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LEGAL BS: Feel free to read this story at your leisure. The characters, the plot, and the machine which makes all this happen belong to me and may not be borrowed or stolen without written permission. If you are an archiver, please contact me if you are interested in putting this story up on your site. I will allow all free sites to post my work so long as I know where it is going and you allow me to prepare a copy of the story which is specifically "branded" with your site's information. (i.e. I put a Meta Tag in it with your site info so that we can identify that you do, in fact, have permission to post it) I will also write up a custom "Author's Notes" for the beginning of the tale which addresses your readers directly. You may NOT archive the TEXT versions of this story which have gone out onto the newsgroups. I have posted a few copies, but they lose considerable punch because of the format structure of a ascii text file. You MAY feel free to pass versions along to your friends, so long as you aren't making any cash from it. Again, I would prefer that the text versions just be used for the newsgroups, while the HTML versions are used for all other purposes. If you have questions about whether or not I'll approve of something you wish to do with the stuff, just ask. :)

Note from the Author: This story is a little different from most of the things I've seen posted around the net. In addition to being along a SciFi vein, it also has a plot which (I hope) people will find both entertaining and thought provoking. I have to admit, there are some pretty weird things in here, so I'm assuming that this probably won't be to everyone's liking. This is my first stab at writing erotic fiction for public consumption, so I'd be interested in hearing from people. You can reach me at grumpus@mail.gv2.net.

  FIVE – After the Storm

It would take about thirty chapters for me to describe, completely, everything that flashed through my mind when Karen told me that Al had been a StormTrooper. How did she know? What did he do? Why did she kill him? Do they have ESP or something else to let others know that they are in trouble, or to help others locate them if they are killed. Do they run in packs? How tight is their network and how much time did we have before they figured out Al was dead and then storm this place to get revenge? There were lots more questions. If you sit back from your reading for a minute and ask yourself what kinds of questions would be going through your head if you were in my situation, you’d have a better idea of it than I could describe to you. And then, take those questions, multiply them by any number greater than, say, 40, and picture it happening all in a split second.

That is the session my mind had at that very moment in time.

I decided to start at the beginning and work through my list. "How do you know he was a Trooper?"

Karen shook her head, "I’m not sure. I think I might know a way to show you easier than I can tell you."

"What do you mean?" I couldn’t take my eyes off the corpse in the shower.

"It’s just a dream I had last night, but it was strange," she explained rather vaguely. "It was so vivid, and I’ve kinda got a feeling that it will really work."

"We’ve got to do something with him before we can do any weird experiments," I insisted as I nodded toward the second door which led to Julie and Marta’s apartment.

"It’s Tuesday. Marta and Julie are both on the lunch shift today so they won’t be back until after four – and that’s if they don’t stay late and milk the happy hour crowd for "privates" like they usually do."

All this did was bring another set of questions to my mind. How long had Al been up here? When would they start to miss him downstairs? Would someone come up too look for him? Were we all fucked?

You get the idea.

"Remember when you said that you appreciated my insight?" asked Karen. "Well, since you brought in Holly, things have been different and I’ve had a lot of time to think. I still think I’m right with my Heaven Theory, but I also think that I’m here to play a bigger role in all of this. And I also think I know what this role is."

During her talk, Karen had led me back into the main room of the apartment. She bent over and picked up one of the cuke vines in her blood stained hand. She extended it to me and smiled.

"Trust me."

Welcome to the Game.

There wasn’t a hell of a lot in that world that made sense to me at that point. I did know that Karen seemed to have some sort of bizarre rationale in her mind that none of the others of us had. While Holly was adamant about certain things, she was still essentially like Robbie and myself. We all had our ideas of what was right, but it was always speculation and we all knew it. Karen, on the other hand, voiced her opinions – and she was always considerate enough to call them opinions – as if she truly believed they were fact. Facts were things I was very short on, at that moment, and if she truly believed that she was onto something, I at least owed her a shot.

I took the cuke in my hand and slid it up beneath my skirt. My eyes never left hers as I slid it inside. She even smiled lovingly and kindly as I began to falter, the drugs racing though me like a stampede of mad cattle. She held me with one of her powerful arms as I slackened even more and she began pinching at the nipple on her large, perfectly round breast with the other. A small droplet of white liquid appeared at the tip.

My god! She’s lactating!

She brought her lovely tit to my lips and I heard her whisper, "Drink."

I began suckling at her tit. Her juices flowed into me and they tasted wonderful. With the drugs from the plant and the cuke in my cunt, it was enough to send me over the edge instantly.

"Open up! I need to fix your shower!" It was Al’s voice and I was scared. For the first time since this all began, I felt scared.

Wait – was it even me?

