Joining

"Hey, hey Michael, Susan!" Joan shouted as two of her bodies ran toward them, her other two heading into the building for the school to which she'd transferred, as everyone did, upon reaching adulthood.

Tony and Victoria were already in the building but the other two preferred to wait outside.

"Oh, hey, Joan, what's up?" Susan said. You smiled a bit at how easily both Michael and Susan got aroused from seeing Joan, even in her compression clothes; they didn't have assets large enough to justify the expense, so each had a very visible erection.

"Well, I was just wondering when Erin was planning to make a body for herself," said your daughter, her tentacles flopping at her sides.

"Today at lunch," Michael said immediately. A very slight change in his posture indicated that Erin was temporarily using his body to front, though. "I was planning to do it then. Why?"

"I think there's something funny with my genecode," Joan said. "I dunno what it is but the home scanner indicated that it probably only happened after we fucked, four-on-four. I've got an appointment with a tech right after class, she's really good, Ms. Mills. Could you please come along, all of you, and hold off on making a body for yourself until then, Erin?"

"Sure," Erin said. "I've waited this long, another few hours won't hurt. Unless it's something really bad and we got tangled up somehow."

"There's procedures for fixing tangled genecode," Susan reminded all of them. "But you also hear the occasional story where the genecode gets tangled and it ends up being a good thing."

Joan shrugged. "Dunno about that. Just, I've already glitched once, and then I had sex with you and I might've glitched again. I'd like to get it looked at sooner rather than later, and since the second glitch may have had something to do with you I'd like it if you all were there, too."

Erin and Susan both nodded. "No problem. Meet you at the teleport pad?"

"Our birthdays are in the same four-week period, we have all of our classes together, instead of just one or two, silly," Joan said with a chuckle. "And anyway her office is like four blocks away, no need for the teleport."

"Yes but we're slow and tired and lazy," Michael said, Erin having yielded control of his body back to him. "Our parents aren't athletes like yours."

Joan stuck her tongue out at him. "Fine, we can teleport, I'm the one asking the favour after all."

Michael and Susan both smirked. "We'll walk, it's fine, we were just teasing," Susan said. Joan gave them a very unimpressed look.

A warning bell rang around the school and all four bodies headed in, joining the stream of students also headed in. Some things didn't change.

The classes themselves weren't of interest to you, so you busied yourself with other matters, such as roughly facefucking Isabel, until it was time for your patients to leave their campus. Shifting your projection to the office you created only when you needed it, you made a second body for yourself and used it to examine your main one.

Hair in sexy bun? Check. Tasteful heels? Check. Panties that reduced your bulge from **** to merely massive? Check. Complete lack of bra? Check. Lab coat that couldn't even close one button and was only just barely stuck on your erect nipples? Check.

You had the 'Ms. Mills' look down perfectly, for those few who saw it.

Just in time for the knock on your office door. Isabel, whom you **** to be your receptionist in this guise, greeted them and showed them in.

"Joan," you said, tentacles lifting in greeting. "It's good to see you again," you went on as all four of her bodies piled in. "Any particular reason you've brought a system with you?"

Tony, Victoria, Michael and Susan all entered. Of course, since you'd known in advance that they'd all be coming, you already had created enough seating for all of you.

"Well," Joan began, knowing you knew but having to keep up the masquerade as Susan closed the door behind her, "it was a day or two ago, we all had sex together, and when I did my regular projection stability check it showed something a bit funny."

You extended a more sophisticated analysis device toward her. "Could you check again, please? Just to make sure it wasn't a false positive or anything like that."

Joan obliged and you made sure that the device showed exactly what you wanted it to show. You sent the results to the overhead screen. "It does appear that there's a tangle in your genecode. I've seen this pattern before, more or less; it can in fact result when someone who glitched has sex, but it's really rare, and of course I don't know of anyone with your specific glitch, Joan."

"Well, I hope it doesn't harm any of my family; we had an orgy last night and I fucked pretty much all of them." You could tell that it wasn't exactly easy for Tony to hear that; all eight of their hands clenched ever so slightly, but they had agreed that Joan could engage in that orgy as much as she wanted, so long as she was exclusive once they were actually engaged.

