by Chogan Swan
Her next task was to finish the research started the night before. She needed to know him down to the genetic level.
She’d already parsed his DNA, so she knew how to neutralize the genetic time bombs lurking there. Now she sought to know how his genetic vulnerabilities had affected him so she could make the repairs and changes and reset his biological clock. For that, she’d need to connect the filaments at the tip of her tail as well.
~~~Jonah~~~
To Jonah, it seemed as though his mind had stopped functioning except for telling him that there were waves of pleasure surging through his body. Tiana’s pulsing inside and outside his shaft, sent shivers through him. It was like riding a wheel of yin and yang, he was no longer sure where he ended and she began. The mat beneath them was warm and wet with the fluid that dripped from their coupling. The flavor of her milk changed as he drank, yet it always seemed to be what he desired most. He was dimly aware of tendrils moving inside him, and his muscles twitching when they met.
“Okay, mealtime is over,” Tiana said.
Jonah loosed her nipples with a sigh. She set her forehead against his and looked into his eyes, arresting his attention. The fingers of her right hand splayed across his jaw and face in a classic Mister Spock position that almost made him laugh. She mirrored the grip on the other side as well and he felt a slight pricking at the base of his skull. Threads tickled as they crawled from her fingertips into his nose and across his face to find homes in his body. He seemed to sense her presence under the surface of his thoughts. He wondered if he would hear her mind-to-mind if they stayed this way long enough.
Tiana’s tail came up between her arm and his shoulder, caressing his neck and sliding languorously along his right side then up the inside of his leg. It came to rest between his legs, putting slight pressure on his prostate. The tip was warm and slippery from the puddle of warm liquid that had collected between his legs. Then it moved again, dipping to settle on the sensitive ring of his anus.
The slippery stroking and the polite pressure made him open his sphincter muscles to receive her with a whisper of, “Oh, yes, please.”
She worked the tip inside him, giving him time to adjust to each increment of her depth and girth. Her tail had a joint near the tip, and she used it to massage his prostate.
He sighed with the pleasure.
Her tail turned and moved deeper, stretching him as she moved around the corner of his bowel. He opened his eyes wide, teetering on the edge of panic even though it hadn’t been uncomfortable.
“Shhhh! Easy, Jonah, it will be fine,” she whispered and stopped her progress as he fought to keep calm.
“Sorry, I wasn’t prepared for that,” he said in a subdued voice. “I hadn’t thought about you going that deep. I’m fine now. Do what you need to.”
“In a few more minutes,” she said. “I’ll give you time to get used to the idea. You may even enjoy it.” With that, she lowered her head and took his right nipple in her mouth, running her tongue around it. The sensation shot through him like an electric current and he panted for air. She sucked his nipple across her open teeth and fluttered her tongue on it hard and fast, building a storm of pleasure from one side to the other. Her tail muscles flexed, spreading him wider, rubbing his prostate.
“YES!” he shouted.
Tiana smiled up at him without stopping her tongue from teasing his nipples. He encouraged her with wordless sounds as her tail moved deeper, flexing and pulsing before each gentle, insistent move. She followed his inner workings until her tail muscles flexed against his hipbones, almost pushing them apart. The building orgasm grew to a tsunami and finally flooded over him.
He lost track of time and everything but the waves rising and falling, on and on and on. Still climaxing, he entered dreamstate, rocked by the tossing sea. As he went under, he reached out with his mind /will / emotions and held onto her, or dreamed he did.
~~~Tiana~~~
Well, that’s different.
Jonah had lost consciousness.
He was in no danger.
After thirty-minutes… and counting, he had just… blissed out from the most intense orgasmic state she had ever seen in a human male. Tiana him hovering where he was. She scanned his body until she was sure of her way forward then she took a strand of his DNA and went to work. Flipping switches on and off, she built a reworked strand of his genetic make-up. It was still Jonah, just Jonah if he’d been a little luckier.
