Chapter 20
Jon had seriously intended to visit the brothel, but between Kiash and Hali, he didn’t have a time to play between all the play. It was not a complaint, just a realization that he was easily distracted. Loxy, Lilith, and Kiash solidified their friendship and shared a ring with her.
Then they were off, back to Lanza space. Onuk was parked where they had left it.
It was clear that the pilots had made headway befriending the Little Ones, and so Biocorp had decided not to use their pilots in aggressive maneuvers to capture the Little Ones to avoid losing ground in the trust department. Biocorp did try to catch a couple using metal ships, but the Little Ones could always jump to safety.
The Space elevator had come online and traffic was flowing. It was a ten day trip from ground to station, a double tether with one car going up, and another going down. They would pass midway. Lanzarians came to visit the station. Some made it their home. Enya was one of them that had move into orbit. Jon spent time with her and the twins. He ordered her a personal surrogate android so that she would have help with the twins in his absence. When he slept, he visited others via the androids, possessing them, helping mothers, and caring for babies. When not directly involved, he continued to receive updates, assessed needs, and spent a fortune buying more androids. He wasn’t just getting experience, though. He was growing in wisdom.
He found he had new skillsets that he hadn’t even known he had. He found himself holding babies all the time; even at night, his dreams were of holding babies. There were some in between dreams of drama, minor conflicts that required resolutions, and he wondered if his dream solutions were sent back out to the collective personalities in order to help bring a greater level of peace. He discovered he was really good at caring for babies. He found he actually loved holding babies. He would sing to them and provided nurture in a way that was vastly different than what he remembered recieving. One of the regions Jon visited he found the females were darker, and dressed in clothing similar two traditional Cambodian dance wear. They had gold ear rings, and upper arm bands, and he wondered if they were dressing up because he was visiting, or they always ‘dressed up.’
Of course, it wasn’t just him being useful below. Lilith and Loxy were also tuning into androids and providing assistance and holding babies. This was probably the longest spell of happiness Jon had recalled ever having. Lilith radiated love. He watched her for hours, her eyes closed, the halo lights blinking, her smile captivating. He wanted her, but he didn’t intrude while she was away. He could have. She had given him an open invitation, but he wanted her present. Elodie captured him staring, and he asked her if she wanted to play. He only had to ask, and she was practically attacking him. When not playing, she had her own halo, and she, too, participated below, caring for babies and learning about the Lanzarians and their regional diversity. Binh Ngo, Biocorp representative, head of the Lanza operation, began pushing for more creative ways to entice the Little Ones into being more cooperative. He was also trying to get Jon to do more pilot things and less fatherly things. They had a bio-engineer in a free-floating habitat in orbit around the gas giant studying the Little Ones. The Little Ones had avoided the habitat until they observed Onuka hovering around it. Biocorp was interested in their mating habits, but no one had yet seen them mating. They knew they did, because the Little Ones had little ones. Jon spent days hanging with Onuka, hovering near the station. Quantum links allowed him to tune into any of the androids, but he found every time he got himself comfortable the Little Ones would come and bump Onuka, as if trying to distract him from anything other than being present with them. Other than that, there was no evidence that they understood or responded to quantum frequencies; they definitely seemed to know when Jon was focused elsewhere. The Little Ones seemed to have been in a rather mischievous mood on his designated day to bounce back to Indigo, because he couldn’t even close his eyes for a minute before they playfully bumped him. Trilon, Shay’s ship, approached to hover near, but it didn’t stop them from playing with Onuka. They preferred Onuka, but they no longer fled from Trilon. Shay asked Jon to stay while she tried to get the Little Ones to play with her the way they were with him. He tried to nap, but the Little Ones bumped him. He tried meditating, but again the Little Ones bumped Onuka.
Jon went for coffee. Elodie was sitting on the table, her feet on the bench, her elbows on her knees, breathing in over a cup of tea. Loxy was planet side, helping with babies.
“Can’t sleep either?” Elodie asked.
“Not from wanting,” Jon said. “I think Lilith would sleep through a train wreck. You okay?”
“Yeah, just, seems like there is so much work to do with the babies and all. They clearly weren’t thinking ahead when they decided to get pregnant all at once,” Elodie said. “Fifty thousand surrogates might not be enough.”
“They could afford it,” Jon said. “They just have to request them.”
A hail came through from Shay. He met her on virtual deck. “I have an idea. Link with me.”
