The Swarm Cycle Universe
Copyright© 2007 The Thinking Horndog

“Missy Sinclair. I haven’t seen you since Graduation. How have you been?”

“Monica? My goodness, look at you! You look great! I’ve been fine. Married Fred, just like everyone expected. We got divorced in less than two years. At least we didn’t have any kids. Then I met Jacob and things are great now. I’m Mrs. Johnson now with two kids. Let’s see now. Here is your reunion packet and your seating location. You are at table thirty-seven, so you’re sitting with Henrietta Esterhaus, Bill and Sandy Clementson and Mark ... Ohh! Maybe I had better move you to another table. That would be like me sitting with Fred.” Missy still looked almost as she did as the best looking girl on the cheerleader squad. She would have been Yell Queen, but her perfect milk chocolate complexion probably flipped a few votes towards her paler friend Sandy.

“No, don’t move me. I want to see Mark. I promise I won’t cause a scene over it, or strangle his wife or anything like that. My hope for the evening is for all three of us to leave here smiling.”

“Well, okay. You were never a confrontational bitch type person in school, like some people I can remember. So I’ll just hope that you haven’t changed in only ten years. I should warn you, though. Watch out for Bill Clementson. He gets pretty obnoxious these days after he gets a few under his belt.”

“Thanks, Missy. I remember Bill. Good luck tonight.”

‘Hmm,’ thought Missy as she watched a newly stunning Monica stroll into the dining room. ‘I wonder why I would need good luck. It’s just a High School ten -year Reunion Dinner.’

Monica Crenshaw walked into the dining room and headed to her table without even glancing at the seating chart. She had known which table she was at and who all of her dining partners were, for well over a week now. In fact, when she had hacked the seating file, she had made the modifications to set it up this way. As she strolled past the other tables she was barely aware of the looks she was getting. Few people really recognized her. She wasn’t one of the cheerleaders or part of any of the social cliques. She was an Honor Society member in school, but most people ignored them. People had never paid attention to her in high school. Now though, they looked.

She was five foot seven inches, but the three-inch heels on her designer shoes put her on a par with the average guy. She had some great curves on an otherwise slim frame that was obviously the product of long hours in a gym. Her hair, makeup and clothing were visibly expensive to anyone with the knowledge. The few people that knew her from back then wondered how she had lost twenty pounds and when she had won the lottery.

As she approached her table, she studied the five people already seated. Henrietta Esterhaus was still redheaded, pleasant faced, a little bit overweight but definitely earth mother female. She was Monica’s favorite teacher. Still only thirty-seven, the young Physics and Math teacher had inspired Monica, Mark and many other students in her first few years at the school.

Bill and Sandy Clementson were the classic stereotypical young couple, the high school star quarterback, who found that he could not make it at the college level, and his beautiful blonde cheerleader wife, who had found out around the same time that she had married the wrong guy. Bill was big. Six foot two inches and well over two hundred pounds. Twenty-eight and it was already starting to spill over at his belt buckle. He was signaling the waiter for a refill. Sandy was still a blonde beauty, but her depressed attitude was taking her looks down a notch. She was wearing pretty clothes, showing quite a lot of skin and curves, as was the current custom, but she was also wearing a scarf around her neck, in July. Probably it was to hide a bruise.

Sharon Kinney. Monica hadn’t met Sharon, before. Sharon’s figure was a bit curvier than Monica’s, with long dark brown hair and shiny dark eyes. Mark and Sharon had been married for a little less than three years. Sharon was obviously pregnant, again. Monica knew that they already had a little girl that was just two years old. Mark. What could she say to Mark? Her high school sweetheart. Her first lover. Her former fiancé. The first guy that broke her heart. Well, not that that was his fault.

“Hello, Mark. It’s good to see you again.” The look on his face was one of complete shock.

“Monica! Uhh, hi. How are you doing?” Sharon was watching him when he greeted her. She jumped a bit when he said the name and then she looked at Monica. He had obviously mentioned her.

“I’m fine, thank you.” Monica slipped into her chair at the round table. She was between Bill and Sharon, across from Miss Esterhaus. “Hello, Sandy, Bill. Miss Esterhaus, it’s so good to see you again.”

