Imnir Ark Vol. 01 Ch. 02

"What do you mean? Making this bigger wasn't all of it?" He waved a hand at the flaccid cock hanging down his left pants leg; even soft it was still somewhat visible through the pants he wore. *I'm probably going to need to buy new clothes...* As he'd worn the clothes around for a couple minutes, he was becoming more aware that she really had increased his body's general muscle mass. It had been harder to tell before, but with his old clothes on, he definitely felt a tighter fit.

"Of course not. That was just the most basic part; a long, thick penis that ejects the maximum amount of semen as often as possible has the highest chance of producing a viable impregnation. It turned out you were more than just viable – you're actually perfect, more than I ever hoped for." She smiled, folding her arms and leaning forward on them, letting her breasts hang down pleasantly onto the countertop.

"Is that what you meant on the ship, about 'perfect DNA'?"

"Oh, you remembered. That's only part of it. I picked you because you were free of any genetic defects, even recessive ones. Analysis from orbit said that would be almost impossible to find, but I got lucky. Then, though, I was talking about your role as the Patriarch and how your DNA might interact with the eggs you'll be making women lay. Right now, I was talking about the changes to your own body. You're only going to get better."

Despite his contained rage, his cock swelled in anticipation. He finished the massive bowl of oatmeal, and grabbed an apple out of the fridge as well, taking a big bite. "Putting the loss of my job to one side..." In reality, he wasn't *that* furious with her about the job, though he was still pissed off that she had just decided she could do as she wished with his life. His job as a company strategist – officially, 'VP of Projects" – was a dead end, and he had enough inside knowledge of the company and experience in the logistics field to know that – more than just his own position – Grand Courier Inc. itself was doomed. Isaac had had his resume fielded for two months before now, and he was actively searching for another job; he knew he had a lot to offer, and he honestly believed – ego or not – that part of the reason for Grand Courier's failure was the board's inability to take Isaac's advice. He'd joined when the company had just started up a little over a year ago, a particularly rich man he'd never actually met having bought part of a collapsing freight and warehousing corporation and trying to turn it into his springboard to a personal empire. Isaac had been convinced to join up by another unemployed friend who was coming on board, the two having worked together in the past – but now they both shared the same dreary outlook of Grand Courier's future.

He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. "Putting the loss of the job to one side – what do you mean, you spent the last six days learning about me?"

"Just that. I looked through everything about you, and learned a lot about Earth in the process. I still want to keep my time in public to a minimum, so you'll stay here with me until I'm clear enough on human culture." He grumbled, angry that he was somehow grounded like a high-school kid just because Nall was too scared to go outside.

"Nall – um, I don't know how to break this to you. You could become an expert on human culture and still stand out." He pursed his lips.

Nall glanced down at herself, shamelessly nude and bright red, then back at Isaac. "Don't worry about that, I have something in mind."

"I don't think the 'skin condition' excuse will fly."

She didn't seem to understand it was a joke. "I considered that, but there's no medical conditions on file that could reasonably explain this appearance. So, I have to give it up." She sighed.

"What, are you like a chameleon?" Isaac took another bite of his apple.

"Chameleon... Oh. There's something like those on Avoch too. Was. No, I mean there's a way to make me look like a regular human. Finish eating and rest for a while. I'll make you come again when you're ready." She said it so easily, like she was talking about making him a sandwich.

"I think after blowing my load like that, you might have to wait a week or two." Isaac's cock felt spent.

"It only seems like that right now. I told you, your body has been changing. Once it's done, you won't be able to go more than a couple hours without coming at least that hard." His cock pulsed again, its semi-erect status moving a little further towards erection. She flung herself into his office chair in the far corner, and busied herself looking something up on the internet. Isaac sighed.

"I'm going to go check the mail."

"Fine. Remember, we're bonded. You can't escape." She didn't even face him to say it. *Bitch...* Isaac grabbed some pants and a shirt from a closet, tossing them on and putting on his walking sandals.

