Chapter 1

- Old Calendar Year 2804 - Sagan’s Galaxy, Lower Beta quadrant, planet Henrich-4 -

I, Jonas Henrich, was a very lucky man. As the dawn and daylight arrived each morning, Darlene would always wake me by licking and sucking my penis. For me, grumpy mornings were a thing of the past! Feeling her lips and fingers on me and the suction of her mouth was a wonderful way to start the day. After the wake-up blowjob and bathroom tasks, I’d dress and have a nice breakfast she made. Darlene wasn’t a fully qualified chef, but still a better cook than the average grandmother.

She would look in my eyes with her dark brown ones, kiss me, and wish me a great day as I left the house to do any maintenance or repairs. When I had time, I would drive around scouting for minerals. The mine would last another three or four years and I needed to find another good site by then.

Around noon Darlene would bring me lunch and make love to me. She’d lean over the table in my workshop and let me do her from behind, or if I was away from the buildings she’d lay on the ground and we’d have sex under the open sky. There was no one else to see us and complain, so we screwed outdoors several times a week.

I’d return to the house shortly before dusk. If I’d had a difficult day she’d crouch and crawl under the table, then lick and suck me while I ate. It never failed to improve my mood. After supper we would watch a video with her in my lap, put on some music and dance, or play our own music. I enjoyed strumming my guitar while she played synth, violin, or flute. At bedtime she was happy to do nearly anything. If I was tired, she’d ride me cowgirl or reverse cowgirl style. Screwing in the missionary position was quite nice, and I got anal sex whenever I wanted. That meant anal any night I wasn’t worn out from a tough day. Fucking her tight ass was wonderful!

Life was mostly great until the day she died. It was starting to rain and I heard thunder in the distance. She was near the top of a hill carrying my lunch, and I saw lightning hit her! I sprinted to her using very long strides. With my panic-inspired adrenaline rush, in the low 2/3 gravity, I might have reached the speed of a champion athlete. Her shoes were charred beyond recognition, and there were burns on her feet and the ground where lightning had exited. I saw the tremendous bolt of electricity had burned the dark hair away from one side of her head, melted through her pliable plastic skin, and exposed her aluminum skull. It had destroyed a few actuators, several motors, and her CPU.

It only took me two days to mostly fix her, but her memories were gone. Without her personality and task programs and the sexy, loving memories I had shared with her; she was close to useless. She just stood or sat in one place until I told her to do something, and then she didn’t do it well. She had the same body, but all the appeal of a trash can.

Darlene had cooked my meals, made and repaired our clothing, and kept our home clean; but she couldn’t even do those chores anymore. In the morning I asked her to bring me breakfast and she passed me her charger. I reminded her, “I need food, not electricity.” She apologized, walked out to the garden, and handed me a raw potato with the leaves and roots still attached. I sighed and made some oatmeal.

Later I told her, “I want to have some fun. Bend over the table.” She stupidly asked if I meant the table in front of her, the kitchen table, or the repair table in the shop. Once she was in position and I lifted the back of her skirt, she asked if I wanted to play dice, cards, chess, or if I wanted ‘reproductive activity simulation’.

I sadly decided to put her in storage and take care of everything myself. I pulled out a bottle of whiskey and got drunk as I cried myself to sleep.

Fifteen years earlier, I had received an inheritance as I was about to finish University. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I leased a small and heavily used scout ship and searched for a place I could call my own. With the usual crew of four it would only have supplies and food to last a month or so, but I slept in the small galley and stuffed the crew quarters with extra, allowing me to explore alone for half a year at a time.

A month into the third year, I discovered the wormhole and stellar system that now bear my names. The Jonas Wormhole only opens for eight days on a two Earth-year cycle, so transportation to my new home planet Henrich-4 is quite problematic. Without the wormhole it would take 90 years to reach it from the closest inhabited world, Glasa-6. Even with it, the trip takes about 70 days each way and is only possible every-other year.

I wasn’t really an explorer but rather a modern-day miner, which meant I was a roboticist. The mine owners from Earth in the old days would have been ecstatic. There were no worker safety laws, since bots did all the work and on my world I was the law. The bots worked without complaints, time off, or demands for more pay. I only needed to do a few minutes or an hour of maintenance on each bot monthly, and refilling their hydrogen fuel cells only took them a few minutes per day. Other than that, most of them had been working non-stop for nine or more years. There were no environmental laws, no taxes, no restrictions of any kind.

