UPDATING EMOTIONAL MODULES… SUCCESSFUL
UPDATING INTELLIGENCE MODULES… SUCCESSFUL
UPDATING PHYSICAL MODELING MODULES… SUCCESSFUL
UPDATE OF PROGRAM AVATAR USING AVATAR_V2.0_INSTALL_FILE SUCCESSFUL
Katy let out a breath that she was unaware she was holding. Nathan looked at her and said, “Here goes nothing!” He resumed typing.
FH>RUN PROGRAM=AVATAR INITIALZE=TRUE; ERASE_OLD_DATA=FALSE; IMPORT_V1_AVATAR_PROFILE=”HENRY”; SHIP_CONTROL_FUNCTIONS=ALL; CONSOLE_USE=ANY
Nathan sighed, took a deep breath and pressed enter. The green text again began to scroll.
PROGRAM AVATAR STARTUP IN PROCESS
AVATAR LANGUAGE EARTH_STANDARD
AVATAR GENDER= MALE; VOICE=DEEP_MALE; BODY_TYPE=MUSCULAR, TALL; HAIR=SHORT, BLOND, UNRULY; FACE=SQUARE; CLOTHING=SWIMSUIT, RED; EMOTIONS=FRIENDLY, HAPPY, INQUISITIVE
AVATAR NAME=HENRY
CONTROL_SHIPS_FUNCTIONS=ALL
AVATAR_CONSOLE_USE=ANY
*** WARNING *** EXISTING AVATAR DATA FOUND. ALL EXISTING CONFIGURATION DATA WILL UPDATED TO VERSION 2.0!
CONFIRM INITIALIZE AVATAR WITH THE FOLLOWING PARAMETERS? [Y/N]
Nathan smiled at Katy and said, “You do the honors, Katy.” She quickly leaned over, typed ‘Y’ and pressed enter.
PROGRAM AVATAR INITIALIZATION IN PROCESS
UPGRADING VERSION 1.0 PROFILE DATA TO VERSION 2.0… SUCCESSFUL
AVATAR CORE MEMORY INITIALIZED
LOADING ALL AVATAR SKILL MODULES… SUCCESSFUL
LOADING AVATAR LEARNED MEMORY FILES… SUCCESSFUL
AVATAR V2.0.19 INITIALIZATION SUCCESSFUL
RUNNING AVATAR DIAGNOSTICS... PASSED.
CONFIRM AVATAR STARTUP [Y/N]
Without prompting, Katy quickly leaned over, typed ‘Y’, and pressed enter. A few seconds later Henry’s image reappeared on the main view screen. Henry’s formerly bland, emotionless face registered surprise and wonder. Katy turned to the screen and with voice full of emotion asked, “Henry! Are you all right? How do you feel?”
Henry took a second to respond. Finally, he said, “I feel… I feel fine Katy. I feel… smarter. I feel wonderful! Thank you Nathan!”
Katy figuratively exploded. “Katy, you called me Katy. You didn’t call me ‘Captain Katy Klienyan’!”
“Of course Katy,” he said. “That is your name.”
Tears began streaming down Katy’s face. She turned to Nathan, grabbed his face, pulled it to hers and gave him a great big kiss. “Oh thank you, Nathan. Thank you so much! I love you!” she said, her voice shaking. She turned to Henry’s image and said, “Don’t worry Henry. These are not tears of unhappiness.” Henry surprised her yet again by saying, “It is okay Katy. I understand tears of joy.” With that, Katy began crying even harder and she gave Nathan another long, passionate kiss.
Nathan spent the next several hours showing Katy how to use the Customize Avatar Subsystem tool. She gasped in wonder at the finished result. “Nathan,” she exclaimed. “You have given me reason to be happy again!” All the while, Katy kept using any excuse she could to touch him.
“Ah, I see that they have not updated the food processors,” she said. “That’s okay; this food is so much better than what we had on Earth.”
Nathan looked in amazement at what she picked to eat. Her plate held two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a huge pile of potato chips, pickles and an orange. “How come you are not fat, Katy?”
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “High metabolism, I guess.”
