Humanity 2.0, Year 001, Day 022

"Ben... what did we just do? Was it just sex, or..." She didn't sound alarmed or freaked out, just... wondering.

"I hope not." I kissed her on the cheek from behind, with tender affection that showed her how I really felt. "I'm pretty sure we just made love, sis."

"We did. It wasn't just sex, was it?"

"Of course not."

She curled up, still naked, pulling her legs in close to her body and hugging her arms around her knees. She looked sideways out the window. "How could we possibly make this work? What was I thinking? You're my brother... I want to do it again, but we can't."

"Of course we can." I shrugged. "I mean, we can't get it on in front of people, but that goes for everybody, pretty much. How often do you hear about brothers and sisters getting busted for incest?"

"I guess so. Still... what happened to me just then? I'm never like this. I always make men work for weeks before I as much as let them touch my leg. With you I just... spread my legs and practically mailed you an invitation. My own brother! Am I really that kind of person? Am I some kind of slut inside?" She frowned at me. "I should be so fucking angry with you, but I just... can't. It's like it just slips away as soon as I try to think of it. God, what the hell is with me? Am I the one losing it?"

I didn't share with her right then exactly how this all happened. I would wait until after the retrovirus had changed her. If I told her the truth then, she probably would have thought I was insane still. I was opening my mouth, taking a breath to give her some kind of reassurance that I hadn't quite formulated yet – then the damn doorbell rang.

It was the hotel; a housekeeper, with my clothes – neatly pressed. I answered the door in my bathrobe, Emily nude but wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the bed as she looked out the window, lost in thought. I hung up the clothes and went back to her. We were both sweaty, and smelled of the forbidden act we'd shared.

"I can't believe myself..." She was still staring at the bright city. Afternoon was ending, and soon sunset would be rolling around.

"Em. Stop worrying, and just think about how good that was. You don't have multiple personality disorder or something; you're just trying something new." She didn't react, just frowning as she looked out the window. I sighed, and offered my hand to her. "We're both a mess. Let's take a shower."

She looked up at me, then back out the window. She made a small noncommittal noise, then took my hand and doffed the blanket. I led her to the shower and turned it on, then left the robe on a hanger and we stepped in together. We didn't have sex in there – that time, anyway – instead just enjoying the closeness and fun of washing each other's bodies. It seemed to get her mind off whatever was eating at her, for a time.

I didn't mention this to her until many years later, but I also had another reason I wanted to get in the shower with her – to test the power. The misty air and flowing water on our skin should have – I wasn't 100% sure, though – suppressed my pheromone powers. I was using the logic that rain makes pollen allergy sufferers feel fine because it clears the air. If she freaked out in the shower and realized she just fucked her little brother, at least it would be when I was there, and I could turn off the water and let the power go to work again – instead of freaking out the moment she and I were separated for more than a few minutes, then who knew what would happen.

I wasn't sure how much of the effect just made her horny for me, and how much of it affected her more generally – she'd said she couldn't get angry at me just then, and I wondered if the power worked more broadly than I thought. The Experimenter said that the power made girls trust me, but I was fairly sure that was only after the retrovirus had its way with their DNA. If she didn't freak out, that meant either its effects were lasting, or maybe – I didn't even want to entertain the thought too much for the entirely-too-interesting implications – she hadn't actually needed that much help from the pheromones, and she'd wanted to do this with me even before then.

She didn't lose it, and we still didn't speak, just bathing one another. I'd never enjoyed this with a girl before; Kathleen had never been interested. She'd always done it in the dark with me; she'd mentioned how insecure she was about how she looked before, and while she was with me, she never got over it. Emily didn't have that problem, and let me feast my eyes, run my hands and fingers, and explore her whole body, so long as she got to do the same with me.

I was sure she had been with more men than I had women - or rather I knew for a fact she had - but she showed the same overjoyed expression that I did... like she was seeing all of this for the first time. We stepped out and toweled off. The bathroom had a digital clock behind the mirror, and it read 9:12 at night.

"We should sit down and talk at some point, huh?"

"Yeah, sooner or later. Not like we're either of us in a rush..." We were both effectively on vacation for the next few months, neither of us able to attend school this semester. Her debut into the world of criminal law would have to be delayed at least a few months, and I had no particular plans for my own time either. I pulled the big comfortable-looking chair in the corner up to the window along with its ottoman, and then I ordered room service for us after putting on my underwear and tossing my sister her own.

She seemed to sense my intention, and let me sit down on the chair first and lie back until she slid down on top of me, both of us facing outward and looking at the bright city at night. Holding her to me, we talked for nearly an hour until the room service finally arrived.

She hadn't had a boyfriend since Jerome because he died. I remembered Jerome, but I thought they had simply broken up. The two had been great together, and he was much more the type of guy I imagined her ending up with than myself. Tall, black, and handsome, he had loved the cold and winter sports. As I recalled, he'd looked into going for the Olympics for some kind of skiing, actually, but had decided to focus more on his studies than practice and only got as far as the tryouts.

