Chapter 12

As it turned out, Karen only had to allocate six apartments, but she had to come up with seven more radios. AI promised to deliver them by tomorrow morning. Ed, Hank, and Shirli were the first three in line, so they got the available radios. Hank and Shirli were married with two children, George, 15, and Helen 12. The others were Tom (73) and John (16), traveling together. The others were Lois, Sue, and Albert.

Ed and Lois partnered very early, and it wasn’t long before Sue and Albert became an item of gossip. These two women were already married before their flight, but they realized that they had lost those husbands forever, so they started looking around right away. That left Tom and John without female companionship, but Tom figured that at 73, he was past worrying about it, but John at 16 noticeably felt left out.

Hank, John, Albert, and George were the four who wanted to learn to fly. P1 already had a duplicate set of pilot’s controls at the copilot’s seat, so I figured to use that plane for the preliminary training.

Once the assigning of apartments was completed, we all adjourned to the apartments to inspect them. The Watkins family of four got a large apartment, but all of the others were assigned the standard two-bedroom apartment. These were all close together to promote a sense of community. Karen, Jane, and I hoped that worked.

All four men had completed their flying training and had been issued their Mustangs. M5-M8. George got his first and John got his second. That annoyed John no end. John had always been the richest kid at school, and he didn’t let the other kids forget that. I had recognized that early, but I had tried to ignore it. I guess that was a mistake, but I had little experience with rich teens.

At least, John spent most of his free time in his plane, M6, and that kept him away from the rest of the community. I supposed that was in compensation for his raging hormones having no normal outlet. Finally, though, the whole mess hit the fan.

One day, Helen was walking down the street. Suddenly, the door to an empty apartment opened and she was grabbed by the arm and dragged into the apartment. The door was slammed and locked. That was when Helen saw that it was John who had attacked her. Helen was dressed in the bikini outfit that all of the women were wearing, and John jerked her bra up to expose her breasts.

At first, Helen was so surprised that she didn’t know what to do, but she then started to scream for help. That did absolutely no good because the apartments were all very effectively sound proofed. Her screaming resulted in a slap in the face by John, and that was enough of a hint to make Helen shut up. John dragged her into a bedroom and jerked her bikini bottom off. This time, Helen began to cry and to beg John to let her go.

Of course he didn’t. Instead, he threw her on the bed and jerked his briefs down to expose his erect penis. By the purest stroke of luck, AI was making his usual safety sweep of all of the apartments looking for signs of fire. He noted immediately that a supposedly empty apartment was occupied, so he turned on the video and sound recordings. That was when he heard Helen pleading with John not to rape her.

You can imagine how fast a modern computer can react when it has to, and AI didn’t hesitate to act in this case. In a stern tone of voice, he commanded John to release Helen. John reacted immediately to the command and jumped off the bed. That was enough to make Helen jump up and grab her clothes as she ran from the room.

As a safety measure, all apartment doors, whether locked or not, would open as soon as they were activated from inside the apartment. Helen ran toward home, still carrying her clothes, and burst in to report to her mother what had just happened to her.

Meanwhile, AI reported to me what John had done to Helen, and I rushed to the nominally empty apartment to apprehend John. Well, John may have been a bully, but he was no fool when it came to preserving his own skin. He jerked on his pants and ran to an empty tram car. He ordered it to take him to the hanger. As soon as he arrived, he jumped into M6 and taxied to the runway. He jumped into a headlong flight toward Big Lake. Nobody ever did figure out why he had gone in that direction, but AI soon lost track of him.

Apparently, he had smashed or thrown away his personal radio with its built-in tracking device and smashed the one on his plane because AI never did pick him up again. As soon as AI reported that John had escaped in his plane, all of the rest of us pilots ran to our planes and took off after him. We instituted a search, but we never did find him. God only knows what happened to him and his plane.

Certainly, the battery driving his main engine was going to run down eventually, so he could not fly forever. He must have forgotten that in his panic. We had to give up the search while we still had enough juice in our batteries to get back to Miami. Once home, we decided that it was just not worth the danger of trying to find John. We figured that we were better off without him!

Since John had never actually penetrated Helen, she was able to recover and return to a normal life after the attempted rape. The only person among us who was really affected was his grandfather Thomas. The poor man died shortly thereafter in what the medical computer diagnosed as a fit of depression. He was the first member of our cemetery.

The only person to make a major change in his life style was her brother George. From then on, he kept a very close eye on her, so that sometimes she was annoyed with him. He kept up that watchful gaze on her even after they were married a couple of years later. With the medical service available, AI convinced us that incest would never be a problem. The medical computer could even correct genetic problems.

It was hard for us to get enough exercise the way we were buried underground in these bunkers, so it was easy to convince AI that we needed a gymnasium with an attached swimming pool. Now we had a good excuse for our bikinis, as if we needed one.

Karen finally had her twins, and she named them Bill, Junior and Harriet, after her mother. Both children were delivered in the medical chamber so that the computer could control every phase of the delivery. The medical computer took the opportunity, at our request, to remove Harriet’s hymen and Bill, Jr’s foreskin. It also removed the appendix from both children. That was all of the special treatment that the children needed. The computer estimated that they could look forward to 240 and 280 years of life, respectively. Of course, that estimate was subject to change.

The next two years moved forward with no surprises. Three more babies were born with the same kind of medical treatment and prognosis. We were surprised that all three children were girls, Mary, Alice, and Susan. AI said that we shouldn’t be concerned—his calculations showed that the optimum ratio for population growth was four females to one male. I cringed a little bit, and the women laughed.

We had six males, and that meant that we needed 15 more girl babies, unless we were blessed with some more female immigrants. I didn’t know just how to work this out, but I could see the gears grinding away inside my wives’ heads about what to do and how to do it in getting me two more wives. Were they thinking of our daughters? At least, that would give them about 14 more years of an exclusive with my cock.

We went another two years before we had any more immigrants show up, and these were quite a thunderous surprise! The rainy season had arrived for this year, and we were all staying inside doing little but looking out for leaks. That wasn’t really necessary because of the job AI did, but we didn’t have much else to do. We could hear the thunder crashing all about us even though we were at least 25 feet underground.