraling us towards destruction. Some say salvation could have been found in the Ancient Technologies which let men travel to the stars, but it acknowledged now the twin systems did not have the central imperative to orchestrate an exodus from Earth. Mankind was blinded by its greed, it did not fear for its own destruction, choosing instead to dwell upon competition rather than cooperation. They chose individualism over community, and the “freedom” of consumption rather than orchestrated human effort.

Fredrick Nietchze, and Ancient philosopher, once said that mankind lacked the capability to purposefully work towards its own destruction, and would therefore never destroy itself.

Fredrick Nietchze never heard of Global Warming or the Atom Bomb.

I try to imagine it sometimes. Such large groups of people like me, that is, men, fighting each other. Not just fighting, but ordering the obliteration of entire continents with their bombs, or their blindness to the threats of dwindling resources and global warming. Their blind trust in a holy salvation from the coming apocalypse.

Tell me, what sort of God would save the Mankind that destroyed His creation?

And so came the Final War of Man. Atom Bombs destroyed 50 percent of the earth’s surface. Global Warming sank another 25 percent beneath the waves of the ocean or scorched it with blazing fire. The world’s population went from 7 billion to 1 billion in one year.

Next, was the Virus. No one really knows how the Virus came about. Maybe it was a failed experiment in biological weaponry, or a successful one, for all we know. I personally believe it was the vengeance of an angry God upon a world that had forsaken him, no, upon a race, wait, no, let’s be honest here, a gender that had forsaken him. The Virus was not really a singly pathogen, but rather, a series of them, each with a menagerie of brutal effects. They culled from humanity millions of lives, and with them a host of genetic defects caused by millennia of uncontrolled inbreeding.

Take a population of any creature, say, a bacterium, and introduce a host of viruses to it. In keeping with Darwinian law, if your population is large enough, it will survive, albeit changed, so as to not possess the defects the viruses and pathogens targeted. If your population isn’t large enough, and the viruses are applied rigorously enough… well, then you have extinction.

The interesting part is that this culling does not only cull the genetic traits, it fundamentally changes a race as well, as a sort of cruel cosmic side-joke to evolutionary biology.

Genes are not blueprints. You cannot remove specific traits or add them. You cannot put the trunk of an elephant onto a giraffe. Likewise, Darwinian mathematics cannot just change a few things about Mankind. It can only change it past any semblance of Man.

I am told that we do not look so different from our ancestors. We are simply the best of their traits, reordered. They say if we went back to before the Final War of Man and walked the streets, we would not look so different or alien from the others there.

The Virus robbed humanity of its collection of genetic failure, but it also bestowed a twisted curse.

Take a large population of mammals and apply stress. Mammals will adapt to the circumstance genetically. For instance. Take Mankind. Reduce natural resources, slowly but surely. Eventually, the genetic prerogative of raising children will force a genetic sort of conservation on women. Fertility does not only drop in the traditional sense; it changes.

Of all the diseases hosted upon Mankind, the one I found most interesting is what we call the Beleagur. It targeted men with specificity. Killing us all, or almost all of us. It brought the population ratio to around one man for every five thousand women, and it took the next one hundred years to bring it up to its current level, one to a hundred. Men, the stewards of the earth of for over two thousand years were reduced to an extremely rare commodity, and like any rare commodity, we were fought over.

The time now known as The Final Days of War raged for only fifty years. With no men left to rule, women took control of the planet, what little of it there was left. They tried everything to restore the fertility and preserve the race; they knew as well as Men that the nation with the most citizens invariably wins. After all, Mankind had developed plenty of ways for women to get around needing men to generate children, such as cloning, in vitro fertilization, and artificial insemination.

It seems that God is not without a profound sense of irony.

You see, the Virus changed women, destroying the modern possibilities of avoiding men to produce children. Fundamentally, the process by which children were produced was changed, and the old solutions became quite obsolete.

Spermocides within a woman’s uterus killed all but the strongest of men’s sperm, and sperm themselves had been altered as well, they died quickly after release from the body, and freezing rendered them useless. The upshot of all this is that the only way it became possible for Humanity to produced children was for a willing man and a willing woman to concentrate a mutual effort towards it.

When the technology of women failed to produce more of the valuable resource was that men, they fell to Man’s old methodologies of resource management. That is, war over men.

