Humanity 2.0 Year 001 Day 002

HUMANITY 2.0

YEAR 001, DAY 002

She'd said the Vault was mostly below sea level, of course, but I had blanked on that by then. I looked out the window -- the room was lit dimly, and I guess the window looked out into a part of the ocean shallow enough that the sun still shone through.

"Oh my god... where are we?"

"Like I said... an unnamed, rocky island in the Pacific. This the lower observation lounge I built for you and the girls you will bring here. There's a second lounge up top, which also has a door to a small grassy clearing above. You'll be able to go outside. Well, unless the Earth's atmosphere gives out..."

I stared at the incredible sight for some time, until I felt the tug of her hand into the room proper. "Come. Sit down." She led me by the hand as I continued to gape. What was that window made of? I hoped it was some heavy-duty stuff. A few fish sped by, small brightly colored tropical things. We reached a big lounge chair, the size of a double bed, and she pulled me down onto it.

I let her do it, and we fell together into almost a cuddling position. It was right about then that I realized all over again what a goddamn beautiful woman she was; those perfect tits were snugly wrapped by her skin-tight black outfit, down to her nipples being plain as day, and they brushed against my chest as we pressed together. A certain part of me she'd increased responded naturally, which was likely just as visible to her, but she kept on explaining things. I was distracted enough not to notice my own arousal, for the time being.

"Well, any questions about yourself?" She glanced over at me. "I'll tell you now - even I don't know entirely what the revised human body's capabilities will be. It's too early to say. Going over the whole thing would take days or weeks, unfortunately, which we don't have.

"So give me the short version." I shrugged. "X-ray vision? Can I fly? Breathe fire?"

She raised an eyebrow. "No, none of that... basically, Ben, you're going to notice a serious increase in physical strength and resilience, first of all. The new body is tougher, from the inside out. I borrowed the best of what all the different creatures on Earth had to offer. You can take a look later if you want.

"I suppose the most important one to tell you up front - I tried any number of permutations, but the most successful were what I settled on. Once you begin having children, you'll notice there'll be roughly one male for every eight and a half females."

My eyes just about bugged out, and I finally tore my gaze away from the window to stare her in the face. She had been looking at me the whole time. "Eight?"

"And a half. I didn't have time to test that specific number much, to be honest. It's really more of a best guess; my tests reported with 99.2% confidence that the true optimal number was between five and nine, so I erred on the side of caution. If it isn't perfect, well, it's fine if you just blame me. I'll be long gone by the time anyone asks."

I nodded. "Will do."

She seemed a little put out by my quick response. "Regardless, I did make females bisexual by default, which should serve as sort of a fudge factor in the exact ratio. As for male homosexuality, I left that as-is. Culturally, it might be interesting to see how it plays out in a society that's numerically so dominated by women; my testing couldn't really get me reliable data on that. Maybe I should have tested it more... watching two men together was always way too much fun." She bit her lip and stared off into space for a while.

I remained quiet, expecting her to continue. She seemed to drift off into la-la land for a moment, until I cleared my throat. She shook her head and looked back at me. Odd how she seemed so perfectly human, really... and was it me, or had she just been daydreaming about two dudes going at it?

She jumped right back into her monologue as if there'd been no interruption. "Um, for physiological stuff, here's what to expect. Females will be able to naturally exercise birth control, which in my modeling I found changed things drastically even in the earliest stages of civilization. Males will be larger than they are now -- that's the reason for your massive appetite; you're having another growth spurt, and you can expect two more. You'll be a few times stronger and faster than any other males you know now, but even I don't know exactly how much so."

"Jesus." It was like the Superman shopping list... but something didn't really fit in. "Why is it that, out of all that amazing stuff, the only thing that happens to me is you make my tool bigger?"

She snorted, glancing over at me. "A lot more happened to you than that, but most of it is internal. The rest will come with time. The only reason I increased your penis size was because I wanted you, specifically, to make lots of use of it -- and I figured having a 'gift' like that might go a little ways toward breaking through your anxiety about women and sex."

How was that not-

"Try not to think of it as me calling you shallow. I think, if anything, you're so deep you get lost in your own mind before you try to get through to anyone else's. Anyway, that last part about memory is important because of the addition of new DNA and telomerase integrity-policing RNA, and enhancements to the immune system. The two of those together should result in increased lifespan."

I was still thinking about how what she said could possibly be assembled as me not being called shallow when the last thing she'd said registered after a few seconds. "Uh, increased by how much?"

"Hard to say. Best guess, natural lifespans will end at about five hundred to eight hundred years, though there's a huge upward margin of error on that. Life expectancy -- mainly due to accidents and such -- will probably land at around four hundred years, but again, that depends almost completely on culture, environment, diet, all that. If you're living that long, obviously, having that good memory will be much more important."

I didn't have any words. It's hard to explain to the younger ones in our society today how death was viewed in the old times versus how it's seen and portrayed now. Aging, and death, just... loomed, in ways they don't to us here and now. Very few of the original species ever faced death and truly came to terms with it.

