My name is Mark. We've been travelling for almost 300 years now, and anticipate that we will be travelling for almost 200 years more. I was born on the Atlanta, like the rest of the crew. Our own trip has been uneventful. We haven't met any aliens and we haven't forgotten our purpose. We don't know what has become of the other ships, nor have we been in communication with Earth. As emergency-free as our mission has been, we haven't had a need to. You might say that our mission has been boring.
We're still happy, though. People have work, food, love and all of the other necessities of life. There is little strife aboard the ship. We don't even need clothing anymore. Things have still changed, though. No society, much less an artificially constructed one such as ours, could stay static and survive. We are missing one thing aboard ship, although you'd never be able to tell that we ever had it, much less missed it. We have no women.
There are only men aboar the Atlanta. About a century into the voyage, the leaders of the ship came to a decision. They held the belief that too many women were bearing children. Though children were necessary to a self-sustaining population, we needed as many workers as possible to keep the ship going. Spending time pregnant and raising a child took time away from the all-important task of maintaining the ship. They handed down a decision: Women were to be replaced by a special caste of breeders and allowed to go extinct. With our advanced genetic engineering, we replaced women with he-femmes: men who were born with women's reproductive systems. They would compose a mere 10% of our population, with normal men composing the other 90%. The he-femmes would then spend their adult lives giving birth to and raising children. They would easily get pregnant and deliver large litters of children, averaging between 4 and 6 children per pregnancy, and the he-femmes would raise them communally. With only a small number of people dedicated soley to child rearing, the rest of the population could keep the ship running.
With only one gender aboard ship, the sexual orientation of the ship's crew has been changed. As part of the intrucution of our single gender culture, we have been genetically engineered to be gay. Our 'male' male crew members marry other 'males,' though they are required to make regular visits to the he-femmes, both for pleasure and for procreation.
As I said, children are raised communally by their he-femme mothers. Once they reach 15 years of age, they are considered adults. The male children join the crew and are assigned tasks, while the he-femmes are sequestered off to begin their sexual duties. I can hardly wait. I turn 15 next week, and ever since I had my first period, I've wanted to join the other adult he-femmes and have my first litter. Yeah, there are times when I'm jealous that I wasn't born with a penis, but I remind myself that I have a special gift: the ability to make life, to nourish it within my body and to bring it forth into the world. And that's something that I would never give up.
