I got up and she laid back and shut her eyes. She opened them immediately and stood up, taking my hand and pulling me toward the pool. She executed a perfect dive and started swimming like an Olympic contender. I dove in after her and discovered I was a hell of a lot faster and more graceful than before my resurrection.
The two of us swam for twenty laps and got out. We had a lot of fun drying each other off.
When we were done, Gem grabbed my towel from me, tossed both of them on the lounge and led me through the door and across the hall to our room.
We took each other in our arms as soon as the door was closed and kissed for a few minutes. The room had changed shape and was larger now. There were two comfortable chairs and a love seat with an assortment of tables in the new area. There was also a table suitable for eating with a couple of chairs pushed under it. The bed was in the same place but had been made. All of the displays were as before.
Gem pressed some buttons under the big graph and it changed. There were spikes and plateaus, some of them fairly high. Everything was closer together, condensed somehow.
“What did you do?” I asked her.
“Oh, I changed the time frame. This over here,” she said, pointing to a spot near the left of the screen, “is when we went out to the hallway. This is when you were first looking around the hallway, then we went into the exercise room. Here’s where you used the body shaper. Here’s when we started running. Look at how the graph went up and the number of subscribers. What was going on?”
“I was looking at your ass as you were running ahead of me.”
She chuckled. “I see. What’s this over here? Kind of a yellow green with a touch of orange?”
“There was a little excitement, a little arousal. But I think the primary thing was admiration.”
She smiled at me. “Really? That’s nice to know. Look at how the subs went up. That must have been some admiration.”
“Subs?”
“Short for subscribers. We tend to shorten things. Vid used to be a phrase as long as your arm. Don’t ask me what it was because it was way before my time.”
“Before your time. What would that be? Ten, fifteen years ago?”
“How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know, you look about 19 or 20. Assuming some age reduction from nanites, I’d say 25 or 30.”
“I’m 93 years old.”
“Ninety three? No way.”
“I told you we tend to live longer. I could count on 190 or 200 without help. And believe me, I’ve earned plenty of help. So, does it bother you that you just fucked someone old enough to be your mother?”
“My mother? You’re only sixteen years older than me. It’s possible but that’s really pushing it.”
“No it isn’t. My eggs were harvested shortly after I reached menarche, at twelve.”
“Harvested?”
“Yes. We don’t reproduce by joining. Our eggs and the males’ seed are harvested and combined when we need more people or combinations of DNA.”
“But you do make love,” I said.
“No. I was a virgin until today.”
“No, now you’re really pulling my leg. There’s no way you haven’t done this before.”
She held my arms to my side and looked me straight in the eye. “I swear, Jeff, before you woke up, I never had fellatio, intercourse or even kissed anyone.”
“But … you do all of them as if you have years of experience.”
“Don’t think you’re the only one who can sleep learn. Or that swimming is the only subject I have access to.”
*******
Chapter Four
I had a thick, juicy steak, a baked potato with everything on it, fresh baked rolls with loads of sweet butter followed by blueberry cheesecake for dessert. All were foods that had been on my do not eat list for a decade and each one was the best I’d ever had, anywhere or any time.
After dinner, Gem did her thing at the keypad and a door appeared on the opposite wall from the one to the hallway.
“What is this?” I asked as we walked through the door.
“You would probably refer to it as a bathroom but we call it a waste elimination room.”
She took two things off a shelf and handed one of them to me. It looked like brushed aluminum but was pliant and yielding to the touch. It resembled a high tech curling iron only smaller and sleeker. One end was obviously the handle, larger, with ridges for a hand to grasp. The business end was about as long as an old fashioned Bic pen, a little bigger around. The tip of the rod was rounded.
“Open your mouth, put this in and gently move it from side to side until it beeps.”
She put hers in her mouth and I followed suit. Hers beeped first, mine a couple of seconds later. She held out her hand and I gave mine to her. She put them both on the shelf which disappeared into the wall. My mouth felt fresh. Not covered over, as with toothpaste or mouthwash, but fresh. All I could taste was me.
“I know those things clean your mouth, but how do they do it?”
“They produce several different wavelengths to loosen anything that’s adhering to your teeth, tongue or any other part of your mouth, then any loose matter is broken down into minute particles for eventual recycling.”
“Very impressive,” I said. “What’s next?”
“I’m sure you can figure out what these are,” she responded, pointing.
There were two stainless steel toilets. Each had a rim to sit upon but it was part of the unit, no hinge, no lid to worry about. The seat was circular, a foot and a half across, then it narrowed to the floor, similar to a funnel, measuring half a foot in diameter at the base. There was no water and the bottom rested on the floor, not a hole. The two units had a privacy wall between them.
Gem plopped down on the nearest one and motioned toward the wall. “Have a seat. You know what to do.”
I wondered if this was going out to a few billion subs and figured what the hell. If they could handle my ass pumping up and down while I was fucking Gem, they could handle me sitting on the throne.
The seat, like most other solid surfaces in this realm, was flexible and molded to me as I sat down on it.
