We, the scientists of Earth, have come to the realization that we cannot solve the Earth’s problems.

Environmentalists of centuries ago sometimes used slogans, such as “There is no Planet B,” based on the fact that we only have one Earth and we have to share it with one another and make sure it’s still there for subsequent generations. That didn’t work out. Although we delayed it, we didn’t stop the icecaps from melting, we didn’t avoid breaking the ozone layer to the point where it’s mandatory to wear protection from the sun even for short trips outside, and we didn’t manage to avoid polluting the oceans to the point that we killed enough species to disrupt the food chain and kill lots more species. We didn’t even manage to avoid polluting the space in Earth’s orbit, so every spacecraft now has to have special shields and defense lasers to keep it from being destroyed by space junk.

The problems are only getting worse. We now agree that there is at most a century and perhaps as little as half a century left before Earth simply becomes unlivable. Fortunately, thanks to the work of Mikhail Gregorevich, we now do have a Planet B. And C, D, and a whole series going way beyond Zebra. The Djinn Worlds, bearing similarities to the Earth people know, have become the most popular, though we may have to solve the same environmental problems there we failed to solve here. Maybe with the experience of how the first Earth turned out, and improvements due to the Djinn’s changes on each world, we can help them before it’s too late.

Today, Ethertravel, Inc. is announcing the end of the Ethertravel Explorer program which required people to learn how to build ether communicators and pledge to send us reports from where they ended up, if they were able to do so. We are also ending the Paid Ethertravel program, whose cost has been reduced twice previously, which let people be reborn on a world of their choice from among those the explorers reported back about. We have a catalog more than a thousand worlds, and we’ve built up the capacity to simply send anybody out to a new life on one of these worlds. Just sign up, pick a world, and make an appointment to be sent out at a nearby transmission center. In all likelihood, it’ll be your last life; there won’t be more ethertravel devices there to let you zap yourself into an unborn child before you die, on the same or other worlds, but you’ll be able to have a better life than you have had here. The critically ill and elderly will be given priority in the case of any booking issues.

We will continue releasing information about worlds those in the Ethertravel Explorer program reported back to us, including the recently arrived one that follows, to assist you all in making this decision.

Ethertravel report #2250, received November 9, 2557.

Myra’s Arrival

Jack Curtin reporting. When I first gained consciousness here, I thought I was inside the womb and might experience being born. There were some reports of this happening, though usually you didn’t get integrated enough with the body until after birth. But after a few days of this I realized I wasn’t in a womb; I was in an egg. They said anything was possible when you ethertraveled, and that was one of those possibilities; many ethertravelers had reported being born from eggs.

Although everything was dark, I soon figured out I had a yolk sac attached to what would have been my navel, if human, and it was almost gone. I tried to bust my way out of the egg, but failed at first. I slept again later, and the next time I awoke I was feeling hungry. The yolk sac was empty. Now I really needed to hatch, to break my way out of the egg. I couldn’t tell whether I had arms or wings at this point, but they had elbows. After trying several other strategies, by poking both elbows to opposite sides at the same time, I was able to break a hole in the eggshell. Once it was broken, it was pretty easy to break the rest of it.

Something was beeping, and I found myself in a glass chamber quite a bit larger than the egg was. I could not reach opposite sides of the glass at the same time with my fingers and/or toes. I did have fingers and toes, though; I seemed human, though in some odd proportions. Pretty soon, a giant woman came over. Naturally, as a baby, adults seem huge, but this was really huge; she could have picked me up and swallowed me whole. Apart from the proportions, though, she looked like a human, more than I would have expected.

She opened the chamber and took me out. First she washed me, removing the remains of the empty yolk sac in the process. After she dried me, she pulled away some clothes and held me to her giant breast. I could barely fit the nipple in my mouth. And I did this a lot. The first few times, I quickly got full, grotesquely full by any normal standards since my belly had expanded like I was pregnant, but after what seemed like less an hour, the big belly was gone and I was drinking from her other breast. This continued, day and night. I slept on my mother’s chest at night, crawling onto and drinking from her breasts whenever I needed it. I grew quickly, though, and after about 20 days, I had grown to the size of a normal newborn, where my mother was carrying me in her arm instead of her hand, and I was feeding about 8 times a day instead of 20-30.

