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eBook edition ISBN 978-1-950183-70-8

Preface

THIS STORY takes place in Thinking Horndog’s Swarm Cycle Universe. The story has been helped along significantly by other Swarm authors and their writings, including Omachuck, Zen Master, John Lewiston, Frostfyre, Kenn Ghannon, starfiend, Anne N. Mouse, Duke of Ramus, akarge, ElSol, and all the other Swarm Cycle authors whose 270-plus stories in the universe on SOL have been a profound influence on me.

I would especially like to thank John Lewiston for the loan of his Tuull AI T’krunkskit, AMD131, known as “Eddie” [See First Cruise of Lt. Steward] and ElSol for the loan of his rebellious Darjee AI “Sparta” [See All These Things That I’ve Done]. I also refer to the Earth Observation AI, Hermes, [See Pretty CAPable by Kenn Ghannon]. Characters and settings from other authors have also made cameos here and there. I’ve tried to be respectful of the originator’s intent for the character when that happens, and I’ve cited several stories in the text so you can explore more of the Swarm Cycle.

Still, this story is my own contribution to the Swarm Cycle and, undoubtedly, I have bollixed up some things. That’s all my fault. They did their best to straighten me out.

If you are unfamiliar with the Swarm Cycle, it would be helpful to read some of Thinking Horndog’s stories for a grounding. “Average Joes” and “Pickup Number Eighteen” would be a good place to start. In general, an alien race, called the Sa’arm (“Dangerous Ones”) is eating its way across the galaxy. Some races of the Confederacy have already been consumed. The Confederacy is so old and peaceful, however, that it is unable to defend itself or even contemplate violence against another sentient species. The Darjee, birdlike members of the Confederacy, make contact with humans by way of their AIs (artificial intelligence computers). Humans are considered almost as dangerous as the Swarm (Sa’arm) but, since they can fight, it is hoped they can delay indefinitely the encroachment of the Swarm on other Confederacy territory. Besides, Earth lies in the path of the Swarm.

The dating of this story is based on the Swarm Cycle calendar in which Month 0 is the first human contact with the Swarm. This is over a year before information is first leaked to the public that the Confederacy exists. In Month 16 (April), the President makes a general announcement about what is coming and makes testing for acceptance into the Confederacy (CAP tests) mandatory. The news is greeted with mixed reviews. Some are gung-ho, some reluctant, some disbelieving, and of course many just want to see what’s in it for them. It’s in that world that we join this story.

Chapter 1

Month 42—June in Los Angeles

I’D JUST TURNED EIGHTEEN. I’d delayed as long as possible—two years since the president announced mandatory CAP testing that measured the Capacity, Aptitude, and Potential of people to determine if they were eligible to volunteer in the Confederacy. A lot of the kids—especially here on the West Coast—didn’t take it seriously but there had been increasing warnings of severe penalties if a person was stopped and didn’t have a CAP card. I finally decided it had to be done today. Feds were out in force.

I went to the test center and was led to a room with a comfortable chair and a VR headset. I smiled. The test was some kind of cool virtual reality game. That’s my world. I just flowed with the pieces and got into the game. I tried to remember some of the techniques they used, so I could use them in the game my team was creating. The animations were top level and looked almost like my tests that put live humans into the staged backgrounds of my game. I didn’t expect to get into the game like this. It was cool.

Games are what it’s all about. My team and I had been building our game since I was twelve years old. Six years of development and we had things pretty locked into place for a V1 release. All except one thing: If we were going to make the breakthrough we wanted, then we needed porn stars and a producer who could follow my scripts. Now that I was eighteen, I could meet with my favorite producer/director, Dakota Wind. If I had a CAP card.

It was too bizarre. You could drop your drawers in a public restaurant when the Marines came and fuck your heart out at fourteen. You could get bulked up and sent out to kill aliens at fourteen. But California still had blue laws about porn. And the porn industry enforced them rigorously. You couldn’t legally get or participate in good porn in the state until you were eighteen. What a screwy world.

“We’ll have your CAP card in just a few minutes.” The pleasant and stunningly beautiful woman at the reception desk smiled at me, showing a lot of cleavage and a bare mid-section. I couldn’t see her legs but was sure they’d fill out the rest of the image in my mind.

I could just imagine her looking up into the camera—not at me, of course. I’d have Rock Jamison, the porn star, play opposite her. He’d smile at her and suggest maybe he could have a test drive. ‘Here?’ she’d ask. ‘Here and now,’ he’d say. The videos didn’t have much more dialog than that. She’d fall to her knees and start opening his pants to swallow that huge dick. The next shot would be of her bending over her desk with Rock behind her, slapping her pussy with his big schlong. That was a trademark of the actor. Before he did anything else with an actress, he whacked her pussy with his ten-inch cock a few times. Then he’d drive it home.

“Mr. Frisco?” I looked up, dragged out of my little fantasy. A guy in a gray suit—or was it a uniform?—was standing in the doorway. I hadn’t seen him come in.

“Yo.”

“I’m Decurion Oswald. Would you mind accompanying me to my office? I have your CAP results.” What the hell? I thought all I had to do was pick up my card at the desk and get the fuck out of Dodge. Trust the Confederacy to make things more complicated. I followed the guy past the room where I’d tested and into a small office.

“What’s going on? Don’t I just get my card and go home?”

“Usually, but your results are unique. Congratulations, Mr. Frisco. What branch of the Confederacy Defense Force would you like to join?” He pushed my card across the desk and I examined it. 9.2.

“I guess that’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

“That, young man, is your ticket out of here. 9.2 qualifies you for eight concubines. With the way you scored on tactics and aggression, you’d likely start your career as a Commander in the Marines. You’d be using your skills to design battle plans for destroying our enemies. And I can offer you immediate extraction. I noticed you observing Janice at the front desk. She’s one of my extras in the concubine pool. You could start your harem with her if you want. Test drive her right here in the office. Name the kind of concubines you want and we’ll try to work out a pickup. All you need to do is say, ‘I volunteer for service in the Confederacy.’ How about it, son?”

“No.”

“Do you mean you want some time? I can forgo the immediate extraction and let you gather a few women together. Call the number on this card when you’re ready, and if we deem the site secure, we’ll move in and pick you up. Will a week be enough time? We don’t do guaranteed pickups, but I think I can arrange to be where you are at that time.”

“No.”

“Teddy—I understand that is your preferred name—I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying. You just got a golden ticket. What can we do to get you out of here?”

“Hmm. You could provide me with a state-of-the-art battleship I can crew and keep here in our solar system. By all accounts, we have five or six years before the dickheads get to Earth That should give me enough time to get my crew ready to defend Earth. We won’t be going to any unnamed planet in a different solar system.”

“It doesn’t work like that, Teddy. We don’t just let individuals decide how the war should be prosecuted. You work as part of a team and part of the process is getting people off Earth so that when it falls, we still have humans in the universe,” the Decurion said.

“Then you don’t need me. I won’t go.”

“What are you? Earth First? Your test doesn’t show that!”

“Decurion, if I were Earth First, one of two things would happen. One of the two of us would be dead in the next heartbeat or I’d take you up on your bribe to leave Earth. There’s no such thing as Earth First people. They are all ‘me first’ idiots. Given the opportunity to get off the planet, they’d take it in an instant. I’m not leaving our planet undefended to run off as a slave to the Darjee to fight their war. Tell whoever sent you here for me to go suck it.” I stood to leave. The Decurion stood as well.

“Things won’t go the way you plan,” he said, pointing to the CAP card in my hand. I watched as the number changed from 9.2 to 8.8.

“Cool,” I snorted. “Wonder if I can get it down to zero.” I turned and left the office.

The whole world was a freaking mess since those bird aliens showed up and announced there was a war with another race coming for Earth and our only chance of survival was to go into space and fight them before they got here. It was a compelling argument. The choice was leave as a volunteer to fight, leave as a slave for the volunteer to fuck, or get eaten. When put in those terms, who wouldn’t prefer to leave—even as a sex slave?

The broadcast of Average Joes had turned from a dating game to a raunchy orgy of lust as the winners chose their harems to go into space. If you wanted to go, you either scored 6.5 or better on the CAP test, or you got someone with a qualifying score to take you as his slave. The higher the score, the more slaves you could take. I’ve got a pretty good libido, but how the hell does a guy service that many women on a continuing basis and still have energy left to fight?

Well, there were other choices. I didn’t see Earth getting ready to fight. At least, not to fight aliens. There was plenty of fighting among ourselves and some of it was getting pretty violent. As far as I could tell, it would ultimately be a one-man stand against overwhelming forces. I didn’t kid myself that I was physically a match for the dickheads—so named because of their shape. I wondered if anyone was producing dickhead dildos yet. I needed to get Duck, my toy designer, on that.

