Henrich's World Ch. 01

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Old Calendar Year 2804 - Sagan's Galaxy, Lower Beta quadrant, planet Henrich-4

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I, Jonas Henrich, was a very lucky man. As the dawn and daylight arrived each morning, Darlene would always wake me by licking and sucking my penis. For me, grumpy mornings were a thing of the past! Feeling her lips and fingers on me and the suction of her mouth was a wonderful way to start the day. After the wake-up blowjob and bathroom tasks, I'd dress and have a nice breakfast she made. Darlene wasn't a fully qualified chef, but still a better cook than the average grandmother.

She would look in my eyes with her dark brown ones, kiss me, and wish me a great day as I left the house to do any maintenance or repairs. When I had time, I would drive around scouting for minerals. The mine would last another three or four years and I needed to find another good site by then.

Around noon Darlene would bring me lunch and make love to me. She'd lean over the table in my workshop and let me do her from behind, or if I was away from the buildings she'd lay on the ground and we'd have sex under the open sky. There was no one else to see us and complain, so we screwed outdoors several times a week.

I'd return to the house shortly before dusk. If I'd had a difficult day she'd crouch and crawl under the table, then lick and suck me while I ate. It never failed to improve my mood. After supper we would watch a video with her in my lap, put on some music and dance, or play our own music. I enjoyed strumming my guitar while she played synth, violin, or flute. At bedtime she was happy to do nearly anything. If I was tired, she'd ride me cowgirl or reverse cowgirl style. Screwing in the missionary position was quite nice, and I got anal sex whenever I wanted. That meant anal any night I wasn't worn out from a tough day. Fucking her tight ass was wonderful!

Life was mostly great until the day she died. It was starting to rain and I heard thunder in the distance. She was near the top of a hill carrying my lunch, and I saw lightning hit her! I sprinted to her using very long strides. With my panic-inspired adrenaline rush, in the low 2/3 gravity, I might have reached the speed of a champion athlete. Her shoes were charred beyond recognition, and there were burns on her feet and the ground where lightning had exited. I saw the tremendous bolt of electricity had burned the dark hair away from one side of her head, melted through her pliable plastic skin, and exposed her aluminum skull. It had destroyed a few actuators, several motors, and her CPU.

It only took me two days to mostly fix her, but her memories were gone. Without her personality and task programs and the sexy, loving memories I had shared with her; she was close to useless. She just stood or sat in one place until I told her to do something, and then she didn't do it well. She had the same body, but all the appeal of a trash can.

Darlene had cooked my meals, made and repaired our clothing, and kept our home clean; but she couldn't even do those chores anymore. In the morning I asked her to bring me breakfast and she passed me her charger. I reminded her, "I need food, not electricity." She apologized, walked out to the garden, and handed me a raw potato with the leaves and roots still attached. I sighed and made some oatmeal.

Later I told her, "I want to have some fun. Bend over the table." She stupidly asked if I meant the table in front of her, the kitchen table, or the repair table in the shop. Once she was in position and I lifted the back of her skirt, she asked if I wanted to play dice, cards, chess, or if I wanted 'reproductive activity simulation'.

I sadly decided to put her in storage and take care of everything myself. I pulled out a bottle of whiskey and got drunk as I cried myself to sleep.

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Fifteen years earlier, I had received an inheritance as I was about to finish University. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I leased a small and heavily used scout ship and searched for a place I could call my own. With the usual crew of four it would only have supplies and food to last a month or so, but I slept in the small galley and stuffed the crew quarters with extra, allowing me to explore alone for half a year at a time.

A month into the third year, I discovered the wormhole and stellar system that now bear my names. The Jonas Wormhole only opens for eight days on a two Earth-year cycle, so transportation to my new home planet Henrich-4 is quite problematic. Without the wormhole it would take 90 years to reach it from the closest inhabited world, Glasa-6. Even with it, the trip takes about 70 days each way and is only possible every-other year.

