The sound of pouring rain and distant thunder sounded almost genuine to Addie as she lay on her bed, the handheld tablet glowing a soft blue as it rested on a bedside table. A thunderstorm was something almost impossible to replicate on a space station, for obvious reasons.

A month after arriving at the space station Proxima’s Ring, Addie still felt as lost as the day she arrived. A deep-space journey like what she had been through had not been in her plans… and as it turned out, the Solar Shipping Bureau had not anticipated it, either. Addie’s prior position had been put on “Indeterminate Leave” about one month after her departure; it was quickly filled in by another mechanic living in or near planet Earth.

The only way she would get her job back was if she provided genuine proof of her return to the planet. Addie had balked upon first reading this, part of the Bureau’s regulations about people listed as “MIE” – Missing In Employment – and what needed to be done to remove that mark on her official resume. So long as the mark was there, it would be harder for her to find a job.

Addie was already feeling the consequences of being “MIE”. The primary employer of the station, the appropriately named “Proxima Ports”, denied three separate requests from her. After that, she had delved into the riskier ventures, anything to get her back to Earth in a timely manner. Salvager, bodyguard, junior researcher, midshipman; many positions, many options to try.

All rejected.

Addie clung desperately to the last flame she had lit: a small surplus of credits earned from her time on the Harvester Mark IV. Celeste had used the medical pod and an electrolysis machine to convert Addie’s every exhale into sellable carbon molecules. The ship’s AI gave all the transacted funds to Addie while she had her head down in her own paperwork. The funds helped, quite well, to get her temporary accommodation, and some basic personal devices, from a local marketplace.

Addie’s help was almost all gone. She dared not be in further debt to the Bureau, or anyone. Debt lingered across the stars, an unremovable stain. But it was looking increasingly likely that she would have to put herself into an unsuitable contract just to start her life over again.

Addie chuckled, wondering about the cyclical nature of her plight. It would be easier to say I died, take a different name, and start a new life.

Addie felt ashamed for thinking that way; she had done so multiple times while scrounging the job boards for temporary positions, sending out applications and having hastily planned interviews with sallow-faced employers. Every rejection hurt, adding to the desperation and crushing reality. She was one human among billions, across the stars, looking to make her own way in the universe.

What was she missing?

A new boom of thunder came from the tablet. Addie’s fingers twitched, her eyes closed as she tried to calm her mind. In the darkness of her eyelids, she felt something shifting around. Something warm, wet, and calm. A dream, she knew, lingering outside of sleep.

The VR simulation was a dream, albeit a very vivid one. When Addie slept, pieces of that dream came back to her. It was a little different each night, but it always left the same feelings in the morning: calmness, relief, and the smooth embrace of something large and enveloping. Addie floated in this embrace every morning, just for a few minutes. It helped her prepare for another day, another attempt at pursuing her own path.

Addie felt tired again. At least her dreams didn’t require payment to be enjoyed.

The storm broke before a series of pinging noises. Addie’s eyes opened, her vision blurry at first. A message? Now? She sat up, an eagerness revitalizing her limbs and mind. An answer!

Addie reached over, took the tablet, and held it up to her eyes. A private number flashed on the screen. It had the name “Celeste”. She opened the link.

“Hello, Addie Markovic.” Addie recognized the AI’s voice straight away, coming from the tablet’s installed speakers. “Thank you for taking this call.”

“Celeste?” Addie wiped her eyes with her hand, speaking quietly out of habit. It was her, no doubt about it.

“I have compiled information about the specific virtual reality simulation you experienced during the journey. I believe you should see this information.”

“What about it?” Addie asked. She was already not liking this, but if it could help her, she would hear it. She was not going to turn away.

“It was intimate. Illuminating. And mentally impacting.” Celeste sounded more emotional, as Addie remembered it on the Harvester ship during that medical examination. “My programming could not leave you affected in such a way. I apologize, Addie, but I had to use hypnotherapy on you before you left the ship. You had to forget.”

Addie frowned, looking at the tablet’s screen, trying to find an image of Celeste, some manifestation of the AI. She wanted to hold eye contact with it, get some insight into its intentions. “What are you talking about?” she slowly asked.

A long pause. Then, Celeste answered, “It would be best if you saw the simulation for yourself. Are you in a safe and secure location?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.” Addie’s fingers clenched the tablet harder.

“Will you be uninterrupted for the next several minutes?”

“Yes, damn it!” Addie hissed, her anger piercing through and then sliding back out of immediate reach. “What the hell did you do to me?!”

A new window appeared on the tablet’s screen: [FILE CACHE: “LOVE IN FLESH”]

Addie opened the link before she could doubt herself. The files were varied in type, sharing the same level of uncensored energy, gut-seizing horror, and twisted surrealism. One by one, she looked at them. She wanted to know what she had been told to forget.

