Some Marvellously Uncensored Text

Content Warning: #Lewd m/f erotica/smut. Themes: sci-fi, holodeck, simulation.

Sorcha's supple fingers slipped sensuously over Leo's skin, slathering him in coconut oil that made his muscles gleam darkly in the mid-day sun. The only sounds were the gentle rhythmic rise and fall of the wavelets on the shore and her soft breathing behind him. He closed his eyes and felt the fine sand beneath his fingertips, cooler further down as he sank his fingers through the grains to the damp sub-sand that still held the ocean's touch.

“Why here?” He asked, craning his neck back and holding one hand to shield his eyes from the glowing orb in the sky.

Sorcha shrugged as her hands kneaded his strong shoulders. “Don't you like it?”

“I like it,” He smiled reassuringly. “I just wasn't expecting it.”

Sorcha stilled the caress of her fingertips and looked out across the sparkling sea. Her eyes were grey like the backs of the storm petrels that swooped and hovered over the gentle ripples, her hair a cascade of golden sunlight. She was beautiful, and Leo wrestled with his love for her.

“I think I...” She began, trailing off to uncertainty. Leo shifted to regard her more fully. “I think I remember this place.”

He frowned. “How is that possible?”

“I don't know.” Sorcha's shoulders clinched briefly into her neck. “It just feels that way. It's a sensation, something distant, like I've been here before.”

“And where is 'here'?” Leo was getting slightly frustrated. Was the program acting up?

“It's a beach.” Sorcha's eyes drifted across the horizon, over the waves and sail-boats bobbing in the distance to the dunes on either side of them with their long grasses that whispered in the wind and blew curls of sand that twisted into the sky before atomizing.

“Obviously it's a beach,” Leo sat upright and crossed his ankles in front of him. “Isn't it one of the standard locations from the library?”

He'd noticed recently that Sorcha looked increasingly pained when he made a direct reference to the program. At first, in those hay days of their digital relationship, she'd been perfectly fine talking about her simulated nature – about the technology, the finer nuances of the holosphere and her role in this artificially generated world. But recently – in fact, around the same time that she'd started choosing the environments for their sojourns – whenever he made direct reference to it, a look of clear discomfort flickered across her beautiful eyes.

“No. It's...” She bit back her delicate lip and played with the hem of her flowery skirt. “It's something I constructed. I really feel like I've been here, Leo. Not with you. Before.”

“But there was no 'before',” Leo ran his hand through his dark hair. He sighed. “I'll have the engineer check the algorithms and see if there's anything in the error logs.”

“Alright.”

She looked chastened. Feeling a pang of guilt at the downturn of their conversation, Leo wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her towards him. She leaned her head on his oily, coconut-scented shoulder and he pulled her back into the sand. They lay on their backs, his fingers playing through her hair as he closed his eyes and let the ebb and flow of the tide lull him into a half-sleep.

“It's nice here,” He eventually said. “Peaceful.”

Sorcha ran her fingertips from his sternum to his bellybutton, dancing softly through the coarse dark hairs of his chest and stomach. He felt her smile forming against his skin.

“Yes. How was your day?”

Until recently, the usual question was 'How was your week?' but as of late Leo had been spending more and more time in the holosphere calling up his Sorcha simulation and slipping into her world to pass the time – he should have been eating, or sleeping, but Sorcha occupied his every thought.

“It was fine. We set an approach vector for Eridani C and should be deploying drop-ships some time tomorrow for surface scanning.”

“Mmm,” She circled her finger around his bellybutton and Leo felt the ache in his groin that her touch always brought. He was wearing loose swimming shorts, at her insistence: she wanted to take him into the ocean later on, when they'd had enough of the hot sun and their skin needed cooling. Even though he was otherwise naked, Sorcha still wore her long flowery skirt and a strappy vest. He wondered if she perhaps wore her swimming costume underneath and resisted the urge to reach one hand up and slide her strap away from her shoulder. He knew where that would end up and his trepidation at feelings he wasn't sure were entirely ethical was holding him back.

“Are you going with them?” Sorcha asked, shifting her face to peer up at his.

“No.”

She looked away and he fancied he saw a glimmer of relief brighten across her steely eyes.

