Gfoxx2

I'm back, baybay! Took a couple weeks off to deal with life and stuff. Got roped into a new project at work, went to a convention, watched Wrestlemania. Good times were had by all.

“I don’t know about this plan of yours, Jason.”

After school, I headed immediately to the meetup spot Ken sent me over text. It’s much closer to his school than ours, so it unfortunately required me to navigate the unfamiliar winding streets of the city. Luckily for me, thanks to the power of modern technology, I could be simply guided there by my smartphone. Despite the mild chill of the early evening air, I followed his lead as he led me into a local ice cream shop, or “Shoppe” as it was spelled on the sign out front. The place had a 50’s diner aesthetic, which I personally considered kinda tacky, but the fact that the clientele were almost entirely my age suggested that this place was actually a fairly popular hangout spot, probably out of irony more than anything. After my arrival, I had spent the better part of half an hour filling him in on all the details of my troubles since our hangout on Monday. From the intrusion of Mira into my personal affairs, to the bundles of letters currently polluting my backpack, he listened to me complain and explain without complaint.

Until now.

“Like, it could seriously backfire,” he continues as he enjoys a partially melted spoonful of his hot fudge sundae. Even from his seat, I can see his long tail wagging away behind him, obviously signaling he was enjoying the sugary treat. This kid is so goddamn adorable.

“The best way I could see it working is if you fake having a girlfriend in another state, but even then that’s not going to hold up to any real scrutiny. And… well, we’re under a lot of scrutiny, especially at school.” With a downcast sigh, he stares into the bottom of the glass boat he's eating out of like a middle aged divorcee looking down a whiskey glass.

I slump into my bright red faux leather seat and take a dejected pull from my own birthday cake milkshake, taking a moment to consider the blindingly sugary flavors, a welcome respite from the doom and gloom of the conversation. “Well how about finding an accomplice then?” I venture, not really feeling it myself, but throwing the idea out there anyway.

“Ehh, that could work,” he admits to my surprise, gesturing lazily with his spoon. “It’s still liable to blow up in your face if the girl decides to use your fake relationship as leverage against you. I mean, she could blackmail you into dating for real or something, and then where will you be?” He gives a small shudder, the motion making his floppy ears flap about on the side of his head. “But, assuming you find a girl who you can actually trust, it’s a start.”

I nod along. “Yeah, that the real problem, right? Being new here, I haven't exactly had much time for... like, networking." I return to my shake, but a thought strikes me suddenly. "Wait, do you happen to know any girls you’d trust?”

He thinks for a moment, cocking his head to the side. “Nnnnnnno, not really. The only girls I really trust are my sisters, but…”

“But?” I press.

“Well, they’re all either in college or working full time,” he says with a shrug. “Not really relationship material, even if we put the age gap aside. Let’s see…” He thinks for a moment before starting to tick off his fingers. “Ariah is spending a gap year in Italy, Savannah’s going to college in Washington, Gwen is working on a crab boat in Alaska, Monica’s on an archeological survey in Turkey, Candice joined the Marines, Cordelia married her boyfriend and moved to Texas, Tilly’s in New York and just won’t shut up about it, Jenna’s working for Disney, and Brenda’s designing roller coasters. Riley’s still local at least, and she's only maybe a year older than you, but she's doing her new temp gig right now.” He puts down his fingers and inhales another spoonful of ice cream, apparently oblivious to my dumbfounded expression.

There’s a pregnant pause in the conversation as I digest this information.

“You have ten sisters?” I ask, trying (and failing) to keep my surprise out of my voice. I understood on an intellectual level that that’s how things had to have worked in this world; During my wiki dive I’d seen the birth rate charts, and I was vaguely aware of the prevalence of polyamory in this world. But hearing it come out of Ken’s mouth is another thing altogether, and just emphasizes the surreality of my new life.

“Yeah,” he says with a dismissive wave of his spoon. “Dad wanted to keep trying until they had a boy. And well, he got one,” he adds with a slump. “Lucky me, huh?”

“And your mom was okay with that?”

He answers me with another awkward shrug. “Well yeah, obviously my birth mom was, since I’m alive and all. I mean, I’ve never heard my other moms and Dad fight about it or anything. It probably helps that I was born after they passed the MPR Act, so it’s not like money would be an issue.”

“Right, of course,” I concur, quickly typing ‘MPR Act’ into a search engine on my phone while trying to look nonchalant.

“So anyway, I don’t think I’ll be any help here,” he admits. “I really wish I could do something for you.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” I reply to assuage his concern, “I’ll figure something out. Hey, I can always pack my bags and hitchhike down to Florida or something. Worst case scenario, I'll just walk into the ocean.”

