Humanity, 2.0
Year 41, Day 112
I felt myself stirring awake, and an uncomfortable weight lying on my chest and abdomen. My dreams had been of labored breathing and of mysterious weight pressing on me. I groaned, and opened my eyes to a lovely sight; Emily, with a bored look on her face, her cheek resting on one fist and elbow resting on a knee. She was sitting cross-legged directly atop my chest, and was staring down directly into my eyes. My sister had let her hair grow out longer lately, and had it tied back in a partial ponytail, the rest sweeping down around her head gracefully, framing her oval face. She wore a simple white shift and lacy white panties beneath, and I saw down near my feet where some of her clothes lay discarded. On her feet she wore long and colorful socks, which seemed to be the fashion lately.
“Em…” I moaned. “What time is it…” I felt like going right back to sleep.
Emily gave an almost imperceptible nod off toward the bedside table. “You can read.”
So, she wasn’t in any better a mood than she was last night, then.
The clock to my left read 05:00A, yet the sun was already shining. Welcome to Alaska. We were back in Nadine’s summer palace at the time; it was located in a remote part of the Alaskan wilderness. The closest other settlement was twenty miles away. When the climate issues had started to get worse in the past ten years, we’d started living there full-time; the winters there were becoming relatively mild, though they were still dangerous to the unprepared. The oversized house we lived in, with its surrounding sheds, workshops, and even a laboratory, was surrounded by low hills and valleys. The land bloomed with short, hardy wildflowers and lichens growing over an otherwise stony tundra. It had a massive, brilliant and lively beauty that I always appreciated. Several herds of caribou lived in the region, and Nina or Bethany sometimes took the children out on trips to observe them. They even had names for most of them.
Our house itself was rustic and huge; it had to be, to fit all of us. An even twenty young ones had the run of the place, and that wasn’t counting the nine girls I counted among my lovers. It was fairly rare for all of them to be home at once; now was no exception. The exterior of the house was made of the cedar logs common to the area, long-lasting, but was built around a much more sturdy cement and rebar frame; it was a home meant to last a hundred years or more. There were ten bedrooms, two kitchens, three dens, and a twelve-vehicle garage, all paid for easily on Nadine’s tab. She never asked any of the rest of us for a damn thing, just to be alive. It’s too easy for us to forget the nice things about Nadine, especially in these times; I have never forgotten. I hope she knows that.
The house’s interior was that of a traditional mountain lodge, a look that Nadine favored; the heavy, smooth wood furniture dominated everything, with big fluffy cushions, natural, aged hardwood floors, and numerous landscape pictures and murals hung about the place. She kept something somewhere that made the whole place smell nice, like maple and cinnamon – which, despite living there for nearly three decades, I never did find where she hid it.
Emily was still casually resting atop me. I took a deep breath, moving my sister’s whole body up and down a few inches. Emily didn’t budge; she knew she wasn’t really hurting me, although it wasn’t exactly comfortable either.
“Em…” I vaguely recalled some strange dreams of the previous night, which gave me a thought. “How long have you been there?”
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Dunno… maybe half an hour.”
“And you were… what, watching me sleep?” Bethany liked doing that, and Rain to a lesser extent, but I’d never known Emily to have an interest in it.
“No. Yeah.” She frowned. “Thinking.”
I waited for a while, but she didn’t offer anything further; the distant look on her face remained exactly the same. I resisted rolling my eyes. “Em, it’s five in the morning… if you want to make this like pulling teeth…“ She remained silent. I sighed. “Listen, if you need to watch me sleep, can you do it from off to the side or something? I know you’re mad at me, but I had a late night, and I have the kids for the day once Claudia gets back. I don’t want to—“
“I wasn’t mad at you.” I let her interrupt me, perplexed. She looked away for a moment. “That was just me being bitchy the last few days. I came back from New York with this idea then I couldn’t follow through on it, and after that every time I saw you it just reminded me how pissed off I was with myself.”
“Okaaay…” I raised an eyebrow. “What was the idea?”
Emily remained quiet for a few moments, then came up, resting both palms on my bare chest. She tilted her head as she looked down at me again, studying me. “Ben… why the hell haven’t you pressed the issue of having children with me?”
“What?” I was still half-asleep, and not really prepared for an emotionally charged argument. “Em… is this really the time? You’re obviously in a weird state of mind. I’m running on three hours of sleep. Talk it over with Claudia or Nina—“
“I don’t want to. Not about this.” One finger traced lazy patterns around my chest. “Nina, Rain, and Wren are in the lab working on something. Claudia and Nadine have the little ones, and they won’t be back until lunch. It’s just you and me… brother and sister… with the whole place to ourselves…” She said it quietly, giving me a hungry look. “Now’s the only time. You won’t have time to come up with some long-winded moral bullshit and I’ve got just enough anger bottled up that I’m thinking crooked enough to ask. Tell me why you’ve just left this thing alone for the past ten years!”
“Em…” I sighed.
“Damnit!” She slapped a hand on my chest; it stung, but I could tell she wasn’t truly furious. “Spill it. I don’t care if it’s a stupid reason or embarrassing or whatever, just blurt it out here and now.”
“It’s not obvious?” I groaned. “You weren’t ready. I’m not going to force it.” I let my hands slide up over her thighs. “As long as we’re asking questions we shouldn’t, how about you? It’s just you left. Even Wren had Zoe, just last year.”
“It’s two of us. Me and Rain.” She pouted somewhat.
“Well, okay, but I think Rain’s a pretty obvious case, you know?” I shook my head. “Besides, what do you even call it when you have a child by your daughter? A daughter…er?”
Emily paused for a time, giving me a flat look. “You’re such an idiot.”
“Have mercy on a tired idiot. I want to sleep.”
