Author: Sterling
Title: The Sperm With the Million-Dollar Dowry
Description: Throughout history, rich men have parlayed their
wealth into reproductive success by way of polygamy, mistresses,
or taking advantage of the servants. In the year 2031, the
richest man in the world decides to use modern technology to
translate his wealth into offspring on a scale commensurate with
the extent of his riches.
Keywords: preg megapreg
NOTICE:  This story contains explicit sex.

First posted 11/10/2011.

I'm always eager for comments, whether good, bad or mixed.
Comments to sterling27@live.com.

I have written many other stories and they can all be found at
/files/Authors/Sterling/
For an index see
/files/Authors/Sterling/A%20%20SUBJECT%20INDE
X.txt

You are welcome to copy this story if you include the entire text
unchanged, including this notice.  If you tell me where you have
re-posted it, I can enjoy knowing it is appreciated and perhaps
enjoy the feedback the story gets where you re-post it.

Sterling

And now, our feature presentation.  Enjoy!


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The Sperm With the Million-Dollar Dowry

David Kaufmann sat at his desk, feet up, looking from his corner
office out over the panorama of Palo Alto. It was May 17, 2031,
three days before his 40th birthday.

What had he accomplished in life? He'd founded Facetwit, which
had brought him fame at a tender age. He'd steered it through the
inevitable trials of the information age. It had flourished as
the giants had fallen away -- Microsoft, Google, Facebook,
Twitter, and Apple. There were earlier dominant players that had
fallen before his day, such as IBM, but those were the big five
he had slain. As he considered that from the 'What have I
accomplished with my life?' perspective, that didn't seem like
anything to write on your tombstone. But the destruction wasn't
the thing, it was what he had created at Facetwit. It met
everyone's needs, and that was why it succeeded. Or, he thought
with a tremor of uneasiness, it met the needs of the huge
corporations and certain notable nations such as China. With them
on his side, Facetwit's position looked unassailable. He had been
just a kid with an idea that had blindsided Google, Facebook and
Twitter all in one fell swoop. The pundits agreed there wasn't
room for that sort of thing any more. No other kid would be
coming along to knock him off his pedestal. He had certainly made
his mark in the world. He had fame.

He also had money. $1.7 trillion net worth. He looked at the
words on the paper, and said them in his mind. $1.7 billion
looked almost the same. If you flopped the 'r' upside down and
glued it to the 't', you'd get a 'b'. What about $1.7 million?
Very similar-looking. Yet of course those initial consonants made
a big difference. Inflation had remained low throughout his
lifetime -- rich people really don't like inflation. $1.7 million
was still a respectable fortune. And he had a million of them.
You could take a fair-sized city full of millionaires, and he was
worth more than all of them put together.

He had fame. He had money. What about happiness? He had briefly
played an old game called "Careers". He'd found it in the attic,
a 1950s game his parents had saved from their youth. You started
the game by creating a secret formula for success. You chose some
combination of hearts (happiness), stars (fame) and wealth
(money) that added up to 60, and if you got that combination
first, you won. He had the equivalent of, oh, 900 fame points and
1,700,000,000 money points (they had been measured in $1,000
units). But you needed to meet all three of your goals to win --
excess in one could not make up for deficiency in another.

What about happiness? There had been Stephanie, of course. The
thought of her still filled him with yearning -- and rage -- 15
years after their divorce. He'd dated other women, but there was
a big problem. He'd met Stephanie before he was famous, but no
one he met since could see David Kaufmann. They saw a
mega-superstar. Women who liked his fame swarmed about him like
mosquitoes, but they didn't see him for who he was, a guy who
needed love like anyone else just for being who he was, not for
being rich and famous. The women who didn't care about his status
were harder to find -- he had to seek them out. And in getting to
know them, their perspective on a future together came up early.
If one of them married him, she would be famous too, attracting
her own swarm of mosquitoes for the rest of her life. His
conclusion was that women who didn't care about his status didn't
want to deal with fame either. He supposed in theory he could
give up the company. By keeping a mere $10,000,000 in the bank,
he could live a simple life in the country -- or in any country.
But if he was honest with himself, he realized that he couldn't
stand that. Having wielded power for so long, he couldn't give it
up without losing himself.

