The First of the Stoners
Copyright© 2026 by Al Steiner
Chapter 2: Time For Me To Fly
Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 2: Time For Me To Fly - 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
Roseville, WestHem
June 30, 2135
Nate stood just inside the doorway of the pee-hue with his bag at his feet, the strap already looped over one shoulder. It wasn’t a large bag. ETES didn’t allow large bags. Approved contents only. Weight limits enforced to the gram. Anything else could be replaced later—or it couldn’t. Either way, it wasn’t ETES’s problem and they had made that quite clear.
His mother hovered near the stove even though nothing was cooking. His father sat at the table with his hands wrapped around a chipped mug that had gone cold sometime yesterday. The sink still dripped. It would probably keep dripping until the building collapsed or was condemned, whichever came first.
“So,” his father said. “This is it.”
Nate nodded. “Mag-lev’s in thirty-five minutes. They want us early for ID and scan.”
His mother turned toward him. Her eyes were red but dry. She hadn’t cried—not really. She’d gone quiet instead, which was worse. She straightened the collar of his shirt with careful fingers, smoothing wrinkles that didn’t matter.
“You didn’t have to go,” she said.
“I know.”
“You could’ve married,” his father added. “Had a place. Had a life.”
Nate looked around the pee-hue—the warped floor, the cracked wall seam near the vent, the spot where the overlay always failed in the summer heat.
“I’d have had this,” he said. “Just with a door that locked.”
That landed. His father nodded once.
They’d already done the arguing. The night he told them—really told them—they’d tried everything short of begging. Distance. Danger. Never seeing him again. What finally ended it was the look on his face when he said he was going anyway.
He’d made the decision earlier that same night, though they didn’t know that part.
After Kay-Rin had done him—after the pressure finally burned itself out of his body and left him calm and clear for the first time in years—the answer had been obvious. With the noise gone, there was no romance to weigh, no fantasy strong enough to compete with reality.
Mars was work. Mars was money that couldn’t be clawed back. Mars was a life that didn’t require begging permission to exist.
Common sense hadn’t argued. It had simply nodded.
Sexual urgency came roaring back soon enough—nineteen-year-old biology didn’t stay quiet for long—but the decision stayed put. He hadn’t told Kay-Rin right away. He let her kiss him. Let her touch him. Let her try, night after night, to anchor him to a future he’d already left.
That was the part he wasn’t proud of.
When he finally told her, she slapped him, called him a fuckin’ moocher, and told him she hoped he died in space, gasping for fuckin’ air. Then she walked away and never looked back.
He would never see her again.
His mother hugged him then, sudden and tight. He hugged her back, breathing in the familiar smell of detergent and old grease and home. His father stood, cleared his throat, and clapped a hand on Nate’s shoulder—once, firm.
“Comm us when you can,” his father said. “If they let you.”
“I will.”
They walked him to the door. The auto-slide still didn’t work. Nate shouldered it open one last time.
The hallway smelled like too many lives stacked too close together. Someone was yelling two units down. A baby cried somewhere above. He didn’t look back when the door clunked shut behind him.
The Roseville intracity platform baked under the open sky, concrete radiating heat back up through Nate’s welfare mart shoes. The canopy overhead was narrow and grudging, more a gesture than real shade. It was the last day of June in the Sacramento Valley, and the sun sat heavy and unmoved, indifferent to anyone leaving the planet. It had to be close to forty degrees right now. And it was only just past midday.
Nate stood with his bag at his feet and waited.
He’d been on this platform more times than he could count—jobs in Midtown, installs out toward the eastern suburbs, off-rec runs that paid a little better if you didn’t mind the ride. Intracity mag-lev was just part of life. You showed up. You paid with a fingerprint. You stood. You went where you were going.
Nothing ceremonial about it.
The ticket panels lined the back wall of the platform, flat matte screens already smeared with fingerprints. No cards. No codes. No cash. Nobody had carried money in generations. You laid derm and you had money in your account for the system to deduct or you didn’t ride.
Nate stepped up to an open panel and pressed his index finger flat against the glowing square.
