The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Sole Survivor

By Stub

mc mf ff md sf

Chapter 23 — Ten Years Gone

Sex in a hammock is always tricky, but sex with four people in a hammock is downright impossible.

“Enough,” I said, laughing, as the mesh sling rocked under me. “Katy, I told you to wait.”

“But, Alex, I couldn’t. I need you, lover.” The expressive face of the world’s most famous actress twisted into a pout.

I smacked her naked ass, and she yelped. “None of that,” I said. “I can read your mind, remember?”

Her face went back to its beautiful self. “OK,” she said. “Never hurts to try.” She somehow managed to disentangle herself from the pile, and slid out onto the warm sand. Her nude body was flawless, and she certainly knew how to flaunt it as she stood next to the hammock, hands on hips, chest out. All of her fans had known her as a bobbed blonde, but I actually preferred her long, natural brown hair.

Next to me on the hammock, Erica was grinding her crotch against my leg while her soft hand stroked my cock. Amber was stretched out on the other side, her pregnant belly and full tits warm against my skin.

“Go tell the comm people that I need a meeting with Mateo around 2:00,” I said. “And get the word out to anyone who needs to be there.”

[Maybe then he’ll fuck me...] Katy smiled at me and skipped off over the beach, her fantastic ass bouncing in a way that had my dick pulsing in Erica’s grip. After ten years, the beautiful redhead knew my triggers, and eased up on her strokes, letting me calm down a bit.

I turned to nuzzle my face between Amber’s tits, while my other playmate leaned down to gently kiss my straining dick. The sun broke through the morning overcast, and lit up the north beach of Kili Island. The palm trees rustled in the westerly breeze, as a flock of cormorants landed at the water’s edge, looking for breakfast. My stomach rumbled a bit as well, but I knew that food would come later. For now, I was here with two of my favorite girls, and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity.

“What do you say, daddy,” Erica said as she straddled my thighs, and ground her wet pussy against my dick. “Should we try for another one?” [Please...I want another baby...] She lifted up, and Amber helped her out by positioning the tip of my cock at her wet entrance. With sighs from both of us, she slid down, taking me inside her welcoming hole. Her enthusiastic bouncing threatened to dump us all onto the sand, but I didn’t care. As I reached up to cup her swinging breasts, Amber leaned in and gave me a passionate kiss. I laid back and let the sensations wash over me, thinking it was good to be the King of the World...

My newly-built Summer Palace covered nearly a third of Kili Island, enough to house my two hundred servants and the one-hundred and seven women of my growing harem. The gleaming tower in the center rose over five hundred meters in the air, letting me looking out over my domain, while I sat on my Ruby Throne...

Who am I kidding. It was nothing like that.

There was a compound on the island, a mix of old and new buildings that housed an elaborate comm center and a collection of guest houses for when I visited here on vacation. Jeffrey Matusa, Lani’s father, managed the place when I was back in San Francisco, which was most of the time. Sole Survivor was tied up at the south dock, the one for small craft use, unlike the north dock, which housed a deep-channel mooring and several warehouses.

Lani skipped up to me as I walked toward the Comm building. She had on one of her island dresses, strapless and bright, showing a lot of brown shoulder and a lot of leg.

“You know that dress is the reason you’re here?” I said.

“What?”

“When I first saw you, eleven years ago, you were wearing something just like that, and I couldn’t stop staring. You were such a turn-on that I couldn’t let you leave my boat.”

“I remember,” she said, taking my hand and walking alongside me. “But I didn’t think it was the dress that did it.”

“Well, it was a lot of things, but the dress helped.”

She laughed at that, and we walked along in comfortable silence for a while. That was one thing I liked about the island; it was always the same, pleasant temperature, with the same light breeze blowing through the same waving palm trees, while the same flocks of birds flitted overhead. It was a constant in a world that hadn’t had many of those in the last decade.

I heard sandaled feet flopping behind us, and my other hand was suddenly snatched up.

“Where’re you guys headed?” Malie Matusa asked. She gave me a bright smile, and squeezed my hand. Lani’s younger sister had grown out of her awkward teens to become a beauty rivaling her older sibling. While not as willow-thin, she had a pleasant roundness to her, and a lovely face, framed by thick black hair that fell nearly to her calves. Just like Lani, she liked the strapless, floral dresses, but in her case, the fabric was always tested trying to contain her full breasts.

