Chapter 18

It was evening when I woke up, with still just a hint of the remaining light of sunset coming through the living room blinds. I might have been mind-raped, but I didn't seem to feel the worse for the experience.

"Well, you drugged me ... you bastards, but I do still feel like 'me', but then again after being mind controlled, I would feel that way I anyway I suppose." I muttered, as Walt, Mary's father, handed me a tall glass of orange juice to drink. Sedatives always tended to give me cotton-mouth anyway and I needed the drink.

"I should hope so." He casually replied, sitting himself down on the leather armchair next to where I was lying on his sofa. "Trust me, any poking around was done with a very light touch. Just perhaps slightly rearranging the furniture but no massive redecorating. I'll think you'll find that nothing of any significance was altered or changed. No, we did not embark upon a program of significant personality alteration or even character improvement, and your morals and values remain completely intact. Instead, I found it advisable to merely provide you with a few helpful 'suggestions' for the future."

"Just how helpful? I assume I've been conditioned to now forget Lovett and its collection of rather colorful characters exist the moment I drive back to Austin?"

"Certainly not. While we have our secrets, a few of which you now share, Lucy has selected you and your lovers for some extremely important long term tasks, virtually none of which are of much relevance to present or even future events here in Lovett. But since Lucy believed these tasks were of important significance, then so do we, and I've tried in a very minor way to perhaps help you, albeit indirectly."

"I suppose then there is zero chance that Lucy is either mistaken or perhaps just slightly exaggerating?"

"Less than zero. Zip, zilch and none. If I understand the situation correctly, your particular assignment is merely to preserve some tiny meager glowing ember of what civilization used to and protect your unborn daughter from harm until she can perform her own far more important tasks, so your slice of this unfortunately immanent shit pie shouldn't be all that hard to swallow. Really, in my professional opinion, all you need to do is keep calm, and carry on. One foot in front of the other and live one day at a time. It's not that complicated, or at least try not to make it any more complicated than it already is."

"So, just what sort of help did you provide? This whole thing was just a confidence builder? You could have just politely asked ... I might even have agreed."

"My way was faster and simpler. In a nutshell, yes. Think of it as a big three day self-confidence seminar rolled into about three hours. Perhaps you'll notice a little more firmness of decision and action and a bit less dithering. Probably not bad things to have a minor surplus of in troubling times. You may say thank you now, any time you're ready."

"Thank you, I think. Let me guess, this might also improve my sex life too?"

"Undoubtedly. Sex is 99% mental and having confidence there is better than any bottle of blue erection pills. Speaking of which, your very lovely lady Amy had rather firmly requested to be the next one put into the tank and drugged so that she could become the ideal perfect slave girl for you, but alas we had to refuse her even more firmly. She does have an unborn child that's just barely a week old and filling her with dangerous psychoactive chemicals at this stage would be unwise to say the very least, and so her education in submission will need to be rather traditional. Anne-Marie too shows interesting potential as a painslut, should you encourage that tendency and even from a brief, drug-free hypnosis session with her I can tell that she is naturally uninhibited and without meaningful sexual boundaries. As a natural submissive also, she will find considerable happiness, like Amy, should you choose to encourage this. As both the husband and father of submissive slaves and pain sluts, I can speak from considerable practical experience that you would enjoy a significantly greater probability of future household happiness with you and your lovers indulging in a caring but firm dominant/submissive relationship, and from what I heard from Mary and Myra, this will very likely include your Katherine as well, but to a more limited extent than the others."

"So I further assume that my subconscious has been provided with a few subtle hints about the care and nurturing of a harem of women all yearning to kiss my feet or be kissed by my whip? And why would Katherine be different?"

"Nothing that dramatic. No you won't suddenly feel the urge to don leather pants and menace about all day with a bullwhip, but yes ... you should feel slightly more comfortable now accepting the unconditional love of your women, in any manner they are likely to display their affection. And entirely of their own free will. You had fears, rather a lot of them, that you were unworthy of them, but since they feel very strongly otherwise, I decided that it would be happier for everyone concerned if you were more accepting of this majority opinion. Katherine will have Kathy and Trixie's memories, of this I'm fairly certain, and with those memories she will inherit a lot of guilt. Enough to drive any reasonable woman to insanity, without treatment. She will still feel some of this guilt strongly, enough to feel both permanently indebted and devoted to you ... but she will also have enough of a strong core within her that she should be able to put aside this guilt and move forward productively with her life now. There is submission within her, within specific bounds, but perhaps not the needs of a an abject unthinking slave, and it would be wrong to make her into something that she is not. I suspect though that she'll continue to share Kathy's love of roleplaying games." He winked.

