Singular Muck

The gender ratio in town was Seriously Skewed.

Yet another clue came in during the day after the march, when I talked with Odouba (Dr. Odouba Carti from Mrs. Lettchick's house). She mentioned that just the day before, she'd gotten notification on her PINETREE app that she was part of a group of Canadian doctors who were admitted to practice medicine in the USA.

She didn't remember our conversation about that specifically, but she did mention that she was setting up a Midwifery Teaching School 'MTS' in her house. She'd start with all her sister-wives, she said, and move from there to whoever else wanted it.

I mentioned Keeni had organized the event the previous day and she agreed fast, that she'd already met with Keeni and had gotten agreement to share some of the teaching duties.

My freewheeling free-use freedom to fuck was freakin' fantastic!

At the same time as I enjoyed the women, they enjoyed me and each other, and we got along in the process of gardening and learning better how to grow veggies in sub-irrigated planters.

== ==

Pretty much most of the industrialized world got back to work in at least some small ways over the month after the President's speech, and I heard back that many of the women I was living with were now 'In a Family Way' and mostly happy about that. I say mostly because I don't know for sure, and there was some griping about morning sickness and I felt bad about that for them.

Certainly, it was their choice and they were being well-compensated for their pains and hassles, so it was kind of a rational thing, like, 'oh, you're a cross-country runner, your legs hurt, yeah, that's gonna happen' thing.

At the same time, I knew I was being used for a larger purpose that I may or may not understand, and that part worried me, and in concert with that I worried for the women who were pregnant around me. I couldn't help them, there's no fixing some of that hassle. More than that, I couldn't even get an understanding of what the feelings were like - I was a guy. So, when the famous 'you don't understand' line popped out, even without anger, I had to agree, correct, I don't understand.

Other things were happening in the world, and news on the web carried some bigger stories.

As part of a PINETREE enforcement, religious ultra-conservatives from all the major religions ended up being shipped all over the world and discovering that their worldviews were not the only ones available. They could still believe what they wanted, but the clear message was that the people who resorted to violence were found out in short order and moved to the company of more moderate people in the hopes they could calm down somewhat.

That was the dream anyway.

Sometimes it worked, and sometimes not, where the 'not' times included real violence against innocents and that was a problem. But, I guessed that would always be a problem. There's only so much you can do to help people caught in bad situations.

Those that resisted doing what PINETREE wanted found "accidental" situations abounding that were disadvantageous enough that the people just were forced to comply.

There were lots of holdouts, for sure, Amish people, for instance and they were fine and mostly left alone. The PINETREE had no problem with iconoclasts as long as they were nonviolent and not oppressively conversion-happy outside their groups, I think.

== ==

Months passed and people started to settle into their new patterns. My life was occupied watching and helping my group in their hydroponics-based greenhouse experiment, which went through a bunch of iterations with different tech. Some of the women that had come to join and live near me were world experts on hydroponics, and having them all in the same place trying new ideas and living nearby made for some obsession over it.

Those of us staffing the equipment, trying new things, we all got the benefit of fresh tasty produce. There were frequent tastings of this or that thing, lots of carrots and which one tasted better or worse. I could handle most of that, but I found I had ZERO tolerance for brussel sprouts no matter how much butter they were cooked with.

Infrastructure around town grew rapidly, too, first in slow ways with scaffolding here or there, and then more, prefab houses dropped in, then entire prefab apartment buildings brought in on electric semi trucks, stacked and done.

Our schools, by the fall, were at least doubled in size, as many of the women that showed up already had a child of school age and we needed the capacity.

That fall, walking around, I was so surprised to just look around and see so many people walking around (on new, wide, safe, well-lit sidewalks) with larger bellies, getting out and exercising while inside, babies were growing.

As much as the whole strangeness seemed surreal and oddball, there were aspects that I absolutely loved, and those included having so many women around me competently working away at this project or that, despite being crammed into housing that just plainly wasn't big enough.

