Chapter 2

The Circle was as dreadful as he remembered. Incredible how, despite all their technology, every single room in that station (station? Planet? He wouldn’t know) managed to be as dark and dreary as the most isolated corner in the starless space between the galaxies.

He heard a voice call. “Enter the stud.” And he heeded.

A white rectangle appeared in front of him. The whiteness receded, and then it was all black again. «Yes. Indeed.» He looked inside through it. «The Circle is as dreadful as I remember.»

Stepping through the portal, he entered what seemed to be a perfectly dark place safe for thirteen small bright spots: twelve above him, equidistant from each other, forming a circle, and one spot in the middle, much below the other twelve.

He knew what to do. In fact, he did it as quickly as possible just to avoid the sound of those dreary voices; to not be asked or demanded to walk straight and stand still in the middle of the room, and there to wait for their judgment—or for whatever they had in store for him.

He simply walked and stood and waited for their words. His heart beat steadily. He was proud of it. «If they finally decided to finish me off, at least I will go peacefully, unafraid of death.»

Many a Seedmaker had an unreasonable fear of death—or, at least, unreasonable to him. As early as he could remember he had indeed pondered about death—if not to have it, then about its nature, what it meant, or what all in life led up to. As he aged and the wombs his prick seeded piled into the hundreds of thousands, indeed, he began thinking about death in a more ... invested manner. Still, his heart remained strong; his dignity continued to be his guiding star: “Endure what you have and then quit on your terms. They don’t have to control your fate, nor do they have to set the pace of your death.”

So he endured, spreading his seed to as many wombs as he was required while only casually pondering about the Final Journey. It was not as if he would have to endure that for much longer, after all. At thirty years of age, he had just drawn into the final decade of a Seedmaker’s lifespan. The last golden years before his penis would ejaculate no more.

The giant stud stood still, waiting for their announcement. Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long. No suspense or drama. Straight to business, it seemed.

“Seedmaker Roberto.” A voice spoke. It wasn’t known from which of the twelve floating dots it came. It simply spoke, and like the voice of god it seemed to envelop Roberto from every direction. “Pleasantries? Chit chat?”

The stud raised his chin. “No. Straight to business, if you will.”

“Very well.” A pause. And then... “Care to explain yourself?”

Roberto’s mind came back to that hideous box floating so close to his face. There was a rumble in the room. The sound of stretching and tearing. Those were his muscles expanding on their own, tearing the constraints of the tight-fitting clothes he wore.

“Personal space.” He answered, and then there was another silent, slightly longer pause.

“We apologize for that.” The voice came again. Impossible to know whether the same or a different voice. They all sounded alike—but also slightly different in some inexplicable way. “We would assume you would be in a jollier mood, having bred so thoroughly and such.”

The giant stud moved his jaw, again looking like he was chewing his tongue. Then, he cracked a tender smile, and his face, so rough and masculine, looked as innocent as a child’s, as the smooth and inexperienced face of his twinky years. “So you do not know me completely, I see.”

There was another pause, as long as the previous one, and then they delved straight into business indeed: “Have you thought about your punishment? About your reclusion here?”

Roberto drew in a deep breath. “What do you mean by this? If you mean whether I’ve been thinking about these dark walls and cramped spaces, then I can say...” A burning fire in his eyes. “Every single day.” Another rumbling. His body seemed to be growing, if only slightly at every second. “If you mean whether I’m repented or not for my supposed crime...” His voice grew deeper. “No.”

There was a rumble and a quake within the room. That wasn’t supposed to happen. No creature, Seedmaker or not, should be able to so disturb the room—but Roberto’s voice did, and at that moment the longest silence transcurred between the glowing dots, one which saw the rumble grow mighty, then disappear like a distant echo.

There seemed to be flickers in some dots before the voices returned. “Do you enjoy your existence, Seedmaker?”

Roberto was taken aback by the question. He was, and at the same he wasn’t. “No. Not really.” His heart changed little. His pulse skipped no beats. “Do you wish me to be specific?”

