Uranus Is a Lonely Place

Alvar Corso soared through the hard vacuum, a graceful parabola that ended with one foot firmly planted on rock, and his cock balls-deep in Genevra Frey.

Two strokes per leap now, because he was getting close, and from the sound of it so was Genevra. He covered twenty-five meters before pulling his shaft clear, the glistening wetness of Genevra's pussy glowing in the dim sunlight. Then the glorious apogee, ten meters high, everything perfectly aligned. Genevra arched her back against the black sky, her brown hair streaming behind her like a veil, her breasts thrust forward, upright and magnificent, like the figurehead on an ancient sailing vessel, the nipples hard as ice. His dick slammed home in his childhood friend, and he gasped, because she was making a noise he hadn't heard before, a moaning sigh that seemed almost familiar. He twitched his eyes, and on cue Genevra's pussy quaked around him, squeezing him harder and harder, until he slammed into the ground again and blasted his load deep inside her.

He'd bungled the step slightly, and he cursed as his dick pumped, over and over, the orgasm still tailing off ten seconds later when he had to make the corrective step. But he executed the adjustment perfectly, and Genevra sighed in contentment as she pulled off, turning to face him. Not his finest finish, but that one moment—oh, that was how he'd always remember her now. It was probably best to move on.

Still, she was so beautiful, floating in front of him now, the cum dripping down her soft thigh, even as the slickskin did its work on the actual stuff, cleaning and disposing to recycle in a process that was better not to think about. As he bounded across the barren rockscape, he watched her, searching for something familiar. Fifteen years ago now. Truth was, he barely remembered her.

"There was that cleaning mech," he said. "You remember the one? A couple of us locked it in a utility closet, and it was banging around for hours."

"Sure," Genevra said, smiling vacantly. "That sounds fun."

He frowned, and hastily dismissed her. Idiot. From the first moment yesterday, it'd been obvious this was a cheap shell, hardly able to have a conversation at all. Little chance it was even one of Genevra's. But she'd seemed so plausible. Genevra had popped into his mind after all these years, and fifteen minutes of searching had turned up an anonymous shell with a striking resemblance. And there were little things, too, tantalizing hints at the edge of memory. He could've altered her to match his memories even more closely, but he liked it better when he could entertain the fantasy that it really was Genevra's work. He'd been stupid to push it too hard.

Drill Four was only minutes away, so he summoned one of his more ordinary companions, a petite, bald alien with blue skin, immense tits, and eight long, dexterous fingers on each hand. One of the top ten most popular shells, thanks to that memorable entertainment series, but he wasn't a snob. And Xyxxta knew her shit. One look at his suit vitals and she understood the situation called for her split tongue. The slickskin altered texture just so, rippling with a warm wetness over his half-hard cock, and he stroked her smooth head, the suit feedback so transparent and natural that you never remembered unless you thought about it. This was a top-notch suit, after all.

Alvar steadily shortened his leaps, already envisioning the way he'd grab the catchbar on the drill housing. Momentum is momentum, whatever gravity might be telling you, and anyone who forgot that wouldn't have much time to regret it. Just as he caught the bar, Xyxxta surprised him with a slick fingertip in his ass, but that was the kind of clever thing she would do. She knew he was good at his job, that the extra thrill of danger avoided was a rare spice in the life of a grunt tech on this godforsaken rock.

He went through the manual checks: visual, electrical, software. Everything nominal, of course, but it was the last task of today's rounds, and Xyxxta's tongue could make the time pass pleasantly enough. She looked up when she noticed him watching, her blue lips humming around the base of his cock, her deep violet eyes dilating, the fresh, orange-blossom scent of her arousal tickling his nose. Xyxxta would hold him here, a minute away from an orgasm, unless he signaled her to finish. She wasn't a snob, either, and she was smart about her work, even if her personality left something to be desired. That character hadn't exactly been the brains of the show.

The drill wasn't even on-line, but this was the schedule, and he could get audited anytime. He worked meticulously, and Xyxxta was a comfort as always. When the checklist was done, he glanced at the important timer.

