Chapter 2: The First Breeding
The synthetic jasmine scent was cloying. Reito paced the length of his quarters, the plush grey carpet swallowing the sound of his steps. He’d read Anya Volkov’s file three times. Her IQ, her hemoglobin levels, her ancestral genetic diversity index. It said nothing about whether she laughed easily, or what her favorite music was, or if she was afraid of the dark. It was a spec sheet. He was a spec sheet. Two compatible sets of data scheduled for convergence.
At 1858 exactly, a soft chime echoed through the room. The door panel slid open.
Elisa entered first, her posture as rigid as a chalk line. Behind her, a woman stepped into the light.
Anya Volkov was taller than her hologram suggested, her shoulders squared as if bearing a load. Her ash-blonde hair was pulled back in a severe twist, emphasizing the sharp intelligence in her blue eyes. She wore a simple dress of dark blue fabric, functional but carefully fitted. She clutched a small tablet to her chest like a shield.
“Reito,” Elisa said, her voice neutral. “This is Anya Volkov. Anya, Asset Nineteen, Reito Mizuhara.”
Anya’s eyes flickered to Elisa, then locked onto Reito. She gave a short, formal nod. “It is an honor to meet you.”
The words sounded rehearsed. Reito just stood there, his own hands hanging uselessly at his sides. “Uh. Yeah. You too.”
Elisa’s gaze swept the room, missing nothing. “The scheduled session is ninety minutes. Standard protocol applies. Wellness monitoring is active. I will return at 2030.” She turned to leave, then paused, her eyes on Reito. “A successful introduction is in everyone’s best interest.” The door whispered shut behind her, leaving them in a silence that was suddenly vast and fragile.
Anya remained near the door, statue-still. Reito gestured vaguely toward the sitting area. “Do you… want to sit?”
“That would be acceptable,” she said, moving with stiff grace to perch on the edge of the sofa. She placed the tablet neatly on her knees. Her knuckles were white.
Reito sat opposite her in a low chair. The distance felt like a canyon. “So. You’re an engineer.”
“I am the lead structural engineer for the North Euro-Sector arcology dome reinforcement project,” she recited, her voice precise. “My work involves calculating stress loads for nano-polymer composites under prolonged atmospheric pressure shifts.”
“Right.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Sounds important.”
“It is. The dome integrity is vital for seventeen thousand inhabitants.” She looked down at her tablet, then back at him. Her composure was flawless, but a faint tremble in her lower lip betrayed her. “Your file indicates a background in applied physics before stasis. We have that in common.”
“I barely passed my thermodynamics course,” he admitted, a weak attempt at a smile. It felt grotesque.
Anya didn’t smile back. “The probability of our combined genotypes producing offspring with a superior capacity for spatial reasoning and immunological resilience is sixty-three percent. That is a highly favorable correlation.”
The air left the room. There it was. The transaction, laid bare.
Reito stared at her. “Is that why you volunteered? For the… correlation?”
Something finally broke behind her eyes. The professional veneer cracked, revealing a desperate, raw fear beneath. “I am thirty-four years old,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “The waiting list for natural insemination protocols is eleven years long for my demographic bracket. The lottery odds are… statistically negligible. This assignment… a direct introduction…” She stopped, drawing a shaky breath. “It is the single greatest contribution I can make to the continuation of our species. It is a privilege.” She said the last word as if trying to convince herself.
“It doesn’t feel like a privilege,” Reito said, the words escaping before he could stop them.
Anya flinched as if struck. Her chin lifted. “Your discomfort is noted. But it is irrelevant to the biological imperative. My ovulation window is optimal for the next forty-eight hours. The success rate of conception decreases by approximately eight percent per day thereafter.” She stood abruptly, the tablet clattering to the floor. “We are wasting time.”
She crossed the space between them before he could react. Her scent—clean, like ozone and soap—enveloped him. Her hands came up, not to touch his face, but to the fastening of his shirt. Her fingers, though trembling, were deft.
