Humanity, 2.0
Year 1, Day 2 – After Midnight
She’d said the Vault was mostly below sea level, of course, but I had blanked on that. I looked out the window – the room was lit dimly, and I guess the window looked out into a part of the ocean shallow enough that the sun still shone through.
“Oh my god… where are we?”
“Like I said, an unnamed island in the Pacific. This the lower observation lounge I built for you and the girls you will bring here. There’s a second lounge up top, which also has a door to a small grassy clearing above. You will be able to go outside. Unless the Earth’s atmosphere gives out…”
I stared at the incredible sight for some time, until I felt the tug of her hand into the room proper. “Come. Sit down.” She led me by the hand as I continued to gape. What was that window made of? I hoped it was some heavy-duty stuff. A few fish sped by, small brightly colored tropical things. We reached a big lounge chair, the size of a double bed, and she pulled me down onto it. I let her do it, and we fell together into almost a cuddling position. It was right about then that I realized all over again what a goddamn beautiful woman she was; those perfect tits were snugly wrapped by her skin-tight black outfit, down to her nipples being plain as day, and they brushed against my chest as we pressed together. A certain part of me she’d increased responded naturally, which was likely just as visible to her, but she kept on explaining things. I was distracted enough not to notice my own arousal, for the time being.
“The second iteration of humanity I designed is mentally almost identical to how you are now. That’s why you aren’t thinking or acting differently. Both men and particularly women have a stronger sex drive, mainly because it’s a good outlet and balancing mechanism for the mind – and there’s some alterations to how the instincts work with regard to the opposite sex. Females are a lot less possessive, and for the instincts pertaining to the raising of children, I borrowed from other social animals on Earth – wolves, actually. Female instinct will be to group up with other females and collectively raise children, rather than trying to exclusively claim one male to help raise their children. That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a fairly minor change. I wanted to preserve the human identity as much as I could. Years from now, if I’m right, your new species will seem incredibly different to you – but that’s because they will be what humans had the potential to be, but were always held back by a few evolutionary relics lingering in their DNA.
“The most significant changes I settled on are mostly physiological. In your species, the model I came up with to solve the gender and sex issues that I think are the root of probably half of humanity’s problems – rather than break open the male and female minds on a very deep level – instead works by just changing the gender equation itself.”
“Equation?” My hand stroked up her arm and onto her shoulder, but I kept staring out the window.
“The 1:1 ratio of men to women makes sense for hierarchical pack hunters evolving on the savannah and competing with lions and apes. That’s what humanity’s DNA is built to do, and it did a decent enough job. But in a technological civilization, it boils down to a liability; the whole arrangement is inefficient, and causes all kinds of problems. Monogamy has seemingly worked for most human cultures more because it’s convenient and because of the natural near-1:1 ratio than because it’s actually the best environment for the human brain to function in. It was an arrangement that served nobody well on the large scale. So, the new human race will have roughly one male per eight females.”
My eyes just about bugged out, and I finally tore my gaze away from the window to stare her in the face. She had been looking at me the whole time. “Eight?”
“Eight. I didn’t have time to test that specific number much, to be honest. It’s really more of a best guess; my tests reported with 92% confidence that the true optimal number was between five and nine. If it isn’t perfect, well, it’s fine if you just blame me. I’ll be long gone by the time anyone asks.”
“Will do.”
She seemed a little put out by my quick response. “Regardless, I did make females bisexual by default, which should help as sort of a fudge factor in the exact ratio. As for male homosexuality, I left that as-is. Culturally, it might be interesting to see how it plays out in a society that’s numerically so dominated by women; my testing couldn’t really get me reliable data on that. Maybe I should have tested it more… watching two men together was always way too much fun.” She bit her lip and stared off into space for a while.
I remained quiet, expecting her to continue. She seemed to drift off into la-la land for a moment, until I cleared my throat. She shook her head and looked back at me. Odd how she seemed so perfectly human, really… and was it me, or had she just been daydreaming about two dudes going at it?
She jumped right back into her monologue as if there’d been no interruption. “Um, for physiological stuff, here’s what to expect. Females will be able to naturally exercise birth control, which in my modeling I found changed things drastically even in the earliest stages of civilization if I assumed a blank-slate scenario. Males will be larger than they are now – that’s the reason for your massive appetite; you’re having another growth spurt, and you can expect two more. Males will have a more complex physiology than females do, so kind of the opposite of how it is now – for some technical reasons I can’t go into with you now, I had to load the overwhelming majority of the genetic alterations I made on the male reproductive system. Being male will be a different experience than you know now, but even I can’t predict exactly how it will be once you reach maturity. You’ll have to figure most of it out as you go.
“Aside from that, I also hugely increased baseline capacities in both genders. Endurance, efficiency of muscle use, ligamentary tensile strength, bone construction and resilience, eyesight and sense acuity, reaction speed… just about everything is improved, sometimes by only a little, sometimes by a factor of two or three. You’ll grow into all that in time, but the females will pick it up much more rapidly. Mental capacity is more tricky to enhance and I didn’t have enough time to really figure the human brain out on the most fundamental levels – but I did seriously improve the way synapses maintain older connections, so it should be tougher for you to forget things at least, and you will all be pretty smart by the time you reach a hundred or so. The brain’s also less error-prone, neurologically I mean, and I studied the most common mental disorders and tried to build in some basic resistance to them… but don’t hold your breath. You may not even notice the difference.”
