Erotic Hitchhiker's Guide Ch. 04

Chapter 4

Hitchhiker's's Manual Page # 748653724165874.6 Entry: Preference, Sexual

"A much debated version of sexual preference (or 'type' as it is more casually referred to) is the far more restrictive concept of sexual orientation. Essentially, it is the idea that one cannot be truly satisfied with a partner who does not fit a previously specified set of criteria (e.g. dissimilar external genitalia or quadrupedal body type). When adhered to by an individual, this pattern of behavior is often considered a perversion; when shared by an entire species, it is widely accepted to be one of the 26 indicators of barbarism; the most recent species to suffer extermination as a result were the bipedal inhabitants of the planet they termed Earth.

Certain radical fringe groups have taken to extolling the virtues of sexual orientation, claiming its restrictive aspects make the attainment of one's sexual goals that much more gratifying. Also, the automatic outcast status indulging in it bestows on the practitioners makes them more likely to be artists, philosophers, musicians and janitors, occupations generally disdained by the more conformist members of society, but essential in creating and maintaining a vibrant, healthy culture. Currently, having a restrictive sexual orientation is not a punishable offense, but it does preclude one from a career in architecture, beadwork, or antimatter waste disposal.

*****

When we last left our heroes (and their reptilian hosts) they were waiting to see if they would be kindly deposited at the nearest spaceport or be expelled into an arid vacuum. Ford, the only non-human in the group, had been willing to allow himself a measure of cautious optimism, based on the fact that all three of them had been able to resist the (completely natural) urge to strangle their incessantly annoying hosts, with Arthur even achieving a mutually affectionate interaction with one of them.

That was until the Vagines bestowed high praise (for them, anyway) on the stowaways sexual performance. Ford knew that a Vagine's favorite activity following sex was to kvetch about the supposed inadequacies of their partner. It irritates them no end that these negative ratings are never taken seriously, and indeed are often claimed as a badge of pride. Ten galactic cycles ago, a common pick-up line in any spaceport bar was, "Ever satisfied a Vagine?" This approach went out of favor as it wreaked havoc with various inter-galactic consent laws, being an obvious example of "No!" emphatically meaning "YES!!!"

If they were complimenting you, they didn't intend for anyone else to hear about it, ever. Ford decided it was time to get a word in edgewise, figuring he couldn't make things worse.

"All right, put the honey talk back in the jar. Why'd you decide to give us the axe?"

The head Vagine looked irked. "We are merely trying to express our appreciation for the sincere efforts –"

"Oh my God!" cried Agnes. "Ford's right! This is exactly like every forced retirement dinner I've ever attended! You could at least drop us off somewhere we'll have a chance, you cold-blooded –"

"Alas," said the Vagine who'd mated with Agnes, "there are circumstances that make it impossible for us to assist your survival in any way, being as you are the last two known survivors of a species condemned to extermination. "

Ford was taken aback. "Surely you've done enough," he argued. "They have no home world, no source of diverse genetic material – it's not like they'll be able to last more than one or two generations, tops!"

"Our instructions state we are to leave no trace of the species. We have even been instructed to forgo retention of the genetic material we extracted from you during our passionate trysts –"

"WHAT?!!" cried Agnes, outraged.

"Oh, yeah," said Ford. That's standard Vagine practice. They keep trying to breed a species that can tolerate them. It always terminates in the embryonic phase, so nobody frets about it."

Agnes, looking horrified, was unable to say anything further.

Finally, Arthur found the presence of mind to enter the discussion. "How can you just go along with this?" he implored, addressing his own private Vagine, as he had come to know her. "Isn't this the kind of behavior that makes you hate being a Vagine?"

She shook her head. "I think as much as I hate being a part of this, I can see where being on your own gets you."

"And me," Ford said, dispirited and desperately hoping to avoid sharing in his friend's apparently inevitable demise, "any reason why you have to throw me onto the scrap heap as well?"

"We naturally assumed your loyalty to your friends would override your survival concerns," said the head Vagine. "But since you ask, we have been instructed that anyone with significant exposure to human culture must be dealt with as a probable contaminant."

