Alone in Space

Author's Note:

This is a story of the frustrations presented by new, but also predictable, circumstances, and the means of alleviating, or at least dealing, with them.

It is, however, almost certainly pointless. Therefore, in the immortal words of Mark Twain:

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author."

On the other hand, it contains a naked woman and several metal things, some of them potentially fiendishly complicated, although, to tell the truth, it's not particularly erotic.

* * * * *

Alone in Space

Or: In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Moan

Nobody can hear you scream in space.

Nobody can hear you moan, either.

Or gasp, whimper, or sob.

Or complain, bitch, or whine.

In space, you are more alone than any human being ever had a chance to be, before travel between the stars became a commonplace thing. No hermit, recluse or solo explorer was every more than half the circumference of a planet away from other human beings, no matter how far they tried to run. They could escape detection, avoid a hunt and even request to be left alone, but they were breathing the same air that other human beings were breathing, under the same sky and on the same ball of dust and dirt and rock.

The early days of space travel? Not a chance. If you weren't cooped up so tightly with others that privacy was merely a nostalgic dream, you were unconscious for most of the duration, not truly alone because you weren't awake to appreciate it, not far from others because they were merely an arm's reach away.

No.

It wasn't until spacecraft grew reliable and fast, until commercial pressures meant that solo pilots were requested, did mankind truly know the meaning of "alone". Not until the distances were covered while conscious did human beings get to fully appreciate what those distances really were. Not until the nearest warm, living and breathing bodies were parsecs away, not miles, did loneliness really start to bite.

The Wolfhound floated alone in its own little bubble of rarefied space, not even properly connected by physics to any other little bubble of inhabited space, and so far removed from them that it might not even be recognizable humans who picked up a distress call even if Jade felt the desire to send one. She sometimes even wondered why they bothered teaching her the S.O.S. in morse code. If anybody was close enough to rescue her, they wouldn't need an S.O.S. coming over the radio to realise that she needed rescuing.

But there was no need to worry: All she had to worry about was her sanity. All she lacked was company. All she really needed, even in this tin box with its unchanging array of books and old movies and infuriating board games to play against the computer, was a man.

Instead, she had to make do with her imagination. Her imagination, and her toys. To be perfectly accurate, she didn't care about her imagination: It had grown too often jaded. She preferred a good video instead, but the morality that gave mechanical masturbation toys to long-haul travelers forbade actual pornography, so she was stuck with her imagination.

After a month in space, she didn't care any more and didn't need to prompt herself. The mere fact of being awake was enough, in a little world without space to roam or stimuli to keep the mind from melting under its own boredom. So twice a day she headed from her regulated monitoring session in the cockpit, down the only corridor on the ship's inhabited space, past her sleeping quarters (a bunk just high enough to roll out of without risk of hitting the edges, set into the wall above and below storage cupboards) and into the gymnasium.

The gymnasium wouldn't be there at all if the health problems of not exercising in zero gravity hadn't been so photogenic: The space was so badly needed for cargo.

The inside of the ship was full of rounded corners, handholds and straps, through which Jade moved with the effortless speed and dexterity of mind-numbingly endless practice, ricocheting off the walls and snatching last-second at handholds, swinging herself around with shoulder muscles quivering from the strain, moving from the snug cockpit, through the cramped corridor and into the carefully constructed gymnasium with what an outsider might have termed reckless abandon, or about three seconds.

She let herself continue once she entered, turning at the last moment to land hip-and-shoulder against the opposite wall. She rebounded gently, and started to drift back the way she had come. In the meantime, the vague lighting that permeated the ship had increased, detecting her presence in the cabin, as the lighting coming through the door dimmed to the level of an emergency background.

To call this room a "gymnasium" was misleading, but worked. It was really the only suitable name left. This room, with its gently padded, almost featureless off-white walls, served the purposes of exercise. Sleeping was in her bunk, which also cleaned her and emptied her and could cocoon her in the event of an emergency. Reading or watching the endless, pointless, humorless videos stored in the ships' mass-produced memory banks occurred in the cockpit where the pilot could be on hand if needed. Needed for what, Jade was never quite sure. If the ship couldn't handle it automatically, the chances of her being able to do anything in the time available were as remote as the nearest inhabited planet.

So in this room she exercised, strapped into machines that stretched, pulled, pushed, massaged and resisted an almost complete range of human motion, often without the active participation of the person using them. This kept her bones dense in weightlessness, her muscles strong and her joints stable and healthy. In space, this just gave her the energy and the exercise to be bored and restless all the time, but once she made planet-fall, on worlds where the gravity could go up to 1.4G(Earth), it was vital. So no pilot was allowed to let their bones or musculature atrophy. The health insurance claims alone made sure of that.

As Jade floated away from the wall she had collided against, she kicked off her shipboard-shoes, the laces never done up as tightly as regulations demanded, and stripped herself of her uniform, avoiding the graceless tumbling and struggling that had plagued her first days in space, moving quickly and efficiently so that she could be naked before she reached the doorway again.

This gave her little time: The room was not just empty of all equipment, a featureless box, but surprisingly small as well.

