Chapter 7

Jo, from the right hand seat, brought the A-300 down gently on Mather's Runway 22L with only the slightest of thumps. It was 6:02 AM, exactly the time she'd put on the flight plan for arrival, and the sun was still forty-four minutes away from broaching the eastern horizon. Runway lights whizzed by outside as the nose wheel touched down and she transitioned from flying an aircraft to driving a ground vehicle. She deployed the reverse thrusters to slow them down as a matter of course, even though with nearly two miles of runway to play with and only eleven thousand pounds of fuel in the tanks, she could have easily just rolled to a stop without even using the wheel brakes. Flying the A-300 under routine circumstances was now completely second nature to her. When this shift's flights were recorded in her log book, she would have a grand total of 406 hours as First Officer.

"Nice one," said Dan Sparks, the PIC of this particular line, the man who she had been flying with for two months now. Dan was thirty-two years old and almost impossibly handsome. He was tall, well-built, and had both a smile and a set of eyes that could send nearly any female heart aflutter. He also had the hots for Jo, something that Jo had noted, without much surprise, on their second flight together. Jo knew that if she wanted to she could have not just a relationship with Dan but could get him to propose to her within six months with just a little encouragement. She gave him no such encouragement. Despite the fact that Dan was single, made good money, and would soon be escaping from Early Bird and joining the ranks of either UPS or FedEx (he had more than a thousand hours of PIC time in multi-engine jets logged as of three months ago and was currently in the hiring process for both of the big carriers) she had absolutely no interest in him, romantically, sexually, or even platonically.

"Thanks," she told him absently, her voice monotone, the same voice she always used when conversing with him on any subject, work related or not.

Still, despite the complete lack of encouragement and the prevailing rumor that Jo was a lesbian—a rumor it served her purposes not to deny—Dan kept taking his shots. Part of it was the small amount of pheromones that he was exposed to whenever he was around her, an amount that was just enough to make him think she was the woman of his dreams. The other part, perhaps the major part, was that Dan, who knew he was a good catch and used that to his advantage quite shamelessly to get into the pants of various women, just could not conceive of the concept that a woman, lesbian or not, would not want him.

"So," he said when they finished going through the landing checklist and she turned the jet onto the taxiway that led to the cargo terminal, "it's been a long night. You must be hungry, right?"

"Yes," she said, quite truthfully. "I'm famished."

"What do you say about heading over to this little hole in the wall Mexican joint I found in Fair Oaks? They have the best huevos rancheros you've ever tasted."

"Sounds fun," Jo said, keeping to the monotone, "but I'm allergic to eggs."

"Oh ... I see," Dan said. "Well ... uh ... you can get stuff without eggs there too."

"Thanks," Jo said, "but, like I told you before, I don't date people I work with."

"It's not really a date," Dan said, giving her his award-winning boy-next-door smile. "It's just two co-workers going out to breakfast."

"It's close enough to a date for my purposes," Jo said.

"Well ... even if it is, we're not really going to be co-workers much longer, are we? I should be hearing from UPS or FedEx any day now. They pretty much told me the job is mine."

"And I congratulate you for that," Jo said, "but my answer is still no. Sorry."

Dan nodded a few times, not arguing or giving her any grief. He just gave her a look that basically implied he thought she would give in to him at some point and he intended to keep trying.

They parked the jet and powered it down, exiting through the door aft of the cockpit and walking together to the main operations building to complete their final paperwork and fill in their logs. Dan tried one more time to get her to join him for breakfast—hell, they could go to Denny's if she wanted (the implication being that Denny's was far beneath someone of his stature but he'd make the sacrifice for her)—and she shot him down neatly and efficiently once again.

God, I miss flying with Ken, she thought sadly.

