The Marnott Liaison

"Good enough for me," I said, kissing her once more.

~~~~~

Gellor posed the question about volunteering to become Homo Marnott to her crew the next morning. In under an hour, every member had agreed to become the future parents of Homo Marnott and to settle a new world. Now to find 39 more humans willing and deserving to be their mates. And cross my fingers that all of these theories about how the human and Marnott nanites reacted to each other would prove to be true.

I resigned my position with the State Department that afternoon, throwing my lot in with Homo Marnott fully. Not that I had a lot of choice - the nanites had taken the choice to become hybrids away from Gellor and me. The only choice that remained was whether to let the new species die out with the two of us, and my heart said to move forward. All of the volunteers would be going into it with their eyes open. They got to choose.

The President tweeted that Metaman was a traitor within the hour, then backtracked when the public mainly took my side, seeing my gesture of joining the Marnotts who had transformed me as both romantic and noble. The white supremacists and America Firsters and a new faction calling themselves Earth First defended the original tweet, however.

~~~~~

Chapter 6: Up, Up in the Air

~~~~~

As nice as it was to have replicators on the Marnott ship to make whatever I needed, including clothing, I wanted a few things from my apartment and expected the press would give me major trouble getting in and out, as they were still camped out along the street.

As an experiment, I stepped out of a hatch on the side of the ship that faced the East River and used my telekinesis to push hard against the ground beneath me. As I expected, it launched me into the air. I was quickly at the level of the U.N. Secretariat building's roof, a height of 505 feet.

I discovered the ground below me was now too far to push against, and I began falling. How the hell did superheroes supposedly do this? I began a frantic combination of pulling on the air above me and pushing against it as it rushed by me, just to stay aloft and I was being buffeted by the very downward winds I was creating. At least I had stopped falling, about 300 feet off the ground now.

Pulling the air above me onto my head made little sense, so I visualized a funnel instead. I left the air directly above me undisturbed while I gathered air from a circle around that, pulled it past my body and concentrated it to a point just below my feet, where I could push against that compressed air and found I could now hover with minimal effort and, by increasing the air flowing around me, could rise easily as well. Gravity took care of coming down and as I got closer to the ground I could push against it again to come to a soft landing.

It took another three minutes of practicing rising and falling before I attempted to tilt the funnel, so that I was able to move horizontally as well as stay aloft, at first floating out over the East River, then picking up speed as I tilted forwards. Being buffeted again by the wind that was now flowing sideways into the funnel, I reconfigured the airflow, parting the air immediately above and in front of me like a cone, flowing it and the rest of a thick cylinder around me and compressing it all behind me as another cone, as a stable bubble of air around me was propelled in the direction I desired. By various tilts of the configuration, I could rise, fall, steer left and right and slow down.

Unlike any superhero movie I had ever seen, my body was not at all level to the ground, but oriented to the airflow which had to draw air from both in front and above me and push it behind and below me to both move forward and stay aloft. To slow down, I flipped direction so I was feet-first and pushing the air down and in front of me. As I slowed, I turned upright until I was hovering in place. The faster I wanted to go, the more my body could lean forward, but never to the point of being horizontal.

I could stand upright if I were close enough to the ground to push against it while pulling/pushing the air to move horizontally, but that was also the level where various power lines and other wires were strung, so that wouldn't work for getting around the city. I didn't want to push against the wires to stay above them, either, for fear that I would damage them. I had to be higher, and that put the ground out of my telekinetic range.

I'll note here that it took another two years of experimenting for me to figure out how to hold air stiffly in place around me in the shape of a wing to produce lift so I could fly lying flat. I found that looking straight down all I could see was below me, not very far in front of me, unless I used even more energy to enlarge the wing enough so I could raise my head to look forward. In the end, I went back to my leaning approach and have stuck with that ever since, and taught that method to those who gained the same powers after me.

