Author's note: This wasn't originally an erotic story but, well... It's hard to avoid the inevitable, isn't it? It isn't particularly graphic or involved, it's just a scenario, and one rather hackneyed option for how we may react to technology that overwhelms our meat bodies.
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The Test
The last link with the base was cut with a "Good luck, cadets" from the officer on duty. From this point on, they would only ever return if they accepted a teaching position. For cadets of this school, being a courier to return training vessels as not an option. Success in this last test would mean permanently moving on, into active service or civilian life. Failure meant death. It was as simple as that. The ship they were in was more single-purpose than any they had ever flown; fast but only moderately so, just small enough for pilots, fuel and thrusters, manoeuvrable and, most of all, cheap. It had to be cheap. There was a seventy-five percent failure rate on the Last Test.
Nor did they know if any of their fellow cadets who had gone before them had succeeded or failed. You didn't, not until you got there yourself. If you got there yourself. When they left, they were gone. As simple as that.
Behind them, the training base where they had spent the last five years of their lives was only another bright spot in the blackness. They had been ferried out by a transport ship which had already departed. None of the systems on board their tiny ship were operational except life-support. It was thoroughly checked and nothing could go wrong; every part had been inspected to the best of modern technology's abilities. They had broken their last contact with the base; from here on they would have to boot up the ship's systems, pre-flight it, solve any problems (there might well have been a software problem introduced by the Academy purely to test them) and from there start, survive and complete the mission. They had a destination and a course. Deviation from either would spell failure as surely as would death. Not all of the seventy-five percent who passed this test actually qualified for further training.
Conrad was lying back in his seat, eyes open. He was adopting the emptiness as his own. It was the first skill they were taught as pilots. Most people can't handle the emptiness of space when you're away from a planet or station. You have to accept it, take command of it. Even sitting in a disabled spacecraft out of all reach of help, with military vessels ranged against anyone who might try to give assistance.
In front of him, almost sitting between his knees, his four-year training partner and, from this moment on, primary pilot, Amber, sat and did the same. Her seat hid her from view, the top curving over to snugly hold her helmeted head. His head was similarly locked into place, the Removed Interface Neural Network Scanners snugly fitting onto his bare scalp. The helmet wouldn't let him turn his head, but with simple head movements he could change his perception, vision painted directly onto each retina. At the moment, however, that system too was turned off and he could only see through the helmet, forward over Amber's seat and out the mono-crystalline front window of the craft. When the craft was running, all senses would be supplied by the ship itself.
This was the first test; mental stability while sitting in a dead craft, the sounds of your own heartbeat and breathing beating in your ears, your vision restricted, and empty space all around you. It was not something that Conrad, a man fathered by a boy gifted with a powerful and strongly controlled imagination, had ever been bothered by. Amber had once been troubled, but her skill as a pilot had lent her a contempt of the open spaces and, slowly, that contempt had matured to a calm acceptance.
Suddenly red light flashed over Conrad's vision as the entire visor of his helmet briefly glowed. The Academy transporter was docked, the stage was clear for them. As Navigator (a term horribly inadequate but historically valued), Conrad quickly moved his fingers inside his gloves, touching a virtual key-pad to boot up the main computer and start the Accessibility routines. His visor flashed data at him, a Head-Up Display small enough for him to read at this close distance. All systems checked clean, so Conrad ran a subroutine that checked the check program. There was a joke in the Academy that if everything's right, something's wrong...
The check program turned out to be looping its commands back to itself, on an infinite positive loop. It took Conrad three seconds to fix the constructed error and be satisfied that everything was really, as it seemed, okay. Then he logged the rest of his suit into the system, the Retinal Sensation Projectors slid down in front of his eyes, and the glorious vista of space unfolded around him, receiving sensation from sensors built into the skin of their craft. Another set of checks showed all okay and, undistracted by the glorious vista around him, he logged Amber's suit into the system and flashed a system report onto her visor. A grunt in his ears showed what she thought of the test he had been set.
Around him, the craft woke up as Amber fed life into the hardware, deflecting and neutralising a tiny bug in the second main engine that would have turned them into a small fireball. Conrad's entire body tingled as the ship's internal sensors woke up and started transmitting, giving him information that no amount of screens could possibly make him understand. With his deceptively inflexible skin-tight suit locked firmly into his seat, Conrad couldn't move even his fingers, the sensors in his gloves responding to changing pressure instead of actual joint movement. But that became less and less important as his senses changed from human to, for want of a better analogy, shark.
Amber completed her last hardware check, and held the system on readiness. Conrad started the last software activation routine and rang a check over all hardware. He fixed a non-fatal but disabling incompatibility and readied the software for integration. Amber's voice sounded, undistorted, in his headphones.
"Software status."
"Checked and ready. Hardware status."
"Checked and ready. Transferring network connections."
Conrad took network control from Amber, ran his own check and then balanced hardware and software against each other, feeling with his mind and body as well as instruments for problems. Finding none, he logged Amber out of the system and then bought hardware and software smoothly together. The resulting integration was more organic than mechanical, a synthesis that defied mere categorisation into either hard- or software.
It felt, to Conrad with his expanded senses, like the pre-orgasmic thrill you get when your lover suddenly grabs at your crotch. Unexpected, dangerous and utterly distracting. With Amber keeping an eye on the system, Conrad had the luxury of a few seconds to be distracted. Mind and body humming, he dragged himself back to reality and shook off the effects. This he was used to. The firmness in his crotch was no longer an embarrassing distraction now that he recognised it for the sympathetic nervous effect that it was, nor was the way his skin seemed to crawl with constant caresses. Sensory-Induced Elevated Arousal the psycho-medics at the Academy had called it in their lectures. Sophisticated language for Getting Your Rocks Off On The Ultimate Virtual Reality Game.
