by Aaron Bunce
Jacoby sputtered and sucked in a breath, his chest, shoulders, and stomach alight with pain. The blue underlighting flickered and grew brighter. He took another breath and his vision cleared. Two ribs popped back into place with a snap.
Anna coughed. Spluttered. And groaned.
“That…sucked,” he grimaced and unbuckled the chest strap so he could rub his aching sternum. “You okay?”
Anna coughed again, blinked, and looked his way. She took in a breath and rubbed her neck, before unclipping the chest strap.
“Five pulses? That last one…crush me to death,” he said.
“My whole body hurts. Like an elephant sat on me,” Anna said, coughing again. She was back. But from where?
“Where’d you go? I tried talking to you, but it was like you couldn’t hear me.”
Anna stretched her neck and swiped the back of a hand against her cheek, rubbing a few stray tears away.
“Go?” she asked. “I’ve been right here with you, Coby.”
Had she? Had she responded? Did he simply not notice? The idea fluttered around in his mind, the muscle-tightening hum of anxiety immediately reestablishing its hold on his heart and lungs.
“Really? Because it seemed like…” he started to say but trailed off. Anna watched him, her blue eyes sparkling and bright.
“Seemed like what? Coby what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. When I tried to talk to you it just kind of felt like you couldn’t hear me. Like you were physically here, but your mind was someplace else.”
“I’m right here, Coby. We’re all here. We’re safe now. I just…well, yes. I feel different now,” Anna said and considered her left hand for a moment. The neural glove was gone now, the black fabric and fiberoptic pathways having been replaced by substitutions grown right into her skin. They looked like tattoos…an incredibly complicated bio-mechanical map marching all the way from her fingertips to her left eye.
“I know. It feels weird, doesn’t it? Like we’re still somehow docked at the station? Like none of this is real?” he asked but looked up and found Anna still staring at her hand. A ripple of light shone through the dark touch receptors on the pads of her fingers and passed slowly up her fingers and palm.
“Anna?”
“Hmm?” she asked, finally looking up from her hand.
“You just did it again. Like you slipped away.”
“Don’t be silly. I was just looking at my hand. Honestly, we just need time to rest. We’ve all been through a lot, and let’s be real, it’ll take quite a while to wrap our heads around what happened back there. I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”
Jacoby swallowed hard and took another breath, waiting for the pain radiating all the way down his spine to subside. He silently agreed with her. Yes, it would take a while to get right again. But he didn’t drift off when people tried to talk to him. Did he?
He tried to push away the idea, but it just added to the heaping pile of doubts and worries already crowding the storage closet of his mind. The anxiousness reached his legs and arms.
Exercise. You need to burn this off, Jacoby. A good workout always helped clear your mind before…
Anna smiled and pushed off, floating up and over the benches and consoles. She stopped at the fore display, pressed her hand against the screen, the intricate pattern on her arm and neck immediately glowing blue.
“Velocity is good…excellent, actually. Capacitors are recharging, and all ship systems are green and looking good. We are on schedule for our next pulse in ten hours and forty-five minutes. I’m bringing the gravity plating back online now.”
“So, why were the pulses so much harder this time? And five. Why were there five? I thought Lana said we’d accelerate on a four-pulse schedule at first and we would trim them down once we approached target speed?” Jacoby asked, unbuckling the first shoulder strap as his body weight returned. His boots slapped against the deck.
“Carbon dioxide levels are a touch high, but chemical scrubbers are working. I can compensate by increasing flow-through volume by eight percent. It’ll put more strain on the air handlers, but as long as we’re not running them that hard for months on end, it shouldn’t be an issue. We probably want to avoid activity that results in a lot of heavy breathing–working out, stuff like that,” Anna said, her voice echoing off the large polycarbonate screen.
Well, scratch that idea.
“Anna, did you hear me? I said–why five pulses this time?” Jacoby asked and bent over to scratch his thighs. The anxiety made his skin itch. He sucked in a breath and tried to bundle it all up and push it out, but it refused to release.
