Pregnancy
So all that was really left at this point was to get the women pregnant. In this first round I could only speak for my two assigned women, but neither of them shied away from this duty. However, Lakshmi quickly got into a mood of “let’s get this over with.” She didn’t want to worry about enjoying it, just to get me to come inside her. She ended up not getting pregnant that first month. Sarah, on the other hand, was a sex fiend. When it was our turn, our sessions ran for one to two hours, sometimes with me coming inside her two or three times, and I couldn’t keep count of her apparent orgasms. And she showed up at my house to start on the 10th day after the red light, just in case she ovulated that early, and kept going until the 19th day.
It probably wasn’t surprising Sarah got pregnant. Lakshmi needed two more cycles. She was one of only two women to not be pregnant two months after we started the program. After the third month, every woman was confirmed pregnant. By this time, we were eating delicious food at every meal, we had a good command of the computers here, everybody had all new clothes in styles they liked, and the living was easy.
Some of the people who’d been appointed jobs didn’t have much remaining to do, but they found other things to do. Some people went into the various houses near us and took all the old, ruined clothes and hauled them over to the clothing factory. Also, all the pants with tail holes went there, even if not ruined by time. While we now had adequate clothes, we could always use more, so we just amassed a pile of to-be-recycled fabric there for when we needed something. Elsewhere in the building with the sex parlor, we found a space with racks like a clothing store, and Chen thought that was effectively what it once was. It was obvious that it hadn’t been maintained in about as long as most of the homes hadn’t been lived in. The few garments left were ruined, so we put them in the recycling and moved all the still-good clothes from the nearby vacant houses into the store, sorted by type, gender, and size, free for anybody to take. This let us all move into a block of adjacent houses like a neighborhood instead of just wherever we found fitting clothes.
I also wanted to explore how the sims could be adapted as childbirth sims. While we might not strictly speaking need them, all the women would appreciate any help they could get. Clara volunteered for this job, and Chen assigned her the government role Director of Sim Development which gave her essentially unlimited power over the sims. That was one of the few high-level government officials who was allowed in the sex sims, as it was expected she would sometimes need to test how things were operating and test new or questionable sims, but she also had control over the non-sex sims. One of her first changes was to make generic male and female human models that she made available as options in the bathroom sims, something everyone could test, and we all approved of them.
Three months later, Clara reported, “Chen helped me learn how to register a new type of sim, and how to access the sim designer, but I was on my own after that. I started with an empty sex sim with no partner, and with the user in a human body pregnant and ready to give birth. Then I experimented with body modifications meant to make birth easier. I had no choice at this point but to test it repeatedly in different configurations so I could properly compare them. I considered bringing in other volunteers, but the results were going to be subjective and difficult to compare experiences across different people. The only way to compare them properly was for me to do them all myself. Fortunately, after the first few, the births were pretty easy. I made one which was way too easy; the baby shot out like a rocket with a single push which might have injured the baby due to the impact. Then it was only a matter of finding a happy medium between that and the human norm. Here’s what I ended up with.”
She showed a video of a birth in the finished model. The body looked like a caricature of a wide-hipped woman, with the thighs at least 25 cm apart. The actual birth took only a tad over two minutes.
“After that, I extracted the changes between the original, realistic human woman and the final model, and made that into a body modification sim. To test that it would work, I did more testing in modified sex sims, taking several different bodies from the sex sims, applying the human female generic over them, making them pregnant, and applying the birthing body mod. Once again, I gave simulated birth using these different bodies. Having decided it all worked, I packaged it up as a bathroom sim mod.”
She brought up another video on a screen for all of us to watch.
“When a pregnant woman enters any bathroom now, she’ll have six options. Own body, generic male Martian, generic female Martian, generic male human, generic female human, and childbirth. In the childbirth sim, instead of the toilet there will be an inclined birthing chair. The body mods I designed will be applied to your real body, and you will sit in the chair and really give birth to your baby in a process that should take only 2 to 5 minutes. When you are done, pick up your baby and leave. The sim will remove the cord, placenta, all the fluids that come out during birth, and apply the same cleaning to your body and clothes and the baby that you get during bathroom visits, and restore the shape of your body before the mod. While I can’t test it for real until one of our pregnant mothers is ready to give birth, I’m confident the testing I have applied to the parts should give a good result, even if it doesn’t 100% match expectations.”