Jo had not seen or talked to either Ken or Meghan since that night in the Pioneer Towers mini-suite, since shortly after that horrifying moment when not just one, but both of them had told her they were in love with her. After hearing their words, after realizing what it meant, she had gotten dressed quickly, telling them as succinctly as possible that what they had just done had been a mistake, that she took complete and total responsibility for the mistake, that she would not be seeing them anymore, and, above all, that they needed to forget about her. To say that they had been stunned by her reaction would be an understatement. Meghan had started crying, begging Jo for forgiveness and saying it had all been her fault. Ken had just kept telling Jo over and over to at least stay the night so they could talk things over in the morning when everyone was sober and clearheaded.

"No, I have to go now," had been Jo's parting words to them. "Right now, right this second. This is my fault entirely, guys. All of it. Everything. I was the one who was supposed to be strong and I failed at that. Please, just forget about me and continue with your lives."

And she'd gone, walking out the door without looking back. The next morning, she called Early Bird management and put in a bid for an open line on the other half of the week. Her bid was successful. The four remaining shifts she had scheduled with Ken before the bid was to take effect, she traded with other FOs.

Ken, and especially Meghan, had called her multiple times since then but she never answered when she recognized their phone numbers. After hearing the first tearful, pleading voicemail from Meghan two days after the mini-suite incident (as she had come to think of it) she no longer even played voicemails from them—she simply erased them as they came in. When they started trying to text message and email her in lieu of voice communication, she had their numbers blocked from her phone, their email added to her spam list. It was what people like her did when people like Ken and Meghan grew too close, when they thought they were in love. You walked away, avoided communication, let the spell the damn cattle were under fade away, and everything would go back to normal.

Except the spell had apparently not faded away. The phone calls, voicemails, text messages and emails had stopped after the first three weeks, leading her to believe the plan was working. But just this last week there had been an envelope in her office mailbox. She had opened it to find a note from Ken.

Jo,

Could we at least talk about this? Was what happened so horrible that we can't even be casual friends? We can meet you anywhere you feel comfortable meeting and will agree to any terms to continue a friendship with you, but please don't shut us out of your lives. We both care deeply for you. And if you don't want to continue a friendship with us, aren't we at least entitled to an explanation?

She did not throw the note away. Instead, she scrolled across the bottom of it: No, you're not entitled to an explanation and you wouldn't understand it even if I gave you one. I must stay away from you two. Please respect my wishes.

She did not sign the note. She simply put it in another envelope and dropped it in Ken's office mailbox. She did not even write his name on the front. Ken had worked since then. She knew he had to have read the note by now. There had been no further attempts to communicate with her since.

Were they going to do as she suggested and forget about her? Jo wondered now, as she walked across the parking lot toward her Volvo, her flight bag in hand. She was no longer so sure. In her experience as one of the cognate (as her people referred to themselves among themselves) which, admittedly, was somewhat limited and perhaps immature as compared to other cognate, regular humans would always fall quickly out of love or lust or infatuation with one of her kind once the spell of the pheromones was broken. The pheromones were wonderful, almost magical things. On short term exposure, they induced an overwhelming lust and an amnesiac effect—perfect for the main job for which they were intended. After long term exposure, however, an ordinary human would grow somewhat accustomed to the effects and lose the amnesiac qualities but retain a subtle, underlying attachment to the source of them—an attachment that would stimulate the subject's brain in a way that mimicked the emotion of love. This too, served a purpose in the scheme of things under certain circumstances. And even when accustomed to the pheromones on this level, a sudden burst of them at the right time—such as during a period of sexual excitement—could still trigger on overwhelming sensation of lust in the subject.

That, Jo now realized, was what had happened to Ken and Meghan. She had exposed them to her pheromones enough that they thought they were in love with her. She had known this was a danger, she had known that they were a correct destiny couple, yet she had continued to expose them to her power on a regular basis anyway. And then on the night of the mini-suite incident, she had let herself get carried away and release a huge burst of lust-inducing scent into the air while Meghan and Ken had been making love. That was undoubtedly what had triggered Meghan to beckon her over. That was undoubtedly what had prompted Meghan to pull her to her breasts, to touch her between her naked legs, to allow and even encourage her husband to put his mouth on her vagina.

