Toybox #5 (Lost Paradise Prologue & 1) (Patreon)

Note: This week was a tie.  Considering that, I chose the one I haven't posted yet.  I don't do sci fi often, so I hope you enjoy.

Lost Paradise

Prologue:

As the Earth’s population grew too large for the planet to sustain, efforts were made to find new homes for humanity among the stars. Trillions of dollars were poured into research that would carry human beings from their birthplace to a new home, but nothing seemed sure. Colonization of new planets was costly and dangerous, and though there were plenty of theories as to what we would find out there as we explored, there was woefully little evidence to draw real conclusions from.

Early efforts focused on terraforming, but the process was long, expensive and results were inconsistent. After many failed attempts and growing famine, disease and increasing unrest, immediate solutions were necessary. Nations around the world began researching and building new ships and picking candidates of their best and brightest to send to distant planets of their own choosing, planting proverbial flags before even setting foot on the soil.

Adam’s family was not chosen at random to be aboard of the Colony Ship Seekers of Paradise, but they were not considered a part of the best and brightest, either. Their way was bought onto the ship by his eldest sister, a one Dr. Andrea Carpenter, whose work on the ship’s A.I. was not only seen as instrumental to their launch and the success of their mission but also saw her as necessary to send along to maintain it post-landing as they established their foothold on the planet in the early years of the colony. Their success could see more ships following, and Andrea was too valuable to refuse.

So, when Andrea was chosen, she reached out to her parents and to her siblings, and she asked each of them the same question: “Do you want to make history?”

Adam was the youngest and the most nervous about going. He had only just turned eighteen that year and was planning to start college if his parents could find the funds for it. Andrea’s offer was gracious, unexpected and very important. He honestly didn’t feel equipped to make such a big decision at such a young age, but the combined efforts of his mother and his sister Aiden were able to convince him. His whole family had decided to answer Andrea’s call and were there as the gathered crowd was parted to allow them to board.

Orientation had been thorough. The crew and the specialists had done their homework and then beat Adam over the head with it. He was given more information in the weeks leading up to the launch than his brain had room for, and he would often sit up at night in the darkness of his room and stare out his window at the smog distorted stars as he waited anxiously for the day of launch. Once stood at the edge of the ship and staring out at the gathered masses, many of whom would have given everything they had for his ticket and his cryogenic tube, he felt humbled and a little bit guilty.

Aiden joined him and worked her fingers in between his. He looked at her and smiled. “Think they’re going to be okay?”

She took a deep breath and held it as she stared out at them. “I don’t think about it,” she admitted. “We won’t know if they will or not, and we’ve got the impossible in front of us, little brother.” She unlaced their fingers and messed his hair. “Come on. We’ve got to strip down to our skivvies and get suited up before we’re popsicled. Let’s go.”

Adam nodded and followed his sister after giving one last look out the window.

His family were allowed only a few personal items, and those that were allowed had to be small. Adam brought a journal and a pen, though he didn’t know what he would do with them. He wanted to bring his favorite books or his favorite games, but those were too much. It was his mother who had suggested he start journaling once they woke up, and it seemed like a good idea. Now that he was there, he worried that it was a mistake.

After stowing his personal item with the luggage team, he was led to two medical assistants who gave him a thorough examination. One of them was pretty, and he felt very embarrassed about being naked in front of her. Then, they put him into a special suit which was supposed to protect his entire body from the freezing process. It fit him like a second skin and covered his whole body. He felt like the world’s stupidest looking superhero.

After that, he was placed inside of his cryogenic tube. He was situated with his family and located between his sisters Aiden and Abigail. His mother and father were farther to his left, and Abigail’s husband was past her on the right. At the very end of the line was Andrea’s best friend, Gabby, whom she had also gotten on board. Andrea was with the crew and would be one of the first people woken up once they landed.

He looked at his sister, Aiden, to his left and smiled at her. She was wearing the same white material that hugged her very inch, and though he couldn’t see her face, he thought she smiled, too. Outside of the tube, the engineers counted down. Looking out from his tube, past his reflection, he could see hundreds of other tubes. Some of them were still being loaded as more passengers and settlers were put through process. Seeing it all finally sunk into Adam that he would never see Earth again, and he was just about to beg them to stop when they initiated the cryotherapy process. He heard a hiss, and then he didn’t hear anything at all until he woke up inside of his broken cryotube fifteen years later.

Chapter One:

Adam Carpenter was not meant to be the first person woken Seeker of Paradise reached Nod. In fact, he was not even meant to be woken in the first hundred. He, like many of the colonists, would be woken as labor was needed, and as young and unskilled as he was, that likely meant he would have been frozen for months if not years longer while the colony grew.

