Working out on the edge was something that Samantha Morris enjoyed. She liked the solitude and the privacy; but mostly she liked the idea that she was the only one around for millions of miles. She grinned to herself at the anachronistic term, a term for which she had been chastised many times in her past.
The honest truth was, she was approximately three hundred million parsecs from Earth, which placed her as far from the home planet as human kind had reached to date. Not only that, but she was in an orbital station above a planet that had been discovered about fifty solar years before and had dumbfounded the scientific community because it had contained the ruins of an apparently abandoned civilization; ruins that were man's first concrete proof that they were not alone in the universe.
The first few decades after the initial discovery had brought more archeologists and paleontologists and exobiologists and every other kind of "ologist" you could think of than you could shake a stick at. It became apparent though that, not only were the ruins very old, they had virtually no evidence of what kind of creature had actually inhabited them; and after the discovery of the ruins themselves there had been no new discoveries about the ruins since. And so after forty years of frustration, the ruins had been abandoned yet again, this time by the scientific community of Earth who held that everything that could be learned from the dig had already been discovered.
And that was just the way Samantha liked it. She had come here three months ago to study the planet, not for the ruins, but for an unexplained EM field that had been emanating from the planet since long before it was discovered and showed no signs whatever of dissipating. All the testing of the field that had been done prior to this had been for the sake of determining whether it was harmful. After it had been deemed safe it had been largely ignored by the best and brightest minds on Earth. They were after bigger fish, an alien civilization! And now fifty years later, their hopes and dreams shattered and their egos smashed before the whole world, they had left Planet Ruins, for so it had been named, to go and lick their collective wounds.
Samantha Morris was a striking woman. Just thirty-two years old, she had graduated with a PhD in rocket propulsion from CalTech and yet another doctorate in electro mechanics from MIT. Not only had she done this concurrently, attending classes and submitting two very different theses to the two universities, she had graduated convincingly near the top of her class at both institutions. Her counselors had encouraged her to acquire the degrees separately so she could excel at each one, but she had rejected the idea, knowing that there was a wide universe to explore and only so much time to do it.
So here she was, examining her data as far away from home as a person could be, seeking and getting all the satisfaction she had ever needed from the digital readouts in front of her, recording the data for later use in her next thesis which she would publish after she had learned everything there was to learn about this strange EM field.
The station itself was relatively small but functional. It contained sleeping quarters, a fully equipped electronics lab and a centrifugal gymnasium so she could retain her athletic figure. It also contained a galley with the latest in food recycling technology. The premise was simple; it isolated the atomic make-up of all human effluents and rebuilt them as needed.
For instance, you could have the generator produce a sirloin steak or an ice cream cone; it just needed the required atoms to produce whatever it was you created. Because the foods that people ate provided the nourishment they needed to build muscle mass and to create new cells for every part of the body, not all the atoms going into the body through the mouth came out the other end. Necessity demanded that a healthy food stock be provided at the outset of a mission. A well-balanced food stock could be recycled effectively and extend a month's supply of food into a thirty six month's supply.
While most people tried to overlook the source of the atoms used by the recycler, Samantha was fascinated by it. Who would ever have thought that a person's feces and urine could be broken down so completely as to be rebuilt into the most delicious foods you could find outside a fresh fruit and vegetable market on Earth? After all, one carbon atom was completely indistinguishable from another after all the chemical bonds had been severed.
After re-sequencing, no one could tell that the food had not been grown fresh from the ground; the world's chefs had eaten their own share of crow after the very public taste test had been broadcast worldwide two years after its creation. None of them had been able to guess with any consistency which of the foods they had been given were the creation of the generator and which were from more conventional sources. The creators of the generator had stepped aside and said nothing when the lawsuits began pouring in from McDonalds and KFC, all of them targeting the chefs who had declared their products to be "Shit!" on worldwide television.
Samantha recorded her last data dump for the day and made her way to her sleeping quarters. Because she was alone and had disabled the video output from her communications array, she never wore clothes; she never saw any logical reason to. She went to the shower stall next to her bed and sealed herself in. There really was nothing like a zero gravity shower. She donned her swimming goggles, closed her eyes and simply floated as the hot water jetted at her from all angles. The cycle went from rinse to power wash to rinse yet again; Samantha often likened it to a car wash back on Earth.
