It's My Party

"Well…" Mark finally confessed. "Yes, we did. Oh, this is so embarrassing. Never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine women critiquing me over what I was saying. I didn't mean any of it. It was just boy talk. Just idle boosts, idle words…"

"Words are powerful," Emily pointed out. "Words can change perspective, and perspective is everything."

"Nolo contendere," Mark admitted. "I was a gorilla beating my chest. But it wasn't all horrible."

"No, that's true," Emily admitted back. "As a girl, I guess I would be proud… a little anyway, that a boy was boosting how he had circled the bases before capturing me. A little proud and very annoyed!"

"Uh… Can we change the subject?"

"I think that's a very good idea," projected Hannah.

"All right," conceded Emily. "Mark, do you see why it's okay for you to have sex with Holly? This would not be a one-night stand with her, quite the opposite in fact."

"Would I be committing to her?"

"Ah, that is the question, isn't it? You don't need me for this. Search your heart Mark. You already know the answer. And if you want, I'll also offer you a memory. Will you share it with me?"

It was a strange experience. Emily did not yet have the power and certainly not the skill to do what she was attempting. Mark joined more firmly with her mind and guided her with the manifestation.

Mark was sitting in a lounge, the lounge at Green Mall, and a crowd of women were there, Toshi and Frida and Hannah were there with Emily, and Jada was on the phone. Mark's mind appeared to be sitting behind Emily's eyes. He was seeing and hearing her experiences. And other women were there too, Aggie and Ashley and Fatima.

And he was inside Emily's body. She was offering him everything she was, her very being. Mark took a moment to explore. Oh, the wonder of it. He spent a moment skipping out of Emily's memory and exploring his/her new body.

"Examine all you want," whispered Emily's voice in his mind. She purred. "It feels so intimate and sexy to share my body with you! But when you're finished, we'll continue."

"Oh. Sorry."

"I don't mind. I like how interested you are in me. But anyway, just pull back and be an observer for a while. This is something we all agreed you should see." A moment later in Emily's memory Holly walked into the lounge.

Mark was amazed as he listened to the conversation. At the end of the women's meeting, there were many hugs all around before they broke up. Mark turned his mind to the current presence of Emily and Hannah and asked, "You screen people who want to date me?"

"Not exactly," said Emily. "We accept people who want to date you. Don't you see Mark? We women have all been deeply indoctrinated by our culture. We are absolutely not supposed to pursue men who are already taken. Holly would feel very awkward about… well, hitting on you without getting our permission first."

"She never told me," he whispered in a thought.

"Yes I know, and I've just explained why."

"We've never turned anyone away," added Hannah. "A few other women have asked us. We'd like to keep their confidence and not tell you who. It should be up to them to make the first move." But she couldn't stop herself. An image of Whitney formed in Hannah's mind. Mark was helpless to conceal the knowledge Hannah had revealed. Within the triple link, there was no place to hide his conscious thoughts. "Shit!" wailed Hannah.

"Hannah," replied Mark. "This is absolutely not your fault. You are drugged, I am not. I'm being a cretin forming a triple link with you and Emily when your defenses are so weak."

Emily ignored his concern. "Will you accept Holly now?"

The answer seemed to spring forth from the core of his soul. "Yes." Before he could think more, their link dissolved. Holly's hands were moving across his thighs and scrotal sac again, and Emily and Hannah were bailing out of the bed.

"We'll be in our sleeping bags in the living room," Emily called out verbally. Her words were slightly slurred and brought back a memory to Mark. After the mind boost, sharing thoughts became so easy and desirable, for a while it was sometimes difficult to go back to the effort needed to verbalize. He reached down and petted Holly's head as she suckled his penis. Emily and Hannah left the room.

"I take it you're okay with this then?" asked Holly between slurps.

Mark smiled and shivered in his pleasure. "Yes. Thank you Holly. Thank you for choosing me."

"Oh, I should be thanking you. I'm drugged, but this isn't the drug. You understand that, don't you?"

"Uh huh. Emily and Hannah shared their memories of your meeting."

"Yikes! Really?! Well, I guess that's okay. They said that they would." She came up to Mark's face and smiled at him. "Ever hear the saying that there's no hornier woman than a pregnant woman?"

