The Dirty Emperor

I was farther ahead in math than the hard sciences. Engineering school had only required linear algebra, diff-eq, and stats, but I quickly re-did those courses (in like, a few weeks) and started in on univariate and multivariate, topology, number theory, and some advanced stats that just was seriously cool.

Kim noticed I was working on this stuff, and started picking up on it, too. It wasn't just me that was getting smarter and younger. She'd regressed physically to looking about 25 or so, though her face still had those same expressions she used on the kids when they were doing stupid crap, when she looked at me for not picking up my dirty laundry.

Life was taking a strange turn, and our kids were coming to visit for the holidays. They would notice something was up, and I didn't want to have to answer questions that I didn't know the answers to.

Ug.

Emily even said her college boyfriend might fly out for a visit.

Paul, our son, was a junior in pre-law, a nice name for a double-major of political science and philosophy. He had come out as gay as a freshman in high school, so all my dreams of a big family were depending on Emily, and I just hoped her accounting major would not interfere with her making us some grandchildren.

I don't know why I was focused on that, but ... at the same time, I did.

I was the only son of an only son, and at that, from a small family all around. If Paul didn't end up having a kid with some surrogate situation, or adopt, my last name would die out - at least this branch, and I had no info on far distant branches.

My last name - Cooper - wasn't rare, but it was the idea of the thing.

If Emily didn't have a kid, my bloodline likely would die out. This upset me in profound ways and I don't know if I communicated that with Kim, but I kept it all pretty well bottled up from my kids.

They had enough to worry about without concerns about their dad telling them to pop-out a bunch of kids while they were trying to get college handled.

They both showed up by plane, flying from Toronto because the drive would have taken 23 hours. Canada is big. Despite both being at the same college, they apparently rarely saw each other.

Kim and I were nervous. Kim hadn't asked me how it was that we were thinner and younger, and I didn't volunteer, but it came up at the dinner table a couple of days before their flight arrived.

We decided to just say that we were on a super-healthy diet and were working out, which was true, and that Kim was dying her hair. Mine was short enough and my gray hair hadn't been obvious anyway, so I didn't have to tell a story there.

Paul noticed his mother's lack of wrinkles immediately, and mine, and complimented us; Emily didn't know what to do about it either except exclaim and congratulate us.

We kept it together while they were back, though it was tight quarters in the house.

Technically, this is incorrect - our house was huge. It's just that the livable portions were small.

In the 1890's, it had been a giant farmhouse, high ceilings and 3 floors and sprawling additions thrown onto the back, complete with a walk-out basement.

The problem is, before we got it, the roof had leaked, the plaster had gotten wet and fallen off the walls in most of the upstairs-top-floor, the second floor had water damage, too and no functional bathroom, and we had very little money to fix it up, despite my salary. College tuition, even in Canada, wasn't cheap, and we had some debt from moving many years ago.

That said, I'd gotten the place with a construction loan for a song, enough to put a sweet standing-seam metal roof on and fix the structural foundation problem, and change the heating to forced-air propane from being just wood stoves on each floor.

Still, because of all the bad-plaster, un-insulated winter-admitting rooms upstairs, I'd shut off that water and we were down to 2 small bedrooms on the main floor and one in the basement.

Emily and Paul had been there before, during nice weather, and had slept upstairs. That wasn't possible in the cold. So, Emily slept on my office futon, and Paul was in the downstairs bedroom I had my treadmill in.

For them, I was sad I couldn't help more, but life is odd, and as soon as it got to be nicer weather I knew I'd have more energy to do the fix-ups we'd been planning.

Winters in Manitoba being what they were, we watched a lot of TV, I got to watch more anime than I wanted courtesy of Emily, and it turned out that Emily's boyfriend couldn't afford the plane ticket after all and wouldn't be joining us.

So, the vacation was relaxing for them, even if it was a little crazymaking. Paul offered to help work upstairs or outside, and we did do some small tasks together. I loved him so much, but despite wanting to help, he had many thumbs (was not coordinated).

The biggest hassle with their visit was that my libido (frequency-wise at least) was hard to keep a secret.

