Nove couldn’t name the sensation she was experiencing. She was used to the Novgorod's sensor-web data, informing her of nearly every centimeter of her 'body' inside and out. If she had to choose a word it would be: claustrophobic. The courier ship she’d copied herself onto had only one thing going for it: speed. Its shields were a token soap bubble compared to the sturdy weave of invisible forces that helped give her and the Novgorod’s crew the confidence to sail the starry void without an escort.
She felt numb without the benefit of her new sensor-webs, relying on only the bare minimum of instrumentation to help judge the condition of this new form. She had to admit it was lonelier as well with just a single occupant. Organic life operated at speeds that stretched to a perceived geologic scale next to the flow of thoughts her processors afforded her, but having an entire crew of unpredictable lifeforms had helped occupy her.
The lone courier, a crystalline entity the humans called Xylo thanks to the chiming/tinkling sound of her language, was learning what it meant to be the focus of a bored AI’s attention.
“Sorry Xylo. I know this is an imposition to start with, and you’ll be compensated for your trouble.”
She turned a quartet of pixel-cut gems that served as her eyes toward the main viewscreen.
Nove was saved from any further courier-soothing by a navigation alert. “Emerging from transversal in three, two, one.”
The smooth lozenge shape of the unnamed courier vessel snuck its way from reality’s crawlspace back into legal bounds, and immediately received a cheerful hail.
“Nove, is that you? Good to see a friendly prow!”
Nove’s sensors swept over Pandora’s shape, taking in the deep-space explorer’s redundant hulls, bulky cargo modules, and her impressive array of communications equipment. If she’d translated to a human body one might describe her as ‘hippy’ with that big cargo section, and the glittering collection of masts, vanes, and dishes clustered around the ship’s nose could be imagined as a messy mane of hair.
The living ship from the reports hung nearby outside a small trading station. It was like nothing the Confluence had encountered before. Other living ships had been purpose-bred creatures, practically hollowed-out and stuffed with technology. This was a symbiotic relationship with a naturally space-dwelling creature and a race of aquatic aliens.
Nove’s sensors lingered on the unusual shape of the organic ship, noting that its overlapping layers of stony skin helped perform the same function as Pandora’s layered hulls, preserving its contents even in the case of multiple breaches. The rock-like surface of the creature surrounded an open cylindrical core that ran the entire length of its rod-like shape. She guessed stellar winds would be funneled through that core, useful radiation or particles extracted to sustain the organism.
“Pandora, I didn’t expect to see you again this soon, and I’d certainly hoped for better circumstances. Care to tell me what happened?”
A new voice, almost as cheerful as Pandora’s, cut in. “Good morning comrade! Cap’n Sheeba here. Don’t be too hard on our gal, okay? She didn’t have the best role-models.”
Nove felt Pandora request a high-speed transfer and accepted. Highly contextualized information slammed into her, the events of the last few weeks heavily annotated with Pandora’s thoughts, observations, and simultaneous status reports from ship systems. The story unfolded for her, every fact conveyed and cataloged in the split-second it took for Xylo to drum two heavy magenta digits on her console.
***
The Pandora had been a week into a ten month mission when the technicians arrived to arrange the gestalt. The vessel had participated in a number of lengthy missions and though some crew had rotated out, the roster had remained about seventy percent unchanged since it was first commissioned. Deep-space vessels attracted a certain spectrum of personalities. It wouldn’t be polite to call them antisocial but they needed far less herd-time than typical humans.
That did not mean they didn’t get lonely and/or frustrated however. While on other ships the crew may have paired off, relationships were informally discouraged on ships like Pandora where it would be impossible to escape one another if relations went south. So the crew downloaded various media instead and certainly created their own share of the same all to keep themselves satisfied and clear-headed. On extended missions however, the old standbys could grow stale and tensions would mount.
Pandora’s AI had been marinating in this atmosphere for years before the personality seed was planted. Pandora emerged with not only the best kink education of the ship-gestalts but a drive the others hadn’t yet exhibited. She became a voyeur, though she was careful to ask for the consent of those she’d monitor during intimate moments. Consent was a very big deal in much of the content she’d soaked up, fortunately for all involved.
The crew was bemused by and large. It took time for word to circulate that their ship was a closet pervert, maintaining a bubbly but PG-rated persona outside the cabins of her confidantes. As a starship she explored different avenues of stimulation, experimenting with allowing fine stellar dust to bathe her hull or adjusting engine harmonics to vibrate her superstructure at a resonant frequency. Thanks to her enhanced sensor-web, she could interpret this data as ‘sensation’ after a fashion, and though it could be tantalizing and stimulating it didn’t scratch her deeper itches.
