“Yeah,” Zac admitted, still peevish. Then his tone became coolly academic as he added, tenor voice reverberating in the hallway: “And did you know that all that fucking has lowered your chance of succumbing to heart disease? You’ve also increased the functioning of your immune system, sharpened your thinking and inhibited tumor growth”
“All right, Zac.” She halted and planted her fists on her hips, grinning sideways at Zac’s closest blinking camera. “How did I accomplish all that?”
“Like I said, with all that fucking!” She fully expected Zac to expound, which he did. “By releasing copious amounts of the hormone DHEA at orgasm, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed, grabbing hold of the ladder rungs. As she climbed up to the control center, she considered that she should research DHEA on her personal computer when she was alone in her bunkroom sometime.
“You experience an average of three to four orgasms a day during hibe,” Zac continued blithely, as she entered the control center, “which adds up to a hundred and twenty orgasms during each hibe session.”
“That’s quite a few,” she muttered, a little startled at the statistic. “Too bad we couldn’t harness that…”
“You mean chemically, like tap the surge of dopamines and endorphins in your brain?”
“I mean―” She cut off and giggled, ceasing her climb. She didn’t know what she meant. “I don’t know, Zac.” She shook her head and grinned out of the side of her mouth. “I didn’t really mean anything by it…”
“Well, speaking of orgasms,” Zac continued in a voice that sounded suspiciously snide for an AI, “what do you call sex with a lion?”
“Oh, God, not these again,” she moaned, throwing her gaze up at the ceiling.
He didn’t wait and announced, “Roargasms! What about sex while sleeping?”
“Okay!” she said enthusiastically, despite her initial reaction. “I know that…eh, snoregasms!” she barked out a victorious laugh. “I have one. What about sex in a supermarket?”
“Ah,” Zac said with obvious pleasure. “You’ve been thinking them up in your spare time, haven’t you? Storing them. Ha! Storegasms! How about sex at the entrance of your house?”
Zac gave her a while to figure it out.
“I know, doorgasms!” She laughed again, then halted at the top of the ladder to think of another. “Here’s one, sex close to a garbage can…”
“Odorgasms! Good one. How about sex with a cookie. . .”
Genevieve started to giggle uncontrollably. This was getting ridiculous. “I have no idea.”
“Oreogasms!” Then Zac made the strangest sounds that were supposed to be laughter. Since she’d tweaked his settings eight hibes ago, Zac had developed very convincing voice inflections and emotive sounds, except for that goofy laugh. She’d have to fix that, Genevieve thought as she strolled into the control room.
Chapter Two
“We already measured the B ring, Genevieve,” Zac informed her as she lowered her leg and leaned forward to inspect the console’s read-out. “During our routine ship diagnostics to quality-check the FDS only ten minutes ago. And we confirmed our previous hibe’s measurement. Twice that of Saturn’s outer ring, which suggests that the satellite that likely contributed to the ring was thicker than your fellow scientists previously thought.”
Genevieve exhaled and smiled through the corner of her mouth. “Right. You’re right, Zac. As usual. I forgot we’d already done that.” She was always a little disorientated, and stupid, when she first came out of hibe. Slightly depressed, too. Like coming off a sugar high. Reality had a way of doing that, inexorably washing away the flush of cyber-dreams like an ocean wave over hot sand.
She felt like a drug addict scrabbling for a last hit. Her eyes fluttered shut briefly as she focused desperately on her most recent cyber-dream. Lying on a tropical beach, Dan’s naked body pressed against hers, swollen cock teasing tendrils of longing from deep in her belly…a painful ecstasy welling up in a tide of wet arousal as she hungered for his pulsing hot flesh to fill her…pulling him frantically close… his young stubble brushing her cheek, heating her face…wet lips finding hers…cock finding her other mouth, slippery, gaping and seeking something hard and thick to fill it…tongue and penis penetrating deep as she gasped in the flush of coming.
“You need to go to the gym, Genevieve,” Zac cut into her reverie. She inhaled sharply, face smoldering with a prickly heat, and found that her hand had strayed down to her wet and dilating crotch, deliciously probing. She blinked several times and removed her trembling hand from between her legs and placed it on her knee.
“We can leave the in-depth ship diagnostics and planetary measurements for tomorrow,” Zac suggested helpfully.