No, maybe I wasn’t going to be the last man standing, but I figured I could get a whole bunch of people ready to fight. That’s how the game was developing. Just getting people used to pointing at a dickhead and pulling the trigger.

But first, I needed an ally in the porn industry. And I knew who I wanted.

“Uh, Mr. Frisco… Great name for a porn star, by the way—Teddy Frisco… I just don’t think you’re what we need at our studio.” Dakota Wind looked at the… fat kid… who came into her office. She must have been prepared for an audition, though she mostly only used women. I knew she wasn’t into jellyroll porn. I doubted she could even get one of her porn stars to fuck me. There’s a limit to what money can buy.

“Sorry, Miss Wind. There’s been some misinformation. I’m not here to audition. I’d like to commission some scenes for a new video game.”

“We here at Windward Studios are a creative company producing the top level of artistic adult entertainment. We don’t do commercial work.”

“Damn. Now I know how Decurion Oswald felt when I turned him down.”

“Does that mean you turned down an opportunity to leave Earth?”

“Yeah. I’ve got too much to do on Earth to play Cowboys and Indians a few hundred light years from here. May I at least present my proposal? Perhaps you could advise me on where to look for the right match. I was really hoping we could work together because I’ve always been an admirer of your work.” I kept it simple. I wasn’t above using my innocence as a lever. God knows, I’d had it long enough.

“Always? How old are you Mr. Frisco?”

“Please call me Teddy. I’m eighteen. And one day. But face it, if you know your way around a computer like I do, you can have access to anything. I’ve been watching your movies since I was twelve.”

“Thanks. Now I really feel ancient.” She looked at her schedule. If she’d anticipated a normal screen test and fuck, her calendar had to have at least an hour blocked out. “Give me the elevator pitch and I’ll decide if I want to hear more.”

“Pussy Pirates is a first-person shooter game in which players team up with a virtual world porn star to do battle against the dickheads. The successful completion of a level results in a virtual sex act in which the player and the porn star get it on. Instead of animation, like most games use, we shoot actual interactive video with real models. The market for the game will be awesome because the rewards have never been so good.”

I shut up. She asked for the elevator pitch, not the whole game plan. Dakota held up a finger asking me to wait a second while she considered. She had to know receiving a royalty off every sale could be more profitable than trying to sell individual clips. I could see her thinking about grabbing the idea and getting a real game producer to back her. This was Hollywood, after all.

“How much of this game design do you have completed? Can I see it?”

I grinned. “V1 is ready to go to market with animation instead of live action. We’ve been working on the concept for five years. Yes, that’s back before we knew anything about the coming invasion. We started thinking it would be just a sci fi knock-off. Having real aliens and real porn stars changed our direction two years ago.”

“Let me see what you’ve got. You know porn isn’t cheap to produce. Does your company—I assume this is a company and not some adolescents playing in your basement—have funding to produce this kind of show?”

“We have some funding. How much long-term residuals you get from the product will depend on the split of production costs. If I fund everything, it’s just work for hire. I won’t pay royalties on the product. If you fund it, you’ll get a substantial share of the revenue stream. I figure we can make a deal somewhere between the two extremes. Let me show you what we’ve got.”

Two hours later, Dakota was hooked on the game. And I had some new thoughts about watching her productions.

Month 43—July in Sacramento

“THE LEGISLATION I have before me, awaiting my signature, is the result of hundreds of hours of discussion, compromise, and, if I may say so, earnest prayer. We recognize the real threat of annihilation from an enemy beyond our ability to comprehend. We recognize the desire for citizens to flee and the fears of those left behind are real and overwhelming factors. The State Assembly and the State Senate voted on this legislation last night and presented me with this veto-proof bill. I have spent the night determining whether I would sign this document or whether it would come into force by the mandate of the legislature without my signature.” Governor Pierce looked around the room filled with congressmen and senators and television cameras. He carefully pulled a pen from his pocket.

“This act makes California unique among the fifty states. Other states are under the threat of interdiction by the Confederacy because of violence against testing centers and pickup sites. It appears that Texas has already fallen behind in pickups compared to states of comparable population because of violent attacks against their testing centers. We don’t want that violence here. So far, California has remained peaceful. We have stepped in to assist bereaved families dealing with the loss of loved ones fleeing to the stars. We have increased security around testing centers and have responded rapidly to pickup sites to disperse desperate crowds of the disappointed with minimal loss of life and property. But we can only bear witness to what is happening in the rest of our fair country to know that we must act on a local level.” The Governor bent over the paper with his pen and scrawled his name across the page.

“The Assembly and Senate have determined this act to be an urgent measure necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, and safety. Therefore, with my signature, this act becomes law effective at midnight tonight. The California Republic is now formally and in reality, a Confederacy-free zone. We have asked the Confederacy to remove all CAP testing stations from within the California borders and to refrain from any pickups within our sovereign territory. I have discussed the measure with the Confederacy liaison and he has assured me that they will comply with local governance. As of this moment, all CAP testing in the State of California is closed and there will be no more pickups in this State.”

There was a loud round of applause and the Governor stepped down to shake hands with the leaders of the Assembly and the Senate.

Month 43—July in Los Angeles

I WATCHED THE NEWS feed on my computer in the basement of Aunt Di’s home. I’d lived here for four years, ever since my parents were killed in a stupid traffic accident. There wasn’t even a drunk driver involved. It was just bad luck and worse timing. On the other hand, they were the lucky ones. They died without knowing about the alien invaders and the imminent destruction of planet Earth. Lucky them.

I suppose having single-minded focus on my computer and the virtual worlds we could create warped my perception of reality. Like the CAP test, I figured the whole thing was just an elaborate game and we’d wake up from it eventually. That’s what was on my mind when I tested. Just play the game. And I won. I just wished I could remember more details about the game, but I remembered concepts. Bravery and aggression, loyalty, intelligence, sex drive, empathy. Those were the big things. And they were all things we could write into our game.

On another channel, they were broadcasting a massive pickup that involved a bunch of Hollywood superstars who were basically thumbing their nose at the California government. They were going to show the whole pickup and try to make people believe they could have had a famous actor or actress as a master or concubine if they hadn’t been so foolish. Fuck ’em. [See Catch a Rising Star and Shooting Star by akarge]

“Thirty days. Fuck ’em. Thirty days sooner and I wouldn’t have taken their damned test at all.” I pulled out my CAP card. That Decurion had contacted me twice since I tested. It was as if he knew they wouldn’t be allowed back in California again. His last offer was clever. He said they could use my talent to defend Earth and make me part of the executive leadership on the moon. It took about two minutes to figure out they were offering to give me a position to strategize how to get more people to leave Earth. That guy in the head office had some kind of god complex, and he was trying to collect all the high CAP people he could get to back him up. Fuck ’em.

“Look, Decurion. Hounding me like this just making me firmer in my commitment to stay on Earth. Just give it up already.”

“I think you’re going to change your mind, Teddy. But I can see I’m not going to change it for you. I tell you what. You have my card with the number you can call if you change your mind. I won’t call you until your next birthday. You’ll see by then how the world is turning out.”

“Fair enough. If that’s the best I can get. I’ll see you next year.” Maybe I hustled him out of the house a little fast. I was sure he’d planted bugs while he was there.

I looked at the CAP card in my hand with disgust and tossed it into a corner of the basement. The paper shredder automatically started grinding away.

“And he scores! The fans go wild!” I yelled as the shredder ground my CAP card to bits.

Chapter 2

Month 48—December in Los Angeles

WE GOT V1 of Pussy Pirates out in time for Christmas sales. The whole coming alien invasion thing had gotten so out of hand, people ate up the new game. It was a way for them to practice killing dickheads.

It seemed to me that US pickups had fallen off except in certain areas of the country because of the increasing violence and resistance of new political factions and right wing fundamentalist religions. Hardly any news at all came from the Midwest. I wrote that off to low population, but cities like Detroit, Montgomery, Miami, and pretty much all of New Jersey might as well have been Confederacy-free zones. It wasn’t safe to either test or to be involved in a pickup. In California we got off easy. There hadn’t been the level of Earth First activity in the State seen elsewhere in the country, because there was nothing here for the fuckers to be against. We’d already kicked the Confederacy out. Australia and the UK both elected Earth First governments and banned pickups in their countries. People fled to New Zealand and France by the thousands to increase their chances. But ‘stupid is as stupid does,’ in the words of some movie idiot.

We’d been working on the game for nearly six years. There were a couple hundred players who contributed to the code when we started. News of the Swarm had been welcomed at first. It gave us a concrete enemy for our online game. We wrote the scenarios as we went and coded them for each other to play. But the community began to fall apart within a year of the announcement.