Well, quite a bit luckier.
Next, she took a custom virus from her inner store of tools and embedded the strand inside it. Jonah was about to get a twenty-four-hour bug that would change him forever. Tiana released it into his intestinal track and monitored it while she moved on to other tasks.
After hours of—weeding out scar tissue, stimulating bone growth, injecting collagen strands into spinal disks and telling glands and organs to do their job properly—she sensed Jonah waking. His contractions were tapering off, so she decided to let him come up for air. She dropped the filament connections and backed her tail out, pulling her inner shaft out of him, but keeping him inside her.
She put a nipple in his mouth. He latched on and pulled in languorous swallows. When the flow slowed, she moved him to the other side and let him drain that too. His contractions finally ended.
“I can’t believe you just slept through a thirteen-hour orgasm,” she said with a teasing lilt.
“Vlid najii abeu,” Jonah murmured.
Tiana froze. “What?”
“I dreamed I was you.”
“I understood you the first time,” she whispered.
What was happening? She hadn’t heard her own language from another voice for over a century.
Chapter 5 (Original) — A trip to the store
“I don’t even remember what I said anymore.”
Jonah sighed, sagging back on the couch. “… only feeling as though I was losing touch with my sense of self. The orgasm started, and then I was dreaming. I can’t remember much about the dream, but you were in it, but I was you. The one I had yesterday when you woke me, I remember that.”
“You spoke words you had no way of knowing,” Tiana said. “It’s a mystery….” She snorted. “I always thought I liked mysteries, but this one is… huge. And I’ve no idea how to solve it.”
“I suppose we keep looking for clues,” Jonah said.
Tiana nodded, rose from the couch and stepped to the middle of the room. She put a hand on the floor and lifted her legs, flowing into a graceful, one-armed handstand. Her body harmony exercises would help settle her. She flowed through the form. Her anchoring shoulder turned through figure-eight patterns while her legs counterbalanced, tracing circles in opposite directions. As she moved, Tiana focused on her environment: the morning sunlight spilling in the window warmed her skin as her limbs passed through the rays; the polished heart-pine floor glowed, reflecting light onto Jonah’s form as he relaxed on the leather couch. The exercise required more effort than it would have in her last body. The undeveloped muscles needed work. She switched arms.
When finished, she went through the closing stretches and breathing sequences.
“You would be hailed as the grand master of yogis, if people saw you do that,” Jonah said. “Around you, I could never do yoga without being self-conscious. You are the entire troupe of the Cirque du Soleil Varekai—to the power of ten, by yourself.”
“Another compliment with a referent for which I am clueless? I need to get catch up more.” She looked at him. “But right now. I want to talk about something else.” She moved back to the couch with a graceful vault. Pulling him to her, she sat on his lap facing him and wrapped her tail around his waist. He enjoyed close contact and touching. His body lit up from a simple hug.
“First, you should know that I didn’t approach you Friday night at random. My nose tells me interesting things. From paying attention to it during our conversations, I know you are a man trying to live what I would call a cause-driven life. F
or me, there’s a… rightness to your smell when you face different situations. It tells me you have a cause. It’s important to you, but you are also frustrated….”
She paused for Jonah to process the statement, waiting for the three-stage response humans always went through for paradigm shifts to cycle. Doubt would come first, followed by consideration, next either acceptance or denial. He reached acceptance in five seconds, but he’d had practice with paradigm changes the last three days.
“Okay, moving on,” Tiana said. “My philosophical leanings are also cause-driven. I need a mutualistic symbiosis with a cause-driven dynamic. So, I need to know if your cause fits my goals.”
She leaned forward and put her forehead on his. “Jonah, what is it you’d like to do if you could? What is so big you haven’t done it already and what’s in the way?” She shifted back to give him space to answer.
Jonah cleared his throat before speaking. “As a symbiont, you might well understand my own… ‘cause-driven’ ambition.”