"Just doing your jobs, eh?" said Arthur bitterly.

"Oh no," said the female who had until recently been his favorite. "We expect a sizable bonus for our actions here."

The head Vagine sighed. "Unfortunately, this is a black-ops mission, so no official commendation. Which is another reason we're putting you out. Sor–"

Sadly, his intended audience never got to hear him complete the apology, since by then transmat beams had transferred them approximately 186,000 miles from the relative safety of the Vagine transport, presumably into the void of deep space.

*****

One of the reasons the transmat beam is such a useful device for disposing of waste or unwanted life-forms is that it abrogates the necessity of doors, airlocks or any other possible weaknesses in the structural integrity of one's space craft. As many safeguards as can conceivably be built into the average airlock, for example, there is no more certain way to guarantee that it won't spontaneously open, disgorging 50% of one's carefully maintained artificial environment, than to not have one in the first place.

Of course there is always the possibility that the transmat system itself will malfunction, but this has proven to be an unpopular speculation, and all apparent instances of this have been assumed to be particularly creative and utterly successful suicide attempts.

An even more unlikely occurrence than a transmat malfunction would be that of one beam, containing, say, three bipedal life forms, encountering the interference pattern of another beam from an entirely different ship, attempting to dispose of six months worth of garbage and biological waste, and therefore resulting in the three unbelievably lucky transmittees being deposited via a feedback loop to the very corridor which had been used as an impromptu trash bin.

The chances of this are so unlikely, in fact, that nobody in this galaxy makes a high enough salary for it to be worth their while to calculate them. So just keep that in mind. It might be relevant later.

Ford was the first of them to get back on his feet. Looking around, all he could think to say was, "Well, I hope these guys are nicer."

Arthur was quick to stand up himself, once it was clear 'up' had a workable definition in this frame of reference. "And who are 'these guys,' exactly?"

"Dunno," said Ford. "But it's definitely a different ship."

"And how can you tell?" asked Agnes, who seemed very uncertain if her balance worked at all, moving from foot to foot as if to catch it off guard.

"No methane," said Ford. "Whoever lives here doesn't come from a swamp planet."

"There are entire planets that are nothing but swamp?" Agnes sounded quite skeptical.

"Of course." He turned to look at Agnes, a bit skeptical himself. "You don't think most planets are like Earth, with the different climates all jumbled together, do you?"

Agnes told herself this was another discussion she would have to file away under 'Later.' Right now she was more concerned with the fact that everything suddenly seemed to be emitting a green glow, even her.

"Are we being irradiated?" she asked Ford, her voice uneasy.

"Never heard of any radiation that looked this red," he said, puzzled himself.

"Arthur, what do you see?" asked Agnes.

Arthur blinked. "Everything's gone sort of...yellow," he said, mystified.

Ford smacked himself on the head. "Of course!" he cried. "Nothing's changed color. It's our eyes going wonky."

This did not reassure Agnes. "Is this a result of that transmat beam?"

"No," Ford said. Then he grinned a grin, a guilty sort of grin. "I'm afraid it's the DILDO. It's making adjustments."

Arthur was aghast. "You mean it actually thinks we want to have SEX?!! Here and now?"

Ford grinned again. "Yeah. There's got to be some kind of local interference. Normally it won't spontaneously adjust like –" He paused. "Hey, are my arms getting shorter?"

"Yours and mine both," said Arthur, mildly horrified. "And my legs, they're connecting!"

"My feet seem to be swelling, too," noted Ford. Luckily, the DILDO automatically divests the user of any clothes that might become uncomfortably restricting, so his shoes and socks promptly slid off, as his feet continued to swell alarmingly.

"And for Christ's sake, what's happening to your nose, Agnes?" yelled Arthur. Indeed her nose was growing into what Ford and Arthur almost concluded was a penis until the hood grown over it made its feminine essence obvious. Agnes's mouth opened, at first apparently in shock but it just kept opening wider and wider, teeth and tongue retracting until her lip stretched the entire length of her body like the giant vagina she had stretched into. Her hair had completely frizzed into a furry pubic patch, and she was already exuding a musky feminine odor.

