Chapter 2 - Ominous insights

by MadGenuis

Mercifully none of the girls inside got horny again for the next fifteen minutes or so, at least, allowing Adam some much-needed rest. Part of his mind reminded him that there was still an urgent need to investigate what had happened, and to find out whether anyone else had survived the activation of SOWN, but at the same time another part of his mind - one greatly influenced by the telepathic presence of his family inside - remained alluringly calm and content. He both wanted to get off the ground and back to work, and to stay where he was and enjoy the moment, all at the same time.

Of course he ultimately opted to stay where he was, at least for the moment... he did just have the single most intense orgasm of his life, after all, and he was left feeling thoroughly exhausted.

Things are going to get really complicated once they wake up, he thought to himself once his post-orgasmic bliss had faded enough for him to see past the fierce optimism provoked by sexual gratification so great that it was almost enough to make him religious. He frowned at the sky, and worried. It's fine - no, it's freaking awesome now, when they're asleep and unaware of what's going on, but what about later? Once we're all awake... Well, I don't know about them, but I'm pretty sure that I'll inevitably get horny again, and probably need to masturbate to vent that horniness. They'll feel all that. It's going to be really awkward... I mean it feels great and everything, but Cathryn and Sylvia are my sisters, and Mom is... well, Mom. And Cathryn is eleven years old! She's just a child! She isn't supposed to feel things like this yet. Is she?

Sitting up with a groan, Adam took a moment to admire the abstract work of art he had just painted over the white wall next to him - he called it 'Jizz in a Snowstorm' - before standing all the way back up and, fixing his clothes, looked at the others through the window.

Amazingly they were all still fast asleep, it seemed, and would have looked almost innocent if not for the remaining signs of what had just occurred in there, namely that Sylvia's hands were still resting on her breast and just down the waistband of her skirt, respectively, just as Angela's one hand was still down the front of her jeans, and her mammary was still exposed from her having pulled it out of her shirt earlier. Cathryn was predictably the one who pulled off her innocence the best, with the only obvious sign of her having just been masturbating fervently being that the front her dress was crumpled up to her waist and there was a plainly visible dark spot on her pink underwear.

Adam had to take several deep breaths to calm himself, fighting off the arousal he already felt building inside of him again and that he strongly suspected would infect the girls if it was allowed any kind of prominence in his mind... and quite frankly, as awesome as that massive masturbation session before was, he figured that repeating it too frequently would end up killing him.

I need to calm down and think about something else. He pondered how he was supposed to pass the time while he waited for the girls to wake up while he headed for the front door, going back inside. Off in the distance he heard a coyote howl, and he felt anxiety emanating from Cathryn and, curiously, his mother as well. He had never known that she was afraid of coyotes. He wondered what other animals might be boldly lurking in previously human territory by now, working to reclaim the settled lands for nature. Wondered what would happen to their civilization if everyone really was dead. Good, it's working. I really can control myself. I just need to keep my urges in check and my thoughts busy, and everything will work out just fine. It'll be fine. Just God damn wonderful is what it's gonna be. Yeah. I really want to believe that.

He stopped in the hallway, heaving a sigh. He felt itchy. I think I'll go and take a shower.

And so he did. Four minutes later Adam had arrived upstairs at the white-and-blue tiled master bathroom, stripped out of his clothes and was heading into the shower stall. The floor-tiles felt warm on his naked feet, heated as they were, and when he opened the door to the shower stall, he could hear the bathroom door emit a drawn-out high-pitched beep to indicate that it had locked itself for his privacy.

Once he closed the stall door, a green LED lit on the shower head above him to indicate that it had registered his presence and recognized him, and was awaiting instructions.

"Warm, medium current," he delivered his request, and immediately he was hit by a shower of perfectly tempered water. "Soap," he added a moment later, and the scent of lavender filled the shower stall as the shower automatically mixed water and soap optimally, with most possible cleaning and least possible waste and contamination. He could feel the girls' approval from downstairs, as well as a disturbing yearning for them to join him - a thought that quickly had an erection growing once again.