Just a half hour left of the five-hour budget. Cheaper suits might let you push it, but these fancy models couldn't be tampered with. He'd only had five orgasms today, but even with the best chemical assistance, he grudgingly accepted the time limit was for the best. Anyway, he was feeling glum after messing up the ending with Genevra. He didn't have the energy to pick a new partner now, and it'd been a while since he'd actually finished off the day with Xyxxta.

"Hey, Xyxx, it's your lucky day," Alvar said.

She laughed in that weird, throaty way, pulling her lips from his cock and giving him a last lick with her forked tongue. "I was hoping you'd say that, Al. Which way d'you want it?"

"In the pussy. And no teeth this time."

"Aww," Xyxxta said. "Next time, right?"

"Sure, sweetheart."

She turned around, bracing herself against the side of the drill housing. All an illusion, of course, but this shell was so quick about using the scenery. And then he was sliding into her soft rear hole, the one with the teeth she was always hoping he'd ask for.

Whoever had written Xyxxta's character must've thought they were so clever, swapping her genitals backwards. But hey, whatever worked. Halfway in he bumped her inner wall, pressing, until finally she moaned and opened all the way. She had a second inner wall, too, if you were ridiculously endowed, or letting your slickskin fake it, but Alvar was happy enough with his basic equipment. And he'd done it with Xyxxta enough times to know exactly how to move so that her breasts swung in their mesmerizing, pendular way. One twenty-fifth of Earth gravity meant five times as long for every swing.

Their conjoined bodies were a pendulum as well, but in comparison to gravity their muscles were strong enough that they might as well be weightless, at least if they tried to thrust too quickly. Either way, if you didn't brace tight or fiddle with tethers, it generally enforced a slow pace for sex. But Xyxxta's pussy worked its magic, and her comically rude grunts and moans had a pleasant familiarity. He stroked her smooth lower back, her perfect, firm ass. If he looked hard enough, he could see the faint edge of his hard outer suit, the sharp line cutting right through her body. Safety meant you could never dial it away completely. But you learned not to notice.

Five minutes later she fluttered her fingers over his balls while he emptied his modest load into her, and then she thanked him in that over-the-top way. But she'd known he wasn't in the mood for one of her yelling orgasms. A well-trained shell, that was for sure. Probably it'd been a committee effort by the promotional staff of that entertainment conglomerate. That was a funny thought. He patted her on the ass and dismissed her with ten minutes still on the clock.

Alvar sighed and turned back. Just fifteen kilometers to his tiny landing shuttle, now serving as sleeping quarters and suit restocking base. He was on the chemical letdown, along with the loneliness that pressed in when he was cut off from his usual distraction. He could talk to Ysabel, but he hated feeling like he only came to her in these moods.

He gained speed, bound by bound. Alvar could practically do this in his sleep. The low sun lit the gray landscape as always, turning in its tight nine-day gyre around the south pole. Barely changed for the fourteen months he'd been here. He wasn't the first man on Titania, but he might be the first to call it home. And perhaps the last.

Push, glide, brace. The landscape flew by at a speed that would've terrified him when he'd first arrived. Ahead was the small crater that provided his shuttle some radiation protection. And high to his left the partially lit green-blue orb of Uranus hung like a massive, bloated fruit. Titania was tidally locked with her father planet, which meant the gas giant would hang in that same spot for the rest of his life.

* * *

Carmen woke him with a blow job, like she always did when he didn't schedule another alarm. But Alvar was in a shitty mood, and he dismissed her right off. She gave her brief pout before disappearing, and five months of that gesture suddenly seemed too much. Time to replace her, as well. After breakfast.

He sat against the wall with his plate of scrambled eggs, shoveling them carefully into his mouth. Titania had less than a quarter of even Luna's gravity, and the slightest mistake would send everything flying. Still a damn sight better than zero g. It was on the ragged edge of acceptable for long-term habitation, and they were still talking about a colony here. The first attempt had fallen apart before it even started, the initial shipments victims of bad luck, dumb management, and even piracy, all the way out here. He had to salute the effort.

This time around, they'd been a hair smarter, investigating whether the rocks mixed in with the cheap ice could make Titania a profitable place. But even the preliminary mining operation might never go operational, depending on Corporate's arcane financial algorithms, or maybe the whim of some idiot oligarch.

He lost concentration and bobbled the plate. The eggs went sailing into the air, but of course they faded away. When he brought the plate up, there they were again, ready to eat.

