The First of the Stoners
Copyright© 2026 by Al Steiner
Chapter 14: A Day On the Beach
Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 14: A Day On the Beach - 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
New Pittsburgh, Mars
November 16, 2135
Nate had trouble going back to sleep.
No work for the next two days. At least that was what the message had said, and messages like that had a way of stretching once they got started. Two days could turn into three without much effort. Three could turn into four if the weather decided to keep being an asshole. And every one of those days meant the same thing.
No work meant no income. No income meant no money to keep his shaky little ship afloat.
He lay there on his back, staring up at the ceiling, watching nothing, thinking everything. Just when he was starting to feel like he might be swimming upward toward the surface of the proverbial water, something heavy had latched onto his leg and started dragging him back down.
An iron ball.
He ran the numbers because that was what his brain did now whether he wanted it to or not. One shift netted him two hundred and twenty-two dollars after federal and planetary taxes. Two hundred and twenty-two times two was four hundred and forty-four dollars that simply wouldn’t be there on the next pay dump.
At the very least.
That assumed it was only two days.
His eyes tracked slowly across the ceiling as if the answer might be written up there somewhere. Weather. That was all they had said. Unsafe conditions for outside work. He didn’t quite buy it. He’d been out there in a biosuit, sealed tight, pressure-controlled, temperature-controlled. Martian wind didn’t have much punch behind it. The air was too thin. It could blow dust around, sure, make things a little harder to see, but it couldn’t push you off balance even if it was blowing at ninety meters a second. It just didn’t have the mass to do anything serious.
The whole situation felt ... off. Like something sinister was going on behind the scenes.
But he wasn’t in charge of making those calls. Somebody somewhere had decided it wasn’t worth it, and that was the end of the conversation.
And Nate wasn’t getting paid.
This was not good.
He rolled onto his side, then back again, pulling the blanket up and then kicking it down a few seconds later. His mind kept circling the same numbers, the same projections, like repetition might somehow change the outcome.
It didn’t.
Eventually, the thoughts started to blur at the edges. The numbers lost their sharpness. The ceiling softened into nothing. Exhaustion crept in and did what logic couldn’t.
He drifted off.
And it wasn’t long before he was yanked right back out of it.
“Nate-dawg,” Snark said from the ceiling fixtures. “It’s time to get up for work and shit.”
His eyes creaked open. The room had shifted into full morning lighting now, no ambiguity about it. His body felt heavy, like he’d only just closed his eyes. The projection clock read 07:00.
“I don’t work today,” Nate said, his voice thick with sleep. “We’ve established that, remember?”
“I remember,” Snark said. “Weather grounded your ass. At least two days. Fucked up shit, Nate-dawg.”
Nate blinked up at the ceiling, letting that sit for a second.
“If you remembered,” he said slowly, “why did you wake me up?”
“Because you set an alarm,” Snark said. “You didn’t tell me not to wake you up.”
Nate let out a long breath and rolled his head to the side, staring at the wall for a moment before closing his eyes again.
AI. There was a reason people didn’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about them taking over human civilization and becoming evil overlords. No matter how fast they were, no matter how much data they could process, no matter how perfectly they could execute a command, they still missed things that any halfway functional human being would catch without even thinking about it. Basic shit. Common fucking sense. And without that, they weren’t conquering anything.
Nate did manage to go back to sleep.
It wasn’t clean sleep. Not the kind that reset anything or left him feeling like a new man. But it was enough to take the edge off, enough to shut his brain down for a few hours and give him something resembling rest.
When he woke again, the projection clock on the wall read 09:03. He lay there for a moment, staring at it, letting the number sink in. Nine o’clock. It felt wrong.
There was a vague, unsettled sensation in his chest, like he’d missed something important, like he was already behind on a day that had barely started. Weekday mornings weren’t supposed to feel like this. He was supposed to be somewhere else entirely.
He should be atop the high steel right now, BEASTing for all he was worth. Earning thirty-seven dollars for each hour of BEASTing.
That thought sat there, heavy and persistent, refusing to move.