There wasn’t a father anywhere to be seen, but my mother cared for me and from that point forward my development seemed to follow the path of an ordinary baby human girl. Yep, I was a girl, or at least, that is what my private parts looked like. She called me a girl, too, and named me Myra. The only other person I’d seen was my mother, and since in the first few days she took me practically everywhere with her, I’d seen she had parts that looked like those of a human woman, too. I had not seen any other people yet for comparison.

Eventually I did see another person, and realized I had seen him before but didn’t realize he was a real person. Fred was a winged man, one smaller than I was by that point. He had the proportions of an adult man, except he had huge dragonfly-like wings he used to fly around. When the wings were not in use, they folded together and rolled up on top of his head, looking like a weird hat. One room of the house was his alone, and within it, on a large table, was something like an oversized dollhouse, except it was closed on all sides, inside which he lived a significant portion of his life.

By the time I learned to speak, I understood that Fred was my father, and my mother’s name was Tina. When other people came to visit, or when we traveled outside, I learned this arrangement was true everywhere. Women were full-size, and men were doll-sized people with dragonfly wings.

To my surprise, we were speaking English. This was somehow Earth, though something had gone very weird with it. My training as an ethertraveler didn’t say we’d go into a parallel universe. Nor into the past, though that was not exactly right, either. Here, it was centuries earlier than the Earth I’d left, and they hadn’t destroyed the environment or even gone as far down that road as my Earth had by this century.

When I was age 4, Mom brought out the incubator I was born in and put another egg into it. At least, I am assuming it was the same incubator; I was watching her when she got it out of a closet and set it up. Now I could see just how tiny I must have been in those early days; the egg was larger than a chicken’s egg, maybe the size of a goose egg, though I had only been vaguely familiar with those, but it was far smaller than a newborn baby on old Earth; not even a newborn baby’s head would have fit into it. The glass dome was only about 6 inches across.

The new egg eventually hatched, and Mom fed the new baby as she did me, but he didn’t grow quickly. I figured out that was because he was a boy. It took him a year to grow to about the size of Dad, by which point he had stopped feeding off Mom and had learned to walk and fly. Shortly after his first birthday he was sent off to what they called school, and didn’t come back. Whatever he really did, I didn’t see.

At age 5, I went off to school with other little girls. The boys weren’t there; I imagined they had their own school in a castle of a dollhouse the size of a normal single family’s house. I followed the path of other ethertravelers, using my knowledge from my previous life to appear to be an excellent student but not otherworldly.

In school I found out what happened to this world. First in second grade, again in fourth grade, and more fully in sixth grade, we had school units that covered The Wish. They had documented it very well here and it was essentially treated like a new religion that supplanted all the previous ones.

After The Wish was made, The Djinn spoke to all of the people of the world, in their respective languages, apparently in their heads, rather than audio that could be heard worldwide, so there were no audio recordings of it but many transcriptions, varying in little details based on people’s memory, and of course varying in other languages, but the accepted English words were as follows:

Hello, people of Earth. The world is not working the way your God, whom some of you know as Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Brahma, or other names, meant for it to work. It is time for a new world order, and a new name. I am now known as Djinn, and this shall be called the Age of Djinn.

I permitted your fellow human, Lisa Steiner, to make one wish to improve some aspect of the world. She wished that childbirth wasn’t so painful, stressful, long, or directed by men, and that women could just lay eggs, while men could go off and fix the real problems of the world.

So that is how it will be. Women who are already pregnant will find, within 24 hours, their pregnancy turned into an egg, which they will lay. You’ll need to keep the egg warm, near your body temperature, for a few months, and your son or daughter will be born from it. Men are going to find themselves changed to world-fixers during their next sleeping cycles, with the ability and duty to remove mankind’s stains upon the Earth. They’ll be transformed, but they’ll have instinctive knowledge how to use their new abilities. Mating will be changed also, but you’ll instinctively know what to do when the time comes.

