Chapter 7

She hesitated, then asked, “What did the girls mean when they told me I could join the commune if I felt like it? What commune?”

“Oh, that is a bit of an ‘in’ joke with them. It is simply because the girls like to feel they are my wives, and so it is communal living, if you like.”

“Like wives?” she queried. “What, all of them feel like wives of yours? Is that what they mean by that joke? But it is only a joke, yes? Or do they really pretend they are married to you and behave accordingly?”

“After a fashion, yes, but of course marriage in this country is between one man and one woman. That is the law, and it prevents a man marrying several wives. That is why they say, ‘like wives’.”

“Eh? Does that possibly mean they choose to have sex with you, or have I picked that up wrongly?”

“Your first guess is more accurate, in that they have decided that if they are my wives, they act in that manner. You will note that it was entirely their own decision to become my wives; never any pressure from me. What they want is what they get, sort of thing. The girls all seem to think they made a good decision. I can only agree. Certainly they intend to have children and have made a start. Phyllis and Jenny have both said they are pregnant, and Linda is enthusiastic to follow them. Elizabeth we shall have to wait and see,”

This stunned her for a bit, while she continued to gaze into my eyes, and I into hers. Something appeared to be happening between us.

“Umm... “she wavered after pondering things for a while, suddenly unsure of herself. “I think I can see what they see in you, somewhat. You don’t put pressure on them, or make demands on them. In fact, I have seen them bossing you around, and that surprised me. You put it all down to love, do you?”

“Not entirely, Catriona. Love on its own is nothing but a social notion. It requires a degree of propinquity ... closeness ... to be stimulated on both sides. You have to meet first, to fall in love. I am sure you fell in love with your baby’s father, but only after you met him and got to know him? Am I right?”

“Oh, yes! He was a great fella and treated me well, as well ... well, you know what I mean...” she stuttered to a halt with all these ‘wells’ tripping her up. I laughed a little at this, but patted her on the shoulder, “I know what you mean, Catriona. You fitted to each other like a glove, almost made to be a fit, right?”

“Gosh, you do know what I mean, Bob. Your girls see you in much the same way from my view on the outside: a perfect fit for them, but for all of them?” she seemed astounded at the concept.