I wasn't really an explorer but rather a modern-day miner, which meant I was a roboticist. The mine owners from Earth in the old days would have been ecstatic. There were no worker safety laws, since bots did all the work and on my world I was the law. The bots worked without complaints, time off, or demands for more pay. I only needed to do a few minutes or an hour of maintenance on each bot monthly, and refilling their hydrogen fuel cells only took them a few minutes per day. Other than that, most of them had been working non-stop for nine or more years. There were no environmental laws, no taxes, no restrictions of any kind.

I was still careful about what I ordered the bots to do, since I lived near the mine on the smallest of the planet's three continents. I wasn't going to shit on my own floor by scattering mercury, arsenic, or other toxic things around. In addition to my Robotics degree, I had only taken four Mine Engineering and three Geology courses in college, which I thought were enough. I'd bought a satellite with telescopic cameras and several other sensors, plus a scout driller bot with ground-penetrating radar to find the rare metals my six minerbots dug up. Four refinerbots extracted the valuable metals from hundreds of tons of ore every day and smelted it into ingots, then I hauled them near the mass driver with my tracked land crawler. I guess you could say it was a heavy-duty vehicle, since it was nearly the size of my house and could carry up to 200 tons at a time.

Interstellar shipping costs were extremely high, so I couldn't make a profit selling copper, iron, or any of the other common metals. I supplied silver, samarium, palladium, and sometimes a gold or platinum ingot or two. Including the freight fees; my tracked land crawler, 8-wheeled rover, and two-seat flyer had cost me five times their weight in silver. On another shipment, a dozen 8.5 ton ingots of silver only got me a welding machine, a large chest of tools, and four boxes of chocolate bars, which I loved. I had to ration them out and only eat two a week until the next shipment. On most of the Developed Worlds, a hundred tons of silver would buy a small city! Living on the New Frontier was frequently difficult and rarely cheap.

Just one ingot of iridium would be enough for me and at least three generations of my descendants to live in luxury. I was mostly agnostic and generally didn't like the idea of religion, but nearly every day I prayed my satellite or driller bot would find more iridium. On most planets it was worth ten times its weight in high-quality diamonds. Too bad it was so scarce that in eleven years I had only produced 31 kilos, a miniscule fraction of a saleable ingot. I thought about having it transported to the ship, but transporters couldn't handle any materials denser than iron.

When I first arrived I'd brought seeds for food crops and a few hundred saplings, descendants of trees that had originated on Earth, way back in the Milky Way galaxy. There were several types of fruit trees, a few fast-growing softwoods to provide lumber, and some hardwoods like oak and walnut in case I ever got time for my carpentry hobby. My trio of agbots took care of the grain, fruit, and vegetables I depended on. They also tended cotton for clothing and caught some of the common and edible fish creatures that swam the rivers and seas.

Native grasses, vines, and shrubs grew over most of the landscape, but there were no plants taller than my shoulder until I arrived. Some insects crawled on the plants and wandered around. Two-legged amphibians preyed on the bugs that ventured near the water, and fish ate them in turn. A few small rodent-like ones ate fruit, seeds, and some of the bugs, and a species similar to weasels consumed large bugs and the rodents. The top predator near my home was a six-legged canine that ate weasels, rodents, and amphibians. They were the size of foxes from Earth but looked more like small wolves with extra legs. I was a little surprised how well they could climb steep and rocky mountainsides, probably in search of prey I hadn't discovered yet. I offered them food a few times, but they were quite skittish and wouldn't come within 20 meters of me.

I found several fossils and bones in and around the mine, including a few from extinct bison-sized herbivores and a type of very large canine. The six-legged 'superwolf', as I called it, had apparently been the planet's apex carnivore until the recent ice age, which had ended only a few decades ago. There might still be some of the larger animals in remote areas, but I was pretty sure none remained on Myhome, the continent I lived on. I'd named the other continents Eastland and Westland. At heart I'm an engineer, not a poet, okay?

Other than weather and the animals, nothing happened on my world unless I wanted it to. At first I had enjoyed having my own planet with no other people on it. It was nice seeing five other planets and a few dozen moons through a telescope at night, knowing all of them belonged to me. I was a King with only a herd of robots as subjects. Without Darlene, I was a very lonely King.

