Glitch (The Harem at the End of the Galaxy, #4) Page 3

  “He won't tell,” said Jaime.

  “He likes it,” said Bette.

  They were right. Even under these circumstances, cuffed and facing the wall, I couldn't help but appreciate a gifted pair of female hands.

  Was there any real harm in taking a moment to enjoy the situation? Maybe not. Maybe I was still thinking too much in linear. My brain was being changed by the process of time travel, but it hadn't completely transformed yet. Time was a loop, not a line. The math that made time travel possible said as much. But I wasn't used to thinking of time as a loop. I still thought of it as a train through a tunnel about to hit an oncoming train.

  “Hurry,” I said. “Hurry.” Maybe we had a moment, and maybe we didn't. I simply didn't know.

  “Mmmm.” Responding to the urgency in my voice, Janice bent quickly to wrap her mouth over the thick knob poking out of Becky's fists.

  I came so hard I nearly dropped to my knees. Janice or Jaime or whoever she was now swallowed and swallowed. Even when I closed my eyes, I saw red, and that's when I realized the red light had begun to flash.

  An alarm began to sound.

  Here we were again at Defcon One.

  Blink.

  I was under the palm trees on a sidewalk outside the hospital.

  Blink.

  I was on a cold metal table.

  Blink.

  I was in a booth at Brass Macchiato. Brandy sat across from me, her green eyes wide with shock.

  Blink.

  The red light. The alarm.

  Blink.

  The sound of the surf endlessly pounding a beach at the end of the universe.

  Blink.

  A girl reaching for my body. Another girl twining around me from behind.

  Blink.

  If my timeline was a loop, was it an infinite loop? Could I ever get free long enough to change the destiny of humanity? Or was I condemned to bounce around endlessly, eternally while the galaxy died around me?

  Chapter 6

  I couldn't do this alone. One twenty-eight-year-old data analyst against the universe isn't enough. Especially when I seemed to be caught in a temporal loop.

  Back in the Pentagon bunker, Julianne had me flat on my back on a metal table, the rolling wheels moving us around the room as she bounced on top of me.

  Had the table had wheels on it before? Had her code name been Julianne?

  Was the timeline being changed, or was it my memories that were being changed? After all, the very genetic code written into my cells had changed as a result of my travel through the experimental device. Why hadn't I asked more questions before I accepted this job? I had assumed a time-travel device was about math and physics, not genetics.

  Julianne sat high and then lurched. The powerful inner walls of her athletic pussy collapsed in shuddering waves around my upthrust cock. Her deep-centered orgasm triggered me, and I blasted off a private fountain deep inside of her. Both of us were groaning, gasping, and grabbing.

  “He's passed one test anyway,” Flora said.

  Flora wasn't the name she used to have. I was certain of that.

  I wasn't condemned to endless repetition. The timeline was capable of change. The small changes I'd observed were evidence of that. Or was I clutching at straws? The changes we needed weren't small, and they needed to be made soon before the aliens released the deadly virus into our solar system.

  Then I thought of something else. Most of the other intelligences in the Milky Way had already been wiped out long before the human race took its first step on the moon. The last women escaped to such a distant planet because most of the solar systems in our galaxy had been contaminated for geological epochs.

  How far would we have to go back to eliminate the menace forever?

  Too far, I thought. It was too big to think about right now. Breathe.

  I can't fix the whole universe. I don't even know if I can fix the Earth.

  “His physical function is indeed impressive,” said Beth. Was it Beth? Fuck it. The blonde one. That was safe enough. No matter how many times I bounced back, the three techs were always two sultry brunettes and a slinky blonde.

  “I assume that's why he was selected for this mission,” Flora said. “But is he resilient enough to handle two of us?”

  A blonde and a brunette scrambled on top of me, Beth settling in on my face and Flora settling in on my dick. This probably wasn't a DOD-approved test of my psychological resiliency, but no red-blooded male is going to bitch about being double-teamed by two beauties. I stroked up with my tongue and my stalk. The girls sighed.

  This part of the temporal loop had its advantages. The three techs had certainly loosened up quite a bit over the last few bounces. Any concerns about professional behavior had vanished up the timeline. The pheromones kept on doing their thing. We were moaning, coming, and then snuggling in the afterglow.

  Maybe they'd be softer now. More inclined to give the subject of their experiment a listen.

  “I have information from the future I can only share with the general and the Joint Chiefs,” I said.

  “But you haven't gone to the future yet,” Flora said.

  Once again, I was back before the time I ever entered the device. And so around we went, around and around and around.

  Chapter 7

  “Wait. What. You have the wrong guy.” I sat up between the two beautiful women on either side of me. “I would never have any occasion to be in any experimental sub-sub-sub basement under the Pentagon. My security clearance wouldn't allow for that. I'm not even supposed to know about secret bunker shit like that.”

  I'd said those lines before so many times. Today, as so often, the two girls I said them to were Darlene and Lacey.

  Lacey. My heart twisted. The cute blonde with the blow-up boobs had no idea of what was coming. None of them knew. Someone or something was forever destined to bring home the virus that was attacking the L-clones only a few days uptime. I'd struggled to change it, but I hadn't gotten very far.

