Chapter 6

2073 a.d.
Baby Sister

Sibilius had the first project ready for installation.

Béla didn’t make any suggestions about who would get what body. She’d only met two of her sisters inside the Praetor; Elisabeta and Melinda. She was still a little annoyed with Melinda for torching her boyfriend, Raul, and also for Torquemada, although Melinda swore that she never let Dear Tomas feast on her blood. As for Elisabeta, she was just plain scary! She looked at Béla like she was lunch and Elsa had missed breakfast! Plus, she was the one who had passed on the secret of immortality to Melinda. Did she have any idea how much trouble that had caused, making Torquemada immortal?

Hmm, maybe Father would choose his son to be first! Then she could actually fuck Jesus for real! But, Béla noticed that the first project completion was female, which shot down her private little jest.

‘Are there going to be any male bodies?’ she asked hopefully.

Sibilius frowned in disapproval at his unhappy and obviously frustrated daughter, then shielded his mind, blocking her thoughts out along with those uncomfortable feelings she was broadcasting.

The birthing process was a lot different for her first sister than it had been for Béla. The body Béla was using had been carefully reconstructed, reconstituting one cell at a time from her ashes and grafting it to the previous one. It had required constant immersion in nutrient fluids to keep each recreated cell alive over the years as her father carefully grafted on progressive layers.

With Béla, there had also been the problem of her reconstituted cells wanting to grow haphazardly in an attempt to heal her unfinished body. Sibilius had found it necessary to constantly inject fresh DNA into her cells so that they would maintain her proper form. Even then, he had found it necessary to cut and graft her cells back into the desired form several times over the years, and he was always grateful when the grafted cells healed without leaving any scar tissue.

The projects her father was currently working on were being created the same way Béla’s original body had been created. They were simply grown from splicing human and alien DNA together and letting it grow, with special modifications to the human DNA forcing the body to form full size instead of as an infant.

Her father used different human DNA for each project, so that his hybrid children wouldn’t all look exactly alike. The alien DNA was all donated by the same being. The reason for that, her father had explained, was because the special metamorphosis that Béla used to create her wings was part of her alien DNA. In addition, he had designed her digestive system in such a way that it was almost impossible to kill her, as she could simply ingest any weapon or projectile that penetrated her body. Using just one crewmember’s DNA saved him the effort of having to find and modify those special traits thirty times.

‘Does that mean that I have an actual father, too?’ Béla inquired. ‘Do my sisters have the same father?’

He didn’t know, so she asked the Praetor.

Béla found out that her own biological father had died of old age over a thousand years ago. He hadn’t wanted to continue his existence in a Martian Drone body, therefore, according to the law as determined by the Praetor, his soul was permitted to leave their society and find its own way.

So as it turned out, Béla wasn’t going to be related by blood to any of her sisters or her brother, although they would all be related to each other, as Sibilius was using his own DNA to blend in with the humans. They would still be her siblings, though, because Sibilius was the father, the creator, of each one of them, as well as Béla. She would have to be satisfied with that.

At the time Béla’s biological father had passed on, Sibilius had been finishing up an artificial moon orbiting around Jupiter. He had spent the previous thirty-five-hundred years overseeing the development of the environment inside that hollow shell.

Once the shell had been completed, the biggest challenge was creating an atmosphere inside it. That alone took several centuries of collecting planetoid-sized chunks of ice and hauling them inside the hollow moon with a tractor beam, then warming them enough to melt. Chunks of ice the size of small planets weren’t hard to find, but there weren’t any close by; the best ones hovering lazily in orbit some distance beyond Uranus.

Making dirt was much easier. There was an abundance of plant life on Earth that could break down rocks. In addition, they used hydraulic pumps from their ship to blast the rocks with the water from the ice asteroids. For almost a thousand years, the inside of the hollow moon was one great low-gravity ocean. While the inner surface of the hollow moon was covered with water, Sibilius was forced to slow the moon’s rotation, as the centrifical force of the water kept rupturing the comparatively thin metal shell.

Eventually, and with the help of the great sun-collecting crystals located at each axis of the moon, most of the water evaporated into the vacuum which still existed in the center of the moon, creating a breathable atmosphere and leaving a lot of mud caked against the moon’s inside surface.

