Dystopian Future The Working Minds

Ebuka turned off the computer that was projecting Jade’s digital face to the OvAd2030 Origin and research class. It was one of his many duties as a working mind handler.

“Welcome back professor. How was your class?” He asked, knowing his voice would be collected from the quiet room, imputed into the computer to be downloaded by Jade’s brain in the working mind programmer before Jade could reply. He also knew because of technological advancement, that process took less than five seconds to accomplish now. It was almost like having a conversation with a real human instead of a hunk of brain floating in a container filled with nourishing liquid made especially to keep it alive and working as long as technologically possible.

“Same, same. They seem to understand the world’s predicament but who wouldn’t. I tell you, every day I am afraid that we will never find a cure. People are still dying and there is no replacing the dead.”

“Indeed. You are correct. They have to understand that everything is up to them now so I don’t think the origin class can be repeated too much. What assignment did you give them today?” He asked as he injected a blue liquid drug prescribed by the doctors of the work your mind into the tub that led to her container. The substance was one of the many that kept her brain active and functioning.

“I asked them to read up on the female pains that prompted the scientist to embark on such a radical research in the first place.”

“That sounds very easy. That information is available on…”

Jade interrupted him.

“We all know it’s an easy assignment but I gave them that so they can go the extra mile and I think that if they understand the scientist, her thinking and how it used to be for an average woman, they might understand her research. What were the pains then?"

“Back in 2030, before the great outbreak, women went through the worst kind of pain prescribed by nature. It usually started at a tender age, as little as 11 and 12 sometimes. They bleed every month and some women had a complication from this monthly discharge that greatly reduced their quality of life. There was also the pain of ovulation which afflicted more than 40% of the female population at that time. But the worst of it all was the pain and terror they went through to reproduce. As you know, human evolution made so that having the ability to move while erect severely narrowed the birthing canal of the female of the species and gradually made childbirth difficult. Some of them died in the ordeal, got deadly sick from complication while some lost a part of their body and had their quality of life as I mentioned before greatly reduced. And then there is the psychological change for those that do survive childbirth, the changes that happen within the body and outside the body that they couldn’t control. The female population carried a lot of pain for centuries, a lot of pain that humanity did not appreciate or acknowledge according to the scientist. The scientist wanted to find a way to ease some of the sufferings. The fact that she had a rough upbringing which she blamed on the fact that she was born a woman also contributed to her radical thinking.”

Ebuka thought about the articles and works written about the scientist, her life history, what she went through as a woman, as a mother and a total lack of reward that came from it. Those writings also documented the mistakes that she had made and there was a lot of them but being born as a woman was her biggest mistake and most of the wicked things happened to her because she was a woman. So it was written in her biography.

“Go on,” The professor prompted.

“There isn’t much else. She tried to develop a cure that could help women when she stumbled onto something deadly and unexpected, a virus that only affected women because she was creating it for women and could be spread in every way possible. It attacked and permanently destroyed every egg in any infected female. No known medication can slow it down or stop it and no one can decipher the origin of that virus. evidence have shown that it was created using ancient herbs and extracts from animals. Now we have less than 1 million people in the world with no way of reproducing and it’s only about time before everybody dies off and the cats take over."

“It is the end of the world as we know it, right? Thanks for the lecture. Have you heard anything from the explorers?”

“There have been no updates since yesterday. They think that it might be somewhere in the Biafra land. Can you believe the Biafra land has less than 100 people in it?”

“I am frankly surprised they still have people there. India used to have billions of people in it and now there are less than 500 people in the whole country and they are dying rapidly too. It really is a shame.”

“Do you really believe they will find something if the locket is found? You did say that we might find an answer in the heart-shaped locket.”

“A student in my class asked me that and I will tell you the same thing I told her. I don’t know but it’s worth exploring. There isn’t much of her life or much of science we haven’t explored. I believe in my heart there may be a glue in the locket if it’s found intact and you know what’s ironic about that?”

“The fact that you don’t have a heart?” He ventured to answer having already mastered her dark sense of humour.

“I swear sometimes you can read my mind kid,” she returned in her plainly neutral computerized voice. Ebuka knew that if she could, she would have laughed at that moment but she couldn’t and he would never hear her laugh because that sound wasn’t a necessary program to be coded so it just wasn’t.

In the race to prolong and hold onto the human race, some of humanity has been stripped down and sacrificed and emotions were discarded in the pursuit. He wasn’t sure the little things that mattered, that made living meaningful would be restored if they should find a cure