Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2020 07:52:51 +0100
From: Daniel Comnenus <daniel.comnenus@gmx.com>
Subject: Space Colony Chronicles (part 9)

SPACE COLONY CHRONICLES (9)

By Dolphin Dan


*** This story takes place against the backdrop of an alternate history
where, after the U.S. Apollo Moon landing program ended in 1972, the United
States and Soviet Union, and eventually other countries, joined together in
a massive concerted effort to build a large Earth-orbiting space station
capable of sustaining a significant human population in space. This
alternate history explores a trajectory of peace and cooperation that was
not taken, instead of a course of antagonism and conflict that, in the real
world, was. Peace and cooperation is always better than war and conflict.
[/Dolphin rant OFF Execute Program Space Colony Chronicles 9.0] ***


After four years of college, and of being away from my home in space, I
finally returned to Cooperation 1 in 1995. My parents made their first trip
back to Earth in nine years to attend my college graduation. It was
instantly evident that they had become completely acclimatized to space and
even being on Earth was very awkward. You could tell that from the way they
walked; gravity is slightly different on the station. We spent about two
months traveling around, seeing friends and family again and visiting
places probably none of us in the family would see for years, or perhaps
ever again, due to the rarity of trips between Earth and the station. That
summer I visited New York City, Washington, D.C. and my cousins in Kansas
City. Then in July we all went back up to orbit together on the space
shuttle. When the shuttle docked and I walked down the passageway I
remember wondering if I would ever again leave Cooperation 1. (It turns out
I did; I made one trip back to Earth in the 2000s). It was nice to be back
for good.

I know I talked a few chapters ago about the strange and different ways
that lives and jobs worked out for people from the station, as compared
with those on Earth. I got into Stanford on a special program for kids of
space colony residents. It worked both ways: when I got out of college I
had preference for a job on the station, way ahead of applicants from
Earth. I wound up working at the MC, Maintenance Center, first in an
entry-level position and then eventually helping to plan the very complex
maintenance tasks that kept the station running and its residents,
including me, my parents and Javier, alive. This was a career pathway. If I
ever gave up the job for whatever reason it would mean permanent banishment
from the station because they'd need to hire someone from Earth to take my
place. This was a good career for me and I wound up liking it and doing
well, but not everybody takes to it. Many people who had lived for a long
time on the station and then went back to Earth had tragic or unhappy lives
after they returned. Some became alcoholics or committed suicide. No one
thought of this sort of thing when the station was built, but it had been
operational for 9 years now and we were only just starting to understand
the effects it had on people's lives.

I was very happy to get back to my home for another reason: Javier. It had
been two years since I'd seen him. I was almost terrified to meet him again
when I got back. He had changed a little bit. He still had long hair but
had ditched the Goth look, so no more eye shadow and nail polish. He was
still devilishly handsome though or at least I thought so. And he'd learned
English, just as I learned Spanish. I was now 22; he was 17 and was just
entering his final year in high school as I got back. There was now a
community college on the station, and several countries' national
universities had extended correspondence courses to allow students to go to
college without having to come back to Earth as I and my brother had to
do. His father was still administrator of the Argentine section. We had to
keep our relationship a secret as neither of our families knew we were
gay. Everyone knew we were friends and hung out a lot, but some of my
co-workers were puzzled why I spent most of my free time with a high school
kid.