No. I was seeing it through Karen’s eyes. In fact, I had just been witness to every event in her life: her first steps, her first day of school, the time Jimmy Handleman had raped her in the sixth grade… There were a lot of terrible things which had happened to her. It was no wonder she had wound up a stripper in a seedy dive like this.

"Damn it! I heard ya in there rustlin’ around! Open the fuckin’ door or I’m comin’ in anyway!"

I – she – I ducked back into the security of the mass of vines and foliage which took up a good deal of the back corner of the apartment. Despite the calming effects of the drugs in my body, I was scared. Al was a real pig – and then there was the rape.

I remembered it vividly, just like I remembered every other part of this life which seemed to be mine, but which I knew was Karen’s. It had been when I first started working for the club, Al had taken me to one of the private booths for an "interview." I won’t go into the rest, but it was disgusting, to say the least. His sperm burned as I was forced to swallow it all.

The door to the apartment jiggled as I heard a master key being inserted into the lock. I inhaled and held my breath waiting for him to enter. Fear filled me and I knew that I was going to have to go against my friends’ wishes if he even so much as caught a whiff of the thick heady aroma which permeated the room.

When the door finally did open, the shock was even worse than I expected. Don’t ask me how I knew, I could just tell. There was something about his aura, something that was different. Everyone else I had seen since being hooked into the plant had a sort of greenish tint to them. I thought this had to do with the plant, or just the drugs which had become a part of my internal system. But, Al – he was bathed in total darkness, almost stealing the light which hit him like a huge black hole. He looked like the people I had seen in the one vision I’d shared with the others – the ones who had come through the door and taken Harry/Holly’s life. He was a StormTrooper.

"Son of a bitch," said Al, more surprised than angry. He was staring right at the mass of foliage which served as my refuge. He reached back and pulled something out of his pocket and leveled it in my direction. I knew it had to be some sort of electrical beam thing like I’d heard described – like I could personally visualize, but like Karen had no solid point of reference of.

"Robbie? Jackie?" It sounded as if he were trying to call a couple cats down from a tree.

Then, things started to get really strange. My body tensed even more and I felt myself begin to grow. Looking down over my nude frame, I watched the muscles bulge and refine. I was already very athletic, but now I looked more like one of those powerful body builders from one of the magazines you’d see at the drug store. I was still scared shitless, but now – assuming physical strength had been gifted along with the new musculature – at least I stood a chance of being able to beat him in a fair fight.

There was still the matter of the Star Trek phaser thing, and that I didn’t like. I also noted that Al didn’t seem to be affected by the plant’s intoxicating scent. If the same rules applied, it meant that he had the memories of at least one other lifetime in that chauvinistic pea brain of his. I hoped, though, that it was merely just a matter of racial – if StormTrooper is, in fact, a race? – immunity.

Surprisingly (come to think of it, what hadn’t come as a surprise, lately?) the plant took the initiative at this point. Several smallish vines shot across the floor at lightning speed and began coiling tightly around his limbs. Another vine wrapped around his hand and managed to wrestle the "phaser" from his grip, sending it sailing across the floor.

With Al disarmed and subdued, I lunged from the thicket and was on him in an instant. My powerful hand grasped his fat little neck and I jacked him up against the wall with a thud, his feet dangling inches off the floor.

"Hey there, Al!" I said tensely, my whole body overcome with rage. "How’s it going, you fat prick?"

"Put me down Karen," he said, trying to sound calm, but his eyes betrayed him. "This has nothing to do with you, the wheels have started turning now and if you let me go, we can take out the menace and you can continue to live your life of bliss, all hooked in and nothing will ever get in the way of that again."

Menace? As near as I could tell, Al was the menace. He was the one standing between me and my life of bliss and peace. And tranquility.

Strengthening my grip on Al’s throat, I lowered him to the floor and dragged him toward the kitchen. My hand at my side, he gurgled as he was bent over backwards, unable to breathe. His hands clawed at my powerful arm, but he was helpless in my grasp. I grabbed a knife – the biggest, most jagged one I could find – and I dragged the fucker to the bathroom.

I’m not sure if it was bones or the tiling in the tub I could hear breaking as I slammed him against the back wall of the stall. I was driven by total rage. This man had raped me three years ago. He had made my life miserable ever since, forcing me to live a degrading life and pleasing him at his whim. And now, I held his life in my hands.

It was an upward stroke, right through the clavicle and piercing his heart. I even twisted it, not so much to make sure he was dead, but hoping that it would hurt on some level. His body went limp in my hand and I lowered him to the bottom of the tub, a pool of blood being rinsed down the drain by the showerhead. The curtain to the shower whipped open and I turned, shocked to be staring myself in the face…

I woke up sputtering, Karen’s tit popping out of my mouth. Looking up, I could see her smiling down at me and wiping a droplet of milk from the corner of my mouth.