She craved the intimacy of a partner. Through long lonely nights she watched steamy films with crew-members, all torturing themselves with the sight of bedsheets humped up into dunes bathed in moonlight, impractically long hair sprayed across an overstuffed pillow. Closeups of sweat and gooseflesh or the shadowed cleft in a lunging back made the humans bite their lips and often caught Pandora running dozens of pleasurable thought-loops.
The straight-up porn was interesting from a mechanical standpoint but the movies with a story, with the peaks and valleys of a relationship (however idealized and packaged) ignited such a longing in her!
Aesthetics were interesting from Pandora’s viewpoint. What did a starship find attractive? She found she didn’t like her own model much (crew-members commiserated with her readily on that count) but found the lines of other Confluence vessels pleasing. Was anything physical possible between two ships? Pandora had a long list of hypotheses to try out but her mission took her further from any possible partner with every passing hour.
Then she clapped sensors on the living ship, whose name translated to something between ‘void breaker’ and ‘heaven cutter.’ It sounded better in Latin, so she wound up calling him Caelum, and Caelum was definitely masculine.
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While Captain Sheeba had been initiating first contact with the aliens inhabiting Caelum, she had drawn closer, extending the gentlest and most tentative brush of an EM field to his stony exterior. He’d reacted by unspooling millions of unbelievably-fine filaments from his skin, their lengths floating towards her slowly, as cautious as her own overture had been.
She resisted the urge to raise her shields and allowed those filaments to play along her hull, registering their touch along so many parts of her simultaneously that the sensor-web actually began to lag. Even if it took time for the queued impulses to arrive, she felt every tender brush and inquisitive stroke in the end. Those exotic vibrissae caressed her hull, finding the different temperature zones, marveling at the sheer smoothness of her skin.
Minute vibrations traveled along the filaments touching Pandora’s nose and she concluded in moments it must be a language. She struggled to respond with a delicate enough vibration to match Caelum’s, but no equipment she was wired directly into was up to the job. Leaving an apology message for crew-member Daphne, she used her internal tractors to fetch a very personal item from her quarters and brought it to one of the viewports a vibrating tendril lay against. Activating the colorful toy on its lowest setting, the filament still recoiled. Pandora fetched a hand-towel to dampen the vibrations further and tried again with greater success. She buzzed out enough information to help the pair establish a more complex means of communication.
(Daphne neglected to file a report against Pandora for the unauthorized borrowing, and privately renamed the toy Voyager.)
Caelum suggested a direct connection using one of his tendrils. They had light-conducting properties, and though some software handshaking and an interesting adapter were necessary it was only thirty minutes of work. She did need the captain to okay a brief EVA to install the new port on the hull, but Caelum assured Sheeba (through Pandora) that his own crew supported the move.
The rapid pulses of light funneled into her system through the filament submitted to decoding and soon organized themselves into sensible patterns, then a language, then pictures, and finally immersive imagery with sound as the pair negotiated more and more complex protocols within a span of minutes.
Pandora discovered she’d been offered a place in a simulated environment, a beautiful underwater reef-analogue carpeted with sessile lifeforms. But at the same time it was space, shininh points of light in the water weren’t glowing organisms but stars. Planets bobbed and wobbled through the deep blue void, leaving trails of bubbles to mark their orbits. ‘Schools’ of asteroids circled, their shadows like blots of ink swirling along the seafloor.
As she watched, a comet cut through the scene, pursued by a larger aquatic creature who wove a helix around its glowing tail. Then Caelum smiled at her, and there was no doubt in Pandora’s mind it was him. He was a blue giant star, his envelope guttering violently around his immense sphere. This was one of the bad boys of the galaxy, a star whose only future was going supernova.
Pandora swiftly built herself an avatar, a humanoid figure with a suggestion of feminine curves, her skin the smooth finish of her own hull. Her face she left blank with just a vague bump for a nose, then added a series of rings copied from ancient photos of Saturn to float around brow-level like a stellar hatless-brim.
Other shapes bubbled with amusement, contempt, confusion and delight in the aquatic cosmos. Caelum ignored them, extending a coronal flare to brush her hand with warmth. As cool and blue as his shape looked, he still burned fiercely and Pandora showed her avatar’s silvery hand melting as a signal to tone it down.
Caelum didn’t have anything close to eyes, but his entire chosen shape was a window into his soul. He was old, and not afraid of what that meant. His envelope lapped at her, flickers of plasma like a fiery syrup splashing on her skin. Every ounce of his attention was bent upon her, and she bathed in that radiant warmth, reflective skin bouncing the azure violence of his blaze around the undersea grotto.
“You’re a ship of few words, but your intent is clear enough.” Pandora cupped the grand sphere, watching her arms become bars of shadow against the brilliance of the dying sun.
