Duo

Author's note: This wasn't originally an erotic story but, well... It's hard to avoid the inevitable, isn't it? It isn't particularly graphic or involved, it's just a scenario, and one rather hackneyed option for how we may react to technology that overwhelms our meat bodies.

=======================

The Test

The last link with the base was cut with a "Good luck, cadets" from the officer on duty. From this point on, they would only ever return if they accepted a teaching position. For cadets of this school, being a courier to return training vessels as not an option. Success in this last test would mean permanently moving on, into active service or civilian life. Failure meant death. It was as simple as that. The ship they were in was more single-purpose than any they had ever flown; fast but only moderately so, just small enough for pilots, fuel and thrusters, manoeuvrable and, most of all, cheap. It had to be cheap. There was a seventy-five percent failure rate on the Last Test.

Nor did they know if any of their fellow cadets who had gone before them had succeeded or failed. You didn't, not until you got there yourself. If you got there yourself. When they left, they were gone. As simple as that.

Behind them, the training base where they had spent the last five years of their lives was only another bright spot in the blackness. They had been ferried out by a transport ship which had already departed. None of the systems on board their tiny ship were operational except life-support. It was thoroughly checked and nothing could go wrong; every part had been inspected to the best of modern technology's abilities. They had broken their last contact with the base; from here on they would have to boot up the ship's systems, pre-flight it, solve any problems (there might well have been a software problem introduced by the Academy purely to test them) and from there start, survive and complete the mission. They had a destination and a course. Deviation from either would spell failure as surely as would death. Not all of the seventy-five percent who passed this test actually qualified for further training.

Conrad was lying back in his seat, eyes open. He was adopting the emptiness as his own. It was the first skill they were taught as pilots. Most people can't handle the emptiness of space when you're away from a planet or station. You have to accept it, take command of it. Even sitting in a disabled spacecraft out of all reach of help, with military vessels ranged against anyone who might try to give assistance.

In front of him, almost sitting between his knees, his four-year training partner and, from this moment on, primary pilot, Amber, sat and did the same. Her seat hid her from view, the top curving over to snugly hold her helmeted head. His head was similarly locked into place, the Removed Interface Neural Network Scanners snugly fitting onto his bare scalp. The helmet wouldn't let him turn his head, but with simple head movements he could change his perception, vision painted directly onto each retina. At the moment, however, that system too was turned off and he could only see through the helmet, forward over Amber's seat and out the mono-crystalline front window of the craft. When the craft was running, all senses would be supplied by the ship itself.

This was the first test; mental stability while sitting in a dead craft, the sounds of your own heartbeat and breathing beating in your ears, your vision restricted, and empty space all around you. It was not something that Conrad, a man fathered by a boy gifted with a powerful and strongly controlled imagination, had ever been bothered by. Amber had once been troubled, but her skill as a pilot had lent her a contempt of the open spaces and, slowly, that contempt had matured to a calm acceptance.

Suddenly red light flashed over Conrad's vision as the entire visor of his helmet briefly glowed. The Academy transporter was docked, the stage was clear for them. As Navigator (a term horribly inadequate but historically valued), Conrad quickly moved his fingers inside his gloves, touching a virtual key-pad to boot up the main computer and start the Accessibility routines. His visor flashed data at him, a Head-Up Display small enough for him to read at this close distance. All systems checked clean, so Conrad ran a subroutine that checked the check program. There was a joke in the Academy that if everything's right, something's wrong...

The check program turned out to be looping its commands back to itself, on an infinite positive loop. It took Conrad three seconds to fix the constructed error and be satisfied that everything was really, as it seemed, okay. Then he logged the rest of his suit into the system, the Retinal Sensation Projectors slid down in front of his eyes, and the glorious vista of space unfolded around him, receiving sensation from sensors built into the skin of their craft. Another set of checks showed all okay and, undistracted by the glorious vista around him, he logged Amber's suit into the system and flashed a system report onto her visor. A grunt in his ears showed what she thought of the test he had been set.