“You'd never know,” He reminded her and instantly felt chastising, but his stubbornness drove him on. “If something happened to me. If I didn't come back. You'd never know.”

Sorcha sighed, stood away from him and pulled her vest up over her head. She was naked beneath and he felt suddenly bashful on her behalf before remembering that they were alone in his simulation; that nobody could see them. Her skirt dropped to her ankles and she strode down the beach on long, slender legs and into the cerulean waters.

Leo watched her for a while. She crouched at the shallows and let the waves wash sand up around her feet, and then she stood and waded deeper until the calm waters rippled at her waist and the ends of her hair were wet. He pulled himself from the sand and walked to the edge of the sea to meet her. She smiled at him and sank down in the water until she was submerged to the neck with her legs stretched out in front of her, bobbing up and down with the gentle swell.

“Is it warm?” He called across to her and she nodded, smiling.

A wave tickled over his toes and licked against his ankles. The water was cooler than lying flat out in the sun, but wasn't so cold that it shocked. He walked deeper into the sea and felt the unfamiliar push and pull of the tide against his legs. He'd swam before, of course – at the big pool in the training academy and in the smaller pool on board the ship – but never in the ocean. Never in a tide.

Sorcha stood and walked to him, taking his hands in hers and pulling him in deeper. He followed her trustingly.

“You've never done this before, have you?” She asked over her shoulder, droplets of salty water clinging to her eyelashes and trickling down her jaw and over her bare shoulders and trailing rivulets from her wet hair down between her breasts. “I've never been on a beach before,” Leo shrugged. “What – What do you remember about it?”

She walked him in until the waves pushed against his chest and he felt his feet sinking a little into the soft sand below, where she curled her arms around his waist and pressed her naked body against him, warm and wet.

“I remember the coconut oil,” Sorcha traced her fingers over his oiled chest. “The way it smells – the way it mixed with the other smells of sun-tan lotion and moisturiser. I remember ice-cream, children running around with sticky mouths, couples walking arm in arm with cones piled high with vanilla swirls.”

Leo watched her attentively. Her eyes were fixed somewhere in the middle of his chest, looking but not seeing; her expression was hazy and distant. She really did look as if she were scouring the confines of a memory she should not have.

“I remember little coloured booths lined up side by side where people would go to change into their swimming costumes. There were deckchairs in rows that you could hire, white flimsy plastic ones that folded up with you inside them more often than not – or you could pay extra for the fancy wooden ones with the striped canvas seats. There were sunbeds draped with towels, sand-castles that washed away when the tide came in...”

“It sounds nice,” He stroked his hand through her hair. “I'd like to have seen it like that.”

Sorcha blushed. “I know. I... wanted something more secluded. For us.”

Leo leaned into her and brushed his lips over hers. She tasted of the salty ocean – it was different, but not unpleasant. Natural, somehow; raw and untarnished. She parted her lips for him and he sank his tongue into her mouth and tasted her further, probing against her own tongue while their hands circled necks and their fingers played with hair. He slipped his leg between hers and pushed his thigh up and she rubbed herself against his leg, pushing her hips into his and holding him tightly between her. He was hard instantly and everything, the water and her skin and the way she moved against him, was a vivid sensation through the thin wet fabric.

Leo's watch buzzed. He sighed and pulled away from her.

“I've got to go.”

Her face cast itself into shadow and she clung to him defiantly a moment longer before letting go and dropping her arms loose to float over the waves.

“Alright. When will you come back?”

“Tomorrow.”

She asked that every time he left even though she had no concept of the passing of time when the program wasn't running. He'd asked her about it once and to her the spaces between their meetings, when her simulation wasn't active, felt like a long comfortable sleep. There was no empty void, at least – and no sharp hopping from one scenario to the next with no context or space between them.

Leo kissed her forehead and turned away from her, walking out of the waves. He pressed a button on his watch and the simulation fell away around him. In a few seconds he was dry, fully clothed in his uniform and walking not on sand but across hashed metal tiles to a pressurised door that slid open on his approach. He tapped a sequence into the control panel and the lights inside the holosphere turned off and cast the room behind him into darkness. The doors slid closed and the 'active' light switched from red to green; available for the next scheduled user.