The next cargo ship was scheduled to depart for my home in two months. I thought long and hard and decided to get the expensive parts to build a second mass driver. It would double the transfer speed when it was time to fling my metallic wares up to the cargo ship as it circled in synchronous orbit. The last time, the ship barely made it out before the wormhole closed.

I wished I could have afforded a full Hypercom instead of just a basic Ansible. The Ansible had major limits, but the way it communicated using spooky-entangled subatomic particles was still a marvel. Instead of a radio or laser signal taking 24 years to reach Glasa-6, then waiting another 24 years for a response, I could communicate instantly. Paradoxically, it was instant but still slow. I typed messages and a linked Ansible on Glasa-6 would display them only milliseconds later, but there was a serious bandwidth limitation. Ansibles could only send or receive about twenty typed words a minute. Unlike a Hypercom, there was no hope of video or voice communication. I could easily transmit a grocery or spare parts order but sending a single medium quality photo or a four-minute song took half a day.

I knew I should have a family and start populating the world someday. If I didn't request a woman or women soon, I'd need to wait two more years. I was a mature man of 40 and thought having a family would be much easier if the ladies already knew each other. I was matched with a divorced mother Trissina and her daughters Rebe and Liri. I got two pictures of each and we had brief text chats. I made it clear that I expected them to take care of our home and have children with me. I'd wait until the girls were at least 21, of course. I'd be the father in a household with two mothers and a still-fertile grandmother. They sent me a recording of their voices, which I treasured and listened to several times a day. Other than brief chats with the cargo ship crews, I hadn't heard another human voice in over a decade!

I thought of Darlene and ordered programs for cooking, housekeeping, and other tasks. I also got thirty lovebot personalities, in case things didn't work out with the girls. I transferred some money to their accounts so they could get the things they'd need to be comfortable in their new home. I was happy Trissina asked if we could get pigs for pork. I ordered six weaned piglets, which could be put in a cold-sleep tube meant for humans. The four of us wanted cows for milk and beef too, but the shipping costs for a live bull and a couple of cows would have been downright absurd. Female calves, frozen bull semen, and artificial insemination was a more reasonably priced alternative; but we didn't have any veterinary training and found the idea quite distasteful. Instead, I bought some goats. Rebe suggested getting chickens or ducks, so I ordered ten of each. I made a mental note to put the pigs and goats on large islands, since they could reproduce quickly and be destructive if there were no predators to control their numbers. I knew if any chickens or ducks escaped the mini-wolves would keep them in check.

I also ordered two more agbots and a lot of spare parts. I looked at a pack of frozen embryos, which my med-bed could implant in women to prevent inbreeding problems, but decided that could wait until my future children were in puberty. As a major indulgence, I also bought some sugar cane and sapling cocoa trees, and an agbot add-on to process them. I thought ten percent of my profit from the last shipment would be worth it to have chocolate any time I wanted. I thought about ordering more whiskey, but knew I had what I needed to make a still I could use to produce rum or vodka.

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I wore double hearing protection as I started up the mass driver using a switch in the small shack a few hundred steps away. Once I'd marveled at an old photo of a water battleship's huge cannons, but the ceramic-lined bore of my coil gun was a little wider and much longer. Each launch-ready ingot was a two-meter-long cylinder half a meter across, with a rounded head. As I had a bot start loading them, I felt the dirt beneath my feet vibrate and a pressure on my chest as each shot made a sonic boom and a tremendous 'KLANG!' The sound resembled a violent sledgehammer blow on a thick piece of steel, combined with an explosion. It was so loud that dust rose from the ground each time. I'd built the control shed far away, since the enormous electrical howitzer's 200-plus decibels could harm unprotected ears three hundred meters away. At thirty meters, the shock waves would be intense enough to rupture organs and might even break bones!

The eight to fifteen-ton rods left flame trails behind them as they ascended toward the ship at more than Mach 15. Each precious projectile was covered by a centimeter-thick steel outer casing and five centimeters of carbon foam insulation, to protect the much more expensive material inside from the phenomenal heat generated by air resistance. The launch energy had to be calculated precisely, so they would have enough speed to reach the ship's catching net but not enough to damage it. Maybe due to the loss of Darlene, as I saw a bot load an ingot into the mass driver I had a macabre thought. I realized a coffin would be about the same size.

