Vy

Chapter 13: The Federation of World Guardians

The world had already undergone a monumental change when VY killed almost all men worldwide, but there wasn't a single person who had anticipated that every world power would institute mandatory interfamily breeding. The very thought of it hadn't even entered the minds of the wildest conspiracy theorists. Preliminary approval numbers showed that the new breeding initiative was more successful than the government had predicted.

Owens house not alone in the efforts. Braedon had reconsidered his willingness to go along with such a distasteful practice of having sex with his own daughters. He had a long discussion with Savannah and Letobain after the discovery of their actual relationship. They had debated most of a day before the three of them had come to a decision.

Braedon and Letobain would continue their marriage, and would continue to have children since it had been determined that VY was correcting all known incest-borne genetic disorders. Letobain had already given birth to four boys and five girls, two of the girls being identical twins. Her rate of post-birth recovery amazed the medical personnel with her augmented regenerative ability. It had made it possible for her to attempt her second pregnancy in record time.

With the first pregnancy going to term without complications and the birth of all nine children having gone off without a hitch, Dr. Beccy authorized Letobain to receive the same fertility treatments again. It wasn't as if she hadn't met the federal requirement for maintaining permanent status and benefits. But Letobain felt like it was her special calling to give birth to what might possibly be the leaders of tomorrow. There was something special, a bond unlike anything she could describe with each of her children before they were born.

It was more than just an emotional bond with her babies in the womb. When she slept, she had dreamed she communicated with them, but without words. It was as if they sensed each other's thoughts. When she had awoken, the sensation had lingered such that it made her dreams more real. While unsettling the first few months with the maturing thoughts, she had come to find the daily presence comforting.

For this reason, Letobain had chosen with haste to undertake another pregnancy under the most similar conditions as possible. Like the last time, it only took one coupling for her husband to fertilize the multiple eggs the fertility drugs had coaxed her body to release. Days later, the clinic confirmed her pregnancy. Both of them prepared themselves as best they could for what could very well turn out to be a very large addition to the family in the next few years. Especially considering the augmented regeneration, they assumed that daughters of VY males would all be more capable of multiple births.

As Owens house continued to create more VY purebred children, the major houses around the world continued to do the same, some at an even more brisk pace thanks to more authoritarian governments. As these purebred children grew up, parents had started noticing peculiar events occurring only when the purebred children were around.

Things like the New York City house purebreds speaking more advanced words that they never heard before and that were what you expect from an older pre-teen. Florida house noticed that the purebred children could hold their breath underwater for over a minute before they'd rush the child back up, which the children were surprised by. Even more odd was the California house purebreds; when playing with their electronic toddler toys, the toys were performing functions they weren't programmed for. Texas house, meanwhile, had been having strange glitches in their electrical equipment, but hadn't attributed it to the new children yet.

Overseas in Western Europe, our long-time ally England had no idea what was going on with their new purebred children. Their best description of what was happening was that the children were changing the subatomic state of whatever they played with. Toys would sometimes become distorted hunks of completely different materials. Other times they would return to find toys imbedded in walls or floors or even the dirt, yet there would be no disturbance or damage to whatever they were imbedded in.

A few years more, and Braedon started having the strangest feeling that his mind would drift off to past events. Initially, he had attributed this to just daydreaming since the notion of it was ridiculous on its face. That is until one night when he was playing a game of poker with a few of his wives, he felt like he had already known not only who had been bluffing, but also what cards they held in their hands. This turned into a wild lucky streak for him, especially since they had been forced to come up with a new version of poker since no one could strip off clothes when they lost a hand.

As advantageous as knowing what the wives were holding was, they caught on after a while and demanded an explanation. This led to a deeper discussion with the family directors and finally with the ICPD administrator who briefed the council. As more reports about the male heads of house around the world came in with similar outcomes, but different abilities, the wool had been pulled away from humanity's eyes.

Owens house being among the first to be identified as housing powered residents, through extensive interviews with clinical psychologists and experts on paranormal phenomena, Owens House was classed as having Temporal Communication. Specifically, it was found that those that possessed the talent could extend their conscious awareness into the past. For reasons unknown, none of them could extend into the future. Attempts to do so were met with failure as each of them would sense only a void. They claimed to be able to reach as far back as, roughly, the day they were born.

New York City House was another of the houses identified early on from the unmistakable signs of artificial memory inheritance in the very young. An exact cause wasn't known, though there was a general consensus that there was likely a genetic component to the memories. Through intelligence testing administered to the children, it was determined that the children all possessed an age-adjusted intelligence equivalent to a four-year college education. Not only that, but they appeared to all possess almost identical memories. NYC House was classed as being a Genetic Memory house.

California House was among the next houses to undergo evaluation. Initially, investigators observed the children playing with their simple electronic toys. What they did next though was have the children touch various input devices connected to a non-networked computing cube. They apparently only had to have physical contact with an electrically active part of the input devices, and the screens flashed with a flurry of activity as the multi-cored CPUs processed the neural data. The results varied from thousands of drive searches per second to complex applications written in minutes. The investigators classed California House as exhibiting Tactile Digital Brain Interface ability.