He paused, looking up as though his answers were on the ceiling before meeting her eyes again. “For several years, I’ve been studying institutions in terms of how they relate to society in terms of how parasitic they are. Institutions can begin to fill a need in society, but they always move toward a more parasitic state. I don’t know if anyone else has coined a term yet, but I call it ‘parasitic entropy’ because institutions lose the energy to benefit society. Parasitic people cooperate to achieve power then—together—they siphon benefits from the systems. They grow in power and delegate that to their cronies who help them amass more power.”
He sighed and rubbed his face. “It’s a known problem in social science. But, we have nothing in society to counteract it until it becomes so extreme the only solution becomes violent revolution.”
“You may not have enough exposure to our current events yet to see how it has affected this country, but I see it every day. It’s rampant in government, business, police protection, charities…”
Tiana hid her outward reaction; the odor of his passion pulled her. “Yes, Jonah, go on,” she said.
“We need something in place to help people understand our society for what it is… a complex system. The way government initiatives are set up makes it impossible to carry out long-term solutions for the problems we have. Government tries to apply linear solutions, so of course they fail. The parties can’t work together because their primary concern is keeping power. They’re dominated by special interests groups which prevents moving away from their platform rhetoric for fear they will lose votes.”
He paused. “It’s like… Have you come across the mathematician John Nash’s work?”
“Of course,” Tiana said. “Nobel prize winner.”
Jonah nodded. “Thanks for not saying, ‘duh’. There was a movie about his life called A Beautiful Mind. In it, there’s a scene in a bar where Nash is challenged to ask a girl to dance. He has an insight that contains the message the moviemaker wants the audience to understand regarding the Nash equilibrium…. That is, there must be a win-win option for lasting solutions in competition between parties. There is no mechanism in place in our society for this to happen—we need something that can build engagement outside the political power struggle.”
“What can we do about that?” she said.
“Every person who changed the world started with a vision. Karl Marx. He changed the world, but he was naive…. He didn’t account for a parasitic attack within his own system.”
His lips tightened. “I’m not sure it could be called a vision, but I have an idea, but even the groundwork would be huge. And I’m not an idealist….”
He doesn’t believe that. He knows he's an idealist, but he’s seen too much to be optimistic.
“So, should I throw the rest of my life into the grinder of human affairs when my chances of succeeding are so small?.”
“Tell me about the groundwork,” Tiana said.
“Well, I’d need to improve my skill set in the math and modeling required. The modeling tools themselves need to move to a higher level and mesh with internet technology to allow public access in a gaming format. Beyond that, I’d need to recruit people who could see the benefit, help build a wiki framework and implement it. That’s as far as I’ve taken it.”
He tilted his head back and rubbed his neck. “And I wonder if people may just be too stubborn to act in enlightened self-interest. Sometimes I get so angry at how stupid and shortsighted people are I just want to live for myself like everyone else does. At least then I might enjoy the time I have until idiots destroy us.”
Tiana reflected, listening to the birdsong coming in the window. The tip of her tail twitched on Jonah’s ribcage as she synthesized what she’d heard.
“So, in summary,” she said, touching his shoulder. “You want to build models of societal problems and put the decision variables and the ability to manipulate them in the hands of the public… in a gaming format. Your hope is that it will drive support for better thinking around public policy.”
Jonah nodded. “Yeah, SimSociety, only more than a game. That’s only the start. It will need babysitting, a lot of babysitting and a huge amount of work. The models don’t need to be perfect, just useful enough to generate system insights and get people engaged in thinking outside of their knee-jerk agendas.”
Tiana’s lips turned up at the corners. “I suspect the politicians aren’t going to like these games. We need a feasibility study. We need a table and lots of paper, like the setup in the Information Science textbooks with wall space and post-it notes.”
“I’m not using the attic bedroom on the third floor for anything but storage. There’s enough room if we clear it out.”
