The S.S. Daedalus was in fact an educational vessel for aspiring researchers that still had not graduated from the Galactic Academy. To be selected as a member of its crew meant one was the best of the best and had a bright future ahead of them in their chosen field of study. It also gave the future stars of the academic community the chance to build social connections with one another as they journeyed through space for three years together.
Having already spent a year exploring the Stars everyone had acclimated to the new environment. However, things were not peaceful for everyone, while journeying each student was also required to complete a thesis based on experimentation. For many this was easy and they just needed to crunch data received from the ship’s normal sensors. But for Issac Omell this had caused him days of anguish.
As the acclaimed ‘most gifted’ Astrophysics major on the ship, he was expected to be a cut above the rest. It had been like this since he was a child. It had long been made clear to him by his family and supervisors he had to be exceptional.
There were many factors that led to this. His parents were famous astrophysics themselves and expected him to be as good if not better. He came from Terrain II, one of humanity’s earliest colonies, and the people of his world carried an innate dignity about them. His home world had idolized him for years as he broke records and aced exams, everyone expected him to continue this thread. He was also one of the first subjects of the Human 3.0 Project. A genetic modification program was founded in his home world with the goal of engineering the most elite human race possible. The project received a lot of scrutiny from humanity’s traditionalist faction and thus he was expected to be better in every way. Beyond all of this was his own drive and passion for his craft, he wanted to contribute to the human race and knew as the best he had the duty to spearpoint new developments.
It was a heavy burden for a young man of 19 and with all of this weighing on his mind he had spent countless hours preparing for the astral anomaly due to take place only a month away. His mission was to test a new probe that he had been constructing by hand, designed to test a theory he had on gravitational wave behavior and dimensional flux. If the reads from this anomaly matched his theory he would have the groundwork for a new calculation that could greatly improve the effectiveness of space travel. But first, he needed a working probe.
For the sake of his project, he had put everything else aside for the first year of the voyage and now the finish line could be seen in the distance.
—
As per usual, Issac Omell woke in his small room early and quickly turned off the alarm with a wave towards a holographic screen.
A female voice then spoke in a pleasant tone, “Good morning Isaac, you have three messages and two uncompleted tasks.”
The black-haired and golden eyes young man yawned and stopped up responding, “Thank you computer. Who are the messages from?”
“Lead Science Officer Hanssen, Student Jacob, and Student Sara. Shall I play them for you” The voice informed him in a steady tone?
Issac considered this and responded, “No need. Tell Officer Hanssen I’m still on schedule and he has nothing to worry about. And tell Sara she can just kill by DnD character off, I won’t have time to join them anytime soon. I’ll hear Jacobs later.”
“The messages have been sent. Today’s breakfast is rehydrated proton biscuits and vitamin water. Will you be eating?” The computer gained a curious and even scornful tone having been coded to be abrasive when people don’t follow procedures.
Having not eaten breakfast for five days now Issac knew he couldn’t get away with it much longer. He sighed and responded, “Fine, I’ll eat but make it quick.”
A panel in the wall next to his small table opened and a meal tray was pushed out. He took a step forward smelling the food but then looked down at his pajama pants. His dick was hard as stone and poked firmly against the fabric. His residual sleepiness had prevented him from noticing this at first but now he could feel an itch in his veins. After a second he looked up and went to the table knowing this was because he forgot his medicine the previous day. After taking a bite of food he spoke out, “Also get me my pills.”
From the same pale a small cup with two capsules was pushed out. It had been forever since he had forgotten to take his pills but things had just become that busy. He quickly swallowed them and then returned to eating the food filling his hollow belly.
The medication itself was a neural sedative meant to restrict his response to hormones. A side effect of the early stage Human 3.0 project was a massive increase in one’s primal instinct. This affected attention span, one’s sensual acuity, emotional potency, and sex drive. By trying to heighten the human brain function to get a super genius, they had ended up heightening everything. It was a defect that had been worked out for people like Issac; it was a daily hindrance kept in check by medication.