Pause. Then... “No. Not really.” The voices came, and then they kept coming as if their Masters had already made up their minds. “It matters little now. We have one final mission for you.”

Roberto raised a brow. “A final mission?”

Then there came another voice, and this time Roberto was sure this voice was quite different from the others: “I would like to congratulate you, Seedmaker Roberto, for your recent streak.” This voice also had a much different tone from the others. Unlike the others, it didn’t sound like it wanted only business. For once, it actually sounded like there was a soul in the creature that spoke it: “Nine hundred and ten thousand females! Nine hundred and ten thousand wombs successfully colonized! You must be feeling pretty proud of yourself, even though you may no longer enjoy the act of sex or even the breeding itself.”

The earnestness in that voice molassed Roberto’s heart a bit. “Hmm. Indeed, it was a good day.” His body was awash with coolness and his muscles deflated a bit. “Two weeks ago. Ninety thousand wombs to a million.” He didn’t have much to say on the matter. Things weren’t just a number to him, but they also weren’t anything more special. They stood awkwardly in the middle. Somewhere in that mediocre, unexciting middle. “I hope the Universe is a better, kinder place because of it.”

The voice—the same one, he knew it—sounded overjoyed: “And this is what the Seedmakers are all about! Power? Virility? Beauty? All of those things, indeed, but also something much greater and deeper: Seedmakers are Happiness! The happiness that comes from the best genetics! The happiness that comes from knowing that the Gods, should they ever exist, truly love you! And they have shown this love from the moment you came out of the womb, perfect in every way, a superior specimen to guide your species closer towards this very superiority! You have, dear Roberto, made the Universe a much brighter, better place. In a couple of generations, all your virile offspring will successfully reproduce, and they will amount to dozens of billions (at least!) who will in turn amount of trillions a couple generations further. You are, or at least you shall be, quite literally, the father of half the Universe in under one millennium—and you should be just as proud on this scale! Just as proud as your progeny shall be numerous and its quality so elevated!”

There seemed to have been a clap!, though (this Roberto was mostly sure) was probably just a figment of his imagination.

There was a weird churn between his thighs. His testicles had just unleashed a massive amount of cum into his system, and his body trembled a bit, overfilled for an instant with almost more semen than the god could handle. He felt the desire to unleash it all, but one second later he cooled down and controlled himself.

It was good to know that such random, spontaneous bursts of virility still occurred to him. After his prime days, there just hadn’t been much in Roberto’s life to justify such natural, brimming sexuality.

He was, indeed, just a machine. A machine of cumming, a machine of breeding, and often times he forgot just how much of a passionate being he could be beneath all this cumming, all this breeding, all this (near pointless) fertilizing.

«Nine hundred and ten thousand wombs.» The thought occurred to him in a flash. «And not one of them was the same twice. Not one face was repeated. Not. One!»

He hadn’t even kissed and made out with more than five percent of these. He couldn’t even remember the last time he squeezed a boob or groped a buttock.

Day in, day out, it was just cock in, cock out. Cumming and cumming and cumming. Another conquered womb, another fertilized female. And nothing other than this.

His heart finally skipped a beat as different (and colder) voices returned. “Would you be interested in leaving this prison?”

Roberto reacted nonchalantly. It wasn’t a front. No facade in that man. He truly did react like the news meant nothing at all to him—and perhaps they really didn’t. “That depends where I am leaving to. Space is mostly inhospitable, as you know.”

“What about the best space there can be in space?” A voice uttered, then paused, gauging the stud’s reaction. “A paradise planet?”

Roberto’s attention was finally peeked. “A paradise planet? Of what sort?”

“Of the technical, non-generic kind of sort.” The voices seemed to consult with one another for a bit before they continued: “One of our paradisical worlds. Big and lush and green and full of life—and (up until recently) completely uninhabited, as far as sentient life is concerned.”

Roberto felt his heart pick up pace and the neural activity increase in his brain. He could see it so clearly, oh, the metal map of his brain firing up in all the interesting areas! After all, there was indeed quite a bit interesting to dissect in those short, casual sentences. Not a lot, but interesting regardless: two pieces of information that would immediately catch the attention of anyone (or anything) at the same level of intelligence as Roberto.

