Humanity 2.0, Year 001, Day 007

You know... had he been an archaeology major or something, I could have understood, but he was studying telecommunications. By definition, his field was all about not having to go somewhere else. I never figured that out, or come to think of it, anything else about John; one more unsolved mystery of the old world.

After that, I was sitting in front of the computer for a while. I felt a sense of restless energy. I needed to clear my head before I talked to Emily. For the first time in my life... I felt like exercising. It was strange, but all my muscles had this tenseness to them, not like being nervous -- more like just having to get rid of their excess power.

I had never really worked out before, except for that bullshit they put us through in high school; I had to actually go online and look up stuff like good routines, the right way to do a squat, the correct ways to work out in general, what I needed to eat and what a catabolic period is... everything. Despite this wealth of information, I still ended up pulling muscles, falling over, bruising myself, and spending hours lying around feeling dim pain from some overstressed joint or another.

There wasn't a weight set or anything on the yacht, though it was certainly well-furnished. I had to settle for deadlifting the anchor, chain attached and everything. I did a lot of bodyweight stuff for eighteen days -- but it was probably for the best that there weren't any bench presses or anything like that around for me to get myself killed on.

Even though the changes she had made in me were only starting to take effect, she hadn't changed the fact that I was still an overall physically awkward and inept person. I needed time to get used to using my body, and back then I had no idea how much bigger and stronger I would really get. She'd mentioned that males of my species would be physically larger, and I could expect two more growth spurts -- one starting in a few months, when the bulk of my change into the new species began, and one in another ten years or so -- but hadn't shared anything more specific than that.

I'd brought her research notes, but they basically said even she wasn't sure what the exact outcome would be of the alterations she'd made to males. She hadn't had time to let a few test subjects grow up and see. I hoped I wouldn't be eleven feet tall or some crazy thing like that; she'd wanted me to keep a low profile, but if I ended up being gargantuan, or the most handsome man alive, or glowed in the dark or some shit - then that would be out.

Finally, I resolved myself - it was time to call Emily. I felt like putting a crash helmet on first; I knew she would have slapped me had I been standing there in front of her.

I heard her clear, emotive, feminine voice on the other end. "Um, hello?" I felt confused for a moment. Emily had caller ID, so she always answered knowing it was me. I palmed my forehead. Right, not calling from my own number.

I cleared my throat. Time for the crash helmet. "Em. It's Ben."

"BEN?" Her tone was abruptly both vicious and pleading. I could even hear the public commotion in the background from the disturbance she'd made.

Then followed a ninety-minute conversation, which was mostly me - ineptly - dodging her probing questions. She wanted to know if Bethany slipped me any drugs or otherwise coerced me into what happened... it was, of course, if anything, the other way around, but I just told her at the time that nothing like that occurred and it was something "just happening" between two adults.

I didn't have any good answers for her about where I was, and she was convinced I'd had a nervous breakdown and was hiding out somewhere and just lying to people about the whole on-a-boat-on-the-ocean thing -- but after ninety minutes, she finally seemed to relent on convincing me to give up the act. Had there been a camera onboard, I would have taken a shot of me on the open sea -- but she knew I was at least handy with photo-editing software, so she probably wouldn't buy that either.

"I'm staying here at the Marriott Marquis down the block from your place. I'm going to fucking stay here until you get your head back on and come home, and I will not leave until I see you and decide you are not insane. Anymore."

I blew out a breath to my side. Her reaction wasn't unexpected, but it still wasn't super convenient either. I remembered something. "Doesn't your next semester start soon?"

"It did start, the day before yesterday. I'm fucking missing the next semester of school because of your nutjob episode, Ben. Tuition down the drain, and everything. I fucking knew you were going to snap sooner or later. You don't spend your whole life locked up in your room studying and playing video games because you're a stable and happy person. I should have come here a year or two ago and dragged you out into the fucking sun.