As the pregnancies progressed, our mothers were able to get the robots to construct beds, cloth diapers (based on a pattern modified to eliminate the tail hole), and other supplies they would want for the babies.
Laura, our director of breeding, was ironically the first to go into labor. Somebody helped her to the nearest bathroom and she called up the birth sim and went in. Five minutes later she emerged holding her child in her arms.
“I never gave birth before, but I’m pretty sure this was the easiest birth any human woman ever experienced. Thanks, Clara and Chen for helping set this up. Everything you designed worked the way you described.”
This also started our next duty: Childcare. Laura started the research into that area with the first obvious question, “What did you do about dirty diapers?”
Chen was unsure. “I never had kids of my own, and I don’t remember from when I was little.”
But she looked it up and came up with the answer: “When the diaper is soiled, take the baby with its dirty diaper into the bathroom sim. That sim was designed to remove poop and pee, wherever they ended up, and that includes clothing, which the cloth diapers count as. In dirty, out clean, as simple as that. We should have figured that out, given that that was how we cleaned our own clothes. Those sims removed other bodily secretions, dirt, food stains, and just about any problem that could befall clothes. We had long ago developed the routine of going into our bathroom before bed and then taking off our clothes and hanging them up.”
I guess this meant we really only needed one diaper per child, so the stacks we had made would probably last us through this entire generation of children.
At first it was just Laura, but two weeks later we had three babies, and the mothers decided on a new plan. There were some larger houses clearly meant for larger families, and the mothers moved into one of these together, and they switched back into sleeping in shifts, since of course babies slept when they felt like it. This let each woman sleep part of the day, take care of the children (which to a significant extent meant breast-feeding) part of the day, and take care of other duties, if any, for part of the day, or simply rest. Two weeks later, three more mothers gave birth within a week and they moved into another such house. The last four mothers straggled out their births over the next couple months, and moved into a house with room for four. Then men then moved into the single houses closest to this group. By the time the last of the first round of children were born, the first mothers had already had their first post-birth period and were certified ready to get pregnant again. In later generations we would wait, but we had to compress this generation because some of the women were as old as 33, physically, when we arrived, including Laura, who ended up with me in the second round.
Chen felt left out. To our surprise, Chen decided to use the body modification sim to replace her reproductive system with a human one, and not just an imitation one! The ships’ databases included the complete human genome, and we had the data about the DNA structures needed. The body modification sim was able to process that to make real human cells with human DNA, and we chose a set of genes for her from the genome which was considered safe while being optimally distinct from what we had.
However, there was an issue with rejection, and we ultimately decided the only way around that was for Chen to take a fully human body. She felt weird without a tail, but otherwise was able to make one close to her original sizes and continue wearing the same clothes. The final test was whether she could get pregnant and bear a human child successfully. We assigned her one of the men at random and she succeeded in getting pregnant around the same time as the others were doing so for the third time. Then we just had to wait.
During that time, even though it was still years away, we started trying to figure out how we were going to teach the children. We were going to have 4 grades with 10 or 11 children each, and the plan was to introduce one teacher for each grade, to be assisted by what we could get out of the computer. Their other duties would get shifted to other people, to the extent those jobs were stlll needed. Chen had already learned English to a 5-year-old’s level and volunteered to be a test student for lessons they set up.
When birthing time came, Chen had her child along with the rest of them, and he seemed perfectly healthy. But this gave us a dilemma. If this child grew up healthy, we could use the same technique to artificially make children using the complete spectrum of human DNA, not limited to just the genes of the crew who survived the trip to New Mars. But should we?
One woman said that since the women had all contributed to the effort by giving birth, the men should do so too. Literally every other woman shot that idea down. Some pointed out that the women who signed up for this mission did so knowing they would be asked to bear children if they arrived successfully on New Mars. The men had no such expectation. Others noted that if one or more men did go female for this, they wouldn’t be there for their turns servicing some of the women.
Still others pointed out that our effort to raise 40, and now with Chen 42 kids was already going to be a strain on all of us, and suggested we should not have any more. If we modified DNA at all, we should modify some of these children, or their children, wherever certain genes are detected in excess to avoid inbreeding when they had to start having children with their effective cousins two generations from now.
With all these arguments, and none of the men volunteering to become female to have children, and Chen happy to stop at 2, the idea of having more than 42 children in this generation by any means was dropped.
