EOTVD

"Today's VD quota has been met with the talks involving the Occidental Triumvirate agreeing to a shift in the allocation to the European Congress. This raises to comforting surpluses the numbers of VD contracts for the next three years."

The commentator droned on with figures - always increases, but somehow never enough of the VD availabilities.

Walter had become selective listening to the news. He was never sure he believed any of it anyway. He listened carefully when he and Gail attended the mandatory Community Meets. Most people seemed to like his attentive posture and they often spoke directly to him. He found that most of the ComPartners said what he already thought and what they considered to be real or made up.

He and Gail rarely attended ancillary meetings. They were encouraged but not absolutely required -yet. Block Leader Leland often said something to Walter about coming to more meetings. Walter usually replied with a "We'll see." whereupon Leland would slap a brochure into his hand or into his pocket. He used to read the folded papers, but they always had the same drivel - nothing new or of any import. Repetitions of the same yammering on the media. He thought he might attend at least one meeting next week even if Gail wanted nothing to do with it.

Gail said something recently about another baby. The rest of that evening and most of the day at work, he gave it some thought. They had, after all, been so happy with the twins - before they died. That thought chilled him and blackened his mood about the subject.

That night, in his recliner, he leaned over and put his hand in his overall pocket. The chains of both lockets were loosely twisted together. He eased the lockets out and disengaged one chain from the other. The first one he recognized was Gina's. The familiar lovely heart shape almost eased his stupor. It was a very pretty thing. Very intricately carved figures on the surface evoked, hope, beauty, care and love. He could remember Gina and Jeanette first reaching for the lockets. Gleaming swirls cut into a red cross-hatched background that was encircled on the outer rim with flowers made of jewels. The mountings were real gold. Both lockets were identical except for a number etched into a small oval plate at the rear with the imposing EOTVD ensign over the number. Only the numbers differed.

Walter took an EnerFiz carton out of the cooler by his chair. There was a cold, creeping sensation in his neck coming from his shoulders. He wished for alcohol, but the only thing available to his community was dangerous and sickening. He lifted the carton in a mock toast to the Hegemony. "I would toast you, First Hegemon, but I don't know which of you is in place this week." He had learned to make his toasts sound genuine. Hegemons changed position every 14 days - at least they said they did.

He turned off the TV video and reduced the sound to a legal minimum and turned his attention to his late daughter's lockets. He enclosed them in his hand gently and began crying silently. Gail, aware of the lowered volume, walked to the bedroom doorway and looked at him. Tears were falling from her eyes, also. This was normal for her most days. Tranquilizers and soporifics from SocioMed had controlled her thoughts of suicide.

Even with tears flowing, Gail was amazingly beautiful. He looked up, seeing her in the doorway and was filled with pity, love and desire toward her.

"I've got to crawl out of this for her sake." He said to himself. Braving a smile, he held it until she moved toward him. It almost made him weep again, but he was able to lift himself out of the chair and meet her. They embraced.

"Can we have a go in there?" Gail asked quietly, moving her eyes to the bedroom. Walter's heart was breaking.

"Yes. We'll be careful. I'll be careful."

"You always are." She said, pulling him to the bed.

After they'd coupled and rested in the afterglow, he gently and meticulously examined her for evidence of the possibility of impregnating her. Their loving had been so desperate and so fulfilling, that he wasn't comfortable. He did his best to hide anxiety. He loved her so much and could not imagine doing or saying anything that might frighten her. But it had been so passionate and so very distracting to his cautions. He had lingered a fraction of a second too long. The evidence was there on the outside that his caution had finally moved him away from her, but... horribly... there was the trailing evidence that he had not moved in time.

"Here, let me freshen you up, honey." He said, moving to the bathroom to prepare a wet washcloth.

"Is everything all right?" Gail asked with a note of thinly disguised alarm.

"Fine, fine." He called back. "I just don't want you to have to clean the sheet. I just want us to lie down together and hold each other." He hadn't kept the slight break in his voice away from the last word.

He went to her quickly, washed her legs and the sheet. He wanted so badly to have her go and wash herself as completely as possible, but any indication that they wanted to do that would be instantly obvious to the watching minions of the EOTVD enforcers. They always watched. They both would have gone immediately to prison and Gail would have been immediately impregnated by force. Walter stole a glance at the one camera that could see intimately what they had been doing and - yes, the lens was focusing on him even as he finished cleaning up. If anything had been suspicious, an alarm would have sounded and Gail and he would have been required to stand at assigned places in the room until authorities arrived.

Alarms in the commune complex used to sound every night for months. They lived in fear for those months that the alarm would go off against them some evening, but the alarms lessened in frequency as the populace grew accustomed to the voyeuristic intrusions into their lives even to the most intimate of their actions - with each other or totally alone in the apartments.

The wars (were they real?) had changed everything. Though prayers were discouraged by the authorities. Walter prayed, but only silently. Gail had stopped praying altogether. He had reached a point to where he no longer knew what to pray about. He didn't believe anything any more or IN anything. Instead, he did what they said must be done - just like everybody else. He took the mood meds, he ate the mysterious loaves of meat, he drank the EnerFizzes and tried his best to be unnoticed in a world where the EOTVD minions always watched.

He was 36 and could remember being 24 and happy. When they announced the declaration of war and then another and yet another, the news was full of terror and demands to isolate oneself and make sacrifices and say nothing against the Hegemony which now controlled the "out of control" government he had lived under all his life. Nobody knew what to do or who to believe. One thing prevailed. The cadre of well-known figures comprising the EOTVD took 'necessary' steps to lead the nation and much of the world into emergency measures that put everyone in general on an even keel. That's where he and Gail lived today - on an even setting with everyone else at their social level.

Walter exaggerated the motions in cleaning the bedsheet for the camera's benefit and its crew of voyeurs. He tossed the washcloth into the laundry basket and held Gail for the required twenty minutes placing her in the mandated elevated hips position to increase the likelihood of her being impregnated. Every coupling required this posturing. As he usually did, Walter rubbed her shoulders and back. He watched the clock, moving to her hips and legs with the massage. She was incredibly tense. The time passed and she went to bathe, cleaning herself as thoroughly as possible. If it was going to happen, she was already pregnant and nothing more could be done to prevent it. The law was severe in these matters.

When she began showing, SocioMed reps brought a team that examined her, declared officially that she was expecting and gave her nutrients, instruction manuals, exercise plans, scheduled visits and other niceties and promised her that her two babies would be delivered in fine health and that she, too, would be fine.

Walter lost weight after that, lost interest in sex and entered a level of depression he had never experienced. After a month of this, SocioMed took over for him prescribing meds, injections, instructions demanding that he improve his health for Gail's sake and for the continuing strengthening of the social fabric. Their instructions were not suggestions.

When the babies were born, Walter visited the ward. They were beautiful. They looked just like their late sisters. He took the lockets out of his pocket and tapped on the glass. A nurse saw the lockets and came out to him, taking the jewelry to put on each of the little girls. "I'll just change the numbers." She said. He stopped the nurse before she left the room and said, "Can it be quicker this time?"

She rolled her eyes a bit and replied, "You know they have to be developed enough to be talking before they're taken. They have to be vocally developed - VD. Walter had no more tears to shed. The Advocate Office of the Eaters of the Vocally Developed always had their way. They were the law. How could anyone go against the law?

Couples that provided twins were very special. If five sets of Grade A twins could be provided to a hungry society, the sixth set could be raised to adult status. Twins were, if you could believe the EOTVD, so very nutritious, so vital to the social fabric. The lockets gleamed on the babies' little bodies. They were special. Walter and Gail were special.