Gaming the System

She got her phone out, and pressed a key, and put it on speaker. Ring. Ring... "Yes?"

"Mom?"

"Yeah, hun?"

"I'm staying over at Kevin's tonight. Don't wait up."

There was a pause.

"Okay?"

"I'll be home in the morning. Probably."

Her mom switched to Hebrew (which I could speak but she didn't know that) and said, "Barbara, please tell me you've thought this through? I really love Kevin, too, he's a mensch, but are you sure?"

Barb was still crying, joyfully, and was having a hard time answering.

Deciding that there's no time like the present to break the ice with her on language, I replied in Hebrew, "Mrs. Collins, I am pretty sure Barb has thought this through, yes. She let me give her a really sweet gift tonight, you can see it tomorrow. And, Ma'am, I love you, too. Thank you for your kindness and blessings."

Mrs. Collins had gasped when I spoke, but she switched back to English, "How come you didn't TELL me he knew Hebrew!?!?!? I've been making a fool out of myself for a month now with the secret messages!"

"Mom, we couldn't! It was so funny! Kevin would have to hold his face perfectly still and innocent, pretending not to know! I loved it. Thank you for that, too."

Her mom sounded mock-disgusted but also smiling and said, "Well, fine then. Still. Let's talk when you get home. Have a good night. And, if he snores, turn him on his side, it works for your father."

"Mom, Dad's apnea mask is old and leaky, you need to buy a new one. They're only supposed to last six months."

Her mom said, "Yeah, yeah, I know..."

They laughed and said goodbye.

Barb very deliberately took her ring off and put it in her skirt pocket and pointed at mine, so I put it in my pants pocket and we went to the TV room.

Looking at me, she asked carefully, "Do you mind if other people know?"

"Pffft! Me? I get to brag all over! I'm not keeping this a secret long... If it's okay with you."

Mom paused her show and looked over at us standing in the door, Barb hugging me from the side. "Yes?"

I said, "Hey. I know, it's like 7:30, but we're gonna head upstairs." This wasn't unusual, Barb usually watched shows with me on my computer monitor.

"Sounds good. You had a good meal?"

Barb said, "Very good, Mrs. Cooper. There's leftovers if you want some."

I cut in, "But... don't eat all of them, Barb might want some for breakfast." I hadn't planned on saying it that way, but it worked out nicely.

Mom looked at me and Barb, and smiled, and paused a moment to take a breath. "Well, that's fine then, dears, there's towels in the bathroom, and if you decide Kevin's being a big jerk or he hogs the covers, sleep anywhere you want, or even come in and wake me, I'll give you a ride home."

"Oh, no, Mrs. Cooper, I have my car here."

"Fine, then. Offer stands." Mom thought about something, but we were turning to go. She called after us, "Oh, and I sleep with earplugs sometimes, I'll be doing that again tonight."

"Thanks, Mom."

We went upstairs.

Well then.

Barb used the bathroom, then I did, and even though I had a single bed, we found we could both fit.

The other thing that fit? Our rings - on our right hands. Symbolic, but not marriage, yet.

For once in a long time, we didn't put on our headgear to go to sleep.

Amazingly, both she and I just snuggled up...

Sleep...

I awoke during the night, some, found who I was near, and hugged her more tightly, comfortable, and went back to sleep.

Mmmmm....

== ==

Super-early still-dark night-morning, the clock said a little after 4, I woke and realized I was fresh minded and happy. Barb's t-shirt clad body was in front of me, my strident boner poking her (I was sure)... and... I needed to pee!

Getting out carefully, she asked me what's up and I said, 'Gotta pee!' and she giggled, and I went to do the needful, plus brush my teeth on general principles.

Coming out of the bathroom, she was outside the door and we traded; I went back in and laid down.

I really wanted skin.

If what Barb gave me was real, well, then, I figured I could, but I didn't want to offend her: should I take my t-shirt off or not?

She came back, shutting the bathroom light off as she did, and there was precious little light coming in my window. I held open the bedsheet and found she wasn't wearing her t-shirt anymore.

That solved that problem!

I pulled mine off, and then I discovered I need to ditch my underwear, also.

"I'm on the pill, Kevin. No condoms needed. Still, I'd like to start with just ... exploring? Is that okay with you?"

It was. We explored each other. I explored enough to find out what makes her shudder and orgasm, it turns out both my tongue and my fingers are helpful, but that my tongue alone works as well.

Her tongue worked on me, and she had no problems helping me get some relief three separate times.

School Years

Barb and I made love that next week, and many times following, though we kept our brains engaged fully in the courseware.

We kept our engagement secret from the school, though Alice and Jan joined us for sleep-overs and eventually in long-term plans.

Tina, Ying, Mary, Kara, and Irene joined us for a sleep-over as well, and I got a taste of what it's like trying to keep eight women happy.

Busy, for sure, but joyful as an experience.

Barb, Alice, Jan, and I graduated from high school officially.

Unofficially, we were continuing to soak up courseware as fast as we could, all 8 of us.