“Oh, shit. Coby, can you go back and let the others out of the acceleration chamber? I forgot to set it to automatically decompress this time,” Anna said, turning back to him suddenly.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.
“Of course. We’re together and safe. That’s what matters. Everything else will straighten out with time.”
Everything else? Will she feel that way when I tell her about my father? What I did? Will she ever look at me the same? he thought, desperate to tell her, to have her help him sort it all out.
“Hey, I thought maybe we could heat up some coffee and talk for a little…”
Anna was already turned back to the terminal, as if she couldn’t hear him. The pattern on her arm started to glow, the symbols and scrolling text on the screen flicking by one after another.
“Parsing logarithmic data…saving acceleration data…travel time estimations updating,” Anna said, her voice so low he could barely make it out. She sounded different–mechanical, digitized.
“Anna? Do you want me to heat up some coffee for you?”
She didn’t turn or give any indication she could hear him.
“Okay, I guess I’ll take that as a no. I’ll decompress the chamber and lay down or something. Maybe just give in to this stress and have a heart attack or stroke,” Jacoby said, irritably. He had Anna back, but some large and irritatingly vocal part of him felt even more awkward and isolated than he did back on the station…when he was by himself…surrounded by fleshy, hungry monsters.
I sacrificed everything to make sure you were safe. I was ready to die to make sure you had a chance. And you can’t spare the time to have a conversation, he thought, his ever-simmering anger all-too willing to answer his call.
He stomped back into the galley, his footsteps just a little louder than they needed to be. He turned left at the table and walked up to the small door on the far wall.
“Can’t spare me the time but she can converse with the stupid computer all day. Nothing like being replaced by circuitry and a hard drive. What are those conversations like? Zero…zero…one…zero…oops, I mean, one,” he whispered, and tapped the small screen. The flasher above the door lit green and a light beyond the small window turned on. The anxious weight settled into his feet and hands, the itchy, crawling sensation covering his whole body now.
Jacoby turned around as the small chamber’s bleeder valves opened, compressed air hissing loudly on either side of him. Acceleration foam started to break down and sink towards the ground. Six heads appeared, oxygen masks strapped tightly over the lower halves of their faces. The light above the door turned blue and Jacoby pulled it open.
He rubbed his chest, the ache still present but already fading. The six people inside wobbled unsteadily and unhooked their oxygen lines before slowly making their way out of the small chamber. Soraya was the first one through the door. She unbuckled the straps on her mask and let it hang against her chest.
Jacoby drifted out of the way, and Soraya moved with him, allowing the others to file back out into the common room. Lana moved through the door last, the shiny, black fabric of her pressure suit shining like an impossibly tight second skin. It left nothing to the imagination. He tried not to stare, to let his eyes linger, but the fabric might as well have been transparent.
“That one sucked…like really sucked! Even s
uspended in that horrible chamber. The g-shock absorption foam, and the dark, it was, well, it was almost too much. Kind of like being locked in a can, with the sides slowly pressing in all around you,” Soraya said.
Jacoby nodded, eyeing the featureless walls of the cramped compartment, silently wondering how it felt to be locked into a sealed, black space as his body was encased in thick, elastic gelatin. His thoughts turned dark, jumping back to Hyde station and the massive, evolving alien creature. Would it feel like being trapped in that abomination’s stinking gut, while every ounce of him was slowly cooked down to base, genetic material?
“Too soon,” he said, shaking the thoughts away. His hands were already clammy, the strength in his legs wavering.
“Too soon for what?” Soraya asked, following his gaze.
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about other stuff.” He met her gaze and tried to smile, but his face felt stiff.
Soraya reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear, her soft fingers lingering against his cheek before pulling away.
“I thought our acceleration curve would be smooth, even ignition pulses. Shit, I mean when you look at the math, the pulses should get lighter as the ship reaches velocity. That’s what Anna and I figured, at least,” Lana said, closing her eyes and rubbing her sternum.