“Going to Comm,” I said, swinging the arms of both girls as I walked. “Got a vidcall in a little bit.”

“Bummer,” Malie said. “I was hoping for some time with my favorite brother-in-law.”

“Well, since I’m your only brother-in-law, I guess that means me.”

“Aww, you’re so much more than that, lover,” she said, clinging to my arm with both of hers now, and rubbing her tits on me. “Well, maybe after the call you can stop by. Mom has the kids under control, so I’m sure we can find somewhere private...” [Or you can just bend me over a table and take me in front of everyone. I don’t care...]

Lani laughed from my other side. “You little...I’m right here, sis. You think you can just walk up and steal my husband away so you can go make more babies?”

“Yup.”

“All right,” I said, trying to sound stern, but failing. “That’s enough. I’ll see if I have time after the call, Malie.”

The younger island beauty clapped her hands and gave me a peck on the cheek, before turning back toward the house that she lived in with our two children.

Yes, I’ll admit it, I’d become something of a stud in the last decade—but not in the macho, hot, manly-man sense of the word, more in the horse whose job it was to make babies kind of sense. It was all very convoluted, but at the moment, I had seventy-four children, all under the age of nine, with six more on the way. And yes, I knew all of their names, although birthdays were sometimes hard to remember.

Lani and I were the proud parents of three. We’d gotten married on VC Day, exactly one year after Curtis had splattered the Supreme Expedition Leader against the wall of the bunker. The bride was already five months along on the happy day, but no one seemed to care.

September 18, 2035 was the day I had declared as Victory over the Chrxjthal Day—VC Day—and it was the only holiday included in every single person’s normal behavior. In four days we would have a huge, world-wide celebration for the tenth anniversary. The party wasn’t for the people who had survived the invasion—most of them were still dependent on outside instructions to run their normal life—it was for their children, so that the newest generation would never forget what the planet had gone through. All of the schools were dedicating an entire week to the history of the war, culminating in a global celebration.

Party planning was one of the topics I had to discuss with Mateo, if I managed to get to the Comm Center on time.

The new building was bustling with activity as we walked in. It was refreshing, but a little eerie, to see everyone going about their jobs with purpose. Such was the new world we had inherited from the aliens. Everything was done with alacrity, which had become the new buzzword for the human race. I kept telling myself that it was just temporary; that the next generation would have just as many slackers as the world did pre-invasion. Although I was refusing to produce any new video games, at least for another decade, so that we might slow the progression.

The first floor vid-conference room was already full, and Mateo and Anatoly were on the display in a split-screen as Lani and I walked in.

“So, now that we’re all here...” the Russian said. I knew he wasn’t capable of being malicious with his comments, but sometimes I wondered if the acerbic scientist was spontaneously regenerating the ability to be unpleasant.

“Yes, sorry we’re late,” I said. We settled into our chairs, and Mateo began his report.

That night, I stretched out on the big hotel bed, looking out the full-length windows over the Golden Gate, and the lights of the Presidio. Beth and Kara snuggled close, and I sighed as the reunion ended, and the business began.

Lani, Amber and I had taken an egg back from Kili Island, one of a little more than two dozen small alien craft that we’d managed to salvage from the remains of the fleet. Officially, they were all allocated to other departments, but Scarlett, as my executive assistant, tended to always have one on standby when I travelled.

I’d dropped Lani at home in Sausalito, where she lived with our three daughters, plus Jill’s two kids and Amber’s two. Only mine and Jill’s youngest was a boy—Jerrold, after her dead father. There had been a lot more girls born in the world than boys over the last ten years.

Cassie had led the research on it, and figured out that the changes to women’s brains by the aliens had caused some havoc in the levels of estrogen and testosterone produced during different phases of their cycle. Luckily for me, none of them could act out during their mood swings, but it did have an effect on the sex of the children being born. There were five girl babies for every boy, at least for the first eight years following the rebellion.

Once we’d developed a “fix,” I’d made the scientists test their hormone-balancing therapy for over four years before I’d allowed it to be used on the public, no matter how skewed the birth rates were during that time. It had been essential to me that it was absolutely safe, since no one at the moment could question any order I gave them. If I’d told every woman in the world to use an untested treatment, they would have without question. The problem was, it would have been only me who was responsible if anything went wrong. I couldn’t take it if I was the cause of an epidemic of birth defects because I wasn’t careful.

