I started this story on the old forum.  Here it is again with some modification and additon.  Hope to add to it soon.

Prologue

Benjy walked out of the shower and grabbed a towel.  Even though the towel was large and thick, it didn’t completely dry his 6’3” frame.  “At least I’m not dripping,” he thought as he stepped to the full-length mirror.  Benjy had worked hard to stay in shape and was proud of what he saw.  His shoulder-length hair was dirty blonde, the close-cropped goatee and mustache a light brown.  At his neckline began the thick, silky pelt of hair that covered his pectorals, the same color as his beard.  Beneath the cleft between his pecs, a line of thick hair a couple of inches wide headed toward his belly.  Four or five inches above his navel, this broadened into a parabola of hair, the same distance on either side of his navel and extending to his thick, darker brown pubic hairs, which he kept trimmed like his beard.  His penis hung eight inches soft, in front of his generously large scrotum, also covered with dark hair, encasing two testicles the size of small eggs.

His legs were not massive but were well-muscled and hairy from the top of his thigh to his ankles; Benjy’s arms, similarly muscled, had thick blonde hair on the forearm as well.

He turned around; looking over his right shoulder he saw his bubble but, also furry, and the hair on his lower back and on his shoulders.  He grimaced a bit; his back was the one place he didn’t really want hair.  “Just doesn’t look like I’m very highly evolved,” he would say, but nobody else seemed to mind.  Some even commented they thought it sexy.

No doubt, Benjy was all man.  Then he turned to see his profile.  He reached into the linen cabinet again and grapped a tape measure, wrapping it around his hairy midsection.  “Sixty-four inches,” he smiled.  His belly, covered with the fine, light-brown hair, hung massively from his middle.  No doubt, this man’s-man was pregnant.

As he entered the living area of his quarters, the door slid open.  A few close friends had the entry code so Benjy wasn’t concerned.  Nudity was a non-issue here, especially among friends.

“Hi, Clint,” he beamed as the adolescent entered.  Clint appeared to be about 14, though Benjy knew he had just had his sixteenth birthday.  The youth had light blonde hair on his head.  Adolescence had brought some fine blonde hair to his upper lip but one would have to push to call this growth a mustache; there was still no need to shave to keep a clean face.  If he had been ten years older Clint would have been considered skinny but lanky would be a better term for someone his age.  His chest was undeveloped, almost bony; his arms were thin, with wiry muscles entwined around his humerus and femur bones.  His fingers were long and delicate. 

Clint’s pubic hair was barely darker than the hair on his head and was still sparse.  Puberty had been reached only a year ago.  There was of course no hair on his abdomen, and only a few sparse hairs under his arms.  The darkest coloring was on his belly, where the linea negra formed a neat vertical split of his bulging abdomen. 

Cling advanced across the floor silently, pulling the older man into a tight hug made awkward by their large bellies.  Benjy bent over rather uncomfortably to wrap the boy in his arms.  He heard Clint sniffle and he felt the damp of Clint’s tears and mucus from his nose spreading to his own hairy chest and belly.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Benjy asked as he lifted Clint’s chin and looked into his watery eyes.  He took his other hand, grabbed a tissue and wiped the boy’s nose, then held the tissue and said “blow.”  Clint responded with a couple of honks to clear his nasal passages, then hiccupped and stammered as he tried to speak.

“God, I’m so big and fat and I don’t understand all the stuff that’s happening to me!” the boy wailed.  “Oh, it’s OK, baby,” Benjy said as he pulled the boy’s head back to his chest. ‘You’re not as big as I am!” he laughed as he rubbed his huge, hairy belly with his free hand.  “Come on over here,” he said as he steered the youngster to the piece of furniture that served as both a couch and a bed.  They sat, side by side, Benjy turning toward Clint and doing his best to cradle the boy in his manly arms, though their bellies were still awkwardly in the way.  Benjy lay back against the pillows piled in the corner, pulling Clint with him.  The boy lay between the wall and the man, his whimpers quieting, his hand wandering over the man’s belly, now sticking up toward the ceiling.  Clint’s own belly was wedged in below Benjy’s, the top against and perpendicular to Benjy’s own belly.  Clint’s belly covered Benjy’s penis and scrotum; that member was now quickly coming to attention, poking Clint’s belly from beneath.