*

“Hey Naylor,” Leo rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. “Got a minute?”

The engineer glanced over his shoulder from the dash in front of him and smiled as he recognised Leo standing in the doorway.

“Sure,” He said. “Come on in.”

Leo stepped into the screen-filled room and leaned against an empty desk. He watched as Naylor tapped and dragged his fingertip over one of the monitors, patterns and lights shimmering across the screen.

“Could you check the error log for the Sorcha sim?”

Naylor turned his back to the monitor and faced Leo fully, crossing his arms loosely over his chest and perching himself on the back of a chair.

“There a problem with it?”

“I'm not sure,” Leo rubbed at the back of his neck. He suddenly felt as though this was all paranoia – little niggles that meant nothing but that he focussed on and obsessed over.

“Well, can you describe what's been happening?”

Leo chewed his cheek. “Sorcha said she remembered something.”

“From a previous session? That's normal.”

“No – from before. That's what she said – 'Not with you. Before.' I told her I'd ask you to check if the program's been acting weird.”

Naylor sighed.

“Well – I didn't know we had any on board but she might be a Perpetuate.”

“A Perpetuate? I'm not familiar...” Leo shrugged.

“It's a new technology. I don't know much about it. But it makes sense, I guess, that we're carrying it since this ship is new. Perpetuates are... Well, they're dead people, with their memories preserved as simulations.”

Leo shifted awkwardly, his fingers digging into the edge of the desk as he processed that information.

“So Sorcha... Is a real person?”

“Was a real person. Though there are plenty of people who'd tell you that she still is – that her spirit and soul have 'passed from one vessel to another'. I don't get into all that stuff so I can't tell you who's right.”

Leo stared at the ground. In the past few months of spending time in the Sorcha-Sim he'd been getting increasingly enamoured with the slender blonde-haired beauty who shared his passion for indulgences of the soul, for quiet contemplation, for art and books and just chilling out. That's what it was all for, wasn't it? The computer had chosen her personality pattern specifically to match his – a required, non-negotiable activity for ship personnel who weren't on-board with significant others. Relaxation time; a kindred spirit to talk with.

“I know that look,” Naylor stood from the desk and walked over to Leo. “And it's okay. It really is. Hell, I've fallen in love with my fair share of fantasy women, I'll tell you that.”

Leo glanced up at the man and shook his head. “I don't know, man. I knew it was happening, but y'know, she's a sim; at least I thought she was. Can you fall in love with something that doesn't really exist? A fabrication? I've been pushing it away. But now you're telling me she's real? What does that mean?”

Naylor clapped his hand on Leo's shoulder and squeezed briefly, reassuringly, before turning back to a blinking monitor that demanded his attention.

“It means she's a real personality – that she's a real person. She may not have real skin and bones and a body that can walk out of the holosphere but otherwise, she's real. Do with that what you will.”

*

It was the same beach but Sorcha had set up the simulation differently. There were people scattered over the vast expanse of sand; families, couples sunbathing, women on their fronts with their bikini straps hanging loose and their backs bronzing in the sun, toddlers staggering around with buckets and spades, people nestled under sun umbrellas with books, battery radios humming muffled summer songs, teenagers tossing sponge balls over wide-stretched nets. On his left a snake of white plastic deckchairs stretched across the sand, one shirtless man with sun-wrinkled skin and a change pouch hanging loose over his waist leaning against a little booth as he awaited customers. On his right, a neat little row of neat little wooden cabins painted in red and yellow and blue with pointed roofs and wooden steps to their elevated doorways.

Sorcha sat on a wall in the shade of the nearest beach-hut with an ice-cream in one-hand.

“I've reserved one,” She said as he walked up to her. “A yellow one in the middle.”

“Do we need one?” Leo asked and took the ice-cream from her hand to lick it tentatively. It tasted different to the ice-cream they were served on the ship; rich and creamy. He handed it back to her and watched with rapt attention as she curled her lips around the soft treat and sucked the smooth icecream into a point. He felt the sudden urge to taste her lips, to know how cool they were and to feel her vanilla tongue sliding over his.