That is it. That is the entire scripture of The Djinn, though it is variously published with numerous first-hand accounts from people around when this happened. Pregnant women ceased to appear noticeably pregnant and if they were far enough along in their pregnancy, they laid an egg the following morning within a couple hours of waking up. Men changed to the form they have now, and, except in self defense, they generally find themselves unable to attack other people physically. They possess limited magical abilities. They can fly, which their wings should generally be unable to achieve, but they do it anyway. And they can purify the Earth. In fact, they are compelled to do so to a certain degree.

This doesn’t mean people are unable to make or use technological devices, but if the production of those devices creates pollution, they are compelled to use their powers to clean it up. Additionally, men were compelled to clean up pollution everywhere for a part of their lives, generally about 5 years per man upon reaching adulthood, until the world was clean, a goal which was reached within the lifetimes of many people alive today. Since that time, men have only been compelled to clean up any new pollution people create.

The electronics industry came to a near standstill for generations, though. Human generations, not the tech generations which are only a few years long. Men were simply not capable of doing any work that caused pollution without themselves or some other man cleaning it up. They had also become too small to practically use most of the devices that had been made, and so small that they couldn’t do much of the physical work in their creation. Women could, and they continued trying to make devices using only women in the factories.

However, every electronics company had men on its board of directors, and the men all insisted the companies clean up their pollution. Most pre-existing tech processes were so polluting that employing enough men to clean up the pollution made them entirely unviable, and companies went back to the drawing board, producing simpler, slower, and less capable devices that could be made in a pollution-free way, while also figuring out how to miniaturize the devices so men could use them. Essentially, the world went backward 40 years in tech overnight, and it took 200 years to get to where we are today, which is roughly where we were when The Wish happened, except that we now make all the things with minimal pollution that men entirely clean up, and we have smaller versions of the devices that men can use.

Only in sixth grade did they teach us how mating works. We all had to have signed parental waivers before we got to see any of this, and my parents (like I assume most parents do) went over what passes for the Birds and Bees talk with their daughters before signing, so we got their version and then the school’s version. It looked like everybody got them signed, though the school apparently had some sort of provisions for excluding anybody who didn’t.

There is still sex, but it works dramatically differently in order to make it possible for our vastly different body sizes. The changes also made it so heterosexual sex is the only kind possible. Gay sex, lesbian sex, and even masturbation is no longer possible. They haven’t even figured out how to make functional sex toys! It takes an actual man and an actual woman.

The way we’re kept apart during school keeps there from being teen sex, though that’s not the reason they do so. The eggs make contraception or abortion or whatever you want to call it dead simple. Don’t incubate the egg, no baby. If I got pregnant in high school, it wouldn’t even be an issue. And I’m going to be laying eggs each month, anyway. At least there’s no menstruation. Pop out one egg each month and it’s over. Well, almost none. When the whole system starts up during puberty, and when it shuts down during menopause, there may be months when the uterine lining develops but does not make an egg; that leads to menstruation. But it’s likely to happen only a few times in a woman’s entire life.

The actual reason they keep us apart is that the tiny size of men makes life dangerous for them. So they are kept away from the dangers of the world until they are ready to face them, and their schooling includes learning how to stay safe when you’re the size of a squirrel.

In seventh grade, we learned more about the life of boys. Once boys are weaned at age 1, they indeed go live in dollhouse-skyscrapers housing hundreds of boys. Quite a few men help to care for and teach them in each of these schools. Those men commute to work, flying at rooftop level above the pedestrian women and cars. Almost all of them live with their wives nearby. Jobs in these facilities are among the few occupations that require men to visit a physical workplace, the other major one being pollution duty, though usually only young unmarried men perform such work. My father is like the majority of married men who work over the internet from a home office inside the home-within-a-home where they live.

The first floor of each of these school buildings doubles as a shopping mall for men, so even then men who don’t go outside for work still go out sometimes to visit these places, where they buy clothes and tiny-sized versions of many items. Naturally, these are men-only zones; the spaces inside aren’t big enough for women or even young girls, and there are no stairs, only empty shafts that men use to fly up and down between floors.

Also in seventh grade I started menstruating, and after two periods, the third month I laid an egg instead. And that was a weird experience. It started out feeling like I had to poop, but when I got to the toilet and tried to do so, there wasn’t any, but I could still feel it in there, and that’s when I realized it was the egg. Although they had explained about using these vaginal muscles, there wasn’t any real practice; they didn’t have us put something in there and try to push it out. But I figured out how to use these muscles I hadn’t used before to push it out of me. It wasn’t too difficult or painful. I was a man on old Earth, so I never had the experience of childbirth there, but I’m certain this was nowhere close to childbirth. Since I was going to be doing this monthly for quite a while, that was a good thing, too!