"Soap off, cold, high current," he said, and was immediately pelted with an abundance of water so cold that any kind of arousal was immediately forgotten, and his dick shrank to just about the smallest it could possibly get. The girls radiated displeasure and irritation. He sighed again, and turned off the shower. Apparently there was really nothing he could do anymore without SOWN imposing itself on him, and through it his family. There no longer existed such a thing as privacy.

But as changed as things were, Adam mused as he dried himself with a towel, there was a lot more that was unchanged. Considering that it was now pretty much a post-apocalyptic world he was living in, life actually seemed pretty much the same as before, aside from everyone being dead. The perpetuality reactors were still delivering power, and would continue doing so for centuries without ever needing to be refueled - longer, if they received some maintenance - meaning that technology would continue to function. The water supply still worked, computers still ran... and, he figured, the various automated processes across the Earth probably continued as well, unhindered by the lack of humans altogether. Electricity, water and food would still be delivered as always, their PCs and consoles would almost certainly still run flawlessly, and he figured even some other channels on the TV probably had a program planned ahead for various shows to be aired automatically.

Somehow he could not help but to smile, and even laugh a little to himself. Frankly this was probably the most convenient and comfortable life one could possibly have after the end of the world. Humanity had spent so much time making all processes automatic that now they would all run on their own, and Adam, Angela, Sylvia and Cathryn would reap the benefits. The world was theirs for the taking! All hail Adam, King - no, Emperor! Pharaoh? Ruler of the world!

The girls reacted to this with amusement, and even Adam chuckled a bit. It was ridiculous, of course, but that did not make it any less real. They could have anything in the world if they cared to take it, and there would be no one to stop them, to tell them what they could or could not do. The only law was the one they made, and everything belonged to them.

Once he had found himself some clean clothes - he went for blue baggy jeans, a baggy white T-shirt and black sneakers - Adam went back downstairs, feeling clean and calm, and maybe a little bored. He was just considering how to entertain himself while waiting for the girls to wake up when he sensed his mother's thoughts and emotions grow more frantic for a moment, her consciousness growing clearer and stronger, before she calmed back down and delved back into her dreams.

It probably won't be long, he reasoned, heading into the living room where the girls would still be sleeping on the couch. They've been getting more and more lucid these past thirty minutes, and I'm pretty sure Mom almost woke up just then. I should probably start thinking about what I'm going to tell them when they come around. "Hi there, sleepyhead! Everyone in the world but us is dead, and when you masturbate we'll all know and feel it," somehow does not seem like the best way to break the news to them...

He stopped in the middle of the room and gazed at them warmly, quietly pondering what to do. I want them to get through this with the least possible amount of pain, but how am I supposed to soften the blow of something like that?

Despite his best efforts while standing there, he found that his gaze was inexorably drawn to the exposed features of each of his girls: his mother's amazingly round and soft-looking breast, with the brown areola about the size of a dime and the slightly paler nipple pointing outwards, slightly erect; Sylvia's provocatively placed hands at her chest and waist, fingers slipped inside the clothes to caress what was within; Cathryn, and the still-damp spot on her exposed panties that clearly marked the location of her little pre-teen vagina. And again despite his best efforts, he found an erection growing in his pants - one which through SOWN had the girls start to get anxious very quickly, which only made calming himself back down again all the harder.

Although his first instinct (once he had quelled the urge to satisfy his desires rather than ignore them) was to simply leave, Adam soon enough realized that simply staying away would only ever be a temporary solution at best. He needed to address the problem in a more lasting manner...

Not to mention that as much fun as it was to have them lying there like that, they were going to wake up sooner or later, and by then finding themselves exposed as they were would probably not be an enjoyable experience for them. His mother would probably be embarrased, he figured, and try to rearrange herself and pretend nothing ever happened, and Cathryn would just be confused, but Sylvia... oh, if his older sister woke up to find all three girls looking like they just finished masturbating, she would blame him and beat him within an inch of his life. The girl was incredibly hot in his eyes, the very epitome of feminine beauty - but shit, when she got angry she was one scary bitch.

