Lifeboat: Introduction
Introduction:
Introduction of the Bloom family, and the lifeboat on which they are now dependent.
This is not the story of how my mother, my sister, and I escaped that catastrophe, of how the starliner Pegasus II tried to escape the disaster into FTL only to be destroyed by debris, of our flight to and rendezvous at the lifeboats, of the 24-person lifeboat jettisoning with just the three of us aboard. There are at least a dozen such accounts from the 87 survivors from the Peg, and most, to be honest, are more compelling.
This is not the story of the first tumultuous hours after the lifeboat launched, of our lifeboat getting pummeled with debris from the Peg, tumbling and burning for hours before it stabilized while we cried and screamed, vomiting and pissing ourselves in sheer terror before the lifeboat finally stabilized and we collapsed into an exhausted sleep. I never want to revisit those twelve hours again so long as I live.
No, this is the story of the three months after that, the time between waking up on the lifeboat and getting picked up two months ago by a patrol ship out on the edge of explored space. The story of what happened with my mother, my sister, and I. It is a very personal story, not to be released before my death, but one that is very important to me. Even if no one else ever gets to read it, I wanted it to be written.
Before we get to that story, let me introduce the cast of characters, my family.
We’ll start with my dad. His name was Michael Bloom, and he was 55 when he died down on Mariachi-2. Long before I was born, he grew up on Hestia-3, went to college, got his MBA, got married, and started working in corporate finance. They had a couple of kids, but I guess things just gradually started to fall apart. My dad took a new job with a biotech company on Podarok-2 where he met my mother, the final nail in the coffin for his marriage. He and my mom got married soon after the divorce, I was born a year later, and my sister was born a year after that. He was a good dad, and seemed to be a good husband, although he poured so much energy into his work that we all kind of had to make the most of the time he had free. And he was apparently great at what he did, because he got picked to be an Executive Vice President of this big financial services firm on Minos-4 not long before we took our trip. That’s why we took it – he was taking a break between jobs to finally enjoy some time with his family. He was a good guy.
My mom is Anne Bloom, she’s 37 but looks 25, about 168cm tall and maybe 65 kilos. She was a teenage beauty queen on Podarok-2, but her family couldn’t afford the kind of custom genetic improvements needed for her to make a career out of it, so after high school she went and got a job as a receptionist. My dad picked her to be his new secretary on sight, a sure sign that he had already mentally left his marriage. She kept working until after my sister was born, by that point Dad was really raking it in. She was a housewife after that, but the rich, glamorous kind. I don’t ever remember her lifting her hand to do actual housework – that’s why we had a household staff. Her main job was to host parties and look good, and she managed both with a great sense of style and an amazing hourglass figure that was probably 80% natural and 20% biomed touchup. She never got spoiled, she is still a poor kid from the hills in her heart, she’s a good mom, and from everything I saw she was a good wife, too.
My name is Jackson Bloom. I turned 17 standard years old a few months before all this happened, and should have started my fourth year of high school about a month ago. I was genetically engineered at birth and “updated” periodically ever since, just like 99.99% of the human population, but while my upgrades were truly top shelf, I’ve always lacked the kind of motivation that would really let me live up to my potential. So while I am 180cm tall and 85kg of lean, athletic muscle, I’d say I’m really a pretty normal teenager. Well, I am a little unusual in one big way. Or two slightly smaller ways, depending on the occasion. I mentioned that Dad worked for a big biotech company, and somehow he was allowed to give me some “special features”, things they had invented but would never release. Things like enhanced pheromones, and testes that can churn out more semen than a typical college frat house. Oh, and two dicks. Sometimes.
I have a regular penis. Well, not regular – it’s about 15cm long when limp and more than 30cm erect, and a little more than 6cm across. I call it Honest Johnson. But it is basically a regular penis. Underneath it is where things get complicated.
