Chapter 1

Month 42—June in Los Angeles

I’D JUST TURNED EIGHTEEN. I’d delayed as long as possible—two years since the president announced mandatory CAP testing that measured the Capacity, Aptitude, and Potential of people to determine if they were eligible to volunteer in the Confederacy. A lot of the kids—especially here on the West Coast—didn’t take it seriously but there had been increasing warnings of severe penalties if a person was stopped and didn’t have a CAP card. I finally decided it had to be done today. Feds were out in force.

I went to the test center and was led to a room with a comfortable chair and a VR headset. I smiled. The test was some kind of cool virtual reality game. That’s my world. I just flowed with the pieces and got into the game. I tried to remember some of the techniques they used, so I could use them in the game my team was creating. The animations were top level and looked almost like my tests that put live humans into the staged backgrounds of my game. I didn’t expect to get into the game like this. It was cool.

Games are what it’s all about. My team and I had been building our game since I was twelve years old. Six years of development and we had things pretty locked into place for a V1 release. All except one thing: If we were going to make the breakthrough we wanted, then we needed porn stars and a producer who could follow my scripts. Now that I was eighteen, I could meet with my favorite producer/director, Dakota Wind. If I had a CAP card.

It was too bizarre. You could drop your drawers in a public restaurant when the Marines came and fuck your heart out at fourteen. You could get bulked up and sent out to kill aliens at fourteen. But California still had blue laws about porn. And the porn industry enforced them rigorously. You couldn’t legally get or participate in good porn in the state until you were eighteen. What a screwy world.

“We’ll have your CAP card in just a few minutes.” The pleasant and stunningly beautiful woman at the reception desk smiled at me, showing a lot of cleavage and a bare mid-section. I couldn’t see her legs but was sure they’d fill out the rest of the image in my mind.

I could just imagine her looking up into the camera—not at me, of course. I’d have Rock Jamison, the porn star, play opposite her. He’d smile at her and suggest maybe he could have a test drive. ‘Here?’ she’d ask. ‘Here and now,’ he’d say. The videos didn’t have much more dialog than that. She’d fall to her knees and start opening his pants to swallow that huge dick. The next shot would be of her bending over her desk with Rock behind her, slapping her pussy with his big schlong. That was a trademark of the actor. Before he did anything else with an actress, he whacked her pussy with his ten-inch cock a few times. Then he’d drive it home.

“Mr. Frisco?” I looked up, dragged out of my little fantasy. A guy in a gray suit—or was it a uniform?—was standing in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him come in.

“Yo.”

“I’m Decurion Oswald. Would you mind accompanying me to my office? I have your CAP results.” What the hell? I thought all I had to do was pick up my card at the desk and get the fuck out of Dodge. Trust the Confederacy to make things more complicated. I followed the guy past the room where I’d tested and into a small office.

“What’s going on? Don’t I just get my card and go home?”

“Usually, but your results are unique. Congratulations, Mr. Frisco. What branch of the Confederacy Defense Force would you like to join?” He pushed my card across the desk and I examined it. 9.2.

“I guess that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“That, young man, is your ticket out of here. 9.2 qualifies you for eight concubines. With the way you scored on tactics and aggression, you’d likely start your career as a Commander in the Marines. You’d be using your skills to design battle plans for destroying our enemies. And I can offer you immediate extraction. I noticed you observing Janice at the front desk. She’s one of my extras in the concubine pool. You could start your harem with her if you want. Test drive her right here in the office. Name the kind of concubines you want and we’ll try to work out a pickup. All you need to do is say, ‘I volunteer for service in the Confederacy.’ How about it, son?”

“No.”

“Do you mean you want some time? I can forgo the immediate extraction and let you gather a few women together. Call the number on this card when you’re ready, and if we deem the site secure, we’ll move in and pick you up. Will a week be enough time? We don’t do guaranteed pickups, but I think I can arrange to be where you are at that time.”

“No.”

“Teddy—I understand that is your preferred name—I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. You just got a golden ticket. What can we do to get you out of here?”

“Hmm. You could provide me with a state-of-the-art battleship I can crew and keep here in our solar system. By all accounts, we have five or six years before the dickheads get to Earth That should give me enough time to get my crew ready to defend Earth. We won’t be going to any unnamed planet in a different solar system.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Teddy. We don’t just let individuals decide how the war should be prosecuted. You work as part of a team and part of the process is getting people off Earth so that when it falls, we still have humans in the universe,” the Decurion said.

“Then you don’t need me. I won’t go.”

“What are you? Earth First? Your test doesn’t show that!”

“Decurion, if I were Earth First, one of two things would happen. One of the two of us would be dead in the next heartbeat or I’d take you up on your bribe to leave Earth. There’s no such thing as Earth First people. They are all ‘me first’ idiots. Given the opportunity to get off the planet, they’d take it in an instant. I’m not leaving our planet undefended to run off as a slave to the Darjee to fight their war. Tell whoever sent you here for me to go suck it.” I stood to leave. The Decurion stood as well.

“Things won’t go the way you plan,” he said, pointing to the CAP card in my hand. I watched as the number changed from 9.2 to 8.8.

“Cool,” I snorted. “Wonder if I can get it down to zero.” I turned and left the office.

The whole world was a freaking mess since those bird aliens showed up and announced there was a war with another race coming for Earth and our only chance of survival was to go into space and fight them before they got here. It was a compelling argument. The choice was leave as a volunteer to fight, leave as a slave for the volunteer to fuck, or get eaten. When put in those terms, who wouldn’t prefer to leave—even as a sex slave?

The broadcast of Average Joes had turned from a dating game to a raunchy orgy of lust as the winners chose their harems to go into space. If you wanted to go, you either scored 6.5 or better on the CAP test, or you got someone with a qualifying score to take you as his slave. The higher the score, the more slaves you could take. I’ve got a pretty good libido, but how the hell does a guy service that many women on a continuing basis and still have energy left to fight?

Well, there were other choices. I didn’t see Earth getting ready to fight. At least, not to fight aliens. There was plenty of fighting among ourselves and some of it was getting pretty violent. As far as I could tell, it would ultimately be a one-man stand against overwhelming forces. I didn’t kid myself that I was physically a match for the dickheads—so named because of their shape. I wondered if anyone was producing dickhead dildos yet. I needed to get Duck, my toy designer, on that.

No, maybe I wasn’t going to be the last man standing, but I figured I could get a whole bunch of people ready to fight. That’s how the game was developing. Just getting people used to pointing at a dickhead and pulling the trigger.

But first, I needed an ally in the porn industry. And I knew who I wanted.

“Uh, Mr. Frisco ... Great name for a porn star, by the way—Teddy Frisco ... I just don’t think you’re what we need at our studio.” Dakota Wind looked at the ... fat kid ... who came into her office. She must have been prepared for an audition, though she mostly only used women. I knew she wasn’t into jellyroll porn. I doubted she could even get one of her porn stars to fuck me. There’s a limit to what money can buy.

“Sorry, Miss Wind. There’s been some misinformation. I’m not here to audition. I’d like to commission some scenes for a new video game.”

“We here at Windward Studios are a creative company producing the top level of artistic adult entertainment. We don’t do commercial work.”