He was five years her senior, a junior defense attorney at some firm or another, and he'd intentionally spent more than the required amount of time as a public defender. He championed the wrongly accused and had an endless amount of things to say about the problems with the way society treated criminals... she'd fallen completely in love with him, and from what I knew, he was one of the guys I would say deserved as good a girl as my sister.

It hadn't been some poetic end where he got shot by one of the criminals he was trying to defend, or anything of the sort. To her, it was much worse than that – in her mind, it was her fault. She'd known her car had problems, and had been driving it anyway because she didn't want to spend the money to fix it. She asked him to go down to the store to pick up some ingredients for a meal she was going to cook for them at his place. His car was in the shop, and he took hers, but she'd been so excited with preparing the whole thing that she forgot to tell him the car's electrical and some other systems had been acting up and to be careful.

Just as he pulled onto the highway, it all but fell apart - including the power steering. He'd been unable to turn fast enough and had careened into oncoming traffic. He'd died instantly, and so had another person, an unidentified older man driving a pickup truck. She'd remembered only ten minutes after the wreck happened to call his cell and tell him about the problem, and the phone had been answered by an EMT who had just pulled up. She told me that she felt like her life ended in that moment, and until today it had just been a boring epilogue she barely paid attention to.

She'd been devastated, and had shut herself in her apartment for days. Jerome's family had never blamed her, and they kept trying to come by and bring her out, but she wouldn't listen. She told me that she had been honestly ready to die and considered herself the worst person on the planet. If she'd had the will, she'd said, she would have killed herself, but instead she decided to just wait and see if she died for no reason. She started cutting herself, but never quite got to the point of finishing the job - I was lucky, then, that she'd broken that habit before we became involved.

She'd woken up in a hospital after a particularly bad run-in with her own demons, not remembering what happened – she'd cut herself too much and had passed out. Jerome's brother had found her apartment key in Jerome's house, and happened to be coming by to check in on her – and found her passed out in a puddle of drying blood.

She spent a few weeks in psychiatric care, and was finally released with prescriptions for benzos and any number of other 'head-fuzzers', as she called them. Eventually, she got back on her feet, enrolled in school again, and changed her major to pre-law. Going into Jerome's field and continuing his work was how she was able to live with herself.

The specter of Mom's schizophrenia haunted her daily, and she always wondered if and when she would snap and start seeing the Celestines. When she heard the news about my own alleged bout with madness, randomly vanishing and apparently taking off on a yacht for several weeks, she immediately went into a near-panic and dropped everything.

I had never known any of this about Jerome. I simply held her the whole time she'd told me. She had never called after he died; she just hadn't picked up when I called for a few weeks, but I had just guessed she was busy, and I had my own troubles that I was too distracted by to look into why she wasn't answering. I could tell from her voice that she wasn't torn up by this anymore, it was simply part of her life, but I knew why I'd always sensed something off about her ever since that time. Jerome had taken a part of her with him.

I felt no malice or possessiveness about it. I had barely known Jerome, and didn't know if the reality of him matched up with the heroic image she'd built up in her head. From the sound of it, though, Jerome was the kind of guy you would think should be founding a new civilization - certainly before someone like me, some random almost-dropout horndog with no romantic history to speak of.

That being said, then, he probably would have been too strong for 15226; he would have fought hard to stay true to his one love, and not really served the Experimenter's purpose in being the male that would change and impregnate a whole harem of women and jump-start a new civilization of new humans. Emily told me I was the first guy she'd been with since Jerome died; that until she was with me, here in this room, she'd been tellin herself she'd go without for the rest of her life.

As for me, I added some things, and revealed a few things I had never told her – yes, I had peeped on her a few times when I was young, yes, she was my first crush, yes, I had been the one who had precipitated Dad's meltdown and eventual imprisonment when I hid his coke stash. I had just found out the truth about him, and being a stupid kid, I thought hiding his drugs would make him turn himself around and suddenly be a good dad again. Mostly, though, it was Emily who did the talking, at times just rambling and letting everything fall out, and at other times eloquently explaining every facet of parts of her life I never knew about.

The food arrived, and we were both starving. We let the guy deliver everything after we put on our robes, then sat down to eat. We were both too famished to make it a fine, conversational meal – it was more me and her both wolfing down everything while we sat across from each other on a cramped hotel-room formica table.

I couldn't have her come back to my place with me, at least not for the night – I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off her, and for once John was home for a few days and was one of three people in the city who'd realize I was in there fucking my sister – but I was loaded with an exorbitant amount of money now, and we could spend as long as we wanted in the hotel. Much as I would have been okay to sit around in there indefinitely and cherish this newfound relationship, though, I did have plans. Dr. Lazar was expecting to see me sometime, and at some point I wanted to chase down that sexy blonde Nina.