So with that in mind Adam decided to try to restore some decency to the girls. Swallowing on a dry throat and now completely failing at stopping himself from getting hard, he decided to start in the small and went to kneel by Cathryn's little sleeping form, and sat there for a moment, his hands held up in front of him hesitantly. He was not even sure why he was pausing - it could be that he was trying to figure out what to do, even though that logically should have been a simple conclusion to come to... but even then the fact remained that his eyes seemed glued onto that wet spot on her panties. Thinking was hard for some reason, and he noticed a certain... scent... that combined with his arousal, and the reactionary lust of the girls made it extremely hard to concentrate and remember what he was actually supposed to be doing. Adam felt waves of emotions coming from Cathryn, so strong that he could barely even tell what he was feeling. Foremost in his thoughts was the desire, the curiosity, the urgency...

Adam blinked, momentarily confused and feeling his gut turning painfully while the taste of bile rose in his throat. What... what's happening? He was leaning forward, much closer to Cathryn than he remembered having been leaning just a second ago, his nostrils full of the overpowering scent of Cathryn's juices. His tongue was lolling, he realized with growing horror, and his right hand was raised to shoulder-level and extended forward, middle- and index-finger stretched and positioned just a fraction of an inch from where he could now see just the faintest contour of the little girl's labia through the wet spot in the panties.

Gasping for air as he tumbled backwards, eyes wide with shock, Adam coughed and retched as he felt his abdomen contract painfully while his lungs worked like bellows, his heart pounded like a jackhammer and his throat felt like it was sealed with cement. What the hell just happened?!

Cathryn was squirming slightly in her sleep, and was radiating need, which the other girls automatically echoed... but also fear - specifically, Adam recognized, fear of pain and irrevocable injury. It was probably the fear that snapped me out of it, he guessed, as he realized that had he continued on the course he had been on just before he regained his senses, he would probably have ended up breaking his baby sister's hymen with his fingers. Who knew, he might have ended up doing even more.

That explains what I was doing, he thought, although part of him pointed out that it was hardly a very difficult conclusion to make, considering their circumstances. A much better question would be why he had been doing it. He was a teenage boy with raging hormones, to be sure, and he had been pretty damn horny at times these past few years - never as much as he had been since the activation of SOWN, but he could still get quite anxious for release - but never to the point of blacking out and nearly raping his sleeping virgin sister. It had to be SOWN doing it, somehow... Dad said that SOWN makes humans perform significantly better in a bunch of ways, like the brain being more efficient and stuff. Maybe it also enhances our instincts or something like that, to the point where they can overrule rational thought. That would mean that if I get aroused enough, I might not be able to stop myself... shit, what's going on? Dad would never let SOWN activate if it had this many flaws. Something is completely wrong here...

Shaking his head to clear his mind, Adam postponed that line of thought and concentrated on what he had already decided needed to be done. Taking deep breaths through the mouth and doing his utmost to think unsexy thoughts, Adam leaned back in and gingerly started tugging the hem of Cathryn's dress back down to where it was supposed to be. He was extremely careful, only ever touching even the dress with the tips of his fingers and never coming into contact with Cathryn herself. Somehow it seemed to the boy as though he was disarming a bomb rather than fixing a little girl's dress; the similarities between the two situations were quite striking, after all. One misstep, one slip of thought or sniff of her scent or touch of her thigh, and he would risk having another blackout, and this time he might not regain himself in time.

It was an immense relief when the dress was finally in place, and Adam sat back and relaxed. It felt like a real achievement, somehow, as mundane as it would usually have been to do something like that. The irony of him feeling proud of himself for not molesting a little girl - something that just hours ago would have been a matter of course - was not lost on him. But things were different now. It was a new world: the Age of SOWN.

Swallowing once again, Adam decided to act fast and get this whole process over with before something happened that could make his concentration slip after all. Bracing himself with all of his mental strength he stood, turned to his left and was faced with the glorious sight of his mother's naked perky breast. This was definitely going to be the most difficult part of arranging the girls decently. Trembling like a leaf, thinking about soccer and basketball and violent video-games, he went to her and slowly reached for his mother's chest.

