Chapter 18
“What about Fil?” I asked.
“Oh, well, you’ve been under for a few hundred years,” Fiona said. For some reason, that did not bother me. The generation I lived in was dead. I only wondered what became of the world. “Filigare lived for about forty years among the humans before he aged out to be a Zaxi. Now we’re a full family of stars, but to the cluster we’d be a scandal, so we’ll probably be outcasts for a bit.”
“Why a scandal?” I asked.
“Aside from both you and our son being born as lowly humans?” Fiona asked. “I don’t mean I think they’re lowly. The cluster leaders think anyone who feeds from Zaxients is below them.
“In Zaxi terms, you’re a baby, Fil is also a baby, and I’m still pretty young. I think Doc will be in the most trouble if they could ever catch him. He’s definitely not authorized to turn humans into my kind, but I’m glad the experiment succeeded. There is an energy I feel from you that is so rare. Only my parental clusters made that energy at the start.”
“Maybe that’s love,” I suggested, but the blank expression on her purple face with blank white eyes did not change. “I’ll need time before I can interpret the pulses you give off, Fiona.”
“Oh, right,” she replied. “Let’s do some now. You should know the basics. This first one is joy.” I felt a tickle on my skin hitting with a lick of soft feathers. The energy given off was bubbly. Laughter was next, a sort of poking wave of soft energy. I wasn’t feeling these with my skin, but sensing her mood as pulses. It was new, but I wanted to be out of my body like her.
The following pulse was throbbing and overpowering. Fiona defined it as sadness. It sure felt that way. Anger ripped at every pulse, with hot daggers. Disgust just oozed over me like, well, ooze. It was a very confining energy. Fear was a shivering pulse of icicles, but without the cold. Annoyance was a bit of a solid pulse, as if being hit with a wall of energy and told to just go away. Attraction felt reversed when each pulse hit. Even though I knew it came from her, the energy drew from my side, as if it was me pulsating. Mutual attraction must have felt explosive.
“That’s about the basics,” Fiona said. “But most often it’s a mix of a few energies like this.” The pulses she sent out tickled and poked away from me. I understood, but that was an easy one. How could fear and anger mix when one was cold and the other heat? Even if it had nothing to do with temperature, the energy felt that way to me. I was still interpreting things in human terms.
“So, how do I come out of the human skin?” I asked, but Fiona hesitated.
“I would tell you, but I’m a bit afraid to,” she said. “When you released into me, the energy was far too great. You don’t have enough control yet. What I’m doing here,” she motioned her hands over the naked and purple physique of a woman draped in light, “Is containing a supernova. If Zaxi wanted to, they could release without end, but that gives off a lot of energy, like the sun that gave birth to all of humankind and all life on Earth. Letting you try it now, would be equivalent to giving a baby an array of buttons that explode nuclear weapons to play with.” I almost laughed at the image, since that situation was a bit on the nose from my generation.
“Whoa,” I said. “Can you feel my fear?”
“Yup,” Fiona replied. “Let’s take it slow. For now, let’s just find Filigare, He’s just as new to this as you are and I only taught him the basics so far.”
“Right,” I said, feeling bad that I forgot about him. “Our son. So you’re officially a single mother of two Zaxient babies. I’m sorry, Fiona.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied, with a poking few pulses. “Can you walk?” I stood up to a feeling of brand new joints, but the muscle tissue was underdeveloped. It hurt to stand and Fiona sensed my pain. She stabbed something into my spine without warning, or was that spiraling pulse a warning? In seconds, the muscles all over my body grew within the skin. I could stand, even jump up to the ceiling.
“What was that?” I asked, pointing to the syringe Fiona just emptied into my body. I felt so energized and powerful, with absolutely no fitness humans had to do. It felt like a cheat code. “It’s amazing!”
“Doc’s special formula for human skins,” Fiona replied. “We don’t always feed the body like humans need to, so this mix restores vitality. In fact, my system doesn’t have a digestive system in place anymore, so this mix is the only way to keep up my muscle mass.”
“Digestive systems are pretty messy,” I said. “Did you keep the taste buds?”
“Not sure why, but I did,” she replied. “Maybe I liked the fact that flavor stimulates different parts of my internal systems.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said, flexing. “So, where is that son of ours?” Fiona slipped back into her skin and got up to leave, but I stopped her by the door.
