Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Cutie2000
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Cutie2000

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"Welcome To New Terra"


Maggie Greer emerged from her stasis bed grimacing and groaning at the stiffness overwhelming her body. She'd expected discomfort after 22 years in hibernation, but this she would have given a 14 on a scale of 1 to 10.

She found a sealed bottle of fortified water in a holder next to the stasis bed right where she'd left it more than two decades earlier. She drank it down slowly, set it aside, let it settle in her stomach, then consumed the adjacent nutrient pack as well.

"Artie?" she asked softly. Getting no answer, Maggie asked, "Artie, you awake?"

The artificial intelligence for Deep Space Settlement Transport New Hope, DSST-1, was supposed to have greeted Maggie upon completion of her reanimation. It hadn't, which didn't honestly surprise Maggie. The leadup to the first manned mission to New Terra -- an ironic description as the crew included 2 males and 6 females -- had been plagued with problems right up until New Hope's departure from Earth Station III.

Maggie called out for the AI again, getting no response. She shrugged and went about her post-reanimation tasks without the computer's company. She stripped out of her sports bra and panties -- standard female attire for stasis -- and soaked for an hour in a tub of hot water laced with revitalizing chemicals.

After a short walk, she was in the quarters she shared with a second Crew Member who -- like the other 5 Crew -- wouldn't be reanimated until Maggie had performed her Systems Checks. She slid open her closet, gave the company issued clothing a look, and sneered. The standard issue crew uniform was a front-zip coverall of pinkish-tan that the very blonde Maggie had always thought made her look like a hotdog dipped into mustard.

Instead, she unzipped the bag of personal gear that she -- like many others -- had slipped onto the ship before departure and hid. She took out a bra and panties set that reminded her that she was a woman, then added a soft-to-the-skin blouse and a pair of yoga-style Spandex shorts. With the addition of a pair of slip-on shoes, she was more comfortable than she had been in a quarter century.

"Fuck you,," Maggie murmured, her words meant for the Mission Supervisor who had so often bitched and moaned about her refusal to wear the standard uniform at all times. She reminded herself of the distance between them, "A hundred fuckin' light years, asshole. Like to see you write me up now, dick."

Maggie checked on her fellow crew members, finding them in perfect hibernation, then wandered forward to the bridge. There she called for Artie again, got no response again, and set about rebooting the computer systems that would tell her all she needed to know about the mission's status.

And ... that was when her eyes bulged and her mouth dropped open. Maggie didn't initially believe what the computer was telling her, and when she finally got the AI's interactive communications to function, she asked, "Artie, how long have we been in stasis? What's the date?"

The AI answered the second question first, then responded to the first inquiry, "The crew has been in stasis for 122 years."

"How can that be?" she asked with a shocked tone. "What the fuck went wrong?"

Artie ignored the profanity per its programming, then began a long explanation about how an unexpected collision with space debris just 6 years out had disabled one of the engines "Primary and secondary communications are out as well. The tertiary communications system is functional but only to send messages, not receive."

Maggie spent the next six hours reviewing the situation, but in the end, there wasn't really much she could do to fix anything. She was a Medical Doctor, awoken first to check on the crew's health prior to their own reanimations. She had only rudimentary training in ship's operations; rebooting the AI had actually been a bit of a stretch for her.

She checked on the crew again, then hit her rack for some much needed sleep. Artie had told her there was no hurry to wake up the crew as -- despite the damage -- the ship was safe and secure and there were still 40 hours left before the others needed to be awoken.

*****************************


In the end, Maggie began reanimations just a couple of hours after she awoke from her 12 hour long nap. After changing into her coveralls -- she still wore her personal undergarments as a silent protest -- Maggie began with the Mission Commander, Helen Davis, who was the oldest member of the crew at 38 and the only one of them to have ever been in stasis for more than the Training Session of 6 months, as had Maggie and all the others back at ES-III.

Then, one by one, the others were brought out of stasis, permitting each of them to have their blessed turn in the hot tub. Helen chose to initially tell them nothing of the ship's troubles and extended hibernation, but eventually, they gathered on the bridge and she filled them in.

"We're fucked," she said, not knowing know how to start the conversation without simply being blunt. "As you all are very aware, the mission was for 4 of the 6 of us to descend to the planet's surface to perform surveys and experiments meant to establish beyond a doubt whether or not New Terra would support human life, while the other 2 processed data up here and kept the ship warmed up for our flight back home in 550 days ... 18 months.

"That's not gonna happen now, though," Helen went on. "We don't have the fuel now to reach New Terra's sun at the required speed for the necessary slingshot maneuver. We have no choice but to descend to the surface."

