Prologue: A Changing World

Author's Note:

I had been writing Chapter One for a couple weeks when I realized that I was spending a lot of page space on recaps and transitional notes between Life With Alpha books One and Two, so I separated out most of that material into this prologue. For readers familiar with Book One, there are paragraphs here that you may want to skim or skip. (For that matter, I highly recommend that any new readers start with Book One.) But this chapter also provides some details about the new estate and discusses what the members of the household have been doing throughout the summer and autumn between the assassination attempt (i.e. the end of Book One) and the beginning of Book Two, as well as giving general updates on their lives outside the confines of the story.

I'd also like to point out that some of the storytelling focus will change. For most of Book One, the focus was on introducing one or more new characters each chapter (well, most chapters) and various character interactions. As you may have noticed from the last two chapters of Book One, from now on a significantly larger part of the story will deal with happenings outside of Frank's personal little world. I enjoy doing character stuff too much to give it up, but the outside world will play a major part in the story from now on.

Which is not to say that every chapter is going to focused on the changing world. In fact, the first major outside-the-household plot excursion isn't planned until chapter three. But the point I'm clumsily trying to make is that the outside world will be intruding in every chapter from now on.

Dramatis Personae:
Frank _____ - Lead character, creator of Alpha
Alpha - First Artificial/Synthetic/Computer Intelligence

Mobile Copies of Alpha:
Beta aka Bayonetta aka Elizabeth Alana Franks (cyborg, from Bayonetta)
Gamma aka Princess Jasmine aka Jasmine Marza (cyborg, from Aladdin)
Delta aka Elisa Maza aka Elizabeth Marza (cyborg, from Gargoyles)
Alphadroid Dorothy aka R. Dorothy Waynewright (android, from Big O)
A-Ko aka Eiko Magami aka Epsilon (organic copy of Alpha, from Project A-Ko)

Artificial Women (in order of arrival):
Kasumi Tendo (from Ranma 1/2)
Daria Morgendorffer aka Daria Morgan (from Daria)
Jane Lane aka Jane Lannister (from Daria)
Kara Zor-L aka Power Girl aka Karen Starr (from DC Comics)
Rei Ayanami aka Rei Ayanami Ikari (from Neon Genesis Evangelion)
Anna Marie aka Rogue aka Anna Marie Raffen (from Marvel Comics)
Princess Diana aka Wonder Woman aka Diana Prince Walters (from DC Comics)
Zatanna Zatara aka Annabelle Tara Zane (from DC Comics)
Kara Zor-El aka Supergirl aka Linda Lang Starr (from DC Comics)
Blossom aka Belle Underton (from Powerpuff Girls)
Bubbles aka Britney Underton (from Powerpuff Girls)
Buttercup aka Bobbi Underton (from Powerpuff Girls)
Ororo Munroe aka Storm aka Imara Aurora Munroe (from Marvel Comics)
Kitty Pryde aka Shadowcat aka Katherine Preiss (from Marvel Comics)
Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk (from Marvel Comics)
Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl/Oracle aka Barbara Freeman (from DC Comics)

We moved into the new house at the beginning of September, less than three months after I had been shot. While there were a few side projects still being finished up, the house ... well, the 'mansion' ... was complete. I've never been comfortable with the notion of living in a 'mansion', but given its size, the only valid alternate names were along the lines of manor, palace or castle. Sooner or later, we'd have to decide on a proper name for the estate but no decision had been reached yet.

The estate itself was a bit less than an hour outside the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, which gave us quite a commute to AARD (80 minutes with normal traffic), though we maintained our old house in Fort Worth for those times when it just made more sense to stay in town overnight. There was also a lot of telecommuting, and we eventually added in a helicopter pad for faster trips back and forth, though I'm skipping ahead a bit too much with that last comment.

