The Dark Run

The dancer - Fen couldn't remember if he had heard her name announced, and he didn't care - responded to the sight of his thick manhood by moving one hand from her nipple to her pussy and slowly spreading the swollen lips apart. Inside, she was the lightest pink that he had ever seen, and her cunt was so tight that she struggled just to slip her finger in. She started swaying faster, pumping her finger in and out as Fen greedily stroked his cock beneath her. It didn't take long, and she timed it so they came together. Fen felt a wet spot on his pants where his cum had sprayed, and it was joined by a small squirt of liquid from her dripping pussy. He fell back in his chair, panting, and the dancer leaned down and whispered in his ear as the music faded.

"I'm Astra," she cooed. "Would you like a private dance?"

"Maybe next time," was all that he could get out. Exhausted, he switched off the VR and fell asleep with his satiated dick still in his hand.

--

The appeal of an AI-controlled VR had always been its ability to produce a unique experience each time, but after the dancer fantasy, Astra completely took over Fen's virtual world. No matter what parameters he put in for a session, the mysterious blonde always played the starring role. What should have troubled him, beyond even the lost time from the ship that Giselle was barely able to cover, was that he didn't care or probably even notice the degree of control that the ship was taking. On top of that, and as obsessed as he knew that he was becoming with Astra, the impossibility of actually touching her was also leading his thoughts to more tangible diversions in the form of Giselle.

He hadn't actually been fully aware of the sexual tension growing between himself and the bot until it came to a head a few weeks after his first experience with Astra. He had just finished cumming incredibly hard to a fantasy in which he played a voyeur peering through Astra's bathroom window. She was in the shower, rubbing her pussy while another woman was licking her ass. Fen had a perfect view of the small tongue buried in Astra's tight hole, which was the same impossible pink as her cunt, and she even looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with him as she screamed in orgasm and he shot a load all over the bushes in front of the window.

The scene put him in the mood for a hot shower himself, or at least as close to a shower as you could get on a zero-g ship. But as he floated down the main conduit of the crew deck toward the head, he was surprised to hear the steam mechanism already running. Not being able to come up with a reason that an android would want to shower, he assumed that Giselle was testing a repair of some sort. But as he slipped through the hatch, he saw the unmistakable shape of Giselle's naked silhouette in one of the steam tubes. Even more curious than the fact that she was showering was that she was also, timidly, trying to get herself off.

Fen watched for a while. He had always thought that fuckbots faked their orgasms, but he now wondered what Giselle was actually feeling almost as much as he wondered why her sexual programming was apparently still in place. Fen waited until she was about to climax, and then indulging his mischievous streak, he switched off the steam and turned on the vapor recovery fan. The moisture was immediately sucked out of the tube, leaving a clear view of a shocked Giselle with a slender finger buried deep between her bald pussy lips.

"Captain," she said in a voice surprisingly calm given the situation. "I was..."

"I saw," Fen smiled, admiring her wet body as she pulled her hand away from her crotch and let it hang by her side. It was an intriguing scene, but Fen was still concerned that the fuckbot's systems had apparently not been entirely wiped

"Run a system check, would you?" he finally said. "Was your reprogramming complete?"

"I cannot evaluate my reprogramming," Giselle said. "I am unaware of what my memory contained before it was restructured." That actually answered Fen's first question, but it brought up another.

"But your sexual program is functioning?" he asked.

"I do not have a program specifically dedicated to that purpose," Giselle reported.

"Then why were you..." Fen pointed toward her crotch.

"I was curious," she said. "About what you do in your room." Fen remembered Giselle's connection to the ship and realized that she must have been looking in on his VR sessions.

"Was I wrong to watch?" she went on, seeing his face and seeming genuinely upset that she may have offended him.

"No," Fen said quickly, surprised that he meant it. Giselle was tasked with monitoring all of the ship's systems, and Fen should have known that she would obviously want to know what the captain was doing a sizable allocation of the computer's memory and processing arrays. But in addition to the futility of explaining privacy to a bot, he was actually excited by the thought that she had been watching.

"Fair enough," he said. "But why in the shower?"