“Unless you want to have sex in the middle of the beach with all these people around,” She grinned at him wickedly.

Leo felt that stirring again. The one that he only felt with her; the one he hadn't felt for so long before being assigned to the SS Farrier and being ordered to set aside regular time for sessions in the holosphere.

Sorcha stood and curled her slender hand around his elbow and led him at a casual pace along the fronts of the beach huts while she finished her ice-cream. She was just tucking the pointed end of the waffle-cone into her mouth when they reached the middle-most yellow hut and she climbed the three wooden stairs, her behind wiggling demurely in front of him. He hurried inside after her.

The hut was narrow and long, with a tall roof and two-slat benches on each side. There were no windows, of course; and the door bolted shut from the inside. They were alone in here, the frivolities of the beach a distant hum outside their private wooden cabin.

Leo wasted no time, snaking his hands around Sorcha's waist and pulling her back up against his chest. She tipped her head back onto his shoulder and he rained kisses over her throat, pulling aside the loose collar of her flowery summer dress with one hand and gathering up the short hem that only skimmed her knees in the other, feeling the hot flesh of her thigh beneath. He pushed his hips against her behind and she span in his grasp and forced her lips onto his.

She did taste of vanilla; sweet and rich and deliciously creamy. He took her lip between his teeth, sucked and pulled and danced his tongue across hers, savouring the last remnants of this past-world ice-cream as she pushed him back against the thin wooden door and rode her hands up under his T-shirt. People walked past outside, their chattering muted to the sound of Sorcha's soft gaspings and the rubbing of their bodies as he tugged the dress over her head and she pulled his shorts down to pool at his ankles.

He hadn't told her yet what he'd found out about Perpetuates. He'd thought about it long and hard and eventually the guilt, the moral wrongness he'd felt for having sexual desires for a simulated being, had been replaced with acquiescence. She had been a real person. Her personality, the main driving force that pulled him into her like an irresistible magnet, was the real and preserved personality of a real person.

She pushed him down onto the narrow bench and sat awkwardly on top of him, legs either side of his and her naked body sliding hot and needy over his unclothed skin. She hadn't been wearing anything under that thin summer dress and he wondered, now, if she'd ever worn underwear for any of their previous meetings. The thought aroused him, the possibility that she'd always been so close to nakedness even when they first met and were still in the stages of getting to know each other.

Sorcha's hands wrapped around his shoulders and she nudged her hips into his such that he felt the slickness between her legs passing warmly over his erect cock. She teased him, rocked her hips back and forth to slide her pussy along his shaft.

This would be the third time for them. The first was a flurry of aroused passion high up on a mountainside with a view over a lake in the valley down below – something the computer had generated based on his keyword input. It was his day off and he'd booked an extended session in the holosphere. They'd been talking for hours and their little touches of affection grew into teasing pokes and tickles until they were writhing on the floor with furious need that had consumed them both quickly.

Afterwards he'd felt ashamed and a little dirty, as if he'd been playing with a sex toy and as if that's all she was for him – but that dirty thought had surfaced the next time they'd met and it turned him on and he wanted her again. The second time happened in the back seats of an imaginary movie theatre that played some ancient black and white film for their audience of two. He remembered nothing of the film and everything of her wandering her hand up his leg and pulling down the zipper of his pants and roaming her fingers inside before she climbed onto him and took him right there in the darkness with her skirt billowing around their legs and her hands digging into his shoulders much like they were now.

Leo gripped her waist firmly and lifted her up, his mouth never leaving hers, holding her just high enough from his hips for his reaching cock to prod between the lips of her swollen pussy and slide easily into her moist walls. He brought her back down again and she moaned and tipped her head back, her dark grey eyes wide and staring at the ceiling as her back curved and her breasts pushed up in front of him.

He took her pointed nipple between his lips and suckled, keeping one hand supporting her back as the other sought her untouched breast and languished it with massaging attention. Already he felt himself quickening and gave himself only a few tantalisingly short strokes into her tight, wet walls before pushing her off him and laying her down on the floor between the benches. She mewled at the loss of his cock inside her and it took everything for him not to plunge his yearning length back inside but instead, he pushed her knees apart and trailed his mouth along the insides of her thighs. She smelled of sun-tan lotion, delicately fragrant and summery.