Mark grinned. "Yes. Toshi taught me."

"Ah yes, Toshi. Toshi has been my teacher too. I owe your wife so much. And as for now, I'm what Toshi would call a hot ticket. Mark, I want to be your ticket to ride!" And with that Holly hugged him and showered his face with feather-light kisses.

Such eagerness. Mark realized the honey was helping her release it, but from what he shared with Emily and Hannah, he also knew that the eagerness had been there for many weeks. Holly had just been too shy to let it out, shy and worried about acting unseemly. But not tonight. Tonight she wanted to play and frolic, and tomorrow… Well, the future would always be a frontier, but one thing was clear. Mark would not have sex with her now if he had any reservation about wanting her for his wife. Every woman at the meeting was absolutely convinced of that, Holly included.

Holly cried out as she felt Mark's hands return caresses on her body, tears springing from her eyes. She felt reborn.

Chapter 78.

One week later.

Time: Monday, May 4, 2019 8 PM

Ricardo was on the second floor of the southern face of the great complex of buildings, watching the last seconds of the day as the sun set behind a western bank of buildings. He was on the opposite face from the one he had entered seventeen days ago. And it was now almost sixteen days since he last had any food. Ricardo didn't have a scale to weigh himself, but since leaving the Black Mall home complex, he estimated he had lost ten kilos of body weight, and his guess was accurate. It was a horribly fast rate of decline, but it couldn't be helped. He needed to explore full time, and exploration took energy, stored energy, fat-cell energy. Fortunately he had allowed his weight to creep up a few kilos while playing house with Jessica. Those extra kilos were pure gold, but by now the gold had been spent.

On the plus side, Ricardo still had plenty of vitamin tablets in his backpack and all the water he wanted. His body was still in good shape and if he could only get some damn food, he'd be fine. But he also couldn't kid himself. His body had had an easy ride so far digesting fat cells, but that energy source was almost depleted. Soon his body would begin digesting muscular tissue in a desperate attempt to prolong his life. Ricardo needed food, and soon.

He had spent the last week searching the building complex above the crazy polygon maze. Ricardo had never heard of buildings constructed on this magnitude. He estimated four square kilometers, and that was only the portion where he had safe access. The place was insane, its functions impossible to decipher.

As a single explorer, Ricardo was gravely handicapped. One careless trip through a one-way door and he might find himself trapped in a dead-end room cut off from his water supplies. Every new door had to be wedged open, and even then he was on a short leash. If he got out of eyesight of the wedge, the servos would remove it. The restriction had made the job of exploration maddening and his progress painfully slow.

But less than an hour ago he had completed a major phase of his exploration, and he was proud of that though bitterly disappointed in the outcome. There were no easy exits to the outside from the known portions of the building. It seemed inevitable he would have to start taking the insane risk of walking through one-day doors. He had no choice. Unless… Ricardo sat down on the floor by the windows and pulled out his notebooks on the polygon maze below. He had been staring at the numbers for the last few nights.

There were 1296 corridors connecting the entrance pentagon to 157 triangles, 157 squares, 3 x 157 = 471 hexagons, and 157 octagons. And guessing an average corridor length of sixty meters, his new estimate for the total length of the corridors was seventy-eight kilometers. With each corridor connecting to two faces of the polygons, the numbers showed that half the polygonal faces had doorways and half did not.

Ricardo's mind screamed at him in exasperation. "Who the fuck cares?! So it's half! Who the fuck cares?!" What could he possibly do with such knowledge? And yet, Ricardo was tortured by a recurring nightmare. He was with Diego, and the former compadre still had his wrists and ankles shackled, but in the dream the man also moved about easily as he talked. And Ricardo could never quite see how Diego managed that trick.

"157," Diego said smiling in the dream. "Don't you see boss? The number is 157. That's 157, get it? Get it boss? That means we have to…" And Diego would calmly keep on talking, but the words were mumbled, impossible to understand. At the end of the dream, Ricardo would wake up with a howl of frustration.

Ricardo bitterly resented now his decision to chain Diego to the dead-man's switch. The man had the extremely rare gift of insight. It was a horrible waste to leave him in a position where the only decision Diego had to make was whether to survive. And yet Ricardo had done just that. He chose to explore with a child witch and two men he once considered morons, Hernando and Jenaro, and look where it got him.

