Nothing mattered to Palo Vidro, the Berrio's pilot. Not the NOW, the LATER, or the NORMAL indicators on the longship's laser-propelled, solar-sail-towed claustrophobic command capsule nor its cryogenically slumbering cargo of 300 workers bound for Haumea — a piece of mineral-rich, otherwise forgettable hunk of Kuiper Belt rock. Nothing but from where in the depths of their recently, artificially enhanced memory had come the bone-biting, eardrum-piercing, stomach-churning soul-curdling wail: "I HATE YOU - I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!"
Even our dearest memories tend not to reveal but conceal the truth.
Lids pressed tightly closed in a largely futile attempt to block out the longship's rapidly increasing, blood-scarlet-hued demands for their attention, Vidro shoved their consciousness down, cracking through layer after layer, year after year, month after month, day after day of their once-hazy, mostly indistinct, now-vivid, complete-clear memories…
Where was it? … Where was it? … Where was it? … Where was it?… their thoughts chasing one another in a ouroboros loop, bordering on obsessive.
Hands clenching and unclenching; pulse drumming in their skull; breath a stuttering, ragged moan. Vidro felt the cracks widen, revealing not answers but a seductive, mindless emptiness: the warm, welcoming embrace of insanity….
No! Mimicking the electrode-laced needle's crunching volume, the single-word rebellion against the darkness stilled their hands, quieted their heart, soothed their breathing.
Where was it? Renewed, focused, determined, Vidro slowed their mental descent. It couldn't be too old; the scream was too fresh. Not professional; they didn't care about their piloting job that much.
Perhaps Barcelona. That dust-storm-filled, sunlight-sliced apartment, a pair of photographs hanging on a wall, a bed with what had seemed like an infinite geological strata of handmade blankets?
Maybe Alma, her playfully bouncy curls, her playfully bouncy laugher, her playfully bouncy breasts, her playfully bouncy everything?
They recalled her perky and upswept breast, it's opposite shyly drooped, explained with what to Vidro felt at the time was a erotically thunderous demonstration: wet fingers rubbing her stiffening clit while her others ferociously gripped, yanked down on that one nipple.
The wail wasn't from when Vidro's hand joined hers or when they'd tumbled back and forth, giggles sparking, groans booming, and moans bubbling.
It wasn't when Vidro's own pointed fingers teased Alma's asshole, chortling as it tried to escape their touch, eventually surrendering — aided in part by a dozen or so dabs of coconut oil — to Vidro's entire fist.
It wasn't when they'd lost count of how many times each and both of them had cum. Not as they curled together, slipping in and out of sleep. Not when afternoon relinquished to dusk or when the summer dawn warmed then baked their slumbering faces.
Vidro's mind quivered, shook, a scream gripping their chest. It wasn't that day nor the next.
But artificially stimulated, synthetically precise, they did know it was three later.
While they sat beneath one of Café Dios' dandelion-colored and patterned umbrellas, their espresso barely touched, Alma's lemonade half finished, Vidro, without a trace of empathy or an attempt at sympathy, broke the news that two weeks and four days ago, they'd agreed to pilot the Berrio on its ten-year-out, ten-year-back voyage.
Alma had screeched, sending ice cubes and cracked glass flying, and there they were, the words that tore through their mind, unearthed, dusted off, and shoved back into their now-bitterly ashamed face:
"I HATE YOU!"
NOWs, LATERs, NORMALs strobing on and off, their eyes still determinedly shut, Alma's fury banged against the walls of Vidro's mind, their body. They wanted out, away, anywhere but there and their inescapable guilt.
So to Marseille and massive cocks, specifically Gonzalo's, after they hauled them up to their room and relentlessly drove their blue-veined Goliath into Vidro starving cunt. Screams, but this time of pleasure; howlings, but of delight, shrieks, that evening of mindless bliss...
But wasn't there a morning after? Plucking at the memory, Vidro felt it uncoil: a new day, a weave of arms and legs, a half-spent-half-hard cock plastered against their cheek, the tangy aroma of fresh and not fresh cum making them immediately, voraciously hungry for marithia.
In the present, Vidro's chest spasmed, their lungs burned, their fingers dug again into their aching palms: Alma only screamed, "I HATE YOU," but it was Gonzalo — leaning out from the hotel room window, banging on its wrought iron balcony railing — that had roared, "I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!"
The memory was unavoidably, inexorably, irrevocably there. No fond farewells, no sweet kisses, no tearful thanks, but with Alma's heart still lying freshly broken at their feet, they'd tried, and failed, to slip out unnoticed.
Gonzalo was big, close to massive, in every way. His laugh monumental, his cock magnificent, a work of art, and his skill at wielding it a (wet) dream come true. But his heart was also massive, his love monumental, and Vidro's selfish cowardice had smashed the first, poisoned the second.
