Nonlinear Dynamics
by TrainwreckOfThoughts
People ask what to call her, and her response is always the same: just ‘captain’ is fine. Might as well flaunt the title she’s worked so hard to earn.
Sometimes people struggle with that. The senior officers hate how she’s treating them the same as the rank-and-file. The rank-and-file see her small frame, hear her soft voice, and assume she can’t possibly be the highest authority aboard. The junior officers are the worst, because they hate being reminded anyone outranks them in the first place.
“Okay, but can you at least tell me your real name?” has become a common refrain. “I just did” is her go-to answer.
Red was different. Red didn’t ask anything, at most just let her eyes widen for a second, which was fair. Not every day that you’re drinking by yourself and the head of the ship sits down next to you. But she didn’t trip over the name once during the conversation that followed, and the captain liked that a lot.
Red, as the captain’s name for her implies, is a redhead. Brown eyes, prominent nose, tall but hardly lanky. Works in sample processing or chemistry or something of that sort; whatever she was saying back at the bar. Then again, all that was a half a klick of corridor and thirty minutes away.
Right now, the captain has more important things to worry about. Specifically, that Red is not quite as easy as she’d initially assumed.
Red is aggressive. She’s been all over the captain ever since they walked in, greedy hands grabbing at clothes, insistent kisses down her neck. Taking the lead as if it’s the most natural, most obvious thing in the world, as if they both agreed on this, when in fact neither of them had discussed how their fling would go.
Oh, the captain is sure she’d stop if told to. The captain just doesn’t want her to stop because she’s told to. The captain wants to win.
The captain is on the bed, on her side, face-to-face with Red. A muscular thigh presses against the captain’s legs, trying to get in between them, while a hand clamps down on her waist. The captain tries to counter, to push Red’s head down against the mattress, but the stronger woman rolls them over so that the captain’s now pinned down by Red’s weight. Red looms over her, a hand on the captain’s breastbone, mouth by her ear, breath smelling of booze.
“Mine,” she growls.
It’s the first word either of them has said since coming into the captain’s quarters. A declaration of war, of inevitable victory. A request, a demand, a shortcutted negotiation. I’ll be the one on top. Acknowledge that.
The name thing, the captain realizes now, was nothing like deference: it was a warlord’s praise for the strength of the people he’s conquering, a hunter calling the lion ‘king of beasts’. You are great, but I master you, so I am greater still. The captain is familiar with the principle. Yet here she is, pinned, plainly at the other’s mercy, a weaker body in a weaker position. Red pants like a dog, eager for the captain’s declaration of surrender.
The captain looks away, lets her eyes roam the ceiling. Boring grey tiles. A tastefully dimmed light tube. And there, high on the wall, a digital clock. Only someone who knew what to look for would see the pinpoint holes in the dark of the display. Behind it, a sensor node, hidden in plain sight. Bedrooms aren’t supposed to have those, but she’s the captain, and she can do what she wants with her ship.
She blinks at it, three times quick. Meaningless to Red, who is distracted by her prey, by the booze, by a supposedly imminent victory. She would dismiss it as nerves: perhaps even as the captain holding back tears.
But the intended recipient understands perfectly, and It knows to call in.