She sighed. “Ben, it makes no fucking sense. We’re an entire new species. I’ve been studying some of our genetics stuff with Claudia and Bethany. Learning about what makes us different from all them.” She waved one arm in a wide gesture, indicating presumably the human race. “The list is getting longer every day. They’re still finding stuff that your alien girlfriend came up with, little things and big things. We’re all so amazing, Ben, and the less of us there are, the more risk we could all be wiped out by accident or something.”
I shrugged. “I know that part. And I’ve got twenty-one children now, counting Rain. You don’t need to feel obligated to do anything.”
“Ben, you have a super power that lets you make me dripping wet in a second. You might not be able to completely dominate us the way you can normal humans, but you have to know how easy it would be to fuck a baby into me. You know I’d have done it if you asked, right?” A hand slid down across her belly. “I’d have had one for you.”
“Having to ask means I won’t ask.” I shook my head. “Again, can we not do this now?”
“Drop the Zen bullshit! It doesn’t make any fucking sense, Ben!” She seemed genuinely angry now. “You have to know by now, even if you used your power left and right and fucked us all nice and pregnant every nine months, that if spaceship girl was right – well, the only people writing the history books will be your own children. I’m pretty sure they’d give you a break.”
“Maybe.” I grinned. With some luck, maybe I could make her wrong about one part of that. “Would you have, though?”
“I…” She frowned. “I don’t know. Does it matter? Ben, this is bigger than either of us. We have an obligation to have as many kids as we can.”
I snorted. “Em...” I thought for a moment. “Have you ever asked Nadine what went through her head before I put Jacob into her belly? Or Nina, what she was thinking when she decided to have Blake?”
“That it was time they contribute—“
I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing.
“What?” Emily was looking down at me with mixed resentment and confusion.
“Ahhh… no, sorry, Em, I…” I got out one more chuckle before I found control of myself again. “Nadine just wanted another baby because Nadine always has to be number one. Nina just said she felt like it.” I shrugged. “That’s it. That’s the sum total of their reasoning. Ask them; they’ll tell you the same thing themselves.” I smiled up at her, but she returned only a dim glower.
“It’s not like that for me. I—“
I stared her in the eyes. “—You still think you’ll be another of Mom.”
The flash of anger on her face was briefly frightening; for a moment, I thought she would slap me. She caught herself, then looked away. “Is it that stupid?”
I shrugged. “Anything is possible. But Em…” I took her chin in one hand, turning her face back to me. “15226 didn’t pick me because I was perfect, and it wasn’t like I thought you were before I changed you. Do you know how much thoughts of her drunk-ass old man still haunt Bethany? She’ll be eighty before long, and still she thinks about it. Melody lost her younger sister when she was seventeen, and a part of her still thinks it was her fault. It’s part of why she and Hannah are so inseparable. And don’t even ask me to start on Wren’s issues, we’d be here all morning.” I gave a light tap on her thigh. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Which one?”
As if she didn’t know. “What your idea was that you had when you came back from New York.”
She scowled at me. “How is it not obvious?”
“It still helps to hear you say it.”
“Fine. I want a baby. From you. I want my brother’s baby.” She rolled her eyes. “There, I said it…” She trailed off, seeming to realize how easily it had come out of her mouth. As I’d thought, saying it out loud changed the way she thought about it. “But I’m scared, Ben… I want to be a mother so bad, but I’m so fucking scared I’ll turn into Mom… Ben, I’d ruin everything, not just our kid’s life, if I lost it like she did – I could bring all of us down.”
“Em.” I shook my head again, pulling her down toward me. She didn’t resist, and I felt her pressing against my chest. She wasn’t sobbing, but despite the angle I was at, I could sense tears were coming from her eyes. I stroked her hair for a while, then after I time I spoke again. “Em, you aren’t Mom. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
There was silence for a time, five minutes becoming ten, then fifteen, then twenty. The only sound was the morning breeze outside and our breathing. As more time passed, I began to sense something familiar pressing against my thigh; where my sister’s legs met, the lacey cloth of her panties was becoming a little damp. I grinned to myself, but didn’t act on it at the time.
“Ben…” Finally, she spoke, but still didn’t look at me. “Do you remember when we first made love?”
“In the hotel in Sacramento.” I stroked her skin, sneaking fingers underneath one of the straps on her shift.
“I just… lay back and told you to fuck me, and not stop even if I said to.”
“You said you loved it that way.”
There was another brief silence.
“You know I let an egg out, inside. Late last night.” She looked away, and mused to herself. “If some enterprising man were to just up and come inside me in the next couple days, well, I’d get pregnant.”
I nodded, more to myself than to her. There was another few seconds’ silence. My cock was becoming rigid underneath the covers, where my waist and legs were partially hidden. It was obvious how she wanted this to happen. Emily’s desires shifted readily to accommodate her lovers; in my case, she often became meek and submissive when she wanted to fuck, passively inviting me to just push my cock into my sister. She couldn’t quite bring herself to step out and ask me to make her pregnant, even if she wanted it more than anything. Emily was incredibly courageous most of the time, except when it came to the strangest things.
My beloved sister. I rolled us over, coming up above her on all fours; my cock, now long and rock-hard, swung below me as I bent down to give her a kiss. She returned it, wrapping two arms around my upper back, and then laid in place as I ravished her. My mouth and hands played across her body, teasing at first, then helping her out of her shift. With casual but practiced care, I tugged off the panties she wore, leaving her nude and defenseless underneath me. I gave her folds and clit a few playful licks; the wetness and taste betrayed how aroused she was. The idea of finally getting pregnant was affecting her powerfully. She later told me that she had developed a little bit of a fetish for it after seeing and playing with so many of the other girls when they were round with child.