As shocking as the transformation was to Arthur (only mildly surprising to Ford) their own mutations were every bit as startling. Their hands had completely shrunk into their bodies, and their feet had swollen into impressive scrotal sacs. Their own mouths had migrated to the top of their completely bald, and now surprisingly spongy heads, from which drooled a clear, slick fluid.

Luckily, they still functioned as mouths, for speaking purposes anyway.

"Ford," said Arthur, who seemed likely to blow his top, "is there a good reason we've transformed into giant genitalia?"

Ford was cautious in his reply. "Well, I'm sure there's a reason, if not a good one..."

"Ford!" boomed Agnes, understandably having a spot of trouble with volume control, "how do we change back?!!"

Ford was almost apologetic. "Only quick way is to, um, perform the operation we've been configured for."

Arthur saw his point immediately. "So I need to insert, um, my entire self into her..."

"Actually," said Ford, "you two might prefer it if I took the front, since the, um, back entrance is considered to be rather intimate..."

Arthur rolled around to the back of Agnes. "Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "It's nothing but arse cheeks and your, er, rosebud."

"So you're both just going to impale me?" echoed Agnes. "No foreplay? Just ram it in me?"

"It doesn't seem to be an option, sweetie," said Arthur, regretfully.

"Well," Agnes sighed, "you may as well get it over with then."

Ford slid in pretty quickly, as the DILDO was ensuring maximum lubrication, and had successfully angled himself so that a good amount of stimulation was imparted to her clitoris with each eager thrust. But Arthur was having a tougher time of it.

Remarkably, the self-lubricating function of the DILDO even allowed her arsehole to secrete lubrication. But that didn't mean he could just slide in like a pinworm. Her butthole was tight, and Arthur was perhaps a bit too gentle.

Baby," she gasped, "you've GOT to keep pushing. If you let up for half a second I'll reclench!"

Arthur tried to remember something from the million or so men's advice columns he'd read in his life. "Um, sweetie," he said, maybe too nicely, "maybe if you bear down a bit, I can squeeze in..."

Oh, for Christ's sake!" snapped Ford. "This is all stupid human mental blockage! Arthur, be a man and tame that asshole. Push, for God's sake!

"And you, Agnes, I can tell you want to get it in your arse! For once in your life, you get to take it like a whore, show Arthur how dirty you can be. Go on, tell him how much you want it!"

"Arthur," she moaned, "I want it in my ass. I want YOU in my ass. Now, tame it with that huge prick! Fill me UP, God damn it!!"

With a roar Arthur shoved through. This precipitated a gasp and a mighty clenching by Agnes's anus. But Arthur would not be squeezed out. As Ford aggressively pumped in and out of her massive fuck hole, her ass relaxed enough for Arthur to do some pumping of his own.

As they quickly developed a rhythm with each other, both Ford and Arthur began to twitch expectantly and swell as they thrusted. Giving herself up to the feeling of being a massive cavity serving no function other than being stuffed full of man-flesh, Agnes could not distinguish their climaxes from her own. As they pounded her into submission, she pondered living as a hole, as a pair of holes, stretched out to fit two massive penises, empty without them...

*****

"Now, if we're quite done, could someone PLEASE tell me what that was all about?" Agnes was clearly directing the question at Ford; she hoped he had an answer. He definitely had some explaining to do.

"I have a theory," Ford answered. "Now, obviously this has been a little...disconcerting, but please bear in mind that ultimately I am responsible for you guys getting off your doomed planet with seconds to spare, raising your odds of survival juuussst enough to keep you alive so far. So, a little faith, please?

"Now, I've been beamed around a time or two. Usually conspicuous by it's lack of affect, right? Not even a long, dark moment, just first you're there, then you're here, right?"

Both humans nodded to show they understood, even if they didn't. It seemed polite.