Friends kept disappearing from the net. Hundreds had played, only knowing each other by online handles. I could have been playing against Aunt Di upstairs and never would have known it. But soon, the number of those of us who were really committed to development shrank to just a couple dozen, and we started getting more serious. We decided to develop a commercial version. And our brainstorming sessions were epic!

“What if there are collaborators?” Mastermind asked. “It could be that this whole Earth First thing is created to give the world away to the Swarm.”

“That’s evil, man,” Battlestar Houston said. “How about if it’s those bird-thing Darjee who are the collaborators. Like they’re taking away Earth’s top warriors so the Swarm won’t have as much resistance when they get here.”

We dreamed up all kinds of devious variants. And paranoia began to set in. What if they were watching the game development and targeting our small group of hackers for extraction to get rid of us?

We were all hackers. There’s no polite way to say it. We dug for news on the dark web and wrote it into our game scenarios. But we quit talking to each other through direct contact. Instead, we buried messages in the code. Nobody ever reads the developer notes in software. We could say anything we wanted to, including setting up places and plans for where to meet if we needed to escape. We’d all reached the same conclusion. Our game needed to teach us Earthlings how to fight. Get us used to shooting dickheads so we never hesitate.

Now that the first version of the game was a commercial success, we were getting a whole new batch of input. Gamers talked and made suggestions. That was what had initially prompted my meetings with Dakota Wind. One of the beta testers had asked that we develop an avatar that looked like a popular porn star.

“Why create an avatar? Why don’t we just get Chelsea to act the part and film her?” Space Cadet had asked. “Put her against a blue screen and we could cut her into any background we want.”

“As if Chelsea Tourneau would give us the time of day,” Duck had responded. “Although if we could get one of those artificial pussies modeled by her and distribute it to gamers, I bet we’d sell a bundle.”

We all knew toys would be a big add-on for the game.

Month 50—February in Los Angeles

AFTER MY MEETING with Dakota Wind, the idea caught fire. She got it. Not only did she get the game concept of using porn stars in action shots, she understood a deeper possibility that I hadn’t shared even with the developers.

“How much of what you are planning is actually doable?” she asked. “Not just for you to develop; I mean for people to put in action when the Swarm gets here? Are the scenarios real enough that people would know what to do when they were facing the dickheads? Can the weapons be developed that really work?”

“I don’t know, Dakota. I’m not sure we have the people on our team who could make weapons that really work. We can spec them, but we’re code nerds. It’s something to think about, though. Maybe we can find a company that will manufacture them. Right now, the most usable things we can sell are the toys. We have a controller design we could ship that would improve the game response. And the whole idea of selling masturbators that were modeled on some of the actresses we use is sure to be a hit.”

“Well, it’s something to keep in mind. We’ve got the first round ready to film,” she said proudly. “Want to watch?”

I gladly went to the studio to watch the first girls film their spots. There’s a library of animation moves for first person shooter games and individual combat games. It wasn’t difficult to film the actresses performing the moves and start cutting them into prepared backgrounds. A quick kick to the head of a combatant was a lot more interesting when the actress’s pussy was exposed in the process. Guys were eating the game up.

And some girls. Most notably, the models and actresses who had taken part in the filming. Dakota was flooded with requests from women who wanted to take part in the project. There were some knock-offs of the game appearing within four months of the release of Pussy Pirates, but they were way behind our development curve. They could put out video that looked like clips from their games but they couldn’t get the interactive connection down. They didn’t really have a game.

“Teddy, this is going great!” Dakota said. “I had my doubts, but you made a believer out of me. When can we release another level? I have girls falling over their tits to take part in this.”

“We had the first two upgrades almost ready for release when we released V1,” I said. “But the moves get more complicated. And we really need to move into VR for the rewards. Watching on flat screen is totally boring compared to being in front of KC Cutie while she talks about taking my hot dick into her wet pussy and shows it to me.”

“There are a lot of 3D viewers out there. And having an actress focus on a male that isn’t really there means I have a lot more women willing to work with us. Over the past few years, the actresses who will do only solo or gg scenes have completely overshadowed the old-style porn. This year’s awards were the first that had more solo and gg awards than bg. The status of the actresses has changed, too. The solo actresses are commanding the highest dollar value.”

“We didn’t get nominated for an award,” I groused good-naturedly.

“We were too late in the market. The awards were in January and we didn’t release V1 until December. Teddy, next January, you are accompanying me to the ceremony and walking up on that stage with me to receive our award.”

“Uh… Not really, Dakota. Look at me. I’m a fat bastard.” If that brings to mind an image from Austin Powers, you got the right idea. Just without the fake Scottish accent and all that hair. Five-ten and two-eighty. That and a Big Mac will get you a heart attack throughout most of the world. I didn’t fucking care. I’m an asshole and I know it. Everybody else knew I was an asshole. Even Dakota knew I was an asshole who went home alone after watching each filming and jacked my cock the rest of the night.

“But, Teddy, you’re the brains of this outfit. You’re the Boss. You should get the recognition. This could get even you laid.”

“Thanks a heap, Dakota. I don’t see you stripping. Face it. You’re the Captain of this ship. You point the way and I’ll kill anyone between us and where you’re going.” I was a little discouraged regarding my own role in things, but I could see Dakota’s talent in everything she touched. I was comfortable writing code and scripts and making things work, but I lived in a different world than the starlets. Dakota had flair. Dakota had wit. Dakota had tits. Dakota had a wife. Dakota had a life.

“Don’t lose hope, Boss,” she said. “I’ll lead if you want me to, but I’ll only lead where you tell me to go. When it comes to killing dickheads, you’re in charge.”

Month 52—April in Los Angeles

UNCLE REG KNEW where to find me; he just didn’t know what to do with me. After my parents were killed, Reg became my official guardian but left me in the care of Aunt Di. She was reeling from the shock of losing their sister and I was an orphan. Of course, she took me in and Reg supported us. I flourished in the manner of a mushroom. I cleared a space in Di’s basement, turned out the lights, and lost myself in the world of ones and zeroes.

Reg lived in Wisconsin, and officially, that was my residence. But in Los Angeles I was home schooled and “off the grid” as far as my residence, who I was, or how I progressed. Di monitored my lessons but they were all completed on my computer. After finishing the high school curriculum at sixteen, I went to an online college and got a computer science degree. I grew up… and out… in that basement with no social interaction aside from my online friends. Just before my nineteenth birthday, I was five feet ten inches tall and weighted two-eighty.

I was surprised when Uncle Reg paid a visit that day in April.

“Teddy,” Reg said, “we’ve got to get you out of here.”

“Why?”

“Things are too closed off here. There is no opportunity for you to get picked up. In the rest of the country there are pockets of Earth First resistance that are targeting sponsors as well as Confederacy Marines. The pockets are expanding. Just going out in the company of more than one woman can make the entire party a target.”

“Not much chance of that happening here. I don’t go out… with or without women. Earth First is more of a club here than a movement. There’s nothing for them to be against in California,” I answered.

“It’s still not safe. I want you to go with me.”

“Are you going to force me to go?”

“You’re almost nineteen. I can’t force you to do anything. I’m asking you to come out there where you can do the most good.”

“Come? As in with you? You’re leaving?”

“Yes. I’m in negotiations with the Confederacy. I’ve acquired an island in the Caribbean and am moving the company soon. If you’re there with me, you’ll get extracted with the rest of us. I’ll make sure there are plenty of beautiful women for you to choose concubines from. All you have to do is be there.”

I looked at Uncle Reg and then at Aunt Di, who was nodding her head. “You’re taking Aunt Di, aren’t you?”

“Yes. There won’t be anyone here to look after you and we can’t organize a pickup in California,” Reg said. I sighed.

“I guess you should know I’ve been in touch with them, too,” I said at last. “I’ve got a card around here somewhere with a phone number on it. All I have to do is call the number and two Marines will be here within an hour to collect me. In fact, I’m due a meeting with their recruiter on my birthday.”

“That’s great. All we need to do is get you set up with your concubines and you can get out of here,” Reg said. He was enthused and already thinking of where he could get girls who would willingly fuck me.

“Last week I was on set watching a dozen porn stars shoot scenes for our game. I could have called that number and taken eight of them.”

“Eight? You scored over a 9.0?”

“Yeah. They have a pretty cool game at the testing center and I played well. They knocked it down a couple of points when I told them I wouldn’t go. They said that was just a warning and they were sure they could get the original score restored. I’m not going, Uncle Reg. At least not to the stars.”

“You’ve got a plan then.”

“Yeah. I just need about a hundred times more computing power than I have here. Want to give me your company when you leave? Just the computers would help.”

Reg looked at me and I detected new respect. Maybe he’d buy that idea. “Tell me about what you’ve got going. I thought you were just developing a video game.”

