The Imnir Ark
Chapter 02 – Lessons
Groggily awakening, Isaac was aware of bright sunlight filling the room. He felt dimly guilty, and it occurred to him that he might have overslept. His eyes lazily made their way to his clock radio. 10:05am.
Shit. I did oversleep.
With a jolt of willpower, Isaac made his arm toss back the covers, and he slowly sat up, facing out toward the window. He’d had the most fucked-up dream. There had been this spaceship, and he-
“Oh good, you’re up.”
He recognized the voice before he even turned to see her; still, he automatically faced her. Ävhip-ñall Solclaá – known to him as Nall – was naked on the other side of his bed, laying on her front with her feet up in the air, her upper body resting on her elbows and her breasts suspended below, ample cleavage not at all hidden by the sheets. Her bright red skin was just as he recalled, brilliant and eye-catching, with highlights of orange and yellow spread around seemingly at random like so many complicated birthmarks, and small teal spots in innocuous locations. She had one of his books in front of her, a big ‘Unexplained Incidents and Mysteries’ coffee-table piece his older sister had bought him for Christmas a couple years ago. It had been collecting dust on his bookshelves for years now, never opened; she was into that stuff, but he wasn’t. Isaac could only manage to croak one syllable.
“Nall.”
“That’s me.” Nall kept reading, a banana in her other hand. The skin of it looked mangled, like she’d never peeled one before and had resorted to brute force. He glanced down and saw that he, too, was as naked as she was, and – finally confirming his wild experience hadn’t been a dream – he saw his dick was still the giant size she’d forced it to grow to with her mysterious ‘quarkware’.
“You’re in my house.”
She put the banana down, and closed the book. Rolling off the bed, she walked around its base and towards him. “And you were in my spaceship. We’re bonded now, right? We’ll be living together. It’ll be like being married. The imnir had marriage too.” Approaching him, Nall kissed his throat, as she seemed to like doing. “Anyway, I need you to come now.”
“What? Where are we going?”
She sighed. “English. I need you to come.” Her hand went immediately to his cock, the pole instantly responding to her touch. A shudder went through his body at being so easily manipulated, but from the moment she was in contact with him, he knew his cock belonged to her. She looked into his eyes as she held his length in a hand. “It’s part of the process. I’ll make you come many times in the next couple days.” Another pulse, and his cock hardened further. She said it clinically, and he worried at what the ‘process’ was. Nall slid downward, falling into a kneeling position. With both hands, she gently stroked his engorged manhood – quickly reaching its new maximum size.
He hadn’t yet measured it, but it looked to be almost a foot long – and much thicker. She’d mentioned in the ship that she had more than tripled its mass. How?, he wondered; if he knew his science, wouldn’t she have had to take that mass from something else? Maybe some other part of my body? His mind reeled in horror for a moment, then he reined himself in. Wait, she did the same thing when she laid all those eggs. They just seemed to grow inside her, and make her stomach real big like that, but that only took what, maybe fifteen minutes? She doesn’t seem to have lost weight now after laying them – and she doesn’t have much weight to lose…
He lost his train of thought as her lips passed over the crown of his dick, the massive pole opening her jaws wide as she took more and more into her mouth. He held his breath for a moment, then let out a loud sigh as warm, slick wetness laved his cock, and he felt her hands on his hips, maneuvering him and herself into a better position. He was soon leaning down somewhat and her throat was lined up directly with her mouth around his dick; he watched in amazement, and felt an incredible sensation as more of his cock disappeared inside her. Hot, tight wetness surrounded the end of his prick as it entered further; she was now truly deep-throating him, and betraying even his expectations she soon bottomed out – her red button nose touching against the spot where his pubic hair had once stood before she had made it all mysteriously vanish.
His hips involuntarily began a slow fucking motion, his feet moving up and down in a gradual up-and-down tiptoe as he made love to her throat. Isaac braced his hands against the side of the mattress, spreading his legs a little wider to let him thrust harder. She accommodated him, bending down a little lower and never breaking her vacuum hold on his cock. She might treat me poorly, he thought, but she seems to take a lot of care around my cock… the passing though vanished as he bottomed out again, watching his dick disappear into the bright red woman’s lips and mouth. Isaac didn’t want to admit it, but he was quickly developing a fetish for her unusual appearance; the contrast of his tanned skin against her mysterious, otherworldly colors was alluring and sensual. It helped that she looked damn near exactly like a human, down to having the same equipment as any human female. He made a mental note to quiz her on why the hell they were such a perfect match, her having allegedly come from a species from some other galaxy. What were the chances, even on that scale? He vaguely recalled her explaining that, but the reason she’d given had been forgotten.