“Jesus.” It was like the Superman shopping list. “Why is it that, out of all that amazing stuff, the only thing that happens to me is you make my tool bigger?”
“More happened to you than that, but most of it is internal. The rest will come with time. If you must know, I left males of the species the same size ‘down there’ as the originals, in proportion to their larger overall body size anyway. The only reason I increased your penis size was because I wanted you, specifically, to make lots of use of it – and I figured having a ‘gift’ like that might go a little ways toward breaking through your anxiety about women and sex. Try not to think of it as me calling you shallow. I think, if anything, you’re so deep you get lost in your own depths before you look into anyone else’s… if you can forgive taking that metaphor a little far. Anyway, that last part about memory is important because of the changes to DNA maintenance and telomerase integrity, and enhancements to the immune system. The two of those together should result in increased lifespan.”
I was still thinking about how what she said could possibly be assembled as me not being called shallow when the last thing she’d said registered after a few seconds. “Uh, increased by how much?”
“Hard to say. Best guess, natural lifespans will end at about five hundred to eight hundred years, though there’s a huge upward margin of error on that. Life expectancy – mainly due to accidents and such – will probably land at around four hundred years, but again, that depends a lot on culture and environment. Living that long, obviously, having that good memory will be much more important.”
I didn’t have any words. It’s hard to explain to the younger ones in our society today how death was viewed in the old times, versus how it is now. Aging, and death, just… loomed, in ways they don’t to us here and now. So very, very few of the original humans ever really faced death and came to terms with it. It’s little wonder the part of Old Earth history that the newest generation have the most trouble understanding is things like the code of Bushido of ancient Japan; people came up with these ideas because death was just an ever-present thought in our minds. Some, like those warriors in feudal times, came to kind of worship it in a way. Even now it isn’t banished from our minds, but… it isn’t what it once was. I can’t explain it to someone who never experienced it. Just take my word for it that hearing this from her, and believing it, completely left me speechless. I had no context to understand what I would become.
“So… I’ll be the only human left on Earth?”
“What?”
“You said humanity is lost, but you could only make the one of me.”
She gave me an odd look, then blinked. “You didn’t figure it out already? You won’t be alone, Ben. I guess I forgot to mention your most important function; your body can change normal women into members of your new species.”
How an ancient super-being like her “forgot” is beyond me. When I try to get my head around it, I usually chalk it up to the effect of her living in one of our bodies for so long that she started to take on some of our flaws.
“In creating you, I created a propagation system. You’re the progenitor of a whole new race. Your body has the capacity to rewrite and create, on the fly, the retrovirus necessary for making baseline human females into members of your species. I actually shortened the human genome by a lot – there were thousands of defunct viruses floating around in your DNA, doing nothing – but there’s still far too many differences for you to interbreed directly with the previous species. The changes to female baseline DNA are a lot easier to process than those to male DNA, and can be done on a much simpler system – such as within your own body. It’s changing other males to be like you en masse that I couldn’t get to work; the only solution was to tailor it for a single individual. It made a hell of a lot more sense in propagation terms to make a single male that could alter multiple females, than to make one female who could alter several males. I’m sorry, but you’ll only be able to save other females of your species. You can’t take any other men with you into your future. And of the females, they’ll have to be of birthing age to be receptive to the retrovirus your body will create.”
“I – what?”
“Why do you think I chose a twenty-two-year-old gawky college kid who whacks off a couple times a day, and would love nothing more than to have a big dick, Ben? Your intellect and problem-solving abilities are just why I originally chose you over the other guys like you. That, and your otherwise clean bill of health, and your varied genetic background and the way that suppresses the nastier recessive traits... anyway, in order to change women to be like you, Ben, all you need to do is fuck them. Your body will take care of the rest.” She gave me wink. “The first time your semen gets inside them, it changes them into one of your kind. That may take several days or weeks, and depending on the individual, they may experience a more mild version of the sickness you underwent. The second time, if the change has completed by then, they can get pregnant if they want to. Since you’re the progenitor, I need you to do it with a lot of girls. But don’t just sleep with every one you see.”
“You did notice the part where I’m the least suave and charming guy on the planet, right?” I eyed her. “Getting two girls into bed, years apart, was as much as I managed for my entire life before you did this to me.”
“Actually, I chose you when you were still in high school and a virgin. I changed this body to look different at times and dropped in on you occasionally; I was a couple different people you spoke to and probably don’t remember. At first all the reasons I chose you as a candidate were purely technical, but afterward I watched you and got to know you better. I picked you because you have all the tools, Ben – the mental ones that I can’t give you with a retrovirus. You just don’t know how to use them. You have competence, morality, and the ability to see and understand the consequences of a decision before you make it. You can absorb lots of information quickly and start to use it just as quickly. You have all the traits necessary to become the man you need to be, you just needed the motivation to do it. The problem for you has always been all the anxiety inside you, tearing you up and stacking redundant thoughts so high that you can’t get things done. I tweaked your chemical balance a little, but it’ll only do about as much as common antidepressants. You’ll have to overcome the rest on your own.”
I chuckled. “If you say so. If the mission is for me to get girls in bed, I think the mission is already in a lot of trouble.” I paused. “Wait. I’m thinking this through. So let’s assume some miracle happens and I manage to bed Girl X. I do my thing, and her DNA starts changing. We get together a few weeks later. I tell her she’s now a superhuman who can expect to live a couple hundred years, and I’m also one, and I received my gifts from a space alien.” I held out both hands. “How does she not think I’m nuts and call the police?”
