Liquid Diplomacy

Day 736

I keep journaling to mark the passage of time as I careen through space. It's part of what keeps me to the Earth definition of a "day", out here in this empty region. Journaling and coffee and exercise and sleep and (since no one else will ever read this) jacking off.

It's been two years, by my reckoning, since Earth Command put me on a ship and shot me out to meet our neighbors from the next galaxy over. I was a compromise choice, I know. Qualified, but not too important to spare. After all, this is a one-way mission. Even if I survive first contact with the aliens, I have no ride home. It was only by a precise gravitational slingshot maneuver that my ship was able to achieve its velocity in the right direction. To achieve that, the ship had to be stripped of any propulsion and navigation systems.

When I left Earth, we knew that this alien race is interested in a first contact meeting, but not much else about them. It's been a week since a transmission from Earth Command caught up to me. Using infrared telescopes, they'd gotten better imagery of other worlds this race had been to. Worlds that had been showing signs of space exploration, like us. After these aliens visit, the worlds they visit stop exploring. Perhaps they kill intentionally, or perhaps they carry disease. Guess I'll find out soon enough.

My instructions are simple. Establish first contact and report back, and don't betray humanity.

Day 741

It was easy to forget sometimes that I've been traveling at close to light speed. But I sure could feel it when the alien ship locked onto mine, and brought the two ships into alignment. I could feel the deceleration of my ship even before theirs came into view.

It's been a very strange day, and I don't know what to think about it yet.

Their ship brought mine in to dock. My airlock gave me readings from the outside--the pressurized interior of their ship--and it looked compatible, in terms of pressure, temperature, and composition. It was basically equivalent to Earth air. Maybe it was foolish, but it seemed like they had prepared the meeting chamber to meet my requirements, so I decided not to bother with the full space suit. I guess I wanted them to really see me, and understand what humans are.

I stepped out of my airlock and into the chamber on their ship. There I saw one of them for the first time. It was tall, probably 7 or 8 feet. It was swathed in something--cloth? loose skin?--so I couldn't really even make out how many limbs it had under there.

"Uh...hello," I said, my adrenaline pounding.

Instead of a verbal greeting, it started poking around in my mind. Images came and went. The muddy ground of the Earth Command training camp. Over-warmed coffee and fluorescent-lit offices. It was sifting back through my memories. I was powerless against it. I saw myself arriving at the training camp, duffel bag over my shoulder. If it had gone back that far, it already knew everything that I did, about Earth's capabilities and defenses. But that didn't seem to be what it was after. It kept searching.

Then it latched onto a memory, and I was thrust into it. I was lying in bed, curled up against Jenna's back, morning light filtering through the blinds. My erection was pressed against her backside.

I had thought about Jenna often, on so many nights to myself. The last relationship I had, before I got catapulted into space. I knew what my memories of her felt like, and this was something more. It was so real that I risked forgetting that it wasn't.

I held Jenna close in my arms, and kissed the back of her neck. She gasped, and craned her neck out of the way, offering more of it to me.

As she started to writhe in my embrace, my cock found its way down between her thighs. Angling her hips, I could feel my shaft slide across her cleft. I could feel the heat and slippery moisture of it.

While my hands reached around, teasing the soft skin of her stomach, caressing her breasts, Jenna kept pressing back against me, guided by her own sense of need. The friction between us was nearly overwhelming, but I held out, waiting for a moment I knew would come. Feeling her align with me just right, I pushed forward into her, the head of my cock slipping just barely inside her.

We both stopped to savor the moment, and hesitate about what to do next. This was dangerous, but that made it all the more intoxicating. In moments like this, when I was having a brush with fate, my life would flash before my eyes. Jenna wanted kids, but not with a guy who didn't want them. So I was only ever a stop-gap lay, on the way to a guy who would. We both knew this had to end pretty soon for her to have a shot at that, or else I had to become that guy. Sometimes she tried to change my mind; I knew it was out of a desire to make it work between us, but it always grated on me anyway. But sometimes, in the heat of the moment, my mind was more open to what she wanted.