Nall’s hands reached up and took his heavy balls each into a hand, gently kneading them and tickling the bare skin of his scrotum. She seemed quite passive now, allowing him to do most of the work – and his hips unthinkingly obliged her, pumping in and out of her mouth at a gradually increasing pace. He slowed down with an act of will, wanting at least to draw it out; she seemed to notice and opened her eyes, giving him a vaguely impatient glare. Not caring, Isaac took his time, and then decided to change positions. He took her head in his hands and laid her out flat, her eyes questioning him. He let his cock slip out of her mouth for a moment, and spun around atop her. Nall had barely had time to ask what he was doing before his massive dick was hanging over her face once again, glistening with her spittle; she didn’t hesitate and took it back into her mouth, now upside-down, and bobbed her head up and down somewhat while his hips also moved to their own beat.
Isaac was rewarded in this new position with an up-close and personal inspection of Nall’s pussy. He hadn’t gotten a chance to indulge his curiosity on the ship; he’d seen – and felt – this same pussy release many round, grey eggs. Her lips were shaped a little differently than he recalled from the two other women’s folds he’d been this close to before, but Nall’s weren’t so different as to be obviously alien. The bright red of her skin extended to her outer lips, staining the pink of her insides with a reddish tinge. The extremities, and the tip of her clit, were tipped with yellow patterning, the same kind that was under her eyes and on her hands. It intrigued him that an alien would have damn near exactly the same equipment as a human, yet have such a radically different way of giving birth. His thinking mind – while not any kind of biology expert – couldn’t make sense of it. His not-so-thinking mind just wanted to find out what her wildly colored pussy tasted like.
He took an exploratory lick, and she didn’t taste quite like human women did; it was distinctly different, sort of like black licorice, but tangy and very natural. It wasn’t unpleasant, he decided. He heard her moan around his dick as he focused more attention on her, probing his fingers inside her and taking some licks at her clit. After more experimentation, Isaac was confident that making love to Nall was basically the same as making love to a human woman, and he could use all of his experience and tricks. He began to trace lazy, strange shapes with his tongue all over her clit and pussy, enjoying himself and sending his fingers inside her at random intervals, teasing and exciting her. He could tell she was vaguely displeased at him focusing on her so much instead of his own orgasm – probably not what she had planned for her ‘process’ – but the thought only excited him more as he elicited more of a reaction out of the manipulative and powerful alien.
When he suckled on her clit for longer, he felt a long and deep moan emanate from Nall. It was strong enough that he felt it resonate in his cock, the vibration stimulating him and making him want to thrust his hips more. She noticed and redoubled her own effort, seizing the chance to make him finally lose it. Caught off guard, Isaac’s body betrayed him; pleasure surged at the base of his pole, his balls began to tighten, and her slick tongue and throat moved up and down over his dick even as he stopped his hips to try and contain his explosion. It was inevitable, and she was ultimately in control. He felt the pulses begin, and his mind was overwhelmed as his new, super-sized, energized and much more pleasurable and sensitive organ did what it was made to do – pump enormous amounts of semen. He gasped, moving his face away from her folds momentarily as his mind was washed away with each blast of come also frying his mind and wiping out conscious thought. Isaac felt load after load empty into Nall’s throat, and she swallowed it all greedily. Coming down, he realized her pussy was still completely exposed in his face – and whether or not she wanted to pretend her only goal was for him to blow his load for this ‘process’, the wetness and heat of her pussy belied her body’s desire.
With his cock still dribbling out a slow stream of his last supplies of come, he attacked her pussy again with fury. This time, he didn’t tease or experiment, going solely for the maximum stimulation in the shortest possible time. He inserted three fingers and twisted them all round, nibbling, sucking, and kissing her clit, and pressing it with his thumb like a button. Her hips bucked, and her knees gathered up against his sides. Looking down, he could see she had been overwhelmed herself, and he felt his cock slip out of her mouth; a few final drops of gooey come dripped out onto her chest as she moaned out loud, her arms going out to her sides and bunching up the throw rug they were making love upon in her fingers.
“Ah! You – ah! We’re done, you ca – Ahhh!” Not willing to listen, Isaac mentally dared her to stop him. Nothing happened, and he continued his assault. With his fingers, he felt a tiny pulse that he knew wasn’t from his own motion; he focused on it and timed his attention to it, making the pulse grow. She had gone silent, and glancing down he could see her mouth was wide open, though he couldn’t get a good look as she’d arched up her back and her dark nipples were pressing slightly against his abdomen. Her left hand slapped again and again on the hardwood, the rug having been thrown up and disheveled in an unthinking moment of bliss. He puckered his lips into an exaggerated kiss and sucked hard on her clit, pressing his fingers inside her, and he was rewarded; he felt her orgasm with certainty as her body shook and twisted beneath him. The sensuous undulations of her red body put a gentle stir back into his own dick, though he knew he wouldn’t be going for a second round for a while.