The city limits expanded to the south into former farm fields, and into it went many of these pre-constructed apartment buildings, separated by parks, overhanging cantilevered structures giving shelter to almost-indoor parks and ball fields.

My 'family' got a large delivery one day of a set of suitcases, each one with a name embossed on it. Even I got one. They contained a letter to that person, with specific directions to what their new address was going to be in this massive complex being built. Of course we had to go see.

Our apartments were on the fourth floor and encompassed a large section with wide circular ramps that flowed up from one level to another and split out to the sections. High ceilings, solid concrete construction but with large windows onto either closed or open-topped atriums, big kitchens (with flat-pack boxes of furniture to-be-assembled), it all spoke of some kind of massive planning effort and I wondered who in my crowd had helped.

No one would admit to designing anything, exactly, relating to housing, but they had all chimed in on some App questions about what they wanted in a house or apartment, etc.

My own apartment was off a central concourse and to call it immense would be... correct. I didn't know what I wanted in an apartment, but this was far beyond that.

Swoopy walls, connected spaces with soundproofing panels that took away the noise, I was floored by the layout.

My 'wives' (still, a wow! idea) took up the move with some gusto and we shifted locations over the next week, leaving some of the women who were super-into hydroponics to keep working on their project, and more women moving in to take up the suddenly open living spaces.

We weren't stupid - we took the kids toys that had been left in those garages with us, there was a shortage of those for sure.

My firstborn son, Moishe Fenimore Cooper Brandeis, was born of Peggy Brandeis, 2 months premature (risky) but healthy, and Wowzers was I happy!

I didn't attend the birth since although Peggy and I had been intimate, we weren't 'best friends' or anything and she had another gal as a birth coach, a lady in her 70's who had 'Been There Before' and had been drafted into helping several of them by being a birth coach.

The birth itself went quickly and relatively painlessly. I'd helped out that much, giving her an instruction that it could be uncomfortable but that she could suppress her pain if she wanted for five minutes at a time by chanting a phrase. I figured, it was good for emergency use, and she really did appreciate it.

The doctors, too, were surprised at how well she was tolerating the pain.

I saw them a couple of hours after the birth. Being a premie, I couldn't hold him (in an incubator at the hospital), but I did get to see him. Peggy was nearby and we talked about the name. I left it entirely up to her, but asked that a middle name be either Fenimore (my own middle name and a family tradition) or my last name, Cooper.

She chose both, and kept the last name as her own since there would soon be LOTS more Coopers in the world.

She was happy, and thus so was I, but we were worried since no premature birth is without risk.

Since there's nothing to be done but wait and trust in the doctors, we agree that one thing we could do was agree on a pet-name. The short version of Moishe (a Hebrew spelling of Moses) is typically Mo, she said, and I wondered if she was going to have Larry and Curly next, but she didn't know who they were and I had to dig up some old videos.

That didn't last long. She was sleepy.

== Chapter: Going with the Flow ==

My responsibilities for my harem kept up, and even though some of them were pregnant, I was tightly scheduled for my nighttime bedmates were.

As much fun as that was, I did ask at one point if there were any others missing off the roster who had elected to stay out of rotation, to not get pregnant?

This was interpreted as a request for women who were not pregnant, i.e., new people that I hadn't met yet.

Not that I was objecting, a steady stream of beautiful, super-smart women parading through my life, that made for a fun time for both of us. I had a super-high libido, and the new stream of people stimulated that.

For a daytime job, my work had stopped but my paycheck continued, so I had a lot of free time. My PINETREE App started assigning me tasks. I had to learn about a subject, summarize what was known at the time, give an opinion on the ethical and correct way to fix it might be (as options) and write it all up.

I'd been at this for several months, and by Christmas I started noticing that some real-world things were happening that bore a strong resemblance to what I'd recommended.

One of the problems, a lack of big fish in freshwater ecosystems, I proposed out of the blue that we should dredge a large section of existing lakebed, perhaps in the great lakes or next to them, super-deep, and put the soil somewhere useful, like areas of the world where bad farming techniques had resulted in ground that was mostly rocky.