We'd been watching a bit of TV, and Emily had been cuddled up next to me on the chair as I offered her something to drink. Her hand was against her forehead, and she was wincing.

"Em?"

"Gah, no, I just have the worst headache all of a sudden." She waved me off.

Her forehead was hot to the touch. I called down and asked, and they said they would send someone with painkillers they had on hand right up. Some guy in a funny red suit showed up; I gave him a few bucks, and gave them to her. I knew, of course, what was happening. The retrovirus was at work. I hadn't thought of her when I first began to run through a list of girls I'd like to fuck and change, but when I thought more about it, I was glad she was one of the first. I needed her. Emily would be at my side forever now.

I got her a glass of water and she took some of the pills. She seemed exhausted all of the sudden, and just wanted to rest. I waited until she was sound asleep, then got up and took a quick walk down to my apartment. John was in class right then, so I picked up my wallet and laptop, then left him a note thanking him for putting up with my pissed-off sister for a little while – and a check for my half of the rent for the last month and this one. I packed a small bag with some clothes and other stuff, and went back to the hotel. Emily was still on the snoozing away. I set up my laptop and checked my email again; no news to speak of.

I wanted to go out and get started, banging a whole panoply of sexy women, but the Experimenter had said the girls who underwent the change may or may not get as sick as I did before, and she couldn't know exactly how long each would take – a few days to a few weeks, she said. Emily was in peak health, more so than I was, and she came from the same (mostly) defect-free genetic stock that I did; the Experimenter had also said that was a reason she had picked me. So my hope was that Emily would recover in a hurry.

She slept for fourteen hours. I'm surprised I didn't go nuts, just sitting around her hotel room like that. When she woke up she was so hungry that she made a joke about gnawing my arm off that didn't sound completely un-serious. The minibar had some snack stuff, and instead of waiting for room service we went down to the bar and took a small, private table in a corner, and ordered up some more appetizer-type stuff while they made us something more substantial.

"Feeling better?" I was only taking a few bites, instead leaving the bulk of the stuff to her. She seemed to have no qualms devouring both of our meals. I knew that the process would demand a lot of her metabolism while it happened, but even for me it hadn't been this powerful – though, as the Experimenter said, aside from the changes to my semen and pheromones, I would take years to fully change into a hominus, whereas the girls I chose would be a few weeks at most. Lately the biologists think they've figured out why the Experimenter ended up doing things that way, but I only got two pages into the report; I admit, it was completely over my head.

"Mmph." She didn't stop munching on the quesadilla, and only ten seconds later or so did she pause. "I'm still kind of sick, but somehow it's not in my stomach. I've never even been this hungry. This is weird..." She trailed off, then grabbed the next slice of quesadilla and kept going. I took another sip of my Long Island.

To be honest, as hot as I found what we'd just done, I was worried right then. Had I known what Emily had been through before then, I might not have slept with her. In her mind, as far as she was concerned, she probably still thought of herself as Jerome's girl.

It was only the power the Experimenter gave me that broke her out of that, but I wondered if it was just temporary – basically, I wondered if the moment I turned my back, she would lose it and start thinking she'd not only killed her one true love, now she was sleeping with her little brother; how fragile was she inside, really? Would she fall apart the moment I glanced away? I had no good answer, and could only resolve to keep a close eye on her... not that that was hard. With this fresh view of her that I had, Emily was a goddamn beautiful woman. She still is.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" There were finally two clean plates in front of her, to my own half-finished salad. I wasn't even taking my time either.

"Just looking."

She smiled a little and gave me a light kick under the table. "Can't believe I hooked up with my own brother." She rolled her eyes.

"I didn't expect to sleep with my sister either... but here we are. Can't say I regret it."

"You know..." She took a quick drink of her beer. "God, I can't even imagine myself saying this, but I don't think I do either. God knows I needed someone to just... grab me and fuck me until I was out of this funk I was in, and I'm glad it was you. It had been so long and I let myself get so twisted up... I feel, I don't know, clear now.

"It's even like colors are sharper, and I can see and hear better now. I can read the labels on those bottles on the wall there. Hennessy, Hennessy Black, Don Julio, Seagram's..." I didn't tell her that that had nothing to do with her improved mood. She kept listing off the labels on the distant bottles, like it was a game to her. She stopped halfway through. "I still feel a little dizzy though. Let's take these back up to the room."

I took her by the arm and walked her upstairs. As we passed the front desk, the girl I saw when I first came in was still there. She raised an eyebrow at me walking my sister to the elevators, arm in arm; I wished then that I hadn't made a point of correcting her when she assumed Emily was my wife and not my sister. Fortunately, she didn't do anything about it. Emily stumbled a little in the elevator and I had to carry her back into the room. She passed out again as soon as I let her down onto the bed. I lay down next to her and dozed off myself.