Nordberry Nosh

The carrot was, they'd get their whole house painted, fixed up by various girls' parents through some cajoling process, and free lawn care all summer. Plus, during the maid service (6 hours a week) the 'maids' would be head-to-foot naked.

That Mrs. Wain agreed to this astounded me, but they were in their 70's, so I don't think she felt her marriage was much under threat from it.

The stick was that if they said anything about it, they'd lose out on all the help, and might get bad-mouthed to various people.

Bev, being the 'former asshole', had been observed making this offer and apparently did a good enough job at it that the thing that sold it, the free work, made it stick.

In the process, the Wain's driveway and basement were made into work areas for study sessions, for changing clothes, and for general misdirection about who was over at my house at any given time.

Almost all of the houses on our block were single-story ranch homes; the few that weren't included the Wain's and ours, but old and tall trees handled the rest of the spying-neighbors problem (a significant risk).

Oh - almost left off the surprise that just about gave Dad and Mom aneurysms. That Sunday night, after the introductions were done and my sisters and boyfriends got dressed, They took my parents out for a walk to the nearby park, and told them they were getting married.

The ceremony, performed by our parish priest Father Juan in the chapel instead of the main sanctuary at the church, was pretty small, with the two couples at the front at the same time, and the parents and siblings in the audience.

Father Juan said it was the first time in his life he'd ever married two couples at the same time. He was happy with all of it, I was pretty sure, but mentioned privately that one of the older nuns was complaining because neither Jeff nor Dean had converted to Catholicism, though they both made a firm commitment to do so in the future.

[As of this writing, only Dean has. Jeff hasn't officially but they do go to Mass regularly.]

Both couples moved into apartments in Sudbury, short term, so they could be together, but it was short term until the end of the semester in May, when they packed up and moved to the same apartment complex in Winnipeg near U Manitoba, where they started summer school in June.

From them, I heard the values and beauty of Winnipeg extolled, along with seeing their phone-pic texts. They have a city orchestra and lots of high-tech firms - it's only 18 hours drive west of Sudbury, mostly through forests.

Yes, Canada is freakin' huge.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Through a series of herculean feats and some mattress purchases, the girls and I worked it so each and every one of them suffering from bad symptoms (e.g., head and body aches, nausea, and nightmares) got a 'treatment' by me, with some personal attention to boot. That was handled faster than I'd thought, with as much close attention as I could give them given general time constraints.

The eight girls - the four musketeers of April, Bee, Roo, and Julie, plus Jo and Kim, and Mads and Dani, and of course, myself, moved to near Montreal to attend McGill.

Quebec speaks primarily French, and only Julie (the smartest of us when it comes to languages) was the only one of us initially able to converse easily. The rest of us had to learn fast and discipline ourselves to only speak French at home so we could get used to it.

The girls' parents had some difficulty with them moving away, but due to one thing or another, flying back to see family instead of them coming to see us, they were unaware of us living together as a large group until almost a year later. We were very circumspect about our living conditions, though eventually it did get out and we had parents visiting.

Our explanation was far more simple than us being a group-marriage of 9.

Instead, we explained that since three sets of the girls were lesbians, and they knew and trusted each other, they decided to move in together to avoid getting picked on by people.

As for Jo, Kim, and myself, well, we explained we were the polyamorous couple, and we wanted in, too, so it was just incredibly convenient.

Later that summer, the girls told their parents, as couples, that they wanted kids, and that they'd convinced me to act as the birth-father / sperm donor. Plus, they got the benefit of kids being raised in a house with a guy, even if they were lesbians.

And, did I mention that all the girls were pregnant with twins, by late May when we drove East?

Egads.

Life was moving Very, Very Fast.

Our first house was a large farmhouse well outside the Montreal suburbs.

We had 7 bedrooms and a full basement to work with, on 22 acres, though some of the bedrooms were tiny and some of the acres were both hilly and wooded.

The highway entrance was close, though, and our neighbors were well away from us so we didn't have prying eyes. Privacy was a big concern when we bought the place.

