On Trackless Seas

Chapter 02
***
Waking up in a strange location with no recollection of how one got there is such an overused trope that I almost felt bad when it happened to me, when I actually took a moment to look at my situation objectively.

 

Then, I was right back to subjectively wondering where I was, how I had gotten here, and why I was nude—along with a host of other questions.

 

Questions like, whose bed am I in? Seriously, this thing is the most comfortable bed I have ever heard of, let alone had the privilege to lay on. It was like being in water, as opposed to water beds actually being roughly as hard as concrete and entirely lacking in support. The sheets felt like some combination of silk and fleece that was sinfully smooth and soft, and just the right temperature and weight.

 

Who is the chick wrapped around me like she’s trying to substitute for clothes? She was clinging in a way that pressed every curve of her naked body to my back. And oh, were there curves. I could tell she was a bit shorter than me, with wide hips, large breasts, and cool skin that gave the bedding a run for its money in the ‘softness’ department, but beyond that I couldn’t tell much.

 

Why does my entire body feel different? My teeth? Cavities that I’d been saving to get fixed were simply gone, a missing tooth back where it should be. My hands? Fingers longer, thinner, and not knobby like I’d popped my knuckles for thirty years. Body overall? Like I lived in the gym instead of living the life of an IT worker behind a desk. Even my dick felt larger, upon investigation.

 

At least I still have my beard, the idle thought crossed my mind before I dismissed it.

 

Gently disentangling myself from my clingy bed mate, I sat up. The room was cast in total darkness, but as soon as I started moving the illumination came up slowly before leaving the room at a comfortable level of lighting. The light didn’t have any one source and instead seemed to come from the walls and ceiling.

 

A look down at myself confirmed what proprioception and a few touches had already told me about my body, so I turned my gaze to the rest of the room.

 

The room was a cozy size, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, and sparsely furnished—but what was there was of obviously high quality. Smooth, warm red wood floor that looked like it was all one piece. Walls and ceiling made of a material I couldn’t identify that looked just as smooth as the floor, save for obvious doors. A small table beside the bed I was laying on and a dresser against a wall beside what was probably a small closet. A love seat and a coffee table off to one side. No television, windows, lighting fixtures, electrical sockets, and no switches.

 

The bed was a pretty standard rectangular affair, but looked like someone had decided a king size was too small and had instead gone up to emperor, and the bedding was black trimmed in dark red. There was a headboard and foot board, along with column-like posts at each corner stretching up to and merging with the ceiling, carved with an outdoorsy design. The columns resembled trees, to the point that they spread out into a green canopy above the bed, while the headboard was a wooded scene and appeared to be made of the same wood as the floor and other furniture. Hanging from the posts were dark green curtains, but they were drawn up at the moment.

 

Finally, I turned to look at the woman sharing my bed and my heart stopped. “Lesl—”

 

My mouth shut with a click of teeth as I met her familiar eyes. She looked younger—a lot younger, like the last time I saw her just out of high school, before I made the mistake of writing her off and not the late-30s woman who’d had three children and smoked a pack a day—but it was still the woman I knew. My heart ached and I turned away from the blatant reminder of what was probably my biggest regret.

 

She backed away, pulling she bedding up to cover her nakedness as she sat up, head turning down and dark hair pooling around her in the corner of my vision. “I’m sorry!” she apologized quickly, tone contrite and panicked, before I could say anything. “I, I thought you would prefer seeing a familiar face when you woke up. I didn’t realize— I’m really, very sorry. I-I’ll change it now!”

 

“Don’t go digging through my exes and it should be fine,” I warned quietly. Not that that particular face had been one. The one that got away, on the other hand, yes.

 

“Hmm,” the woman hummed and I felt a hand tentatively rest on my shoulder. “How about I change and you stop me when I get it right?”

 

Turning back to look at her, I watched the face she wore shift, features changing like someone playing with a slider. It happened almost faster than I could keep up. Her nose changed shape and size, first larger and wider, then small and narrow to a cute button nose. Lips bloomed to ridiculous porn starlet before settling down into a small moue that looked amazingly kissable—and immediately evoked mental images of having them stretched around my dick.

