Slave Prince of The Impotent King.

Three hundred years ago, ninety percent of men were rendered impotent, and now I have to marry a king.

It was never my destiny to become a prince, I am of low birth. Born to a fisherwoman and a coconut trader on the white beaches of Sottu. As a boy, Father told me time and again about the day of my birth. Mother had gone into labor while out on the sea. With no one close enough to help birth me, she sailed back to the shore with unbearable labor pains all by herself. Immediately she docked, he could tell something was wrong.

My father delivered me that day in my mother's boat, and at the sound of my first cry, the entire villagers gathered around the dock, rejoiced with cheers, clapping, and whistling.

“Is it a girl?” Mother asked, and when Father's smile shrunk with no reply, Mother pleaded, “Tell me it's a girl.”

The question quieted down the cheers as Father hesitantly shook his head. He’d been holding off on revealing my gender because Mother had been over the moon about welcoming her second child and was certain it would be a girl. The fear of having her child taken away by the government made many expecting mothers in my village pray for female children. The law could not be bent or disobeyed without facing a consequence of hefty punishments.

It had not always been that way. The tight supervision of male birth became a necessary factor in preserving the human race after Antarctica succumbed to the global warming of the twenty-first century, unleashing a virus, never encountered before, into the open sea: The MutantX40.

The virus was said to have gone undetected during the first decade of its introduction into warmer temperatures until the pandemic of 2075 hit, killing over three million people in its first month across the globe. MutantX40 was a viscous unpredictable virus and big pharma were up to their necks in search of a vaccine and a cure.

It was eight months before a vaccine was made—MutantV—and the world believed salvation had come after the death of a hundred million people and many more still hospitalized. I suppose in a way, it had, but salvation came with a price. MutantV bonded with MutantX40, and created a new strain of virus: VX40. Deemed harmless at first, VX40 provided no immediate threat to human life, the vaccine had worked, lives were being saved, and the world began finding its way back to normal.

It took another three decades for the world to begin searching for an answer to the quickly declining birth rates. More miscarriages were being recorded, fewer women were getting pregnant, populous countries were starting to shrink faster than they could have ever anticipated, and by the fifth decade, the declining birth rate had become a world crisis, only one in three thousand women gave birth daily.

Fertility clinics began turning their focus from female bodies to male bodies to find answers, and finally, the answer presented itself. VX40. The once seemingly harmless virus had found a way to annihilate sperm cells in men, rendering them impotent even before they were born.

Fertile men were now deemed unicorns in society, and many nations now took to extremely rigorous measures to preserve their populations. The Kingdom of Zulan was no different.

All new male-born children across the Kingdom were to be delivered to the regional fertility protection center on the day of their birth, no later than six hours after birth, to ensure the complete preservation of male fertility.

For a year, parents were not allowed to see their babies, let alone touch them as this could lead to possible contamination. After the first year, parents could visit every three months and watch their babies from behind glass walls. Many parents found this even more damaging since the children were connected to tubes of all sorts, pumping various medications and biomatter into their bodies. Many babies did not make the first year. And those that survived the first year were subjected to even more physically intense treatments.

I can’t remember what it was like to be three years old and living in a glass tube filled with bio elements while breathing through a pipe, but somehow I remember the look on my parents' faces each time they visited, especially my mother whose eyes always seemed to be the saddest. I remember those eyes more vividly than what I had for dinner last night.

I was four years old when I learned that the woman who watched me with the saddest eyes had passed away. I did not know what it meant to lose a mother having grown up in a fertility facility, and perhaps I still don’t, but I found myself searching for those eyes each time my elder sister and father visited. I still search for her eyes in the face of my sister, my father, my servants, random strangers. I’m uncertain of what I hope to find, only that I long to find it and know it.

In the fifth year the children are finally released back into the care of their parents, those who, like the majority of men in society remained sterile would go first, and then a week later, the few whose fertility reports were progressive would be released after a tracker had been injected into their bloodstream, then other unique numbers and passport had been issued as priority citizens. When the boys turned sixteen, they had to return to the fertility centers and begin their civic duties as sperm donors up until the age of twenty, before finally, independence.

In the entirety of Sottu, seventy boys were born that year, and only nine were made fertile. I was among the nine, and as the boys packed to return to their homes, so did I. A single backpack of all my toys and one piece of clothing. There hadn’t been much to show for the five years spent growing up in the facility. I was not excited to leave, none of the boys were, it was the only true life we had known, but we weren’t excited to stay either. An end to the constant medications and heavy regulations.

While the rest of the boys returned to their families, what awaited me while I stepped out of the facility was a rather long convoy, my father and sister, nowhere in sight. I was driven to the airport and flown in a private jet to the capital city of Bangkok, and there I was introduced to Her Majesty the Queen.

“Well, it’s a joy you are here, Kwento,” the queen patted my cheeks with a smile and I flushed. In the facility pictures of the queen were hung across the main halls, the only image we were allowed to see. I was star-struck.

I came to learn that day, that the palace was my new home because I was a rare unicorn. A male child with an active sperm count of over two hundred million, and rare unicorns lived in the palace, in service to the crown.

The next day, my Father and Sister would be brought to the palace, and given their official roles as my caretaker. My sister, seven years older than me was assigned my chaperone and trained in that regard, her whole life shrinking to the size of mine.

There were three other rare unicorns living in the palace, and through them, I first came to discover what my purpose was to the crown.

The Kingdom had been proclaimed to be the most fertile place in the world, producing the highest number of fertile boys the world had seen, and the crown had learned of a way to capitalize on that by auctioning off the most fertile boys to the wealthiest across the world. Kings and queens, presidents, business tycoons, they call came to Zulan in search of fertile boys, cherry-picked by the crown.

I was six years old when I was first presented with his picture. The future king of a faraway kingdom in the plains of Africa.

“He is your future,” the governess said, “And you are his.”