“That’s what I thought you said before,” Jacoby said, fighting to look anywhere but at Lana’s chest. But she groaned and his eyes automatically dropped in response. Then his gaze drifted to the side, where her nipples poked clearly through the thin material.
“Five pulses. The last one was the heaviest yet,” Jacoby said, as her eyes opened again. The ache in his chest was gone, Poole’s microorganisms having already swarmed through his body to repair any damage.
“Five? That’s strange. I figured we would have been down to two or three by now. How many G’s did we pull?” Lana asked, stretching her neck from side to side.
The movement drew his gaze to her neck and the freckled span just visible between the splayed zipper. Then she bent over and started rubbing her legs. He watched her, the pressure behind his eyes doubling. A jolt shot down his spine, through his belly, and then into his groin. His imagination flashed to life, Lana reaching up and pulling the zipper down slowly.
Shit. No! Not now. Jacoby felt it happen, just like with Lex, when the whole ordeal first started. Recognizing the signs didn’t do him any good, however. Strong impulses flooded his body, working to wash away every other thought.
“Anna worked out the acceleration table. Maybe she knows something. But how are you? That acceleration stress must have been hell without any protection?”
Protection? a voice rang quietly in his mind, a knowing laugh quickly following. You know how we can protect her. You can feel it. Give her our gift. Our strength. Let me make her whole…complete. Don’t lie, you know you want her.
Lana stretched her legs and then her back. But in his mind, she’d already pulled the zipper down to her bellybutton, the fabric splaying to the side to expose flawless skin and just a hint of small but pert breasts. The zipper continued down, as even more blood rushed away from his head and to his pelvis. Lana shoved the suit down, one hand smoothly sliding between her legs and against the small strip of neatly trimmed hair. The other stretched towards his groin. It was so vivid in his mind that he could actually feel her hand work inside his shorts and slide over his manhood.
Jacoby’s eyes snapped open to find Lana’s suit still zipped up, her hands messaging her arms and shoulders.
“I mean there has to be a reason for it…planetary gravity…routing through the belt,” she said.
In Jacoby’s head she ripped his pants down and pulled his erection free. Lana turned and pushed her shapely rear up against him, her hand latching firmly onto his erection and teasing the tip just inside her before pulling it back out again.
“No…stop,” he said, the real Lana and his heated thoughts blurring together.
“Stop? Stop what? Do you think we should talk to Anna? Jacoby, are you okay?” Soraya asked.
Lana pushed back into him, his cock sliding smoothly inside. She cursed and turned to look back at him, her eyes full of lust and need. Jacoby felt every millimeter of her body accept him as she rocked back hard. Her ass hit with a slap. Urges pounded into his brain–to grab onto her hips and thrust deeper inside, to lick and kiss her skin. For them to become one.
He felt it all, tactile and strong, a kinetic and fiery life bubbling up from deep inside and pushing into his groin. He felt his manhood slide in and out of Lana, her body growing warmer and wetter around him. But it was deeper than that. He felt the energy of her body buzzing, her cells moving and dividing, responding to the fire in his loins. They were preparing for his…
“I can’t,” he grunted as his perception tilted. An urge filtered in, something beyond the lust…an almost insatiable hunger.
A small part of him resisted, a voice cracking through the smothering wall of lust and building hunger. A light started to glow inside Lana’s body in his mind–green. He connected to her in his mind, the link stretching around Soraya, Lex, and Anna. In that moment, Jacoby felt his own desires strip away, until Poole’s motivations were all that was left. He wanted to pull Lana in, to link her biology to his network. To grow and spread. To tweak, alter, and evolve.
“Can’t? Can’t what?” Lana asked.
Jacoby tipped forward and caught Soraya’s gaze. She half opened her mouth to speak but he stumbled sideways into the table. He straightened and pushed away, his vision clearing a moment before momentarily going fuzzy again. Soraya was there, her arms around him, holding him up.
