Chapter 226

“There should be a draft where every young person has to do one year of something—military, public works—something so that we all feel invested in the same game, because that’s the part that we’ve lost.”
—Jon Stewart, NYMagazine.com/intelligencer, Oct 2014

REBECA WAS SANDWICHED between Joan and me Thursday night. She’d been soaking up the attention all day, even though we all had work to do. I’m not sure Beca got any done. She’d settle down and suddenly be whisked away by one of our wives, only to appear half or three-quarters of an hour later, looking disheveled and a little confused.

It wasn’t just her birthday. It was her golden birthday. She turned nineteen on the nineteenth of January. After we’d all had a little party and invited Dark Smith and Tips Are Welcome to join us, we headed back to our B&B and the three of us went straight to bed. Joan and I did our best to treat Beca like a princess, massaging her and bringing her treats.

“I’ve been licked half to death today,” Beca sighed. “Nine orgasms in a day is exhausting.”

“Are you saying you don’t want two more?” Joan whispered.

“Well, no, not exactly. But ... Can we just cuddle for a while? Maybe after a nap, I’ll feel up to more playing.”

“Whenever you want, precious,” I said as I pulled her and Joan close to me.

It was early in the morning that Beca collected her last two birthday orgasms. Joan and I rolled her legs back toward her breasts and took turns licking her sweet little nub. Then Beca arranged things so I could fuck Joan while Beca rode her face. Beca and I kissed and fondled each other as we both used Joan for our mutual satisfaction. Joan’s nipples got a workout, too, and she screamed out an orgasm into Beca’s pussy while I pumped mine into her.

I woke up Saturday morning cradling a sobbing Remas in my arms.

“I know I’ve made the right choice but I don’t want to leave you,” she cried. “I love you.”

“And I love you,” I assured her. “Remas, this isn’t the end. You’re taking a wonderful opportunity that is everything you wanted. And we are still in service. No telling where we’ll end up when our term of service is up. We could all settle in Seattle for all we know.”

“We travel,” Cindy said from the other side of our lover. “We’ll see you.”

“I know how much you struggle to see Livy regularly and she’s only two hundred miles away. Seattle is 3,500 miles.”

“It seems insurmountable, but we will persevere. One day we want to put that ring on your finger,” I said.

“Love me. Love me some more,” she whispered. I found Cindy’s fingers already buried in Remas but she made room for my cock. Remas and Cindy had developed a very close relationship over the past year. I think Remas was the first true friend Cindy had who was at the same level of musicianship as she was. They shared something that was beyond my simple finger-picking.

Sadly, we couldn’t spend the day in bed. The bus was leaving in order to be in DC with plenty of time for Remas to prepare for the concert in the evening. Most of our pod was going with them. Only Donna, Nanette, and Cindy would be left at Tanglewood with me. And I didn’t expect we’d be there much longer.

Rob “The Boss” Nelson had been relieved of duty at Abigail’s house. When I asked if he’d been arrested, Ron told me he was being investigated. There was an alphabet soup of agencies involved attempting to determine what actual laws had been broken. I suggested kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, but Ron said there was a question about that because I was in the National Service and was merely sent to my training camp. Having two sets of assignment papers produced by the AI did not prove anyone had altered or forged the papers.

Of far more immediate concern was whether Nelson had a covert chain of command within the Secret Service that allowed him to operate outside the guidelines of the agency. There is a strict chain of command in the Secret Service and the President sits at the top. Accordingly, no one in the service should function in a way contrary to her direction. So, how had Nelson been able to disappear from the grid for at least two months to train the SSR and not be suspected of any wrong-doing?

And if it wasn’t a covert chain of command that subverted the President’s wishes, had Nelson gone rogue?

Ron came up on Sunday afternoon to talk about the various implications of the investigation. With the high profile rescues the SSR had effected, no one really wanted to pursue the idea that it wasn’t legally created as part of the National Service. This had affected the investigation of General Gerhardt as well. What had turned that investigation into a prosecution was a folder of financials implicating him in a bribery. Amanda was subtly supplying documents to the prosecution. Of course, no one but me knew that.