Not content to stop at the threshold, I pulled her to me, pushing my erection deeper into her. We used condoms religiously, but I could always tell the difference when I entered her raw.

"We ought to get a rubber on you, it's my fertile time of the month..." she said, short of breath. I could feel her vaginal walls responding to my intrusion, in a way I never could through a sheath. "Unless..."

"I've missed this so much," I groaned.

"Huh?" she said, confused but only half paying attention to my words.

In that moment, I realized I wasn't just a passive observer here, this memory was maleable. My present self was the one reliving it. It reminded me of the real world out there--the first contact mission, with a powerfully telepathic race of aliens.

I also realized exactly which time with Jenna this was. This was the very last time we were together. I'd just been chosen for the mission, and I had held off telling her, for as long as I could. And I remembered what I had actually said at the time.

"I'm going to miss this so much," I said.

Her hand grabbed mine, stopping me from teasing her further. "What did you say?"

I hesitated. It would be so easy to lie. I could play out this scene differently than how it had actually happened. This was my chance to be with Jenna just this one last time. Except she was so real to me here, and I did care about her, too much to actually do that.

"I'm leaving at the end of the week," I said. I stopped thrusting into her, and just held her close, kissing her shoulder. "I'm going to space!"

I expected it to be something of a disappointment to her, but I hadn't registered just how suddenly things could change between us. She pulled away, my cock slipping free of her. I tried to reach for her again, but her hand intercepted mine.

"What are you doing?" I asked, letting my hand fall to the bed.

"Sorry, I'm only into people who are into me," she said, pulling on her clothes with shaky hands. "I take that back, I'm not actually sorry."

"Jenna, come on! Can't we just make the most of the last few days we have?"

But her mind was already made up. She shook her head in disbelief.

And then I was torn from the scene. The alien kept skimming back through my memories. I felt it linger briefly on other times I'd been with Jenna. It would drop me in for just a moment, often mid-act. My mouth on her pussy. My erection straying dangerously up into her for just a moment. These moments came to me not just in sight and sound and smell and touch, but in the full-body sensation of coupling with her. I could feel my cock straining for the warmth and comfort and caress inside of her, like it always did.

And then we were delving further into my past, before the Jenna era, venturing back through a string of short-lived flings and one-nighters. It was dredging up encounters that I had all but forgotten about. Not that I marked my life in sexual acts, but these were the only parts of my past that the alien paid any attention to. I wondered if it took a voyeuristic pleasure from it.

Then we reached Lila. Lila and I were a match made in hell, with drama at every turn. We split up and got back together too many times to count. Lila at least knew herself well enough to recognize that nobody should ever entrust a child to her. That didn't stop us from stupidly pushing our luck too many times.

I recognized this memory immediately. Lila and I were on a road trip with Lila's sister Emmie, and we had just checked into a motel room in West Virginia, sharing the room to save some cash.

Emmie was in the shower, and Lila hopped up on the bed, straddling me, kissing me hard, her intent clear and outrageous. Her hand found its way down between my legs, and she never had any trouble coaxing me to hardness. Lila seemed to get turned on by the possibility of getting caught. (I've always suspected this is why I found out about her affair in the end.)

"Seriously?" I asked, letting the voice of reason have its say.

"We've got plenty of time," she said, with a wicked smirk.

I pulled down my shorts, mainly so she wouldn't get her juices all over them, and she guided me up into her. Then she started bouncing frantically on my lap, so hard that it almost hurt every time her buttocks came down on my thighs.

Lila wasn't lying; it didn't take long until she was writhing and shaking on my lap, biting her lip to stifle her cry as she came. I wasn't far behind, panting in her ear. Then the water in the bathroom shut off.

"Stop," I whispered. "Stop stop stop!"

"Okay, okay, okay," she said, teasingly.

Lila's skirt was splayed out around us where we were conjoined. It maybe hid that I didn't have shorts on, but it also wasn't hard to guess that we were in flagrante. Her sister Emmie seemed deliberately clueless as she came out in a towel, just long enough to grab a change of clothes and go back into the bathroom. Meanwhile I was still very much erect and on edge inside of Lila's vagina, trying with all my might not to cum inside Lila with her sister in the room.