“There you have it, Catriona. You have your baby to remind you of your lost love, but remember that love is not exclusive; it can be shared. My ladies all share their love for me, and I spread my love back to them, sharing back. They deserve all the love I can give. And by love I don’t just mean sexual love. I grant that sexual love comes into it, but only as part of the totality of togetherness. I would do anything to give my girls a happy life, and I think they would be the same back to me. It is a two-way process of sharing our love for each other.” Her eyes took on a dreamy look as she answered, “That is so much a desire of mine. I thought I had it with my Tom, then he was taken from me so suddenly. I thought my life was over, but then I thought of our baby, my last connection with him. Your girls fostered that attitude, the notion that I have something to live for, and then I get to see the man that they share their lives with so readily. You are definitely different in some way, You have an aura about you that says to me, ‘this is a man worth my loving.’” She quickly amended her words, “I mean, an aura that says ‘this is a man worth loving’ and your girls have taken that on board. I can see this quite clearly now.” I was willing to let her slip slide, and treat it as an additional step towards integration. Catriona had a strong affinity with her deceased lover, and might take some time to swivel that allegiance in my direction. But if my girls saw her as a prospect for joining us, then I could not object to their intentions. I could wait for as long as it took. Waiting was not a major problem in my company takeovers. Once I had control of the specific company, it did not take long to replace the directors with men and women of integrity who were willing to work for performance-related pay and not automatic bonuses no matter how the company performed. Their high salary levels came with injunctions to protect staff if at all possible. Good employees are the main asset of every business, even if so many stupid directors fail to see that. Often that failure was part of the reason for a company going bottom up. Once I had competent directors in place, I could leave them to actively run the business, and that allowed me to direct my attentions to another company. I worked with my broker to set him a pattern for selling some of my much enhanced company shares to other investors who took a long term view of the market. Under the new board with my new set of business practices, I was confident that these shares would continue to gain more value, but I was in a hurry so for me it was: get control, replace the board, set new directions, and sell to long-term investors as soon as I had seen a satisfactory profit margin arise for me. My modus operandi was therefore a quick takeover, quick clear-out and replace with competence, then a swift departure as soon as I had seen enough profit in my shareholding. I did this with small company after small company, then went after bigger companies that my accumulated and steadily growing funds permitted me to work on. Occasionally this meant finding another prominent investor who saw the same as I did and was glad to let me do the dirty and clear the board of its useless members, retaining only those with the vital attitude of ‘make the company work properly’ and put aside all the pet likes and favouritisms of the useless directors. This could include having a branch in the director’s home town to curry favour there, even if the business was not doing well in that locality and ha no signs of improvement. That sort of activity was just a waste of resources. Within a year my smash and grab tactics had built up both my portfolio and my cash assets to the point that I was being noticed in the financials. I was still an unknown figure as I took no part in socialising with other investor groups and individuals. They didn’t even know where my base was, as I used one of my companies as my business address, with all my official correspondence then redirected from there to my home. We also had added to our family, as Phyllis and Jenny had long since both had their babies – a boy and a girl, Linda was heavily pregnant by now, and Elizabeth was several months pregnant. Catriona, our latest spouse-by-choice, had by now had her son, named Tom after his father, and had resumed sex with me as she had done for months before the birth. I was getting into the swing of fatherhood, learning to change nappies on my children, or clean up when they had been sick on one of us or on the carpet. This was where our carpet cleaning machine got well used. The trick is to get it done as soon as possible after the sick had hit the carpet. I also got into the habit of reading a book whilst a baby slept on me as I laid back or my child was cuddled happily in the crook of my arm. We have a few photographs taken of me in that position, in one of which I had fallen asleep along with my daughter in the comfortable armchair. Working from home as I did most of the time made me available for babysitting while my ladies went shopping or cooked or cleaned or got the clothes washed; it seemed that happened every day. While working at my computer looking into company facts and figures, I listened to a lot of music in the background to my work, from early classical composers like Purcell to modern stuff like The Beatles and Queen; my music taste was quite eclectic. The same went for my TV watching; it was more history and science programmes rather than soaps and panel games, which were more the girls’ style. Once the babies started arriving, I also had to put up with repetitive rhymes and tunes for them, but these were also educational as the kids learned rhythm and patterns. We also encouraged them to pick up languages like French and German by playing them French and German songs and nursery rhymes downloaded from the Internet; things like ‘Frere Jaques’ or ‘Sur le pont D’avignon’. TV and Internet had its downside, of course. I had to teach my spouses how to spot silly conspiracy theories among all the other material on TV and the Internet. It was astonishing how much opinionated rubbish is peddled as if it was fact, when knowledge of simple geography, geology and technology debunks most of it. The claims about giants, for example. Simple physics and anatomy explains that any human being taller than around seven feet would hardly be able to move, and certainly unable to do any of the things attributed to human giants. Existing tallest humans have very weak muscles that struggle to support their weight due to their excessive height. We are not made to be much larger. Even the animal world cannot support giants with current oxygen levels in the atmosphere. Elephants need to have very thick limbs to take the huge weight of the body, and large foot pads to spread the load on the ground. As a result they move slowly and carefully, so large mammals are easy prey. Larger whales are only able to grow large because the water supports them. Giant animals and giant insects millions of years ago could exist only through having much higher levels of oxygen in the air, but not now or at any time in man’s history when oxygen levels are much lower. These tales of giants were all invented fantasy or misinterpretation of dinosaur bones as human remains. Any claimed photos on the Internet are faked. There is absolutely zero credible evidence. The notion of the one-eyed giant (cyclops) comes from an upside-down skull, where the single visible hole is not an eye, but the hole for the spinal column. The same implacable logic applies to almost every claim of us being visited by beings from another world. The human imagination can come up with everything from lost worlds to lost civilisations to strange visitors. There have certainly been strange visitors as the Aztecs found, but they were Europeans with horses, animals unknown to them and so to be feared as alien monsters. Lost cities are also common in Earth’s history, and many are being found again, but their disappearance was mostly through plagues or climate changes wiping out the civilisation and leaving all the marvellously clever stonework for us to discover and wonder at. We humans have always been clever, despite some folks today imagining that we are at some pinnacle of knowledge. Our ancestors were just as clever, but had less material to work from, so they worked out the best stone solutions to most problems, using techniques that we later codified as the lever principle which magnified human effort immensely, and using shallow pooling of water to show whether your stone surface was perfectly level or not; all very simple but effective techniques. Sticks and shadows at two distant places were used to work out that the world was a rough sphere, thousands of years ago; the ancients never believed the world was flat: that would seem stupid to them, but there are plenty of stupid people around today who will believe almost anything. The principles of geometry and regular shapes were also well known long before Euclid and Pythagoras wrote them down. With string and sticks they could mark out straight lines, make 90 degree corners and all the other fancy shapes that we view as modern ideas. The ancient Egyptians could work hard granite with simple application of desert sand as an abrasive, for sand was quartz and so harder than granite. It simply took a lot of time to do the job, but the Egyptians had plenty of time and people available to do the work. Nowadays we use complicated machines to achieve marvellous things, but the ancients could do that with people, time and the right material for the task. They applied the techniques of woodworking to fitting stone blocks together, such as with butterfly joints, or used abrasion to get odd shapes to fit. My musings were pushed along by my reading of works on ancient history and ancient science. These are available as sources for anyone with the ability to read big words. I borrow or consult most of my reading material at the public library, but I buy a few books that are of particular and recurring interest. Knowledge is an investment that pays for itself over and over. Opinions and claims merely divert your attention from reality. I gradually became aware that my mental discussion was all about facts, logic and consistency. These musings seemed to be more in line with the alien apps in my brain, which had somewhat of an affinity with certainties rather than fantasies, despite the human brain normally being addicted to fantasies of one kind or another; fairies and leprechauns and gold at the end of a rainbow. Witches fall into the same category, but with evil intent toward the women and men accused. Witchcraft was basically an early conspiracy theory, and later in the US mcCarthyism replaced witches with ‘communists’ as the accused victims. Having any left-wing views at all automatically got you branded as a communist in this purge of people who did not fit the professed norm. Jews were another group that were attacked for their ethnicity and not for anything that they had actually done. Demagogues always look for a group they can accuse as being ‘different’, and invent accusations that are never supporterd by evidence. Immigrants can easily be lumped together as a group to despise, without evidence of doing anything except arriving. Claims of them indulging in criminal activity simply matches the statistics for local residents comitting crime; nothing different at all, except in the odd exception just as with local criminal gangs. I asked my resident alien mentally if my current thoughts were being affected by their implanted programs, and the alien device on our roof responded with an immediate acknowledgement.