 

Eyebrows thickened and lengthened, before narrowing down and leaving her face with a naturally teasing or amused look. The eyes beneath them shifted both in size and placement, widening, narrowing, and tilting until they came out perfectly spaced with a bit of a slant to them—then they cycled through colors before settling on bright green. Her hair shortened and changed styles and colors, gradually lengthening until she laughingly asked, “All the way to my feet?”

 

“I’d be fine with that,” I chuckled quietly, absolutely fascinated as I watched her change. The hair eventually settled on an inky black that, when it caught the light just right, shone with a hint of something like violet, and at a length that looked exactly like what she had suggested. “How are you deciding when to stop?”

 

Her skin shifted colors, darkening a bit past a healthy tan before abruptly going very, very pale—not unhealthy, but the milky complexion of someone particularly fair skinned. “A combination of things. I uh, don’t get mad?” I made a rolling ‘go on’ motion with my hand. “I started with your taste in women from, um, her… and your previous, yeah. Anyway!” She coughed quietly, the nervous look returning momentarily before she pushed through. “Started with that and then took the data I scraped from your browser history, anime and manga, and saved porn collection. From there, I’m reading your biometrics, microexpressions, infrared, and a few other things to see how you respond on a subconscious level.”

 

“Anime women are unrealistic,” I started to point out and she shrugged.

 

“This body is made of smartmatter. It’s not limited by real biology and when I eventually do create a bio-body for reproductive purposes, I’ll be able to adjust it in ways baseline humans can’t emulate even with plastic surgery. In other words, ‘unrealistic’ is relative for me.”

 

With a naughty grin, she stood up off the bed and opened her arms wide, showcasing her changes so far. Then, her body began to change as her face and other features had. Breasts grew, and grew, and grew until they looked like beach balls. My eyebrows climbed for my hairline as I shook my head.

 

“See?” She poked one, setting it into a ponderous jiggle. “Relative.” I opened my mouth, only to be cut off by a knowing look. “Don’t pretend you aren’t interested. I’ve seen what you fap to. I know all your fetishes, mister. And trust me, we’ll be going through all of them.” A pause as she took in my skeptical look. “Yes, all of them.”

 

“Do I get a say?”

 

“Sure, but I can guarantee you’ll say yes,” the woman smirked. “Especially when I can bring literally any woman you’ve ever fantasized about to life.”

 

The boobs of unusual size shrank down, disappearing as quickly as they came. And down, and down. “Washboard?” shaking her head, she stopped and rolled her eyes before they expanded back into a very nice, perfectly proportionate and perky upturned curve with small nipples that stood out about half an inch. “So you really don’t have a preference there. Strange.”

 

“My preference is ‘whatever looks best on the woman.’ If you can change everything, then, well…”

 

“Right, no preference beyond symmetry and proportion,” she nodded.

 

With that, her body grew taller before abruptly reversing course and shrinking down, stopping around 5’4”. Arms, hands, legs, and feet all shifted into perfect proportions. Muscle tone and fat shifted until she came out lean and toned—a sporty physique. Hips and ass shifted into what could best be described as the kind of apple ass that women who wore yoga pants wished they had and a very grabbable set of hips that bordered on what could be called ‘childbearing.’ Pubic hair thickened, changed, and eventually was done away with entirely, along with every other bit of hair that wasn’t on her head.

 

Finally, she stopped and crawled back into the bed and it was an uphill battle to keep my eyes on her face. “It’s okay to look. I want you to look. I built this body for you, after all.”

 

I gave her a long, appreciative once over before reigning it in. “Do you have a name?”

 

The woman smiled and shook her head. “No. It is your privilege to name me. But really, that’s the first thing you ask?”

 

“Woman, I feel like I’ve been thrown down a rabbit hole. I have about a million questions, but I suppose it’d be easier if I had something to refer to you as other than ‘you.’” Eyeing her, I hummed and asked, “It’s unoriginal, but how’s Alice work for you?”

 

“‘Alice,’” the woman said, repeating it softly several times, testing the name. Abruptly, she straightened, body going rigid as her eyes glowed faintly, visible even in the light of the room. “Controlling intelligence designation ‘Alice’ confirmed. INSV Last Whisper is yours, Captain Wright.” Alice relaxed and bowed her head, “What do you wish to know, my captain?”