“If you get what we need, I’ll tackle the attic space, but, I need a blood test before you go. I need two ounces.”
Jonah tilted his head back. She smiled. He was a quick learner; he’d already gotten accustomed to the procedure. She nipped, drew the blood and healed the bite.
When finished, Tiana unwrapped her tail and stood. “Get seven avocados and two pounds of kale while you’re out,” she said over her shoulder as she went up the stairs.
Jonah
Jonah rubbed his neck where she had taken the blood then rubbed the back of his neck. “Why aren’t there any knots in my neck?” he mused aloud.
Tiana’s tinkling laugh answered him from the attic stairway two floors away.
Jonah slid into his boots, grabbed his helmet and went to the door. “Probably take about an hour.”
“And shiitake mushrooms and another bottle of those amino acids I got last time,” Tiana yelled down the stairs.
“Add twenty minutes to the last estimate,” Jonah amended and walked outside to his bike. He’d grown accustomed to speaking in a normal tone of voice even when she was rooms away.
“See you around noon then,” her voice floated to him from the attic window.
Jonah threw his leg over the bike, rolled it down the drive and popped the clutch to start the motor. He focused on paying attention to the road. A wandering mind was a ticket to disaster on a motorcycle. He managed to get to Staples without accident.
It seemed hot for so early in the morning and he was sweating when he arrived. On his phone, Google Weather was showing only 75 degrees. Even the air-conditioned store felt warm; he was perspiring.
Several multi-colored packs of post-it notes and a prepaid cell phone for Tiana went in the cart with two packages of Dri-Erase markers. The girl ringing up his sale was helpful and chatty. She jotted something on the back of his receipt before handing it to him. He smiled and thanked her as he went out. On the way back to his bike, he glanced at the receipt and noticed she had written a phone number and ‘Kathy— call me!’
That’s odd… and risky for her to do on the job.
She had been young… in her twenties and pretty.
Jonah had seen flirtation from twenty-somethings when he’d been in his masters programs, but th
at had been in Blacksburg, a hard-drinking, hard-partying college town. He’d always mentioned his wife and kids to fend off advances. Well, he supposed girls in Lynchburg could have daddy issues too. Also, he’d been wearing a bandanna to keep skin oil out of his helmet. Perhaps she mistook him for early forties when his salt and pepper hair with extra thin on top wasn’t visible. He smiled and put the receipt in his pocket.
At the Vitamin Shop, he found the amino acid tablets. He’d known the manager there for years. She invited him to a party, but he’d already committed to Tiana for the next few days, so he begged off.
At Kroger, he headed to the produce section and picked up the kale, then made his way to the bulk mushroom bin. He was shoveling the stalky fungus into a produce bag when a tap on his shoulder made him glance up, but he had to look higher. His gaze travelled past a pair of long, muscular legs to the smiling face of a girl in a Liberty Flames volleyball jersey. She was blonde, easily 6’4” and had a fresh-faced beauty only enhanced by a dusting of freckles across her nose.
“Didn’t we meet at Rivermont Pizza when Firecracker Jam was playing on Thirsty Thursday?” she asked, smiling at him.
Jonah kept his own smile in place as he looked up into her eyes, but found himself speechless. Was Allen Funt about to step out from behind the cut-flower display to announce that he was on Candid Camera? He almost snorted with laughter, but managed to keep control. “I am certain I would’ve remembered you, but I’m afraid I missed them that time. They are a great band though aren’t they?”
“Mmmm,” she replied. “Is that your bike outside?”
Jonah, nodded. He’d carried his helmet in on the mini-cart to, so it was an easy guess on her part.
“Could I get a ride with you?”
This was getting crazier. He snuck a peek at the flower display. Still no sign of Allen; besides, he was sure Allen had gone on to a funnier world a couple of decades ago. “Uhm, where do you need to go?”
The girl stepped forward and ran her fingers down the front of his chest. “Wherever you’re going,” she said with quiet, smoky intensity.
