THE PREDATOR

The Year 2048

Since my therapy, my relationship with Ousmane had improved somewhat. It took me a long time, but we both felt significant improvement throughout the years. I saw him more often, I spoke to him more, I listened to him better and I could look him in the eyes when he asked me questions about him, about me or about my family who was obviously also his. He was seventeen.

I had started working again, but in commerce. This often led me to travel for short periods during the year. My employer had big contracts in the United States, so I often went there on business trips. By 2060, men had finally found the inspiration to quickly develop affordable ecological means of transport, so travelling no longer did harm to the ills of the planet. It was around this time that men stopped travelling for any reason other than work. 

How about tourism? 

To see what? The same scorched and ugly landscapes that we could already see at home?

It was also at this time that windows stopped showing the outside world. No one wanted to see it, the one we had reshaped in our image. So, we started decorating it first, with curtains, then with sophisticated holographic videos and images that reminded us of the outside world before the one we had just created. During one of my business trips to the United States, I met Charlene, or maybe I should rather say that Charlene found me.

Sitting alone at the table of a restaurant where I liked to eat regularly, absorbed by the menu that I was reading attentively, I didn't notice that a predator was watching me from afar, sitting on a chair at the bar. She had seen me a few days before, and my looks and manners intrigued her. Surely, I wasn't from here.

"Are you expecting someone?" I heard a female voice asking in front of me.

I poked my head out of my menu to look up at the woman standing in front of me. She was tall, a long face, high cheekbones, full lips, and big dark mysterious eyes. Her heavy dark brown hair invaded her bare shoulders. Her skin was brown-red like the earth on Alegria's land. She held the confident, relaxed posture of women who know they are attractive. I let out a sigh then answered stupidly:

"I don't think so."

The woman laughed. A frank laugh that made her chest vibrate.

I couldn't really tell her age. I would have said a little younger than me, but I suspected the many experiences of her life camouflaged under her beautiful makeup.

"Does this mean I can sit at this table?" she asked, immediately taking a seat on the empty chair opposite me.

Once comfortably seated, she remained looking at me, smiling for awhile, devouring me with her mysterious eyes which spoke for her of her burning desire. My whole being responded to her gaze. I felt totally consumed as in an instant my whole body came back to life.

"I saw you sitting all alone and sad and I thought: why not go talk to him," she began, cutting the silence.

"I'm Charlene. What's your name?" She continued, reaching out from under the table with a delicate but firm hand.

She had guessed correctly. I was all alone and very sad at my table as in life, but that would no longer be the case from then on. Charlene was giving me a second chance. Despite the femininity of her face and features, I knew. Charlene carried within her the secrets of yin and yang. The aggressiveness and simplicity of the masculine combined with the restorative strength and creativity of the feminine.

Somehow, meeting Charlene allowed me to complete the last stages of my long therapy: the shame and the taboo around my sexuality. A bit like with Alegria, with Charlene, I felt neither judged nor looked down to, I could simply be. Their authenticity reflected my image like in a mirror where I could contemplate myself without fear. Like Charlene herself said to me at the beginning of our relationship: We can always go on pretending for as long as we want, we will always have to go back to the basics eventually. Our natural needs and what we do with them isn't just our business, it is the business of the survival of our species. Unlike the activists of the movement that upended the norms of western societies in the mid-2020's, Charlene never wanted to fight against women for her right to enter the ladies', women's sports competition, or even the right to gain the woman's status. Her fight was ever-lasting since childhood, and it involved constantly fighting herself, her thoughts, her body.

Charlene was born in her twenties at an age when Charlie had already carefully considered the path he wanted for the rest of his life. However, artificial intelligence decided otherwise. Ten years after Charlene's birth, the same body that Charlie had hated for so long saved Charlene and hundreds of women and children locked up in the camps. Her story as a survivor of the AI camps gave me a terrifying and disturbing insight into the horrors of what my sisters must have gone through. Charlene's nightmares haunted me for days on end at the thought that Iwona and Ania may have gone through this, each of them on their own. My sisters had paid with their own flesh for the vulnerability of their sex. Charlene saved women during the colonisation of the modern sophisticated men by their artificial intelligence because in spite of herself, she had kept Charlie's strength within herself: a fierce and aggressive strength that only Charlie could possess, but that Charlene could never have.