Aberdeen Dreams

"God damn," I groaned and turned onto my side. The world tumbled past, rolling over itself in my stomach. My hand reached out for my night stand, passing through where I expected my phone to be. It fell limply to the side of the bed, grazing along the cold, smooth floor. "Fucking hell," I griped as a wave of nausea and vertigo battered me into a fetal position.

After a few minutes of holding my stomach, I remembered: my bedroom has carpet.

"Okay, guess I had a lot last night." I spoke into the darkness, half hoping the person in whose I was would answer. A slight echo, then nothing.

The world rolled again as I sat and swung my feet out from the mattress. My chest felt like a glass of water, teetering on a fulcrum; each moment exaggerated in its effects, over emphasizing itself past its normal end. I fell as I tried to stand; the ceiling fell through me and I rotated a full 180, churning momentum pressing me into the bed. I put a hand to my chest to try to still my heart.

"The fuck is this?" I asked as I my fingers rubbed across what felt like some sort of webbing, like what I'd imagine a wetsuit was like.

The sound of a motor whirring to life beneath the floor. A thread-thin line of light sparked to life in front of me, from what I think was one wall to the other; a bold, pinstripe of white that grew and filled the whole wall from waist height to the ceiling. In the moments my sight I adjusted, my old life and its concerns passed away, thoughts of obligations and filings, upcoming litigations discarded; birthdays and vacation days erased from the calendar.

I managed to stand this time, still facing the wall as the rectangle's luminosity dimmed and glimpses at the beyond came into focus.

"What..."

It was dark outside, darker than the room.

"The..."

Except for the thousands of trillions of white dots scattered across the expanse, like shifted flower onto a dark workspace.

"Fuck."

Purples and oranges swirled, in massive clouds billions of miles away, intermingling and nebulous.

"I'm in Goddamn Space," I said as I laid a hand against the freezing glass, the opulence beyond too detailed and beautiful to be a fabrication.

"Yes," a static voice said from behind me, "you are currently trillions of miles from Earth."

A small glass sphere embedded in the wall revealed itself with a flash of green, the size of a marble. Pale, of the sort that might be associated with terminal displays in the early 1990s. A cone of light shone out from it, into the likeness of a human form made intentionally vague, gesturing at facial features without definition, suggesting a nose with broad strokes, flat lines drew a mouth: polygonal geometry mocking human anatomy. Eyes needlessly filled with similitude and life blinked in the dark.

"God damn, you're spooky," I said and backed up the window, to rest my hands against the pain and lean back.

"I'm sorry?"

"The blinds don't match the carpet," I said pointing to its eyes. Cold from the window seemed to help with the feelings of vertigo.

"Oh," the projection said, conjuring a mirror and inspecting itself. It opened the hand holding the mirror which disappeared in a puff of data. As the pixels cleared, the eyes had taken on the same abstraction as the rest of its form. "Better?"

"It's a start. What the fuck is going on?" I groaned and put my hand in my head.

"I apologize; what I have to say will not be of much satisfaction to you for the time being. What I am authorized to say, and therefor know, is that my name is Abe and I am here to help you navigate the Aberdeen."

So many questions.

"So," I asked, "You only know what you're allowed to know?"

"That is correct, in so far that your query conforms to the contents of what files I may access of my core programming at this time."

"Now, 'navigate the Aberdeen,' that's a little ambiguous; it could mean to move the ship through space and it could be to get around inside the ship. Which is it?"

"I know that I am to help you as you make your way around. As you explore, I understand, you will unlock new files in my memory banks; they are supposed to contain information that explains how you arrived here and what you are to do. I suspect as more information is gathered, it will confirm my intuition that I am also to assist in your piloting of the Aberdeen."

"You've intuitions? Do you have inclinations and volitions as well?"

"I..." he drifted off and walked up next to me, the green projection of his form highlighting specks of dust floating throughout the room as he came next to me, starring off into the stars. "I don't know." He placed a hand on the glass and the lines suggesting his cheeks tensed, pulled up and under his eyes. He turned to me. "Can you help me determine the answer to your question?"

"Does the computer program have a soul?" I shrugged my shoulders. "Sure, why the fuck not?"