One of these concerned the phrase “our paradisical words.” The other one, slightly more intriguing, was “up until recently.”

He decided to be a good sport and start with the lesser of the two: “One of your worlds, you say?”

“Exactly.”

Damn it! Roberto wanted to let them do the talking, but his brain went far ahead of his will: piercing two and two together, he already deduced what the mighty beings were going to ask of him. “One of your worlds has been invaded.” He said. He didn’t ask; he said it.

The silence that followed was proof that, if not completely right, then he was mostly on the right track.

The Paradise Planets were arguably the second greatest feat of technology from the Masters—whoever they were. These were either fully-grown or heavily terraformed planets meant to become the center of the empires of the Seedmakers’ trillion-strong offspring. Most of these planets were idyllic “dumping grounds” (for lack of a kinder term) for the strongest and most promising of the studs’ offspring. Some were “test planets” meant for the Masters’ continuous techno-biological developments, be them kind or ... not so kind. Some planets effectively acted as giant laboratories for new kinds of species and all sorts of genetics experiments. Some other planets, paradises at first, became living nightmares as the Masters used them to test their latest weapons and all sorts of destructive concoctions.

And some really special planets, the rarest of them all, were rewards to the most powerful (and most faithful) Seedmakers, given to them with no strings attached so that the mighty studs might enjoy their final years of retirement with overabundant peace.

Few were the Seedmakers who ever reached such high rewards, and of these fewer still were those who actually got to enjoy said reward for longer than five years. Most Seedmakers whoever got so far only gained these planets at the age of thirty-five, thirty-six. Most Seedmakers were dead before forty.

In his mind, in the secrecy of his dreams, Roberto always imagined how these powerful breeding machines—the most powerful of the most powerful males in the literal Universe—got to enjoy their virgin worlds for less than half a decade; less than a third (or a fourth!) of the time they spent relentlessly and mindlessly breeding, only to then die and be replaced by another “bitterly lucky” Seedmaker.

He always had this image in his mind of a new Seedmaker arriving at a planet only to later randomly come across the corpse of its previous owner—realizing, not without some disgust, if not outright horror, that his “Paradise” planet wasn’t even a unique Paradise at that.

All these thoughts ran through Roberto’s mind after he uttered his deduction. They all came and went in under a second, and after this second flashed by he waited for the next utterances of his Masters, hoping that they wouldn’t be too aggrieved—for whatever reason.

“You are quite right.” Their voices came, neutral and matter-of-factly. “There has been an unidentified foreign organism invading our planet. We want to task you with finding it, identifying it, and (if it comes to that) neutralizing it.” No more words were said before the final question was asked: “Do you accept?”

«It’s a trap!» His mind sounded the alarm. «Some mischief.»

He didn’t take these alarms too seriously. If anything, it was only a natural, instinctive reaction—one that proved that his mind was still healthy enough to harbor these.

He lowered his chin and pondered. His shoulders little by little came down, as if brought under the weight of his heavy thoughts.

The pondering went in silently for a couple of seconds. It ended with him raising his chin and proclaiming: “I see. Well, here’s the situation as I see it.” He gave the shining dots a conciliatory glance. “You can stop me if I veer too away from the facts.” A silence followed. He took it as a sign to continue: “Very well. You say one of your paradise worlds has been invaded. Right, right. It is a virgin paradise, I suppose. Not a planet you have been using for some other undeclared purposes, correct?”

“You are correct. The planet is yet untouched by our devices. It was supposed to stay resting for two hundred years longer until we found a purpose for it.”

“Two hundred years, huh? So no colonization yet in plans?”

“The planet is too far away from the main breeding ground of you Seedmakers.”

“Hmm, that is peculiar.” His shoulders boomed as he shrugged them. “In what part of the Universe is it?”

There was silence. Then the answer: “Classified.”

«Oh.» Went his mind. «Now, that is peculiar indeed.»