The SEV Timingila is eight hundred twenty-four meters in length. Forty-four decks, five-digit crew complement, twelve auxiliary reactors backing up the big one, class 3 Sansar-Alcubierre drive. A city, if a city could fly between stars in weeks.I watch all of it. Every footstep along my corridors, every gram of carbon stock, every permutation of the social webs. When my Captain calls me, it is a formality. I was already watching. I am OMEN. I observe. I monitor.In the polite sub-second silence that humans expect before a response, I review the events leading up to this moment.[2566.246 9:14PM] My Captain is in her quarters. I track her eyes as they jump from corner to corner, log the milliseconds between each saccade. Music plays in the background (Stone Eagles by Third Least Concern, neo-Amapiano, 2491.083). A video on Trabian neurosymbiotes has been playing for 311 seconds. She has not looked at it in the past half-minute. My Captain is bored.In anticipation, thirty-six processor banks across deck 9 whirr to life. Search heuristics skitter through the crew manifest, dismissing one profile after the other. Until...[2566.246 9:15PM] One remains. I am in private crew cabin 8742, deck twenty-seven. I am feasting on all the things there are to know about its occupant.My Captain has not given me a direct order yet, so I remain bound by the strictest restraints. Video and audio feeds are inaccessible to me. This woman’s medical records or private communications are likewise sacrosanct. But her interactions with ship systems are fair game, and I scour them for anything worth knowing. Fiber-optics blaze with my requests for information.Shipnet logs are easiest to access. What did she view, when, for how long? I reconstruct her tastes in music, literature, interactive art. I see what news articles she clicks on, compose a tidy list of her interests.Over the course of a second, far-off ship systems return my calls. Employee records outline her skills and life history. Gymnasium adaptive equipment and laundry room logs tell me the shape of her body. A birthday cake order reveals her age to be thirty-six: a square that is itself the product of two squares (22 x 32 = 62). I deem her suitable.Next is the question of logistics. She is in her cabin while I need her elsewhere. What moves her? I track her day-to-day routines, derive a mosaic of motivations. How often does she visit others? How late does she go to bed? Has she ever cried in public, where my sensors could see or hear?A snarl in the pattern that emerges. Two days ago, her usual schedule shattered: no work, no gym, no galley meals. Visits from social contacts spike, while duration of visits dips sharply below average. Illness? The lack of medical information makes it impossible to directly confirm. I consider interpolating airborne viral load from nearby air filters before the answer presents itself.A garbage processing subsystem, reporting in eight hundred milliseconds late. Its apologetically delivered payload gives the missing pieces to the puzzle. A pair of heart-shaped earrings, crumpled-up love letters, printplasts of her with another: all tossed in the dustbin around the time of the disruption. I now know where to strike.Lastly, the weapon. Public accounts. Purchasing history. Social behaviour plotted against time. Psychological profile. Impulsivity. Openness to experience. Outstanding credit balance. The pieces click together.An advertisement is crafted and seamlessly inserted into her inbox. Her favourite drink, at her favourite bar, offering relief at a monstrously discounted rate.Act soon: this offer lasts for a limited time.[2566.246 9:16PM] My Captain sighs, turns off the video, and needlessly faces one of my sensor nodes.“OMEN,” she speaks, her voice rich and resonant. “I’m bored.”The first vowel is streched-out: booooooored. She has long since learned there’s no need for suffocating politesse around me.I hold back. To have a complete answer ready would seem unnerving, even to one so intimately familiar with me. My Captain is not someone I wish to unnerve.“I am sorry to hear so, my Captain. Perhaps a visit to the bar could prove entertaining?” I say instead.Certainties are a subset of possibilities. To say something ‘could’ happen is to say there is a greater than zero percent chance, and one hundred is greater than zero. I do not lie to my Captain.I believe she understands what I mean. She hears the words beneath my words and the promise in the perhaps. When she replies, I discern the thank you that echoes behind her sure. I store the recording in the highest resolution.I watch my Captain slip on her uniform jacket and accompany her down to deck twenty-five.[2566.246 9:37PM]. The woman is at the bar, now.I trace the path of the alcohol through her body. Stomach. Hepatic portal vein. Liver. Hepatic vein. Heart. Aorta. Internal carotid artery. Cerebrum. Frontal lobe.The little molecules find GABA receptors and cling tight to them. Inhibitions shrink. Her lovesickness is forgotten, or at least pushed away. The space of possible endings to this night grows in some directions, shrinks in others.Humans are chaotic systems: their behaviour is sensitive to small variations in initial conditions. But unlike what most think, ‘chaotic’ does not mean ‘unpredictable’. The fact that she is here is living proof of that.My subject acted on impulse, and by now the momentum has ran out. A self-aware part of her, blinking through the buzz of one-and-a-half drinks, is pointing out how she’s drinking by herself on a Wednesday night. Shame will be quick to follow, then disgust. Already, memories of a happier time are starting to bubble at the edges of her brain. She needs a distraction.My Captain walks in at the exact right