The bathroom door clicked shut again, and Lila laughed quietly; I could intimately feel her abdominal contractions.

"Is it a safe time?" I asked.

"Safe enough," she replied. "Just don't cum on the hotel bedspread."

I knew Lila. If it was a safe time of the month, she'd have said so, without reservation. She'd already been through two abortions, and I didn't want to be the cause of another one. It was an argument we'd had enough to not have it verbally now.

In my present mind, I knew I didn't need to give a damn about any of it. In the heat of the moment, Lila would've gladly had me cum inside her, even if we'd regret it later. But reliving this moment, I didn't have to worry about that. I could knock her up without consequence. I could do it right in front of her sister if I wanted to.

My arousal was only heightened from having just re-experienced all those times with Jenna. It was only ever building up. But it didn't feel right somehow. I was starting to wonder what the alien was getting out of this. Whatever it wanted, it must not have gotten yet.

"Shit," I said, gritting my teeth as I pulled out of her, lifting her up off my lap. "We have to stop."

Lila sighed and rolled off to the side of the bed, and I pulled my shorts back on, as if nothing had happened.

That was the end of that scene, and on the alien went, back through my history with Lila. There had been so many desperate quickies with her, so many close calls. The alien brought me back to the time that Lila and I were pretty sure got her pregnant the first time. I'd been bareback inside her for a whole hour before pulling out at the end, but my precum had been enough to do it. Now that sexual marathon was even more taxing, because I'd been kept in a state of constant arousal and stimulation for an inhuman length of time already.

On and on, reliving encounter after encounter, all the way back through my sexual history, all the way back to the very beginning. The night I lost my virginity.

Kelly and I had been friends forever, but it wasn't until we were eighteen, and I was a horny teenage boy with no other prospects, that it occurred to me that she was a girl, maybe even a girl willing to fuck me. She certainly wasn't my typical type, either before or since; Kelly was a heavy-set girl with some bad acne and unruly hair.

One night, she was over at my place to watch a movie. Before we even started the movie, I kissed her on the mouth. I thought if it freaked her out, I'd play it off as a joke or something. There was a momentary look of surprise on her face, making me worry that I fucked up, but then she kissed me back, harder.

Every move that I made, I was sure would be the last. But when I felt up her chest, she pressed back into my touch. When I started unhooking her bra, she took it off for me. When I slipped a hand down into her sweatpants, her hand guided mine to where she wanted it.

It all moved so quickly, quicker than either of us expected. Soon we were pressing against each other through our underwear, and then soon that underwear was out of the way. We were both so awkward; taking cues from each other was the only thing we knew how to do.

The first time I pressed the tip of my cock to her hole, I was looking into her half-lidded eyes, waiting for this dream of a moment to break. I pressed into her slowly, gently, every little movement bringing with it new sensations for us both. I was riding high on the fact that I was losing my virginity and experiencing intercourse for the first time, and it felt amazing. I wasn't thinking about the consequences of what we were doing--not just what could happen to Kelly, but what this might do to the friendship we had up to then.

When I was in her completely, before I started to move again, she asked, "Do you have a condom?"

I knew what the right answer was, and it wasn't the answer I had for her. I shook my head, and stalled, waiting for her to respond.

"Just...be careful," she pleaded.

I started to pull out and push back into her, slowly and deliberately. It had to be that way, or I was going to lose control. Her hands gripped mine, and I could feel her intensity building, but not like mine was. I wasn't going to make it.

What actually happened back then was that I pulled out in time to ejaculate on her stomach. I worried about leaving her unsatisfied, but she was smiling as she cleaned herself up, and kissed me again before she went home that night.

The next day at school, she was making doe eyes at me, and Trevor, one of my guy friends, started teasing me about it, about her, about her weight in particular. I denied that we were together, and Kelly overheard. That was the end of our relationship, if you could call it that. I know it was shitty of me.

But in the flashback, I'd already been aroused for hours, and I wasn't handling it anymore.

"Stop this," I thought, to the alien. "I know you can hear me. I know you understand what I'm saying."

