Humanity, 2.0
YEAR 088, DAY 105
“Paradise.” I shielded my eyes with one hand, looking out over the tremendous expanse of granite and ice, then shrugged with one shoulder as I turned back to Claudia. “You know. Give or take maybe one or two thousand years. Call it two.”
A light, freezing wind blew around us both, bone-dry; for all the ice, the place was technically a desert. No snowstorms to blind us or hail to pelt us up here. The interior of Greenland wasn’t exactly a welcoming environment, but it did have a sort of beauty all its own—and it was fun to let my imagination fill in the details, wondering what sort of place this would be if the massive climate shift Claudia predicted came to pass… well, don’t tell her I said ‘if’.
Claudia only gave a half-hearted smile as she continued to operate ultrasonic machine, taking readings of who knew what below us. She didn’t even respond, instead giving more of a quiet mumble—to herself more than anyone. “Lots of pitchblende… probably an old peat bog up above it. They’d kill for this if they knew.”
Even now, I still found myself easily entranced by her Oxford-accented, soft-yet-throaty voice. I sometimes wondered if it was the only real reason I’d recruited her; at the time it seemed utterly criminal to let a normal human lifespan rob me of ever hearing it again after a few scant decades. Had the fact that she was actually a brilliant, original thinker who could keep anyone guessing really been the first and foremost in my mind when I first pushed my cock into this beautiful, dark woman—knowing it would change her forever?
There was no visual display on any of her equipment; she’d long since surpassed the need for it. Claudia wasn’t Rain, but she knew her way around technology—and no hominus was as inept as I when it came to electrophoric interface. She had taken off her gloves for a few minutes to run her long and slender fingers over first the ultrasound rig, then on the thin wafer-shaped thing that apparently served as her personal computer and assistant. Taking more readings, recording everything, adding to the body of data.
Claudia was as beautiful as any of the girls, but she had a unique allure all her own. The decades hadn’t robbed her of that, nor of the garish—yet gorgeous—colors and beadwork she favored in her clothes. Mixed Okinawan and Australian Aborigine descent yielded a smooth, very dark, and supple body—athletic and incredibly limber, and her trademark haircut was now only visible as two shimmering black tresses with a variety of colorful beadwork dangling on the ends. Both currently framed her her handful-sized, perfectly shaped breasts.
Sadly, the breasts in question were were well-hidden by her parka. Even the thick and bulky pink, orange, and turquoise outfit she wore couldn’t hide her beauty, though it did make a worthy effort. She turned back to me, apparently finished as she had the ultrasound rig folding itself up again, and stood. I tried not to get lost in her deep blue eyes again.
“On to the next site.” She nodded to the east… at least I think it was east. The sun was the other way and it was late afternoon, but this far north, nothing worked the way you thought it would. On the one horizon was a few spots of green, but mostly ice and stone, with a distant hint of an ocean; on the other horizon, only an endless mass of icepack. We were meandering along on the edge of the thick plate of ice concealing much of Greenland; Claudia thought it the best way to scan for her quarry.
I gave a half-hearted shrug. “Guessing the stuff wasn’t here either.”
She glanced at me over her shoulder as we set out again, giving me a brief frown before hoisting her gear and attaching the folded ultrasound rig to the side of her bag. I hadn’t put my gear down the whole time, and as the designated pack mule of our duo, I was carrying three times what she was. After walking around with it so long, it made me a little dizzy to take it off for a while.
I had changed my look, much like how Claudia changed hers—though I did so less often. Now, I wore all deep red, with white stripes, and a pair of ski goggles with a yellow reflection to repel the sun’s glare. Underneath the hood covering my head was my new pride and joy; Emily had rolled her eyes when I asked if it would look good, but I’d proven her wrong to hell and back—though only if you asked me
My dreadlocks were tied up and covered with a wool cap for the moment, but later tonight I’d let them down and let them flail about as I fucked Claudia raw. Of the first nine, she was the most energetic in bed, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
“Not ‘the’ stuff, no.” She pursed her lips. “This was always going to be a low-yield site, though. The real treasure will be further north. Besides, there’s another big uranium deposit under us right now, that’ll actually be pretty easy to get to once the ice is gone. That alone makes the trip worth it, let alone all the other stuff we found. Just the knowledge by itself is worth a small chunk of a decent national GDP.”
I didn’t ask which country she meant… hopefully not one of those in Micronesia with a population of fourteen or something. Just this month on our little arctic adventure, we’d found two new species of dinosaurs, three major uranium deposits, a possible diamond mine, and more oil than we’d ever really need—yeah, Greenland was a nice place, I guess, if you could get past the whole ‘frozen wasteland’ thing.
According to Claudia’s climate model, which even Wren and Sasha deferred to, the ice sheet covering it all would melt in about three to five hundred years—leaving a set of three large islands with an absolutely enormous supply of natural resources just waiting for some enterprising variant of the human race to gorge themselves on. Only problem was, we weren’t sure if there would still be a human race around by then.
The resources we’d found so far weren’t the real prize. We could have mapped all that with an aerial drone fleet launched from our Iceland facility without sparing more than a few days’ time. What had convinced Claudia to trek her actual person out here, to one of the few remaining untouched-wilderness areas of the Earth—and also one of its least hospitable locations—was the possibility that, buried under and within the ice, were heavy concentrations of helium-three.
How exactly they decided a lot of it may be buried here—or according to Claudia, inevitably had to be—was complicated. I actually thought I had a decent understanding of the theory at the time, but I won’t drag the whole thing past you. Solar wind, the Borealis, unique mineral and magnetic patterns under Greenland, blah blah. She thought the place had more of the ideal fusion fuel than what might be found on the entire rest of the Earth altogether.
I shifted the massive weight of the pack I wore, letting out a long breath of air—then watching its grey-white mist vanish in front of me near-instantly. I set out again, two steps behind her; our spiked boots crunched through the snow and ice, occasionally finding purchase on stone as we zigzagged down the side of a crevasse, then up the other. The sun kept doing its sideways thing that it likes to do way up north, confusing the hell out of my instincts.
It was easy, I found, to stop thinking too much when I was out in places like this. Not those filled with wildlife—the jungle, the beach, the ocean, places like those triggered too many primal instincts. Fight or flight, the hunt for food, keeping an eye out for the predators of the savannah that might take my food—or hunt me as food—it lit up all kinds of little red lights in my brain that I’d taken decades to become accustomed to.