Roberto made no fuss. He simply continued: “An untouched, virgin paradise world has been invaded, you say, and you’re sending me personally to evaluate the situation. To locate such an organism, study it, and if necessary neutralize it.” The word rubbed him the wrong way. Roberto wasn’t a man for euphemisms. They sounded too cowardly. Too disrespectful. Much of a waste of his or anybody’s time. “To kill it. Eliminate it if I see fit—or, I suppose, if you give the order.” He paused, and then ... he left his place.

There were many glows in the blinking lights as Roberto turned around and, with his enormous hands crossed behind his gigantic, prominent rear, all disguised in the dark by those fully black, tight-fitting clothes he was wearing, began to walk to-and-fro around the room, going from wall to wall while pondering aloud:

“I see. So this organism is sentient ... well, not necessarily. What it is is powerful. Crafty. Special in its abilities. You are sending me, a Seedmaker, personally, and not on a breeding mission—or at least that’s what I suppose. You’re sending me because you want me for my other abilities—namely my strength, my agility, my intelligence. A living weapon. You’re sending me as a weapon, so this is what I can conclude about this organism: it’s either intelligent or dotted with enough skills to avoid all your detection and capture systems. If that wasn’t the case, you would have sent probes or ships or any of your fancy robots to capture it. That you haven’t yet proved that this organism, whatever it may be, if of such a nature that can evade all your crafts—all of it, of course, except your last resort.” A minor pause. Even in his walk. “A Seedmaker.”

Roberto peppered his talk with pauses here and there, and let them go on for just long enough so he could gauge the reaction of his Masters, who all seemed, until there, pretty agreeing with his words. “Very well.” He walked again. “So I continue: you can’t find this organism. You can’t pinpoint it. You can’t do anything other than identify its arrival and conclude that it’s beyond your grasp. Hmm. Hmm...” He paused again. “You probably didn’t even see the creature—if it is indeed a creature, not some robot or some artifice from another advanced civilization ... You probably didn’t see it arriving on the planet. I would suppose, even, indeed, that the entity has landed on the planet long ago, and you only detected it because its influence on the world—its developing of the land, for instance—grew noticeable enough for your probes to capture it.”

He paused. No comment came from the blinking dots. He continued: “The entity, whatever it may be, is probably enacting changes on the planet. Land development, buildings, terraforming ... something of the sort.” A gentle pause. “Something of the sort in such a scale, again, that its presence was finally felt. And you’re sending me—me personally; not some other more trustworthy Seedmaker—because, unless this is some trickery...”

He paused. He thought. Many strands and pathways followed from that line of reasoning. He picked up the most probable ones and threw away the rest.

He continued: “There is danger. Or at least you feel there is.” Roberto paused and raised an arm. Those tight-fitting, all-covering black clothes he was wearing, suppressing every inch of his powerful physique from tip of the toe to the top of his neck, merged his body with the darkness, to the point he looked like a faint head floating in the nothingness.

Still, his presence was powerful enough, his muscles magnificent enough that even in that profound darkness he could see the swollen shape of his arm, the turgid mass of his biceps, triceps, and all other delicious muscles, as well a glimpse the outline of his powerful, thick, throbbing veins, all rumbling and booming with that power that never really stopped coursing, never really stopped flowing in his ultra mega superior organism.

“I am strong.” He declaimed, and a little fire, a lovely flame burned somewhere behind his heart. “Not the strongest, but one of the strongest. I have been one of the most powerful Seedmakers since conception, and I suppose this is one of the reasons why you keep me around; why you put up with me and not just discard me for my transgressions.”

He stopped and said; despite his words, there was no arrogance in his voice: “Seedmakers are the most advanced of your technologies. The most complicated ... and the most expensive. There are only four thousand, eight hundred of us. Four thousand, eight hundred Seedmakers with the task of breeding a Universe of potentially quintillions of life forms. Even if you just select for the one percent most fertile while excluding all species that are not really compatible with our genes—namely, all non-humanoids—you’re still left with trillions of potential mates. Trillions to be bred by mere thousands.” He stopped walking and stroked his chin. His face was the only naked part of his body. “It’s no wonder that you’re so lenient. Seedmakers are not creatures you can just afford to go without. Not without heavy consideration. Not without a serious and thorough cost-benefit analysis.”

