Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2019 23:00:58 +0000 From: Simon Mohr Subject: David's Contribution: Payne-Chapter 2 This story is a work of complete fiction. Any resemblance of characters to real persons and reality is a coincidence. This story eventually includes descriptions of sex between adult males. If you are a minor, if this material is illegal where you live, or if this material offends you, please don't read it. Please donate to Nifty. Find the donation button on the Nifty web site to help you to pay your share of their expenses to provide these entertaining stories for you. All rights reserved. David's Contribution: Payne-Chapter 2 As we sat on the front porch thinking about David's unexpected idea, I thought back to what I had said to David that first night we had shared, just the two of us. "If you parent, I will parent with you." None of us had children. None of us had openly discussed since our throuple had begun. I hadn't seen a child around the place. Our workers didn't bring their children to the farm. My first thought was that David had seen children on the trip presented with a loving parent(s) and been favorably impressed. I thought again. That was probably a long shot. Perhaps he was busy with a memory from his childhood, wanting to do better than his parents or do the same as them or wanting to reverse what had happened to him. None of it was clear to me. Joe looked at David in some surprise and then at me. "Tell us what's in your head, David." In a busy mind, a variety of stimuli from previous memories, touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing are constantly received. Continuously received, actually in varying streams of intensity. The mind then deals with that information below or above the level of what most people regard as conscious thought. The whole process may be described in terms of neuron mechanics, but awareness is more than that in its complexity at least. It's probably safe to say that David never knew all of the factors that brought this wish to his head and perhaps never knew why he uttered that want right then. It's equally safe to say that his words changed our throuple, our lives. Do children live to make adults older? No, but the processes co-exist. The farm came to harvest that year and the hay was brought in. We had built new storage sheds for more farm equipment, so they were going to be sheltered over the winter. Joe had optical fiber laid by our local ISP to our place. The deal made was that Joe would pay for the fiber and labor in return for lifetime farm access without caps or throttling of data. We could have just gotten a satellite dish or microwave tower built, but Joe hated latency issues and weather disruptions. Joe built an addition to the house that we called the library, a place where he had a server and workstations installed that could take full advantage of the bandwidth now available. The server had 20 some cores, a large number of threads 64 gigs of fast RAM memory and some 500 TB of SSD storage. Joe told us that he wanted to become an expert on something, didn't specify what exactly. David and I figured it was his money to play with and didn't press him. We all had access to the system. Joe had applied a password to his personal files, we knew this, and figured it had something to do with his finances. Without consulting David or me, Joe was educating himself about the biology of reproduction. He took online courses, downloaded public research, and press reports. He began to spend more time with the computer than with us as a group. When he started to skip meals, I mentioned that I was worried about him and his nutrition. His response was that at least his protein intake was good. Right... He did show up, however, at breakfast December 1 to our surprise and ate like he'd never seen food before. He appeared excited with a sparkle in his eyes we hadn't seen for a while. "I found it." "What did you find?" "A way for us to have kids." "So, adoption or a surrogate mom or what?" "You two know that it takes the union of an X chromosome and either another X or Y chromosome to make a baby." This agreed with our high school biology class, anyway. An XX pair turned out to be a girl and an XY pair produced a boy, normally. The problem was that the mother's 'egg' had an X chromosome, the only sex chromosome she had to donate, after all and father's semen had sperm of both the X and Y persuasions. When the long swim occurred, the first sperm to bump up against the egg and get through before the egg membrane signaled 'no more need enter' determined the final pairing, XX or XY. Turned out that the gender of a baby was determined by absolute chance in nature. Joe went on. "My idea was that two of us could donate sperm and modify one or both to be able to mate, something not done before this, then solve the problem of growing that into a person without a womb or transplant it into a womb perhaps." "I thought perhaps others were workers somewhere on the planet to accomplish the same thing so all the research. Turns out that 4 of the 6 centers have solved the growing environment problem (on the order of an 'artificial' uterus and hormone environment' and last year 1 of those centers managed to transplant an X chromosome into a sperm cell along with a marker for tracking its progress properly and safely." "I've talked to all the directors/researchers at the centers, explained the advantages of collaboration, perhaps funding, and our goal of having two men be mother and father genetically to a baby." "Society won't approve initially. Some churches may not approve. There