He laughs at that, the somewhat dour humor breaking the pall that's been cast over the conversation. “If I was old enough to get a learner’s permit, I’d drive you off the pier myself.”

I sigh as I lean back from my laptop. It’s getting late, and the day got away from me pretty quickly once I got home. Research on the MPR Act was quick and easy thanks to the power of the internet. From what I can gather based on a small amount of googling (a term I'll have to remember to stop using, as apparently Google doesn't even exist in this world), it was a law passed in the mid aughts that provided a government subsidy for large families. Which I suppose made some amount of sense, seeing as ever since the Brinkley Treatment got rolled out there had been a significant drop in population. What surprises me more is the fact that the same act also redefined marriage. Where once the law saw it as a partnership between two individuals, now it was defined as an agreement between any number of individuals, thereby legally allowing family units of theoretically ludicrous sizes. Apparently it’s not uncommon nowadays for a family of four or more parents with a dozen kids between them to own a single 4,000 square foot home.

The idea boggles the mind. Sure, the cultural implications are wild, but honestly I’m just floored that there are people under the age of fifty able to afford a house at all, let alone one that size.

But what with all the existential implications going on here, that leads me to a second horrible realization. If families that size weren’t uncommon… What did that mean for my family? I mean, I'd talked to my mom the other day, but was she only one of three or more moms I had now? The thought sits in the pit of my stomach like a stone.

For the first time, I try in earnest to log onto a social media account that the Jason from this world used. Luckily the lazy bastard was more like me than I expected, as he has all of his passwords saved to autofill. So at the very least I won’t have to go through the whole process of resetting all of them. A rare win for Jason Prime.

At this point, I’ve seen enough online to realize that while Facebook never existed in the new timeline, there was at least an equivalent that should have info on all of my family. Bizarro Harem World Facebook is apparently called Keepsake, and as soon as I’m logged in my new homepage greets me. Wait, is it actually called a homepage? Every social media has a different branded term for the homepage, right? Is it a dashboard? Timeline? Well, regardless of what it’s called, it’s filled with unfamiliar posts all the same. I can only hope that Bizarro Jason was as adverse to using social media as I’ve been, or it’s gonna raise some questions when I seem to be ghosting everybody all of a sudden. Not that I refuse to use it on principle or anything. I mean, I message my friends, we’ve got group chats, a Discord server, all that stuff. But I don’t think I’ve ever just sat there and scrolled a timeline, and I find short form video stuff like Tik-Tok too annoying to be worth my time.

God, what a pretentious douche I am. As much as I don't like the idea, maybe a career in art would suit me.

Anyway, the most recent post Bizarro Jason (god that’s a mouthful, but fuck if I’m gonna call him BJ for short) made goes back three months to my brother’s birthday, and it’s nothing beyond a simple platitude wishing him fun at his party.

Aw damn, did Bizarro Jason not show up for Victor’s party? If so, dick move, Bizarro Jason. Vic and me have always been pretty close, at least as much as two brothers four years apart in age can be. Sure, he could be a little annoying when he tried to tag along with me and my friends, but I love the little guy. If Bizarro Jason was being a bad brother to him, I’ll travel across the boundaries of space and time to kick his ass myself… Assuming such a thing was even possible, of course.

Vic’s page itself looks more or less like what I’d expect, though there’s something a little off about it. Where once he had a photo of himself as his profile picture, now it’s been replaced with some anime boy I’ve never seen before. I knew he watched a bit of anime, but still, that was new. And while he’s never exactly been a social butterfly or anything, scrolling for a moment reveals an absolute dearth of activity and only the occasional post from one of his friends. The most recent one with a photo attached, unsurprisingly, is from his birthday party, hanging out with a couple kids his age. He just turned fourteen earlier this year, and that meant he’d be entering high school in about a week or so based on the schedule they use back home. Looking at his smiling face, I’m enormously relieved to find that he looks exactly the same as I remember him, including a shoulder length mop of shaggy black hair that he finally got cut only a couple weeks ago.

With a relieved sigh, I click back to my homepage, and scroll down until I see Alex’s name. My even younger brother wasn’t hard to find, and with little worry in my mind, I click over to his page... But sadly, that’s where my luck seems to run out.

Because instead of a photo of the little gremlin I'm expecting, the person in his profile picture is someone I've never seen before in my life. A young girl with jet black hair stares back at me from the page.

And yet, as I look just a little closer, I realize something that makes the pit of my stomach fall through the floor.

This stranger... bears an uncanny familial resemblance with my little brother.