FTL…

Faster Than Light…

Faster Than Life…

It’s a saying a parable of sorts from the old days. It used to be you’d be dead and gone and your great grand kids would be the ones arriving to where you used to be heading. Then came the great invention of FTL space flight. The basic theory of it requires the ship involved to have a man made micro-singularity as the engine core. It creates its own gravity and when you jump it’s using a particle beam to link it to another gravity well or a star and your ship is attracted to the larger field.

People used to think that you couldn’t go faster than light but a black hole pulls light in so that’s like a catch 202 in the theory. The PTP or Point to Point travel required things to be shielded. You had to or when you crossed the light speed threshold you broke apart, became energy, so part of that gravity force that comes off the core is what holds you together. It’s another reason that you need a singularity; the power to hold things together is well you know what I mean.

So know you can go if you can afford to on a FTL ship and jump to other stars and do it well within your own life spans. You never feel it because the jump does this kind of time freeze or slow down inside a jump, but you can take anywhere from hours to weeks or even months according to GST. Galactic Standard Time. The closer you are to your jump point the faster you go so it’s all relative?

Is all of this safe? Yes? No? I’m not sure. The shielding keeps us from getting shredded by debris because we’re quantumly dense or something. But the thing is, coming out of jump. That you gotta do outside the solar system or you get snagged by the gravity well and you either get snagged by the gravity well and could damage your ship, or hit a well full of debris, or slam into the star. Not counting all the ones who end up hitting each other coming out of the jump but that’s all pretty rare. But it’s not just flying around either.

Bad and strange things are said to happen though if the shielding fails, or there’s a leak. You see there are these particles out there that we don’t know much about. Some of them get called Chronotons and other trippy head case names but what mankind knows so far is that getting exposed to this energy changes you. Random body parts getting exposed often leads to that part rapidly aging, or mutating like the cellular evolution went sideways or that it just sped up. There a fundamentalists that point to this as a sign than man was not to break god’s laws. “Let there be light.” Was to be taken literally, Keep off the grass, don’t proceed beyond this point, don’t touch the damned apple.

We’re Humanity do you think we’d ever listen?

And with that aplomb we hit the stars from our home system of Earth and hadn’t really looked back.

***

My alarm program woke me up buzzing my nervous system with neuro-stim sensations that woke me out of REM sleep. I opened my eyes and yawned still shaking out the haze of sleep as my implants were working overtime.

It’s the 43rd century and everyone is implanted. Just about anyone from civilization has an OBC or On-Body- Computer. It’s like how our ancestors used to use watches and phones and all that other stuff. It’s hooked through your brain by nano-connections and it lets you function as a member of normal society. It regulates the production of chemicals and hormones through you body to help you do stuff like control your breathing and heart rate, tells you when you’re getting sick and lets you do all sorts of computing functions.

You might think that it seems distracting but it’s not. You click thinks off as they appear in your visual perceptions and it’s almost autonomic for most of it. Like recognizing a shape or a color. Sending or receiving messages are just like thoughts, they’re bursts of information that you just get used to dealing with.

Human life span is now close to two hundred years, most organs get replaced by cloned ones except for the brain. All they can do is give you stem boosters after you hit one twenty or so the OBC’s actually help with cognitive functions well past the old human life spans.

And I’m being boring…Sorry I’m still not used to a narration about anything really I’m no Sim-Sense star/actor.

I guess what’s the point of this? Well you see it started like this…

Like I said I woke up at my preset time and did my daily routine and was getting myself some food, soy-bacon and synth-milk, perfect- egg, and then brushed my teeth. I set off jogging trying to work my way up to the requirements needed for starship duty. You had to be in a certain level of conditioning to get duty on a ship and being sedentary is a bit of an issue with cyber technology letting you live in your head so much. Or if you’ve grown up in a certain environment, the Colonies of United Humanities or the Colonial Union for short have certain requirements for anyone to be at while in service, if you’re not “Ship-Shape” then you’re a danger to the others around you.

I’ve really had enough of Arcadia.