Nall continued to come beneath him, and he let up and simply watched it happen, enjoying the sight of her waist and pussy wiggle around, entrapped by his arms. He’d felt her strength, and knew she could fling him up in the air if she wanted to – but she contained it, or somehow otherwise left her physical power at something approaching the natural amount. Soon she had come down, and slowly drew breaths beneath him. He rolled off and sat up, and was met with her glare while she remained lying flat. He enjoyed the sight of her breasts somewhat pancaked, but still looking delicious, and smiled down at her despite her obvious anger.
“That was unnecessary.” Nall glowered.
“Too bad. Poor you.” He gave her a fake, overconfident grin. She shook her head and suddenly did a kippup, surprising him. Nall looked down and saw the dabs of come remaining on her breasts and upper chests; she wiped them up with her finger, then licked them off. Standing above him, she pointed with her thumb out the door.
“Come on out into the primary room. You need to eat, I imagine. Your body is changing inside and will need nutrition.” He shuddered, not liking that she had done as she pleased to his insides without asking or even explaining to him what was going on. Regardless, she was correct – he was starving. Isaac stood up, and Nall picked up the book she’d left on the floor, trying to find her page and then becoming distracted with another entry.
“Okay. And it’s the living room, or den, or just the big room, not the ‘primary room’.” He stopped for a moment to fish out a pair of boxer briefs and linen pants and a shirt, his typical around-the-house loungewear. As he threw them on, he noticed they were tighter than usual. Not just around his waist, but his whole body – either he somehow shrank all of his clothes accidentally with the last washload, or he’d gotten bigger overall… from his recollection from the ship, and looking at himself now, he was definitely bigger. Before he could think it through, his stomach growled, and he caught Nall rolling her eyes as he buttoned up his shirt. Ignoring her, he went back out into the den and then to the kitchen of his condo. He’d done the whole place up in one trip to Crate and Barrel, all basic patterns, simple geometric shapes, and hard angles – though over the two years since he’d bought the place, his taste had drifted away from the style. Everything was either white, black, or a light woodgrain. Isaac grabbed milk from the fridge, and two packets of oatmeal out of the pantry, then changed his mind and made it five packets. He was hungry. Some part of his mind noted that the pantry seemed awful sparse, but he could have sworn he’d just gone grocery shopping two days ago.
Mixing up his breakfast, he stuck the bowl in the microwave, and then a thought occurred to him; he began to shuffle through things, looking for something. Nall had found her way to the kitchen bar and was sitting up on a stool, her head resting in one elbow – her dark red skin and markings a massive contrast to the condo’s décor. She looked bored. As he found was he was looking for, he hit the power button, and was rewarded with the Apple logo. Good, it’s still charged.
“What’s that?” Nall asked from the side, flailing the banana weakly from side to side in her hand. She seemed to enjoy watching the mangled skin fly back and forth.
“My cell phone.”
“Phone, phone, phone…” She wracked her brain. “A kind of communications device… Who are you contacting?” The idle boredom in her voice was replaced with a hard edge.
“My boss. Telling him I’m late for work.” It seemed an utterly mundane concern, but he knew it would be serious enough if he ignored it for long – crazy red sex alien living in his house or not.
“Don’t bother.”
“Yes bother. This is important. This house? These clothes? That banana?” He gestured at her with the phone. “I need my job to pay for these things. I don’t know how the economy works on Planet Nall, but around here we have to work for a living.” He found his boss’s speed-dial. Devon is going to blow his top…
“I said, don’t bother. You already quit, and I told you I would take care of you.”
His world stopped for a moment.
“I already quit...?” He said it flatly, but the question was unmistakable – apparently even to an alien. “Pretty sure I didn’t do that before I left. What did you do?”
“You did. Your assistant stopped in earlier. I had her help me with a few things. She prepared and delivered your ‘resignation letter’, as I understand it, and you’re now no longer tied up with all that.” She took another bite of the banana.
“Why the –“ He sputtered, and almost broke the phone in his hand before stopping himself. “Oh, so your ‘mission’ isn’t just to screw with my cock and my mind, it’s to ruin my career too.” Rage boiled in him, at both his situation, and the possibility she used the same mind-bending powers on Clara as she had used on him. He gave her a huge fake smile, opening his palms. “Oh well! It’ll be fine! Especially in this day and age, with jobs for everyone! When your idea goes to hell, they’ll just let me back in, no questions asked!” She frowned at his sarcastic anger.