The surface warmed slightly as it read him—ridge pattern, pressure, blood flow. Fingerprints were still the backbone of identity in WestHem. Cheap. Reliable. If you were an official child, your print existed in the system. Nate’s did. That much his parents had made damn sure of.
The screen pulsed.
IDENTITY CONFIRMED
NATHAN WHITNEY
STATUS: ADULT—UNEMPLOYED
So far, normal.
The system paused just long enough to make him wonder.
Word was the employed sections had seats. Real ones. Even on intracity. People said they were cushioned, quieter—like the train actually expected you to be comfortable. Nate had never seen one himself. Might’ve been bullshit. Probably was.
Still. This wasn’t an ordinary day.
The screen updated.
TRAVEL CLASS: UNEMPLOYED
CAR ACCESS: U
Same old shit. He had been hoping that now that he had a job he might be allowed to sit in the employed section of the train. No such luck. Nathan Whitney did not have a job. Nathan Stoner did. And Nathan Stoner would not really exist until he laid the same derm to board the Green Horizon.
There was still some traveling under the old name to do first.
Nate pulled his thumb away and stepped aside, exhaling slowly through his nose. He followed the floor markings toward the unemployed boarding zone, which wasn’t blocked off so much as nudged—painted lines, a slight shift in platform geometry, the subtle way the station encouraged certain bodies to cluster in certain places.
It was closer to the open edge. Hotter. Filled with vermin like himself. Were any of them going to Edwards? Heading for a new life on a new planet? No way to tell.
He took his place near the line and waited.
A low hum crept through the platform—not loud, not sharp, just deep enough to feel in the soles of his feet. The sound thickened, steady and controlled, and then the intracity train slid into view along the elevated guideway.
It was long but not imposing, its skin a dull gray composite that swallowed light instead of reflecting it. No visible seams. No windows that opened. It didn’t look fast while it was still—but Nate knew better. These things cheated.
The train didn’t arrive so much as be present. It pulled in at about twenty meters per second and maintained that speed until the last three seconds before slamming to a bone grinding halt. Only it wasn’t bone grinding to the people inside. They only knew they had stopped if they had been looking out the windows. Doors opened along its side in a smooth, silent line.
Nate boarded with the others.
Inside was exactly what he expected: open space, bare walls, no handholds, no poles. There was nothing to grab because there was nothing to brace against. The gravity field under the floor hummed faintly, doing the real work of muting any inertial changes for those inside. He claimed a corner by habit and set his bag between his shoes.
The doors sealed with a muted thud.
Somewhere beneath the deck, the artificial gravity field adjusted—not changing his weight, just locking him in. That was the trick. The same tech they used on spacecraft and off-world habitats. It didn’t just keep you from floating. It made you part of whatever you were standing on. You and the train became one system, not two arguing ones.
The train began to move, going from zero to twenty m/s in two seconds.
Nate felt nothing.
No push. No pull. No sense of acceleration at all. Outside the windows, the platform slid away, replaced by warehouse roofs and service yards drifting past in smooth layers. Intracity speed. Familiar. Manageable.
He let his shoulders relax without thinking about it.
The intracity ride took twenty-five minutes end to end.
It stopped and started the way it always did—no sensation in his body, only the city sliding, halting, sliding again beyond the windows. Platforms came and went. People got on. People got off. Bags shifted places on the floor. No one spoke unless they had to.
More vermin boarded as the train worked its way toward the city center. Some carried duffels like Nate. Some carried nothing at all. A few looked wired, eyes darting, bouncing on their heels like they’d already had too much of whatever the day was going to give them.
Halfway in, six members of the Ass-Fuckers got on. AF was a large, well-organized street gang that trafficked in guns and illegal drugs. They were all young, all loud in that nervous way that meant they were trying not to look nervous. Cheap tattoos crawled up their necks and forearms. One wore a sleeveless vest with the gang’s name scrawled across the back in crooked block letters. They clustered together near the doors, talking fast and low, glancing at the windows, at the other riders, at nothing in particular.
Nate watched them without staring.
