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.
