Chapter 4 - Evolution

by MadGenuis

It was hard for Adam to decide what was the hardest: to watch Cathryn and his mother listen to his father's message (on his and Sylvia's recommendation they had turned the picture off, at least while Cathryn was there) and see and feel the emotions that paraded through their minds, or to force himself not to think about what he and his older sister had just been through while the others had still slept.

Only, he was not entirely sure that the others actually had been sleeping; specifically he figured from her distraught questioning of him when he had found her that Cathryn had been awake for at least some of the duration of the blowjob. The thought of the innocent little eleven-year-old sharing Adam's sensation of receiving a blowjob and Sylvia's sensation of giving one was disturbing, to say the least... and worryingly a bit arousing, too. What was happening to him? Just earlier that day he would never even have considered acting upon any of the fantasies he had had about his amazingly attractive mother and older sister, let alone his little sister whom he had not even considered to feature in his imagination, let alone in reality. Yet since he woke up after the activation of SOWN he had masturbated to the sight of Cathryn (and Sylvia and Angela) masturbating as well, had had to exert enormous self-control to even stop himself from raping the little girl, had received oral sex from Sylvia and was now once again getting aroused by Cathryn. It was insane! It was fortunate that Sylvia had put such effort into depleting him utterly during his last orgasm, or he would have been getting properly horny again.

Things were made all the stranger by the fact that he did not even think that Cathryn was attractive at all, yet felt excited by her presence. Although she was only two years younger than himself he was still much more physically mature - more so than most boys at his age, he had observed - and he instinctively looked for similar maturity in the opposite sex. Cathryn had no breasts, had very modest butt and hips, and although her skin was undeniably pleasantly soft to the touch... well, she just had no curves at all, really. She was incredibly adorable, to be sure, but in a wholly un-sexual way.

Something's wrong with me, he thought, suppressing the heat he felt building within himself.

"I agree," Sylvia's mental voice replied, startling her brother, and he realized from them shooting him sidelong glances that his mother and Cathryn had heard his thought, too. "But let's explore what a nutcase you are some other time, shall we? I'm almost done with my shower. I just need to get dressed, and I'll see you all in a minute."

"So everyone...?" Angela trailed off at the end of Kenneth's message, sad but also strangely calm, all things considered. Cathryn's reaction was also less intense than one might have imagined; she mainly just felt confused, and whenever her emotions started to become more concrete in terms of sadness, happiness, fear and hope, she was just struck by a fierce sense of disbelief.

"Yeah," Adam confirmed with a solemn nod of his head. He felt oddly numb for the moment, which was probably good, since he was much less likely to betray things that he was thinking about and feeling that he did not want the others to know about.

"Have you seen anyone?" his mother asked, not quite as incredulously as the question felt like it should have been uttered. The way she said it made it evident that she fully expected him to have seen the corpses produced by the activation of SOWN; one could tell that even without turning one's attention to the sorrow she nestled close to her heart, and the emotional pain that knotted in her chest.

Regardless of whether she was actually in doubt or not, Adam nodded his head again. "I have."

"Look, we're going to have to leave the house soon and then we'll all see, so there's no point in sugarcoating it too much," Sylvia interrupted, insensitive but practical. "From what Adam told me it isn't pretty, and they're still lying on the street. As far as we know we're all that's left of humanity, although maybe Dad and his colleagues survived too."

"You think Dad's alive?" Cathryn asked with a sniffle, finally allowing herself to feel a cautious hope.

"We think so." Adam had the strangest feeling of slight discomfort and heat on his skin, even though he was just standing there for the moment, and it took him a moment to realize that he was feeling his sister get dressed. Somehow that was weirder to him than anything thus far had been.

Wait, he thought, frowning as something occurred to him. How can you hear what we're saying if you're still upstairs?

"Through SOWN, obviously," came Sylvia's reply, and the boy could have sworn that he could actually feel her shrug. "What, you think just because you say it out loud that SOWN doesn't register it? You still have to think something to say it out loud, so whatever you say down there, I hear up here, too."

"Oh," he muttered, sounding like he had just been told something obvious but at the same time trying stop the feeling of utter terror that filled him at the realization that he could not say anything to anyone without everyone hearing it. It seemed likely that he could not write it, either, since that definitely required one to think what one wrote, too, so communicating with just one person was only possible if the two others were asleep. In other words, he would not be able to talk to Sylvia about what had just happened between them until Angela and Cathryn fell asleep. And he really felt like he had to talk about it! How was they supposed to keep this a secret from the others? Crap!