“Robert Jenkins, I am tasked with offering an apology if I am asked this type of question. The detailed response is that there is never a perfect assimilation between a biological brain and an inserted purely logic-based program. There seems to be always some side effects within the brain that were not anticipated. We have worked out that indeed there are minor occurrences in your thinking that derive from our program and these may or may not have a detrimental effect on your thinking; we are not certain of the exact details, but you may experience an unease at what comes into your head. If you find that you can control such aberrations, then we can leave it alone, but if you have important concerns, then we are prepared to delete the program from your brain. That deletion is a simple matter of erasing instructions, so that you will not notice anything other than a more generalised type of thinking, but you may regret not having that logical ability from then on. Think about it and let us know what you have decided.” This proposal left it with me to make up my mind. It was not easy, and I thought about it over and over. The basics were clear. If it remained in my head, it might become a nuisance over time, but if removed, I would be less able to make good financial choices in the UK stock market. I was also not sure if the family expansion module would also go, or perhaps not be affected. My speed-reading and comprehension ability was another app that I would be loathe to lose where I needed to learn detailed facts to make good decisions. I spoke with my girls about the choices offered to me and how the actions might affect them. They were astonishingly receptive of additional females, but that may have been one aspect of the software acting on them. I asked them to look at the question logically, taking in what practical impact it would have on the family, and after a day of them talking it over, they decided to advise me to restrict it to one more woman. The speed-reading did not seem to bother them, and the financial app was seen as a plus for them and their future lives. They did not see more cash as a drawback to their lives, but left it to me to decide if I could live with the app in my head. After a week of debating with myself, I sought out the alien for advice on each app from their persepctive. I posed the question in three parts: 1. Should the male-female attraction app remain or not, and could it be adjusted? 2. Should the speed-reading ability remain or not? 3. Could the financial app be amended so that I would remain with an advantage in financial decisions, or would it have to be deleted entirely? Were any of these apps detrimental to me in the long term? I posed these questions to the alien relay unit and it declared itself willing to pass it on for a reply. That took nearly a day, so it suggested that an examination of each app was undertaken to clarify their workings and their effects on humanity, i.e. me. The response was specific and to the point for each question. If I desired it, a numerical limit of my choice could be placed on my attraction with acceptable females. Beyond that limit, neither I nor the female would have anything other than normal human reactions to each other. It was a simple change to the program. On my speed-reading, the aliens saw no benefit in removing it, for me or for them. They considered it to be only an advantage for both sides. I agreed with that conclusion. The financial program was more complicated, it seemed. The program involved an amalgam of my own abilities guided by the program’s logic programming, and removing part or most or all of the program might not have any positive results for me. In fact, they suspected that amendments might cause me more mental anguish through a clash of reasoning. I might feel slightly happier if the program was deleted, but I would lose all the advantages it conferred on me and would be back to normal human fallible judgment. Partial retention would hardly work effectively at all, they had concluded. It was thus up to me to decide if I wanted to continue being adroit at business decisions, or revert to what was nearly guesswork. I decided that the advantages of a high-powered business mind with positive outcomes outweighed the more random choices of the normal human mind. I could learn to make more personal judgments in my thinking about non-financial, non-mathematical matters. After all, life is all about what judgments you make about what faces you. Some opt for criminal activities, some for religious observance in institutions, some take the academic life in their stride, and others view helping their community in one way or another to be their task in life. It was all very personal life choices. For me, keeping abilities was what mattered to me. The advantages made a marked difference. I would simply have to allow for excessive logical thinking in future, and apply it or avoid it as appeared best for me and my family. Before I could make a fully reasoned reply, I got a sudden notification of departure.