Liza

Chapter One She was his. He stared at the faded black and white picture that stared boldly back at him from the computer screen. His woman. Not by any word of his own or hers, nor of any solemn declaration before a person of religious stature. Legally, it was true, though. He had the email bill of sale, which stated the obscene amount he had paid for her in fuel, batteries, and generators. He owned her; short of death she was his to do with as he pleased . . . and the State pleased that he should impregnate her. Well, if that happened, he thought, it happened, although he wasn’t sure he could sire a child, and at her age he wasn’t sure she could conceive one, either. It had been the ad that had intrigued him while he was casually surfing what now passed for the World Wide Web. In truth it had almost reverted to its origins as a method of communication between small clusters of universities and governmental workers. Nowadays, since the Cultural Retrofit – as he liked to call it with dark humor - it was a connection between clusters of survivors around the world, spotty at best and rife with talk of insurrection, revolution, and, of course, tons of spam. Like roaches, spam survived anything. What had caught his eye was not that the solicitation was flashy; it almost consciously wasn’t. He had been casually surfing in the eBay listings for a woman, not thinking to find one he particularly wanted in this day and age. He thought they were all too young, with chronoages of twelve and thirteen or even younger, staring out at him with big, frightened eyes. 5