Luckily the reaction when his fingers came into contact with the malleable tissue of Angela's tit was far from as strong as Adam had expected. It was a big deal to him, of course - this was the first time he had actually touched a boob, and his mother's were extraordinary specimens, soft, warm and extremely hot - but all that was relayed from his mother was a faint sensation of enjoyment, diluted with a little impatience and irritation, and far from the intense pleasure he had felt when Sylvia had started to play with her breast. It was enough to make the woman shift a little in her sleep and grunt with annoyance, but far from enough to send any of them into a lust-filled haze.

Ignoring that his cock had gotten hard and keeping his thoughts on other things, Adam methodically went to work stowing the breast back where it belonged. It was surprisingly yielding to his touch, he found, and could be relatively easily shifted about, although doing so seemed to cause dangerous spikes of pleasure to emanate from the person attached to it. Thus he tried jostling both it and her as little as possible while he pulled her bra cup up from beneath the ribcage - it was white, he noted, the same as her shirt - and carefully replaced it so that it covered the breast. Then he tugged the shirt back up, and stepped back to admire his work. She looked completely innocent now, and although his dick was so hard that he could have fucked a cinderblock with it, he had not done anything indecent to her, aside from what he had had to do to make her decent. He would call that another success.

Only Sylvia was left now...

Just then, as though that very thought had been her cue, the oldest of the Peterson-children jerked her head to the side, her expression contorting in displeasure as Adam felt her mind growing rapidly clearer and more distinct. There was no doubt about it: she was waking up.

Feeling utterly helpless and clueless on what to do, Adam did the only thing he felt that he could do and ran to the other end of the room, turned a lounge chair so that it was facing the couch, and threw himself into it and tried to look completely innocent. Which, he realized immediately after arranging himself in the chair, would be rather useless if his mind was radiating anxiety and guilt - which it was - from having just basically been groping on his mother's boob. He tried to calm himself, but Sylvia was opening her eyes, now irrefutably awake, and groaning as she removed her hands from within her clothes - Thank god for that, Adam thought gratefully - and pushed herself into a sitting position.

"Argh, damn... what happened?" she grumbled, rubbing her head with one hand while clutching her (bare, toned) stomach with the other. Adam could feel the pain and nausea radiating from her, and although it was far from as intense as it had been for him when he woke up - as evidenced by the puddle of vomit he had yet to clean up - he still sympathized with her. Feeling sick and having a splitting headache was far from a preferable way to wake up.

"Ah, shit," Sylvia groaned, letting her hands drop down her sides and immediately looking straight at Adam, as though she knew exactly where he would be. "The counter-signal didn't work. We're affected by SOWN."

Adam was both surprised and impressed; she had arrived at that conclusion much faster than he had.

"Don't be too impressed so soon, numskull," she pointed out grumpily. "Even if I couldn't plainly feel the anxiety you're broadcasting at full signal strength, I know how SOWN feels. I've felt it before, remember?"

Feeling embarrassed and annoyed with how she spoke to him, Adam still had to nod his head, realizing that he had forgotten that Sylvia was familiar with SOWN. She had, as the only of them, helped their father test the early prototypes of SOWN over a year ago, when he had still been building the thing in his basement from whatever materials he could scrounge from work and what he could buy himself. The prototype had been much smaller and weaker than SOWN was now, but it had still been enough for CERN to take an interest in the project and help with its development. She and Dad had worked together down there for months, Sylvia because she adored her father and wanted to help, and Kenneth because he enjoyed the company. The two of them had been the first people on Earth to feel the effects of SOWN... of course she would recognize it.

Giving off a sense of impatience, Sylvia glanced briefly at Angela and Cathryn next to her on the couch, and then turned her gaze to the window through which the soft golden rays of sunlight were flowing bountifully now that the sun had moved to that side of their house. "Why can't I feel anyone but you guys, though?"

Adam's heart skipped a beat, and he swallowed a lump. Shit, this is what I was nervous about. How the hell do I break it to her that everyone's dead?