“I wouldn’t have done this without securing everything you need first. By the way, you’re a gifted inventor, it’s made you significant money in the last few days.” She gave a furtive sidelong glance, looking subversive. It took him a couple seconds to figure out; he remembered Nall was from an apparently quite advanced, spacefaring alien species.
“Really. Jog my memory, what did I ‘giftedly’ invent?” He tilted his head, keeping his giant fake smile.
“Some incrementally better kinds of insulation for various niche construction purposes. A new method of alloying titanium to iron and bauxite. A better variant of miniature antenna geometry. A way to turn a lithium-chromium alloy into a foam you can spray. A cheap way to manufacture safe aerogel. Three radar-absorbent polymer formulas. Couple other things. The next batch goes on the market automatically in four days, and the batch after that two weeks later. ” She took a final bite, finishing the banana. “I sold the patents through a ‘lawyer’,” she seemed to twist around the word, “so your identity is protected and you won’t have to worry about the details.”
“You’ve been awful busy.” He folded his arms, and the microwave beeped. Furious though he was, he couldn’t ignore the maddening emptiness of his stomach, and he greedily removed the oatmeal and continued talking through large bites. “I seem to recall you being flabberghasted at our medieval planet. You got over that quick.”
Nall nodded. “I spent most of the last six days learning everything about yo—“
“Six days!” He shouted, almost dropping the bowl.
“Well, yes. You needed time for the changes to work their way through you. I wasn’t sure how long it would all take – though I admit I thought it would only be fifty or sixty hours.”
He took another bite of his oatmeal, too famished to ignore his hunger even with the stunning revelation. A thought occurred to him. “But wouldn’t I die, being out that long without medical care? Did you feed me when I was asleep?”
“Sort of. I ate first, and my body turns it into a kind of gel. Then…” Her hand went to one of her breasts, and her fingers squeezed the dark red tip of her nipple. A tiny squirt of white milk shot out. His eyes went wide, stunned.
“You’re kidding.” He glanced at her bored expression, then back at the well-shaped breast.
“Well, eventually you’d need to wake up. There’s certain nutrients I can’t transfer, and your body would eventually absorb too many imnir sulfur-based blood structures. In another day I would’ve had to find some way to bring in a human doctor. But – that’s why you’re so hungry now, because your body has to catch up. And if you knew what was going on inside your body, you might be a little more grateful. I’m putting a lot of work into you.” She pointed, more at his chest and abdomen than at his face.
“Oh, okay.” Isaac counted off on his fingers. “Like making me your slave, turning my cock into your personal toy – and now probably ruining my life?”
“Like adding redundancy and failsafes to your internal organs, reinforcing your skeleton with pico-wire mesh, and laying the foundation for the more obvious physical stuff that will come later.” He stopped, not having known about any of this.
“What do you mean? Making this bigger wasn’t all of it?” He waved a hand at the flaccid cock hanging down his left pants leg; even soft it was still somewhat visible through the pants he wore. I’m probably going to need to buy new clothes… As he’d worn the clothes around for a couple minutes, he was becoming more aware that she really had increased his body’s general muscle mass. It had been harder to tell before, but with his old clothes on, he definitely felt a tighter fit.
“Of course not. That was just the most basic part; a long, thick penis that ejects the maximum amount of semen as often as possible has the highest chance of producing a viable impregnation. It turned out you were more than just viable – you’re actually perfect, more than I ever hoped for.” She smiled, folding her arms and leaning forward on them, letting her breasts hang down pleasantly onto the countertop.
“Is that what you meant on the ship, about ‘perfect DNA’?”
“Oh, you remembered. That’s only part of it. I picked you because you were free of any genetic defects, even recessive ones. Analysis from orbit said that would be almost impossible to find, but I got lucky. Then, though, I was talking about your role as the Patriarch and how your DNA might interact with the eggs you’ll be making women lay. Right now, I was talking about the changes to your own body. You’re only going to get better.”
Despite his contained rage, his cock swelled in anticipation. He finished the massive bowl of oatmeal, and grabbed an apple out of the fridge as well, taking a big bite. “Putting the loss of my job to one side…” In reality, he wasn’t that furious with her about the job, though he was still pissed off that she had just decided she could do as she wished with his life. His job as a company strategist – officially, ‘VP of Projects” – was a dead end, and he had enough inside knowledge of the company and experience in the logistics field to know that – more than just his own position – Grand Courier Inc. itself was doomed. Isaac had had his resume fielded for two months before now, and he was actively searching for another job; he knew he had a lot to offer, and he honestly believed – ego or not – that part of the reason for Grand Courier’s failure was the board’s inability to take Isaac’s advice. He’d joined when the company had just started up a little over a year ago, a particularly rich man he’d never actually met having bought part of a collapsing freight and warehousing corporation and trying to turn it into his springboard to a personal empire. Isaac had been convinced to join up by another unemployed friend who was coming on board, the two having worked together in the past – but now they both shared the same dreary outlook of Grand Courier’s future.
