During the third hour of my two-mile commute, I thought of a field trip to a chicken farm I took as a child. Before the Bearing, kids always used to make those random trips. Farms, factories, museums, whatever the school could spin as educational. These days, a trip like that would take weeks. I remember the farm worker opening up double metal doors, and he revealed a room of which I couldn’t see the other side. Every single inch of the floor was occupied by a white chicken. The sound of their chirping morphed into an insensent, ever-present aviary din that seemed like something from another world. They had no room to walk, no room to jump, no room to breathe. The farm worker looked at us and asked if we wanted to see something funny. He grabbed a nearby metal pipe and hit a nearby railing, sending a loud ding echoing through the room. The chickens all screeched even louder. They jolted, jerking and flapping upward in place. It looked like a whole sea of white was suddenly distrubed. An intense pang of stress hit me as I watched how crammed the poor birds were. The poor things didn’t even know how awful their living conditions were. Or maybe, they did. Maybe they somehow, they had visions of a wider world.

I think of those birds a lot now in the Post-Bearing world. Almost twenty billion people in the same world that once barely handled seven.

The bus slugged along a narrow road. Sparks flew as it scraped against the residential quarter buildings on both sides. Steam and smoke and smog rose from the grated metal that comprised the world, releasing gasses from the city’s lower levels. Whenever I’m lucky enough to have a spot near a window I would watch the gases rise through our own “Sky“ to the higher levels above and someday, maybe those particles would even reach the upper echelons of the surface. I remember the surface well. I remember the sun and the white clouds that drifted before a blue sky. I remember flying and fields and the freedom to extend my arms without hitting another person or object. I remember days from the past that are only torment now.

Inside the bus, a woman wearing a technician’s gray jumpsuit uniform pressed against my right side. A man wearing a sanitation’s brown jumpsuit uniform pressed against my left. Behind me three soldiers pressed against us three in the standard camouflage fatigues and gasmasks. Before us, a mother with four children, all identical, wearing non-worker black jumpsuits. I saw next to the mother, a woman wearing a blue mail clerk jumpsuit uniform stare at the children with saddened, longing eyes. Another loser of the parenting lottery. We all assumed the traditional commute position — heads down, screens streaming content on their eyeglass units, and ignoring the twelve rows of other people around them.

“Brace for sanitation,” a computerized female voice said.

Everyone sighed in a uniform fashion as a series of brightly lit disk drones hovered over us, spraying a disinfectant. Most of the adults barely reacted, while some of the children still cried over its slight sting.

“God, I hate this stuff,” I said.

“I’d take the spray over the light therapy any day,” the technician said.

“What are you talking about? Every doorway still has the light bars,” the sanitation worker said.

“Yeah, but how many times do you actually go through a door these days? You usually stay put once you’re at where you’re heading,” the technician said.

“I just hate it all,” the mother of the children said.

“You all should be grateful for the sanitation that our government provides,” one of the soldiers said. “Could you imagine if we had even one-tenth the diseases the pre-Bearing world had now? SARS, rhinovirus, COVID-19, the X-R30 flu, just to name a few. We’d all be a lot worse off.”

“Debatable,” the technician said.

“What’s that?” the soldier replied.

“If we still had those diseases, the population crisis would probably be solved for one thing,” she said.

The soldier turned, the best that the cramped space allowed, to face her. Panic waved through me as I felt his fabric and weight shift against my back. It released some sanitizer that had pooled between us, and it ran down my leg.

“That seems like a radicalized statement to me,” the soldier said, staring at her through his gas mask.

“No, sir,” she said, looking back down.

The scraping of the bus filled the air. The fluorescent lights flickered, revealing the grimy tube the hundreds of us were crammed in.

***

When I entered the office facility, I looked at my screen and saw I only had ninety more minutes to get through security, climb two flights of stairs, and take the tram to my desk. I scolded myself for getting up too late as I shuffled down the fortieth security lane.

“Do you have any personal electronic devices?” the guard said. He wore similar garb as the soldiers, but instead they were a dingy green, the color of UUR Inc.

“Just my screen,” I said as I tapped the clear device that hung on my left eye. “Same as yesterday.”

He nodded and ushered me along down a tight, tile-encrusted corridor, where an endless line of workers walked in single file.

“Good morning, UUR family,” a computerized voice said. “The time is now zero-five-hundred. Today, as you are all aware, we commemorate the thirty-first anniversary of the Bearing. As you proceed to your designated work station, we are bringing you a special treat—“

“A brief history of the Bearing,” I said alongside the voice and dozens of other fellow workers. It had become an inside joke to mimic these automated messages amongst us grunts.

I rolled my eyes as I heard the recorded audio for the fifteen year in a row. It’s been the same since I joined UUR. As I become squeezed amongst countless other green jumpsuit wearing workers, the voice tells a story like it’s a fairy tale.

“After the three superpowers whose names we no longer utter began the Third World War, a new type of biological weaponization backfired, hyper-fertilizing all the people of the world. Nothing less than quadruplets were born across the world. Unplanned pregnancies went rampant. World hunger spread to first-world nations. Infantcide and suicide rates spiked 670% across the world. The world was falling to pieces.”

I boarded the upstairs tram, a clunky electric train that always acted as if it was about to run out of power. I doubt it’s engineers intended for it to be running day and night, constantly transporting hundreds upon hundreds of disheveled employees. It was hard to breathe, and watching the endlessly expanding space of workstations made it even harder. I asked myself the same question I have to fight myself from asking every day. What if there’s a fire? What if the extremists try to bomb the city again? We would all be obliterated, subjected to a slow, scrambling, trampling, death.

