“I’m bored!” Terri said, for the fourth or fifth time that morning. “Why isn’t there anything to do?”

Harriet looked at her fifteen-year-old daughter in frustration. She knew the feeling well, but it wasn’t appropriate to say so. “Well go find something on the TV to watch,” she snapped.

“I’ve watched it all!”

“Not possible. There’s millions of hours of films and series available. I’m sure you can find something if you really wanted.”

“Well there’s nothing I want to watch, alright?” snarled Terri and flounced off a huge huff.

“AI, help,” Harriet said softly when Terri had left the room.

“I have no suggestions at this time,” the AI responded.

Harriet sat heavily into one of the straight backed chairs by the main dining table, rested her elbows on said dining table, and put her face in her hands. “Fuck,” she moaned. “Why me?” She sighed. “This was a bad mistake.”

Harriet pondered her woes. She now really wished she hadn’t been collected. At all, not just with the man who had chosen her. He was okay in his own way, but she was fifteen years older than him and it sometimes showed. She was also the oldest person in the pod.

Eight months earlier Harriet, along with her husband and three children, were sitting in a pub on the outskirts of Oxford. They were supposed to be celebrating Terri’s fifteenth birthday, but as usual she and David were starting to argue. They had been married seven years, which she had finally admitted to herself, was seven years too many. Although they had been together for nearly twenty years, by the time they did marry it was a sticking plaster to an already failing relationship. If they had only separated after thirteen years together, instead of marrying and spending another seven years falling apart, they might have still been friends.

But that was a long time ago. Instead, by Terri’s fifteenth birthday, it was starting to come to a head, and had they stayed on Earth, it was pretty clear they would have separated within a month or so and divorced within twelve.

But events had changed everything.

The Confederacy had come to town. They wanted staff and students from the university, but the central university body had banned them from collecting on any university property or grounds. This in fact was only to prevent too much disruption to the functioning of the colleges and university; they were not opposed to the Confederacy, nor were they opposed to any member of staff, teaching or otherwise, or any student, from being collected if they so wished. Indeed they supported it. Just not on university grounds.

Instead the Confederacy had collected from a number of pubs, restaurants, shopping centres and similar locations near some of the advanced engineering and high tech companies that were fed by the university.

Harriet had been barely seventeen when she had met, and fallen in love with, David. She had still been at school, while he’d been a student at the university. She hadn’t wanted to go to university, so when, two years later he had started work at a local tech firm, she had gone along to the same firm and applied for a job there. She’d assumed it would be a cleaning or catering job, but in fact both of those were contracted out and instead she had been taken on as a junior clerk doing general paperwork. Theresa, Terri, had come along only a year later, just months after her own twentieth birthday. Will and Ruth had followed along three and five years later. By the time of their collection, she had been the deputy manager of the payroll department in the same company, while David had changed companies twice, each time getting a promotion, and was now a departmental manager.

When the collection had been announced, she and David had looked at each other, and almost instantly both had shaken their heads. David had smiled at her. It had been the nicest, most friendly, smile she had had off him in years.

“I’m so sorry love,” he had said. “Please find someone you can go with. Someone younger and less ... me!”

She had smiled and reached over to give him a peck on the cheek. “As odd as it sounds,” she had said, “I will miss you, but, you’re right, we shouldn’t go together.”

David had turned to Terri and given her a hug. “I love you poppet, so very much. Be safe. And happy birthday.”

Terri had looked surprised. “Um, am I going with Mum? Can’t I come with you?”

David’s smile faded. “You can’t come with me. Not unless you want to have sex with me, because that’s what it means at your age.”

“Ugh, no!” Exclaimed Terri.

David laughed, and hugged her again, and gave her a peck on the cheek. “That’s why love.”

“Oh. Yeah.” She’d looked up at her father. “I will if you really want me to, but I don’t...”

David had pushed her gently away.

“We both know incest is allowed up there, but since neither of us want that, it’s not an issue. You go with your mum. I’ll miss you. All of you,” he looked at his two younger children, “and I’ll certainly be thinking of you.”

“Please can I take the younger ones?” asked Harriet.

“You sure?” It was obvious that David was quite happy for the younger ones to go with his wife, but equally, Harriet recognised that he would have loved to have had them himself.

“I think, for now anyway, it would be better if the three stay together as long as possible. I’ll try and get whoever takes me to take Terri, or vice versa: whoever takes her to also take me.”

