Mad World or How I Learned to Fear Women

I'm walking down a series of winding corridors, each one littered with more refuse and detritus than the last; books, equipment, apparatus, pictures - all strewn across the floors. The walls are smeared with dirt, shit and blood; signs of struggle, death and birth. As I move further on, the lighting becoming intermittent then non-existent, I find the nature of my present environment is growing ever more ruinous and feral.
There are thousands of photos everywhere I walk. They show rows upon rows of naked women, women of differing shapes and sizes, ages and colours. Why are they all of naked women? It's weird...arousing at first but then it becomes so repetitive that it's just kind of disturbing. It makes no sense. Something massive happened here, something terrible.
I move through a series of doorways into a dark chamber, the doors hanging from their hinges, others ripped from them altogether. There is no lighting in this area now but there is a queer phosphorescence coming from further into the space ahead of me. I sense this is an enormous place - it is considerably colder than just a moment before - a cavern of some sorts.
Suddenly there are noises distant, then closer at hand. Shadowy figures play about my peripheral vision, stabbing at the edge of reality, allowing me glimpses of macabre figures. I stop because there is a naked woman directly ahead of me, seemingly frozen, prone against a chipped and scarred concrete column. She is convulsing wildly and whispering a filthy gibberish that I can make no sense of. She is bloody and dirty all over, her hair patchy and straggly, filled with bits of shit and litter.
I am profoundly scared but I keep moving forward. Further in I sense that there is fierce movement all about me, circling me, testing my boundaries. Then I come up against another female. She does not look like a woman much at all though it is clear that once she must have been.
She is crouched on the dirty concrete floor, her arms and legs twisted about her, like in the manner of a lizard. Her head is cranked upwards and she is chattering loudly, foaming at the mouth. Saliva mixed with blood and bile foams and cascades from her lips. She turns her head ever so slowly to peer madly at me and quite deliberately she begins to totter on her misshapen, twisted limbs, making her way towards me.
She is speaking mostly like the one before but every tenth word or so I am able to make sense of: it is clear she means to harm me but not on her own. It appears her insane whispers are, in fact, a call to arms against me. The distant noises in the murk and gloom now transform into most foul cries of torment and hatred.
Suddenly there is a loud clap and the dim blue phosphorescence erupts into a flare that enlightens the space, displaying the enormity of the chamber I'm in and in the process, betraying the positions and the extent of the malevolent force closing in around me. I make a rapid, panicked retreat from this horrible place within and make our my back along the broken, wrecked corridors. Except now they are extending into infinity and I seem to be slipping on something...
The world swims into focus around me.
“James? You awake?”
“...Hm?”
“Oh you are there!” It was Anna.
“Sorry...” I reply, focussing.
“You okay?” she asks like a mother, “Thought I'd lost you there for a moment.”
What the hell was that? I wonder, rubbing my head. How long have I been asleep? Jesus!
“I’m fine,” I answer, “I was dreaming, I think. Weird, I've never had a daydream quite like that before.”
“Alright...”
“I'm ok. I haven't been sleeping well lately.”
“Listen,” she starts to reassure me, “You're nervous about this - that's to be expected - but you shouldn't worry; this procedure has been done thousands of times. They know what they're doing, they're the best.”
“Yeah, I know the spiel. I can’t help it.”
I approach a large glass fish tank: the lobby of the Gene Hub. Everything is glass and hard furnishings; all of that contemporary architectural wank and nowhere to fucking sit down. Typical.
“Hey, I’ll be with you all the way through.”
A man in a pink bodysuit comes my way and motions for me to follow him up to the labs. There are a lot of these guys walking around, directing traffic, collecting people, and running errands. I’m reminded of how few women I see these days. Anna is a blessing.
I arrive at Lab 309c and get dressed and prepped by a monkey with a distended mnemonic suplex. He – it doesn’t even seem to register me. I get laid out on a white rack with masses of wiring connected to it. Ahead of me the monkey pulls a screen down from above and positions it in front of me. A large disclaimer notice appears after a minute or two of start-up and begins to scroll up the screen. Something is fed into my arms at this point and I start to relax considerably, forgetting about my previous anxiety.
“It’s important for you to fully understand these conditions.” instructs a disembodied voice from somewhere behind my head. “It’s a mandatory procedure to use this method and you need to take special notice of the side effects when they appear.”
Side effects? What the fuck? I don’t remember anything about side effects in the ad.
“Wha sid ffeks?” I mouth incoherently at the voice.
“Just one or two minor points,” the voice explains, “They really don’t amount to much at the worst of times…about one in a hundred thousand experience some form of side effect. You’ll recognise the notices when you see them - they’ll be outlined in red on the screen.”
Ok. They’ll be outlined in red on the screen.
After several minutes of legal bullshit that I don’t even comprehend, let alone have the chance to read, a flashing red box appears as the notice slowly makes its way up the screen. So these are the side effects then. Something called Skin Lissaghous. That doesn’t sound comfortable. Another called Boobs 3000? What the fuck? It’s difficult to tell whether these are a joke or something but I guess they’re serious. Sincaleptic Fury and Hobson’s Wipe start to scare me a bit.
I ask for the doctor but all I see now are monkeys prepping the op station. I scream for the doctor but start flaking out midway through. The last thing I see is a twin spiralling helter-skelter.
Again, the fabric of my reality ebbs and flows. My world coalesces around me and I find I'm back where I was, in the ruined corridor.

I look down: what I slipped on is an embryo, I think. I don't want to be right about this assumption. Whatever it is has fallen to the floor – or been thrown – and has been trodden on extensively. But when I study it there is no mistaking what it is. The smear had caused me to lose balance in the retreat and I think I blacked out for a time. I might’ve dreamed or I might not have. I seem to recall talking to a woman, perhaps a doctor.
This placental waste is in several places, now that I realise what I’m looking at. I hadn’t noticed it before but now I can see they’re all over the place.
I don’t stop too long to ponder this, as I can hear the screams growing behind me but I can’t tell how close they are. I keep running; I don’t really understand why, I just know I can’t stop anymore.
Time has run on. It's been five years already.
Ironically a woman had discovered it. Once it had been tested they made it accessible to pharmacies. The usual stuff occurred: protests, fights. Eventually the media focus shifted away. The vaccine Hyteps Twin 301 worked barely longer than half a decade before it started to deteriorate rapidly. Initially they sought to stave off its decline by introducing more up-to-date vaccine code to overwrite the existing one but that didn’t help; it just made it crash faster. They didn’t notice this until it was far too late. How they missed the mark by such a degree I’ll never know.
When they finally realised – admitted – that what they were doing wasn’t helping they fled. Clinics abandoned in days, surgeons fleeing. Some got murdered. When I say some, of course, I mean thousands; it’s likely a good percentage of these were never even involved but that didn’t mean shit.
Finally, we arrived at our current state of lawlessness, fear and ruin. The code they seconded from men to heal all the ills of women never worked. It unleashed something terrible into the world and now all we can do is run.