That fall, we started at the University of Toronto, moving into a run-down but functional five-bedroom Victorian house a decent distance from campus but only a half-hour by transit.

Following the pattern of many international students, we started testing out of classes and accumulating degrees. In the age of advanced learning-tech, it wasn't as big a burden to test out, though some classes needed practical hands-on experience.

Canadian Thanksgiving is earlier in the year, but all our parents knew by the time the US Thanksgiving what was happening, and most were fine with it. Ying's grandmother could not be swayed, but she changed her tune when she got the dual simultaneous pictures of our commitment ceremony (Ying and myself in that picture but the ceremony had all of us), along with a sonogram picture of the impending bundle of joy.

By arrangement, Barb was in the first group, flipping a coin for the other 3, and four would wait 3 months to go off birth control.

After we'd gotten our degrees and both Alice and Tina started their residencies (delaying kids number 3 and 4 respectively), I swore off using the admin interface again.

In all that time, they'd not changed the password, nor had they checked who had taken all those courses.

Life was good, and getting better.

Jimano Incident

The USA was suffering from many, many problems, and even though we were in Canada, we felt the angst over the border in our news feeds as well.

Russia, finally broken up into groups of regional oblasts, could no longer make genocidal war on its neighbors. The strangle-hold of the ultra-wealthy on US politics, and to a degree, European politics, too, prevented any real change, and more and more people were dying as a result.

Outlawing abortions drove it to be unsafe, making birth control illegal made more of them, revisionist history that promoted racist tropes in schools, healthcare costs that bankrupted vast numbers of people, all these problems were coming to a head.

Mary's childhood friend married a man named Jimano and they'd moved to suburban Boston, a pretty liberal place if ever there was one.

Jimano was stalked and killed by a racist who decided that he didn't deserve to get subsidized WidgetCo courseware and be mostly done with med school.

Jimano's wife, Mary's friend, was then killed when news coverage of her plight put her picture on the net and that crazy person decided she didn't deserve to live, either.

My journals, personal memoirs like diary entries I'd kept forever (since my Dad left, as part of my healing process) were hacked into by someone researching who had taken some of the fast-learn courseware.

That someone we'll call Harry.

Harry found my hack method into WidgetCo, seven full years after the fact.

Harry decided that some instructions had to be placed, deep but wide.

Harry gave the instructions in a pretty creative way; he'd gamed it out and rumor had it, he ran tests using small subsets of people in various parts of the world.

His instructions? Basically, work to reduce racism, ensure the rich pay 39 percent taxes plus a yearly wealth tax, ensure free universal healthcare, eliminate gerrymandering, and basic (feminist) equality.

His mistakes?

Eventually people figured things out by the third election cycle when basically there were no Republicans ("conservatives", really by that point, fascist authoritarians) left in office across the United States.

At that point, centrist small-government Republicans started showing up in small races again, promoting pushes for more efficient healthcare, surprisingly the Libertarians started pushing for the UBI universal basic income platform because it cut out vast swathes of individual government programs that had to be administered separately and required a lot of federal workers.

Big changes were afoot, and I'd been part of it, though I didn't know it yet.

Jig is Up

Since Harry did finally get caught, he had to admit where he found out how to do all the things he did. That led back to my diary entries, and we got a visit on our farm in New Brunswick, Canada from the Canadian FBI, known as the RCMP.

We were full-fledged Canadian citizens by this point. We weren't stupid - very, very busy with lots of kids filling the farmstead, but we weren't stupid.

After the RCMP brought us in and did many interviews, took testimony from friends and neighbors, looked through all sorts of data on my very, very old computers (as a geek, I didn't throw them out. Alas) and validated our stories... They believed us.

That is, we decided it was obvious that the girls very much loved their lives there.

I thought for sure I'd be in the doghouse, evicted and convicted and divorced times 8, for functionally forcing them to fall in love with and marry me, and enter into a polyamorous ("poly") marriage.

It turned out, they had figured it out a long time before, and didn't care. Of course they didn't care, the headsets put that info in under 'unconscious' level, meaning they just assumed it was true.

I got a larger surprise in that same set of interviews, though farther at the end.

I'd been part of a double-blind study by Johns-Hopkins med school to determine if polyamorous relationships were more or less healthy, both mentally and physically, versus control groups.

Thus, my illusion of control over, and decisions about, subjecting my wives to the instructions about being harem-wives? That was all predetermined by some rogue med school students who falsified consent forms and implanted the instructions into over 2000 test subjects heads, as well as the backdoor programming methods to ensure we got both polyamorous and high-input WidgetCo courseware.

They wanted to prove that harems actually make family groups richer and happier.

As far as we were concerned, YES, we were happier than the people around us, we had good kids, successful careers, loving sister-spouse and kevin-spouse relationships, and well-balanced emotional lives.

Thus, while I could feel guilty about doing the instruction-imprinting on my wives, those many years ago, to convince them to join with me and make a big family, I'm not guilty anymore.

I know the truth.