The interlocking triangles forming his lips contracted into a smile and the rectangles of his teeth flashed for a moment.

I pushed myself from the wall and steadied myself as my weight shifted out of balance. "I take it you can follow me around as I get a look?"

"Yes," he said and pointed to his sphere. "Merely take the sphere with you and I can project myself within a thirty foot radius, even through clothing."

I grabbed the sphere and found that the wetsuit had pockets.

"Abe?"

"Yes?"

"Is there a," I ran my hands across the smooth metal walls, "door?" A soft hissing and a click, then a rectangles of brilliant white against the black outlined a door to my left.

"The ship is voice activated, with few exceptions."

The sound of smooth, minimal friction wooshed from the door frame; as the door retracted, a solid shape of white filled its vacancy.

I put a hand to my eyes and walked, shakily, to the light.

"Excuse me, before we leave, can I ask something?" Abe asked.

"Uh, yeah," I said wrapping some fingers around the doorframe and trying to adjust to the burning LEDs.

"What should I call you?"

I stopped and felt my eyebrows raise and my jaw detach. "I don't know." I scratched my head. "I'm twenty-nine, a moderately successful lawyer; I do work for celebrities, but not in the industry. I live in Santa Monica. I like literature and I have issues with my family. But I don't know my name."

Abe's face flickered to life in front of me. "I'm sorry. I can simply call you sir till you remember or we access a file with that information."

"No, that's a little much; if I wanted something formal, we'd go with 'esquire.'"

A spectral hand scratched his chin. "Perhaps Daniel, after the fictional eponymous Daniel Webster, the pre-eminent lawyer who out argued the devil himself?"

"I think 'Web' is good."

"Very well. It's good to meet you, Web."

"Likewise, Abe," I said and took a step beyond the darkness of the room. Lights flickered into being in a row that stretched off into the darkness in a straight-line, hinting that I was standing in a hall. Abe's face flashed over my left shoulder and a bell noise donged from the sphere as it vibrated in my pocket like I'd just gotten a text.

"A new designation has been unlocked in my memory bank: DSG 001. Shall I relay the contents?"

"From now on, go ahead and just let me know what they say as they unlock."

"It contains one new instruction node for me and one statement of biographical interest."

I rolled my hand for Abe to continue. His eyes followed my hand, watching it is rolled and his gaze returned to mine. "I am to accompany you down the hall to companion assignment."

"'Companion' assignment?" I scratched my chest. "I'm liking the sound of that."

"I can explain more once we reach the associated workroom."

"The biographical datum?"

"You are allergic to cats and bee stings."

"Are there any cats or bees on the Aberdeen?"

His eyes glazed over with a white static, like the snow of an old CRT, then returned to their abstraction. "None."

We came upon another door, this one painted a soft red that was barely anymore colored than the darkness around us. "Open," I said and the two doors swooshed away from each other. Inside was a desk and a leather chair and a keyboard. As I scooted the seat back, I saw a notched an indentation on the keyboard about the same diameter as Abe's sphere.

"I take it this is for you," I said to the sphere as I held it in my hand.

"Yes," Abe said, "Please deposit the sphere into the interface."

I dropped the sphere into the hole and the sounds of contactors, one after another like a ware house, echoed in every direction. After a moment, LED lights above flashed, more brightly and lit the small room and the space just beyond the window. Rows of pods, endless like a grain field, spread forward.

"These are your shipmates," Abe said, flicking to life in front of me and flicking through a pages on a clipboard. "They are to remain in stasis," he put the clipboard to his side and looked at me with regret, "for the duration of the time you are to be awake."

"Companion my ass," I said and leaned back into the chair.

"Perhaps there is some good news. One moment." Abe looked through the pages, quickly thumbing them. "Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to wake or sustain another authentic human at the moment."

"Authentic?"

"Yes, however we do have the means of creating two android companions..." Abe drifted off and leaned over the desk, quickly typing a few keys in front of me, his ghostly finger tips passing through the metal keys. Somewhere in the distance gears meshed and began to move. "The cost of maintaining androids is near zero; they perform most of the necessary functions onboard."

"Androids? Like, you want me to hang out with the fucking terminator?"

"No, no, no," he said. "Synthetic humans. Clones with artificial memories."