He rolled out of bed and went through the motions of starting his day anyway. There wasn’t much ceremony to it. No rush, no clock to beat, no sequence of tasks that had to be executed with precision just to make it out the door on time. Just ... movement. Slow, unstructured movement.
In the kitchen, he poured some fake egg protein into the pan and scrambled it with a little cheese and some leftover burrito meat, watching it cook without really paying attention. The smell filled the space, familiar and neutral. He ate standing at the counter, fork in one hand, glass of water in the other, washing each bite down like it was fuel instead of food.
He tried not to think about the money. He tried to put it out of his head. It didn’t go. It sat there in the background, steady and unmoving, like a number burned into the back of his skull. Four hundred and forty-for dollars per day he wouldn’t be getting. At least two days. Maybe more if this thing stretched.
He finished eating, rinsed the pan, plate and fork, and wiped down the counter out of habit. There was no real mess to clean, but the act of doing something—anything—felt better than standing there letting the thoughts circle.
When that was done, he dried his hands and drifted back into the living area, where the main holo stage for the rezzie sat atop a small desk. It was dark at the moment, inactive, just a flat surface waiting to project whatever you told it to.
Nate stood there for a second, thinking.
Then he made a decision.
“Snark,” he said, “send a message for Bib Billings. ‘Please give me a com if you’re not busy.’”
Billings was the BEAST supervisor at the site. The one who handed out assignments, who kept the whole operation moving in rhythm, who knew what was going on without needing it explained to him twice. He was a greenie, and more importantly, he wasn’t one of the ass-sucking types who spent their whole day trying to act like Earthlings just so they could maybe, someday, get a pat on the head.
Billings had been on Mars for ten years. Long enough to understand the ceiling. Long enough to know exactly how high a greenie could go and exactly what sat above that line. He had no illusions about rising above it. Nate respected that.
“Message sent,” Snark said.
Nate nodded once and waited.
The room stayed quiet. The holo stage remained dark. He shifted his weight slightly, hands resting at his sides, eyes unfocused as his thoughts drifted back toward the same place they’d been all morning.
Two minutes passed.
“Bib Billings is comming,” Snark said. “Would you like to answer?”
Nate blinked. “I’m the one that told you to message him to comm me, so ... what do you think?”
“What I think does not matter,” Snark said. “Do you want me to answer the comm though?”
Nate let out a quiet sigh. “Yes, Snark. Answer the comm.”
“Answering,” she said.
The holo stage flickered to life.
A moment later, the projection resolved into the head and shoulders of Bib Billings, hovering in the air with just enough depth and clarity to make it feel like he was standing in the room.
He was bald, clean-shaven up top, his scalp catching the light slightly. His face carried that permanent, half-lidded look, eyes narrowed just enough to suggest he’d already seen whatever bullshit you were about to bring him and wasn’t particularly impressed by it.
“Wassup, Nate-dawg?” he asked. His holo then brought a pipe to his mouth and took a hit. AgriCorp Brown. Staple of the working class. Nate didn’t need to be able to smell it to know what it was.
“Hey, Bib,” Nate said. “Sorry to bother your ass. You got a minute?”
“I got all fuckin’ day thanks to the weather,” Bib said. “What’s the issue?”
Nate shifted his weight slightly, glancing off toward nothing in particular before bringing his eyes back to the holo. “I was just ... wondering about this shutdown,” he said. “I mean, I’ve been out there in the suit. Wind don’t really do shit. Not enough air for it to matter. Dust might cut visibility a little, but that’s about it. Feels like we could still be working. And ... we’re really not getting paid for these days?”
Bib took another pull from his pipe, holding it in for a second before letting the smoke drift out slowly. His expression didn’t change much.
“You’re really not getting paid,” he said. “No big. Just take out a little extra on your next no-burn. Cost of doing business outside.”
Nate’s jaw tightened just a fraction, but he didn’t comment on that part. “I just don’t see why we can’t work,” he said instead. “Feels like we’re shut down for no reason.”
“There are Martian safety parameters,” Bib said. “Part of the fuckin’ planetary law. Wind speed thresholds, particulate density, all that shit. Once it hits a certain level, outside work shuts down. Automatic.”
