" Serina where are you?"

"Serina?"

"I’m here. I was hiding."

"What from?"

Oh, not much, just sitting and thinking really."

So, do you want to come to the beach with us?"

God I remember conversations like that. Simple and easy. All we needed was a nice day and a good tan. I look back at that and long for it. Well, sometimes I do. Most of the time I don’t have the energy to remember. If I do get enough time to start to think about that kind of thing I am much more likely to just fall asleep. I guess that is what happens with responsibility, you lose time to remember who you are and what makes you happy.

I guess it sounds like I am complaining but I’m not. Not really. I am much happier now. I guess I should tell the whole story. If this is for history then it should be complete.

In those early days we all lived in simple beauty and happiness. We were ignorant of things beyond our own pleasure. I would spend days sitting outside and talking to friends. I would make wonderful bags, and jewelry. I loved working with the bark of the trees near my house. It gave me a real connection to nature. Well, what I thought was nature.

I had lots of friends we would go to the beach and swim in the surf. I can still almost taste the bitter vinegar taste the ocean had. We never had to cover up we went wearing what was comfortable, usually nothing at all. We had no need for modesty we were all the same. Not that we looked alike but there was no sexual difference. We were all women.

This paradise was perfect and uninterrupted until the day that everything went dark. I was lying in my bed and all of a sudden everything was gone. I had no idea what had happened. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even move my fingers. My mind was racing and all I could do was lie there.

For hours I lay there like this. Eventually I began to be able to move my hands and slowly the rest of my body came to life. What I discovered as I awoke was that I was bound and wrapped in a black rubbery sheet. I thought I had been abducted. I lay there for what seemed like an eternity bound and unable to move except to contract and release my muscles.

Then I saw something I had never seen before. There was a person, something that looked very much like me standing over me. It was familiar in form but I didn’t really know what it was. I was to learn very soon that this was a man. He, as I learned the pronoun to be, was to be responsible for nine other "women" and me. I had never heard that word "woman" before and the way that he said it I could tell it was not a good thing to be.

He unwrapped me from my rubber sheet and lifted me into a machine. It was good that he had lifted me because as he unwrapped me I realized I couldn’t move my joints. My body looked normal, except I was so sickly white I could almost see through my skin, but it wouldn’t bend. The machine he put me in unlocked my joints by chemically "stretching" my tendons. My body had been able to maintain its condition and tone because the simulator that I was in allowed my body’s muscles to contract and release as my simulator body did. Of course I didn’t know any of the whys at that time. I was just scared and confused. I didn’t know where I was or what these men wanted or where they had come from.

In the following weeks I, along with the other women in my group were subjected to heinous abuse. We were not allowed to sleep. We were sexually assaulted. We were forced to scavenge food from the leftovers of the men’s meal. The list of indignities and atrocities is too long to name, not only for me but also for all of the women. This was the worst time in our lives.

We tried to think of a way out. The other women in my group and I tried once to escape only to realize there was nowhere to go. We were on board some kind of ship and all we could do was wait and hope. We were also slowly gathering information about where we had been. We discovered that we had all, including the men, been kept in stasis for a long space journey. We were to teraform and colonize a new planet. The simulators that had created our worlds before we were woken up were to maintain our minds and bodies so that when the time came we would be ready to wake up. We had apparently been put in stasis as babies and in it we grew. The simulators provided all that we needed mentally. The holding cell where we were placed provided for us physically.

One day while we were trying to find some food something went terribly wrong. The ship lost control as we were descending into the atmosphere of a planet that was a possibility for teraforming. We crashed in a jungle of sorts. Many people died. I lost consciousness. When I came too I realized that my keeper was dead. I began to search for a way out. That wasn’t hard there were doors out everywhere, I learned that the ship was to have been the beginning of the new city that was to be formed. I got out and began to find other women.

We clustered in the trees around the crash sight. The men seemed to stay inside. I saw a few venture out briefly in those first days but not many. As the women began to gather we talked about how we had been treated. Across the board the women had been abused and mistreated they all wanted to get away from the men. Then I told them what my keeper had told me. That they needed us to survive. That we were to carry on the race. I told the women that if they needed us then we probably needed them.

So, we began to talk about what to do. We also began to set up camp and to carry on very much as we had in the simulator. We lived simply and survived off of what was here. After weeks had passed we began to see men coming out of the ship. They didn’t look well, but we weren’t ready to trust them yet. We were very watchful of them. One evening a small group came and stole our water. We decided after that that we had to set up a protection system for ourselves. So, we organized sentries. The men tried again, this time to steal our food, but we beat them back. They were too weak with hunger and dehydration to put up much of a fight. We couldn’t imagine what was wrong with them. We were in a jungle; very near a large lake, with plenty of food and water around all they had to do was get it.

Then one timid man came to our camp in the middle of the day. He came alone and asked very quietly if he could please have some food and water. We couldn’t say no to someone so desperately in need so, we took him in. However, he was to clear up all of our confusion.

He told us about the simulators and how the men and women had been kept separate. Though there were women characters in the men’s simulator. Any way in their situation they had to go to school, and learn how to deal with computers and how to build buildings. Every want and need was provided for them. They were highly educated in things that should have helped them create an environment on a hostile planet and then quickly build up a city. Their simulation also taught them that women were nothing except breeding tools and that they were not to be dealt with on any other level.

We then began to realized that our simple "primitive" simulator situation, that had been designed to keep us from learning, and to prepared us for out of doors work, had prepared us ideally for the situation that we found ourselves in. We had the knowledge to survive in this world without computers or technology. The men on the other hand needed to technology to survive. When the ship crashed all of the computers inside of it shut down and left them with nothing. They were stranded. While they tried to scrounge around the ship for food we had been building a small village.

That young man who had come begging opened our eyes to the whole situation we had been in. We sent him back with food and water and a peaceful invitation for a group of male delegates to come to our village and to discuss the situation. They came, unwillingly, but they came.

That first encounter was the beginning of healing the hostility that the men had felt towards the women and the fear that women had of the men. From it came the agreement that led to the integrating of the two groups. That isn’t to say that everything went smoothly but that conflict is for another story. But how we got here? Well, we got kicked out of paradise into hell and climbed back to reality. It was a long journey but we survived.