Today wasn’t a clit-licking day; I came up and played with her small breasts briefly, reveling in her warm and slender body. It might have been hard to believe for some humans of the old world that Emily and I were related, aside from the similarity in our faces; she was slender and of average female height, whereas I was, by then, a titan compared to all but the largest humans. Emily weighed in at just over one-third my mass.
It didn’t take much guidance anymore for my cock to find her entrance. I knew all of my girls’ bodies intimately now, down to the specific patterns their bodies tended to move in as I stimulated them here and there. I rarely even slipped out on accident after the first thirty years. Once I’d passed her entrance, I felt myself descending; the gentle passion I’d shown at first started to erode in the force of my desire.
I gradually but firmly entered her, down to the hilt, watching her expression change from one of submissive enjoyment to one of temporary pain and surprise. My cock stretched any of them to the limit, even after all this time. It was only moments before I could see the pain seeping away, her face instead becoming one of a woman experiencing pleasure. The little bumping motions I was making against her clit helped, of course, and I knew all of her little pressure points – the sensitive parts of her body that even she didn’t fully realize were erogenous.
My hand cupping the side of her ass, squeezing the firm muscle just so; one hand gripping behind her shoulder, hard and forcefully – giving her just enough of an impression of being helpless and unable to escape. Kisses trailing down her cheeks and across her ears, down her neck then up her chin, back onto her lips. Tugs on her nipples with a free hand, occasionally, keeping them nice and pointy. Deliberately moving a tight grip down her thigh, grasping behind her knee to hold it up beside myself – spreading her legs wide as I speared her. She was so beautiful once she got into lovemaking. My rhythmic thrusting didn’t change angles or mix up the pace much; Nadine and Bethany liked it that way, but Emily liked a firm, steady, pumping fuck that was unhurried but powerful.
Her moans made a kind of music that only I really heard; it told me a lot, about things she was trying to hide, things she liked and didn’t want to admit, that even after forty years with me she still thought there were things I didn’t know about her. Things she thought I would judge or would think were too kinky. I would bring all of it out, in time, but it would be centuries. The mind – human or hominus – can be very fast about some things, and incredibly slow at others. Her legs wrapped together behind my ass, and with one thumb I found her clit and moved just so, over and over. It had the expected effect. She moaned, quietly, being kept on the edge, denied every time she came too close. If I wasn’t careful, some of the girls would come before I did, I’m proud to say. It only took me fifty years to figure this sex thing out.
She was giving me – giving us both – an incredible gift, and I needed to ensure she was rewarded well. Our child would be as loved and cared for as all of the others, and would never lack for companionship considering my small army of offspring and the numerous mothers they would have available.
Little did I know our first ‘child’ would actually be two – the first hominus twins, Michael and Michelle. Bethany had been wondering if hominus could still have twins the way the humans could, given that one of the biggest differences was the way our bodies handled ovulation – and that question was answered when my sister began to swell up and Bethany’s tests showed two little ones growing inside. It would be two centuries before the first pair of identical twins, but it did eventually happen. It’s actually about three times as common with us as it was with the old species, but you know what they say about statistics and small sample sizes.
My pumping accelerated, thrusting my cock over and over. It was a good thing that making love had become such second nature to me; I didn’t have to think at all about how exactly to ensure she was pleasured too, I just let my body do its thing and rode the sensations. My cock slammed home faster and faster inside sister-pussy, preparing itself to spew life-creating seed. My hand worked in a motion so natural that it did it practically on its own, teasing and playing with Emily’s clit in all the ways I knew would drive her wild. I was groaning aloud in a way I rarely held back on anymore, unless I thought one or more of the kids were nearby.
I let out a primal shout, as if announcing some great important moment. My cock erupted not long after my strumming fingers had brought her off, making her quiver silently as she usually did when she came. My churning balls did their job, and my cockhead opened to spurt a rope of thick white come, then another, and another. I groaned repeatedly, sliding myself in to the base one last time as I felt my balls emptying inside her.
There was a long silence as I wound down, catching my breath; I remained above her for a few moments, letting my cock slip out of her as it softened. Her eyes caught mine, and something long and impossible to put into words happened between us; our decades-long incestuous relationship had just crossed a line that both of us had been idly staring at for years. I slowly relaxed and came down at her side, and she looked down at herself, then at me again.
“Well.” Emily smiled. “We did it.”
“And neither of us went crazy yet.” I raised an eyebrow.
Emily frowned at me. “Idiot.”
I gave a low chuckle and pulled her in closer to me. She didn’t resist, and cuddled up to me for a while. We remained that way for an interminable time, listening to the rustling wind outside and the cranking of the old heater unit outside. Emily heard the approaching passel of children before I did.
“That’s them.” She sat up. “Get dressed.”
I shrugged. So much for my rest before having to take care of the kids for half of the day. Groaning, I slid out of bed and fished around, finding some slacks and a collared shirt. Emily, who still didn’t handle the cold all that well, put on thermals then a pair of jeans and a dark green cable-knit turtleneck sweater. I had just got down to the kitchen when I heard the children outside, and a minute later, the back door opened. Tristan and Jacob first, of course; neither would settle for less. After those two, it was the ‘six witches’, as they called themselves – Katherine, Jacinta, Fallon, Sophia, and Ava and Mia – the twins-but-not-really, Hannah and Melody’s two that were born on the same day. Those six girls, all in a ten-to-twelve age bracket, had formed a little pack and were rarely seen apart for long.
Claudia and Nadine came in with the main pack of the children; Claudia was hefting the youngest of the little travelers, Wren’s daughter Zoe. She wasn’t even two yet, and was no less inquisitive and curious than her mother. They were surrounded by Lily, Alice, Constance, Fox, Genevieve, and Mackenzie. The group Nadine and Claudia had kept around them were the youngest, from three to five, and afterward, the last five, those young enough to move about on their own but still too young to let out of sight, came in – Fiona, Rose, Stephanie, Angela, and the seven-year-old Blake, my only other son than the first two at the time. The affiliation of those five was a looser thing than that of the witch cadre, but it would ultimately outlast them. Claudia had a little bit of a swell, being four months pregnant herself with a daughter who would later be named Gemini, and Nadine was on a three-year break from having children – a record for her since we’d been reunited.
