Into the Unknowable Ch. 16

There were few such attractions to the male Vashti who was engaged in the full scale warfare that had broken out on the space ship represented by a wholly homosexual masculine Solar System. At least Vashti was well versed in the practice and execution of war, though the viciousness of the conflict between the different but almost identical factions of a society based on philosophical contemplation could only result in the eventual death of every last soldier. Much as Vashti enjoyed fucking her fellow soldiers prior to conflict, it was less pleasant to wade through their corpses and with their blood splattered over her uniform. There was no way that the philosophical concerns about whether morality was pre-existent and omnipresent or emergent and pragmatic could be resolved in this manner. This Vashti still had to slaughter several more soldiers to make her escape from the space ship she'd been exploring and then launch herself into absolute nothingness.

Although still invisible to all but the senior officers of the Intrepid, the thousands of Vashtis of many different shapes and sizes all converged towards a single point where a massive Vashti was beginning to coalesce. She was soon larger than any of the space ships surrounding her. Indeed, her majestic and perpetually tumescent member was several kilometres in length. Her erect penis was larger than any space ship and her testicles could hold entire alien space fleets. In the sense that they were fully assimilated inside her, this was truly no exaggeration. On occasion, a Vashti that coalesced with the larger body was in such a state of sexual excitement from whatever she'd been doing earlier that the larger Vashti ejaculated into empty space. The semen flew out into the void, sometimes splattering its invisible sperm on the neighbouring space ships before then being re-assimilated into the master thread.

However, all was not well. The lack of integrity within the whole nanobot community was becoming increasingly manifest.

A Vashti who was making her way towards the escape hatch of a space ship in which the simian crew were busily shooting one another was hit by a laser beam through the head which she wouldn't have normally noticed. Instead, she fell to the ground with blood gushing onto the floor and didn't recover. As so many other simian corpses were piling above her, nobody noticed as the corpse began disintegrating into microscopic nanobot grains.

There was a similar fate for a body-modified Vashti who was able to maintain a penis on a woman's body. This happened while masturbating with casual acquaintances as was the expected custom during any social interaction with the other bizarrely modified human forms on the space ship she was exploring. Upon ejaculating, her entire body dissolved into dust leaving just an unattached penis jumping about by itself and continuing to spurt. When the last drop of semen shot free, the penis collapsed and died. The large-breasted, well-endowed, red-skinned humanoids with whom she was conversing were understandably distressed by this gruesome event, but like in the other space ships there had been so many peculiar happenings that this was readily attributed to the Anomaly's general weirdness.

A similar fate befell a Vashti who'd returned to her original form and was flying across empty space at a velocity that most space vehicles would have difficulty in matching. As she flew forward she discovered that parts of her skin were peeling off. She was even feeling slightly cold in the near absolute zero temperature of open space. And then she died in the way most biological forms would. The lack of air pressure burst open her lungs and her blood froze to solid red ice.

But soon enough all the various Vashtis were in one place and the monstrous invisible Vashti that had swollen in the heart of the Anomaly had coalesced into one whole.

Vashti viewed the space around her to locate the Intrepid in the far distance. When she found it, she propelled herself forward as if swimming through empty space. It would still take many hours, perhaps days, but the now re-integrated Vashti was flying back to the Intrepid to find out what was happening and attempt to rescue what was left of an increasingly desperate and failed mission. A mission moreover for which she had full responsibility and had already condemned many thousands of humans to eternal banishment beyond the bounds of normal space and time.