“They’ll know something is very different about them. As you mature in the next few years, you’ll come to have conscious control of far more body functions, be more aware of other autonomic functions, and your senses will be more acute. You’ll be stronger, faster, and your memory will become very sharp. However, for you, that process will take ten years, mostly because – like I said – the changes to your DNA are a lot more complicated. The girls you alter will experience those changes much more rapidly, and they’ll grow a few new muscle groups which have no analogue with previous humans. It won’t be ambiguous by the time the virus has had time to work; the girls you’ve changed will most likely believe you if you tell them the truth.” She paused. “Most of them, I would think, anyway.
“Now – as for it allegedly taking a miracle for you to find girls to sleep with... you’re going to like this part. I couldn’t risk everything on you eventually changing your life on your own – so to that end, for you, and only you, I added some pheromonal enhancement and other slight deviations from the planned norm for new species. The pheromonal stuff, along with some subconscious stuff that you won’t even know is working, will make your dick pretty much irresistible to any woman who sees it, if both of you feel even a speck of desire for each other. Further—“
“Oh shit.” I was awestruck. Finally something made sense.
“What?” She shifted, and as snug as we were right then, we both felt each other’s every motion. My head might have forgotten how close we were together, but my cock never did. She leaned up on one arm and turned toward me, and her pretty face was framed by the large ocean window behind her. You know, whenever I think back on her, that’s the image that first comes to mind.
“That doctor in the hospital. Bethany.”
“Does someone know about your nature already?”
“No… I don’t think so anyway. I mean she accidentally saw my dick. I was as surprised as she was, but she made this dumb excuse to look again, and before I knew it she was giving me the blowjob of my life. She swallowed my come… is she going to change into a super-person?”
She frowned at me. “You don’t think super-person is a tacky name? Think up something better after I’m gone. Anyway, there’s no way she would have been exposed. Your body was still in the process of having its DNA rewritten, and the capacity to manufacture the retrovirus would come last – you won’t be able to do that for a week or so, actually. The pheromonal effects would have taken effect earlier than the more complex biochemical and cellular alterations, so all you got was a fun little adventure in your first few hours as a new man. Cherish it. And go back and really fuck her later, if you want. I’m sure she wants you to. You said she was a doctor? Good a reason as any.” She paused, looking upward as if to search herself. “Don’t be shocked if the pheromone effect doesn’t work on every female. It’s a hamfisted solution, but I didn’t have time to come up with a better one – like sprinkling hundreds of guys like you around the globe. So just one male, artificially made irresistible, will have to do.”
“I can’t believe this.” I leaned back against the glass, folding my arms. “I need time to just… sit down and think. This throws my whole life out the window. Is this really the right thing to do? Shouldn’t I just tell everyone? Let them use my DNA to come up with something to just make everyone in the world better?”
“Don’t.” She said it with finality and firmness, like I was suggesting we club a baby seal.
“Don’t? Just like that?”
“Don’t try that. It won’t work. Your scientific base doesn’t understand retroviruses as well as I do, and certainly not as well as they think they do. I modeled that scenario six hundred and eighty-five times, and changed every variable. Trying to reverse-engineer my virus results in a horrible death for millions or even billions of people just about every time. Changing even a couple elements of the retrovirus can look successful at first, long enough to let it spread to the whole baseline human race. Only twenty or thirty years down the road do the flaws start to come out, and by then it’s already in all the children. The whole species starts to die off.” She shook her head. “Even in the scenarios where it works, it still results in an arms race to create even more advanced versions of humans, which has an even more ugly ending. Tell nobody you don’t trust. Try to make all the people you trust also women that you’ve fucked; I also coded the pheromonal stuff, and some trace compounds in your semen, so that you – and only you – will damn near always gain the trust of any woman you have sex with.”
“What the – how? They all just love me the moment they see my dick?” What the fuck kind of salvation is this?
“Love, you’re on your own for. I can induce trust and a degree of loyalty, and a strong lust for your body, but not love.” She shrugged. “Again, this is only for you. Your own children that you’ll father will probably be half sons, to help propagation – but if they make love to a baseline female, nothing happens. Your sons will have to mate with females of their own kind to have children, and all of them will father the normal 1 male to 8 female ratio.”
“Wait. I’m one guy. Even if there’s enough guys and girls of the new species, aren’t they all…”
“They’re all your sons and daughters, so they’re all siblings, yes. I added some genetic code which should damn near completely obviate the need for incest taboos by editing out genetic disorders that may arise from it. I put that in mainly because I had to settle for a single-male origination scenario, but it also builds in an element of protection should there be a time in the future when a serious disaster or something drastically reduces the population. I’m not necessarily a big fan of the minimal genetic diversity that comes out of incest – but if you find yourself a wide variety of women, that problem should sort itself out.
“Aside from the physical enhancements and better immune system, I also enhanced regenerative capacity and more other things than I have time to list.” She punched a few more buttons, and a screen appeared in the air. Massive amounts of information in some foreign language sped by. “None of these things seem likely to you now, but just remember I want humanity to still be around in 412,000 years. That’s a long time, and lots could happen between then and now.” She nodded to herself. “When I recreate a species, I make damn sure they’re built to last.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
She took a quick breath, then waved an arm over her head, indicating the whole place around us. “I used this mountain originally to house all the experimental societies I constructed, but I cleaned it out for you to use down the road if you need it. There’s enough supplies in the lower levels to last a community of five hundred people a hundred years of good eating, and a huge stockpile of every kind of equipment I could think you might need if and when you decide to settle on the landmasses again.”
