“I’m really interested and I hate to interrupt you, but there’s something that’s been bugging me. I know I’m not talking English and it seems like we’re both speaking the same language. But I understand things as if I’d been speaking this forever. All those minute differences, those inferences that come across in which word you choose and even the way you say it – I’ve got a total understanding of those things in this new language.”
“Well, first of all, you’re speaking what we refer to as Standard. It’s as close to a universal language as there is, but there are millions and millions of different languages and dialects. You have received an implant, smaller than any of the cells in your body. It allows you to understand and speak Standard, as well as approximately 30,000 other languages. If you came across somebody who spoke a language you are not familiar with, your implant would communicate with their mind and within minutes the two of you would be able to speak in his native tongue.”
“Well I’ll be damned. Thirty thousand. Sheeeit! I could probably understand one of them Englishmen”. My phony accent went straight over her head though I’ll admit, Cockney doesn’t come across too well in Standard.
“You will be amazed at what you understand. There’s a lot more to it than just putting an implant in you. Different people learn differently, at different speeds. Some people wouldn’t be able to communicate half as well as you after years and years of trying. It isn’t the chip that communicates, it works with your mind and you communicate.”
“Wow. Like algebra. Some got it right off, some never figured it out.”
“Precisely. I have no idea what algebra is but you communicated the essence to me and your comparison is spot on. I am amazed at how well you are doing. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were able to speak telepathically somewhere down the line.”
[You mean like this,] I thought, aiming it at her as if it was something I’d been doing all my life.
“Yes,” she said, then got a shocked look on her face as she realized what I’d done. “Amazing. One out of 500 is able to do that natively and it’s very rare for someone to develop that ability after living a few years, much less the length of time you have. I was joking when I said you could learn to do it.”
“It doesn’t seem like I learned anything. You said I could do it so I did it. I just didn’t know any better. FM.”
“Well, that little trick brought you up to number three in popularity. And that’s against some beings who’ve been on vid for centuries.”
“Centuries? The man who … I guess recruited me is the best way to say it … He said I could live another 76 years, probably on a planet with primitive people. He was kind of abrupt, really.”
“That’s Mot. A report is being sent. Is there anything more you want to say about it?”
“Hey, I don’t want to get the guy in trouble. I did notice that it took a long time from when he talked until I ‘heard’ it in my head. It seemed to get faster, the more we talked.”
“That’s the learning period I was telling you about. Mot has never been subjected to English before and he tends to take longer than some of us to grasp a new language. I imagine he’s still disturbed to be put into a recruitment position, too.”
“Oh, he was new? What did he do before?”
“He was a producer. The ratings on his projects have been declining over the past two decades and he was given a chance to show what he can do as a recruiter. There is a lot less prestige in his new position and he was probably taking it out on you.”
“So, did you take over his job?”
“No, nothing like that. Although I could see how he could imagine that was the case. This is my first time producing, but I didn’t fill a slot that he vacated. I was a developer. I would be assigned several beings and would keep an eye on them. If the ratings dropped, it was my job to figure out why and find something that would fix them. It could be anything from introducing a potential new mate or enemy into their world or even moving them to another location, on or off planet. I would go over my ideas with the producers and figure out what might work. Then the producer would pitch the change to the production board and they would accept, refuse or modify it. It’s a lot easier to get them to go along with introducing a new female than sending someone off to establish a new colony on another planet. Finance has a lot to do with it.”
“Ah, yes. The bean counters. I’ve had my share of run ins with them.”
“People who count beans?”
“Not literally, but yes. They pick every potential activity apart to make sure each dollar they put into it has the potential to get 10, 20 or 50 back.”
“Oh, yes. That’s Finance.”
“So did you work with Mot on some of the projects that lost ratings?”
“No. This is the first time we’ve had anything to do with each other.”
“You mean him recruiting me and you producing.”
“More than that, actually. You see, part of the developer’s job is to find potential subjects. Not every developer is good at it and they don’t like to let the good ones go. I had a difficult time convincing my superiors to let me run the production after I selected you as an ideal subject.”
“Ideal? Because I abused my body? I’m sure there are a million more just like me you could have chosen.”
“Is that what Mot told you?”
“He said I had five minutes before I died to make up my mind. I was going to be an experiment and the ones you people liked most were the ones who had really fucked up their bodies. He stressed the repair of my body more than anything. He was very specific on me getting another 76 years and said nothing about centuries.”
“Oh, boy. Where do I start? First off, humans tend to be a bit lower on the lifespan scale. 150 – 200 years is probably the average for most species. Your body has been reconstructed and should last well past the 76 years you lived prior to coming here. Even though most of it has been beefed up and will last longer than before, you are not immortal or some kind of superman. If you fall off a cliff, get attacked by a wild animal, get into a fight with someone else, any of these can damage or even kill you. If you prick your finger, it will still hurt.