"Or I should have just gone to a local school so I could keep an eye on you and force you to have a social life so you wouldn't go nuts. God damn it. God damn it, Ben. I would have dragged you out with me on the weekends if I'd known you were half this bad. You must have gotten Mom's DNA. I hope I can bring you back to this planet before you end up like she did." I winced. Emily sounded both furious and disgusted. Even if everything she thought about me was true, surely that was going too far. I wasn't like Mom. I wasn't seeing the Celestines. I was completely together and lucid through the whole course of this phone call, at the very least.

Our mother, Lydia, had been schizophrenic. That's - thankfully - rare these days; look it up if you haven't heard of it. She'd been fine for decades, through her marriage with our father, up until around when I turned eight. It was around then that whatever sleeping monster was lurking in the chemicals of her brain woke up, and she gradually lost touch with reality over the course of about a year and a half.

Nothing Dad said could bring her back; everything we tried to tell her was just another attempt by the aliens to mislead her. When it reached its worst, she'd tried to hide us both in a shed on some farm miles outside town for a few weeks, to "keep you two safe from the Celestines". We never figured out what the Celestines were exactly; the answer seemed to make less sense every time one of us asked. I hope they weren't the Experimenters.

We were only locked up in the shed for about a day before they found us, and the police took Mom away. From then on, I'd only seen her in the institution. The drugs they kept her on seemed to keep her on the ground, but never quite there either. She'd abruptly died in there the year before last, an allergic reaction to some experimental new medicine she signed up to try. The prison hadn't even let Dad attend the funeral. Emily had made barely an appearance for the service before vanishing again.

As far as I was concerned, Mom died taking a risk to try and make herself better. Maybe she knew on some level that she was deranged, but couldn't help herself. Maybe if it had worked, she could have been let out and been a part of our lives again. Even in her insane state, she'd locked us up in the shed thinking it was to save us - she'd never stopped thinking about us, or keeping her children safe before herself. Emily, unfortunately, was always a lot less forgiving; to her, it was like Mom had personally betrayed her. She still carried it around like this great weight in her life - one I'd let go of a long time ago.

Emily had harangued me for a few minutes more before she hung up. Had she been able to slam the receiver down, she would have, but I'd called her cell. I tried repeatedly to assure her that I was okay and that her staying obstinate and not going back to New York wouldn't, and in fact couldn't, make me get home any faster. I was really starting to get pissed off with the Experimenter for not either teleporting me back home... or at least giving me something faster than a fucking sailboat.

I spent another seventeen days on the yacht. There was no real place to do cardio, so I satisfied myself with using a mooring line as a jump rope. After the third day, some of my pubic hair began to fall out. I checked the copy of the Experimenter's notes that I had brought, and sure enough, that was also on the list. Both genders had lost that little detail; she said it no longer served its evolutionary purpose and was now just a liability for lice and infections. By day nine, my cock was hairless, which - to my enjoyment - made me seem a little bigger even still.

The rest of the time I wasn't working out, eating, or sleeping, I was thinking and planning -- mostly in circles, anxiety rearing its head again. Unfortunately, thinking was a skill I never really developed like I thought I would. I'd been a gamer all my life, all planning and tactics - but somehow I never managed to translate that into a truly strategic mindset. I've always had to rely on the girls to do the intellectual heavy lifting, while I've always felt more like their personal cock, cook, and mascot.

Well, really, I lied about 'thinking and planning' eating up all that much time. In truth, I stroked off more times in those seventeen days than I had in half a year prior. Once I'd gotten over the emotional whiplash of meeting 15226, making love to her and feeling this deep connection all of a sudden, then watching her leave Earth forever, my brain started to reassert itself -- and to begin to sort through and reassemble the thousands of raunchy, sweaty sex scenes she'd injected into my mind.

She had spent two full and very interesting lifetimes as a human female, and aside from those two long stints, she apparently had also taken off for adventures around our planet for a few years at a time while her experiments ran. She honestly enjoyed running around as a human and particularly liked having sex as one, and it showed in the memories she'd put in my mind.