She was wearing a snug, elasticized one-piece jump-suit with a zipper up the front. There was no loose fabric that could catch on equipment or get in the way, and being one-piece, the uniform kept itself from riding down, up or anywhere else.

As Jade pulled the material back from her chest and off her shoulders, it revealed a hard, corded physique created by a combination of regulated exercise (besides, what else is there to do except tire yourself out?) and adequate but not generous rations. Her breasts rode high on her chest, firm enough not to float in free-fall, small enough to make her look boyish. Her nipples, by contrast, were surprisingly large, the aureoles covering more than a third of the breast's surface, her nipples fleshy and large already, although still soft. Given a generous diet, a relaxed lifestyle and less testosterone-pumping exercise, the rest of her breasts may have looked like that.

Her arms were wiry, her torso devoid of spare flesh, her belly flat and firm with the faint suggestion of her abdominal muscles even when relaxed. She pulled her arms out of the sleeves of the jumpsuit and pushed it down off her equally well defined hips, sliding over brief panties worn for hygiene, not habit, and on down over hard thighs and tight calves.

The suit floated out and down the corridor, to be snagged and held by the ship's utilitarian cleaning utilities, as Jade gently bumped into the wall near the door. A touch of a button made the door, also padded, close with a faint squeal. The squeal had developed five days into this trip, and was beginning to set her teeth on edge.

Another touch on a button and a synthesized voice started to read out a standard health warning along the lines of "This equipment was not intended to be used in any way contrary to the operating manual and any injury or damage resulting from such use..." The actual script was tortuously long, and although Jade could recite it almost verbatim - pilots were occasionally tested to see if they were paying attention - she had long ago stopped actually paying attention to any of it.

She was too busy waiting for it to finish, because when the voice finished the machinery awoke.

To Jade, the movements of the machines were balletic in their beauty.

As the door through which she had opened closed and the temperature slowly rose from bearable to warm, the far wall opened, splitting along lines barely visible in the ubiquitous ship-board gray padding, splitting into four, two sections pivoting into the room, two sections tilting back into the revealed space behind, making room for a chair to slide out into the room, running on its substantial base along tracks in the floor, each of them just barely revealed by the padding, until it stopped in the dead centre of the room.

Through the opened panels other machines could be seen, machines to stretch or compress or resist her, to vibrate her bones to encourage their growth, or to massage her muscles to encourage their tone, machines gleaming, machines black silver, machines black, machines colored, seen faintly in half-glimpses as the ballet was played out.

Abruptly they came forwards, collections of arms, a bewildering range of sizes, thicknesses and numbers of joints, with a bewildering array of tips, some recognizable, some not, some vaguely familiar but still puzzling.

Two groups came forth, swarming out along their tracks in rows like ants from a nest, one across what habit was programmed to call the floor, one across what must therefore be the ceiling. Jade loved all of them.

The machinery arranged itself, rushing through the air to cluster around the base of the chair, or to attach themselves to a boss that appeared to spring, sliding so stealthily in front of its gaudy companions, from the dead centre of the ceiling, above the chair. The boss shifted, growing legs, each running along a track until, carrying its attached brothers and sisters, it had lowered itself until just above the chair.

As she watched the sculpture grow, reaching down lovingly to match the cluster of arms now rising from the base of the chair, Jade felt herself, finally, grow damp enough to match her frustration. "My toys," she crooned, her voice falling dead into the padded space but raising anticipatory echos off the hard steel and chrome in front of her. Her fingers, not waiting, crept down to her damp cunt, stroking it lovingly, raising a thrill that tingled all the way to her expanding nipples.

With a final click and a confirmatory beep, the equipment was ready. Trying not to rush herself too much, Jade pushed off the wall and floated towards it. The first time she had seen this equipment in its full configuration she had been frightened by the malevolence of it, but now she knew that it was friendly and welcoming.

Now she swam eagerly into its net, giving herself up to the cool touch of its metal embrace.

The chair was the one constant in this room, tilting or swiveling and reshaping itself to be an exercise bench, vibrating massage chair, induced-meditation couch, or bondage seat.

With no induced gravity, just the way Jade liked it, the angle of the chair hardly mattered, but it reclined itself anyway. As Jade drifted backwards into it, her back and buttocks contacted hard, very slightly padded surfaces molded to her body. Her head nestled back into a cradle that folded itself around her naked skull, pressing contacts in the chair onto contacts implanted in her scalp, and wrapping a sensor-filled collar around her neck. A visor slid down over her eyes and settled snugly into place. She had once hoped that some decent pornography would be piped through what was merely a user interface, but now she just kept the visor semi-transparent so that she could see what the machinery was doing to her.

Two tall arms folded down over her shoulders, pinning them securely in place. A wide mesh belt, wrapped itself sinuously around her waist and tightened against her lean, toned abs, the final essential restraint for zero-gee.

Her thighs dropped onto two curved supports that, when they sensed her weight, spread wide, stretching her deliciously to nearly the limit of her flexibility. Her calves settled onto two curved extensions of the thigh supports and her feet dropped onto plates. When her feet made contact, two more webbed belts wrapped themselves around her ankles and held her legs tight.

