The First of the Stoners
Copyright© 2026 by Al Steiner
Chapter 1: The Pee-Hue
Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 1: The Pee-Hue - For readers of the Greenies Universe, this is where it all began. In 2135, nineteen-year-old Nathan Stoner is offered something no vermin has seen in generations: a real job. The catch? It's on Mars. Follow the first wave of colonists as they leave Earth behind and build the foundations of the society that will one day shape the entire Greenies timeline.
Caution: This Science Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Consensual Fiction Science Fiction
It was June 1, 2135 when Nathan Whitney—generally called Nate by those who knew him—received the message from the ETES mail server. It was a form message, only 200 words in length, about as impersonal as such correspondence could be. There was no signature on the message. There was no return address. It was the same message, in fact, that had been sent to more than ten thousand others throughout North America that day. Nonetheless, it was a message that would drastically affect the rest of Nate’s life and irrevocably alter the future of his descendants.
It was 15:30 when the message arrived. Nate’s communication link, called a “clinker” in the modern vernacular, began to vibrate in the pocket of his welfare market synthetic cotton pants. The frequency of the vibration was three hundred cycles per second. It went through two three-second cycles and then stopped. This was the signal for a mail message, as opposed to a video message or a live communication or a live text. He kept his clinker in his pocket for the time being. There was no reason to believe the mail message was the message he had been waiting three weeks for. It was probably nothing more than another unsolicited targeted advertisement, or perhaps another request for services. He was working right now. Not actual sanctioned work he would be paid in actual North American dollars for, but work all the same. If there was one lesson he had learned from his parents throughout his nineteen years of life it was that honest work was sacred and should be treated as such.
He was in the main room of a middle-class RHU—a residential housing unit, pronounced are-hue—in a building filled with a few hundred just like it. His great-grandmother would’ve called it a condo. Most city dwellers now lived in are-hues. If the government gave it to you—as they had with Nate’s parents—it was a public housing unit, or pee-hue, courtesy of the Department of Public Housing.
This particular are-hue was a one-bedroom, one-bath unit with a small kitchen and a modest main room. It had no windows to the outside; it sat buried in the core of the thirty-sixth floor, away from the outer wall.
It belonged to a woman named Rhonda Ballesteros, a forty-four-year-old mid-level accountant for Free-West Communications. Recently divorced from her third husband, she’d moved in the week before and hired Nate for some off-rec installation—new flooring and wall covers in the living room. By hiring an unlicensed, non-sanctioned worker, she was breaking both regional and federal law (as was Nate), but she was saving herself roughly three thousand dollars.
Nate had been crawling around on the floor and climbing up and down a small ladder to the ceiling for the past six hours, pushing and gluing, connecting and trimming. He was dirty and sweaty and extremely hungry. He made one last inspection of his work. There were no seams visible, no traces of the liquid adhesive, no bumps or bulges or air bubbles. It was perfect, or at least as perfect as he could make it. Now there was only one last thing to do.
“All done, Rhonda,” he called out. “Ready to power it up now.”
“On my way,” she replied from the bedroom, where, at Nate’s polite request, she’d spent the last two hours.
He heard her slipper clad feet slapping on the floor. A second later, the bedroom door slid open and she entered the room. She was an attractive woman, though not stunningly so. About sixty-five kilograms on a one hundred seventy centimeter frame, her face was pretty, her brunette hair mostly natural. Like many women of her generation, her manner of dress was a bit on the racy side. She wore tan shorts that hugged her bottom tightly and exposed nearly the entire length of her long legs. Her maroon top was sleeveless, clinging tightly to her tits, with a plunging neckline that showed about fifteen centimeters of her cleavage. Her hazel eyes took a quick glance at the floor and walls, which were uniformly pale gray in the unpowered state, and then began to look over Nate in a way that could only be described as hungry.