Finding various landmarks, I flew myself from the river to my apartment building and lowered myself into the alley my apartment faces, using both buildings to brake, coming to a floating landing on my fire escape. Telekinesis made opening the security bars and window latch easy and I climbed into my apartment. I poured spoiled milk down the drain and threw out some other foods. I then packed two boxes of books and photos, and flew both of them back to the ship, unobserved by the press.

On my second trip, I packed the remaining belongings I wanted and turned my key into my landlord. I wasn't as lucky with the press and photographs under a headline of "Metaman Flies!!" appeared in the following day's Post. I was amazed when people online complained that I was just in street clothes, not spandex and a cape. Were they expecting me to fight crime for them, too? My telekinetic shields had gotten me out of one scrape involving guns, but I sure didn't imagine I was bulletproof against a bullet I wouldn't see coming.

The furor over my flying died down a few days later, when there were no more sightings of me.

~~~~~

Chapter 7: Founding a Species

~~~~~

What replaced it was the furor when we announced to the world that Gellor was pregnant and she and I were a new hybrid species calling ourselves "Homo Marnott" or "Homarn" for short, created by our sexual liaison, and our call for 39 human volunteers to mate with the Marnott crew to undergo the same transformation. We didn't mention powers, but the press jumped right onto it, calling it "The Rise Of The Homarns," mostly abandoning "Metaman", although some charlatan decided to publish a poorly-drawn comic book about a homarn superhero team led by "Metaman" with a whole range of powers to capitalize. It wasn't worth suing over, but it ran for several years until I heard it had been canceled.

It only got worse when I rejected a large number of applicants who were plants from one government or another, attempting to infiltrate the group and gain the special abilities everyone assumed would result. I used my unrevealed telepathy to weed out these folks and others who were mentally unwell, and was labeled "Disloyal to the U.S." in the press because we insisted on representation from as many races and nationalities as possible, for genetic diversity. Easy to find in New York City, hard to justify to the white pride and America First crowds.

We were also getting flak from the left, when it was revealed that there was no homosexuality among the Marnott, so we were not recruiting any human homosexuals to join us. We needed breeding pairs, regardless, so would have rejected Marnott homosexuals as well, if any existed.

Tonya Jackson, my nurse from the hospital, surprised me by being one of the earliest applicants. I happily approved her and she wound up paired with Doctor Morto. Her desire to learn the Alliance's advanced medical techniques was as strong as her desire to be a mother to our new species. They made a great medical team.

Two weeks after I had left the hospital, the skin of Gellor's labia split and her clitoral hood and clitoris surfaced. The whole process was rather painful for her, and it was another week before we even tried to have sex again.

Once we did, she loved the sensation of having her clit licked, on top of all the other sensory nerves she had in her genitals. She said it felt different from her other sense patches, both more intense and slightly ticklish. Interpret that as you will.

This also marked the end of her transformation, as her breasts were now formed, just slightly smaller than a standard B cup. She had no concept of a bra, so went without.

Marnott scientists answered Gellor's technical queries in the midst of the interviewing process, confirming all of the suppositions that had been made. The two sets of nanites had indeed communicated and collaborated, with computational assistance from the computers onboard the ship, on the genetic structure for our hybrid species, and accomplished the transformation, beyond their expected programming. The nanites would do the same with every pair of human and Marnott who had sex together, working with the DNA of each pair to produce a safe transformation. Whether powers would form, or even be different, was unknown.

As the first to volunteer that night in his lab, Doctor and Tonya became the second homarn couple, transforming Tonya first. Soon, all of the other pairs followed them, and the species technically now numbered 60, the Marnott men not yet transformed.

The 39 ex-humans were asleep as the Dynatech nanites repeated the same hibernation I experienced. The brand-new nanites we purchased from Dynatech were a more energy efficient model of the cancer fighters, so the hibernation period among the humans only lasted a week, without the hypothermia I experienced. Doctor provided all of the humans with a slow-dissolving nutrition/hydration capsule to avoid having to put them on intravenous feeding and catheterized them after they were asleep. They just slept for a week straight, then woke up, their transformations nearly complete.