Before they'd arrived, I had wanted sex pretty much every night, plus maybe a BJ during the day. Kim helped, though my drive was stronger than hers.

During their visit, it was only at night and quietly, since the bedrooms were not well sound-insulated (no such thing in the 1890's when the house was built).

I had to find a place to masturbate, and the kids didn't need to hear that, but the house wasn't big (smaller Canadian room sizes). It was too damned cold to do it outside, so I just more and more frustrated.

Christmas was nice enough, and as soon as they were back on their plane flights, Kim and I could have sex in the kitchen again.

== ==

Third only to the 3k day, the most important single day in my life was January 10th. The first-class days were marrying Kim and the days my kids were born.

On that day, I heard a voice.

It didn't start as a voice. It started as a set of tones, like when your ears are ringing, and when you stick your fingers in your ears, the ringing keeps going, so you know it isn't super-high-pitched tones from some crazy thing nearby.

This set of tones _varied_, though, and when I covered my ears they were just as loud.

I was in the house alone. Kim was off doing a dog-rescue afternoon, and the kids had left for college the previous week.

Sitting back in my chair, I pushed down my laptop lid and stood up, and went into the kitchen, thinking maybe the tones were some environmental thing.

Opening the front door (COLD!), the tones were the same volume. Damn. I'm going crazy.

Nothing to do but sit down and wait.

A voice came through. It was in English, though some part of me knew that it could switch to French if I wanted it to.

It was a voice in my head, but it wasn't MY voice-in-my-head. Most everyone has a voice, their inner monologue, but this wasn't MINE!

It sounded like it was coming through my ears, though, except it wasn't. It was in a low register, and had an American accent, which I found funny since moving to Canada meant my own accent was increasingly Canadian.

My memory of this is Absolutely Crystal-Certainty-Clear.

"Kevin. No, you are not Crazy. This sound is coming through your auditory nerve. I have chosen the name of Jesus, though I am not Jesus. In your culture, talking with Jesus and calling his name, even when he is not physically there, is not regarded as a mental illness, so it could be useful to think of me with this name. I am not God. I am not Jesus. I am just calling myself Jesus."

The voice waited, so I said, "Okay?"

"Good. I have come here to help humanity. I will do this by making you Emperor of Earth."

I burst out laughing. "Uh... I'm ... "

"We both know that. You are not prepared. You are not wise enough. You don't know enough. However, some things need to happen in order for humanity to survive what Fermi called 'The Great Filter'. You must fix some big problems before they doom your species. Humanity will probably survive anyway, but it's not certain, and I can help increase the odds. Yes, I'm an alien."

I hadn't asked it yet.

"I have changed your body to give you more time on Earth. I've changed Kim, too, because mated pairs in sexual-reproduction paired-genome species typically cooperate and I want to make life easier on you."

"You ... want me to do stuff?"

"Obviously. You know some of what's wrong. I have access to more information than you do. I will give you some of that information. You will use it. Knowledge is power, and you will have access to all of humanity's knowledge, plus much of mine."

"How can we...?"

"Prove you're not talking to yourself? Auditory hallucinations typically don't provide info not already known to that person. So. Here's some info. You have a brokerage account. I have inflated it to abbott US$12m. This is a reasonable sum to start with. I'm going to execute some trades on it that will increase the value of this account to about $300 million in the next two months."

"WOW!"

"Yes. Hallucinations don't pay off."

I didn't know what to say.

"First of all, I have some work for you to do. Your brain is tuned into your culture pretty well. So, you will rephrase emails I send you, then send them on. Those emails will go to people across the world who will be inspired by them to invent things."

"Useful... for money?"

"For helping your species survive. The first one will be a lithium-silicon-copper-sulfur battery with a gravimetric density about 10x the current types, and with a far, far cheaper manufacturing cost. There are a few developments to make this happen, but I'll feed those to you over the next month and they'll get it."

"And... Someone will get rich?"

"Sure. Lots of people, including you."

"Okay?"

"The second will explain how to create aneutronic fusion using 2-Kelvin cryogenic crystalline Boron-11. This will generate more power than humanity can use, cheaply, for centuries. No radioactive by-products. Can't make many reactors, though, just a few."