Even a couple months confined to a suit would send most anyone mad, so Corporate had any number of tricks to help with that, to prevent an employee from committing suicide and affecting profits. This low-key breakfast was one trick he happily played along with. Corporate considered it wasteful to fill even his small shuttle with air, but it was still good to pretend.

Intellectually, he knew it was the suit feeding him: fake eggs, delivered carefully by the slickskin interior of his suit. He could feel the plastic fork on his tongue, but his hand was actually twenty centimeters from his face. The suit worked with its occupant's natural sense of self, and over time you could convince yourself it was your own body you were touching. Some people even claimed they could masturbate just fine, the slickskin fooling them with the feel of their own fingers or palm, but it never worked for Alvar. Like his mistake with the eggs, something always brought him up short. But at least the shells worked fine for Alvar, usually.

The shells were the big way Corporate kept its employees pacified. Everyone used shells, but no one used them more enthusiastically than the grunts in shit jobs scattered across the solar system. And even among that sad tribe, Alvar doubted anyone used shells quite like he did.

He still had some morning wood. Hadn't even turned the chemicals on, but in any case he had to piss. Suddenly he remembered Jacqueline. He hadn't done this with her in a long while.

"Alv ... whass your name again?" she slurred. "Gotta piss like you wouldn't believe."

Wasted on algae vodka, cute as all hell. This was a real shell of hers, one he'd tracked down after the fact without much trouble. She must've had real money problems to put up so many genuine ones, or else she just didn't give a shit. Still, he'd had to tinker with the shell to get it to act out the particular scenario they'd shared.

They'd been on Titan: the gateway to the deep cold, a sprawling city on Saturn's biggest moon. Past closing time at a bar, strangers at loose ends on the way to nowhere. And the nearest public toilet was out of order. Giggling, she'd led him to an airlock, patching in the emergency override.

"What the fuck?" he said now, and she laughed. Just like then. They faced the door of his shuttle, and fastened the emergency facemasks. Down came her pants and out came his cock. She pulled the lever, and Titan's thick atmosphere swirled inside, the frigid nitrogen half freezing him even as Jacqueline's stream arced majestically out the airlock door.

Titan was near Luna gravity, but no one was dumb enough to expose skin to Luna's vacuum and dust. Plus, your piss would just evaporate instantly. On Titan, though, Jacqueline had cleared ten meters of air, her piss splashing on virgin rock, and something about it had been so perfectly ridiculous, so wonderfully alive. She'd won that original contest handily, as she did now. When it was over and he'd gotten the outer door closed, they'd laughed their asses off as they desperately warmed their extremities. Nothing sexual about it, and then they'd sat in the airlock and talked for hours about everything and nothing.

He couldn't remember much of that conversation, and Jacqueline's shell wasn't Jacqueline. Still, he'd sometimes sit with her a while, just reminiscing in silence. None of it counted towards your time budget, if you weren't on the chemicals or otherwise aroused.

"Where'd you wind up, anyway?" Alvar asked, not really expecting an answer.

"Died in an accident on Callisto," Jacqueline said blandly.

He stared at her, mouth opening but not working. Shells could be updated, of course. He eagerly awaited the weekly packet dump, the pages of new uploads and updated versions. But it took some illegal skills and a macabre sense of humor to force-update your old shells with info about your own death. For Jacqueline, it somehow didn't surprise him.

But then she kept talking. "You worry about that sometimes? Dying alone?"

It sounded like Jacqueline all right, more than her shell usually did. But without any of the humor to lighten the sting.

"I try not to think about it," Alvar said.

"Whass this, then? Try not to think about what?"

He stared at the shell. Something had glitched. But that wasn't so unusual in shells that you monkeyed with, the way he'd done with hers. It wasn't a good idea, if you meant to have a coherent conversation. And probably Jacqueline's force-update had fucked it up worse.

"I'm gonna miss you, Jac," he said, and then deactivated her before he got more depressed. He was pretty sure he'd never call her up again.

* * *

It was the kind of morning that called for mindless fucking, and Alvar had years of practice with that. Even before the debts, the long struggle to quit booze, the unraveling of his last few casual friendships. There's always been the fucking, using whatever suit he could afford. He'd never been rich enough to afford a suit like this, and he never would be. He'd known that going in, which put him a step ahead of most of the poor grunts.