Even now it isn't banished from our minds, but... it isn't what it once was. I can't explain it to someone who never experienced the suffusing, ever-present thought of death in the old civilizations, how it was woven into everything. Just take my word for it that hearing this from her, and believing it, completely left me speechless. I had no context to understand what I would become - even the barest hint of that realization was mind-blowing.

"So... I'll be the only human left on Earth?"

"What?"

"You said humanity is lost, but you could only make the one of me."

She gave me an odd look, then blinked. "You didn't figure it out already? You won't be alone, Ben. I guess I forgot to mention your most important function; your body can change normal women into members of your new species."

How an ancient super-being like her 'forgot' is beyond me. When I try to get my head around it, I usually chalk it up to the effect of her living in one of our bodies for so long that she started to take on some of our flaws.

"In creating you, I created a propagation system. You're the progenitor of a whole new race. Your body has the capacity to rewrite and create, on the fly, the retrovirus necessary for making baseline human females into members of your species. I actually shortened the human genome by a lot -- there were thousands of inert viruses floating around in your DNA, doing nothing -- but there's still far too many fundamental genetic differences for you to interbreed directly with the previous species.

"The changes to female baseline DNA are a lot easier to process than those to male DNA, and can be done on a much simpler system -- such as within your own body. It's changing other males to be like you en masse that I couldn't get to work; the only solution was to tailor it for a single individual. It made a hell of a lot more sense in propagation terms to make a single male that could alter multiple females, than to make one female who could alter several males. I'm sorry, but you'll only be able to save other females of your species. You can't take any other men with you into your future. And of the females, they'll have to be of birthing age to be receptive to the retrovirus your body will create. I think."

"I -- what?"

"Why do you think I chose a twenty-two-year-old gawky college kid who whacks off a couple times a day and would love nothing more than to have a big dick, Ben? Your intellect and problem-solving abilities are just why I originally chose you over the other guys like you. That, and your otherwise clean bill of health, and your varied genetic background and the way that suppresses the nastier recessive traits... anyway, in order to change women to be like you, Ben, all you need to do is fuck them. Your body will take care of the rest."

She gave me wink. "The first time your semen makes contact with them, it changes them into one of your kind. That may take several days or weeks, and depending on the individual, they may experience a more mild version of the sickness you underwent. The second time, if the change has completed by then, they can get pregnant - if they want to. Since you're the progenitor, I need you to do it with a lot of girls... but here's the most important part. Don't just seduce every vagina you see. You should romance them, get to know them... make sure they're the right choice. The change to them is irreversible."

"You did notice the part where I'm the least suave and charming guy on the planet, right?" I eyed her. "Getting two girls into bed, years apart, was as much as I managed for my entire life before you did this to me."

"Actually, I chose you when you were still in high school and a virgin. I changed this body to look different at times and dropped in on you occasionally; I was a couple different people you spoke to and probably don't remember. At first all the reasons I chose you as a candidate were purely technical, but afterward I watched you and got to know you better. I picked you because you have all the tools, Ben -- the mental ones that I can't give you with a retrovirus. You just don't know how to use them.

"You have competence, morality, and the ability to see and understand the consequences of a decision before you make it. You can absorb lots of information quickly and start to use it just as quickly. You have all the traits necessary to become the man you need to be, you just needed the motivation to do it. The problem for you has always been all the anxiety inside you, tearing you up and stacking redundant thoughts so high that you can't get things done. I tweaked your chemical balance a little, but it'll only do about as much as common antidepressants. You'll have to overcome the rest on your own."

I chuckled. "If you say so. If the mission is for me to get girls in bed, I think the mission is already in a lot of trouble." I paused. "Wait. I'm thinking this through. So let's assume some miracle happens and I manage to bed Girl X or Girl Y. I do my thing, and her DNA starts changing. We see each other again a few weeks later. I tell her she's now a superhuman who can expect to live five to eight hundred years, oh and I'm also one, and I received said gifts from a space alien." I held out both hands. "How does she not think I'm nuts and call the police?"

"They'll know something is very different about their bodies, more than they can explain with any mundane reason. As you mature in the next few years, you'll come to have conscious control of far more body functions, be more aware of other autonomic functions, and your senses will be more acute. You'll be stronger, faster, and your memory will become very sharp. However, for you, that process will take roughly ten years, mostly because -- like I said -- the changes to your DNA are a lot more complicated.

"The girls you alter will experience those changes much more rapidly, far quicker than they would simply grow into and not notice. It won't be ambiguous by the time the virus has had time to work; by the time their bodies are halfway done changing, the girls you've selected will most likely believe you if you tell them the truth." She paused. "Most of them, I would think, anyway.

"Now -- as for it allegedly taking a miracle for you to find girls to sleep with... you're going to like this part. I couldn't risk everything on you eventually changing your life on your own -- so to that end, for you, and only you, I added some pheromonal enhancement and other slight deviations from the planned norm for new species. The pheromonal stuff, along with some subconscious tricks that you won't even know is working, will make your dick pretty much irresistible to any woman who sees it, if both of you feel even a speck of desire for each other. Further-"

"Oh shit." I was awestruck. Finally something had clicked.