Genevieve said in a calm but slightly shaky voice, “Right, Zac.” She stretched hard until her muscles ached. “My brain’s too fuzzy right now for measurements and calculations. I need a work out.” She got a good one in the
jack
suit while in hibe, but those were different muscles than the ones she was using now in positive G. “Let’s finish our basic QA here and in the nursery first.”
“Work-in, before work-out,” Zac said with a chuckle.
Genevieve smiled from the side of her mouth and pulled up her knees, wrapping her arms around them. She bit down on her lip and exhaled, all business now.
“That leaves us with checking our messages from Earth,” she suggested. “There might be a directive for our mission waiting for us.”
They’d been journeying for a little over a year, and the quantum signals that surfed the spin-networks of space and time were now too delayed to make real time two-way communication practical. It took a month for a message from Earth to reach Zac, so they’d resorted to sending messages to be received at pre-designated times, when Genevieve emerged from hibe. Jim Frost, her boss at Zeta Aeronautics Corporation in Seattle knew she’d be emerging from hibe about now. Likewise, Genevieve knew there’d be a message sent from him a month ago, just arrived and waiting for her, even if it was just to say hello.
“Good idea,” Zac said. “I detect two messages waiting for us, Genevieve.”
“Gen, Zac,” she corrected the ship for the hundredth time. “Call me Gen. All my other friends call me that.”
The ship’s large screen came to life with staccato pixels that assembled themselves into Cheryl, her friend and colleague at Zeta. “Hi, Gen,” she said, smiling brightly. Too brightly. “How’s everything? I trust all is well and you’re nearly at your destination. How exciting it must be for you.”
Genevieve frowned. She dropped her legs and spread them apart to lean forward. Resting her elbows on her knees, she clasped her hands. Cheryl sounded worried under that glossy smile.
“We’ve had a little…eh…development here, Gen,” Cheryl went on in hesitant spurts, vindicating Genevieve’s concern. “Zac II had to be recalled. There were…eh… complications.” She looked very uncomfortable and Gen wondered if she was withholding more because Zac could hear everything. “Zac II lost two of its crew during an incident that we think could have been prevented if we’d programmed the ship differently. Gen, you need to send us the most current specs on Zac I. I know you reprogrammed its personality since you got on board. The Spec team determined that it wasn’t a technical problem, but a judgment error by Zac II. We need your data on Zac’s latest personality program pronto so we can properly advise you, okay? I realize that it’ll be at least two months before we can do anything about it. Considering your present timetable, you should be already orbiting Eos by then. But late is better than never. Don’t want to scare you. We’re just being careful, Gen, so it’s your call…”
What was her call? To abort the mission or not? Now Cheryl was really looking worried, Genevieve thought, studying her friend’s thin but pretty face and darting eyes. So was Genevieve. Shoving the disturbing thoughts to the back for now, she threw a glance at Zac’s closest camera and shrugged with a nonchalance she wasn’t feeling. “Guess we better do what she says, eh, Zac?”
“Sure, Genevieve,” Zac answered in a soft but enigmatic tone.
She leaned her leg on her other knee to absently play with her toes. “I’m going to want all the information they have on the accident, too, Zac. Put it on my personal computer.”
“Okay.”
Cheryl’s thin lips pushed on a conciliatory smile. “Oh, because of the accident, you’re back in the news, too, Gen. Look!”
Cheryl’s face dissolved to that of a young newscaster with spiked blue hair: “In the wake of the tragic accident aboard Zeta Aeronautic Corporation’s second organic AI ship, the Zac II, we thought it pertinent to replay our interview with the captain of Zac I, Genevieve Dubois, who, along with a crew of eleven others, set out to Eos sixteen months ago on a mission to acquire knowledge about their unique and highly successful ecosystem technology. Concern over this critical mission has mounted as a result of the other accident. Could the same thing happen to Zac I? Here’s what Captain Dubois said a year ago…”
The news clip of Gen’s interview just before leaving on the mission appeared. She saw herself, sitting with long legs crossed, and facing Jonathan Trip, SBS’s most controversial reporter.
“Oh, God!” Genevieve leaned back in her chair. She moaned and blew out a long breath. “Do I want to see this again?” It was the interview from Hell.