"You already did," Sylvia's voice remarked coldly, and the boy jumped when he heard the voice inside his head instead of from her, and realized that she could hear his thoughts, too. The gorgeous fifteen-year-old glared at him from across the room now, frowning impatiently while emanating annoyance, mixed with a hint of confusion and fear. "You'd better start explaining what you know right now, shithead."

"So in other words you have no clue what happened," Sylvia sighed disappointedly as she paced back and forth in the living room, having listened to Adam's description of how he had woken up long before the rest of them and had gone about trying to figure out what had happened. He had obviously left out the sexual bits of the story, seeing as they did not really seem relevant and were hardly worth being beaten to a bloody pulp over. "All we know is that Dad's machine in the basement had a freaking meltdown, we were knocked out, that everyone's heads apparently blew up while we slept and that SOWN is still on and operating at full capacity..." She paused, suddenly worried. "Actually it feels like it's working much better than it's supposed to. Like I can feel and hear you guys' thoughts much more clearly than last time I was connected to one."

"Well, it's way bigger now," Adam ventured uncertainly, "and way stronger -"

"Not like that," she cut him off in mid-sentence. "The new SOWNs have a longer signal range than the early ones, yeah, but their intensity was supposed to have been decreased, not increased - to let loads of people connect to them at once without them having a total overload from it. SOWN is way more powerful now than it was supposed to be, I'm sure of it."

Her confidence was literally palpable, so Adam automatically believed her. "But why? And what are we going to do about it?"

She shrugged and made a noncommittal noise in her throat, while accidentally thinking in words, the way that allowed Adam to hear her thoughts. "Like hell if I know. Crap, I knew this was going to blow up in Dad's face... but this is much worse than I imagined." Out loud she said, "We'll have to stay here until Mom and Cathryn wake up, so we can't do much yet. Do you know if Dad survived?"

"How would I know?" he asked confusedly, throwing up his hands helplessly. "There's an entire Atlantic Ocean between us and him! It's not like I can just walk over there and ask if he's okay, can I?"

Sylvia rolled her eyes impatiently. "Did you check if he called or mailed us? The phones and Internet should still be working." She paused for only a moment before continuing, spending this moment scrutinizing her dumbstruck brother. "That's a no, then. Let's check the answering machine and see if he's left a message, numskull."

As it turned out there were quite a few messages on their answering machine, most of which were from just before the activation of SOWN and were various people calling to congratulate them and their father on the completion of the project - messages that quite frankly sent chills crawling up Adam's spine aplenty.

"I think I'm gonna be sick again," he muttered dazedly, feeling his stomach turn and twist as he watched their uncle - their Mother's brother - on the display of their phone and heard his praise for their father and SOWN pour from the speakers in an eager voice. Somehow watching these recorded messages made everything seem so... real. Until then he had been able to distance himself from all the dead people and tell himself that at least the ones most important to him were still alive and well, but just listening and watching these people, knowing that he knew them, that they had been alive, and now they were dead... it was like listening to ghosts. The end of the world seemed so much more horrible when he had to face that all these thinking, feeling people were now irrevocably gone. And I let myself be optimistic about things. Damn, what an asshole I am... I can't believe they're all gone.

"I know," Sylvia's thoughts stoically intruded upon his own while the girl herself did not remove her gaze from the screen, but just kept switching to next message, showing more and more faces of people that were now dead. She seemed hurt, somewhere deep inside, but more afraid. She clearly dreaded what she would find on their answering machine... or more exactly, what they might not find. "Calm down. Falling apart and blaming yourself isn't going to help anyone, least of all the dead. Pull yourself together. We have to be strong."

From the living room next to the office they kept the answering machine in Angela and Cathryn sent their assurances, comfort and love, and Adam was both touched, and could feel that Sylvia was as well. Once again SOWN made the nightmare it had created all the more bearable thanks to his family. Was it really that hard to understand why he was optimistic when his family kept encouraging him to be so, and filled him with their love and understanding, even in their sleep?