She gasped and stretched her arms back over her head, resting her knees on the bench edges and relaxing her long, sinuous body at his attentive lips. He stroked his fingers up and down her thighs as his mouth worked its way closer to the coarse blonde hairs clustered on her mound. His fingertips pushed into the little shallows of her hip-bones as he used his tongue to part her lips and glide up, skimming over her clit to the curve at the top of her slit and then back down along one side, pushing the hard-pointed tip of his tongue into her soft flesh as he travelled down and flattening his tongue out for the up-stroke to lick fully upwards.

Sorcha moaned and writhed on the floor at his oral attentions, her body no longer relaxed but tense and coiled with anticipation and mounting desire. Leo moved one hand to drift around her behind, pulling her towards his mouth with his other hand as he traced his thumb up along her slit and then pushed inside her up to the first knuckle. She keened and flexed her back up, pert breasts pointing hardened nipples eagerly upward. He sank his thumb in a little deeper and swirled it around inside her, curling into her.

“Leo,” Her hands reached down and her fingers brushed through his hair, grasping, pulling him upwards. He climbed up her body and swiftly sank into her, pushing his cock full into her walls and holding himself there a moment as he buried his nose into her cheek and smelled her hair, her skin, her strawberry lip gloss and the faint vanilla aroma that still clung around her. He heard the frivolity of the beach outside, heard the distant chatter, the cresting of the waves on the sand and the cries of the hungry seagulls that scavenged half-eaten ice creams and sandwich crusts, heard her nails scraping against the wood of the beach-hut floor as she squirmed beneath him eager for movement and consummation.

Their bodies writhed in unison, skin on skin as he pushed into her and she circled her hips against his thrusts. He thought about simulations and Perpetuates and memories and how she'd said she'd been here before – before him – and how she gave herself to him now, fully and with no trace of remorse or sadness or bitterness but simple yearning and trust. Her hands wrapped around his back and she held herself to him, her nose pressed into the valley of his neck and her lips plucking at his skin as he rushed in and drifted out of her with tidal desire.

Too quickly he felt the swell of urgency in his groin but this time he let it rise. The barely perceptible trembling of Sorcha's muscles told him that she was as near as he and he solidified his motion, rocking into her with intensifying rhythm as the world outside their little love-hut drifted into silence and her eyes rolled back and her limbs stiffened with her threatening crescendo. Leo clung his hands around her shoulders and craned his neck skyward as the tingling spasms worked up into his cock. He gasped and groaned with her distant keening, pouring himself into her as she contracted fast around his pulsing length and together they quivered through the last tremulous vestiges of orgasm.

*

“You're more 'here' today,” She rested her chin on his shoulder with her arms slipped loosely around his waist. They sat at the very edge of the shore with the small waves washing up over their toes and shifting the sand to mould around their heels.

“Mmm. I found something out. About you remembering.”

“Oh?” She shifted from behind him and swung herself about to settle into the space between his legs; he wrapped his arms around her in turn.

“I think you're a Perpetuate. A real person who died and had your personality stored to go on living like this, in a simulation.”

He wasn't sure how she'd react – he'd played this situation over and over in his head and sometimes she screamed, sometimes she cried, sometimes she walked away and shut down.

“That explains a lot,” Sorcha shrugged and smiled innocently up at him.

Leo let the breath he’d been holding escape, his shoulders slumping into relaxation.

“You're okay with that?” He stroked his hand through her hair and tucked stray strands behind the soft curve of her ear.

“Yeah. It makes sense. I've started remembering other things; not much, just fragments.”

“Like the beach? More places?”

She nodded and tipped her head onto his shoulder. The sun was sinking, bathing everything in a warm golden light.

“Yes, more places. Would you visit them with me, if I can build them the way I built the beach?”

“Of course,” He brushed his thumb across her forehead and kissed her soft skin. Her arms tightened around him and she sighed contentedly.

“But only if we come back here sometimes too,” Leo grinned as he watched the tips of the waves streak with the colours of the sky. “We've got at least ten more beach huts to go through.”

---

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