“Oh, right,” she said. “I forgot to wear the damn clothes again. Stupid human tradition.”
As I stood there with her, both naked in our borrowed cloned skins, I felt absolutely no shame that a human might. I knew I should wear clothes to go out into society, but felt stupid putting underwear on to cover an imitated penis. Why did humans hide away behind animal skins and cloth? Was it to protect their skin? It had to be. My mind told me to lust for Fiona’s naked curves, but it only activated the new male organ. I felt no pull to penetrate as I would in my human body. A wave of licking and poking energy hit my body.
“Again?” she asked with a fire in her eyes. Did I send out a lusty wave? What did that feel like? Her hand wrapped around the length of the erection and moved as she bit my neck open. Before I could react, she jabbed an open finger into the wound. It almost felt like sex, stimulating the nervous system on the outside and the network on the inside. “Release into me so we can go.” I did not need to be told twice. Waves of pleasure exploded out of me, as Fiona’s energy flooded inside to replenish the emptiness. I sighed against her ear as lust faded.
“How come that still activates?” I asked, touching the bigger flaccid piece of skin. “Does it make anything similar?”
“Well, Doc needed to make it realistic,” Fiona said, squeezing the bag of skin underneath. “So these fake testicles create candy goo.” She brought her hand to my mouth to lick it off, but I hesitated. “It’s good.” She licked her thumb, looking as if she was a porn actress. I licked her pinky with a slight hesitation.
“Cola?” I asked. “I squirt cola-flavored gel?”
“I think it changes flavors daily,” she said. “They’re Euphoria Eggs, after all. Another Trevit tech. In their world, the flavor changes every three seconds. I’m not sure why they would invent something like that, but Doc knew about it and I’m sure they aren’t used like this.” We stood there licking Fiona’s hand until the flavor faded.
“Won’t this bother your lack of a digestive system?” I asked.
“Nah, anything inside me is incinerated,” she said. “We should get going, but let me know when you want to do that again. We have plenty of flavors to test out.”
“Definitely,” I said. It was strange to look forward to eating a gel produced in such a manner, but it was no longer the human life-creating component that came out, and I was no longer a human being. The realization of that hit me only when we left the apartment.
Everything looked different, remodeled. Fiona did say I was under for a few hundred years. The world changed a lot over that time. I was excited to see how. The door stood open onto a new world.
In the end, the few hundred years did not change that much. The rich of the world liked to delay change too much to allow groundbreaking advancements unless for fighting purposes. There were humans living on the moon, Mars, and one of Saturn’s moons, but all still childish colonies relying on Earth for support.
All the while, the home planet was mined out to an extreme extent. Parts of the world were now uninhabitable, but that was the price of progress. One interesting invention lowered the sea level by pumping it out into millions of desalinating factories. The water was purified and consumed, while the salt and minerals were stored to be used in other places, all fueled by solar energy on floating ocean farms that sank under the water during storms.
The internet thing grew exponentially in the hundreds of years, finally progressing into virtual travel humans feared second only to the creation of Artificial Intelligence. One feature was interesting, converting criminals into persons available for anyone to use, based on the weight of the crimes committed. That was the virtual travel of the present. A person could take control of a human body in another part of the world, be it male or female. It was a virtual loan. This left prisons only half-filled by people with small crimes and misdemeanors. Murderers and other violent offenders were treated to become shells for others to use, all the while allowing the rich to cash in on this vast enterprise of the virtual world.
“The world sure has changed,” I told Fiona, as we walked on an empty street heavily littered with trash from the few highways above. It seemed nobody used the ground streets anymore. Cities grew upward, away from the dirty ground and the lowly people who worked there.
“A blink of an eye to me,” Fiona replied. “I’ve seen a few others go from the smallest of organisms either to extinction or to venture out into the cluster. Life and death. Humans call it the cycle of life, but it’s more of a star cycle. My kind breeds stars, then the young ones learn the basics and set out to create brand new life from our energy. If something unexpected happens, or we stop feeding a planet, life dies.”
In half an hour of our walk, we arrived at a worn-down warehouse. Last I remembered, Doc’s place was much smaller. Did he expand over my unconscious time? Fiona touched the wall with a bit of a purple glow and a panel slid open, taking the rest of the wall with it. Within was a laboratory filled with bubbling solutions and wild systems set up with glassware. Most of the hanger-sized space was filled with workbenches, except for the empty space where we headed. There sat a young man, wearing a lab coat. I was cautious, but Fiona went right up to him.