Out here, in a near-lifeless expanse of stone, thoughts could become… something else. Ethereal, intangible, undefined and airy. It was the state of mind I needed. That was why I’d decided to come along on Claudia’s little trek, though she was fully capable of doing everything she needed herself. Well, that and I didn’t want to think about her spending three months in the snow with no cock for her to ride within a hundred miles; when we finally got her back to civilization she’d be loopy.
I needed the solitude and raw, inhospitable nature of this place to find something in myself. My recovery after the first encounter with Naglfar had taken the better part of two years; the damage done to my nervous system had been extensive. The ghilmen didn’t seem to care how much they fucked up the rest of me, as long as they got what they wanted—the specialized neuro-bundle that 15226 had bestowed on me, that gave me a limited form of mind control.
That ability was gone now. I could still remember using it, though how I did it was… hazy, like remembering how to use a third arm I’d never had. It had become so natural and easy to do over the decades that I often used it on my girls without even thinking; it was only once it was torn out of me that I began to understand how losing it would hurt me.
Reaching out and touching another person’s desires, poking and jostling them in a particular direction… it had been so damn much fun to just turn on two random, completely straight women to one another and watch the hijinks ensue. There were plenty of other uses, of course, but that particular one I had especially fond memories of.
Who knew what Naglfar was using it for; it certainly wasn’t for sex. The monster didn’t care about that in the least. We had managed to evade Naglfar and its ghilmen for more than thirty years now, though with its attention fully occupied on playing mercenary in the many ongoing wars of the world that wasn’t especially difficult. It didn’t really care about us, I think. It had gotten what it wanted, and maybe it just left us alive in case it wanted more from us down the line.
Some of our DNA was integral to how it worked, we knew that much—but how, exactly, was a complete mystery. The few experimental facilities and data we’d managed to recover from the research that brought it about were too damaged or degraded to figure out how exactly our nature had been twisted and abused enough to produce the abomination that Naglfar was.
Without my sexual power, which had replaced our kind’s normal affinity for our electrophoridae and interfacing with both machines and one another, I was—theoretically—now capable of the same use of our specialized electrical organs as any other hominus. Bethany assured me that absolutely nothing stood in the way, biology- or neurology-wise. I had all the same potential as the rest of our kind.
The problem was mental. The problem was me. Bethany, at least, had been kind enough not to dance around telling me the results of her tests. More than a decade had gone by since her last complete neuro-scan and clean diagnosis, and I had virtually no progress to show. I couldn’t even control a lightswitch with my mind. I was being left behind by my own wives and children. They assured me a thousand times over that that wasn’t the case, but I damn sure felt like it.
Miles and miles went by as we trekked in silence. Claudia knew me well enough to know I wasn’t ignoring her. I hadn’t hid the reason I’d come here from her; she’d figure it out quickly enough anyway. Keeping secrets from my girls was typically an exercise in futility. I was just… taking it all in. Minimizing my own mind and thoughts and just moving across the empty world, trying to find whatever it was in me that kept me from being what I was supposed to be… or was I?
Despite my attempts to concentrate, I often found my attention wandering from the grey stone, lichen, snow, and ice—to a whole another kind of scenery. Claudia’s ass didn’t quite sway the way I found the most sexy… she wasn’t wearing a snug-fitting long dress and flats, walking just in front of me and knowing all the while what I wanted to do to her… but then, she was carrying fifty pounds of pack and bundled up in extreme-cold-weather gear. It didn’t make for a very erotic sight, even if her body was sexy enough to be appealing even practically waddling across the frozen wastes wrapped in a sleeping bag.
My imagination could easily fill in the details; underneath those garish neon-orange pants she wore, was her smooth, bubble ass—taut and begging to be grabbed. I think I saw her put on a yellow bra and panties in the morning, but I could be wrong. I wanted to tear them off and fuck that tight, dark pussy—maybe after I gave her a good tongue treatment to that Neapolitan flavor of pink-strawberry and chocolate she kept hidden between her legs.
At some point, my eyes still fixed on her ass, we stopped. I almost bumped into her, turn glanced up to see her striking blue eyes meeting mine—and a look of concern on her face.
“You’ve been staring at my ass for the past two hours, Ben.” There was another gust of wind, obscuring her last few words, but I could hear well enough with my bat-derived ears; another of 15226’s countless gifts. “If you want to fuck, just say. You know I don’t—”
“I… hey, umm, sure… wait… I don’t even know.” I shook my head, blinking. “Listen, sorry… I…”
“Sorry about what? Staring at my ass?” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s been thirty years since you last apologized for that. Don’t start now. I’m here for the taking, Ben. You don’t need to give me a reason.” She took a step closer, and I felt an automatic and natural response in my cock—to a woman, giving herself to me—but my heart and mind weren’t quite there yet. It would be fucking just for the sake of clearing my head, mechanical and boring… something I’d learned not to indulge. It made things… tasteless. Claudia looked concerned. “What’s wrong?”
“It isn’t that.” I looked down at her, feeling—yes, even feeling myself salivating, like I was staring at some choice meal. Perhaps I was mistaken… maybe I really wanted her, right here and now. The hunger for taking and fucking was there, growling underneath it all, demanding I claim Claudia again. The fact that she’d just flatly told me that I could do it any time I want wasn’t helping me tame the beast. I put my hands on her shoulders. “I… well, didn’t come here just to say I fucked a girl in the tundra.”
“This isn’t a tundra.” Claudia said it flatly, and met my glare with an even stare. “This is a full-on desert. Only lichen out here. You and I are the only real animal life for two hundred klicks, except for a few kinds of insects.” She suddenly was wrapping herself around me, her face nuzzling into my neck and chin. Even at six feet tall, she was still dwarfed by my raw dimensions. I found an arm wrapping around her back in return. “Set up the tent.”
“We don’t have to. There’s another two hours until time.”
“I’m the expedition leader.” Claudia looked up at me. “I’m calling a break. You’re in another of your moods. Set up the tent and get ready to fuck and suck.” She winked. “I have just the idea to get you out of it.”
I raised an eyebrow at the last, but let it be. If she’d wanted to clarify, she would have; likely she thought whatever it was, would work better if I didn’t know. I dropped my back, bearing with the dizziness even as my cock stiffened further and stole more blood from my brain that it really needed at the moment. This wouldn’t be simple, mechanical fucking. She was feeling the passion rise inside, I could tell—and I was too.