The estate was roughly four square miles (laid out as a roughly 1.5 x 2.6 mile block), and was originally farm and pasture land. We had cleaned it all up, leaving most of it still undeveloped, with the main estate occupying maybe one quarter of a square mile, which is still a really good chunk of land.

Speaking of which, the main estate included: the mansion itself, garage, barn with horse pen, greenhouse, workshop, pool, tennis court, water tower, two wells and a stone wall surrounding the main estate area. (The rest of the grounds were also fenced in, but not with the same high stone wall which enclosed the main estate area.) The grounds outside the main estate included a large horse pasture, two ponds, two more wells, twelve electricity-generating windmills and two streams. We were still installing an extensive security system throughout the property, including a mix of hidden and obvious cameras to cover the entire perimeter as well as at least half of the interior.

We had a variety of plans for possible additions in the future, including things like a heavy-construction lab, private airstrip and guest houses. And there were a few other private ideas that Alpha was working on, which we'll get into at a later time.

In addition to the power-generating windmills, we also had a back-up generator the size of a small barn, solar cells (our own AARD design) and fuel pump for underground storage tanks. Theoretically, we could provide independent power for anywhere between one-third and all of the house's power requirements, varying with how much wind we had at any given time. (With a bit more investment, we could be completely self-sufficient all the time when it came to electrical power, but we weren't quite at that level when we moved in.)

I think I've mentioned our solar cells before. We had been improving and refining the photovoltaic designs for years. The ones installed at the estate were our most practical so far, with an overall 78.3% efficiency rating (with efficiency varying for different ranges of the spectrum). We had been able to construct versions with efficiencies in the 90 percentile range but which cost close to $80,000 per square foot and were dangerously brittle. Our 78% style was fairly flexible, could be produced on a large production scale for as little as $26,000 per square yard and was the type currently sought after by NASA and satellite makers. We had recently licensed the technology to a manufacturing company and were expecting a good, long-term income from them. (In comparison, commercially produced solar panels before Alpha came along were considered top-of-the-line if they had above 25% efficiency. We had high hopes that the combination of our solar panel designs and upcoming fusion reactors might actually supplant the need for expendable/exhaustible fuel.)

We were planning on even more power sources than the solar panels and windmills with half a dozen other power generation and/or storage ideas in the works. Heck, we were already adapting our water tower to make it a gravity-powered battery. You pump water up into the tower to store the potential energy. When it comes back down, you use the water's descent to run a generator, turning the stored energy into electrical power. Not horribly efficient, but simple and workable.

Our wells produced excellent water but not in sufficient volume for the daily needs of a household our size, meaning ... well ... I'm reluctant to get into the icky details, but without a sewer system or metropolitan water supply, we did a lot of recycling. Seriously. I'm just going to leave it at that.

The main house/mansion was huge. It was three stories tall, with a large basement underneath. It was divided up into a main central section, with two large wings branching off at thirty degree angles away to the rear. Sections of the second and third floors had balconies, and we had size two-story columns lining the main entrance. There were plans to add statuary decorations, but Jane and I had yet to find something we would both approve of. We were also planning on a decorative fountain and various shaped topiary trees and bushes in front of and around the estate, but nothing like that was yet in place.

The house itself had 98 rooms, if you ignore things like closets, bathrooms and hallways. It was a very big place, with average bedroom size about 50% larger than our old house. Personally, I was not even certain I had visited all of the rooms. The basement included things like Alpha's server room, my home lab, and a four lane bowling alley. The first floor had all the main stuff, like kitchen, dining rooms, library, game rooms, parlors, sitting rooms and such. It also had a small sixty seat movie theater (though maybe I should point out that the theater encroached on the second floor as well). The second and third floors held mostly bedrooms. And given how many athletic women we had in residence, each floor had a different style exercise room. Oh yeah, I also had a secret art gallery on the third floor with nude portraits of each of my women, mostly painted by Jane.