Don’t get me wrong this is a beautiful place and I’ve net-jumped on Sim-Sense trips to places all over the colonies and Sim-worlds too with friends but there’s nothing like reality. Imagine eating a big juicy steak now compare that to actually having the steak.

See that’s the thing, I’m fifty three, still young but at the same time I’ve never really, really lived. Never had a physical relationship, never been off planet, hell never been physically off the continent.

I want to live, I want to eat steak.

I’m nearly there to the readiness levels to go to Fleet and enter one of the programs there. I’m good at Math and physics being touched with altered temporal and physical reality conformation. Aspergers they used to call it but now a days it’s actually seen as an advanced aptitude in your perceptual focus. We see the world in a way that others aren’t able to, most people get brain tied over the though of the math that goes into actually making the magnetic counter sheer event that creates a force field, us we’ll get fascinated by the math and the fact it was used to make the pretty shiny. Once socially awkward we’re more mainstream now with the OBC’s able to transmit our thoughts into transmissions we can be just like anyone else.

Actually we’re in high demand because of our skill-sets we often find ourselves drawn to. Me…I’m looking to actually get into navigation and really getting into fourth dimensional mathematics and using it to plot courses and move fifty thousand tones through space and bending time.

I run my route from my apartment and over the paved jogging paths and I’m tuned into a favorite selection of music that I’ve plotted out and I run, I’m doing quite good actually with the entire work out plan, there’s something to be said about actual physical activity. Oh I can get an endorphin rush from my system but it’s the aches and pains and the feeling of my body changing getting into a level of fitness that’s so addicting. Plus I’m doing something.

There’s so much we don’t do in the everyday because well…machines do it for us.

There’s about twenty percent of the population that really do anything. These are mostly the religious types though. Most of them don’t ascribe to the usage of cyberware. In fact religion is one of the few things that good clean logic hasn’t been able to erase.

The hard core ones actually are openly hostile to body-mod’d people of any kind and are against still a whole host of things. In fact there’s a planet or group of planets out there colonized with every different sect or faith some people can think of. They start wars and border and trade disputes and are still universal pains in the ass.

Arcadia is a very conservative world where the faithful have been here since it was colonized, we’re a mostly agricultural planet and have actual limits on body modification and cybernetics. A good example is me. I’ve been trapped in the pretty much straight male for that I was born in and despite the fact that being transgendered isn’t seen as anything more than a medical condition that can be re-wired by the right neuro-mapping when you get you OBC put in and hence “Cured” the medical need is ignored if you don’t want then messing with who you really are. The fact that I didn’t want them to rewire my brain is actually seen as freakish by people. I mean who would want to be like that or gay or whatever…thus this is why I’ve never told anyone just who the real me is. Aaron Stone is actually Erin Stone and always will be.

But when you join the fleet they will work with you to become the best you that you can be. As long as you fit the bill to do the job they don’t care about “Medical” issues.

My family is all for me leaving home and them because having a son who chooses to be a deviant is embarrassing for them.

Like the way some towns and regions used to be like this, so is my home colony. A close minded rinky dink mud ball of people who don’t want different in their lives. I’m just glad it’s not some of the really bad places where they’ll make you conform. But this is really just bad enough that it’s been slowly killing me for the last twenty years.

I spend most of the week doing that. Like I said I’m nearly at that point where leaving is becoming a reality. I work out, mostly running and swimming there’s a routine I have where I collect metal balls from the bottom of the pool. Holding my breath and swimming underwater are recommended in several net-tomes for getting ready for zero gravity. I’m linked up to several VR classes I do work outs in VR with other people instead of going to a gym which we don’t have, these are Pilates, Aerobics, Yoga, Tai-Chi all of them that we’re really doing and socializing in these classes. But I’m actually doing the exercises even though I’m wearing an avatar that’s female. I’m not beautiful here, not blushing hot thing just an extrapolated skin of what I’d look like based on my own bio-data and my family tendencies.