"Adam?" his mother asked, abruptly tearing him away from his private worries and returning his focus to the outside world. "What's wrong, sweetie? You're suddenly terrified..."

"I, uh..." Oh fuck, think quickly! "It just occurred to me that maybe the neodytes aren't affected by SOWN. Which would mean -"

"Shit, I think the numskull is onto something there," Sylvia joined in, either genuinely passionate about the thought Adam remembered he had had earlier, or she had realized why he was really worried and was just as eager as him to stay off that topic. He felt discomfort and heat around his torso now, and a very faint pleasure in the breasts he did not have. "Fucking neodytes!"

"Language," Angela cautioned her eldest child, which had Cathryn giggle a little.

"I can think whatever I like! It's not my fault you can hear it," was Sylvia's dour reply. "But the neodytes... I know the politicians argued that they are still people, that they're still human, but the fact that Darwin started the trend of everyone having their brains converted to computers means that they're incompatible with SOWN. That means we can't feel them through it, and it would most likely not have killed them, either."

Even if it was him that had brought up the subject, Adam still found that he was uncomfortable even thinking about the neodytes, and the prospect of them being the only other living humans on Earth was easily frightening enough to justify his use of them as an excuse. They were a faction lead by a rich guy that had changed his name to Charles Darwin II and then started doing campaigns on TV and the internet that convinced a lot of people that his ideas about Neo-Darwinistic ideas made sense; that humanity had stopped evolving somewhere along the line and that it had become their own responsibility to ensure that they kept evolving to remain the ones most fit for survival. The eagerness to use SOWN had been strongly suspected to be a move to appease the Neo-Darwinists, but before the work on that had even started, Darwin had already had his brain converted into a computer, and many hundreds of his followers did the same, coming to be known as 'neodytes'.

While the fact that they were people without brains was disturbing enough in itself, what really made the neodytes shunned by normal humans was that they were... different. The computers they had installed in their skulls might have greater memory and faster and more reliable processing speed, and might even make them overall more efficient in nearly all ways, but in the end a computer could not simulate emotion. They were people, yet they were not people; they had no conscience or real preferences, and made all their decisions purely through logic.

In other words they were some scary fuckers with dead eyes, with no other purpose than self-preservation and the preservation of their kind.

"Maybe it's not as bad as you think," his mother tried to calm them, now that the fear had really set in with all three of her children. "At least that means that there're other people out there and that we aren't alone. Maybe there's hope for humanity after all."

After a few minutes if arguing the matter, Angela and Sylvia finally agreed to disagree, and everyone - Adam included - had forgotten all about what had brought them onto the subject in the first place. The fear had died down by the time they had discussed the topic as much as they cared to, though, and it was not long before the family were ready to turn their attention to other things.

"So how are we getting to Switzerland?" was their mother's first question after the argument had been abandoned. "Because obviously that's where we need to go now, to find your father."

"Don't worry about that, Syl's got it all planned out," Adam assured her with a strange sense of pride. "We're going to the coast first, so I guess we'll have to think about packing the car soon."

"That's right. Car to the coast, ship to France and car to Switzerland," Sylvia confirmed, and it took a couple of seconds for Adam to realize that he was actually hearing her say that with his ears and not just his mind.

Even before the boy could turn and look in the direction of his sister's voice he could feel the surprise emanating from the two other girls, so he knew that something about Sylvia was not as usual. And sure enough, once his gaze came to rest on her form as it stood there just inside the doorway into the office, he echoed the others' disbelief at what he was seeing. Instead of seeing his precious sister in one of the provocative, tight-fitting, and usually very feminine outfits that she preferred, Sylvia had apparently decided to take his warning about her being nigh irresistible to heart and don a pair of old faded blue baggy jeans that looked like they were several sizes too big for her, and a similarly oversized lime-colored T-shirt with arm-holes that could fit five or six of her arms through them, and with a hem that went so far down that it covered nearly as much as Cathryn's dress.