“Wait, why would I need that much food and stuff?”
“It’s not just for you. Use your head. I told you this planet would become hell for a while, Ben. When things get very scarce, every model says that times will get very dark before the end. By that point, I expect that you and your people wouldn’t be able to hide your secret anymore. You’d be viewed as freaks, and probably hunted, or blamed for any number of things. Not to mention how physically inhospitable this planet will become. This island is a fortress, and what’s better, from the outside it’s completely indistinguishable from any other small, rocky uninhabited island that nobody would have any reason to go to. You won’t need it quite yet, but when you do, I’ve got not only all that food down there, but a collection of all the information, textbooks, literature, and history of your entire planet that I could get my hands on – as much as the servers I built here could gobble down off the internet.
“When times get bad, and you can’t live on the outside anymore, you can bring yourself and all of your women and children here, where they will be safe. The most likely scenarios say the planet won’t become literally uninhabitable, just almost so except for a few tiny regions, but a combination of warfare and disease is still likely to kill off all of the remaining pockets so that human history ends with them. It’ll take probably fifty or sixty years of freedom from an irresponsible civilization for the planet’s ecosystem and climate to re-establish themselves and for sections of the planet to become habitable again. I’ll let you explore this place on your own, and just tell you that your means of getting home isn’t far from where the east auxiliary vault exit is. You’ll have plenty of time to find your way around it later on, that’s for damn sure.
“Anyway, on those same servers, I’ve left all the literature documenting the experiments I did and the results, how those fed into my final design choice, and an overview of the physiological changes I made to you and the girls who you’ll make like you. It’ll have enough detail that any doctors you bring – sounds like you found one already, actually – will have what they need to treat any member of the new species…” She trailed off for a moment. “When all is said and done, there’s still room for improvement with what I added. I’m sure that, given a thousand years or so, your descendants will have figured out everything I did, and maybe come up with some even better solutions. I’m just one… shit, English doesn’t have a word for what I am, does it?” She laughed. “Nearly three hundred years I lived on your planet, why didn’t it occur to me until just now?”
I thought for a while. “If I had to finish your sentence… I’d say, ‘person’.”
She considered me for a few moments. “How kind of you, though I don’t think you’d agree if you knew me better. The real me, I mean, down in the chamber. This me is human, but she is… a lot of things. I’m just one… person. I did everything I could, and I’m leaving you to it.”
“I can’t help but think I’m going to disappoint you.”
She looked out the window for a time, then turned back to me. “Forget it, Ben. Just go with your best judgment and do whatever you can to stay alive. I’m just an old spaceship who thinks she knows everything.”
“I don’t know about that. For one thing, you look no older than me.”
She snorted. “Very funny. Anyway, even I can’t see the future with any certainty. Maybe this will all be a waste of time and your species really will fix its problems.” She sighed and stood up, walking over to the glass and leaning against it. “Would be the first time I’ve seen any species do that without help, though.”
I was staring at her ass right then, I confess. My cock was standing up in my own skin-tight outfit, like some kind of parody of superhero Spandex. I didn’t even notice when she glanced back at me and smiled.
“I suppose it’s been an hour or two, hasn’t it?”
“Huh?” I shook my head and met her eyes. She walked back over to me, and stopped at the side of the lounge chair. She suddenly bent down to one knee, leant over me, and kissed me.
My body responded instantly, and I found my arms were wrapped around her back before I knew it. I felt her legs settling onto the lounge on either side of my waist, and my desire roared in my head. I still couldn’t believe this whole thing; this absolutely fucking beautiful woman not only practically demanded I fuck her earlier, but now she wanted a second round in the same day. My hands found her ass, gripping its firm roundness tightly. She broke the kiss finally, and came up above me, staring down at my face between her big tits.
“You understood faster than I thought… we have a little time. How about another confidence booster, Ben?” God, the way those tits jiggled…
“Confidence booster?”
“I need you to become a great lover, Ben, and what’s more, I need you to actually believe that you are. So you’re going to fuck me again, and I’m going to do a little trick this time to help you understand how to please a woman. You might feel funny in your head for a minute, then it should all come back to you.”
“Come back to me? I’ve gotten more sex in one day today than my whole life. What’s there to recall?”
She only smiled, and her hand went to the side of my face as she closed her eyes and her face took on a look of deep concentration. I felt an odd tingling, then the strangest sensation of my mind somehow becoming simpler, more animalistic. I was only vaguely aware of the process, but I knew something was wrong and met her eyes with a question.
“I know it feels odd, Ben… you’re going to want to just grab me and fuck me soon. Some part of you might panic and think you’re becoming a rapist, but it isn’t like that. Don’t resist what your body wants to do for a while. I’m taking over your upper brain functions for a little while so I can do a data dump. I’m giving you all of my memories of sex as a human female… every time I was touched by a man or another woman, every time I came, every time I got horny in this body, all of those you’ll remember like past lives. It’s going to overload your body’s arousal neurons for a little while and you’re going to want to try all of it at once. Just ride it out and let your body do its thing.”
