Hello readers! Please enjoy the Prologue for June Day (which is also the first tale in Curious Tales of a Warped Reality) for free in this blog post! If you enjoy what you see, the full story is available here. This prologue sets the stage for a world built on illusions, control, and the fight to remember what’s real.

Prologue – June Day 

(The short story from Curious Tales of a Warped Reality)

“It’s time for school!” my Dad yelled as I was running late for my classes. I head downstairs, eat, and get ready for school. I am in my pajamas, enjoying a great day. Today is the first day of health class, and we are starting by learning how babies are made! Fun stuff, right?

I sit in front of my PC and put on my virtual headset. Class for me has always been virtual; in fact, everything we do is. When we want food, we put on our headset and order. An hour later, a drone arrives with our food. The drone is sanitized after each use and reused to deliver anything we really need. If we want to go on a trip, we put on our headsets and take a family trip. Everything is done this way! It protects us and keeps us safe, while giving us the freedom of experiencing the real world in some way. We can feel, touch, or interact with anything using our headsets and controls. We can interact with the world, meet people and see animals all from the comfort of our home.

School started as you would imagine, with us reading our global pledge to be good, clean citizens. We took roll call and got started on the day’s lecture, June Day.

I might have gotten ahead of myself when I said “learn where babies come from”. They come from sex we all know that. We are 15-16, not stupid. The real reason I was excited is I got to have a good explanation as to why everyone’s birthday falls in the same week of February. I always thought it was strange, and my dad would never tell me the reason. Mom would always deflect the question and just tell us that health class would tell us, like they told her.

“Does anyone know what June Day is?” asked our teacher as a few raised their hands. “Yes?” he said, pointing to one of the girls in the back.

“June Day is the one day a year we are allowed to leave our homes without a VR headset?” She phrased it like a question, implying that she wasn’t 100% sure.

“That is partially true,” said the teacher, “June day isn’t so much the one day a year you are allowed out of the house when you are an adult, but it is the one day a year you are expected to mate.”

That sentence rang hard with me. “Expected to mate” as in I am expected by our government to have sex with someone, anyone, in the hopes of having a baby? It is understandable as the population has declined since the great wave and we became a virtual/digital society but “expected to” almost felt like a dead word that was used hundreds of years ago called “rape”. I found the term in a really old dictionary. We don’t have this in our society since people can’t see each other, with the exception of very early childcare. You might have thought my father was yelling to me from the stairs this morning, but it was over an intercom. I see him every day on the monitors or on my headset. We play, make food together, and have meals together. Just not in person, as you would expect.

I raised my hand.

“Yes? You have a question?” the teacher asked when I raised my hand.

“Why are we expected to mate? Isn’t the day about human contact? That’s what I was always told.”

He replied, “No. We have human contact every day. You see your friends and play with them anytime. You see your parents whenever you need to. Right now, we are in class interacting, but there is only 1 day a year we can get close enough to each other to reproduce. Only one day a year, our doors unlock, and we are allowed out into the world to mingle and interact. After which, we go home and back to our lives.”

We spend all year virtually meeting people and connecting, then get one day a year to meet face to face and try and reproduce? Or just have a little fun? I had more questions as I never knew the life outside of our virtual one, so I raised my hand again.

“Yes, miss?”

“What happens after June Day, and how exactly does it work?”

“Miss… I am getting to that.” He answered somewhat impatiently.  “The day starts at 9 a.m. on June the 3rd and ends the following morning at 9a.m. This gives us 24 hours to meet, have a little bit of time to get comfortable, and mate. After which, hopefully, the female becomes pregnant and continues our way of life. You will have 24 hours to do anything you wish in the outside world. You can explore a little bit, although there isn’t much to explore, and mate. Then head back home or face the consequences of not making it home in time.“

I raised my hand again and was asked, “What happens if we don’t make it back home on time?”

“You will be banished from society and never heard from again!” He said with a serious look on his face to suggest he was not joking. “Doors open at 9 am and they close at 9am too! If your face is not recognized in your home shortly after, then you will be deemed unsuitable for society and cast out into the wilderness to live with the feral humans. The dirty, unclean, and unkempt humans if they can even be called that anymore. Don’t let this be you!”

I had never heard of feral humans before, but it would make sense that they are unclean and dirty since they have no technology and live with each other. It sickens me to think people spend all day, every day, right next to one another, passing germs and disease like it is currency. I can’t help but wonder why our history books skip over some parts with the explanation that it will be covered in health class. Here we are and eagerly waiting for my answers.

“Why do we do this, you may be wondering?” the teacher asked. “Population boomed here on Earth. Children went hungry, and there weren’t enough resources for everyone. Then came the great plague that wiped out 70% of our society. After that happened, we rebuilt.  We rebuilt with the plan of never letting resources be an issue, or plague and sickness affect us again. So, we built a virtual world and cut off physical contact, except for once a year, to mate.”