That same type of situation was really at the heart of all my dilemmas—I couldn’t afford to be wrong, and I couldn’t farm it off to someone else. At least not yet; maybe in another twenty years.

Population had been a huge issue at the start of the post-alien era. I’d spent four sleepless months trying to save as many people as I could, as the whole concept of normal behavior broke down around the world. When the levels had finally stabilized, there were a little under three billion people left on Earth—2,833,747,311 as of our first census. Almost two thirds of the planet had died, and I had never been so glad that everyone else on the planet had been converted, because the amount of grief that would have caused was unthinkable.

It had been hard for me, too. All I had to do was look at any three people, and imagine two of them dead, to really understand what had happened. Even now, when I’d watch Lani playing with Daisy, Lindsey, and Rebecca, and imagine two of my daughters gone, I’d choke up and have to leave the room.

Still, we were lucky to have saved the ones we did, which was why I thought it was important to celebrate our victory—to let the new generations know what we had gone through so that they could live.

“How did your trip to New Mexico go?” I asked the two former Arbiters lying next to me. “What’s the verdict on joining us for the party?”

“Still being discussed,” Kara said.

Ten years and two children had really changed the tiny woman. She had a softer look to her, and smiled a lot more than she had when she’d been in the thick of the fight against the invaders. I remembered the emaciated pile of bones that we’d rescued from starvation so long ago, and tried to reconcile it with the plump rear that I was fondling. She purred and curled her leg over mine, resting her head on my shoulder.

Even though she’d been a confirmed lesbian before the invasion, the process of “freeing” her from the alien mind control had made her dedicated to me above anyone else, regardless of the fact I was male. She still enjoyed playing with other women, but there was no way we’d discovered yet to alter the bonds that were formed into the structure of her brain. That ingrained dedication had included getting pregnant, and giving birth to two daughters, Maria and Veronica, who were currently with their grandmother on another floor of the swanky hotel.

“I don’t think they’re going to make an appearance,” Beth said. “Every day, they get more and more lost in their own heads. A lot of them never come out, even to eat. If you hadn’t set up the facility down there, I’m sure quite a few would have starved by now, which...” She shuddered and closed her eyes. “I don’t know how anyone who’s been through it once could endure it again.”

During the last days of the rebellion, a command had gone out through the alien network, that overrode the programming of all of the Sentinels assigned to Earth. They were told to kill their masters, the alien wardens, and then deliver their paired Arbiters to the nearest medical facility. A call line and automated vid instructions had been set up by my medical team, for doctors to learn how to care for the starving women. That was all that could be done at the time, and of the twelve thousand Arbiters on the planet at that moment, less than nine thousand survived. It took several months for Dr. Goldberg and Dr. Montoya from the Stanford Neuroscience Center to instruct all of those remote facilities on how to properly remove the all-encompassing blue helmet, and finally release the enslaved women.

After they’d been freed, I’d asked all of them to make their way to San Jose, where I could meet with them, and have them checked out by my own medical staff; people who knew more about their physical and psychological difficulties than anyone. I also tried to interview them all, speaking with each woman individually, and then, as more gathered, in groups.

Many of them had a hard time with the transition, and weren’t able to have even a basic conversation. In those cases, the ability of the Arbiters to join minds had been a great help, with the stronger women aiding the weaker ones.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized how much of a crutch the mind connection would become for them, and how it would keep them from trying to deal with the real world. All I saw at the time was that it took away some of the pain, and the emptiness that they felt. Even with the support of their own kind, some of the newly-released women hadn’t been able to handle the transition back to caring for themselves, and had taken their own lives. In a kind of desperation to not lose any more people because of the aliens, I’d allowed a group to form that would eventually become the Azure Circle.

I’d found that by putting twenty or thirty former arbiters in a room, the collective power of their joined minds could overcome even the most depressed and suicidal urges of one of their own. So I’d set up a place close to the Neuroscience Center that had become the haven for all of the planet’s former Arbiters.

