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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