After the initial cycle was complete she switched the controls to continuous rinse then allowed herself to just relax as the water spray enveloped her. Her five foot five frame floated blissfully, her long auburn hair waving in the spray, her C-cup breasts tingling pleasantly. She repositioned herself so that one of the spray nozzles was pointed directly at her pubis and then switched the spray to pulse. She gasped slightly as the tiny packets of moisture struck her clitoris and then moaned as she increased the pressure. She knew from experience that she would cum within minutes and she bit her lip as the jets did their job. Her nipples puckered and hardened and her clitoris emerged from its hood, swollen and engorged, as the water jets battered its sensitive tip. After a few minutes, that old familiar feeling washed over her and she let out a long gasp as her orgasm took its course.
She turned off the water and waited for a slow count of ten before unsealing the shower door; she did not want to repeat the mistake she had made the first time she'd used a zero gravity shower. It had taken her days to dry out her sleeping quarters after unsealing the shower door too quickly.
She grabbed a towel and dried herself off and then spent the next few minutes massaging a moisturizing cream into her skin. As she rubbed the cream into her breasts and around her inner thighs she began to tingle once more. Letting herself float in the zero gravity, she plunged her fingers deeply into her vagina, stimulating herself once more as she drifted slowly across the room. With her other hand caressing her breasts she applied her fingers to her clitoris, teasing at it mercilessly as she drove herself desperately to orgasm.
These days she marveled at just how much she masturbated since her arrival at Planet Ruins. Usually she attributed it to the fact that there wasn't another human being within several million parsecs, and that was why she needed the release. This she didn't wholly accept. There had been many nights back on Earth when she could have gone out and found a suitable partner for sex, but had chosen instead to stay home and masturbate herself, though she had never done so more than once every couple of months; since her arrival at this orbital station she had found herself masturbating at least a few times a day. It was sometimes hard to concentrate on her work, but she hadn't obtained two doctorates by not being able to exercise some self-control. Most of the time she was able to stop herself and get on with the job; though not always.
Relaxed and sated now, she pushed herself toward her bed and zipped herself into her sleeping bag for the night. As she drifted off she wondered to herself yet again what had prompted her to masturbate so often. It had never been part of her character before. And with those thoughts in her head she drifted off to sleep.
In the morning she made her way to the electronics lab, as she did first thing every morning, to check the instrumentation readouts. She paused and looked curiously at the sector sweep display, the instrument that had been set up to try to determine the source of the EM field. There was definitely something different about the data this morning.
The apparatus had determined that one particular sector had shown readings at least twenty percent higher than all the other sectors swept so far. It was an area on the north-east wing of the ruins about one kilometer from the central structure. She studied it for a moment and then checked the values from the other sectors just to make sure she was on to something. Then she directed the sensor to sweep the area once more to double check the results.
Each sector was one hundred square meters and the sensor had been designed to read all bands of the EM spectrum. Because the ruins were laid out on approximately ten square kilometers of ground, it had taken almost three months until it found this particular anomaly.
Knowing the sweep would take at least a half hour, Samantha went to the centrifugal gymnasium and began her daily workout.
As the name implied, the centrifugal gymnasium rotated along the axis of the station to provide an artificial gravity within its confines. Inside there was a treadmill, weight station, rowing machine and gymnastics pads. The G-factor in the gymnasium was set at ¾ of a G, meaning that Samantha weighed three quarters of her usual one hundred and twenty pounds or ninety pounds. She went through her workout with her mind fixed on the sector sweep data. She wondered if she was finally going to uncover the mystery of Planet Ruins and smiled to herself in anticipation.
After her workout she took a shower and only barely stopped herself from masturbating once more, so eager was she to see the results of the second sweep.
After toweling off she went to the lab once more to read the results. She smiled to herself in quiet glee as she saw virtually the same results as the first sweep had found. She reset the sensor to continue sweeping, jumping to new sectors according to a predefined pattern and then went to the galley and ate some yogurt and toast for breakfast.
She typed her findings into her laptop as she ate and then began planning her EVA. She would have to go to the surface to investigate the sector first hand. She would take some portable gear, basically smaller more sensitive versions of the sensor instrumentation on board the orbital station, and set them up where the on-board electronics had found the elevated EM levels. She would then feed their output to a communications array, which would transmit them to her on-board lab where the data could be analyzed by the computers. She smiled once more as she anticipated what she might find.