By now my jaw was open wide and I was staring up at the ceiling in a silent cry of mental… I wouldn’t call it pain, but it was something equally alarming. It faded quickly, and I found my mind returning to me, but… different. I was saturated somehow, like my mind had been a dry sponge and had just now been thrown into a pool and then handed back to me. It was dripping with erotic memories, of very personal encounters and first-person experiences of female pleasure. I remembered men – and women, actually – eating her pussy, but it was all from her perspective; on top of that, every memory, as all memories are, was inextricably linked with her emotional and mental state at the time. I could remember being her, how she felt about the people she loved and touched, the self-doubt and insecurity that plagued her even after her millions of years of life, the way it all evaporated for a time when her many lovers had touched her.
I remembered the haze of arousal and pleasure she felt as a cock entered her, penetrating her depths and fucking her raw, that sensation doing something in her mind that had no analogue on the male side of sex. How she knew when her man had come and was pouring life-making come inside her body, and the disappointment that came with a man finishing inside her without bringing her off too. I remembered the dim sense of happiness she felt when a man’s cock was in her mouth, the power she felt over him and his pleasure, and the way his world was totally focused on her as she did it – as well as the satisfaction she felt as his seed squirted down her throat, a job well done. I remembered guiding others to eat her pussy, what she liked, what she had learned to like. I remembered countless female orgasms, how they felt and how they were brought about. I remembered tender, fleeting moments of girl-on-girl sex, soft flesh against soft flesh, breasts and nipples pressed together as wet red lips met, mouths and pussies meeting simultaneously in a sixty-nine, the secret knowledge that women had about one another’s bodies that let them make each other squeal with ecstasy. I remembered how she learned the tiny but critical differences between what she liked and other girls liked. I remembered her joining couples, groaning as a cock invaded her willing ass while a gentle female tongue teased her clit. It was… indescribable.
The sponge was dripping with this and far more stuff, which it would take me years to sort through. Even now I occasionally dredge up a new memory of a scene she experienced. It was soaking the entire rest of my mind with sex. By the time I’d stopped with my little reverie and was in control of my own head enough to realize where I was and what I was doing, I realized we were both naked and our odd outfits discarded on the floor. I was sitting up and mauling her tits, using my teeth a little in a way I clearly recalled she liked. It was as if she had vouchsafed her every deepest sexual secret to me, and I could say with absolute certainty that I now knew how to make her come every time. The power of it blasted through my anxieties so easily that I could scarcely even think of stopping to question if I should do this or that first. I somehow knew from reading cues even I didn’t understand that she wanted to suck me; she’d given me this huge dick, and she deserved to try it out in her mouth at least once. I turned and deposited her on the side of the lounge, sitting her up then standing in front of her myself and presenting my cock to her.
She smiled, knowing what I knew. I guess she was just glad the transfer worked so quickly. Without wasting any time, her mouth found me and she began to swallow my length. I could see her throat stretching open to accept my long pole and I gasped as the tight, slimy warmth of her mouth enveloped me and I felt her slender fingers tickling my balls. Oddly, she had no spittle, though her mouth felt wet and warm. I guess it was some technological wonder of that ‘biogel’ body, but I never got to ask her. Some part of me recalled that she was fine with her lover being more active while she sucked him, and my hands went to the back of her head. With my motions beginning slowly, I began to fuck her face, at first with a tender gentleness and then with increasing urgency.
Her hands went to my ass, and she let me fuck her mouth with abandon. We both knew I didn’t want to finish there, but we also both wanted her to feel my cock at its most primal, the big shaft worming down her throat and stretching her jaw. Her head bobbed back and forth in sync with my thrusts perfectly, my hips settling into a kind of timing with her automatically. I felt her begin to hum to herself, and the vibration went right down to the center of my shaft.
Who knows how long we just did that. Finally, though, I decided she needed some kind of attention herself. I pulled her up and then twisted around, letting myself fall onto the little couch and pulling her with me. We kissed for a time, then I guided her head back down to my cock while I turned her around. In a few moments, her pussy was squarely above my face, glistening and looking delectable.
I dove into my memories for only a moment – recalling being her while she was eaten out. I remembered the exact way she liked her lips to be teased, the way she liked closed lips to nibble her clit gently while fingers probed her insides. It came to me naturally, and I felt her sucking pause as I began. She still wasn’t soaking wet, the way human girls get, but I never had any problem getting my fingers within her. I snaked my other hand over her back and pulled us together closely, mainly just because I wanted to feel her squirm with pleasure as I ate her. Her suckjob became far more distracted and intermittent, but I didn’t care; I knew exactly what I was doing to her and how it was making her feel, and it was a glorious feeling. A woman was honestly nearing her orgasm because of me and my tongue and fingers.
“N- inside! Inside me!” She groaned. She lifted her hips up a little, then spun around before I could protest. Eating her was fun, but I guess she wanted to save her orgasm for the real fucking. I was tempted to just grab her and spin her around again so I could keep playing with her pussy, but I let her take the lead again as she rubbed her pussy against my cock. Like her pussy, her mouth was slippery and hot, yet not wet; my cock was bone-dry despite how hard she’d just sucked me off. Her hand reached beneath herself, and she lifted herself up to let the tip of my shaft poke into her pussy. Both my hands went to her waist, and we stared into one another’s eyes as we both moved her downwards, impaling her on me.
“A-a-a-ahhhh….” I bottomed out, and felt her warm pussy lips resting against the base of my cock. She stayed right there for a time, and the hands I’d had on her hips wandered north, sneaking under her breasts and then teasing her nipples. She bent downward, letting me suck on them a bit, before she rose up again. She bounced a bit, letting my shaft slide out a little before settling back down. She moaned, then kissed me again. “This is so much better than at your house.”
