Pushed by one sun-orbiting 50-gigawatt laser after another focused on the Berrio's twenty-kilometer square, 5-micron thin sail, which, in turn, pulled the longship steadily towards Haumea — the 30 AU-distant hunk of frozen rock its 300 hibernating miners were expected to work. Berrio's pilot Vidro, first name, Palo — who lay at the center of its web of spun-diamond nanotubes, molecule-thin actuators, and billions of multi-spectrum sensors — was hired to monitor its progress for the remaining nine and a half years of its decade-long journey.
When it comes to love, lust, and longing, sometimes more than distance can separate us
Vidro's command capsule was a model of brutally ruthless efficiency; everything necessary to ensure the longship, its precious cargo, and — well, its less-than-priceless, hardly-precious pilot — would arrive at its destination was within easy reach. Every button, switch, and toggle was meticulously designed for maximum productivity and minimal effort. So there they were, crammed into a barely coffin sized box for the next nine and a half years, which thanks to the Company's surprising generosity and a microsurgical alteration to Vidro's cerebral context, would feel — barring emergencies, of course — closer to two.
Still, 730 days, 17,530 hours left… minutes, and seconds available if they chose to query the Berrio's computer, though Vidro had long ago learned details like that were best not to know. Hands sweeping across the buttons, switches, and toggles, attention flickering over rows of monitors, Vidro drifted back, as they often did, to McMurdo Station. The sight, sounds, smells, and the delight of being able to actually touch another person, whether by a shaken hand or accidentally brushing against someone in the base's narrow corridors.
His frustration pulled up that widely grinning PsychTech, thin seams of overly-tight lips framing rows of too-even, too-polished teeth, who'd said, "—effective method to maintaining emotional stability—" then "—only requiring associating a real-time object—"
Bullshit was what Vidro, two weeks out, had thought of it. But as three rolled around, it became You've got to be kidding me. Then four turned it into What a stupid idea. Five, six, seven … and Vidro's fingertip hovered over the Berrio's Secondary Backup Oxygen Mixture Regulator's sensuously pert synthetic-rubber coated nub "—with the memory of a positively-associated place or person—"
Late morning... or early afternoon? Was the sun painfully bright, a hard-edged geometric shape that'd inched across Alma's tiny, terra cotta-floored kitchen, crawling up and along her apartment's empty, stark white walls, or did something or perhaps several things hang on them?
The air was dusty, that much Vidro was sure. Sipping tea from her battered electric kettle, listening to her musically ringing, beautifully sincere laughter, lost in her playfully shimmering pupils, the messy tangle of wood-stain shaded locks framed by that gently swimming cloud. Barcelona … was it more than a year or less? Vidro's sense of time was unreliable long before the Company fooled with it. Pinching the button's warm resilience, they prayed it was less and not more — when that morning or afternoon in Alma's sharply illuminated flat, Vidro's first time there… their first time with her: a memory too precious to belong more in the past than the present.
The first time, though not the last, her hand in Vidro's, leading them from kitchen to bedroom, their conversation fading, words no longer necessary. Did she undress, or did they? Knitting their brows, Vidro tried… failed… to remember. But the morning, perhaps afternoon, light shining on her as she exposed more and more of herself was clear.
It was slow, relaxed, patient. That much was certain. Not a bursting, rushing fever but a sacred ceremony: her plummy breasts, tipped with wrinkly-taught nipples; a wisp of pale — almost transparent — hairs peering from between her tightly muscled thighs; the steady ins-and-outs of her breathing… Vidro couldn't forget, wouldn't forget. Not a frozen memory, as that conjured thoughts of brittle snow, cracking ice. No, instead, it was suspended in their mind, in that Barcelona apartment, in that room. How they'd exploded into a flurry of furious kisses — patience abandoned, discarded for mindless urgency.