Nate suppressed a sigh as he noted her gaze. He had been enduring her brazen flirtation and shameless ogling all day. This was a fairly common phenomenon for members of his generation, who were much more conservative sexually and socially than those who had brought them forth. A girl Nate’s age, for instance, would never dream of exposing to public view her shoulders or her cleavage or her legs above mid-thigh. And casual sex, which was the hallmark of Rhonda’s generation, was considered the very essence of deviance and depravity to Nate’s. To those younger than twenty-five, engaging in any form of sexuality beyond kissing and touching over the clothing without being in a committed long-term relationship was a social taboo that carried nearly the same weight as incest and pedophilia.
The reason for this was not based on any sort of religious or moralistic enlightenment but was actually medical in nature. The members of Rhonda’s generation were only the second in human history to enjoy completely reliable physiological birth control for both genders. Two generations of rampant sexual freedom coupled with the virtual abandonment of condom use as a part of that freedom had led to a tremendous explosion of sexually transmitted diseases of every shape, form and severity. Despite modern medicine’s best efforts to eradicate, control, or at least render them harmless, there were more than two dozen distinct varieties of STD floating about that had not existed a hundred years before.
Most of these were simply annoying, causing itching, discharge, rashes, or lesions. Others, however, were more serious. There were STDs that caused infertility in both sexes. There were STDs that could destroy the functionality of the male sexual equipment. And there were two that caused lingering unpleasant death, one by destruction of the nervous system, one by systematic destruction of the internal organs.
To Nate and his peers, the older generation, no matter how attractive or desirable, were potential death traps. But to Rhonda and her peers, the younger generation, even if physically unattractive, even if members of a lower class, were aggressively coveted because they were so difficult to entice.
And Nate, though most definitely of a lower class than Rhonda, was not unattractive. Perhaps he would not have been asked to model clothing or star in a holograph show, but, all in all, he was a respectable representation of twenty-second century North American youth. He was slightly taller than average, measuring in at one hundred ninety-six centimeters. His build was on the thin side, but only slightly so. His stomach was flat, his arms and legs well-muscled, his skin tone a pleasing pale tan thanks to a recent smattering of African, Asian and Arabian contributors to his primarily Caucasian bloodline. As North American men had been doing for the past hundred years now, he shaved his head on a daily basis. As was the current trend with his age-group, however, he was not completely bald. A well-trimmed pattern of hair was allowed to remain in place. In Nate’s case it was a forward pointing chevron, two centimeters in width, that started at the peak of his forehead and extended backwards to the tops of his ears. The hair that made up this strip—this style was known as a ‘pointer’—was his natural shade of dark brown, the same shade as his eyes.
“Looking good,” Rhonda said, her eyes still tracking up and down his body and over his face. “Looking really good.”
“It will look even better when it’s powered up,” Nate said, pretending to miss her innuendo.
She knew he was only pretending, of course. She had many years of experience at being shot down by men half her age. She let it go, however—at least for the moment. “All right,” she said. “If it’s ready, let’s light it up.” She pulled her clinker from the pocket of her shorts. “What do I do first?”
“Access the are-hue computer and make sure it has acquired the new floor and walls.”
“Right,” she said, putting her finger on the small device. A three dimensional holographic screen, ten centimeters square, popped into existence above the top of the clinker. It was a screen that would be nothing but a blur to anyone not looking directly at it. She rolled the track wheel a few times, tapped a few places, then nodded. “The are-hue has it.”
“There should be a tab for initial power-up,” Nate said.
“I got it.”
“Go ahead and tap it. That will synch the software with the hardware.”
She tapped it. A few seconds went by. “Gasmic. It says it’s ready to go.”
“Are there any options you have to check first, or can you just initiate?”
“There’s an options tab in here but it says the defaults are in operation at the moment. The initiation tab is tappable.”
Nate smiled at her—a friendly smile meant to convey no sexual interest of any kind. “Tap away then. Let’s decorate your room.”
She tapped. There was a whirring noise from the main are-hue processer in the kitchen and then the program activated. Beneath their feet the gray of the flooring suddenly changed to the image of polished mahogany hardwood. The walls changed to a pale lime green, complete with holographic molding that matched the floor. Two windows appeared as well, a large picture window on the front wall and a smaller garden window directly across from it. The picture window showed a view of a placid lake with wispy clouds in the blue sky above it. The lake was framed by jagged mountains. There were a few rowboats drifting on the surface, their occupants apparently fishing. The smaller window looked out on a forest of pine trees, complete with the occasional squirrel or woodpecker.
