At the height of its glory, the City was everywhere and everything. All that was, was the City. For a hundred brilliant centuries, the City defined and explained the human race. Those who came from other stars to visit the only naturally habitated planet of the system within which the City's planet revolved were unanimous in their judgment: Few glories in any galaxy could match the accomplishment of those who had created and now sustained the City.

And when, after ten thousand years of undiminished splendour, the City's greatness declined, it was no failing in itself or its citizens but merely the next stage in the planet's evolution. The human race, after millenia of contact with beings from light years' distance, began to understand their being and possibility in terms other than the City. The totality of the City's dominance of all things human had gone unchallenged for thousands of years. Humans had forgotten that once they were separate from anything like a city, much less the City. But in time, the realization reappeared, and almost instantaneously, the City began to diminish, not lessened in its splendour but only as the essential defining aspect of life on Earth.

Humans began to realize: the City was no longer everywhere and everything. There was more.

But, some fifteen thousand years before humans came to this realization, all that Monica and Alfred thought about was if they would be caught before they were done fuckng. The corner in which they stood, bodies pumping at each other excitedly, hurriedly, was dark and secluded, but people still came by occassionally. They had been walking by in that way when she had grabbed his hand and pulled him into that shadow, lifting her dress to leave no doubt what she desired.

Muffling her half-shout into his shoulder, Monica came with a series of shudders; a few thrusts more, and in silence, she felt Alfred spasm with his own orgasm. As he withdrew from her, she clung tight to him, arms around his neck, not in adoration but simply out of momentary exhaustion.

She did not love Alfred; she did not even know his name. They had been passing each other, walking in opposite directions, when they arrived at that secluded corner and she had grabbed his hand, dragged him deeper into the dark for a fast, furious, anonymous fuck. That was always the first risk: Finding the right partner. Mistake the look in someone's eye, they way they walked or dressed or glanced covertly at you, and you'd not merely end up in jail but medicated, mind-swept and desexed.

The thrill of the hunt was almost as ecstatic as the culmination of the sex. Either one could destroy your life, yet both gave pleasures and joys that made the rest of life in the grey world of the 22nd Century worth tolerating.

“If I couldn't fuck,” she whispered into Alfred's neck, “I would kill myself.”

She stepped back, smoothed her dress, took a deep breath. She looked at him for the last time, enjoyed the mirrored satisfaction on his face.

“Thank you.”

And without hurrying, without looking back, she walked away and continued down the dark path to where her husband would be waiting for her.

Monica had no fear of disease. Her husband did not know, but before they were Introduced, she had studied science. Of course her studies had been structured to involve only the scant knowledge necessary to be a health technician, but her desire to learn more — and the numerous rebukes from instructors who, for reasons ranging from fear to doctrinal devotion, refused to teach her more — brought her into contact with like-minded students. Among these several with books on real science: chemistry, biology, physics, psychology. Steathily but greedily, Monica read and learned all she could. She kept secret notebooks, with her own transcriptions in a code that she doubted anyone could decipher, based, as it was, on an obscure set of random numbers she devised and memorized one winter evening. She found ways to conduct experiments; nothing extravagant, having no access to the necessary tools and equipment, but enough to teach her some basic scientific principles and one important fact about herself:

She was a genius.

No one measured intelligence anymore, of course, but the old words persisted in the language, even if the human aspects to which they pertained had been erased. Or so those who thought themselves the shapers and leaders of the world's few remaining societies liked to think. Monica and her cohorts knew better. They all knew that she was the most brilliant of them all, the most intelligent and insightful person at the institute. Perhaps in their nation.

She was that smart, and more. She was smart enough not merely to recognize her talents but to be able to disguise and hide them, protecting herself from “precautions” that would be taken to protect her and society from her aberrant personality. She kept secret her knowledge, her understandings, her dreams and goals. She made herself normal, unremarkable and thoroughly mundane. Putting her great intelligence to work in the most necessary of tasks — self- preservation — she adopted a personna of utter normality, and did all that a normal young woman was expected to do.

She completed her studies, accepted the position as a health and wholeness center, and then registered for Introduction.

She also learned how to have sex. More importantly, she learned that despite all the lessons and warnings to the contrary, sex would not kill her. The plague, she determined, had passed from the planet at least a century earlier. Sex was no longer a death sentence for the unwary and wanton. The fear of sex-by-death, however, continued to be the most potent tool for keeping under control a human population that had been reduced to a mere three or four percent of its zenith in the late Twenty-first Century but now, even with the strict regulations on reproduction, was beginning to grow at a rate that alarmed the controllers of Earth's surviving societies.

Monica figured out quickly what the strategy was and that someone like her was an abolute enemy to the leaders of her people. She knew their domination would collapse in time, but she had no desire to be a martyr to that cause. Her two desires were to learn and to fuck. Nothing else mattered, and to that end, she used the Introduction to find a suitable partner, a man with wealth, an incredibly busy worklife and little desire to spend any time with his Chosen One until the call came to reproduce. And even then, should Monica prove incapable of becoming a mother, he would have little disappointment, other than what was officially and ceremoniously demanded of him.

Monica chose her partner well, and she used the wealth and independence her marriage brought to pursue her twin passions.

And she almost got away with it.