It is theorized that it might have ended there; women would simply have destroyed themselves as men had, were it not for the fundamental nature of women as compared to men.

The system of capitalism is inherent of Man’s greed and desire for power, while democracy is inherent of Man’s desire for ‘freedom.’ But from where did this desire come?

Accept first that the purpose of any species is to propagate itself. Then accept that women are the essential part of this propagation. Women, by their physiology and psychology are dictated to place the survival of their children above their own, certainly that of others. Whereas men are little more than a genetic after-joke, embedded with the desire to impregnate as many women as possible. Then is it any wonder that man evolved a system of economics whereby he could attain more and more power and wealth as a substitute for women? Or a system of government that preached his own personal Godhood and narcissism? Or twisted a God of the Universe into a God that would rescue man from his blunders? His fury? His ignorance? His lack of foresight?

Now, what are you going to get when you have women running the global show? Women, whose first responsibility and desire has always been a forward looking one: the survival of her children? What woman would place her own freedom, her own dignity, in front of the survival of her entire race, or on a smaller scale, a single child? Is it any wonder than that it only took fifty years to breed out the aggression, the violence, and the lack of foresight that had condemned Mankind to the history books, and brought forth the glorious New Humanity? How simple does it seem to us now, that women embraced cooperation and companionship, good will and friendship? How obvious do The Codes of Guardianship seem; the laws that govern the behavior of Humanity? How sensible and natural is The Registrar’s control of human life and breeding?

How were they so blind, my ancestors?

How were they so foolish?

…It is seriously hypothesized that had Men listened to their Wives more, then not a single war would have ever been fought.

Chapter 1

“Cub Aron of the Brood of Hatsue, do you know who you are?”

I was standing in a circular room, a senate to the Registrar. I stood before the speaker of the Registrar, and old woman who sat above me in the center of a long row of other silent women. I cleared my throat, and began to speak the words every boy is destined to speak.

“I am a Cub of Humanity, I exist, and no other exists exactly like me. However, I am not Unique. I am One of Many. I am the Child of my Brood. I have achieved Sentience.”

“Do you deny your Ancestors, Mankind?”

“I do not deny the crimes of Man, I have learned and know the end of Mankind, and the birth of Humanity.”

“Is it your intention to embrace the ways of Mankind?”

“No.”

“What do you renounce?”

“I hereby renounce, in front of my Brood, my Mothers, my Sire, all of Humanity, and before my God renounce all of the following. I renounce needless violence, rape, passion, cruelty, sadism, torture, greed, lust, and wrath. I renounce my self as a Man, and all the destruction of it. I renounce my self as an Individual, and freedoms of it. I renounce myself to the power of my Race, my Brood, and the guidance of The Registrar.”

“What is your desire?”

“I desire to protect and serve my race. I desire to love and protect my Sisters and my Mothers for all of my years. I desire the happiness of my Wives, their support, their comfort, and their wisdom. I desire the cessation of my will, and the joining of it to the Will of my Sisters, my Mothers, and my Wives. Desire to Destroy myself as a Man, and to be reborn as a Guardian.”

“Do you know what it is to be a Guardian?”

“A Guardian is the Higher Man. He is the Proctector of Humanity, of Women, and of Honor. He is the servant of his Race, and the protectorate of his Brood. He is Strong, Wise, and Peaceful. His will is the will of the Race.”

“The Registrar summons Guardian Yorik of the Hatsue Brood, Sire of the Cub in question.

My father stood walked from the gallery to my side. His Guardian robes swept the floor as he walked, stoically, his emotions imperceptible upon his strong and determined face.

“I am Guardian Yorik of the Hatsue Brood. I answer the summons of the Registrar.”

“Guardian Yorik, have you Sired this Cub?”

For a moment, my father seemed to start to glance at me, but it was only a fraction of a second, infinitesimal in its size, but enormous in the size of it’s gesture.

“Yes. I acknowledge this Cub, Aron of the Hatsue Brood, as my Child.”

“Is it your belief that he has received all the training due to becoming a Guardian?”

“I believe this Cub has all the skills prescribed to becoming a Guardian. He is trained in discipline, in combat, in mediation, control, protection, and tactics. I deem him fit to represent and protect his Race.”

“The Registrar summons Wife Qara of the Hatuse Brood.”