Rasima raised an eyebrow at me when she proofread those last few paragraphs. People think I don’t remember the names, birthdays, mothers, and everything else about every one of my two hundred and nineteen children. Even here and now, six hundred years later and my body and mind finally feeling the effects of age, that’s the absolute last thing I could ever forget. That being said, I’ve been asked – both politely and pointedly – by the bulk of that first generation of children to skip over any great detail of their earliest years. For some it’s to save them embarrassment, as many of them are now highly placed and well-respected individuals who might not want Dad to share with all hominus-kind who stopped wetting the bed when, and for others it’s just that they would prefer to write their own story at a later time. Worry not; I will respect both wishes.
The whole lot of them were bundled up in various cold-weather clothing; it wasn’t freezing out, being a northern Alaskan summer, but it could be chilly even on the balmiest Alaskan day. I hadn’t had time to prepare lunch for everyone, which earned me a frown from Nadine; with a quick scramble, I was able to put out sandwich makings for the whole lot of them. The amount of food consumed by twenty young children is truly a staggering thing. We had food delivered by the pallet monthly, and even then I sometimes had to have rush orders placed when I ran low. Nina had thought to have a large underground cooler installed in the basement, so we could go for a year or more without resupply if we needed to, though the fare would rapidly get boring. Even a master chef couldn’t work miracles with an inexhaustible supply of canned tomatoes, frozen tofu, and soybean derivatives.
The scent of food wouldn’t escape the girls, even in a separate building. A few minutes later, we were joined by Wren, Rain, and Nina, who had been out at Wren’s laboratory-cum-shed. It was always freezing cold in there lately – Wren said it had something to do with some superconductors she was working on, though I suspected she just liked it that way.
Before long, school was in session. The little field trip had only been half of today’s alleged school day. I had had my doubts early on about the method the girls wanted to use for teaching the kids; my original plan had been to either hire some tutors or find a way to sneak our kids into public or private schools somewhere. Both ideas had been voted down in short order, which in hindsight probably makes sense. When an eight-year-old is roughly as strong and fast as a human professional athlete, one cannot realistically expect them to keep that concealed day in and day out when surrounded by other kids their age. It also meant keeping too many of them out of line of sight before they could defend themselves. I had, however, prevailed on them to let our kids choose to go to university on their own.
Instead, each of the girls brought them all together and took turns teaching them all lessons. I had wondered at first how that could work, when there was such disparity in their ages; when one kid is still learning to read, and another is burning through light novels, how can you teach both at once? Still, in fairness, I suppose the education I would have sent them off to probably wasn’t all that much better. As a one-time outcast and nerd, I probably had a bad image of the social cliques and constant jockeying of public school, but I doubted they’d have learned more that way than what we were doing here.
As we sat back and watched Rain walk her army of siblings through some simple first-aid techniques, Emily settled in next to me on a couch. Claudia happened by, and bent down to whisper something quietly to Emily, so as not to disturb the class; as she put her hand on the opposite side of Emily’s head to draw her in closer, she suddenly turned and looked at my sister. The two shared a brief exchange which took place only in their expressions, from where I sat, then Claudia smiled and came up. She looked at me and seemed overjoyed, and practically bounced away.
I guess the news was already out, then… damn electrophoric stuff. I really felt cut off sometimes. Claudia worked her way around to the others, sharing the news quietly, and we got happy glances from everyone.
School finished, and the girls wandered off in turn; Emily went to take a nap, and Nina then Nadine followed her upstairs – likely she wanted to hear the story of how she’d finally given in. Wren and Rain went out to Wren’s lab again after talking quietly for a long time about something intensely technical; they were followed by Fiona and Rose, the two younger ones who seemed to show an interest in the science. In Fiona’s case, obviously, she stuck it out and became quite a scientist in her own right; Rose said later on that she just liked to look at all the glowing buttons and lights.
Claudia graciously stayed with me to assist; I spent the following eight hours with my passel of children. I don’t think 15226 could have given me enough stamina to keep up with that many young ones for more than a few hours alone, and the girls all generally agreed; even if the schedule usually just had one or two of us with the kids, it often ended up being more for sheer practicality. It wasn’t like any but a few of us had jobs anyway. Nadine, Nina, and Emily brought in the real money, along with Wren’s patents – the rest of us just had side interests and hobbies, really.
We all watched some shows together, and played some games. Those older than six or so went back outside to play what appeared to be something like soccer, except they had a tendency to make up new rules if nobody was around to correct them. One time I looked out and it had turned into a full-contact sport where they threw the ball with both hands, like basketball. Some returned with cuts and bruises as it got into the evening time – though it was still bright out, welcome to Alaska – but I knew they’d all be fine by the morning. Bethany said they healed up even quicker than any of us did, which was saying something. To date, not one of them had gotten sick.
Most put themselves to bed after such a busy day, though a few had to be shown to their rooms. They had a whole wing of the house. After another hour or so, the kids were largely in bed, and Claudia and I had found our way back downstairs. I put away the mess the kids had inevitably made, and packed up the many food items strewn about the kitchen. Taking one last look around, I glanced at the stairs. I was still running on three hours of sleep, and crashing sounded very inviting right now.
“Where are you going?” Claudia’s clipped accent, from behind me.
“Bed. I’m tired.”
“Like hell you are. Come back down here and make us some party food.”
“Party food…” I sighed. “We just partied the night before last. Remember? It was Nina’s birthday.”