And I let them do it! That was the thought that kept returning to her, that kept spinning around in her mind, that robbed her of sleep. I was under the influence of nothing but my own sexual needs and desires, and I let them cross over the line. With pretty much any other married couple it wouldn't have mattered. She had, in fact, seduced and bedded six married couples and probably two dozen boyfriend/girlfriend combos since being bestowed with the gift of the pheromones, including two couples that she had maintained relationships with for more than half a year. She had involved herself sexually with these couples without hesitation, without guilt, marking the experiences as nothing more than another conquest of her predatory nature. But those couples were not correct destiny couples and which meant, under the beliefs and values the cognate, they were nothing more than cattle for the taking. Ken and Meghan were a correct destiny couple and she had interfered with that correct destiny. And if their destiny went off track because of her interference ... well ... under those same values and beliefs, she was damned, unworthy of her gift.

Such was the basis of her hope that removing herself from Ken and Meghan's lives, that removing the influence of her pheromones upon their brains would cause what they thought was love for her to fade and disappear. Once that happened, she figured, it was likely that they would go back to the life they lived before she entered the equation—that of two people in love with each other, compatible, happy, going about their lives.

The letter from Ken, however, was disturbing. It had been more than two months since she had been in the same room with either of them. That was four weeks longer than the withdrawal effects of the pheromones should have influenced them. By this point they should have realized that they weren't really in love with Jo and started working to put their fractured relationship with her in some sort of perspective. Why hadn't that happened? Why were they still trying to contact her? It didn't make any sense.

She tossed her bag into the back seat of her Volvo and climbed in the front. She sat behind the wheel for a bit, her keys in her hand, her eyes looking at the security fence that surrounded the parking lot but seeing nothing. She needed to feed herself, and soon. Right now, however, that seemed like the most loathsome chore imaginable. All she wanted to do right now was go home and put herself to bed so she could fall into a deep slumber and stop worrying about Ken and Meghan and destinies and damnation. But she knew, appetite or no appetite, she couldn't go to bed hungry. She had to fly again tonight. If she didn't feed herself now there might be problems with Dan in the cockpit later. She had enough to worry about with adding that to the mix. And so, listlessly, without the slightest sensation of enthusiasm, she started her car and put it in gear, pulling out of the parking lot and heading for a popular bagel shop near her house.

It took her only fifteen minutes to pick up a bite. She did not feel any better afterward. As she drove home, the sun was just above the horizon, peeking in and out of the trees as she drove eastward on J Street. She pulled out her pilot's sunglasses and put them on to protect her eyes from the brightness. When she got home, she parked in the small attached garage and walked in the side door of her house. After re-activating her security system she made a quick check to make sure all the blinds were closed (they were) and then shut off all the lights, making it unnaturally dark in the house. She took off all of her clothes and climbed into bed.

She shut her eyes and tried to shut down her brain but it refused to go quiet. Ken and Meghan stayed at the forefront of her thoughts, only now it wasn't worry for their destiny or fear of her own potential damnation that kept spinning around and around. She kept thinking of Meghan's face and her voice, and the way she giggled when she was doing or saying something naughty. She thought of Ken's quiet sense of humor, the dry comments he sometimes made in response to something she said or did. She thought of the contentment she had always felt whenever the three of them were together, the wonder of watching their loving interaction with each other, the feeling of belonging when that interaction included her. She missed all of that; their friendship, their companionship, their flirting, their humanity. How she wished she could take back that night in the Pioneer Towers. True, it had been the single most erotic episode of her extensive sexual life, but it was not worth the friendship that had been the price for it.

These thoughts of what she liked and missed about Ken and Meghan soon led to a dark, almost shameful sense of sexual arousal. She began to think of the more physical aspects of her attraction to them. She tried to channel these thoughts in different directions but they refused to go there. She kept thinking of Meghan's bare breasts and that moment when her lips had first closed around her nipple. She thought of Ken's turgid erection and how it had looked glistening with Meghan's saliva. She remembered the feel of Meghan's mouth on her nipples, licking them and tonguing them with both enthusiasm and hesitation.