“Hey, Doc,” she said. “I brought Finn. He’s all cooked. Doc?” He wasn’t moving, only remained still in a perplexed pose of thought. There were little flickers of light in his eyes that looked something like computer code.
“That’s Doc?” I asked. “What happened? Wasn’t he an old guy last time?”
“Yeah, well,” she said. “He regenerated into a new body. I think they based a TV show off of him a few blinks in the past, but the name is ridiculous and human-based.”
“Why is he frozen like that?” I asked, waving a hand in front of his open eyes. “Did he get hacked? Is- Is that possible now?”
“It is, but I doubt he got hacked,” she replied. “He’s far too smart for that. Nah, he’s just virtual. Let’s go get him out.” Fiona tossed a coin at me. My body acted with lightning reflexes before my mind processed the catch. It looked like plastic, but the inside was hefty. “Base of the skull. It’s a dongle.” She struck a pose by holding her hands behind her back and froze still like the new young Doc.
I reached behind my head realizing that the Gilk was gone. It was nice to have a normal human skull again, but I wasn’t human anymore. The second that heavy plastic disc touched my skin, tiny needles jabbed into my neck. The countdown started in my vision, from ten. I sat down like Doc and mirrored his pose. When the count reached zero, I felt my body stiffen and my vision went blank white. There was something in the distance. I somehow knew it was where I had to go, but a whisper tickled at my mind as I flew. Who was JJ?
alter
No way…
F- Finn? Ar- Are you there, buddy?
No. There is no way. I trapped him in a fading time loop of a dream. He shouldn’t know my name. The link should be entirely severed. I don’t…How? Did he…? Did he leave a remnant of our connection in the character of the story?
Finn?
No answer. Maybe it was my imagination. That place is vast, after all. If he’s in there somewhere, he’s bound to ruin this story. I hope he’s gone, even IF I miss him a bit. Heh. I’m probably worried for no reason. Back in.
Previous Chapter
Find all chapters in this page - Chapter Links
“Oh, well, you’ve been under for a few hundred years,” Fiona said. For some reason, that did not bother me. The generation I lived in was dead. I only wondered what became of the world. “Filigare lived for about forty years among the humans before he aged out to be a Zaxi. Now we’re a full family of stars, but to the cluster we’d be a scandal, so we’ll probably be outcasts for a bit.”
“Why a scandal?” I asked.
“Aside from both you and our son being born as lowly humans?” Fiona asked. “I don’t mean I think they’re lowly. The cluster leaders think anyone who feeds from Zaxients is below them.
“In Zaxi terms, you’re a baby, Fil is also a baby, and I’m still pretty young. I think Doc will be in the most trouble if they could ever catch him. He’s definitely not authorized to turn humans into my kind, but I’m glad the experiment succeeded. There is an energy I feel from you that is so rare. Only my parental clusters made that energy at the start.”
“Maybe that’s love,” I suggested, but the blank expression on her purple face with blank white eyes did not change. “I’ll need time before I can interpret the pulses you give off, Fiona.”
“Oh, right,” she replied. “Let’s do some now. You should know the basics. This first one is joy.” I felt a tickle on my skin hitting with a lick of soft feathers. The energy given off was bubbly. Laughter was next, a sort of poking wave of soft energy. I wasn’t feeling these with my skin, but sensing her mood as pulses. It was new, but I wanted to be out of my body like her.
The following pulse was throbbing and overpowering. Fiona defined it as sadness. It sure felt that way. Anger ripped at every pulse, with hot daggers. Disgust just oozed over me like, well, ooze. It was a very confining energy. Fear was a shivering pulse of icicles, but without the cold. Annoyance was a bit of a solid pulse, as if being hit with a wall of energy and told to just go away. Attraction felt reversed when each pulse hit. Even though I knew it came from her, the energy drew from my side, as if it was me pulsating. Mutual attraction must have felt explosive.
“That’s about the basics,” Fiona said. “But most often it’s a mix of a few energies like this.” The pulses she sent out tickled and poked away from me. I understood, but that was an easy one. How could fear and anger mix when one was cold and the other heat? Even if it had nothing to do with temperature, the energy felt that way to me. I was still interpreting things in human terms.