“Nice clarity,” Nate said with approval. It was a high-end system, its purchase price probably around sixty thousand dollars—twice the amount Nate pulled in via the Western Region Public Assistance system each year.
“It’ll do, I suppose,” Rhonda said with a shrug. “I’m not particularly fond of the scenery, and the shading between the flooring and the wall simply has to be adjusted. Far too little contrast.”
“Adjustment is easy,” Nate said. “It should be under the options menu.”
“I know,” she said sourly. “It will be my first order of business.”
“And as for the scenery, just go to the manufacturer’s server. I’m sure they have hundreds of scenery options you can download.”
“Of course they do,” Rhonda said. “All for a price. That’s the problem with these systems: everything costs you money. Different flooring is five to eight hundred, extra windows are a thousand apiece, and bookshelves are eight hundred. As for different scenery ... well, that’s where they really rape you. A basic scenery download is four thousand dollars. Live scenery—something like Lake Yellowstone or Tahoe or the Grand Canyon—that’s a minimum of ten thousand for download and installation and then you have to pay up to a thousand a month to maintain the link.” She shook her head. “Those damn software companies own the world.”
“That is one theory,” Nate said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Oh the problems of the employed. It sounded like a terrible inconvenience to be middle-class and responsible for deciding your are-hue’s scenery scheme on your sixty thousand dollar holographic interior design equipment.
Rhonda played around a little with the options settings. She changed the size and location of the windows, changed the size and composition of the floor molding, tweaked the color shades a bit. Finally, she locked in the scheme she was most happy with (although she was still groaning about having to purchase a bookshelf and some artwork downloads) and put her clinker back in her pocket.
“Happy enough?” Nate asked her.
“Happy enough,” she agreed. “Or at least as happy as I can be until my furniture is delivered.”
“I guess I’ll be heading out then. When would be a good time to settle up?”
By this, he meant when would he be compensated for the work he had done. The amount they had negotiated for a standard installation of her wall and floor covers was three thousand dollars. However, since he was unlicensed and working “off-rec”, it was impossible for her to just give him three thousand dollars.
This was not the twenty-first century. Cash did not exist anymore. All monetary transactions were done by computer—all the better to keep an eye on you. If Rhonda were to just drop three grand into Nate’s bank account, the bank computers for both of them would make note of it and send a little notification message—known as a rat-out—to the Internal Revenue Service computer. The IRS would then note that Nate Whitney, ID number 557-09-0998-C4, was not officially employed or licensed to charge for services. After taking twenty-five percent of the three grand for income taxes, the IRS computer would then send a rat-out to the Western Region Public Assistance computer advising that Nate Whitney had just come into two thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars. They would then deduct that amount from the next welfare payment.
But even that was not the worst. The WRPA computer would send a rat-out to several Western Region employment licensing agencies and several law enforcement agencies requesting an investigation into the source of these funds. And sometime within the next month or so, a couple of people wearing suits and carrying guns would show up to talk to him and Rhonda about why three grand had been deposited into Nate Whitney’s bank account. The consequences for a first offense would not be that severe for Nate—he would probably just lose the money and be given a black mark on his record—but Rhonda would probably be fined at least three times what she’d paid him. And if Rhonda had been convicted of such an offense in the past, she might actually have to spend a few days in a jail cell.
Still, there was a large and well-organized market for off-rec services in a large variety of fields. Unemployment in the Sacramento region, where Nate and his family lived, had been around thirty percent for the past sixty years. And Sacramento wasn’t doing that badly compared to the North American cities as a whole. The United States unemployment rate was thirty-six percent. Canada fluctuated wildly but was generally between thirty-two and forty percent. Mexico was among the worst on the planet, with nearly forty-five percent of its capable workforce unemployed.