The Second Martian
The women had all borne their last children and we were at one of the now quite-large meal sessions with all the adults and half the children eating standard food, the one-year-olds eating pureed food, and the infants either breast-feeding or sleeping, but all 58 of us were there, filling the restaurant, when a man stepped out of the sim room and said something we didn’t understand since we had stopped using the translators at this point, carrying out both our business with the computer and conversations with Chen in English.
Chen responded to him in his language, and then when none of us said anything, she realized we didn’t understand and translated for us.
“He asked, ‘Who are all you weirdos?’ and I said ‘They are our guests from space and you are welcome to join us.’”
The man hadn’t made a response yet either, but by the time he did, one of my tech people had found and turned on a translator so we could all speak with him.
“So, you all are having real sex and making babies? Does that have anything to do with your skin being so pale?”
Clearly, this guy hadn’t figured it out yet, so I responded, “We are from another planet where all the people look like this, and we traveled two lifetimes to get here after we discovered your world through big telescopes. Except for her; she changed her body to look like us because she was lonely as the only one of your people here.”
He responded, “The only one? Where are all the others?”
“In the sims,” Chen responded.
“What? All of them? That was supposed to be forbidden for government officials.”
Chen replied, “Only overseers. And you are looking at the entirety of the government officials of the world now, at all levels.”
“For the whole world? Computer, how many government officials are there in the world now, excluding people in this room?”
“Zero.”
“Computer, how many of the people here are government officials? How many overseers who are prohibited from using sims?”
“Sixteen, five with roles that prohibit them from using adult entertainment sims.”
“How did this happen?”
Noting that he did not address the computer this time, Chen responded, “They all resigned. Our society automated everything, and made it so we could live every part of our lives in the sims. And so people did. And so the government officials who had nothing to do resigned and joined them.”
“So you all just volunteered for empty offices?”
“Exactly. I volunteered to be emperor because the post was empty and certain things couldn’t be done without government officials.”
“You volunteered to be the emperor? Computer, how long has this person in front of me been emperor of the world?”
“For the last four years, three months, seventeen days.”
“Computer, how long was the post of emperor vacant before she assumed the role?”
“Nine years, eight months, twenty-one days.”
“So Miss Emperor, what are you doing about the problem that our entire race is living their entire lives inside sims?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“They are happy and they are not needed.”
Even through his alien face, it was clear the man was flabbergasted at this response, and didn’t know what to say for a moment. Finally, he asked, “So what are you doing?”
“Acting as ambassador to the people of Earth, who have traveled an unimaginable distance to see our world in person.”
“But... our people!”
“Look, we’ve been eating almost all of our meals in this restaurant, in plain sight of people changing sims, every day for over four years now. Or at least the sixteen adults among us have, since the children aren’t that old yet. You are the first person in all that time out of over a thousand using this sim room to show any interest in us.”
“And how did you come to be with these people?”
Chen was speechless, apparently out of ways to explain things, so I spoke up. “When we first arrived, we found everything functioning but all the people missing. We discovered that people were switching sims periodically in this room, and we tried talking with them while they did so until we managed to get her to answer us. And she was as shocked as you are to discover the state of your world.”
Then Chen added, “And I am surprised you noticed us.”
“It’s hard not to notice a room full of aliens.”
“Maybe for you. Not for them. The people switching sims here have tried everything, including sex with aliens.”
“Oh, I wasn’t switching.”
“What? You were in one long-running sim?”
“Yes. Computer, how long was my last sim session?”
“Forty-seven years, eleven months, twenty-five days.”
“What the heck kind of sim was that?” Chen asked, clearly shocked one sim could go on that long.
“Custom paid sim. But my money should have run out long before that.”
“The government abolished money once the automatic electrical generation exceeded even the needs to keep the whole population in sims.”
“Oh, well that explains that.”
“So why did you leave your sim?”
“My buddy died and I was distraught.”
“Your buddy died? Level with me, what kind of custom sim was this that you were in?”
“It was the deluxe sex sim. You can change into any type of person or animal you want, have sex with literally anything, basically mold the world how you want.”
“The God sim.”
“Yes, that one. When normal sex got boring, I turned one of the prostitutes male and taught him how to double-penetrate women with me. But eventually that got boring, and I taught him how to do other things. Non-sexual things. And we were just living a good life in there and he just fell over and froze solid! Nothing I could do could bring him out of it.”
