by Sebastian Bilbo

I was born in a world that had already betrayed itself.  

My father, Jacob, liked to say the land had been good to us once. “Before the tampering,” he’d mutter over his whiskey, his calloused fingers brushing the rim of the bottle. He’d been a farmer all his life—so had his father and his father before him—but the land he knew was now a distant, bittersweet memory. After years of genetically modified seeds and unnatural pesticides, the soil had turned barren. Everything had changed since the crops were “improved.” No longer did they need rain or sun in the same way, so no longer did rain or sun come in the same way. They grew on command and yielded more than nature would allow. It was progress, they said.  

But there was a price.  

I was thirteen when the infertility crisis hit. At first, no one knew why birth rates dropped so fast. Some blamed pollution or climate change, others thought it was God’s punishment. But it became clear soon enough—anyone who had consumed genetically modified foods lost the ability to procreate. The science was nightmarishly unambiguous. GMOs, engineered for efficiency, had subtly altered the genetic makeup of their consumers. Nearly the entire population of the world was sterile.   

Our family was different, among the few who had held on to the old ways. My father was stubborn like that. He’d never trusted the new crops, never planted the seeds the government had pushed on us. He grew only what his father had grown, seeds saved from the time before. It made us outcasts in our farming community, but those social nuances didn’t matter much now. It kept us alive.  

At first, the government tried to manage the crisis through fertility treatments, artificial wombs, and surrogate programs. It didn’t work. The sterile masses grew desperate, and as the birth rate plummeted, so did any sense of rationale. That’s when the roundups began. It started quietly at first—whispers of missing families, neighbors vanishing in the night. Then they broadcast their message everywhere: Those who could had a responsibility. They “had” to reproduce. We “had” to save humanity.   

The government called it a “Civic Duty.” My father called it a nightmare.   

Our small farm became a fortress. Dad refused to go into town and refused to sell his crops anymore. “They’re watching,” he’d say. “They know.” It was just the four of us—me, my older sister Emma, Dad, and Mom. We lived in fear.  

The day they came it was a grey morning, fog rolling over the fields, the ground damp from a night of rare, natural rain. We were having breakfast, and the smell of eggs and toast mixed with the damp earth outside. Emma was reading something at the table—she always had her nose in a book, escaping into a world that still made sense. Dad was staring out the window, the familiar look of worry etched into his face, his hand clutching a glass of whiskey he hadn’t yet finished from the night before. Nothing was said, but we all knew.  

The sound of engines, low and rumbling, cut through the silence.   

I felt my stomach drop as I saw the dark silhouettes of government trucks appearing over the hill. Black, angular, menacing, a crimson emblem of their power over us stamped on their sides. Dad shot up from his chair, knocking over his drink. “They’re here,” he growled, grabbing the shotgun he kept by the door. Mom’s face turned pale as she pulled Emma and me toward the back of the house.  

The trucks stopped at the yard’s edge, the heavy doors creaking open. Men in dark uniforms, helmets obscuring their faces, marched toward the house. Behind them, a man in a grey suit stepped forward, carrying a clipboard.

 “Jacob Miller,” he said calmly as if we were discussing a weather report, not the fate of our family. “By order of the National Reproduction Program, you and your family are required to report to the nearest Civic Facility for processing.”  

“Process this,” Dad spat, raising his shotgun.  

The man in the suit sighed, looking at us with the weariness of someone who had given this speech a hundred times before. He took a chair, wiping the dead grass and mud off his shoes with our tablecloth. “You have a responsibility to humanity, Mr. Miller. You cannot hide from it.”  

“We don’t owe you anything,” Mom shouted, stepping in front of Emma and me like that would protect us. Her voice was shaking, but there was steel in her words. “We never touched your cursed food; we kept to ourselves—”  

“That’s exactly why we need you,” the man interrupted. “The rest of the world is dying. You can save it.”  

“By turning us into breeders?” Emma snapped, her voice finally breaking the tense silence. She was barely eighteen but spoke with the fire of someone who had already lost too much.  

The man in the suit looked at her with a gaze I didn’t quite understand. Then, to me, his eyes devoid of any emotion. “Your children will be the future. It’s not a choice.”  

Dad raised the gun higher, his hands shaking. “Get off my land.”  

The soldiers stepped forward, and I could feel my heart pounding. There was no escaping this. There never had been. For a brief moment, I wondered if Dad would pull the trigger—if he would fight them off, and somehow, we’d get away. But I knew better.  

The man in the suit didn’t flinch. “You have until sunset,” he said, turning back toward the truck. “After that, we’ll take you by force.”  

And then they were gone. Just like that, leaving behind nothing but the low hum of engines fading into the distance and the smell of Dad’s spilled whiskey.  

We stood there in stunned silence for a long time. I could see the fear in my father’s eyes, the rage simmering just beneath the surface. He was a proud man, but even he knew there was no fighting them. Not really.  

“What do we do?” I whispered.  

No one answered. No one could answer.   

The hours passed in a blur. Dad tried to come up with a plan—talk of running, of finding a place to hide, but it all seemed futile. They would find us just like they had found everyone else. Mom sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. Emma paced, muttering angrily under her breath, refusing to accept what was happening.  

I felt numb. Helpless. A boy drowning in the waves of a world I didn’t understand. The weight of the future hung heavy in the air, pressing down on me with a suffocating finality. 

As the sun began to set, we heard the trucks again. The same dark figures appeared on the horizon, growing closer with every passing second.  

The shotgun clicked.  

At first, I thought Dad would fight back—some desperate stand against the soldiers at our door. But when I saw the way his shoulders slumped, I realized it wasn’t defiance driving him. It was acceptance. Submission. He wasn’t trying to save us. He was trying to end it all before they could.  

The first shot roared through the kitchen. My mother’s head snapped back, an iridescent spray bursting across the room like some morbid firework. I blinked, the scene unfurling in slow motion. I heard Emma scream, but it was distant, muffled, like the world was pulling away. She looked at Dad, terror and confusion in her eyes—just for a second. Then came the second blast.

And then, Dad turned to me.  

At that moment, I felt something strange. I didn’t freeze like before. There was no fear left—just clarity.  

His eyes, once full of rage and regret, were empty now—hollowed out by the weight of everything he couldn’t fix. He wasn’t my father at that moment. He was a man cornered by a world that had broken him, doing the only thing left that made sense.  

I understood.  

There was something almost peaceful about the barrel of the gun, as if it whispered of release from the chaos that had engulfed our lives. The inescapable force wasn’t uniforms or authority—it was this quiet arbiter of an end no one could outrun.  

I nodded, just slightly, accepting what was coming. There were no words—just a final moment of shared silence between us.  

I closed my eyes.  

And I waited.