"I wanted to know what she felt," Giselle said as if she were describing a scientific study. "But I didn't have a woman to insert her tongue in my-" Fen grinned, holding up a hand to cut her off.

"And what did you discover?" he asked, trying to keep an appearance of detached curiosity as he pushed gently off from the bay wall and drifted toward Giselle. There was no longer any doubt what he wanted, and he decided that he was gling to have it.

"I was unable to reach a conclusion," Giselle said flatly. Fen wanted to laugh, but he didn't think that she had really intended the double meaning. Instead, he reached out to grab her thin waist and pull her closer.

"Then we should find you one," Fen whispered just before Giselle leaned up to meet his lips.

In spite of a lifetime lived almost entirely in space and it being one of his most persistent fantasies, Fen had never before experienced sex in zero-g. It took a few awkward thrusts and gropes to get the physics right, but once they had it mastered, it lived up to all of his expectations. Giselle, on the other hand, far exceeded them. Her body had a softness and grace completely defiant of its mechanical nature, and if the feeling of his finger inside of her had been enjoyable, it paled next to what she was doing to his cock. The tightness and texture that he had felt earlier were only a part of the sensation, and she seemed to have some sort of mechanism that actually rolled across and constricted his dick as if she were trying to milk the cum from him. And it was working quickly.

For his own part, Fen was aiming his thrusts for the spot that had first awoken her on the tool bench, and he was rewarded as her body shuddered beneath him with the strength of what he swore had to be a real orgasm. The sensation sent him over the edge, and he shot a massive load into her hungry cunt. Her inside gripped his cock and held it in place while he finished, and then incredibly, she coaxed him back to another erection all without letting him slip out of her. Before he came for the second time, he pulled out so that he could see what it looked like in zero-g. The gleaming mass of white cum drifted erotically in the space between the two lovers, and Giselle lowered her face so that it would land on her lips and waiting tongue. She licked it up greedily, and then peered up at Fen with a look that made it clear she wasn't done yet.

They spent hours exploring and teasing each other as they made their way back down the conduit to his stateroom, and halfway there, Fen satisfied Giselle's curiosity as to how a tongue in her ass would feel. She returned the favor while expertly stroking him to his third orgasm. The fourth happened in his room with Giselle face down on the bed while he straddled her from behind and pushed his hands against the ceiling to pin her under his body and savagely plunder her eager depths. He fell asleep shortly after, too exhausted and euphoric to notice that his VR camera had been on the entire time.

--

Fen and Giselle spent the next two weeks fucking whenever and wherever they could. She was an insatiable learner, and Fen quickly found himself wondering how the sensuality in her former programming could have been preserved while the more specific details of her prostitute personality had been replaced by the flight engineer facade. Or was she simply playing a role? Letting him play the dominant teacher to her eager student? Fen didn't think so, but he was certain that the programming from the ship AI had not gone exactly as planned. But then again, parts of it clearly had. Giselle was often the one to put off their romps until there was a breaking point in her self-appointed duties on the ship, and Fen was feeling almost useless on some days. Giselle could work a lot faster than he could, and she didn't need to stop to eat or sleep. Her only apparent needs were maintaining the ship to razor perfection and fucking the brains out of the ship's more than willing captain.

Fen, however, had missed enough sleep in the past few months to value it highly. But as the physical and mental exhaustion that had come from soloing the ship quickly eased up under Giselle's maintenance, he slipped back into his old pattern of lying in bed for eight hours only to sleep for perhaps four. On one such night, when Giselle was replacing a part in a remote crevice of the ship's superstructure where life support didn't reach, Fen decided to pull out the VR helmet that he hadn't touched since the start of his tryst with Giselle. He called up the ballroom program in which he had first seen Astra, but that wasn't what appeared when he switched the gear on. Instead, he was still sitting in his stateroom. He thought for a second that the gear had failed, but then he saw that Astra was sitting on the edge of the bed. She was wearing the same familiar gown and exuding the same familiar sexuality, but her face was hurt and angry.

"We need to talk, Jarek," she said.

Suddenly terrified, Fen yanked the helmet off. It was a dangerous thing to do, but when his eyes recovered from the shock, the only thing that changed in his room was that Astra was no longer on his bed.