The plan was that the first settlers would be the most technically skilled. They would be the xenobiologists and botanists. It would also be the doctors, engineers, and programmers like his eldest sister. The plan, however, has gone awry. Adam does not know what has happened other than he is awake, and that the ship has a subtle but noticeable forward lean. He also realizes as he blinks the long, frozen sleep out of his eyes that the front of his cryotube has a sizable crack down the center of it that he assumes saw him woken up.

He finds himself leaned against the tube with his shoulder at rest against the cool, frosted glass. The interior is still wet and his body is still slick with the gel that they froze him in. The crack has broken the seal on him, and so the ship is tube is programmed to immediately end cryotherapy in hopes of preserving him and preventing lasting or fatal damage.

During orientation, Adam was told that this was unlikely, and he was given so much information that he honestly doesn’t remember what he is supposed to do. He does a quick appraisal of his body and finds himself with four limbs, twenty digits, two eyes and a penis and testicles. Those are, more or less, what he left with, and he assumes that is enough to keep him going for now.

Next, he finds the latch on the inside of the tube and pulls it. The tube jets up and rolls off of him. It falls onto the catwalk beside him and lands without cracking. He is naked and feels modest, so he hides inside of his tube as he looks out. He expects to find someone else awake with him but finds nothing and no one. There are just hundreds of frosted cryotubes with only the barest portion of their bodies visible for him to see.

“What happened…?” He speaks aloud as if there is anyone there to respond, and even in the quiet, his voice does carry. He climbs out of the tube and lands barefoot on the catwalk. His entire body is glossy with melting gel and a chemical stench clings to his skin as he walks.  He notices that the cryotherapy storage is darker than he remembered it being when he arrived, and then he notices that sinister red glow he is seeing by is the emergency lights.

He frowns. “Did we…crash land?” He goes wide-eyed and yells, “Aiden!” Adam goes to the cryotube beside him and tries to wipe away the frost gathered on the inside, but he cannot reach it. The exterior is icy cold and painful to touch, but he can see his youngest sister’s head just above the gathered ice. She looks largely unharmed and that calms his nerves enough to help him think.

Adam is naked in the center of the ship with all of the other cryotubes he can see fully frozen. They had planned for every emergency and trained them accordingly, but Adam had not planned for such emergencies and so he didn’t really listen. Now, he wishes he had. “Andrea would know what to do,” he thinks, and then he brightens. “Andrea!!”

He tries to recreate the map of the ship in his head and feels silly walking naked around the ship. All of the cryotubes he passes are still frozen, but there is a looming fear that one will not be or that someone else had already thawed and would meet him on the catwalk. He meets no one, though, and that only makes him feel worse as he reaches the front of the catwalk where all of the most important staff are.

From the captain to the lowliest workers, it appears to him that everyone is still frozen. Only his tube suffered damage, and so only he was thawed. “The worst of all the options,” he tells himself as he saunters over to the switch board which controls all of the pods. The lights are dimmed, but they are on. There are hundreds of lights for him to look at, and all of them are glowing a pale green except for his. Names are list alphabetically, and there are a lot of names.

“How do they expect anyone to find anything in this,” he says, and he sticks his tongue out and chews on it as he squints at the board. He looks for his last name and for Andrea, but then he plucks the first Carpenter he finds only to realize afterward that it was not hers. Panic sets in until he realizes whose name he found, and then his guts hurt. “…Mom?”

Adam knows how uncomfortable it is to wake up on a darkened ship without the appropriate people there to greet you, and so he runs back barefoot to meet his mother and only remembers his nudity upon arrival. The tube is thawing slowly, as Adam imagines it is supposed to, and so he stands, paces and waits while the tube thaws its way out. He watches the gradual revelation of his mother’s body with immediate horror and growing teenage interest. He is still young and a virgin, and his mother’s body is actually quite nice despite her age.

Staring at her, Adam can see the parts of her body that were changed by birthing four children. She is a woman in her late forties but has kept fit for as long as Adam can remember. She is a lean, athletic thing with dirty blond hair, big brown eyes, and a tight little body that excites and embarrasses Adam. In high school, all of Adam’s friends said she was hot, but Adam ignored it because they said the same thing about his sisters.

Honestly, Adam had never thought of his mother as a woman before. Seeing her naked as the ice melts down the side of the cryotube does not change this about him. She is still his mother, but he can now see why his friends had said she was hot and is slightly afraid that he will get a hardon as he waits for her. Lucky for him, that fear alone is enough to prevent anything so embarrassing.

After nearly an hour, cryotherapy ends with a hiss of steam and the glass hood screwing off of the tube and then being lifted off by a mechanical arm. His mother is still in the apparatus that held them, but she is equally naked as him and the hair on her head and framing her delicate pussy is damp. Her skin glistens as she stirs.

Stephanie Carpenter blinks and then frowns at her son. “Adam? Why are your naked, baby?”

“Mom…” Adam blushes and looks away, and Stephanie looks down her body.