An interesting thing is that some women eat their unfertilized eggs. There are egg scanners which can determine if an egg laid by any woman who has had sexual activity is fertilized, but since casual sex is rare, they are usually only used by women attempting to become pregnant. Unfertilized eggs can be cooked and eaten in the same way people eat chickens’ eggs, though some people don’t like the apparent cannibalistic nature of eating your own or another person’s eggs and won’t do it.

But I did. Once a month I ate an omelet made with my own egg; the egg is just big enough that when combined with typical omelet ingredients it makes a single breakfast for one person. At first I cooked it with supervision and later on my own. My cycle was about 28.5 days, so while the first couple times I laid an egg I was at home, it soon drifted into weekdays and every second month it happened some morning at school and I kept the egg in my locker and then brought it home with me to eat the next day. That’s perfectly fine when you are going to eat it the next day; the refrigeration of eggs people on Earth are used to is because they are trying to keep eggs fresh for weeks in delivery from farm to store to home.

It was an interesting experience developing as a young woman in all-female schools, but that was just the way it was. It has been centuries since single-gender schools were common on Earth, but there was a time when many children grew up this way, where there was no teenage dating or competition for boyfriends and girlfriends. I imagine the boys have a similar experience.

At the end of high school, we go into a kind of vocational assessment, a short program that tries to match your aptitudes and skills with the jobs that are available. Well, the girls do, anyway. Boys graduating from high school go into pollution service, basically working to clean up polluting processes before that pollution can end up in the environment. This used to last longer, but now that the pre-Wish pollution has all been cleaned up, it lasts two years, and after that, they go into their own version of vocational assessment. If my old Earth had had anything like this, the whole job search would have been much, much easier for most people. The top 20% or so based on school performance and a few other factors go off to college, usually with a predefined plan of study. With my extra knowledge from my past life, I was easily able to get into college.

College is free; it is all treated like any other part of the public school system. And unlike the other schools, men and women go there together! Single men and women have separate living quarters, and married students have cohabiting living quarters much like my parents had while I was growing up, in either case also free. They attend most classes together. Most classrooms have a couple raised platforms in front of the normal sized desks, with tiny desks lined up on them for the men. In the big auditoriums, the men sit on raised platforms high up in the air. Some classes have more men, some more women, but most rooms are set up to accommodate roughly equal numbers of men and women. There are some courses of study primarily women or primarily men embark on, so there are some rooms with a different proportion of male and female desks. And PE is mandatory, though separate for men and for women. Our food during college is all free, but our weight is carefully monitored and if we gain too much we either have to go on a diet or exercise more. They are pretty serious about health.

The social life that was infamously lurid in college on my Earth is completely absent here. There are few social interactions between men and women. Their vastly different sizes make that difficult. Men get together for social gatherings in tiny buildings, and women get together in human-sized facilities. However, the mixed-sex social activities that do exist are basically intended to help pair up men and women with the intent of getting married after a relatively short time. In fact, it’s expected that college students do get married before they finish. So I dated some men. Dates here mostly consist of dinner, conversation, maybe a movie, and absolutely no sex. It is just not the way things are done here; people are universally strictly celibate until marriage, probably because of how incredibly intimate and invasive sex is. So people dated, and some people date quite a lot, to find somebody they like.

It’s permissible to stay unmarried, but few people do. Most women marry within three years of finishing high school and most men marry within three years of finishing pollution duty, whether they attend college or not. Every home for a woman includes a home for a man within it. Unmarried men live in what is intended to be temporary men’s housing within buildings that host regular meetups for unmarried men and women. The other option is living in men’s housing within your company’s workplace, which exists at most companies to house the pollution workers.

I was looking for another ethertraveler, of course, but it was hard. If one of the men was trying to trying to signal to me that he was an ethertraveler, would I even see it? But I did my part, with clothing and my school gear decorated with “Gregorevich” and other things only those from my Earth would know.