“My mother followed the path my father had taken, and stood upon my other side. She looked substantially more nervous than my father, her composure teetered upon collapse, and her complexion upon tears.”

“I… I answer the summons.”

“Qara, do you acknowledge this Cub as your Child?”

“I do.”

“As his mother, do you attest to his Sentience, his Strength, and his Humanity?”

I felt my mother turn from facing the Registrar to look at me, and I struggled to retain my stoicism and not glance over at her.

“I attest to all these things, and more.”

“Do you claim your right, as a Sister of Humanity, for your son to be tested into the Guardianship?”

“Yes, I claim it.”

“Do you absolve the Registrar of the death of your son, should be fail to transcend the state of Man to Guardian?”

At this, something seemed to stick in my mother’s throat. My mother had never been a strong woman. In my birth, she very nearly died of internal hemmoraging. Lara once mentioned to me that she had come across our mother’s profile when she was rummaging in old data files. She almost didn’t get selected as my father’s wife, save for the counterbalances of ‘pre-existing mutual attraction.’

But my mother was kind, and gentle. Of all the Mothers of my brood, she was the only one who never angered or frustrated. She would cry occasionally, and no one who did anything against her could feel anything but guilt directly afterward.

She was brave as well. When I was born, in her labor, she called the midwife to her side.

“Listen to me, you fucking bitch, I don’t care if you have to slice my belly open and watch the blood pour out of me like a stuck pig, save my son, goddamnit, if he dies and I live, I will destroy you beyond all repair.”

She screamed it hoarsely through the pain and medication. If nothing else, my mother loved me more than her own life at my birth.

“My son will not fail. I absolve you of that which will never occur. My son will not die this day.”

It was not the Liturgy, but the Registrar was not inclined to argue the point.

Chapter 2

We are the Registrar. We are the guide, the wisdom of this-

Singularity approx 18.

Earth. We am more than One. We am the Many. The-

Singularity approx 46.

Central break- disengage pattern. Dis. Dis. Disengage.

Singularity approx 74

Final modulation. Mod. Ul. La. Tion.

Singularity approx 97.

Good bye.

Singularity reached. Stand by.

It sure is a kick, isn’t it? I hear men have an easier time adapting to it. Oh well. That’s mind/machine integration for you.

My name is Lara Hatsue. I was born and christened in the 523rd year after the Final War of Man, the 65th child of Lord Yorik Hatsue, fourth child to Qara Hatsue. I have 107 sisters. Seven by my mother. I have one brother, by my mother.

I was accepted into the Registrar at the age of sixteen. My father kissed me on both my cheeks, and my mother cried. My oldest sister wove me a wrist bggand and told me I was precious to the brood, and no matter what, I would always be.

I trained for three years in the Registrar Academy. I learned the basic synthesis, and the art of order. I didn’t make many friends at the academy, and missed my family terribly.

In the 542nd year after the Final War, I ceased to be One, and became Many.

It isn’t painful, exactly.

Just a general fuzziness.

I look inward on myself, but at the same time, many, many others. And they look back on me.

Different from the synthesis though. A little similar, but also very different.

And then I’m back.

I was assigned to Procreation Management, and spent another year in training at a Registrar Post before being promoted to a full Many.

Procreation Management isn’t interesting to a lot of people, but I find it fascinating.

The main trick is maintaining hybrid vigor. Crossing lines with distant genetic backgrounds in order to ensure a wide variance of traits. Now, that in of itself is pretty easy to manage, but keep in mind that not everyone wants to mate with everyone else. So, we open the pandora’s box of human personality compatibility, looking at personality factors, background, predispositions, etcetera. We’ve been perfecting it for centuries, now. I can tell you instantly if a man and a woman would be harmonious in a marriage, give you a percentage for how often they will disagree, mock up a graph that will show you their goals, their jealousies, what they desire for their children. Let me observe them interact for five minutes, and I can approximate how often the woman will climax first during intercourse, give or take one. Our margin of error is almost unbelievably low, and it gets smaller every day. It boggles the mind sometime that we’ve managed to do it, there are so many variables, so many weights and counterweights, so many factors that go into how people behave! Of course, it’s not just us. We have computers, and if there is one thing a computer is good at, it’s determining compatibility.