Henrietta dimpled up and immediately put a stop to that. “It’s Henrietta dear, or I’ll have to send you to the Vice Principal’s office for punishment. Hmm, the new VP is pretty dreamy. See if you can get him to spank your bare behind with his hands. You might want him to take his time.” Henrietta had always had a free wheeling attitude about sex that got and kept her students attention. No one quite understood how she had not yet been fired, or even reprimanded, but her students always got high marks on the standardized tests, so the office had just left her alone.

“Maybe later. Mark. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your wife? Don’t worry, I won’t bite, bark or even growl.”

“Yeah, Mark. Introduce the bitch to your wife.” Bill laughed out loud at his own joke. The others just ignored him.

“Sharon, this is Monica Crenshaw. Monica, my wife, Sharon Kinney.” Mark was a bit nervous, as was to be expected.

“Sharon, I am so very glad to meet you. Knowing Mark’s penchant for honesty, you’ve already heard of our history.” Monica was smiling at Sharon, but Sharon was still not sure if things were going well or going to Hell.

“Yes, you went together during school, and college. You got engaged, then you broke up about six years ago.”

“Yes, I don’t know if it was best for him, but it was certainly a dumb move on my part. You’ve got a good man, hang on to him.” She threw a quick, wry smile at Mark then started talking to Henrietta in an obvious change of subjects. “Henrietta, would you believe that when Mark and I were in our Math 312 class in Metric Topology, we were the only ones in the entire class to know how to use Symbolic Logic? We had all these mathematical proofs to do on the board to the satisfaction of the class and none of them had a clue as to what we were doing. The Professor freaked that no one else knew about it yet. You got us both a leg up on getting ‘A’s in that class because you made us learn it in high school Math.” Henrietta smiled her dimply smile and the conversation went on to school and old friends.

“ ... So, I sold the future royalties and interests to my employer and now they have the hassle of dealing with the people copying my design. I made 250k on that deal. Not bad for a little device I cobbled up at college. However, speaking of devices, Mark, Henrietta, what do you think about this thing?” Monica pulled a small piece of gear out of her purse. It was slimmer than a cell phone; a clear plastic window in the center with some small control buttons around the edge. It was about three inches by four inches, maybe less. There were no obvious charging ports.

“Confederacy?” Mark had looked it over and finding no markings, had jumped to that conclusion before he handed it to Henrietta. She looked it over and nodded in agreement.

“Yup. I found it just laying around.” Monica had a bittersweet smile on her face. “The electrical engineering firm I am working at now has had four pickups made on our people in the last two years. I’ve missed all four. Once I was home with the flu. Next time I stayed and worked over lunch and they hit the restaurant next door. Third time, I was out of town for a client meeting. The last time, I missed getting in the door of the restaurant by about five minutes. When I went in later, I saw it lying under a table. Heh. By some discarded bras.”

“Do you know what it does?” Sharon was curious. Monica seemed to be pleasant enough. Maybe they would get through the rest of this night with no problems.

“Yeah. I had a clue beforehand. Some of the pickups have been recorded and I saw these being used. Sandy do you have your CAP Card with you?” When Sandy nodded, Monica continued. “Place it underneath the clear panel. You will be able to see all of your little sub-scores. They’re labeled. You can touch the screen and it takes a score and opens it up to more detailed ones.” Monica was sitting beside Bill with Sandy on his other side. Monica leaned over Bill’s lap, which seriously distracted him. He was concentrating on discretely, deniably, copping a feel of the breast that was almost in his lap and looking down at the taut dress stretched over her nice ass, while she was hitting buttons on the card reader. “So, for example, Sex. That breaks down to sex drive, open mindedness and function, I think. Wow. You’re pretty good there. I guess they are right. Blondes are more fun.” Unspoken was the disappointing overall score. It was lowered by the serious lack of aggression, quite a bit of submissiveness, moderate intelligence, creativity and what Monica thought was just general despair. She had good parenting stats, but nothing else really stood out. Monica retrieved the reader and pulled away from Bill. When she had said nothing about the feel-up, he had gone for a solid grope and overly rough squeeze. It was all under the level of the table, so maybe no one had seen it. Well, certainly they were all too polite to mention it.

“How about you, Sharon? Do you want to see how you measure up?” The tone was casual, but they all realized that it was a challenge. Mark started to stop her from answering, but gave it up as a bad idea even before he got a word out.