So he figured he'd be single for the rest of his days.
Masturbation under the influence of ordinary, "wholesome" porn
was about as sexually satisfying as sex had ever been with
Priscilla or anyone else.

But what else made people happy?

Religion. Forget about it -- a total nonstarter.

Philanthropy? He'd joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a
couple others in his pledge to give away half his money. And when
he'd been worth $200 billion, that's what he'd done. Gotten rid
of a full $100 billion. He had felt amazingly virtuous, and
people were so terribly grateful. Their gratitude earned him some
more fame points. But his remaining fortune had continued to
grow. How often was he supposed to get rid of half his money? If
he got rid of half of his fortune each day, then he'd be under a
dollar in something like four months.

The bigger problem was that the world was going to hell in a
handbasket. No matter how much money you threw at problems, it
seemed they got worse. The Gates Foundation had made great
strides in controlling AIDS in Africa, which had led to even more
population growth, slamming the sub-Saharan nations harder than
ever against the wall of limited resources. Some of his money had
gone to supporting the Bangladeshi refugees, driven from their
homes by rising sea levels. But they seemed to live such a
miserable existence, and even he couldn't support them forever.
His entire fortune wouldn't do that.

Here's how it worked these days: The Third World starved. The
First World's working and middle classes got by OK, but with less
each year. (The seldom-discussed Second World had split with the
fall of communism, half joining the First and half the Third).
But the rich? The rich did great. He served the rich. He wasn't
exactly proud of that, but if he didn't do it, someone else
would. He had always figured that anyone else in his shoes at the
top of Facetwit would pay even less attention to social welfare
than he did -- he *had* given away that $100 billion, right?

He was the wealthiest man in the world, but he was powerless to
make the world better.

A more subtle problem was that these days, "making the world
better" referred to healing it, alleviating ills, and restoring
an equilibrium. The ideal was a stable ecosystem, with everyone
free from the fear of war, famine or pestilence. But the price
for everyone getting along was a lack of shared positive goals.
In the ideal world as imagined today, there was no shared sense
of what they were striving for. There wasn't even any mass
funding for space exploration, scientific discovery, or the
construction of great art. In the past, individual societies had
taken pride in subduing the wilderness, converting the world to
the one true faith, and building great works to the glory of a
God they believed in fervently. But equal opportunity for all,
limiting growth to the sustainable, and letting everybody choose
their own goals just didn't fit well with the human psyche. We
had evolved to compete and prevail.

He foresaw a collapse of society. It might be sudden, for
instance if a highly contagious microbe mutated to a lethal form.
Or it might be gradual, lasting centuries. Something new and
inspiring might arise -- it *would* arise, he could feel it --
but no one could tell what it might be, and no one could tell how
to hasten its arrival or plan for it.

But he was aware of his history. His Jewish ancestors had
struggled in the shtetls of Eastern Europe for centuries, working
hard, never giving up. Disease, famine and waves of invaders took
their toll on everyone. Jews were constantly nipped by pogroms,
and then over half had been wiped out in the Holocaust. But some
had made it to America, where a great many had been successful
and helped disproportionately to their numbers in achieving what
greatness the modern world had created. His ancestors in the
shtetl could never have foreseen that -- their hopes were pinned
to the coming of the Messiah. What they had actually accomplished
was to be fruitful and multiply, and while most of their progeny
had perished, some had lived to blossom in America and Israel.

Kaufmann knew he wouldn't be around for the next inspiring
chapter of human greatness. But his offspring could. Like his
ancestors before him, he could be fruitful and multiply,
spreading his genes. And what about his genes?

He was smart, confident, and hard-working. He had no illusions
that his hereditary endowment was the reason for his phenomenal
success -- he didn't have some special one-in-a-billion gene
combination -- but his genes were good. Whatever new chapter in
humanity awaited, it could certainly use some more Kaufmann
genes. And then there was still the Holocaust to make up for;
Jews were due some extra representation in the future gene pool.

He didn't actually want to raise any kids. As far as he could
tell the parents around him reaped more sorrow than joy from
their own children. The standard pattern for having them involved
a relationship with a woman, which he had already decided was
more problematic than it was worth. Besides, a woman could only
have a few children -- as many as a dozen would be shocking in
this day and age. Another standard pattern for the rich was
adopting kids, but that didn't fit his goals at all. They
wouldn't have his genes, and what's more would tend to have
problems arising from whatever circumstances made them candidates
for adoption.