I know it wasn't my fault. More than that, though, I know I've found I can give genuine caring love and grow it, and make a better life together for us than we'd have had apart.

Are things easy with us? No. It's not always easy. We each make mistakes. But, that's fine, we get the many blessings from God. Those blessings cry, and laugh, and run amuck, and play, and make astounding pronouncements of What Will Be (as kids do), and they brought us along for their fun growing-up ride.

Not all of this was easy. Some of our parents (Alice's) got sick as they got older, and passed away. Some of our career aspirations turned out to be misguided, and bad ideas.

All of that worked out, it's life. L'Chaim!

There's a wonderful word in Hebrew, it's used in some religious rituals and it translates to 'It Would Have Been Enough', emphasizing that God gives things to us in abundance, and even one of the things He gives, would be Enough to be happy. That word is Dayenu - it would have been enough.

If only one of us got a loving relationship out of this, but not even marriage? Dayenu!

If only one of us got a real solid functional marriage out of this? Dayenu!

If we had only had one marriage that was fulfilling and the rest pro-forma? Dayenu!

If we had only married fast so as to avoid spending our 20's lonely, hunting for a spouse? Dayenu!

If we had only gotten One child from this? Dayenu!

If we had only gotten one child, from each wife, from this? Dayenu!

If we had gotten all healthy children, but ourselves been in bad health? Dayenu!

If we had only enjoyed the beautiful scenery and sanity of Canada, much less, emigrated? Dayenu!

If we had made beautiful and welcoming and Functional Canada our home and Joyous location, but not gotten an education? Dayenu!

If we had only gained careers and not love? Dayenu!

If we only had Amazing Friends and a solid, caring, friendly church community (a large UU congregation), but not any of the other things? Dayenu!

If we had only gotten the chance to prove that Poly relationships work, even without living happily in one our whole lives? Dayenu!

If we had only helped 340 million people in the USA fix through our example?That someone used us as part of a joy-making life experiment and that experiment succeeded? Dayenu.

That my work changed the course of history in the USA (no longer our country, but the country of our birth), that alone was enough for joy. Dayenu.

Where Are We?

As for where we ended up?

New Brunswick is a great place to live, lots of open space and nature and about the same climate as Boston. Moncton has universities and a business community and farms nearby.

Long ago, next to a fence at a cross-country meet, Barb told me something pretty epic, and in retrospect, prescient: she didn't mind the cheesy compliments.

In keeping with that prescience, we have a dairy operation and make several kinds of high-end cheeses from cow, goat, and sheep's milk. She's not the only one. We all like cheese.

Yes, yes, the dairy industry has largely gone away since most milk is now FAR more safely made in vats with sets of yeast strains that turn soybean paste into this or that milk subcomponent, to make exactly perfect, exactly pure milk. Cow's milk, goat's, sheep's, yak's all sorts of milks are shelf-stable, utterly sterile/safe, and inexpensive. Yes, we know this.

At the same time, there is a market for natural milks and cheeses, analysis of existing cheeses to run x-ray crystallography on (thank you, UNB-Moncton), and characterize organic and biochem for other industrial-scale cheese producers. That analysis pays well, but the careful work of feeding and caring for the animals, that has to be done, too.

Along the way, our kids have grown up knowing the value of work, and that there are no idle hands on a farm.

Afterwords

As a small bit of advice for those reading this, don't be afraid to commit to someone early in life. It does require polite but clear negotiation about shared responsibilities and where exactly the division of labor starts and ends.

Once those negotiations are mostly through? GO FOR IT. Life is too short to wait for Mr. Perfect or Miss Perfect to come along. Be very honest with yourself. Know what positive-only reinforcement parenting is. Know you're both going to have to change diapers and do unfun things. That's life.

But, you can spend forever getting to perfect and Never Ever find it.

Better to find someone Earlier and work together, honestly, but build it.

That, and FYI, it's quite a bit easier to chase toddlers when you're 20 than when you're 30.

If you're just Mostly Sure? It's fine. Make it happen.

If you've dated more than six months and spent 5 to 10 whole weekends together? Yep. You know enough. Waiting more won't increase your knowledge about core things.

Oh - and don't bother with flowery weddings. We found a city park, bought a crap-ton of fast food and coolers full of beer and ice cream, hired some babysitters to chase the guests' kids and mind them on the swingsets, and had a grand, relaxed time.

The beauty you create will fill the universe, and from our family to yours, may you live long and grow bountifully.

People

Barbara Collins, primary, cross country

Alice Lyub, high school band

Janice "Jan" Castella, High school band

Ying Min-xi, college chorus

Christina "Tina" Larson, college chorus

Karanastas "Kara" Tsalikiasvili, nearby dorm room

Mary Iglesias, nearby dorm room

Irena Freknisdottir, nearby dorm room

Class schedule

MWF: Physics 3 lecture, breakfast, chorus, diff-Eq

TR: English (lit of Metaphor), chorus, physics lab, data struct.

High school: Lunch, Health, band, gym, gym, cross-country.