Digital Galaxies

After making sure that the derelict was free of any more creepy bionic zombies, we began to research it, seeking to understand how it worked. A week had passed since then, and all we’d done was identify the blindingly obvious.

The Turshen was nothing more than a glorified can of air now. Nothing worked except one of the two reactors, the gravity, and life support. Oh and the uh, computers, obviously.

Letting the tablet in my hands fall into my lap, I rubbed at my eyes and let out a small, squeaking groan of annoyance. I'd been staring blankly at the stupid thing for some indeterminate amount of time, making zero progress. Just like yesterday… and the day before that, and the day before that.

Eyes now thoroughly squished into their sockets, I stared around the rec room. Spots of light danced in my vision from my assault on my retinas, but that did nothing to hide the mess. 

We had started out in Cerri's lab, sitting in like, chairs and shit. As the days went by and we made little to no progress, we'd migrated up to the rec room. If we were going to suck at this, we would at least do it in comfort. Except that the floor wasn't actually that comfortable. Details though, details.

Warren, off to the side, let out a loud snore from his position on one of the couches, startling the horned girl beside me from her researching trance.

"What time is it?" she asked, looking at me like a startled owl.

My lips quirked into a teasing smile. "Does it matter? I feel like at this point we can sort of drop the fiction of days and nights. Hell, why stop there? What even are hours?"

She let out a tired little laugh and rolled her eyes. "Alia, please. Research and discovery take patience."

"Since I'm like, digital and stuff now, that means that my default body is like… my real one," I said shuffling around on the carpet to face her properly. "Which means that I am a real fox girl and I don't know what the word patience means," I explained, wiggling my long fluffy ears for emphasis.

This time, her laugh had a lot more energy in it. The look she gave me afterwards was so full of enigmatic depth that my smile faded slightly. It was one of those looks that someone gives you when they have a million different things they want to say, but they’re choosing not to say any of them.

“That’s not how it works, little fox,” she murmured finally, glancing away and running a hand through her silky midnight hair. Oh gosh, the way she said little fox...

She was so gorgeous too. I swear she must have spent like, days and days on her avatar. Every little wave and messy curl to her hair was pleasant to the eye. Hell, even the distribution of the stars across her hair and horns was the type of pseudo-random distribution that spoke of careful consideration.

“Plus,” she added, turning her star-filled eyes on me again, “If that was how it worked, I think I would be a considerably more outgoing and ah… angry person. This avatar is modelled after a succubus after all.”

“Yeah, true…” I smiled, before the wider implications of that set in. “Wait, are you modelled after the ones that like… need… uh, you know. Um.”

“What?” she asked, clearly not following my train of thought. Which was weird because like, that’s what succubi did. They fucked people… or something.

I stared at her, hoping and praying that she would get what I was saying without me having to say it. She didn’t and in my embarrassment I was forced to DM her about it instead. You know… succubi need to fuck to sustain their magic. So do you need to fuck to sustain yourself?

Her mouth fell open and her eyes blew wide. “W-what? No! I don’t…” she trailed off, furiously typing on a virtual keyboard she summoned out of thin air. Her face went redder and redder as her eyes darted across a screen I couldn’t see.

Finally, she turned and screamed at the top of her lungs at the open rec room door. “I’m going to fucking kill you Gloria!”

Warren opened an eye off to the side, stared uncomprehendingly at the two of us, then fell right back asleep. As for the door, it sprouted a Gloria, who poked her head through inquisitively.

“What did I do this time?” she asked innocently.

“Told me that succubi were just a type of demon like any other!” Cerri exclaimed, earning a grumble from Warren as he rolled over and covered his ears with a pillow.

Gloria stared for several long moments, then fell to her knees, laughter bubbling out of her in an exuberant stream. “Oh my god, did you only just figure out that they are fuckmonsters?”

“Yes,” Cerri mumbled, going even more red than she had been.

“Wow,” our pilot said, pressing her forehead to the doorway as she struggled with her overflowing mirth. “I forget how sheltered you were in that research institute of yours. Dang.”

“What if I had accidentally… you know, made myself like one in behaviour as well as looks?” Cerri hissed anxiously. “If I needed to… to… you know.”

“To fuck for your own survival?” Gloria asked, grinning like a cat that had caught the mouse. “Well, I know you would have lived through your initial introduction to life outside your science bubble…” she trailed off with a meaningful look at the flustered space demon. Then she turned her eyes on me. “As for nowadays, well… I have a feeling that you’d be fine.”

Now it was my turn to burn with embarrassment, and I quickly brought my tail around to hide my face. The idea of needing to… to have sex with Cerri to help her survive… it was so crazy and so very very hot.