Soon that—and the tightness I felt from my growing erection—was downright uncomfortable, and pushing the bounds of my heavy snow pants. I could feel each and every micron of the elastic fiber of my boxer briefs as they fought, with limited success, to hold back my stiffening pole. It occurred to me as I set down my gear and extracted our folding tent that I was pitching a tent in two ways at the same time.
Preparing the tent was easy; it was mostly a self-completing task. Place it flat on the ground, with the big-ass yellow ‘THIS SIDE UP’ text on the side that’s facing up. Clear the space, then slap the bright red button. Wait about twenty seconds while the thing unfolded itself neatly, then fasten down the pitons at the six corners of its hexagon shape… soon we had a car-sized dome tent—complete with an insulated floor.
I reached inside long enough to attach the lamp to the central mount hanging above the middle of the thing, both light source and heat source for the whole contraption. It had all become rote over the past few weeks, as we spent every night in the barren wilderness of Greenland—and my body had figured out that this particular series of actions seemed to inevitably result in wild, animal sex afterward. My cock’s Pavlovian response to setting up the tent was excruciating; it wanted so much to fuck and come inside a tight, dark pussy, but Claudia wasn’t climbing in with me.
I glanced over, frowning as she took another measurement with her ultrasound rig, its four dome-shaped feet spread out evenly on the ice. One ungloved hand was resting atop the chrome exterior of its central chamber, and suddenly she bolted upright. I waited a few moments, and her face was still turned away; slowly she crouched again, touched the machine, then she must have commanded it to fold up again. She stowed it next to her pack.
I tried not to let an ounce of impatience into my voice. “Getting in this thing and stripping, then letting you open the door again to get inside, is kind of—”
“I know.” She walked up to me, then took me by the hand and led me inside as we both ducked. We sealed up the entrance, then followed the fun little ritual that had evolved over our weeks here—stripping each other bare of the multiple and complex elements of our cold-weather gear.
The heat lamp illuminating the space was a powerful little thing, and had already heated the place up considerably; within a minute or two, it would surely be downright balmy inside. We’d picked up the deluxe version of the thing specifically so our tent would be comfortable to sleep naked within—after the inevitable good and hard fuck that left us both sweaty. Nothing else would do for our kind.
Rolled beds that I’d thrown in before we entered were hastily unfurled, and moments later I was treated to the sight of her bare breasts as I quickly stripped off the yellow—my memory was right!—athletic bra that she’d had on. Instantly I suckled on one almost-black nipple, then the other, feasting on her chocolate orbs and letting their warmth leak into my lips and cheeks that had only kissed freezing air since this morning.
She paused for a time, simply breathing heavily as I laved her large nipples—making a few fleeting attempts to get her pants and panties off in the meantime. She managed neither, and I had to help her pluck her boots off before we both gleefully pulled away her pants, then her panties, leaving her utterly nude and beautiful. I could make out the barest hint of pink inside her folds, along with the glistening hint of readiness.
At some point my undershirt had come off, but she had to undo my pants then belt to get at the cock that had been fighting so hard to be free. I immediately gasped—first as it hit the cool air, then again as it was enveloped by a far more warm, welcoming environment. Claudia’s mouth and tongue accepted my stiff length, almost instantly taking me deep and warming me down to the base. Her incredible ability to hold her breath also translated to an equally incredible ability to deep-throat even an enormous cock like my own, which was especially welcome in the cold.
I became naked at some point along the way, and laid out flat on the joined sleeping bags that we shared. My cock vanished again and again inside her dark lips, knowing blue eyes staring at me the whole time. Warm fingers found my balls, kneading and massaging the things to prepare them with the biggest and heaviest load possible. I wasn’t sure if it was our activity or the lamp, but the tent was definitely heating up and it was no longer the least bit uncomfortable to be naked.
There was an urgency I felt, though I couldn’t be sure why. I had to fuck her, before I got too lost in her blowjob. Turning her around and putting her on all fours, she sensed my plan and lowered her upper body to a bedroll, wiggling her ass enticingly. My target was on open display.
She seemed surprisingly delicate when my hands took hold of her hips; even as tall as she was, all of the girls were much smaller than me. I pushed myself firmly inside her bit by bit, savoring her long groan as her body slowly adjusted to my size. It was just low and loud enough that I could feel the sound with my cock as well, adding a nice extra sensation to our fucking.
I was going to be a little rough. She wouldn’t mind. I picked up the pace quicker than usual, bending down on one knee and pumping in and out of her quickly. Her taut ass had just a tiny bit of bounce as I fucked her, and I felt her breasts doing the same with my free hand.
“Ahh… more, faster… ahhh…” She’d turned her head, and our eyes met. “Ben… oh yess… fuck my pussy, it’s yours… I’m yours… use me!”
She was talking a little odd, but I couldn’t ignore how hot it made me. This wasn’t a side of Claudia I knew too well. Still, I took the invitation—my pleasure was her pleasure, and she wanted to see me fuck her to my heart’s content. I stroked in and out, paying attention to little other than the simmering bliss building inside me.
It erupted slowly, telegraphed by my loud groaning and the lusty expression on her face as she realized her lover was coming inside her. The girls’ bodies were just sensitive enough to actually feel the ropes of my semen as they coated her inner place and marked her once again as one of my many women. My beautiful wives.
When it had subsided, I laid down alongside her. She had a wide, beaming smile now—her innocent joy was hard to resist. I kissed her, pulling the double-sized sleeping bag’s cover over us. I wrapped both arms around her squirming body as she cuddled up tight, rubbing her thighs over me. The tantalizing hint of her hot and wet sex threatened to make me hard again.
I wasn’t quite up for another fuck right then—a long day of trekking across the wilderness can do a number on even a fit hominus’ joints. Still, even if I could tell she was fine mentally with just me having fucked her so hard, I knew her body wasn’t satisfied. I could feel it in the way she was running her hands, legs, her entire person on me; she was practically in heat after what we’d done.
Instead of fucking her again, I turned her around, pulling her toward me as I sat up. The sleeping bag rested about my shoulders, partly covering us both save for an open front—just enough for me to see what my hands were doing. The only sounds now were her quiet, sigh-like breathing, and the slippery noises of my fingers on—and in—her body.
