{"id":96,"date":"2025-06-30T23:08:43","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T23:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/?p=96"},"modified":"2025-06-30T23:08:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T23:08:48","slug":"prologue-free-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"Prologue \u2013 Free Read!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hello readers! Please enjoy the Prologue for June Day<\/a> (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<\/a>. This prologue sets the stage for a world built on illusions, control, and the fight to remember what\u2019s real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prologue – June Day <\/h1>\n\n\n\n

(The short story from Curious Tales of a Warped Reality)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s time for school!\u201d 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I might have gotten ahead of myself when I said \u201clearn where babies come from\u201d. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDoes anyone know what June Day is?\u201d asked our teacher as a few raised their hands. \u201cYes?\u201d he said, pointing to one of the girls in the back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJune Day is the one day a year we are allowed to leave our homes without a VR headset?\u201d She phrased it like a question, implying that she wasn\u2019t 100% sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat is partially true,\u201d said the teacher, \u201cJune day isn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That sentence rang hard with me. \u201cExpected to mate\u201d 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 \u201cexpected to\u201d almost felt like a dead word that was used hundreds of years ago called \u201crape\u201d. I found the term in a really old dictionary. We don\u2019t have this in our society since people can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I raised my hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes? You have a question?\u201d the teacher asked when I raised my hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy are we expected to mate? Isn\u2019t the day about human contact? That\u2019s what I was always told.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He replied, \u201cNo. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYes, miss?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat happens after June Day, and how exactly does it work?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMiss\u2026 I am getting to that.\u201d He answered somewhat impatiently.\u00a0 \u201cThe 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\u2019t much to explore, and mate. Then head back home or face the consequences of not making it home in time.“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I raised my hand again and was asked, \u201cWhat happens if we don\u2019t make it back home on time?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou will be banished from society and never heard from again!\u201d He said with a serious look on his face to suggest he was not joking. \u201cDoors 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\u2019t let this be you!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy do we do this, you may be wondering?\u201d the teacher asked. \u201cPopulation boomed here on Earth. Children went hungry, and there weren\u2019t enough resources for everyone. Then came the great plague that wiped out 70% of our society. After that happened, we rebuilt.\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"nelio_content":{"autoShareEndMode":"never","automationSources":{"useCustomSentences":false,"customSentences":[]},"efiAlt":"","efiUrl":"","followers":[],"highlights":[],"isAutoShareEnabled":true,"networkImageIds":[],"permalinkQueryArgs":[],"series":[],"suggestedReferences":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/98"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/97"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curioustalesbooks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}