Nate frowned slightly. “Seems like those parameters might lean a little heavy on the caution side,” he said. “And not so much on the us making money side.”
Bib gave a quiet snort at that. “Of course we could work,” he said. He lowered the pipe, fixing Nate with that same half-lidded look. “Your mistake is thinking that anyone giving a shit about us has anything to do with this. It’s just a money game.”
“A money game?” Nate asked. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Bib shifted slightly in the holo, settling back like he was about to explain something basic to someone who just hadn’t seen it yet. “It means this ain’t about wind,” he said. “Or dust. Or whether your ass can stand up on a beam without getting knocked off it. It’s about two corporations playing tug-of-war with a pile of money.”
Nate frowned. “What two corporations?”
“Briggs and the insurance company,” Bib said. “Two separate outfits. Both in it to make money. That’s all they do. Briggs carries insurance for loss of productivity. That means if they shut down—weather, equipment, whatever qualifies—they get paid for the time we ain’t building shit.”
Nate’s eyes narrowed slightly. “That’s supposed to cover wages too, right? For the people who can’t work?”
Bib gave him a flat look. “In theory. But it don’t specifically say that in the contract in any way that matters. So what happens is Briggs gets a day’s worth of productivity money ... and we get jack shit.”
Nate let that sit.
“So they’re getting paid,” he said slowly, “and we’re not.”
“That’s the fuckin’ deal,” Bib said. “Insurance company ain’t stupid either. They charge huge premiums for that coverage. Weather delays are common as hell out here this time of the Martian year, especially when you got your butt buddies at Mars OSHA setting ultra-conservative shutdown triggers like today.”
Nate glanced off for a second, picturing that—some office somewhere deciding what counted as “safe.”
“They don’t mind paying out?” he asked.
“They mind it plenty,” Bib said. “That’s the whole fight.”
He shifted slightly, the dusty light behind him still smearing across the background.
“Briggs wants that threshold lowered,” he said. “More shutdowns, more insurance payouts, more days they get paid without paying us. Insurance company wants it raised—fewer shutdowns, fewer payouts, same fat premiums coming in.”
Nate blinked once. “So they’re fighting over how often this happens.”
“Exactly,” Bib said. “That’s the game. They push it back and forth a few inches every year. Lobbyists on both sides. Looks like movement, but it don’t change much.”
He gave a faint smirk.
“Right now,” he said, “winds over thirty-three meters per second and visibility less than five hundred meters, we shut down. Automatic. No discussion.”
He looked straight at Nate.
“Briggs gets paid,” he said. “We don’t.”
“That’s fucked up!” Nate declared.
That earned a shrug from Bib. “Welcome to Mars, greenie,” he told him.
The rezzie was empty.
Nate wasn’t used to that. There was always somebody around—Tyler moving through the space, Xan talking about something half-interesting and half-weird, Roxy drifting in and out like she owned the place even when she didn’t. There was always presence in the rezzie. Movement. Voices. The low hum of other lives happening in parallel.
Now there was nothing. Just the soft mechanical breathing of the building and the faint ambient noise of systems doing what they were designed to do while the residents were earning their paydays. Except one of them was not on this day.
He stood in the middle of the living area for a moment, hands hanging at his sides, taking it in. It felt off in a way he couldn’t quite define. Not wrong exactly. Just ... incomplete.
He moved over to the main video screen and activated it. Some generic stream came up first—something formatted to look like programming, but really just a delivery system. He watched for a few minutes. Half of it was advertisements. Not even subtle ones. Full-screen pitches, loud and polished, trying to sell him things to improve his life. The other half was content, technically speaking, but even that felt like it existed mostly to keep him there long enough to see the next ad.
Fifty percent ads. Fifty percent content. That sucked ass.
He gave it another minute, then shook his head and killed it.
“Fuck that,” he muttered.
He switched over to a live stream instead, one of the public feeds from New Pittsburgh. This one was mounted atop the Triad Steel Building near the northeast edge of the city. High enough to give a real view. Real enough to feel like you were actually seeing something. The image came up steady, the camera panning in a slow, deliberate arc.
