“Crazy, right, that there’s no gravity in space?”
Rose would have floated away from Daniel when the Tranquility module lost its namesake, but her feet were strapped to the pedals of the exercise bike. “You can say we’re in a zero-G environment, but what’s ‘crazy’ is to say that there’s no gravity in space.”
She would not have had to explain basic physics to the partner she trained with for an entire year down on Earth. They would have been talking about the mission and its many essential tasks. This boy was not her partner. This boy was an idiot, a last-minute replacement whose ultra-rich dad decided it’d be good for him to see the world.
“Pfft, for a genius, you’re not very smart. Look at your hair; it’s floating, like a shiny blonde jellyfish. And check this out.” Daniel almost kicked Rose in the face with his childish backflip in a 100-billion-dollar satellite covered wall-to-wall in sensitive, life-saving equipment.
Rose had promised herself she wouldn’t blame the idiot kid for the hubris of his rich father, that she wouldn’t let the fact that she was poised to become the youngest person to ever board the International Space Station before the last-minute swap get to her. She couldn’t even hold the title for two seconds as this 18-year-old little prick skipped safety checks to beat her to the hatch.
“That’s because we’re in orbit. It’s like constantly falling but following the curvature of the Earth.”
“You actually believe in all that curvature bullshit? You know there’s a lot of evidence that the Earth is actually flat.”
Rose blinked. Rose blinked again. She gave Daniel plenty of time to say he was joking. “That the Earth is… You… The Cupola is right there!” The hatch to the observation pod was a foot away from the boy’s head. “You can look at the globe through seven windows!”
“These ‘windows’ could be screens for all we know. NASA doesn’t want us to know the truth.”
“I got my appendix preemptively removed for this…” Rose mumbled to herself, pedaling as much frustration as she could.
Daniel watched her maintain her muscle mass with a look in his eyes that Rose didn’t like one bit “You’re hot. When do you want to try anti-gravity sex? I didn’t bring any condoms but I’m pretty sure you can’t get pregnant in space.”
The pedals stopped moving for a brief moment from the shock of this depraved question and how casually it was asked.
“Never. No. Never. Ever.” Rose’s legs were moving again but she added a head-shaking exercise to the routine.
“You say that now but you’ll get pretty lonely on your own for 10 months. Let me know when you change your mind or if you just want someone to feel up your cupolas in the Cupola.”
Ten months… that used to sound like not enough time. Daniel stared at her weightless breasts for a few more minutes before bumbling his inexperienced floating ass back to a random room he had no idea what was for. Less than 10 months if I consider how likely he is to accidentally kill us both. The thought was ghoulishly comforting.
At least she was still the youngest botanist to ever visit the space station. Rose had her hands deep into the glove box, an aquarium-size greenhouse with arm holes. She held an unearthed kale plant in one hand while installing the revolutionary hydroponic system that had earned her a seat on the shuttle… next to a guy who apparently specialized in dumb conspiracies.
At a critical moment in the procedure is when she felt the first droplets, like horizontal rain on her face. The slimy substance had made contact with her cheek and stuck to the skin like a wet booger instead of sliding down because of weightlessness.
Rose turned her head to yell. But mid-scream of Daniel’s name (the obvious suspect of any catastrophe), a fresh shower of floating globules entered her mouth and did their zero-G sticky thing on her tongue and palate.
“Oh god…” she gagged, unable to spit them out despite violent headshakes. Salty ammonia was not a taste she recognized. It certainly wasn’t the flavor of any liquid food pack in the galley. Afflicted by her first space panic attack, dark thoughts were racing through Rose’s head. What if I swallowed some toxic coolant from a leak? What if I become the first person to die aboard the space station? “Daniel!”
“What’s up? If this is a booty call, you might have to give me a few minutes.”
The truth ended up being so much worse than her nightmare scenario that Rose considered rinsing her mouth with toxic coolant.
“Then get him out of here!” Rose screamed at a floating tablet by her workstation. She had stayed calm until the conversation with Ground Control started heading in the ‘we can’t really stop someone from masturbating aboard the space station’ direction. Could they not see the state of her hair, covered in white goop despite her best efforts to wash it as if the ISS was a pigeon coop?
“Rose, you know it’s not that simple. If this is an emergency, it’s not a 200-million-dollar evac emergency. I’m sure, in due time, Daniel will learn to use the vacuum toilet properly for his… urges.”
“In due time is not good enough! The entire space station is a minefield after just three days. Tending to his ‘urges’ must be the only thing he does. I’m scared of breathing, I’m terrified of sleeping. I know I must have snorted some of that stuff in my sleep. I just know. It’s all I can smell. It’s all I can taste.”
“We don’t know what else to tell you, Rose. There’s bound to be hygiene conflicts in cramped quarters like this. A good astronaut learns to compromise.”
“A good astronaut?!” Rose composed herself and hissed her ‘Thank you. Out.’ through clenched teeth. She had her arms back in the embedded gloves of her greenhouse when the swear escaped: “Fucking… fuck!”
“Finally, I didn’t think it’d take you so long to change your mind.” A wild Daniel appeared. “I just rubbed one out, but your dirty talk is all I need to get going again.”
“Until you start dumping your bodily fluid in the Waste Collection System, I don’t want to see you or talk to you.”
“That thing’s like a big vacuum cleaner. Next thing you know, your dick is a frozen meat popsicle floating in space. You’d understand if you had one. At least I can pee in there from across the room.”