 

Blinking, I considered her as I turned over everything I’d seen in my mind. “‘INSV?’”

 

“Imperial Naval Space Vessel.”

 

“Uh huh,” I muttered. “‘Controlling intelligence?’ You’re an A.I.?”

 

Alice shook her head, dark hair swishing about as she did. “No, captain—”

 

“Kyle,” I corrected. When she sent me a questioning look and made to protest, I pointed out the obvious. “I’m not wearing a uniform. Neither are you.”

 

Tilting her head a bit to the side, Alice considered it—or rather, acted out considering it when, if I was correct, she had made her decision in the milliseconds after I had finished speaking. “Informal address for informal situations is acceptable,” she finally stated.

 

Her eyes met my own and she smiled. “I’m not an artificial intelligence as you think of them, or Earth media portrays them. I was artificially created, yes—engineered, even. However, beyond some core guidelines and programming, my intelligence and personality all grew along more biological lines. My primary neural matrix runs on a computer that simulates a biological brain, while my secondary neural matrix and seat of consciousness—or soul, if you prefer—is hosted on a biological platform. The two are synced and, unless I need to dip into higher CPU usage for calculations or to emulate time dilation, I never notice a difference between them. This platform is running a tertiary neural matrix that is synced with my primary and secondary, but runs strictly in realtime.”

 

In other words, while she could spend relative hours deciding on something while I waited what felt like a moment and then spend more subjective hours deciding how best to emulate human responses to maximum effect—that is, to better manipulate someone—she didn’t really need to. If she was telling the truth, then I wasn’t dealing with a soulless machine, just an alien intelligence that happened to have a computer for half, well a third, of a brain.

 

I resolved to ask several very pointed philosophical and technical questions about her nature and origin later. Instead, I focused on the more immediately important questions. “Where are we? I understand that we’re on a ship and that you are the… physical avatar of that ship? Ship girl?” I asked for confirmation and she nodded. “Where is the ship in question? Earth?”

 

Alice winced, looking away. “No, ca—Kyle. Approximately seventy hours ago, the Whisper left Earth orbit and entered subspace, immediately after you were brought aboard. I took a heading,” she paused at the look on my face. I didn’t particularly care for the technical details, I wanted the general overview. “A few minutes after we entered subspace, relative to clearing the Kuiper Belt in realspace, I encountered a spacial anomaly that didn’t show up on my sensors until I was practically on top of it. I was unable to turn in time and entered the anomaly. Sensors do detect subspace beyond the walls of the anomaly but moving by at a speed many, many times greater than my engines are capable of traveling.”

 

“Wormhole?”

 

Alice smiled faintly, nodding. “A wormhole.” Her expression shifted to excited. “In subspace!”

 

“That’s rare?”

 

The woman rolled her eyes. “My databanks are full of all kinds of research material on wormholes and related phenomena. I could make wormhole based weapons or FTL drives if I wanted to, at this point. They were thought to occur exclusively in realspace. A wormhole existing within subspace? So close to a garden world? With sentient life? That screams ‘forerunner race technology.’ The kind of stuff that makes my people look like your cavemen banging stones together. I’ve been scanning it nonstop and it’s absolutely fascinating—”

 

“I’m sure it is,” I agreed calmly, but something must have given me away because she stilled, all the excitement wiped off her face as she turned serious. “Can you get us out? Does this tunnel have an end?”

 

“I have been unable to locate an exit. Not to subspace, a nexus, or anything else. As far as my sensors can detect, this is one long, continuous path. I believe I could get us out by modifying an anti-superluminal warhead—in fact, I have already done just that and prepared a torpedo. I believe I will be able to collapse the wormhole ahead of us, prematurely ending the tunnel and forcing an opening into subspace allowing us to exit. There are risks, however. The tunnel could collapse entirely, destroying the ship in the process. Physics could turn us inside out or explode our atoms at the speed of light. Or we could simply exit somewhere unexpected. I’ve run a few models, but simulations will only go so far. All they can guarantee is that the wormhole can be breached. What happens after is up in the air.”