Two docking modules lit themselves up as two pods decided from above, descending on wires from someplace else, frosted gasps of condensation thawing as they clinked into place five feet on the other side of the window.

"It appears I have been working on these, scouring your memories as you slept to create the ideal companions for you given the resources at hand."

"You've been doing this, but you've been unaware?"

"Or that I have forgotten after some other conditional was satisfied, such as your awakening, or I am one instance of a multifarious program. Any of the these explanations is plausible and congruous my programming, though I believe your estimation is correct."

"Are you aware of your programming?"

"In broad strokes; what is missing is most obvious."

"'I notice what is absent,'" I mused. "The God Emperor's Dilemma of Prescience."

He blinked at me absently.

"You gotta read more, Abe..." I said. A burst of heat cleared the condensation. On the left, Harper: voluptuous, dark-skinned, curly-haired, the sort of body the goddesses of Persia were immortalized in with fresco, breasts perky but heavy, hips wide-set; her expression was the same as it nearly always was, as if she were in the middle of composing a line of verse. Then Quinn, thin and athletic, though that diminish her curves, with those same plump lips which used to express such affection as she took me in her mouth, hair up in her nurse's bun. I'd dated Harper first in college and missed her, somewhere in the back of my mind, until Quinn and I got together a few years later. After my asshole tendencies ended that relationship, I figured I'd blown more chances than most guys ever get and that my career was about the only thing I had.

"They've been recreated from your memories, more or less identical, though they've been aged up a few years to match your own aging. Notably, they've never met you before."

I leaned forward and put a hand on the window. "Are they the people they were before we dated, or are they as they would be if we had dated- minus they're experiences with me?"

"I determined it would be best to create them as they were the day you met, so close as I could."

"I get a second chance?"

"Well," Abe said and put the clip board on the table, "If you'd like, I can still make alterations to their core memories and personalities to predetermine some behavior patterns."

"As in, make them love me, so I don't fuck it up again."

"Exactly."

"No, that feels like cheating."

The vertical lines that drew his eyebrows condensed and rose.

"Except, let's make them okay with 'sharing.'"

"You were almost moral there."

"I don't see the difference," I said, putting my feet on the desk. "None of use really choose our beliefs. Some are just the results of our pasts experiences and the rest come from deliberation and introspection, of which we are equally not responsible for. We're just aligning things that they wouldn't've controlled to begin with to accommodate things that would please me as well."

"An excellent rationalization. Anything else you would like to change?"

"Make them bisexual."

"My analysis of your memory suggests that they were likely both bisexual."

"Huh, makes me wish I had brought up a threesome with either of them."

"That same analysis indicates a chance of a threesome was quite low with either partner."

"Also, I like to smoke."

"Ah, they hated that."

"They put up with it," I said with a shrug. "Do we have cigars here?"

"We do."

"Make them like the smell of cigar smoke."

"Done. Anything else?"

"Let's make things..." I tapped my fingers against the desk, "organic."

"Organic how?"

"Yeah, let's have it so we don't start out together, any of us. Make it so I run into them among all the other androids on the ship."

"There's no guarantee you will then."

"That's the fun, I suppose."

"There's one last action item before I can begin the activation phase proper," Abe said, appearing next to me. "Wether or not you chose to activate them with a predisposition to sleep with you, I need to confirm a few data points about your..." he looked at his hand and mimicked rolling it as I had earlier, "performance and dynamic."

"I need to fuck them?"

"Yes. They've been preloaded with a standard amorous memory-behavior set. They shall behave as though you've been together in a loving relationship for some time. It is all very 'bare bones;' don't ask them any questions about their pasts or opinions; it'll be shunted as soon as you've finished." He snapped his fingers and lights to our right revealed a bed and a door to the chamber opened.

"I'll set myself to private mode. Simply remove my sphere from the interface and we can resume our work; the girls' programming will take care of their next steps once you've finished. Just say, 'Argo.' I believe, once you've 'finished,' I will unlock a further designation."

A pneumonic woosh as the pods opened and the girls stepped out, wringing podgel from their hair and laughing: Harper as always marching intently, purposefully despite their levity, while Quinn, who had never fully abandoned the sense of whimsy and wonder of childhood, mixed maturity and mystery with hints of girlhood in her stride.