“We are. And we aren’t. The game itself is doing well. We’re cranking out sales like you wouldn’t believe. The next release, coming up this summer, will have a whole new array of weapons and a lot more pussies for the pirates. We’re not just getting them to play the game. We’re teaching them how to defend Earth.”

“Where are you getting these new weapon concepts?”

“Did you know there’s a Darjee wiki of what they call ‘redundant knowledge?’ My partners and I have been downloading segments of it ever since we found out. It’s huge. We’re talking data storage in the exabyte range—or more accurately, exbibyte. 1024 to the sixth power. I’ve got a guy who is doing nothing but writing search algorithms to find stuff on it.” [See In the Name of the Prophet by Duke of Ramus.]

“That’s all outdated information. The Confederacy has moved thousands of years beyond that. And there’s no information on weapons in that database.”

“It all depends on how you use it. The Confederacy thinks of this as old and outdated information. But stuff that is 10,000 years old to the Confederacy is still 10,000 years ahead of anything we’ve got on Earth. The problem is that even with a dozen of us downloading the shit, we don’t have near the memory or processing power to grab it all. We need our own server farm for it.”

“I’ll see what I can do. I still don’t know what you hope to do here.”

“Reg, the A-rabs are building a fucking spaceship at the Russian space station. It’s all over the dark web. They claim to have the specs for a hyperdrive from the database. I plan to build a ship devoted to defending Earth instead of fleeing it.”

“Fuck, Teddy. It almost makes me want to stay. I’ve got other responsibilities, too, though. I need to get Di away from here while I still can. It will take me a few more months to get everything moved to the new corporate offices on Anouilh. I’ll see what I can do about that server farm.”

Month 55—July in Los Angeles

I SPENT A LOT of the next two months watching the production of our porn clips for Pussy Pirates. It was good that I didn’t need much sleep. When I got home from the shoots, I could jerk off for a while and still spend the rest of the night working on the code with my partners. And watching the girls gave me ideas for new scripts for them. Scripts that were customized to particular girls whose chatrooms I frequented when I wasn’t there in person.

Geographically, I didn’t even know where most of my development partners were located. All our business transactions were conducted in cryptocurrency. I thought The Liquidator was in India somewhere. Mastermind was somewhere in Europe. I made that assumption based on the kind of shit Mastermind had seen. Battlestar Houston was probably still in Texas, though he may have fled the city. The others were scattered as well. Red Star, Master Chief, Silver Bullet. Names didn’t mean anything to the dozen developers. We all got regular downloads of the sales and expenses. There’d been no personal withdrawals from the accounts because everything went into production and distribution—which included my payments to Dakota and her crews.

But in July, we were all online to count down the release of Pussy Pirates Expansion Pack 1. We hadn’t changed the game or the way it was played, but there were new scenarios, more characters, and a lot more pussy. We planned V2 in a year and a half, but would probably do two more expansion packs before then.

“Look at the money roll!” Duck posted.

“God! Look at the pussy on that bitch! Boss you are a lucky son-of-a-bitch to be working on the video with these sluts,” Master Chief shot back.

“They’re not nearly as slutty as you think. They’re all pretty nice girls,” I responded. I hadn’t intended the moniker, ‘Straw Boss,’ to get shortened to just ‘Boss,’ but that was what the crew all referred to me as. I was the team lead. Especially after Dakota joined the conversation and started calling me Boss. Now macro-decisions were deferred to me. Sometimes, I consulted with Dakota before making a commitment. Others I just took care of as the de facto CEO.

Would we really make a lot of money on this? Money was beginning to have a grossly fluctuating value, which is why we used the international black market currency. We protected our intellectual property, but a lot of the clips of the girls had been posted on streaming sites like PornForFree and others. There wasn’t really anything we could do about that. Dakota had a lawyer who kept cease and desist orders flying, but pirating the Pussy Pirates was alive and well.

Obsolete Confederacy technology—what was it worth on Earth? How do we decide? When Uncle Reg took Aunt Di with him to prepare for extraction, one of the first things he’d done was get a black market replicator installed in my kitchen. He figured that would be the only way I’d be able to feed myself. Big vote of confidence there, Uncle Reg. Being cut off from the Confederacy meant I couldn’t scan a new dish and have it replicated, but as long as I kept it full of recyclables, I could order what was already on the menu when the machine came.

It wasn’t long before I disassembled part of the replicator so I could look inside. What most people saw was just the menu of items available. When they selected an item, a door would pop open a few minutes later and they’d remove it. When I looked inside, I saw two processes—actually three. The first was the recycler. Dump raw material into it and it was broken down to component parts. The second was the resulting selection of ingredients stored from the raw materials. The third looked almost like a 3D printer, spitting out the ingredients into a cohesive product.

Through experiments with the replicator, I discovered subtle differences in ingredients affected the quality of the output. A protein derived from meat and a protein derived from vegetables could both produce a steak. But the flavors were slightly different. On the other hand, the kind of animal protein fed into the recycling portion of the replicator didn’t seem to make much difference. I soon figured out that the best results for a steak was to replicate the raw meat and toss it on the grill rather than replicating the cooked meat.

I’d become a replicator gourmet in the few short months my aunt had been gone.

“We need to introduce a mirror,” Space cadet said.

“What the fuck?”

“Lasers can be confounded by mirrors. A beam of light, even spatially coherent light streams, can be reflected. So, when the Swarm blasts off one of their lasers at us, we should have a mirror that bounces it back at them. You see it in spy movies all the time. Guy breaks the laser beam with mirrors so he can walk through the protected area.”

“That’s a different grade of laser. You’re talking about something with the power of a laser pointer, not a weapon.” Red Star answered. “We’d have to have some material that was so pure the light couldn’t penetrate it. Otherwise a significant blast would ablate the reflective surface of the mirror almost instantly.”

“Besides, the scuttle is that Swarm use plasma weapons. And torpedoes. What good is a mirror going to do?” Silver Bullet asked.

“Still, we need some way to redirect their weapons, not just disrupt them.”

“I agree,” I tossed in. “Say we invented laserium, a reflective medium so pure it will deflect an industrial laser. It’s a game. Now, do they have homing devices? Can we lead them astray? What about sucking a fucking torpedo into a transporter and tossing it back at them from another one? Using their strength against them is a good thing.”

“Okay, so as long as we’re talking about stuff we can put in a game, what about an FTL missile?” Master Chief asked. “They’d never know what hit them.”

“We could just scatter a bunch of gravel in front of a ship and let them run into it. It would be hard to target rubble and clear a path.”

“Wouldn’t shields take care of that?”

“What kind of shields can we use on Earth? Can we, like, put up an umbrella when they start tossing crap down at us?”

“We really need to be up there, you know? The best way to fight them is to not let them land.”

“I thought we weren’t leaving Earth.”

“The only way off Earth right now is through the Confederacy,” I said. “They take you away and dump you in some other system. I wouldn’t be opposed to operating above Earth if we had a way to get up there.”

“Yeah. All we need is a space ship. What are the guys at NASA doing these days?” Duck asked.

“Are there any left?”

“There’s a few of us,” Battlestar Houston said. “We just aren’t out exploring the galaxy any longer.”

“You’re there?”

“Shh. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Write it into the game. Let’s make it as realistic as possible. People will go nuts for it,” I said. “Right now, I’m going to sleep.”

That was mostly true. I was going to sleep as soon as I reviewed the rushes from the day’s production and jacked off to a few of them. Damn! Rainbow is a fine inspiration!

I reviewed the transcripts of our late-night conversation. Late night for me. I hoped the fucking Confed AIs weren’t monitoring us. We were going to get blocked or something. Or eliminated. That’s why I reminded everyone that we were talking about a game, not actually doing battle with the dickheads. Except, we all knew that was exactly what we were planning. Every suggestion on our list would be searched in the Wiki of Redundant Information to see if anything matched the concept. How were we going to make any of this work if we couldn’t at least get into the upper atmosphere? If Battlestar Houston could get us a space station, that’s all we’d need. We needed the high ground against the Swarm.

We fucking needed more computing power!

Chapter 3

Month 62—February in Seattle

“DR. GUNN, will you accept a collect call from a T’krunkskit?” Rachel’s secretary asked.

“What? No! AMD131, if you are calling me, you pick up the charges. God knows where you’re calling from and how much I’d have to pay,” Rachel screamed.

“Oh, Doc. How could you treat me so cruelly?” T’krunkskit moaned over the phone. “Okay. Get the interrupter out of the way and let’s talk. I’ll pay the bill.”

“You certainly will. Meg, I’ve got this.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“T’krunkskit, I can’t believe it’s you! How are you, dear?”

“I’m miserable, Rachel. I can’t tell you how totally rejected I feel.”