The first summer we had a lot of fixing up to do, but it was a beautiful house on the outside and old enough that we could rip into it and know that if we didn't do it, the house might have been torn down.

Additions came later. We needed them.

Chickens in the existing chicken house were hard to get since it wasn't spring, but enough phone calls and the girls had us filled up with 35 hens and 5 roosters, all of different breeds so they were an eclectic flock - much like our own!

Our summer school courses were handicapped by not knowing French very well, but we managed, each of us getting A's despite the complexity of being pregnant and doing heavy remodeling or in my case, keeping them satisfied in bed, reading, and remodeling.

Mom and Dad helped a lot with the expenses, a loan that I vowed to repay, but didn't know when that could be. They came out to visit for a month in September and it was an amazing thing to have Mom there, a woman who had HAD a kid before, help out with assurances and tricks when the time came.

That time was about five days after my parents got there: Dani gave birth in September to twins, Saul and Sadie. She was only at 8 months gestation because, well, twins, plus first-pregnancy, so it was expected.

All the girls doted on the kids, but they had their own complexity with being pregnant and trying to finalize house things and take care of chickens and the dogs and still do some schoolwork.

They signed up for 12 hours each of mostly-easy classes, enough to claim full-time student status, but easy enough (and with dispensation of their professors) they could work on a schedule of get-it-done-when-you-can.

Of course, they made all A's then, too - almost - Jo got one B, and got razzed about it, even if it was in a class she hadn't properly had the prerequisite for but convinced the prof to let her take it anyway.

Jo's dyslexia, not tremendously severe in the first place, cleared up as part of the changes that happened to her brain, from whatever cause. It might have been the mushrooms, it might have been just hanging around me, or it was getting regular infusions of sperm from me.

Every one of my wives' pregnancies was twins.

But, life was more complicated in other parts of Canada.

Dani coordinated by secure messaging with most of the affected women.

The headaches that had plagued them? They continued, and in some cases got a lot worse.

Over the summer, in early August, the girls that were able to and motivated by severe pain, got in a set of carpooled vans and we did round-robin stays, filling up a small hotel near a casino in the Niagara area. I went out first, then the girls came in and out, stayed a few days, and left again. They never knew where I was living, and I kept that secret, locking up my wallet in the hotel safe so there was no indication.

To throw them off, I talked about Idaho being pretty, but I couldn't say more.

Those weekends, helped out over 70 women.

Within a day or two of getting some fluid correctly delivered, over half of them had their bad symptoms (headaches, body aches, and nightmares) stopped.

Those were the ones that became pregnant.

The rest, it took another trip, with better timing.

Several more trips over the next months helped things get resolved. I apologized profusely for making their lives complicated, but they were Far, Far more happy to have had the situation since they each got a significant boost in mental abilities out of the deal.

Dani kept track of so much of this.

The presence of so many multiple births (in our close family) did 'make news' among our local hospital staff, but since we could list our barn and chicken coop as a different set of addresses, they didn't have proof we all lived together. From afar, it was an apartment / townhouse situation.

That explanation got harder to keep going.

About nine weeks after Dani gave birth, we found she was pregnant again... and, it turned out, it was again, twins.

All these twins were fraternal, by the way, we didn't have any matched-sets, as they say.

Jo, Kim, April, Bee, Julie, and Mads, all gave birth within 3 weeks of each other, and we had a Very, Very full house.

My sisters, too, gave birth to twins, both of them, and had a lot on their plates, too. Living right near each other, though, they could trade off some childcare and that helped, and my mother helped as best she could given that she was pregnant as well (giving me two more brothers, good job Dad!).

My ability to help at the farm was obviously limited by competing interests, but Dad visited for a while and lent a hand with what he could. He was mostly a salesman, not a mechanic, so it was well intentioned but in no way excessively useful - until he started helping with the kids. That, he could do, and he grinned his ass off with them, too.

Dad's work income suffered for being away so long, but he said it was the best work he'd ever done, coming to help out.

I had to agree. I defined my literal happiest moments in my entire life, as being when my kids were born, right in front of me. Not just Dani's, but all of them.