He looked around. No sound or blinking seemed to come from the lights. So he walked again and kept on talking: “So this is what you do: the breeding dens are well-stocked. The Seedmakers are doing their purpose. Nothing wrong in there. But now you have one of your untouched planets finally touched by a foreign organism—one that you just can’t pin down, control, and tame. The situation is bad enough that you call me, one of your most powerful, but also recalcitrant Seedmakers, and you task me with the awfully simple and straightforward duty of “search and destroy.” A living weapon. Predator and prey. If I’d put it like that, I’d say that this planet is a precious crop and this entity is like a new pest against which you have no real medicine. No real pesticide. So, like when fighting against pesky mice, you send in the cats.” He stopped and pointed both index fingers toward his massive, sprawling pectorals. “You send in me.”

There was no voice or blinking still. He resumed his walking and talking: “Why me in particular? Your other Seedmakers might be stronger, but they are loyal—and their breeding tasks never cease. They never relent. You need all the Seedmakers you can get to make a tangible impact on the universe. You’re not going to cast aside a more powerful Seedmaker just to have him risk harm by this foreign entity or species. Or worse yet, perhaps...” He stopped. His glances towards the lights were not without great irony and defiance. “To risk giving this Seedmaker a taste of freedom. A taste of autonomy. A taste of rebellion.”

No sound. «Hmm.» Roberto was surprised—and positively so. It was quite a nice thing that the Masters allowed his talk to continue even into heathen territory. Their mere mention of that topic had gotten lesser Seedmakers arrested—or killed.

That they allowed him to speak so openly and cleanly meant only one thing: “The situation is dire. You have made your cost-benefit analysis, and these are the results that came back: send in Roberto, they say. He is thirty years old and on the last lap of his life. His breeding is notorious, but unexpectional among our most notorious breeders, and slightly decreasing every day. He might even “go barren” eventually, you say, refusing to procreate or just succumbing to his (rather infamous) ennui. He might give us some trouble if his captivity persists. He might turn into a real nuisance—a great sink in our accounts—if we don’t find something else for him to do. Some other task he might be useful for.”

He stopped again. His hands went back to his buttocks. It was very nice, indeed, having muscles so overdeveloped on his backside. His ass was so prominent and powerful he could easily rest his huge hands on it like bottles on a firm table.

His ass was also really smooth, somewhat. The thing was pure muscle, yet his muscle also behaved in a fleshly, gentle manner, like silk and gel, something really pleasant to the touch. He was all-muscle, but unlike other creatures of such musculature, he was soft and cozy like a giant, virile pillow.

It was such a shame, he often thought, that this gentle, but virile body; this soft, but hard physique; a body so well made for cuddling and snuggling; for fondling and caressing; for massaging and kissing; was instead only used for rough and uncouth thrusting; for pile-driving a meat rod into a meat hole, and then inseminating this meat hole with (to be honest) more gooey seed than any hole would ever need.

«A waste. What a waste.» He thought sadly, and then continued talking to distract himself from his sadness: “So you send me. You can only win, can you not? If the entity is really dangerous; if it is as intelligent and crafty and powerful as we think it is; if it actually poses a threat to our greatest technology—say: if it actually kills me—then you will have some meaningful information to work with. Some clear data. It might cost you a Seedmaker, but ... hey: it was one rather useless Seedmaker. A Seedmaker that was more trouble than it was worth. A fair trade. You put me down while also putting me to some good use. A fair trade indeed.”

He paused. No words. No comments. So he continued: “If the creature is no trouble and I dispatch with relative ease, it’s business as usual. This little incursion, you reason, will certainly wake me up from my boredom and my rebellion. It might even instill in me a sense of purpose again. Happiness, as you put it. Once it’s done, I might even become a better breeder and rise through the ranks, now that I have tasted some sort of autonomy and, as the rough tongue puts it, “got it out of my system.” The threat is eliminated and a better Seedmaker is acquired. Again, pure profit.”