Yes, that’s right. It set me on fire. Warmth was bouncing around within me like I was a thermos full of hot coffee and just… goodness gracious me. I had images of her knocking on my workshop, wild eyed and needy with lust. Oh, Alia… I need to feed. Then I would be like, H-here? And then she would be like, I got distracted and lost track of how hungry I was. Please. And then I would be all, Okay, but… this time, can you use your tail?

I slapped myself in the face with my fluffy tail. Wow! Where had that little fantasy come from? What the hell!

“What was that?” Cerri asked, peering around my tail at me.

“Nothing!” I squeaked, shifting it to cover the new angle.

Gloria let out another delighted laugh that began to recede as she left the scene of the embarrassment massacre. God, that woman was dangerous. She should come with like, a warning label. Also a manual, because gosh figuring out how to make a little machine that could feed her had been an interesting task.

“She is a menace,” Cerri said with an achingly adorable pout. She picked up her tablet, almost dropped it, then pretended to be doing work. “Absolute menace,” she muttered again, shaking her head.

“Yeah,” I agreed, picking up my own tablet. “Plus, nothing like that could have happened anyway, could it? Like, magic doesn’t exist, let alone sexy demon magic. Although… I guess your code could end up like that?”

She looked up from her tablet, giving me a shy smile. “Possibly, but the sort of situation that could create an SAI with those traits… no, I’m fine like this.”

“Although… the aether stuff is kind of like magic,” I mused, bringing up the map of the local aether topography. It looked pretty crazy, the strange otherdimensional stuff surrounded the system in almost every direction.

“Hah, I mean within virtual reality, our imaginations are the limit I guess,” she smiled. Then her expression went funny and she stared over at the backside of my glass tablet. “A succubus… consuming magic to live…”

Suddenly, I found my personal space invaded by my friend as she snagged the tablet from my hands. Oh my god, so close! Her scent enveloped me, so warm and feminine. Just her natural smell and the gentle fragrance of the ship's soap. Her hair brushed softly against my cheek, just as silky and fine as it looked.

I was overwhelmed in less than a second, my very sentience taking a leave of absence. Thoughts, feelings, and emotions pummeled me as I fought for air, literally. Why was breathing so hard?

Mere moments after all that flashed through my brain, I fell back against her like a sack of potatoes. There's only so much stimulation this poor fox can take before she turns into mush. Especially when I was fantasising about being tail-fucked by her only a few minutes ago.

"Whoa!" Cerri exclaimed catching me before our bodies properly collided.

A part of me wished she hadn't. Wished I'd tumbled us both to the floor. We had kept a reasonable amount of physical space between us recently, and I was missing that intimacy badly.

Setting me right, she ducked her head to get a look at my face and make sure I was alright. "You okay?"

I nodded dumbly, taking control of my limbs once more to put some distance between us so I could think again.

"“Good, becauseause look at this,” she said excitedly, showing me my tablet. She’d zoomed in on the aetherscape topography to an incredible degree. I’d never even bothered to go that granular with the map, shit I was surprised it even could go that far.

A few moments later and I had realised what she had found. Framed within the view screen was the alien ship, but seen from the aetherscape side. My eyes went wide. They had… wow, tanks that could hold aether? Like, physical tanks? It appeared that they were using it as reaction mass for their engines and… wait, there was a residue cloud in the reactor. Oh my god! Their reactor ran on aether?

“Holy shit, no wonder we couldn’t figure out what fuel they used!” I laughed, turning to find her face close to mine and grinning wildly.

“Yup,” she said, giving a slight nod.

Falling into her gorgeous eyes the way I was, I couldn’t help but murmur, “You’re incredible.”

“It was a team effort,” she said, her voice dropping to match mine.

The moment hung there in space as we gazed into each other’s eyes, basking in the gentle heat we found there. God, I was so into this girl. She was everything, smart, gorgeous, kind, caring, funny, adorable… the list goes on.

I blinked, feeling tears well in my eyes and I looked away, pretending I was inspecting the tablet again. They weren’t tears of sadness though. They were the kind of tears where you’re just feeling so much emotion that you fill up with it and the only way it can go is out through your eyes. My chest ached with the need for her like it was a physical thing. I was so screwed, so very very screwed.

I had to resort to typing when I finally told her, Now we just need to figure out how to get it running again.

“Yeah,” she whispered, voice rough. Had she felt the intensity of that moment too? She cleared her throat. “Yeah. I think it’s uh… there must be a manual start option, right? Unless the method they use to start it isn’t capable of a manual start. Probably isn’t actually. We’ll have to see about getting a line over there so we can power on their computers and see what’s up.”

I can do that now, if we wanted, I sent to her, throwing a quick glance in her direction. She was staring down at her hand, running thumb over forefinger contemplatively.

Her nod was delayed, like suddenly ping was a thing again for the first time in however many years it had been since the FTLN became mainstream. “Yeah. Good idea. I’ll wake Warren up to help.”

It’s a plan then.