Trip wore his long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and gazed at her like a raptor as he slouched in his seat. Belying his laid-back posture, his long face and razor-sharp eyes wore the rude contempt of a man whose passion was to quench his thirst for controversy and the bizarre. He thrived on the squirming of others. And she was his next victim.
Genevieve shook her head as she examined the image of herself in her short electric blue dress with thin straps. “No wonder the schmuck came on to me in the hall after,” she muttered. Genevieve remembered being more nervous meeting the celebrity reporter than she was of the mission she was about to embark on.
Trip leaned forward in his chair, arms hanging over his lap and almost touching her knees. “As the sole member of the twelve person team on this mission to be somewhat conscious of the long year and a half journey, don’t you think you’ll feel lonely, and aren’t you a little anxious about your responsibility to the remaining crew? You’re the one responsible for getting the crew and the ship to Eos. And when it comes down to it, it’ll be just you and the ship.” Trip never asked simple questions. They were always a barrage of challenges.
The camera focused on her tanned face and sun-streaked chestnut hair that cascaded like a turbulent brook over her shoulders and down her back. Once on board Zac, she’d cut it shoulder length, tucking it behind her ears for manageability, and often tied it back in a ponytail. Genevieve raked her fingers through her thick mop and watched herself answer: “I won’t be awake for much of the mission, actually,” she said in a slow deliberate voice. “So, Zac is really the one who is going to get us there. He’s a very capable ship. That aside, I’m a Class One astronaut and extremely competent.”
Genevieve snorted. “I was so full of myself then, wasn’t I, Zac?”
“What do you mean
then
?” Zac retorted.
“I trained eight months for this mission,” Genevieve onscreen continued, “I know my responsibilities and I’m eager to fulfill them. As for loneliness,” she half-smiled and pushed the dark cloud of hair coyly from her face, “when I’m not in hibernation, Zac will keep me company.”
“Yes, the ship with a personality,” Trip conceded. Then he looked down to straighten his shirt and muttered as if to himself, but loudly enough for the audience to hear: “Hardly a substitute for human company.” His voice dripped with contempt and she pegged him a luddite. Then, with mock courtesy, he snapped his head up and eyed her sharply. “But what if the ship’s personality and yours don’t match and you don’t get along? What if you have an argument? It’s not like you can go off in a huff to cool off. You’re stuck inside this thing twenty-four/seven.”
Genevieve responded with a tight-lipped smile. “I already know we get along. Zac’s an AI. They’re too logical to have an argument even if I wanted to have one. Besides, I trained with Zac and I was involved in some of the programming. I had input.”
“So, you had a say in the ship’s personality traits. Did you model it after yourself?”
Genevieve on screen laughed sharply, unprepared for his question.
She remembered being very uncomfortable at that moment, but luckily it didn’t show. Genevieve watched herself straighten her short blue dress and purse her full lips slightly as she contemplated a reply. Then she noticed what Trip was doing.
“Look!” Genevieve pointed at the screen, fuming. “The bastard was looking down my dress!”
Meantime, her screen image aimed a steady gaze into Trip’s eyes with an expression suggesting he was an idiot. “Of course I didn’t model Zac after me.”
“Well, who then?” he pressed her, knowing he’d found a chink in her armour and reveling in prying it apart, like a boy ripping off the legs of a fly.
Genevieve watched her face colour and twitch with discomfort. “No one in particular.” To his silent prodding, she continued, “I suppose loosely on my husband, my dead husband.”
“Ah,” he said and paused, tapping his lips as though he might show some compassion and drop the subject, the wound, she’d reluctantly and foolishly bared. But compassion was too much to hope for. She’d given him a prize and he moved in for the kill with slow, but deliberate thrusts. “Dan Gallagher, right? A Zeta Corp pilot like you, wasn’t he?” Of course he knew that and the whole history. “Died in that explosion on the Prometheus IV five years ago, just off Eos, weren’t they?” He paused for effect as she paled, terrified of what he would ask next. “That was the last time anyone from Earth ventured to Eos, wasn’t it? Until Zeta accepted this current mission you’re on. Your husband’s crew were within days of getting there and Pop! No one knows what happened to this day. Doesn’t that make you just a little nervous? Aren’t you afraid that the same thing might happen to you and the crew you’re responsible for?”