“We can’t party again?” Claudia put her hands on her hips, giving them a nice little shake. “You aren’t allowed to go back to bed until you’ve celebrated with us. The girls will be back in a little bit, and we’ve got to ring in Emily’s pregnancy. It’s certainly been long enough.”
I paused for a time, letting out a long breath. If I crashed anyway, they’d probably sneak in and ambush me with a threesome or something. Not that I was particularly against that idea, but it was clear I wasn’t going to be allowed to rest much either way. Turning around, I went back to the kitchen and cut up some small pastries, crackers, and assorted party food stuff; Claudia, meanwhile, broke out the booze. Thank the stars that 15226 didn’t make us immune to alcohol along with most of the drugs and poisons that affected humans. Soon she’d filled two coolers with various beers and had a large supply of glasses and tumblers set out on the closed veranda, with its plastic windowing. It was an extension of the old patio, which we’d covered over so that we could keep it heated. Partying in Alaska at night got old pretty quickly without some kind of heat source.
It was nine at night, and the sun was finally setting, when I heard the girls returning one by one – first Nadine, Nina, then Emily, then the two who’d been over in the lab after they put Fiona and Rose to bed. They gathered on the patio. It was a smallish place, cozy, just the way we liked it. It was lit by strings of white Christmas lights they’d strung up along the rafters holding the canvas roof in place, and big wicker chairs and couches dominated it. There was a large central table upon which all the food and alcohol was set out. The floor was a plush blue rug we’d tossed atop the concrete of the patio. Along the rafters was also set a long space heater that kept the whole room toasty warm, if a bit dry; it was comfortable but not somewhere you would want to sleep. The room had a thrown-together look, but in the many years we’d been there, we’d all gotten quite used to it.
There wasn’t going to be a really wild party; this was more a gathering of friends and lovers, to celebrate Emily’s decision. They played it up as if it was mine and hers, but mine had been made ages ago; I’d just been waiting for her to get to where she needed to be. They seemed a little perplexed that they were having trouble sensing if it was a boy or a girl, as they seemed to be able to with all the previous pregnancies – it did concern Bethany for a while, until we realized it was because there was one of each growing inside her. Nina and Wren each took up a position at my sister’s side on the couch opposite us, while Nadine and our daughter Rain cuddled on a small love seat – meanwhile, I rested lengthwise on another couch, with Claudia spooned in front of me and letting one of my arms drape over her chest.
The drinks flowed. Claudia made a bit of a show of feeding me, holding one or two morsels at a time over her shoulder in front of my face, alternating them with herself. The girls talked, and I only occasionally butted in. The conversation would go late into the night, I already knew. The sky finally went dark around eleven at night, but I knew it would be brightening again before we knew it. Nina and Emily were joking about some woman they both knew through their company, a rival CEO whom they speculated had some repressed bisexual urges. A half-dozen jokes awaited for suggestions on how I might use my power to help her get past her inhibitions. Nadine and our oldest daughter were quietly talking something through, barely audible to the rest of us, while Claudia seemed intent on stuffing me full of enough hors d’oeuvres that I likely wouldn’t need to eat again until the weekend.
They talked business for a time. Wren was involved in some capacity, her inventions and scientific mind being on the sidelines of their massively profitable joint company, and Claudia occasionally poked her head in and did a few months of work for them at a time; Rain, as well, had never really stopped working for her mother. In fact, I was the only one there who hadn’t done a lick of work since we came together, though none of them complained. The jokes about me being the housewife of the harem – the one who stays home with the kids, cooks and cleans, and makes babies – had all been made and made again years ago. We wouldn’t realize how prophetic they’d be about the most common structure of the hominus family that would emerge centuries later.
“The Macao expansion is a complete loss.” Nina’s head lolled back onto the top of the couch, and she let out a loud sigh. “I’m sorry, Em, but it’s time to call it there. Cut our losses and just withdraw.”
“Not to say I told you so… but yeah.” Nadine shrugged. “They’re blaming the floods, but it was caving years before that. Too many bad decisions and bad investments. The whole place is going to be another Dubai before 2050. Another Vegas, for that matter.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Emily frowned. “Well, wait, though. Let’s say it crashes. It becomes a penny stock then, right? So we buy up the whole goddamn place. We sit on it for a few decades, until the demand is back, then we bulldoze everything and start over.”
There was a brief silence, then Nadine tapped a sock-clad foot on the ground as she pulled Rain tight to her. “What if the demand isn’t coming back, Emmy?”
“We can wait it out. What’s Bethany’s most recent guess?” My sister looked over at Claudia.
My darkest lover had a mouth full of nacho chips, but managed to choke something out after a few moments. “Five hundred, six hundred years maybe. She says the upward margin of error is—“
“—Huge.” I completed her sentence. “15226 said the exact same thing. Even she wasn’t sure how long we’d live, only ‘long’.”
“Well, okay. See? We can play a long-term game like nobody else can. We can sit on an investment for fifty years if we have to.”
“Em, the demand isn’t coming back because China isn’t. Without the anchor, the ship drifts away and eventually runs aground. Most of Southeast Asia will go with it, for that matter.” She shrugged. “I’ve been consolidating what I can into northern Africa, eastern Europe, a few other places…”
“You think it’s really that bad?” Nina raised an eyebrow. “I hadn’t been out that way in the past few years, but I can’t convince myself that the Balkans and the Sahara are the place to invest over China.”
“Like you said, Em. Long-term game.” Nadine tapped her temple. “I’m not looking at the Sahara and the Balkans as they are right now. Right now, they’re too much of a political quagmire for anyone to bother investing. Nobody could stabilize the place inside twenty or thirty years, and no investors are looking to play longer than that…” She smiled. “… except us.”
“Ehhh….” Nina and my sister seemed unconvinced. There was a brief lull in the conversation. I was buzzing on about three beers at the moment; at my size, it was the same effect as about one would have before I grew to my full hominus size.
