SPACE COLONY CHRONICLES (1)
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 1.0] ***
I was born on December 17, 1972, the day the last American astronaut of Apollo 17 set foot on the surface of the Moon. My father, an engineer by trade, worked for the space program throughout the '60s and early '70s. His first wife, Muriel, died while giving birth to their son in December 1968, while the Apollo 8 mission was on the dark side of the Moon, and the child that should have been the older brother I grew up with died after a few hours of life. In 1971 my father married my mother, Kathleen, and they had two children, myself (Daniel) and my younger brother Lucas, born March 16, 1975, the day that American and Soviet capsules docked in orbit to form the first module of the space station, called Cooperation 1, that would eventually become my home through almost all of my adult life. I never wanted to be the older brother, I always wanted to be younger and have an older sibling, especially another boy, to look up to. But in our family you did your duty and you didn't complain.
We moved to Cooperation 1 in August 1986, when I was 13. We were the first generation of civilian families, as opposed to trained astronauts, who were invited to live on the station. The astronauts had been building the station for ten years and the first colonists were supposed to go up in 1985 but the construction ran a year or so late. My father, who continued to do engineering work for the space station, had put us in the official NASA line to be among the first colonists more than six years before, when we were living in Houston, Texas. In 1980, when I was seven and my brother five, he had a long discussion with my mother about whether we should commit to go. "If we go," he said, "we will live the rest of our lives there. Our sons will be raised in space and will consider the space station to be their home. Once we start this, we can't change it." It was a near thing but my mother decided we should go.
At the end of the summer between my 7th and 8th grade year we packed up our Houston home and took a NASA-chartered bus from Houston to Cape Canaveral to board the rocket to Cooperation 1. I resented it. I had a crush on an older classmate at my school, Jason, and he was the subject of my sexual fantasies just as I learned to masturbate. Even though Jason was straight and he never knew that I loved him I thought it was the end of the world to have to leave him. I fantasized that Jason was my older brother and that he had taught me how to play with myself, and in my fantasies sometimes he couldn't help himself and made me suck him or submit to anal sex from him. I had no clue about my own sexuality except that I must keep it a secret from everyone because fantasizing about other boys plugging your butt was bad and evil no matter how much pleasure you imagined it would bring them. On the last day of school in 7th grade I stole a pair of Jason's underwear from his locker in the school locker room and secretly buried them in my luggage we brought on the Cape Canaveral bus. They were BVDs, size boys' 14. I still had that pair of underwear 9 years later, in 1995, among my belongings on Cooperation 1.
The space station was always designed as a huge ring-shaped tube that would orbit Earth distantly at one of the LaGrange Points, called L-5, basically midway between the Earth and the Moon. It was many years before the full ring was completed. There was supposed to be a huge mirror, miles across, that would be attached to the station and reflect sunlight down onto it; we called the mirror the "Toilet Lid" because it was attached to the station with a hinge, but it was not completed until decades later. The section that opened for occupancy in 1986 was about 1/8 of the full structure. It was basically a couple of rocket fuel tanks bolted together in the shape of a piece of elbow macaroni. It had a counter-mass attached to it on a long stalk, some rocket engines filled with cement, and it spun to create artificial gravity through centrifugal force. The apartment we lived in, my parents, my brother and I, was 400 square feet. You try finding enough privacy to masturbate in 400 square feet. The shower became my best friend, to the point where just hearing the shower running through the wall, while I was in bed in my bedroom on the other side of the wall, was enough to give me a boner. In the early days I had to seize what few chances I had to get off sexually. I shared a tiny stainless-steel-walled bedroom with my brother. At 11 he was just barely too young to be exposed to anything sexual and I was very careful never to let him see me undressed or in any state of arousal. Basically at age 13 I had to live like a monk. It was excruciating.
The one good thing was that I attended the first high school on Cooperation 1. There were so few of us that they didn't really care much about the split between the grades. We had, technically, kids as young as 5th grade and all the way up to high school seniors (class of 1987) in the same classroom. There were three teachers. A guy named Bill, the son of one of my father's engineering colleagues, was in my class. He was two years older than me. Our families had lived in the same subdivision back in Houston and I remembered seeing Bill, about the same age then as I was now, riding around the subdivision on his BMX bike on late summer evenings with his shirt off. He was very tall and thin, and he had red hair and braces on his teeth. One thing you learn living on a space station is that you can't be choosy. Bill was nothing to me back in Houston, but on Cooperation 1 suddenly he was super hot, especially after the day early in the school year when he dropped his pencil on the classroom floor and when he leaned over to pick it up I saw the waistband of his underwear sticking up over the waist of his jeans. He wore Hanes underwear and there were very fine silky red hairs in the pit of his lower back. This meant he had body and pubic hair, which triggered my older-brother-lust complex as I imagined a sexually mature boy, like the brother I never had, telling me what to do. Bill was clumsy and dropped his pencil again, meaning he had to lean over farther to get it, and this time the elastic band of his briefs slid down even further so I could see the top of his butt crack. Few things could have been hotter to me. I jacked off that night in bed, fixing my mind on Bill's butt crack, taking care to be quiet so as not to wake up my brother. I came into a handful of toilet paper I'd stolen from the school bathroom and stuffed in my jeans pocket at school. If you grew up on Earth you don't understand how dangerous this was. Supplies on Cooperation 1 were at such a premium that wasting anything, like toilet paper, water or a kilowatt of electricity, was the ultimate taboo and severely punished if anyone found out. It cost a million dollars an ounce to launch supplies from Florida to the space station.