Rhonda lingered by the wall, flicking idly through her clinker’s interface now that the install was complete. “Three thousand even,” she said. “Right?”
“That was the deal,” Nate confirmed, wiping a spot of adhesive from his palm with a scrap of synthcloth.
“I assume you want BuyMax?”
“It’s easiest,” he said. “They carry pretty much everything. Civic Plaza is closest to me, if that works for you.”
“Fourteen hundred tomorrow?” she asked.
“That works.”
BuyMax was a five-level retail monolith stacked inside a high-rise just east of downtown Sacramento. If it existed, BuyMax carried it—from groceries to synthetic leather furniture to replacement parts for mid-tier air scrubbers. Unlike the welfare marts, which accepted only public assistance credit, BuyMax was exclusive to the employed. Vermin like Nate were not allowed entry without a chaperone. That was where Rhonda came in.
The arrangement wasn’t unusual. Everyone knew how it worked.
Rhonda would take Nate through the store and load three thousand dollars’ worth of items onto a rolling pallet. Household gear, new clothes, backup toiletries, maybe a few luxury snacks he could stretch into a month of ration supplements. There would be no record of payment to him—no money trail to flag by the IRS or WRPA. It would just look like a stressed middle-class woman doing some aggressive consumer therapy. And if she tried to stiff him?
She wouldn’t. Not unless she wanted to be flagged on the off-rec network, where her employment ID would be attached to a bright-red warning that said: DOES NOT SETTLE. No off-rec laborer in North America would touch her apartment after that—not unless she prepaid in full, with premium on top. Rhonda, like all her type, wasn’t that reckless.
The system worked both ways. If Nate had done a half-assed job, if the floor had bubbles or the window seal graphics warped in the corner, Rhonda could post a negative review on his labor profile. That would throttle future job offers, maybe even shut them off completely. There was no appeals process, no union, no restitution. In the off-rec world, reputation was currency. And reputation was well documented.
So each would do what the other expected—Rhonda would settle with honesty, and Nate with perfection, getting every last cent that was due to him.
She seemed disappointed to see the job wrapping up.
“Well,” she said, closing her clinker screen and stepping a little closer. “I’m impressed. You do good work.”
“Thank you.”
“I believe in tipping for good service,” she said, her eyes sliding over his arms, his shoulders, his neck. “Would you be interested in ... a little bonus tonight? Something off the menu?”
Nate smiled politely, the kind of smile he’d learned to keep practiced and flat. “I appreciate the offer,” he said. “But I’ve got another job I need to get to. No offense.”
Rhonda sighed, a blend of amusement and resignation. “No offense taken. I figured I’d ask.”
“You’ll see me at BuyMax tomorrow?”
“Fourteen hundred sharp.”
“See you then.” Nate gathered his tools and slung the synthcloth bag over one shoulder. “Enjoy your scenery.”
She gave him a parting smirk. “I will.”
And with that, he left.
The public rail stop on Harlow and 48th was half-sheltered from the late afternoon sun, its canopy patched with dust-grimed solar panels and tagged with a rotating graffiti loop that flickered in purple light: FEDS SUCK. VERMINS BITE. FUCK THE FAGITS!.
Nate leaned against the steel support column and pulled out his clinker. The train wouldn’t arrive for another six minutes. Assuming it was on time, which was a big assumption.
He tapped the screen and brought up his inbox. As expected, three new messages: one was a spam pitch from a supplement vendor trying to sell black-market testosterone kits for “virile men of distinction,” and one was an overdue reminder from Public Welfare asking him to complete his latest job search log—even though everyone involved knew it was a bureaucratic ritual with no actual expectation.
The third was different.
From: ETES.MailServer .762
Subject: Congratulations, Nathan Stoner
His real surname wasn’t Stoner, but that was the last name ETES knew him by.
Nathan Whitney would never have qualified for official employment on Mars—not with a criminal background. Nothing too serious: a few busts for off-rec work, an assault case that involved an employed person (it had been complete self-defense, but the system didn’t see it that way), and a vandalism charge from when he was sixteen. Not much for a vermin—almost saintly, in fact—but enough to disqualify him on paper.