The city looked different. Visibility was down. Not terrible, but enough to notice. Maybe seven hundred meters, give or take. Beyond that, everything softened into a hazy smear. The light was dimmer too, filtered through suspended dust that gave the sky a muted orange tone, like the whole place had been dipped in weak rust.
The camera continued its rotation. For a few seconds, nothing stood out—just the usual grid of rez-hues and industrial structures fading into the haze. Then the angle shifted just enough. Nate leaned forward slightly. There it was. Their building. Or at least the outline of it. A darker shape against the already dim background, its upper skeleton barely visible through the dust. But it was there. He knew it immediately.
And it wasn’t moving. It wasn’t lost in the haze. Nothing about the scene suggested danger. No violent motion, no whipping debris, no conditions that looked even remotely unmanageable. Just dust. Just reduced visibility. Annoying, maybe. Slower work, sure.
But not impossible.
“No reason we couldn’t be working,” Nate said quietly.
Bib was right. It was a money game. And no one was actually concerned about the poor greenies who had to climb that tower.
He let the feed run for another minute, watching the city rotate past, then turned away and went into the kitchen. He grabbed a glass, filled it from the tap, and took a long drink, letting the cool water sit in his mouth for a second before swallowing.
Back in the living area, he pulled out his clinker and brought up his financials. The numbers were right where he’d left them.
He started running them again, slower this time. Income, expenses, projections. What he had, what he owed, what was coming in, what wasn’t.
If the shutdown was only two shifts, he wouldn’t have to take out another no-burn. He’d sink a little deeper under the water. Not much. Enough to feel it, enough to push the timeline back a bit, but not enough to break him. He could recover from that. It would just take longer.
He let out a slow breath. It made him feel a little better. Not much, but a little.
He tapped the screen and switched the view. The city feed collapsed, replaced by an overhead image from a GPS satellite in low orbit. The angle was high and wide, showing a broad sweep of Martian surface under the same muted daylight. No cities. No dust either. Just terrain stretching out in muted reds and browns, clean and uninterrupted. A different part of the planet. Probably closer to the equatorial regions, maybe even dipping into the southern hemisphere. Hard to tell without a reference.
He could have Snark throw up a corner map and give him exact coordinates, track the satellite’s path, see exactly where it was looking, but he didn’t bother. He didn’t care enough to do so.
It took him a while, but Nate finally realized that he was bored.
There was literally nothing to do.
He drifted around the rezzie for a bit, half-looking for something that wasn’t there. No work. No errands. No real obligations. Just time. A whole lot of time that wasn’t earning him a single dollar.
He couldn’t even get drunk or stoned. There was no pot or beer in the house that belonged to him. Yeah, there was probably some in Tyler’s stash, but that wasn’t his, and he wasn’t about to start dipping into other people’s shit without asking. That was against the butt-buddy code. He could go down to the lobby and buy whatever he wanted. It wasn’t like that was hard. The building practically encouraged it.
It’ll be fun, a part of his brain whispered. Getting drunk and high will make the day pass, make you forget you ain’t making any fuckin’ money.
He actually listened to that voice longer than he should have, turning it over for a few seconds before finally pushing it aside. Fun didn’t pay for anything. Fun didn’t get him out of the hole. It was exactly that kind of thinking that got motherfuckers into trouble in the first place.
“Yeah ... no,” he muttered, shaking his head as if the thought had come from somewhere outside him.
The room stayed quiet. Still nothing to do.
“Lissa Greenbud is comming you,” Snark said from the ceiling. “Do you want to answer her ass?”
Nate blinked. Lissa. Right. She was off today too. Same reason he was. That hadn’t even crossed his mind until just now. And now she was comming him. Why?
His mind went back to yesterday for a moment—the awkward setup, the conversation, the kiss at the end of it. He felt a faint tightening in his chest as he considered it. Maybe she’d been thinking about it. Maybe she was upset that he had kissed her without commitment. Maybe she wanted to demand girlfriend rights and privileges because they had touched their lips together for a few seconds. In his brain, with the way this day was going, that seemed perfectly plausible.
