"I'm Sorry, This Is the Men's Room"
There were several disturbing implications in what the alien said to us that day. The first and most obvious was that we weren't going to see a member of the opposite sex for the duration of the trip, which was scheduled to last approximately 9.7 Earth years. The second implication, while less dramatic, was equally as upsetting to me, and it went something like this: the 37 of us only got one room.
Now those two facts would have certainly provided enough reason for us to be upset with the coordinators of the colonization fleet, but the fact that he apologized at the same time was probably what pushed us over the edge. If the alien had left that part out, we wouldn't have known that our ignorance of the particulars of the situation was quite intentional.
The recruiting drive had been vastly successful. They wanted 37 young, healthy, intelligent, and heterosexual human males to colonize a new planet. Actually it was a moon, but at slightly larger than Earth, it felt more like a planet to us. The aliens promised us fun and adventure, but the big selling point, of course, was the man-to-woman ratio necessary for the optimal population of our destination.
The religious right was up in arms over the whole thing, not to mention the gay communities and the feminists. There really wasn't anything they could do about it, though. The Cape Canaveral sit-ins and the letters to the Earth governments pledging a lack of funding weren't terribly effective.
The aliens had all sorts of reasons for keeping the sexes segregated, but that didn't keep us calm. After all, we didn't want to reproduce; we just wanted to hang out with the girls. When we asked about birth control, the aliens got really upset. Apparently the same religious tenets that drove them to aiding us in spreading our species throughout the galaxy also forbade them the use of any form of contraceptive.
We complained an awful lot those first 250 days or so. Formal complaints, demands and threats all fell on deaf ears. The hunger strike didn't work very well either. As soon as someone passed out from malnutrition, they hooked him up to an IV in the infirmary corner. The rest of us were too weak from hunger to stop them.
One enterprising man spent a month studying the aliens' holy books in an attempt at forming a theological argument against them. It was a noble, if doomed effort, considering that the aliens had several millenia of religious doctrine to draw from.
We didn't even think of mutiny until after the first rape. It wasn't until then that we discovered that the aliens not only eschewed capital and corporal punishment, but that they didn't even believe in imprisonment or isolation. The best they could do was remove the flavoring agents from the perpetrator's meals.
We attempted to regulate ourselves, setting nighttime watches and physically restraining the worst offendors of our increasingly complex set of rules and regulations. Rumors spread quickly, whispers of prisoner beatings and bribery. It wasn't long before nobody had flavoring agents in their food.
After 700 days or so, the feminine form had been elevated to divine status. We knew that if we could reach the women, all of our problems would be solved. Order would be restored, and everyone would live happily ever after. We continued to fight our miniature little gang wars, dreaming of the time when we would overthrow our captors and take back our women.
It wasn't even truly about sex anymore, not really. We'd just villified the aliens and made myths out of the female gender. Some treated them as though they were godesses, while others made them into objects of power. But everyone agreed that as soon as we could overcome the mighty alien overlords, that we would have reached the promised land.
Men sold future members of their harems. A small group became immensely popular by throwing a makeshift drag show. But it wasn't until most of the way through the third year before someone actually struck back at the aliens.
It was amazingly easy once someone got up the guts to try it. On day 733, an alien came into the room to check up on a resident of the infirmary, and a particularly enraged colonist struck him over the head with a chair. The alien crumpled into a heap on the floor instantly.
Using the id chip implanted in his foot, we were finally able to open the doorway leading to the rest of the ship. There was a moment of eerie silence when the door opened, but only a moment. Soon the room was filled with the noise of men scrambling about for weapons and piling out into the corridors beyond our room.
We found the control room quickly and easily overpowered the engineers and pilots we found there. Every last alien we found was thrown into our newly-made prison corners. They were bound just like the long-forgotten first rapists. We scoured every nook and cranny of the ship, making sure no alien went unpunished. We force-fed them pure flavoring agents and tortured them into showing us how to access every closet and catwalk in the ship.
The torture was the worst. The aliens were strong-willed creatures and didn't give in easily. They refused to tell us where the women were being kept. It took two days before we were able to get them to even admit that there was an armory.
In retrospect, we should have sent more guards with the alien who unlocked the weapons cache. They showed up several days after the prison break, stun burns on their faces. All the escape pods were long gone by then, and the 37 of us were left alone on the ship, searching for the fabled Women's Room.
Some of us still believe that the room is still hidden somewhere on the ship, waiting for some messiah to find its entrance. Others are convinced that there never were any women and that the aliens had some other nefarious plan for the males of our species. Me, I don't know what to believe anymore. I just count the days. Only 1,862 left.