He’d never joined a gang. Never saw the upside. Gangs made you visible. Visibility got you noticed, and being noticed rarely paid. He’d learned early to keep his head down, do his work clean, and not owe anyone anything he couldn’t walk away from.
The Ass-Fuckers weren’t looking for trouble here. That much was obvious. They were on a mission—whatever that meant for them—and this ride was just a piece of it. They didn’t look at Nate. Nate didn’t look at them.
Not his business. And he made sure he wasn’t theirs.
The train rolled on.
By the time they reached the intracity terminus, the car was packed shoulder to shoulder. Heat hung in the air. The gravity field hummed steadily, holding everyone where they stood as the doors finally slid open and spilled them out into the station.
The terminal was big. Bigger than any platform Nate used day to day. High ceilings. Wide spans of concrete and glass. Noise layered on noise—announcements, foot traffic, the distant thunder of other trains arriving and leaving. Micro-drones drifted overhead in lazy patrol arcs.
This was the hub of the intracity system for the entire Sacramento region.
He followed the flow toward the intercity side, signage growing more explicit the closer he got. Before the doors, another set of scanners waited—taller, heavier, unmistakably more serious.
You didn’t just wander into intercity.
Nate stepped up and laid derm again, index finger flat on the plate. The system took longer this time. Cross-checked. Verified. Made sure he belonged here—or at least that he was authorized to pass through.
TICKET VERIFIED--EDWARDS
ACCESS GRANTED
The doors parted.
Beyond them, the boarding area opened wide—and split.
The “Unemployed on Earth” section was new. You could tell because it looked bolted on rather than designed in. Worse lighting. Fewer benches. Lines painted on the floor instead of proper barriers. It hadn’t existed before because it hadn’t needed to. Vermin hadn’t traveled intercity in numbers worth sorting before Mars started hiring like mad.
Now they did.
Nate’s assignment scrolled across a display as he passed through another checkpoint. UE. No surprise there.
He headed that way.
Security stood between the waiting areas and the platforms—real cops, not hired security guards. Dark uniforms. Hard eyes. They waved scanners over bodies and bags. One of them took Nate’s duffel and dumped it onto a metal table, pawing through it like he expected something interesting to crawl out.
He didn’t find anything.
The cop handed it back with a look like he’d stepped in something unpleasant. “You one of the vermin heading off-world?”
“Yes, sir,” Nate said politely. You didn’t want to make a cop angry if you were vermin. They could beat you or even kill you with little to no repercussions if they wanted to. Nobody cared if a cop beat a vermin bloody or broke his skull wide open and spilled out his brains.
The cop snorted. “About fuckin’ time. You gettin’ off the planet for good?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Good riddance,” the cop said. He leaned in just enough for Nate to smell his breath. “Do us a favor and take a few more with you.”
Nate nodded once. Polite. Noncommittal. Exactly what the situation called for.
The cop waved him through.
Nate stepped into the UE boarding area and set his bag down at his feet. Around him, other people waited in the same posture—quiet, contained, processed.
Ahead, somewhere beyond another set of doors, the intercity trains waited.
Earth was still doing what it always did.
Sorting. Routing. Moving people along.
And Nate stood where he’d been told to stand, one more piece in motion, waiting for the next door to open.
The announcement came without ceremony.
Employed passengers were to board first.
They moved immediately—small groups peeling off from the main waiting area and funneling toward the ramp. A cop stepped into position at the threshold of the UE section, boots planted wide, one hand resting near his tanner. He didn’t look at the employed riders at all. He watched the vermin.
No chance encounters. No mixing on the ramp. No accidents.
Nate stood where he was told to stand and waited.
The last of the employed disappeared inside the train. The doors at their end sealed. Only then did the cop turn and gesture with two fingers.
“All right,” he said. “Vermin up.”
They filed forward.
One more derm check at the door—index finger to glass, quick confirmation, green light. Nate didn’t slow down. His print was already warm in the system. The door slid aside and he stepped into the UE car.
It was different from intracity.