“As you said, people who didn’t take care of their bodies are a dime a dozen. You took two weeks to fix. Some take a little less, some a little more. A month or two of orientation to the way things are and will be in the future is normal. I would wager that you would take a lot less time than normal except for the fact that you ask about everything. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not objecting. One of the reasons your ratings are so high this soon is that you aren’t just sitting there and accepting whatever comes your way.”
“I’ve never done that.”
“No, you haven’t. And that’s the real reason I selected you and was able to convince my superiors to let me produce you. The majority of people on Earth are perfectly willing to go to work every day and do some repetitive, unrewarding job, careful not to intrude on anyone or upset anything. They come home to their beer and their TV and start the same thing over again the next day. Or they are content to sit around all day, use drugs to try to escape their existence and let the government support them. Did you ever disturb anyone when you were working?”
“Hell, yes, I was always rocking the boat. Damn fools went around with their heads up their asses. It’s a good thing I was a vice president and could make them listen to me.”
“How did the people you worked with feel about you?”
“Maybe 50-50. Half of them thought I was an asshole and the other half loved me.”
“Yet some of those who considered you an asshole still went along with you.”
“Sometimes. It usually took some real convincing.”
“When did you stop working?”
“I retired eleven years ago, when I reached 65.”
“And what has happened to your company in the last eleven years?”
“I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to them. The first c
ouple of years, the real dicks took over and a bunch more joined them. They were all afraid to say boo for fear they might lose a dime or two. They wanted to do things the way they did twenty years ago.”
“And now the company is no more. Did you ever consider there might be some connection to your retirement, the transition to an ultra-conservative management and the company’s bankruptcy?”
“You’re shitting me. You think I had that much influence on the company?”
“The statistics seem to show a direct correlation between your retirement and the company’s demise. And when you fought hard for an idea of your own or against someone else’s bad idea, and won, things improved after your idea was implemented. The harder you fought, the better things went.”
“I kinda felt that way but I didn’t have any statistics to back me up.”
“I do. I’ve been keeping them for 23 years.”
“Twenty three years. That’s when I became a junior VP.”
“That’s what alerted me. There was an attitude of grudging acceptance throughout the company’s upper management. Like they didn’t really want you but they knew they would do better if they had you. That’s why you were constantly forced to prove yourself. Your people have an expression, ‘Thinking outside the box’. You’re one of a few who do that instinctively. 99% of the people are stuck inside the box and the majority of them don’t even realize there’s a box. And I’m not just talking about Earth. I’m talking about the whole fucking universe.”
******************
Chapter Two
I stood up and held out my right hand. She looked at me, confused, then brightened up and took it in hers.
“I’m Jeff,” I said, shaking her hand.
“I know,” she answered. “Jeffrey Thomas Henderson.”
I continued to look her in the eye, not allowing her to pull back her hand. After a while she started to blush.
“I’m sorry, I never did answer you. You have no idea who I am, do you? Of course you don’t. My name’s Gem.”
I shook her hand again. “I’m very glad to meet you, Gem. I look forward to working with you.”
“As do I,” she responded.
“I hate to be a pain in the ass,” I told her, “but as you pointed out, there are many things about this place I don’t know.”
“If you’re afraid I’ll mind, I won’t. That’s one of the reasons I chose you.”
“That I’m ignorant?”
“No, that you don’t like to remain so.”
“Alright, then. I don’t know what your society’s attitude toward nudity is and I have no concerns about it one way or another, but I notice that you are clothed while I am not.”
She started to regain the blush that had faded out since she told me her name, and walked over to the section of the wall where she got my water and soup. She pushed a few buttons on what looked like an oversized keypad and a shelf came out with an article of clothing on it. She picked it up and held it in front of her. It looked like a skirt a teenage girl might wear, a waist of their equivalent to elastic that expanded out and down for a little over a foot.
“It’s our version of your kilt,” she said. “It’s more like a woman’s skirt in appearance but it is acceptable for either sex to wear it. To answer your question, there are no taboos regarding either wearing clothes or not wearing clothes. To be quite honest, I was so wrapped up in finally getting to meet you and talk with you that I didn’t even notice that you are naked.”
“Thank you,” I said, taking the kilt from her. I held the sides of the waistband, stepped into it and slid it up until it was around my waist. It tightened to a perfect fit but it wasn’t like elastic, snapping in. It almost felt alive, or at least intelligent. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is someone putting their hand around a cock. There’s no hesitation, no fumbling around, it just tightens to the right tightness. As it needs to get looser or tighter, it does so, seemingly automatically. The kilt came down to mid-thigh.
“Are there any undergarments that go with it?”
“We don’t use them.”
“Yes,” I said, “I’ve noticed. Or at least that you aren’t.”