As more and more of them trickled in, the gatherings to join minds with their sisters got larger and larger, until at one point almost a thousand painfully thin women had converged in a gymnasium, stripped off their clothes and lain down on the covered floor. That day, I’d been able to “hear” the raw power of their minds from five kilometers away, and for the first time, began to suspect that the thoughts of these former alien minions weren’t entirely focused on helping humanity rise from the ashes of the invasion.

I’m not blaming it on one gender being more in touch with their feeling than another—although there had been a physiological reason that the aliens had controlled the Sentinels with pain and the Arbiters with pleasure. What happened once the group mind became a perpetual thing—with women constantly coming and going from their “nest,” but never dropping below a certain threshold of joined minds—was that the members started thinking of their own path to the future. They were less concerned with practical matters like farming collectives and the reintroduction of heavy manufacturing, than they were with the establishment of inner peace and enlightenment as humanity’s true goals.

The real turning point had come when I noticed some of the women around me—normal Converted women, not my freed girls, or the ex-Arbiters—expressing the Circle’s views. After questioning them, I’d figured out that the joining had become so powerful, that they were able to influence the minds of others, even without the net connections.

Unlike me though, they weren’t concerned with saving as many people and cultures as they could; they only cared about saving those that could advance their new goals for humanity. If they really got going with their reprogramming of the world’s female population, they were going to be a threat to all of the plans I’d set in motion after the invasion. I wanted the population of Earth to grow and thrive so that we could never be threatened with extinction again. The Azure Circle didn’t care how many people survived on Earth—two billion or just two thousand—as long as they were joined in spiritual harmony.

Faced with this problem, I’d come up with a solution that in hindsight was pretty harsh, and more than a little self-centered, putting my plan above theirs, and treating the Circle as an enemy, rather than just a group with a conflicting viewpoint. The Arbiters and Sentinels were the only humans that had any kind of free will, and I was hypocritically discovering that free will really annoyed me when it conflicted with my carefully laid-out plans.

I ran through all of the scenarios, from using captured alien tech to convert all of the ex-Arbiters, to using my Sentinel troops to disperse them across the planet so they couldn’t gather en-mass, and form their super-mind. I knew what some people—like Anatoly or Colonel Freeman—would have advised, but I really wasn’t ready to take that step toward becoming a murderous dictator.

In the end, I’d decided to leave the Circle alone, but limit its ability to affect the rest of the population. From what I could tell, the women who’d had the alien helmets attached to them were the only ones who could participate in the group. While they could influence the thoughts of other women, they couldn’t recruit any more members to their core collection of psychics. I was willing to take the long view with them, just like I was forced to take with the converted population of Earth; eventually, the ones whose brains had been physically altered by the aliens would age and die out, and the new generations would take over as stewards of humanity’s future.

The way I’d dealt with the Circle wasn’t noble by any means. It was more along the lines of duping an innocent child out of their lunch credit. I’d started by moving all of the normal women away from their main meeting place; an old high school and a nearby office building. That limited their ability to influence anyone. Then I flooded the area with men, including several hundred Sentinels. I’d never seen proof that the women in the Circle could cross over to the male mind, but the presence of so many men in their vicinity seemed to make them the slightest bit uncomfortable.

Although I’m reluctant to call them “weapons,” my real instruments of change within the Circle were my four ringers—the former Arbiters who were now devoted to me. They had the ability to join in the group mind just like their sisters, but they couldn’t be swayed from any direct commands that I personally gave them. I planted Kara, Beth, Megan, and Tammi like a slow-acting poison in the brain of the group, having one of the four constantly in contact with the merged minds.

I didn’t try to change their deep-seated philosophies, but instead had my girls plant the notion that the Circle was unique. They were the chosen ones, who should withdraw from this society of mental cripples—people who would never know the beauty of perfect spiritual harmony. Slowly, over several months, my propaganda campaign started to work, and the Circle became more and more uncomfortable among the inferior minds of the Bay Area.

When I offered them their own space—an entire town in the middle of nowhere—they leaped at the chance to go. The transition took a couple months, but eventually their compound was finished, complete with a master “nest” that could hold all eight-thousand plus of them. An all-male support crew was assigned to take care of them logistically, and less than three years after we defeated the aliens, the second threat to the planet was resolved.