If I wouldn't have stopped them when I did, she thought with a shiver, Meghan would have kissed her way down my tummy and put her tongue on my slit. And Ken would have raised up off the bed and slid his cock into my mouth.

Jo knew there was no sense fighting this arousal. It was too intense, too consuming. Instead, she just went with it. In a drawer of the 1911 bedside table next to her was a 2006 model vibrating dildo purchased from one of the most reputable adult websites on the Internet. She removed it from the drawer and soon it was buried eight inches deep in her swollen, wet vagina. As she shoved it in and out of her body with one hand and rubbed her clitoris with the other, she thought of the sights and feels and smells of that forbidden night and of what might have happened had she not stopped it. A powerful orgasm swept over her in less than five minutes.

Finally, in the aftermath of this frantic pleasure, her mind decided to power down and let her drift off. She slept solidly until just after one in the afternoon. That was when her phone started to ring.

"God damn it," she muttered as the harsh ringing jarred her ears. "Who in the hell is calling me now?"

She rolled over and looked at the bedside table where, just next to the alarm clock, there was a 1955 rotary dial telephone. Like the brass phone in the living room, it was wired up with a caller identification box. The display on the box did not give her an actual number for this particular caller but told her who it was all the same. 011—INTERNATIONAL it read. That meant it was coming from Christchurch, New Zealand, where her parents lived from April to September each year.

She picked up the phone and put it to her ear. "Hello," she said.

"Hi, Josephine," said her mother. "It's me."

"Hi, Mom," Jo said, stifling a yawn. "It's good to hear from you."

"You sound tired," her mother—always the worry-wart—told her. "Are you getting enough sleep?"

"Yes, Mom," she said. "In fact, that was what I was doing when you called. It's mid-afternoon here."

"Oh ... I'm sorry," her mother said. "I can never keep it straight how many hours different it is there. I was thinking it was early morning. You go back to sleep. I'll call you back in ... what? Three hours?"

"I'll be on my way to work in three hours, Mom," she said. "It's okay. I'm awake."

"But you need your sleep, Josephine," she said. "That horrible career you've picked is dangerous enough. You don't want to be tired or hungry when you fly."

"Really, Mom," she said. "I'll be fine. I was going to get up in another hour anyway."

"Well ... if you're sure," she said.

"I'm sure," Jo said. "How are things in Christchurch?"

"Very spring-like, actually. The trees are blooming, the weather is getting warmer, and the days are getting longer. Pretty soon, summer will be here."

"Which means it's time to head to Calgary, right?" Jo said. Calgary, Alberta in Canada was where they spent every October to March. As they moved back and forth across the equator every six months trying to stay in eternal winter, they always stopped by whatever city she happened to be living in and stayed a week or so with her. The coming of the parents was as sure a sign of the changing of the seasons as the first robins of spring or the turning of the leaves in the fall.

"That is correct," her Mom confirmed. "That's why I'm calling. We'll be flying out of Auckland on September 26^th our time and arriving in San Francisco on the same day your time. I've sent the flight reservation information to your email."

"Okay," she said. "I'll go over it before I go to work and make sure everything is okay."

"Thank you, dear," her mother said warmly. "And if it all checks out without any changes needed, we'll arrive in San Francisco just after sunset. That's a Friday night. We'll be staying at Ritz-Carlton and you can join us on Saturday night if you'd like. We'll have dinner at The Dining Room."

"That sounds good, Mom. I have a flight on Friday night but I'm off on Saturdays. After we imbibe a little at The Dining Room I can show you some good places in The City."

"My dear, you seem to forget that your father and I lived for more than a decade in The City before you came along. I'm quite sure we've forgotten more good places than you even know about."

"How long ago was that, Mom?" Jo asked with a roll of her eyes. "Back when the streetcars really were the only way to get around?"