  This time, like so many other times, I tried to say something different. But the same old words came pouring out.

  “We know what happens in the past,” she said. “We have the archives, and we don't have the wrong guy. We didn't scoop you from the future. You sent yourself from the past. And...” She looked over at Darlene. “We have to introduce you to these concepts slowly to keep from overloading you. I can tell you this much, though. It's very, very important that you continue to make... contact.... yeah, you should be making regular and frequent contact with the women of your time. Not just us. Earth women too.”

  Darlene giggled. “She means fucking. Don't be exclusive to us, Clayton. It's mission critical for you to get around.”

  If nothing else, I'd been doing that. If nothing else, I'd been sharing my goo around at both ends of the galaxy and the timeline between us.

  Sooner or later, the ability to travel was communicated to my partners. Darlene and Jing had already bounced back and forth from 2020 D.C. any number of times. Unfortunately, Darlene and Jing weren't the girls who needed to bounce.

  “Where's Daisy?” I asked.

  Darlene crinkled her brow.

  “Chase. General Dyers.” Under what name did this iteration of the galaxy girls know the general? Or did they know about her at all?

  “Oho,” Lacey said. “I know Daisy. She's fun. Women of our time stop the aging process at twenty-seven, but she has that unique touch of maturity.”

  Also, she was a lot higher up in the Pentagon than the rest of us, so she could help us get shit done. “Is she here?” I asked.

  “How could she be here?” Darlene asked. “Women of your time can't come here, can they? We've only seen her in the archives.”

  Of course, the general had already been here. Several times. Brandy too. But Darlene and Lacey hadn't reached those memories yet. Hmm. Could you call them memories if they hadn't yet occurred?

  They were only memories for me.

  Events. Call them events.
Which may or may not keep happening over and over.

  What did the girls at galaxy's end know at this point?

  “Do you know why it's so important for me to spread myself around?”

  “Of course. You're the last man left alive with pure DNA. We've been struggling to survive for generations by cloning, but no advanced species can keep producing healthy offspring without sexual reproduction. The clone lines wear out. It's telomeres or something.”

  “Yes, here, on this planet. But the archives instructed you to tell me to spread myself around in my own time as well. Do you know why?”

  They looked at each other and shrugged.

  “As long as the Andromeda menace remains in our galaxy, humanity is always at risk of being wiped out. The virus can mutate naturally or it can even be intentionally altered to continue attacking the human race.” I decided not to mention the infection of the L-clones. There was no point in casting a shadow over what could be Lacey's last good day.

  “The time-travel talent is also a virus. I can spread it to my partners, and it alters their genetic code. Some of them eventually begin to travel themselves.” I looked at Darlene. “You do, for certain. I've seen you in my time. On multiple occasions. We persuaded the general to travel here, to your time, so she could see for herself the reality of the human future.”

  “We've done a pretty good job, considering.” Darlene smiled.

  Lacey, alert to something in my face, didn't. “What's so bad about the human future? We survived, we made it all the way out here.”

  “Sure, humanity survived. Sure, but...” I gestured in frustration. Their world was so small. So empty. And they didn't even see it. “We should have had a whole galaxy by now. Instead, we have a few towns on a small planet in an isolated solar system where we cower in fear, never knowing when the bad guys from Andromeda are going to finish the job of wiping us out.”

  There was a long silence. I hadn't meant to make the girls feel bad about the little world they'd created. They'd achieved more than ninety-nine percent of the other intelligent species in the Milky Way. After all, as Lacey said, they'd survived.

  Time to get the conversation back on track. General Dyers and her assets at the Pentagon were my focus now.

  “I'm the one who brought the general to your world, maybe a few days, maybe a few hours from now, depending on how the time-loop spirals around this time. However it happens, the first time she came, the general possessed no ability to travel independently. She came through to your world because she was in physical contact with me, and I don't know if she ever developed the ability to bounce back to 2020 without my help. I need to seed her again or, barring that, I need to take her back myself.”

  I wondered how technical I could get with these girls. I couldn't prove I was running out of time to save the Earth, but I could feel it. Hell, I could taste it. Time wouldn't snarl around forever. Eventually, the timeline would settle on a shape, and we all needed it to be the one where the Earth beat the aliens instead of the other way around.

  “If you save the Earth, our future changes,” Lacey said. “I realize we all have to do the best thing for the billions of people alive in your world, but sometimes I get a little scared. What happens to us when the past changes? Do we all vanish in a puff of smoke?”

  I hugged them to me, a girl on each arm. “No way do you vanish. You're here, and I'm here. You had to be here for me to travel to you, right? I've had a lot of subjective time to think because I've been reliving the last days for months. This is what I believe: If I save the Earth, humanity still travels to this world, and you're still here waiting for me. The difference is, billions of other people survive. We fill the open worlds of this galaxy. Not just this tiny world, but thousands of planets all across the Milky Way between here and the home-world. That's what happens if we defeat Andromeda. The human race flowers across the galaxy.”

  “Wow,” Darlene said, at the same time Lacey said, “What an incredible vision.”