I cleared my throat, setting my beer down on the endtable. “While we’re playing Illuminati…”
Nadine snorted. “Hardly. If we were the Illuminati, maybe we might have a shot in hell fixing this cluster-fuck of a world. I don’t see it happening. For any of us.” She let her mostly-empty beer dangle down in front of her, looking at my sister through its brown glass. “It’s kind of hard to invest in the future when—“
“There’s a future.” I shot her a glance, which she met coolly. Nadine’s cynical outlook was tempered by the other girls, but if she was left alone for long she could become quite morose. “Actually, I was going to ask for everyone’s help for an idea I had.”
I got a response in semi-unison from all of them—“Huh?”
It shouldn’t be surprising that they were taken aback. It was something of an unspoken rule that I stayed out of business. We all agreed I had no head for it; I was more the lover, counselor, and mascot to my industrious harem of girls than I was a bread-winner. 15226 hadn’t been clear if she expected me to take a leadership role or not, or if she’d even thought that far ahead. I was more than happy to let the experts – particularly Emily, Nina, and Nadine – take the reins almost all the time. This time, though, I felt the need to rise up and do something, both for myself, for them, and for everyone else out there.
I say that, but there was no way in hell I could’ve afforded it with the money I had. Even wisely invested, the fortune 15226 had left me was pennies compared to the scale of my plan. So here I was, asking for my girlfriends for the loan of the century. How very manly.
“It’s not a big secret that house-husband Ben hasn’t gotten off his ass for, oh, forty years…”
I was assaulted by a barrage of counter-arguments. “—It’s not like that, Ben—“
“—it’s fine with me if you stay on your ass—“
“—You better not want to stick your neck out again…”
“… how do I know I’m about to hear a terrible idea…”
I sighed. “Girls, I can’t possibly answer all that at once.”
Wren was the only one to respond, as she rolled the deep red wine in her glass around in circles, staring at me with a dark but curious look. “Tell us.”
“Thanks… this is a bit involved. And it’s a very long-term game.” I sat up, pulling Claudia up to my side and taking her in one arm as I prepared to sell them on this scheme of mine. “I was thinking – why aren’t we panicking? The reason we exist, the reason we were all created, is because a really fucking smart alien put it together that humanity isn’t going to save itself. There wasn’t anything she could do to save everybody; too little, too late, and she had other civilizations, other species who needed her expertise.”
They were all silent, so I continued. “I could tell it tore her up, because she really did like us. All she could do was make one male of her new human species, with a few tricks… and leave. But not before she gave us the Vault.” I took a long breath. “That’s the big thing. We have the Vault to go to if things go really south. 15226 was afraid of something she called an algae blackout, which could potentially wipe out anything that needs more than 5% oxygen in the air to survive – so basically everything bigger than a fruit fly. The Vault would keep us alive through that, until the world was habitable again.”
“Don’t tell me you want to take normal people into the Vault with us, Ben.” Nina shook her head. “It wouldn’t work. Even if the first generation were happy and grateful, if that algae blackout really happens, it could be two hundred years we’d be stuck in there. Would every generation be as grateful as their ancestors? Would they be able to control their population growth that long? Would we have the resources to feed ourselves and all the kids they decide to have for that long? How many generations before they turned on us?” She frowned. “It’s not easy, but it’s the bald truth of this thing. The Vault has to be for us alone.”
“I know that.” I nodded. “I know all of that. I agree. I might not have twenty, thirty years ago, but I see that now. Thing is… we’re thinking only in terms of what 15226 left us. We have an enormous amount of money, and power, and, well, except for me, we’re all pretty smart people.” Emily rolled her eyes, tired of my self-effacing style. I brushed past it. “We have Wren’s incredible technology and genius. We have the company. Most of all, we know what’s coming. We have decades and centuries to ourselves to think the problem through. All that isn’t enough to save the world – I know that – but what if we don’t try to save the whole world? What if we scale it down?”
Wren raised an eyebrow, perplexed. “You mean… build a second Vault?”
“Sort of.” I rocked my head from side to side. I folded my hands in front of me, leaning forward and composing my thoughts. “What’s the Vault? It’s just a very nice cave. It’s got a sealed environment, air recyclers, and an enormous amount of space, supplies, and food… but there’s nothing inside the Vault that we couldn’t do on our own.”
“At ridiculous expense…” Nadine cautiously added. “Ben, it would take a significant chunk of this country’s GDP to put together something like the Vault. It just won’t happen that easily.”
“Sure, if we did it the way she did it. But keep in mind 15226 also wanted to stay off the radar, and needed a ton of huge isolated spaces to conduct all the weird genetic experiments she had going on. We’re not up against the same limits 15226 was. We’ve got the money and resources to make use of a massive base of industrial power over years and years. I’m thinking, we keep the Vault for ourselves… but we give all our brothers and sisters out there a fighting chance. We equip one city to weather the absolute worst that the Earth could throw at it. We could even dome it over with Wren’s new carbon membrane stuff—“
Wren sounded doubtful. “Which is in no way ready and we can’t make anywhere near enough…“
I held out both hands. “… neither of which have to be fixed today or tomorrow. We don’t need this thing to be up and running right now, Wren, Nina, Nadine. We take our time, develop everything we need, and only begin laying the groundwork now. We fortify one city’s power grid with long-term sustainable energy. We give it large-scale water purification onsite, we include enough farmland or food plants or something that everyone can eat, we even find a way to let them make air for themselves to breathe. We look into ways we can seal it against the outside environment. We set it up with some kind of quarantine system to prevent some disease from killing them all.
“We can roll all this into some city somewhere, among all the other factories and whatever else is around, so that nobody notices – until things go south. Then we flick the switch and hand it all over to our brothers and sisters, and then – only then – do we jump into the Vault and wait out the end of the world.”