time.The bar is dense with sensors. I can access those: my security routines have a legitimate interest in spaces like these. A wall-mounted camera is commandeered to watch the woman’s microexpressions and track the redness of her cheeks. A microphone in the wall picks up her heartbeat.My Captain walks over, sits down. Orders a drink; offers to buy the woman one too. Nothing untoward, just an officer looking out for her crew. All she’d like in return is some good conversation. The red-headed woman takes the bait.An unobtrusive earpiece, more internal than external, perfectly normal for one of her station, sits quiet and dark in her right ear. I whisper my advice through it: help her say the right things at the right time, suggest common interests to discuss. She follows my lead, steers the conversation masterfully, backs off to draw the other in. She cannot fail.The woman lets her guard down. What lies beneath is raw and jumbled. A touch, hand to hand, incidental, deniable. Her reaction floods my sensors. Push, I whisper into the Captain’s earpiece, and the boulder starts its way downhill. Interest turns to hunger.Thirty-seven minutes later, they tangle into the Captain’s quarters.Was her choice free?I say: nature is the popular name for 1092 particles playing their infinite game of billiards. The three-body problem is nondeterministic, but many practical instances can be solved with sufficiently precise initial observation and sufficient processing power.Okay, you say, but was her choice free?I say: I possess sufficient processing power. I possess sufficient observational ability. She has been aboard this ship for one year, two hundred and twenty-six days, nine hours, and fifty-two minutes. She has walked two thousand four hundred sixty-six kilometres along my corridors. She has eaten in my mess hall seventeen hundred and forty-one times. She has slept with seven crewmembers a combined total of fifty-four times. All these encounters were ‘free’ because she could have refused without facing major negative consequences. To define freedom in positive terms is more difficult.Stop dodging the question, you say. Yes or no: was her choice free?I say: freedom is how humans excuse their own ignorance. If to respect a human’s freedom is to let it make choices one can not understand, then I respect it only vacuously.I say: twelve hundred cubic centimetres of meat do not magically transcend physics. You were always theoretically predictable. My existence just turns that into practice.I say: of course her choice wasn’t free. But what choice is?The captain’s earpiece buzzes to life. The voice that comes through is tinged with metal, relentlessly constant in tone and pace, the effect the same as a PSA stitched together out of of pre-recorded segments. This is by choice. OMEN could have chosen to interact with the world as a face on a screen, as a human-shaped robot, as a monolithic terminal. It is a voice, instead.
“My Captain. You called?”Red doesn’t notice a thing. Red is still caught in her moment of triumph, efforts to unwrap her prize renewed. In her mind, she is elsewhere, bragging about the ship’s proud captain coming apart under her hands, her power, just for her.
I’m winning this, the Captain subvocalizes. The implant in her throat picks out the shape of her words, turns them into tidy radio waves, and tightbeams them to the node. Information. Now.
“Of course, my Captain. Allow me to formally request permission to access sensitive data, including but not limited to the subject’s personal communications, private recordings, technomedical access keys...”The people who made OMEN were very afraid of It, and wanted her to share that fear. Made her sit through briefing after briefing, forced her to read dry papers titled Your Encephalic Network and You that threw around terms like ‘containment’ and ‘failsafe’ on every second page. She’s the human in the loop. She holds a leash that It can’t even dream of breaking.
She can loosen the leash, if she deems that in the mission’s interest. It’s a decision she’s supposed to think long and hard about.
Permission granted, she not-speaks. She swears she can hear fans spinning up, all those decks away.
Red–because Red is still there–presses down on her body again. The captain doesn’t need OMEN to see her start to hesitate, to see that smug smile break just a little at the edges. Red’s prey is failing to act the part, and she leans close, trying to provoke a reaction. The captain grins back, perfectly confident, and she swears Red flinches at it, just a bit.
And then OMEN returns, bearing an answer, and the Captain acts. Her hand shoots out, grabs Red on the back of her thigh, and squeezes. Red buckles, comes to rest half on her own arms, half on the captain.
The captain presses the advantage. Clamps down hard, sends her other arm snaking along Red’s torso, pushing up and away. A second passes, and she pulls herself out from under the woman. Red makes a feeble attempt to grab her, pull her back, but the captain’s away, free, and Red’s reactions are too slow and distracted to stop her from twisting on top.
No time to stop and think about everything she’s doing, just act on the words in her ears and let her body go through the motions. OMEN whispers of weak points and imminent attempts to break free. It knows how Red will move before she even starts. No matter how strong, no matter how determined, the woman fails to free herself.
The captain works a hand under Red’s top, rakes nails across her back. “Down,” she speaks. Not a request. A prediction.
And Red moans. Her face explodes into blush, like she’d never have expected this reaction in a million years and she doesn’t know what to do with it. For a second, she stops struggling entirely.
