Chapter 1

Jack:

Earth. Frankly, I never thought I'd see the home world again. I got extracted in Year Three of the Diaspora in a classic pickup from a fast food restaurant and transported in a thousand-pod transport to the new colony of Nuevo Angelino, along with a shitload of other Californians (and Mexicans and transplants from a whole lot of other places doing the whole migration to the Land of Opportunity thing). Well, Nuevo Angelino was undoubtedly going to be a better opportunity than anything available in East L. A. after the Swarm hit, so I was more than pleased.

Nuevo Angelino was to be a huge naval base and shipyard. We got what I was given to understand later was a somewhat different start than other colonies, as the Governor, COL Sharpe, wasn't satisfied that we had the asset base that would make us successful. One of the first things he did -- while we were still in transit -- was to collect employment histories for every concubine. COL Sharpe liked to come out with old aphorisms like, "Idle hands are the Devil's playground," -- and be more or less serious about it. His basic platform was that we had a lot of sponsor bodies, but without the support structure -- butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers -- we were going to have a huge bleed-off from our efforts. Concubines sitting at home on their thumbs were a waste of assets. Therefore, he wanted 50% of the concubines employed in colony support at any given point in time.

I had two concubines -- and first Tina, then Dottie entered the workforce in rotation, Tina going first as Dottie was the first pregnant. Were they super-helpful to anyone? Maybe not. Tina, in particular, was 'the lunch girl' at the transporter station that ported the workforce to the orbital shipyards. But you could argue the point (and the Support Directorate chickie -- also a concubine -- who requested her for that job did) that if the workforce didn't have to port down to grab their lunch, there was more time for them to work. Groundside jobs tended to go to the Support Directorate -- which was a fancy name for concubines and a few Civil Service overseers. Anyway, a few months back things switched up and Dottie was doing the working Mom thing as shift supervisor at a distribution center and Tina, who was now about six months preggers, was home trying to get a handle on motherhood by watching Jack Jr. when he wasn't at the local crèche -- a day care for a half-dozen or so families run by a concubine next door who has good nurturing skills.

'Families' is the proper term. Despite horror stories about concubines being recycled into meatloaf at the snack bar and various 'you can kill 'em as long as you don't make a mess' lectures, the bottom line was that concubines are SUPPOSED to be your good right arm -- and need to be treated as such. There are plenty of ways to handle personality conflicts between yourself and your concubine short of turning her into glop -- you can get glop anywhere. You can paddle her ass or whatever, or if she bitches, you can pop over to Medical and shut down her vocal cords for a while. If the whole thing just isn't flying, you can trade her to someone else or for a Civil Service wench who knows a good thing when she sees one. Governor Sharpe put his foot down over excesses early on and it was a good thing, in my opinion. Oh, sure, you can still kill a concubine if you have to, but the review board is going to go into the meeting with a bad attitude; the whole, 'You can't shoot a dog but you can shoot a concubine' thing just didn't make sense...

Bottom line, abusing the mother of your children is counter-productive for domestic tranquility -- and I'm a big believer in domestic tranquility. Just about everyone I know is in total agreement with me, too...

I seem to have drifted, some ... Earth. I'd been away a bit over two years; doing something mundane like standing in a supermarket checkout line was sort of surreal, but I was there undercover while we conducted some negotiations -- um, yeah, more about that later. The point was, I was living in a hotel room and I needed supplies to take me through the next few days -- not to mention a pack of strawberry Twizzlers and some other luxuries to take back home for replication purposes. Replicator technology had removed some links in the economic food chain, but supermarkets were still distribution centers for a whole lot of things, since on Earth there still wasn't a replicator in every home -- and there wouldn't be, before all Hell broke loose. So I was standing there, waving my debit card while the chickie at the checkout waved things over the scanner and some girl wandered over to bag things for me...

Real tits sag. Real women who have had real kids have had their breasts swell up and then shrink back -- and that means they don't stick out, unsupported, like gun turrets. Lots of real women come to that point purely through weight gain and loss without going through pregnancy -- but a mother is CERTAINLY going to have some droop to her bust...

Now, I know you're asking yourself, 'What the fuck... ?' so I'm going to explain myself, here. You see, the average concubine's tits do NOT droop; through the miracles of Confederacy medicine, a young woman can have fine, puffy, high-riding breasts of just about any shape and size her back will allow her to carry -- and THAT, too, is adjustable. The vast majority of concubines, fourteen or forty four, tend to look like they're somewhere between eighteen and twenty five -- and belong on the cover of a fashion magazine. Pregnancy changes this not a whit -- although it tends to make the poor things look incredibly ungainly while they push around that basketball under their navel -- because as soon as they deliver, nannites start putting them back into the unspoiled, virginal shape they started out with.

Now, in general, this isn't the fault of the concubine; sponsors drive it, and they're looking for the ideal woman when they do it. And we're all naughty little boys and tend to have oddly similar concepts of feminine perfection -- driven largely by the media, in most cases. So there are a lot of blonde concubines out there with breastworks that don't sag a millimeter and killer legs all the way to their asses and, well, you get the picture...

So this sweet thing bends over in front of me to bag my stuff and I end up looking down her tank top at a pair of hooters that are definitely being squashed a bit but are hanging and displaying a deep, soft cleavage -- and I'm all over it, moving here and there so I can track that canyon as it sweeps back and forth...

Well, she catches me and turns a bit pink and turns a bit to the side to rob me of my view -- and I'm standing there wondering exactly WHY I want to climb over the counter so I can reposition...