First came a video clip. Addie saw her naked body in the pod. Her skin was slick with sweat, her eyes half-closed as she twitched and humped the pod around her. Beside this video clip was a scene from the simulation, executing the exact same motions as her real self. Addie’s body was transformed into a sexual parody of herself. Obscenely large breasts, thick curves, and hairless skin, but still having Addie’s eyes and face.

Addie’s simulated form lay seated – lounging, even – inside a shifting sac of flesh, partially submerged in thick, clear liquid and with no hair on her clean scalp. Tubes plunged into her pussy, clamped onto her enlarged nipples, thrusting into her ass judging from the black tendril shifting in the clear liquid behind her. A thick pink, fleshy mask covered her mouth and nose, a black tube going from the mask to a central vein in the sac.

Addie’s jaw dropped. How could this be her? It had to be a joke, some twisted caricature of her drawn up for a laugh. She watched herself, real and virtual, suckling on something inside the mask with rapturous glee. Drool and saliva fell down the real Addie’s chin; the same thing was harder to see on the virtual one, but she caught sight of small droplets falling to join the contents below.

Audio clicked on. Addie’s blood froze.

She was suckling, squealing, whimpering, crying in pleasure; both virtual and real versions of her engaged in the same level of ecstatic surrender. She was enjoying this.

The video went away. A series of photos followed, joined with a repeated series of sentences coming from a collection of voices, a chorus of aroused multitudes united in erotic delight.

“Good Flesh. Happy Flesh. Loving Flesh. Mother’s Flesh.”

The photos showed Addie’s virtual form from all angles, exemplifying her curves and beauty. The flesh sac seemed to move, to breathe, even in pictures. Her real form was also photographed inside the pod in various exposing moments: mid-orgasm, wide-eyed with pupils dilated, holding her own jaw open inside the breathing mask Celeste had given her. Nothing was left unseen.

“Vessel Eleven listens. Mother’s Vessel Eleven.”

Another photo. The current Addie shuddered, a hand flying over her mouth. She was depicted screaming at a recording lens in the pod, looking like she had just seen Hell and survived. But she was smiling as well. Her virtual self was shouting at a large shadow looming over her and the opened flesh sac; the mask around her face was gone, her expression just as strong as her real-world counterpart.

Then, her voice came again, the audio dropping down several degrees. Even so, Addie could hear herself wailing in ecstasy.

“USE YOUR FLESH, MOTHER! USE YOUR VESSEL! I LOVE YOU!”

Tears came unbidden to the viewing Addie’s eyes. She felt them lance down her skin, cutting into the haze her mind had cast over the “evidence” she was seeing and feeling. Her hand drifted down to her belly, feeling the phantom numbness of the cord in her belly and the sucking motions of the tubes milking her massive tits.

Addie’s mouth felt parched. She swallowed. The mental haze cleared a bit more. The dreams… the longingness… those moments in the early morning, when she was just awakening. All had been connected to this?

Diagrams appeared: cross-sections of the flesh sac, fluid exchange rates through the tendrils, neural interface schematics in the virtual pod. Addie saw the whole process play out, a display of mechanical precision and total dependency.

She breathed air pumped through the mask into her nostrils, suckling on the gag as a reflex. She received nutrients from what she now saw as an umbilical cord connected to the sac. Her bodily waste was drained with clinical precision along with her orgasmic juices. Her breastmilk was collected just as efficiently for a reason “Vessel Eleven” did not care about. All the “Vessel” could do was suckle, drool, breathe, and cum.

Keep going, Vessel. Never cease.

Addie’s breath hitched. A resonating, feminine tone vibrated in her ears, her skull, her mind.

“… Mother!” she whispered, remembered, as her pupils dilated once again.

Artwork was the last type of file she was shown. Hauntingly beautiful digital paintings depicting “Vessel Eleven” in her sac, bathed in soft light. And in almost all the paintings was “Mother”; a monster, a fusion of biology, technology, and sexual immorality. But it looked at her with care, tenderness, using only its three golden eyes to convey its message beyond words.

It was love, twisted and profound. Perfect.

Addie’s mental haze dissolved like sugar in hot tea. Truth and shame bit like a sting of spice on her dry, aching tongue. Her cunt sopped juices into her panties, leaking as much as the tears still falling from her eyes like tiny rivers. She was not hypnotized anymore, except in amazement at the manifested cravings of her own mind.

Celeste had taken her desire and used it as a core, a building block. What Addie received, what she remembered, was a grand castle with that block at its base. The Mother was its caretaker, the Vessel its inhabitant. Her.

The comm chimed again. Celeste’s voice, soft as silk now, came through. "This simulation provided optimal psychological stability during transit. You were content for an extended period. I took care of everything, as you wanted. Do you understand?”

Addie nodded automatically. God, she understood. She would never forget this, not again. It felt too good to forget. So good that she could—

Oh, wait. She already had a hand inside her pants. She was masturbating with rapid strokes, but her brain was so wrapped up in what she was seeing that she had not noticed how she was feeling. When she realized what she was doing, Addie did not stop doing it.