To be honest I don't even remember how Bill and I hooked up. Another thing that may be hard for you to understand, if you didn't live on the space colony, was that your choice of sexual partners--especially if you were young and gay--was so incredibly limited that if you were picky at all you'd simply never get any action. I have a vague memory of Bill approaching me in the locker room before P.E. class. Phys ed was a big deal on the space station because they (the shadowy people who controlled it) were very keen on making sure people who lived there, especially kids, did not lose muscle or bone density as a result of living in space. So we did a lot more P.E. than kids back home did. I remember running on a small U-shaped track with Bill, struggling to keep pace with him and he was telling me, "Come on, keep up. Keep up! You gotta do better than that." I also remember being in the locker room and seeing Bill get dressed after P.E. class and noticing that his dick was semi-hard, tenting out the front of his underwear. The projection of his penis, much bigger than my tiny wick, pulled the fabric slightly away from his leg, creating a small gap where I could see one of his hairy testicles. At his suggestion we had lockers next to each other, and when I saw him semi-hard I did or said something that indicated I was receptive to him coming on to me but I have no recollection of what it was. I specifically remember being in the locker room when he patted me on the butt through my underwear and said "Good boy." I don't know what this was in reference to. This was nearly 35 years ago now so much of it is hazy.
I first had sex with Bill in a shower associated with the school. It was late at night on a Friday and I want to say there was a school party or something, but we decided to meet at the gym showers next to the locker room. In those days all showers on the space station were tiny plastic-walled cubicles, very much like a Porta-Potty, with rows of holes in the walls that squirted pressurized water at you in controlled bursts to conserve water, which was one of the most precious things in space. We snuck away from the school party, got into a cubicle and took our clothes off. Because of the uneven way the centrifugal faux-gravity was distributed the gravity in the shower was only about 2/3 of what we were used to. I remember looking down and seeing our clothes, including our shoes, jeans and shirts, and with my little briefs and Bill's much bigger ones on top of the pile, beneath our bare feet. Bill said, "You wanna play with my dick?" He was rock hard and his penis was gigantic compared to mine, a huge thick spear sticking out of a bush of rusty red pubic hair. I did better than that. I turned myself around so my feet were on the ceiling of the shower cubicle, not difficult in 2/3 gravity, and there was a bar on the ceiling that I could hook my feet under (most ceilings on the station had bars or handholds on them in case gravity failed). When I looked straight up I could see Bill's hairy lower legs and feet seemingly above me. We were basically in a 69 position. I grabbed his ass, aimed his penis at my face and for the first time took another male into my mouth. I'd been fantasizing a lot about oral sex lately so it was a dream come true.
Bill almost couldn't handle what I was doing to him. I don't think he ever imagined that anyone would actually want to suck his dick. He moaned and squirmed as I tongued his tip and the underside of his shaft. He reached over and felt my butt, and after a while he finally realized that I had a dick too which was quite hard. He began stroking it roughly. I hoped he would suck me too so we could do a genuine 69 but he never did. I could feel his whole body tighten up as he approached orgasm. He started gasping and he grabbed the vertical metal bar bolted to the inside of the shower. He stifled his own loud groan by biting his lip and grasping that bar with white-knuckled hands. Hot salty liquid exploded into my mouth. It was nasty at first but I swallowed as fast as I could and tasted little of it. Only after he came did Bill remember (again) that I had a dick too. He started stroking again, but I was so turned on that it only took a few pumps before I started to go off. I shot several jets of hot white cum onto the wall of the shower cubicle. They trickled slowly down the wall in the light gravity. Again, like my disjointed memory, Bill patted my butt lightly and said "Good boy." He opened the door of the cubicle, which was a folding zig-zag plastic door like that of a phone booth. We grabbed our clothes, he closed the door and turned on the water for two or three short bursts, mainly to clean my cum off the wall. We went back to the school party and no one knew we had been together.
This was my first sexual experience, both with another male and on the space station. I don't know how much gay sex was going on aboard Cooperation 1 in those early days but I like to think that Bill and I were one of the first same-sex couples to pair off in the station's history, though of course I didn't think about that at the time. There would be many encounters later.
To be continued...
My book, "An American Elf in Paris," is out now: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BNVGZYQ
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