“Go on, Shannon. Tell it to them just like you explained it to me,” Meiko said. Brenda could not help but notice that Meiko’s gaze was fixed on her, intently studying her reaction.
Shannon actually looked nervous. “Well, let me begin by saying I really appreciate how you two are trying to make the world a better place and all. But there’s just one thing about your plan that I have questions about…”
A long pause.
“Well?” Brenda asked.
“It’s evil.”
“Strong language from someone who was just about to ask me for their dream body.”
“Hear her out,” admonished Meiko, rather sternly.
Shannon squirmed and continued. “You’re offering a great deal to women, even if you change their orientation without their consent. And you’d have to change their orientation, because after a generation or two, every last man on earth will have died off.”
“And your problem with that is…?” Brenda was feeling a little defensive, even if the plan was mostly Meiko’s idea.
“It’s like a slow-motion Thanos snap,” Tiffany interjected. Once more, Brenda marveled at how her formerly nerd-hating spouse had become so fluent in pop culture.
“That’s it exactly,” Shannon explained. “You’re offering immense and perpetual benefits to half of society, while you allow the other half to fall into irrelevance and eventual extinction.”
“So what do you want us to do about it? Turn every man on the planet into a woman?” The idea didn’t sound half-bad to Brenda as she said it out loud.
“It would be a start,” Shannon replied. “At least it would be more fair. But I don’t think we can really feel good about this little project if we treat the issue of free will and choice as a secondary concern.”
“Out little project?” Brenda asked. “Aren’t you being a little presumptuous?”
“She’s on the team,” Meiko asserted. “Just like Tiffani is. We need people to keep us grounded.”
Brenda gave Meiko a glance, but she could see she was outnumbered. “All right. What do you propose we do?”
Meiko took over the explanation. “We scale back the virus. Have it give immortality and youth, but let people be able to choose their orientation.”
“Make everyone bisexual?”
“More or less. At least for the near future. Then we introduce a technology…a pill or something…that men could take that would make them susceptible to the disease. So they could choose to become women and get all the benefits of our new world.”
“And the men who refuse the pill?”
“The homophobes, transphobes, and would-be alpha males? Good riddance.”
Something about this rubbed Brenda the wrong way, and she realized that one of her first commands made any deviation from the march towards an all-lesbian world seem wrong to her. “You’re OK with this, Mei?” she asked.
“It would mean scaling back the timetable. A lot, possibly. But remember that we have the luxury of patience. Eventually, people will choose to join us.”
“Why should they? You know how people are!” Brenda was getting heated. “Once they see us as a threat to our way of life, we and everyone who chooses our way will be in danger.”
“Other people have changed the world before,” Tiffany said. “Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus…”
“Are you suggesting we start a religion?”
Tiffany smiled. “Why not? We have something those other leaders didn’t. Two somethings, in fact.”
“Mei’s boobs?”
“Four somethings, then, you idiot,” Mei laughed. “The way would not be easy, but I think we could sleep easier at night.”
Brenda nodded. She could not shake the ominous feeling in her stomach.