Laura rested her head on Tom’s naked chest. The room’s lights were off and a purple glow flooded into the window, painting their skin warmly. The glow came from the billboards outside.
A holographic calendar hovered over the bed. It was Tuesday, January 20th, 2057. Sunday the 25th was brightly lit and a small icon of a cupcake was shown beneath the date.
According to law, and to help deter the crippling overpopulation, no couple was allowed to sire a child until one party was twenty nine years of age. Tom was going to be twenty nine on Sunday.
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Billboards loomed over Tom as he drove to work. They spewed the same rhetoric:
“One more birth is one more grave.”
“Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children.”
“Each New Life is a Death Sentence.”
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“You feel guilty about this?” his coworker asked. Tom scoffed and shook his head. He had been saving money for his first child ever since he paid off his student loan.
“We’re only human,” Tom said. “This is what we were made to do.”
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The next day, as Tom’s ‘56 Honda hummed along the highway, he noticed that the billboards had changed. Happy couples and bloody baby fetuses were replaced by a product called the Brev. It was a tiny cell phone.
Brev’s CEO, David Forten, was pictured holding the new phone. Forten smiled widely, showing off an unusually large amount of gum and an unusually small amount of teeth. Forten was an odd looking man, with pale green eyes, a protruding forehead and a head like a barrel.
According to the ads, the Brev had a holographic projector which acted as a keyboard and doubled as a movie screen. The base model started at $50, with no contracts or agreements.
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It had been over a week since Tom and Laura had sex. They were saving it for Tom’s birthday. The analysis process that women went through during pregnancy was too exact to fudge around with; if they conceived a few days early, the consequence would be an abortion and imprisonment or heavy fines.
Instead of sleeping with one another, Tom and Laura watched television. Every other commercial was advertising the Brev and its stylish belt buckle carrying case.
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On Sunday, Laura surprised Tom with a small box wrapped in blue wrapping paper. She kissed Tom on the lips and held the box under his nose. “Happy Birthday,” she said.
Tom returned the kiss and tore the paper off. Inside was a Brev and the belt buckle carrying case. Tom loved it. He immediately put it on and made a few calls to some friends. Most of his friends, he learned, had the Brev, too.
That night Tom and Laura tried to conceive, but failed.
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The Brev kept pumping out new models with new colors and features. Its marketing team began to focus internationally; mainly in China. The Brev was selling by the billions. It won gadget of the year, 2058.
Birth rates around the world plummeted to an all time low. For the first time in three decades, the additional food tax was abolished and the age at which a person could have a child was lowered to twenty six. The two child limit was also done away with, much to the content of many religious groups.
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Laura couldn’t get pregnant. Tom took her to many doctors and they spent hours holding one another’s hands in waiting rooms. All tests concluded that Tom and Laura were both perfectly healthy.
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In 2059, a class action law suit was filed against the Brev company.
Tom was with the protesters who stormed the company’s headquarters.
“What did you do to us?!” he screamed. “What did you do?!”
The case made it up to the Supreme Court and was thrown out. There was no physical evidence that linked the phone with impotency. To add, not every man affected with this impotency owned a Brev.
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On New Years Day, the couple clicked glasses and toasted to their health. Some brief talk made mention of adoption, but the couple threw the idea away.
An announcement was made after the ball dropped; the world was no longer overpopulated, and all pregnancy laws were done away with.
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The Brev was discontinued in mid 2060. Nobody wore them anymore, anyway. The billboards changed and now advertised different trinkets and gadgets, and a new fertility drug named Forten. The Forten fertility drug was guaranteed to work. It was far too expensive for the average couple to buy.
Tom and Laura were able to buy the drug with the money they had saved up for their first child. Tom took Forten and a week later Laura was pregnant.
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Laura gave birth to a healthy baby girl. She looked nothing like Tom. He said the child wasn’t his. He called Laura a **** and ran out of the delivery room.
For the first time since the Brev’s release, the maternity ward was filled with new life. The fathers stood outside the nursery, staring at their odd children. The fathers looked like hell. They couldn’t tell which child was theirs.
The children all looked the same. Their heads were barrel shaped and their foreheads protruded. They were the billboard babies and they had green eyes and low gums, just like their father.
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