The Same But Different

"I never said that," I said hastily. "I just don't think it'd be appro-"

"Screw what's appropriate!" she snarled more forcefully than I'd ever heard her say anything. "You created me. You didn't just father me, you created me. And you probably broke several laws to do it. As far as I'm concerned, you're not just my father, you're my Go-"

Now it was me holding up a finger of warning. "Don't you dare say it!" I cut in and stood up. "I'm not a religious man and never have been, but I have no illusions about godhood in any of this. That was never my intention. I was just a lovesick young man who saw an opportunity to try and reclaim what he'd lost and..." I let that trail off, knowing that the next words needed to be chosen carefully.

But she chose them for me. "...and, instead, you got me," she said hollowly. The way she said it, you'd think that I'd kicked her in the gut.

"That isn't what I was going to say," I said imploringly and tried to reach out for her.

She recoiled from me and took a step back. "As much as I love you," she said quietly and she turned to leave, "I don't think I want to be around you right now. Not after being rejected and certainly not after being told that I'm... an inferior product by the man who made me." Before she closed the door behind her, she glared at me. "For what it's worth: I don't think I'm a mistake. I am exactly what you made me to be."

With that, she left me alone in my office. I stood there for several long seconds, ran my hand through my slightly-graying hair and muttered one word, which seemed to sum up the situation nicely.

"...fuck."

Chapter 04

I didn't see her for the rest of the night. I had to fend for myself when it came to dinner. I can only assume that she had somehow stealthily done the same; she made very certain that our paths did not cross. And, to be honest, I was too much of a coward to go and try knocking on her door in an attempt to patch things up. God, she was so much like her mother! On the few occasions when I upset her mother, I'd had to learn the hard way to give her plenty of room. Our daughter was no different.

All through the night I gave serious thought to her- what was it? An offer? A proposal? An idea? A request? A bit of all those things and perhaps more, I gathered. Her whole life had been constructed around a certain context and now that context had shifted for her. Now she knew who and what she really was, what she was meant to be. If Pinocchio had never known that real boys existed, would he have still wanted to be one? Would the idea have occurred to him? Now that Helena knew her true origins, how could she unknow it? She couldn't.

And that was the monstrous thing in all of this, in me. I had asked her to step backwards, to go back to being ignorant of the truth. And why? Because of fear. Society. Self-doubt. Shame. All of that. I was being a coward and she had called me out on it. Maybe not in name, but certainly in meaning.

I was at war within myself. Part of me, the part that fell in love with the original Helena, wanted her with a yearning I hadn't felt in years. But another part of me, one that had grown into being as she grew up under my care, railed against that desire. I couldn't reconcile those two parts of myself. I knew that, eventually, one would win out over the other, but I had no idea which one. Both had their justifications and rationalizations. And, when I finally did make my choice, I'd have to own it completely because there would be no going back, either way. I'd have to take responsibility for my actions and choices, come what may.

I got up out of bed and started my morning routine to clear out the cobwebs in my head. With those few precious moments to focus on nothing more but hygiene gave my mind a chance to relax, to breathe. By the time I was drying off my face after shaving, I started to realize that this wasn't just my decision, that the choice wasn't entirely my own.

Helena had clearly already made her own choice. She knew what she wanted and how she wanted to move ahead in her life. She was unambiguous about that, really. She wanted to pick up where her mother had left off.

I, however, was withholding my own choice and decision. I was biding my time, hoping that the decision would be made for me. Maybe if I held my tongue long enough, it would be a moot point. Maybe, over time, her ardor would abate and we would be able to fall back into our previous patterns. But that was the coward's way, wasn't it? Even refusing to make a choice was making a choice. And that wasn't fair to anyone, least of all her.

At the end of it all, I had to ask myself only one question: do I love her? Of course, the answer was a resounding yes. I loved her with all my heart. How and why I loved her was secondary to the fact that I did. So why focus on myself? Why not focus on her, her needs and desires?

Helena was a grown woman now. She was capable of making her own way in life. She was every bit as brilliant as her mother and educated better than most people her age. She knew the consequences of her choices better than anyone.