He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. “Putting the loss of the job to one side – what do you mean, you spent the last six days learning about me?”
“Just that. I looked through everything about you, and learned a lot about Earth in the process. I still want to keep my time in public to a minimum, so you’ll stay here with me until I’m clear enough on human culture.” He grumbled, angry that he was somehow grounded like a high-school kid just because Nall was too scared to go outside.
“Nall – um, I don’t know how to break this to you. You could become an expert on human culture and still stand out.” He pursed his lips.
Nall glanced down at herself, shamelessly nude and bright red, then back at Isaac. “Don’t worry about that, I have something in mind.”
“I don’t think the ‘skin condition’ excuse will fly.”
She didn’t seem to understand it was a joke. “I considered that, but there’s no medical conditions on file that could reasonably explain this appearance. So, I have to give it up.” She sighed.
“What, are you like a chameleon?” Isaac took another bite of his apple.
“Chameleon…. Oh. There was something like those on Avoch too. Was. No, I mean there’s a way to make me look like a regular human. Finish eating and rest for a while. I’ll make you come again when you’re ready.” She said it so easily, like she was talking about making him a sandwich.
“I think after blowing my load like that, you might have to wait a week or two.” Isaac’s cock felt spent.
“It only seems like that right now. I told you, your body has been changing. Once it’s done, you won’t be able to go more than a couple hours without coming at least that hard.” His cock pulsed again, its semi-erect status moving a little further towards erection. She flung herself into his office chair in the far corner, and busied herself looking something up on the internet. Isaac sighed.
“I’m going to go check the mail.”
“Fine. Remember, we’re bonded. You can’t escape.” She didn’t even face him to say it. Bitch… Isaac grabbed some pants and a shirt from a closet, tossing them on and putting on his walking sandals
He stepped outside his condo for the first time in what was apparently almost a week. It was a nice enough day, maybe sixty degrees out and clear, with a little wind. He rode the elevator down to the ground floor, and there were a couple people he recognized coming and going through the lobby; there was Sheri and her two kids from the third floor, and there was Daniel, the bank manager from the eighth floor, and there was Eric – who Isaac had begun to suspect was some kind of bourgeoisie drug dealer. Isaac chose not to speak to anybody – he knew better than anyone how utterly bizarre his life had just become, and even putting on his best act, he knew he wasn’t a good enough liar that someone astute or who knew him wouldn’t catch on to him being a little weird at the moment.
Here and now, in a normal and familiar environment without Nall around, he realized for the first time that he felt somehow different too, and not in reference to the increased weight of the cock hanging between his legs. His thoughts didn’t match up to the personality he remembered having; it was subtle and he couldn’t put his finger on it, but the more he focused on it, the more he was certain it wasn’t just the stress and craziness that Nall had put him through. Something else inside him had been… changed. Nall. Isaac felt certain she’d been mucking around with more than just his body.
Grabbing the heaping stack of mail from his lockbox, Isaac rode the elevator back up, fuming. Not even five minutes had passed when he barged back in, Nall glancing at him sideways for a moment before returning to the computer. He shut the door and locked it, tossing the mail down on the small desk by the door. Isaac walked up behind Nall and folded his arms.
“What are you doing to my head?” He put as much force in it as he could muster.
Nall slowly turned back to him, eyes narrow. A smile broke across her face. “You noticed, then. That’s good. It’s working.”
“What is working?” Isaac was finished with Nall’s incomplete answers.
“Let’s sit down together.” She nodded to the couch. Barely tolerant of the delay, Isaac sat bolt upright on the love seat, his arms still folded in front of him. In contrast, Nall laid out in a lounging position on the full-size couch at right angles to his love seat, crossing her legs and not bothering to cover anything. “You’re becoming the salvation of the imnir race. Really, get over yourself. You have no idea how much good you’re doing.”
“Good I’ll never see. All I know is you just keep taking more and more away.”