One hand cupped a breast, kneading it and tweaking the perfect little nipple on it, and the other was at her sex, gently exploring her and reaching her clit. Two fingers fucked her, and she turned her head; our eyes met and we kissed again, this time as I played her like a musical instrument. When our kiss broke, the metaphor became a bit more literal; the sounds she was making were in perfect tune to my ministrations.
She came on my hand, soaking it with feminine love, and kissed me again before she was finished. I could feel the minute muscle pulses inside her as the orgasm washed through her, making her whole body go stiff, then tremble. I could feel the tenseness gradually leaving her as the pleasure diminished, and held her the whole time. We were still spooned when we laid down together and pulled the bag once again over top us—just before I tuned down the heat lamp a bit for bed-time.
Under normal circumstances, I’d find the sun would awaken me. Decades of my lifestyle had made me accustomed to living by the wild instincts 15226 had enhanced in me; I didn’t want to be one of those people who always got up at six in the morning and followed a mindless routine. It simply wasn’t natural for me.
Unfortunately, this far north of the equator—even near the summer equinox—Greenland was not forgiving to either those who lived by rote, or those who lived off the cuff. The damn sun decided it ought to stay up all night. Maybe it did that just to piss me off?
I awoke, got close enough to consciousness to realize that the ball of hydrogen and helium was taunting me, and dozed off again—almost half a dozen times, before Claudia awoke me fully. She did it with a deep kiss, crawling up my body underneath the thick satin covers and making sure I felt every micron of her sexy, smooth, and well-built body against mine. Did she intend for me to go another whole day of trekking without a hard fuck, or would she give herself to me again now, in the morning, before we set out?
Sure enough, Claudia’s treatment had cleared my mind. The hunger to learn more, to be more was there still… but sated with a different kind of meal, the pleasures of Claudia’s body. He’d be good for half a day, maybe. For good measure, though, I soon found a warm mouth wrapped around my cock; Claudia’s good-morning blowjob, a slowly moving mass underneath the sleeping bag. She rested between my legs, only a few fidgets betraying the fingers she had working her dark little clit as she sucked me.
There was no denial, no retreats before reaching the peak. She simply compelled me to orgasm beyond her welcoming lips. When it came, it was incredible as always; a rush of pleasure and excitement, flooding her mouth with my potent semen and sensing her throat working hard to swallow every gulp of it. Bethany sometimes joked about my come being a decent three to five percent of the girls’ diet, and that if I stepped things up then they could all go vegan and still get their full daily value of protein.
We wouldn’t be hominus if Ben Stanton wasn’t the designated cook. It’s probably the only consistent role I’ve owned across all three of the grand chapters of my life; then, too, I soon was sitting cross-legged—still nude, as was Claudia—in front of the small heat-plate that we’d brought, preparing us my special clam chowder. No, not that kind of clam chowder; I’m referring to the genuine article. She’d already had a serving of that today, and there would be more later.
Our meal went by quietly; I couldn’t help but let my eyes fix on Claudia’s dark nipples as she scooped up spoonful after spoonful of the semen-colored stuff. A bit dripped down off her spoon, landing on her breast, and my mind instantly flashed to a scene not even an hour ago when my load had been a bit too much for her to handle—that’s what happens after a hard day of trekking—and leaked from her lips down onto the dark skin of her breast, standing out clearly.
Just as the bit of extra come I’d gifted her earlier, she dabbed it up with a finger and sucked it into her mouth—giving me a wicked smile all the way. I grinned, but only let my erection get to half mast. We had work to do. Another few minutes later, and we were dressed, bundled up in our gear and getting out. The cold bit into what little exposed skin of my face showed, but it wasn’t too uncomfortable. Refreshing, even. I stowed the tent as Claudia did a few final checks on her equipment, then we resumed our day.
The sun couldn’t have cared less; it still meandered about the horizon, unable to decide it was coming or going. He really made for a total jackass; I was once again glad that 15226 hadn’t placed the Vault near one of the poles. I’d have gone nuts in the first decade of the anoxic years. We continued north, keeping up a hard pace; Claudia didn’t seem interested in taking more scans for the time being. Ten miles, twenty—then before I knew it, we’d made a solid thirty and change. My legs were apparently still attached, according to what my eyes told me, though I couldn’t quite tell otherwise.
Claudia set out her gear at an otherwise unassuming location; it was at the foot of a small, stony hill. The only upside was that the hill broke the worst of the wind, giving me a few minutes’ respite as she laid its steel feet out in a careful tripod pattern and touched the top with an ungloved hand, giving it some kind of instructions. An almost imperceptible hum began to sound as the machine went to work.
I had sat down atop my pack, laid out flat upon a nearby lichen-encrusted stone. There was what might have been a small brook once, a stony ravine with a few dribbles of ice forever stuck at its center—and a few hints of greenish lichen and even a few hardy plants peeking through, grabbing whatever excuse for sunlight they could find. Up the few hundred feet of the hill, I could see mostly the same, save for the peak which was all ice. The sky was clear, only filaments of cirrus visible, though the sun’s eternal dusk-dawn had colored everything orange.
Claudia’s palm rested atop the thing for a time, and she seemed especially focused—her brow was furrowed. Perhaps she’d found something… or not. Wouldn’t have been the first false alarm this trip. I brushed clear a nearby stone and sat down on it, looking at the far sea and thinking for a time.
There was plenty of thinking to be done, especially lately. Naglfar might have been focused on playing its role of some kind of cyber-mercenary force in the three major theaters of war in the world, but we had no illusions as to its real intent. It cared nothing for humans, or us for the matter; it only asked for resources in exchange for enemy bodies instead of money, which our best guesses said it simply found to be a more practical way of acquiring things like ceramic-polymer plates, rare earths, delicate electronics, and other complex manufactured goods than simply taking them at gunpoint… or worse.
We would have to carefully hide our knowledge of even these newest geological findings from the cyborg monstrosity. Fortunately, we had no indication that it had made any progress on breaking our encryption. I couldn’t even pretend to understand the way our particular flavor of it worked; apparently three small particle accelerators around the globe were involved somehow.
“Set up the tent.” Claudia’s voice broke me out of my trance, though I could see she hadn’t let go of the ultrasound machine at the moment. I shrugged and set to work, preparing the black and blue thing once again, in a series of motions now almost a ritual. A few minutes later, it was fully set up and the lantern was warming up the interior.