David nodded. “I think that’s a good idea. He turned to the two younger ones, now twelve and ten, who were crying gently, understanding that they were about to lose their father, though possibly not yet understanding that it could be for ever.

For a few moments he had hugged his three children tightly, all of them crying. When they separated, he had turned to her and given her a hug too. “Goodbye beautiful lady. I will miss you, and I guess, in my own way, I still care for you, but I don’t think we would work together out there any better than we’ve been working together down here.”

“No, I know,” sighed Harriet. She looked at him speculatively. “Would you really have taken Terri if she wanted to go with you?”

He shrugged. “I guess so. But she’d have had to be truly totally absolutely sure. Really 110% sure.”

“In other words,” she said slowly, “you don’t really want to, but will put your feelings aside for her?”

He nodded. “She’s my daughter and I really do love her, all of them, very much. I’d do anything for her. But I don’t want to have sex with her. That’s not my scene. So thankfully nor is it hers.”

He had left them shortly afterwards, to go and find two concubines for himself, to go with his 6·8 CAP. Harriet’s own 5·9 CAP meant she needed a sponsor, but she thought, hoped, that wouldn’t be too difficult as she was still attractive and only just thirty-five.

She looked around at the dining area of the pod she now occupied. Occupied along with eight other people.

She had been chosen by a handsome young man called Martyn, only twenty-one and a recent graduate from the university. By chance he worked for the same company she worked for, though they had never met before that day. He had a 7·0 CAP, so was taking four concubines. Harriet went as his senior concubine, but he also asked Terri to go as well. She would be his youngest. Terri agreed without any hesitation. He was handsome after all. As it turned out he was only okay in bed, and since Terri and one of his other concubines had both been virgins, Harriet had advised him to be ultra gentle and had helped him to be their first.

Martyn’s other two concubines were a seventeen year old blind girl, Georgina, who it turned out was a friend of his sister, Lillian, and a young woman, Perri - actually Persephone - a few months older than him who was Georgina’s trainer, helping her to learn how to cope, as a blind person, out and about in the ‘real’ world. The three, Lillian, Georgina, and Perri, had been staying with Martyn for a week to get her used to being somewhere different and new. Lillian went with another man who point blank refused to take a blind girl. She and Martyn had spent ten minutes trying to persuade a couple of different men men to take the three women together. Eventually, as neither Lillian nor Martyn wanted to ‘go incest’, they reluctantly decided that Georgina and Perri would go with him, while she would go with someone else. It was not a happy start, and affected the extended family for a few days afterwards.

Perri had two young children, Michael, two, and Collette, four months, who had been collected the following day. Perri’s husband hadn’t put up much of a fight to losing his children, to Perri’s combined relief and disgust.

So that was the family. Herself, Perri, Georgina and Terri as concubines, plus four under age kids: Will, Ruth, Michael and Collette. Plus Martyn.

Idly she thought about David. She had bumped into him on the spaceship a few hours after they had been collected. At the time he had had his arms around two girls, and a huge grin on his face.

“Hello,” she had said coolly.

“Oh. Hello babe. You okay?”

The girls, twins she only then realised, looked at her speculatively, possessively.

“It’s okay,” Harriet had told them. “He’s my ex. I’m his ex. He’s now yours.” She’d turned to David. “Looks like you did well.”

She looked back at them calculatingly. Like most females at this point, including herself, the twins were naked. They had lovely, pretty much identical, bodies. Both were about five foot four, an inch or so shorter than her. Both had small breasts with no hint of a sag and with pale, upturned, nipples. Both were slim with brown hair, brown eyes, small pert noses, flat bellies with a very obvious six-pack, and small shaped tufts of pubic hair above a clean shaven vulva. The only difference that Harriet could see was that the tufts of pubic hair were very different shapes. It was equally obvious to Harriet that they had both very recently had sex. Presumably with David, but she wasn’t crass enough to ask. They were truly beautiful. And appeared to be so far out of David’s league she wondered how he’d managed to ‘capture’ them.

“I think so. Seventeen year old twins. Sophie and Marie. I can’t tell the difference between them yet.”