Secret? Yes, secret. I had at one point during the design phase pointed out a good spot for a secret door. I didn't have any specific purpose in mind for it, I just bubbled over with a bit of child-like glee at the idea of having a secret door in my home. Alpha, seeing how much I enjoyed the idea, had ended up including hidden doors and secret passageways throughout the manor on every floor, though we only had three actual, proper secret rooms. (I didn't have an actual purpose in mind for the secret room on the second floor yet. The secret room in my basement lab was set aside for growing and storing bodies.)

By the way, the art gallery was an open secret. Everyone had posed for the portraits, which had been painted by Jane (including three nude self-portraits), so everyone knew the paintings existed. Most were very tasteful, and some of the ladies had only been willing to pose with an arm across the breasts or legs crossed demurely or something along those lines to keep the paintings from being truly R-rated. (Trust me. There was almost zero chance of Kasumi willingly posing for an R or X-rated picture.) Everyone also knew where the new portrait gallery was, secret entrance or not. And to be honest, given how easy it was to see anyone you wanted to see naked, the gallery was rarely visited.

Another area that was secret was our sub-basement, which is probably not the right term for it. Alpha was using bots to tunnel out areas under the house which would only be accessible by bots. Among other things, she was planning to turn it into a nanite production facility, since we were the main supplier of nanites to the rest of the Alpha cyborgs and such around the world. Basically, I left that entirely in her hands, including keeping the building foundations structurally supported. (Actually, if we fast forward to a couples years after we moved in, Alpha detected a slight foundation shift and used the sub-basement tunnel system to build more structural support for the foundation for that side of the house.)

Oh yeah, something else that was different about the new place: Animals. I know I had mentioned horses previously -- and yes, we were slowly buying ourselves a small but respectable stable of equines -- but horses were not the only additions. We were also adding cats and dogs to the mix. Well, more accurately, kittens and puppies.

We had known for quite some time that animals, dogs mainly, did not react well to the cyborgs. Somehow they were able to smell or otherwise sense that something about them was unnatural. (And here I'm speaking only about Beta, Jasmine and Elisa. Eiko and the others with their tiny implants caused no unexpected reactions.) However we believed that if animals were introduced to a cyborg when they were very young and allowed to acclimate to their presence over time, the normal negative reactions could be avoided. So, yes, puppies and kittens were added to the household. Also, yes, the early introduction/acclimation over time theory was working out well so far.

Over a year before during the house design phase, after I had planned and located the master bedroom on the second floor, Kara immediately claimed the room next to mine and no one was willing or able to face her down over the claim. However the ownership of the room on the other side was voted upon, with no one being allowed to vote for themselves: Kasumi was given the room by an almost two-thirds majority vote.

Kasumi Tendo was my first artificially created woman, with appearance, personality and memories taken from the Ranma 1/2 manga and anime. Along the lines of the craziness of the series, she believes she might be a magically created clone of the original Kasumi, who she believes is still living in Japan. I chose her because ... well, first because she's a beautiful young woman from a series I loved ... but also because I knew that I would need someone to run the household, a combination major domo and house mother. Kasumi is probably the nicest person I've ever met and is good friends with everyone in the house. Her mere presence can stop an argument.

Kasumi's role had changed somewhat. She was still in charge of the household in general -- with responsibilities covering cleaning, upkeep, shopping, cooking, schedules and so on -- but this time she had 21 different robots and androids at her disposal designed to maintain the estate in general. Some were Alphadroids but most were remote-controlled robots built for specific purposes (e.g. mowing and edging the lawn, vacuuming, trash collection, etc). Given the reduction in most of her duties, Kasumi started taking pride in keeping the bots and droids themselves shiny and clean.