Her arms also dropped onto supports, but these were flat and under her left hand was a control pad, a rocker switch under each finger and a small joystick under her thumb. Then there was stillness and she licked her lips, her hips squirming with anticipation, her belly tightening under the strap.

She licked her lips again, suddenly undecided about what she would actually do, the goggles painting a picture of her body on her retinas, an outline drawing of herself in the chair, glowing bands denoting bonds, bright spots of light pointing out options. Time and again, she grew damp and weak just looking at the possibilities.

She pressed the most obvious button, and between her thighs rose, on its own arm, a meaty dildo studded with small balls all over its shaft and completely covered in a teflon-coated transparent artificial skin. In the head of the dildo was a realistic eye, and from it oozed its own pre-cum in the form of simple lubricant.

Up between her thighs swung too a closed speculum that guided itself unerringly into place, sliding between the now puffy lips of her cunt and then opening like a flower, spreading her wide for the entry of the dildo before then withdrawing, separating around the shaft and dropping back out of sight.

Jade was never quite sure which felt better; the spreading of her lips in anticipation, or when they closed around the fat head between them.

She definitely knew that neither sensation felt half as good as when the shaft slid smoothly inside her, bottoming out, making her head collapse backwards and her eyelids flutter closed, a long "Oooh..." pushed out of her throat as the dildo pushed inside her.

Her fingers, no longer undecided, stabbed again at the controls. A bifurcated arm descended from the ceiling, fat enough to be hollow. On the end of each of its branching sections was a long cylinder with a spreading, cupped end.

The cups fit one each over her aureoles and sealed, fitting her now long, hard nipples snugly inside the cylinders. With a slight hiss the seal was tested and found good, then vacuum was steadily applied until her nipples were distended. At the same time, a bladder inside the tubes contracted, squeezing like a milking machine.

Her moan managed to bounce off even these padded walls.

As the suction released and then grabbed again, settling down into a steady pulsing, the dildo between her legs withdrew nearly to its limit, then plunged within again.

Clutching the armrests, every muscle of her body shuddering, she flicked a button that caused padded restraints to whip around her wrists and tighten snugly.

The collar around her neck and the plugs in her scalp recorded her arousal via clinical measurement of blood pressure and pulse rate, levels of adrenaline and estrogen and testosterone, and neurotransmitters she didn't even know the names of.

Slowly, obeying her instructions to make it last just a little longer than necessary, the dildo and the pressure pump adjusted themselves to the rhythms of her body.

No matter how many times she sat strapped in this chair - twice a day for months on end - she never got tired of the clinically perfect way it manipulated her arousal and used inhuman stimulation to give her more arousal than any human ever could.

Jade was not a nymphomaniac - she would never have been given this job if she was - but this chair always made her feel like one.

She started to plateau, sweat sheening her skin, and the chair responded by slowing the pace, no less steady but less likely to exhaust her human body. The pumps began to vary their behavior then, pulling and then holding, or pulling and then hesitating, then pulling slowly more, taking her just to the edge of pain but no further.

She arched against her restraints, straining every muscle until it quivered, gasping in delight.

It was a battle, now, between her self-control that wanted to extend this tireless assault on her senses until it eclipsed everything else and the world grew gray, and her need for release that demanded climax /now/.

Her hands on the controls quivered, and there blinked in her vision, projected by the visor, a schematic of those controls, one among all the options left unused taunting her as the dildo slid in and out, ejecting a little more lubricant when it needed to, the pumps on her nipples pulling and squeezing again and again, until her finger stabbed downwards.

The display flickered, and she stabbed again, frenzied now that the decision had been made, no longer able to deal with the frustration of delay.

Next to her right thigh, delicate and gleaming, arched a final arm, tipped with a bulbous swelling, the swelling terminating in a delicate, long pair of jaws, the jaws lined with ridged rubber.

The jaws swayed backwards, turned, rotated, and dipped unerringly towards the top of her dildo-distended pussy, as if daintily sniffing, starting at her gaping hole, tracing up without quite touching her flesh between her parted, swollen lips, pausing for just one second above her small, swollen nub of clitoris as it was pulled back and forth by the action of the dildo.

The jaws opened, dipped, closed neatly around her clitoris, squeezed gently as her body convulsed against the restraints, backed off as the sensors in her skull reported pleasure turning to pain, then started to vibrate.

Suddenly, making it last was no longer an option. Within minutes, she was screaming through her orgasm.

She refused to let herself turn anything off, her fingers writing on their rests, her arms jerking as she tried, just this once, to eek out a second climax before the first had finished.

Once again, all she managed to do was scream as the pleasure grew so much that it turned to pain, the machinery whipping back, the delicate jaws poised high above her cunt as the dildo stopped then slowly withdrew, leaving her moaning in frustration at her own body's limitations.

With a polite beep, a message flashed on the inside of her goggles: Your alloted time is up. You will now return to the control centre.

In Jade's head, a small clock began a countdown to the next time she could come and sit in this chair. It always started at far too high a number.