Chapter 10

We only ever had two legal problems for the rest of our lives. And Jackie was the cause of both. The first was a groundless suit against us for the loss of her father. He died of a heart attack when she was in prison. I think she only got a lawyer to file the suit in the first place because he believed we would settle it like a nuisance suit.

That may be how other rich family companies did it. In this case, however, her lawyer found out how wrong he was. His world was turned upside down with the investigation against him. It seems he and Jackie were closer than ethics allowed. Did I mention that the lawyer was Annette’s fifth husband? I can’t help it if he was stupid. The fact was, he wasn’t even a lawyer last time around. That was strange if you ask me. Then again, from my perspective, everything was different from the previous time around, from the moment I met Beth.

Anyway, the case was dismissed out of hand when he didn’t even show up in court. Jackie was screaming at the judge so loud she was held in contempt of court. I heard she died in prison shortly after that. Something about an attempted jailbreak: there were three of them. They planned on kidnapping one or more of my kids and holding them for ransom. Anyway, that was what the other two said after the fact. Why did they confess to their plans? I think that must have been The Three Thieves’ doing. I got a mental chuckle in response to that thought.

The other legal problem dragged out for years. It involved social services and our lifestyle. Thank God there was nothing illegal about it. They wanted to take the children away from us. However, they could never find a judge that would agree with them. It was something about showing how they were harmed that kept getting in the way. Not that they didn’t try! However, Lance was on top of the problem before they could get the police to help. And statements like ‘it should be obvious’ and ‘it’s just wrong’ don’t mean anything to the judicial system. We would have been in trouble if we had been in front of a jury, but we were never charged with a crime. It didn’t take long for us to decide that the social workers we had to deal with were more interested in carrying out some personal agenda than seeing to the real welfare of the kids. Each mother had a different social worker because their classification system didn’t recognize us as a single family. That was a good thing because they did try and claim I was a bigamist. That claim fell flat on its face. Legally, there was no proof I was married to any of them. The corporation was not recognized as a family. It was a separate type of entity, and the bigamy laws did not apply to it. Strangely, their department had no power over a corporate entity. That’s why there were five different workers and five different cases. It could have worked out differently if it wasn’t always the same judge. Thank God he didn’t find the social services’ antics amusing.

Beth and Sara won some prizes for innovations in premature infant treatment ... don’t ask me for the details. That doctor stuff is still Greek to me. I know it’s mostly Latin, but I am a photographer, not a doctor.

As a result of their prize and from a strong desire to understand the process of premature births, I was asked if there was any way we could photograph the process of fetal development. I was at a loss. To be able to do it, one would need to implant a camera into the womb before conception. And often as not, even if you did that, you would probably miss the first two months or more.

All five wives got together and wrote the grant proposal for that study. We could have paid for it ourselves; however, given the nature of the survey (complete coverage from conception to birth), they believed it would be best if the process were government-approved beforehand.

It was a five-year grant. The first four years were spent developing the cameras to be used. They were miniature digital cameras so small that one would fit on ‘the head of a pin’—okay, then. I am talking about the large end of a straight pin.

It was an offshoot of video technology. It was a very low-light IR (infrared) system. It had to be, as it was always dark in there. You still needed some external lighting. But between the IR cameras and high-intensity lighting, we got images, that was for sure. The subjects had constant deep tans during their entire pregnancy. Of course, that led to a different area of research altogether. Why did children born in the study never suffer from jaundice? I don’t know. Maybe the moms were giving the developing child more vitamin D than anyone had ever been exposed to. In any case, children who were not premature at birth had better liver and kidney functions than were typical for newborns.

However, back now to the camera and research being done. We ended up with one hundred college-aged girls who were willing to participate. It was probably the full scholarship being offered that attracted most of them. Of those, twelve had husbands who would become fathers, and thirty-eight had boyfriends they wanted to use. The rest were to be artificially inseminated by anonymous sperm donors. You’re right if you think I was the donor. I did enjoy some extreme spousal attention to harvest the sperm on demand. After all, it couldn’t just be trusted to blind luck, and freezing was unsuitable for some reason. That was how forty-six of the girls were impregnated for the study. I know there are four more. We’ll talk about them later.

Now, for the cameras. We used twenty of them for each subject. All were implanted before ovulation. They were embedded at various points within the women’s uteri. This provided maximum coverage inside for imaging during the pregnancy. And yes, as soon as menstruation began, the cameras would be expelled from the women’s uteri. Most of the time, however, the cameras sit until activated. It was called ‘proximity powering.’ It was like holding a fluorescent light bulb below high-voltage power transmission wires. If you have ever done that, you know that the tube glows. It’s not bright, but it’s getting the power out of the air. The cameras get power the same way, and they start taking pictures at the rate of one per minute, which happens to be the time it needs to broadcast the image and recharge to take the following image.

The subject is placed in a room with high-intensity lighting and put through a position routine that allows for the fetus to shift around within the mother and expose it to different cameras during the process. It takes thirty minutes per subject and produces six hundred images per day. That’s why they became quite tanned under the lights, even though the lights were focused on the middle of their bodies.

Also, six thousand images a day take some time to get through. A few undergrads were earning enough to pay for the rest of their classes. In the process, the women were nude from day one and were also photographed in the traditional sense.

The four women who were not artificially inseminated or impregnated by their spouse or boyfriend were a particular group. These girls volunteered to be part of my particular group. It was Annette’s idea, not mine. They were fitted with many more cameras and special lighting inside their wombs. These would be removed before the cervix closes. The extra cameras were in their vaginal area and even fitted into the fallopian tubes. They needed the extra cameras because these girls would be photographed inside and out ... from the end of their menstruation cycle to inception and beyond.

Yes, we were planning on getting images from within virgins to the act of sex, as well. It had never been done on this kind of scale, or, for that matter, with this kind of equipment. Since lighting was inside and out, the extra cameras could record and transmit much faster than the ones in the womb. The ones in the vaginal wall were a bit bigger than pinheads, as well. Being fitted with more power receptors, they could take a photo every ten seconds.

The four girls were Amy Jessie, Clair Donaldson, Sandy Cook, and Shelly Arnold. All were nineteen and in prime physical shape. They also happened to be knockouts. When all was set up and the cameras implanted on the first girl, we discovered a problem. Someone forgot to pick out the man for the project. We should have used girls from the married group for this. Amy was a good sport and thought it was hilarious. I mean, something had to be done quickly. A male had to be found for the project because she was at peak ovulation. The fallopian tube cameras, one of them anyway, showed the egg coming down.