  Incredible for humanity, I thought, but horrifying to the aliens from Andromeda.

  My sneaking suspicion was they'd started infecting the girls again because they were somehow alerted to the fact one man survived. Somehow, they'd learned I not only possessed healthy DNA but the ability to travel through time. For whatever reason, they couldn't show themselves, and they couldn't attack me directly.

  But I was under attack. Make no mistake. They couldn't allow me and my girls to change the future.

  Because if I did that, the Milky Way became ours, not theirs.

  Chapter 8

  I flashed back to a red light going off.

  “Defcon One. This is not a drill, this is an actual emergency...”

  By now, I'd programmed my own handprint into the electronic box. Slapping it in the appropriate place, I silenced the siren. The three techs stared at me, jaws agape.

  “How did you...?” somebody asked.

  “I've been going around and around for subjective years,” I said. “I've had time to figure a few things out.”

  “We need to test your vital signs,” said somebody else.

  Of course, they did. Subjective years of being cooped up in a metal bunker with the pheromones of the future had completely transformed the three women into a trio of dick-hungry nymphomaniacs. At the slightest excuse, they checked my sexual function in a variety of interesting and athletic ways. Over the past few weeks of subjective time, I'd become something of an expert at figuring out how to pleasure three women at once.

  The weird thing was, for them, almost every time was the first time. They didn't seem to remember their endless travels around the time-loop. At least, their conscious minds didn't remember.

  This time around, as they shed their three lab coats in unison, I stole a moment to consider the swerves and curves of their perfectly proportioned bodies.

  But there was no time.

  “I need to talk to the general.”

  Fae brushed her blue-black hair off her face. The gesture suggested she was trying to remember something, although her smooth forehead never crinkled. It was time for the handcuffs to come out, but they'd forgotten all about the handcuffs several bounces ago.

  “There's no transmissions in and out of this bunker,” she finally said. “That was the only way to guarantee we'd be completely invisible to the enemy.”

  “There must be some transmission. We got that alarm.”

  “It's a pre-programmed alert to let us know when we enter Defcon One, but we're not capable of sending or receiving more specific information. In the event of imminent nuclear war, it's even more important for this bunker to remain secure. The time-travel device might be the only way for humans to evacuate from a contaminated planet.”

  Around and around. A discussion I could have in my sleep because I'd said the same thing so many times before.

  I'd done my part. I'd spread my seed. When was destiny going to do its part?

  I could no longer sit on my ass and rotate my dick around and call it doing the job. My mental state was deteriorating. Couldn't prove it, couldn't point to gaps in a graph on an EEG, but the time-travel techs had spotted it from time to time. Me, I could flat-out feel it. My brain kept going fuzzy for longer and longer intervals.

  You want to talk about what time it is? It's time to face facts, son.

  The general wasn't coming, and I couldn't keep waiting. Maybe, in her version of the timeline, only a few minutes had passed while I was trapped in this forever time-spiral. Maybe she was only a few seconds into partying with Jia and Brandy in the space capsule. Hell, maybe the three of them hadn't even noticed yet that I'd vanished.

  Time looped on and on for me, becoming ever more knotted-up, ever more complex, but maybe no time at all had passed for them. If I kept waiting for them to catch up, I might wait forever.

  The human brain wasn't made for a hamster wheel. The longer I spun around, the more at risk I was for losing my sanity.

  No, I couldn't rely on the gener
al. I couldn't rely on anyone.

  No one was coming.

  I would have to be my own cavalry.

  Chapter 9

  We were in the bunker below the Pentagon, Felicity and I snuggled together for a quiet talk, Jaime and Bette busy in the background doing something I couldn't understand with equipment I couldn't build.

  “How did you select the endpoint of the time-travel device?” Had I asked that before? If so, I didn't remember.

  Felicity kissed the tip of her index finger and pressed the kiss into the side of my mouth. She'd long ago lost the ability to stop touching and caressing me. “Because it's experimental, we decided to aim for the farthest known habitable planet at the most remote possible distance away from the earth. If something goes wrong, well, we don't want risk destroying the region of spacetime around our solar system.”

  My memory tingled. Didn't the timeline use to go differently? The first test had been conducted under fire to send me a few years into the future of planet Earth to see if a nuclear war had occurred. They hadn't aimed the device for the planet at the end of the galaxy at all. I'd arrived there completely by chance. They hadn't known how to calibrate it properly in that early version of the timeline.

  By chance? No, not chance. Fate, karma, a shadow of the future cast back into the past.

  Time wants us to change something. I have to hang onto that. Even with all the craziness swirling around me, even with all the mental blurring, I have to believe that.

  Now time had changed, and this wasn't a small change. In this version of the timeline, they could calibrate the device to send me a great distance not just in time but also in space.

  “So you have some control of the final destination,” I said. “You can send me to the time and place of your choosing.”

  “In theory. I mean, we are talking about a completely untested device. But, yes, we have a mechanism that allows us to set your final destination in spacetime. It could be better calibrated, I suppose, but with a whole planet to aim at, it would be hard for you to miss. You aren't going to end up in the middle of their sun or anything.”