He stepped outside his condo for the first time in what was apparently almost a week. It was a nice enough day, maybe sixty degrees out and clear, with a little wind. He rode the elevator down to the ground floor, and there were a couple people he recognized coming and going through the lobby; there was Sheri and her two kids from the third floor, and there was Daniel, the bank manager from the eighth floor, and there was Eric – who Isaac had begun to suspect was some kind of bourgeoisie drug dealer.

Isaac chose not to speak to anybody – he knew better than anyone how utterly bizarre his life had just become, and even putting on his best act, he knew he wasn't a good enough liar that someone astute or who knew him wouldn't catch on to him being a little weird at the moment.

Here and now, in a normal and familiar environment without Nall around, he realized for the first time that he felt somehow *different* too, and not in reference to the increased weight of the cock hanging between his legs.

His thoughts didn't exactly match up to the personality he remembered having; it was subtle and he couldn't put his finger on it, but the more he focused on it, the more he was certain it wasn't just the stress and craziness that Nall had put him through. Something else inside him had been... changed. *Nall.* Isaac felt certain she'd been mucking around with more than just his body.

Grabbing the heaping stack of mail from his lockbox, Isaac rode the elevator back up, fuming. Not even five minutes had passed when he barged back in, Nall glancing at him sideways for a moment before returning to the computer. He shut the door and locked it, tossing the mail down on the small desk by the door. Isaac walked up behind Nall and folded his arms.

"What are you doing to my head?" He put as much force in it as he could muster.

Nall slowly turned back to him, eyes narrow. A smile broke across her face. "You noticed, then. That's good. It's working."

"What is working?" Isaac was finished with Nall's incomplete answers.

"Let's sit down together." She nodded to the couch. Barely tolerant of the delay, Isaac sat bolt upright on the love seat, his arms still folded in front of him. In contrast, Nall laid out in a lounging position on the full-size couch at right angles to his love seat, crossing her legs and not bothering to cover anything. "You're becoming the salvation of the imnir race. Really, get over yourself. You have no idea how much good you're doing."

"Good I'll never see. All I know is you just keep taking more and more away."

"And you still find it in you to try and make me come too." She smiled, this time without any of the mystery or evil in it. "I'm glad I chose you, Isaac." He faltered, not expecting such honesty from her. She reached out with one hand, resting it on his knee. "And so what if it's good you'll never see? That doesn't make it not real. My people died. The whole imnir race. I'm not even really imnir anymore, I'm something else." She looked away, staring at an indeterminate point far beyond the ceiling panels. "I'll never see the good of it either, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"This was a one-way trip, Isaac. I can't ever go home; there isn't enough power on Earth that could twist up a warp bridge strong enough to send a quarkware vessel all the way back to my galaxy – not that there's anything left to go home to. I'm also forgetting Sõrlacc. I told you, copying your language center overwrote my own. I only know Sõrlacc about as well as..." Nall did some mental math. "As well as a four-year-old human would know English, about. And it's getting worse. Eventually it'll all be gone. I've been trying to write down, in English, things from Sõrlacc I don't want to lose. How to say my name, my parents' names, my hometown, hello, goodbye, that kind of thing." She sighed. "The imnir homeworld – and no, it's not named Planet Nall, it was called Avoch – was both like and unlike Earth. It had much the same environment, evolutionary steps, ecology niches. That's why we're similar enough to mate... well, that's half of it. Does this planet's schooling and science have the theory of convergent evolution?"

"I think so. I heard the term before, anyway. Something about bats and birds." He surprised himself with the clarity of the recollection; at the same moment, he realized it did go a ways – but certainly not the whole way – toward explaining human and imnir being so close to identical.

"Bats... birds... oh, two winged creatures. It's a good example of two completely different kinds of creatures evolving similar features – wings and flight, I mean – independently. It's sort of like that between humans and imnir, though we're even more distinct than bats and birds are. DNA is the most common way that hydrocarbon-based life at this energy level chooses to organize itself. Given a roughly similar amount of water, sunlight, and chemicals, life evolves roughly the same way, and produces roughly similar niches – just not the exact same creatures.