are those in every walk of life who are afraid of or who resent change." "If we draw straws, the three of us could pool our seeds and it is possible that two of those have a 66% chance of being a genetic parent." David's mouth fell open. I sat there shocked. There is a lab in Ireland willing to work with us, Joe told us, and they will need to have our consent, a contract of some kind and samples when the time comes. "You guys in?" "If you decide yes, only one of our sperm will be tasked to have its 'X' chromosome transplanted into a woman's egg along with a marker. Our baby will have that genetic marker in its tissue cells for research purposes. Another one of us will be chosen at random to donate a 'Y' sperm that merges with the marked 'X' egg." "This sperm, selected from the pool of sperm, in this case selected from the 'Y' set, will receive a different marker in order to identify the donor, track its progress, and separate it from other donor 'X' sperm" "For any one baby, the third one of us won't be involved genetically. On any subsequent child, that 'left out dude' will have, again, a 66% chance of being a genetic parent." David and I must have been still speechless. Joe began to lift his eyebrows and turn his head just to the side, still looking at us with a little grin. David recovered first. "That would be cool to have two of us related to our child instead of just one of three. But, Joe, I have to say that any child of any of us will be a child of mine too. I will parent and care for any child resulting from our throuple. I'm committed to that." I felt the same way and said so. The story of that journey is technical. A lab in Ireland took sperm from all of us. We would know afterward by DNA testing who the 'fathers' were. This was groundbreaking stuff and the lab wasn't eager to have demonstrators or legislative shutdown or anything else interfering with the process. We kept our mouths shut and waited. We didn't wait long. 3 months later a coded email came to Joe. The pre-arranged code was 21476. Precisely translated from the sheet of paper in Joe's pocket, this was their code for '2 'X' chromosomes from one of you transplanted to a healthy egg and fertilized, having been exposed to sperm 'X' and 'Y' chromosomes from another one of you...embryo growing normally in artificial womb'. Some permutations of that suggested themselves to us, thinking ahead to a baby made by taking the 'X' and/or 'Y' chromosomes of sperm, transplanting two donors into an egg and exposing them to the third man's sperm. For now, it was wait and see. 3 months later another coded email arrived for Joe. 61476 mean artificial pregnancy progressing without difficulty. The three of us flew to Ireland in August to be close by and kept our mouths shut. One at a time, we visited the lab, scrubbed to an inch of our lives, gowned and then got to look through a window at an astonishing room full of scientific instruments and a single glass tank that held my interest...a small baby attached by an umbilical cord to something I couldn't see, kicking and moving to classical music stimulation at the moment I was there, its temperature precisely controlled, sounds and tank motion controlled, a paternal voice playing that I recognized as snippets from Joe, David, and I at various intervals. We met with the lab director once and he told us that the process of labor had little to do with the baby except through chance. From the biology I'd studied, however, chance didn't entirely describe the process of onset of labor. Like many biological events, a cascade of trends or events ended in an identifiable process, somewhat unlike the meteor crashing into the earth in the sciences of space and geology, which causes a definite cause of the ensuing observations. One of the more subtle influences on the timing of labor includes the growing fingernails of the baby which randomly scratch the inner surface of the bag of membranes (of fetal genetic origin) that surround the fetus. In the 'normal' sequence of events in the womb, releasing local prostaglandin hormones from membrane disruption caused a biochemical chain reaction involving oxytocin which caused contractions which then caused even more membrane disruption and finally an irreversible uterine muscle cascade of contractions, which forced the cervix to open, followed by maternal expulsive efforts to push the baby out. The process was very similar to the obstetrician who 'strips the membranes', disrupting them a bit on purpose from the outside of the bag of membranes, to ripen the cervix and hasten the onset of labor. When the obstetrician identified a ripe cervix a day or two prior to expected delivery or wanted to hurry the process, the doc would sometimes advise her to go home and have vigorous sex with her partner or someone to get the further disruption and/or the high dose of prostaglandins normally present in semen. Either way, it worked if the partner produced. In addition, docs have used prostaglandin hormone gels which, applied to the cervix, ripen it quickly in many circumstances if timing is an issue for the patient. Since in our case there was no uterus involved, the lab decided to deliver the baby, relying on other tests of lung maturity. They solved the question of 'does the baby benefit from labor squeezing its lungs or creating an air hunger that prompts the baby to breathe' right after birth by measuring the oxygen in the umbilical cord of normal newborns and made sure our baby had 10% more oxygen that that and the same amount of carbon dioxide and roughly the same blood PH. We were present in the building when