I just eliminated my bowels and drained my kidneys. My body knew that’s what I was there to do and did it without any effort. There was no grunting, no trying to go, no clenching and pushing. My urine flowed out of me like turning on a hose with a power nozzle on it full blast.
I noticed three things as my body disposed of its waste. First, there was no sound of anything hitting the floor. Second, there was no smell. And third, the same thing that had happened to the inside of my mouth happened to the outside of my body.
“So, these are cleaning stations as well as toilets,” I said over the wall.
“Actually, we can program a cleaning cycle anyplace. I just programmed the toilets so that when we sat down, the room would do one. The inside of the toilet has its separate system so that anything you eliminate is immediately broken down, as well as any residue that remains behind.”
“So I don’t have to shake after I pee and there’s no need for toilet paper.”
“Exactly.”
I stood up and ran my hand over my stomach. “Wow, I even feel clean. A much better job and a lot less hassle than washing, shampooing, conditioning, drying off, using powder and all the other crap Proctor and Gamble have convinced everyone they need to do. Why the separate wand for our mouths?”
“It would cause an unpleasant sensation to make the cleaning waves strong enough to work inside your mouth. It’s just easier and more pleasant to use the wands. Not to mention more efficient.”
With no Jay Leno to keep us occupied, Gem and I talked for an hour or so, then went to bed. I’d noticed when we came out of the waste elimination room that the bed was now wider than it had been when I woke up from my body repairs.
Our lovemaking was loving and enthusiastic and better than before. We both did a lot of exploring with our mouths and tong
ues. Gem seemed to be every bit as sensitive as I was. Her nipples and her vulva were, naturally, but kissing under her ear, her neck, even her stomach caused goose bumps and made her shiver. We finished together with me kneeling behind her perfect ass, her face buried in her pillow. I pushed inside her as far as I could go while her rolling muscles sucked everything out of me.
She lowered her midsection and slid up, reaching up and playing with the keypad. I felt the foreign articles on my body leave, once more becoming perfectly clean.
“I guess you could have kept the pool from getting contaminated by our sexual fluids by cleaning us off before we dove in.”
“I could have, but it doesn’t really matter. None of it is there anymore.”
“None of what? The water?”
“None of what was on the other side of the door when we went through. It all disappeared when we came back into this room. I can create it or anything else, any time I wish. It joined all the other matter and energy available for conversion.”
I looked around. The door to the waste room was gone. The door to the hallway, or what used to be the hallway, was still there.
“So, the waste room is gone, too?”
“Yes.”
“Why is there still a door, even if there’s nothing on the other side?”
“There’s always has to be a door in case someone has to come here.”
“Why would anyone need to come here?”
“I did. It’s rare, but it’s possible someone else might need or want to come here. Face to face meetings are highly unusual, but then, so are you. The door isn’t essential but it’s an ancient courtesy that somehow makes a personal visit a little less disturbing than just materializing in a room.”
We both lay back and enjoyed holding onto each other. No need for conversation, we communicated everything we needed to by the feel of hands and arms on bodies. She smelled clean. Not like Dial or Dove or Nivea, just like Gem. Pure Gem.
I drifted off, slept like I was dead and woke about seven hours later, feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed. Gem woke a couple of minutes later.
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel good. It’s been decades since I woke up this rested.”
“That’s good. Do you feel any smarter?”
My first inkling was to say no. It’s not like I woke up and thought, ‘I can now hunt buffalo’. But as I examined myself, I did feel smarter. I was more intelligent than I was when I went to sleep but I couldn’t explain how. I thought about what skills might be needed to survive on the frontier and in an Indian village and realized that I could, indeed, hunt buffalo. And I could distinguish between edible and poisonous plants and how to prepare some that could turn poisonous if prepared incorrectly.
“Yes, I do feel smarter. I know that I know some things today that I didn’t when I went to sleep; I even know what some of them are. I do know that the knowledge will be there and I’ll be able to use it, as if it was something I learned as a kid and had been doing for years.”
She was playing with the displays.
“That’s good. See this new graph? Here’s what you were scheduled to be taught last night. Some subjects hit their targets right off the bat while some have to spend several sleep learning sessions before they consistently do. This point up here is how much you learned.”
“That looks about one and a half times as much.”
“It’s actually 1.63. The highest any other subject went is 1.57, and that was a one-time deal, almost two weeks into the sleep learn sessions. Take a look at this.”
She played with the buttons and the big graph compacted again. All of the times I’d looked it the activities while I was awake were fairly similar. There were low and high points. If I was really into something, like I was when I tried the chicken soup, the graph would go up high and would stay in that high range until the emotion wore off. The graph didn’t just go up and flatten out at the higher level. There were still peaks and valleys while I remained excited or emotional, they were just all in the high range. I was not emotional the majority of the time and the activity would be similar but in a lower range.
The graph while I was asleep was different. When I first started sleeping, the activity smoothed out. It wasn’t quite still but was not as rough or jagged looking as when I was awake. It was also up a little from where the non-emotional awake graph was.