After their move, the Circle’s meddling in the outside world shrank to almost nothing, but I wouldn’t let them retreat completely into their own reality. I actually found a use for their hive-mind, as a sort of self-imposed check on my own power. There was no one on the planet that I could ask a question to, and get either a free-willed answer, or an unbiased one. The Sentinels could give me an opinion, and I often asked the ones I trusted to weigh in on the problems I faced, but I was getting more and more certain that they were up to something, and other than Mateo, Curtis, and a few others, I avoided disclosing all of my plans.

The Arbiters on the other hand, had no agenda other than their own, limited one. Either I, or one of my four ex-Arbiters, could pose a problem to the group, and have the power of eight-thousand perfectly in-sync minds analyze it for potential flaws. I’d used them to look over my rationing plan, and my decisions on which cities were to be abandoned, and which were to be renovated. They’d given me insights into potential problems that I never would have come up with on my own, even with the genius of Anatoly and my other advisors to help me. The Circle had a unique way of boiling problems down to the bare bones, and then giving a yes or no answer.

I’d done the same thing early on post-victory with the Eights, but those limbless heroes of the revolution hadn’t lived much longer than two years after we drove the aliens out. Their mutilated and modified bodies just weren’t strong enough to last, no matter what we did to their nutrient bath. And unfortunately, if a single member died, the rest would soon follow. The Prime Eight—the ones we’d set up in Alameda, who had literally saved the human race—had only lasted for eight months after the final fight. One night, Four-Anika had a stroke, and the rest of the group lost all of their function. I sat by their side, plugged into the helmet for three days before the last of them passed away.

So without the resources of the Eights, I’d come to rely on the Circle to play sounding board, and at times devil’s advocate for my plans. I’d sent Kara and Beth to New Mexico to offer them a place in the anniversary celebration, but I think we’d all known their answer even before the question was asked. The fact that they were still considering it was the slimmest reason for hope, but I wasn’t going to put much more effort into trying to convince them.

“I didn’t tell you the other thing that happened while we were down there,” Kara said.

“Oh, yeah,” Beth said, “you should hear about this, Alex. I wasn’t in the group at the time, but Kara was.”

“So? What is it?” I asked. I started to read it from her thoughts but then stopped. I’d let her tell it in her own way.

“Well, it was kind of hard to figure out at first,” Kara said. “I was in the nest, just relaxing, when there was this rush of excitement through the bond. A bunch of them were welcoming someone back from a journey, and this girl, when she joined the group, felt...different. And then I figured out that she was pregnant, and we were experiencing the raw, unformed mind of her growing baby.”

“Wait,” I said, “you could hear the kid?”

She shook her head. “No, that’s what was weird. We could feel the child through the mother. It’s something that I’d never felt when I was pregnant, but somehow, this woman, Gina, had a real bond with her child that she was echoing to the group. It was beautiful, but a little bizarre, the emptiness of an unborn baby’s mind, filled with nothing but echoes and half-formed emotions.”

“So, other than you two, Megan and Tammi, is that the first former Arbiter that’s gotten pregnant in the last ten years?” I asked. “Nothing like that has happened before?”

“Nope. Gina is the first. I think she was an experiment, but I’m not sure what the results are going to be.”

“An experiment in what?”

“Continuing their ‘species,’ of course,” Beth chimed in. “Think about it—they have this sublime ability that has become the focus of their entire world, and they don’t have any way of perpetuating it.”

“Well, not since I took all of the helmets away,” I said. Kara frowned at that memory, of the time when the Circle had tried to recruit more members by putting fully-powered Arbiter’s helmets on regular woman. Over fifty “volunteers” had died before I found out about it, and confiscated all of their helmets. “So, wait, they think they can breed the ability to bond into their children?”

Beth nodded. “They’re using this incomprehensible system of eugenics to pick potential fathers, and then sending members of the Circle out to get knocked up.”

I shook my head. “I explained to them, years ago, why that wouldn’t work. Their brains were artificially modified by alien technology, and the bonding ability actually came from the enhancement of their pleasure centers, along with the shuffling of some of their key neural pathways by the filaments in the helmet. It was your own version of being converted, but not nearly as extreme as the rest of the population.”