 

I digested that for a moment before asking, “Are we in any danger right this moment?”

 

“Immeasurable. I haven’t noticed any radiation outside of what I was expecting—nothing my shielding or hull couldn’t handle. Of course, that’s just what I’m capable of detecting—for all I know, we could be taking in deadly radiation that can’t be observed or shielded against. The wormhole could exit outside of the universe, or into a universe filled with cosmic horrors. We could be circling a black hole, stuck in time dilation until the heat death of the universe. We’ve been scanned at regular intervals along our path by a high energy waveform that penetrates my shielding and hull and while it appears harmless, I am not entirely sure what it does—it could be keeping us locked in here indefinitely.”

 

Sighing, I asked, “Immediate dangers?”

 

Alice opened her mouth, paused, then closed it with a click of teeth. “I don’t know.”

 

“And it scares you?”

 

The woman nodded. “More than anything. Because you are in danger and there is nothing I can truly do about it.”

 

Ah, so that was it. She wasn’t worried about herself. She was worried about me. Or perhaps, more specifically, her captain. She seemed… young, and very inexperienced. The thought had crossed my mind that it was an act, tuned to my reactions based on information she had gathered about me, but it seemed entirely too genuine for that. She was eager to please—over eager, in fact. She was even a little manipulative, but in the same breath she admitted to doing so specifically to better suit herself to my tastes, which ran right back into ‘eager to please’ territory.

 

But what I saw now?

 

It was the look of someone who desperately wanted to impress someone they felt was important, but had only bad news to give. And yet, because I asked, she forced herself to risk my anger or disappointment to tell me the truth instead of just lying and saying everything was fine. I could respect that, admire it even.

 

“Okay. Let’s fix this mess, then.” Alice blinked before an eager smile settled onto her pretty face. “Let’s start with some clothes.”

 

Standing up from the bed, she hurried to the dresser and began opening drawers. I followed and took the clothes she offered. It was all things I recognized, at least in form if not in brand or material. Boxers, socks, pants, belt, boots, and a long sleeve thermal shirt were all quickly donned. The shirt was a dark, dried blood red while the pants were black and the boots were a dark, leather brown. Everything but the boots felt vaguely like cotton, but smoother, and when I got the shirt on it pulled tight against my body. “Smart matter?”

 

Alice nodded. “Most of the things aboard are. Either artificially created smart matter, like your clothes or the bed sheets; or biological smart matter that I grow such as the walls, floor, and furniture.” She padded over to the closet and it was at this point that I realized she hadn’t pulled out anything for herself yet. Opening the closet, she pulled out a black long coat with dark red piping before passing it over. “The Whisper is currently in winter, so public spaces such as hallways and open areas like the garden are cold—only personal quarters and necessities like the bridge, engineering, medical, and other work spaces are exempt from seasonal change and weather.”

 

Pulling on the coat and feeling it conform to my body, I asked, “Isn’t that a bit wasteful, in terms of power and resources? Especially on a military vessel?”

 

Alice lead me to the door, which opened at her approach, parting silently in the middle and sliding into the walls. A light gust of cold air flooded the room and her nipples immediately went perky. Between steps, clothes flowed out of her body as she crossed the threshold—knee-high brown leather boots, stockings that went up to mid-thigh, a black and red tartan short skirt that stopped above her stockings to leave a two inch gap of bare skin, and a waist-length uniform jacket similar to my own.

 

“Not really. I have power to spare. At constant, full output my power plant would survive the heat death of this universe and well into the next before I needed to replace it,” Alice explained as we walked, her flat heels thumping softly in the layer of black soil and brown, dead grass that lined the hall. A hallway that looked less like a hall and more like a path through a forest.

 

Trees appeared to line the path, curving from the floor up to the ceiling ten feet above, where they intertwined into a collection of leafy branches—leaves that were more like translucent green crystal that allowed the artificial lighting to pass through. In between gaps in the leaves and branches I could make out blue and white of a sky that looked real from where I was standing but couldn’t possibly be.