Around him, the craft woke up as Amber fed life into the hardware, deflecting and neutralising a tiny bug in the second main engine that would have turned them into a small fireball. Conrad's entire body tingled as the ship's internal sensors woke up and started transmitting, giving him information that no amount of screens could possibly make him understand. With his deceptively inflexible skin-tight suit locked firmly into his seat, Conrad couldn't move even his fingers, the sensors in his gloves responding to changing pressure instead of actual joint movement. But that became less and less important as his senses changed from human to, for want of a better analogy, shark.

Amber completed her last hardware check, and held the system on readiness. Conrad started the last software activation routine and rang a check over all hardware. He fixed a non-fatal but disabling incompatibility and readied the software for integration. Amber's voice sounded, undistorted, in his headphones.

"Software status."

"Checked and ready. Hardware status."

"Checked and ready. Transferring network connections."

Conrad took network control from Amber, ran his own check and then balanced hardware and software against each other, feeling with his mind and body as well as instruments for problems. Finding none, he logged Amber out of the system and then bought hardware and software smoothly together. The resulting integration was more organic than mechanical, a synthesis that defied mere categorisation into either hard- or software.

It felt, to Conrad with his expanded senses, like the pre-orgasmic thrill you get when your lover suddenly grabs at your crotch. Unexpected, dangerous and utterly distracting. With Amber keeping an eye on the system, Conrad had the luxury of a few seconds to be distracted. Mind and body humming, he dragged himself back to reality and shook off the effects. This he was used to. The firmness in his crotch was no longer an embarrassing distraction now that he recognised it for the sympathetic nervous effect that it was, nor was the way his skin seemed to crawl with constant caresses. Sensory-Induced Elevated Arousal the psycho-medics at the Academy had called it in their lectures. Sophisticated language for Getting Your Rocks Off On The Ultimate Virtual Reality Game.

A few quick checks and he flashed Amber a warning before logging her in. In his aroused state he had never been able to get used to the gasp she made when logging into the machine/body synthesis, and still tried to block it out. They spent most of their training in close quarters, practising first-aid on each other, fighting, surviving and hiding from carefully programmed robotic opponents in a string of hostile environments, but sex had never entered into the picture. Neither of them had experienced a less than full sex life at the Academy but your partner was, well, it was like kissing your sister.

"Ready for Fusion." Amber's voice, with the bright savagery of combat in it, broke into his thoughts. One final check and:

"I have control."

Fusion. The one thing that they had never before experienced. The final trick that they must learn. Flying as they had always previously done it, using the unnatural senses of the ship, was like growing the ship around them, feeling exactly what happened to it, having it respond to commands almost as fast as you thought them, feeling the response even faster.

But what if the ship really did respond that fast? What if it wasn't a part of you, but you were a part of it? Fusion; taking man-machine integration to the next level. While Conrad had control of the ship, saving them from the unpredictable and wild reactions of a novice, Amber took a deep breath and punched for Fusion. The RINNS, until now only feeding sensation to her, read in one second her entire brain, taking every network, every burst of activity, every connection and writing it to a RAM disk. Amber's being was freed from the restrictions of one body and given to another. She stopped being human and became machine. Her body was put into a carefully controlled coma so that her experienced personality could be copied back with no problems later, but the cry she gave before it happened was so intensely sexual that Conrad tried to squirm his way through the seat and bulkhead behind him, the vulnerability and openness of the lustful shout in his ears changing the pressure from his still-present erection from uncomfortable to painful.

Like kissing your sister, he thought feverishly. He could not see Amber, but knew that she was unconscious in the seat in from of him, living now at speeds faster than thought in a computer created purely to run personality constructs. Old, racial fears of losing your soul or walking in hell surfaced, but then the instruments in front of his eyes flickered as Amber was accepted by the ship as being safe to take command again. "Come on up," a voice in his head whispered so lasciviously that nothing could stop the shock to his groin. "The water's fine."