There was no limit on number of partners, or climaxes for that matter, aside from what your body could manage. Just the daily time limit. Alvar hadn't exactly set out that morning intending to make personal records, and after the eleventh time he knew his body wasn't what it'd been when he was young and stupider. This suit, though, and these chemicals: no doubt the oligarchs had better ones, but he didn't think they could be all that much better.

He'd argued with Jiang about this, long ago. "Real, warm flesh," Jiang had said. "And someone to hold you afterwards. A good brothel beats a suit any day. Cheaper in the long run, too. You'll get addicted."

Alvar had disagreed, though part of that was defensive. A piece of his mind had known already, that he'd substituted another addiction. And his current suit was so good, he could have the warm woman to hold him all night, if that's what he wanted. Generally he didn't. Anyway, he'd tried the brothels route, and a couple physical relationships. The suits were more reliable. Even with Inés, he'd liked doing it the suits better. Realtime, his cock sliding into her virtual's perfect slickskin pussy, his lips on her perfect slickskin tits. Across the cabin or the ship, his slickskin cock would be pressing inside her, his slickskin lips on her sensitive pink nipples.

Maybe she'd secretly made his cock bigger, or changed his face entirely, but he doubted it. They were alike that way, except that Inés was more so. When he'd admitted he'd probably always prefer the slickskin to physical, she'd broken it off. Alvar had been smart enough not to go looking for one of her shells, though the temptation was strong. Anyway, there was a good chance she hadn't uploaded any. She'd even refused to let them train shells during the months they fucked, though everyone knew that was the best way. A good relationship made for more interesting shells, and Inés was the best he'd had.

Alvar finished vacuuming one of the relay station panels and reassembled everything. His body felt dead as a hunk of meat, and he was getting depressed again. Time for Xyxxta.

"Mmm," she said, furrowing those tattooed eyebrows. "You've been busy. I love a man who knows what he wants."

Ten seconds later she had his soft cock in her mouth, and one of her long fingers deep in his ass, massaging his prostate with her usual expertise. When he began bounding off to his next task, she worked with the natural sway of his hips, the slow swing of his body in motion. Second nature for him after all this time, the unique signature of local gravity.

It took her a long while, but she got him good and hard. By lunch she was working on his balls, the forked tongue darting unexpectedly, longer and quicker than any human's. She'd wrapped all eight fingers around his shaft, but was barely stroking. It was enough. He leaned back against the arbitrarily chosen boulder, letting Jamila feed him his sandwich while he finger-fucked her. Everything about Jamila was perfectly smooth, her plump pussy lips even darker than the rest of her. Her free hand stroked Xyxxta's shoulder. Jamila liked girls, or at least her shell did, and of course Xyxxta would fuck anything that moved, along with most any inanimate object you suggested.

"You like watching two girls?" Jamila asked, and he started. Jamila was a smart shell, but she rarely said anything unless he started the conversation. And this was a weird question, given how much the shell knew about his preferences.

"Yeah," he said in between sandwich bites. "You want to do it with Xyxxta again?"

"Your finger feels pretty good," Jamila said. "But maybe you could fuck Xyxxta, and I could help you both."

He raised his eyebrows. That was bolder than Jamila usually was. But she was smart, and maybe she knew he needed some prodding today.

"I like that idea," Xyxxta mumbled from somewhere below his balls, and he smiled, sensing he'd been double-teamed. Shells couldn't interfere with each other's programming, but they could learn to interact with each other, and he'd used this pair often enough. Watching the smarter ones learn was one of the real joys of using shells, and he had unlimited combinations to experiment with. Some people would reset a shell after a while, but Alvar hated doing that.

It was time to get moving. Next was a test drill out near Elinor crater. Everything on this goddamned rock was named after fictional women from some long-dead writer. Last time he'd had a long job out there, he'd spent three solid days fucking every shell named Elinor he could find. He smiled at the memory.

Xyxxta waited until he got his running rhythm, and then her floating form rose to her feet, smiling in that faux-innocent way. She knew what he wanted when he reached for her, and she jumped into his arms, the suit feedback making it feel—well, close enough. It could only do so much to fake her extra mass.