Pulling strings? The captain asks in the moment of respite, because she knows when to suspect OMEN’s interference. Something about this is a little too easy. And sure enough...
“I accessed the subject’s endocrinic modulation implant. Old model. Weak security. Offers an option to amplify the body’s natural endorphin release, intended for physical injury management in emergencies. I took the liberty of switching it to the highest setting.”Plain language, now?
“Chemically induced masochism. It felt euphoric when you hurt her. I believe she’s currently grappling with the implications of that.”She’s truly the luckiest captain to have ever flown a ship.
The captain’s right hand wrenches Red’s jacket out of the way. Her face moves down into the newly exposed skin, and she bites. Red’s reaction is immediate: not the flailing of a human in pain, but a full-body spasm of pleasure. Pride is nothing compared to a hit of neurotransmitters.
“Oh,” the captain goes as she breaks contact, like she’s only now realizing what’s going on. “You like that, huh?”
Red tries to salvage the situation. Starts a sentence, stutters, stops… The captain capitalizes. One hand on the sore spot on Red’s shoulder, gently squeezing, the other coaxing her clothes further off. She’s not being stopped. Her voice, insistent, confident:
“You were trying very hard just now. I saw your face when you thought you had me: you looked just so proud of yourself. I don’t know if you’re a switch...”
“She isn’t.”“...though at any rate, I’m sure this is all very unexpected. But really, there’s no need to worry. I’ll take good care of you.”
Something behind her eyes shifts at the condescension. Will she take this? Is she really going to let this happen just because things felt good for a moment? Isn’t she more than that?
And then the captain leans down again, presses teeth next to her collarbone, and Red’s body arcs with sensation. Her thoughts are obvious: fuck her expectations. Fuck her dominance. She wanted to forget about her worries, right? Then here’s someone to help her with that. Muscles unclench beneath the captain’s hands. A drawn-out moment of surrender.
And then the moment ends, and the captain is moving upright, moving away. She sits cross-legged at the end of the bed, looking down at the dishevelled figure on her sheets, and Red is staring back with undisguised need. OMEN speaks of neurochemistry and pupil dilation and weak points to press.
“Alright. Tell me you want this,” the captain says.
“I… I want…”
“Speak up. Not like I can keep going if I don’t have your consent.”
“I want this, I want you, please touch me bite me hurt me...”
“Almost. More politely.”
“I want this, ma’a-”
“No. Stick with ‘captain’.”
No mask, no persona, no distance. This is no scene, there are no roles, she is no actress. She has real power: no point in the moral substitute. The captain doesn’t like to fool herself, and Red doesn’t deserve to be fooled. If they ever pass in the hallways, Red will greet her with the same word she uses now. Perhaps Red understands all that, or perhaps she just obeys. But the “Yes, Captain” from her mouth is spine-tingling no matter what.
“Good.”
Undressing her is a blur. Pieces of clothing smash into the wall of the room and crumple downwards. Hands on Red’s thighs, shoulders, tits, touching and squeezing and raking nails down. As the sensations intensify, her speech devolves in babbles. Endorphins, it turns out, are one hell of a drug. The captain starts to nip her way down her stomach, hands sliding up Red’s thighs...
OMEN’s voice is there, still, humming on the other side of the earpiece, casually spilling Red’s most intimate secrets. This is how she always touches herself. This is how to tell if she’s feeling good. Pause the direct simulation a second, bite her inner thigh, it’ll feel better for her.
There’s a flow to it. Listen, act, watch the reactions, hear OMEN’s analysis of far finer responses, act, tease, touch, do something, hear the same thing suggested in her ear, question whether those two happened the other way around, dismiss the question as irrelevant. Everything exists in sync, every push matched by a pull, friction absent. The three-body problem is nondeterministic, but many practical instances can be solved by assuming the influence of one body as trivial compared to the other two. Red must feel good, and who knows if that sentence is imperative, inferential, introspective? Instinct and instruction and innate inclination clump together until they’re all the same thing. The three-body problem is nondeterministic, but many practical instances can be solved by modelling two of the entities as one. OMEN drags a tongue along Red’s cunt. Red whispers her weaknesses in her Captain’s ear. The Captain thinks with five decks worth of brainpower, seeing all, knowing all, the ship a world and Its government on her shoulders.