“And you still find it in you to try and make me come too.” She smiled, this time without any of the mystery or evil in it. “I’m glad I chose you, Isaac.” He faltered, not expecting such honesty from her. She reached out with one hand, resting it on his knee. “And so what if it’s good you’ll never see? That doesn’t make it not real. My people died. The whole imnir race. I’m not even really imnir anymore, I’m something else.” She looked away, staring at an indeterminate point far beyond the ceiling panels. “I’ll never see the good of it either, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“This was a one-way trip, Isaac. I can’t ever go home; there isn’t enough power on Earth that could twist up a warp bridge strong enough to send a quarkware vessel all the way back to my galaxy – not that there’s anything left to go home to. I’m also forgetting Sõrlacc. I told you, copying your language center overwrote my own. I only know Sõrlacc about as well as…” Nall did some mental math. “As well as a four-year-old human would know English, about. And it’s getting worse. Eventually it’ll all be gone. I’ve been trying to write down, in English, things from Sõrlacc I don’t want to lose. How to say my name, my parents’ names, my hometown, hello, goodbye, that kind of thing.” She sighed. “The imnir homeworld – and no, it’s not named Planet Nall, it was called Avoch – was both like and unlike Earth. It had much the same environment, evolutionary steps, ecology niches. That’s why we’re similar enough to mate. Or well, that’s half of it. Does this planet’s schooling and science have the theory of convergent evolution?”
“I think so. I heard the term before, anyway. Something about bats and birds.” He surprised himself with the clarity of the recollection; at the same moment, he realized it did go a ways – but certainly not the whole way – toward explaining human and imnir being so close to identical.
“Bats… birds… oh, two winged creatures. It’s a good example of two completely different kinds of creatures evolving similar features – wings and flight, I mean – independently. It’s sort of like that between humans and imnir, though we’re even more distinct than bats and birds are. DNA is the most common way that hydrocarbon-based life at this energy level chooses to organize itself. Given a roughly similar amount of water, sunlight, and chemicals, life evolves roughly the same way, and produces roughly similar niches – just not the exact same creatures. I looked up some paleontology from Earth. They think that wings evolved several times – like you said, both bats and birds evolved wings independently of one another, at different times, but they otherwise do the same things, eat the same food, hunt the same creatures. They both had the same need, and found similar evolutionary solutions. Something real similar happened on Avoch with gasbugs.”
“Okay, but the analogy goes to hell after that. A bat can’t get it on with a bird and have it lay bat eggs.”
She frowned and waved a hand. “That’s a… weird metaphor. I know where you’re going, but let me finish. Like I said, the convergent evolution thing only covers half of it. Nobody really expected to find a perfect copy of ourselves across the cosmos that we could directly mate with. The chances, even over fifteen million years and searching several galaxies, are nonexistent. All we needed was a species with a reproductive system that was similar enough to our own, that could be adapted to lay eggs.” She turned back toward the ceiling, tracing meandering imaginary patterns in the air with a finger. “There’s a crazy number of planets with life on them, but not every planet with a complex chemical breakdown on its surface produces life. Those that do, tend to have one of nine specific sets of circumstances – certain chemicals in abundance, ambient temperature, radiation saturation, and level of energy available. Humans and imnir are in the same set, the high-temperature hydrocarbon band.” She took a breath and continued. “The imnir planet, though, had those same things, but had a very different situation otherwise.”
“Why, how was it on Avoch?”
“Earth has it easy. It’s a planet, on its own with a moon with more than 2% of the planet’s mass, orbiting one star, in a circle. A year is damn near exactly 365.25 days long, every year, every century. Kind of boring, really. Avoch was on an elliptical orbit around a yellow dwarf, which itself had an irregular fifteen-year orbit around a binary pair. Avoch occasionally swapped positions with the other moon that shared an orbit with it, which meant we had to swap calendars every two and a half Earth years. The white dwarf in the binary pair accreted a lot of matter off the yellow main sequence star, and it every three thousand years or so it would build up too much pressure and explode. You call them novas.” He nodded, though it was all far too much to take in. “Avoch had a very strong electromagnetic field, which protected it from the brunt of the radiation blasts when the white dwarf in the pair would go off. The white dwarf usually went off when Sondrir – the yellow star – was very far away from Avoch and the gas giant it orbited, but on rare occasions Sondrir would be at perihelion when the white dwarf went off. The electromagnetic field was just barely powerful enough to protect most of the planet’s life even at those rare times Avoch took it point-blank, I guess you could say.”
“Okay…”
“Well, we imnir are like you humans, really good at finding new and interesting ways to wipe each other out.” She paused for a few moments. “Nuclear warheads didn’t just get used a couple times, like here. There were a total of one hundred and eighty one nuclear warheads that went off during the Three Wars. That was just the big ones, the smaller tactical kind got used all over the place. The oxygen-methane balance in the ocean destabilized, which wasn’t something anyone understood until it was too late. It ripped up the outer atmosphere’s conductive layer and weakened the magnetosphere. The shell that protected the world from nova radiation was gone, and wouldn’t come back for a couple thousand years. They’d known that Bando was scheduled to go off during the next close approach of Avoch, and we all thought it just be a big light show… until then.”