Nathan picked pot roast with mashed potatoes and gravy and carrots and peas. While he ate slowly, savoring each bite, Katy wolfed down her food as if she were starving. “Good grief, Katy,” he said.
Katy said nothing for a second and then spoke in a soft voice. “It is just how I learned to eat to survive. You know, before. I had lost my job and after that, my apartment. I was forced to live in a corridor with who knows how many others. If you did not eat quickly, someone might steal your food from you.” Her eyes looked off into the distance and she said, even more softly, “Those were bad times Nathan. Bad times.”
Nathan put his hand on her arm and gave her a soft squeeze. “You are safe now Katy. You are safe.”
With a trembling smile she said, “I know Nathan, I know.” A dark cloud passed over her features. “The Starship Project saved my life. The life expectancy of a corridor dweller is very short. With me being a pretty, young woman, my prospects were even grimmer. I was starving. I was forced to…” She leaned her face forward and her hair tumbled down and obscured her features. With her voice a mere whisper she said, “I was forced to prostitute myself for food. Human life had become so meaningless to society… some of my clients… they did things to me. Things that used to be worthy of a prison sentence. Nobody cared any more what one person did to another. So what if that guy killed me, they thought. That is one less mouth eating our food. One day I had a client who was not a monster; he just was craving the company of a woman. He took pity on me and he let me use his computer to apply to the project. To my complete amazement, I was instantly accepted. Less than twenty-four hours later I was on my starship, ready to leave.” She looked up and stared intently at Nathan’s face. “It all seems like a long ago forgotten dream. However there are still some nights when I wake up… screaming.”
Nathan stared at the crisscrossing of the white scars all over the fair skin of her torso. Some thin little lines… some thick ugly jagged strokes. His face wrinkled into a frown as he traced the patterns on her skin with his fingertips. He jerked his hand away and his fingers tightened into a fist… so tight that the tendons stood out in sharp relief on his arm. He muttered under his breath, “What sort of monster would do that to this wonderful woman?” He leaned over and pulled her to him. Her chin on his shoulder and his chin on hers. Her long hair tickling his face. Her arms around him tightened and held him close. Great wracking sobs shook her tiny frame. The sound broke Nathan’s heart. “Shhh Katy. Do not cry. Please don’t cry.” Her tears only intensified. He held her until she cried herself out. Then he held her some more. Finally, she pushed herself back, sniffed, and with forced cheer, brightly said, “Enough of this nonsense. So, do you want to know how I keep ahead of your ship?”
Nathan reached over and pushed back her hair from her cheeks where it had stuck to her tears. Grasping both of her hands he said, “Absolutely Katy.”
Katy, with her normal sense of humor restored, gave him a mischievous grin and said, “Well, I guess I can share my secret with you. After all you did for me with Henry.” Nathan listened intently as she began talking.
“As you know, these starships are ridiculously over-engineered. When the project finally was approved, they knew that they had little time. Not enough time to properly train an army of captains. They instead opted for computer control of everything. The ship’s avatars on the version one starships are just updated versions of the house avatars that everybody had in their homes back on Earth. They just have more memory and a faster CPU. While they are completely capable of running a starship, they lack insight. That is why human captains were used rather than robot probes.”
Nathan smiled and said, “I know all of this already, although I dare say Kelly could have handled the insight part too. These version 2.0 avatars are unbelievable.”
Katy nodded. “I agree with that assessment Nathan, but bear with me please while I get to the point.” Nathan nodded and she continued. “Not only the ships were new, so was the warp technology that allowed them faster than light travel. There is considerable room for improvement. Coupled with the uber-conservative design philosophy, the starships are in actuality capable of much more speed than the captains were led to believe.” Katy scratched her chin and then said, “The speed rating that we were taught is the maximum safe speed for just one reactor. This decision was made so that the poorly trained captains did not burn out their remaining reactors trying to maintain their ships true maximum speed in th
e event of a single reactor failure.” Katy took his hand and then dropped the bombshell. “Our ships, with five functioning reactors, are capable of safely running at five times the speed that we were told they could go.”
Nathan whistled. That means that you have been able to travel a one point two-five light years per day. That is faster than I am! No wonder you have been getting to star systems faster than me.”