Ricardo shivered at the memory of his awful battle and defeat. There was a child witch living in the body of adult Jessica. At least on this point Ricardo was not cursing his stupidity. He could not be blamed for not foreseeing this horror. He had dressed Jessica in children's clothes in order to weaken her and make her more submissive. Who could have foreseen he would actually be strengthening the child witch that lived inside her mind? Ricardo shivered again at a nagging thought. Why was it impossible to find her body?

She must be dead. Each new day brought new confirmation. Ricardo could not lock the pentagon from topside, but he did crisscross the opening with several curving strands of stiff wire and carefully noted the details of how the wires overlapped. It would be impossible for anyone pushing up from below to put the wires back together in precisely the same way. Jessica was dead, she must be, and thus the child witch was dead too.

So why hadn't he found the body after a full week of searching? She must have crawled into a closet to die, perhaps even into a drawer. Her body represented forty to fifty kilos of meat. Should Ricardo resume his search for it?

He had no qualms about cannibalism. The problem was the damn closets. There were almost always six on each side of the corridors. Each closet would have a generous two-meter by two-meter inside space and the inside walls would have three rows of drawers. Each row would have two drawers on the left, two on the right, and two drawers opposite the door, for a total of eighteen drawers per closet. And each drawer would open only if the closet door and all the other drawers in the closet were closed. Ricardo couldn't imagine giving a closet a full inspection in less than three minutes.

There were close to sixteen thousand closets. At twenty per hour, that would be eight hundred hours of search time. And he would have to add the time to travel to all the closets. The situation reminded Ricardo of an old mathematical puzzle called the Traveling Salesman Problem, except here his problem was not the optimal path to visit all the polygons. He needed an optimal path to walk all the corridors between the polygons.

Shit! This was ridiculous! He couldn't eat her decaying body anyway. So why was he wasting his time? But the problem kept nagging him. Why wouldn't his mind let go? He gave up the struggle and went through the numbers one more time. He had been highly efficient in the eight days it had taken to chart the maze. Assume he needed half the time to walk each corridor at least once. He had the time for that. But the closet searches, 1296 x 12 closets at three minutes a closet, plus time to sleep of course. It would take two months to search all the drawers in all the closets of the maze, and Ricardo would be starving to death in one month.

That's it, no more thoughts. Ricardo had already picked the most promising door to leave this part of the building complex. He would head towards the west, the direction he had last seen Jenaro take. Ricardo would commit himself to the plan at sunrise tomorrow. His mind temporarily at peace, he headed off to a shower before sleep.

An hour later, a few kilometers north inside Black Mall's diamond complex.

Time: Monday, May 4, 2019 9 PM

It was three hours after local sunset in the bee park, and Suvarna's first night here. She was on Boost Team-3, and together with Carla and Tom were the new junior boosters. With the departure of Emily's Team-1, Aggie, Ann and Cassidy of Team-2 were now the senior boosters and would be here until their graduation day on May 8th when Team-4 consisting of Fatima, Husna and Kiyoko would arrive.

A week ago Emily inventoried the stored food at the bee park kitchen and determined there were enough supplies to feed fifteen people for eight days, which was their target length of stay in the bee park. The slots for the mind boost quickly filled up with volunteers, and the teams were overlapping their stays in their eagerness for the advancement.

Suvarna sighed as she gazed out the window. The temperature outside was -2C and a light snow was falling. Somehow there was just enough light to see it even though the sky had looked very black before the flakes started to fall. Suvarna felt deeply relaxed and excited, both at the same time. It was a little disconcerting. Emily had warned her she might feel like this after first tasting the honey this evening, and it had come to pass. But the main boost and sexual arousal would not hit until tomorrow night.

Suvarna smiled in the darkness. She felt horny now! And Tom's hand was lightly stroking her hip and it felt delightful. She and Carla had Tom sandwiched between them, and they were all drifting in and out of sleep after a very busy day. Suvarna thought she was probably the most awake of the three, and in kindness to Tom she didn't turn and try to arouse him. Besides, she had already promised Carla the right to be the first with Tom.

