Chapter 26

Despite our unprotected activities, Paula was not the first of my companions to produce my child. That honor would fall upon Donna. She presented me with a daughter about a year and a half after we were extracted. I loved my little Charlotte, and was there in the birthing room when she was delivered. I loved Donna as well.

In fact, I love all my companions, but I wasn’t in love with most of them. I tried to divide my time evenly between them while still showing Donna that special affection I knew all new mothers needed. It seems funny to me now that, when the Char first awarded me twenty-two companions, the only thing I could think of was “OH BOY, nightly orgies” but, although I still enjoyed sex, I found myself engaging in these activities more to appease my women than to satisfy my own carnal desires.

Work became my sanctuary where I could escape for eight or more hours a day, though that wasn’t exactly a utopian atmosphere, either. The problem was we just weren’t making any real headway. Nobody could seem to get along and, instead of taking any one theory and trying to develop it, all anyone wanted to do was argue over why they didn’t think something would work.

After two full years of bickering, we were all becoming very frustrated, and so were the Char. They slowly started transferring members of our team away to other projects. As our numbers began to dwindle, we finally started developing some of our ideas. Unfortunately, I was still considered the “junior” member of our group and was essentially ignored by everyone else.

Another year went by, and we still were no closer to solving our technical problems than when we started. The Char gradually pulled more of our team away to other projects. They offered to transfer me three different times, but I knew how important this project was to our continued survival and truly believed that we could eventually make it work.

After five straight years of producing no tangible results, our team was officially disbanded. I implored the Char to allow me to continue on my own, and they reluctantly agreed, but I wasn’t sure how long that would last. I knew I couldn’t rely on my previous success much longer and, would need to start showing some serious results if I hoped to remain on this project.

I decided to start from scratch and, instead of trying to come up with one machine that could reproduce all organic materials, concentrate solely on replicating a single natural resource. I chose water because it is the most important for sustaining life. I worked through theory after theory, putting in extended hours at the expense of any personal life, trying desperately to come up with a way to reproduce massive amounts of water from a single sample. Nothing worked.

Worse yet, I was losing the respect of the Char. It was obvious they felt I was milking my previous success with the Vermin and no longer contributing to our mutual survival. When I would submit requests for resources needed to continue my experiments, I would often get responses such as “Yeah, Joe, we might be able to get you that in a month or two.” Obviously, this slowed my progress considerably, but it also gave me more time to review my theories.

Energy was a major factor. I discovered it took far too many resources to power my machine than we could spare. I challenged myself to see develop a power supply that would be self-sustaining. This too, required many more acquisitions for resources.

By now, everyone was frustrated with me. My ladies were pissed that I was never home to take care of their needs, the Char were mad that I wasn’t making any real progress, and I was disappointed with myself for letting everyone else down. I had lost all the respect I previously built up and, when one of the Char actually referred to me as Joey, I came damned close to chucking the entire project. However, I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything, praying that things would eventually work out.

Editing and Proofreading by WildBSinTX