"And live there?" Maggie asked in shock, adding, "forever ... 'til we die?"

Maggie shrugged. An animated conversation erupted, with some of the crew arguing that there had to be options for a return to Earth while others argued that life on the planet wouldn't be that bad.

"We're here to determine whether or not New Terra will support life," one of them reminded the others. "Well, I guess we're gonna now, whether we like it or not."

"War of the Worlds," one of the crew reminded the others, referring to the often discussed H.G. Wells book in which Earth-invading aliens were stopped not by mankind and its weapons arsenals but by microbes for which the aliens had no immunity.

"Our inoculations will protect us," Maggie promised. "Trust me, they'll work. Decades of advanced, revolutionary genetic work eliminated nearly almost all disease on Earth, and the inoculations that came out of that research will protect against anything New Terra throws at us."

"What about DSST-2 or -3?" someone asked, referring to the Deep Space Settlement Transports that were supposed to be following behind New Hope.

"We're late to the party, guys," Maggie reminded them about their 122 year flight. "They're either not coming or have already been here, and I checked the sensors. There's no sign of another transport, in orbit or on the planet. When they lost contact with us just 6 years in, they probably abandoned the program."

A discussion laced with panic, disappointment, anger, fear, and just about every other similar emotion erupted until Helen finally got control again and said, "We can talk about this more later, but right now, we have procedures to perform for the braking procedure, which begins in less than 8 hours."

Helen issued some orders, and each of them headed out to get their work done. Maggie went to the Med Bay to look at the Crews' medical records and schedule checkups and further inoculations. Only then, when she was alone and certain no one would see or hear her did she begin sobbing.
Hidden 3 yrs ago Post by Cutie2000
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(OOC: The image below is of the character in her underwear. Do not open this link if you are in a public place and about to embarrass yourself.)

"Greetings Missy," the Artificial Intelligence -- now again working -- spoke to Misako Hashimoto as she was finishing her reanimation from hibernation. The ship's brain used the young crew member's nickname, just as Missy had programmed it to do. Artie followed up with, "How do you feel?"

Missy grimaced and groaned from the extended stasis period, very much as those who'd come before her had: she was the fourth to be brought back to life after -- in order -- Doc Maggie, Mission Commander Helen Davis, and Sebastian Muatoya, the ship's Chief Engineer.

Shifting her hands from where they laid at her sides to touch her body, Missy was reminded of how scantily she was dressed. Like Maggie, Missy had brought a set -- a few sets, actually -- of sexy undergarments with her on the deep space voyage. Unlike the Doc, the AI Tech hadn't waited for the thaw to wear hers, telling the Cryogenic Specialists back at Earth Station III about getting into the stasis bed, "I'm getting in there dressed in these or dressed in nothing, your choice."

She smiled now, recalling the the smiles and laughs amongst the others when they'd spent a couple of minutes arguing the merits of risking their jobs by letting her do the latter. Missy responded to Artie, "I don't recall it being so painful last time."

The AI pointed out, "The cryogenic stasis training session in which you participated had lasted only 6 months, Missy. You have been in cryogenic stasis for 122 years. Let me explain--"

"Don't!" a female voice called out from nearby. A moment later, Maggie was standing over Missy's stasis bed, asking her how she felt, just as Artie had. But the younger, much more petite woman only wanted to know what the AI had meant. "Let's get you out of here first and into a hot bath first. I'll explain then."

Missy was just as shocked as Maggie had been before her. She asked about the rest of the crew, relieved to find the others were healthy. "The ship is still together? We're not decompressed anywhere important?"

"Not sure," Maggie answered. "The Commander and the Chief are checking it out. Yes, we have some decompressions, and we have an engine that has malfunctioned. Sebastian is checking it all while Helen reviews the Comms to figure out our mission status."

Missy blushed at the mention of Sebastian Muatoya's name. She and Bass couldn't have been any different from one another. And yet by the end of their first day of training back on ES-III, Missy had known that the moment the mission was over and New Hope had returned to Earth, she was going to strip the man's clothing off and maul his body for hours, maybe even days.

As she soaked in the revitalizing bath, Missy began quizzing Artie about his functionality. There were a couple of glitches detectable just from her verbal inquiries; what would she learn once she was sitting at the AI's control panels? Maggie excused herself to begin the reanimation of the next crew member, timing it to coincide with Missy's emergence from the sole Chem Tub.

"Are we gonna die, Doc?" Missy suddenly asked the tall, voluptuous blonde, who'd reluctantly changed into her standard issue coveralls before waking the Mission Commander. When Maggie turned back to her, the AI Tech said, "I don't really wanna die. Not out here, all alone in the Void."