“As the world accommodated for the incalculable amount of new people, the Union of New Nations commissioned corporations like UUR to help maintain our fragile peace, limited resources, and ever-shifting culture. Thank you for being part of the new future, a Post-Bearing Future.”

By the time our little origin story finished, I had reached my work station, only ninety rows away from the tram terminal. I had to push and shove through the constant stream of people to finally get into my four-foot-wide cubicle. I panicked as I saw on my screen that I was four minutes late. As I sat, my keyboard appeared on the smart surface of the desk. The projected screen appeared, synced with my screen, and pulled up my spreadsheets to read.

“Good morning, UUR-E-311. You are five minutes late this morning. These five minutes will be deducted from your lunch hour, leaving you with seven minutes. This action has also been reported to your superior. Today is January 1, year 31. Happy New Year. This is a reminder that this is a no-child year. No children can be born legally this year, even if you were a winner in the parenting lottery. Do your part to lower the human population. You may now begin working,” the same computerized voice as the loudspeaker said.

There was little to my job. I simply had to identify numbers that were either twenty numbers higher or lower than the previous year’s report. Whether it’s data from a piece of the supply chain, profits, or human deaths, I didn’t know. They would never tell us. We were all confident an AI problem already existed that could do our jobs. It probably existed before the Bearing. But for some reason, UUR wanted human eyes on the numbers.

Around me, I could see an ocean of analysts doing the same thing as my job. My neighbors were distorted by fogged glass between our stations, but I could see them, and they could see me. I wondered if I looked as zombified as them.

Yet, it wasn’t all bad. In fact, beyond the gray world I was in, there was a bright star right in my aisle. I looked to the row behind me and eight stations down, and a blonde-haired female worker looked at me. I first smiled, but her worry-stricken face turned my own face into one of concern.

She blinked three rapid times, then a break, then two more. I responded with two quick blinks.

In a few moments, I saw in the corner of my eye that she got up to leave toward the restroom stations. After nearly ten minutes, I followed.

Going down the aisle was like being stuck in rush hour. It was so busy, constantly busy, that it would take at least an hour to get there and back, not counting the time of whatever she wanted to say to me.

Someone firmly grasped me on the shoulder, and I turned around.

“311, I was just heading to your work station,” I heard the voice of my manager say.

“Sir, about this morning,” I said.

“Five minutes is a long time, 311,” he said. His voice was both stern and mocking.

“My stomach hasn’t been agreeing with me, sir. I was sick most of the night,” I said.

“And where are you going now? Shouldn’t you try to catch up?”

“I feel like I may have to go, one last time, sir,” I said.

He scoffed in disgust.

“I’m docking another five from your lunch. Hurry up,” he said and disappeared into the crowd.

***

Before the world went to hell, I remember going to baseball games with my grandpa. There was no other feeling like it. The roar of the crowd, the crack of the bat, the smell of the hot dogs. Then, chaos would strike during the seven-inning stretch. We’d try to go to the restroom and only to fit a wave of men swarming to get in and out before the next inning began.

That was how the restrooms felt at UUR constantly, every moment of the day. I weaved through the scrambling visitors of the men’s room toward the nineteenth stall. There was a line of eight people, I eagerly waited as all the men before me went in and out. Then, I saw a friend of mine about to pass me on the way out. His eyes met mine and he cracked up laughing.

“Tim, are you two meeting up already?”he said. It was the first time I heard my name all day, and not 311.

“Morning, Hank. Yeah, she seemed sort of upset,” I said.

Yet before we could continue the conversation he was pushed through the line.

It was finally my turn. I got into the stall and without wasting any time, pulled open the service panel behind the toilet. It exposed the inner guts of the building, an endless forest of pipes and valves. I managed to squeeze my body into the forbidden space. Wedged between an arrangement of pipes, I shimmied forward in the darkness. The loud din of the bathroom was starting to fade away. Finally, my hand reached out and felt another. Her hand squeezed mine, it was soft, warm, and shaking.

“How was your trip from the girl’s room?” I said.

“Tim,” she said, trembling.

“Emily, what’s wrong?” I said.

“Tim, I,” she said, her voice cracking in tears.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m pregnant,” she finally said.

The news knocked me out of reality. I couldn’t quite seem to grasp it, like someone trying to catch a fish with their bare hands.

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“I know. I don’t know we could’ve let this happen. But it’s true. I’ve taken three pregnancy tests already. All positive.”

“Three black market pregnancy tests,” I said.

“They’re still accurate and you know it,” she said.

Flashes of the last time something like this happened came to mind. I remember Doug and Rosa, old friends I knew even before the Bearing, ended up getting pregnant during a no-child year, and they won the lottery. They disappeared before entering their second trimester. I started to hyperventilate right away. The already-tight space started to close in on me.

“What the hell are we going to do?” I asked.

“Tim, I need to escape before they detect it. I need to get out of the city. I need to get to the surface before it’s too late.”

The idea of the surface once again came to mind. The open roads. The isolation of walking in the forest. Homes with acres of land around it. But, that all might be ancient history if what I’ve heard was true.

“We don’t even know if the surface exists anymore. It could all be just like this now,” I said.

“It’s more of a chance I have than down here. I’m not asking you to come with me, especially if you’re already having doubts. But I’m keeping the child. And I’m not staying here until they come knocking at my quarters with a black bag.”

A child. A child. I never thought it was possible. Since we lost the lottery, the hourly sterilization should also be affecting our fertility, too. Something happened, an anomaly. And, a pre-Bearing Tim would say this happened for a reason.

“Let’s go,” I said.