Not standing room—benches ran the length of both walls, long and bare, molded composite with no padding and no pretense of comfort. There were only about two dozen people total, spaced out enough that no one had to crowd anyone else. Bags sat at feet. Some people slouched. Some stared straight ahead.
Nate took a seat halfway down the car.
A woman sat down next to him a moment later.
She looked to be in her mid-twenties, just a little older than him. Welfare mart clothes—plain gray pants, loose-cut shirt, everything designed to conceal rather than flatter. No bare skin except arms, neck, face. Even the shirt was cut to give no hint of shape beneath it. Modesty was a thing now. Not out of virtue. Out of caution.
She glanced over and gave him a small nod. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Nate said, shy despite himself.
“I’m Darla.”
“Nate.”
She smiled faintly, like that was enough conversation to start with. Then she tilted her head toward the door they’d just come through. “You headed off-world?”
“Yeah.”
She studied him for a second—not appraising, not flirting. Just curious. That alone was a relief.
“You a greenie?” she asked.
Nate frowned. “A what?”
She snorted quietly. “Greenie. You know. Mars types.”
He shook his head. “Never heard it.”
“Figures,” she said. “It’s what they’re callin’ us now. Earthside, I mean.” She leaned back against the bench. “Little green men. Old bullshit. Anyone desperate enough to fuck off to Mars for work—boom. Greenie.”
“That what you’re doin’?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Gettin’ the hell out.”
She said it like a fact, not a dream.
Nate nodded slowly. “Guess that makes me one too.”
She shrugged. “Congrats. You’re officially not Earth’s problem anymore.”
The doors sealed with a low thud at the far end of the car, and somewhere under the floor the gravity field adjusted, tightening its grip. Outside, the cops stepped back, and inside the UE car settled into quiet. Nate sat with his hands resting on his knees, letting the word roll around in his head. Greenie. It didn’t sound nice, and it wasn’t meant to—but it wasn’t vermin either. Not yet.
The train prepared to move, and there was no warning. No chime. No countdown. No polite announcement about departure. One moment the doors were sealed and people were settling into themselves, and the next the number on the display climbed—fast—then steadied.
135 m/s.
The landscape outside the windows snapped into motion. Nate leaned slightly forward without meaning to, his eyes tracking it as the American River flashed beneath them—a ribbon of water and sun glare gone in an instant. Downtown Sacramento followed immediately after, a dense wall of towers sliding past so fast they lost their individuality, collapsing into vertical streaks of glass and shadow. A second later they were through it, the city proper already behind them.
Suburbs took over. Medium-rise blocks. Long factory roofs. Rail yards. An airport with planes parked in neat, motionless rows, the whole field gone before his brain finished registering it. Beyond that came the rich parts of town—actual houses, spaced out, with trees and yards and private quad-rotor pads—flickering by like something glimpsed through a closing door.
It was all scattered, messy, endless.
Everywhere he looked there were buildings. Warehouses. Production lines. Distribution centers. The farmland that had once dominated this valley was long gone, paved over and stacked upward. Too many people. Not enough dirt left to matter. That was why ships were bringing food down from Mars now. Why a planet that averaged more than a hundred million kilometers away had become part of Earth’s supply chain.
There were nearly eight billion official human beings in WestHem, plus God only knew how many unofficial ones born in violation of the one-child-per-female rule. EastHem held more than twelve billion official humans—most of them in Africa and Asia, though it was western Europeans who wielded the real power. There simply wasn’t enough farmland left to feed that many mouths. They tried, but the entire lower end of the human race had been living in a state of abject food poverty for generations now.
Mars was perhaps a way out of that trap.
The train curved, climbed, dipped, the terrain rolling beneath them in smooth, impossible arcs. Nate kept watching, fascinated despite himself—and then his stomach tightened.
Not sharply. Not all at once. Just enough to make him swallow.
He frowned and shifted on the bench.
He remembered this feeling. Dimly. Being a kid on the intracity lines, staring out too long, the world sliding when his body said it wasn’t moving. He’d grown out of it years ago. City speeds didn’t bother him anymore.
This was different.
