Chapter 1

About six years later

January 1984

[Lexi, I know you are awake. I hesitate to interrupt you so early in the morning, but Charlie’s mind is going to be tainted by the primitive science they are teaching at McGill University.]

Yeah, Red. I was just laying here, enjoying being a sandwich.

[I know. But you have to begin extricating Charlie from that environment, before we’d have to un-teach him a whole lot of 1984-era physics.]

Okay, okay.

I slithered out from between the arms of my bookends. Bear would wake almost immediately I knew. And Rock would wake only when the comet hit the earth and caused massive destruction. I kicked the covers off the Bear side of the bed and crawled over him to get to the floor.

“I’m only going to the bathroom,” I whispered to Bear. I slipped into a Navajo night-shirt. It was a size too small, but I didn’t want to disappoint the boys. It covered my asscheeks, which was good enough.

“You know,” he said, not whispering at all, “I don’t know if I like you better wearing that shirt or not wearing it.” He threw a pillow at Rock. “Wake up, dozey. She’s up. That means everybody is up.”

Rock mumbled, “I want an alarm clock with a snooze button.”

I got into the bathroom, grabbed a toothbrush, and looked back at the double queen bed. Just in time, too, cause Bear was just reaching for his Jockeys. I didn’t miss an opportunity to stare at either of them. Well, when they were in their birthday suits.

It had only been since the Christmas party that I’d invited them both into my bed. After an entire autumn of teasing them, believe it or not, I really had to convince them. I think it was the two-males-in-the-same-bed thing that put them off at first. But then I stripped down to the bare essentials – meaning nothing at all – and crawled into bed.

I’d filled out quite nicely by that time, I thought. 34C breasts. Shapely figure, better than average since I still worked out. I was taller than in life #1: five foot nine inches. I even had the making of a four-pack of abdominals. I’d have said a six-pack, but that would be pushing it. I’m sure, at the time, it was the picture of my ass crawling over the sheets that did the trick. I did have a great ass, if I say so myself. And I was wagging my tail while I crawled.

I was in alpha level almost all the time, these days, and I tuned in to their emotions.

‘Well, I’m going to, no matter what he does,’ thought one.

‘Shit, I’ve been waiting for this invite for years,’ thought the other one.

I’d turned to my right and slung my arm around Rock. Then turned to my left and slid my other arm around Bear. Then I hooked a leg over each of theirs. Flat on my back, arms held down by the guys’ shoulders, with my legs effectively held open, I shut my eyes and just moaned, “Yeeesssssssssss.” I’d planned this moment for a long time.

I felt, rather than saw, them give each other a high five over my chest.

It almost broke the mood for me. Goddam MEN! Thinking that they had made a conquest, at last. Fucking MEN! Pun intended.

Well, I said almost. I’d made MY conquest. And I intended to enjoy it. I was nearly twenty, had a billion dollars in my public trading account, and six times that amount in hidden, overseas accounts. And I had two boys – should I call them men? Nah. They’d be my boys ‘til they were old and gray. Two boys pawing at me like the eager puppies they were.

The Spirit of the Hunter project was purring along. It was turning out a nice number of enhanced solar panels every week. Gerry was running a little shop of four assemblers now, drawn from the Navajo people, and he was planning on expanding it to six. He was using the entire output of chips from the Burnside North plant. Pretty soon we were going to train a second crew of chip-makers. We were approaching full implementation of solar power on every residence in the Piaqogwaiq, the Wind River Reservation – ten thousand people of the Shoshone and the ten thousand of the Arapaho. That was over five thousand of our improved solar panels. And we were close to doing the same on the Navajo / Hopi lands. Almost 175,000 people needed some 46,000 panels. We had about sixty percent of them supplied with glorious, FREE solar electric. The Wyoming Rural Electric Co-op, Arizona Power, and New Mexico Power company were starting to feel the pinch.

The enhanced panels turned out about four times the electricity of a traditional (for early 1980s) solar panel. We laughed when some of the bigger electric companies bought some on the black market. They bought them from us; we’d never let an enhanced panel out of our control. When they took apart the special chip we’d made, it burst into flame. You see, we never patented the special ‘booster’ chip. The main chip had a patent, but it was nothing special – just used existing technology. The ‘booster’ chip was free for anybody to use if he could figure it out. But it contained an oversized dose of N-thermite – the formula enhanced by Red’s 3500 CE (that’s Current Era, the successor to Anno Domini or AD.) technology. The ‘N’ was for ‘New.’ When the N-thermite ‘blew up’ it made the ‘booster’ chip just so much rubble.

So, no, we didn’t have a patent on the mechanism, but we protected it better than any scrap of the white-eyes’ paper could. Yes, we’d had several tries at getting into the plant where we made the chip. They got a rude greeting from our security guys and the second generation of Wokita dogs, courtesy of Shen and Toni’s wolf-Akita dog factory.