After waking, the 20 transformed human females mated again with their Marnott males and transformed them as well, bring our number to 80.

Externally, the Marnott males changed little, but internally their DNA was changed, a temporary 40th chromosome enabled their fertility with 29-chromosome sperm and the conversion to the 29-chromosome cells began. The human females gained the genital sensory ridges that Marnott females have, but had their eggs changed inside their ovaries, rather than develop eggs in their uterus. The bulk of our internal organs did not change, but we expected that would not be true of our children, based on simulations from the new DNA.

We could still tell the difference between ex-humans and ex-Marnotts through their earlobes and hands, but we embraced the similarities more.

As Gellor had said, Marnott don't have a marriage tradition, given the biologic bond between couples being so strong. No human clerk, of any jurisdiction, was willing to grant a wedding license to non-humans, so we had a group commitment ceremony for all forty homarn couples three months after the Marnotts had landed. The one television feed we allowed was broadcast on all of the networks, and was the third highest rated broadcast worldwide that year.

Two hundred more Marnotts were being recruited on Marn and would arrive in a few years, that being the transit time outside subspace. We would wait to recruit two hundred humans to pair with them. Until then, we turned our attention to the Alliance diplomatic mission.

Telepathy developed in everyone. A variety of other "powers" became apparent, including a light-bending camouflage ability and enhanced mathematical or memory abilities. Nobody burst into flame or turned into the Hulk or anything, just a series of useful skills that were apparently lurking as potentials in both species' DNA, that only surfaced when our chromosomes were combined, like we were puzzle pieces that had finally come together to form a whole.

8 other couples gained the same telekinetic abilities, along with Gellor who also developed hers during this period of time. I taught them to form shields and my methods for flying, and soon the people of New York became accustomed to seeing us, flitting from place to place. The newspapers soon tired of putting photos of us in the air on the front page. The press finally left my old apartment building alone when they finally accepted that I no longer lived there.

The Marnott nanites never produced any warning about homarn being bonded. Doctor indicated that the issue wasn't that the nanites didn't know we were fertile, but that they did not count us as Marnott. Nobody was certain whether the infidelity fever would affect us, though, so we stayed faithful to our mates, which was the Marnott expectation, anyway.

Gellor was the first homarn female to become pregnant, but not by more than a couple of weeks. Soon, all forty females were pregnant with the second generation of Homo Marnott, a couple with twins, something unheard of to the Marnott.

Two months had passed since First Contact.

Throughout all of this, the nations of Earth were still debating the requirements laid down by the Gorlak Alliance, and six months after the Marnott had landed, they unanimously signed the Unification Treaty, beginning a transformation of their own, to world-wide government organized around the United Nations structures and beginning the disarmament process. Korea was even reunited by this process, the North Korean military deposing Kim Jong-un when he attempted to oppose the treaty and giving authority to the Republic of Korea government's authority.

Upon completion of this agreement, the Alliance purchased the undeveloped parcels of land that their ship had landed on for 100 kilograms of diamonds, mined on a world where a combination of chemical impurity and high pressure made them green like emeralds, as opposed to the green diamonds on earth that are the result of radiation exposure. The Marnotts, now Homo Marnott, had been selling small numbers of these diamonds to fund their purchases of goods and services on Earth, including reimbursing the NYPD for providing security. New York jewelers and their customers adored them. The exuberant market for these "Galactic" diamonds quickly valued the land sale at 8.5 billion dollars, twice what the property would have been worth if the development originally planned for it had actually been built.

This land would become the site of the Gorlak Alliance Embassy and was granted the same status the U.S. had granted the U.N. Headquarters in terms of diplomatic immunity. Construction on the Embassy began immediately using human crews trained in Alliance construction methods that used a lightweight organic concrete that exchanged gases depending on which environment was desired in a specific room. It transformed CO² back into O² in most, but other atmospheres were configurable in numerous residential rooms and offices, with airlocks. The Embassy and buildings in its complex would eventually become home to other species as mankind grew comfortable with the idea, and many of them breathed other gases.