He let out a quiet sigh.
“Yeah,” he said. “Answer it.”
“Answering,” Snark replied.
The holo stage flickered to life again, resolving into Lissa’s head and shoulders.
She looked ... different. Her hair was neatly styled, not just brushed and functional like it usually was after a shift. She had earrings in—cheap ones, sure, but they caught the light just enough to draw attention. Her blouse was yellow with frilly sleeves, something he hadn’t seen her wear before.
Roxy had called her a girly-girl. Now that he’d heard it, he couldn’t unsee it.
“Hey, slut-dawg,” Nate said casually. “I see you got the fuckin’ day off too.”
“What’s up with that shit?” she shot back immediately. “I looked at a camera view. We could be working in this shit! It ain’t that fucked up!”
“Yeah,” Nate said. “I talked to Bib about the shutdown.”
Lissa leaned a little closer to her holo, her expression sharpening. “Yeah? What’d he say?”
Nate walked her through it the same way Bib had walked him through it—slowly, piece by piece. The insurance, the productivity coverage, the shutdown thresholds, the way the money moved even when the workers didn’t. As he talked, he watched her face change. Her eyes tightened, her mouth setting a little harder with each new detail as the picture came together.
By the time he finished, she was staring at him with that same look he knew he’d had a few minutes earlier. And she said the exact same thing.
“That’s fucked up!”
“Welcome to Mars, greenie,” Nate told her.
She shook her head, looking off to the side for a moment like she was trying to process it all. “I’m gonna have to take out another fuckin’ no-burn if this shit goes on past the weekend,” she said. “I was just starting to put my new plan into motion.”
“I’m in the same boat,” Nate said. “If it’s just two shifts, I can eat it. Anything more than that...” He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Well ... fuck,” Lissa said.
There was a brief pause. She shifted slightly in her seat, then looked back at him, her expression changing just a bit. “And it’s fuckin’ boring here by myself,” she added. “You want to do something?”
“Like what?” Nate asked.
“Let’s split a fuckin’ six-pack and a hundo bag of Brown,” she said. “We meet at Kroger Park, climb that fuckin’ hill, and forget all this shit is happening.”
Nate let that sit for a second.
A hundred bucks for a six-pack of cheap beer. Another hundred for a hundo bag of AgriCorp Brown—which, if you were being honest, meant about six decent pipe hits if you stretched it. Two hundred dollars to sit on a hill and get drunk and high. True, it would be divided among them, but a hundred dollars was a hundred dollars. Throwing it away on beer and buds would not exactly be helpful to his financial situation.
But the image came anyway. Sitting up there with Lissa, looking out over the park, passing a pipe back and forth, drinking beer, letting the day slide by instead of fighting it.
That did sound like fun.
And really ... was a hundred bucks all that much in the grand scheme of things?
“That sounds static, slut-dawg,” he said. “You want me to pick up the shit or you wanna do it?”
One hour later, Nate was at Kroger Park with Lissa.
She was still dressed in her yellow blouse, the one with the frilly sleeves, paired with black shorts and black mocks. The fake diamond earrings were still in place, catching what little light filtered down through the canopy. She looked put together. More so than he was used to seeing her. It fit what Roxy had said about her, whether he wanted to admit it or not. She was a girly-girl when she wasn’t on the high steel.
She smiled when she saw him coming up the path with a cold six-pack of AgriCorp lager in his hand. They greeted each other without much ceremony, a quick nod, a brief moment of eye contact that lingered just a fraction longer than it needed to. Then Nate pulled out his clinker and sent the receipt over to her. She checked it, tapped through a couple of screens, and sent him her half.
They were square. No awkwardness. No negotiation. Just the way things were done among greenies.
“Let’s go,” she said, jerking her head toward the hill.
They started up the path together.
The climb began as a winding trail, packed dirt and scattered pine needles underfoot, curving its way up through the trees. In a few sections, it gave way to short flights of stairs, the steps set into the slope where the incline got steeper. They moved at a steady pace, not rushing it, but not dragging either.