As I laid out my "at home" clothes (jeans and t-shirt), I heard a soft knock at my bedroom door. "Come in," I said.

When the door opened, Helena stepped through it wearing nothing. Not a stitch of clothing. Naked as the day she was decanted, but infinitely prettier. Her skin was pale and luminous, her breasts soft yet firm and proud, her mons clean-shaven and even showing a hint of dew in the morning light that streamed in through my bedroom windows. I just stared at her, my mouth agape.

She cocked her hip, framed in the doorway, and rested her hand on it while tilting her head slightly. "So I've been doing some thinking," she started. "Whether you want to admit yet or not, I am your wife in every way but one. You're in a tailspin, I get that. You're helpless to make a decision. So I'm forcing your hand, Dad. Take it in. Get a good, long look. Because in two minutes I will either walk out this door and you'll never see me like this again or you'll invite me into your bed as the woman I was always meant to be."

"It's not that easy," I said. "Contrary to popular opinion, a guy can't just suddenly be in the mood for sex, Helena. I certainly can't."

Helena smirked. "Four minutes, then," she said. "For extenuating circumstances."

I put my palm to my face. "I doesn't work that way, honey. You... you've had time to figure out what you want. I'm still not sure." I uncovered my eyes and gestured to her. "And this... this isn't helping."

Helena let out a huff of air. "Well, what would help?" she asked pointedly. She took a few steps toward me and I couldn't help but notice her nudity even more, if that was possible. I also couldn't help but notice my own near-nudity, as my clothes were still laid on beside me and I was dressed only in my boxer briefs. Every move of her supple, well-toned muscles was like a song to my eyes, one that I was almost helpless to ignore. She stopped just a few feet away from me and I looked up to meet her eyes. Her pupils were dilated with obvious intent, but I could see a mix of concern and frustration in them, too.

My daughter raised one, delicate hand to her hair and slowly let it caress her soft skin downward, past her neck, to the outside of her right breast, down her flat tummy and stopping at her wet sex. I watched her finger seductively slide between her folds, making it slightly wet with her juices. Then she brought the finger to her mouth and gently licked it while keeping her eyes locked onto mine.

"Hmm," she murmured. She cocked an eyebrow at me. "Want a taste? Will that help you to make up your mind, Dad?"

I swallowed hard and felt my throat bob with the effort. With her standing so close, I could smell her scent and I couldn't deny that it was more than a little intoxicating. "I'm sure it'd help me to make the decision you want me to make," I replied, "but do you honestly think that would be playing fair, to manipulate me like that?" I wasn't about to tell her that it was taking every bit of my self-control to not just grab her by the waist and succumb to the desires she clearly wanted me to feel.

"I don't want to manipulate you," she answered softly. "But I... feel her inside me, Dad. I know what she would want and I know that what she wants is what you want. It's always been that way, hasn't it? Before she died? Before you made me?" Without taking the time to repeat her actions, she wet her finger again and held it out to me as an offering. "What's holding you back?" she asked. "What's stopping you?"

Her scent was even stronger now, so close to my nose. I involuntarily inhaled. Memory is a weird thing, sometimes. We each remember things from our distant past due to a variety of triggers- sounds, sights, sensations... and, yes, scents. I could instantly recall, over twenty years earlier, the source of that fragrance with perfect clarity. I remember the first time my fiancé and I had made love and how her natural essence was like ambrosia to me, sweet and strong and musky. My daughter's was, like every other part of her, identical.

It took a force of will, but I reached my hand up to hers, gently grasped it, and slowly pulled her to sit beside me, my eyes locked on hers. "Let's..." I paused for a flash of a second and carefully chose my words. "Let's start off small and see if we can build up from there," I said.

Helena took a seat next to me on the bed, half-turned to face me, and opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself. I said nothing, giving her time to respond. A flurry of different emotions crossed her features, but they all finally dissipated into something like a mix of resignation and patience. "What do you have in mind?" she asked.