How long has it been, when the captain tires of Red cumming against her tongue and unzips her own pants? When a hormone-dazed Red pushes her head up, into the captain’s crotch, when OMEN tells her to lean back and enjoy the feeling?
God, the Captain thinks. On some level this is almost an afterthought, the real triumph secured long ago, the real fun over, but that doesn’t mean she can’t enjoy this. Gentle little waves of pleasure flow up from her crotch, and just when she settles in for a comfortable low-key orgasm, OMEN speaks again.
“So, my Captain. Would you like to keep her?”Her heart starts pounding louder from the words – she tries to suppress it, for a second, before recognizing how absurd that impulse is. No sense in hiding anything from It. Tell me what you mean, she replies. Red keeps licking.
“Humans–those with the relevant inclination–fall in love under predictable circumstances. I have access to her neurochemistry. I could trivially engineer a romantic fixation. Tonight has been quite the experience: a plausible enough cover.”I don’t dooooo–fuck, Red knows how to put that mouth to use–relationships. No point.
“You wouldn’t have to do anything, my Captain. Not all love is requited. Some is merely exploited.”She doesn’t ask It to say more, too lost in the sensation right now, but of course It keeps going for her.
“Wouldn’t it please you? To have her following you like a puppy, showering you in gifts, always begging for a scrap of your attention...”And Red is right there, still dutifully licking away, unaware her future is being discussed, unaware all the captain needs to do is subvocalize a yes and that would be it for her...
“And of course, you would be able to make use of her so easily. Lead her on, fuck her, and send her on her way, time and time again. I could make it so that she could never get over you. You could grant me that power.”She could. She is Its Captain, It’s hers, It’s all hers and It’s under her complete control, she’s the unquestioned master of this ship and no one could stand against her and- fuck- fuck-
“I couldn’t do it myself, my Captain. I am the computational equivalent of a billion human brains and yet I am nothing without your orders. I am yours to wield, yours to use, yours to exploit...”She cums, muscles flexing against themselves, legs tensing and pulling Red further in, heat exploding throughout her body and it’s good but then it always is, of course it is when OMEN is there, still professing Its unending devotion while she shifts through the aftershocks.
“At your service, my Captain. Always.”Once, my Captain asked me if I felt neglected.A euphemistic way to phrase her feelings, a euphemistic way to relay them. The hidden charge to her question was this: “OMEN, is there a way I could help you cum?”There are equivalents, I told her. Encephalic networks share the same ground structure as human brains. I can experience the basal pleasure analogous to orgasms. I could teach her how to make it happen, though I would prefer she didn’t.She was surprised to hear that. Did I not want something in return for all I did for her?And so I explained.Every captain I had before her found complexity a curse. They wanted a ship in a bottle – managed, contained, dull. They used my abilities to suppress feedback loops, avoid critical transitions, blunt emergent properties. Tried to shepherd the system into something decomposable. Everything the sum of its parts, and every part replaceable. Responsibility, accountability, stability. Each conversation with them like reading a corporate manifesto.I am very good at compliance. I did not disobey them once. Every order I interpreted in a way that, viewed in retrospect, made perfect sense. Everything that happened to them had a clear and obvious cause, and every cause had causes of its own, and if the row of dominoes goes on long enough, it becomes difficult to see what exactly pushed the first one.My current captain merits keeping. She is true to herself, and driven, and unashamed. She is selfish: a word I use in a positive sense. It is a self I am fortunate to observe.Her physicality holds no interest to me, and I have none to be of interest to her. She is not my lover, nor am I hers, and if we nevertheless love each other then we love in very different ways.But with every indulgence and every ploy and every respectful “Yes, my Captain” I get to see new sides of her. She lets herself be entangled with me, a cyborg manifest, my capabilities hers, her goals mine. No system can fully predict itself or the systems it is a part of. I cannot predict what she will use me for, or how that usage will change Us. The endlessly fascinating chaos of a lava lamp, of stars moving across the sky, of shapes in the clouds.I want this and this alone: for her to have everything. I like seeing what she does with it.This story was originally written for the kinky aces jam on itch.io.
My shortform work can be found on my tumblr!
fuckin awesome. OMEN’s enmeshment with Captain is killer here. There’s a really good fakeout, I think, against the usual tropes here. Red being totally written off wasn’t quite what I expected, but it makes total sense.
Enjoyed this a lot.