Light brown hair that I keep at regulation length, I’ve got dimples that are a tad too big for my personal tastes because they make me think I look chubby or a little so when I smile and freckles. My eyes are my only vanity, I’ve always wanted to have green eyes and here I do. B-Cup Breasts, a bit of a big butt because I’ve got big hips like this. It’s all a Sim though because when I move I can’t really feel the same things, the right things.

I give away or sell or ship away most of the things in my apartment and sell my lease as well and put the final down payments on a set of cottage domes out in lake country. I meet a few friends that are real people in town one last time and stop by the family house to say my farewells.

I rode my bicycle there. It’s a new vice for me. In a world of very good public transportation and a few personal vehicles bikes are a rare thing. It’s not efficient to get off your ass and actually do something. I attract a few stares as I pedal my way through the gently rolling streets and past all the neo-fiber homes with the solar siding and solar windows and all molded and designed to look like very pale tones but very nice homes with turreted windows and lovely yards and decks and everything looking just…well it is pretty much machine ordered. Yes you’re external maintenance bot keeps everything cut trimmed and pruned just so.

I grew up here, there’s almost no children playing just the really young ones out with their nurses or the rare mother making sure that the children get to perform their mandatory exercises so they develop normally and can be bust little clones just like everyone else here. I know I’m used to it, or I should be used to it but it’s a little creepy.

I pull into the house and set the kick stand of the bike and head up the walk smiling at bit at the calorie count and burn rate percentage. I walk up to the door and it doesn’t open. I send a net-signal with my ID to the house; I get dumped to the junk mail folder as an unregistered user.

Nice, really nice apparently they erased me from the family systems. My family unfriended me…Lovely.

I knock. I have to because we don’t use doorbells any more and the house isn’t recognizing my code.

I knock until I get an answer. My mother opens the door and looks at me. She’s got that fed up but uptight not impressed look. “Aaron.”

“Hey Mom, can I come in/”

“Why?”

“I’m leaving soon for the Fleet. I thought it would be nice if we spent some time together before I left. I mean I don’t know how long it’ll be before I come home again.”

“But You won’t be coming back will you? You’re gallivanting off to god knows were and you’re going to get changed while you’re out there with them.”

“Mom I’m still going to be me. I told you that before. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“You keep letting your illness do the talking for you Aaron. You could have had that disease in you fester away and causing all sorts of embarrassment for us. You should have just started to undergo the remapping and we’d never have had to live down the fact that our child is proud to be sick and an aberration.”

“Mom…I’m not sick! Why can’t you get if I let them do that to me that’d be the same thing as if I committed suicide. That’s against the rules in your bible isn’t it?”

“Aaron do not bring our faith into this after what you had the nerve to do.”

Yeah, my family and several hundred others attend a Sim-Service where the bible can be seen and explored in VR detail and that the faithful can gather without leaving their homes for all of the varied services and church events. I hadn’t logged in for a few years and when I finally went I went as My Avatar. Apparently it hadn’t gone over well with the Virt-Flock. I’ve been considered a pariah since.

“The house of the lord is the house of the lord mom even if it’s in virtual space, I went as myself and it’s not my fault that you and they were so small and hard hearted that you couldn’t empathize with my side of things.”

“You’re side of things is to be something you’re not supposed to be.”

“Mom there’s long held genetic evidence of transgenderism and gender having genetic components; I was just being myself as god made me.”

“You could have had the remapping done Son; with that nonsense out of your mind you could have undergone the gene-treatments to fix your disorder.”

“How is that any different than me getting myself fixed to fit the me inside of myself?!”

I’m getting upset and tears are leaking out now and I hate this. I hate that she just refuses to see me.

“It’s hugely different, when you were born you were born a boy, you’re an XY child and you have a disorder that makes you think that you’re something that you are not supposed to be. You are blatantly doing this, you glorify in causing this family embarrassment and pain. Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

“That’s the point! I want to be like my sister!”

“Good then you’ll come to your senses and get the remapping done like she did when she started to have that unnatural attraction to other women.”

“Dammit mom, Kelly practically killed herself! She erased who she was supposed to be because she was scared of being different!”

“Your sister is a successful well adjusted happily married you woman with a happy husband and six children.”