I shared that opinion. I'd only sensed Katherine a few rare times during my relationship with Kathy and I felt immediately that she was a stronger and potentially a much more confident woman than her more active personas. I remarked on this to Walt and he agreed.

"You're extremely lucky you know, more than you realized. You have three exceptional women in their own way that each love you and want to share your life. Most people can't manage a normal marriage or relationship, let alone a plural or harem situation. In modern civilization, it's probably inherently unstable as it fosters jealousies in 95% of the relationships that try it, but sometimes it works and works wonderfully, and I think you'll be one of the lucky few! Once civilization is over, more or less, I think things will become more tribal once again, with men sharing their women in common, for security and protection, such as what you and your swing friends are now starting to establish. In the near future, in a world lit only, or mostly so, by fire, your variety of group or tribal marriage might once again become the cultural rule rather than the extreme exception ... and perhaps for the better."

I shared that opinion too! Oddly, now that I was thinking about it, I did feel rather much more confident about a number of things and the crushing load of depression, worry and regrets seemed far less overwhelming now. I still didn't understand why Amy felt the need to abjectly submit herself to me, or why Anne-Marie enjoyed being occasionally debased with acts that had been a bit beyond my own comfort zone, but now I could accept this. What they did, they did for love ... our love, and I needed to reaffirm my own love for them.

Maybe having one's skull cracked open and letting a little fresh air and daylight in can be a good thing once in awhile, but I was pretty sure, benefits or not, that I didn't want another brain polishing session on Walt's couch ever again!

"Alright, Kurt you were very definitely right and I was wrong." Myra admitted as everyone assembled together at the lab to discuss the last final bits of Katherine's restoration project just before she was to be decanted. It was almost like being at a birth, and was being treated largely as such.

"Apology accepted. I just knew that Katherine was there hiding somewhere and that she'd only want to talk to me. She'd been locked away by Katie, hidden playing a sort of perverse game of hide and seek for all of her adult life, watching but unable to speak in her own voice, except under such extreme conditions of stress that neither Kathy or Trixie could cope with, providing a brief opportunity for escape. Is that more or less right?"

"Entirely. Katherine is the woman that Katie as a little girl was meant to grow up into and become, but was put away instead so that Katie could continue to live a fantasy. Now she's finally in control of her own body after perhaps fifteen years of watching her other personas living in it. Everything will be familiar to her yet different, and I think she's going to gain confidence quickly, but give her all of the time and patience she needs. I think she will become a strong and very remarkable woman, and it goes without saying that she will need a lot of love."

"Also," Mary added, "as my father said, she'll have the majority of Trixie and Kathy's memories, both good and bad, but her childhood memories of abuse from her father and then others, were largely removed along with Katie's persona. Instead, she'll only remember them sort of second-hand, like bad dreams, of how they had been used to torment and control Trixie, and then later even Kathy. We've also dulled these fragmentary memories further, enough so that we're sure that they're all very safely and thoroughly buried. The past is now very much the past. Trixie's memories were more complicated and couldn't, and perhaps even shouldn't, be removed wholesale or altered as well, and in fact it was the issue of how the remnants of Trixie the Slut's persona were incorporated that occupied the majority of our time. Nothing about this could be 100% perfect or exact so we erred on the side of leaving her with as many old memories as possible, all the better so that she could re-adapt to life again as quickly and safely ... and permanently as possible."

"Exactly." Myra quickly added. "She will always possess some degree of guilt over her past actions and especially over her, or rather Trixie's treatment of you, and her other lovers. We think that she will be quite strong enough to deal with this guilt, perhaps in a somewhat sexually submissive manner, but not to the abject extent her other lovers tend to exhibit and even shameless flaunt. Yes, that means both of you, Amy and Anne-Marie! Within a future dominant/submissive sort of relationship and multi-partner household, I would suspect that she will eventually become something of a switch ... pretty much like my own lover Allison, able to alternate being in charge of her girlfriends or in turn kneeling in submission to obey her master. Get used to it, you've been blessed far more than you'll ever appreciate! I guess that more or less covers everything. Any last questions?"