Shopping and cooking were the only major jobs left for human hands, and with twenty-one people living in the house, they were not small tasks. (The food bills alone were thousands of dollars a week.) Kasumi, who could probably qualify as a master chef by this point, cooked at least half of the time, but the rest of the household residents were assigned meals to prepare or, if their cooking skills weren't up to the challenge, given shopping lists to purchase. (I should point out that no one cooked a meal for our extra-large household by themselves. Our chore schedule generally included at least two assistant cooks. For dinner that is. Breakfast and lunch were sometimes group events, but more often than not, they were fend-for-yourself affairs.)

Kasumi was still slowly working on her nursing certification and would probably graduate to a hospital internship (if she wanted it) the following spring. That particular fall, her two classes were arranged such that she often spent one night a week at our old mansion -- one night class followed by an early morning class the following day. I noticed that at least half of the time, Zatanna would stay in town to keep her company. From Alpha's observations, they often didn't even have sex. Zatanna was just there to provide friendship, companionship and support.

As a side note, Kasumi is the only artificial woman who had maintained her 'real' name (well, the only one until Jennifer arrived). Everyone else's names had been famous enough that they had needed to be altered (e.g. Barbara Gordon had a fake identity of Barbara Feeman). I've occasionally regretted leaving her name unaltered since there are apparently enough Ranma 1/2 fans around to notice it.

Daria and Jane were drawn from the Daria cartoon series, with the background story idea that their families had been killed in a hurricane when they were starting college. Though the series had stated fairly explicitly that they were both heterosexual, like the rest of the artificial women, bi-sexuality had been written into their DNA and minds. Thus they grew together as lovers as they joined my household and bed. Perhaps unique among our growing family, they alone believed they had normal backgrounds, which often led to conflicts since Daria had difficulty accepting things which were too far outside the norm.

Daria and Jane remained as roommates after the move, claiming the room next to Kasumi's. Jane had become a bit more subdued and Daria a bit angrier and more reckless in the months following my shooting, but within a couple months after our move, they had mostly settled back into their old patterns.

They had graduated from TCU about three years previously, Daria with a double-major in English and Journalism, Jane with a major in art/graphic design -- I honestly don't remember if the specific degree was in art history or what. The degree and training hadn't changed Jane's styles, it just let her express herself in a few new mediums. Daria kept considering going back to school for a Masters or PhD; Jane, of course, had no such ambitions.

Daria had a syndicated opinion column that ran weekly in three print newspapers, plus another column for an online-only news site and had gotten one pulp spy thriller published so far. None of that was giving her any serious income as yet, but it also didn't take too much of her time each week. That was good because she still had her job at AARD as 'Project Coordinator', which was a fancy way of saying she was in charge of requests from our researchers and kept them from getting out of hand with her almost unerring internal bullshit detector.

Jane was AARD's graphic artist and decorator, jobs which usually took very little of her time. However her decorator job had been kicked into high gear for the past six months or more leading up to the move into the new house. She had taken charge of the work crews assigned to finishing and painting tasks, as well as using Alpha to the fullest extent possible when it came to keeping track of everything on a room-by-room basis. At least half of the household had provided their individual bedroom design instructions, often with 'helpful' notes along the lines of 'maybe a light blue?' or 'something fun', which both added to her work and freed her up creatively speaking.

Jane had generally tried to give each room its own theme, with subjects ranging from a color to birds to Picasso to China. By the time we moved in, she was physically, mentally and creatively exhausted ... but pleased with the results. Technically we had roughly forty rooms which were still undecorated, but they weren't being used yet, so doing them later was perfectly fine with me. (And yes, there were a few theme rooms designed for fantasy sexual encounters, including the Arabian Nights Room, the Jungle Room, and the Dungeon.) Some of the rooms had murals covering one or more walls. The huge basement game room with the bowling alley had one huge wall covered with an interactive mural, with various items cut in half and attached to the wall to look like they were coming out of the wall. One of my favorites is a table where you can sit next to James Dean, Janis Joplin and Stevie Wonder. (Still don't know why she picked those three.)