He had already been secretly living out his emerging dream on a
modest scale for six years: he had been an anonymous sperm donor.
Some women had chosen him as the father of their children based
on his anonymous profile. He had fathered perhaps ten children
already, though even he with his great power and wealth couldn't
find out for certain -- not without twisting arms more tightly
than he wanted to.

But so far he had attracted women to bear his children based on
an anonymous profile. He had another possible enticement: money.

He thought that men as a group had been blinded by their
instinctual natures to the possibilities that lay before them.
Evolution predicted that men would be motivated to father as many
children as they could, and in many respects this was borne out:
they were far more eager for casual sex than women. They sought
out the one-night stands, and they let far less deter them from
sex, including attention to contraception. Rape, especially in
times of chaos such as war, was something men engaged in all too
regularly. Polygamy was very common and attractive to many rich
men as the multiple uteruses churned out babies in parallel. The
tendency in modern societies for successful men to abandon their
aging wives for younger women could be chalked up to the same
basic instinct.

But when it came to sperm donation, suddenly everything changed.
If men truly wanted to have as many children as possible, they
should be engaged in fierce fights for the chance to donate
sperm. It was a free chance to pass on genes, without any need to
limit other options! Instead, fertility clinics had to advertise
for sperm donors and sometimes offered payment. But the reason
for this state of affairs made evolutionary sense as well: in the
human environment of adaptation, it was sex with women that led
to children, not masturbation.

If a man saw beyond the inclinations that evolution had endowed
him with and took it as his conscious goal to father as many
children as possible, he should volunteer for sperm donation. He
shouldn't require anyone to pay him -- on the contrary, he should
be willing to pay!

In line with current norms, anonymous sperm donor agreements were
ironclad in releasing the donor from any obligations of child
support. Even if his children exercised the right he had granted
them of contacting him at age 18, they couldn't successfully sue
him for a dime. But avoiding child support payments was not his
goal. He could easily afford even $100,000 per year for each of
his ten kids without noticing its effect on his fortune.

So his latest thinking was: why not set up his own sperm bank,
and entice women with not just his genetic profile, but his
money? Why not offer them a reward for bearing his children?

In times past, the opportunities for abuse would have been
rampant. Women could take some sperm from his sperm bank, throw
it away, conceive a child with a husband or boyfriend who looked
something like him -- and send him the bill. But modern genetic
testing made such a scam impossible. It was a simple procedure to
tell with 100% certainty whether a baby was his or not.

He smiled. There could be dozens more little Kaufmanns -- maybe
hundreds! He could certainly afford to support them.

It might be something of a scandal, but what did he care? He had
broken new ground with Facetwit. Why not break new ground with a
way for rich people to spend their fortunes? Many people would be
incensed. Perhaps the majority of potential parents would never
consider his offer, perhaps an overwhelming majority. But that
didn't matter. All that mattered was finding a tiny minority,
just a few hundred, who were interested. Other people could think
what they wanted. He and consenting women had reproductive
freedom and could have children together -- it was no one else's
business. He could offer the women anonymity if they were
concerned about some social stigma. No one ever need know that
the young boy or girl was a little Kaufmann. As it turned out,
his fame and success itself attracted considerable interest.
Women were more often than not proud to tell whose baby it was.

He'd had confidential talks with some lawyers who specialized in
legal issues raised by artificial fertility techniques. They'd
found a couple ways to address concerns some women would have. To
guard against fraud or mischance on his part, they could have an
amnio done to verify the genetic match in time to allow an
abortion. To guard against unexpected encumbrances on his
fortune, the support money could be placed in an escrow account
at the same time they were given the sperm; the money would
revert to Kaufmann if they didn't show up with a baby after ten
months. Protections for him included giving the money out over
time, verifying on a yearly basis that the baby or child was
alive, healthy, and being cared for reasonably well. Mothers
could give up a Kaufmann baby for adoption, and the money would
go with the baby. Existing laws prevented them from selling the
baby, but if some sort of under-the-table consideration was
given, it didn't concern David particularly. Whoever was raising
the baby would have to demonstrate its well-being to collect the
ongoing payments.