"It... shouldn't," you said, hedging. "This is the sort of tangle that doesn't ordinarily propagate after the initial instance, so they should all be safe."

"After the first instance?" Victoria asked. "But if it happened after she had sex with us, wouldn't that mean that there's a risk that our genecodes are tangled as well?"

"It's a risk," you agreed. "Would you like me to check?"

All four of them swiftly agreed and you threw up the genecode scans onto the screen as soon as they were done.

They were unmistakably tangled as well.

"So, what can be done about this, Ms. Mills?" Tony asked.

"Well, as a rule, there's two possibilities. First is that each of you has your genecode tangled with someone else's; in all likelihood, since it happened after you all had sex together, with each other. I have a scanner that can detect that, and if that's the case I can explain the potential issues and we can go over the potential solutions. Second is the much worse type, where, frankly, I'm obligated to do anything I damn well need to in order to fix it, because that's when your genecode has been tangled with the running code, and so you end up threatening the stability of the entire simulation. I hope it's not that; if that gets bad enough, and the sim starts running some critical function on your mind-chip, it's the only case where involuntary termination is permitted, because it means it's either you or the entire sim. Including you."

"Well, how about we check for the first option, then?" Joan suggested. "As you said, it's the most likely, since we did have a wild fuckfest the other day." Tony was a bit embarrassed by her words but Victoria, Michael and Susan all had wide grins. Perhaps not coincidentally, Tony was the only one who didn't have an absurdly gorgeous physical form.

You looked at Tony. "Which of you wants to scan alongside her?" you asked as your tentacles reached behind you to pull the more detailed scanner out.

"I'll do it," Tony said, placing his hand on the thin glass pane. Joan placed her hand on the other side, matching his as much as possible.

"OK, let's see what we've got," you said, replacing the individual genecodes with the analysis you wanted.

"I've never seen this before and even I can tell that that looks bad," Victoria said.

"It's not great," you allowed, "but it's far from the worst that could have been the case. It's a personal entanglement, but, relevantly, it's a personal entanglement mostly at the pattern level, not the projection or the runtime level."

"Isn't that worse?" Joan asked. "If our mind-patterns are entangled, then that means that our personalities will slowly start bleeding into each other. How will that even work given that Tony is a system?"

"It's not as bad as you might think. Pattern-level entanglements aren't even possible unless there's a substantial degree of emotional compatibility between the two, and a tangle like this means that it must be really high. In a sense, you've just found out how good a match you are for each other."

"So what can be done to fix it?" Michael asked.

"Well, I wish I could say that treatments were further along. There was just so much we didn't know at the upload and we've had to do emergency research ever since. We've come up with ways of forestalling the personality bleed, but it might be trickier in your case since there's a bit of tangling at the projection level, as well." You tapped a spot on the projection.

"If you like, I'll give you a referral to a specialist who has the necessary access and training to try to do something about this. I could also prescribe a course of emotional stabilisers to make sure that you don't influence each other any further."

"Is there another option?" Joan asked. "I'd rather not be linked to Tony like this if it means being on **** for the rest of our lives, or if it means waiting goodness knows how long before the programming techniques are developed to deal with this issue."

"Well, there is, and it's one that I can do right here, right now, but it's really rare and requires me to do an invasive mind-scan before I can proceed. All your data will be strictly confidential, of course, but I can't even talk about it with you unless I know you have an extremely high degree of compatibility, which means a detailed mind-code analysis."

Eight heads turned to look at each other. "We'll do it," Susan said.

A moment later, Joan added, "So will I." You knew she'd already made up her mind, knowing the scan was a farce anyway, and was simply waiting for her lover to make their choice.

"This won't take long, but it will be a bit uncomfortable," you said, pulling out a fingertip pricker, the sort of thing diabetics used before the upload to get a drop of blood to check their blood sugar level. "It'll do the analysis almost immediately, but to get proper results you will have to enable pain."

Joan and Susan looked at each other, then held out a hand. You placed the device on Joan's middle finger first, and she gasped at the sharp sensation. You withdrew the tiny needle, now glistening with red, and placed it tip-down in a slot on yet another device. Susan gave a yelp at her experience of pain, her first since making a body for herself after almost twenty spent as Tony's headmate, maturing alongside him but still not having had that sort of experience since Tony had never enabled pain. The second needle went in place next to the first, and the abstracted results showed up on the screen.