The first instance of this showed up as a disturbance in the center of Lake Michigan that resulted in the level of the entire lake dropping by about 3 meters - a significant amount, but still bearable for the lake shoreline (per the 'experts').

That soil ended up dropped as a one-meter thick coating in a section of western Ontario where the ground was particularly rocky. Those people living in the area noted it was falling like rain and blacked out the sun, making for dusty conditions. Everyone had to rake or shovel their house roof or driveway while it continued.

No explanation came out, it had just happened, like that.

Lake Wilson, in north-central Kansas, was a man-made lake built by damming up a natural valley of rolling hills, formerly cattle land. Instead of being just 60 to 100 feet deep, suddenly someone discovered the sides of the lake had greatly expanded, doubling the lake's footprint into farmland.

Quickly, surveys and soundings were made, and the new lakebed was over 600 feet deep, with the sides going down through solid bedrock into the depths. The iceberg in the center filled much of the lake (in the winter it was less obvious) was made of BLUE ice, obviously scooped out of a glacier or something.

We found out much later from satellite surveys that the ice had come from inland Antarctica.

These were the first signs of odd stuff happening. It just kept getting weirder.

New Zealand had a channel cut across the front of some mountains in the southern island, that then turned and cut to the east, bringing a large S-curve river back and forth across the landscape down to the sea.

This was odd, sure.

It got weirder. The next week, an immense hole appeared, magically overnight, 100 meters deep, ten cubic kilometers total, in central New Zealand, in harshly-sloping brushland outside of Omaku.

The resulting hole in the ground would take five years to fill with meltwater, a small amount of the total water that had been shedding off to the west and into the sea, but now a large flow rushing from late-summer melts. That lakewater would fill with local fish, but it would take a long while since the water was pretty muddy as it poured in.

So, we knew something was going on, some force had magical powers.

It couldn't be a coincidence that the PINETREE had taken over the world and now there were magical things happening.

Well, maybe not magic, per se, but definitely beyond the tech anyone knew about.

After those happenings, no real news came out, well into February.

Just after St. Patrick's day, NASA reported a very large object in orbit, that appeared to be spherical.

Turning telescopes on it, it appeared to be... an iceberg?

Blue ice, white snow, it all looked pretty surreal hanging up there, ten cubic kilometers of it. One iceberg, just there, unexplained, in a 2000 km orbit.

The PINETREE put out a press release saying the ice was for sale, if anyone wanted it, for spacecraft propulsion or habitat. We all laughed, what kind of rocket ships could get up there to use it, but SpaceX just tweeted a simple, "Thank You".

We didn't know what SpaceX's plans were, but at least they saw the utility of having ice in orbit.

I shook my head and went back to making daily visits to the mothers of my children, and my children themselves, though they didn't know who was who yet, as infants.

== Chapter: I Am Unavoidably A God ==

Increasingly and definitely by that fall, I came to know the truth.

The 'government project' I had been working on had something to do with PINETREE. Specifically, whenever I said something, it happened.

The hints and clues had been very slow and sparse in the early days, since so much was new and different about the world that the PINETREE wanted. I didn't agree with everything they did, but a lot of it made very good sense and seemed basically ethical.

There were people dying, or nearly dying, of starvation. They lacked the fish that they usually ate to make up a portion of their protein diet. The governments of the world stepped up to ensure people weren't malnourished, so it worked out, but the desperation was real.

I'd always thought that the USA not being metric was a Profound Stupidity. That idea wasn't just mine, though, so it couldn't clue me into my thinking, my preconceptions, being the foundational basis for PINETREE decisions.

After watching an old Dr. Who episode, I again noticed that the cars were on the opposite side of the road there, and made some idle comment about it to whoever I was watching TV with. They didn't hear me, they were in the bathroom at the time, and I didn't really say it too loudly.

A week later, Britain, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and all of the other places in the world where they drive on the left? PINETREE had decreed they would change to align with the way the rest of the world worked.