---------------------------------------------------------

Kaufmann performed his sperm donations in the usual manner. But
at that moment of ecstasy on this September afternoon, he felt an
extra little thrill knowing that by this one act he would be
creating several more offspring. Suffused with a happy glow, he
screwed the top on the little plastic cup, put it in a capsule,
stuck it in the pneumatic tube and pushed a switch. He could hear
faintly the whoosh of the fans creating the air pressure that
propelled the capsule on its way.

Patricia sat chatting with two other technicians in the lab room
at the far end of David's mansion. They knew David's production
would be arriving shortly. When they heard the motors start up,
they prepared for action. Twenty women awaited insemination.
There was rarely enough semen for all of them, but it was worth
their while to come in just in case he produced an especially
large ejaculation.

The other technicians watched as Patricia opened the lid of the
small container. She guessed there would be enough there for
about a dozen doses -- they actually ended up with a half dose
left over for a thirteenth woman. Patricia drew each tiny dose --
about the size of a lentil -- into the end of a sort of syringe.
It was actually a flexible tube about nine inches long, but the
semen stayed at the very tip, visible through clear plastic. As
soon as a first syringe was loaded, the technician June took it
to the alcove where Emily waited in the standard position for an
internal exam, legs raised with feet in stirrups. She showed the
young woman the end of the syringe with its tiny bit of milky
fluid, then positioned herself between her legs. With a warmed
speculum she opened her vagina, inserted the tube and guided its
end to the center of the woman's cervix. She asked Emily if she
was ready, the young woman gave a bashful smile, and June pushed
the plunger. The tiny drop of milky fluid covered her cervix.
Withdrawing syringe and speculum, June congratulated Emily and
left her. There was no evidence that staying on her back for a
while would improve Emily's chances of conceiving, but like many
young women she did anyway. It had a psychological effect,
perhaps a vestige of the typical female desire to cuddle after
sex.

June returned for another syringe of semen and went into the next
cubicle to deliver it. Each of the technicians inseminated four
women, and the final half dose was June's to deliver. The entire
process had taken fifteen minutes.

---------------------------------------------------------

David's plan had met with the expected opposition, but there had
been no serious repercussions. The applications flooded in, and
David found he could be very picky.

First, he screened for peak fertility. For the most part he chose
women between the ages of 20 and 29 who had already easily
conceived one previous child. These women had demonstrated
fertility and been comfortable enough with motherhood that they
were willing to consider a second child. Lesbian couples were a
good choice, and for the rest he took a mix. A heterosexual
couple had the advantage of two parents, but the disadvantage
that the man knew he was not the child's father and might feel
some inadequacy. The payment David offered for using his sperm
was usually a major factor, and at some primal level the man felt
he didn't earn enough money. Divorced mothers applied in large
numbers; they had a chance for another child and enough money to
live comfortably and afford childcare.

He required some evidence of solvency -- he didn't want people
raising his babies who were financially desperate. The money was
sure to be a draw, but he didn't want it to be the difference
between a comfortable life and imminent homelessness. He also
required a $1,000 fee. The purpose was not to generate income, of
course, but to indicate a woman's confidence in her own fertility
and her willingness to carry the baby to term. The fee had
started at $100, but he had raised it as demand increased and
early results showed that he was producing good-quality sperm.

He had started with Americans, but soon branched out. Who knew
what portions of humanity would survive a future holocaust? Best
not to put all one's sperm in one basket. He had also heard of
hybrid vigor, meaning that children he conceived with women of
notably different genetic stock were likely to be especially
healthy.

He chose women who were themselves from large families,
preferably with siblings who also had all married and had
children of their own. He wanted children born into a tradition
that encouraged them to have many children themselves. His aides
were surprised that he freely chose women from fundamentalist
religious traditions, given his views on the subject. In David's
view, he was in it for the long term. He might have found
Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, or Islam to be repellent, but who
knew what the future held, many generations hence? Their
ideologies might seem misguided now, but perhaps they held the
seeds of humanity's future flowering. Naturally, women from those
traditions tended to keep secret their participation in his
program.