I'm not saying it made me feel like being a woman -- I was very attached to being masculine, especially after I met her -- but having an endless supply of abundantly clear, personal memories of sex as a woman to just think back on at any time can really give a man an everlasting hardon. It felt like I was going to fill up the ocean with all the come I pumped off the side of the boat and into the sea.

I kept thinking of new things I wanted to try, of special ways I thought that I could become the perfect lover -- to become the one guy who really, honestly, truly knew 'What Women Want'. Of course, it helped that I had a decidedly unfair advantage -- at the time, though, I think I assumed I was much better at this than I really was. I laid out plans of how I was going to approach various cute girls I knew around the campus... Nina upstairs, Monica in my chem lab... or Amy, the strange but fun Asian girl I often ran into in my math courses.

They each were smart, industrious, and interesting people, but I should be honest -- at that point I was really thinking more that they were hot. My criteria weren't as strict as they could have been then, and I wasn't really thinking about how every woman I made love to was someone I better be prepared to live with for centuries, and would have as much influence on raising my children as I would.

God damn, if I had realized that before I docked the boat instead of after, how history might have changed.

The boat approached the small marina in the bay outside Monterey in California. Once I was near enough to the coast, I'd set up the berth rental online easily enough. From there it was just a matter of telling the boat where the berth was, and pressing the big 'dock' button. I could have gone to sleep afterwards for all the danger I was in with the autopilot handling things, but I felt compelled to sit in the captain's chair and act like I knew what to do if something went wrong. It wasn't like there was anyone else on board to impress, but I did it anyway.

It was a bustling Friday afternoon, and there were colorful yachts, catamarans, fishing boats, and even wakeboarders all around; the place was downright busy, actually. I intentionally chose what I thought would be an out-of-the-way place where few people would pay attention to my shiny new yacht and the associated impossibly large overnight fortune I'd gained along with it -- but my luck struck out. The place was some kind of out-of-the-way resort and everyone was out there having a good time.

I looked like an ass, I'm sure, fumbling out of the million-dollar boat and trying to figure out how to tie the thing to the dock without hurting myself or watching it drift away. I was about to go back inside and start looking up how to tie knots when I heard someone calling out to my left, out of sight.

"Hey, you need help there?" I turned. She was quite a sight.

Everyone, of course, knows what Nadine looks like now, though most would have a different association with her face than I do. Then and now, I can only see the most welcome sight a man could have laid eyes on after being alone at sea for interminable ages.

To me, Nadine then was a nubile young redhead, lightly freckled; her shiny curls were cut in short ringlets, and she was wearing only a light lavender spaghetti top that made only a token attempt to cover her huge boobs, a wide-brimmed hat, tight white shorts that hugged her generous ass, and green flip-flops. She was very pale, and looking a little out of place in the bright California sunlight -- and I could make out the hint of sunburn on her shoulders, thighs, and cleavage. I didn't see anyone else around that she might have been here with.

I shrugged. "Um, I'm figuring it out bit by bit. I borrowed this thing for the afternoon, but it looks like I didn't do all my homework." I managed to force a sheepish look, trying to cover up the lie.

"Here." She strode over, and I could have sworn I felt a pulse in my dick, the pole getting harder every step she took closer to me. The Experimenter had super-charged my sex drive, then gave me that oversized cock I was so eager to use -- and then she'd ensured I would be stuck on a stupid yacht for weeks, with only my imagination for company.

She could have been half again as heavy and nowhere near as cute, and I'd probably still be forcing myself to think of baseball to keep my rod from tearing open my shorts. Oh -- no baseball lately... I guess my sons have some play on words they use about solving the quadratic equation upside-down, but hell if I remember it right now. As it was, running into such a fine-looking woman right off the bat as soon as I reached the land was like a dream come true, and my thoughts were set upon how I could bed her immediately.

She bent down next to me, and her cleavage dangled pleasantly inside her top as she showed me some knot or other, that I completely failed to pay attention to. I smiled and nodded, unable to tear my eyes from those wonderful orbs. I guessed them at a D-cup - a handful, and then some. Given, I had smaller hands then, but still - they looked huge, soft, and delectable.