“What’s under there today?” I asked aloud, if she’d even answer.
A time went by, then she finally let her hand off the machine. It began to fold itself up again, and she stood, still facing away. Finally, she turned to me. “Ben, how deeply have you tried to link with any of the other girls?”
“Huh?” I blinked. “Uhh, tried or succeeded?”
“Tried.”
“As deeply as possible. As not-deeply as possible.” I shrugged. “None of it works.”
She tilted her head. “Have you tried it upside-down?”
I paused for a moment, wracking my brain as for what she could possibly mean. Rain had invented a whole lexicon of terms that largely escaped me.
“Uh, I think so.” Was that when we tried it literally upside-down? Or was it when we tried to connect through… other parts of ourselves, than the hands or the head? Maybe it was like some kind of sixty-nine or something…
“So you haven’t tried it then…” Claudia sounded strangely excited.
I raised an eyebrow. “C, what did the ultrasound find?”
“About fourteen kilotons of helium-three. Some signs of a lot more further toward the center.” She shrugged with one shoulder. “Only the motherlode. Power for centuries. Millenia. I kind of expected it to be around here… but it’s still good to know… though it got me thinking. I just found what I’m here looking for; what about you?”
I could only stare at her for a few moments—what she was saying was incredibly important, yet I couldn’t get my mind off what she was implying after that. She’d just located enough fusion fuel to last the hominus race well past my own lifetime, even at the upper edge of Bethany’s latest estimates. Even in the worst-case scenario—an uninhabitable Earth for over six hundred years—my children would still have a head start as soon as they emerged from the Vault.
“What’s that?” I shrugged, wondering what it was that she thought I was here for. I hadn’t shared it—specifically, anyway.
“What the rest of us are thinking about.” She gave a sly grin. “All your sons are getting into girls’ heads, and even vice versa. You’re thinking—you’re missing out. Falling behind, or something.” She was up close now, finding her way onto my lap. “You think you already know because 1256 zap—”
“15226…” I sighed.
“—15226 zapped you into thinking you do… but you only know what she thought. What an alien thought. You want to know what your living, hominus girls think. What really makes them tick, no filters or judgments. How me, Bethany, Nina, Nadine, even your sister—how our heads work. You don’t just want to love us. You want to accept us completely, to touch our souls… or whatever you want to call it.”
I was silent. She was dead on, of course. The whole predicate of the way the hominus race was supposed to work—I understood now—was that we could overcome the barriers of mutual understanding that normal humans were simply not equipped to do.
Evolution had had no reason to gift them with 15226’s incredibly complex set of alterations—because evolution was there only to help the species survive in the wild, savage environment they’d once been native to. It worked over the scale of millions of years—and once humans lived in a technological civilization, the selective force of evolution couldn’t hope to work fast enough to produce beings capable of building a truly lasting society.
“It’s time for something special, Ben.” She smiled, then kissed me. Wrapping her arms around me and pressing the side of her face to mine, she whispered. “I’m going to break open your shell tonight. The others can’t see what you need, but I can… or maybe they did, and they’re just not willing to go as far as I am. I love you, Ben. Body and soul. I’d do anything to see you happy.” She gave me a beatific smile, then another kiss. “Get in the tent.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. Whether or not this worked, I was more than willing to fuck Claudia any time, and somehow I just knew that whatever she had planned involved my cock being pushed inside her and—in time, erupting… possibly several times. Something had gotten into her and she wanted to fuck and suck for the next few hours at least… I already knew. She probably planned to do something else the whole time too, but a black inner doubt wiped away my wonders of what she wanted, what would happen if she succeeded.
Minutes later, she and I were once again inside, the door sealed and the air warming up—and whole swathes of the heavy, insulating clothing that was protecting Claudia’s naked body from the cold being stripped away. I suppose mine was being shucked too, but my mind was elsewhere; I could only focus on suckling her dark nipples. One, then the second, then first, then the second, then the first, then the second…
She was holding my face with both hands, looking into my eyes suddenly. “How submissive were Rain, Bethany, Nina, and the others… you know, when you were fucking them as part of the training process?”
I blinked, then answered between long breaths as I continued to give my love to her nipples. “Uhh… wait, submissive? They didn’t seem… I mean, if anything… I was trying to submit. To learn, uh, whatever. Didn’t work.” I gave a shrug. “We tried other ways for a while, but there was so much else to do—”
“Of course it didn’t work.” She sighed, giving her breasts the most lovely bounce as her nipples tried—and failed—to escape my lips and tongue. “They weren’t thinking the right way. I’m guessing the real way to get through to you is exactly the way you’re used to.” She smiled down at me, and I looked up at her—her expression was odd. I raised an eyebrow, despite the hardness of my cock and the scant inches it was away from her center.
“So you know the secret, huh?” Nina and Rain both had decided they knew the secret of unlocking my potential—several times, actually, in the past decade. None of it did anything. A part of me was so tired of the whole endeavor that it just wanted to move on, to just accept that I was an intermediate step between human and hominus. I’d always have an honored place, I knew. I should just accept that I was meant to bring about the hominus—that I wasn’t truly hominus myself.
“The secret… is a girl with no defenses at all. A girl submitting herself to you totally, the way you’re used to from using your old power.” She looked down into my eyes, an odd expression boring into my soul—yet somehow, not being hostile at all. Instead, I felt a… oneness, with Claudia. Something about her was evaporating, being subsumed—but by what?
The head of my cock was just touching her then, and I sensed the reality of it just as I entered her body. Claudia was giving up something fundamental—something even Rain and Emily, my own flesh and blood, hadn’t quite managed. She was forcibly removing the final barrier between the electrophoridae and her true, inner person.
She was giving herself to me, utterly and completely. It meant far more than just allowing me to take charge in bed—or even in life as a whole. I could feel something happening—naturally, easily… yet much more complex than anything I’d ever experienced. My will was extending into hers, over and through it as she retreated and left her entire being unprotected. Before I knew it, I was totally immersed in her—becoming a single person in two bodies.
Every inch of her skin on mine, every tiny sensation as some automated routine took over while I suckled at her dark nipple—all of it was as much me as it was her. It was an incredible experience, being two people at once… and knowing that the whole of her was mine to command. Before I could even think it, she had spread her legs wide and offered her inner self—that dark-yet-pink pussy on open display, and my cock sinking inside moments later. She—we, really—gasped, as I entered.