"It worked, didn’t it?" she asked.

I nodded. I had seen Karen’s entire life in a matter of – I glanced at the clock – five minutes! I had not only watched it, but I had actually lived her life. All the emotions, the failures, the triumphs, the loves and the hates. I had felt it all.

In addition to learning the exact events and the accompanying emotions which had led to Al’s death, I also knew a few more things about our enemy in this. They seemed to think – or at least they wanted Karen to think – that they were really on the same side. To the StormTroopers, they were trying to save the world from us. To make it a perfect heaven for the people – something that, for one reason or another – we were trying to stop.

Maybe that was the hidden variable in this stupid "game." Maybe someone or some thing wanted to see if we would take our own survival to the point of destroying everything else. In order for us to win, we have to sacrifice every other life on earth. Us or them? The needs of the few versus the needs of the many. A classic question.

Was it possible that, in fact, we were the bad guys in all of this?

Karen leaned in close and kissed my forehead and spoke in a soft loving tone. "I think I can take your memories, as well."

My eyes opened wide at this statement. I, of course, already knew this having lived Karen’s life, but it hadn’t crossed my mind, really. I knew how she thought it would work though – by her drinking the ejaculate of a person, she could store someone’s life for later playback to someone else by having them drink her milk. There was absolutely no logic to it, but her instincts had proven right about me being able to live her life, why couldn’t she be right about this?

I nodded. "The only problem now is that I’m not so sure that we’re not the bad guys in all of this."

"I’d thought of that, too," Karen confirmed without hostility nor consolation.

Robbie and Holly got home at about the same time. Karen and I had agreed to keep the memory transference possibilities a secret – at least for now. After all, if we were, in fact, the bad guys in this, the fewer of us who knew about it, the less likely the chances for a mutiny. I was driven by my conscience here, and I couldn’t be sure that the others would be, as well. I did tell Karen to try to "download" their memories without them knowing. She got Robbie when she first hooked back in. Holly would have to wait until the next time. I also planned to give Karen my memories as soon as I could, in the event that something happened to me. I wasn’t sure how it would work after reset – or if it would work at all, but it seemed logical to do so, just in case. For some reason, the game had given us a "tape backup" system, and it just made sense to use it.

Holly, upon hearing Karen’s story (which wasn’t nearly as good as the story I’d gotten) regarding Al, immediately sprung into action. Maybe she was right – she was the one who knew how to get us though this shift safely. She drained all – and I mean all – of the blood from the corpse. She then took Robbie’s makeup kit (I rarely wore make-up, so I didn’t really even have much of a kit) to get some color back to his face. When she was finished, he almost looked healthy, if not alive.

"We’ll sit him up in the passenger seat," she said as she tossed the keys to her car to Robbie. "Drive him around, taking the longest possible route to the river. If there are any Troopers out there, we want them to see him alive in this timeframe. Who knows how long ago he checked in – or even if he sent a signal via ESP or some shit right before he was killed. When you get to the river, dump him and get back here fast. We’re going to have to up the timeframe and move as soon as we can. We’ll have to test your Heaven Theory next shift. It’s too dangerous now."

I didn’t really like the idea. I was really hoping to find the answer this time. I didn’t like the idea of coming out as someone else – even with all my memories. There always seemed to be a new variable and each time, it seemed to prove more difficult than the last. We’d know exactly where to find the plant, and we could arrange a meeting place and time, but there were other variables. We had no idea where the rest of us were any more than we did now. I needed more time to figure out how the Karen thing worked, too. I didn’t want to lose the potential windfall and have to start over again.

Then again, I knew she was right. If we didn’t make a dash for it, the Troopers were going to be on us sooner than they would have been had Al not mussed it all up. If their network were tied only by casual means (i.e. I’ll call you when I see something) we might have a few days before the cops found Al’s body. If we skipped, though, the slate would be wiped clean and we’d have years to get back to where we were.

"I guess we just take what we can get and once we have enough people, we’ll just go," I finally agreed.

"I just hope we have enough time to round up enough people to give us the power to go," said Holly. "There are only 9 more people living in the building and we needed at least two dozen last time. We’ll need more than that to clear."

"How many did you have when you skipped last time?" I asked.

Holly shrugged, "Something over 30, I’d say."

"I suppose we’d better get started," I said, dreading the thought of going around the neighborhood and trying to lure people up to my apartment so that I could hook them into my sexual time machine.

"We don’t have to go out and recruit," said Karen out of the blue. "We can make them come to us."