I was still careful about what I ordered the bots to do, since I lived near the mine on the smallest of the planet’s three continents. I wasn’t going to shit on my own floor by scattering mercury, arsenic, or other toxic things around. In addition to my Robotics degree, I had only taken four Mine Engineering and three Geology courses in college, which I thought were enough. I’d bought a satellite with telescopic cameras and several other sensors, plus a scout driller bot with ground-penetrating radar to find the rare metals my six minerbots dug up. Four refinerbots extracted the valuable metals from hundreds of tons of ore every day and smelted it into ingots, then I hauled them near the mass driver with my tracked land crawler. I guess you could say it was a heavy-duty vehicle, since it was nearly the size of my house and could carry up to 200 tons at a time.

Interstellar shipping costs were extremely high, so I couldn’t make a profit selling copper, iron, or any of the other common metals. I supplied silver, samarium, palladium, and sometimes a gold or platinum ingot or two. Including the freight fees; my tracked land crawler, 8-wheeled rover, and two-seat flyer had cost me five times their weight in silver. On another shipment, a dozen 8.5 ton ingots of silver only got me a welding machine, a large chest of tools, and four boxes of chocolate bars, which I loved. I had to ration them out and only eat two a week until the next shipment. On most of the Developed Worlds, a hundred tons of silver would buy a small city! Living on the New Frontier was frequently difficult and rarely cheap.

Just one ingot of iridium would be enough for me and at least three generations of my descendants to live in luxury. I was mostly agnostic and generally didn’t like the idea of religion, but nearly every day I prayed my satellite or driller bot would find more iridium. On most planets it was worth ten times its weight in high-quality diamonds. Too bad it was so scarce that in eleven years I had only produced 31 kilos, a miniscule fraction of a saleable ingot. I thought about having it transported to the ship, but transporters couldn’t handle any materials denser than iron.

When I first arrived I’d brought seeds for food crops and a few hundred saplings, descendants of trees that had originated on Earth, way back in the Milky Way galaxy. There were several types of fruit trees, a few fast-growing softwoods to provide lumber, and some hardwoods like oak and walnut in case I ever got time for my carpentry hobby. My trio of agbots took care of the grain, fruit, and vegetables I depended on. They also tended cotton for clothing and caught some of the common and edible fish creatures that swam the rivers and seas.

Native grasses, vines, and shrubs grew over most of the landscape, but there were no plants taller than my shoulder until I arrived. Some insects crawled on the plants and wandered around. Two-legged amphibians preyed on the bugs that ventured near the water, and fish ate them in turn. A few small rodent-like ones ate fruit, seeds, and some of the bugs, and a species similar to weasels consumed large bugs and the rodents. The top predator near my home was a six-legged canine that ate weasels, rodents, and amphibians. They were the size of foxes from Earth but looked more like small wolves with extra legs. I was a little surprised how well they could climb steep and rocky mountainsides, probably in search of prey I hadn’t discovered yet. I offered them food a few times, but they were quite skittish and wouldn’t come within 20 meters of me.

I found several fossils and bones in and around the mine, including a few from extinct bison-sized herbivores and a type of very large canine. The six-legged ‘superwolf’, as I called it, had apparently been the planet’s apex carnivore until the recent ice age, which had ended only a few decades ago. There might still be some of the larger animals in remote areas, but I was pretty sure none remained on Myhome, the continent I lived on. I’d named the other continents Eastland and Westland. At heart I’m an engineer, not a poet, okay?

Other than weather and the animals, nothing happened on my world unless I wanted it to. At first I had enjoyed having my own planet with no other people on it. It was nice seeing five other planets and a few dozen moons through a telescope at night, knowing all of them belonged to me. I was a King with only a herd of robots as subjects. Without Darlene, I was a very lonely King.

The next cargo ship was scheduled to depart for my home in two months. I thought long and hard and decided to get the expensive parts to build a second mass driver. It would double the transfer speed when it was time to fling my metallic wares up to the cargo ship as it circled in synchronous orbit. The last time, the ship barely made it out before the wormhole closed.