The genetic engineers at the company gave me a few new muscles, a few new sphincters, and a second, more elastic penis. Most of the time, I keep those sphincters shut with no more effort or thought than you use to keep your asshole closed, and even during sex it is nothing at all to keep Tricky Dick hidden away. The enhanced elasticity lets it compact really small when not in use. But if I want to, and if Honest Johnson isn’t already too erect (it gets complicated, trust me), a barely visible “knot” in my scrotum opens up and Tricky Dick joins the party. The only real hitch is that I only have so much blood, so when both of the boys are in play they’re only about 24cm long and 5cm thick. But they look and function more or less identically, one stacked over the other.
By the way, this isn’t all as great as it sounds. I had to learn to control all that as a toddler, and until then apparently my parents had some really interesting experiences at bath times and when changing my diapers. And while my pheromones and genetically-ensured athletic good looks kept me reasonably popular with the ladies, most don’t want anything to do with a dick that size, much less two. By the time I was 15, I had successfully gotten three girlfriends to take a personal interest in my junk, and two of them had called it quits on the spot – the third was intrigued and resulted in a brief but very educational relationship. On the downside, one of the former two also talked about me to her friends, which quickly spread, earning me the nickname of “Tommy Two-Dicks” around school.
By the way, if you are wondering why my Dad gave me this particular “gift”, I don’t really know. I never mustered up the courage to ask him, and for obvious reasons no longer can. My best guess is that he wanted people to see me as a reflection of him, and part of that included some kind of sexual dominance.
Now before I get to the rest of the story, there is one more person to mention: my sister, Tiffany. Tiff was born exactly one standard year after me. My mother wanted a boy and a girl, wanted us to be close in age, and thought it would be cute if we shared a birthday. My dad wanted her to be happy and I think just appreciated the efficiency of the arrangement. She also got some significant customized genetic enhancements, nothing quite as outlandish as my own… I think. Dad let mom choose her features, and I don’t think Mom really understood what she was doing. Regardless, Tiff has always been incredibly smart and in excellent health, but by the time she hit thirteen she could pass for a few years older and attracted the persistent attention of every man (and many women) in any room she entered. She’s about 157cm tall, maybe 50kg soaking wet, and her proportions are almost supernatural – long of leg and arm, tiny waist, nicely proportional tits and ass, and all perfectly harmonious. Most of my friends (all of the guys, and many of the girls) had made passes at her and I was fully aware of how attractive she was… from a purely academic viewpoint, of course.
So that was us: an overachieving executive Dad, a beauty queen secretary Mom, an underachieving superman, and an elven goddess just coming into her own. A family, pretty wealthy and therefore a little more distant than most, but happy nonetheless.
Oh, one more thing before we begin: The lifeboat.
The Ceres-Hastings line of lifeboats were pretty new but also pretty typical of those found on the nicer class of starliners. They were designed to get passengers away from the ship as quickly and safely as possible, and then basically just wait for help to arrive. They were designed to keep 24 people alive for 30 days, and not much else – they offered safety, not comfort. They can’t really land anywhere with an atmosphere, and the passengers are deliberately locked out of things like navigation to keep them from accidentally crashing it into the something, so let’s just gloss over things like engines and armor plating and artificial gravity and focus on what we could actually put our hands on.
The rear section of the lifeboat had 24 acceleration seats in six rows of four with an aisle down the middle. There was a hatch at the rear by which we had entered, but it literally welded itself shut on launch, so it didn’t really exist as a hatch anymore. At the very front there was a small airlock big enough for a single large person, and on either side of it a couple of “command” seats with the limited controls and displays needed to provide the passengers just enough knowledge and control to stay sane. In between was a small open area lined on one side with dispensers for rationing out food and water and a few storage lockers with some other supplies, and on the other with a laundry, toilet, and shower that could be isolated from each other and the rest of the ship by privacy panels – hygiene wasn’t considered all that important but survivors might need to wash dangerous materials off. In the very center of the floor were a couple of panels concealing the location of two automeds.
The front and the rear section were lined with displays that simulated windows, connected to cameras on the outside of the armored hull, and the whole space was normally kept heated to about 25°C, just a little warmer than normal room temperature. And that was really about it. Again, it was a lifeboat, not a pleasure yacht.
Ok. Let’s begin.