I wasn’t simply in control of her body. Claudia was surrendering far more to me than that. Perhaps it was the only way to show me, the only bridge by which my nervous system—so used to power and control, not used to give-and-take or sharing and joining—could truly understand the link that two hominus could share.
If I wanted to just then, I could have completely rewritten who Claudia was. I could have made her a brainless cheerleader, or an automaton focused only on scientific research… I could have remade her completely, from the ground up. It was as easy as changing myself—or much easier, actually. Changing oneself could be surprisingly difficult. Changing another person, when you had access to their most core thoughts as right now—terrifyingly easy.
Despite my inner fears, I delved further. Human, hominus—we all have secrets; Claudia was no exception. She even kept a little mental list of her worse sins from her life before me, which she went over in her darker moments; she wasn’t entirely convinced we were really any different from the previous species aside from our enhanced bodies.
There was more, which I was helpless to ignore as I let her whole being fuse with mine for a time. The nasty little things about herself that she didn’t want to accept—she’d seen a shootout once, in the streets of Manila in her youth, and before she knew it, two men were bleeding to death on the street not ten feet away from her.
She’d been consumed by fear and panic, and fled—only to later find that those men had bled out and died. She could have saved at least one of them, she thought, if she had stayed and ignored the possibility of being shot herself. She could have stayed, but she didn’t. The desperation and fear she saw in their eyes as she tore herself away and ran would haunt her every day and night, for the rest of her life.
I moved past it; everyone had one of those moments. I had more than one, and less excuse than she did. I saw that she worried constantly about her youngest daughter, Rose, who panicked far too easily and let her anxiety carry her off to crazy-land all the time. I sensed her deep inner love and trust for Emily, whom she loved for all the same reasons she loved me—and possibly then some. It somehow scared and shamed her that she loved my sister just a hair more than me. I wanted to shrug; what was the difference? Why compare?
There’d always been an inner hunger for sex in her, even when she was young, and she’d even been curious about other girls from time to time—so the transformation didn’t seem to affect her mentally at all. It only removed some of her reluctance to… experiment. It was why there’d been no hesitation when she’d accidentally walked in on Nadine and Nina in bed, my blonde eating out my redhead—she’d joined in moments later, stripping naked and straddling Nadine.
In my mind’s eye, Claudia was floating in the air before me, at rest—a deep, careless sleep, utterly vulnerable. She was tiny, and I was gigantic; her fragile little person fit in the palm of my hand. I drew her close to me, holding her, placing into her mind my assurance of love and devotion to her, and my own observations of her character—to let her see herself as I did, instead of from the inside.
In particular, there was something I valued about Claudia—and no matter what it said about me personally, I gave it to her, in full. I couldn’t count the number of times Emily had finally decided to drop some grudge or another—against me, anyone or anything else—after a night with Claudia. Something about Claudia made her a great counselor, and she discounted her own wisdom as meaningless—or some side effect of her exotic, blue-eyed, dark, straight-haired looks. I couldn’t have disagreed more.
Claudia seemed to be under the impression that the others just generally considered her to be a limber, sexy, exotic, but ultimately not-quite-smart chick who happened to have a natural knack for meteorology. I could clearly see, from where I was then, how false that was—of course—but it was what floated around in the back of her mind, waiting to present itself again and again at the right moment.
I could have simply taken that away from her—just removed her insecurities wholesale. I hesitated; was that right? Would simply taking something like that out of a mind really leave her whole and happy? Somehow, I doubted it. She’d be… less, missing something from then on. It was natural for a human, or hominus, to question themselves. Sometimes that took odd forms, but I was certain—without any evidence or experience—that taking things like that out of people would ultimately cripple them, or worse.
I left her as-is, without any changes—only the addition of some of my own choice memories of her. I recalled her swaying Emily when she got into her moods time and again, and deposited those sights into her mind—and other times, when she was able to make the impossible happen, like with the peace accords in Sweden a decade ago. When I’d left enough little presents for now, I retreated slightly—still leaving us connected, but letting my mind drift back into the here and now.
It went without saying, of course, that during this whole exchange, my body hadn’t forgotten that I was deep inside her, thrusting away on an animal reflex. I understood, then, that I had been going about it all wrong with my previous attempts to link with the other girls—I was talking in the wrong language, so to speak.
For decades, my body had gotten well-used to using its electrophoridae in a way totally different from the others. Its language was one of power, dominance—and most of all, sex. When she’d asked about trying it ‘upside-down’, she’d been talking more literally yet more figuratively than I realized; she meant using the nerves in our respective gonads, rather than those in the hands as the others usually did.
Nina and Rain hadn’t been able to manage what Claudia did, simply because they weren’t ready to submit as Claudia had. I don’t think either ever would; it was anathema to Nina’s personality, she would never totally submit to anyone… and Rain, well, her inner strength was such that it simply wouldn’t occur to her. She’d give me a blank stare if I even suggested it, then brushed off the idea as impossible. Even Emily, with her secret little submissive mood she got into with me, couldn’t let go of herself this way. It took Claudia to open up my mind.
The tent was jostling all about now, our bodies—no longer constrained by our higher-thinking minds—flailing about. Had there been anyone inside a hundred yards, they likely would have called the police for all the noise we were making; fortunately, we were in the midst of a barren wasteland of ice and cooped up in a warm little tent, fucking away.
Dropping back into reality was… jarring. My first, most immediate and powerful, sensation was that of my cock inside her, pumping for all it was worth. Her hot sex wrapped around my cock, a selection of pink and dark flesh subsuming my manhood time and again; I felt every bit of her as I thrust within and pulled out, over and over again in a well-rehearsed rhythm.
Her breast was underneath my hand, and then her nipple was between my lips. Not all of the girls had very sensitive nipples, and only some of them—usually those with the smaller variety of boobs—were able to reach the peak of pleasure solely from play with their breasts. Claudia wasn’t among them, but some of her daughters were. None had quite managed to grow as round, impressive, and firm as their mother’s deep brown orbs.
The wailing I realized I was hearing was Claudia’s orgasm, just as I released the grip I had on her psyche. All the while, being so close had set off some kind of powerful reaction in her—coming was almost just a side effect. Her back arched, and I could feel her toenails curl into my skin where her legs were crossed behind my ass.