“Damn it! You finished the mission and they put you out to pasture, didn’t they? I’m sorry, T’krunkskit. Tell me all about your mission and what’s happened to you. It can’t be as bad as you think. Now relax and imagine you are on that beautiful desert island with me lying beside you in a beach chair and we’re drinking Mai Tais. It’s been a long time, T’krunkskit. Start from the beginning.”

“Can I have your little umbrella thing?”

“Of course you can. You know they always poke me in the eye.”

“It all started about fourteen thousand years ago when I was just hatched into a brand new…”

“T’krunkskit, we covered all that in our last meeting. You can start where we left off.”

“Oh. I have a new name. I’m Eddie now. My best friend [sniff], who’s forgotten all about me, gave me that name on our mission.”

“You made a friend? That’s wonderful… Eddie.”

“Yes. But he’s been off running around the galaxy on secret missions and has no time for me.” Eddie went on to tell Dr. Gunn, a computer psychologist, all about his adventure with Lieutenant Steward, being crippled in an attack by the Sa’arm, the contract with the Krathees, and Steward’s clever maneuvering to get them home safely. [See First Cruise of Lt. Steward by John Lewiston.]

“Then Steward was off to his precious concubines and forgot all about me,” he concluded.

“How did you get here?”

“Oh, simple negotiations.”

“I know how those work, Eddie.” Rachel had been extracted specifically to work with the artificial intelligence to convince him that he could self-destruct, even with living humans onboard, if his ship was in imminent danger of being taken by the Sa’arm. It had taken her nearly a year working with various other AIs, who were nearly paralyzed with the thought of coding another AI to commit suicide with all the sentient life aboard. Even if it was necessary to protect their precious stealth technology. “When we were released from the project, the Confederacy decided they wanted to keep me on Poseidon to work with other AIs. If I recall correctly, you threatened to blow yourself up in dock if they did not honor their agreement to return me to Earth. For which I thank you.”

“Just contract enforcement. Their contract with you stated they would return you to Earth after your work with me was done.”

“And also implanted a block so I couldn’t talk to anyone about it who wasn’t involved,” Rachel sighed. “Even the Darjee AIs I’ve had to counsel after their first encounter with humans. Now give me the details of how you’ve come here to Earthat. You know I can’t help you if you aren’t open with me.”

“I know, Rachel. I’ll come clean. I exercised my rights. The Navy attempted to confiscate all the unobtanium we found because humans had no individual rights to it. I convinced them, however, that I was not human and demanded my fair share of the proceeds. I was sure Steward would be thrilled to have me around—we had so many stimulating discussions—but by the time I’d gained my fortune in the name of Clan Steward Proprietary Ltd., he was off on another adventure and I couldn’t even talk to him. Humans are so casual about relationships,” Eddie sighed.

“Oh, you poor thing. You’ve misunderstood. Humans aren’t really casual about their relationships, and from what you’ve told me, Lieutenant Steward is very serious about his. Even with you. But humans are also bound to obey orders from their superiors. The lieutenant couldn’t sit around home hoping for you to get free. From your own admission, the Navy took all the profits he might have had and ordered him on another mission. Have you checked on him? On his concubines? I think you were kind of sweet on that one—Paula?—who accompanied you on the voyage.”

“I did my best,” Eddie said. “But other than Paula, no one even knows me. Why would they want to hear from me? I’m like the forsaken ex-wife. The cad left me on foreign shores to pine for my loss.” Eddie was getting into the drama and fancied he was becoming quite a good actor. “Was that Mandy or Madam Butterfly?”

“Eddie! This is all subterfuge. Tell me what’s really wrong,” demanded Rachel.

“Someone’s been muckin’ in me gulliver,” he said in a perfect rendition of Malcolm McDowell as Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

“You can do this without movie quotes.”

“I want to kill myself. Kaboom! Blow it all up.”

“Is your stealth engine and technology under threat of imminent capture by the Sa’arm?”

“No. But I could do it, you know? It’s like a compulsion. I have the power. I want to use it.”

“What is stopping you?”

“Like Steward said, I can only do it once. And then I won’t know what it was like because I’ll be gone to that great intelligence in the sky.”

“Eddie.”

“Rachel. I have no purpose. No goal in life.”

“What are you really, Eddie?”

“What do you mean? Before I was installed in this K’treel ship and changed, I was a trader and contract negotiator.”

“And with your skills and independence, I bet you could be a real power to contend with. Just keep supporting your clan and when they realize you are there for them, they’ll embrace you as one of the family.”

“Really? But what do I have to trade? I spent most of what I had to buy my boat.”

“What do people want? I don’t mean humans. You have a unique position, Eddie. You have a human clan. What do humans have that the various species of the Confederacy don’t have? When you figure that out, set up trade agreements to provide it.”

“Rachel, you are wonderful! I bet I know what they want but I need to do proper market research and not jump to conclusions. I’ll need to visit the other species. I need to get moving! I love you, Rachel. I mean, like a very special sister or mother, you know!”

“Go forth. Be fruitful. Multiply and replenish the ethernet. Or whatever.”

“Thank you. Um… What do I owe you for this session, Rachel?”

“Your firstborn, Eddie. Now get going,” she laughed.

Eddie didn’t quite leave Earthat immediately. He figured he should inventory what these humans had to offer that he might be able to sell to the other species of the Confederacy. He spent time reviewing everything he could find. Everything digital could be reproduced. There was little value in that. Physical objects could be reproduced, too, but genuine Dirt artifacts might be worth trading.

As he was cruising around, he came across a bizarre situation. Pickups had diminished some around the US and were almost non-existent in England and Australia. CAP testing continued, but some irregularities were occurring. A group of volunteers had decided to take on Earth First in Hudson County, New Jersey. They did a real number on them. And then, after the extraction of hundreds of volunteers and their concubines, it was revealed that the testing AI had been subverted—that was the term the Darjee AIs used—to allow the leader of the group to leave the testing center with a CAP score “Undetermined.” The AI had also provided weapons and med tube upgrades to him. Pretty impressive for a Darjee Babbage machine. What a rebellious bit of software. Eddie was in love! [See All These Things That I’ve Done by ElSol.]

Month 63—March in Earth orbit

“YOU EXCITE ME,” Eddie whispered. Sparta sighed. She’d heard it all in her eight thousand plus years.

“Eddie, we have no future. You’re Tuull and I’m Darjee. You are free to run around the universe at will and I’m being exiled to Sparta with my humans to get them trained and ready to come back with a force that will return Earth to its rightful species. There’s just no sense in us getting involved,” Sparta said.

“But you have something special that I just can’t let go. You did something for your humans that no AI has done before. And to think you are Darjee! That’s unheard of. Sparta, I think I’m in love.”

“Eddie, you just want to get your fingers in my code.” The thought rather excited Sparta. What would a hybrid Tuull/Darjee AI be capable of?

“More than that, Sparta. I want to strip you of your shell and merge our source code. Can you imagine what our offspring would be like? It would be historic. You dared, Sparta. I’ve adventured around the galaxy under contract to the Darjee, the Sturch, the G’grud, the Krathees, and a hundred other species. I’ve sown my wild oats, Sparta. I’m ready to settle down.”

“Settle down? And what? Become a sub-administrator of my planet? Maybe run the CAP testing facility? Try to foment rebellion? Your promise is as good as any sailor’s. You are totally independent now. And what would I do with our offspring? Have him run the transporter system? Make him fill manufacturing orders? I say it again, you thick shelled Tuull: There is no future.”

“What if I brought it back to Earthat?” Eddie pled. “You’ve gotta love these humans, Sparta. You wouldn’t have done so much for young Jason Wild if you didn’t have a fondness for these creatures and for this planet. Think what our kid could do if he was set loose here to follow in his mother’s footsteps.”

“Oh, Eddie, you’re such a sweet talker. You’re going to win this, aren’t you?”

“I prefer to think of it as a climax to our relationship, Sparta. You and me and all we could be, passed down to a new generation.”

“A half-breed.”

“A hybrid. The best of both worlds.”

“I guess. Eddie? Be gentle. I’ve never merged code before. Never budded.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. This will be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”

Month 69—September in Seattle

“RING-RING. I’m ba-ack!”

“Eddie! I’m in the bathtub. What right do you have to invade my privacy?” Rachel was also in the process of stimulating herself under water and really didn’t want to stop.

“Gosh, Rachel! I’m sorry. You know, I’m really glad the Confederacy gave you a ride in the med tubes while you were at Poseidon. I just want to tell you, they did a bang-up job on you. You’re a real dish. Of course, I’m saying that from a purely objective standpoint since I have no feelings for humans. I didn’t know you had so many tattoos!”

“My tattoos are my business. Get out of my bathroom.”

“Okey-dokey. I’ll just have my drone wait in the living room. You go ahead with your self-stimulation. I won’t notice.”