Bee had complications and had to have a C-section, but she got better and her next pregnancy was a normal birth (well, normal for it also being twins).

Did I mention I only seemed to be fathering twins?

Okay. So, here's the Really, Really Complicated part. The pregnancy rate among those I'd had sex with at the fix-it parties was not the 50% calculated at first. It was 200%, given that most (but interestingly, not all) of the births to my classmates were twins.

Given the strict and dire orders to move out of town immediately after semester-end, to prevent prying questions, we mostly ducked that problem. Someone started putting it together given the birth announcements after the first kids were born, but with quick responses and organized secure messaging, the birth announcements stopped and various people were put into hush-hush mode to help out.

Yes, it meant some people believed there were scandals involved, but we had few follow-up questions because people were generally nice about that stuff, or could be convinced to be nice by Various Means.

The official explanation, for the newspaper article that was written about so many college women leaving and giving birth, was that there was some kind of bad batch of birth control medications and all these girls had been on that batch.

Two years later, we had more births, and more joy as our money woes evaporated.

April wrote an applied mathematics paper that had something to do with elliptical curves and prime numbers and factoring. Her professor sent it off to the university legal department to have the method patented, some kind of automatic thing for applied math papers.

That paper turned out to be very useful for hard-to-compute, easy-to-verify cryptographic checksums, which she mentioned in the abstract so the lawyers added to the patent.

Some weeks later, her professor called her and said she should come in for a meeting.

The meeting turned out to be with a large online company, who licensed the patent on their platform and suddenly there was more money rolling in than we knew what to do with

That patent turned out to be a double-edged sword.

It generated a shit-ton of money, but it also prompted a visit to our farm from RCMP and other 'international agencies', who laid out clearly that they knew who we were, that something had happened in Sudbury, that they'd tracked it all down, and that we should be aware that hiding things, while laudable, wasn't something that extended to people whose job it was to professionally know things.

We were all scared by this, of course.

They'd gotten into my computer, apparently, with a national security search warrant, and found my mushroom paper and pictures, and wanted the actual samples. I'd kept those and handed them over, one and all. I didn't need to have more problems.

Sure, I know what they look like, but they're so mundane looking and they're so much like so many other kinds of mushrooms, that neither they nor I would be able to find them again, even trying to exactly retrace the steps of my botany trip, these many years later.

I've put together what I know, what they told me, and what we (the wives and I) have concluded based on experience now, and I attach that page to this narrative in the interests of science.

As a by-the-way, the effects of greater-brainpower are not guaranteed in my offspring. Only some of the kids have it, the others seem normal, maybe 25% of them, whatever the substance did, it made an epigenetic change to my sperm, too, a recessive trait.

Oh - one more birth to mention - My mother gave birth that first November to twin boys, as mentioned, I get to have brothers. I'd only ever had sisters, so this is a Very Kewl Thing.

Mom has gotten tremendously fit, but after her second pregnancy about a year after the last set (another boy and a girl), she had her tubes tied and is done with that, she says. Technically, she was then 46 years old, but she looks to be in her late 20's or early 30's now.

The mushrooms, for those directly exposed, were a fountain of youth.

They've certainly caused my wives to sprout a fountain of youths into our household, every one of them a blessing, a mitzvah unto our family, and unto humanity.

Be proud, my children reading this, of your brave relatives, and always work to Bring Life. With world birth rates drastically falling, maybe the government(s) who took the mushrooms can help us get to a richer future off planet as well as here at home.

L'chaim.

== Appendix: Medical Report ==

Effects list of primary exposure to Kopaire Bluedot Mushrooms, transdermal absorption, possible inhalation of spores in small amounts (less likely).

Immediate (4 hour median onset) of primary symptoms, cessation 4-5 days later.

Less severe but identical effects occur after a second primary exposure.

Extreme fatigue, sleep, 22 of every 24 hours for 2-4 days

Renal impairment - brown urine. Ample fluids partially remediate this but are complicated with extreme sleep needs.