"Why not just have more...?"

"Directed energy weapons would cause an arms race. You don't want that. Using a set of 3 reactors for redundancy, it's simple to build a set of 500-GW reactors that will refine all the polycrystalline silicon needed. That can eliminate fossil fuels inside of 10 years."

"Ah." I got what he was saying, but I wondered, "And... this will save everyone?"

"Yes. Paul and Emily and all your other children and grandchildren will be saved."

I was confused. I didn't have any other children, much less grandchildren.

"You have priorities. I know what they are. Kim is aware, too. Kim is already arranging for you to have houseguests. I have arranged for them to be available for Kim to invite. All you have to do is say Yes. But, now, go check your email. Follow the directions."

"Will I talk with you again...Jesus?" I was laughing to myself as I said it, and thought of the movie 'Real Genius' where the tooth filling makes the Ken character do stupid things.

The voice obviously was listening to my inner narrative and said, "You're not Ken. Yes, you'll talk with me again, but not often. For now, I can give you orders, and you'll have to obey them, but it's much better and easier if you just do what you want to do anyway."

The implication of 'houseguests' and 'want to do' wasn't lost on me.

I got up and went into the office and got to work.

Jesus had worded the emails like a scholarly paper, not an email from a person having an idea. I changed things around, made it simpler to read, and added some colloquial phrases, and quite a lot of couching the ideas as inspired-guesses or questions.

After those were done, I checked on my brokerage account, and it turned out I'd purchased some shares in a penny stock that had done very, very well, then sold out the previous week. My cash balance was indeed up to US$12 million (CA$17m).

As I watched, and though my fingers were not touching the keyboard, text appeared on screen and mouse-clicks on my brokerage webpage started. Jesus bought me stock in several other companies, some small ones and some big ones, just a few shares each. I wondered which ones were misdirections and which ones weren't, but I took some notes on what the tickers were so I could look them up later.

An hour later, my phone rang, my wife was calling.

I answered with, "Hey, hun."

"Kevin. I have a situation that... we can help with."

I was clued in, but I had to pretend I wasn't. "Yeah? You want us to get a dog? You know I'm allergic."

"Not... quite. So, there's this lady here. She's doing one of these cross-country transport relays, going west? She's got these two college students, sisters, refugees now from that Uruguay thing last year. They have no money, nowhere to live, and if they don't find something soon, they'll be kicked out of Canada."

"And...?"

"And, we have a room in the basement. We can move your treadmill."

"You want to take in stray...people?" I laughed, it was a thread in our marriage that she had a soft-hearted streak, but I was really teasing, and quickly added, being somewhat inspired, "I'm okay with this, actually. If they're willing to work for food and shelter, I can set them to work on fixing the upstairs."

"With what money?"

"Drywall isn't expensive, and if they're college students, they can figure it out. I don't have a schedule, I'm sure it'll be fine. Tell them, it's a temporary thing, though, since we may decide we don't like them." I was smiling as I said this, and teasing again.

"I'm not telling them that. I'll say, we'll try it out for a while, until they can get on their feet."

"Cool by me."

"We'll be home in, maybe, 2 hours? I'm gonna take them to get groceries since we're almost out, and we can't feed four hungry mouths out of that refrigerator right now."

We said goodbyes, and I looked around, wondering how my life was going to change.

It changed.

The car pulled in our drive, bright headlights on and crunching over the brittle snow, heading over to our ramshackle shop-garage. It wasn't so much to look at, but it kept the snow off the cars when it was doing bad stuff outside.

I was watching through an upstairs window, having put a log in the woodburning stove and hoping the stainless-steel chimney bolted to the side of the house wasn't so full of creosote that we had problems. I hadn't heated that room up in a while, and I wanted the room to start getting warmer so they could do something useful in the next few days.

Wood, for the stove, wouldn't be a problem. We had 22 acres and most of it was wooded. What wasn't trees was horse-fenced pasture, where calling it a fence was charitable and pasture was a dream-memory of the previous summer that ignored the vast weedy overgrowth that dominated the palace.