“Whoa, wait—” He caught her wrists. Her skin was warm, her pulse racing against his thumbs.
“Please,” she breathed, her eyes pleading now, all clinical pretense gone. “Please, don’t make this more difficult. They monitor compliance. They evaluate performance. A negative report could… it could revert my status.” A tear escaped, tracking down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “I cannot go back to the waiting list. I can’t.”
The weight of her despair was an anchor, pulling him under. He thought of Elisa’s words: Your body isn’t yours anymore. He thought of the sea of faces in the atrium, that collective hunger. He thought of Mina, her memory already feeling like a dream from someone else’s life. Anya’s fear was more real, more immediate than his grief.
His hands fell away from her wrists.
She took it as consent. Her fingers finished with his buttons, pushing the shirt back over his shoulders. Her touch was hurried, methodological, like she was unpacking essential equipment. When she went for his belt, he closed his eyes.
The buckle clicked open. The zip hissed down. He felt the cool air on his skin, then the shock of her hand touching him through his underwear. A gasp—hers or his, he couldn’t tell. He was soft, unresponsive, a knot of defiance and shame.
“It’s… it’s alright,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. Her hand stroked him, her movements awkward, learned from diagrams and instructional videos. “The physiological response will follow. Neuro-transmission can be initially inhibited by psychological distress.”
Her clinical analysis, spoken in that shaky, tear-thick voice, was the most obscene thing he’d ever heard. But her touch, though clumsy, was persistent. The heat of her hand, the sheer human contact after years of ice and isolation, began to wear down his resistance. Against his will, a traitorous heat stirred in his groin. He felt himself beginning to stiffen under her ministrations.
“See?” she said, a note of hysterical triumph in her voice. “Optimal function.”
She pulled his trousers and underwear down his hips in one urgent motion. He stood exposed before her. She didn’t look at his face. Her eyes were fixed on his cock, which was now half-hard, a biological betrayal. She sank to her knees on the carpet.
Her mouth was warm and wet. She took him in with a shocking, desperate greed, her head bobbing with frantic, unrhythmic effort. She was trying to perform, to optimize. Her teeth scraped him; she readjusted, her hands gripping his hips hard enough to bruise. She made small, frantic noises in her throat.
Reito looked down at the top of her head, at the perfect part in her blonde hair. He felt a surge of revulsion, then a deeper, darker surge of arousal. His body, starved for sensation, was overriding his mind. He hardened fully in her mouth, the slap of her lips becoming wetter, louder.
“Fuck,” he groaned, the word torn from him.
She took it as encouragement, redoubling her efforts. One of her hands left his hip, hiking up the skirt of her dress. He heard the rustle of fabric, the sound of her own hand moving between her legs. She was touching herself, preparing herself, all while her mouth worked him. The raw, wet sounds of it filled the silent room.
After a few minutes, she pulled back, a string of saliva connecting her lips to his glistening tip. Her own face was flushed, her lips swollen. She stood up, her dress hiked around her waist, revealing plain white underwear. She hooked her thumbs into the sides and pushed them down, stepping out of them with a quick, decisive kick.
“The highest probability of conception is achieved in the missionary position,” she stated, her voice ragged. She lay back on the expensive grey carpet, not even making it to the bed. She spread her legs, presenting herself. Her eyes were closed tight. “Lubrication is sufficient. Please proceed.”
He stood over her, throbbing, angry, sickly excited. She was beautiful, in a stark, broken way. And she was offering herself up like a sacrifice on an altar of statistics. He dropped to his knees between her legs.
The scent of her arousal was real, musky and human. He positioned himself, the head of his cock pressing against her entrance. She was wet, her body performing its own duty. He pushed forward.
She gasped, a sharp, indrawn breath that wasn’t pleasure but shock. Her eyes flew open, wide with a kind of stunned vulnerability. He slid deeper, feeling the tight, hot clasp of her around him. It was an intense, overwhelming sensation. He buried himself to the hilt, his body shuddering.