"I looked up some paleontology from Earth. They think that wings evolved several times – like you said, both bats and birds evolved wings independently of one another, at different times, but they otherwise do the same things, eat the same food, hunt the same creatures. They both had the same need, and found similar evolutionary solutions. Something real similar happened on Avoch with gasbugs."

"Okay, but the analogy goes to hell after that. A bat can't get it on with a bird and have it lay bat eggs."

She frowned and waved a hand. "That's a... weird metaphor. I know where you're going, but let me finish. Like I said, the convergent evolution thing only covers half of it. Nobody really expected to find a perfect copy of ourselves across the cosmos that we could directly mate with. The chances, even over fifteen million years and searching several galaxies, are nonexistent. All we needed was a species with a reproductive system that was similar enough to our own, that could be adapted to lay eggs." She turned back toward the ceiling, tracing meandering imaginary patterns in the air with a finger. "There's a crazy number of planets with life on them, but not every planet with a complex chemical breakdown on its surface produces life. Those that do, tend to have one of nine specific sets of circumstances – certain chemicals in abundance, ambient temperature, radiation saturation, and level of energy available. Humans and imnir are in the same set, the high-temperature hydrocarbon band." She took a breath and continued. "The imnir planet, though, had those same chemicals, but had a very different situation otherwise."

"Why, how was it on Avoch?"

"Earth has it easy. It's the biggest object in its own orbit, with neatly orbiting moon with more than 2% of the planet's mass - all orbiting just one star, in a nice circle. A year is damn near exactly 365.25 days long, every year, every century. Kind of boring, really.

"Avoch was on an elliptical orbit around a yellow dwarf, which itself had an irregular fifteen-year orbit around a binary pair. Avoch occasionally swapped positions with the other moon that shared an orbit with it, which meant we had to swap calendars every two and a half Earth years. The white dwarf in the binary pair accreted a lot of matter off the yellow main sequence star, and it every three thousand years or so it would build up too much pressure and explode. You call them novas."

Isaac nodded, though it was all far too much to take in. "Avoch had a very strong electromagnetic field, which protected it from the brunt of the radiation blasts when the white dwarf in the pair would go off. The white dwarf usually went off when Sondrir – the yellow star – was very far away from Avoch and the gas giant it orbited, but on rare occasions Sondrir would be at perihelion when the white dwarf went off. The electromagnetic field was just barely powerful enough to protect most of the planet's life even at those rare times Avoch took it point-blank, I guess you could say."

"Okay..."

"Well, we imnir are like you humans, really good at finding new and interesting ways to wipe each other out." She paused for a few moments. "Nuclear warheads didn't just get used a couple times, like here. There were a total of one hundred and eighty one nuclear warheads that went off during the Three Wars. That was just the big ones, the smaller tactical kind got used all over the place. The oxygen-methane balance in the ocean destabilized, which wasn't something anyone understood until it was too late. It ripped up the outer atmosphere's conductive layer and weakened the magnetic shell. The shield that protected the world from nova radiation was gone, and wouldn't come back for a couple thousand years. They'd known that Bando was scheduled to go off during the next close approach of Avoch, and we all thought it just be a big light show... until then."

She closed her eyes. "There was no way anyone would survive. Best estimates said everything short of deep underground bacteria would die within a single day of exposure to the nova's radiation; even people in underground habitats would just die slowly and painfully instead of quickly. We had three years' warning. Most people just went crazy. Nations went to war for insane reasons, about a third of the four billion imnir died from that and disease before we were two years out. Who knows how many committed suicide, nobody could keep track. Anyway, the two strongest nations, Zoucch and Isoh, had a big space presence – even some off-world permanent bases – but even with three years of dedicated effort, there was no way to get a significant number of people off Avoch in that time. The offworld outposts and bases were too small and new to survive without Avoch's support anyway."