"You're not alone, Misako," Maggie reassured her. "And you're not gonna die. They'll figure this out, the Commander and the Chief. Trust me."

Missy laid back in the back, lowering herself until her jawline met the water and all lower than that was soaking. She contemplated what she would be missing in her life if she was to die out here, particularly at her extraordinarily youthful age. At just barely past 22 real years of age, she was the youngest member of New Hope's crew. In fact, she wasn't even old enough per Mission Standards to be part of the crew at all.

Missy had become New Hope's Artificial Intelligence Specialist by hacking her way into the job.

Just like Maggie and most of the ship's crew, Missy was a GenTech Baby. Her pre-conception gene alterations had been aimed at improving her mathematical and analysis capabilities. The result was that by age 4, she could read from and understand any of the text books -- paper or digital -- that her Professor father used to educate his Masters Program students at MIT; she was creating software programs for multiple computer languages by age 8; and by age 12, she'd hacked into hundreds of Private Industry, Government, and Military databases -- domestic and foreign -- and left calling cards that, in the end, had resulted in her being arrested and later hired by the United States' newest black ops computer agency.

Missy didn't like what she was doing there, in the shadows, as she called it. She wanted to go into space, and when she heard that the International Space Exploration Force was finally sending humans to New Terra after having spent far more years than she'd been alive sending only unmanned probes there, she knew that she had to be part of the crew of the first Deep Space Settlement Transport.

So she did what she did best: she hacked.

Missy established fake credentials for herself; she faked a work history with multiple space related companies and agencies; she slipped her face into multiple databases, even using deep fake tech to add herself to official and social media photos for events she had never attended; she arranged and held meetings with other ISEF personnel -- sometimes digitally, sometimes in person! -- until she had people throughout the program talking amongst themselves about the cute little Comp Tech; and then she even fabricated purchase and work orders to have an office waiting for her at ISEF Headquarters the day she first walked onto the campus.

Missy was working at the New Hope's Artificial Intelligence Programming Chief for almost two years before anyone ever figured out that not only was she not supposed to be there; not only had she never been interviewed by Personnel, let alone never hired; but that when it was time for the ship's crew to lift off to Earth Station III for the 3 year long final mission training, Misako Hashimoto was still only 19 years of age!

By that point, though, it was already too late to begin looking for a proper AI Tech. Not only that, Missy had proved herself to be not only capable of doing the job but the best person for it by far. She'd reprogrammed the Artificial Intelligence in a multitude of ways to make it more intuitive to and interactive with its human crew, and she'd found and corrected hundreds of minor to major flaws in dozens of general computer systems that had passed inspection when they shouldn't have, potentially saving New Hope from disaster and its crew from certain death.

Of course, did any of that matter now? As she soaked in the bath, Missy couldn't help but wonder whether she should just keep lowering her head into the hot, revitalizing water and peacefully end it all here, now. No, not yet! she told herself, lowering her mouth into the water and playfully blowing bubbles before her face. No, I still have something to accomplish before I die.

She emerged from the bath, dried, redonned her sexy undergarments, then slipped into the standard coverall that she had had to have specially made to fit her tiny body. Just as Sebastian had had his ISEF uniforms specially made to fit his impressively large, God-like physique, Missy had had the same done to suit her 5'1", 101 pound, 31A-22-33 inch body.

She headed off to inspect her shared quarters, then headed out to find the other reanimated crew. She chatted with Mission Commander Helen Davis a few minutes, then resumed her search for the crew member upon whom she desperately wanted to lay eyes. She found Chief Engineer Sebastian Muatoya in one of the Engineroom Compartments working hard. Without him knowing she was there, she just spent a couple of minutes observing the way he moved, the way his muscles flexed and bulged as he strained or used his tools.

No, I'm not ready to die quite yet, Missy told herself again. Not until I have given my virginity away to that man ... to Bass. Not until after then.

Sebastian finally caught sight of her, and Missy smiled shyly and gave him a friendly but somewhat meek wave. He had no idea that she wanted him in the way she did, though, it wouldn't have surprised Missy to learn that he assumed all women wanted to get naked with him at some point in their knowledge of him.

Who wouldn't? she asked herself as she made gestured to Sebastian that she needed to go take care of something. She turned and hurried away, fearful that if she remained she might just rip her and his clothes off right there in the Engineroom and get'r done, as some ancient comedian used to say.

Missy headed to AI Central, dropped into her chair with snacks and drinks surrounding her, and spoke out loud, "Okay, Artie, let's see what's what."
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