“Oh, god,” she whimpered. Her hands came up and gripped his arms, her nails digging in.
He began to move. There was no tenderness in it, no exploration. It was a mechanical, piston-like rhythm, driven by a mixture of biological imperative, pent-up frustration, and a cruel, growing need to assert some shred of control—over her, over the situation, over his own traitorous body. The slap of skin against skin was a brutal percussion in the quiet room.
Her breathing became ragged, matching his thrusts. Her head tossed side to side on the carpet. “Yes,” she chanted, “yes, optimal, optimal, please…” The word was a prayer and a command.
His own climax built, a tight, inevitable coil in his gut. He fucked her harder, faster, chasing a release that felt less like pleasure and more like a violent expulsion of everything he’d lost. He thought of Mina’s smile, of the sterile walls of the facility, of Elisa’s cold, evaluating eyes. It all fused into a white-hot point of pressure.
With a guttural groan that was almost a sob, he came inside her, jamming his hips hard against hers, spurting jet after jet of warm seed deep into her womb. The pulsations of his orgasm seemed to go on forever, a draining surrender.
He collapsed on top of her, his weight pressing her into the carpet. They both lay there, panting, slick with sweat. The scent of sex and jasmine filled the air.
After a moment, her hands, which had been gripping him fiercely, loosened. They came to rest flat on his back, a gentle, almost absent touch. He could feel her heart hammering against his chest.
He rolled off her, staring up at the ceiling’s holographic constellations—a feature he hadn’t noticed before. Fake stars for a fake world.
Anya sat up slowly, pulling her dress down. She moved with a strange, emptied-out efficiency. She stood, walked to a discreet panel in the wall—a sanitation dispenser—and pulled out a towel and a small, foil-wrapped packet. She cleaned herself with methodical strokes, then handed him a towel without meeting his eyes.
“The UNCT will conduct a pregnancy confirmation in fourteen days,” she said, her voice hollow, all the earlier desperation gone. She picked up her tablet from where it had fallen. “Thank you for your compliance.”
She walked to the door. It slid open before she reached it. Elisa stood there, her data pad in hand. Her eyes took in the scene—Reito on the floor, half-dressed, the used towel in his hand; Anya, disheveled, clutching her tablet.
“Session complete,” Anya said to Elisa, and walked past her into the corridor without a backward glance.
Elisa stepped inside, the door closing. Her expression was unreadable. She tapped her data pad. “Physiological markers from both parties indicate successful completion of the act. Heart rate, perspiration, neural activity… all within expected parameters for procreative intercourse.”
Reito slowly got to his feet, pulling his trousers up. A deep, cold fury was solidifying in his chest. “Parameters,” he echoed.
“Yes.” She looked at him. “You’ll be pleased to know your testosterone levels have normalized. The session was… productive.”
He took a step toward her. “Get out.”
“Your next introduction is in forty-eight hours,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “A botanist from the Southern Hemisphere sector. Her genetic matrix offers complementary—”
“I said get out!” he shouted, the force of his voice surprising even him.
Elisa stopped. She studied him for a long moment, her clinical detachment finally giving way to something else—a flicker of what might have been pity, or perhaps just strategic recalculation. “The grief will pass, Reito,” she said quietly. “The duty remains.”
She left him alone in the quiet room, the smell of their coupling still heavy in the air, the phantom pressure of Anya’s body still aching in his muscles. He walked to the window, yanked the blind aside. The garden walkway was empty now.
He pressed his forehead against the cool glass. In the reflection, he saw a man he barely recognized—hollow-eyed, his mouth set in a grim line. He had done his duty. He had performed.
Somewhere, in a lab, technicians would be monitoring a petri dish of possibility. And he was left here, in the sterile silence, with only the ghost of a dead girl and the chilling certainty that this was only the beginning.