“Yes, Alex, we know,” Kara said, “and we tried to tell them. But I think they’re desperate. They’ve found their equivalent of Nirvana, but it’s only going to last one generation. So they’re trying a last Hail Mary—pardon the mixed religious metaphor—to see if they can continue the Circle without your help.”

“And they think they can find the right men to breed with to produce a new generation of witches?”

“I didn’t get the whole story,” Beth said, “but they’re convinced that there’s a small possibility they can produce a natural mutation; one that will mimic what they were given by the aliens. Combined with their ability to project into female minds, it has them convinced enough to try it.”

“It would be easier if you just had Cassie, or Anatoly, or one of your brain doctors come up with a way to do it artificially,” Kara said.

“No,” I said. “We’ve been over that a dozen times. I’m not going to split the human race onto two different evolutionary paths. I don’t think we were destined to become a planetary hive-mind, which is what would happen if we kept creating new members for the Circle. They would eventually overwhelm the planet, and most likely divide humanity into a master race and an artificially created slave race, whose only purpose was to serve the hive. I did the projections, back with the Eights, and we decided that this variation of humanity is going to die a natural death, once the ex-Arbiters are all gone.”

“But—”

“That’s it, Kara. No more discussion,” I said. Ten years ago, if I had said something like that to a woman, I would have expected a pout, or anger, or a full-blown argument, but nothing like that was possible from my girls, and I’d just naturally gotten used to having my way. Kara’s expression never changed as she looked up at me. She smiled and snuggled closer on the bed, and that was that.

Beth was rubbing her hand along my thigh, and my dick was beginning to respond. Kara reached down to help her sister, and in just a few minutes, all thoughts of the Circle were forgotten.

The compound sat in the middle of an open plain in central France, near the former town of Luzy, and bordering on the Parc Naturel Régional du Morvan. Built on the bones of one of the alien designs, the habitats were arranged in a giant oval, around a central administration building, and fringed by utility plants. As the egg came in over the horizon, I saw hectares of crops growing in the surrounding fields.

Beside me, Cassie was taking notes on her pad, while she unconsciously chewed on the ends of her trademark ponytail. I gently pulled her hair away, and she jerked as her concentration was broken, but then she gave me a grin, and went back to her numbers.

When I’d first faced the task of putting the world back together, I’d had the Eights conduct a survey. The satellites had broadcast a message for every converted person to report in person or by vid call, to one of the twelve-thousand warden compounds. It was my first attempt at a census, and I asked the technicians who ran it out of the old Rollins-Chiu offices to collect a lot more data than the government ever had. I wasn’t looking for demographics—I could care less what ethnic background someone had—I was looking for skills. It was essentially a world-wide job interview.

I needed to plug the right people into the right jobs, based on their ability. It wasn’t a perfect process by any means. For example, there were a lot more technology workers and a lot fewer construction workers than I needed at that time. But the beauty of having a mind-controlled workforce was that there was no resistance to handing a former programmer a shovel, and telling him to dig a ditch.

The algorithm to slot each person into their perfect job was the single most complex project ever undertaken on the planet. Lucky for me, I had several thousand sets of human-computer hybrids who could work on it around the clock. Along with our own scientists, the network of Eights had designed a blueprint for maximizing humanity’s effectiveness. But, just like any real-world project, the initial design and the actual product that emerged at the end were always different. Things like language barriers, health of the workers, even maternity leaves, had to be considered, and sometimes the patches we put in place were worse than the original plan.

Still, over the first couple years we’d kept the lights on, and food on the table. The real problem was manufacturing things like the light bulbs we tried to keep on, and dinner plates for that food on the table. A lot of specialized industries, like my old business at Rollins-Chiu, were structured in a web of so many dependencies, that getting the final product produced—my nanoprocessor for example—was a pipe dream. At least it was for now. My goal, and by extrapolation, the goal of the planet, was to have all of the infrastructure in place so that the next generation, the first generation of free humans, wouldn’t be working at a deficit. It had become a more intimidating job than fighting the aliens.

Of course, beyond the controllable parts of the new world, there was the chaos of mother nature, which included random things like a flu outbreak. That was the reason that we’d come to this compound in France; the nearly one million inhabitants were being ravaged by a new strain of flu that was proving resistant to existing therapies.

As the egg settled in the plaza in front of the admin building, half a dozen Sentinels came out to greet us. The leader stopped a few meters away from the extending ramp as we exited, then stepped up to greet us as we got our feet on the ground.