Strong, dull, broad headache. Rx is acetaminophen and ibuprofen, normal dosage.

Muscle aches in all deep muscle groups.

Lower abdominal aches in both males and females.

Loss of appetite, loose bowels, large-scale excretion of body fat in fecal matter.

Vision blurring, double vision, and sensitivity to light.

Low-grade fever throughout, some night sweats.

In males, night emissions / wet dreams.

Body odor changes at some point during this process.

Post exposure, primary source:

Continued body and abdominal aches for 7 to 10 days.

Greatly increased libido in males, including urges to masturbate 4x to 10x per day on an ongoing basis.

Increased libido in women.

Large decrease in shyness, increase in assertive and confident behaviors.

Body odor changes, emitting PBO, phermonic body odor chemicals.

Greatly increased general cardiovascular efficiency

Greatly increased positive muscle responses to training inputs, increasing strength and stamina.

Body changes drastically reduce body fat percentages of adipose and subcutaneous white fat, increased numbers of brown fat cells.

Significant Neurological effects: stem-cell stimulated growth and connection building in corpus-callosum, prefrontal cortex, hypothalamus, and other areas.

Memory, general cognition, metaphor, pattern recognition, creativity, and musical abilities are enhanced.

Some previously-lost memories are made available, but the primary effect is on new memory formation.

At unknown start point, growth and expansion in spongiform tissues and supporting circulatory structures. In males this expands the penis. In females, it expands the nipples and enlarges the clitoral lobes.

In females, 15% breast mass reduction but significantly increased firmness and tighter ligaments.

Strong dietary taste preferences to desire fresh vegetables.

Desire to exercise daily with large expenditures of energy, similar to small children.

HUGE libido increases, psychological and physiological.

Many long-duration uncontrolled and unstimulated erections in males.

Many occurrences of erotic dreaming and semi-conscious self-stimulation among females, evincing primary sexual characteristics.

In males, prostate gland tissue growth causing increased creation of seminal fluid.

In males, growth in testicular tissue mass approximately 2x to 3x.

In males, increased output of spermatozoa concomitant to testicular mass increase.

Second exposure to mushroom repeats growth to testes or spongiform tissues but only by 5% to 10% of the first growth cycle.

In females, conventional hormone-based birth control becomes utterly ineffective.

Ovaries increase in mass and many stem cell re-growths cause renewal of egg (good) cysts, replenishing supplies of eggs.

Delayed cycle of menses to approximately double the length of one menstrual cycle.

Growth of 'alcoves' in the fallopian tube near the uterus, trapping an egg as it descends. These alcoves are flushed near the end of the cycle.

Net effect of ovarian and fallopian differences lengthen fertilization chances from 4 days per 28-day month (14%) to 30 days in each 48 day cycle (62%).

Virtually guaranteed twin fertilizations, due to each tube having an alcove.

Body odor changes - emitting PBO - by males and females both, causes many specific changes in those who are exposed to this PBO.

Effects of PBO on Nearby Persons

PBO is detected by those nearby as a very pleasant, desired odor, by both men and women regardless of who is emitting it.

In both men and women, though more in women, PBO stimulates large-scale release of oxytocin in the brains of those who smell it. Stimulus is dependent on blood concentration of PBO, so prolonged exposure is exponentially more effective than short-term exposure.

PBO chemical bloodstream half-life is approximately 48 hours. Repeated exposures build up this chemical and shut down the half-life elimination process, again building a self-reinforcing mechanism for exponential responses.

Oxytocin and other psychological-hormone releases in women result in greatly increased trust and love reactions, willingness to cooperate and come to consensus, attention to group-safety and group-health concerns.

PBO thus induces late-stage pregnancy effect of "nesting", usually in women. Known effects include cleaning, mild OCD, resolving conflicts, etc., see literature.

Decreased shyness / willingness to pursue love interests despite costs/risks.

Greatly increased desire to experience that which they deem 'cute'. Cute here is defined as being baby-similar, or that which is useful in nurturing a baby.

Women (not men) exposed to PBO as secondary exposure only, also experience: