Chapter Four

“Are you sure this is okay, Doctor Hughes?” Grace asked, licking her spoon clean. “I’m not contaminating the sick bay by eating at my station or anything?”

What a dear girl she was, Maeve reflected as she handed the mousy brunette another bowl of brown nutrient paste. So conscientious and thoughtful in the performance of her duties.

Efficient too, both in the way she was motoring through the gloopy food substitute and the data packets Tucker was sending them.

“Not at all, Grace. It might be a different matter if we had any actual patients but I don’t see myself performing surgery any time soon.” Maeve waved a hand at the otherwise vacant white room in explanation.. “Your body's reserves need replenishing after a long period in stasis and consider how empty your digestive tract must be after years of nothing but intravenous feeding. I can fetch you a different flavor if you prefer…”

The wall-mounted calorie dispenser had a variety of different settings to adjust the taste and seasoning of the brown sludge. Otherwise it was a tasteless porridge made from a genetically modified algae that was cultivated in vast qualities on the hydroponics deck.

Chemical additives were added to make it as sweet or savory as any palate desired. With a tap on the touchscreen interface it could be set to ‘Beef Wellington’ or ‘Creme Brulee’ or any number of other dishes spanning the width of earth’s culinary cultures.

How close the gastronomic results were to the actual dishes, Maeve couldn’t say. It always produced the same plastic soup bowl of brown gloop and she hadn’t touched another drop of it.

The doctor herself had been subsisting on freeze-dried emergency ration packs she had found in the cargo hold. There were crates and crates of the silver foil packages, vacuum sealed, and therefore unlikely to have been tampered with by the ship’s rogue AI.

“Nah, it’s fine. Not as good as Mom’s home cooking but food is just fuel, right?” Grace replied, clicking a few more keys as her jade green eyes remained locked on the glowing screen full of numbers and symbols. “If my doctor has no complaints, I say keep ‘em coming. I can’t believe how hungry I am.”

It was nice to have company again. Real company instead of the vicarious sense of intimacy she got from watching Tucker fuck Charlotte’s enormous tanned titties and blow fat, beautiful loads all over her ecstatic heart-shaped face as Maeve fingered herself silly in her office.

Grace was an academic prodigy from Canada, had earned her masters in Biochemistry from the University of Toronto by age seventeen and gained a fellowship before her twentieth birthday. She was a short, slightly stocky brunette who hadn’t lost the bookish air of a student or gained the mature figure of a woman grown just yet.

She was good company and the perfect test subject both.

A stack of five bowls sat at the end of her work station, all but licked clean of their mud-colored contents as she started in on her sixth. Maeve had noticed Tucker and Charlotte consuming great quantities of the nutrient paste between frenzied bouts of face or titty fucking, and their increasingly short productive periods of work.

Only… Charlotte had stopped eating the dietary slop at some point. The one source of nourishment the gravid blonde spunk junkie now ingested spouted frequently from the end of Tucker’s magnificent cock.

Maeve could read an obvious hint in the numerous dirty dishes that littered the engineering bay floor. Recognize a connection between her frantically fornicating crewmates and the empty bowls stacked up in the corners like teetering towers of plastic.

…and what better way to turn a hypothesis into a theory than through the scientific method of replication? Reproducing the same result would add merit to her eventual prognosis.

Repeatability was critical to credibility, she knew.

“These readings are pretty interesting. Too early to draw any concrete conclusions but pituitary gland activity is definitely up across the board. Like, way up in every case so far and somatotropin production…”

Maeve let the shop talk fade into the background as she scrutinized the young scientist. She would wait for her full report later instead of indulging in early guesswork. She had chosen Grace as much for her underdeveloped frame as for her esteemed intellect.

Her hair color too.

That had seemed important for some reason. Tucker already had a blonde in Charlotte, and Maeve had hair the color of midnight, so he’d likely appreciate the pigment diversity of a friendly brunette.

Maeve had her eye on a redhead named Harper Kelly next, once Grace was properly settled into life aboard ship with a hugely hung stud like Tucker, fucking like a prize stallion only a few decks away...

Harper was a young Scottish botanist with a thin runner's physique who would be helpful in investigating the vast seedling nurseries that generated supplemental oxygen, soaked up excess carbon dioxide, and grew the future crops which would support the new colony once it was founded.

...or something like that. She also had big amber eyes and an adorable rash of freckles across her cute button nose which Tucker would probably find irresistible.

For now Maeve was busy cataloging the changes already manifesting on her unwitting guinea pig.