In mere minutes he could feel the medicine take effect as his boner subsided and his mind grew tranquil.
Once done eating Issac put the try back behind the pale and got up. He stripped off his sleeping outfit, becoming nude. For a moment he observed his abs, tone thighs, and penis that had regained its flaccidity. Like most aspects of his body it had been genetically designed to be superior to normal humans and he thought briefly it was a shame he had never gotten to use it. Life had been too busy for him to find a lover and his medicine didn’t help.
Putting these thoughts out of his mind he retrieved a skin-tight bodysuit made of sleek plastic material, colored grey with blue highlights. Once he put it on and zipped it up, the outfit highlighted the athleticism of his body hugging his balls, abs, and other muscles. The garment had many protective properties and was the standard uniform for all the students on the ship.
This was because in addition to the S.S. Daedalus being a ship of science, it was also meant to be a match-making environment. The governing council had long thought it a shame for the genetic advantage of geniuses to be lost by breeding with inferior mates. They couldn’t very well force marriages or try to control people’s breeding habits but they could control certain variables. Like so it was highly encouraged for people aboard the Daedalus to not only make friends but to date and have sex. If couples formed then the governing board had gotten what it wanted and if not it still left the scientific community much more intimate.
Issiac had been approached a couple of times early on but girls quickly found they would get nowhere with him. He had long had the reputation of being an aromantic study maniac and his heavy workload only served to further prove this point. Thus while his friends and fellows were off having fun, fucking, and finding love, he was in his lab.
He didn’t intend to stay this way forever but at least until he got the data he needed he couldn’t afford distractions.
After grabbing his data pad and other supplies and leaving for his lab space he could also begin to feel his emotions turning grey. His worry and excitement both turned bland as the main side effect of his medicine took in, a general sense of emotionlessness. By the time he was in his lab he was at his usual blank state everyone had long accepted as his norm.
He was the first person on the floor and quickly arrived at a back room where a ten-foot-long, torpedo-like device sat with wires and parts protruding from many open panels. Eagerly he set to work programming, wiring, calibrating, and testing.
The Lead Science Officer Hanssen, an older man like most of the permanent crew, stopped by to check on him but quickly left him to his work. That day Issac was elated to make an unexpected discovery while testing which would save him lots of time in the coming weeks. He even contemplated messaging Sara about not killing off his character.
A few of his friends and astrophysics fellows stopped by and he changed a few words with them. No conversation lasted longer than three minutes which was pretty usual for him while on the work floor. He had lunch delivered to him and dinner as well before finally calling it a day. The last thing he did was hook his prop up to the computer to perform an overnight simulation.
Even with his supposedly genetically superior brain Issac still had a massive headache after so many calculations. He headed for his favorite spot to relax, the showers.
To further induce romance and lust the student showers were both gender fluid and very open. There were three thin poles with five shower heads coming off them geometrically. At times they would be very busy but at this point in the evening most people were doing activities, hanging with friends, going on dates, or fucking.
When Issac entered the room he was the only one present though he didn’t really care. At the academy, the rules were pretty similar so he had gotten used to being open with his body. At the same time after a year together their cohort had gotten closer and less worried about such things. Privacy only became meaningful if a married couple wanted alone time to copulate and even then it wasn’t that important of a matter anymore.
History books said people used to be extremely sensitive over others seeing their nakedness and that romance was once idolized as a complex ritual. This was until the space age when there were far more colonized than people. A baby boom like never before took place and customs like marriage were pushed to the side for many years. This was also a dark age of rape and savagery that was only put to rest after the Galactic Civil War. Once the Galactic Council took over order was restored and people were returned their right to romantic and sexual independence. Still, historians claim in the eyes of our ancestors back in the first couple millennia of the Common Era present-day society was still ‘open and unrestrained’.