“Damn straight…” It wasn’t just better sex; it was more emotional, more deep. I understood then the distinction between sex and making love. This had started with just animal fornication, her allowing me to use her body to just let my over-eager cock explode. This was so much more, and it was irresistible; our bodies moved together as if they were one larger being, with intentions neither of us completely understood. I sensed she wanted me to take the lead, and without letting myself slip out, I flipped us over and settled her onto her back on the couch with me crouched at its edge, up atop her.
I braced both hands on her hips and ass, and she let her legs cross behind my own ass, sensing that I knew exactly what she wanted next. It seemed completely natural, almost without even thinking I knew that she wanted me to fuck her raw, to just release my own male animal upon her. Without preamble, I pumped out of her and in, then again, picking up the pace rapidly – knowing exactly how long it would take for her to get used to the motion. I saw her grimace, though my gaze quickly instead fell to her breasts, which were now bouncing back and forth with our movements. My own inner beast was taking over, rutting hard, but I had enough presence to remember she needed to come. I had to see this woman come at least once; I had to be able to tell myself that I made a spaceship orgasm. Okay, that sounds tacky, but it seemed passionate and serious enough at the time. My fingers reached down to our union and I began to toy with her clit in a random fashion, teasing and playing with her.
The process didn’t take very long for either of us; we were just too hot. She came first; I knew her signs now, and I saw her biting her lip again while her toes curled at either side of my chest. I kept pumping, hoping I could set her off before the boiling I felt in my own nuts would overflow. Her own quickening orgasm was setting me off, and I heard her make a series of quiet, low moans as the waves of pleasure rode out from her clit as I played with it. It got louder and louder; she eventually was wailing at the top of her lungs, or whatever she had. Obviously, there was nobody else around for hundreds of miles, so who cared? I let loose also, howling and roaring as I felt explosive pleasure in my shaft while she came down from her own orgasm. I thrust away as she finished, and felt my own goopy load firing out of my dick rapidly. I emptied my balls completely before I fell down at her side, letting myself slip out.
I only noticed then how worn-out I was. My body was soaked with sweat, and I probably smelled like a football team. I lay there for a while, her body snug against mine, both of us just basking in the amazing experience. I felt her small fingers running through my hair, stroking my skin and caressing me. Her love had become motherly again, though even without looking at her I could still sense the lonely, loving woman she was, the one that had needed this, had needed to just be fucked to utter satisfaction. She was both parent and lover, good friend and girlfriend.
And I only knew her for that span of twelve hours or so.
I eventually rolled over, and we stared out the window as the light outside began to dim. We’d moved time zones, obviously, so the sunset which had been fast approaching back in Sacramento was apparently only just now catching up here. The bright, colorful world outside darkened, becoming something otherworldly – I could see luminous spots begin to appear as the countless little creatures living in the atoll inside the island’s center began to bio-luminesce. They chased one another around, fighting, eating, fucking, all mindlessly, yet somehow beautifully. I had never seen nature like this before.
We watched – probably not for that long – and then she finally sat up, and looked down at me, putting her hand on my chest. “It’s time, Ben.”
“Wha?” I’d been dozing off, content to just have this incredible person next to me for a time.
She stood, and held out a hand to me. I took it, rising up myself. With a glance, the mass of black stuff on the floor suddenly surrounded our bodies again, forming rapidly into those funny bodysuits she had. Taking my hand, we walked together toward the door.
“Time for what?” I said it dimly as we walked down the corridor we’d come in through, heading back toward the big chamber with her spaceship-self inside. She didn’t answer for a time; instead we reached the room overlooking the big chamber – now lit again – and she walked over to a corner of the room. She looked downward, and a circular hole in the floor near her suddenly broke along a hidden seam. “Won’t you come see me off?”
“Wha – you’re leaving right now?” We just fucking got here!
“I can’t really iterate how close to the line I’m running it with my remaining helium-three supplies, not to mention the launch window. If I don’t leave in the next four minutes, I’m afraid it’ll add one hundred and ten years to my trip to Jupiter. After this many years, you can be sure I have this fuel consumption stuff down to a very exact science. I’m sorry Ben, I had hoped to stay around and be a guide, maybe even make some adjustments as time goes on, but I’m going to have to leave you to this on your own.”
“This fuel stuff, I can’t go find it somewhere else for you and buy some time?”
“Not in anywhere near the quantity and purity I would need. I can only get what I need in an orbit so close to Jupiter that the radiation would be lethal for you in less than a minute, enhancements or not. I didn’t want to tell you this, but… Ben, normally I don’t risk running my fuel this low. I’ve already found the next planet I’m travelling to. By staying so long to try to find a way to save your species, I’ve delayed my arrival there by two hundred and sixteen years already. They were a slim hope to begin with, but either way, I gave your people an unfair advantage because of my personal feelings. I’m sorry, but the rest will just have to be up to you.” Her eyes came back to me, and she smiled. “So don’t let my work all be for nothing. Get out there and put that jumbo-sized tool to work.”
“Would you shut up about the sex thing? This is fucking serious.”
“I’m glad you realize that. It’s completely serious, but if you let that drag you down you’ll never become the man you need to be. I like you, Ben, and I like humans. I wouldn’t have risked myself or the next planet as much as I have if I didn’t. You kind of remind me of my husband, back when I was biological.” She never elaborated on that; I wondered what he was like. She looked down at her hull, her eyes narrowing. “I have to go, Ben. See me off. You’ll regret it later if you don’t.” She was right; I would have. I’m glad I did.
