Chapter 10: FALLING BAROMETER

The dream is contagious? Robots can dream and aspire? What’s happening? Change is in the air!

The Franklins appearing without prior warning in President Linda’s office, DEMANDING immediate access to Wati’s world, gets them nothing more than promptly evicted, and ordered out of town!

“Your plane has been ordered to take off in fifteen minutes. Don’t miss your plane, it’s a long walk home.”

As revenge for their arrogant effrontery, Linda decides she’s entitled to make clones without permission. No copyright laws exist in Florida since she hasn’t considered it necessary to creat any.

An initial run of two hundred each are ordered. Materializing by twos and threes, in ordered ranks, in an empty parking lot adjacent outside, they’re viewable from Linda’s presidential office. A pair of each is called in for her inspection and ordered to strip.

Tom and particularly Skeet have impressive physiques. That was evident without nudity, and her incentive for cloning them. What nudity reveals is a surprise disappointment to Linda. Skeet is female.

Linda is bored with Erik clones, and Wati and his sons are forever in demand, so seldom available for her personal needs. The Wati clones she promised not to molest. These new series, she specifically requested be complete with libidos, original memories, and sexually functional. Skeet isn’t the strapping male Adonis Linda hoped for.

Tom, on the other hand, is a bull of a man and hung like a donkey.

Linda is more than a bit jaded, and kinky sex is an interesting.

The pairs of clones didn’t pair up by series, like with like, but as couples, male and female, and with their arms affectionately about each other.

Very telling, in Linda’s imagination, the fact is the two Toms sport very tempting erections and stare at their daughter clones with lust.

What happens between daughter and daddy in real life, moral restrictions and social taboos, shouldn’t inhibit their clones. Tom, replicated twice in her office, desires sex with his Amazonian daughter, Skeet. Why not? Let the unrequited lust be fulfilled.

She orders one couple to, she almost said to fuck, but changed it at the last second to, ‘Make Love’.

It’s hot. Skeet wants her Daddy even more than he craves her, and he’s extremely ardent. They’re lovemaking exhibits another surprise. Or two. They’re very confident and practiced at their loving, leading Linda to credit original memories for their ease with each other’s bodies. They are obviously accustomed to making love together. More astounding, they’re in love with each other, no denying it.

Linda orders them to stop. Tom sits up on his knees, his wet cock jerking in the air. Expressed on their faces is pure frustration. They are both literally shaking with suppressed tension and postponed fulfillment. Linda is thrilled the actual Tom and Skeet are incestuous.

Tormenting their copies is more delicious because the relationship isn’t a mere dramatization. It’s a re-enactment. Mix it up a little.

Linda hollers for one of her Wati clone guards. Clones aren’t people, they’re appliances. Clones engaged in appearance of sexual acts together, are mechanicals interfacing. Not really having sex together.

No one may have sex with a Wati clone. Another clone isn’t a someone, it’s just an it. A nobody. Nobody MAY have sex with a Wati. The permission is implied for nobodies. Linda orders the Wati to undress and fuck Skeet, orders Tom to bugger the ladyboy Wati clone, and orders the Wati and Skeet to assist, in every way possible.

Now THIS is really hot stuff! The second couple think so too. Both are drooling from their genitals.

Linda sends the spare Skeet back to her rank and file. The extra Tom she instructs to make love to her exactly as the other Tom had with his Skeet partner. She intends to keep a few of these series for her private amusement.

Thirty five of each are ordered to muster with the army. As sexworkers as well as fighters. Keep the human troops happy.

The army marches north with it’s new reserves and camp followers.

Skeet missed the flight, temporarily hiding in one of scores of empty residences. She knows from comments dropped by Susan, the access tunnel to Wati’s world is somewhere aboard the tug SPORT. She is reconnoitering the situation and terrain. This is not her first rodeo.

Events conspire in Skeet’s favor.

WAR. Potential war, a threat of war, puts Crescent City on a war footing again. The North is invading. The army is sent north to repel the invader forces from allied Georgia and Alabama. They intend to split off and split up the Florida panhandle.

Georgia claims everything north of a line from Port St Joe to Jacksonville, but including Cape San Blas.

Alabama claims everything west of the Apalachicola river, ceding Georgia only the desired Cape San Blas and the Gulf deepwater port at Port St Joe.

Alabama has long lusted for the coastal strip of west Florida often referred to in jest as LA. Lower Alabama. It’s now part of Alabama!

Erik goes nominally as the commander, but his daughter Missy, who’s also Linda’s loyal half sister, is in total tactical command.

With all the Dan-nos conscripted into the army, SPORT is left without a crew again. Captain Beth is doing the sanitary herself.

As mentioned, these events conspire in Skeet’s favor. Wearing a filched pair of orange coveralls, Crescent City Public Works Dept is emblazoned across the back, Skeet reports aboard for duty. Captain Beth asks no credentials, simply hands Skeet the mop she herself was wielding a moment earlier.

Dignity restored, she goes topside, leaving Skeet with instructions.

“A clean ship, is a healthy and happy ship. I’ll be on the bridge, if anyone asks for me.”

Captain Beth gratefully retires to her command bridge.

Skeet begins a mopping tour of the entire tug. She makes two complete circuits before she discovers the migration portal is in the cupboard under the stairs in the galley area.

When Skeet actually falls the last few feet into the EROS bridge, she is unconscious and bleeding from the ears, nose, and corners of her eyes. She is barely alive, when she is discovered. Her transition was not an easy one, because inside her skull are several electronic implants that didn’t react well to the scale decompression. A GPS, an AIS beacon for tracking her, and a UHF radio transceiver.