"Oh hush," her mother said. "Don't disrespect your elders."

"No disrespect intended," Jo said. "I was just making the point that there are a few good places you probably don't know about now that Prohibition has been repealed."

"Hmmmph," her mother grunted. "I call halfway around the world to have my only daughter smart off to me? Is this what we've come to?"

"Apparently it is," Jo said. "Do you have a place to stay here in Sac?" She knew better than to offer her spare bedroom to them. Her parents had fought and scraped for years to become independently wealthy and, as such, they insisted on luxury wherever they went.

"We have reservations at the Sheraton Grand downtown. That's not far from your house, is it?"

"A little over thirty blocks. Close enough. Do you or dad want to come fly a shift with me in the jump seat and see me in action? I'm pretty sure I can get the boss to approve it if I ask nicely."

"Goodness gracious no," she said, as Jo had pretty much known she would. Their people had a very strong cultural dislike of flying and only did it when they absolutely had to. This, obviously, was not a trait that had been successfully passed onto Jo. "It's bad enough that we'll be trapped in one of those instant death machines for fourteen hours from Auckland to San Francisco. And then there's the other flight from Sacramento to Calgary. We're very proud of you, honey, but not proud enough to risk our necks unnecessarily."

"I understand, Mom. Just thought I'd offer."

"I can't wait until you get this whole flying craze out of your system, Josephine."

"I don't see that happening anytime soon," she said.

"No," her mother said with a sigh. "Neither do I, unfortunately. Neither do I."

They chatted a little more. Jo asked how her father was doing and was told he was doing fine. He spent a few hours each night tracking and modifying their investments and had recently taken up billiards as a hobby.

"It's good you two are keeping yourselves busy," Jo said. "Idle minds lead to boredom after all." This was one of the oldest sayings of their people as boredom was considered an affliction as bad as cancer.

"We know that only too well," her mother replied. "And don't worry. We're nowhere near boredom just yet."

"That's good to know, Mom."

There was a bit of a pause on the line. "Josephine," her mother said at last, "Are you doing all right?"

"Sure, Mom," Jo said. "Why do you ask?"

"I don't know," she said. "You just don't sound right. Maternal instinct I guess. Are you sure everything is good?"

Well, Mom, she thought, I violated a taboo and I think I might have ruined the lives of a correct destiny couple and put my own soul at risk, but other than that, everything is cool. "Everything is good," she assured her mother, knowing even as she said it that if Mom was able to tell something was wrong just from a scratchy, overseas phone connection, she was sure as hell going to know her daughter was troubled when they were face to face.

"Well ... okay," her mother said doubtfully. "You'll take a look at those airplane reservations today?"

"As soon as I'm done talking to you," she promised.

"And you'll let me know right away if you find anything amiss?"

"Right away," she said.

They said their goodbyes and broke the connection. Jo lay on the bed for a few minutes, pondering the thought of having to confess her sin to her parents. It was an unpleasant thought, somewhat akin to wondering how one was going to tell one's parents that one had been arrested for prostitution or drug smuggling. She put it as far out of her head as she could and got out of bed, walking naked through the darkened house until she got to the spare bedroom, where her computer was.

On the surface, her computer seemed an ordinary, run-of-the-mill desktop from Zale Computers, the third largest direct-sale computer company in the United States. Zale's computers were among the most expensive on the market but they were also consistently given the highest ratings on Consumer Reports and by general word of mouth for reliability, customer service, technical support, and general customer satisfaction, earning them a nice comfortable niche in the home computer market for those savvy buyers who had done their research and were willing to pay a little more for a product that was the best. Zale's Computers were the Mercedes Benz or BMW of the computer industry—fast, reliable machines that were considerably more expensive than other brands, but rarely, if ever, broke down or developed problems as long as they were cared for properly.