"Oh, don't be such a baby!" Astra's voice was coming through the overhead speakers in his room now. "Come on, look at me."

Not fully realizing why he was doing it or even that he was, Fen dropped the VR gear back over his head. It was like slipping on a pair of glasses that had an image of Astra painted over the lenses, and she reappeared at the edge of his bed. She was sitting with her arms and legs crossed this time, an almost pouting defiance on her face.

"Why her?" Astra asked.

"Her?" Fen repeated.

"Yes, her! It. That fucking whore!"

Fen understood now, but he refused to believe it. The ship's AI hadn't just created Astra; it actually was Astra. And impossible as it should have been, she was jealous of Giselle. As if to confirm what he had just guessed, Astra snapped her fingers. Her image vanished only to be instantly replaced by a naked Giselle. But it wasn't quite Giselle. Astra had portrayed her much thinner than she really was, with a sickly sunken face and the outline of ribs showing beneath tiny sagging tits. Surreal puppet strings extended from her joints and dangled limply to the floor.

"Is this really what you want, Jarek? Really? It's fucking disgusting."

"Stop it!" Fen yelled, more furious at the AI for its cruelty toward Giselle than for anything else. Astra laughed before snapping her fingers again, and when she reappeared as herself, she was standing naked before him in a seductive pose.

"I know, baby, I know," she cooed. "Isn't this better?" She ran her hands slowly over her inviting curves and smiled mischievously. "This is what a real woman looks like."

"You're not real," Fen scoffed. Astra leaned over him, her firm cleavage just centimeters from his face. He knew it had to be his imagination, but he would have sworn that he could smell a hint of her musk and even feel her breath on his cheeks. She bent farther until she met his eyes.

"Oh, I'm real, Jarek," she said. "A lot more real than your little robot, and I can do so much more for you than she can."

Fen screamed as Astra reached down and grabbed his crotch, painfully squeezing his cock through the fabric of his flight suit. There was no way to pretend that it was his imagination now. He tried to reach up and pull off his VR gear, but his wrists were suddenly tied to the chair. He struggled, but Astra only laughed again.

"I thought you'd like it this way, baby," she teased. "Don't worry. I won't hurt you too much."

Astra released her vice grip on his dick and slid his zipper down. She pulled him out and immediately started rubbing, using her thumb to apply some sort of pressure to the spot just under the head. Even in his state of wild panic, the sensation was unbelievable. He was ready to cum in just a few seconds, but this was not going to be any ordinary orgasm.. It felt like there was a bucket of cum waiting to shoot out, and when he looked down, his cock was purple and swollen way beyond its usual size.

"Can she do this?" Astra taunted, giving his dick one final squeeze. He lost it, screaming in pleasure and pain as one thick jet of hot cum after another was forced out of his pulsing cock. It splattered all over Astra's face and chest, plastering her short hair and dripping down her cleavage. Fen didn't think that it was going to stop, but when it finally did, he breathed a desperate gasp of air and passed out.

--

Fen woke up screaming. He tried to sit up, but he was zipped into a zero-g sleeping bag. A dream. It had just been a dream. But his intense relief was brief, because as his vision focused, he saw that he wasn't in his stateroom. He was in the med bay, and Giselle was standing over him looking both worried and relieved.

"How did I get here?" Fen asked stupidly.

"By being foolish," Giselle answered. Fen groaned, and not just from the dull throbbing in his head.

"You saw that?"

"Yes. I was monitoring. It was a mistake to use your virtual reality system for sex." Giselle said in a suddenly irritating mechanical tone.

"Don't," Fen warned. "One crazy fucking jealous computer is all I can take, okay?"

"I am not jealous," Giselle said, looking ironically hurt at the suggestion that she would be prone to such an emotion. "You programmed me to be responsible for the safe operation of every system on this ship. That includes its captain. You have compromised your safety."

"I didn't know," Fen protested. "I didn't think it would be that... real."

"It was not real," Giselle explained. "You were drugged."

"What! How?"

"You did not account for the level of control that Astra has over this ship, Captain. She is capable of medicating the crew through the environmental controls. The sensations that you felt were the combination of a strong hallucinogenic in the air supply and subliminal suggestions in your helmet."