“So, how do I come out of the human skin?” I asked, but Fiona hesitated.
“I would tell you, but I’m a bit afraid to,” she said. “When you released into me, the energy was far too great. You don’t have enough control yet. What I’m doing here,” she motioned her hands over the naked and purple physique of a woman draped in light, “Is containing a supernova. If Zaxi wanted to, they could release without end, but that gives off a lot of energy, like the sun that gave birth to all of humankind and all life on Earth. Letting you try it now, would be equivalent to giving a baby an array of buttons that explode nuclear weapons to play with.” I almost laughed at the image, since that situation was a bit on the nose from my generation.
“Whoa,” I said. “Can you feel my fear?”
“Yup,” Fiona replied. “Let’s take it slow. For now, let’s just find Filigare, He’s just as new to this as you are and I only taught him the basics so far.”
“Right,” I said, feeling bad that I forgot about him. “Our son. So you’re officially a single mother of two Zaxient babies. I’m sorry, Fiona.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied, with a poking few pulses. “Can you walk?” I stood up to a feeling of brand new joints, but the muscle tissue was underdeveloped. It hurt to stand and Fiona sensed my pain. She stabbed something into my spine without warning, or was that spiraling pulse a warning? In seconds, the muscles all over my body grew within the skin. I could stand, even jump up to the ceiling.
“What was that?” I asked, pointing to the syringe Fiona just emptied into my body. I felt so energized and powerful, with absolutely no fitness humans had to do. It felt like a cheat code. “It’s amazing!”
“Doc’s special formula for human skins,” Fiona replied. “We don’t always feed the body like humans need to, so this mix restores vitality. In fact, my system doesn’t have a digestive system in place anymore, so this mix is the only way to keep up my muscle mass.”
“Digestive systems are pretty messy,” I said. “Did you keep the taste buds?”
“Not sure why, but I did,” she replied. “Maybe I liked the fact that flavor stimulates different parts of my internal systems.”
“That’s good to hear,” I said, flexing. “So, where is that son of ours?” Fiona slipped back into her skin and got up to leave, but I stopped her by the door.
“Oh, right,” she said. “I forgot to wear the damn clothes again. Stupid human tradition.”
As I stood there with her, both naked in our borrowed cloned skins, I felt absolutely no shame that a human might. I knew I should wear clothes to go out into society, but felt stupid putting underwear on to cover an imitated penis. Why did humans hide away behind animal skins and cloth? Was it to protect their skin? It had to be. My mind told me to lust for Fiona’s naked curves, but it only activated the new male organ. I felt no pull to penetrate as I would in my human body. A wave of licking and poking energy hit my body.
“Again?” she asked with a fire in her eyes. Did I send out a lusty wave? What did that feel like? Her hand wrapped around the length of the erection and moved as she bit my neck open. Before I could react, she jabbed an open finger into the wound. It almost felt like sex, stimulating the nervous system on the outside and the network on the inside. “Release into me so we can go.” I did not need to be told twice. Waves of pleasure exploded out of me, as Fiona’s energy flooded inside to replenish the emptiness. I sighed against her ear as lust faded.
“How come that still activates?” I asked, touching the bigger flaccid piece of skin. “Does it make anything similar?”
“Well, Doc needed to make it realistic,” Fiona said, squeezing the bag of skin underneath. “So these fake testicles create candy goo.” She brought her hand to my mouth to lick it off, but I hesitated. “It’s good.” She licked her thumb, looking as if she was a porn actress. I licked her pinky with a slight hesitation.
“Cola?” I asked. “I squirt cola-flavored gel?”
“I think it changes flavors daily,” she said. “They’re Euphoria Eggs, after all. Another Trevit tech. In their world, the flavor changes every three seconds. I’m not sure why they would invent something like that, but Doc knew about it and I’m sure they aren’t used like this.” We stood there licking Fiona’s hand until the flavor faded.
“Won’t this bother your lack of a digestive system?” I asked.
“Nah, anything inside me is incinerated,” she said. “We should get going, but let me know when you want to do that again. We have plenty of flavors to test out.”
“Definitely,” I said. It was strange to look forward to eating a gel produced in such a manner, but it was no longer the human life-creating component that came out, and I was no longer a human being. The realization of that hit me only when we left the apartment.