"Well, according to the analysis, I think you're eligible for the third option."

"What is it, Ms. Mills?" Michael asked.

"It's obviously not known much of, and it's a procedure only a qualified gene tech can do, but basically it's a wedding."

That got them stirred up a bit.

"Not an ordinary wedding; those of us who know about this call it a 'merge marriage'. There's two forms. One is where one of the partners decides that she wants to give up her autonomy entirely to her partner. This is more common than you might think," you added, since you knew neither Joan nor Tony had any interest in doing that sort of thing. "The other is a shared merge, where the two are entirely equal. In the first type, we copy the mind-code of the person who wishes to be subordinate onto the mind-chip of her partner. In the second type, we physically fuse your mind-chips together, and that requires a level of access that not many have, since it means getting the maint drones to move chips around. Thankfully for you, I've got the necessary qualification."

"So, what, this would be like Joan joining our system?" Victoria asked.

"Or you all joining Joan's, depending on your perspective!" you said, chuckling. You made sure to block off certain bits of Joan's memories from being accessed by Tony after the merge. "After all, when two singlets merge like this, it effectively creates a new system. On occasion new headmates even emerge from that and they end up in an inadvertent plural marriage."

"Well," Joan said, "Tony, Victoria, Michael, Susan, Erin, Jasper, Charlene, Clint, Daisy, and everyone else whom I haven't yet met, will you marry me?"

"This is a bit fast, isn't it?" Tony said. "But yes, yes I will." The words were echoed by the four bodies, "I will," "I will," "I will," as everyone in the system rotated through its relative handful of bodies.

"And do you both consent to merging to become a single being?" Joan and Tony simply nodded, each looking lovingly at the other through all their bodies.

"Then please place your hands on the real-time analyser," you requested. "This is not a very common procedure so I want to be sure that it goes off without a hitch."

The two had no hesitation about doing that, and even though you could have done it instantaneously, you deliberately let it go slow so that everyone could see as the pattern-level entanglement smoothed out and became one pattern, indicating that on some level Joan and Tony were now the same being.

"Why's there still a projection entanglement?" Susan asked.

"Hunh," you said, feigning ignorance. "Looks like it might have something to do with the glitch that gave Joan multiple bodies even though she wasn't plural."

"Tell Erin it's OK to come out now," Joan said. "If it's just projection, we can put in a reversion request if anything really goes wrong, and hopefully instead, since we're here, Ms. Mills will be able to diagnose what's happened and suggest further treatment options."

Victoria nodded in what you knew was a distinctly Erin-like way, and walked over to the office terminal. You and Joan looked away to respect their privacy while the other four gave soft input into what Erin was using Victoria's hands to design. It didn't take long until they submitted it for approval, and there was no need for you to expedite their request, of course.

A centaur popped into existence in one corner of the office, and another body for Joan suddenly appeared in another corner.

Erin looked around, completely naked, her breasts huge, her front and rear pussies dripping. "Hey, Joan, wanna see why centaurs without dicks are better than..." She trailed off as Michael saw Joan's fifth body, and that drew all their attention.

"I think," you said, looking at the other new arrival, "that I know what's going on." You stepped up to the terminal and entered what you already knew to be the case for comparison against the examined genecodes. It was, of course, a perfect match.

"The pattern entanglement is resolved now that you're all on the same mind-chip," you told them. "But projection runs separately for each mental process, particularly relevant for systems, of course, which means that such a fusion won't necessarily resolve a projection-level error. Thankfully, this one seems to be reasonably harmless: it looks like you'll get an extra Joan body every time one of your other headmates emerges with their own body."

You already knew how they'd react to that: "Oh, we cannot wait for you to fuck all of us at once," Tony, Victoria, Michael, Susan and Erin said in unison.

From the sectioned-off portion of her mind-chip, where her special knowledge of you was running on a semi-separate process, Joan sent you a message via private communication: 'You're the best. Except at being my real dad.'

Then you had to step back as a ten-body orgy broke out in your office.