Up and up. The air smelled good. Clean. Pine-heavy in a way that cut through the usual background scent of the city. It hit Nate in a familiar place, pulling up memories whether he asked for them or not. Winterfest in Roseville. Fresh-cut trees lined up in rows, decorated and fucking everywhere, the whole place saturated with that same sharp, natural smell.
It was a weird thing to find on Mars.
There were animals too. Squirrels and chipmunks darting along the ground and up the trunks, quick and twitchy. Scrub jays flitting from branch to branch, their movements sharp and deliberate as they watched everything from above. The whole place felt alive in a way that most of the city didn’t.
Overall, the park wasn’t crowded. After all, it was the middle of a workday and greenies had no unemployment to speak of. Most of the population did not get the day off because the weather was allegedly bad.
But it wasn’t completely empty. There were night shift workers, weekend workers, people who were off during traditional work hours and days. They passed a few on the way up. A couple heading down, talking quietly between themselves. A small group of friends stopped off to the side of the trail, one of them laughing at something the others had said. Nobody paid Nate or Lissa any attention. Just another pair of greenies out for a climb.
The summit opened up suddenly as they crested the last stretch. It was wide and mostly flat, the trees thicker here than anywhere else on the hill. A few of them stretched high enough that their tops brushed close to the canopy above, where the dim, orange-tinted Martian sky showed through in broken patches. The light filtered down in uneven shafts, giving the whole area a muted, almost enclosed feel.
There were people up here too. A couple sitting close together on a blanket. A few friends gathered around a low table, talking and passing something between them. Quiet conversations, low movement, nothing loud or disruptive.
No one looked at Nate or Lissa. No one cared they were there.
They found a plastic picnic table that no one was using, set a little off to the west side of the summit in a small clearing between three closely spaced trees. From there, you could look out over the slope and see the park spread below them, the terrain dropping away sharply for fifty meters or so before leveling out again into trails, open space, and clusters of trees. Most of Kroger Park was visible from that angle. It was a good place to kick it.
Which was exactly what they did.
They sat across from each other at the table, the six-pack between them, the little bag of Brown already opened. Nate packed the pipe and lit it, taking the first hit before passing it across. Lissa took hers without hesitation, holding it in a little longer than he did before letting it out slowly. They got three good hits apiece, just like you’d expect from a hundo bag that wasn’t trying too hard to impress anyone.
By the time the last of it was gone and the first beers were halfway down, it had settled in.
“Good shit,” Lissa said, leaning back slightly, her eyes softening just a touch.
“Fuckin’ A,” Nate agreed.
They let it ride for a minute, the quiet between them not uncomfortable, just ... loose. The kind of quiet that didn’t need filling right away.
Eventually, the conversation started, the way it always did when you were a little buzzed and a little stoned and had nowhere else to be.
They got into free will first.
It started with something small, some offhand comment Nate made about choices and how people got themselves into situations like the one they were in. That spun out into a back-and-forth about whether people actually chose anything at all or if everything was just the result of a chain reaction that had been set in motion long before they were fuckin’ born.
They went at it for a while, circling the idea from different angles, throwing out examples, poking holes in each other’s reasoning. In the end, they both landed in roughly the same place—that free will probably was real, or at least real enough to matter. It felt like they were making decisions, and that was good enough.
From there, it drifted into Martian weather.
How fucked up the planet really was once you stepped outside the controlled environment of the city. The cold, the pressure, the dust, the way everything out there was trying to kill you in one way or another. The shutdown suddenly felt even more absurd in that context. You could survive all that, work in all that, but a little extra dust and some wind on a Wednesday afternoon was enough to send everyone home.
“Whole thing’s backwards,” Nate said at one point, shaking his head.
“No shit,” Lissa replied.
Somewhere along the line, they ended up talking about cheese and crackers. Neither of them was entirely sure how that happened, but once they were there, they both had opinions.
Nate was a whole wheat cracker guy. Plain, unflavored, so it didn’t get in the way. The cracker was just there to hold the cheese, not compete with it. Pepper jack was his go-to—just enough kick to keep it interesting without overpowering everything else.
Lissa disagreed immediately.