Jon agreed and they directed their ships to kiss, linking airlock to airlock. It wasn’t technically kissing, but it was so much like that Jon called it the kissing maneuver. Jon requested
Loxy back. She returned. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Shay wanted to try something. I didn’t want a disruption if something happened,” Jon said.
“Good idea,” Loxy said. Even though the moment she disconnected the resident simulated personality would have kicked in, there was no need to risk dropping babies to test that theory.
Jon dropped from virtual deck and went forward to greet Shay, who had already crossed into his airlock. Being around the octopus head was an intriguing experience. It wasn’t just an octopus head. It was an octopus over a human head. It was a symbiotic relationship where the human and the cephalopod had become one entity. The octopus could disengage and they would become two distinct, but separate personalities, but together they formed a new, superior personality. Neither was dominant, they were enmeshed. So it wasn’t like the octopus had a tentacle up the human’s butt, moving it like a puppet. It did extend a ‘mating’ structure into the human’s mouth and lungs, so that the human breathed air through the body of the octopus. The octopus couldn’t breathe direct air through its gills, which meant it required the human lungs to function out of water. In water, the human needed the companion’s gills. While attached to the human, the human and octopus shared blood, exactly like Jon and Lilith, only this connection was sustained. If the cephalopod disconnected from the human, you would find puncture areas on both sides of the next where the two shared circulation, sharing oxygenated blood and blood sugars.
The first several times Jon had met the octopus head, they were very clearly human body with an octopus head, as they were not utilizing their camouflage ability. The octopus could, however, literally render itself invisible. Unless you were knowledgeable or gifted with sight, you would only see the human host. That was how Shay was coming at him. The human female host was beautiful in her own way, but the cephalopod portion was worried Jon wouldn’t like the idea of kissing an octopus, and so not only was it rendering itself invisible, it was enhancing features that would entice Jon to want to engage the human aspect in a sexual way. Jon knew there was an octopus there, he could see a shimmer about her head, like an aura, through which the background was slightly distorted, and most noticeable if he moved.
Jon was mesmerized chasing the visual cues of something more than the human aspect of Shay, so he was taken by surprised when she kissed him. She took him to the glass wall of the inner airlock. Human host connected to a cephalopod had greater strength.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jon said.
“We were told to engage,” Shay said. Though technically it was one entity, it referred to itself as ‘we.’
“Who told us to engage?” Jon asked. Jon had heard ‘we’ as ‘Shay and Jon.’
“Binh Ngo,” Shay said. “He approved the idea. He didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?” Jon said.
“You and I will engage in intimacy. We will link electronically so we will both experience orgasm simultaneously. On achieving climax, you will direct Onuka to jump and we jump together, broadcasting our orgasm through both our ships concurrently. Learning by orgasm always leads to improved learning, and a wanting for more. If you don’t like math, masturbate with an algebra book and soon numbers will get you off. This technique is used to acclimate new human hosts to the symbiotic relationship,” Shay said.
“Umm,” Jon stammered. He was already versed with that technique. He was surprised someone else knew of it.
“Sounds plausible,” Loxy said. “I think Lilith and I will ride the wave with you electronically, which will amplify the orgasm.”
“Oh, I want in on that, too,” Elodie said. “For posterity, of course.” “Umm,” Jon said, trying to think of a reason not to.
“Are you reluctant because of my symbiotic nature?” Shay said.
“No. No! That wouldn’t stop me,” Jon said. “Hell, I would do an octopus just by itself.” “You have,” Loxy said.
“That wasn’t a dream?” Jon asked.
“Dreams are real,” Loxy reminded him.
“That is a huge turn on,” Shay said. “But you still have reservations?” “No, yes, um, I am sorting!” Jon said.
“Sort out loud,” Loxy said.
“Okay, well, I keep hitting this barrier of my earth programming that says I shouldn’t engage, even though I have engaged more in space than I ever did on earth, and with a few exceptions, I have not been slut shamed, but I keep worrying that I am going to hit a barrier where if I keep engaging strange I am going to be rejected, and I am feeling selfish, because if we were alone, I would have so already tapped into this exoticness, and we have a reporter who is joining in, for posterity, which means everyone’s going to know my proclivities, and it doesn’t help that they already know and I am not being judged, so what, I am judging myself…” Jon rambled.