Women submitted personal resumes. He chose those who gave
evidence of intelligence success in themselves and their
families. He also used videos to select women who were personable
and attractive.

Once the criteria were in place, David like any good manager
delegated the entire selection and scheduling procedure.

David had started with the standard artificial insemination
procedure -- an entire ejaculation was frozen and thawed for use
at a later time. But fresh semen is more effective than
previously frozen, and the demand was such that giving each woman
a full ejaculation would result in a very long waiting list. A
woman of peak fertility needs very little high quality sperm to
conceive with a high probability. A lentil's worth was probably
more than they needed, when it was carefully placed right at the
cervical entrance.

David initially made fertility tours of the world, flying in his
private jet on a secret itinerary. He arrived incognito and
arranged for the use of a vacant building containing a medical
suite. The women were required not to disclose the location,
because others arriving for the same purpose might not want their
participation known. There were hundreds of women in any location
who wanted his sperm, but only the few who were at peak fertility
in their monthly cycles were eligible. David's technicians were
skilled in fertility awareness -- detecting the properties of a
vagina that showed it was hospitable to the survival of sperm.

He found that one ejaculation per day was about right for him. He
might not ordinarily have masturbated quite that often, but the
more often he ejaculated, the higher his total sperm production.

And what about the money?

His initial public offering -- he smiled to think of it that way
-- was for $300,000 at the time of birth, $100,000 per year for
20 years, and $200,000 for other contingencies including fees to
cover the verification steps. A total of $2,500,000 was placed in
escrow at the time of insemination. But as he was swamped with
applications, market forces suggested he should offer less. Now
he offered $120,000 at the time of birth, $60,000 per year for 20
years, and $80,000 for contingencies, for a total of $1,400,000.
That was for an American baby. It made sense to offer less in
poorer countries, as he didn't want to make his child's family
fabulously wealthy compared to the neighbors. So for instance a
middle-class family in India typically received $40,000 at the
time of birth and $20,000 for the 20 years. The escrow funds were
provided in a currency of the mother's choice.

At one ejaculation per day, twelve women per ejaculation, and a
50% success rate, he was fathering six children per day. If he
worked year-round without a day off, he would be fathering 2,190
children per year. The bill for this came to $3 billion per year
if they were all Americans. At that rate, and assuming no growth
or shrinkage in his current net worth of $1.7 trillion, he could
go on fathering children for 567 years before he ran out of
money!

David soon gave up his worldwide spawning trips. He simply paid
women from all over the world and the U.S. to come to Palo Alto.
With assistants to screen the applications and handle all the
paperwork, his role in the process boiled down to jerking off and
handing over the sperm. The ongoing marginal time cost was five
minutes per day.

There were calls to investigate his unchecked spawning. Campaign
contributions assured that no politician was going to actually
stop him, but some had to give indignant speeches to placate
their constituents. But there was little they could do in any
case. He wasn't taking anyone's money; he was giving it away. He
wasn't trying to claim any tax deductions. And the recipients of
his genetic and financial largesse were delighted with the
arrangement.

---------------------------------------------------------

It was May 20, 2032, his 41st birthday. Some exciting gene
therapy had been discovered to extend a person's healthy life. As
he had pretty good genes to start with and could afford the
fabulously expensive treatments, he could expect to live to 120,
and until the age of 100 produce a potent ejaculation each day.
He had sixty years of fathering children ahead of him, and he
should end up with about 120,000 kids. If they found ways to
divide his ejaculations into more parts and still impregnate the
women with a high probability, that figure could rise
substantially.

And the whole process would still consume a mere one-seventh of
his fortune. He wondered what else he should do with his money.
He supposed he could just split his inheritance equally among his
children in the customary manner. Even having to share with
120,000 brothers and sisters, each should receive a cool
$10,000,000 or so!

============================================================

I do not know of any technological or legal obstacle to a person
actually doing this. If Mark Zuckerberg at age 27 is worth $17.5
billion and offered $1 million to anyone who agreed to have his
baby, he could afford 17,500 children. By fathering a mere two
children a day he could reach that figure in 20 years.

What did you think? I'm always eager for comments, whether
positive, negative or mixed. Comments to sterling27@live.com.