I let go of her hand, supremely aware of her nakedness beside me, and thought it over. What would be a suitable starting point for this kind of thing? I wondered at the absurdity of that question, knowing that behind it lay the fact that I was participating in my own seduction. I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out with a shrug. "When Hele- your mother and I started our... relationship, it wasn't a rocket-ride," I said, staring forward into the middle space. "It was a process by degrees and took time. Accidental brushes of hands and arms, that's normal in a lab environment and didn't spark anything."

"So what did?"

Again I shrugged as I remembered the beginnings of my courtship with her mother. "A smile," I said as I turned to look at Helena. "We'd made a small bit of progress in our work one night, nothing extraordinary, but it was something. And, as we looked over the results and data sheets, we both looked up at each other at the same time and... smiled. And we just stared at each other for that brief moment. Suddenly, our smiles disappeared and we were just staring at each other. Then, out of nowhere, she laughed. Not like a mean-spirited laugh or anything like that. It was a laugh of surprise, I think. But she laughed inches away from my face, still looking me straight in the eye. Then she brought her hand up to her mouth to cover it up, still looking at me. I didn't say anything while we just kept staring at each other. And you know what she said, then?"

Helena blinked at me a couple of times. "I think I can guess."

I smirked at her. "Take your best shot."

It was like she'd been possessed by her mother's consciousness. She beamed a smile at me, let it linger for a second. The smile fell into a blank, like she was realizing some epiphany for the first time, burst out with a short laugh of surprise, covered her mouth with her hand (the same one that still had some of her pussy juice on it), let it drop away from her, and said, "Oh... wow."

It was an exact reenactment of that moment, a moment that had occurred before she had even been born, but she nailed it in every way possible. And, for that brief blip in time, I was back there, at the very beginning of when I fell in love for the first time in my life. This time, however, I broke the script. I grabbed Helena by each side of her face, pulled her to me and kissed her. Hard.

If my daughter was surprised by the move, she got over it so fast that I never noticed. She threw herself into the kiss with gusto. Tongues were definitely involved and the kiss lasted a good deal longer than was appropriate. It was simultaneously the kiss of two lovers who hadn't seen in each other in a very, very long time and the kiss of two lovers meeting for the first time. For her it was new; for me it was a cherished memory made real.

Just as the kiss ended, I felt her shiver. I don't remember when my hands had moved to embrace her, but they had and I held her closely to me, skin to skin, the body heat from one like a feedback loop to the other, both of us breathing heavily. We each pulled back just enough to look at each other properly. There were tears in her eyes, but her eyes told a story of discovery, recognition, amazement, joy, surprise and lust, all rolled up into one. What was visible in my own eyes, I couldn't tell you, but it must have made a massive impact on her because she pulled back even further and clasped both hands over her mouth.

"I- I'm so sorry!" she said, her voice muffled by her hands. "I'm... that wasn't fair." She grabbed my face strongly, kissed me chastely on the lips and stood up quickly, her face flushed with... shame? Embarrassment? Fear? I couldn't make it out. "Take all the time you need. I'm... so, so sorry I did that to you!"

Then she retreated out of my room in a flash, like I'd just scolded her. I sat there on my bed, wondering just what the hell had happened. After a moment, I realized that I was now sporting an erection the likes of which I hadn't experienced in a good, long while. I looked down at my groin in contempt, the massive bulge in my boxers impossible to miss, and muttered, "You're of absolutely no fucking help sometimes, you know that?"

Just then my phone beeped. I closed my eyes tightly in frustration and growled low in my throat. A phone call, after I'd expressly made it crystal clear that I was to receive none, couldn't be good news. I quickly yanked on my t-shirt and pants, stomped over to my bedside table, flipped my phone onto its built-in stand and gestured for it to go to full holographic video mode. Alice's thin-lipped face filled the "screen."

"So who will be the beneficiary of your skills starting next week?" I asked coldly.

Alice didn't miss a beat. "I talked with the White House. No vacancies just yet, but they're looking into it. In the meantime, I have feelers out at Random House."

I cocked a curious eyebrow. "Book publishing?" I asked skeptically. "People still read books?"

She shrugged. "It's a private passion of mine," she said.