Shay interrupted him with a kiss, face tentacles drawing round him. She drew Jon down to the floor where human hands freed him from his clothes and they engaged. Onuka was no stranger to this escalation of physical and emotional stimulus, as early on everything was broadcasted due to a broken transmitter. She had grown since then. In humans, the sacral nerve when stimulated to a certain level results in a petit mort, or mini death, orgasm. In a living, human cadaver, a person who was brain dead, and the heart beating to maintain the organs for donor harvest, stimulating this nerve complex not only gave the body an orgasm, but caused the arms to cross over the chest. This usually freaked out the uninitiated intern, but it is also interesting that most humans laid to rest are put with their hands in this position. Was there a connection… Jon had to give up following it as the sensations became too serious to track anything but the sensations.
Onuka’s bio-structures that correspond to the sacral nerve were more pronounced due to the activities that had happened, almost daily, since they started flying. Even if he hadn’t met
Lilith, who had her own level of hyper sexuality due to humans being a ‘super stimulus,’ like the beetles to the beer bottles, Jon was so hyper-sexual he would have masturbated four times a day on a regular day, nut if he were being cooped up in a small space bored out of his mind for months at a time, he would likely masturbate so much he would give himself friction burns on his penis. He had not always been kind to his penis, having had his own versions of frenzy spells. Being on a small spaceship between stars was the equivalent of being snowed into a log cabin, unable to escape till spring. Of course, Loxy would have helped, so their play might have reached the same levels as he and Lilith. Space traveling alone was boring. Lilith was hyper aroused being around Jon, and she released pheromones that hyper-enticed Jon into engagement.
Jon’s past trauma already put him in a perpetual state of hyper arousal, so the pheromones were just icing on the cake. Lilith and Jon over stimulated each other most the time, which is why she slept so much in his absence, but their time together was just the right level of energy for them to quickly exhaust themselves into a ‘normal’ state of being for almost six hours. There were cycles where they spent the entire three days of waiting for the next jump engaged intimacy. Since then, they had found a balance that worked for them and they consciously made efforts to keep a balance. That balanced shifted each time he took on a new partner.
Loxy helped maintain that balance by playing with them, taking on some of their energy directly as herself, or vicariously through Amy. With every new partner Jon had experienced a whole new recalibration, starting the acclimation process over with Lilith and Loxy. Every time he explored a world and encountered someone who was not interested, he would come back to home base, and Loxy and Lilith settled his energy. A part of him wanted to never leave Onuka so he wouldn’t be confronted with the urge and the need to recalibrate his libido’s equilibrium. It was Loxy who told him he needed to engage enough people that not engaging occurred naturally.
He was skeptical of her plan, as he didn’t believe there was a threshold of people where he would stop engaging strange. Loxy was insistent that there was and that he needed to know it for himself by experiencing it directly, not vicariously through study or word of mouth or philosophy, but through direct experience that he would be rejected by some, accepted by some, but ultimately, no matter what, loved by most. No matter what he did and with whom, Loxy and Lilith would love him. His group would love him. They all wanted him to know this. Finding this to be true through direct experience was the only way to heal his past.
Being joined electronically allowed Shay and Elodie to experience Loxy’s unconditional love for Jon. Lilith, too, held this for Jon. This emotion of total acceptance was shared, amplified, and Shay recognized it for the emotion that host and cephalopod felt towards each other, and how the ‘two’ felt towards the ‘Shay’ personality. Shay had touched that, understood it intellectually, but had never fully grasped it until she found it mirrored in the Jon ‘system’ of personalities. Jon, Loxy, Lilith, Onuka were one, and separate, just as she was comprised of others. Shay saw herself mirrored in Jon’s eyes. She saw herself as her. She saw herself as human. She saw herself as cephalopod. She saw Jon’s acceptance of both separate entities and as the one called Shay. She saw Jon in his entirety as himself and all the other personalities presently participating in his life. She realized that all the souls that had touched his journey were participating in the expression of who he was. There was acceptance.
Shay gasped, her orgasm brought with it an unexpected state of expansion. She clung to Jon tightly with arms, legs, and tentacles. She wanted him to be as one with her as her human and octopus nature were one with her- and her expanding sense of oneness with all the universe. Her sense of connection to all there is became absolute, and universal love was certainty. Even so, she remembered her separateness, could feel Jon separateness. She wanted to bring him into the light. They all shared this desperate need for enmeshment and love simultaneously, only she knew there was more. Whatever she was experiencing, it didn’t fully translate; they all felt love, but she had gone further. Onuka traveled, bringing Trilon with them. Onuka shuddered. So did
Trilon. A song began to play. Depeche Mode. “Strangelove.” Onuka’s traveling extended the contractions, amplifying the orgasm. They traveled again, jumping through space like a rock skipping over the waters. They settled in a new place, in the light of a sun. It was a safe, dreamy place, and they all slept.