After Story – Present day…
Alred
Goldie was sleeping.
Alred’s light form was in the same room, standing in the center, waiting with his light set to dull, for whenever she woke. He didn’t want her to wake up anytime soon. She spent so much time lately helping him with the project to build his body, she needed her rest.
But when she did wake, he wanted to be there. The first person she would see.
Elsewhere in the ship, Garnet’s cleaning robot, Spot, was being given directions to continue working. It was too old and busted to communicate effortlessly with the Vainglory. Alred had to send it commands individually. But he did it, because it made Garnet happy.
Rok’s vitals were going up. He was having a nightmare again. Alred sent a chime to his room to wake him up – gently though, so he could easily go back to sleep.
The Vainglory was bigger than the Humility had been. There were hundreds, thousands more processes that Alred had to complete for it.
And it felt good.
His processor was incredibly complex, very powerful, and drastically underutilized. He was powerful enough to run an entire city without issue, including taking care of all the people within it. Maybe not on an individual basis like he did with his crew, but certainly as a population.
Going from the Humility to the Vainglory was like being able to workout muscles that were desperate for movement. It felt good. It felt right.
It was easy. It was effortless.
Chee and Tanin were up in the captain’s bridge, plotting and chatting. Planning their next job. It was a big one. An important one. They had to be ready for it.
It was late in the day, but still too early for most people to be asleep. Goldie, however, hadn’t slept last night. So, he was glad she had gone to sleep now.
And he was happy to watch her. To be there with her, even in light form, as she slept. He could use his computers to track her breathing, her heartbeat, her body temperature. Every muscle twitch. Each time her eyes flickered under the lids.
He recorded them all like precious treasures. It was the closest he could get to touching her.
For now.
Alred wasn’t working on his body project at the moment.
Getting Goldie to sleep had been predicated on him promising to take a break as well.
He didn’t need one. He didn’t sleep. He didn’t stop or rest, not like everyone else needed to.
But he would never lie to Goldie, so he was letting that project lie.
Instead, he was focused on his light form.
The body he projected was a direct replica of his old body. It was who he used to be. But it was missing a few key… parts.
For one, he was yellow. The light form was completely yellow, head to toe, though that wasn’t what he looked like. He just liked the color yellow. He thought it was bright, and it stood out well against the metal of the ships he had been inhabiting.
But that wasn’t what he looked like before. The color of his fur, of his eyes…
If he searched his broken, fragmented, ancient memories in his core, the only remnants of his old, biological life, he could almost recall what he looked like properly.
And if he added that to his light form’s design…
Another thing he was missing was his cock.
He didn’t really remember what his cock used to look like.
Sure, he knew what it should look like. He was able to find information on what, anatomically, an undroitt penis and testicle set up was.
But his memories of his life were so old, so corrupted, he had lost most of them.
And one of the things he lost was what his cock looked like.
So, he was considering what to do.
He kept his light form nude, and he also kept it sexless. It was male presenting, because he still considered himself a male, though he was primarily a computer. Most of his kind had abandoned their gender completely because it didn’t matter anymore. Hadn’t mattered at all in thousands of years.
But Alred knew himself to be a male. Had always been comfortable that way. But when he projected his light form, it was neutered just for basic modesty. There was nothing stopping him from programming a cock there except common decency.
However, if he was building a body…
His light form looked back and it stared at Goldie.
He had multiple scans of her body. She had used herself and the others as practice mannequins while studying medicine.
It was also just practically sensible to have a healthy, uninjured baseline for the machine to work off of.
It was easier for it to rebuild from a previous scan than it was to heal without one.
It could but it made the process easier and faster with a scan already logged.
So, he knew her body. All of it. Inside and out.
He knew her size. He knew how much she could stretch before injury. He knew how much she could take. He knew where her nerve bundles were and what would feel best for her.
And if he didn’t know what his cock used to look like, he could build it.
And if he was building it anyway, he was going to build it for her.
He still wasn’t working on the body project, but he did create a cock for his light form. Building it and placing it on the body. Looking at it. Trying to get used to the sight of it. Adjusting a few things. Trying one size, then another.
It was weird. He hadn’t thought about his penis in a long time. Hadn’t felt sexual desire or excitement or pleasure since he had a biological body. He was not used to it anymore.
But it looked right.
“Mm… Alred…?”
Goldie yawned, turning over, lifting herself up in bed.
The room they had built for her was low in the ship, near the front.
She had a wide, low half circle of windows that looked out into the void of space.
In that half circle, she had a mosaic inlaid into the floor.
One of his design, because he wanted to give her something beautiful.
It was mathematically precise and beautiful, and his light form stood in the middle of it.
Doing so made the mosaic sparkle and shine, coming to life in a way nothing else would.
This was Goldie’s room.
But no one called it that.
They called it their room. Because Alred stayed in there too. And he would until the day he could be in a physical body once more and hold her in that bed and every bed they stayed in forever after.
“Go back to sleep,” he said softly.
She yawned, sitting now, blanket around her waist. She blinked, bleary eyed, at his light form. Then, her entire face flushed as she straightened, seeing his cock.
“Ah… you… erm…”
Alred chuckled and, with a dramatic snap of his light forms fingers, he reloaded the program. From the feet up, he put the new colors into it.
His body, no longer just blank yellow, seemed much more alive, more real, as he allowed his natural colors to return. The pale, soft yellow gold of his hair and tail and the fur on his arms. The white of his claws. The soft, pale golden white of his skin. The bright, piercing blue of his eyes.
And the cock that he hardened for her until it stood proudly.
He didn’t feel sexual desire, but she did, and he knew she was feeling it now by the way her body temperature and heart rate elevated, by the twitching and tensing of her thighs as they clenched together, by the subtle bob in her throat as she swallowed.
“It’s a work in progress,” he said, turning for her benefit. “What do you think?”
“Erm… I think… you need… pants?” She struggled to say, staring shamelessly.
She liked it.
He was glad.
And obediently, he formed a gray jumpsuit, not at all dissimilar to what the rest of the crew wore, concealing his light form’s body.
For the first time, he looked real. The light form display was opaque, the colors correct, the shading designed to match the room. The eye could easily be fooled into believing he was a fully corporeal body standing in the center of that mosaic.
It was almost like he really was there with her.
But he wasn’t.
Alred was behind the cameras that saw every length of room. He was in the microphones that heard the small hitch in Goldie’s breath. He was trapped behind a barrier, always reaching, never getting any closer, no matter how hard he tried.
It was agony.
“You look good,” she praised, wrapping her arms around her legs. “You look really good.”
“I can’t wait for you to see the real thing,” he said, and the words were as much of a wish as they were a promise.