Congress had been busy during the week I was at Tanglewood. It seemed there was a new willingness to work together on the reform bill rather than both sides digging in and refusing to compromise. That was helped along by the suggestion the anti-reformists were complicit in the convention center bombing. They were doing everything possible to divert suspicion away from the National Alliance Party.

Even in the victory of the Reformist Party and impetus behind introducing the bill in both houses again, the procedures of actually getting it to a vote would mean at least sixty days before we saw anything concrete. In both chambers, the reform bill was now considered to be in committee. In order to be considered in committee, committee members had to be appointed. There are 435 members of Congress and fifty-seven served on the Civilian Service Committee. I guess that streamlined the process.

I’d suffered through reading the bill after Amanda did an excellent job of compiling it. In order to avoid the dual process of first repealing the original law and then passing a second law, the repeal was folded into the text of the new bill—a line at a time. It was as important to see what wasn’t repealed from the first law as it was to see what was added or replaced by the new bill. In those changes lay a story and to read the story required what biblical scholars call a ‘parallel reading.’ Amanda’s version put the whole thing together in such a way that I could see the story implicit in the changes.

Yeah. Sixty days was optimistic.

Rehearsals went well. Not only were Cindy and I working with the other two groups, we had to develop and rehearse our own program. All three teams were slated to go out in February. Simon and Jo were getting better at scheduling and venue selection now that the pressure to reach as many people as possible before the election was off. Cindy and I were going to tour Texas. When I looked at a map, I groaned. Touring Texas was almost the equivalent of touring the United States. If you decided to drive on I-10 from Santa Monica, California to Jacksonville, Florida in three equal legs, you’d spend both overnights in Texas. But we weren’t really going to tour all of Texas. We were slated to spend a week each in Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio/Austin. During our week in each metroplex, we would have seven to ten performances at different schools and at least one large concert venue. Since we were simply moving from local venue to venue, we would be staying in hotels rather than a motorhome. We’d move from one city to another on our ‘dark’ day when we had no performance.

And our whole retinue would not be traveling for this tour. Cindy, Donna, and I were the core team. We’d take one additional person and it looked like it would be Nanette. Emily and Rachel would be managing coordination and logistics for all three teams from DC. Joan and Beca were managing a network of websites now and would do it all from DC. Sophie, Desi, and Brittany had their own assignments at the National School.

We tossed around a lot of ideas for the theme of our tour and whether all three deputation teams should have a common message. On the positive side, I was writing the stuff anyway, so it would be easier to put everyone out spouting the same propaganda. On the downside, we would cease to look like independents and sound more like the house organ for OCS. Which I guess we were in a way.

Life would have been a lot easier if I hadn’t gotten so involved in the reform movement. But if easy was what I wanted in this life, I’d have become a mechanical engineer. I chose a path that stacked the cards against me from the beginning. V1 had counseled his children and grandchildren to choose a career they could make a living at. Music, theater, art, literature—they were all fine as far as something you appreciated, but you didn’t earn a living at it. And here I was, given my own chance to do things differently and I chose music. Would you like fries with that?

The messages I wrote for the three deputation teams had the same overarching theme: ‘Discover your dream.’ This would switch us from recovering the general dream of what National Service would be to discovering how your own personal dream fit into it. The service didn’t have unlimited options in terms of what kind of work people got to do. But there was a lot of flexibility when it came to locations, things one could do while fulfilling service, and even beginning college classes while in service. The new regulations book had been in use since the OCS took over. It didn’t need to be passed into law. As the new reform bill was written, having a lot more time to invest in it, the regulations, known almost universally as ‘the manual,’ had also been refined, but the changes weren’t nearly as haphazard as they had been before. It held up pretty well and was now in use in ninety percent of the service. There were still pockets of resistance, but many of those were being eliminated simply by changing the management.

But the key to a lot of the change was new programming for the AI contracted from Design Intelligence. The DI computer understood the AI so well that it was able to make changes to include goals and interests with aptitude and not change the AI’s developing personality.