“Mr. Drummond, sir, I’m Lieutenant LeMarc, leader of the CAG that was dispatched to help.” He held out his large, red-armored hand, and I took it while trying not to look like I was scared. Several times, on meeting a new Sentinel, they’d forgotten their enhanced strength when they’d tried to shake my hand. But the Lieutenant was consciously careful of my normal bones, and didn’t squeeze too hard.

“How are things shaping up, Lieutenant?” I asked. He was the leader of a group of two dozen Sentinels known as a Civilian Assistance Group, or CAG. Each CAG was dispatched from the Sentinel headquarters at Fort Hood to assist the civilian population during local disasters, like floods, wildfires, or in this case, a disease outbreak.

“Four hundred seventy-one sick so far,” he replied, in the clipped militarese that soldiers all over the world loved to use. His hint of a French accent, and his last name told me he was probably picked because he was from nearby. “The local hospital is being set up as a containment ward. We’re shuttling non-criticals, and exceptionally at-risk patients to the hospital in Lyon. Only one casualty so far, an older women that the doctors said already had a compromised immune system.”

I nodded at his report. “Let’s go meet the local doctors, please, Lieutenant.”

He nodded brusquely and did an about-face. He was half-way across the plaza before he noticed that the normal humans couldn’t match his pace. He waited for us to catch up, wearing a sheepish grin under his half-mask.

Cassie tapped me on the shoulder, and handed me an anti-viral filter. I clipped it over my nose and mouth, just like the rest of the people in my group. The Sentinels, of course, didn’t worry about disease. The aliens had modified them to breath sulfur after all—nothing as trivial as a virus was going to take them down. That was the reason that they’d become my go-to reaction force for anything and everything that occurred on the planet. There wasn’t any need for a police force, or national guard, but there was always a need for tough, capable, disciplined troops to handle the random shit that occurred on a planet of almost three billion.

The VC Day party was in two days, and I hoped that this virus didn’t cause a lot of trouble. Not that I was more worried about a party than I was about peoples’ health, but there were a lot of moving pieces coming together on that day, and I wouldn’t want to miss it. I wanted my kids to see their dad give his carefully-crafted speech, and then of course to watch the fireworks over the Bay.

The main hospital for this compound was on the backside of the admin structure, so it didn’t take us long to get inside. Cassie immediately went to meet with the attending doctors, while I followed the Lieutenant to the containment ward. This wasn’t the typical feel-good, photo-op kind of visit of a VIP to a hospital—none of the patients here would feel better or worse because I held their hand or gave them a pep talk. It was actually for me to see how the system was working. And to show leadership in front of the Sentinels; the only people who could appreciate such things.

With my mask in place, I went from bed to bed in the sick ward, noting how the patients were being treated, and making some mental notes about how they could improve their efficiency—the engineer in me never went away, and I was always looking for ways to tweak the system.

“The projections I saw said this could grow to maybe two-thousand victims,” I said to LeMarc. “Are you ready to handle that many?”

“Yes, sir. No problem there.”

“And you’ve made arrangements for the dead?”

“Yes, sir. Cremation for anyone killed by the disease, as well as destruction of their personal effects.”

“OK,” I said, “lets go see the docs.”

Cassie had all of the attending physicians in a conference room, where they were going over a genetic breakdown of the rogue virus. “It looks like this is a mutation of A/Morocco/2019 (H4N2),” she said, showing a graphic of the bug’s DNA. “We’ll call it A/Luzy/2045 (H4N2) going forward. I’ll make sure all of the databases are updated.” She saw me in the back of the room, and gave me a smile and a wave, causing all the faces in the room to turn toward me. “Treatment appears to be the same as the Moroccan strain, and we’ll have a new immunization tailored in another four days,” Cassie continued. “This doesn’t appear to be a major event. Keep following protocols, and we should have this outbreak suppressed by the end of the week.”

I turned to the Lieutenant. “We don’t need to go full quarantine, but make sure the locals broadcast instructions to prevent unnecessary contact.” One of the benefits of a mind-controlled citizenry, was that public health emergencies like this didn’t spread when you could just order people not to come into contact with each other. All in all, this crisis was much simpler than I’d hoped. The tough ones came when the cause couldn’t be so easily controlled; things like a bad water supply, or in one case four years ago, a major earthquake.