Somberly, I got up and rode down the lift with her. The thing was surprisingly fast, we were down a good four hundred feet in seconds. She took my hand, and walked over to the hull. It towered above us, like the skyscraper of God, somehow stuck here beneath the Earth but readying to blast out of it. There was no hatch or obvious point of ingress. She walked up to the side of it, a nondescript patch of metallic hull just like the rest. I could see a seemingly random angular pattern in the metal, but it was otherwise just… metal. Who knows what it was really made out of.
She turned to me a few feet from the hull. “Ben, have fun with being what you are, okay? That’s a critical element of humans being stable in the long term. You have to set that example for the new civilization you found. The way humans think about sex now is screwing up their psychology more than they realize. Tandem-gender hot carbon species almost always have sex tied into their minds on every level. All the changes I made in you are just the start of creating a new culture that the human brain can damn near always be happy and successful in. I know I dumped a huge weight on your shoulders, but don’t let it crush you. The people who you don’t save aren’t equivalent to people you killed. I know you will be tempted to think that, but don’t ever let yourself go down that road.”
I closed in for one last hug. I looked down at her face, close and personal, after the brief kiss we shared. “Didn’t you just say yourself that sticking around here meant you might have doomed whatever aliens you’re headed off to save?”
She gave me this long look of both pride and remorse. “It’s because I live at the end of that road that I should know, Ben. Good luck.”
There was no brilliant, angelic ascension. She stepped back, her gaze never leaving mine, then she stuck one arm into the ship, and her body just… passed inside, like she was walking into a tub of water. I held her other hand as she stepped inside, and she gave me a wistful look as she vanished inside it. She slipped out of my grasp and disappeared inside. There was silence for a few seconds, then the whole mass of the huge thing seemed to just… light up. It took a few moments, and some parts came on faster than others. Once it powered up and I could see it operating, I was struck by an incredible sense of age to her. I didn’t think of her as an ‘it’ anymore. It was her. Hyper-advanced technology or not, incredible sportswear or not, nothing could hide the wear and tear of countless millennia on her exterior. There were tiny dings, dents, and as my eyes wandered around her hull, from this angle I could see something I couldn’t from above – a massive series of burn marks, long and jagged, carved into her hull and not looking like simple age at all. Had someone tried to kill her? What the hell kind of asshole would do that?
I suppose it was an adolescent moment of rage, thinking that because I’d gotten to stick my dong in this woman that she was mine to protect. She didn’t engineer that out of us men, archaic though the idea is. I wanted to rip the bastard who shot at her to pieces, even though she was infinitely more powerful than me. I stood there impotently while her hull flickered to life in a few final places, then began to produce a low hum. I uncurled my fists and looked up; something else was happening now. A band of blue-green… something was forming in the air, in a circle around her center. It occurred to me just about then that I was standing in the launch tube of a goddamn rocketship, and it was about to launch.
Or so I thought; of course, I realized later that was foolish. She wouldn’t go to the great trouble of creating me, having me walk her to her destination, only to incinerate me on her way out the door due to a simple oversight. I didn’t always think things through at that age. I backed up, scuttling to the elevator and stabbing what I sincerely hoped was the ‘ascend’ button. I knew of no other way out. I rose up, thankfully, and it was right about then that the massive door above us commenced opening. It sounded heavier than anything, and creaked with this awful noise as it irised out. I thought for a moment it would fail to open, and some dark glimmer of hope sparked inside me. Maybe she would stay with me, and show me what to do. I had no fucking idea. I still sometimes feel like I don’t. She could have picked a goddamn astronaut, or the President, or some Don Juan. She picked me, Ben Stanton, some loser, lifeless college senior who could barely hold it together. I suppose it’s good she made the plan so painfully simple, and she thought to include the tools that made it so easy that any straight guy my age could follow through with it given the opportunity. Even still, I could already feel my shoulders weighing down, like there was something much, much bigger than me resting on them.
Just as the elevator got to the top and I rushed back to the center of the massive line of windows, I could see the hazy blue-green torus around her was apparently lifting her whole mass off the ground. She was rising up against gravity somehow, with no thrust or propellant being expelled. The door was about halfway open, and by the time she was near its threshold, it was opened up completely. There was no sound, she simply rose up out of the chamber like a hot-air balloon. I craned my neck, and could see her underside for another minute or so as she began to accelerate upward. There were no exhaust ports or big rocket nozzles; the rear-facing segment of the ship was just more nondescript, aged hull, with a couple more of those scars that sent another flash of rage through me.
I trusted, of course, that there was a way for me to get home. For now, though, I had no energy. My life was missing, replaced with some stranger offering me suspicious goods. The world I was growing up in was doomed. My mother had been an institutionalized lunatic, my father was in prison and unlikely to get out before he died, and unless I got real lucky on scholarships, I was going to run out of cash half a year before I could finish school. My body was changed, on the inside, vastly; a part of me felt like it wasn’t my own body. Lying down and thinking of all this only made it worse, even though I couldn’t think of anything else to do about it all. 15226 – or whatever I was supposed to call her – had given me a mission, and I had to do it. But it was such a bizarre mission, and I was totally unqualified. So I did what people with anxiety problems always do when faced with a difficult problem – think in circles and be useless for a while.