For the last thousand years, the alien ship had been transporting more dirt, water, plant and animal life from Earth up to what was going to be their new home, which was already being shared with some humans – those few who had stumbled upon the great ship during its animal, plant and mineral collection phase. Whether or not more humans would be transported en masse was to have been determined by the hybrid species that Sibilius had created to succeed both the aliens and the more primitive humans.

The ‘hybrid project’ was a complete failure in every aspect. It was intended that the hybrid species would introduce an evolutionary advance into the human population, making humans the beneficiaries of the dying alien culture. Instead, most of the hybrids had gone insane over the centuries and had to be recalled.

After a thousand years, when not a single one of his projects had procreated, Sibilius created one final hybrid – a male, this time – to introduce the desired gene modifications into the human species. That backfired, too – mostly because his ‘son’ sought out one of Sibilius’ female hybrids and chose her for his lifemate because they could mind-link with each other so well that he wasn’t interested in inseminating any Earth girls. Disgusted and discouraged, Sibilius had that project terminated as soon as it returned to the great ship, never knowing that the female hybrid had, shortly afterward, given birth to a daughter.

‘And you know this, how?’ Béla had asked during her lesson.

‘All of the Regent’s projects were continuously monitored, ‘ the Praetor had informed her.

‘So why did Father never find out about Mary’s daughter?’ Béla wanted to know.

‘He didn’t ask, ‘ the Praetor replied. Béla could almost see the Praetor staring down its long, aristocratic nose at her.

‘Getting back to the subject at hand... ‘

The one partial success had been Béla. ‘That’s me. Why is he talking about me in the third person? I’m right here! Oh. This is a generic recording. The Praetor isn’t actually talking to me ... This is a history lesson.’ Not only had she survived her own project termination by Sibilius, but she had discovered how to become pregnant. In addition, with her creator’s help, Béla overcame her destruction by the insane Earth people, and enabled the entire hybrid project to be newly reinstated. ‘Very recent history, I notice... ‘ she mused.

Once again, and with new hope, the hybrid project became Sibilius’ main concern. With the demonstrated success of his recreated hybrid, Béla, his abandoned dream could be brought back to life and their civilization could be renewed, using newly created hybrid bodies as hosts for members of the old race as they died off. Sibilius had been more correct than even he had realized when he abandoned her into the human world with the words, ‘You are the future hope of both our peoples! You must survive!’

And so, she did. Here she was, surviving. How could she help but do anything else?

‘Enchi, I really need to fuck something... ‘ Béla thought to herself as she left Father’s lab, bringing the Praetor’s ‘lesson for the day’ to an end.

She thought back on that odd dream she’d had just before awakening in this fine, new, definitely fuckable and, unfortunately, still virginal body, wondering what had ever happened to Daryna after her mistress had given her freedom for saving her from the sandstorm that had destroyed Cambius’ army. When they’d parted ways in Sabratha, a thriving city on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, she hadn’t realized that letting Daryna drink her blood so she wouldn’t die in the desert would extend her life for a few centuries.

She found herself in the cargo area where her ‘flying strap’ was coiled around a peg she’d stuck into the side of a large container. Instead of strapping herself in to exercise, though, she sat down on another carton, her mind processing thoughts that actually didn’t concern sensual entertainment.

‘If the Praetor knew about Mary Magdalena’s child, maybe it knows about... ‘

‘Do you have a question, child?’ the Praetor intoned into Béla’s mind, nearly causing her to fall off her box in surprise.

“Do you ever not record everything that is going on?” she asked, nearly shouting her angry words into the air.

The Praetor remained silent, imperiously awaiting an answer to its question.

“Okay, smartass,” Béla continued after a moment. “Were you recording me when I was sold as a slave in Darkhla?”

Instead of replying, the Praetor simply dumped the memories into Béla’s mind:

‘Holy fuck!’ Béla thought, astounded. ‘Is THAT where that came from?’

“And she got it,” Béla sighed, even now missing Daryna after all these thousands of years.

“So you recorded all that, did you?” Béla asked the Praetor, surprised that the Praetor had even managed to record the emotions of the event. “Did you record what happened to Daryna after she set me free and left Sabratha?”

‘Why do you wish to know, child?’ the Praetor asked.