"Un-fucking-believable," I sighed as I watched them, exactly as I remembered them, waltz back into my life and directly under a set of shower heads a few feet from their pods.

As before, an outline of white appeared, showing me the door podroom. I stood, unzipping my jumpsuit. "Would you look at that," I said, appreciating this new physique. I had abs, well-defined pectorals; I looked like a video game character. "I guess I spent my time unconscious lifting weights and doing sit ups." I ran fingers through my abs for the first time ever.

In front of me, the two them dipped under the spout and splashed each other with a shared laugh.

Quinn giggled as she bent down to slap Harper's ass, playfully and not altogether softly; her own ass flexed as she bent, her graceful thighs tightening; her buns were firm, smaller than Harper's, as were her breasts, though I had always compared her stomach favorably to Harper's. A sharp smacking sound subsisted beneath the shower, water cascading off Harper's curves and the impact. She snorted and turned her head, angling her chin upwards towards Quinn's face, smiling and opening her lips and closing her eyes. From her position behind her, Quinn, who was a few inches taller, wrapped her hands around Harper's wide hips, running her fingers up her smooth stomach to knead her breasts. Harper fell backward, dark curls of wavy hair wrapping themselves around Quinn's arms and slipped her tongue into her mouth; she moaned as her ample breasts (32D, as I recalled) filled Quinn's hands, and arced her back once Quinn's thin fingers began lightly pinching her nipples between her knuckles as though holding a cigarette; she ran a hand behind her, to the back of Quinn's head, taking a handful of hair, while the other explored Quinn's thigh. Those magnificent breasts rose and fell with her moans, shedding water in the shower at obtuse angles because of the curve of her back.

Harper's eyes opened and she threw Quinn's hands away roughly. She turned, grabbed Quinn by the hips and pushed her to the wall, directly under the spray. She let out a moan of surprise and pleasure and approval as Harper pushed her shoulders forward and pulled back her hips. Harper got to her tip toes and pressed her dark, plump lips against the nape of Quinn's neck, and slowly kissed down her spine, pressing hard with her fingers to create dimples like the two at the small of Quinn's back, her nipples leaving trails in the water droplets clinging to Quinn's back under the shelter of her own back. Getting down on her knees, she rubbed her face against the base of her spine and kissed Quinn's mole, above her left buttock. She smiled as Harper bit it lightly, wiggled her hips up and down, grating them across Harper's face.

Harper stood, rubbing her breasts along Quinn's back, and reached for a bottle of shampoo. She poured some in her hand and began to work her fingers through Quinn's hair, fingernails digging down to the scalp. Quinn turned, rubbing her back and side and breasts into Harper, lightly kissing her as she opened another bottle behind her back. It dripped from her fingers as she began to scrub the base of Harper's head, working her fingers slowly upward, past her scalp; she parted the bangs obscuring Harper's face, pulled her head back and smiled. She pecked her on the nose. Harper smiled back, bashfully.

By this point, I was incredibly erect; I bounced with my heartbeat. I took a few steps forward, into the light, where the girls could see me. Harper saw me first, smiled with warmth and excitement, then pointed so Quinn would turn. She fell back on one leg and curled a finger towards herself, inviting me to join. Harper grabbed a washcloth and soaped it as I walked up.

In what could have been a synchronized maneuver, they explored my chest with their hands, wrapped palms around my shoulders, drug fingernails down my ribs. Quinn kissed a path that Harper followed, soaping my chest, her hip pressed against my erection. She drew loops as she washed me, rubbed my shoulders, hooked under my ears. Eventually, she dropped the cloth, pressed her hand flat in the center of my chest, fingers splayed, and slowly lowered it, dipping into the indentations of my abs, past my pelvis, pulling her hand back so that only her fingertips touched, to the very tip of my length. She took my ear lobe in my mouth as she swirled her finger around my tip; Quinn wrapped her soft hand around my length and slowly pumped. Harper's breath in my ear, she leaned forward, my arm parting her breasts. Quinn kissed below my ear as she increased her pace slightly. I let out a groan, just barely opening my mouth for a second- plenty of time for Quinn to dart her tongue inside. She pressed her head forward, mushing her forehead against mine as she increased pace even more.