“Aargh! Goddammit! You’re fucking hopeless!”

My father moves the door open farther and he gives me this stare. “Aaron.”

“Dad.”

“You here to give up on this thing you’re going to do?”

“No sir.”

“I’ll not have a Deviant in this family. You’re hurting all of us son, just stop it before it’s too late.”

“Dad…Dad why can’t you see that this is the me that I’m going to become, the me that I’m supposed to be and…”

He closes the door in my face and I get a net-flash from the house’s home security sensors that I’m now listed as an unwanted visitor and that I have three minutes to vacate the property before the police are called to enforce trespassing laws on me.

It’s the same thing at my sister Lena, the one who changed herself and my brothers Nick and Danny I flash on trespassing alerts as soon as I step onto their property. I’ve always been the black sheep of the family but this hurts.

Being the girl I am I cycled home crying, making a right proper scene of myself to the neighbors if they’d care to look or see me which they don’t. Now a day’s people have more an excuse than ever to not interact. I throw myself down on my bed and cry myself to sleep, hell I stayed in bed all day long the next day mourning my life and drowning in loss.

It’s my bodily needs that got me up and after a shower and the last bit of food is eaten and the rest put in the garbage I pack everything up and order a transport to take my stuff to my new home out in Lake country.

It’s the first time I’ve ever been here and it’s a tiny village that’s up in the hills with faux stone molded to an old mining hole that had a spring feeding the area. So there’s steps going into the water and it’s like if you crossed a quarry lake with a swimming pool. There’s willows and evergreens and cedars everywhere and the actual town is like hundreds of tiny man made islands like docks if streets were the docks and your cottage is usually on an island block with others. If you’re rich you can get your own island with a proper house on it or like me get a dome cluster that’s pretty cheaply made.

It’s a prefab resin dome with built in insulation and a ceramic inside finish, the outside is solar film and they’re connected to each other by a prefab arch-way tube. You order the windows, and a story is usually a ring tube just as prefab as everything else. I look at mine when I get there. Two stories in the central dome, and three connected domes and an entry arch. Mine’s a used home 5th owner and thus it’s affordable. I have to unlock the door with a pulse but there’s no automation built into the house. I smile at having to just do things for myself. First floor is the living room and the master bedroom is upstairs, there’s the kitchen dome and one for laundry and the last one is for storage. One bathroom upstairs non-automated and really basic appliances. Stove, Chiller, Washer-Dryer combo, that’s it basic shelves and cupboards and power outlets. We used to go to these things to rough it. Well we went here once. Everyone in the family hated it and I loved it. I unpack and query the Lake-Net and get directions to the store. I walk there instead of biking there just to get a feel for the place. It’s strange with a few friendly nods from just people as I walk through the area and even see some kids swimming and playing in the water. Even some gardening being done. People come here to get away from it all here, or live a little closer to real life than other people do.

In the ancient days this would be considered very bohemian. It’s a very strange place. It’s kind of scary too. I’m a lot of things but everyone here is loud and extroverted. Mixed company eating places and the shops are small here and cramped so you get in the personal space of other people. Getting the cleaning supplies is actually trying for me with getting around the place and the people and the lines at the cash? They use real money here which means there’s unwired people here. I’ve never met someone who’s unwired before.

I get home and wash down my house and scrub it clean and set out sent pots of citrus peel and get my bed unpacked but without owning any real tools I sleep on the cushioning. Exhausted from the efforts.

The next day is packing everything up and locking my place up and call a transport to take me to the capitol city of Selene.

Selene is nice, it’s also terra-sculpted with it being carved out of the small mountains that go on in the central plains of the continent. It’s built in tiers and is close to seventy miles long with most of it carved out once for mining. Now you can’t really see much of the mountains for the buildings it’s very bust and our version of a mega city even if there’s only four million people living here. Industries however compete for living space and mostly for shuttle docks and the docking bays for light starcraft and other things like the Colonial Union military base.

I have a recruiting appointment.