Alma's nipples in their hungry mouth, held tight by their teeth, stroked by their tongue, sucked by their lips as she slicked her fingers across, down, then drove them repeatedly into Vidro's welcoming pussy. A flip, a turn, a twist, exchanging Alma's wetness for her breasts and nipples for her own demanding clit, the hot wetness of her reddish purple labia. Did they really come together that first time? Or had Alma led with Vidro following?
They couldn't remember what happened next — did Vidro fist her into shrieking orgasms, or had Alma run her hot tongue across Vidro's pulsing anus? They didn't know, couldn't recall...
Vidro's memory broke, the synthetic rubber becoming nothing but… synthetic rubber, uncertainty, doubt crushing them: What was true, real, and how much… wasn't?
The longship demanded their attention, instruments begging to be pacified, hushed with a dance of switches, toggles, dials, and buttons —some synthetic rubber, others not—their hands conducted an electronic lullaby that, to Vidro's modified senses, instantly silenced the Berrio's cries. Cool blues replaced imperative reds, triggering thoughts of a luxuriously cerulean sea, its undulating ripples capped with streamers of pale sea foam.
Was the moon full? It should have been. Was the night vibrantly crisp? They assumed it was. Did they imagine Marseille's cracked-tooth skyline? What about the racing, strobing, pulsing, popping tourist-enticing signs between the undulating bay and the city's distant silhouette?
Walking from bar to bar, then stumbling from bar to bar, had Vidro been really trying to lose themself in the double-digit proof, endlessly murky depths of bottle after bottle after bottle?
Why? Maybe? Perhaps? No, the harder Vidro poked at it, the more why slipped further away.
But Gonzalo was impossible to forget. He was simply too big, took up too much of Vidro's mind; a rumbling giant who had to duck his rust-plumed head, crunch his massively broad shoulders together, crouch the rest of his Brobdingnagian body not to avoid smashing into the roof, ramming against the walls of Vidro's memory. Had Vidro tottered, threatening to tumble forward into the inky darkness — not of booze but the port's black depths — or fall backward onto the city's cobble-stoned paved streets, when that massive hand reached out, gripped them and, however hard Vidro struggled, refused to let go?
From there to a nearby hotel… skipping over the minutes Gonzalo spent half-leading, half-carrying Vidro to a room so cramped and tiny the huge man seemed not to occupy but wear it. What had he said? Vidro should remember. But no, it was gone. Hands crushed into white-knuckled fists, Vidro (metaphorically) pounded their temples, trying to break what was from what wasn't.
Just keep going, Vidro chastised themself. Hold him tight, don't let go. How Gonzalo's rough-hewn hands had gripped their shoulders, how his shaggy, leonine face came within millimeters of their own, Gonzalo— Vidro sincerely hoped — saying, "You're not going anywhere." Not a threat but a promise that'd sheared through Vidro's wire-taught strings, changing the locked-tight muscles of their legs to boiled custard, painting their face with a widely straining grin. Did they really say it aloud, or had they merely shown it by nodding, nodding, nodding their head.
From there to a nearby bed, clothing discarded, then complaining springs, groaning floorboards. Gonzalo's huge mouth enveloping Vidro's, feasting on their tongue as a gargantuan right hand supported, then cradled Vidro's head as a colossal left tore at their pants. Gonzalo was in every way impossibly big: ceiling scraping tall, doorway crushingly wide, and had appetites to match. He didn't so much fuck as trample Vidro, smashing them into the bed's brick-hard mattress, crushing them against the room's warped and buckled floorboards. Vidro had loved it, knowing nothing they said or did could break, bend, or shatter that marble statue: an unstoppable and huge cocked force perfect for meeting Vidro's immovable object of his lust.
No. Pounding wasn't right. Neither was hammering. Had the universe really disappeared from Vidro's mind, unable to compete with the awe-inspiring length and eye-watering girth of Gonzalo's relentless cock?
Why can't I remember? What color were his lips, his cock, his asshole? What did his breath, his pits, his ass smell like? What did his spit, his skin, his cum taste like?