Clint lifted his face.  Though no longer crying, his eyes were still wet.  Benjy pulled himself up far enough to plant a light kiss on Clint’s forehead.  Clint moved farther up and engaged Benjy’s mouth with his own.  Their tongues met and wandered over each other, as their hands explored each other’s bodies.

At another time, in another place, Benjy would never have considered being intimate with anyone half his age, nor with another male.  Clint might have been a high school sophomore; he might be seeking solace from his parents or exploring his sexuality with a boy or girl in his own class at school.

This, however, was a new world.  Social mores had changed to fit the times.  And Benjy did truly love this boy and would never do anything to hurt him.

Chapter 1

            By 2023, the first space elevator had been completed.  A joint venture of Japan and the U.S., a carbon fiber ribbon stretched from its anchor on Midway Island to a counterweight some 23,000 miles up, in geostationary orbit.  The “counterweight” was, in fact, a space station far larger than the recently abandoned International Space Station.  With the completion of the elevator, the price of moving material into outer space had suddenly dropped from $10,000 per pound to $10 per pound, and construction of massive objects and interplanetary probes in orbit was suddenly feasible.  Industrialists quickly took advantage, moving certain materials production into orbit and constructing giant solar arrays to supply the earth’s burgeoning power requirements.  Several more elevators went up from various spots on or near the equator.  Who first proposed the idea of linking the various geostationary into a ring around the earth is a name lost to history, but when the Midway and Galapagos stations began forging the first link, the other stations weren’t far behind.  Soon almost everyone on the planet could see a section of arc, being built between the stations, shimmering across their night sky.

            In 2045, the hundredth anniversary of the Axis defeat in World War II, the final classified Nazi files were opened.  Hitler had one last surprise to spring on the world.  Dr. Mengele, the infamous Nazi physician, had engaged in one more experiment.  Mengele had impregnated males.  There was no record of any of those babies surviving.  Apparently all the subjects had been eviscerated at predetermined points in their pregnancies, with autopsies to determine the effects of pregnancy on the male body.  The longest male pregnancy recorded was seven months.  The records showed this was just another experiment to satisfy Mengele’s morbid curiosity, with no practical application in mind.  But it did show that for all intents and purposes, men could carry a pregnancy to term with no lasting ill effect. 

            It was a different world than 1945, though, and gender roles had undergone a massive evolution in the human race.  Same-sex couples were accepted without question in all but a few forgotten corners of the planet, and in many heterosexual couples, the wife was the primary breadwinner.  The ability of a male partner to carry a child would open new avenues for parenthood to millions.  Of course there were still many of the religious right ilk who found the thoughts of male pregnancy abominable and they opened a firestorm that put the gay marriage and abortion controversies of 50 years earlier to shame.  By 2050, though, the right of a man to carry his own child was recognized in all countries.  Male pregnancy was certainly not the norm, but more and more, men with bellies distended by pregnancy walked the streets.  At a crowded beach, it was not unusual to see a giant orb topping a young hunk’s speedo.  Some younger men even entered surrogacy contracts, carrying children for others.

            In 2057, a prosperous and peaceful planet celebrated 100 years of the Space Age.  In a century we had gone from a basketball-sized sphere rising into orbit atop a Soviet ICBM to elevators lifting thousands of passengers and millions of tons of cargo to the orbital terminals each day.  Great space liners carried passengers on regular routes to the moon, where new telescopes and power stations were being constructed and the regolith was being mined for Helium-3 and other minerals in short supply on earth.  A new elevator was being constructed from a station in lunar stationary orbit .  For the first time in history, we had resources exceeding our needs.  Every human was fed, clothed, housed, and had medical care.

            In the course of history, the unintended consequences of our actions have had a much greater effect on the outcome than the planned consequences of those same actions.  Opening up trade with the East brought the bubonic plague to Europe, killing two-thirds of her inhabitants.  The Native American population was wiped out not with guns and knives but by diseases brought from the Old World.  Thus it was that, during the year-long celebration, biochemists announced development of nanobots that might well end the scourge of aging.  These tiny machines, when injected into the bloodstream, went to work cleaning all the detritus – plaque in the arteries, organic pesticides and herbicides absorbed into fat tissue, cancer cells lurking and waiting to burst into tumors when conditions were right – these bots recognized many of the conditions that caused us to grow old and die and went about correcting them.  They were capable of reproducing themselves, and would, it seemed, provide major improvements in health for all.