Grace was clearly a studious sort, prone to getting lost in her work to the detriment of her situational awareness. Even as the distractible girl prattled on about testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone levels between spoonfuls of artificially flavored muck, her body was slowly changing.

It was an insidious, creeping change but noticeable if someone knew what to look for.

Grace remained in her sheer nano-weave hibernation suit at Maeve’s insistence, never questioning the head physician’s reasoning, but wore an open lab coat over it as a token nod to modesty and propriety.

Beneath the white coat, the early warning signs were beginning to appear. Gradual but significant.

Her quarter-sized nipples were pebbled and hard. The last vestiges of baby fat were melting away from her pooched belly by small degrees… or perhaps “creeping away” was a better term, as Grace’s barely-there bust and boyish hips swelled by almost imperceptible fractions.

All that gobbled food had to go somewhere and… was her hair growing? The poor girl kept trying to blow the walnut brown fringe of her bob cut out of her vision, even as the chub was oh-so-slowly sucked from her apple cheeks to relocate down into her incrementally plumping lips.

“–you said some guy called Tucker was sending us these readings. Where is he and what does he do? Can I meet him?”

Tucker!

That name snapped Maeve out of her state of clinical observation and returned her to the present. Grace was staring expectantly up at her, expression perplexed as the Doctor’s skin broke out in an immediate blush and she toyed with a loose strand of her long raven hair.

“I–I should probably check in with him.” Maeve recovered, pulling her treacherous hands down to her sides and taking a deep, calming breath. “He’s very busy and important… but I’ll let Tucker know you asked after him. I think he would appreciate the kind regards.”

“Sure, though I meant it more as a professional courtesy.” Grace said, discarding the soup spoon in favor of raising the bowl to her lips to drink deep of its sludgy brown contents. “I don’t play for the men’s side, if you catch my meaning, and Doc… I’ve noticed the way you’ve been staring at me.”

With a saucy wink, she tipped back her head and poured the soupy nutrient paste directly into her waiting mouth, swallowing thickly and lapping up stray globs with her moist lashing tongue.

The scene was so reminiscent of Charlotte cleaning up after Tucker that Maeve’s run was a little bow-legged as she fled back to the privacy of her office.

The ship’s fabrication units had taken a hard turn towards vulgarity.

Thank goodness!

The advanced molecular printers held terabytes of digital blueprints for clothing, tools, electronics and all manner of other useful items they could produce in a jiffy with the push of a few buttons.

Maeve had used the sick bay fabricator to summon her sexy new skirt into existence after the pants portion of her smart green suit had a curious hole worn into the crotch.

The tiny emerald micro skirt was made of some shiny elastic material and had been the most modest replacement option she could find in the suddenly sexified selection of women's clothing available through the user-friendly interface. It stretched taut over her toned hips and ass, ending a bare inch below where her panties would be if Maeve had bothered to wear any.

The previous utilitarian range of practical women’s fashion had vanished as though deleted. Sensible skirts and sturdy footwear, weather resistant pants and jackets gone from the various drop-down menus and categories.

What appeared in their place belonged in a boudoir boutique that sidelined as a sex shop after business hours.

Dark leather and latex took the pole position amongst the myriad new options. Closely followed by frilly lace and wispy chiffon. Slinky mini dresses that wouldn’t look out of place in a strip club back on earth and enough scanty lingerie to outfit a dozen high end brothels.

Comfortable sneakers and durable steel caps were out. Glittery sky-high heels and big buckled fuck-me boots were in. Platform soles and studded straps dominated the screen.

Kinky costumes too. If Maeve wanted a new medical uniform, it would come in the form of a short-hemmed white plastic naughty nurse outfit with a chunky zipper that ran down the front and red crosses painted over the peaks of her breasts.

She had given it serious consideration.

But no, what really had her anglo-indian heart going pitter-patter was a brand new drop down menu that surely wasn’t there last she checked…

TOYS.

Nothing for the kiddies asleep in their pods. On the display was a ribbalt range of intimacy aids covering every need from solo play, to co-op, to massively multiplayer bedroom activities.

Cock swazzles, clitty blitzers, vibrating humdingers… the variety was boggling. Nipple clamps, furry restrains, collars and gags were featured in every conceivable color and design. Maeve’s painted fingertip stroked a scroll bar of motorized dildos, looking for one of a particularly large size and girthy shape, searching for the closest match from memory alone.

There!

Her finger jabbed and the fabricator chimed as her salacious selection was atomically arranged in the compartment below.

It was alarmingly big, rubbery pink and came with five speed settings.

Maeve just hoped it could keep up with the real deal.

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