I drove the ten kilometers home and even at that distance, I could hear the noise once I removed my hearing protection. I called the ship and told them I was ready for my deliveries. They released the two drop pods with my supplies and new bots. I had them aimed at a flat desert area a hundred kilometers from my home, for safety. I wasn't concerned about finding them, since they were bright orange and had tracking beacons. I would go get them in a day or two.

Since humans and most other animals couldn't come close to handling the 30G impact as drop pods hit the ground, they were transported down. The chickens, ducks, piglets, and goats appeared right on target; in the pastures I'd fenced for the goats and pigs, and the large cages I'd built for the birds. Transporting wasn't necessary on many worlds, but due to the thinner atmosphere of my new home the drop pods' parachutes only slowed them to 150kph before impact.

Star Trek and some other very old sci-fi videos had predicted transporter technology just about right. It demanded a very large amount of energy, but was 99.99 percent safe and only took several seconds. That last 0.01 percent happened to my girls. The pretty redheads arrived in front of my home alive and mostly healthy, but with a major problem. The 53-year-old mother Trissina's shapely body was topped by Rebe's cute 20-year-old head, and Liri's 18-year-old head was on Rebe's body! Maybe most disturbing of all, Trissina's head was on her younger daughter!

Their first minute on our world was filled with crying. They were standing when they appeared, but they immediately fell to the ground. They could barely make noise vocally and weren't able to speak, since they couldn't coordinate their breathing with their mouths. They'd move their mouth to produce words, but if there was no air flow at the right time sounds got missed or scrambled.

I looked at Trissina and said, "Hold up one finger for 'yes' and two for 'no', okay?" She made fists with both hands, then all her fingers wiggled.

"How about blink once for 'yes', and two for 'no'?"

She stared at me and blinked.

"Are you in pain?"

Two blinks - no.

"Are you having trouble breathing?"

She thought a moment, then two blinks again - no.

"Take it easy. Just relax and take a few deep breaths." The three of them calmed down significantly. After a short time, they were able to sit up and turn their heads. "Are you hungry or would you like something to drink?"

All three blinked once - yes.

They were able to crawl awkwardly and I led them to the kitchen. I offered them lunch, which was a big mistake. When each tried to swallow a bite of bread they choked, or nearly did. They'd need to learn to eat solid food again like babies. I helped each of them drink some water, then told them I'd be back soon. I had to get the poultry and animals situated, but the first thing I did was call the ship circling above in orbit. They knew their transporter had malfunctioned and an engineer was working on it.

A few hours later the girls were still unable to speak but could walk using baby steps if they were careful about their balance. All of us were happy they seemed to be improving. For supper that night we had fish soup with corn grits, which they were able to eat with only a few minor mishaps.

We had a long yes-no conversation evaluating our options. I was worried for their health, and they were worried I wouldn't accept them because of their head and body situation. None of us were doctors and I didn't have a transporter to attempt a fix, if any of us even knew how. My med-bed was a basic one. It could handle simple issues like childbirth, cancers, and most injuries and diseases; but I couldn't afford an advanced one capable of brain or head transplants.

I went out to the shop and called the ship again. They had some awful news. The transporter needed some parts they didn't have, so they wouldn't be able to fix it until they got back to base. The girls and I were stuck for at least two years! I wondered how I should break the news to them. I had a lot of other questions too. If the girls and I liked each other, would it be wrong for us to have sex if only their body or head was over 21, the age of consent on Glasa-6? I could make the law whatever I wanted on my planets, but would it be okay morally?

Over the last millennium human life expectancy had gradually increased to 400 or so years, but since Trissina was 53 I knew she probably only had three or four fertile decades left. Thankfully, due to the anti-aging treatments everyone got at age 25, she would look young and beautiful for another century or so. I wanted to start a family soon and wondered if it would acceptable for me to get her pregnant, even though her new head was only 18. If legal maturity and sex being allowed were based on the mind, would it be okay for me to make love with Liri's body with her mother's head in control? Despite her body only being 18? I was tempted but realized that would be wrong too.