She closed her eyes. “There was no way anyone would survive. Best estimates said everything short of deep underground bacteria would die within a single day of exposure to the nova’s radiation; even people in underground habitats would just die slowly and painfully instead of quickly. We had three years’ warning. Most people just went crazy. Nations went to war again for insane reasons, about a third of the four billion imnir died from that and disease before we were two years out. Who knows how many committed suicide, nobody could keep track. Anyway, the two strongest nations, Zoucch and Isoh, had a big space presence – even some off-world permanent bases – but even with three years of dedicated effort, there was no way to get a significant number of people off Avoch in that time. The offworld outposts and bases were too small and new to survive without Avoch’s support anyway.”
She folded her hands under her head. “So the project got started by Talas, the nation-sort-of-thing I was part of, and later Zoucch and Isoh gave us the last of their resources too. I don’t think the project ever got named. Probes would be launched in all directions, programmed to look for planets in our life band, trying to find a suitable planet with everything we’d need to survive. The first idea was, hey, we can use this quarkware we just found to record our bodies and minds, then have machines reconstruct us on this other planet once they’ve set up there. Didn’t work. They tested it.” She stopped. “You don’t want to know how that ended. It… made a bad situation worse. You can’t just create sentient life fully formed, even with quarkware.”
Isaac’s arms had involuntarily fallen to his sides, wrapped up in the story. “It was four months until the end at that point, and the team was desperate. Someone figured that, somewhere out there, in the infinite hugeness of the universe, there has to be a species similar enough to us that we can use a little quarkware to bridge the gap and make it possible for them to help us repopulate imnir the natural way. Well, natural in a very loose sense. Imnir don’t normally lay eggs, or hatch out of them, of course; it was something they came up with as a compromise, to use the other species – in this case, humans – to create living imnir, but separate them early enough that they come out still as imnir. It also lets us produce a lot more imnir at a time. So that was the plan. To do it, they needed to make a purpose-built quarkware vessel. They came up with the design, and I volunteered to be a prototype; I was picked to be the first. What I guess nobody realized until the last minute – they were in such a rush – was that they’d screwed up the math bigtime. The amount of energy required to create a metastable quarkware vessel was off by three orders of magnitude.” Isaac was quickly losing track, which she seemed to sense and backed up in the story.
“Basically, they thought they had enough power to create an army of vessels like me. It turned out, it took absolutely everything the remaining generators could pump out – up to four days until the end – to just make me.” She smiled faintly, but he could see the pain in it. Despite himself, his anger was melting. “The process changed me, of course, even more than I’m changing you. They only kept me active long enough to make sure everything worked, then they shut me down and put me in stasis mode. Two days before the nova was to go off, they sealed me in an extreme-depth underground vault, along with a modified freighter also in stasis, the computer with its entanglement comm array, and the big one-shot warp bridge assembly.
“The bridge was by far the biggest one ever built, they weren’t even sure it would work on that scale. I guess it did. They’d only figured out warp bridging just before the last war. The probes were all set to operate for millions of years, reporting back with QE communications to the computer with what they found. When a probe finally found something, all the way out here in your galaxy, the computer figured it was finally a go. It warped the ship, me inside it, all the way to here. It almost certainly blew itself out in the process. When I use the tubes from the ship, I send the eggs back to the robot base that’s been waiting on one of the other hospitable worlds they found early on, and it’ll store them up until it reaches a critical number, then begin hatching them.”
Isaac was silent for a time, his hands on his knees; without realizing he had closed his hand over hers. “What’s the critical number?”
“Eight hundred thousand.”
Isaac gaped. Eight hundred thousand eggs?
“…though I want to send even more. As many as we can. Don’t worry, like I said, it won’t be four or five at a time. If you do what you did do to me with a fertile human female that I’ve fiddled with a bit, she should fill up with a hundred or more eggs at a time.”
“Won’t that… hurt her?”
“No. I’m not a monster, Isaac. The process will actually fortify their health, and I can fuzz out their memories so they don’t remember the whole experience.”
“Oh… uh… neat.” Isaac was still trying to digest the massive amount of information.
“I’ll show you something.” Nall went over and fished around behind the far couch for a moment, and he heard some clinking sounds. She produced a small object, like a TV remote. She pressed a couple buttons on it, then looked at him. “I probably shouldn’t show you this, but I want you to trust me. So… here’s me.” She pressed another button on the device.