our baby was born. It wasn't safe on any level to be present in the room, but within 15 minutes after the delivery was scheduled, a nurse rushed in and told us we were the proud fathers of a baby boy, 6# 1oz, Apgar 8/9, breathing ok, exam normal, all systems go! Emotional, we all had a chance to hold our baby, now wrapped in a soft blanket with a little knitted cap on his head. The lab's contract with us included a life-time contract of silence or until lifted by the lab so they could continue their work in peace. Had it been up to me, I would have headed to the streets and told everyone I met. Our child was an Irish citizen. He also was an American citizen. His birth was duly registered and after DNA testing, David and I were identified as our son's genetic parents. This baby had been David's idea and his contribution to the three of us in that way, so Joe and I asked David to allow his name to be on Ryan's birth certificate. Since David was an American, Ryan by birth possessed a dual citizenship and rather quickly, dual passports for each country. We never did identify the wonderful woman who donated the egg. The lab had arranged all of that. We hired a private jet for Ryan's first airplane ride and a nanny to augment the standard crew. Customs didn't bat an eyelash and we arrived home, all of us taking turns with the nanny getting up at night, feeding Ryan, changing him, etc. We had neglected to build a nursery for Ryan, so his crib went into our room for a few weeks while we remodeled and installed alarms and video monitors and decorated the space. So, we all woke up at night when he did, and we all ended up learning just how much work it is to care for one's child and how close one can become to one's child. I know we all grew closer to each other. The community's idea about our new baby was divided. Some didn't think about it; others did and at least a bedrock 20% disapproved to the point where they would have intervened if they thought they could and stay out of jail. Those less educated weren't so judgmental. Those who got up on a high horse turned out mostly to be members of one very fundamentalist group in town whose preacher, we were told, was on the verge of intervening on moral and religious grounds. Joe and his attorney had a talk with that preacher and his attorney, making it crystal clear that not all babies were conceived in classic situations to 'ideal' families. Not only would we oppose intervention, but would oppose it to any point necessary, but the preacher and his group would have to explain at some point to someone why they had picked us as targets, not a process allowed under our right to live our own lives and pursue our own happiness. We didn't hear more from that bunch until Ryan began high school. Apparently, there was a diverse group of people in town who were not judgmental in nature, needed work and had the talent to help us. Although our nanny had been talented, she and her partner moved to St. Louis a few months later, following his work. Joe and David and I sat and talked about what a woman figure in the household might mean for Ryan and for us. We all wanted a mature woman who was outgoing, loving, motherly, someone whom Ryan could relate to as 'mom'. We weren't quite brave enough yet to try raising him, just us men. When Wren interview for the position, she had just become a grandmother within the last 3 months. Her only child had married and moved to Australia so seeing her grandchild other than Skype wasn't a frequent event. Her nature was intelligent, kind and supportive, matter of fact, not dramatic...all things we wanted to see. After she met Ryan, she might have taken the job just because without pay, but we didn't work that way either. Joe offered a small fortune compared to what nanny's ordinarily earn with really good benefits. Wren's husband had died 4 years earlier of a heart attack, a sudden event that left her with more time on her hands than she had ever wanted; his insurance had made things just comfortable for her. She moved in with us that fall into separate quarters attached to the house. We had informed her fully of our relationship and she told us her brother was in a gay relationship in Chicago, an attorney with his partner, a railroad engineer. We decided to wear underwear around the house at least...it wasn't a burden or anything. Wren wore casual clothes appropriate to the time and place. If outside, the weather affected her choice of clothes. Wren didn't do the cooking. By that time, we had a full-time cook and a maid who managed the housekeeping chores outside the kitchen at least. Ryan met all the normal kid milestones for growth and teeth and development. He walked and began to talk normally and on time. His hair was a thick, light-blond approaching white in some lights. We kept him busy and he didn't have much TV, game time, or computer time growing up until he was 4 or so when we introduced him to a computer mouse named Billy and along with keyboards, iPhones, and tablets and he took to software programming for children like a duck to water. He enjoyed sleeping with the three of us at night after a certain age. We didn't go out of our way to be clothed or not clothed around him. He commented at times on certain parts of us but wasn't fixated. The first time he walked into our bedroom and saw us having sex, he watched for a minute as a casual observer without reacting particularly. David explained to him later that his daddies played sometimes too, liked he played his toys only different. He asked if we liked to play together. He never asked to join in, and we never asked him to.