Something happened after I’d been asleep for a few minutes. The graph shot up and it stayed up for six hours. Not as high as my emotional peaks were, but probably about where a nice, pleasurable moment was, like running around the track and seeing the murals for the first time. The activity was even smoother than when I was asleep. It was a plateau with small bumps rather than the large peaks. Any change was more like a pitcher’s mound than a hill or a mountain.
I could see each time a new subject was started, when it ended and the next one began. The graph would go uphill, level off for a while, then head back down, only to repeat for the next span of learning. The first subject took longer to level out since I had to go from my comparatively low sleep level to my fairly high learning level. The down and up movement between subjects was only about a third of the distance as the movement from sleep to learning and back.
The span of each learning session tended to get smaller as the night went on. That made sense to me. A world where people hunted and scavenged for their food would be a lot different from the corporate world I was familiar with. There would be a lot to learn in the first few subjects that would be applicable to later subjects. So, hunting buffalo, if it was the first subject, would take longer than hunting cougars because a lot of what I needed to know to hunt cougars had been gone over in the buffalo lesson. There were also lots of ground rules and basics about the society and the people that would need to be looked at in the early lessons but would be part of my knowledge base later on.
Gem moved a pointer along the large graph, pointing out when I was sleeping, when the sleep learning started to come in, as the lessons went on, moving through the whole night. The bar graph would show the numbers of subs at the time she was pointing to. A surprising number viewed me just sleeping, then it went up and stayed up throughout all the lessons. We lost a few, but not all the new ones when the lessons ended and I went back to sleep for 45 minutes or so before waking up.
“Can they see things that are happening, even though I can’t remember them?”
“How do you mean?”
“Dreaming, for instance. I’ve always heard that we dream some every night but we don’t always remember our dreams. It’s very rare for me to remember any dreams when I wake up, and if I do, it’s only bits and pieces that don’t make much sense. I know they shot all kinds of data at me when I was sleep learning but I have no recollection of any of it. I was able to come up with a couple of subjects I know now that I didn’t before but I have no details of exactly what I learned. I just know the subjects as complete entities, not as pieces of data. Performing in those areas is now second nature, like driving a car or opening an email.”
Gem smiled at me. “The simple answer is ‘yes and no’. There are an infinite number of beings in the universe and only some of them are compatible enough to interpret the vids that come from you. If you sent your vid feed to a dog, it wouldn’t be able to comprehend 90% of what it got. The eating would go over good and it might get something out of the physical part of the sex but it wouldn’t get anything from running down the track, looking at my ass or the murals. Most of your feelings and emotions would be completely foreign.
“Just because a being subscribes to a vid doesn’t mean that it interprets the feed the same way you or I do. There are some beings that never experience the relative nothingness of sleep that you do. Others do see any dreams and interpret them in their own way. The feeds from a live experience, a conscious memory and a dream are all similar but they are all different, too. Dreams tend to be less inhibited and aren’t restricted by what we call reality. You can fall fr
om an airplane or get hit by a train in a dream and come back to dream about something else. Then there are daydreams, which can be real or unreal, depending upon both the subject and the daydreamer.
“Some subscribers can’t distinguish the actions in any of these. As far as we know, some tend to view the vid as energy flows or feelings. Some can view emotions better than you sense a physical object. Some this is just conjectures on our part; it’s hard to know exactly what is going on in a mind that doesn’t work anything like yours.”
“I know. I often wondered how our scientists could be so sure about dogs only seeing in black and white or what things look like to a bumblebee.”
“I think the human sleep cycle is just unique enough that it’s interesting to subscribers. Whether it’s being at rest or the dreams or even what your senses pick up from the environment while you’re asleep, it’s different enough for them to be curious about. I’m sure as time goes on, you’ll gain and lose subscribers for all types of activity. The key is to gain more than you lose.”
“So what about when I’m sleep learning? The numbers went up quite a lot.”
“Take a look at your mental activity. The level went higher than normal and pretty much stayed there. It was a lot more consistent for long periods of time. Once again, the subs are all different. Some can discern every individual piece of data, others feel a flow of power or energy, only to discover they understand the subject every bit as well as you. There are subs that only subscribe to sleep learning, constantly being educated, learning new skills, even if there’s no way the information will be of any practical use to them in the future.”
“We had some people like that on Earth. They spent years and years learning more and more but never used any of it to do anything. Now, why is my graph up so high in the sleep learning? It’s not like I’m excited or mad or particularly interested in it.”
“I don’t know about that. I doubt you were mad but I wouldn’t discount excitement and I’m certain you were extremely interested in everything that came at you last night, even though you weren’t consciously aware of it. Your sleep learning levels are much higher than normal people’s. What you see on that graph is all energy. Your desire to learn, even when you’re asleep and supposedly unconscious, is what brought your level up and allowed you to absorb so much data last night. And there is probably some unconscious reaction to the acquisition of data that translates as energy on the graph. Don’t forget, the graph measures intensity of something, which all boils down to energy, but it’s not necessarily energy that originates from you. The data itself is nothing more than an energy flow. Just because it isn’t your thoughts and reactions doesn’t make it less valuable in your vids.”
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