by Olivia Myers
“Two heartbeats, very fast. Some sounds of distress. I believe it is an altercation.”
A fight? Out here in a remote corridor of E deck? Surprise fizzled in Jessa’s blood. Lyra Station was one of the smaller orbitals devoted mostly to research. She hadn’t expected any trouble during her brief rotation.
She nodded to let Mack know she understood and motioned him forward. He moved slowly, placing his huge feet carefully to minimize noise. It wasn’t until they were much closer, almost crossing the threshold, that Jessa realized what she was hearing over the sound of the station’s mechanical hum.
Her hand shot out to grip Mack’s arm. She dug her short nails into the tan, silky skin bared just above his wrist, feeling the slight crinkle of dark hair against her fingertips. She knew it wasn’t just skin over muscle, but it sure felt the same.
Mack froze, turning his head in her direction, a line appearing between his heavy, dark eyebrows. His lips pursed. She could read the question clearly on his face. She shook her head.
Blood burned beneath her skin as the sounds grew louder. A deep grunt echoed out to them, the slap of flesh on flesh. Sharp gasps. A moan. It could be a fight… but Jessa didn’t think so.
Her partner pulled away from her easily. Of course.
He stepped further into the storage compartment before she could stop him. Jessa hurried forward to get between him and the couple who was feverishly going at it up against a shelving unit.
Jessa was sure somewhere in his vast data banks, Mack knew what sex was, but she somehow doubted he’d ever actually seen it. She didn’t want him to assume there was danger and react aggressively.
Not that he seemed to be a reactive model. In fact, in the last few months, he’d proven to be much more inquisitive and intellectual than any of her other cys. Still, this was the first time they’d encountered an unknown situation together. Best to be safe.
She pressed her palm against the hard wall of his chest, ready to drive him back out of the compartment, but when her eyes fell on the couple it was her turn to freeze.
They still hadn’t noticed their audience, too wrapped up in each other to care about anything but the pursuit of their pleasure. The woman was a brunette, naked, with a khaki engineering jumpsuit tangled around one ankle. Small breasts jiggled with each of her companion’s rough thrusts. She spread her long, toned legs wider and gripped the edge of the shelf in front of her with white-knuckled hands.
“Harder,” she moaned, dropping her head to stare down between her own legs to watch the glistening length of her lover’s cock piston in and out of her pussy. She was waxed bare, making it easy to see each gliding push of his slick, veiny shaft between swollen, wet pink folds.
Jessa’s eyes were riveted to the sight, too. Though far from the physical perfection of her cy, the man was definitely nice to look at. His button down shirt (olive for botany, she noted absently) hung open, revealing a chest furred with hair a lighter shade of red than that on his head. His face, narrow and a little pointed, but not unattractive, was flushed crimson.
“Fuck, you’re so hot. So tight. So. Fucking. Good!”
He punctuated each word with another thrust of his hips, burying himself over and over again. His hands were long and elegant, the fingers digging hard into the woman’s rounded buttocks.
Jessa’s whole body heated. Beneath her lightweight armor, her breasts ached. Her pussy flooded with moisture at the erotic sight before her. She swallowed excess saliva, her heart tripping up.
Her fingers curled into Mack’s chest. She heard a slight intake of breath, quiet compared to the noises of the copulating pair, but it drew her attention to her partner’s face.
Mack’s winter sky eyes were intent on the couple, the line between his brows much deeper now. His mouth — which was entirely too full and sensual for a machine in Jessa’s opinion — opened and she could see the wet gleam of his tongue behind the straight line of his white teeth.
He would speak soon. Jessa knew it. But on her other side, the couple’s pace had sped up. Their cries grew more frantic and lust-filled. She lifted a shaking hand and pressed her fingers to his lips.
His eyes jumped to hers, brows lifting. She licked her lips, shook her head, and tipped her chin at the couple.
Jessa had no idea what she was doing. She should allow Mack to inform the couple of their presence so they could get their IDs and issue the necessary citations for trespassing.
But her gaze slid back to them, watching a rivulet of sweat snake its way down the golden brown skin of the woman’s back.
“Oh, right there. Yes! Faster, Christof!” She craned her neck over her shoulder. Her companion — Christof, apparently… Jessa filed that away to check against the botany department roster — bent over her back to capture her mouth in a passionate kiss.
She keened against his lips. He sped up, burying himself deep inside her, and then his pace grew ragged. He groaned.
Jessa’s own throat ached with her silence. Slick mercury heat pooled low in her belly. Her whole body seemed to throb. Even her fingertips… But no, she realized. The pulse thrumming against her fingers was not her own. It was Mack’s.
Unlike hers — and no doubt the couple’s — Mack’s heartbeat was steady and even.
Still, the feel of it against her palm made her mouth go dry. Jessa finally remembered where they were and what they should be doing. She pushed as hard as she could, urging him backward.
Mack could have remained unmoved if he wanted to, but he let her drive him through the open door.
He didn’t, however, make any attempt to dampen the sound of his footfalls. She heard a gasp from behind her, but kept her eyes on her cy’s as she spoke.
“Cantra Corp Security. An alarm was tripped. We’ll be waiting just outside to give you a moment to collect yourselves.”