This was not terribly surprising since Zale's, a privately held corporation, was owned and operated by cognate. Back in the mid-eighties it was realized by various free-thinkers among the cognate movers and shakers that if they wanted to survive as a species and remain undetected on the fringe of human society, they needed to embrace and master computer technology. Now, more than twenty years later, it was no accident that the very best computer hardware and software engineers, designers, and hackers were cognate and worked, in one way or another, for Zale's Computers. Virtually every cognate who owned a computer (which was pretty close to all of them in these modern times), owned one with the Zale's logo on it.

This was not to say that ordinary humans did not own Zale computers as well. On the contrary, the cattle (as most cognate derisively referred to ordinary humans) made up more than eighty-nine percent of annual Zale's computer and computer accessory sales and one hundred percent of its profitability. But there was another, separate division of Zale's that made computers that looked just like their standard product but were a bit different. These computers went only to verified cognate, were sold at well below cost, and contained a multitude of software and even some hardware that was years more advanced than any of the cattle—including those whose job it was to know about such things—even realized existed.

Jo's computer was one such model. It was a little over a year old and she had paid six hundred dollars for it, including shipping to a local Zale's computer store, handling, and internet connection fees. When she pushed the button on the main tower, it powered up like any other computer in the world, going through a series of self-checks and then asking Jo to log in.

Had she simply typed in the password "A300pilot", the computer would have given her the latest version of Windows and would have looked and behaved as a normal computer. Instead of "A300pilot", however, she typed in "6974A_33-2C". Pressing enter, the box on the screen told her that the password was incorrect and invited her to try again. The password, however, was not incorrect. It was a code that identified her to the system as a cognate. Now she typed in her real password, which was a sixteen character string of seemingly random numbers, letters, and symbols, both uppercase and lower case. As she typed them, the very keys on the keyboard read her fingerprints to verify that she was indeed the cognate authorized to use this machine. She pushed enter again and the security box disappeared from view and the machine seemed to be locked up. It wasn't. It was waiting for the final security check. Just to the right of the number pad on the keyboard, a green light was glowing. This was presumptively the caps lock indicator light. Its actual function was a retinal scan camera. Jo put her right eye within three inches of it and it read the pattern of blood vessels in her eye looking, not only for the unique pattern that identified Jo as the registered user of the system, but for the swelling and surging of blood that would have indicated an adrenaline burst and, therefore, the possibility that she was logging into the cognate system under duress. To say that the cognate programmers and engineers were a bit paranoid about security would perhaps be a mild understatement.

Finally, satisfied that Josephine Baxter of San Diego, Cognate Identification Number (or CIN) 0501192007041955 really was the cognate signing onto the system and really wasn't under any sort of detectable duress, the computer allowed the main operating system to boot up. This basics of this system was a shamelessly duplicated mixture of the best features of Windows Vista and Mac's OS X, with all the negative aspects—the security risks most prominently—eliminated. It was, in effect, almost perfect as far as operating systems went.

Jo checked her email before doing anything else. As usual, there were almost thirty messages from other cognate, most of them strangers to her, requesting the same service she was about to perform for her parents. Since cognate loathed flying and wanted to do everything they could to make sure their flights were safe, and since Jo was one of only a handful of cognate who actually flew, she had a reasonably lucrative side business checking out upcoming flights, for which she charged a fee that ranged from fifty American dollars to absolutely free if the client was facing hard times or had to move suddenly. There was an understanding among cognate that they would charge each other for services but not gouge each other.

Jo ignored the business emails. They were easy to identify since they were all headed: from CrazyCognateFlightCheckServices.cog, which was the website she maintained on the cognate internet to solicit her side business. She would go through those on her next night off. Instead, she found the one email that was headed from Gertie Baxter, CIN 1031180207041845. She opened it and found a brief note from her mother (which, of course included a plea to start thinking about another career) and an attachment that included the itinerary of their flight from New Zealand, including flight number and aircraft type. They were flying first class (of course) on Air New Zealand flight 775. The aircraft was a Boeing 777/200. It would depart Auckland at 11:30 PM and arrive at San Francisco International at 5:15 PM the same day, thanks to the International Date Line.