Without waiting to let doubts assail him, Conrad relinquished control of all his tasks to Amber and punched for Fusion. And knew instantly why they had made the command not a simple button but a full-blooded palm-heel punch. Because it felt like a punch in the gut.

Lectures had taught him that part of that was the effect of being transferred to computer, but the rest of it was the sudden jump in speed and the unbelievable harmony with the machine. That was now his body, not his human one. He was now part of the mind of a finely-engineered shark-like machine. But while his human body-sense lingered, he could feel its sensations. That meant arousal that blotted out all other senses. They had a word for that, too. Full-System Hyper Arousal. Meaning that everything, brain and body, psychology and physiology, was running at a peak that would leave a body dead after a few seconds. As a construct, a pattern of switches in a computer, Conrad and Amber could now keep it up for hours.

As he recovered from the initial shock, he could feel not just his own body and the ship, but a third. Amber. He could feel, until the contact faded, everything that her body did. He dropped into it, discarding for a few subjective seconds all sensations from his body and the ship. And, for a few seconds, stopped breathing in his mind.

The Academy liked uniformity and conformity in its students; it made it easier to train and equip them. So Amber was little different from all the other female students. She had the same physique, the same muscle tone, almost the same bra size. So Conrad had, almost, felt her naked body many a time with other students, muscles taut and trembling, skin sweat-sheened, breasts and nipples and clitoris enlarged with blood. But only from the outside.

He now felt it from the inside. He felt her suit stretched too-tight across her aching breasts, felt her muscles trembling, felt the spread-legged braced position of the seat unable to hide the pressure in her cunt - felt it give her a sense of openness that welcomed deep space to fuck her. He felt her sexuality with an intensity that he had never experienced in his own body. The knowledge that it was an image in her mind, not her actual body, changed nothing. Conrad fled the sensations, too twisted with lust to know quite what he was doing, and dived back into the safe retreat of his own body. And felt his own rock-hard cock, tight nipples and trembling muscles like another punch in the gut, stranding him gasping for air, an intensity of experience even greater than he had received in Amber's body-image.

He fled that, too, and returned to the starting point. He could feel not just the ship, but his body and hers, in exquisite detail. For one maddened moment, he knew exactly how his cock would fit inside her, and what it would feel like for both of them.

"Have you ever wondered," a friend of his had asked, conversationally, over a drink in the Academy bar one night, "Why were all paired up by sex and there are no gays or lesbians here?"

"To stop your next thought, Chris, I don't know anyone who has actually slept with their partner."

"No, the rest of us do," Chris had replied with an appreciative and knowledgeable glance at Amber, who was facing away from them and bending over the pool table. The glance raised brotherly ire in Conrad, but since he knew that he was the only male who hadn't slept with Amber, and furthermore that he had slept with every other female, he smothered it. Chris, after all, had a point.

"So what are you talking about? If they wanted sex between partners they could just pair up gays. Besides, why is it so surprising that there aren't any? There aren't that many."

"One in ten, Conrad, one in ten. Remember our thousand-strong intake into Basic Training? There were more queens than some feudal planets. But then we graduated to here and they all disappeared. None followed."

"So what? They want us jumping into each others beds?"

"No but... It's odd, that's all."

Now he knew the reason. It would be impossible not to.

"Conrad," Amber said with a voice dripping lust, "when we get out of this, I am going to fuck you until you are too sore to cum."

"You think I'm going to give up first?" He retorted.

In response, she clasped her imaginary hands over her imaginary breasts and squeezed, hard.

For one dazed moment Conrad, who had forgotten that his body was locked into immobility, and in a coma, wondered if it too had cum.

Then their body-images faded, habit no longer enough to support them, and were replaced with a unity of purpose within the ship the like of which they had never before experienced.