The low murmur of voices followed them back into the corridor. As soon as they’d cleared the door, Jessa jerked her hand away as if Mack’s chest was a hot stove. It might as well have been. Her skin still tingled from the contact.
“Well,” he said in that rumbling voice that shook her to the bones. “That was... interesting.”
Jessa let out a shuddering breath. Interesting was one way to put it.
***
MCK-397 switched to night vision and ran another security diagnostic, but everything was quiet. He and Jessa — Officer JS-824 — had rotated off schedule two hours earlier. Apart from the anomalous incident on E deck, their shift had been uneventful. Routine.
His partner’s behavior had not been, however. Then again, JS-824 was unlike any other officer he’d ever encountered.
MCK-397 had been a security force unit for Cantra Corp since he’d been commissioned in a satellite lab nearly four decades ago. He’d spent the majority of that time on mostly unpopulated outer rim planets protecting isolated drone-operated mineral mining camps from pirates.
Three years ago, the company had brought him back in for his scheduled maintenance and upgrades and moved him to active duty rotation on a series of space stations orbiting the galaxy to combat increasingly frequent pirate incursions on supply runs.
In that time, he’d been partnered with over a dozen fully organic humans. Jessa was the only one who’d ever given him a name. Everyone else called him by his serial number, occasionally shortening it to merely ‘397.’
But Jessa had stepped through the doorway to their shared quarters the first day of her assignment, long blond hair pulled back into a tight braid, and extended a slender hand rough with callouses.
“Officer JS-824. Call me Jessa. And you are?”
When he’d rattled off his serial as usual, she arched one thin eyebrow, looked him over from head-to-toe with her intense blue eyes, and then nodded.
“Nice to meet you, Mack.”
At first, it had confused him. He insisted several times that his name wasn’t ‘Mack,’ that he didn’t have a name. Names were a human designation, and though he consisted of some bio
logical parts, he was not really human. Some of his bio-mech brethren referred to themselves as ‘cybernetic humans’ to differentiate from ‘organic humans,’ but he’d never seen the point.
His new partner merely ignored his assertions and continued to call him Mack.
He persisted in reminding her of his number until one day, sitting over a game of chess in their private quarters, she said, “Look, I’m not calling you that, okay? I’m just not. We are going to be in each other’s pockets for the duration. By the end of my deployment, you’ll know me better than my own mother. So, I am Jessa and you are Mack. Got it?”
Despite her casual verbiage, he had indeed understood her point. And, once he had, he found he enjoyed having a name. He enjoyed partnering with Jessa as well.
His previous human partners had interacted with him hardly at all beyond the call of duty, and then only to issue orders. While Jessa was competent and professional, she treated him much the same way she treated the other humans on the station. Better, even.
The first time he realized this, it filled his chest with a warm sensation he’d never experienced before. It took some researching on the neuralnet and several diagnostic runs before he identified the feeling as pleasure.
It pleased him that his partner valued him and treated him with respect.
In the past, he’d worked alongside his human partners and protected them because that was his job. His BCI was programmed with that imperative. He didn’t feel any particular way about them.
After working with Jessa for the last several months, he’d come to esteem her. Though she was not yet thirty, she’d been an officer for a decade already and had received several commendations from the company for her actions during various firefights.
During their shifts, she was thorough and thoughtful in her work and he’d witnessed her cleverness and grace under pressure during an emergency evacuation when a pipe had burst and flooded the neonatal infirmary on L deck.
Which made her reaction to the security breach on E deck even more anomalous.
Jessa slept now, her form curled on her bunk under a lightweight wool blanket, abundant hair a golden pool around her head. He ran a quick check of her vitals. Heart rate in the mid-thirties, which was within normal range for her. Respiration even. Temperature and circulation normal.
Earlier, when they’d encountered the couple in the storage compartment, her readings all spiked.
His initial assessment that the breach had been the result of an altercation had been incorrect. The man and woman had instead been engaged in what his BCI and neuralnet informed him was sexual intercourse. The specific position was referred to as ‘rear entry,’ or colloquially ‘standing doggy style.’
Mack knew that, in the past, intercourse was a means of procreation. The male of the species delivered sperm to the female’s womb during ejaculation in the hopes of fertilizing an egg. But it had been over a hundred years since the last ex vitro conception. Human children were engineered as embryos in the lab for implantation into healthy mothers. There was no need for males and females to engage in intercourse any longer.
Perhaps shock had been the cause for Jessa’s reaction earlier?
Like him, she was aware that human procreation began in a lab. Logically, she had likely never witnessed humans copulating before. Maybe she had reacted instinctively to an unknown situation.
But no, that couldn’t be right. Mack reviewed his data from the encounter from the moment they’d received the call.
Jessa had behaved according to her personality and protocol right up until the moment before he’d stepped into the storage compartment. His lashes fluttered in the dark as he remembered her strong, slender fingers wrapping around his wrist and squeezing.
She’d tried to stop him, and then placed herself between him and the couple.
Protocol dictated that in an unknown situation, bio-mech partners were always to precede their human counterparts in order to ensure their safety. It was one of his primary functions.