"What?" Sylvia asked irritably, fixing the towel-turban she had wrapped her hair in to let it dry. All the three of them were gawking at her incredulously, but even though Adam knew this he could somehow not bring himself to look away. "We'll be on the road for the next week or so at least, and some of that time we'll be on the sea. If we don't dress warm we'll end up with pneumonia."

It was an excuse so good that Adam actually began to doubt whether it really was an excuse. It was going to be pretty cold a lot of the way, and even if most vehicles were heated it would be stupid to take any chances. Of course even hospitals were mostly automated, so they could still get treatment... but there were not too many hospitals in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And because of the over-usage of medicine the past several decades, penicillin in particular, illnesses were so much more resilient today than they had once been. If one of them got sick, they would need treatment, or they could risk dying from a case of the flu.

Regardless of what was Sylvia's true reason for choosing those unflattering clothes, they really did help. He could barely even make out her figure at all, and with such boyish clothes together with her tomboyish demeanor... why, it was almost enough to trick his mind into not being turned on by her presence.

"Good thinking," their mother agreed to Sylvia's explanation, and Adam could actually feel her and Cathryn accepting it as the truth, and tried not to feel too relieved himself. "You should pack some warmer clothes, too. Everyone grab a dimporter and take anything that fits in it that you think you'll need. If you want to bring anything that doesn't fit, you'll be carrying it yourselves. Okay?"

"Okay," all three children chimed in sarcastic unison, and the entire family actually shared a laugh. Just like that they seemed to have casually dispelled the tension that had built between them, and they went their separate ways to start packing.

Adam and Sylvia were pretty much in sync when it came to prioritizing what needed to be packed, it turned out, as the first thing either of them did after retrieving their dimporters was going to the living room and start shoving their gaming consoles and games into the containers. Both of them were ardent gamers, after all, and neither of them could really imagine going anywhere without retaining the ability to play videogames. Games had always been the one passion the two had in common, and that which had likely made the foundation for Adam's attraction to her. Countless days and nights had passed with them playing with or against each other on consoles or their laptops, and Adam thought he could proudly describe Sylvia's skill as being at a professional level, and his own was not much worse.

Once that was out of the way Adam went to his room, shut the door and heaved a sigh. He was suddenly gripped by a sense of deep-seated melancholy, looking over his room now for what was likely the last time, and all his possessions in it. The posters on his walls were not of bands, but of video games, mostly, and a few of comics. His laptop was full of comics and novels, and he even had a couple of real books that he had borrowed from his mother. He had his dumbbells, which he rarely used anymore since his body seemed to be growing nice and muscular all on its own, but which he had once used vigorously in the hopes of impressing his older sister. His closet, in which most of the clothes were too small. His cabinet with a bunch of computer games. His chest of drawers full of old toys he did not think were fun to play with anymore, but which all represented fond memories to him. His bed. His nightlight.

It was stupid, but just now it struck him that he was going to miss it all. Although he had offhandedly accepted the necessity of them leaving their home to find their father, it was not until now that he really started to understand the severity of what was happening. The world had ended, and they were going on a rather long journey towards an uncertain end. He had always lived here, and now he might never return. It felt... surprisingly painful.

"Maybe we'll return someday," his mother tried to comfort him in his head, or so he thought; it was only the moment after he realized that his sisters were both radiating a sadness similar to his own, and that Angela was trying to console all of her children, not just him, despite feeling a bit teary herself. "It might not even be that long. If we're lucky we can come straight back here once we find your father."

"Yeah, we'll probably be back," Sylvia added, apparently feeling the need to reinforce their mother's support. "We'll come back when we have more time and get all our stuff, and then we can find a huge fucking palace to move into. After all, we can live wherever we want now, right?"

"Language!" Angela chided, and although Adam could not hear the others laughing, he could feel their amusement. He chuckled a little himself, and was once more overwhelmed with gratitude for the fact that the girls were still there. It felt like whatever pain this new and scary world could throw at him, his family were always able to make things all right again, and no matter how bad his mood, they could restore his happiness. He loved them, and he could feel now more clearly than ever that they loved him, and each other, too.

We'll be all right, he thought, only half-aware that he did so in the way that allowed the others to hear. After all, we still have each other.