They had been given ten minutes from release to start and check the systems, integrate with the ship, Fuse, and start their mission. As they merged into one ship-mind, the chronometer ticked over 6 minutes. Two seconds since Conrad had joined Amber in Fusion. How long had she waited? He wondered dumbly.

Then Amber took back control of the ship, and Conrad took back control of its systems. He took five subjective seconds to orient the navigation system, and fed the data to Amber's half of their mind along with the (safety-checked; one subjective second) route they had been given.

Amber acknowledged, ran a final hardware check and then ran the engines up against his block.

In the lectures, the faces of their instructors had often been grim. But not usually as much as on their first lecture of Fusion teamwork. "You will always work in pairs when fused," he had said in a voice meant to make a lasting impression, "Because otherwise you will die. A pilot under Fusion has direct control of more power than can be experienced in any other occupation. There are no checks on a Fused pilot, nothing to stop the use of that power. And using that power is all that the Fused pilot will consider. Don't", And here the voice had grown louder and more imposing, "Fool yourself into thinking that you will have enough self-control to control yourself. You will not. Nobody can. As a pilot, your sole consideration will be to use all the ability at your disposal to complete your mission as quickly and effectively as possible. This can lead to the destruction of your organic bodies or even the ship. It is up to the Navigator to prevent that happening. To that end, passive constraints have been imposed. The pilot can only gain access to control when the Navigator grants it, not when the Navigator forgets to withhold it. The Navigator must control for g-forces, fuel consumption, shield integrity and ability and even the structural integrity of the craft. It is also, therefore, up to the Navigator to decide when death is inevitable and the sacrifice of your bodies, resulting in your certain death, is warranted. Many Navigators have made this choice, and they have all died gloriously, balancing their loss to us with damage to the enemy. You must learn to judge what is allowable, and Pilots must learn what is allowed, and not take a course of action which results in the only way out being forbidden. That is why your graduation from this Academy will be only the start of your training as Fusion pilots."

Conrad slipped off the limits on acceleration and let it build to ten times earth gravity, then fifteen, shooting them across space to the Asteroid field they must negotiate, flying with reflexes a hundred times faster than they had ever before experienced. Amber must learn her limits quickly.

#

Conrad lay in bed, too dazed to move. The trip had been a blur. Their first practical lesson in basic training had been how to perfect Concentration, shutting out all extraneous sensations or thoughts so that absolutely all conscious thought could be focused on one task. It made possible faster reactions and less disturbance, taking all the cadets to heights that they had never before dreamt of in fighting, driving, flying, computer games (most of them used for training) and even academic abilities.

But what they had gone through in the asteroid field had made everything prior seem like a casual, distracted stroll. Conrad wasn't even sure that he could remember all of it. They had come out ahead of schedule, jumped across space preserving their allowable margins and made a perfect landing before un-Fusing, their bodies sore from the stresses of the journey but still impossibly aroused.

They had been given ten hours to relax, bathe and do what they will. It was another part of the Test; remembering enough to be debriefed after that long.

But Conrad knew very well what the other reason was. They had almost run to their room, torn off their suits, and hadn't waited to hit the sack before Conrad had collected Amber in his arms as she turned around, accurately impaling her on his cock as they hurtled towards the bed and slipping in with no friction at all. They had been as eager as virgins; she had been so tight she felt like one. He had cum before he had finished plunging into her, wringing the first orgasm from them both. After that...

Conrad painfully turned his head to the side, to look at the clock. Four hours, Jesus Christ. He couldn't remember who had given up first, but he was so sore that he probably wouldn't be able to stand pissing for a week. And she was probably no better. He turned his head the other way, to look at her. She was lying on her back as awake as he was, her skin sheened with sweat. He had a sudden flashback of her face twisted in orgasm, and for a disorientating moment tried to work out what had been happening, what position they had been in, even who had been on top at the time. A memory flash of the taste of her skin mixed with the feeling of her cunt crushing his fingers, and the shuddering feeling of her fingers stabbing into his arse.