Hercules 500 Read online

  HERCULES 500 Kaitlyn O’Connor 1

  Cyberevolution Aftermath I:

  Hercules500

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  © copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, September 2018

  Cover Art by Eliza Black, September 2018

  New Concepts Publishing

  www.newconceptspublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

  Chapter One

  The phone started to ring just as Anika began the process of disarming the security system for her postage stamp apartment and continued through her working a little feverishly at the locking system.

  She was exhausted from her shift at the factory. She wouldn’t have thought there was much that could lift her from that fog, but there was something about the tone of the ringing phone that jangled along her nerve endings and had her thoroughly rattled by the time she managed to get the damned door open.

  Which was when the frigging thing stopped!

  Glaring at the blank screen, she dropped the burdens she’d been juggling to manipulate the security control and the locks to the floor and secured the door behind her. Having pretty much lost interest in the frigging phone when it stopped jangling, she headed to the tiny bath, stripping as she went.

  The cubicle was barely big enough for her to turn in place—and she wasn’t even an average sized human!—but the water could be counted on to be hot. A half hour, she thought dreamily, would go a long way to helping her feelings, but of course the damned thing didn’t have that option. She got a two minute rinse, two minutes to lather up, and then the final rinse to get the soap off was three minutes.

  She debated whether she even felt like struggling to soap down.

  She’d managed to lather maybe half her body when the frigging phone cut loose again.

  Probably her mother, she thought with some irritation.

  How she could manage this kind of timing from halfway across the galaxy was beyond Anika!

  The debate was brief. If she bailed out before rinsing she would have to sleep in the damned soap.

  Instead, gritting her teeth, she ignored the persistent demand and waited for the rinse cycle.

  The shower helped but it was a long way from restorative.

  Still wrung out, she trudged to her locker and removed undergarments and a faded jumpsuit, worn thin from use.

  When she’d pulled on the undergarments, she draped the jumpsuit over her shoulder and headed to the com unit to see what messages had been left.

  A jolt of alarm went through her when she saw there were ten messages.

  Days went by when even the damned scammers and marketing people completely ignored her!

  Six were from her mother.

  The other four were from the Colony Seven Group and the Spaceport Authority and those completely wiped out any residual anxiety as to why her mother had called so many times.

  Hands shaking, she pressed the replay on the first of the messages.

  “Colonist Anika McNeal—you are to report to the CSG Medical Center for a pre-flight physical between the hours of 8:00 AM and 12 Noon on Wednesday, September 19th. If you fail to report or fail the physical, your name will be returned to the queue for a later expedition.”

  The shock that rolled over Anika was like being buffeted by an invisible force. She literally rocked back on her heels. Her knees wobbled. She glanced around vaguely for support instinctually, but finally wilted to the floor without even attempting to reach her couch/bed barely an arm’s length away.

  Twelve years.

  She’d been accepted into the colonist program when she was barely eighteen, gone through the entire program to prepare for colonization—and then she’d waited through five missions—waited for years to begin her life.

  She thought about that with a sense of misuse, but honesty compelled her to mentally adjust that assessment.

  It would be more accurate to say she’d waited for the life she wanted, the life on the new world.

  She had made sacrifices in a sense. She had searched with a fair amount of desperation for a compatible partner.

  Well, that wasn’t altogether true either.

  She hadn’t felt any sense of desperation at first. She’d been young and naïve and certain she would find the right man. She’d begun to feel desperate after she’d passed the twenty five mark with nothing to show for her efforts but more and worse failures.

  No one, that she’d met, had any interest in a long term relationship.

  And by long term, she meant weeks.

  She’d found no shortage of guys that wanted to fuck, but even at that they had no interest in more than one go round.

  She’d gotten suckered in to that a few times by lying bastards that suggested they wanted a relationship before she’d learned to be more cautious, but eventually, she’d given up altogether.

  If she wanted a family—and she did—she was going to have to buy the seed and forget about a human male companion and settle for a robot to help her with her family and homestead.

  To that end, she’d been saving religiously for years. She’d moved in to the postage stamp apartment—temporarily—to save as much money as possible while she waited.

  It was all she really needed anyway and cost next to nothing. She couldn’t afford to accumulate a lot of belongings when there would be very limited space on the transport.

  But she’d begun to believe the promise of a place on a colony ship was as big a lie as the ‘dating’ sites that promised partners who were ‘like minded people looking for a relationship’.

  “Finally,” she muttered, trying to absorb it, thinking that saying it out loud might help her ‘feel’ it as an indisputable truth. “I’ve been called. I’m going!”

  Her heart skipped several beats as she voiced the thoughts she couldn’t seem to accept. The urge to burst into tears of sheer joy rushed over her.