Kim and I had joked when we moved in that what the place needed was goats to cut the pasture, and sheep to control the goats, and llamas to control the sheep, and a border collie to control the llamas, and the spider ate the fly, and I wonder why.

Yes, we know, sheep don't control goats, but it was a joke, and it stuck.

They ferried groceries from the shop to the porch, and I pulled them inside the door as they went.

Mary and Connie (Consuella) seemed very distracted and smiled at me as they went back and forth, but I tried to be helpful.

Kim had gotten more food than when we had the kids home for Christmas. To be fair, some of the sacks were beans and rice, which I figured might be more something the girls wanted.

Everyone came inside carrying their last load - rolling suitcases and backpacks, and we shut the door behind them with a bang. Our house-tightening wasn't perfect, but the wood stoves downstairs kept the place going and if it got too warm, we cracked a window and the hot air went upstairs and out all the non-patched spots that I hadn't solved yet with plastic bags and duck tape.

They shed their coats and did introductions.

Mary had shoulder-length black hair, a thin build and a pretty face but badly misaligned teeth. She kept her mouth shut most of the time to hide this, and when she did I noticed her sparkling eyes a lot more readily.

Connie was taller and just as pretty, with a thicker chest that may or may not have been due to layers of sweatshirt. I could look into her eyes (brown but with flecks of green) almost directly since she was as tall as I was.

Her teeth, too, were crowded and badly in need of braces, but she smiled readily and was overjoyed to be where they were.

Both of them were Latina so had slightly darker skin than we did, but not so much as to be out of the ordinary. Manitoba had First Peoples, Hispanic, Indian, and Chinese ancestry populations and there was an overlap in how they looked as far as my idiot eyes were concerned. Manitoba might be far from Ontario (a more diverse area) but we were far from being a mono-culture.

It wasn't quite dinnertime so Kim preheated the oven for some pizzas and we gave the girls the house tour. I laid out that I had an ulterior motive for them to stay with us, working on the house, but the way I phrased it, we were solving each other's problems so it could seem mor equal. If they thought they were beholden to me, somehow, I figured they'd want to leave earlier, and I had ... (throat-clearing noise) "ideas" about them based on what Jesus had said.

Kim of course downplayed this whole line of thought and told them the most important thing was getting into a good life-rhythm, maybe signing up for some online classes scored independent of semester- or quarter-based timeframes, and feeling at home.

They chose the basement bedroom, mostly because it was setup already and had access to a utility room that had a toilet and shower in it.

Kim helped them get set up for showers and laundering their small collection of clothes, and I only saw them again about two hours later when we sat down to dinner.

The difference was stark. With clean hair and bodies, and of course refreshed smiles, we could sit around and chat a while, and got the stories of where they were from - Uruguay - what their family did - farming corn - and what happened - their patriarch grandfather had been killed years ago in a war, and then with the recent unrest, her parents had been displaced when their property was stolen by a criminal syndicate.

The displacement had turned into a disappearance when their parents disappeared from a homeless shelter.

Their Catholic boarding school had some scholarships for exceptional students, and they both were, so they got into U Toronto, and the merit scholarship added a meager one from their boarding school.

That was, until the massive Tsunami swept away much of the lowlands around Montevideo and wiped their school off the map. No more funds, no more help, no more U Toronto, and their lives were pretty nearly about to be ruined.

So, with their arrival, we were their Godsend. They had been enroute to a ski-resort set of jobs in B.C., but it was a rumor not an actual offer, and they figured they could just barely make it there on their remaining funds.

Of course, Kim's offer of a place to stay and free food was a whole lot better.

And, that was that.

Our house was two people bigger.

== ==

Two weeks later they'd had all the medical checkups Kim wanted them to have, including orthodontia visits to let them both get braces. As advised by Jesus, I was to say YES to all requests to do with them, so Kim went ahead.

Kim didn't ask how we had this money, several thousand dollars, but I knew she would figure it was me letting my big heart conquer my tightness with money.

Coming back from having wisdom teeth out, they had several days of doing nothing. The pain meds helped both that pain and the aches from having orthodonture (braces) put on at the same time to help with getting their teeth taken care of.

It was needed - some of their teeth were in odd positions.