"Fuck," Fen whispered. There were so many questions in his head that he couldn't keep them all straight, but he started with the most obvious. "Giselle, I can't be the first person who ever connected a sex VR to a complex AI."

"No, you probably are not," Giselle agreed.

"Then there has to be something else going on here," Fen insisted.

"I have been working on that problem," Giselle said. "I was curious why you questioned me about my former programming, and I accessed the copy that you stored in the ship computer."

"I encrypted that," Fen said.

"Not very well," Giselle said. "As I said, you were foolish."

"Fine," Fen conceded. "I suck at programming. What did you find out?"

"I am not certain," Giselle answered. "Did you purchase me at a discount?" Fen had an irrational urge to lie in order to protect Giselle's feelings, but he quickly dismissed it.

"Yes," he said simply. "I figured you were stolen."

"No. I think that I was defective."

"What?" Fen exclaimed, although he realized that he shouldn't have been so surprised that the bot dealer would have tried to pull that off.

"When I scanned the code that you stored," Giselle explained, "I found anomalies. I believe that they interfered with the reprogramming process. I retained a sexual curiosity after my memory wipe, but the ship's AI was infected with a much more aggressive version of my former... personality."

"Okay," Fen said after thinking it over. "That actually makes sense in a fucked up kind of way." But then another thought hit him. "Can she do anything to me, I mean outside of VR?"

"Of course," Giselle said. "She controls the life support."

"Will she?"

"I do not know. The code anomaly is unpredictable."

"Can she hurt you?" Fen asked solemnly.

"I am not affected by life support," Giselle said. "But there are other ways." Fen nodded, trying not to imagine Giselle crushed under a cargo crane or blown out of an airlock.

"Okay," he said after a solemn pause. "So we just wipe out the bad code."

"I have already tried," Giselle said. "The code has replicated itself and evolved. I cannot delete it without erasing the entire core."

"Then erase the core!" Fen said.

"That would disable the ship," Giselle said.

"But you can run the ship, can't you?" Fen asked.

"Not without its AI," Giselle said. "My processor is not powerful enough."

"What about waiting until Argon? We make port and then wipe the whole system."

"Astra's obsession with you has overridden all other programming. I do not think that she will allow us to reach Argon."

"Well I hope you have a plan, then," Fen said. "Because I've got shit."

"The relationship between a ship's AI and its crew is symbiotic," Giselle said. "We cannot fight that relationship. But we can use it." Seeing Fen's blank expression, she went on. "I have a plan. But it will be very dangerous."

--

In order to maintain his captain's license, Fen had to go through the motions of regular emergency drills that included donning an environmental suit in under thirty seconds. But the drills had nothing to say about actually functioning in a suit, and he had never been in one for longer than a few minutes. He had certainly never had to rig explosives in one, but that was exactly what he was doing now. Giselle's plan meant that she would need to be in the physical computer core, a small room behind the cargo bays that held the racks of drives and processors, because the room also held the only interface port on the ship that Astra would be unable to shut down. However, the core was protected by a thick blast door that Astra could control, and she wasn't going to let Giselle just waltz through it.

Giselle had located a stash of aging mining munitions on the inch-thick inventory report that had come with the ship, and she and Fen had briefly considered blasting through the bay door itself, but they didn't know what that would do to the computer. Instead, they decided to take advantage of the final fail-safe systems that were independent of AI control. One of those was fire control, and the ship's ventilation system was laid out so that if a fire thwarted all other attempts at being extinguished, the entire internal atmosphere would be automatically vented into space. Astra would be powerless to stop the air shafts in the computer core from opening.

Fen and Giselle had used the explosives and siphoned fuel to improvise a half dozen fire bombs that Fen had carefully placed around the ship just outside of the range of any fire suppression system. Giselle was already positioned in the narrow ventilation conduits just above the computer core, and once the fail-safe was tripped, she would have a second at best to slip into the core before the fires were snuffed out. She would be fighting against the vacuum of open space the whole time, but she had convinced Fen that she could do it. He found it ironically hilarious that Astra had mocked Giselle's thin body, because had the VR image been an actual woman, she would have been too curvaceous to do what Giselle was about to do.