Gonzalo shrank down, down, down until the giant was nothing but a distant miniature, a barely discernible figure at the wrong end of his memory's telescope.
Briefly refusing to look at the Berrio's NOW, LATER, and NORMAL lights, Vidro took in and wheezed out a steadying, slow breath. When they looked again, the light was at an urgently pulsing indicator. The diamond filament wasn't exactly a NOW, barely a LATER, and would be anything but NORMAL, only if they irresponsibly chose to ignore it. Rigorously trained reflexes again took over. Vidro, half-watching as hardly NOW and not really LATER, disappeared, turning everything on their board into a nice, restful NORMAL.
Nothing up my sleeve, Vidro thought. Pick a card, any card; abracadabra, presto-chango; rabbit out of my hat; with a wave of my wand… And from out of nowhere, Hughlene appeared. Conjured from more jagged-edged fragments of their mind — before Alma, after Gonzalo — the third of the arousing trifecta Vidro had experienced before being packed into the longship's command capsule and laser-sail propelled out towards the Kuiper Belt.
Hughlene, a Shakespearian sprite who relished poetry and feasted on prose, who descended from a Lisbon cabaret's barely-small stage, feathers fluttering and sequins shimmering to standing proud and tall at his table. Zir face pouring into Vidro's eyes, fueling their racing heart, lighting Vidro's cock ablaze as zee festively intoned, "Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! It is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken."
Had that ended the show? No, there must have been more. Or was there?
A flash, a jump, and Hughlene was sitting next to them. Weather, fashion, politics. They must have talked about something, right? Vidro couldn't recall, just another flash yet one more jump and they were in Hughlene's dressing room. Costumes and gowns, dresses and frocks wrapping the walls, spilling onto the floor. Did Hughlene sing to them? What song? Did zir's delicate hands pluck feathers, brush away sequins— not a strip, not a tease, but a butterfly revealing an even more gorgeous caterpillar.
Did Vidro's body quiver, somewhere between wracking sobs and ecstatic tears, as zir folded up zir wings, zir pulsing cock and glistening cunt caught in the wavering light of Vidro's shaky memories. Lips… How had they found each other's? Hadn't Vidro kissed zir's cock, fondled zir's cunt — mesmerized by how elegantly they matched, merged, and mingled with each other, the best of both worlds in one spectacular being—as Hughlene's erection grew, zir cunt moistened. Vidro's body returning the favor, zir magically demonstrating how everything could and did fit together.
Did Hughlene scream, auditioning for Carmen or trying out for La Traviata? Didn't Vidro clamp their mouth to zir's, swallowing the sound to keep an imaginary stage manager from pounding, demanding, "O que está acontecendo lá?" Was it dawn or dusk before they unknotted their exhausted limbs, extracted their sore and swollen genitals, stumbling, collapsing against the fabric upholstered walls?
But soon Hughlene's undeniable, inescapable flamboyance dimmed, fleed their memories, leaving their head throbbing with nothing but infuriating doubts.
Unlike Vidro's mind, the Berrio was quiet, orderly, and though a few of its colors and a couple of its textures attempted to conjure Alma, Gonzalo, or Hughlene again, Vidro fought and largely succeeded to keep them submerged.
Until a cascade of LATERs became a riot of NOW, NOW, NOWs, their fleeting anxiety causing the hideously smiling PsychTech to reemerge, "—comes equipped with a state-of-the-art neural interface suite fully capable of—"
Despite a two weeks-out Vidro thinking, Forget it! and No way in hell! at three, then at four, telling themself Never gonna happen, after putting the Berrio back to sleep, they once again gave the Company permission to meddle with their cerebral context. While hoping they hadn't made a horrible mistake, the process began with a shockingly loud crunch as the longship's computer drove a thirty-centimeter, electrode-tipped needle into their skull.
To be continued... Check the Erotica section for Parts II and III of Vidro's erotic journey through space and memory.
