The Donors

The new world

She spent only five minutes aimlessly roaming around, looking for a familiar sign or building she could enter. Dread filled her body, and her heart felt as if it was going to burst through her chest.
Sweat or rain was sticking to her clothes; she wasn't sure which, and her feet were sore from the ill-fitting, illegal, high-heeled shoes.

She remembered her mother telling her about how, in the pre-ex era, some women's work was to pleasure Donors sexually. She used to sneak into her mother's study and look at the history books and learn that these women were called prostitutes, and she felt now, as she was in lunaria, that she was dressed like one.

She suddenly had a chilling realization that the Donnors might have sent her to be captured.
How easy it was for her to actually be in Lunaria, which is rumored to be the most protected state in the world.

She had been so anxious about infiltrating Lunaria that at no moment did she stop and think about how little she knew about her role in the "plot."
Go to the city,
Find your mother,
Find your brother
Free the donors.
Then...
Then what?

Now that she was in Lunaris, she knew that this was either a ploy for her to be captured or that the donors were foolish enough to believe their juvenile plan would work.
Did they really think that they could take over this fortress of a city?
The Earthers*made sure that Lunaria, Nzinga City, Pallasopolis, and Kalistan were impenetrable.

*The Earthers: A coalition of Women engineers, architects, and scientists from around the world dedicated to creating a sustainable society without the constraints of profit or competition. Originating in the 2030s as a quiet movement, they soon developed advanced technologies using natural and elemental resources from regions like the Congo. By trading resources like cobalt ethically with Nzinga City, they accessed new materials that fueled breakthroughs in clean yet powerful energy systems. They constructed Lunaria as a hidden fortress fortified with renewable nuclear reactors, near-invisible shielding, and a cloaking technology embedded into the city's infrastructure. Earther technology made Lunaria and the other world's countries impenetrable, cities that lived in harmony with the land yet operated at the pinnacle of innovation.

Though she was impressed by the number of donors who lived on the outskirts of Lunaria when she met Jacob, she knew that they were not even a fraction of the entire New World population.

As she slipped into the bustling streets of Lunaria, Sophie felt a creeping sense of absurdity tighten around her.

The plan seemed bold, even grand, back when she'd first joined the Donors. Out there, in the wilderness beyond Lunaria's walls, they looked powerful—two hundred men gathered like some rogue army, radiating the kind of brute strength she'd rarely seen amongst the women she left behind.
Of course, the Women she grew up with were not warriors.

Lunaria had fierce warriors, though now their role was more in intelligence than brutality.

Now, stepping into Lunaria's seamless but imposing beauty, she felt the smallness of this so-called rebellion.

A few hundred men scattered across outposts could hardly rattle a world where they were merely tools in the hands of women.

Donors couldn't make a new life; they just had to give the ingredients for it.
They couldn't carry life in their womb for 9 months, and even though Lunaria was almost on a breakthrough to creating the first artificial womb
The donors lack the physical or mental resources to build one.

They couldn't change society's course. All they could do was supply what was needed, and even that was carefully regulated.

The power, she realized, had always rested with the women—Lunaria's women and the women of cities across the globe who had decided long ago that the power of creation would never sleep in male hands again.

*In the post-male world, donors are created through controlled processes. Each region has laws governing male births. In regions where the limited amount of women was low by the past regime's design, like China, higher quotas were granted to maintain genetic diversity. Still, in places like Afghanistan, any male presence was deemed too destabilizing. These regions only accepted foreign donors temporarily, discarding them after use to avoid any risk of influence. For the more balanced societies like Nzinga City in Africa or Pallasopolis in Europe, minimal numbers of donors were created every generation—never more than necessary, constantly carefully monitored.
All regions shared a common goal: keep donor numbers low, unthreatening, and bound to their purpose. In truth, the men outside of Lunaria were little more than a flicker against the steady glow of these cities, designed to survive without them.

Sophie had a funny thought just then. Maybe—just maybe—the Donors knew something the Lunarians didn't. Something she didn't.

A memory of Jacob flitted through her mind: him slipping out of their tent late at night, murmuring to voices she didn't recognize. She'd brushed it off, assuming it was some rival camp. The Donors, although few, were constantly fracturing, splitting into ever-smaller factions. Cooperation, it seemed, was a luxury they couldn't afford.

She thought about the old stories she'd heard—of a time when women had little agency when clans would broker peace by offering up their daughters as brides. It was a union that bound bloodlines and brought a sense of belonging. But the Donors... they could not produce daughters. An entirely different need bound them. Not solid enough for them to grow organically.

And that made her something strange, something new. Sophie was the first daughter they had ever had.

Sophie remembered that she had never seen a donor growing up in Lunaria, not one, though she knew what their purpose was.

Her brother was the first person she had ever met. He wasn't called a donor, but Caleb and brother, names she had only read in history books.

The sound of the marketplace was a soft hum, barely noticeable, almost peaceful—if not for the traffic robots directing people gliding silently on the magnetized walkways to stop or turn left.

The Lunarians were unfathomably clean, their faces beaming with contentment and their clothes moving with the earth's rhythm, seeming to breathe in harmony with nature.

That was the point. Sophie thought

She had learned that the pre-ex world was ravaged by extreme pollution and poor waste systems. The fashion industry had grown into a dangerous for-profit industry that preyed on the insecurities of some and forced labor of others.

The Lunarian engineering made it so that the clothing seemed to move on its own, almost as if it were alive, reacting to the world around it. The fabric shifted with the wind, absorbed the light, and stayed clean without anyone washing it. It looked soft, light, and natural like it had grown straight from the earth. Sophie remembered from childhood that these clothes weren't meant to be thrown away—they were to be part of a cycle, used again and again until they became part of the ground itself to be regrown.

The Donnors had a heap of discarded clothes outside the camp, and Sophie could swear that it got worryingly big, dirty, and repugnant every year.

In contrast, Sophie's clothes felt restrictive, and the fabric was tight against her skin. She was acutely aware of how out of place she was, knowing she carried the unpleasant scent of dirt and dampness from the Donners' makeshift tents, miles away from this sanitized world.

The Donnors lived simply, foraging, hunting, and bartering at the moving underground markets for pre-ex paraphernalia and clothing to replace the tattered hospital gowns they were thrown out of Lunaria with after their time as Donnors had ended.