She folded her hands under her head. "So the project got started by Talas, the nation-sort-of-thing I was part of, and later Zoucch and Isoh gave us the last of their resources too. I don't think the project ever got named. Probes would be launched in all directions, programmed to look for planets in our life band, trying to find a suitable planet with everything we'd need to survive. The first idea was, hey, we can use this quarkware we just found to record our bodies and minds, then have machines reconstruct us on this other planet once they've set up there. Didn't work. They tested it."

She stopped. "You don't want to know how that ended. It... made a bad situation worse. You can't just create sentient life fully formed, even with quarkware."

Isaac's arms had involuntarily fallen to his sides, wrapped up in the story. She went on. "It was four months until the end at that point, and the team was desperate. Someone figured that, somewhere out there, in the infinite hugeness of the universe, there *has* to be a species similar enough to us that we can use a little quarkware to bridge the gap and make it possible for them to help us repopulate imnir the natural way. Well, natural in a very loose sense.

"Imnir don't normally lay eggs, or hatch out of them, of course; it was something they came up with as a compromise, to use the other species – in this case, humans – to create living imnir, but separate them early enough that they come out still *as* imnir. It also lets us produce a lot more imnir at a time. So that was the plan. To do it, they needed to make a purpose-built quarkware vessel. They came up with the design, and I volunteered to be a prototype; I was picked to be the first. What I guess nobody realized until the last minute – they were in such a rush – was that they'd screwed up the math bigtime. The amount of energy required to create a metastable quarkware vessel was off by three orders of magnitude." Isaac was quickly losing track, which she seemed to sense and backed up in the story.

"Basically, they thought they had enough power to create an army of vessels like me. It turned out, it took absolutely everything the remaining generators could pump out – up to four days until the end – to just make me." She smiled faintly, but he could see the pain in it. Despite himself, his anger was melting. "The process changed me, of course, even more than I'm changing you. They only kept me active long enough to make sure everything worked, then they put me in stasis. Two days before the nova was to go off, they sealed me in an extreme-depth underground vault, along with a modified freighter also in stasis, the computer with its entanglement comm array, and the big warp bridge assembly.

"The bridge was by far the biggest one ever built, they weren't even sure it would work on that scale. I guess it did. They'd only figured out warp bridging just before the last war. The probes were all set to operate for millions of years, reporting back with QE communications to the computer with what they found. When a probe finally found something, all the way out here in your galaxy, the computer figured it was finally a go. It warped the ship, me inside it, all the way to here. It almost certainly blew itself out in the process. When I use the tubes from the ship, I send the eggs back to the robot base that's been waiting on one of the other hospitable worlds they found early on, and it'll keep them all in stasis until it reaches a critical number, then begin hatching them."

Isaac was silent for a time, his hands on his knees; without realizing he had closed his hand over hers. "What's the critical number?"

"Eight hundred thousand."

Isaac gaped. Eight hundred *thousand* eggs?

"...though I want to send even more. As many as we can. Don't worry, like I said, it won't be four or five at a time. If you do what you did do to me with a fertile human female that I've fiddled with a bit, she should fill up with a hundred or more eggs at a time."

"Won't that... hurt her?"

"No. I'm not a monster, Isaac. The process will actually fortify their health, and I can fuzz out their memories so they don't remember the whole experience."

"Oh... uh... neat." Isaac was still trying to digest the massive amount of information.

"I'll show you something." Nall went over and fished around behind the far couch for a moment, and he heard some clinking sounds. She produced a small object, like a TV remote. She pressed a couple buttons on it, then looked at him. "I probably shouldn't show you this, but I want you to trust me. So... here's me." She pressed another button on the device.

Suddenly a flat display was hovering in the air, depicting a reddish person – sort of. There was a definite resemblance to Nall, and the odd coloration was about the same. The shape of her whole head was off, her mouth a little too wide, and the torso was shaped oddly – a sort of grapefruit form. All of her limbs were more spindly, and there were only four clawed digits on each hand instead of five. Her knees were jointed backwards instead of forwards, and she was hefting what appeared to be a tote bag at her side. In the background were a couple other similar creatures, in what seemed to be some kind of public gathering – almost like a mall's food court.