“How do you think he and Otter are going to pick a woman?” Corey asks, eyeing the college boys again with a weird look in his eyes. I swear he’s about to display his plumage and dance like a peacock ready to mate. I’m not jealous about that. At all. Not even a little bit.

“Probably through some long, overly convoluted process that will have no bearing on the final result.” And knowing my brother, it might be a long time before that ever happens, so I have time to get it straight in my head. Because it’s all about me, apparently. I really need to get my priorities straight.

“I’m pretty sure there are agencies out there that have women ready to be inseminated. You sign up and then review each woman before deciding on one to get pregnant. It’s all very clinical.”

I make a face. “So it’s like a baby-making farm? That’s inhumane!” In my head, I see a row of women hooked up to some kind of machine inserted into their wombs attached to a delivery device ready to receive my brother’s deposits.

Corey sounds amused when he says, “You know, for how smart you are, you can be pretty dumb sometimes.”

I ignore him because I’ve already gotten going. “This is how it starts, you know. Baby-making farms. Pretty soon, babies will be genetically bred to specifications, and we’ll all lose our humanity in the process. The machines will rise and the world will be thrown into chaos until a ragtag band of mercenaries rise up and fight back.” I pause, considering. “I may have seen too many sci-fi movies with Otter.”

“Undoubtedly.”

But now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t stop. “And why do the women in this baby-making farm do it? They get paid, I’m sure, but why would they want to get pregnant over and over again? It’s got to be, like, an addiction, right? Like to drugs. Or like that one guy on that TV show, where he was addicted to licking his cat’s fur.”

Corey rolls his eyes. “Obviously, it has nothing to do with the joy of giving others a family.”

“No one’s that altruistic,” I say with a scowl. “There is something more sinister behind this. I think Bear and Otter should hold off until I can get to the bottom of it.”

“And they do it because they’re addicted like the cat-fur licker?”

“Exactly.”

“So just so I can make sure I have this right, if Bear and Otter try to have kids, it will lead to the baby-making farm machines rising up and take over the world?”

“That’s a broad generalization, but you have the gist of it.”

“Gee, lucky me. And when they do have the kids, they will be some kind of white-haired, blue-eyed spawn of Satan.”

“With a lust for blood and flesh that will never cease.”

“And this has nothing to do with your personal feelings at all.” Whether he is asking or telling me, I don’t know.