The way stasis is supposed to work, as we had always been led to understand it, is that we are in something akin to sleep – suspended animation, a stillness of our bodies and probably of our minds as well, preserving us across the long maddening reaches of the dark until the ship’s nearly interminable journey, finally, terminated.

Somehow, it had not quite worked out that way. We could be kept asleep, certainly, the clever machines exercising our limbs with deft electrical impulses enlivening our muscles to prevent the otherwise inevitable atrophy. But while our minds built their own playgrounds, recombining books, movies, memories into imagined new worlds, our bodies continued to age. It became, eventually, quite clear that we were not the passengers who would arrive at our long-awaited destination. Yet someone had to get there; we couldn’t fill a new world from the contents of an intergalactic sarcophagus.

The clever machines discovered the aging of our cells, and woke us. We discussed the problem, long and hard, until the eventual solution was suggested, discussed, rehashed, and eventually accepted among us all. Most of us returned to sleep, while the programmers constructed new instructions for the machines, providing them the solution they had found.

Fairness, it was agreed, could be found only in letting some choices be made for us. The programmers returned to sleep, perchance to dream.

Our playgrounds became bordellos. Under the gentle attention of the clever machines, electronic impulses enlivened our muscles anew. The most delicious of our fantasies, and those careful, calculated touches, elicited heat in our skin, hormones in our bloodstreams. In pairs and in quads, the machines drew open our pods, relinquishing us into a sort of half-sleep, sliding us into each others’ arms.

In our minds there were silk sheets and candles, cold manacles and hot, sharp lashes. There were slow caresses in the salted afternoon sunlight of the beach, in the half-lit perfumed air of a basement bedroom, leaning up against the wall of an apartment building stairwell. A thousand different kisses pressed lips to lips, lips to cheek, lips to neck, lips to shoulder, lips to nipples, lips to the inner curve of the elbow, lips to cockhead, lips to clit, lips to the valley of the knee, lips to the hip, lips to the scar, lips tiptoeing up the spine.

Half-emerged from our pods, our lips pursed against the air, kissing the future splayed out before us.

In our minds, our lover came to us; linen pants cupped his balls, a knit sweater slipped from her shoulder, his skirt blew up playfully as he walked the fence like a tightrope, her leggings showed nothing and hinted at everything, he teasingly eased his briefs down over one hip, she ran one hand across her lace bra-cupped breast and the other down between stocking-clung legs. We licked his jaw, we drew her head to our bosom, his cock ground against our own through rapidly shedding clothing.

Still glistening with the nutrient-rich waters of stasis, our hips quivered, setting up little ripples that sloshed against the pod walls.

In our minds we fucked. In our minds we made love. In our minds we submitted, we dominated, we surged and fell between the bodies of both our lovers at once, our hands were busy at the crux of our thighs watching our lover climax. We cried out, and we came, and came, and came.

We came, and the clever machines directed semen toward eggs, one and two at a time, and slid us away into our pods. Stasis did not work as we expected; it was beyond our wildest dreams.

—

Andrea Trask socializes widely in the intertubes under the name Bliss Morgan and, as the Duchess of her digital demesne, the borders of Blisstopia are always open. A writer in a variety of genres, editor of both fiction and academic works, and burgeoning audio narrator, you’d think that she wouldn’t also have time for knitting, weaving, and other fiber arts. Then again, maybe your mind is as open to possibilities as hers. Find some of her work on Amazon at https://amzn.to/1So5VNe – her blog with occasional updates and perfume reviews at www.callmebliss.com – and the woman herself at https://plus.google.com/+BlissMorgan from whence all other social media attachments can be deduced.