Everything looked different, remodeled. Fiona did say I was under for a few hundred years. The world changed a lot over that time. I was excited to see how. The door stood open onto a new world.
In the end, the few hundred years did not change that much. The rich of the world liked to delay change too much to allow groundbreaking advancements unless for fighting purposes. There were humans living on the moon, Mars, and one of Saturn’s moons, but all still childish colonies relying on Earth for support.
All the while, the home planet was mined out to an extreme extent. Parts of the world were now uninhabitable, but that was the price of progress. One interesting invention lowered the sea level by pumping it out into millions of desalinating factories. The water was purified and consumed, while the salt and minerals were stored to be used in other places, all fueled by solar energy on floating ocean farms that sank under the water during storms.
The internet thing grew exponentially in the hundreds of years, finally progressing into virtual travel humans feared second only to the creation of Artificial Intelligence. One feature was interesting, converting criminals into persons available for anyone to use, based on the weight of the crimes committed. That was the virtual travel of the present. A person could take control of a human body in another part of the world, be it male or female. It was a virtual loan. This left prisons only half-filled by people with small crimes and misdemeanors. Murderers and other violent offenders were treated to become shells for others to use, all the while allowing the rich to cash in on this vast enterprise of the virtual world.
“The world sure has changed,” I told Fiona, as we walked on an empty street heavily littered with trash from the few highways above. It seemed nobody used the ground streets anymore. Cities grew upward, away from the dirty ground and the lowly people who worked there.
“A blink of an eye to me,” Fiona replied. “I’ve seen a few others go from the smallest of organisms either to extinction or to venture out into the cluster. Life and death. Humans call it the cycle of life, but it’s more of a star cycle. My kind breeds stars, then the young ones learn the basics and set out to create brand new life from our energy. If something unexpected happens, or we stop feeding a planet, life dies.”
In half an hour of our walk, we arrived at a worn-down warehouse. Last I remembered, Doc’s place was much smaller. Did he expand over my unconscious time? Fiona touched the wall with a bit of a purple glow and a panel slid open, taking the rest of the wall with it. Within was a laboratory filled with bubbling solutions and wild systems set up with glassware. Most of the hanger-sized space was filled with workbenches, except for the empty space where we headed. There sat a young man, wearing a lab coat. I was cautious, but Fiona went right up to him.
“Hey, Doc,” she said. “I brought Finn. He’s all cooked. Doc?” He wasn’t moving, only remained still in a perplexed pose of thought. There were little flickers of light in his eyes that looked something like computer code.
“That’s Doc?” I asked. “What happened? Wasn’t he an old guy last time?”
“Yeah, well,” she said. “He regenerated into a new body. I think they based a TV show off of him a few blinks in the past, but the name is ridiculous and human-based.”
“Why is he frozen like that?” I asked, waving a hand in front of his open eyes. “Did he get hacked? Is- Is that possible now?”
“It is, but I doubt he got hacked,” she replied. “He’s far too smart for that. Nah, he’s just virtual. Let’s go get him out.” Fiona tossed a coin at me. My body acted with lightning reflexes before my mind processed the catch. It looked like plastic, but the inside was hefty. “Base of the skull. It’s a dongle.” She struck a pose by holding her hands behind her back and froze still like the new young Doc.
I reached behind my head realizing that the Gilk was gone. It was nice to have a normal human skull again, but I wasn’t human anymore. The second that heavy plastic disc touched my skin, tiny needles jabbed into my neck. The countdown started in my vision, from ten. I sat down like Doc and mirrored his pose. When the count reached zero, I felt my body stiffen and my vision went blank white. There was something in the distance. I somehow knew it was where I had to go, but a whisper tickled at my mind as I flew. Who was JJ?
alter
No way…
F- Finn? Ar- Are you there, buddy?
No. There is no way. I trapped him in a fading time loop of a dream. He shouldn’t know my name. The link should be entirely severed. I don’t…How? Did he…? Did he leave a remnant of our connection in the character of the story?
Finn?
No answer. Maybe it was my imagination. That place is vast, after all. If he’s in there somewhere, he’s bound to ruin this story. I hope he’s gone, even IF I miss him a bit. Heh. I’m probably worried for no reason. Back in.
Previous Chapter
Find all chapters in this page - Chapter Links
Comments
Post a Comment