Jessa had never violated Directive #97 before.
Mack could only conclude that the situation hadn’t been unknown to her, that she had become aware in that moment outside the compartment what they would find when they entered and believed that they were in no danger.
Which meant her physiological response was unlikely to have stemmed from shock. In fact, when he reviewed the data again, he realized her heart rate, respiration, and temperature had not risen until they’d been in the compartment nearly a minute. And it had been a gradual increase the longer they remained, not the dramatic spike he would expect from an adrenaline-fueled reaction to fear or the unknown.
He frowned.
Once they returned to their quarters, Jessa had remained uncharacteristically quiet as well. Instead of her normal nine minute shower, she had instead bathed for nearly three times longer.
Mack slid from his bunk, careful to keep quiet. He didn’t want to wake his partner. Humans, he had learned, required several hours of sleep each night to function at peak performance.
He made sure to tie the security system for their rooms into his BCI as he slipped through the main door into the barracks corridor. The dim lighting meant to simulate moonlight didn’t bother Mack. He could navigate easily under much darker conditions.
Still contemplating the issue of Jessa’s anomalous behavior, Mack strolled through corridor after corridor, his BCI running various subroutines and scenarios.
Humans fascinated him.
His first memory was of awakening in a miniscule mining camp on a stable asteroid in the Seti quadrant. The only other occupants of the camp were drones. He received all his orders via neuralnet.
For decades, he’d gone from one such camp to another, his only interaction with humans coming from the infrequent incursion by pirates.
That’s where his fascination began. While fighting off the attacks, he learned that different bands had vastly varied reasoning for their assaults on the camps. Even among a single band, some of the people were simply greedy, while others were just desperate for the money they could earn to care for families and loved ones.
Mack’s people were rather uniform by design. At least when it came to their thought processes and motivations. Those things were programmed into their BCI at their inception.
There were rumors on the neuralnet, however, that what had begun as a game between a few techs was becoming a movement. Initially, a few units had been given bits of modified code — referred to as ‘quirks’. Little things that were mostly unnoticeable and completely untraceable. The company didn’t even mind, as long as they didn’t interfere with the primary functions.
Cyborgs still weren’t the same as humans, but with the proliferation of these idiosyncratic quirks, they were closer than they’d ever been before.
Mack didn’t think he had any quirks, but then he might not know. Jessa could probably tell him. Or Godfrey.
That thought sparked another, and Mack turned his not-entirely-aimless wandering (he’d been sweeping the area of the 23rd sector where Christof Bevins and Padma Arnoux’s sleeping quarters were located) into a focused stride aimed at the tech shop on H.
He felt no surprise to find Godfrey Medvedev awake, hunched over his work station, and tinkering with some small bit of circuitry. The tiny, wiry man had dark brown hair that stood out in a wild halo around his head and a wide, toothy grin. He laughed loudly, and a lot.
Though he often didn’t understand what the man was saying, Mack found Godfrey… amusing. Aside from Jessa, God — as he insisted on being called, usually with a cackle — was the only human who treated Mack with some degree of affection.
“Mack, my boy,” God said without turning, his quick hands flitting over what looked like a tangle of wires. “What are you doing so far away from your luscious partner? Need a repair?”
He frowned at the other man’s odd characterization of Jessa, but responded to the portion he understood.
“No, I am functioning
well, thank you.”
“Of course you are. Upgraded you myself, didn’t I?” God snorted.
“You did.”
Mack knew that God annoyed Jessa, but he didn’t mind his self-assurance. Based on the files his BCI could access, God was one of the most skilled techs in the galaxy. Cantra Corp compensated him astronomically well for his abilities and gave him his choice of positions. He could be working in any lab anywhere, station or planet.
God said he preferred Lyra because it was small, well-kept, and no one tried to micro-manage him or ask him stupid questions. He hated stupid questions.
While waiting for God to finish his tinkering, Mack checked on Jessa. She slept on, her breathing indicating she’d entered REM. He wondered suddenly if she dreamed, and if so, what about?
His mouth turned down as he contemplated this thought. Cyborgs had organic brains fused with CPUs. They dreamed, and the dreams were downloaded to their storage drive where they could be reviewed or wiped as the unit saw fit.
Mack had always dumped his, sight unseen. He’d considered them unimportant.
But the idea of Jessa’s dreams… well, that was intriguing to him.
Before he could follow the line of thought any further, God set aside the small bit of circuitry and spun on his revolving stool to fix Mack with deep brown eyes.
“So.” He clapped his hands together briskly. “To what do I owe this little visit, then?”
Mack leaned back against one of the few spaces of bare wall in God’s workshop and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Do I have quirks?”
God blinked and scrubbed a hand against his smooth cheek. Mack had noticed that the tech’s hands were rarely ever still.
“Well, now. Do you have any quirks? Don’t you know?”
Mack felt his frown deepening, the skin on his forehead tightening as he brows drew down.
“If I knew, I would not be asking you.”
God pointed at him. “Good point, my boy. Good point. Well. I’ve only poked around in your head a little, you realize, but… I would say, yes, you do. Just a little one.” He held up two fingers about three millimeters apart.