Rose shivered at the mental image of a space station filled ‘floor’ to ‘ceiling’ with piss but refused to thank Daniel for his generous aim. This could not be the compromise. But maybe one could be reached. “You know what, I’ll be a good astronaut. If you keep your semen contained in the Harmony node for the next ten months. I’ll go on a date with you once we’re back on Earth.” She could regret this later. Rose’s sanity needed urgent care.
“What’s a Harmony mode?”
“Node. It’s where you sleep!” Rose accidentally crushed a kale leaf with her big rubber glove.
“OK, OK, chill. Not everyone is a space nerd.”
“It helps a lot, actually, to know things about space before going to space. Do we have a deal or not?”
“I dunno, I like to live in the now.” Daniel’s gaze under Rose’s stretched arms was a preview of his request. “So, instead of in ten months, I’d rather touch your boobs now?”
“I never said you’d get to touch me on the date.” Another innocent kale leaf felt Rose’s wrath.
“I’ll slip my hands in your jumper thing. You won’t even have to stop gardening.”
Rose performed a cursory mental check and found that she was 73% dead inside, which was ever-so-slightly above the threshold for letting some teen fondle your boobs for ten months of peace. “Just get it over with. I better not swallow another milliliter of semen after that.”
“What’s a mil-li-liter? And you’ve been swallowing my eggnog? You really are getting lonely.”
“We’ve only been up here for three days!” Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Focus on your work. They’ll name a greenhouse module after you one day. As hands from behind unzipped the front of her coveralls, Rose gave her tablet a side glance to make sure the camera wasn’t on. She had stopped her daily broadcasts after someone asked what all the floating white stuff was.
Daniel’s cold, sticky hands went inside her bra before pulling it down. “Oh, much bigger than they look. Tits feel so different when there’s no gravity.”
“Shut up. Talking is not part of the deal.”
It was an interminable ten minutes where Rose did very little work under the revulsion of her breast massage. Daniel’s hands explored every inch of skin including a thorough exploration of how weightlessness affects breasts being jiggled by the pinched nipples. Even with access to broadband internet, the memory of her squishy, floating breasts in his palms would be the new spank bank go-to.
The amount of cum in the atmosphere had stabilized. It wasn’t cum-free by any means; Rose often had to scrap nasty globs off a piece of equipment she needed to use, and still accidentally swallowed the occasional droplet, but Daniel mostly kept his jizz away from the Destiny node where she worked. She decided not to rock the boat and count her blessings.
“Oh, it’s definitely growing nicely and we’ll have confirmation once we measure the plant’s mass.” With a less saline atmosphere, Rose had been able to resume her streams and was talking to her small but passionate audience through her tablet mounted on the wall, a great way to combat isolation sickness. “How do you weigh things in orbit?” she read from the chat. “That’s an excellent question. Mass and weight are…”
In space, no one can hear you scream. This tagline doesn’t apply to the pressurized insides of the space station unless a basketball-size blob latches on to your mouth and nose before engulfing your entire head. Rose’s first breath was a snort and everything she coughed up returned to the slimy, chaotic sphere.
“Hey, Rose, have you seen my cum ball… Never mind. I forgot that you like drinking that stuff. You can have it. I’ll just start a new one.”
She rocked her head and pawed at the sticky fluid like it was a swarm of bees. Some smaller bubbles separated from the mothership but a thick coat remained of what she had quickly identified as a week’s worth of sperm. Rose would want you to understand that it is with the most absolute of desperations that she willingly sucked and swallowed the mixture of old and fresh sperms through an invisible straw. Mouthful after mouthful she slurped the shrinking ball until precious air entered her sperm-coated lungs.
Panting, shaking, and afraid to open her eyelids through jelly goggles, Rose was too distraught to do anything but float. Once she realized she had been broadcasting the entire ordeal live, the streams were canceled once again.
There ended up being four more similar cumball incidents aboard the ISS, which Rose had first nicknamed the Nostromo on account of the liquid face-huggers she couldn’t avoid, but had recently decided to call it the Event Horizon, her personal hell.
The next best thing to getting back on Earth, where cum tends to stay on the floor, was receiving the scheduled visit of two senior astronauts. Rose knew a 41-year-old woman who had been on ten spacewalks wouldn’t take any shit or sperm from some privileged teen. Daniel was about to get whipped into shape by the two badasses opening the hatch.
“Woah, check it oooout. I’m fucking floating, dude.”
“Where the thick alien chicks at?”
“What… who are you guys.” Though they had been practically impregnated by a thick layer of jizz on multiple occasions, Rose still trusted her eyes. These were not senior astronauts. Even calling them astronauts was a stretch.
“Heyo. Danny said you were hot, but damn. Good thing you can’t get pregnant in space.”
“Smells like jizz in here. I thought Danny was lying when he said you guys have sex all the time up here.”
“Where are Koch and Saint-Jacques?”
“Who? Oh, the boomers? Danny’s dad sent us instead to keep him company. Where’s our boyyyyy?”
“He’s in the Harmony node. There are extra sleeping cabins there, so make yourselves at home.” Rose said this with a smile and zen serenity. She didn’t even twitch when one of the new boys asked ‘What the hell is harmony mode?’ She gracefully bounced through hatches toward the docked Soyuz where the Russians were said to keep a shotgun. But, on her way to commit the first space murder-suicide, she passed by her kale, so green and full, thriving lushly from the hydroponic system she designed, and decided, instead, to fire up her tablet for the first live stream since the initial cumball incident.
“Hello, it’s Rose, your astronaut friend. Sorry about what happened last time. I wish could tell you it won’t happen again, but it’s probably going to get three times worse from now on. Doesn’t matter. Most people on Earth are idiots; it makes sense that most people in space are idiots too. We can’t let them get in the way of science. Check out this Kale!”