There was a long silence, as each of them digested the idea. It was all I could do to not grate my teeth in anticipation. I felt like some low-level functionary pitching an idea to the board of directors. The bottom line was that the girls really did have a far better head for money and power than I did – especially these three. They would know much better than I how feasible my little dream was. Slowly, all eyes turned toward the one person with the most power over the idea at that moment – Wren.
Wren thought for a while, pouting as her incredible mind burned through a dozen enormous problems in moments; it was only a best guess, but it was light-years beyond what the rest of us could come up with tonight. She let out a sigh, looking away. “It’s some science fiction horseshit, but it’s not impossible… just ludicrously expensive. It’s not something they’d ever put together on their own, either, not before it was too late. The economics are all against putting all that shit in one place. Who wants to live in a condo with ten thousand neighbors, stare at a nuke reactor across the street, and smell the sewage treatment plant out back? It makes no sense… unless it’s all you’ve got.”
“Well, that’s where we come in.” I shrugged. “We can get it all ready for them. And when – I mean if – the time comes, we flick the switch on, and hand the reins over to our brothers and sisters, and we say, hey, here’s your second chance; don’t worry about paying us back. Then we hop into the Vault, and we’ll know when we do it that at least we tried.
I waved a hand around. “Right now, the plan says that all the kids we have centuries down the line, when the normal human species would be dead and gone, that all we’d have to show them for history would be so many big-ass Wikipedia articles… some artifacts, some ruins, and lots of books and movies. None of that is going to compare to having the real thing, still alive and well, for them to learn from.” I gave a half-hearted shrug, letting the real reason behind all of it show for a moment. “Maybe we don’t have to just listen to them all die from inside our cave.”
“Which city do we use…” Nina folded her arms in front of her, furrowing her brow in thought. “There’s a shitton of variables to consider with this thing. Can’t be too close to sea level if the poles melt…” She thought to herself. “Or do we use an existing one at all?”
Nadine looked surprisingly permissive with the idea, and looked up as she thought to herself. “Gotta look into buying up all that heavy industry they’re abandoning in the Midwest and Japan…” She folded her arms. “Even if this works, though…”
“We can save a lot more animal and plant species this way, too. Biodiversity will be real important if we have to go back out into the world right after a mass extinction.” Rain nodded to herself. She had already found her part in this.
“I’m gonna need a bigger lab. Several.” Wren already looked excited. She lived for these kinds of challenges. “And I guess I’m going to have to finally knuckle under and recruit staff. I’ll need a few teams of PhDs, young ones who aren’t going to piss and moan every time I ask them to think outside the box. Oh, and they should be cute too…” She paused, rethinking. “Well, I shouldn’t get too picky.”
“I’ll help, Ben.” Claudia smiled, stroking one hand across my broad back. “I’m not Miss Moneybags or science-girl like any of these four, but I’ll help.”
“I’m not either, as well, so I guess we’re both equally qualified.” I shrugged. Claudia let out a quick laugh. In fact, I felt an incredible weight lifting off my chest – greater than I’d realized. Some kind of inner guilt had been festering over the years, ever since I settled down with Nadine and the rest; I began to realize just how incredible the gift 15226 had given me was. The thought of turning the flow of history away from disaster, even from the shadows where I’d never get the credit, was incredibly tempting.
The scale of the loss if she was right – if human civilization was in its final chapters – was only becoming clear to me in the past few years, and it was utterly staggering. Some nights, I couldn’t even sleep when I started thinking about it. Returning constantly to this idea of trying to save at least some nugget of humankind was what had rescued me from those dark thoughts. With it now on the table, and the girls supporting it, I felt an energy gathering inside me, ready to rise to the task. I had a new mission now, one that I could even table 15226’s mission for. This was paramount. This was destiny. This was the ultimate Right Thing To Do.
Or so I believed at the time.
Rain asked me once, centuries later, after the atmosphere was breathable again and we were lying on a secluded shore of western South America after making love, not far from where we built our first settlement – she asked, if I could do it all again, starting from this point in time, back in 2053, knowing how it ended, knowing it would split our people in two, would I still have begun Project Elysium? Was I naïve to think we could do what 15226 couldn’t?
Nobody can ever really answer these things; all I can say is, ‘probably’. I don’t think it was the wrong decision. I’m a lot less afraid of leadership now than I was then, and the project was the first time I really begin to find that in myself, so it did give me that. The question is really more about the value of our lives versus human lives, and about the price of the future. It’s something I’ll leave for the historians and philosophers to muddle through when I’m dead.
Emily sat up, and made her way over to me as the other girls got lost in thought. She knelt down in front of me and Claudia, staring me in the eyes. “How long has this thing been cooking up there?” She pointed a finger at my forehead.
“Four or five years… only with much seriousness in the past couple months, though.” I reached out and stroked her cheek. “I got the idea from this old comic book, actually. I found it in the basement.”
She snorted, and we all had a laugh. I slid one arm under Claudia’s midsection, pulling her to me, and feeling the swell of her pregnancy against my waist; I bent down to give her a kiss, then did the same for my sister, holding one girl in each arm. They seemed to be in a mood for more than kissing – soon, it was a three-way make-out, both girls pressing together near my face and kissing me as if they’d fallen in love all over again. I’d had no idea the thing would affect them this way.
I laid back and let those two go at it for a time, and soon felt probing fingers reaching beneath my pants and fishing something out. The sounds of languid female foreplay were filling the room, and a glance over to my side showed me Nadine and her daughter making out, Nadine having pulled Rain’s top off and cupping one breast, with Rain’s hand finding its way under her mother’s panties. Wren was stripping Nina quickly, in her normal, incongruous and rushed style of lovemaking. Nina, supple and lithe as she was, had little trouble tugging Wren’s articles of clothing off tit-for-tat, half of them likely without Wren noticing.