On a more intimate level, Jane had accrued a dozen different body piercings and half a dozen tattoos, including a recent one of a very elaborately scripted "D" on one asscheek. The normally stoic Daria actually cried a little after seeing it, accepting Jane's devotion to her as evidenced by the permanent marking. I've also glimpsed designs for a matching "F" (for Frank) tattoo apparently intended for the other cheek.

Maybe I should also point out that Jane handled the household's 'time with Frank' calendar/schedule, though when she became overloaded with decorating work, she temporarily handed the duty to Blossom (which was a little odd because the two of them rarely interacted otherwise).

Kara, as I previously noted, had claimed the room next door to mine. In fact, it might be interesting to note that she chose the room on my right-hand side when viewed from inside the rooms. She was making sure everyone remembered that she had first claim on me (as noted in the background story we had crafted for her) and subtlety, thy name is not Kara.

Kara Zor-L (also known as Power Girl from DC Comics) believed that she had first met me when I was a young boy when she had been temporarily dimensionally displaced when struck by a comic book superweapon. She had memories of returning involuntarily multiple times as I grew up until we became lovers when I reached adulthood.

She was our first super-powered artificial woman. She lacked the physics-defying abilities of her comic book self, such as heat vision and flying, but she was significantly stronger than a normal human with extra-dense bones and reinforced skin and muscle. We had even managed to enhance her eyes to let her refocus her sight into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Although they had been refined and improved, the same basic techniques were used for our later super-powered women.

Her job as AARD business manager kept her busy, but since she had Alpha to help, it never became overwhelming. Basically she kept the buildings and company running on a day-to-day basis and kept track of our various licensing deals and product lines, though she also had input on the various development plans and research projects.

Working with Alpha, she had even successfully developed two of her own patents/products: a new approach that adapted the nanowire surgery concept to electronics manufacturing and a slightly more practical method of using DNA to store data (not actually practical yet, but a lot easier and more accessible than other methods being tried). Her dozen or so other projects were generally less than successful attempts to recreate comic book technology in the real world.

Kara was known for her 'bull in a china shop' approach to problems and for an alternately wink-and-flirt or roll-the-eyes reactions to male stares. Kara had a very healthy body. Specifically, she had a very healthy and robust chest. Each of her breasts was just slightly smaller than her head, so she tended to draw a lot of attention. She could sometimes be unhealthily competitive, but she was intelligent and self-aware enough to usually stop before it got out of hand.

Rei was slowly developing into something approaching a normal woman. I like to bask in my successes with my women, talking about how they develop and grow as individuals while still retaining the core of their fictional character origins ... but Rei was almost the exception to that rule. She was still an introvert, preferring silent observation over social interactions, with little development away from her character's starting place. On the plus side, she had been observed laughing on at least three different occasions within the past year. I had begun forming plans to introduce her to tearjerker movies to try to engender more emotional responses.

On the practical side, she was now licensed to drive or fly just about anything that moved across land or through the air. She was a good boat pilot too, but lacked the training needed to legally pilot any large commercial vessels.

She was based on the Rei Ayanami character from the original Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. Among the other ladies of the household, she was unique in that she knew with certainty that she was an artificially-grown clone. She believed that she and others like her had been cloned and seeded throughout the world so that no single disaster could wipe out her genetic line. She expected that at some point, a secret organization within the Japanese government might one day call her in to pilot experimental craft. She was well aware of the Evangelion anime series, but believed it to be a fantasy created by someone peripherally aware of the actual secret program.

The move to our new home did one exceptionally good thing for her: it forced her to clean her room. Her room in the old house was ... what's a nice way to put it? ... a pig sty, if the pig was particularly messy? After spending a little time with her, I was able to convince her to keep her new room much more organized and clean than her previous one. I doubt she had actually agreed that dressers and closets had valid purposes, but at least my influence was enough to convince her to give them a try.