When I returned to the station after college I got my own apartment. It was
a tiny little place, and actually it was in the same complex where my
family's original apartment was when we moved in, 9 years before (though I
had a different unit). Living on my own was great, because it meant Javier
and I finally had a place to be together. That first year after I got back
we fucked like rabbits. It was rare that he could spend the night at my
place, though he did occasionally, but we spent a hell of a lot of
afternoons laying pipe and blowing loads. We experimented a lot, different
positions, that sort of thing. Javier found that what he really loved was
to get it up the butt. The first time we full-on fucked, before I left, I
remembered how he wanted me to go inside him and he orgasmed on his own
before I was finished. That was one of the hottest sexual things that ever
happened to me. I won't say it happened every time when I took him, but it
happened enough, and when it did it made me feel like my balls were made of
concrete. He also liked me to suck him. Javier turned me into a size queen,
but with a preference for small dicks. He was barely five inches but it was
awesome because I could easily get his whole shaft and even his balls into
my mouth. His favorite position was to sit on the very edge of my bed and
have me kneel on the floor. He'd put his knees over my shoulders as I slid
him into my mouth and went to work on him. He'd also say dirty stuff in
Spanish. His hotness and hardness was almost hard to believe. The salty
taste of his sperm going down my throat was always very pleasing to me.

On rare occasions he was able to spend the night. One night in particular I
remember. We fucked before going to bed and it was an absolutely epic lay
that exhausted both of us. But Javier must not have had enough because in
the middle of the night I woke up and found him snuggling against me in a
spooning position. He was rubbing his ass against my hips with the gentlest
of motions. He had underwear on but I was naked. I enjoyed it and got hard,
but I was very tired and soon drifted off to sleep. I woke up again, I
don't know how much longer after that, and he was doing it again. I put my
arms around him and pulled him tightly toward me, mainly just to get him to
stop because I wanted to sleep. Sure enough, a while later I was awake
again and he was rubbing his butt against my hips. I was a little annoyed
to be honest but there was no denying that my dick was absolutely rock
hard. I reached down, grabbed the fabric of Javier's briefs with both hands
and ripped a gash in them, all the way up his butt crack. He gave a little
yelp of surprise but also excitement. I entered him quickly and forcefully.
Once I got in him I really didn't have to do much. Javier moved his hips
back and forth, humping me backwards more than I was humping him frontally.
I told him in Spanish I was going to cum, just a whisper in his ear. Then I
exploded inside of him with a grunt. Within minutes I was asleep again. In
the morning I woke up and found Javier asleep on his stomach, his smooth
butt cheeks exposed through the ripped-up seat of his briefs. Javier told
me later this was one of his all time favorite times with me.

Everyone who lived on Cooperation 1 remembers the date February 14, 1997
and not because it was Valentine's Day. That was the day of the fire. No
one who hasn't lived on a space colony or studied how things work in space
appreciates how incredibly vulnerable spacecraft are to fire. There's dense
wiring everywhere in every wall, far more than in terrestrial building,
airlocks and tanks are often filled with pure oxygen, and you can't use
water to put out a fire in space. The Great Fire of 1997, as it's called
among residents, didn't even start on Cooperation 1 but rather in a Russian
Soyuz spacecraft that happened to be docked that day. Faulty wiring or
something; no one's sure, but within minutes fire was sweeping through the
insulation of the walls in the Russian sector. This was the first general
alarm ever called in the station's history where everyone had to drop what
they were doing and move to escape capsules. I was at work; Javier at
school at community college. It was incredibly chaotic, people moving
through the corridors to the pods, parents looking for their children,
safety captains not sure what to do. I remember looking up through the
window of the corridor next to our escape capsules and seeing a wave of
fire rushing through the buildings on the curved interior surface above
us. It was absolutely terrifying.