A pause. Then... “If not of this happens; that is to say, if the threat is eliminated, but I remain the same sour servant I have been for the past decade ... then nothing really has changed. You arrest me, you throw me in the breeding dens, you kill me ... again, no real change from the options you have presently available. At least I will have neutralized a potential threat. If nothing else comes out of this, you will get that which you value the most: your status quo. Preserved. Untouched. Like your paradise planet before it was violated.”

Another pause. That silence told him so much! “This is not a decision you have made likely. If anything, I would say you have spent at least some weeks, maybe over a month pondering on whether to summon me and give me this task, or figuring out things on your own by the “usual” ways. I won out, but by a slim margin. Even now, in your silence, you’re still pondering, you’re still thinking: He’s too clever, you say. He might get out of our grasp. He might escape, somehow, or forge an alliance with this entity—should it be clever and technologically advanced enough—and then flee. He might even ally with this entity’s civilization and pose a bigger threat to us a near future; not during his life, probably, which is short and near its end, but in his future lives, through his descendants; descendants we haven’t accounted for because they were bred out of our dens. They were bred with the members of this entity’s species, and soon, with enough generations, they will grow outside our designs and hold in their hearts the rebellious will and intent of their father: the desire to find us Masters ... and then kill us.”

He paused. Silence. Forever silence. “He might escape. Like a cat thrown in the fields to catch the mice, but then going wild and escaping the grasp of its masters. The cat goes on to the wilderness and breeds with all other wildlings, and with his fangs behind an unplanned devastation of the wildlife, and through his progeny begins to oppose the very masters who once controlled him, raiding their pantries and refrigerators and eventually, who knows, assaulting their babies on their cribs and overrunning their manors. The mice become the lesser of evils. The medicine becomes the poison.”

He stopped walking. After a moment of stillness, the huge bull perused his brain for more thoughts or lines of logic, finding none. He considered himself satisfied, thus he returned to the middle of the room and there he waited patiently for his Masters’ verdict.

Not without some parting words, of course: “Even now you’re thinking: clever. He’s too clever. He might prove a foil to us somehow. This cleverness is not one that can easily be tamed. And you are correct: I don’t consider myself particularly smart, but I am indeed clever enough to work my way around even your most elaborate and meticulous plans.” His eyes flashed with a treacherous gleam. He didn’t intend them to. They just did. “This is why I am here, after all. This is what got me arrested.”

The silence continued. He had no cause to keep on speaking. In fact, it would have been wise for him to shut up, to play his better hand, for continuing to say the things he ultimately said would only work against him. Against his chances of freedom. Against him seeing a blue sky and smelling fresh air again.

Still, he spoke. He just had to keep on speaking: “You mentioned that the planet is so far isolated from the usual breeding grounds that you didn’t even have the expectation of colonizing it with our offspring for at least two hundred years. This is far. And long. Too long for a planet that, as you mentioned and I inferred, is a fully liveable, fully habitable planet. A true paradise. It is unusual, again, that such a planet remains so, virgin and untouched, without any clear use for so long. Centuries, in fact. Therefore I must conclude that the planet is especially isolated, and that you perhaps had plans for it that go much, much beyond what is usual for you. For us. For this whole lifestyle.”

His muscles boomed. No reason in particular. They just did, and the room echoed their booms like drums of power. The beast breathed deep. He continued: “I asked where it was located. You said no. Confidential. If I were a little smarter, I would conclude, therefore, that the planet is located on some potentially threatening corner of the Universe. Or some interesting corner that will serve your higher purposes. A place so important that you decide to hide from me. From us. A place that probably no Seedmaker knows, not even your most powerful and trusted one. A place that may hide secrets that, once revealed, would be too inconvenient for you or the exercise of your power. A place that may hide opportunities that, if well exploited, will yield far greater returns than those on these old corners of the Cosmos. A place that can greatly increase your power if you tame it ... and that can easily undo your power if you let it slip through your fingers.” He lowered his head slightly. “Assuming, of course, my Masters, that you have fingers.”