I waved my hand as if to brush the exchange aside. "Since you're calling me, I'm guessing that it's important. So out with it, whatever it is."

Alice nodded curtly. "The line I'm calling from is scrambled."

She said nothing more. I looked at her with a tiny bit of surprise, but said nothing as well while I gestured for my phone to engage its encryption. A second later, both sides of the conversation were now impossibly encrypted, so deeply encrypted, in fact, that it would take millions of years for anyone to unscramble what was said. "That bad?" I finally asked.

"There's been an... unsettling development in the situation on the West coast, Bel." She paused. When I didn't say anything, she continued. "We know why Blevins went nuts, at least in part. He was compromised by... we don't know who yet. Somebody. But his parents have been missing for the last two days, twelve hours before the incident. We sent a company security team, led by Security Director Mohad, to their place and it looks like they were abducted- half-eaten breakfast, TV on, that kind of thing."

I inhaled deeply through my nostrils. "Jesus," I breathed. I began pacing back and forth beside my bed. "But... why?" I asked. "Why would someone kidnap the man's parents, maybe threaten to kill them, and demand that he go on a shooting spree at the office like that? That's a little extreme, isn't it? Doesn't make sense. Why not ask for money? Access to proprietary tech? I could understand those, but... hostage-taking? Mass murder?"

"I have security looking into any other possible breaches like this in our other branches," she said. "So far, no one else seems to be compromised."

"Yet," I said with a fixed gaze at her.

She nodded solemnly. "Yet."

I studied her carefully. "There's more, isn't there?" I asked.

She grimaced slightly and gave a slight nod. "The board wants to keep this quiet," she told me.

I shook my head vehemently. "Bullshit," I said. "Do the feds know yet?"

"Not yet, no. At least, we don't think so."

"Tell them," I ordered. "And only them. I understand why the board wants to keep it quiet. They're worried about more media backlash. It'll come out in the wash anyway, so their fears, while valid, are going to only paint us into a corner. Forward everything you've got to the feds as soon as we're done talking. My authority."

"The board won't like that," she warned.

"Fuck the board!" I growled. "I won't have my company impeding a federal investigation. To date, we've done everything above board and I won't stop that now. We have government contracts, for crying out loud. The last thing we want to do is piss them off. Tell Mohad to work with them, not in spite of them. Got it?"

"Yes, Bel." Alice agreed.

I bristled at that. "And why is it Bel, all of the sudden?"

She shrugged. "Well, I figure since this is probably my last official report to you, I could get away with the small liberty. I do hope you'll think fondly of me, Bel. I'll miss working for you."

I rolled my eyes at my secretary. "Oh, for fuck's sake. Will you stop with that, already? You know as well as I do that it was an empty threat. Now get back to work, woman, or maybe I really will shit-can you."

She smiled briefly at me and nodded. "Very well, boss. If anything major develops, should I call you again?"

"No." I paused. "Yes. Dammit... look, Alice, I've got something pressing going on here at my home, which is taking up a good bit of my attention. I don't want the distractions caused by this. But, dammit, I'm the CEO. I have a responsibility. If it's really important, call me. Otherwise, handle it yourself with my full backing and send me reports. I trust you."

"I hope it's not misplaced, sir," Alice replied. "Whatever's going on out there, sir, I hope you're able to resolve it."

"Thanks," I said and then closed the line. The holographic screen winked out of existence and the phone went into its dormant mode.

Yes, I trust Alice. I trust her implicitly to protect both myself and the company. Lord knows she has several times in the past. This new development in the West Coast debacle was a wrinkle that I hadn't anticipated, but knew that it portended of something pretty big. Part of me wanted to get back to the thick of things, get out in front of whatever it was and take charge like a good business leader. But doing that would be to abandon my daughter, who is clearly going through a crisis of her own. Devotion to my daughter, of course, won out over my loyalty to the company I'd built, but if I am to be completely honest, it was a tight thing to call at first. It took me a few minutes of internal struggle to decide.

The thing that kept me home, though, is the realization that I was embroiled in Helena's emotional crisis, too. I had more to lose at home than I did at the company.