Chapter 48: Mission Mars: The Mini-Series

“I NEED TO TAKE my family away for a few days. We have business in Japan we need to take care of and as you can all imagine, adding a dozen women to our household puts some strain on our relationships. We need a retreat so we can work out how to handle our emotions and responses,” I said when everyone had gathered in the morning. I’d called Doug and had him bring in our secondary camera crew—not residents of Areola—so I wasn’t leaving any of my women behind. As far as appearances went, however, it was just Peninnah, Liz, Penelope, Dezi, and Laine going with me.

“Bob, I don’t like this. While the cat’s away...” Doug started.

“Part of what I want to know is how the mice play,” I said.

“But you’ll be off-camera. It will create a hole in the project.”

“I’ve arranged for a crew to meet us in Japan. I’ll record everything, but I won’t be showing everything. This needs to be family confidential,” I said. “However, I think we’ll have a surprise for the girls. Please make sure they all have valid passports.”

Doug’s mouth dropped open and he grinned as the implication dawned on him.

“You’re the boss. It makes me nervous to know we’re at the halfway point and only one girl has been eliminated. We promised the first episodes to HCEN in eight weeks and haven’t started cutting together the first one yet.”

“Let’s go ahead and cut together the first episode out of the auditions. There’s some pretty dramatic footage in that and it should set the stage for what’s going to happen in the season. We have to gather the cast before we can start cutting them. And we’ll have a solution for eliminations by the time we finish this trip.”

I headed for the minibus with the family and our driver took us to the airport, where we boarded the private jet Peninnah had acquired for us. No, I couldn’t fly this baby, but I loved streaking across the Pacific in eight hours to Japan. It sure beat my first trip across the Pacific that took four months!

Peninnah dismissed the staff at our penthouse by phone so we wouldn’t be seen arriving and unpacking our family into our home. Most had traveled in the infinity room rather than sitting for eight hours on the plane. As soon as we’d checked the penthouse thoroughly, I sealed the perimeter, much as I had sealed the house in Knossos 4,000 years ago. No one would be coming in uninvited. And then I opened the gateway. Free of the inhibitions imposed by working with the actors, my wives and possessions and several concubines and the camera crew came rushing into the penthouse to enjoy the view, the pool, and the bed.

We spent a day just catching up with our lovers. That included time in the temple on Areola in full demon form with my priestesses. I always left the temple feeling exceptionally good. Something about the lethal women who worshiped me just charged my batteries. Or perhaps it was the rituals they performed. Whatever.

I let the cameras run on everything as we went in and out of Areola. Of course, they had to leave Areola in order to download and store the footage and to charge their batteries.

There was no electricity in Areola.

That didn’t mean we had no electrical appliance equivalents. I had to give a lot of consideration to this by the time we got to the 1950s. Newcomers expected TV, radio, and even telephones. All I could see was miles and miles of wires and antennae, signal towers, and powerplants polluting the air. But Areola is a magic kingdom. I read a lot of books about power sources and discovered all the usual ones. Water, fire, solar, wind. In every case, something that would be described as magic by ninety percent of my citizens happened inside a device that changed the water, fire, sunlight, or wind into electricity. And if all this could be created through magic, then certainly I could create a power source in Areola that was magical.

After I read up on everything, I found a quiet place where I felt I would be undisturbed for a month and went into the infinity room. It took me the entire month to create the power grid for my capital city. It was a network of forces that I laid out under my bedroom first, because that was the easiest place to generate power. The network spread out beneath the ground and simply began to grow. Soon there was ‘power’ throughout the capital city. And it continued to grow.

Then I called a meeting of the top minds of the room, many from the current century. I explained that there was now power and how they could tap into it. It was their responsibility to invent things that ran on that power. If they wanted television, they needed to create a television that would both run on the power in the network and receive the signals from the network. It was the process of learning to use the power grid for various technologies they wanted. The first and foremost was cooking. We’d never been big on fires in the infinity room, but people had learned early on to heat stones with sunlight and cook on them. That had been established about the time I put a sun in our sky.

How did this power get replenished?

Well, what would you expect? Sex! People generate an enormous amount of psychic energy during sex and my power grid simply collected that and spread it through the network. Sex had always been encouraged and was widely participated in throughout Areola. The more people who were having sex, the more power was spread through the grid. That’s why I originated the grid under my bed. I spent most of the month I was working on the magic having sex in my bedroom. We generated a lot of power.

Well, as a result, we had the equivalent of television, computers, and electricity without having any of the pollution of generating the power.

The first thing Peninnah had said when I brought her into Areola the first time had been, “Bob, there’s no cell signal.” Of course there was no cell signal. You could pick up any telephone connection in the infinity room and simply speak to anyone you asked for. What was really missing was contact with the natural world. That’s where cell signals were and we stayed separate from that.

“My beloved wives and possessions—my family, all of you,” I said to them when we’d all finally gathered in the penthouse without my cock in one or another of them. That didn’t stop us from all being naked, though. “I believe we have come to a crisis point with the whole scheme to leave the planet earth behind and seal ourselves in the infinity room. It has to do with the concept of the ‘reality’ show and the women we are testing for a part in our voyage.”

“You can’t bear to let any of them go, can you?” Nimia laughed. “Bob, you’ve always had that problem. How do you think we got three and a half million people in Areola?”

“I admit that is my problem,” I said. “And I hope you know that I love each of you—my wives, possessions, concubines, and many others—beyond life itself. Nimia, you and Ariane first showed me what love and life was all about when I was barely cognizant of the world around me. I fell in love with it just as I fell in love with each of you.”

“Have you fallen in love with the cast so soon?” Penelope asked.

“Yes. But even that is not the source of my worry,” I said. “I’ve become aware that the women we are testing for inclusion are at minimum suspicious of our greater presence. I mean Areola, of course. You may have noticed that Julie has developed a close relationship with our training instructor, Paul. She came to me a few nights ago, certain that I was aware of it and afraid that I would eliminate her from the competition because she wasn’t faithful. I had to think about that for a while. I don’t possess her. I am not married to her. I have no intentions of either one. I have always tried to let my concubines be free to establish other relationships, whether that means my sharing them or having them leave me.”

“As long as you don’t consider sharing your wives and possessions...” Lakshmi started, then added, “or Zhi or your priestesses, we would have no problem with any concubine choosing to enjoy the company of another man. Some of the girls might not even want to be loved by a woman.”

“That is true, but I asked Julie what would happen if she was chosen and we got ready to depart. Would she be able to leave Paul behind and commit herself to our group? After she considered it a while, Julie asked if I didn’t have a place I could put him, like with my other staff people and camera crew. She pointed out that you all come to my room at night, but none of you are there if one of the cast comes to call on me. And then that you magically appear again in the morning.”

“I could slip out and simply eliminate him. Then Julie could mourn and put him behind her,” Zhi said. She reached for her sword, but I held up my hand to forestall her.

“You know how I feel about that,” I said. “It is one thing to eliminate slavers and kidnappers. Paul has simply fallen for one of our girls. That’s a very different matter.”