For a while it looked like it was the real deal, a "TE"--Total Evac, or as
people called it, Tango Echo. That would have meant everyone on the
station, now more than 2,000 people, getting into a capsule, detaching and
re-entering the Earth's atmosphere. This was really scary because capsules
would be coming down all over the place and there was no telling where we
would land, in Siberia, or the middle of the Pacific Ocean or wherever, and
in most of the simulations they'd done of a TE scenario about 20% of the
capsules would burn up on re-entry. It would also mean total abandonment of
the station because an event that big would likely mean there would be
nothing of Cooperation 1 left that was salvageable, in other words, the end
for the time being of human colonization of space. I got into the escape
capsule convinced this was going to happen. Because I was at work at the
time, none of my family, nor Javier, were among the people in my capsule
(each one held about 40). For a very tense half an hour we huddled in the
capsule, waiting for the order to jettison. But it never came. The way they
put out the fire was to use a plan that was thought to be impractical but
it turned out to work pretty well. When they verified that everyone was
either in a capsule or an airlock, Main Engineering blew open all the
hatches on the station at once, sucking all the air out of the entire
colony. This put out the fire instantly. We had to wait in the capsules,
though, for about eight more hours before they verified it was safe and
before there was enough air pumped back into the station from the reserve
tanks to make it breathable. When the capsule hatch finally opened I felt
an incredible flood of relief. My parents were safe and later that
afternoon I got word from Javier that he'd made it too. Everybody did,
there were, shockingly, no fatalities.

The Great Fire ended well in that sense but it was still devastating. Sixty
percent of the station was completely gutted. Hundreds of people were
homeless, including me. My parents' new apartment had survived and I went
to live with them. Javier's family's place had been lost and they, like
many others, slept in a refugee ward in one of the gymnasiums for nearly
three months. There was just no way to be alone so we couldn't have sex for
those three months; that was excruciating. But rebuilding started almost
immediately. All the governments with sectors on the colony pledged to
rebuild, and within a few months space shuttles were visiting the station
regularly bringing supplies and contractors. NASA, ESA (European Space
Agency) and the Russian and Chinese agencies held a big summit in Moscow
and decided on a large-scale redesign of the station. So what began to take
shape in the next months and years turned out to be very different than the
home I had known now for 9 years.

A lot of other things changed in the time after the Great Fire too, and in
ways that no one expected. The CGC, Cooperation Governance Council, had
existed since the early days but it was an advisory board, made up of all
the various nations' administrators who were chosen by their governments,
usually appointed bureaucrats, like Javier's father. In 1997, though, the
CGC started doing things differently, changing its own charter and becoming
a body with a chairperson elected from the council of members who served
independently of any particular government. This was the very beginning of
self-government. Although it was controversial at first, within a couple of
years the CGC was quietly drafting the "50 Year Plan," which called for
full autonomy and self-government for the station and its permanent
residents by the year 2036, fifty years after it opened. Essentially
Cooperation 1 would become its own country with its own citizenship. The
CGC also began passing regulations for the station that superseded the laws
of the countries represented.

Javier was in college but still living with his family. A few months after
the fire they discovered he was gay when one of his brothers found some gay
porn in his belongings. Immediately it became clear, not just to Javier's
family but to mine, the nature of our relationship. Everyone knew we were
friends who spent a lot of time together, but when Javier came out the cat
was out of the bag and it was obvious we were boyfriends. Both our families
were shocked at first, but there wasn't much they could do, as he was now
almost 20 and we didn't tell anyone that our relationship had begun when he
was underage. Javier coming out was the impetus for him moving out of his
family's home and moving in with me, to the new and much smaller temporary
apartment where I was living during the rebuilding. Javier's father, deeply
Catholic, remained a bit troubled but he was still generally supportive. My
family got over it pretty quickly; I was almost 25 and there wasn't much
they could say.

Not long after we moved in together an acquaintance of mine, Misha, a
Russian who worked with me at MC, told me about a secret society called the
Gay Space Colonists. It was an association of LGBT people who lived on
Cooperation 1. To be honest by 1997 it wasn't much of a secret anymore but
it had been years ago when it was founded. Javier and I started going to
meetings and soon made our way into a very supportive circle of friends.
Rainbow flags weren't yet openly seen on the station, but that wasn't too
far away. The fact that LGBT people had made it into orbit, and were there
to stay, was something of an achievement. I hadn't even known about the Gay
Space Colonists but I wish I had earlier.

There's not much more to tell, just a few loose ends.

Conclusion to come...


My book, "An American Elf in Paris," is out now:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BNVGZYQ

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