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| The "Thinking Horndog" talked to me about the Sa'arm Cycle which captured my imagination. We discussed the subject and he was not displeased with allowing me to write within his framework. |
Pickups happen... and I was finally being extracted.
Mind you, having had four men just shoulder me aside and start to pick women before presenting themselves to the pickup team didn't put me in a good mood. I was a bit miffed by their arrogance and impatience to get at the women before any of the other volunteers-- like me-- could.
I'd read enough to know that you follow the orders of the extraction team... and those four didn't. I decided it was better for me to walk over to them and present myself.
Once I showed them my ID, I realized they were watching the four men as they pushed women into humiliating themselves for a chance to leave the Earth.
I watched as these two soldiers checked each other's eyes and I could see them seem to lose focus, probably communing with the AIs that supported these drops.
When they both snapped out of it they both made a show of looking closely at my ID, pulling up the information on their PDAs and comparing it with me as I stood there. I got a nod.
"Sir, you should stand over there while we get things set up for you..."
I nodded and backed off. The two soldiers went over to the closest of the four men and one tapped him on the shoulder, asking for his ID card. The other three paused in their activity before turning back to their mind games.
Both soldiers consulted their PDAs... and I saw a knife flash as the closer of the soldiers stabbed and gutted the man they'd just approached. I was shocked.
The other three men stopped and stared, one yelling "What did you do that for?"
The knife-wielding soldier called out "Counterfeit!"
The was a pause as the word echoed across the room, everyone looking at the three men who'd paused... and we saw all three pull out guns and start shooting.
I managed to make it to the floor in time to avoid being hit in the fire-fight... I thought.
I came to in a very different place, laying out in an odd tube reminiscent of an MRI I've had. I was soon moved out of it and saw people I didn't recognize around me.
"Alan Wallace?" a tall, bulky soldier asked me, his face grave.
I nodded. Yeah, that was my name.
"Well, Mister Wallace, you were lucky. My extraction team got shredded before the reaction team could get there... and we managed to get you out. I'm sorry, but... we don't have any extras and we're already on our way to your new home."
You may be able to understand the quality of my sigh. I shrugged, adding "Figures."
Donning the crappy gray shift they handed me, I stood and looked around. "What happened? Everything went to hell when one of the soldiers in the extraction team knifed one of those arrogant volunteers."
The fellow chuckled at me. "They were actually zeroes-- all of them were sociopaths and, unexpectedly, were working together... and had counterfeit ID cards with high CAP scores. What they did not know was that the AIs have a record of every person's ID and we compare each card against the database... and itself. We've seen counterfeits before, you know, but we usually quietly extract them... and then space 'em, all nice and quiet. The counterfeit rate has risen, though, so we decided to change the policy to get it across that counterfeits may work with someone who can't run an ID against the AIs, but we check. Those four yahoos thought that their counterfeits-- and they all claimed mid-9 CAP scores-- would get them past the AIs and off the Earth. Well... they got off the planet, yes, but their bodies didn't."
I nodded. "Now what?"
"Sergeant Owens, here, will give you your pod assignment."
I wandered, alone, to my pod. This was going to be a long trip, too...
I wasn't alone for long, though. Sergeant Owens-- Marla, actually-- was an Amazon who took a shine to me. I was also asked if I could switch to Civil Service, given my odd situation.
"Alan," Marla told me, mid-cuddle, "you do want to take that Civil Service position. Someone needs to take over support for Andrew's... ummm... family. And, really, you will be in a good position to do that. Hell, I want you to be there for my family, should anything happen to me."
While I had chosen some minor enhancements to my body, I had not bulked up anywhere near as much as Marla had, so, oddly enough, it was a case of her spooning me.
"But... what good can I do? For anyone?"
She kissed the top of my head where I had retained my bald spot before continuing, "It's a shitty job because you don't have a lot of power, for yourself, but we all need to have people whose job it is to look at the big picture."
I sighed. As a systems analyst I had learned that having good questions tended to be good answer, but also knew that it was too easy for a lot of people-- especially those under time pressure-- to see the "big picture". It is seductive to look at the trees instead of the forest because you can actually deal with a tree, pretty much by yourself, as long as you have a chain-saw.
This job, what I'd seen of it, needed someone able to herd a bunch of cats with chain-saws; the only really good news for the civil service was that fragging members was a bad idea.
Mind you, having a CAP of 6.6 wasn't going to give me anything in the way of respect or leadership.
By the time we started the second week of our voyage, two female concubines had been ejected by their sponsors... and I had the right of first refusal to take them.
The first, Irina, had a CAP of 6.3... and was, I am told, a "dead fuck" with a weak or non-existent maternal drive. Since the consolidated CAP score is a compromise, you can take it as read that she was brilliant in other areas.
I got her with a bun in the oven... and, I discovered, the whiff of vacuum she got on being abandoned by her sponsor, turned her...
There is no doubt that I'm weird, did you know that? I'm an eclectic so I know a little bit about everything. When I decided to try her, I spent the time in soothing her fears and trying to get her out of wanting to be catatonic. When she finally recovered-- more or less-- she was clingy.
Having been one of those men who no one gives a first look-- much less a second-- having a beautiful and bright young woman clinging to you is wonderful for the ego. I'll grant that my parents were right in telling me that I was nothing special, but, now, finding a woman who did find me special did feel good.
And, yeah, she was as dead a fuck as my wife, left behind on earth, had been, but, hey, at least she was able to reach an orgasm.
The second ejectee was Silva, who had been in transit from Iran when most of the middle east was nuked after the Sa'arm threat was finally made public. She'd been chosen by a woman sponsor... and had refused to mate with the man she had picked up. Since Silva's sponsor had a CAP score of 8 she had plenty of women to go around.
Silva was conditioned by her childhood experiences to be submissive-- which, truly, should have made her suitable for being a concubine-- but she wasn't conditioned to take such orders from a woman. She had a CAP of 4.2, almost all of which was based on maternal and sexual drives, if not actual practice.
I was fortunate that she was willing to take orders from me.
Unfortunately...
I had always been something of a "dead fuck", myself, you see... and Silva damn near burned my brains out the first time we got together. She was open to doing things I had heard of but had never been able to experience for myself.
So, in some ways, she transcended some of her childhood conditioning very well.
Silva did adapt well to taking some orders from Irina as my "senior wife" once she knew that I was behind this simple pecking order. If anything, she seemed to be pleased with limited responsibility.
Marla still hung around me and gave me tips about handling my concubines, telling me that, with any luck, Silva should be pregnant by the time we got to our new home. She also gave me advice in how to set up the pod once we were landed.