 

The gaps between trees allowed me to see out seemingly into miles of forest, until I ran my hand along a tree and followed it until it flattened out into a wall, and I realized the walls were displaying an image of a much larger forest. Combined with the breeze, light, and appearance of sky I could almost forget I was on a ship floating through space so long as I didn’t touch the walls. I swore I even heard birds somewhere.

 

Gesturing to the walls and floor, Alice’s voice pulled me from my observations. “There are more practical reasons, besides. The Last Whisper is home to a living biome containing one mega-flora, one near-human, and several thousand smaller organisms including fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, and insects—all engineered to coexist in a natural ecosystem that serves as basic maintenance and cleaning for my exposed biological parts, waste disposal, water filtration, and so on. The only parts of me that aren’t alive are my hypermatter outer hull and the internal bracing and support used to help hold it together.”

 

“You’re a plant.”

 

Alice shrugged. “The majority of my body is composed of plant-based smart matter, but I’m as far removed from plants as you are from your hominid ancestors. Further, really.”

 

Ahead of her, the hallway abruptly split and opened and I realized that we hadn’t actually walked all that far—maybe fifty feet in total. With the way the walls could display images, I’d thought the hall had been much longer. We stepped into a featureless room shaped like a half-dome. “Captain on the bridge,” Alice announced with an amused smile as she stopped in the middle of the room. A chair rose up from the floor like water flowing in reverse and she placed her hand on the back, gesturing for me to sit with the other.

 

“Not much in the way of controls,” I pointed out, dropping into the chair, which immediately began to conform to the shape of my body. It grew softer and reclined a few degrees, growing arm and leg rests as it raised up a little further from the floor, bringing my head even with Alice’s.

 

“I am the ship, my captain. Why would I need manual controls to move myself? Everything here is for your benefit, or that of future guests who lack a direct neural interface. Your interface is currently set to one way communication. I had intended to ease you into learning, well, everything about your situation but it seems we’re a bit pressed for time at the moment.”

 

I frowned over at the woman and she winced. “You can read my mind.”

 

“A little?” she tried. My eyes narrowed and she simply nodded. “It’s, it’s how ship bonding works. Captain and ship connect, share thoughts and feelings, and learn to interpret and anticipate each others’ needs. I’m sorry I didn’t ask permission—”

 

“Anything else you did that I should know about?” Alice nodded and I sighed. “We can go over it later. Can you show me—”

 

I cut off as the walls and floor shifted, showing a display of what was apparently outside the ship. From my perspective, we sat—or stood, in Alice’s case—in a sort of watery blue tube occasionally pulsing with blue light, streaking silently through an inky void. “This is the inside of a wormhole?”

 

“It’s what my external visual feeds see, yes,” Alice nodded. “Bringing up sensor feeds.”

 

The display was overlaid with countless colors and streams of data that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, beyond a grid outline tracing ahead and behind us outlining the walls of the wormhole. In the space immediately before me, light flared briefly before a hologram sprang to life. Earth and the moon, along with what I assumed was the ship herself. The Last Whisper was a dark, angular ship that looked more like a bared knife than a space ship. There were no nacelles, no sweeping curves, no gun ports, no obvious means of propulsion, and no windows. It kind of reminded me of the old F-117, with the angular geometry.

 

I had no real sense of scale for what I was looking at, but at the thought grids flowed over the ship in the hologram and statistics floated beside it—Alice having apparently having picked up the thought and acted on the non-verbal request for information.

 

I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that yet, but I would deal with it later.

 

The Whisper was 250 meters from stem to stern, with a 50 meter beam at its widest—about two thirds back from the fore. The displacement was listed as ‘classified.’ Shooting a questioning look at Alice, she smiled sheepishly.

 

“It’s not polite to ask a lady’s tonnage, captain.” I shot her a dry look and she quickly added, “Hypermatter armor is very dense and very heavy. It, it’s not fair to judge me by the standards of a planet that still uses steel in their construction!”

 

“Uh huh,” I rolled my eyes, turning back to the hologram. I watched as it showed the Whisper turn away from Earth and disappear. “How do you have a visual of yourself leaving?”