The Sentinel nodded. “I’ll report in to my Captain at Fort Hood. What would you estimate, sir? Two weeks, maybe?”

“Something like that,” I said. “I’ll let your superiors make that call.” The meeting was breaking up. I’d wait for Cassie to finish with any last minute instructions, then we’d catch the egg back to San Francisco. “I haven’t heard what they’re doing around here, Lieutenant, but it looks like you’ll be stuck on deployment for VC Day. From what I understand, Fort Hood is planning a big party. Sorry you’re going to miss it.”

“That’s OK, sir,” he said. “My family is from a village about two-hundred kilometers away. I’d much rather make sure that they’re safe from this new virus than go to a party.”

“Are they still there? Your family?”

“My mother, and my two sisters, sir. My father, and my older brother and his wife and daughter, they...”

I put a hand on his armored shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Tell your Captain that I’d take it as a personal favor if he’d give you leave to go see them.”

He gave me a thin smile, while his visor only showed the reflection of the overhead lights. “Thank you, sir.”

Cassie was done, so we trooped down the hall, led by two Sentinels, and trailed by two more, like an honor guard. It wasn’t required—there weren’t any standard protocols for protecting my less-than-royal ass, since who was around to attack me? But sometimes the soldiers did it just out of...respect, maybe?

We made it outside, and headed around the edge of the admin building toward the plaza. Cassie wanted to hold my hand, which I did with a little blush of self-consciousness. The former grad student, and former sex slave to her professor and two fellow students, was another one of those who had decided that having a baby with me was a great idea. We had a daughter, Adele, who was back home with several of her “aunties.”

[God I’m so horny right now...] She squeezed my hand, and I turned to look at her. Shielding her actions from the other people in the group, she reached up and rubbed her hand over one of her big tits. “How about you order the rest of the people on the egg to cover their eyes, and you and I can—”

“Down!”

The voice came from Lieutenant LeMarc, and it was followed by a heavy blow to my back, and a crushing weight on my legs. Cassie was screaming next to me, and I heard a strange, high-pitched whistle getting louder. Something exploded nearby, and for the first time in a long while, everything went black...

I groaned as I opened my eyes. I thought I’d given up the whole being-knocked-unconscious thing ten years ago.

“Careful, baby. Don’t try to move.”

Of course Lani was here. I felt her take my hand, and tried to turn my head to look at her, but something was holding me back.

“It’s OK,” Lani said. “It’s just to keep your neck straight. There was some bruising on your spine from the Sentinel’s weight falling on you.” Before I could ask, she answered my next question. “You’re back home. We’re at the Neuroscience Center.”

“The Lieutenant,” I managed to croak. “Cassie?”

“They...you...” she had tried to keep a brave face, but a tear rolled down her cheek and landed on my lips. I licked it away, as she leaned down and buried her face in my neck, crying softly.

She couldn’t talk, but I didn’t need her to talk to know what had happened. I plucked the details from her chaotic thoughts, and the story left me shaken.

The Lieutenant was all right. His armor had saved him from the blast, just like it was designed to do. Two other Sentinels had been hit by shrapnel but weren’t hurt. Three of the compound’s medical staff that had been walking with us were injured, one critically. Cassie had a wicked gash in her leg, but the shrapnel had missed any major vessels. She was lying sedated in the room next door.

Then there was me. I knew about the swelling on my spine already, but what Lani’s mind revealed after that was just too difficult to imagine. I tried to move my legs, but couldn’t. I tried to close my eyes and feel my legs, but there was nothing there. From what Lani knew, the feeling would come back as the swelling went down, but what wouldn’t come back was the half of my lower leg and my left foot that had been blown off in the explosion.

A crash from the doorway made me jump, and Lani pulled away to look around. Mateo rolled his chair through the narrow door, banging into the side again. He had a pad in his lap, and his mouth was set in a determined line. “Curtis just got back from France, sir, and I’ve got his report.”

“What happened?” Lani asked. “What exploded? A old gas line or something?”

“Nothing like that,” Mateo said. “I don’t know how it happened, sir, but you were hit by a mortar round.”

“You mean—”

“Someone tried to kill you.”