I kind of knew then. I still didn't want to believe it. I hadn't done it on purpose, but the power I had was not imagined. There could be no coincidences like the ones that happened to me.

Many of my wives were having trouble with morning sickness. I commented that it was entirely Wrong that this was such a common problem for pregnant women, and we didn't really understand why it happened or have a way to fix it. Likewise, swelling feet, and sagging boobs, and all of the aches and pains of pregnant women.

I read a week after that comment that CDCP and NIH and US HealthService were issuing grants, a new initiative to eliminate common hassles of pregnancy, and improved the pain management care during delivery so as not to require an epidural.

(I hadn't had kids before, and one of the women was talking about the only choice for pain relief during delivery was an epidural or tylenol, there WAS NO OTHER OPTION! I was aghast. I said that can't be right, it's horrible. We didn't finish that conversation, but sure enough, that conversation tied in with the Health Service initiatives, to find another way.

Realizing that my ideas mattered, and that PINETREE was listening to me, I started spending some significant number of waking hours writing (on paper only! In private only!) ideas I had for what might be things I'd change about the world, if it were up to me.

What would you change, about the world? Is it silly? Is it not?

I didn't like that speed limits in the USA have always been set too low, so when you break them, it seems like a bigger deal. Everyone just drives +7, or +13 mph over the limit, and the cops ignore it.

If cops need to meet a quota, to fund their pensions or that shiny new police cruiser, they write tickets for +10 mph. Other times, they leave it for +16. There's no truth in speed limits.

It makes everyone into a law-breaker. Every American regularly breaks the law, every single time they go out to drive a car. They drive over the speed limit. They don't stop for a full 3 seconds at every line/sign/crosswalk before proceeding. They don't slow down Before a speed limit change area, they wait to slow down until they're already in that area.

It's training the USA to regard breaking the law as trivial, but it also leads to unequal enforcement, on people of color or people with shitty cars the cops know they can target and those people will fail to show up and never fight the ticket.

As a test, I mentioned to someone that it'd be great if we had truth in traffic laws, enforced by a dashcam with a GPS and that person would get a break on their insurance prices.

PINETREE implemented that not so long afterwards.

Likewise, my suggestion that school classes include age appropriate psych topics like the five stages of grief, types of autism, ADD, ADHD, OCD, and how to live with those or with a family member who had one? That seemed useful. Plus, characteristics of alcoholism and codependency, anger management, etc.

In a far-ranging discussion with some others, I described that every kid should get music lessons, basic life-saving first-aid / trauma care training, and have two gym classes a day (one being a skill like yoga or a martial art). The school day should be longer, I said, to help people who had to work until 5.

All schools should require marriage and family life classes so everyone knows basic relationship and parenting skills - they're going to use them later in life, for sure.

No class I ever had in school taught me how to have an argument.

It's a skill, having a good argument! Repeat what the other person is saying, then add to it with a fact and an emotion, and don't put words or emotions into the mouths of people around you. Simple? Sure, it's simple, but I had to read it in a pop-psych class book I picked up randomly in college. It's the kind of thing every kid over 3rd grade should be taught.

And, anti-bullying stuff.

I never was one of those people who went in for "participation medals", if everyone wins nobody wins. Sometimes you need to have a clear winner and loser or losers in a game, and that's fine, as long as nobody takes it too seriously.

All these ideas came out in PINETREE directives over the next month or so after I mentioned them, sorta, in passing.

It wasn't 'in passing'. I had an agenda. More than that, PINETREE listened to me.

This was dangerous.

This couldn't keep going.

I had to change my ways.

I had to shut the fuck up.

== Chapter: Epilogue ==

I'm finishing writing this from a former cruise ship, landed on the deepest part of the Vallis Marinaris on Mars, which would sound like a chasm but it's really not all that steep through most of its length.

Above us, really piled up against us, is a steep wall of ALON (Aluminum/Oxy/Nitrogen) glass, scooped out of the martian soil and baked into transparent glass blocks. They shield us with about 5 meters of yummy radiation-free goodness, and let the light flow where it needs to flow.