The checkout chickie is amused; I'm making a total ass of myself for what is clearly no good reason. I get a grip and start the payment transaction and Sweet Thing says to the checkout chickie, "Frieda, can I thut down theven? I need to clean it..." -- and I get this MAJOR boner! She LISPS, for God's sake! I take a good look at her face; she's wearing braces and her upper lip laps over her lower because she doesn't have much in the way of a chin. She has thick, bushy, dark, reddish hair pulled back from a wide forehead into a bushy mass at the back of her head that releases springy little wispies at her neck. Her face is very pale (and a bit pink at the moment, under my startled gaze) and dusted with freckles. Thick, bushy eyebrows almost meet above muddy hazel eyes that hide behind the frames of the glasses that sit on her nose -- which is unfortunately short enough that turning up at the tip makes it a bit hoglike...

I gather myself and circle around to the bagging area to collect my purchases; Sweet Thing goes around behind the counter next to Checkout Chickie and starts digging under the counter, saying, "I need the cleaner..." And Checkout Chickie stands there watching me as my eyeballs trace the three inch strip of pale skin that appears above the three inch strip of flowered cotton panties that appears above the top of Sweet Thing's jeans as she bends over...

Now, the ass in question here was, jeez, twenty-four inches wide if it was a millimeter. Tina could almost have been standing there twice! But I'm ogling it and taking in the little translucent hairs that appear here and there in an expanse so pale you can see the blue of the capillaries under it...

So, to recap, ten days ago before I left home, I got a blowjob from a narrow blonde supermodel (well, she's a bit misshapen from being six months along, but the basics are still there), then fucked a curvy brunette goddess -- both of whom belonged to me and me alone. In transit, I'd fucked two or three similarly stunning specimens placed on board the transport for our entertainment by the Civil Service -- but I was making a total ass of myself over a big-assed, slack-tittied, chunky, brainless looking piece in blue jeans and a tank top under an open jean shirt!

Sober reflection on the matter over the course of several days has led me to understand that, to me, Sweet Thing was exotic. To the normal North American male resident of Earth, she was a commodity, and better could be found just about anywhere you cared to look -- Checkout Chickie wasn't totally hot by any means, but she had Sweet Thing beat -- but I had been looking at carbon-copy 'ideal women' for a couple of years, and her pear shape was something I'd developed a hunger for ... At the time, though, I couldn't explain it for the life of me!

Sweet Thing backed out from under the counter to find me where I shouldn't be, between that counter and the next, hovering over her so I could watch that strip of bare skin at the saddle of her back pass by as she backed. She looked at me, startled, then looked at Checkout Chickie, who was grinning, and blushed furiously. I stood there, invading her personal space as she slowly shifted to the vertical -- and my mouth said, "Hey, uh, you wouldn't want to go out or anything... ?"

I don't know who was more surprised -- Sweet Thing, Checkout Chickie -- or me!

"I don't think so," she husked.

Reality intruded. I'd done the rejection thing many, many times -- or it seemed that way, anyway. Jack Version 2.0 looked twenty three rather than thirty six, had a bit more hair, whiter and straighter teeth and a bit more chin, but that didn't mean I should have expected much. Oh, I'm more muscular -- but I'm Navy, not a Marine, so I didn't look like the Incredible Hulk. Similarly, I hadn't had my cock up-sized to the length and girth of a Tall Boy (a sixteen ounce beer can); it seemed stupid to then have to alter my women so the damned thing fit them anywhere. I'd been packing a decent eight inches to start with, so I opted to have the thing's recharge time reduced, added a touch of girth, and left it at that. Dottie would describe me as 'boyishly handsome' when she was flirting with me, trying to wheedle me out of something -- but that didn't mean I believed it. Without the cachet of 'sponsorship, ' I was no more in demand than Sweet Thing... "Uh, yeah, sorry -- I got carried away," I stammered, and grabbed my four bags of goodies, tucked my head, and slithered toward the door.

The team AI pinged me with, "Are those the selection parameters for the new concubine you are collecting, Jack Harper?" Some AIs don't seem to have any sense of humor, but I fancied that this one had been after me ever since I told it, "Call me 'Jack'." It had responded exactly the way Mrs. Ratzenburger, my fourth grade teacher had, "But your records indicate that your name is John..." Mrs. Ratzenburger had eyed me over her half-glasses and added, "Therefore, you are 'John'," as if that ended the matter. I'd responded to THAT as I always do -- and as I'd responded to the AI twenty-four years later -- "Nobody calls me 'John'." Mrs. Ratzenburger had attempted to press home a victory -- but I refused to respond when she called upon 'John' and eventually, she relented; the AI and I had a short discussion about the relationship between the names John and Jack. I figured it was needling me; surely it knew such things. This time, I growled under my breath at it...

"Mithter..." there was a pluck at my sleeve. I turned and Sweet Thing held out a wad of register coupons -- clearly more than I would have earned. "You forgot theeth... !"

I blinked and accepted them, muttering, "Thank you."

"I was thurprithed..." she murmured, then eyed me sidelong. "Where would we go if I thead yeth?"

'Some where I could fuck your brains out!' my brain screamed. Fortunately, my mouth said, "Dinner? A movie? What's your name?"

"Beth." Later, I was to learn that it was actually Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Hopkins. Ironically, she'd been stuck with a name she couldn't pronounce. "I, um, get off at theven-thirty," she announced coyly.

I looked up; Checkout Chickie was watching us fixedly -- and had probably been the source of the coupon gambit. Seven-thirty was a half-hour away, and I had nothing in my clutch of groceries that required special handling. "I'll wait at the coffee shop next door."

"Okay!" She bounced a little and I thought she was going to clap, then she bustled off, that ass of hers rocking and rolling. Checkout Chickie was grinning from ear to ear. I grinned back and hit the door.

Beth:

I don't know how it happened; it was like those magazine people just suddenly showed up at the door with the big check and the balloons and TV cameras and stuff! I got up and went in to do my shift as usual -- and everything changed...