She had nodded. “Okay. Enjoy.” She had smiled at all three of them, given them a gentle wave, and hurried in the other direction. She could feel tears forming. Even though they had both agreed to the split, had both accepted and understood the reasons why, to see him only a couple of hours later with such young and beautiful women, girls, was incredibly disheartening. For a while it had threatened to disturb her fragile equilibrium, but with an effort she had got herself together, and now, eight months later, rarely thought of him. Beyond the fact that they were both now stationed on Mars, she didn’t know anything about his new life. It did however mean that every now and again Will and Ruth went to stay with their father for a few days.

She was bored. Sex with Martyn hadn’t been good at first. It hadn’t been bad, it just hadn’t been good. She had taken him in hand and trained him, it was lucky he’d been open to the idea of being trained in sex and lovemaking. So many men weren’t. Now he was good in bed. Not spectacular, not as good as David could be, but good enough for now. He was away in training or working or something most of the time so she didn’t see him much, but she’d had a message to say he would be home late again. Which was pretty much par for the course.

There really was nothing else to do apart from watch TV. Mars wasn’t capable of supporting people on its surface, so all living was confined to the various pods, most of which were buried in the Martian soil and rock. They had been linked together in various ways to form some sort of rapidly growing township, but it was not the same.

She missed ... She sat up suddenly.

“AI?”

Ten minutes later she walked briskly into the TV room not really surprised to find Terri there despite her claims a few minutes earlier of not wanting to watch TV. “The dining area will be closed for nearly two hours,” she told them. “There’s no entry. The AI is reconfiguring it.”

Perri had taken Collette, just about to turn one, through to one of the bedrooms, and was putting her daughter down for a nap. They were the only ones not there. Everyone else pretty much ignored her, though Terri and Georgina, with her recently restored sight, just shrugged. No one said anything.

Nearly two hours later, Harriet heard a small ding coming from the dining area. Smiling slightly to herself, she left the others and went to investigate. She stood looking around in delight. This was absolutely perfect. She grinned. There was a hint of maliciousness in that grin, but it was amused rather than mean or evil.

“AI, this is wonderful. Now, there’s a second part to this.” She told the AI what she wanted it to do, and why, and it agreed.

“Right,” she muttered, “time for some fun.” She went back and sat down with the others and waited. It would only be a matter of time.

They were watching some trashy American school based soap opera. To be honest only Georgina was truly watching, but that was as much because of her new eyesight. She had heard it before, but now she was watching it. It truly was new to her.

At the end of the forty-five minute episode, there were no advert breaks, Terri stood and, without looking at her mother, left the room. Harriet watched her daughter surreptitiously, knowing she was going for food. Terri was six months pregnant now and had suddenly got a much larger appetite than she had ever had before. All four women were between five and seven months pregnant, Harriet herself was seven months, Perri and Terri were just over and just under six months respectively, and Georgina was five months.

Harriet grinned to herself when she heard the loud screech of anger and confusion. “MOTHER!” yelled Terri. “What the fuck?”

Everyone looked up.

“Yes dear?” Harriet answered, her voice a little too innocent.

Perri looked at her and frowned questioningly.

Harriet just winked.

The door opened and Terri stormed back in carrying a tray of, well, it wasn’t immediately obvious, apart from the fact that there were a number of small boxes and packets on the tray.

“What is this?” demanded Terri.

“Exactly what it looks like dear.”

“But this is just ... I asked for a sandwich and this is what it gave me.” She slammed the tray down in front of her mother. Georgina and Perri both stared at it. After a few moments Perri burst into laughter, but Georgina just looked confused. The packets and containers all had labels, but Georgina still struggled to read the lettering.

“Very good. I like it,” laughed Perri.

“But ... but... , “ spluttered Terri. “What am I...”

“What do you think you are supposed to do with it,” asked Harriet calmly.

“How should I know!”

“Well what have you got?”

Terri just glared at her mother.

“Well?” asked Harriet again. calmly indicating the tray. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

Terri, in a high dudgeon, snatched up one of the bags and read the label. “Strong white bread flour.” She picked up a bottle. “Olive oil.” A small packet. “Yeast.” There was also salt, lemon juice, sugar and strawberries.

“And what are they?”

Terri sighed. “Ingredients.”

“For what?”

Terri gave an even more exaggerated sigh. “Jam.” she separated the strawberries, sugar and lemon juice, “and bread.”

“Correct. Well off you go.”

“Can I come and watch?” asked Georgina. “I’ve never seen anyone making bread. Or making jam.”

Terri opened her mouth to snarl at the older girl, but then must have decided that actually, having someone to teach might be vaguely interesting.