The odd noise brought my conscious mind back into the drivers' seat for a time. I looked up at her face, where she was snapping her fingers. I smiled before I belatedly realized what the gesture meant. She had a little disappointed frown. I winced internally; way to start off well, try to impress a girl by spending your first few minutes with her staring at her tits more than her face. So much for the Great Lover Benedict Stanton.

"Ready to pay attention now?" She gave a tight smile.

"I -- I'm sorry. That was just completely crude of me. I can't believe I -- listen, is there any way I can turn this around and make it into a complement? I mean, you look fantastic, there is just nothing else to it, and I'm just a lonely sailor who's been out on the ocean by himself for a few weeks."

She sighed. "Listen, you aren't the first and you won't be the last. What I'm saying is important if you don't want this expensive boat to get wrecked the first time a half-assed storm comes by here, so pay attention." Her voice was a little scratchy, which made me wonder if she was a smoker. She wasn't, of course. It was just her voice.

She showed me the knot again. I managed to focus this time, and then tried it myself. It was surprisingly easy, simpler than tying a tie. She watched as I then went around the boat and tied it off completely, and she seemed satisfied. I'd passed at least one test so far.

"Benedict Stanton. But call me Ben." I held out a hand toward her.

"Nadine O'Bryan."

I shook her dainty hand gently. It was warm, and soft; even if she hung around this marina a lot, she clearly didn't handle the heavy ropes here very often. "I'm glad at least one of us knows something about boats."

"My step-dad owns this place. We occasionally come down here during the summer for my mom's booty calls -- I mean, their vacations together." She smiled, making it obvious her 'error' had been anything but.

"Well, if there's a place to take a woman, this is it. This place is beautiful. Out of the way, perfect weather, nice scenery..." I felt the breeze as it came over me; the sky was brilliant, the water was sparkling and full of colorful boats, and what few people could be seen around were having a great time.

She shrugged. "It gets old after a while."

"Well." I held out my hands. "What's there to do around here that isn't old for you, then?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Well... umm... if you're asking, then there's a this new theme bar a ways south of here where you have to pretend to be a pirate."

"Seriously?" I'd been hoping for something a little more traditional, known-territory stuff so I'd have room to let my power work. A pirate? Like with a peg leg and a parrot and eyepatch and shit?

"Mm-hmm. They only opened three weeks ago. My mom and stepdad are too busy getting reacquainted, and I love my old mom too much to let her go without her alone time with her man. I'm stuck outside the house with no friends for most of a month."

I felt quite invited by now. "Well. You did just save me from my own foolishness. All you can drink, on me. Let's go."

I'm not going to give you all the play-by-play of our evening together. There were these cheap city cabs that would take you anywhere around town, and we hopped into one and headed straight there. She seemed into me, in a way that I was just completely unaccustomed to. With Bethany, the whole thing had been so out of the blue, and was really more something that happened to me; now, though, I was clearly expected to take the lead.

The pirate bar was something else -- and what was even crazier was the 'pirate ale' they served. I had no idea what to expect, and it tasted sort of like cheap beer, so I kept drinking and drinking, not realizing how strong it was. The Experimenter hadn't given my body - well, anything in the way of alcohol immunity, despite the other enhancements, so I quickly went just about as out of control as any real pirate.

I don't remember the second half of our little date. There was some kind of dancing, I think, and something about a red motorcycle. My recollection largely resumes when we got out of the cab. She'd been all over me in the back seat, climbing into my lap and grinding herself against me in a way that left no room for interpretation. Those massive tits were right in front of my face, their sensuous weight covered only by a thin sheet of cotton.

The cab driver was complaining to us about something, and he dropped us off at a small nearby hotel. I rented a room, their largest suite; chump change with my new fortune. I took her upstairs, keying the door open as she hung off me and kissed my neck and shoulders. She was pressing herself against me, practically humping my leg like she was in heat. In a sense, she was.