Tom stirred and yawned, his hand drifting to stroke her outer thigh. Suvarna pushed her butt back into his groin to signal her approval. There was a sleepy kiss on the back of her head, and then more gentle caresses. Suvarna blinked at the thought of what she was doing. This would have been unthinkable just a few months ago, especially with another woman in the bed. And she wasn't committing herself to marriage, not exactly. But the bonding was there, with her and Carla too. Perhaps they wouldn't call it marriage, at least not for a while, but the three knew they would be facing the future together for a long time to come.

So many changes since leaving Wobanakik! Suvarna was now an official employee of Kappa Alpha. Exactly what Kappa Alpha was, well, that was still a question. But Suvarna had already made a small contribution. She had noticed an obscure emergency protocol near the end of her training and had mentioned it to Kiyoko. It allowed Kiyoko the ability to open the first-floor door to the diamond complex from the lounge side. Frida's original trip through the ivy hall had been unnecessary.

But the discovery was small compensation for a big disappointment. Two days ago the moment she graduated, Suvarna jumped to White Mall and activated and reset the lounge elevator there. Then she joined a re-supply team to the entrance rooms of Wobanakik where she attempted to activate the elevator at the bottom of the stairwell. Her effort was unsuccessful.

Over the network, she could here the disappointment in the voices on the other side. So close! The people were literally just a few meters away. But there was no way to get them out, not yet anyway. The issue would remain their society's top priority.

On other fronts, the medical training of Lucia, Tajana and Paige was proceeding well. Their training program was more extensive than Suvarna's, and was expected to last another week. The three women were tentatively scheduled to become Team-5 and enter the bee park on May 12th. After that, people would have to wait for the new growing season to kick in.

It had been an interesting dinner tonight, small portions of carrots, broccoli, alfalfa and cucumbers, with a dessert of apples and sunflowers garnished with the mysterious dark honey. But what Suvarna remembered most was the conversation. Aggie would be leaving through the Green Mall trap door a day or two after leaving the bee park, and Cassidy had volunteered to join her. Aggie had convinced Fatima that continuing the exploration was the correct course to take. It was a decision Suvarna privately had her doubts about, but she still admired the women's courage and determination.

Suvarna finally started feeling sleepy, and it felt so nice to cuddle with Tom, warm and dry under the covers and protected from the dancing snow outside. Suvarna dimly heard the senior boosters talking quietly in the living room, Aggie and Cassidy she thought. Well, those two had a lot to talk about, and besides, their soft conversation was soothing, a reminder of the welcome presence of humanity.

Suvarna sighed as she thought of Earth. So crowded! She was a U.S. citizen, her parents were too. But they took a trip to India in 2015, the year India's population hit 1.2 billion. Suvarna remembered the trip well, flying into Mumbai on the west coast to visit her mother's family, and then the trip north to Jaipur a week later. Walking in the streets, at the train stations, so many people! And now she would never have such an experience again.

Tom felt Suvarna shivering in his arms. He stirred sleepily and stroked the side of her hip and thigh. "You okay?" he whispered.

"Me? Yeah. Just thinking about life."

"Ah. Old or new?"

Suvarna chuckled. "Both I guess. I was thinking about the changes. And Carla, Carla as a sister-wife! This is going to take a lot of getting used to!"

Tom nodded and kissed the back of her neck, burrowing into the thick black hair until his lips found the soft skin beneath. "I love you."

Suvarna yawned and wiggled her rump in appreciation back into him. "Without love, none of this would be possible."

"Hmm?"

"Go to sleep my love." A moment later Suvarna felt Tom return to slow deep breathing. She sighed and relaxed. There were dangers ahead and they were boundless, but for now her mind was at peace. Suvarna closed her eyes and thought of nothing at all.

Meanwhile, at the central island.

Jada was calling it a night, leaving the library for bed, but she thought she might stop by the kitchen first for a small glass of warm milk with a dash of vanilla and sugar. As she was passing the lounge, she noticed Charles there. He was alone reading a book. So a few minutes later she joined him after stopping in her bedroom to drop off her shoes. She was sipping her hot cup and sitting barefoot a few meters away in another lounge chair.