“Jacoby, what’s wrong?” she asked, her voice close. But the growing hunger turned and twisted everything about, like a massive, smothering mouth closing in around him.
“Just stop! I can’t…make sense of it!” he cried, almost falling over as his vision titled.
Jacoby took a step towards the bridge, thought better of it, and turned left. He needed distance, space, and quiet. To get free of the overwhelming impulses.
Every step away from Lana bought him a little extra clarity, some rational thought wrestling back its control. It was a voice, small but powerful–the real, rational Jacoby.
This is all Poole, he thought. Somehow, his alien alter ego had swept in so hard and fast that he’d almost completely swarmed him over. What would have happened if he had? Would he cease to exist?
Jacoby swung his leg around the ladder and descended, the pulsing hum in his brain beating against the inside of his skull.
“What in the hell was that? Did I do something wrong?” he heard Lana ask, just as he approached the bottom and jumped off. People were above, at the top of the ladder, calling his name.
Jacoby took a single step to the right, towards the door to the hold, but changed direction halfway through and went left instead. He pushed through the small maintenance hatch and into the passage beyond.
The door hissed shut behind him, the dark and quiet helping him reclaim a bit more of his fracture thoughts. He stopped for a moment, closed his eyes, and pushed on.
“Poole, where are you?” he shouted, fighting hard to ignore the throbbing in his pants.
“Always with the yelling. You’re my ride, Jacky-Boy, that means I can’t really go anywhere. Not anywhere fun, at least,” a cold voice echoed in the narrow corridor behind him, or it could have been in his head. Jacoby didn’t turn. He pushed forward, moving to put even more distance between himself and the others.
Jacoby reached the end of the passage, pushed the control panel, and stepped through the small door after it whisked open.
Establishing Boundaries O’clock
Stepping into the reactor room, Jacoby closed the door behind him for good measure. The space was roughly horseshoe shaped, with half-door access panels on either end, leading back to what he assumed were engine service spaces. It was relatively dark, too. Several small strips of lights glowed on the ceili
ng, a diffuse radiance pulsing off the reactor’s main housing.
The craft’s small fusion drive sat in the middle of the space, like a six-foot-tall, shiny donut. It glimmered, as if covered in hundreds of Christmas lights. Cables and glowing tubes ran down and over the case, branching and terminating in dozens of boxes, cylinders, and other unmarked equipment. He puzzled over how anyone could identify, let alone maintain and service the mass of seemingly random components. He didn’t have the knowledge or the training to sort any of it out.
“Poole? Where are you? We need to talk now!”
The space hummed peacefully around him as the reactor, the ship’s heart, worked to recharge the pulse engine’s capacitors. But the room’s peaceful appearance didn’t match the conditions inside Jacoby’s body. Not even close. Pressure shifted and moved in his head, Anna, Lex, and Soraya’s distant emotions flitting around like indistinct shapes against the dark tapestry of his mind. Their emotions, their feelings blurred his vision one second, only to recede to a distant, barely noticeable hum in the next. He struggled to differentiate where their emotions ended and his own began–his anxiety, almost smothering depression, the lurking anger, and now, the frightening hunger.
He was angry at Poole, for taking over his head, at Anna, for abandoning him, and himself, for…everything.
Jacoby’s heart raced and slowed in response. And underneath it all, connecting him like a thick length of chain, was the uncomfortable and altogether undeniable sexual urge.
It wasn’t just that impulse. That he was fairly sure he could ignore. But this was so much more…consuming, stimulating, and enervating at the same time. It was so powerful it burned in every muscle strand, skin cell, and ounce of coursing blood. It was intimately woven into his D.N.A, permeating every thought and sensation, and if left unchecked or unsatisfied, it felt like it would split him down the middle. It felt like an addiction, like the stims Mike had pushed on him.