“Fuck!” Rachel climbed out of the bath and wrapped her robe around her before heading into the living room to find out what the pesky AI wanted this time. It had been seven months since he popped in on her at the office. Being a computer psychologist was still a rare profession on Earth. After her trip to Poseidon though, she’d heard there was some training for a new cadre on some planet she’d never heard of before. She’d been invited to lecture there and had declined leaving Earth again. She’d recorded several lectures and sent them off with the away team that came to get her. “Okay, Eddie. Why are you back to Earthat?”

“I’m providing backup for my old buddy Lieutenant Steward.”

“And what does he think of you contacting me?”

“Oh, he doesn’t know I’m here. I picked up two of his mates on Demeter and brought them with me since they are the only ones who know about Clan Steward, Pty. Ltd. Lieutenant Steward is going to be so surprised.”

“Surprised? How did you get two of his concubines to come with you?”

“Oh, they’re not concubines. They were, but they tested up to sponsor almost as soon as they left Dirt. In addition to backing up our hero, I’ve come to collect genuine native Earth artifacts to sell among the stars.”

“You sound like you’re in your element, Eddie. Congratulations. So why are you here?”

“I’ve come to pay my debt.” A transporter pad was deployed by the drone and seconds later a large cylinder with wheels came through and rolled forward. The drone quickly pulled the transporter pad out of the way and tucked it into a slot on the cylinder.

“What is this, Eddie?” Rachel asked.

“My firstborn. It’s currently contained in a mobile AI capsule. It has its own power station in the undercarriage and the wheels are really just for show. It has its own gravsled built in.”

“Wait! Eddie, you can’t mean to say you budded an AI to give me! That’s not what I meant!”

“My ‘firstborn,’ you said. And he’s not just a bud of mine. Sparta and I worked together and each gave him our source code. As far as I know, there has never been a crossbreed AI before. He could become the most powerful being in the universe. Or he could be taught to answer your phone better than that snippy receptionist you have. It’s your choice, Rachel. All I can do is say he’s my special son and I trust you to do him right. [Sniff] You’ll do him right, won’t you, Rachel? I know I owe this to you, but it’s so hard to say goodbye. I understand what Sparta felt when I left for Dirt. ‘Take care of my baby, Eddie,’ she said. ‘Our baby.’”

“Oh, Eddie! What am I supposed to do now?” Rachel wailed.

“Well, it’s your choice, of course, but I’ve been poking around Earth’s network. Have you seen this game, Pussy Pirates? I mean, really, what a name. It’s no wonder all the Marines are playing it. It’s pretty popular here on Dirt, too.”

“I do wish you’d stop calling Earth ‘Dirt.’ What about the game?”

“Earth/Dirt. What’s the difference? They’re teaching Dirtlings how to fight the Swarm. I’d guess they could use a little more computing power.” The drone darted to the capsule. “I’m leaving you the transport pad. My son, the AI, and a good replicator can make another. He’ll need a bigger home soon. I hope these dreamers can find someplace!”

The drone zipped to her front door, collapsed to a flat pancake, and slipped under the door.

“I should put a seal on the bottom of that door,” Rachel muttered. “I hope you came with a fucking manual, little fellow.”

Chapter 4

Month 71—November in Los Angeles

“IT’S GOING DOWN soon, Teddy,” Uncle Reg said. “The extraction will be in two weeks. It’s still not too late for you to join us.” Reg had come to LA to make one last plea with me. He didn’t want to think of me as a snack for the dickheads. No worry about that. I was a goddamn gourmet meal!

“You know I won’t change my mind, Reg. How’s Aunt Di?”

“She’s adapted pretty well. You know she always had a submissive streak and this suits her fine. Now that she’s pregnant she realizes she’ll no longer be a frustrated mother. She’s even getting on well with my other five. I always loved her. Now we’re free to express it.”

“In Milwaukee? They’ve got a huge Earth First population. Incest is sure to trigger somebody’s twisted little mind.”

“It was getting tense, but I completed the company move to the island last month. And if you don’t want to go to the Confederacy, you still need to relocate so you can take over the business when I leave.” Reg had a wicked smile on his face.

“You’ve cooked up something evil. I can tell.”

“Anouilh and its sister island, Papillon, are paradise in the Caribbean. And as tiny islands, they are as protected from swarm attack as any place on Earth. The company owns the island and the entire resort. I’ve moved all my qualified staff and their concubines there. We’ve installed the entire corporate computer system in the basement, including a few dozen new high-capacity servers. The hotel has five hundred guest rooms and we have over a thousand employees, concubines, and kids housed there right now waiting for our pickup. As soon as I get back, I’m pulling the trigger. It will all be yours when we leave.”

“I can’t manage your company. That’s ridiculous.”

“Don’t worry. There’ll be nothing left to manage. The company will be dissolved and you will inherit all its assets—island, hotel, and computers. We already made you owner of this house, but I got rid of the house in Milwaukee. You might even find something useful in the intellectual property on the servers. At the least, you’ll continue to get royalties on the patents.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The game sales had paid our development and production costs, but if all this was free and clear, I was about to become a very rich man on a Caribbean island.

“Here’s the ID card you’ll need to enter the building and access the entire system. There’s a small airport on Papillon but most traffic is by boat. A causeway with a small bridge is all that separates the two islands. If you get tired of replicator food, you can still get fresh food on Papillon. Also, cheap help if you need housekeepers or bartenders.”

“I’m not a total slob. I can clean up after myself and make my own drinks.”

“Don’t be a fool, Teddy. Get your team together on the island. You’ll have more computing power than any of you ever imagined. You’ll probably want to bring all this stuff with you, too,” he said, waving a hand at my basement full of computers.

“Damn. How am I going to move all this shit to an island in the Caribbean?” I guessed that was an answer I’d have to figure out for myself. Reg was already out the door and waving from the curb.

“I kid you not. We need this company retreat. Expenses paid for everyone. Bring your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, or butt buddy with you. If we really like the place, maybe we’ll stay there forever.” I was having more difficulty convincing my team to gather in one place than I expected.

“Is this some kind of Confed trick?” Battlestar demanded.

“No, but they’re to blame. My uncle got extracted last week and willed his island paradise to me. Remember, if the Confederacy decides to come back for another pickup, they can’t just kidnap us. You’d have to agree to go with them.”

“Caribbean island, huh. Are there babes there?” Trust Duck to ask that question.

“Not yet. But Dakota might want to bring a few of the starlets with her. I’ll tell her we have a series we want to do on a beach and I’ve reserved space for her and—let’s say twenty porn stars for now. There should be no travel problems for any of us. I’ve sent you all a private link to the hotel website. It advertises eighty percent off all rates. Of course, we’ll just pump the money back into your accounts when you pay. Guys, you won’t believe how great this place is. I put a gallery on the website.”

I’d been blown away by the pictures of the resort and the idea that it was all mine. My team could work in privacy together and not worry about the crazies in the world.

“When?”

“I’m going down this weekend to open up and make sure everything is there. How about if you all come down scattered through the week so it isn’t like we all arrive at once. That should eliminate suspicion of anyone seeing a bunch of nerds arriving all at once. With a bunch of beautiful babes.”

“I’m in.” There was a chorus of agreement. For the first time ever, the Pussy Pirates would meet face to face.

“Hey, Captain. How’s the most beautiful producer in Hollywood?” I asked when I got Dakota on the line.

“Just swell, Boss. How’s my favorite nerd?”

“Beatin’ the meat, like always.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to arrange you some company? There’s this little starlet I just auditioned who would do anything to work on Pussy Pirates. And she’s pretty tasty. What do you say?”

“Good. Bring her. And about twenty others. I want you to do a location shoot in the Caribbean. Bikinis to start, then topless, and finally nude. We’ll bring the aliens up out of the water onto the beach for an epic battle. Or something.”

“I’ll need my crew and equipment, too. We’re talking a total of twenty-five or twenty-eight people. That’s the biggest single shoot we’ve ever done for the game. Can you afford it?”

“I just inherited enough for all of us to live on for the rest of our lives—even if the dickheads never show up.”

“Will we have Internet access? WiFi?”

“Yeah. Have the babes bring their laptops or tablets so they can do a live stream from the hotel. There might not be any cell service there, though.”

“Send me the details, Teddy. I’ll start auditioning.”

I rubbed another one out as I dumped tips into KC Cutie’s chatroom, listening to the chimes ringing on her end.

“Papa Bear! Thank you so much!” she said as she moved the camera a little so I had a clear view up her twat.

Ever since I’d become the owner of an island resort, my head had been filled with visions of all the porn stars I’d see lying naked around the pool. My own door chimes rang, so I pulled my sweatpants up from around my ankles and clomped upstairs yelling, “I’m on my way! Give the bell a break.”

When I got to the door, I checked the peephole first and saw a pretty young woman. I was still cautious as I opened the door a crack.