“I’ve noticed that you’ve noticed,” she said, glancing down at the bulge in my kilt. “It’s been at least two weeks for you.”
“Two weeks? Shit, Lady, try ten years. I got less and less active the more wives I worked through and the more years I lived. When I had my first heart attack and the doc told me to take it easy in the bedroom for a while, I sorta gave it up.”
“Well, that’s one thing that’s definitely going to change,” she said, walking over to me. “Your libido is now higher than it was when you were a teenager and will stay that way as long as you live.”
She slid down until she was squatting in front of me. Pulling the kilt away from me, she said, “Hold this out of the way.”
I lifted it up so it was above my waist, then used both hands to bunch it up on top of my stomach. In the meantime, Gem was giving me a world class blowjob. Blowjobs are something I was familiar with but not something any of my wives was thrilled to dish out. I recalled the first time I got one and damned near pushed the end of my cock out the back of the girl’s throat. The graph spiked even higher than it already was when I thought about that.
I have to say, it’s pretty erotic to see yourself getting blown from sixteen different angles on monitors approximately eight feet in front of you. I spotted something in one of them and noticed it again a couple of seconds later. Gem has a forked tongue. You can do amazing things giving someone a blowjob if you’ve got a forked tongue.
***********
Reds and oranges and pinks, multiple spikes so high they had to change the scale to fit them on the graph and new highs on the bar graph of people watching. Best blow job I ever had and if I had any doubts, the displays proved it.
I hadn’t suddenly become an exhibitionist. Somewhere along the line I’d realized that whatever I did, there were going to be some billions of beings watching it and it was stupid not to experience life because others might be watching. I was extremely happy I didn’t miss the best blowjob of my life over some misplaced sense of modesty.
“That was amazing,” I said as she swallowed that last of it. “You did an excellent job but there seems to be something more than your skill involved. Have the nerve endings on my penis been played with?”
“All of your senses have been enhanced. Your smell and taste helped make the soup and the water more enjoyable. Your sight, hearing and sense of touch are also better than ever. There are others that have been recovered that have been suppressed by your species because of not being used for some reason or other. For instance, we all have a basic sense of knowing that something is not the best thing for our survival. Still, some push it aside to get a temporary high from alcohol or drugs or even drawing poisonous smoke into our lungs. You seem to have had more survival sense than others when it came to what was good for your company.”
“You’re right. I knew when something was going to create problems or lose money before anyone else. Sometimes I felt it but didn’t know why until I explored it. That’s why I fought so hard when I felt a new policy idea was wrong.”
“On your planet, ancient men were able to sense danger for long distances and over time. A saber tooth tiger stalking a couple of miles away or an earthquake or tornado about to happen would make people feel uneasy. Not everyone could sense these things but those who could tended to survive better. You will be living in a primitive society shortly and you will have enhanced ‘danger senses’. This even includes knowing whether someone is lying to you. Provided you don’t discount it.”
“Why would I discount it?”
“Past feelings, emotions, there are lots of reasons. Love and fear can both influence your propensity to follow what your gut is telling you.”
I chuckled at that. “So any woman I take an interest in will still be able to wrap me around her little finger
.”
“If you let her. We both know that that is part of what makes interaction of the sexes fun, for both parties. Taken to extremes, it can, and often does, ruin a loving relationship. You will still be able to play that game, it’s just that you’ll know you’re playing and won’t be blindsided as easily.”
“Well, just that would be worth the price of admission.”
Gem looked at me with a puzzled face so I sent the concept directly to her mind. She smiled and nodded.
“Why haven’t you continued to speak to me like that?” she asked.
“It hasn’t been necessary. It seems kind of one sided since you can’t do it and to tell the truth, I’d feel like a bully, constantly pointing out that I can do something that you can’t.”
“Well, it wouldn’t bother me but I appreciate it. You are really a very considerate person.”
“I try to be. I think it actually takes more effort to be an asshole.”
“You may be right. I’m going to have to explore that idea further. I think it may help me increase viewership on some of my projects. I’m hungry. Are you ready to try to eat something?”
As soon as she said that, my mouth started watering. “Yes, Ma’am. I’m starving. Do you think I can eat more than a couple of spoonfuls?”
“I’m sure you can. You’ve been awake long enough for the nanites to recondition your stomach and should be able to eat just about anything. Your body won’t let you overdo it. What would you like?”
“What can I get?”
“Just about anything you want. We can duplicate any food item from your planet along with any recipe that appeared on your Internet, as well as similar items from close to a million societies.”
“Good God. The storage problem for a project like that sounds incomprehensible.”
“I don’t understand it all. We take regular backups on all the data bases in all the universes. We have gotten very good at compacting data.”
“Alright, I’ll try you out. There were some things I wasn’t able to eat because of my heart attacks. Are there any restrictions like that?”
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