“Fine!” she snapped at her mother.

“If you need help, just call. The replicator will supply all the necessary tools etc.”

“And the oven? ... Oh, that’s what the AI was doing wasn’t it? There’s an oven in there?”

Harriet nodded. “There’s a six ring hob, including a wok ring and there’s two large ovens, one of which doubles as a pizza oven since we all seem to like pizza. There’s also a smaller oven that doubles as a grill. There’s two sinks with hot and cold water taps and a pot filler tap near the hob that will dispense either boiling water or cold water. Bread requires some warm water.”

Terri and Georgina left.

Harriet looked at Perri.

“I miss cooking. I love cooking and baking. So from now on all our food is going to be cooked fresh, by us. Any ingredients we want can be got from the replicator, as can any kitchen tools and pots and pans we need. The replicator will supply all food raw and uncooked as initial ingredients. So if you want a ham sandwich, you had better make sure you have made the bread and cooked the ham.”

“Will it still supply baby food?”

“Yes and no. When Terri was young I had a long conversation with a proper infant nutritionist. Most pre-prepared baby food is rubbish. Contains far too much sugar. So I always prepared my own. It had more good quality protein, no sugar, almost no salt, and far more of the vegetables like broccoli that most kids take time to learn to like, and of course some never learn. All of my kids will eat practically anything.” She grinned. “Even brussels sprouts.”

There was some good natured gagging from Perri. “Yuk,” she laughed. “Horrible. Horrible,” her grin faded somewhat. “But I do see what you mean. I think you’re right, we should make our own. No sugar, very little salt, and all the appropriate vitamins and minerals we can pack in.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“What happens if Martyn needs something in a hurry before he goes out?” Perri asked.

“I thought of that,” Harriet assured her. “In a real emergency, well, if it’s important enough, if someone is in a real hurry, we can override and get prepared food out. But only me, you and Martyn can do that. Also, in future the younger kids will be denied food direct from the replicator unless it’s something healthy like fruit. They will have to come to us first.”

Perri nodded. “I could imagine Michael in a year or two asking for chicken dippers or something like that and ending up with raw chicken.” She shuddered.

Harriet nodded. “I’ve added all the safety controls I could think of, though I’m sure we’ll think of some more in time.”

“You know I’m allergic to peanuts?”

“Not any more,” interrupted the AI. “That was noted during your initial medical, and fixed during your physical body changes.”

Perri shuddered. “I still won’t eat peanuts,” she muttered to Harriet. “Not if I can possibly avoid them.”

Harriet nodded. “I asked it to make sure things like that are kept out, but it wouldn’t commit.”

“Why?”

“All it said was that it wouldn’t guarantee that, and we shouldn’t worry.”

“But giving things like that to young children and babies? Doesn’t that trigger allergies?”

The AI broke in again. “There is published, peer reviewed, medical evidence going back more than twenty years, from both the UK and the USA, as well as many other countries, that show that introducing young children to small quantities of possible allergens early in their life can actually help improve and reduce their reactions to those same allergens in later life. In any case, nanites already in the system can reduce and offset any allergic reaction that does occur. It is not necessary to remove them from your diet.”

“Oh!” The two women looked at each other, nonplussed. Although it had been nearly eight months since they had become part of the Confederacy, neither had realised any of this.

Fifteen minutes later Terri popped her head through the door. “Mum, you’ve made bread before haven’t you?”

“No, but I’ve seen it done, many times. Why? Are you struggling?”

“Yeah. I don’t really know how to knead.”

“Okay. I’ll come. We can learn together.”

When Martyn got home nearly eight hours later, the smell in the pod was extremely enticing. He stopped and sniffed. “What’s going on here?” he asked suspiciously.

He walked into what had been a very simple food prep area and stopped, shocked. On a new, island, work area in what was now very obviously a true kitchen, were the results of an afternoon of cooking and baking. There were two different loafs of bread, plus what was left of a third, a score or so of scones, another of rock buns, a pie, though of what sort it was impossible to tell as it was a closed pie, and about half a dozen jars of some dark red, currently unidentifiable, jam; while on the stove a large pot of savoury stew simmered gently giving off it’s own wonderful rich aroma. Terri was currently working at a bowl mixing ingredients, though what she was doing, what she was making, Martyn couldn’t see.

“I know I said you could redecorate,” he said slowly, “but this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”