So, he gave them the name Nathan Stoner.
Nathan Stoner didn’t have a criminal record. He didn’t have any record, because he didn’t exist. And ETES didn’t do deep background checks—just superficial ones. They ran the name through a system that flagged criminal convictions, nothing more.
It wasn’t sloppiness. It was deliberate.
They’d started with legit background checks and quickly discovered that almost everyone who applied had some kind of disqualifying record. So they adjusted. Word spread fast in vermin circles: give them a clean name and you’re in. And, true to form, a lot of people picked surnames rooted in marijuana slang. Stoner was by far the most popular, followed by Greenbud, Redbud, Bongwater, and Dealerman.
Nate stared at the word Congratulations on the screen. He’d never had that word directed at him before.
Could the rumors be true? Were they really hiring any vermin who applied to work on Mars?
He stared at the header for a long time, not opening it.
It had been almost three weeks since he applied.
The application had been short, the screening basic: a brief aptitude check, a personality flag, a name scan. That was it. No employment history needed. No follow-up interview.
Because Mars didn’t care.
The red planet was desperate. The discovery fifteen years ago that large-scale agriculture could thrive in Martian soil had changed everything. Massive greenhouses were now being constructed in the Eden area, the first of the equatorial colonies. The demand for labor was unrelenting. They needed bodies—hundreds of thousands of them—to build, to haul, to grow, to maintain. Behind that labor boom, mining in New Pittsburgh had surged to feed construction and infrastructure. The entire Martian economy was inflating overnight, and Earth couldn’t supply the help fast enough.
Not from the employed class, anyway.
No one with a job was willing to leave Earth, not for a one-way ticket to the other side of the solar system. That left one group to fill the void: the welfare class. The vermin.
Like Nate.
His family had been unemployed for nearly three generations now. The last man in his bloodline to hold an above-board, tax-paying job had been his great-grandfather, who’d done refrigeration repair back when people still owned their own appliances. Since then, they’d existed on state credits and off-rec work—installations, hauling, some light code writing back in his dad’s day. But they’d never stopped trying. Somehow, his parents had clung to a belief in honest labor, and they’d raised Nate to believe the same. Work wasn’t just about money—it was dignity, self-worth, contribution.
Most families in their building had long since abandoned the pretense. The will to work had faded out of them like heat through a cracked wall panel—slow, steady, and permanent. They sat in their pee-hues, watched state-issued content, smoked shitty welfare marijuana, and waited to die. You couldn’t even really blame them. The system had written them off. Just having the designation of “welfare recipient” in your WestHem profile was enough to block 90% of Earth-based employment opportunities. Nate couldn’t even sweep the floors in a public transit station without special clearance.
But Mars? Mars didn’t care.
Not yet.
He thumbed the clinker screen, hovered over the message, and finally tapped.
CONGRATULATIONS, NATHAN STONER
You have been selected for provisional employment through Extra-Terrestrial Employment Services (ETES) in partnership with AgriCorp, a WestHem-certified primary contractor for extraterrestrial agriculture and logistics.
Location of Position: Eden, Mars (WHA Federal Colony)
Position Title: To be determined post-arrival, following aptitude and psychological testing during transport.
Departure Instructions: You are to report to Edwards Spaceport (Southern California Region) no later than:
July 1, 2135 at 08:00 hours local time. You will board shuttle transport to Departure, the WestHem geosynchronous orbital city. From there, you will transfer to the Green Horizon transport vessel, bound for Triad Orbital Facility (Mars Orbit).
Final transport to Eden Surface Terminal will be coordinated upon arrival.
This offer is time-sensitive.
You must acknowledge receipt of this message within 24 hours.
If you do not wish to accept, you must notify ETES within 72 hours to be removed from the applicant list.
Failure to respond will result in disqualification from current and future ETES employment opportunities.
We congratulate you on taking the first step toward an exciting future in extraterrestrial employment.
{br}
Sent on behalf of ETES / WestHem Division of Workforce Recruitment
Nate stared at the message for a while.