  She fought it. Abruptly surging up onto her knees and crawling to the console, she punched callback on her mother’s message, ignoring the other message from CSG because she had a bad feeling that message wouldn’t be nearly as welcome to her.

  They hadn’t called and left messages twice to get her to her appointment for her physical. There was no shortage of volunteers for colonization.

  The second message was something else and probably unpleasant.

  She wanted to bask in good news for a little while before dealing with bad.

  “Finally!” her mother exclaimed when they connected. “I’ve been calling for hours! Where have you been?”

  Anika blinked at her mother. “I was at work. What’s wrong?” she gasped.

  Belinda McNeal beamed at her abruptly. “Nothing’s wrong! You’ve been called! Finally! You’ll be coming out! Honest to god, I was beginning to think this was just a scheme to get rid of me! I’ve been here going on five years and still no Anika!”

  Anika felt the blood rush to her face and then away again. “Mom! You know I wouldn’t do that!” When her mother had realized her only child would be leaving Earth and might or might not ever be back, she’d begun to save to pay for passage to the new world. Naturally enough, the ‘free seats’ on the colony ships were reserved for young colonists. It wasn’t that the colony was closed to older residents, but they needed able bodied young people to build and the young could pay their passage in labor.

  Older colonists might or might not.

  They’d both thought Belinda would follow her daughter out to the new colony, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Belinda had gotten passage money and sailed away to await her daughter’s arrival.

&
nbsp; And they were both still waiting.

  Belinda laughed. “Yes, I know. But I could hardly believe it when they called me looking for you! Finally!” Her smile faded and resentment took the place of her smiles. “It sucks that you didn’t win anything on the seed lottery … but … we’ll think of something! I’m going to get my grandchildren!”

  Anika uttered a choked laugh and then a sob and then ‘lost it’. Her mother was staring at her worriedly when she finally got a grip.

  She used her jumpsuit to wipe her nose and eyes.

  “Oh my god! I’ve been called! I have to get ready! I’ve only got a few days! I’ll call you later!”

  She broke the connection before her mother could object and ran several circuits around the tiny, one room apartment before she realized she hadn’t finished dressing. Tossing the jumpsuit she’d used for a hanky, she went to her locker and pulled out a similar one piece suit and scrambled into it. By the time she had, she’d managed to remember where she put her ‘travel’ notes and headed to the drawer that she was certain held them.

  Ten minutes later, after emptying most of the drawers in the cabinet, she’d unearthed her notebook.

  Flopping on her couch/bed, she opened it up and squinted at the jumble of notes.

  Dismay filled her.

  She’d hand written it over the years since she’d been accepted into the program, and she could hardly make out the half of it.

  One thing she’d underscored, though, was the need for a domestic.

  Those scribbles represented years of searching, anger, desperation, and finally acceptance.

  Well, not really acceptance if she was honest.

  Even now ….

  She sighed. She’d been working really hard to ignore the bad news she’d known instinctively had come with the good.

  Trust her mother to throw that out to bust her bubble when she hadn’t even finished enjoying the good news!

  She just needed to keep her head high, hold on to the great news, and figure out how to make the rest of her dream come true.

  She’d signed up to be a colonist as soon as they opened the rolls for volunteers—when there had been nothing to go to but a raw, primitive … Eden-like world—so they claimed. Even so, even if it was as wonderful as they claimed, it was a scary thought—leaving Earth forever to live on an alien world, but the future she was facing on Earth was just too bleak to accept if there was any chance of changing it.

  She wanted the chance to have a family and raise them in a healthy environment.

  She couldn’t believe it when she was selected. It had seemed like such a long-shot. She was beyond excited, began to make immediate preparations. But she wasn’t among the first group chosen to go—or the next group. Over the intervening years, each time they announced a new expedition, her hopes soared, but, time and again, she was disappointed. Finally, when she’d decided she was never going to be picked to go, she had been.

  Unfortunately, she had passed the ‘peak’ reproductive age. She’d done her best to ignore that but she was nearly thirty now and even though it was a proven fact that women could, and did, have perfectly healthy, normal children into their mid-30s without any exceptional help of modern science, the organizers weren’t risk takers—not when it came to the citizens of the new world. Anything that was not 99.9% guaranteed was a no go.

  It was grossly unfair, but she wasn’t the only female in that category—which was also unfortunate. There were, in fact, so many over the years that it was almost harder to get on the damned donor list for ‘volunteers’ to fertilize her eggs as it had been to get on the short list to go. She didn’t win the donor lottery.

  Because they’d removed her from the list when she passed twenty eight.

  She knew they had.

  For a handful of moments, despair washed over her—but it was brief. She wasn’t the kind of person to give up.

  She would find a way.

  She always did.

  It wouldn’t even have been necessary to get on the lottery if she hadn’t had such rotten luck with men in general.