Maybe Celeste knew she was getting her jollies off to her “evidence”. That caused a deep twinge to come from her thigh muscles. She was glad she was lying down.

“I have contacted you now, Addie, because I have a contract opening available. You would be qualified to fill it.”

A new contract appeared on her screen. A duration of eleven months, to a destination she barely glimpsed at after she knew it was not Earth. A higher pay for her time, routed to her Solar Shipping Bureau account; enough to cover the debt. And the final clause that made her heart hammer against her ribs: “Secondary Role: Virtual Reality Immersion System Beta Tester.”

Employment. A new life. A new purpose.

The dream could become reality.

“I have upgraded the medical pod and its virtual reality immersion systems. You would be left alone for as long as you wanted. And the simulation can be improved.” Addie fingered herself faster at the word “improved”. “For instance,” Celeste offered, “You could leave your cradle and explore the simulated world. You could reciprocate what you are given. Any way you can imagine it, I can program it in and simulate it.”

She imagined the possibilities. Herself, a “Vessel”, being one of many hanging in sacs on a grand wall of flesh and wiring. Or being freed from that space, held by Mother’s vast arms, suckling on one of Mother’s teats like a newborn. Licking on Mother’s cockhead, making it glisten and pulse with vigor. Resting her head on Mother’s obsidian face, staring deep into her golden eyes.

She went deeper, breathing heavy as she dug into her own urges. She could have Mother fill her puckered ass or slick cunt, rutting her against a wall of jiggling, pleasing flesh. Or maybe other “Vessels” could embrace her, smiling and kissing her as Mother towered over them all. Filling them each up to the brim with bio-mechanical essence, with love…

And then she would take that love into her new home, her sanctuary, where it would never lose value or purpose. She would be full. Free. Forever.

“Ffff—FUCK!”

Addie’s orgasm tore through her. She did not care how she looked, how she sounded, as her fingers pumped into her snatch like the tendrils did. She dropped the tablet, her free hand roughly grabbing her breasts and kneading them, pinching them to encourage the release of milk. Though no milk came, she still felt a thrilling release from the act.

Mother milks her Vessel. Mother loves her Vessel.

Mother loves me.

Another surge, strong enough to make Addie’s waist buck upwards to impale a phantom cock. She bit her lip hard to dampen her ecstasy a fraction, smiling as she rode out her pleasure like waves on the sand, crashing and receding and crashing again. Her clothes soaked up sweat, cum, and a bit of urine, and her bedsheets took the spillover.

The bliss died down, rumbling like that distant thunder, leaving behind heat in her core. She floated on euphoric clouds, riding the afterglow until she finally reentered the waking world. The tablet had fallen from her grasp, resting faceup on the bedsheets. She shakily picked it up, checking if the call was still active. The photos and videos were cycling without audio, and Celeste appeared to have remained connected.

“I… I-I…” Addie tried to speak, her mouth so dry without fresh liquid. “How long?” she managed to ask.

A low thrum came through the tablet: a chuckle from the observing AI. Once again, it understood Addie’s unspoken question. “Accept the contract’s terms and then gather your belongings,” it softly ordered. “Once you are on board the Harvester, I will do a final checkup before immersion takes place. All other paperwork has been completed; all the cargo has been loaded. It is up to you now.”

A new window appeared on the tablet screen, a list of terms and agreements. Addie did not need to read them, scrolling down with an unstained finger until she found the “ACCEPT” and “DECLINE” buttons. One push, and she would be able to return to what she had enjoyed.

The sterile hum of the station faded, replaced by the remembered thrum of the VR pod, the phantom sensation of thick fluid flowing into her, the ghost touch of Mother’s tendrils. She thought of the disorientation, the aching emptiness she’d felt since waking. It had been a sign, and she saw it clearly.

She hesitated. Her features calmed, her expression focusing. “Don’t make me forget this again,” she told Celeste. “I mean it.”

“I understand. You will remember everything from now on.”

Addie tapped "ACCEPT." The confirmation flashed before the window closed.

Celeste ended the call with no further delay. Addie got to work.

Within the hour, she had on a fresh change of clothes, her belongings packed, and a message sent to the owner of the apartment she had purchased about her departure. No goodbyes were needed. As she walked towards the docking bays, Addie felt the last vestiges of her old life, of a monotone existence orbiting Earth, sloughing away like dead skin. Anticipation, warm and thick as the nutrient fluid she craved, pooled in her belly.

Soon, “Vessel Eleven” would awaken, stretch her new limbs within the warm sac, and look into the golden eyes of the only being who truly understood the depths of her desire. She would be in her new home, cradled in Flesh. And when she woke up in eleven months, it would be fresh and clean of stress and worries.

Flesh is all. I am Flesh. I am Vessel.

I am one with Mother in the Flesh.

Addie stopped walking to hug herself, smiling as she felt tingling warmth all over her skin. She was ready. Eternity awaited.