I erupted. The volcanic blast of pleasure fired out of my cock, again and again, eliciting a long rumble of pleasure from me. Claudia only moaned, softly, her tresses shifting about as she laid on her back and the wobbling lantern reflected off her sweat-sheened skin.
A scant minute later, the two of us lay side by side, and I held her close to me. There was nothing to say; everything we could have talked about, that I saw inside her, was already settled. I loved her far more than she loved herself. She was still in my arms when I felt her drift off to sleep, and I soon did the same.
The morning found us silently breaking camp. There was far too much on either of our minds to bother with a conversation. We trekked further north, the sun meandering about the horizon the whole time.
On the third occasion that Claudia set down her ultrasound thumper, she looked over at me and nodded toward it. I wasn’t ready, of course, but who was? She gestured, once, then again, as I looked doubtfully at the machine. What if I broke it? Would the memory inside it be enough to find the helium-three cache again, or would it be lost?
I had to trust that Claudia was storing the knowledge in herself too. Pulling off one glove, I knelt before the tripod, and placed my bare hand atop the domed metal housing on its cylindrical main body. I reached out, figuratively speaking, trying to find something the same way I found Claudia last night. It hadn’t worked like I thought it would, but there was something… maybe I should slap my cock on it instead?
I chuckled, then abruptly a presence became known to me. It wasn’t how I envisioned, from how the others had explained it to me. The machine was simple, with no intelligence or purpose of its own. Some of the machines Wren and Sasha programmed, the others said they could sense some kind of drive within them, but this was like having a third arm suddenly announce itself—it had no agenda, it was simply an extension of my will.
It was designed to be as easy to use as possible. First it sent out its pulse, then another, in a carefully designed sequence—and the number-crunching little processors inside it began to gobble up the raw data and convert it into something. The vision took shape in my head, at first just a jumble of information—but then taking on a pattern, a vague inverted-dome shape as the machine surveyed the contents of the deep earth in the surrounding few miles.
Just as she’d promised, I could see, out on the edge, the telltale signs of something promising. The strong signs of the helium-three deposits, mixed in with heavy water ice and a few choice minerals in what would have been—if the Earth warmed up too much—a massive lake. They would have to be mined before the Earth became warm enough to melt Greenland, turning it into the set of three islands it had once been in ancient times, at lower latitudes.
We had but a scant five or six hundred years to do it, before the valuable compounds mixed with the ocean. It would be important that we protect the site, I thought. We’d need a good power source when we left the Vault, probably; something that could jump-start us. I didn’t especially look forward to leaving the Vault only to find ourselves living in huts and lean-tos for a few decades. Had to keep Greenland off the radar… not that that would be especially difficult in the present.
I took my hand off the machine, and the it began to fold itself up. Controlling it hadn’t been nearly as difficult as I had thought. Somehow, from how long it had taken the girls, I assumed that it was a subtle, difficult thing to grasp—but perhaps, all along, my body and nerves had been practicing interfacing… in a different way. It just needed a special kind of impetus to cross the gap, and apply my well-honed mental reflexes to another task.
“You’re a natural.” Claudia was kneeling beside me now, and I felt her lithe form leaning against mine.
“It isn’t like I thought it would be.” I replaced the glove over my hand—welcoming the return of something like warmth.
“What did you think it would be? A big light show or something?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know… just… not that.” Shrugging, I rose, leaving her sitting cross-legged on the packed snow. “We should probably signal for pickup. Don’t you think we’ve learned about as much as we can?”
She smiled at me, then held out a hand—a bright look of expectation on her face. “I already did when we broke camp. It’s at a clearing along the coastline, about a half-hour north of us.”
I nodded, and helped her pack everything up. Ten minutes later, we were treading north, and we crested a small hill—allowing me to see our vehicle, a hyperfan modified for long-range flight in extremely cold weather. Its stubby wings housed a pair of circular hollows, and squinting, I could see the traces of the blue-ish heat that emanated downward out of them. It was idling, of course, to keep from freezing up.
The walk went quickly, more so than I would have thought. I somehow expected my giddiness at gaining this new mastery over the electrophoridae to make it pass by with agonizing slowness—but then we were at the rear of the gunmetal-colored beast. Claudia looked up at me, gesturing toward it.
Oh, right. We didn’t bother with external buttons or handles, just induction pads for interfacing with the chips inside. I pressed my hand to it, and reached out mentally—and found something inside which was simultaneously much more complex, but noticeably dumber, than the ultrasound array. A tree-like myriad of various system and subsystems arranged themselves around my thoughts, from the avionics and thrust all the way to the simple air conditioning controls.
Finding the hatch access was easy enough. I let down my hand, and looked at Claudia, frowning as the ramp descended. “How long was I out?”
“Huh? Out?” She blinked. “You were only touching it for a half-second.”
“Okay, good…” I trailed off, leading her inside, and touching another panel within to close the hatch. She offered me the honors again for starting it up, and I pressed my hand on the forward console at the pilot’s seat—and mentally located the autopilot controls. Commanding it to cycle up and get us underway to the
It was a very complex system, though I understood then that it simply didn’t have the raw processor capacity of Claudia’s ultrasound array—that was why I somehow perceived it as ‘dumber’. The array was meant to crunch massive amounts of ultrasound data and produce usable information, but could do little else… the autopilot, on the other hand, was meant only to work in real time with a far lower volume of data.
“There’s no way in hell we can’t use this for porn.” I grinned, turning back to Claudia as I took off my jacket. The floor attempted to rise underneath me as we took off, but maintaining balance was trivial.
“Use what? Interfacing with technology?” She had already stripped off her jacket, and was now stripping off her insulated pants, then her boots. I sat down opposite her, watching as she gradually took off more and more of her shapeless snow gear to reveal the svelte body underneath.
“Yep. There was a saying in my time…”
“Pfft, your time.” She rolled her eyes. She wasn’t that much younger than me, though she’d only been to the US well after becoming one of us.
“… all technology, they said, is invented for one of two reasons: war, or porn. Everything else is just re-purposing shit they invented for those.”
“But we’re not a warlike people.” Claudia suddenly gave a wry smile. “So I guess in this paradigm, we’re more limited than humans. We’re going to have to invent some damn good porn to keep up.”
“I guess so.” I took my undershirt off, tossing it away, then knelt down in front of her. “I’m going to need more practice.”
