It’s tough being in charge of the Reprocrimes Unit. I suppose anyone in the distant future who reads this deserves an explanation. O-kay. I’m Simon Tatersall, former university bioethics lecturer at the University of Otago.

I’m one of the survivors of the Decima Plague, that genetically engineered virus that was intended to wipe out the world’s lesbian and gay population, but instead underwent a reverse transcription mutation, so that the ‘gay gene’ conferred immunity, instead of being targeted by the epidemic. Earth’s entire heterosexual population perished, as did those LGBT community members who were too traumatised by the loss of straight family members and friends, mostly through suicide.

Added to that, there’s Normativa. One of the legacies of the social conservative governments that spasmed across the world from the eighties to the end of the noughties was that they left a pocket of religiously conservative lesbians and gay men who hated their intrinsic selves, which led to Normativa. Its ‘rationale’ is that the world has been cursed, and that heterosexuals are the ‘human baseline,’ so that anything is justified in returning them to existence.

“Anything” includes criminalised human cloning. Let me explain. Whole human cloning is too dangerous to pregnant women to be permitted, which explains why it was justifiably banned across most of the world. It doesn’t result in viable embryos or fetuses- in fact, it produces carcinomic teratogenic anomalies (CTAs) most of the time, which means that any pregnant lesbian will expire in agonising pain as a result of her involvement in the cult.

Where am I in all this? At the moment, I’m in a car, hurtling down Geelong’s main highway, toward a nest of the lovelies in question. And there’s Stewart. I still remember what it was like making love with him one final time. When I awoke that next morning, he left with a rose on the pillow opposite me, stating that he’d returned to the priesthood. And then I saw the AusPolice webphoto of him. I couldn’t stop throwing up for the next three hours. Genevieve touches my hand as we screech to a halt, and I see him again, snarling, spittle flying, bringing up his weapon to fire back at us.

My Glock buckles in my hand and in slow motion, I watch as the bullet fusillade rips through him, causing him to jerk back in the middle of a guttural cry of primal rage, as they drill through blood and bone and gore, and his eyes turn sightless and the impact throws him against the wall of the Normativa compound.

Of the five pregnant women, three expire on the operating table - the CTAs have metastasised and the phantom pregnancies have turned into septic ghouls.

Back in Wellington, Rauwhiti, Haukiekie, Alice, Genevieve and I head out to get wasted and blot out what we’ve seen and experienced these last few days.