HUMANITY 2.0
YEAR 041, DAY 112
I felt myself stirring awake, and an uncomfortable weight lying on my chest and abdomen. My dreams had been of labored breathing and of mysterious weight pressing on me. I groaned, and opened my eyes to a lovely sight; Emily, with a bored look on her face, her cheek resting on one fist and elbow resting on a knee. She was sitting cross-legged directly atop my chest, and was staring down directly into my eyes.
My sister had let her hair grow out longer lately, and had it tied back in a partial ponytail, the rest sweeping down around her head gracefully, framing her oval face. She wore a simple white shift and lacy white panties beneath, and I saw down near my feet where some of her clothes lay discarded. On her feet she wore long and colorful socks, which seemed to be the fashion lately.
"Em..." I moaned. "What time is it..." I felt like going right back to sleep.
Emily gave an almost imperceptible nod off toward the bedside table. "You can read."
So, she wasn't in any better a mood than she was last night, then.
The clock to my left read 05:00A, yet the sun was already shining. Welcome to Alaska. We were back in Nadine's summer palace at the time; it was located in a remote part of the Alaskan wilderness. The closest other settlement was twenty miles away. When the climate issues had started to get worse in the past ten years, we'd started living there full-time; the winters there were becoming relatively mild, though they were still dangerous to the unprepared.
The oversized house we lived in, with its surrounding sheds, workshops, and even a laboratory, was surrounded by low hills and valleys. The land bloomed with short, hardy wildflowers and lichens growing over an otherwise stony tundra. It had a massive, brilliant and lively beauty that I always appreciated. Several herds of caribou lived in the region, and Nina or Bethany sometimes took the children out on trips to observe them. They even had names for most of them.
Our house itself was rustic and huge; it had to be, to fit all of us. An even twenty young ones had the run of the place, and that wasn't counting the nine girls I counted among my lovers. It was fairly rare for all of them to be home at once; now was no exception. The exterior of the house was made of the cedar logs common to the area, long-lasting, but was built around a much more sturdy cement and rebar frame; it was a home meant to last a hundred years or more. There were ten bedrooms, two kitchens, three dens, and a twelve-vehicle garage, all paid for easily on Nadine's tab.
She never asked any of the rest of us for a damn thing - as far as she was concerned, all we had to do to deserve what she gave was to be ourselves. It's too easy for us to forget the nice things about Nadine, especially in these times; I have never forgotten. Well, maybe for a while... but not lately. I hope she knows that.
The house's interior was that of a traditional mountain lodge, a look that Nadine favored; the heavy, smooth wood furniture dominated everything, with big fluffy cushions, natural, aged hardwood floors, and numerous landscape pictures and murals hung about the place. She kept something somewhere that made the whole place smell nice, like maple and cinnamon – which, despite living there for nearly three decades, I never did find where she hid it.
Emily was still casually resting atop me. I took a deep breath, moving my sister's whole body up and down a few inches. Emily didn't budge; she knew she wasn't really hurting me, although it wasn't exactly comfortable either.
"Em..." I vaguely recalled some strange dreams of the previous night, which gave me a thought. "How long have you been there?"
She gave a noncommittal shrug. "Dunno... came in... was getting light out... you looked comfortable."
"And you were... what, watching me sleep?" Bethany liked doing that, and Rain to a lesser extent, but I'd never known Emily to have much interest in it.
"No. Yeah." She frowned. "Thinking."
I waited for a while, but she didn't offer anything further; the distant look on her face remained exactly the same. I resisted rolling my eyes. "Em, it's five in the morning... if you want to make this like pulling teeth..." She remained silent. I sighed. "Listen, if you need to watch me sleep, can you do it from off to the side or something? I know you're mad at me, but I had a late night, and I have the kids for the day once Claudia gets back. I don't want to-"
"I wasn't mad at you." I let her interrupt me, perplexed. She looked away for a moment. "That was just me being Bitchy Emily the last few days. I came back from New York with this idea then I couldn't follow through on it, and after that every time I saw you it just reminded me how pissed off I was with myself."
"Okaaay..." I raised an eyebrow. "What was the idea?"
Emily remained quiet for a few moments, then came up, resting both palms on my bare chest. She tilted her head as she looked down at me again, studying me. "Ben... why the hell haven't you pressed the issue of having children with me?"
"What?" I was still half-asleep, and not really prepared for an emotionally charged argument. "Em... is this really the time? You're obviously in a weird state of... I don't know. I'm running on three hours of sleep. Talk it over with Claudia or Nina-"
"I don't want to. Not about this." One finger traced lazy patterns around my chest. "Nina, Rain, and Wren are in the lab working on something. Claudia and Nadine have the little ones, and they won't be back until lunch. It's just you and me... brother and sister... with the whole place to ourselves..."
She said it quietly, giving me a hungry look. "Now's the only time. You won't have time to come up with some long-winded moral bullshit and I've got just enough anger bottled up that I'm thinking crooked enough to ask. Tell me, Ben! Why the hell did you leave something that important alone for the past ten years!"
"Em..." I sighed.