I decided to sleep it off. I crashed on the bed we’d landed next to in the facility, for a few hours, and woke up some interminable time later. There were no windows, and no clocks until we added them years later. I was rested, but hungry again. The computer had a map and directory button right there on the home screen, which I used to locate one of several enormous frozen food lockers. The bodysuit protected me even in below-freezing weather inside. Steak and potatoes for me. Cooking gave me a distraction from my insane situation long enough to get myself together. I slept in the same bed again, and when I woke up, the funny black outfit had somehow become inert and fallen apart into a pile of sinewy fibers that disintegrated when I touched them. The facility was actually somewhat drafty and cool, I quickly realized. I ran around wearing a bedsheet for a while.
I wandered more. The place was enormous, though most of its space was given over to giant, empty chambers, some a quarter-mile in length or width – I guess those were where she ran her experiments. I spent two days walking through the storage areas on the lower levels, getting an idea of what each room had. She’d thought to leave manifests of each room’s contents. How she got all that stuff there, I still don’t know. It all appeared to have been made here on Earth. Medical supplies and drugs, barrels and barrels of chemicals and countless ingots of several pure metals, small vehicles, cooking supplies and fuel of all kinds, countless tools both simple and technological, scientific gear, clothing for both extreme weather and casual wear, some of which I appropriated… there were spare parts for everything, and even workshops to make whatever else we wanted.
I resolved to spend at least a day looking at the computer she mentioned, familiarizing myself with this Vault place and getting a broad overview of what was inside the system. After my meal, I got right to it. She was right – there truly was an endless amount of information in the system. Instructions and blueprints for the creation of virtually every machine or device the human race had ever come up with. There were endless texts on the sciences, beginner’s to very advanced texts on hundreds of languages, historical documents from all over the world. Books, art, poetry, movies, music, all of it… the thing couldn’t express to me how much it was in terms of bytes, but best I could figure, it was at least an exabyte. It wasn’t organized particularly well, and its search engine left much to be desired over even the contemporary options online. Some dumb voice in my head made note – remember to stick my super-dick in a girl who works for Google, before the world goes to hell completely.
God, I was incorrigible back then. Oh right, I suppose you younger kids might not know who or what Google was. Look it up.
The next day, when I woke up – I found out later it was actually just after midnight local time – I went up to the top floor and found the main exit hatch, after no less than three hours of wandering around looking for it. Opening it was easy, and the thing was apparently set to answer to me automatically. I was looking out over a vast, rocky set of hills, which led down to an arid plain. Down at the bottom, anchored fifty feet or so off the shore, I could see some dim lights through a window of a house… on the water? I looked closer. It was a yacht, maybe thirty feet, complete with polished wood-paneled decking, a small launch on the back, and bright white sails. She had to be kidding me; I’d never sailed a day in my life. A goddamn yacht?
I took a look inside two hours later, after I got down. It was already stocked with over month’s worth of food and drink, and to my surprise, despite its outwardly quaint appearance the boat was not only posh inside, but also almost completely automated. I wouldn’t have to manually adjust the sails or learn to sail at all. The ship’s automatic navigator controlled the sails, could download satellite weather data in real time, avoid storms and follow the wind wherever it went, find shipping lanes, plot courses to any destination I chose, and even find other boats if I wanted it to. There was an emergency motor and radio should the wind just stop for some reason. It had satellite internet, was stocked with a data library that wasn’t quite as impressive as the one in the vault, but was about as nice as anyone could have gotten onto a boat this size with contemporary technology. I wondered how she thought I could even afford to maintain this thing, or berth it somewhere. Curious, I checked my account on the satellite internet, just to see how dire the situation had become. By now, the hospital bills from my interesting foray there had to have been pouring in, and my insurance wasn’t so good that I wouldn’t be set back by quite a lot.
It read that I had just over 62 million dollars in my account. I just stared at the number for a good ten minutes, wondering if there’d been some mistake. The transaction history said that I’d received payments for services rendered from a number of ambiguously-named foundations, and all the paperwork was already in order. Who knew what kind of shenanigans she’d had going on… I never investigated any of it for fear of kicking up red flags. Even leaving me so quickly, she’d still set me up with as much as she could find before she took off. I walked out on the deck and looked to the dark night sky, but there was no sign of her, no moving stars, no matter how much I squinted. She was gone, somewhere, for good.
I sat down in the captain’s chair, but the fake sense of being in charge only made me feel worse. I found out one could control the boat from any screen inside if the permissions were changed around, so I spent most of my time on the upper deck, underneath a big jacket to protect me from the sun, and looking out at the sea. Before setting out I made sure it locked in my current location and saved it, for fear of not being able to find the place again. I wrote down the latitude and longitude and memorized them, and plastered it on a couple of the walls just in case the computer died and I forgot too. I punched in the course to a medium-size city on the West Coast, where the computer said they had a big marina. I thought about just going to some much closer island in the Pacific with an airport, it would be a lot quicker to get home that way, but I didn’t have much faith in my ability to talk past the authorities if they asked any questions. She’d said I would live for a very long time now; what was the rush? Better to take it slow.
It said it would get me there in eighteen days, give or take a few hours. From there, I guess I would get a flight home and just say I took a road trip. Well, I had wanted time to think this whole thing over... I relaxed in the chair, and stared out through the small windows to the open sea at night. I heard the machine automatically retracting the ship’s anchor, and something whirring as it unfurled the sails. The thing visibly started moving over the waves, and after a few minutes I was surprised at how fast I seemed to be going.
Staring out at the open, dark sea, I started to think.