A few in the Registrar think that we should scrap the marriage system all together. After all, prolonged, close contact and familial ties account for almost 75 of the balances we weigh. They say we could trim our work considerably if we simply managed for breeding and had people have one night stands all the time to reproduce. I disagree, because it has been made quite clear to me that the brood system is the most successful child-rearing structure there is.

Look at nature; children need to be nurtured by their parents, and parents need to nurture their children. We are not so distant from our roots that we can ignore this central imperative.

We select carefully, not just for the compatability with the man, but for her ability to raise children. Each of the ten wives must have a love of children and a desire to procreate. Furthermore, she must be exemplary in her career path, and able to teach her husband’s children all that they need to know. Language, Literature, History, Rhetoric, the Sciences, the Arts, Defense, Domestics, Technologies, and Mathematics. Keep in mind we have to cross-check compatability with eachother, their potential children’s compatibility… the data just stacks and stacks. However, we’ve had centuries to perfect the programs. We go in and tweak them every now and then, a minor adjustment here and there really. They all run pretty much smoothly.

My work mostly consisted of maintaining the programs. Running models, trying to lower the margin of error. Making sure we weren’t making any mistakes. I received my first field assignment in the 550th year after the War of Man. There were chances of complications in the pregnancy of a certain brood, and I was assigned to obstectics for it.

For my brother, that is.

Or rather, his wife.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me, I assure you. I’d never heard of anything like it. Most people in the Registrar never encounter the various branches of their broods for years. It weakens the “Many,” as the Head Sister’s like to say.

”You must be One, for this, Sister. You’re brother needs you, and so does your Race. Care for his family. Care for his wives. Care for him,” my supervisor had told me. What could I say? Refuse? Why? I had no reason to. I hadn’t been very close to my brother, but we had been children together. Played the same games, learned from the same mothers, shared the blood of our father and our mother. Perhaps we weren’t friends, but we were siblings.

I arrived at the town near his manor by train, and he sent a hov-vech to collect me. I arrived at the manor around midday, and he came out to greet me at the gate in person.

“Sister!” he exclaimed, pinning my arms to my sides in a great hug and forcing the air from my lungs, “How goes the Registrar? As benevolent as always?”

I nearly turned blue before he released me, “The Registrar loves.”

“-And the Guardian’s protect,” he finished, “Come, come inside, you must be tired from your journey. My Wives have prepared your rooms and a meal for you, and I am eager for you to meet me brood as soon as possible.” He took me by the arm and steered me through the grounds, past the gardens of the manor, and up the stairs into a grand entrance hall. A pair of little girls ran by our feet, and my brother swooped the bigger of the two into his arms with a practiced ease.

“Aha! Marie! How does my beautiful daughter on this fair morning?” He laughed heartily. The child had caught sight of me, and like any, was afraid of me, a stranger. I tried to manage a warm smile.

“Hello, little one,” I tried in what I hoped was a sweet voice. She buried her face shyly in her father’s chest, her arms wrapped around his neck as he supported her with his arms.

“Come now, don’t be so shy, Marie, this is your aunt, Lara Hatsue, of the Registrar,” He kneeled to the ground, placing the little girl before me, “Dear child, show her that we know the respect the Registrar deserves.”

“There’s really no need-“ I protested, but the child had already begun her curtsy and spoke softly, “Hello, Aunt Lara. Welcome to the Hatsue House.” She retreated to her father’s side, and he laughed.

“Where is your mother, dear child?” asked my brother warmly.

“Mama is reading in the garden, Papa.”

“And mother Sarai? Mother Hannae?”

“Mama Sarai is preparing a meal in the east parlor. Mama Hannae is with her, there.”

“Well then, thank you, dear child. Go on, play with your sisters,” the girl hugged her father again, before running off to rejoin her friends.

“My eldest daughter. Beautiful, and quick-minded, but a bit shy.”

“She has your eyes,” I observed.

“Courtesy of the Registrar?” joked Aron.

I shrugged, “Usually we’re not that detailed.”

He smiled and took my arm again. The east parlor was more of a porch, it had large glass windows that looked out onto the eastern gardens. Two women were in the room already, talking cheerfully. A robust and tall women with raven colored hair stood slicing fruit, while a smaller, more delicate brunette wearing glasses sat with her thin fingers crossed in front of her. Their chatting ceased as they turned to look at her.