"Well, before we came to in this passage, I felt an...expectancy, like a hesitation, like maybe we'd beamed but not quite? Admittedly, this is pure subjectivity, because once they break you down, they can either scramble your patterns to nothing, or store 'em on a database until they're good and ready to welcome you back to the living, and of course the former group doesn't talk, but the latter...all the same. Like time stood still, but not in a magnificent, awe-inspiring way, more like an oh-they-must-have-lost-that-reel-of-the-movie way, a don't-blink-and-you-still-missed-it way. So I think we must have got to our destination..." Pause for effect. "...and something happened."

Agnes reflected that after about a year of these sorts of occurrences, she might be able to participate in a sensible discussion about such matters, if she hadn't been driven stark, staring mad in the meantime. Arthur wanted to get her in a room alone, strip her naked, and cling to her, hoping she wouldn't hate him forever if he started weeping. Letting Ford speak seemed easier than expressing either of these thoughts.

"I think," Ford said excitedly, "that either this ship materialized around the space we were beaming into, which disrupted our materialization just enough to create a small but noticeable delay in the process, or –" (and here he seemed to get really excited) "something intercepted the beam, and either captured or bounced us to a completely unexpected but utterly safe destination."

Arthur wondered if they'd gotten to the explanatory part yet.

Ford now spoke in a low, confidential tone. "Now either of those events, " he said as if sharing a secret, "is very unlikely."

He nodded as if to say, I must agree with myself, so someone will. Now, the likelihood or unlikelihood of events is a very important field of study recently."

"I believe the proper term is 'probability,'" said Agnes.

"Only for smug academics," said Ford. "Now, the DILDO has a circuit that directly affects this."

Arthur was confused. "Why would a sex aid be given the ability to affect prob–"

Ford cut him off. "Please say "likelihood." I'm really trying to avoid copyright infringement here."

"All right, likelihood. Even so, the point remains."

"I'm getting to that. Look; have you ever bought a pack of condoms, then a year later you discover you only used half?"

Arthur was embarrassed and could only reply with, "Er..."

"Exactly. Nothing like getting your overconfidence flung back in your face. Well, what if a condom was able to determine where its purchaser's most likely prospects were, steer him in their direction, and even tweak the odds so she – or he – is 90% likely to give you a 'yes?' All, of course, to increase the likelihood of the product being used in a timely manner."

Arthur was enthralled. "I'd spend half my paycheck on condoms. I'd likely go days without food, if necessary."

"Right," said Ford. "Now imagine a device that can tweak both your chances of success and you, so every likely target just happened to be what you were attracted to because you just happened to be the sort who's attracted to that type?"

"Wait, why did you wait until we were off-planet to share this with me?" Arthur felt an indignance which he wasn't sure was justified. Still, he'd slept alone a lot more Fridays and Saturdays than he'd cared to.

"Because you're too bloody nice to use it properly," said Ford. "You'd convince yourself that every two-bit skank just looking for a new rod to ride was capable of oh, so much more if she gave herself a chance, and you wouldn't see it was best for you and her to fuck and move on. And you have to get over the idea that every woman that shags you is doing you a colossal favor." Ford had gotten a bit red in the face. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself down.

"Anyhow, this device tweaks reality enough to basically position you and someone else close enough together to let nature take its course. But if it were to come in contact with an even stronger field, then the feedback could impact the biological adaptation circuit, in which case we get turned into, um, fucking machines."

Agnes thought she might have understood half of that, which made her worry she was going crazy ahead of schedule. "So what could make reality warp on that kind of scale? And will it happen again?"

"I can tell you," said a voice from the end of the corridor. "But I'd rather take you to someone who feels like explaining it. The whole thing is more than I want to deal with."

Who could this new character be? Isn't it kind of aggravating to give them just one mysterious line and end the episode?

And what's with the "Destroy All Humans" directive? Are we really that bad? Or is there some darker, more sinister purpose at work?

And lastly, aren't there less ham-fisted ways of foreshadowing than constantly asking rhetorical questions?

There may be answers, or just more sex, or maybe about as much sex, in the next "Erotic Hitchhiker's Guide."