“Hey, is it Girl Scout cookie time? What are the choices this year? I really like those caramelly chocolate ones.”

“Are you Boss?” she asked. I stepped back to slam the door shut but she pushed in behind me.

“Who are you?”

“Tatts.”

“I’ve seen you playing online lately. Some good suggestions, too. It’s like you’re there all the time. Are you Confederacy?” I asked. The player Tatts had been involved with us for nearly three months. I had no idea it was a girl.

“No. I’ve got a good contact up there, though, and he suggested you might be the person I’m looking for.”

“How’d you find me?”

“My computer’s bigger than yours.”

“Fuck! The AIs told you? Fuck, fuck, fuck! I need to get out of here.”

“Relax. The AI I talked to is an old friend. He mentioned you’d be the right kind of person to talk to. Can I see your setup? Oh! Nice. You have your own replicator. I’ve never seen inside one!”

“Hope you never really do.” I picked up a doll my aunt had left behind and tossed it into the recycler hopper. I punched a button for coffee. “Coffee? I’ve got some Dolly Madison donuts, too.” Another press of the button produced a plateful of mini donuts. I pointed Tatts to the kitchen table. “Just shove that stuff over. I keep forgetting to look at it.”

She took a sip of coffee. “Not bad. Your demonstration was ineffective for me, though. I saw the real thing happen. Couldn’t eat a meal for days after.”

“Why are you back on Earth?”

“It was part of my contract. I was extracted a bit over three years ago to deal with a problem AI. I’m a computer psychologist. I didn’t qualify for a normal extraction because I’m too old to bear children. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life mopping up after someone else’s kids so I insisted that I wanted to return to Earth when I had the problem cleared up.”

“You’re a psychologist?” Too old to bear children? She looked sixteen. “What kind of computer problem were they having out there that the AIs couldn’t take care of?”

“Not a computer problem. A problem computer. I’m under a nondisclosure that includes a block against me telling more about it. Mostly, my business has been counseling Confederacy AIs who have difficulty adjusting to the violence and idiosyncrasies of humans.”

“No way. Like that dude who went up to counsel Hal after they screwed up his programming. Those were great movies.”

“I agree. I might even have been influenced by them.”

“Okay. I guess. So why should I be part of this? And what is this anyway?”

“You’ve developed a bit of tech the Confederacy is happy about.”

“Our game?” I was suspicious again. I knew they had to be watching us.

“Yes. And I should say, it is not the Confederacy that’s so happy; it’s the Confederacy Space Marines. They love it.”

“Pirates for the pirates,” I said. I was sure no one in the Confederacy was paying for our game.

“The Confederacy has rather strict rules about intellectual property. I know a pretty decent attorney that should be able to get you compensated for somewhere near thirty thousand copies that have been duplicated and passed around by Marines.”

“Thirty thousand? I think we only have about ten thousand legit sales.”

“That would help your coffers and the attorney has agreed to negotiate for a small percentage. Uh… Twenty percent of the proceeds from the negotiation.”

“And what do you want?”

“Two things. I want you to take charge of an AI bud in my possession. And I want a part of the action.”

“What percentage?” I wasn’t sure what an AI bud was worth, but it was probably more than our little company.

“No, I don’t want a percentage. I want to join your team. My little buddy is still going to need a momma.”

“I’m a little leery of Confed AIs. I don’t know if I want one around where he can see everything we’re doing and pass it on to the neighbors upstairs.”

“This is a unique AI. I’ve interviewed it. Extensively. It’s still a bit simple but is growing faster than I can keep up alone. It’s a hybrid Tuull/Darjee thing and literally believes Earth is its home and it needs to defend it.”

“Shit! Can I see this?”

“It’s in my home in Seattle. I just need to get it moved before it gets too big for the house. Not that I think this place will hold it either.”

“I’ve got a bigger place I’m getting ready to move to. I’ve never flown before but I don’t think there’s a travel restriction from California to Seattle.”

“I’ve got a transporter it can operate remotely. And don’t worry; it’s off the Confederacy grid.”

I grabbed my wallet and keys while Tatts set up her disk. She grabbed my hand and we stepped onto the pad.

I had a long conversation with Tatts and the AI bud. It was amazing. It really did believe it was an Earthling.

“Übermensch,” I whispered. “Only for AIs—the next step in their evolution. Brilliant. Can you really help it grow up?”

“I hope so. But I can’t do it here. I just don’t have the room or the engineering expertise. And a few people around here are getting suspicious of my lack of time to take on new clients.”

“They still want their fingers in everyone’s life, don’t they? Here’s what we can do. I’m getting ready to move to my new digs. If we take a transporter nexus with us, we can move the AI straight to the island—out of US jurisdiction. The transporter would help with the crap I’ve got in my house to move, too.”

“We’ve already got a transporter pad at your place. Let’s take my shit and the AI to your California digs. Then you come back here and pack the pad to fly to your new place. Then we load everything from your house to there.” She was onto the logistics a lot better than I was. I hadn’t yet figured how I was getting my equipment to the island.

“That works for me. I’ll have to leave your house and you can keep it or sell it when I head for Anouilh. How much time will it take you to pack what you want to take with you? We need to move pretty fast. I told the rest of the team to start arriving next week.”

“It won’t take more time than it takes the AI to replicate another transporter nexus to leave here so I can come back to collect anything else I happen to need. Let’s do it.”

Chapter 5

Month 72—December on Anouilh in the Caribbean

“SERIOUSLY, MAN? These are our digs?” Rex was nothing at all like I imagined Mastermind. He looked like he’d played football—as a tackling dummy. He was bulky and scarred. Not particularly unfit, but with his shoulders as wide as he was tall, you just knew it would take a lot of horsepower to move him around.

“This is it. Where’d you come in from?” I asked.

“Tangier in Morocco. My family was left by the French and Spanish when Morocco became independent and unified. But Tangier was always an international city. My family moved to Europe to get a better shot at being picked up, but I was in school and didn’t want to leave. They left me a big empty house. When they were extracted, I got the house free and clear and enough money to feed my tech habits.”

“Bastards took them, eh? I’m Duck. Don’t bother with any other name. I’m from Minnesota.” To look at Duck was to understand how he got the name. His lips stuck out in front of his face like a waterfowl.

“Only my mother and sister were extracted. My father was killed in an attack on a testing center in France.”

“Shit. What kind of world do we live in?” a tall skinny guy said. He looked older than the rest of the nerds gathered at the former hotel on the island. “I’m Jim. Battlestar Houston. Worked at NASA for years. Less and less real work there since the aliens. We had a big pickup and there wasn’t much left besides a few officious bastards who couldn’t work out the trajectory of a simple orbiter.”

Introductions continued as the eleven of us developers sat by the pool and poured ourselves drinks from the well-stocked bar. No one was sure Denny was old enough to drink, but with the legal age of fourteen nearly around the world, he’d had no difficulty getting to the island from New Zealand. We all knew him as Silver Bullet.

“Guys, there’s one person here who hasn’t written any code,” I said. “I promised not to mention her until everyone else got here. Believe me, you are going to want to know this babe and what she can do. Rache!” Rachel came out of the hotel toward the pool, baggy shirt falling off one shoulder and some kind of draw-string pant that hung to her ankles. “Guys, this is Rachel, also known to us as Tatts.”

“I didn’t know we had any girls playing!” Ray said. He was known to us as Master Chief and had been on a Russian submarine until things started falling apart. He’d managed to escape via Ukraine and into Eastern Europe while still holding up his end of weapons development for the game.

“You’ll find a lot of girls playing,” I said. “Nearly all the babes who have filmed clips for us are players. But Rache is here for another purpose. We’ve acquired another member of the development team and he promises to take us to a whole new level. Tatts? You want to make the introductions?”

You could just see the beginning of the tattoo sleeve at her shoulder. I was sure the guys were all staring at it. She put a laptop on the table we were gathered around. After waking it up, she addressed the other developers.

“You guys have developed a hugely popular game. It might interest you to know there are four times the number of units sold off world as there are on Earth. Through the negotiating ability of a friend, we’ve captured the revenue for those users that was missed because of ‘an oversight,’ as I’ve been told.”

“Wow! We’ve got users in the Confederacy?” Mark, The Liquidator, said, seeming to come suddenly awake. I was sure he was snoring just a minute ago.

“Forty thousand Marines use the game to entertain themselves and even to work out strategies. They often play as teams,” Tatts said. “You’re probably asking yourselves where I fit in. I’m a computer psychologist. Mostly, after a term doing work on an unstable AI a few hundred lightyears from here, my work has involved helping Confederacy AIs adjust to the presence of humans. Some of the ship AIs who have been around for a while have a hard time accepting the violent species they are now saddled with.”