Putting down the dimporter - which had the appearance of a twenty by twenty inches metal frame lying on top of a three inches thick plastic box of sorts, with what appeared to be white canvas inside the frame - on his bed, Adam went and got his laptop, currently folded so that it made a tall cuboid. It was folded several times and could actually be unfolded to have three twenty-five inch monitors, but in this compact state it measured far less than that. He placed the computer on top of the dimporter, on the canvas, pressed a button on the metal frame, and watched with indifference as the computer appeared to lower itself into the canvas, and within seconds had been reduced to a 2D image of the top of it, which would have pointed away from the dimporter before.

The dimporter emitted a quiet buzz, and the canvas moved within the frame like a conveyor belt, so that the image of the computer disappeared under the frame and was replaced by a new piece of clean canvas, which came to hold a pile of computer games.

Adam had no clue how the dimporter worked, he just knew that it was a pretty handy way to move a lot of stuff at the same time, and that it had been there since his early childhood. It could reduce any object that fit inside its frame to being two-dimensional instead of three-dimensional, and in doing so negated much of the weight of stored objects. It only had so much room, but what it had essentially allowed a person to store dozens of suitcases worth of baggage in a container the size of a small briefcase.

Thus Adam proceeded packing all the games he thought he might possibly play again someday and an armful of clothes from his closet, his blankets and pillow from his bed and the books, and then he simply closed the lid on the dimporter to protect the relatively fragile canvas within, and picked it up with his left hand. It weighed maybe twenty pounds or so, possibly a little more, but still just a fraction of what all the things inside it would normally have weighed, and packing everything he thought he could have need of on the trip had taken barely five minutes. The dimporter was a useful invention indeed.

While Adam packed, and he expected the girls had been doing the same, something - a kind of yet-indeterminable feeling of kinds, like an itch near the center of his abdomen - had been developing, though, and by the time he left his room with the dimporter under his arm, that feeling had grown from being something faint that he was barely aware off to a major nuisance. It was like nails on a blackboard in his mind, and he realized that he was feeling hot, too. It was not until he returned to the living room and found his mother and Sylvia, both evidently bothered as well, that he realized that the feeling did not come from himself.

"What the eff is that?" he asked them, unfamiliar with the feeling altogether and genuinely confused as to where it came from and what was causing it. It was not downright uncomfortable yet, but whatever it was made it difficult to think clearly and somehow also interfered with getting reliable readings on the others through SOWN.

The two girls looked up at him, then at each other, and then stared into the floor, all with an awkward and rather nervous expression in their eyes. They were both clutching their stomachs with one hand, he realized, and he noticed they were trembling slightly. Their thighs were also squeezed together, and it did not take long for Adam to recognize the behavior from Sylvia earlier: it was arousal! Whatever this feeling was the girls were echoing it, and he could tell that it was getting them pretty excited. His penis ached, too, he realized, trying to get hard again but only halfway succeeding due to having been so thoroughly spent earlier; that had to be the reason why it felt different from before, and why it seemed slightly painful now. Someone was horny, and although his mind was trying to react by reproducing that horniness, his body was not ready yet.

"Who -?" he started asking, but then he felt warm pleasure spreading in waves from his crotch, different altogether from when it was himself feeling it. He had felt it before, when the girls had been masturbating on the couch... but back then it had been mingled with his own pleasure, and he had not paid attention to it very closely. It was only now that he realized that the sensations were very different, but both definitely very likable.

"Cat," Sylvia managed to hiss between clenched teeth, and he could feel the effort it took for her not to start masturbating as well. "She's still in her room... I think she's... you know."

I think I can guess, yeah, he thought, feeling his fingers twitch as the alien sensation in his crotch continued. "Cat, we can feel that," he said out loud, stumbling over to the armchair he had been sitting in earlier and letting himself drop into it. "Cat? We -"

"She can't hear you," his older sister interrupted him ruefully, "or any of us. When you delve deep enough into your imagination, your mind shuts off the ability to listen to slow thoughts over SOWN." This was news to Adam, but then again, he had not experienced SOWN until today; Sylvia was definitely the expert among them in that regard. "The mind will only let one hear one's own thoughts, then, to preserve the illusion one creates for oneself. Such as... masturbation  fantasies."