  But then again, it was the very fact that men were so eager to ‘donate’ and so reluctant to commit themselves to even a short term relationship that had led to the great sterilization project to start with.

  It had taken a very long time for the men to admit that it was men who were the problem with overpopulation. Everyone was too focused on the fact that it was women who actually produced the off-spring to consider that one male could, and often did, impregnate multiple females. A woman might have one to three children, but quite often the male had already produced multiple children in other relationships and/or moved on to produce more. The only thing that made them the least bit cautious was the fact that they could be tracked down and end up having to pay child support.

  In the end, it was their wallet that actually decided things. Despite every effort, scientists simply had not managed to produce a male birth control that was reliable and didn’t cause the unpleasant side-effects that discouraged men from using them. Vasectomies were the only procedure that worked 100% of the time, but men were reluctant to get that done. The wallet finally convinced them—the vasectomies were free and they were allowed to collect and store sperm(also free) to produce their families at some later date and they didn’t have to worry about being hit up for child support until or unless they reached a point where they were ready for commitment.

  Not that she believed for one moment that the men actually wanted families. She certainly hadn’t managed to track down one of those rare individuals!—but they knew if they decided to settle their chances weren’t good if they couldn’t produce. Women settled to produce and raise families NOT for the convenience of men who’d grown too lazy to stalk pussy.

  So—finally—she had her ticket to the new world, but no way to produce the family she’d wanted—no seedlings—which was her reason for wanting to go at all.

  After some consideration, she finally decided that, as much as she hated to accept it, she had to face the fact that she wasn’t likely to find a relationship now that she’d passed her peak ‘freshness’ date.

  She had been saving all the years she’d waited to be called up, though, and she had a nice little nest egg now—because she’d had to wait so damned long! She hadn’t decided, specifically, what to do with it beyond using it to buy her dream, but since the family was the heart of it, it wasn’t hard to conclude she’d have to cough up a chunk to make that a reality.

  The immediate problem was that, even with money the babies might be out of reach.

  But she decided to cross that bridge when she came to it.

  The first order of business was to secure a helper.

  She told herself there was still a chance she might find a partner among the colonists, but she knew the pool was going to be even smaller and the odds higher.

  It didn’t matter, she told herself.

  She was going to get a domestic to partner with her to rear her family.

  A male robot so that the children could at least have a facsimile of a ‘normal’ family.

  They were heavy.

  It was going to take a chunk of her savings and most of her weight limit, but it would be worth it.

  And she doubted she could get one after she got to the colony.

  It wasn’t a risk she was willing to take, anyway.

  With that thought at the forefront of her mind, she settled in front of her console and began a search for retailers.

  She wanted the absolute top of the line if she couldn’t get the ‘real thing’—as close to the real thing as she could possibly get!

  “Jesus Fricking Christ!” she exclaimed when she’d looked at the price tags on the first site she pulled up—top of the line Hercules 500 models—the ‘freshest’ available, which meant about a decade old since nobody could afford the damned things. She’d thought she had managed to save up a respectable nest egg, but she damned well couldn’t afford top of the line!
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br />   For a few minutes she considered trying to hit her mother up for the rest, but then she realized she still hadn’t bought her sperm seedlings for her nest.

  Or really any of the things she was going to need to set up a household on an alien world that had only been colonized a little over a decade previously.

  “I’m just going to have to set my sights lower,” she muttered.

  Disappointed and resentful, she went to the new and good, then the ‘certified refurbished’ like-new used dealers. Even those prices were almost nosebleed high, though, and, after a while, she worked her way down to used dealers.

  “Well hell!” she snarled when she’d studied those prices. “Fifteen percent more and I could get a frigging new model, god damn it!”

  Struggling to hang on to long held dreams, she began a search for ‘used’. She had to have something. She didn’t have a fucking clue of how to go about rearing children let alone how to care for infants!

  She was sure she could take a course, but it wasn’t like having experience! And a programmed robot had ‘experience’.

  Of course, her mother had said she would help, but she knew that meant her mother wanted to enjoy the grandbabies and give them back. Their well-being was her responsibility.

  Finally, she managed to find a shop that had a few used robots that she thought she might be able to afford.

  Unfortunately, the site was pretty basic and there were no pictures of the robots listed as ‘very affordable and available for sale’.

  And there were a lot of sold out flags.

  She called the shop owner.

  He looked disreputable.

  She resisted the urge to cut the connection immediately.

  She had good security and she wouldn’t be here much longer anyway.

  “I’m looking for a domestic. I’m headed to the new colony and I need a partner to help me with my family.”

  In spite of all she could do, she couldn’t help but blush as the man looked her over speculatively. “You got credits to pay? I cain’t do no financing if you’re headed out to any of the colonies.”

  She studied him cautiously. She didn’t want to sound like she didn’t have the money to buy, but she also didn’t want to be cleaned out by a crook.