“Oh,” she says plainly, and she tries to stand away from the device holding her body up but cannot quite manage it. Her limbs feel heavy and her head foggy. She looks around the darkened chamber, and her frown deepens. “Sweetie, where are we?”

“The Cryotherapy Storage room,” he says, and he stares fixedly at the small holes in the catwalk he is standing on. “Mom, we crash landed. I was trying to wake up Andrea, but I got you by accident.”

“You got me by accident?” She laughs. “That’s silly, sweetie. Our names are nothing alike.”

“It’s…It’s complicated.” He chances a look at her and finds her stretching. Her lean, lithe body confuses him again as his eyes roam her figure. He is not horny for his mother, but he is beginning to see the appeal before he looks away. “Anyway, we’re both awake.”

“Then we should get dressed,” she says, and she climbs carefully out of the tube after shaking some life into her limbs. “Why didn’t you go and grab a jumpsuit before you woke me up?”

“I…didn’t know we had jump suits.”

Stephanie frowns again. “Adam, didn’t you read the literature?”

“All the pamphlets,” he asks, and she nods. He shakes his head.

Stephanie rolls her eyes. “My children,” she says, and she glides past him with maternal grace. He notices how firm and tight her ass is as she leads him deeper into the room. “Come on, mister. We can’t just run around naked like savages, can we?”

“N-No, ma’am.”

Stephanie led Adam to a large storage room in the back, and together they found flashlights and jumpsuits to pull on. Then, carrying the flashlights, Stephanie led Adam back along the darkened catwalk to the switch board at the front of the room. There, she took her turn looking it over with the flashlight on.

“Well, having looked at it myself, all I can say is, you must really have been scared to want your mother so badly.”

“Mom!”

“I’m just teasing you, Adam.” She messes his hair and smiles at him. “It’s a simple mistake to make in the dark.” She throws the light of her flashlight along the ten nearest cyrotubes and spies her eldest daughter inside. “You must have been frightened waking up alone like that, though.”

“I…was fine,” says Adam, but now that his mother is awake, he is starting to feel the terror take root. “Mom, you think we’ll be okay?”

“They had plans for this,” she says. “And you did the right thing, nudity aside.” She smiles at him again as he frowns. “I can’t remember the chain of command, but we’ll wake up Andrea when we can, and then she’ll set things right.”

“When we can?”

“Power is too low,” she says, and she taps his sister’s button, but nothing happens. She sighs. “Whatever happened must have damaged the batteries. It said in the orientation that most of Seeker’s systems run on separate batteries. They are self-charging. It must be taking a lot of power to run the cryotubes to begin with, but the batteries will recharge if we give them time.”

“You sure?”

She nods. “It’s all we can hope for. So, we’ll check back later and see if she can wake up with us.”

Adam draws a deep breath and stares at Andrea. “Okay,” he sighs.

“Good boy. Now, there are emergency rations for situations like this, and I think I found them in the storage. Let’s get them and get some cots and blankets out, and we’ll camp out until we can talk to Andrea about what happened.”

“R-Right,” says Adam, and he follows his mother back down the catwalk toward the Cryotherapy emergency storage room where they found their clothes.

The two of them eat in silence, and Adam stares at the wall in this darkened room in an attempt to avoid looking at his mother. Thoughts of her lean, naked body flood his brain and leave him feeling heady and embarrassed. He is hard, and he hopes against all odds that his mother cannot see it in his jumpsuit.

Stephanie, in turn, can see his arousal and is equally embarrassed by it. She understands him to be a young man, though, and cannot fault him his arousal. In fact, she spends her silence staring away from him and trying to convince herself that his erection is not arousal at all. She tells herself that it is merely an unexpected side effect of the cryotherapy, perhaps even that it has something to do with regulation of blood flow, and that his erection will be no more once his body is given time to return to normal.

The truth is, though, that she is also trying to deny her own attraction to her son. Adam is, objectively, handsome, though he is not gorgeous. His penis is larger than his father’s, though his father is quite small. Stephanie has been with larger men, and though she enjoyed the sex more, she is not a size queen. Charles is a good man and has given her a good family, and that is what matters to her most.

Something about seeing Adam naked is sticking in her brain, though. She assumes it to be the taboo of the situation and tells herself that it will pass. For right now, it is just the two of them. There is trauma here that she cannot quite fully fathom, and she assumes that both of them are still trying to work the cobwebs out of their bodies and their brains. Even still, the arousal sticks in her like grease in a drain and keeps her awake well after they turn the lights out.

She lies awake in the dark with moistened lips and a half-empty belly. The rations didn’t feel like enough, and the awkward silence leaves her feeling lonely. The sounds around them are metallic and unfamiliar, and though she assumes that the ship is just settling as they rest, it still makes her feel almost haunted. It is sweet that Adam went seeking her first before anyone else, and as she considers that, the arousal swells. She rolls her back to him and hopes that she can sleep, but they are trapped together, and that is only making her arousal worse.