As if feeling the youngest member of their family playing with herself was not weird enough, it was not long until Adam started hearing Cathryn, still through SOWN, panting and moaning with arousal. "It must be part of her fantasy," Sylvia reasoned, while their mother kept her wide-eyed gaze fixed on the floor directly in front of her, trembling over her entire body. "We can't know what she is fantasizing about exactly, but we can hear fragments of sound that -"

"I've wanted this for so long," the eleven-year-old's voice invaded their thoughts, thick with a lustful passion that seemed so thoroughly wrong, and yet oddly sexy, when it came from her. The pleasure in Adam's crotch intensified so that he had to stop himself from grunting with sheer animal desire, all while his cock was defying its own weakness and getting hard all over again. "I can't believe that it's finally possible. Oh, yes..."

"Holy shit," the boy exclaimed, luckily having the presence of mind to put down his dimporter before he absentmindedly crushed it due to sheer arousal. Sylvia was biting a knuckle of her free hand while still clutching her stomach with the other, and their mother's free hand had gone to her knee, which it squeezed so tightly that Adam could feel the pain. Whatever Cathryn's fantasy was about, it was getting her extremely excited. "The... the fuck?"

"I can't believe it, either," another voice - a male voice - responded, and Adam immediately jumped to his feet, his hands balled into fists and ready to beat the speaker into a bloody pulp. "Oh Cat, you're so hot, I could admire you for days."

"It's still from her imagination," Sylvia pointed out before Adam could charge out the door to hunt down and murder the perpetrator. "The guy's not real, she's just imagining someone else saying that..."

"Oh, yes! So big!"

"Shit, you're so tight, Cat!"

"I saved my virginity just for you."

"I love you."

"I love you, too - oh! So good!"

"Are you sure?" the boy growled, staying just in front of the doorway and fighting the urge to run upstairs and make sure that Cathryn was alone after all.

"Yeah," Sylvia nodded, although she was visibly uncomfortable as well. "If you concentrate on the voice you can hear that it's actually her own voice that she's just changing on purpose... although..." She frowned. "Doesn't the voice sound familiar to you?"

Adam concentrated, and although he could hear that it was actually his little sister's voice trying to mimic what seemed like a teenage-boy's halfway matured voice, he could not seem to recognize it otherwise. "No, not really." He sat down again, feeling his knees getting weak. "But I can hear that it's her."

"I recognize it," Angela surprised them by finally saying, though she barely moved her lips doing so and without letting her gaze stray from the spot on the floor she was staring at. She looked, sounded and felt like she was aroused, embarrassed and frightened all at the same time. She did not reveal whether she also realized who the voice belonged to, though; instead their mother fell back into awkward silence, and they were left with naught but the mental sounds of their youngest relative having imaginary sex.

"Fuck me! Fuck me hard!" It was hard to decide which was most shocking revelation to Adam: that his innocent little sister already not only masturbated, but apparently even enjoyed pretty raunchy fantasies about some guy, or the foul language she was capable of producing in her fantasies despite her never using any such normally. "Oh, god! I'm so happy that we can be together!"

"Well, of course," the male voice replied affectionately, containing just a fraction of the exertion a man would actually feel if he was really banging a girl as hard as it sounded like Cathryn was imagining. "If I can be with Syl, why not with you, my little pussycat? I'm so glad you caught us. If you hadn't, we would never -"

Adam and Sylvia were staring at each other now, their eyes wide in shared horror. "Wait, did she just say -" the boy began, but Sylvia interrupted him.

"He calls her Cat," she pointed out, and Adam could feel that fear was now settling in all of their hearts. "But the only ones who call her Cat are..."

"I'm about to cum, Cat," the male groaned excessively, like one might see in a porno movie, and Adam could feel that Cathryn was starting to climb to her climax, too, which was probably what motivated the imaginary guy saying that.

"Cum in me!" was the little girls outrageous response.

"Are you sure?" the voice wanted to know. "But what if you get pregnant?"

"I want it! Your baby!" By then, Adam had absolutely no idea whether to be appalled by what he was hearing, or turned on. His dick was fully erect, though, and it was getting harder and harder to think coherently as Cathryn's orgasm drew nearer and nearer. "I want it so much! Inside me. Yes. Brother's baby..."

This time Adam actually did let out a grunt. Did she just say -

"I'm cumming, Cat!"

"Yes! You're filling me up! Knocking me up! Yes!"

"Oh, Cat!"

"Aaaaaadaaaaam!"