A few minutes later, Claudia – the only one left in the room wearing anything – was kneeling between my legs and sucking me, with occasional assistance from Emily – who was atop me in a sixty-nine position, her dark folds suspended above my head. They were taking their time, and fortunately I wasn’t rushed myself. Claudia’s lips slid up and down, along the sides and underside of my length, licking my balls and sucking me again, in a practiced and gentle motion that she knew would eventually elicit a mouth full of semen for her.
She rose up, and I was distracted from my idle licking of my sister’s clit long enough to realize she wasn’t going to be coming back. Emily shifted, and suddenly neither girl was teasing my cock. Looking around, I saw Wren and Nadine on either side of Rain, my daughter’s legs spread wide and her womanhood facing directly toward me. She was leaning back on the couch, nude, with her mother and our tattooed genius both kissing and licking at her face and breasts. Nadine turned toward me.
“Ben… I’ll give you as much help as you want… but there’s a condition.”
I smiled. “What would that be?”
Rain answered for her. “Time to put a baby in me, Daddy.”
I paused. I hadn’t expected this. I had no objection to it, of course, but after all this time, I’d assumed Rain didn’t want to bear a child. My cock stiffened further, in a way it only rarely did – twice in one day now, before being when I’d fucked my sister. Make my sister and my daughter pregnant in the same day?
I got up and walked over toward them, my hard dick pointing out in front of me, and came down on one knee before her; lying back as she was, she was still lower down than me. I slid two hands underneath her ass, pulling her a little closer to the couch’s edge, and met her eyes. “Rain, you want this?”
“Yeah… I thought I’d be okay with just playing around all this time… but I want more.” She smiled. “Emily giving in pushed me over, too. I want a daughter, okay?”
I shrugged. “Well, that part is out of my hands. What would I call a daughter by my daughter… we’re going to need a new dictionary.”
A prophetic comment…
Before she could respond, I’d begun to push my length inside her, eliciting a gasp from her and coos of fascination and delight from the girls around her. Emily and Nadine paired off on one side, and Wren with Claudia on the other, neither couple forgetting to tease and assist my daughter as she accepted my cock. Occasional licks to her breasts, kisses, and teasing touches kept her constantly stimulated; my own joining in was almost an afterthought. I sank my cock in as deep as it would go, and gripped her waist with both hands, intending to fuck her raw. I knew the other girls would help on her clit as she came close. I slid my hips out, then back, and before I knew it, I was pounding her.
Our eyes met, and I could see something new in them, a kind of love that was more than just playful as Rain had always been. There was a side of her she kept private from all but her mother, and only now was I being allowed in. My hips moved now of their own volition, leaving my mind to wander briefly through a world of emotion and bonding with her; Rain was more than just a daughter to me, had always been, but this was special. I was watching her change before my eyes, to admit a new part of herself into her own thoughts.
Her smallish breasts jiggled despite their size, from the hard fucking she was being subjected to. Both nipples glistened with the saliva of the other girls from the kisses she’d received on them. A wandering hand – her mother’s, of course – found her clit, and took on a rapid side-to-side motion as she knew Rain preferred. There was no teasing, no denial, just a push directly toward pleasure. She knew I wasn’t going to hold back or slow down, and she wanted Rain to come – hard.
I felt the small, tugging pulsations around my cock as my daughter came quietly, squinting her eyes shut and trembling. She went through a series of minor twitches and convulsions, arching her back as her pussy spasmed around my pole. It was enough to trigger my eruption – I felt my balls churn, and life-making seed poured from inside me into her womb. I groaned aloud, burying myself to the hilt one last time and letting my cock pump away, fertilizing her.
The sight sent the other girls into some kind of spiral of pleasure, and not long after I’d withdrawn my wilting cock from Rain, who was herself only just then recovering from her long orgasm, the other girls began to moan aloud – mostly into one another’s pussies, as both pairs had reverted to sixty-nines. A dribble of my white semen emerged from Rain’s folds, where she laid back with her legs spread wide, without a thought of modesty. Our eyes met again where I sat back, leaning against the coffee table, catching my breath; it was done, I had made my daughter pregnant. Somehow, I knew it probably wasn’t the only time I’d do it too. The fact that both of us seemed to find it so natural and not at all strange was another testament to how much 15226 had altered the human instincts once found in all of us.
An hour later, Rain had dozed off to sleep right there on the spot. The other girls had gone off to their own places. I reached beneath the table and found a large, heavy blanket, and threw it atop her; I snuggled it up around her whole body, the way she liked, and heard someone coming back in. Nadine, dressed again, came over to my side, and kissed her daughter, once on the forehead, then once quickly on the lips – being careful not to wake her. She rose up with me, and took my hand. We went over to the armchair opposite the couch Rain was on, and she sat down in my lap, wrapping one arm behind my neck, and leaned her head on my shoulder. We both stared at Rain for a time, admiring her beauty. She kissed my cheek again.
I glanced over at Nadine. “What was it you were going to say before?”
“Hmm?”
“Before. About my idea. You said ‘even if this works, though…’?”
“Oh.” She paused, frowning, then glanced up at me. “It’s a good idea, and I’ll help you.”
“Just tell me.” I took a lock of her red hair and stroked it. “I don’t want this to be Ben’s Dumb Idea. You, Em, and Nina are the big three players here, but you especially. You know big projects like this much better than I do. Of course I want to know what you think.”
“It’s not that we can’t build it…” She shook her head. “We can’t build a shelter to protect people from being themselves, though.”
“People can learn. I learned, and if I can, then anyone can. We can show them how to live a better way.”
She smiled at me. “Sounds like fun.”
I’d do it all over again.
Probably.