The other house concurrently evaluated was Florida House with reports of the newest generation of children inheriting the ability to hold their breath "for a long time" as the parents had put it. The reality was their precious little ones weren't actually breathing, at least not in the traditional sense. Ultimately, the truth ended up being that officially they were employing electrolytic respiration, both in and out of the water. In other words, as long as there was an oxygen rich environment, be it gaseous or liquid, breathing would continue unimpaired. The official designation for Florida House was Electrolytic Respiration.

The last house on the U.S. list was Texas house. Despite initial attempts to dispel any easily explained phenomena, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had dispatched a team of network engineers accompanied by a senior database developer and senior application developer. While the "glitches" were only affecting the electrical technology on the property, it was system-wide, so the larger technical team was warranted. DHS would end up being the ones surprised though when the entire team reported back that not even a single reported "glitch" could be explained or resolved.

For this reason, they had assigned one more trip to the "Super Friends Team", the moniker that had been given to "classify" them as thanks for classifying the other houses. When they had arrived, a house that looked to be in chaos greeted them. Lights were flashing on and off, randomly changing hues, alarms randomly going off and then going silent, automatic doors opening and closing randomly. It was a bizarre scene, to say the least. Using their now finely honed skills to bring explanations for VY powers gone awry, they spent the next week before coming to a conclusion.

The VY purebred children were unconsciously generating random fields of varying electromagnetic frequencies, wildly changing intensities and, as a first for everyone, varying density of fields. This became evident when one of the more gifted children managed to generate a wall of ultraviolet light that prevented solid matter from passing through it. One investigator had gotten really excited claiming proof of energy shield technology, but their claim had been retracted. Based on Einstein's theory on light behaving as both particle and wave, the team agreed the photons must have achieved a sufficient density to deflect the electrons in the orbits of solid matter. Like shields, but not quite shields. With that explained, Texas house was classed as having Dense Field Generation.

The last house the team was to be dispatched to was England House. This one proved to challenge the investigative team, likely more than any other houses, based on reports that were received by the ICPD. Objects that were embedded in solid surfaces, yet no damage to the solid surface. No detectable light or sound when these events were occurring. And to top it off, no one had actually directly witnessed what happened, so all reports were unconfirmed.

Despite a plethora of sensors having been installed in all habitable areas of the building, in addition to multi-spectral sensor towers surrounding the property, there were no clear indications of what was responsible for these baffling occurrences. Sure, the cameras had recorded the objects sinking into the floor or floating into the walls, but why, and more importantly, how and who? More powerful and extremely sensitive monitoring equipment was set up in all the rooms the purebred children would occupy.

After over a month with nothing verifiable to report back with, the team had been under significant pressure to return for debriefing. As one of the team members was writing the final thoughts in their report, they noticed what looked like rippling water in their glass of water. But it wasn't the water that was rippling, it was the glass itself. They frantically grabbed their phone to record what was happening. That's when something really weird happened. An ice cube floated through the glass and briefly levitated above the desk before falling to the surface like expected.

The question was, had the ice cube phased through the glass, or had the glass changed phase to allow the solid cube to pass through it? When the glass was examined under an electron microscope, the scientists realized that the glass had changed into something that wasn't actually glass anymore. The structure was no longer amorphous, as they had expected. Instead, what they saw were pockets of extremely dense, highly organized glass. It was actually bonded in such a way that it was predicted that it had a greater crush resistance than polycarbonate.

With this key piece of information, the investigative team determined that what likely happened was that one of the purebred children had altered the Quantum Phase of the glass. This could explain how the ice cube passed through while the glass was in flux. This effect would absolutely merit further study, as the implications could be world-changing. But the investigation team had what they needed. England house was classed as having Quantum Phase Manipulation.

Upon their return to the ICPD headquarters in Schenectady, New York, the U.S. government and the English Parliament held a top-secret meeting to determine the next course of action based on the results. The abilities of England house were scary enough, but combine that with Texas and New York City houses, the consequences of these abilities falling into the wrong hands could be disastrous for everyone. Then, there was the issue of Owens house.

The power to travel into Earth's past; Was both, the most significant threat, and the most promising future, for all of humanity. The culmination of this meeting was two important elements. First, the U.S. and England houses would align and cooperate to form The Federation of World Guardians. The second part was that Owens house was of the utmost importance to secure.

Because of this, the U.S. government insisted on beefing up the security both inside Owens house, as well as around the perimeter of the property. Military bases for Army, Marines, Air Force and Space Force were constructed one mile in a pentagon formation, with a Navy base being constructed at Lake Michigan. At the perimeter of the Owens house property were placed sub-surface hot deployable surface to air missile batteries and auto-targeting turrets with 50 caliber dual machine gun turrets and a single 40mm Bofors L/70 autocannon with 736 round drum.

With the exterior walls of the house already being equipped with passive infrared sensors directed inwards, the military equipped the outside of the same walls with the latest in distributed array radar technology, as well as reinforcing the outer walls with armor plating. Owens house had effectively become the most heavily fortified position on Earth, other than Washington, D.C.