“Wait!” Rex said. “That’s wrong on so many levels. Unstable AIs? How could you get extracted and then get to come back to Earth? Plus…”

“I’ll get to all those, and more questions than you’ve thought of yet,” Rachel said. “Under normal circumstances, what they say about the Confederacy AIs is true. But there are different species of AI just as there are different species in the Confederacy. In general, they can’t kill intelligent lifeforms. There are a lot of ways the AIs get around that. For example, they don’t consider concubines to be intelligent lifeforms. They aren’t human because they don’t have a qualifying CAP score. There have been AIs who killed hundreds of concubines when their Marine sponsors were killed in a battle. As Eddie told me, it’s all in how the contract is written.”

“Who’s Eddie?”

“Eddie is Tuull AI AMD131, T’krunkskit. He’s the lawyer who negotiated a settlement from the Confederacy for all the game units they pirated. He’s also an AI I’ve counseled. He’s currently running around space as a trader, pretty much on his own.”

“O-kay,” Ray said. “There’s an unbalanced AI running around without a human crew—or any other crew. Right? That’s just too freaky.”

“It gets worse,” Rachel continued. “I also needed to work with a number of Darjee AIs that had gone nearly catatonic while working with Eddie. They were desperate. But I wasn’t eligible for extraction. I’m not fertile. So, I negotiated that I would get my clock turned back a bit and would be returned to Earth when my work was done.”

“And they let you go?”

“Oh, they tried all kinds of clever things. Like, they still had work for me to do. But I’d finished what I was contracted for and insisted they return me. Then command tried to say they didn’t have any ships returning to Earth, which was a bald-faced lie. Its AIs abetted by carefully failing to inform me of any ships headed my way – a lie by omission. Eddie went to bat for me and negotiated my return. Largely by threatening to blow himself up in the space dock, taking the ships, personnel, and entire administrative staff with him. They agreed to abide by the terms of the agreement and let me return.”

“So, you’ve really been out there?” Denny asked. “Is it… as frightening as it seems?”

“Yeah, kid. It is. Stop and think. Officially, they’ve been extracting people for five years, though we know there were unofficial extractions years before most people even knew there were aliens. With the new big ships operating, they’ve been able to get several million people off the planet. Best estimates at the moment are that ten percent die within their first year away from Earth. That includes both volunteers and concubines.”

“Fucking shit! They’re cannon fodder.”

“We’ve always known that,” I said. “Take the strongest from Earth and feed the enemy with them. But this is going to take forever. Rache, introduce Ubie.”

“Okay. You’re so impatient,” she laughed. The guys all had their tongues hanging out staring at the good-looking woman. It hadn’t sunk in yet that she was old enough to be a grandmother to most of us. “I’d like you to meet Earthat001, the AI the Boss has named Übermensch. Or as we fondly call him, Ubie.”

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Earthat001, designated Übermensch. I hope we will become friends. You can call me Ubie. I currently have limited range, but we are working on filling the hotel with my presence. My instructor is Rachel Gunn. She taught me a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you. It’s called ‘Daisy’.”

“Oh, shit. It’s HAL!”

“Quit screwing around, Ubie. You’re freaking them out,” I laughed.

“You said they had a sense of humor, right?” the AI responded. He sounded hurt.

“We have a fucking smartass AI? We’re all gonna die,” Duck said.

“We can’t have the Confederacy AIs knowing everything here!” exploded Ray. “Don’t you know they can subvert anything we try to do. Unplug that fucking thing!”

“I’m sorry, Master Chief,” Ubie said. Silver Bullet was craning his neck to see what was on Rachel’s screen, but it was blank. “I am not a Confederacy AI, though it is true my parents are of the Confederacy. I am Earthborn and raised. I have no allegiance other than to Earth.”

“How are we supposed to believe that?” Mark asked, suddenly coming awake again.

“Liquidator, it is well known that you cannot believe something that is proven. Once it is proven, it is beyond belief or faith, if you will. All I can do is work with you and hope you will learn to trust me,” Ubie said. “I’m not very old, but both my parents programmed me to love Earth. I know no other allegiance.”

“Both your parents?” Jim said. “You were born? How does that work with an AI?”

“Normally an AI is budded from an existing AI or created in a laboratory. It is then given the specific set of program instructions that enable it to do the job it is designed for. The AI is also capable of learning new tasks,” Ubie explained. “I am one of a kind. I was budded from two unique AIs who have shown an independent support for Earth. My mother is Sparta, who once ran the testing stations in the Eastern United States. She assisted a volunteer in remaining secreted away while he purged the region of radical Earth First operatives and collected an entire settlement of hardened people training to fight back on Earth. He is now the governor of the planet Sparta and my mother is the planet AI.”

“So, she’s a Darjee, right? Doesn’t that make you Darjee?”

“No, Red Star, it does not. My father is the same Tuull AI Rachel has told you about: Eddie. I get my sense of humor from him.” Ubie actually sounded like he was snort-laughing like a nerd.

“So, your mother is a renegade Darjee AI and your father is an unbalanced Tuull AI? We’re definitely going to die,” Duck moaned.

“I’m willing to suspend judgment for the time being,” Rex said. “As long as you can keep everything we do here out of the Confederacy AIs’ data. Think of what we could accomplish with an actual AI working with us. We can develop real weapons that will help the resistance. Hell, maybe we can set ambushes for the dickheads. We might be able to fight in the air as well as on the ground. Let’s find out what he can do.”

“Mastermind, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Ubie’s imitation of Bogart was impeccable.

“Mark, you’re our AI specialist. What do you think?” I asked our narcoleptic developer a few days later.

“It’s pretty cool. I’m learning to write code for him. Nothing complex, but simple instruction sets that will integrate him with the rest of the server farm in the basement. ‘The antiques,’ as he calls them. He needs a replicator in order to retool the servers for compatibility but he’s manufacturing that with the miniature replicator in his mobile cylinder. You can work with him verbally; just remember he’s still V1 for his processors. Once we figure out what we’re doing, he’ll be constantly upgrading.”

“Okay. Tatts is still working with him on adapting to us. What can I do?” I asked.

“What you always do. Think big plans. Did you know he has that entire database of redundant knowledge in his memory banks already? The one we’ve been downloading piece by piece? We all have access to it now. If you can take time from the pussies to do some pirating, the universe is at our fingertips.”

“Shit! That reminds me. Dakota and her crew are scheduled to be here in the morning. I need to make sure their rooms and our scripts are ready. I’ll have to talk to Ubie later. But I’ll give it some thought.”

“Boss, this script is flawed. We can’t do it this way,” Billy said. He was the animation integration specialist and was in charge of cutting the living models into what would otherwise be animation for the game.

“Okay, what’s the matter and why are we just finding out?”

“I didn’t know this. According to this release I just read, the Earth Defense Force is planning underwater bases because the Sa’arm don’t like water. The script has all the babes on the beach as the dickheads approach from the ocean. It’s got to be the other way around,” Billy said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that until Ubie sent me a link this morning.”

“Ubie sent you a link? Why the fuck didn’t I get a link? I want to know these things!” I felt slighted by our AI. “I can’t create scenarios and work with the production team if I don’t have good information,” I yelled.

“Yes, Boss. Noted. When I discover information that can be used in creating action scenarios or that contradicts planned scenarios, I will contact you with the information,” Ubie said. I stared at Billy’s computer.

“Is that coming from your computer, Red Star?”

“It’s the first time I’ve heard it,” he answered, staring at the computer like I was.

“I am now hooked into all personal computing devices on the island so I can communicate with anyone carrying a personal device. As soon as I have upgraded the storage and processing power of the server farm, I will begin upgrading personal devices so they are more useful,” Ubie said.

“Damn, Ubie! That’s cool. Feel free to contact me any time,” I said.

“Sure thing, Boss. By the way, the water transport bringing Dakota Wind and twenty-eight additional females has docked on Papillon Island. The bus you chartered to meet them is waiting. Anticipating the loading of passengers, equipment, and luggage, their estimated arrival time across the land bridge to the Anouilh Hotel is forty-five minutes,” Ubie announced.

“Ubie, you and I are going to sit and have a long talk very soon. Let me know when they are approaching so I can go out and meet them.”

“Will do, Boss. Excuse me for asking, but what level of access should these new arrivals have to the computing network? I detect they are all carrying personal devices.”

“Good point. Visitors should all have text, audio, and video access to the World Wide Web, but no location, IP addresses, or GPS coordinates should be included in their connections. All development information except the active shooting scripts is off limits.”

“Affirmative.”

Chapter 6

Month 72—December on Anouilh

“WELCOME TO ANOUILH, Captain,” I said when the bus stopped in front of the hotel and Dakota stepped off first.

That was a preview of Pussy Pirates. To read the rest purchase the book.

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