Not as they skulked away, Gonzalo's cries stabbing into their back, years later, in the confines of the Berrio's command capsule, Vidro sobbed.
Swinging their eyes away from the row after row of longship's stridently begging indicators, Vidro pretended not to see how the Berrio's vast, gossamer-thin, kilometers-wide sails had begun creasing, buckling, threatening to rip, potentially tossing it, its cargo, and pilot dangerously off course.
Away … away … away … away … their mind circled that lightless drain again, edging closer and closer to alluring oblivion.
Fleeing to when sequins shimmered, peacock feathers shown, and spotlights pinned. Back to that Lisbon stage, back to that evening, back to that tingling whisper in their ear, that seductive Shakespearean melody, "Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds…"
Back to that costume upholstered dressing room. Back to zir aetherial beauty, zir genital magnum opus, eyes as radiant as zir flamboyantly sparkly couture, iridescent as zir fluttering plumes, blinding as the club's person-of-ceremonies proclaimed "Apresentando aquele, o único Hughlene!"
Safe in the memory of zir lips, zir touch, zir arms, Vidro's sorrow ebbed. Sniffles where there'd been nausea, relaxation untying knotted limbs, lost in the tour de force of the geneknitters, fleshweavers, and tissuechisels' art that was Hughlene.
Labia an aubergine purple, zir less clit becoming more dick. Their rusty, gumdrop nipples, their expansively talented mouth, the laughter they exchanged, the orgasms they alternated, the pleasures they shared. With every detail, each specific moment, everything their enhanced memory vividly, perfectly recalled, Vidro's felt their mind unwind, their fear, dread, and guilt falling away.
Then another daybreak, another… Vidro's thoughts snarled, cramped. Chest spasmed, fingers dug, breathing quickened, and eyes submerged in tears.
"Stay with me, please?" Not an act, a performance, a show. Just raw, exposed, vulnerable truth.
Hughlene's face in their hands, canted up, bringing their eyes an eyelash width apart. Zir mahogany dark, fathoms deep eyes wide open and exposed — fearfully quivering, desperately pleading — as Vidro, their own mournfully bleak, sorrowfully bottomless, narrow and doleful, pitifully downcast, shook their head.
Alma screamed, "I HATE YOU," Gonzalo shouted, "I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!" But Hughlene… all zir did was softly weep.
Seeing, but not perceiving — let alone comprehending — the loudly alarming state of Berrio's rapidly failing systems before, in a sudden, mindless panic, Vidro was forcefully wrenched from their now-painful past to their horrifying urgent NOW NOW NOWs!
Months of training proving their worth, Vidro methodically, systematically, frantically dealt with emergency after emergency, crisis after crisis, urgency after urgency — timing sails, dispatching repair units, replacing misbehaving actuators — till the board was awash with peaceful, cerulean LATER LATER LATER LATERs.
Echoing the same detached efficiency they'd shown when putting the longship back in order, Vidro next grazed a twitching thumb across a switch deactivating, withdrawing from their skull, and finally utterly disabling the PsychTech's memory-boosting needle.
Aside from the Berrio's thousands of sensors, which fed into its dozens of displays, the longship was essentially blind. But within its coffin-like command capsule, Vidro imagined the bleak nothingness, the immense, distantly star-freckled darkness all around them.
The same incalculably vast emptiness now lying within its pilot, who'd sworn to live out every single, solitary moment of the longship's remaining 730 days, 17,530-hour voyage accompanied only by their dim yet inescapably shameful memories.
Gathered together at nearly the same moment, though some three billion kilometers away in a timeless, measureless virtual space, digitized faces sporting digitized grins, electronically-replicated hands and palms merrily clasped each other, while exchanging a flurry of earnest, honest thanks:
"Ótima! Bravo, bravo, bravo! What a wonderful idea!" Hughlene, a chatoyant grandiloquent icon, applauded.
"Ναί! Yes, yes, inspired!" Gonzalo, a colossally proportioned, moai-inspired figure, rumbled.
"Mi placer, mi placer!" blushed Alma's stratocumulus-crowned avatar.
"Sim, sim — how beautiful it will be to experience it again!" Hughlene bubbled merrily.
"Katapliktikós! The technology is now so amazingly advanced!" Gonzalo joyfully bellowed.
“Por favor deberíamos prepararnos! I can’t wait to see them.” Alma said, gesturing to begin the process.
“Ítan tóso xechoristoí gia ména! To be able to hold them again!” Gonzalo agreed.
"Mal posso esperar! Wish there was a way to show how much we miss them." Hughlene gently, sadly murmured.
Taking her electronically-replicated hand in zir's as Gonzalo's digitized smile virtually beamed at them, Alma spoke, her electronically-replicated words shining bright:
"Gathered here together, eager to relive every precious moment we were fortunate to spend with them, no matter how far away they are or how many decades may lay between us, how could our dear Vidro not know we'll love them — forever and always?"