            The nanobots were not “alive” – they could build replicas, but there was no genetic material, so there was never any consideration that they might mutate.  Mutate they did, though.  Somewhere in their electronic instructions, a switch was thrown so that they attacked not just harmful tissues but all human tissues.  This didn’t happen until fully a billion people had been inoculated with the nanobots.  The results of this mutation were ghastly and devastating.  Perfectly healthy people were suddenly losing function of vital organs – kidneys, livers, hearts, were all becoming Swiss cheese at the ministrations of the mutant bots.  And though they were designed to be delivered by injection and were never to leave the body, they began multiplying and entering mucous tissues.  They could be shed in saliva, tears, sweat, any bodily emission could carry these bots.  They could stay viable for months outside the body, and as soon as they encountered another living human, they invaded, taking down the new host within a matter of a few weeks.

            No one on the orbital stations had yet been inoculated; the people living in orbit were scientists, construction workers and industrial workers for the most part and were younger and healthier than the general population.  As the scope of the disaster became evident, the elevators shut down.  No one from the Earth’s surface would be allowed to enter space until the problem was solved.

            One of the scientists on the Midway orbital station did, in fact, come up with a simple fix.  If an infected individual were into a strong magnetic field, such as an MRI, new coding could be transmitted to the electronics in each nanobot, causing it to self-destruct.  But he didn’t find this solution until most transmissions from Earth had fallen silent.  After a year, only two transmitters were still working on earth, one in Switzerland and one in Peru.  They told of city after city where the entire population was gone.  Eventually, these transmitters also fell silent.  The world was dark for the first time since Edison invented the light bulb.  There were some 10,000 humans left in five stations orbiting the planet at the end of tethers.  And over 9,000 of these were men.

Chapter 2

            Midway was the first orbital station and was the largest.  Over 4,000 men and women called Midway Station home.  Before the Great Die, as it had become known, the arc between Midway and Galapagos stations had been completed, providing easy transport between the two.  As the nations of earth disappeared, the captains of the five stations organized an orbital council to unify what was left of mankind.  The lunar bases, whose standing population was only 200 or so, were abandoned and those men and women returned to the Earth orbital stations.  With the cure for the mutant nanobots, man could now return to the surface of the earth.  But how could mankind repopulate the planet?

            The orbital council announced the formation of a “Pregnancy Corps” – its members would be made up of volunteers and draftees.  Anyone who wanted to participate would be welcome, and anyone not performing some other vital service which pregnancy would make impossible would be drafted.  All women of child-bearing age were, of course, welcomed, and any man from 16 to 55.  The hope was that the 10,000 humans left could produce at least 30,000 children within a five year period.  Within two or three generations, it was believed, there would be a million humans and that would be a small but viable population.

            There was grumbling to be sure.   Most of them were burly construction workers, hardly the type to be thought of as taking on such a traditionally female role, even in the last half of the 21^st century.  These were desperate times.   New construction was hardly needed.  An infrastructure for nine billion people lay unused.    It was decided that members of the Pregnancy Corps would remain in orbit for the time being.  Though men could carry babies, it was much easier to do it in the low and zero-gravity environments provided at the orbital stations.

Chapter 3

            Thus it was that Benjy and Clint became some of the first members of the Pregnancy Corps.  Benjy, the construction worker, had left a wife and family back on Earth.  Clint, a high school sophomore, had also left family back on earth.  Winner of his state science fair, he had been awarded an internship on Midway Station.  That’s where he was when the Great Die struck.  Benjy took Clint under his wing.  What began as a father/son relationship between the two changed once they became pregnant.  Benjy would not have chosen a male as his primary partner previously.  Though he’d had assignations with men a few times over the years, he was a devoted family man and true to his wife once they became a couple.  And Clint wasn’t sure about sexuality.  He was a “late bloomer” and had never had a girlfriend.  Honestly he’d not really thought about sex that much, until he was thrust into the Pregnancy Corps.

            The male pregnancy procedure was relatively simple.  A small incision was made just below the navel and a fertilized zygote is introduced laproscopically.  A small packet containing is glued to the lower intestine.  Hormones released by the packet cause it to grow a placenta attached to the intestine, and the baby grows inside the abdominal cavity.  Regular dosing with hormones allows the male to carry the fetus to term, at which point it is removed via caesarian section.