Suddenly a flat display was hovering in the air, depicting a reddish person – sort of. There was a definite resemblance to Nall, and the odd coloration was about the same. The shape of her whole head was off, her mouth a little too wide, and the torso was shaped oddly – a sort of grapefruit form. All of her limbs were more spindly, and there were only four clawed digits on each hand instead of five. Her legs were jointed backwards instead of forwards, and she was hefting what appeared to be a tote bag at her side. In the background were a couple other similar creatures, in what seemed to be some kind of public gathering – almost like a mall’s food court.
“Cute little lass, wasn’t I?” Isaac’s gaze went back to Nall.
“That’s you?”
“Yeah, back in my Navy days, before the Three Wars. I didn’t have many good pictures of myself, I became something of a hermit after the wars started and I spent most of my time in space. This was about the best one.”
Isaac didn’t mention that he didn’t see anything best about it. “So how…”
“The Ark, of course. I told you – we knew there was no way we’d find some identical species to ourselves out there. We just needed one with a really similar reproductive system, and the Ark could bridge the gap. After the ship got here, while I was still asleep, it set to changing my whole body to look human – to facilitate myself mating with humans, of course. It sorted out an aggregate image of a beautiful human female and made me look like that; I’m only still colored like an imnir because of some leftover chemistry, and because… never mind.” Isaac’s eyebrow perked. “Internally I’m somewhere in between human and imnir. It imprinted my motor control center with a copy of a female human athlete’s, so I wouldn’t be stumbling around and losing my balance for months. Then, in my head, it overwrote what I found attractive with images of humans – males and females – and the Ark decided I was ready, so here I am.”
“What was ‘never mind’ about?” Isaac folded his arms again.
Nall was silent for a minute or so. “If you must know, well, the Ark couldn’t finish because it found inside me that I wanted to keep something of who I was, okay?” She looked back at him. “So, are you ready to stop fighting?”
Isaac considered for a while. “Nope.”
Her face suddenly turned angry. “I should have guessed.” She shut off the image in the air.
“Don’t blame me. I listened to your whole crazy story.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re bonded, I’m in control. I like you, Isaac, but don’t test me. I want you to enjoy this. I don’t want to fight you every step of the way.”
Isaac shrugged. “Sorry. I guess I’m an ass.” He gave a wan smile.
“Fine.” She stared at him for a moment, focusing. Isaac froze, suddenly afraid of what she might do. “Isaac… you’re going to go out for a walk. Take a look through the other residents of this hab structure, see who might make a good candidate. Any young and fertile female is ideal. Come back and make me a list.”
The idea sunk into his mind, obtuse and against the grain of his thoughts – but he stood up anyway, obeying the order. His mind resettled itself around the command, and he knew it wasn’t really what he wanted to do, but he was helpless to stop it. He chuckled to himself at her calling it a ‘hab structure’ while he went back outside, and began to idly meander through the halls. He passed a couple young women, some attractive, some he knew, some he didn’t. Passing by the fitness center, he noticed several young women pedaling or jogging away, taking note of those he knew and committing to memory the faces of those he didn’t. Isaac began to imagine himself fucking them, using his mammoth dick to make them wail, and pouring his seed inside them. He imagined watching their bellies swell, eggs growing inside them; his cock began to stir to life. It was true, what Nall had said; his body was changing, his libido increasing and refractory period dropping drastically – and beyond that, his thoughts were being twisted around this idea of egg-laying. He guessed he’d be ready to come again in an hour or so; he resolved his walk would take just about that long. He even included the other two condo buildings in the same complex, and a walk through the park and shopping districts nearby. By the time he returned, Isaac had quite a list.
Opening the door, Isaac was stunned for a moment. Inside was a sight he hadn’t at all expected – Nall, naked of course, was on the floor, licking the pussy of another, light-skinned human woman that he could only see the lower half of from his angle. He closed the door quickly and walked inside, getting a closer look and walking past the couch that was obscuring his view of her face. Girl’s clothes were strewn around the floor around her, and she was resting partly atop her own panties. It took him a moment to recall, then he realized it was the new girl, who had just moved into the condo four doors down, a few weeks ago. She was cute, he’d noticed even before, but he had barely ever seen her; he recalled from the one time they spoke that she’d mentioned she worked full-time overnights, which made it difficult to catch up with her. The young woman, a brunette with fair skin, light freckles, and a short-bob haircut, was flat on her back, her legs spread wide, the mysterious red Nall crouched between her legs and licking away at her folds. The girl – Jessica, he finally remembered – was utterly lost in the throes of passion, blissfully unaware of her surroundings and completely open to Nall’s attention. Nall glanced over at him, and her head came up, replaced with her fingers that danced inside the girl and on her clit. She continued to moan while Nall began speaking.
“Good, you’re back. I found one for you to start with.”