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“This turned out to be a really good idea, my love,” Rae said to Alan as she looked around the new base. Taking the better part of a year, what with all of the distractions and demands of raising the quads and fulfilling as many of Earth’s requests as possible, the part of her that had been Sofia Ilona felt as if it had taken forever.
The Raphael piece, with the memories of four thousand years, was amused.
“Glad it worked out,” he replied. “It gives us a redoubt of sorts, and more flexibility.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to just get rid of us?”
“Not at all...though it will allow me to do some running around that I couldn’t do before, while you all work at maximum efficiency here.”
Rae took the avatar in her arms. “How soon do you have to go?”
“In a day or three. Whenever. Besides some rearrangement of rocks, I want to concentrate on serious expansion of my combat capabilities, and I can’t do that with a bunch of kids running around inside me. I also thought I’d pick up Zeke and teach him some more about Memetech and...just have some father-son time, I guess.”
There. That will make her happy, and hopefully deflect her curiosity. She’s so smart in some ways, but isn’t really a good liar or detector of the same, while I...Skull...got quite good at it in my life.
“Excellent. The quads will benefit from some stability, and they can play with customizing the new base as well. By the way, have you thought about the secrecy issue?” she asked.
“As in, communications to and from this secret base? I configured our tame Sentry to act as a tightbeam relay. It’s happy and well adjusted now, and I upgraded its stealth capability so nobody should be able to track it or who it talks to without physically approaching it, and nothing of EarthTech can possibly catch it if it doesn’t want to be caught. Good enough?”
Rae nodded. “They can still figure out some things by transmission time lags.”
“Then don’t ever reply quickly. Make a policy of sending data packages, not messages, perhaps once per day. Think like Ilona this time. She was an intelligence officer.”
“Right.” Rae smiled like the sun coming out, and winked. “A day or three, huh?”
“Woman, have I ever told you you’re insatiable?”
“Almost every day. Is that bad?”
“No...” Alan thought for a moment. “I guess I just wonder how much is who, and from whom it’s coming.”
Rae’s face turned serious for a moment and she drew back to arms’ length. “You sure you want an answer?”
Alan’s avatar replied, “Rae...I’m less human than you are anymore. I don’t have much ick factor left in me. I recycle your wastes, I eat biomass and rocks and I produce the food you eat from my body. Hell, I eat it too, which is damned weird if you think about it. We have sex that isn’t really sex and we had kids after the first me’s body was dead. So yeah, I think I’m all right with you talking about things like that.”
Wryly, she shrugged and answered without reservation. “Okay. I’d say it’s twenty percent Ilona and eighty percent Raphael. To an inexperienced girl, it’s all a dream come true – I’m a physical goddess and I can have all the sex I want with complete control of my biology and reproductive system – no pain, no limits on what I can do, no matter how rough or weird. It gives new meaning to ‘consenting adults.’”
“That sounds like more than twenty percent.”
“That’s because you don’t understand the Meme physical drives. They are biological creatures, even more than humans. Theoretically, human minds depend on quantum brain states for some of what we call consciousness, free will, and the inability to make perfect copies. Trillions of neurons are packed into a few kilos of gray matter. Meme are more distributed, and at the molecular level, much more mechanical. They think more slowly, and their biology drives them more heavily.”
“So you’re saying the Meme sex drive is stronger than humans?”
“Reproductive drive, yes. Much stronger. Human psychology links conquest loosely with sex and dominance. With Meme, it’s inherent, hard wired. They are driven to spread their genes, both before and after blending, so that their bloodlines win out over others. With me, the drive is there; I just choose not to reproduce.”
“But you could?”
Rae cocked her head. “I still have some Skull sperm left. Or I could extract some of the children’s DNA and produce clones functionally identical to brothers and sisters of theirs. Or –”
Alan held up a hand. “Okay. My ick factor finally kicked in. I get it. You have enough self-control not to spawn offspring everywhere you go.” He thought for a moment. “Zeke has never met a girl. Other than his sisters. When he does...”
Rae laughed. “You’re only just realizing that. Maybe that could be one of the subjects of your man time. Now, if you’re done yakking...come satisfy some of my drives, you sexy beast.”
“Yes ma’am.”