We planned to leave Earth by then. Acceptance of Homo Marnott as a new species within the Alliance was granted once our first children were born healthy and approval of Mars as a homeworld came soon after, along with its official renaming to Homarnis. Terraforming began immediately.

Our daughter Diana was born healthy and beautiful, with the Marnott gold skin color, eyes that mixed bands of gold with bands of green and a thin head of purple hair. Between transformation and pregnancy, Gellor now had breasts between B and C cup in size and the look of bliss in her eyes the first time our daughter Diana suckled at her breasts is one I will never forget. I looked at her and said, "This is the one biological bond humans form, between mother and child."

"My life is blessed," Gellor said. "First by you coming into it and now Diana. I love you both so much."

Ongoing medical scans of Diana and all of the other children confirmed that they were true hybrids. The three-chamber Marnott heart was combined with two-lobe human lungs, while the double organ the Marnotts called veltaks served the purposes of liver, kidney, pancreas and spleen all at once. Digestive systems were midway between human and Marnott. The children developed hands with the folding capability of the Marnott hand, but with opposable thumbs on both sides and four fingers between those. Their feet were closer to human, but with six toes instead of five, so were broader. Ear lobes varied, anywhere between the pointed look their ex-Marnott parent had, to the rounded human form. Diana's left ear had just a hint of pointedness, while the right did not.

Of gender differences, the Homo Marnott boys had no nipples or any vestigial mammary tissue, while the girls developed both, this happening later in the fetal stages than in humans. Reproductive systems were closer to the Marnott scheme, with no ovaries or fallopian tubes, but with the uterus already bearing eggs from birth with the expected 29 chromosomes. That was further evidence that no fertilization chromosome was needed by our new species. Female genitalia featured both the human clitoris and the Marnott sensory ridges, and the male penis had both glans and Marnott sensory ridges.

A year after first contact, all of the first pregnancies were done. Two couples decided to test whether the infidelity fever was actually gone. With Doctor Morto monitoring them before and after, they swapped partners for a night. This was a pair of ex-Marnott males swapping their ex-human female mates, so each female would be exposed to a second ex-Marnott male's RNA.

Their medical scans revealed that the RNA spliced itself into each partner's DNA in additional places, rather than fighting to replace previously spliced genes, but this happened without any ill effects, without any fever. The nanites were not even involved in the process. When those original couples had intercourse again, there was no reversal of any of the changes, no fight over whose genes came out on top. All of the spliced changes remained, supplementing what had been gained from the original matings. Then both couples discovered that they gained the powers shared by the other couple, the activating genes transmitted by the RNA.

Following the success of this experiment, another foursome volunteered to test another combination, of ex-human male mating with ex-human female and ex-Marnott male with ex-Marnott female. The results were the same, as were ex-Marnott females swapping their ex-human male mates.

It was the news some waiting for. Homo Marnott did not need to be monogamous by biological duress, we could choose. There was a lot of incentive to swap, if we were going to gain each other's meta-abilities from it.

Lying in bed one night, I telepathically asked Gellor, "Do you want to swap with anyone, now that we know it's safe?"

She looked in my eyes, and answered, "Grell and his Macy."

Grell Arktor was Gellor's aide, and Macy Cho was a Chinese-Italian political science grad from Baltimore who had been paired with him. She had proven herself very useful in the negotiations with the U.N. and the Security Council nations, since I was no longer welcomed by the U.S. delegation. I gave her what advice I could, so had spent a lot of time with her. They had a son named Marshall, a name similar to the Marnott name Mershel, which was Grell's father.

"Why them?" I asked.

"At our last assignment before we came to Earth, Grell asked me if I would mate with him after we returned to Marn. I told him I was not ready to make my life choice, at that time, but we could explore the question later. He accepted that, and our work relationship continued. Then I encountered you, and the path of all our lives changed. We may never travel to Marn, if we are going to settle Homarnis. I realized at our commitment ceremony that the later consideration I had promised him would never come. Now I can decide to pleasure him without a bond forming or harming each other."