Chen explained to us briefly, in English, “That sim is even more expansive than the standard sex sim. You can change literally everything, not just you and your sex partner. You can have the computer create stuff in the scene around you, live, without pausing the simulation.”
And then, in her language directed at our new visitor, “So you were in the sex sim, but you weren’t even having sex.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“What sort of other things were you doing?”
“Oh, everything. We played all kinds of games, we learned to play music together, we did everything you can imagine. But he just froze and the rest of the sim kept going around us.”
Clara, our Director of Sim Development, interjected, “You probably exceeded the capacity of the simulation’s memory buffer. It can access a pretty large amount of memory, but there is a limit. It’s well above what anybody is expected to ever need in even pretty complicated sims, but it is still a limit. Trying to live a whole virtual life in there and develop the AI into a virtual friend is probably enough to eventually reach the limit. And when that happened, since your buddy used the most memory, the computer shut him off to avoid having the whole simulation collapse.”
The newcomer said, “Well, I don’t think I have it in me right now to just try to start over. Well, if there was nobody here I’d get bored and go back into another sim, but right now I’m interested in you all.”
I responded, “I’ve explained how we discovered your world from far away, and traveled here to meet you, only to be disappointed to find that you are all hiding in sims, so we are glad to have been able to speak with two of you. You see that our bodies look a lot like yours except we don’t have tails. They work a lot like yours too.”
“Ah, that is what you said. You are from another world. This would be hard to believe if I didn’t see all your alien bodies here in front of me. Are you wearing our clothes?”
“Yes, since none of you were using your homes, their contents, and what the robots provide, we have taken a small part of that for ourselves.”
“I guess that makes sense, since the owners were not around for you to ask their permission. This world you came from, is it one of the other planets that circles our sun?”
“No. It is like that, but it circles another star out there in space, far away.”
“Another star? The stars are very far away. How did you travel so far? You did say that it took you lifetimes.”
“We were held in suspended animation in our ships. Like in your simulators, it means time didn’t pass for our bodies, but unlike your simulators, we were asleep and did not experience the time. We accelerated close to the speed of light, but even so, the journey took almost 150 of your years.”
“The speed of light. I haven’t heard anyone mention that since I was in school. Nobody ever figured out how to travel anywhere close to that fast, but doesn’t time get funny if you do?”
“Yes. It was more like 12 years on board the ship, half of that in the time it took to accelerate and decelerate, but because we didn’t have your simulators, nor enough room to store so much actual food on board, we spent the time suspended.”
It was interesting to learn that the Martians had at least discovered relativity and knew about it to the point that children might learn about it in school. We learned more from him about the way things were before the sex simulators became the way of life for Martians, but not too much, because he’d also gotten addicted to the sims at a young age. We eventually learned his name was Weld. As a member of one of the aristocratic families, he’d not only been able to get access to the sex simulators before they became free for everyone, but he had access to them before the usual minimum age of 17. By the time he was 21, he’d grown bored with them but even more bored with real life here, and started the custom sim he’d described for us.
“I’m surprised to see all the statues,” Weld explained.
Chen explained, “The statues were added around the time the sims became free for everybody. With lots of people wanting to get in, they wanted a way for people to get into sims faster. That’s also why we have the lockers. People needed to be naked to mount the statues, so they let those using sims store their clothes in one of these small square lockers. It was only expected to hold the clothes you wore into the place, so they didn’t have to be big.”
“Right; when I went in, the sim room was only a quarter of this size, and there were no lockers.”
“That makes sense. The sim preserved the clothes you were wearing, too, so they still look nice. My clothes disintegrated in a locker while I was in a sim, and I bet yours would have, too, if they hadn’t been preserved in sim-space.”
“Well, I’m interested in learning more about you all. I’d like to live near you if that’s possible.”
“Not in your family’s big fancy home?”
“No. I already know they aren’t going to be there. Maybe I’ll go get some of my clothes.”
“You should be aware a lot of our clothes also disintegrated within our homes. Maybe a third of the clothes were still wearable when I met this group, and some of those have fallen apart and been replaced in the last four years.”
“Hmm. Let’s go look.”
Chen and Weld left to go find his home. They came back a little while later with Weld carrying a few garments in his arms, and took them into one of the homes similar to the ones the men among my crew were living in, which Chen assigned to him.