"Probably not. We need to be supportive, loving and very very patient and wait and see what sort of lovely flower blooms from this rose?"

"Got it in one!" Andrew laughed, and with the pressing of a button the hinges of the sensory deprivation chamber unlocked and began to open. Kathy, or rather Katherine was seemingly asleep, but just in a light post-hypnotic doze and she awoke with the first gentle touch of my hand to her cheek. She recognized me at once and smiled at me.

"Good morning sleeping beauty." I murmured as I clasped her hand to help her up from out the large salt water filled sensory deprivation tank.

"You've found me ... at last." She whispered, her voice still hoarse from the feeding tube that had been placed down her throat during the long days that she had been in treatment. Allison next gently removed the urine tube and the last of the monitoring connections to the lab equipment, leaving my weak but happy lover free to leave the treatment tank, hopefully for forever.

Weak from her ordeal, and perhaps more than a little out-of-synch with her body and her mind's new control of it, she was too feeble to get herself out and I lifted her up into my arms to carry her, to cradle and love her as one would a newborn, and she adjusted her head and neck so that she could kiss me.

"I love you Kurt ... and I've been wanting and waiting to tell you for so very long. Kathy loved you too, and even Trixie do too, in her limited way, but now they're all part of me, quiet and voiceless now, happy to just become vague memories and perhaps even later fade entirely away and become forgotten, now that I can make new memories with you! Please don't let me go!"

I promised to never let that happen.

Amy came bounding up next and as we found a robe and wheelchair for Katherine, the two lovers reunited like old absent friends and I heard Katherine just whisper, 'I'm so sorry', over and over again, even after Anne-Marie completed our family reunion.

"You can still call me Kathy, if you want." She whispered later as we were putting her into bed for some real genuine rest and y. "You called me Katherine once and I liked that name and want to keep it, perhaps just for special occasions though."

"Such as when we tell you that we're deliriously happily in love with you?" Anne-Marie giggled.

Katherine, or once again our Kathy didn't reply, but fell fast asleep with a smile on her face and we all left her strictly alone to rest. Fun and games, and demonstrations of physical affection could wait until we were all safely home and our weakened lover was feeling more entirely 'herself'.

I'd known right in my gut that Katherine was going to be an exceptional woman, and already our delicate tender blossom was just starting to begin to bloom!

Kathy slept like a newborn, both figuratively and literally for most of the next two days except for brief awakenings for bodily needs. We constantly had someone tending after her but with little or really nothing of importance left to do, our remaining time in Lovett was spent more socially. We spent the first evening just enjoying a casual dinner and idly discussing nothing of any importance. They were making their plans for doomsday too and Peter's own list of 'to do's' before the shit hit the fan make Charlene's look like a simple grocery list. The county fire department, probably even more than the local police, were going to be important first responders, and a few relaxing bottles of wine later, he gave me his own private interpretation of Lucy's very own inconvenient truth, the very real and coming apocalypse.

"From what Lucy described, it sounds to me that a huge ass solar flare is going to hit the earth. And it's really not so crazy. I've been doing some internet research lately ... while we still have it, and there are some Italian scientists that have been claiming for months that this is going to be a record year for X-class solar flares and that Carrington Events are not only possible but likely. The media is mostly ignoring them but there are few other scientists that are quietly agreeing."

"Carrington Events? What are those?" I enquired. Amy was suddenly nodding her head in agreement too, having just perked up from half dozing next to my side.