This landscape was rushing by in a continuous blur, curves stacking on curves, elevation changes coming one after another. His eyes insisted they were moving very fast—faster than he’d ever gone before. His inner ear disagreed completely.
Perfect stillness.
The conflict made his gut churn.
Reverse motion sickness, he thought. That was the official term. He’d read it somewhere once. Train sickness, most people called it. Or just the barfies.
He closed his eyes.
The effect was immediate. The nausea backed off, not gone but manageable. He leaned his head against the wall and breathed through his nose, letting the gravity field do its quiet work, holding him in place while the world tore past outside.
Around him, he wasn’t the only one.
A few people had already shut their eyes. One man across the aisle stared straight down at his shoes like the floor might move if he looked anywhere else. Someone further down the bench swallowed hard and wiped their mouth with the back of their hand.
Darla glanced over. “Gets you too, huh?”
“Yeah,” Nate said quietly. “Didn’t expect it.”
“Intercity will do that shit to you,” she said. “Goes away if you don’t watch.”
“Yeah.”
He kept his eyes closed.
The train held at 135 m/s, the map stretching southward, Sacramento already shrinking behind them.
Fast. Faster than anything he’d ever ridden before.
And still not shit compared to what was coming.
Nate kept his eyes down, fixed on the faint seam lines in the composite floor. Darla did the same, her tattered welfare shoes planted squarely, hands folded in her lap like she was riding out bad weather.
“This is only the second time I’ve ever been on intercity,” she said.
He glanced sideways at her, then back down. “Yeah?”
“First was two years ago.”
“Where to?”
“Seattle to Sac.”
That got his attention. He looked at her again. “You moved?”
She nodded. “I moved.”
Moving wasn’t unheard of, but it wasn’t common either. Most vermin stayed put. Same building. Same unit. Same floor. Generations stacked on top of each other like bad wiring. Nate’s family had been in his pee-hue for three generations now. People didn’t leave unless something pushed them.
“What made you do that?” he asked.
She huffed a short breath. Not a laugh. “Got married at eighteen. Thought I did everything right. He got killed two years later.”
“Oh,” Nate said. He winced. “That sucks ass.”
She glanced at him, then smiled faintly. Vermin sympathy. She took it the way it was meant.
“Yeah. He died before I ever got knocked up with our legal kid.” She stared at the floor a moment. “So I had to move back in with my parents. And their two illegal kids. That was pretty ... you know ... suck-ass.”
Nate nodded. He could picture it easily enough.
“I couldn’t find nobody else to marry me,” she went on. “Too old. And I couldn’t have a kid for some reason. Don’t know if it was me or my old man or just stupid ass luck.” She shrugged. “So I bailed. Left Seattle. Figured I’d try a fresh start in Sac.”
“And?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Same shit,” she said. “Different buildings.”
The train hummed on, steady at speed, the floor rock-solid beneath them.
“So,” she said after a beat. “I’m breaking free. Headed to Mars. New planet. New life.”
She said it like she was daring the words to argue with her.
Nate nodded again. He was good at talking to clients—keeping things professional, neutral, transactional. This was different. This was just two people, same bench, same class, same direction. He wasn’t great at that.
“I don’t see how no one wanted you,” he said, then immediately wondered if that was the wrong thing to say.
She looked at him, eyebrow raised. “You don’t?”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “I mean ... you’re not, like, glamorous or anything. But you’re cute. In a ... y’know. Grown-up way.”
She laughed then, quiet but real. “Wow. Thanks.”
He flushed. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant,” she said, still smiling.
He looked back down. Part of him knew exactly why it’d gone the way it had for her. Once you’d been fucked by someone else—married or not, dead husband or not—you carried that with you. Particularly girls. Stigma didn’t care about circumstances. And with casual sex dead and buried thanks to their parents’ and grandparents’ wild-ass orgies and the rampant STDs that followed, people clung hard to the idea of untouched starts.
Clean slates.
Second chances were harder to sell.
The train curved again. Nate kept his eyes on the floor and felt his stomach stay mercifully calm.
Mars.
A place where none of that history meant a damn thing yet.