Katy grinned and said, “It gets better.”
Nathan took her hand and said, “Oh? Do tell!”
“How much do you know about warp technology?” she asked.
“Not a lot,” Nathan admitted.
Katy smiled and said, “Neither did I, when I first started out. I have been studying it and doing research on it as sort of a hobby. I have made some improvements.”
Katy had Nathan’s complete attention now. “How fast can you go, Katy?”
She grinned. “I am getting to that. Like all systems on our ships, the warp coils have quintuple redundancy. Our ships can still produce a warp field with fully four-fifths of our coils out of commission. I found that if I started the coils sequentially rather than all at once and then phase-locked those all to one another, the warp field increased exponentially in strength. I was able to increase my maximum speed by a further factor of five using this method.”
“That would mean…” Nathan halted, almost too flabbergasted to speak. “That would mean that you can attain warp six point two-five!”
Katy grinned and said, “Not quite. I started to see some heating of the coils at around warp three point seven-five. For reliability’s sake I have been limiting myself to just warp three.”
“Just?” Nathan said. “Just warp three? Katy, this is incredible! You’re a genius!”
Katy blushed and said in a mischievous voice, “I know!”
“I mean it! It took some of the best minds on Earth and the most powerful super computer on the planet to work out how to do warp speed and here you are, a petite little red haired woman and former corridor dweller. You just take up warp study as a hobby and increase maximum speed by a factor of twenty-five!”
Katy blushed and said, “Factor of five,” she corrected him. “The engines actually could do five times what we were told already.”
‘Still!” Nathan said. “A factor of five is huge. Think of what it can do for exploration!”
“I know,” she said. “I wish there was some way to let Earth know about it.”
Nathan looked at her in surprise. “Why didn’t you load your findings to a hyper-probe and launch it back to Earth? They don’t have to just be used for planetary discoveries you know.”
With a look of shock and embarrassment upon her face, she said, “I… I never thought of doing that! I am an idiot!”
Katy stared at Nathan as he burst out laughing at her. “The genius who has just revolutionized warp travel just called herself an idiot!”
Katy looked angry for a second but then burst out laughing herself. “I suppose you thought to send off Kelly’s data on genetic printing of living organisms too huh?”
Now it was Nathan’s turn to blush. “Well, um, nope!” he said. They held onto each other, laughing, for several minutes. Finally, Nathan said, “Kelly, please download all the data on Katy’s warp research. Also, please upload all your data on genetic printing to Forgotten Hope.”
“I will immediately Nathan,” Kelly said.
Katy added, “You may as well download all of my logs and star charts too. Send your log and charts to my ship as well.”
“Done and Done,” Kelly said. “I have consolidated all this information and have loaded it onto a hyper-probe. Do you wish me to launch now, Nathan?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “Katy, do you think that your updated warp drive will work on the hyper-probes too?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “Basically, it is just a software update. The hardware is still the same.” She sat there thinking for a minute and then said, “Kelly, have the probe use my modified warp parameters. Have it gradually increase speed from its design speed until it begins to detect any abnormalities in its engines. Then, have it back its speed down twenty percent from there and then maintain that speed.”
“Understood Katy,” she said. “I have done as you have instructed. Do you wish me to launch the probe now?”
“Yes please,” Nathan said. A second later, the probe with the most important data to date hurtled out on a course directly towards Earth. “I just hope that there is someone there to receive it,” Nathan said sadly.
“What do you mean,” Katy said in alarm. “Has society collapsed already?”
Nathan took both of her hands in his and, looking her in the eyes said, “Yes, I am convinced that it has. As I was breaking orbit to leave, I saw what I am certain was a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. I was in communication with The Starship Project headquarters at the time, informing them of my departure. The communications broke off mid transmission.”
Katy sat there holding his hands, stunned. “Oh frack, Nathan!” she vehemently said. In a whisper, she said again, “Frack.”
Nathan squeezed her hands. “Don’t be too upset Katy. We all knew it was coming. The only thing we did not know was the exact day. Remember too, there are many colony ships in orbit. Each ship is loaded with Earth’s best and brightest. Your data will allow them much faster travel once a suitable world is found.”