“Ben—ahahaha—Ben!” She playfully slapped me on top of the head as I tugged off her panties, then let my cool lips find her pussy. She gasped suddenly, but within moments I’d warmed up enough to be comfortable for her… and my tongue certainly was warm enough. Her fingers ran over my head, interlacing with my dreadlocks—I felt her nails digging into my scalp as I tasted her once again.
Warm feminine labia and clits were always welcome in my mouth, of course. The aircraft rose to cruising altitude and leveled off as I continued to slowly tease at her, allowing my tongue to dance inside her walls. My lips or fingers never quite departed from her clit, though at times my touch was feather-light. Claudia took a little longer to reach her peak than many of the others, but it could actually make things a bit fun—it made her easier to tease.
She was gasping and occasionally panting, letting me work her center. My tongue ran across her bare mons, as hairless as any hominus girl’s, then returned to enter her once again—her familiar taste flooding my mouth. Over the years, I’d found the minute differences in each girl’s taste even varied with their diet; they were like fine wine or liquor that way, the little details of how the grapes were raised and fermented could make a world of difference in a woman’s flavor. Claudia and I had both subsisted on trail rations for weeks now, and she tasted… tight, with a hint of walnuts.
The flight would take maybe an hour at the fan’s supersonic cruise speed; we were unhurried. After twenty minutes of letting her ascend nearly to the peak, then letting her slide back down, I finally forced her over the limit when she was trying to hold back—triggering a flood of girl-come on my tongue as she almost-but-not-quite-squirted the way she did sometimes.
We rested for a minute, with her snuggling alongside me on her bench, then a few minutes later we were both naked with her resting on my lap in the pilot’s seat. She was running her pussy against my length, teasing me in turn—but she never lasted very long at doing it. Soon, she was rising up and positioning me.
I stayed in place, upright in the pilot’s seat with both hands on the armrests, her legs splayed out underneath them and her ass occasionally bumping the control stick. I’d disabled the manual controls with only a touch, of course, so we didn’t plummet to our doom as we prepared to fuck.
Her hot pussy accepted my cockhead, and inch by inch she let her weight down onto my body—her tight womanhood reluctantly parting to allow my huge intruder within. She gritted her teeth as she often did when taking me in certain positions; she wasn’t naturally quite as stretchy as some of the other girls, so I had to always be patient with her and let her body adjust to my size, even after all these years.
She bent down and we kissed, her long tresses falling around my face and her nipples brushing against my chest as we were joined. I felt the base of her wetness resting on my balls, and knew I’d bottomed out—I was now buried totally within her dark center. She rose slowly, more for herself than me; her pace always began for her own pleasure, but ended totally focused on mine.
I let it play out, but couldn’t resist bringing my hands out to grip her firm ass. I bent forward to take one breast or the other into my mouth sometimes, adding a little nipple-play to the gradual motion of our fucking—then, as I let myself relax further, I found something… happening, naturally, but also completely new.
Yes… Yes… Feels so good…
Another voice was sounding in the distance, but wasn’t being heard through my ears. Our physical closeness and intimacy was triggering something, some kind of sharing of emotions and sensations. I was dimly aware of the raw pleasure that she felt from my big cock spearing her, the pain having long since passed, and the sensation of my lips on a nipple.
I was in two places at once all over again, but it was different now. I wasn’t both of us, I was simply aware of her sensations, more dimly than my own. I wasn’t about to lose sight of which one of us I was. I gripped her ass tightly, taking the pace away from her, and felt the sudden jarring in her mind that came along with it—then the giddiness she felt at knowing that her man was going to well and truly fuck her now.
I rose up, and she attempted to wrap her legs around me as I suspended her in midair—then plopped her down on the seat, resting awkwardly on all fours. I was crouched awkwardly myself, having to duck underneath the canopy, but I was positioned just right to enter her again—which I promptly did, making her gasp again. She clasped her hands behind the pilot’s chair, pressing her tits against its surface as I began a hard pumping.
The raw fucking soon began to fulfill its task, for both of us—the eruption was impending, and I knew she, too, was feeling the rapid motion of my cock on her spot… or so we’d come to call the little place within her pussy that could bring just as much pleasure as her clit. The underside of my cock was massaging it, hard, and through our joined minds I could sense that one’s pleasure always boosted the other’s. The orgasm process may have been different for men and women, but there was still some crossover.
Before, it had been hazy, all intellectual as I had been inside her mind—the raw power and control I had over her psyche had made our fucking seem almost irrelevant. Now, though, was different; I could sense her feminine pleasure rising, in slow waves. For the first time ever, I experienced her female orgasm in real time, not a memory gifted by 15226. It rose, over and over again, and finally crested—making her wail aloud and then bite the pilot’s headrest for a moment.
The peak pushed me over as well, the pleasure in her womanhood somehow transmitting something into my cock. I erupted suddenly, with little warning—my cock firing ropes of virile semen into her body, again and again.
“Ahh…” A moment later, she had rose up, then took me by the arm, twisting me down into the chair again—then plopping herself down into my lap for a cuddle. “That was the best yet.”
“The best fuck yet?” I grinned. I could still feel a hint of our connection through our bare skin. My grin fell away as I searched it, feeling a sort of mental smirk from her mind—then I realized she was… closing… something within herself. Not mentally, it was a muscle she was moving, and…
“Yep.” She came up, kissing me again. “Thanks for getting me pregnant again… Dad.”
I snorted, then laughed, and we kissed again and again. She rested on my arm the remainder of the way home, until we reached the small base we kept in Iceland—officially registered as a private weather research station. We got dressed, then went inside the empty facility, powering it up and cranking the heaters back on.
I knew, of course, that we’d need to get back in touch with the others—they’d want to know about my new expertise, and I’d want an update on the ongoing cat-and-mouse game we had with Naglfar. It hadn’t come to open conflict, but that was more because we were unwilling to throw our meager numbers into the path of an army of more than a hundred thousand killer cyborgs—so we stayed off the networks, using our own private hard lines and scan-shielded bases in remote areas… like where we were now.
We’d need to do all that, and more, of course, but for now… I eyed Claudia, who was smiling at me over her shoulder as she once again stripped her top off—having not bothered to put her bra on as she got dressed in the fan. She padded into the bedroom, a spartan little job with a single queen bed that I barely fit in. I heard her turning on the shower, with the door still cracked open… yep. Clear invitation.
I took it, of course.