"The Carrington Event occurred in 1859," Peter said, "the biggest known solar storm in recorded history. The industrial revolution was just starting so there was little damage, but even then the energy of the flare was powerful enough on earth to melt telegraph lines. Today we'd classify it as an X-class flare, the strongest and most powerful ones at the very top of the solar storm measurement scale. Perhaps Carrington's flare was somewhere around an X-10 to 30 in range, enough to significantly disrupt or even destroy electronic satellites and unshielded equipment here on earth, like what happened in Quebec in 1989, only this one will be magnitudes of order bigger and nastier. X-100 or even X-5000 ... something unthinkably huge and destructive, a solar storm capable of knocking all of civilization back to 1859 all over again, but this time it's for good, at least according to Lucy. 'The lights would go out to stay', Lucy has said, with very limited localized exceptions. We'll be one of those exceptions, and I think you're supposed to be getting prepared as well. We're preparing backup natural gas generators in some underground shielded bunkers and we're also working on solar and wind powered backup systems, so we'll be OK ... supposedly, but the rest of the grid is going offline to stay. No more factories, corporate farms or endless container ships from China. Sounds disastrous at first, but the more I think about it, it just seems like an opportunity to do things better this next time around."

"That is one major world of butt-hurt!"

"Isn't it! For us, the event will happen at night, so we'll get less of an impact, but still enough to knock almost everything out for the count. The daytime side of the world is going to hit hard, probably even scoured and cooked by deadly levels of microwave radiation. That probably means that China and India's massive over-population problems will suddenly become moot. A third of the world dead in just seconds and probably even the survivors are going to be sterilized. It's going to be just like the era of the Black Death all over again, except this time it's Asia that's going to be nearly utterly wiped out, instead of medieval Europe. Then another third of the world's population dying in the weeks and months that follow, and another third before next year is out, and other thirds in the years that follow. Overpopulation is going to be one of our problems anymore for a long, long time. Without modern mechanized agriculture or advanced medicines and antibiotics anymore, ever, the globe would be lucky to ever again even support a billion population, and even that figure's overly optimistic."

"Back to the dark ages then, probably even for the doomday preppers and survivalist nuts in their fortified compounds and bunkers." I grumbled. Sure they'd have food, guns and ammo to last a long time, but eventually they or their children would be joining everyone else foraging through the wreckage for leftovers. Back to the good old days of hunter-gathering. Well, I supposed my two semesters of Sociology were going to be useful then someday.

"It's the dark ages for starters, but maybe back to clipper ships some distant day. We don't even make the machines that make the machines that make everything we use in life today. Everything comes from megafactories in China these days, or somewhere in Germany, or else outsourced to Brazil. We'll all be alive over here in the New World, but for most of us it won't be for long. Corporate mega-farming and ranching isn't going to be putting food into the supermarkets anymore and once the groceries run out anyone in an urban environment, yeah that's you buddy, is going to starting plundering anything and everything not nailed down, and when the scavengers have gleaned the last rusty tin can they'll start hunting and eating each other. Sure the rural folks will still have their farms, if they adapt to farming with a horse and iron plow again, but most of them are going to be too vulnerable to survive when the inevitable raiders come pouring out of the old cities. You get the idea."

"Yeah. Learned this lesson day one of my Sociology 101 class. Any and every civilization that has ever existed on earth is or was only 9 missed meals or less away from total anarchy. Mad Max in glorious high definition Technicolor, right on my front lawn."

"Exactly. My professor gave me the same lecture, I think. It sucks to be you, so have a plan and stick to it. You've got a chance that no one else has, the ability to prepare for the goddamn fucking worst, so that then you can kick back and laugh when the tragedy is everywhere else around you."

"Too much like the 'Masque of the Red Death' for my tastes, so I doubt I'll be laughing. It's the good old, when your neighbor slips on a banana peel that's comedy, but when you fall instead, that's tragedy, viewpoint of life. Fair enough, but I think I'm going to need to secure more than just my household, maybe even most of my entire neighborhood ... and that's a lot of groceries, but that's also a lot of grim determined folks with guns to help keep the cannibal hordes away. My VISA credit card account is already pretty ugly, but we'll buy what we can."

"Good, do just that, and have a plan for killing nearly everyone you meet next year, because that's all you and yours are going to be very soon, just another larder of supplies that someone else will want to plunder at gunpoint. I think you're going to do just fine."

Me too. That new sense of confidence was really digging in firmly. Peter was blunt but right, to protect me and mine, I was going to have to be able to kick serious ass ... and do it with minimal concern or pity. We couldn't save everyone, but we could prepare to do the best that we could!