My mother is a genius, but nobody knows just how much of a genius she is, and it's not exactly something I can freely share with anyone, or at least not anyone I don't know and trust really well. You see, she's a world-class engineer who works for a private aerospace company. She and her team have been collaborating with the government for over a decade to devise the most fuel- and cost-efficient spaceplane possible.
As is often the case when exploring new and perilous territory, certain fundamental expectations of society may need to be abridged or circumvented in the name of pragmatics. Braving the final frontier is no time to stand on ceremony or to let purely cultural stigmas override safety or practicality. My mother, in her no-nonsense nerdiness (much of which I inherited), realized this more than perhaps anyone on her team. That is why it was she who ended up convincing her superiors to fund the development of what she called "sanitary nanobots" or "SNBs." These were basically microscopic machines that could expediently dissolve any natural biological waste, carrying away harmful or offensive byproducts and releasing the innocuous ones into the air. Once embedded into the carpet of the individual passenger cabins which had already been approved for incorporation into the spaceship design, they would spare the money and space of having separate toilets.
When it came time for some serious testing, my mom volunteered her own home as a Guinea pig. By that time, the prototypes had evolved such that there were few common fabrics left into which they couldn't be reliably integrated. After only a few days of nearly constant work, every carpeted or upholstered surface in the house and even our car was covered in Mom's tiny, invisible robots, as were our beds. Of course, she kept our conventional bathrooms completely operational, both for guests and for me just in case I never felt comfortable using anything else. Though Mom made no secret of the fact that she would be putting her invention through its paces and that I was allowed but by no means compelled to do the same, she kept her own self-relief as private as it ever was. If it wasn't behind a bathroom door, then it was behind her bedroom door.
Despite the fact that I had inherited her lack of squeamishness and that she had kept me appraised of the project throughout the development of it, I was still quite skeptical at first. Wanting me to make a truly informed choice, Mom figured out a rather clever way to give me a non-traumatic demonstration. For a while, I had fantasized about having a dog, so on the very same day that the SNBs were installed, she surprised me with the cutest German shephard puppy that she deliberately "forgot" to housebreak. Eventually, she did at least train Shep to not relieve himself on linoleum or hardwood and never anywhere in the view of guests. In any case, I'll never forget watching in awe as one of his first messes in our house just dissolved away into the carpet in mere seconds as if by magic.
Shep wouldn't be the only addition to our family. Mom was as compassionate as she was nerdy, and she believed firmly in sharing her well-earned wealth. This is why she fostered and soon after adopted my sisters, Kala and Catalina, the latter of whom everyone quickly just dubbed "Lina." It has always been interesting to see people react to finding out that this diverse bunch is all one family. My mother was a lean, blue-eyed brunette, while I was a mousy, emerald-eyed redhead, Kala was a slightly stocky beauty of Korean descent, and Lina was a tall and lovely Latina. In some ways, though, we seemed to converge on a kind of family resemblance. We all grew to have roughly the same curvy physique, with firm butts and full breasts that seemed to have little trouble attracting male attention.
Anyone who knew us even remotely well, though, didn't need to resort to our similar body shapes to discern our kinship. Within two years after my sisters came to live with Mom and me, we had all grown to love each other as if we'd been family all our lives, and I think it really showed in how we acted around each other. The memory of the first time Kala and Lina spontaneously called my mother "Mom" still makes me misty-eyed.
In fact, in a sense, we were even more intimate than even most completely biological families. By the time the three of us were 18, we had all acclimated more thoroughly to our home's unorthodox bathrooming facilities than our mother even anticipated, to the point that we no longer even minded relieving ourselves in full view of each bother. I was the first to start using my bedroom carpet as a toilet, tentatively at first, but once I realized the sheer convenience of it, there was no going back. Kala and Lina predictably found it weird but were otherwise surprisingly unfazed when Mom first informed them about the SNBs, and when I casually mentioned that I had begun taking advantage of them, their curiosity was piqued. After that, they couldn't resist trying it out for long, and again, it seemed to be the convenience more than anything else that won them over, to the point that, when it came time for us to get a car of our own, we asked Mom privately if she could put SNBs in it too. In a way touched by such endorsement, she happily complied. By then, the actual test of technology had long since run its course, but we certainly weren't going to stop using it any time soon.
Heck, even Beth, our best friend and neighbor, eventually became a partaker in our secret. For about a month after we decided to confide in her, we could tell that she felt a little awkward whenever she was in our house and one or more of us excused herself to an empty bedroom or closet to do her business, but after about a month, she was able to shrug it off. Actually participating in our unusual self-relief habits, however, required a little more of a nudge.