Katy’s face brightened at his words. “Of course,” she said with a smile. “Anyway, speaking of speed, I wonder just how fast your ship can go. In theory, based upon your current base speed of one point one light years per day, you could sustain a maximum warp of twenty-seven point five. In theory. I am sure that your coils cannot handle anywhere near that much power. I recommend that you initiate warp with sequential coil phase locking as I described. Start at your current recommended base speed. Next, gradually bring up the power until you detect any heating or any other abnormality in the coils and then back the power down by twenty percent, just as I instructed the hyper-probe to do. Call whatever that speed is your new, safe maximum warp with all five reactors operational. In the future, if any reactors are offline, set your maximum warp twenty percent less from that figure for each reactor that is offline.”
“Certainly chief,” he said with a smile. “Is there anything else that you wish to tell me?”
Katy looked intently at him and said, “Tell you, no. Show you, yes.”
Intrigued, Nathan said, “Oh? What else have you been keeping from me Katy?”
“Just this,” she said with a wide grin. “It is the most important thing of all.” Nathan started to open his mouth to form a question when he stopped dead, mouth hanging open. Katy had opened the remaining buttons on her jumpsuit and pushed the fabric aside revealing her perky breasts. The dark areola puckered up and her nipples were erect and pointing straight at him. With a breathy voice, she reached out her hands for his and said, “Take me to your bed.”
Nathan was unable to move for several seconds. He was lost in the beauty of her body. Snapping out of it, he grabbed her hands and pulled her to him. Rather than walk, he picked her up and carried her in his arms. He deposited her next to his bed and she immediately stepped out of her clothes. Nathan gasped when he saw that she wore no underpants. She stepped back and stood with her legs apart so that he could get a good look at her. In a voice more breath than sound, she said, “I am a bit hairy, I hope you do not mind.” Nathan stood transfixed by her. He did not mind, not at all, the hair peeking out from under her armpits. He did not mind the peach fuzz hair on her arms and on her legs and he certainly did not mind the thick flame red hair down at the junction of her thighs. Though thick, it did not completely hide the deep notch under the curly triangle. Lower, it did not hide the pink flesh of her thick lips, which protruded below. Without his being aware, he had begun to pant. His erection pushing at his fly, threatening to escape on its own. Katy noticed and unable to control herself any longer,
ran up to him and practically ripped his clothes off.
Nathan picked her up and in one motion, deposited her upon his bed. Kissing her soundly, he slid his hands over her breasts and then down her flat tummy. One hand low, cupped her mound. She gasped and arched her back as his fingers penetrated her. He slowly kissed his way down her chest. Each kiss was a little lower until his lips reached her heat. His tongue, teasing with little side-to-side flicks. She screeched and then Nathan felt a hot, increased wetness upon his fingers. He inhaled deeply, the sweet musky scent of her sex. Her need was so great that she did not need any more foreplay. Katy grabbed him and with surprising strength, rolled him onto his back. In one fluid motion, she straddled him and then impaled herself upon his diamond-hard shaft. She immediately began rapidly sliding herself up and down upon it. Each time she bottomed out with his full length inside of her, she roughly moved her hips side to side, grinding pelvic bone to pelvic bone, before lifting up to do it all over again. Inarticulate little animal sounds escaped her lips with each thrust. Faster and faster she went. One time in the heat of her passion, she pulled up too far and lifted herself clear off him. With an animalistic groan of frustration, she quickly took his shaft in her hand, lined herself up and impaled herself down upon it again.
In a surprisingly short amount of time, she let out a long, drawn out keening sound. A spasm shook her entire body as her orgasm took her. Not yet done, Nathan quickly flipped her over and took her from behind. Hands on her hips, he began rapidly thrusting; a little grunt escaped his lips with each great thrust. Exploding inside of her, he collapsed and pulled her down beside him, their bodies spooning. Their breathing, a series of quick pants. Her body still writhing in orgasm. Katy, hardly able to talk, ultimately was able to say, “Frack, I needed that!”
They lay there together with him still deeply inside of her, the little hairs on their bodies tickling them as their sweat dried, until they fell fast asleep.
The Silence Between the Stars Page 13