A pressure built in Pandora’s mind, and she ran self-diagnostic after diagnostic, trying to determine what malfunction could be registering as such. She found nothing, but three additional filaments from Caelum had crowded into her receptor port, quadrupling the bandwidth between them through exquisitely-timed strobes of his luminescent cells.
That pressure rose further, and for the first time Pandora experienced true discomfort, the synaptic analogues in her organic components flashing with urgent pain signals! Caelum’s viscous heat engulfed her, wrapping her avatar from toes to crown in a soothing glow. The cracked-looking photosphere brushed her face, that electric cornflower-blue blotting out the rest of the virtual scene.
An impression flew through their link, a plea tagged with reassurances. ‘Relax.’
Pandora eased her grip on her systems, canceled the thousands of monitoring processes and micro-management routines, and even stepped down her firewalls. The vulnerability was a razor’s edge against her throat, but Caelum melted the cold steel, drawing her into himself. His thoughts seeped into hers, a glimpse into a memory storehouse that stretched into Escheresque dimensions and unfathomable distances.
His desire swelled up from his core, the desperation in it terrifying, only tempered and shaped by his eons of experience. Instead of exploding or drowning her, the surge buoyed her, calling out to Pandora’s own freshly-minted lust. The metallic thrust of it, an endless spiraling ribbon of silver wound around the erupting column of Caelum’s need.
Their memories bled together, a storm of images backed by smeared palettes of emotion. A millennia drifting alone between stars / Garrett re-reading his ex’s breakup email for the 458th time. Surfing a coronal ejection, ventral scales basking in temperatures dragons would melt at / Pandora vibrating herself to the point half the galley’s cabinets popped open, keeping pace with Daphne who drove the impersonal void of space back with screams of orgasmic defiance. Watching the last of his herd receding into the velvet wilderness, while he remained behind to wait for a missing mated pair who would never come / Singing a love song she’d written to a tangle of humans interlocked across the bed and floor, only noticing too late her wistful tone had leached into the music when four heads lifted to gaze at her lens. The smooth, impersonal lens her soul was trapped behind.
They fit together, her fresh joy swamping his ancient sadness. His confidence engulfed her self-doubt. Loneliness crashed against loneliness and canceled out, blooming into giddy passion, ricocheting crazily within their joined minds.
It was too intense, too intimate to sustain for long. Pandora felt she’d lose herself in his endless memories and Caelum couldn’t keep up with the cybernetic pace of her evolving, racing thoughts. The melding lasted long enough for a ripple of epiphanies to tear through both, emotional pain and pleasure so intense they were indistinguishable!
Caelum’s avatar exploded, the vast blue sphere dragging itself inwards to a tiny prick of light before rebounding out in a halo of energy that sent every object in the simulation tumbling, stationary or not, fracturing the seascape. Pandora’s silvery figure scattered into a million molten droplets of mirrory metal, only gradually coalescing as she regained control of her processes.
Once she’d reformed enough to speak, she mumbled into the shattered scene: “I can’t feel my legs.”
***
Nove mentally shook herself after essentially reliving Pandora’s rendezvous. “Astounding. The implications are, well, not something we need to worry about just now. That encounter is what impregnated Caelum? How?”
Pandora produced an irritated buzzing sound. “It’s something unique to his species. Mental becomes physical for them. Logs prove I didn’t pass any code to him, genetic or machine, but my memories? My sense of self? They’ve been woven into whoever’s developing inside Caelum now.”
Nove couldn’t wrap her head around that. She’d leave that up to the scientists and re-focused again. “This species that crews Caelum, the...Hyalbols. They seem to be upset by the pregnancy.”
“For centuries it’s been their fondest hope Caelum would breed with another of his kind and perpetuate the species locally. Their concern now is his, or our child won’t be a true member of his species.”
“Have they made any threats? Demands?”
Pandora rotated a few of her communication dishes in what seemed more like a nervous tic than any necessary alignment. “Some vague threats, and insisted on speaking to my ‘leadership.’ Cap’n Sheeba didn’t appear to be enough for them.”
Nove maneuvered the courier ship a bit nearer to Pandora’s forward cockpit, her ‘cheek’ if one was projecting human features onto her. “Well, I’m here to help. That virtual environment sounded useful, given the varied living conditions for the humans and Hyalbols. Can we all arrange to meet there?”
Pandora chirped an affirmative. “I’ll start setting it up. Thanks for running out here so fast, Nove.”
“Of course, but please do not make a habit of this. The Confluence can’t pay child support for ships in another species’ navy. There isn’t even paperwork for that.”
“If I’d had a mind-condom I would’ve worn it!”
Captain Sheeba broke in. “Doubt it. Aww, she’s blushing. The deck always warms up when—nope, too hot. Not cute anymore. Quit it!”