"What?" She shifted, and as snug as we were right then, we both felt each other's every motion. My head might have forgotten how close we were together, but my cock never did. She leaned up on one arm and turned toward me, and her pretty face was framed by the large ocean window behind her. You know, whenever I think back on her, that's the image that first comes to mind.

"That doctor in the hospital. Bethany."

She seemed suspicious. "Does someone know about your nature already?"

"No... I don't think so anyway. I mean she accidentally saw my dick. I was as surprised as she was, but she made this dumb excuse to look again, and before I knew it she was giving me the blowjob of my life. She swallowed my come... is she going to change into a super-person?"

She frowned at me. "You don't think super-person is a tacky name? Think up something better after I'm gone. Anyway, there's no way she would have been exposed. Your body was still in the process of having its DNA rewritten - it still is now, actually - and the capacity to manufacture the retrovirus would come last. You won't be able to do that for a week or so, actually. The pheromonal effects would have taken effect earlier than the more complex biochemical and cellular alterations, so all you got was a fun little adventure in your first few hours as a new man.

"Cherish it. And go back and really fuck her later, if you want. I'm sure she wants you to. You said she was a doctor? Good a reason as any." She paused, looking upward as if to search herself. "Don't be shocked if the pheromone effect doesn't work on every female. It's a hamfisted solution, but I didn't have time to come up with a better one -- such as, well, sprinkling hundreds of guys like you around the globe. So just one male, artificially made close to irresistible, will have to do."

"I can't believe this." I leaned back against the glass, folding my arms. "I need time to just... sit down and think. This throws my whole life out the window. Everything I had planned, that I wanted to do with myself. Is this really the right thing to do? Shouldn't I just tell everyone? Let them use my DNA to come up with something to just make everyone in the world better?"

"Don't." She said it with finality and firmness, like I was suggesting we club a baby seal.

"Don't? Just like that?"

"Don't try that. It won't work. Your scientific base doesn't understand retroviruses as well as they think they do, and certainly not as well as I do. I modeled that scenario six hundred and eighty-five times, and changed every variable. Trying to reverse-engineer my virus results in a horrible death for millions or even billions of people just about every time. Changing even a couple elements of the retrovirus can seem successful at first, long enough to let it spread to the whole baseline human race.

"Only twenty or thirty years down the road do the flaws start to come out, and by then it's already in all the children. The whole species starts to die off." She shook her head. "Even in the scenarios where it mostly works, it still results in an arms race to create even more advanced versions of humans, which has an even more ugly ending. Tell nobody you don't trust implicitly. Try to make all the people you trust also women that you've fucked and made yours; I also coded the pheromonal stuff, and some trace compounds in your semen, so that you -- and only you -- will damn near always gain the trust of any woman you have sex with."

"What the -- how? They all just love me the moment they see my dick?" What the fuck kind of salvation is this?

"Love, you're on your own for. I can induce trust and a degree of loyalty, and a strong physical desire for your body, but not love." She shrugged. "Again, this is only for you. Your sons will have to mate with females of their own kind to have children, and they won't have any special ability to bed human women... though I imagine by then that there'll be more than enough girls of their own kind for them to chase."

I smiled for a moment until I realized something. "Wait." I held up a finger. "I'm one guy. Even if there's enough guys and girls of the new species, aren't they all..."

"They're all your sons and daughters, so they're all siblings, yes. I added some genetic code which should damn near completely obviate the need for incest taboos. I put that in mainly because I had to settle for a single-male origination scenario, but there's other logival reasons to have that in place. I'm not necessarily a big fan of the minimal genetic diversity that comes out of incest -- but if you find yourself a wide variety of women, that problem should sort itself out.

"Aside from the physical enhancements and better immune system, I also enhanced regenerative capacity and more other things than I have time to list." She punched a few more buttons, and a screen appeared in the air. Massive amounts of information in some foreign language sped by. "Probably, most of this is gibberish or not useful to you now, but just remember I want humankind to still be kicking around in 412,000 years. That's a long time, and lots could happen between then and now." She nodded to herself. "When I recreate a species, I make damn sure they're built to last."

"I don't doubt it."

She took a quick breath, then waved an arm over her head, indicating the whole place around us. "I used this mountain originally to house all the experimental societies I constructed, but I cleaned it out for you to use down the road if you need it. There's enough supplies in the lower levels to last a community of five hundred people a hundred years of good eating, and a huge stockpile of every kind of equipment I could think you might need if and when you decide to settle on the landmasses again."

"Wait, why would I need that much food and stuff?"

"It's not just for you. Use your head. I told you this planet would become hell for a while, Ben. When things get very scarce, every model says that times will get very dark before the end - and after, too. By that point, I expect that you and your people wouldn't be able to hide your secret anymore. You'd be viewed as freaks, and probably hunted, or blamed for any number of things.... not to mention how physically inhospitable this planet will become.

"This island is a fortress, and what's better, from the outside it's completely indistinguishable from any other small, rocky uninhabited island that nobody would have any reason to go to. You won't need it quite yet, but when you do, I've got not only all that food down there, but a collection of all the information, textbooks, literature, and history of your entire planet that I could get my hands on -- and as much as the servers I built here could gobble down off the internet.