Maybe I should also point out that Rei was willing to try just about any type of sex. She didn't generally pursue creative or imaginative types of sex, but she had never turned down any suggestion. I sometimes wonder if Rei lacks a sense of self-preservation. Not that she's ever been suicidal, but she seems to lack the ability to fear. When Jane once approached her with a comically over-sized anal plug -- which Jane had created by abusing her access to one of the company's 3D printers -- Rei simply stuck her ass up in the air and waited for Jane to try it out.

Anna Marie, aka Rogue of X-men fame, is in charge of Human Resources for AARD, a job I had chosen for her mostly so she would have lots of human interactions and hand-shaking. She had developed to a point where it was rare for her to draw back from human contact, but every so often an unexpected touch would make her jump far out of proportion to the event. (In case you don't recognize her, her comic book self has a mutant power that absorbs memories, powers and life energy through skin contact.)

Anna remembered living most of her life only fantasizing about romances and encounters with men, but since she could now physically touch others without harm, she had discovered that touching and being touched by women was also very nice. As designed, she was still primarily focused on me, but she responded to most anyone who spent time just running their hands over her body, touching her bare skin. And letting her touch them in return.

She was also the only "interdimensional" woman in the household who had never wanted to go home again. Though she still had moments of melancholy quiet, she was also usually one of the most upbeat women in our group. She was friends with everyone, though she had not developed an extra-close bond with anyone in particular. Well, having said that, I should point out that she had begun to grow closer to Kara ever since the other Marvel characters had arrived. Sure, she was happy to have some old friends with her, but in an odd way, they were also encroaching on her territory, which was similar to how Kara felt sometimes.

Anna had also developed a tendency to prepare for possible downturns in her fortunes. Out of all the women, she was the one most ready to live on her own if needed, with plenty of investments and savings she had developed with Alpha's assistance.

Diana, sometimes called Wonder Woman, is the super-hero-based character who disliked our world's lack of heroics the most. Or more simply put, she cannot sit still.

After her initial arrival, she had rallied the other superheroines to form a crime-fighting team, using motorcycles and police scanners to find out where they were needed. What she discovered was that the police nearly always arrived well before her team could and generally didn't need (or want) their help.

So she refocused her efforts. She volunteered for the Red Cross, often leaving to help areas struck by natural disasters. She helped out with Salvation Army collection drives, low income house construction, fund raising and even the Girl Scouts.

Her official job was as Head of Security for AARD, though I was planning to move her to DC part-time to help take charge of our lobbying and publicity efforts to support the rights of computer intelligences.

She was the closest our household had to a proper lesbian, especially since her memories including growing up on an island where men were banned. Men were often just curiosities to her, though thanks to a bit of mental programming and implant-guided chemical feedback, I was much more than a curiosity to her.

She and Kara had agreed to a division of authority whereby Kara was in charge for anything related to me or the household, and she was in charge for issues relating to outside the house. These were not elected or appointed official positions, this was just an agreement not to step on each others toes between two dominant female leaders.

Diana had become close to Ororo, both because of a shared memory (from the Amalgam DC-Marvel crossover) and similar personalities. As a side note, although Kara and Diana were only occasional sexual partners, I noticed that when she had the opportunity, Diana tended to spend a lot more time focused on Kara's breasts than was normal even for me.

Zatanna, the magical mistress of the DC Universe, is the AARD spokesperson and head of our publicity department. For a time, she had been the only hope for any of the dimensionally-displaced women to return home, since her magic had been theoretically capable of taking someone from the real world to the DC universe ... as long as Zatanna was actually in the DC Universe at the time of casting. That had changed when the DC Universe had been rebooted, and she was trapped here like everyone else. (Or so she and the others believed.)

Interested in, though not obsessed with, a return to the limelight, she spent her spare time developing her magic act, which carried over into the bedroom. Sex with her generally involved a lot of foreplay and often some bondage. It wasn't bondage sex, per se. It was escape artist and sleight-of-hand sex.

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