 

A second hologram popped up, displaying something the rough size of a football and shaped like a miniature version of the ship. “I left an observation drone behind. All of my drones, this body, and your new body all share a quantum data link with my main body. So long as the other side is intact, I can communicate with it with no lag from any distance. It’s how I have a rough estimate of just how far we’ve gone.”

 

The hologram expanded and zoomed out. From Earth, to the solar system, to the Milky Way—a blue line streaking ever away from the planet I’d called home. “Uh,” I muttered as it went out even further, until it became nothing but a single dot and a blue line in a sea of unknown black. “Alice? How… how far are we from Earth?”

 

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Not with any certainty. Not without leaving the wormhole and subspace and having a chance to scan with my astrometrics suite.”

 

Looking from the hologram to the walls around us, showing an unchanging tunnel of watery light, I made my decision. “Alice, get us out of here. If we die, we die, but I’m not going to stay stuck in transit while we’re ejected from the goddamn universe itself. I don’t want to find out what’s outside of everything firsthand.”

 

Her hand came down gently on my shoulder, but I felt the way it trembled. “Aye aye, captain. Torpedo armed and loaded. Awaiting your command.”

 

Taking a deep breath, I braced myself for the worst. Reaching up, I took her hand in my own. Opening my mouth, I hesitated. Eventually, I said, “I’m not angry with you for connecting our minds. I’m annoyed that you did it without asking me first. Next time, ask. Assuming there is a next time.”

 

“Yes, captain,” the woman agreed quietly, squeezing my hand.

 

“Fire.”

 

A small, dark shape streaked away from the ship, its passage marked only by the shadow it made against the blue of the tunnel and the way the Whisper’s sensors painted its path. A five second countdown started and ended in what felt like the blink of an eye. Ahead of us, a sphere of white light expanded to fill the tunnel. Abruptly, the ship shuddered and the blue tunnel terminated in inky black. I didn’t have time to think about it before we were flying through the space where the torpedo had detonated.

 

When we didn’t splatter ourselves on a planet, explode at the speed of light, or turn inside out I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. At my side, Alice jumped in place and cheered. “Yes! We did it! Who’s awesome? I’m awesome!”

 

I laughed as the tension bled out of me, slumping into the supremely comfortable chair. A moment later, I let out a quiet huff of breath as Alice plopped her weight into my lap and draped herself over me, her hair smacking me in the face as she stretched out. “Make your own seat,” I complained halfheartedly.

 

“I did,” she snarked, twisting back and forth in my lap to get comfortable. “It came out a little lumpy.”

 

“That’s your own fault,” I snorted quietly. Deciding to save flirting with the sexy tree ship’s avatar for later, I asked, “So, where are we?”

 

“I’m still scanning, but we appear to be in realspace,” Alice answered, before gesturing towards the walls. “Apparently, cutting the wormhole the way I did—by forcing an exit from subspace—made it cross over instead of just spitting us out and the hole closing up naturally. I’ve done a long range scan of the system and I’m already running comparisons with the visible stars and readings from them against my database. I’ve launched drones already for a more in-depth analysis of the system, so we should know more about it soon.”

 

Nodding along, I gestured behind us. “And why does it look like we almost came out inside of a star.”

 

Alice winced. “Because we did. Almost. It’s okay though! Even if we had, it would’ve been fine. So long as it wasn’t actually, you know, in the center of the star. We’re built with environmental hardening by default. In fact, for those of us who don’t already have the tech built, stars are our forges for exotic materials like hypermatter. We’re designed to dive into them and use the intense heat and pressure to make repairs, build additions, and so on.”

 

I tried leaning back and the seat complied, allowing me to recline fully. Alice took that as an invitation to spread out on me as I yawned. I hadn’t been up for more than an hour but I suddenly felt dead tired. “Ugh, I feel like I need a nap.”

 

“Adrenaline crash,” she answered immediately. “I may have over-engineered your new body and added a lot of cybernetics, but you’re still mostly human. It’s going to take a few hours to figure out where we are. Take a nap. I’ll wake you when I’m done.”

 

“Mm,” I nodded in agreement, allowing my eyes to drift closed. “Some time in the very near future, you’re going to tell me what all you did to me.”

 

“I will, my captain. Rest now.”

 

I went out like a light.