“Maybe it’ll be different there,” he said.
Darla nodded. “Has to be.”
The trip to Edwards took a little over an hour and a half.
They stopped in Stockton, Fresno, and Bakersfield—brief pauses marked only by the map ticking, the speed dropping to zero, then climbing back to 135 m/s as soon as the doors sealed again. Each stop pulled in more heat, more dust, more people who looked like they were done with Earth. Then the valley gave way to foothills, the terrain rising and folding in on itself, and finally the desert opened up on the far side—wide, pale, and empty in a way the city hadn’t been for centuries.
The train never slowed after that.
Nate and Darla kept their eyes down, mostly, watching the seam lines in the composite floor pass the time for them. Every now and then one of them would glance up at the map, confirm where they were, then look away again before the nausea could come back. They talked in fits and starts, the way people do when there’s nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.
He told her his story.
It wasn’t much of a story. Roseville. Off-rec work. Parents who’d tried their best and never quite caught a break. No gang. No criminal record worth mentioning. Just drifting from one small job to the next, waiting for something to open up.
She listened like it mattered.
She nodded in the right places. Asked a question or two. Didn’t rush him or look bored. That was nice of her. Nate noticed it, even if he didn’t say so.
“I got hired by AgriCorp,” she said when there was a lull.
He looked over. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. They’re the big dogs right now. Most valuable stock on the Denver exchange, last I heard.” She shrugged. “Position depends on testing they do en route.”
“Same,” Nate said. “AgriCorp.”
That seemed to settle something between them.
They talked about the jobs they’d heard were open. Greenhouse work. Construction. Mining. Transport and logistics. The whole market, supposedly. Mars needed hands more than it needed credentials.
“But if AgriCorp’s hiring vermin,” Darla said, “we ain’t gonna be workin in the fuckin’ office building counting their money or runnin’ their fuckin’ warehouses. We’ll be grunts. Unskilled labor.”
Nate snorted softly. “That ain’t no shit,” he said simply. “We’ll be growing their fuckin’ money for them, not counting the shit.”
“Or we might be building the places where they grow it,” she said. “Or fixing the shit that breaks.”
“Probably all three,” he said.
She leaned back against the bench, hands folded on her stomach. “I’m hopin’ I get the ganja greenhouses.”
He glanced at her, surprised.
“Why not?” she said. “Imagine. You pick one of those buds each fuckin’ week and who cares how shitty the job is.”
He smiled despite himself. “That’d be somethin’.”
“Right?” She grinned. “Worst case, you smell like weed all the time. Ain’t the end of the world.”
The train hummed on, steady and indifferent, the desert sliding past outside in long, pale streaks. Edwards was coming up fast now, the last stretch already counted down on the map.
Nate kept his eyes on the floor and listened to Darla talk, feeling—for the first time in a long while—like maybe the future wasn’t just a blank wall waiting for him to run into it.
The number on the display began to fall.
Not abruptly. Just a steady bleed downward—128 m/s... 112... 90—the digits stepping down as the scenery outside the windows lost its edge. The blur softened into shapes again. Lines became structures. Distance reasserted itself.
Nate felt none of it in his body.
No pressure. No easing. No sense of deceleration at all. The gravity field held him exactly where he was, weight constant, stomach calm. Only his eyes told him they were slowing.
The desert spread out ahead of them, pale and vast, broken by lines that multiplied as they drew closer. Tracks. Lots of them. Parallel mag-lev guideways branching and rejoining like veins. Warehouses stretched out in blocks the size of small towns, roofs bristling with vents, cranes crawling along rails like insects. Cargo moved everywhere—containers sliding along automated lines, massive pallets being shifted by machines that looked too large to belong to anything that flew.
Aircraft cut across the sky in lazy arcs.
Some were small—shuttles, personnel transports, things that looked almost delicate against the scale of the place. Others were not.
A surface-to-orbit spacecraft lifted off from a distant runway, long wings extended, climbing shallow and steady as it gathered speed. Its shadow slid across the ground for kilometers before peeling away.
Further out, a monster was visible.
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