I’m surprised at the people I see here. Tough capable looking soldiers and even the clerks and other personnel here are so self assured, capable and armed. We’re given pads by this buxom blonde in a uniform with a much shorter skirt than I thought they’d allow. Hell she looks like she came out of a porn-Sim-sense experience. Her patches say she’s a morale officer and a companion…I’ve heard of companions, they say that the military and others use them to pleasure the crews. The others there in the room with me are staring too. One rather awkwardly built young man in his twenties maybe raises his hand. She stops. “Yes recruit?”

“Yer ah Companion right Ma’am?”

“Yes, I’m a companion recruit why are you interested in becoming one?”
“Naw Ma’am I’m not sure thet I could be an Army hooker Ma’am. No offence.” He ducked his head turning red. “Ahm, sorry thet didn’t come out right.”

She smiled at him and us. “I’m a companion, I’m also by regulation a trained councilor, and rated for a lot of other things. Yes the rumors are true we do sleep with crewmen and women but it’s a mutual thing, sex and intimacy are tools I use in my job to get close to my charges. Sometimes it’s just a date, someone to talk to, a shoulder to cry on. Lots of things.”

He’s still staring at her as we all sort of are. Then he nods. “They ain’t gonna make me be one are they?”

“No recruit, being a companion is voluntary only then you still have to pass a psyche eval.”

I cough then quietly ask. “Psyche eval?”

She smiles at me and nods. “As a companion you have to have this emotional flexibility to connect with a lot of people but also to have enough integrity to never abuse the trust that people have placed in you.”

“Sounds hard, sounds so strange.”

“It’s the most rewarding career I’ve ever had, or ever will.” Her smile is so real and true it’s like a sensory balm. I’ve never met someone so good at putting anyone, everyone at ease. As we fill out our forms, both actual hard copy and on a data-pad. No network connections are here. It’s quiet in our heads and I can see it bugging some people. Like a city person out in the country.

I fill out my forms and there’s things that I’d never expected in there. Like not just changing my sex but there’s stuff like requisitions for Amazon class that’s for combat girls and Futanari were you’re female but they make a sheath for your male parts that you can turn on/off that parts arousal connections so if you want to you can get a hard-on that slides out of a internal pouch to have that kind of sex. It’s an accepted deviation.

Deviants, real deviants are those who use bio-ware and cybernetics to bizarrely modify your body. Claws, tails, vestigial wings, horns are all some of the stuff seen in some of the extreme cases. In many cases it’s a life-style, a fetish thing and in some colonies it’s a way of life. It’s what my parents are accusing me of becoming. I’m not into any of that. And neither is the military. There’s a whole list of deviations you can’t have already or get. If it might get into the way of others or working on a ship then they nix it.

I just sign on for the gender change, a basic gene-shift…basic yeah right. I select a target breast size and the two deviations I say yes to are the functioning reproductive system and the mandatory low-light eyes with polarization required for fleet. You need that in case the power goes down to see in the darkness and there’s this shade of almost gem like emerald green I check off for a deviation in color. The rest is courses that I’ll have to take to work as a Navigator and it’s a lot of stuff. Sciences and piloting, basic military training and all sorts of stuff including languages I‘ll have to know and Stellar geography as well as emergency medical and some engineering courses it’ll take years for me to go through the training. It takes hours and my hand cramped up three times and the Officer leans down and presses and writes down on both my forms a penmanship requirement before smiling at me.

“Sorry Erin, your real life writing skills really suck.”

I nod. But offer her this shy smile. She used my real name. She does that for others and I notice out of the forty people here there’s seven being addressed by their real girl names ant two females getting addressed by their real boy names. There’s this look as we notice each other that sort of just say’s I’m not alone?! There’s some wet eyes and there’s smiles too.

My hands are shaking with adrenaline as I sign the final forms and they’re collected by other personnel. I’m called to a line and a nurse with the other transformees where we head off to a shuttle bay.

We’re all excited and scared as we’re hooked to the sleep beds so we go into suspended animation trance for the trip to the Jump ship. That’ll take all of new recruits to Union-1 the training headquarters planetary system for the Colonial Fleet.

I drift off feeling free and alive and scared at the hugest step I’ll ever take.