They reached the last call recorded on the machine, and both of the awakened siblings felt their hearts skip a beat at the exact same time and felt their chests knot in emotion when they saw and heard the time it had been made at: less than two minutes after the activation of SOWN. After. Someone else had survived.

"-on't have much time," were the first words of the call, and Adam immediately recognized both the voice and the picture on the screen as belonging to their father. On the display Kenneth was facing away from the camera, apparently talking to someone else. "Hurry, I... we don't know how long it'll last. We need to get as much work done as we can before... anything happens."

"He's alive!" Adam exclaimed happily, and he could feel the two sleeping girls in the next room approving. Sylvia still seemed worried, though. "Dad survived! I knew he would!"

On the screen Kenneth turned towards the camera, and both of the siblings failed to repress a shocked gasp when they saw his face. They both recalled what he had looked like on the TV, just a few minutes before he had made this call, but he had changed a lot in that short amount of time. For one thing blood was smeared from both nostrils and all the way down his chin, and was still leaking out of him, and his eyes were bloodshot and somewhat bulging. He was deathly pale, and his expression betrayed that he was in significant pain.

"Listen, I don't think we have much time," their father told them, now addressing the phone, and through it, them. "I screwed up, badly. I... I think I just killed ten billion people, all because I was stupid. I... argh, it's hard to think..." He clutched his head with his hands, and sobbed just once in agony. "Claire says we might all be on the verge of having an aneurysm, if we haven't had one yet. Said we would have had multiple if we hadn't engaged the counter-signal immediately once we realized something was wrong."

Sobbing again, their father shook his head briskly and then looked straight at the camera again, his expression hard with determination. "Our counter-signal suffered a heavy overload just a few seconds after we turned it on, so I figure the one in the basement did the same. If that's the case you probably already know that SOWN is online, that there's no way to shield yourselves against it, and that everyone is dead. I was such a fool... I was so careful, so focused on making sure that the individual SOWNs wouldn't hurt anyone that I didn't even consider how they might affect each other. They're all supposed to boost and replicate human brainwaves, damn it, and I didn't even think of the possibility that they would also register each others' signals as human brainwaves and boost those, too. The SOWNs are all connected now because of that, because they all make each other much stronger than they were supposed to be. That's what's happening... what happened... everyone was given a direct connection to every other human on Earth, at full signal strength. The brain can't handle that much activity. That's why everyone... died. How I killed them."

Kenneth clutched his forehead again and leaned forward, below the lower edge of the screen, groaning loudly. When he straightened back up they could easily see his veins under his skin, and even more blood had poured from his nose. He looked as though he was on the verge of death. "This is important, so listen. You... I need you to survive. The counter-signal should have protected you from the initial SOWN-overload, so I think you might have gotten through it in one piece. If so, I need you to come here, to CERN. Depending on how badly hurt we were when SOWN turned on, you might be the last living humans on Earth. Nowhere is safe anymore - SOWN has increased its own range to many times what I intended, and probably covers the entire planet now. Even the countries that don't have SOWN will have been wiped out. There are nearly thirty thousand SOWN spread across the world, so forget about trying to turn them off. You need to get here. As soon as you... can. We have..." He paused, growling with frustration and pain. "We have things here that'll help. That can fix things. Save humanity. And I need to know that if I don't survive, at least you guys will. Please..."

Turning to the side, Kenneth coughed violently several times before straightening back up, although he kept his face turned away from the camera. From this angle Adam could see a tiny trail of blood running downward from his ear, and he could tell from the pain and dread he felt from Sylvia that she saw it, too. "I'm so sorry... I messed up badly. SOWN can't be stopped now, but you can live despite of it. Adam, take care of your mother for me, she'll need it. Sylvia, take care of everyone. You're stronger than you know, and I'm very proud of you. Cathryn, be nice and listen to your mother, brother and sister. They'll know what has to be done. And Angela... I'm so very sorry. I love you... all of you... so much. Please survive. Please live.

You're my only hope. Our only hope. So please... stay alive."

The machine beeped and turned off. The message had ended. Their father was gone.