Abruptly, I was wrenched out of the memory and back to the present. I awoke lying on my back, on the metal floor of the alien's ship. From somewhere under the alien's robes, a long, fleshy proboscis was extended out to my crotch, engulfing my erection, like an elephant's trunk. I saw the muscles of the proboscis ripple as it squeezed down on me. It would have been intensely pleasurable if I hadn't been horrified. My comfortable ship-wear bottoms were down around my knees.

"Let me go," I said, trying to summon some authority, and not have to beg if I could avoid it.

It withdrew its proboscis from my crotch, with a sticky pop as it slipped off my erection. The feeling of its withdrawal made me gasp. I got up as quickly as I could, my limbs stiff from lying on the hard floor, and retreated to my own ship.

I was shaking, with a painfully sensitive erection that wouldn't go away on its own. My head was aching from pumping blood to my cock for hours.

By my ship's clock, nearly seven hours had passed since I docked with the alien ship. Humans weren't meant for this kind of ordeal, not me at least. Earth Command should've sent a porn star, except a porn star's memories would have been an even richer vein to mine.

I knew that whenever I did reach my climax, it would be shatteringly intense. But I was still scared to finish myself off, even in the relative privacy of my quarters. I still didn't know what the alien was specifically after. Was it something psychological, or physical? And I couldn't be sure it hadn't altered me in some way, when it probed my mind, or when it enveloped my penis.

Well, that was certainly a first contact, I thought, laughing to myself. Nothing in my training had accounted for that scenario, or the possibility of an alien STI.

First order of business was a cold shower, to wash the alien's bodily fluids off me, and help clear my head. Then a hearty soup ration.

The erection did eventually subside, the arousal dulling to a low hum in the back of my mind, alongside all the freshly resurfaced memories of all the women I'd ever slept with. It was only through sheer exhaustion that I managed to get some sleep.

Day 742

My sunlamp woke me nine hours later. I still felt a confusing mix of emotions about what happened the day before. Yes, the alien had put me into sexual situations, but I had consented to them. I could have put a stop to it sooner, if I hadn't genuinely enjoyed reliving those memories.

There were no messages from the other ship yet. The alien seemed content to wait until I was ready to meet again. I had very limited options. It wasn't as if I could just fly home. I could undock, but there wouldn't be much point.

I could wait it out, but I didn't much like the idea of testing the patience of an extremely powerful psychic alien, or of souring our diplomatic relations by throwing a tantrum.

Or there was my ship's self-destruct sequence. It was a failsafe, built in by Earth Command. In case negotiations went badly enough, my ship was rigged to explode, and it ought to be enough to take out the alien ship as well.

Had we reached that point, I wondered? Everything I knew about Earth, its space capabilities and defenses, the alien might know by now. It could have already transmitted what it learned from me to other ships in the area, so blowing up the ship might be futile. I was expendable to my own race, and this alien might be in a similar situation. Besides, blowing up the ship could be seen as an act of aggression, setting our worlds up for conflict.

Plus, I didn't really know what they were after, and whether they meant us harm. The alien had certainly pushed me to my limits in pursuit of something, but I didn't get the sense it was trying to hurt me. It let me out when I demanded out.

I dashed off a message to Earth, to relay what little I'd found out about the alien so far, but I left out the juicy details. It didn't say much.

Then I went back to the airlock. I was reluctant to turn myself over to its control again, but I didn't see any other way. The door slid open, and there it was again, a hulking robed mass. I still didn't know where to look for a face.

"Good morning," I said. "How do you like your eggs?" It showed no reaction to my humor.

"Are you prepared to continue?" it said, its words beamed straight into my mind.

I knew the right answer was no. I shouldn't give it free rein to my mind again, nor my body. If it was asking, I should stick to the familiar terrain of talks and treaties. At the same time, the previous day hadn't been entirely an ordeal. It had been extraordinary in equal measure.

The alien didn't wait for me to resolve the conflict, it sensed my willingness and dove into my mind. I felt it rewind quickly through the past few hours. It would know that I sent a message to Earth Command. It would know what that message said. It didn't seem to care.