“Sure, hand it over.” Sandy had kept her stats mostly secret from the table by tilting the screen towards her face. Sharon, on the other hand, laid her card on the table where the 5.8 score was fully visible before lying the reader on top. She had good overall scores and was only relatively weak in aggressiveness and self-confidence. Her parenting scores were excellent and her sex scores were quite decent as well.

“Well, what’s SHE like in the sack?” Bill was craning to see, but Mark had grabbed the reader before Bill got to it.

Monica gave a tight little laugh. “I ‘m sure Mark has no complaints with her scores, Bill. Mark, fair is fair. You saw hers. Let her see yours.” Monica was not looking in their direction at all, like she was not really interested in his scores. She was looking deeply into Bill’s eyes. What Bill did not notice was that she had slipped a card into Sharon’s lap. Sharon started, picked it up and slid it up into the reader so that she and Mark could read it. Monica was talking to Bill again. “You know, Bill, after four misses, I decided that I was not going to miss any more pick-ups. I decided that I would know when the next pickup was taking place around me and who else was going to be there. I decided that, before I walked in, I would know who I was leaving with. So I set out to contact the Confederacy. It was surprisingly easy. They know who you are from the CAP tests, so they can tell who wants to go, who would rather stay at home and who wants to sabotage things. They won’t exactly commit to a pick-up of course. But they will pay attention to big opportunities.”

Mark and Sharon had passed the reader and card to Henrietta, who just smiled and handed it back after adding her card underneath. Monica received the reader and the four cards, glanced down at them one and all. “Bill, I think there is going to be a pick-up here tonight. I have a volunteer level CAP score. I arranged this table for tonight. The six of us.” She showed him her CAP Card in the reader. The other three cards were slipped back into Sharon’s lap. She leaned in to his ear. The others could hear, barely. “Notice that I am mostly in the shadow here, people can’t really see me from other tables. I need you to do me a favor. I want you to trade seats for a few minutes with Sandy. I want to convince her to come along with us. If the Marines come through the doors, I want a head start. We can go on to test drives and stuff then. I get SIX. There are only five of you here. With one exception, I am collecting only from this table. Sandy’s going to be the hard one to convince. You can wa-atch!” Monica almost sang that last sentence and ‘watch’ was a sexy two-toned taunt. Bill practically jumped out of his seat, grabbed Sandy without a word of explanation and shoved her over to his chair. While he was doing that, Monica gave a smile and wink to Sharon and Mark.

“Sandy, you have two kids now, right?” Sandy nodded her head. “And you want to save them, right?” Another nod. “I have a 8.0 CAP score. I can take six people with me plus all of their kids under fourteen. I am taking two guys and four girls. The other girl is at another table. I want to take you. Bill can’t tell you to come with me. You have to decide on your own. You have a pretty high set of sex scores. It says you are very open-minded about sex. That’s good, because I found out that I am bi-sexual. You used to be good friends with Missy Sinclair. I know she had a bit of a rep with some of the other girls. I need to know. Did you ever?”

“Uhh, yeah. We uhh, got carried away at a sleepover a couple times while we were talking about guys. Bill and Fred mainly.” Fred, Missy’s ex, was a middle linebacker on the same team as Bill. “We never did it much and it was always when we were all hot and bothered about them.” Sandy was trying to see Bill without turning to look at him. She wanted to know if he was getting upset.

Monica looked at Bill and smiled. He was practically drooling. “You’re getting Bill all hot, just thinking about.” The relief in Sandy’s eyes was obvious. “Why don’t we give him just a little more to think about?” She leaned in to Sandy, looking into her eyes as she went closer and pulled Sandy into a soft hug and kiss. Sandy was stiff with surprise, then relaxed and kissed back with some passion. When Monica raised her hand up and cupped Sandy’s right breast, the one visible to all at the table, three things happened at once. Sharon gave a quick gasp behind her. Sandy started caressing Monica’s own right breast and left hip. Bill reached in to grab the two ladies. Monica slapped his wrist lightly. “Ladies only for a minute, Bill.” She leaned back in, but this time she kissed her way into Sandy’s cleavage as she freed one breast. “Do you want to come with me tonight, Sandy? I guarantee you that you will be loved and made love to and have lots of pretty babies.”

Sandy was starting to moan and barely got it out. “Yes, oh, yes.”

“Ok, that’s all I needed to hear.” Monica pulled back from the heaving bosom and pulled another item from her purse. She brought it up to her mouth. “AI, Sandy is mine. Start the ball rolling.”