The First of the Stoners
Copyright© 2026 by Al Steiner
Chapter 4: Hot Water
Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 4: Hot Water - 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
The Agricorp Green Horizon
Interplanetary space, inner Sol System
July 6, 2135
The ship had settled into its long, indifferent cruise. It had accelerated at a steady 0.25g for a little more than six hours, making the entire U-deck where the vermin were kept vibrate and moan with engine noise. After that, the fusion rockets shut down—deuterium fusion providing the power, hydrogen propellant providing the push—leaving them coasting through empty interplanetary space.
It would take ten weeks to arrive.
As they approached their destination, they would turn their great big ass to Mars and decelerate at 0.25g for another six hours, letting the planet’s gravity grab hold and pull them in.
The main engine cutoff, or MECO, had been two days ago. The relative velocity indicator mounted above the dorm entrance read 55.0 km/s, steady to the decimal. No climb. No dip. No variation. Just a number that said this is how fuckin’ fast we’re going.
In the far corner of Dorm A, the viewscreens glowed.
They weren’t big, and they weren’t immersive. No surround, no sound, no commentary. Just two rectangular feeds mounted side by side into the bulkhead, left raw on purpose. The view ahead. The view behind.
To the rear of them, Earth hung smaller now, unmistakable but already diminished. A blue-white marble with weather spirals and cloud bands turning slowly, Luna out on the edge of the view, gray and sharp against the dark. The whole Earth/Luna system looked tiny from this distance. Peaceful. Like it always did when it wasn’t trying to kill you.
Ahead—off to the right of center—Mars.
Not a disk yet. Just a bright red star ahead of them, steady and unmistakable, its color bleeding softly into the black. The planet sat slightly off center, no longer a smear but not yet a world—just a point that refused to be mistaken for anything else.
Around it, the stars were sharper than anything planetside. White pinpricks, a few pale yellows, one faint blue that looked almost unreal. They didn’t twinkle. They didn’t drift. They just were, fixed and indifferent, as if the ship were the only thing in the universe that had decided to move.
People gathered there in loose shifts throughout the day, standing or sitting or leaning against the bulkheads, staring at one direction or the other, watching nothing change on a perceptible level. Some talked. Some didn’t. Many played games or read articles on their clinkers. Nobody stayed forever. But everyone came back.
Nate and Darla were sitting on the floor a few meters back from the screens, their blankets spread out where the deck vibration was a little less noticeable. Nate had his back against the wall, legs stretched out, moccasins crossed at the ankles. Darla sat beside him, knees pulled up, one arm draped loosely over them.
Both of them had used their advance dollars to buy shipboard clothing. Space dramas on the clinker services liked to show space travelers wearing bulky uniforms and shiny black boots. It was an image that seemed real until one actually lived aboard a ship. There was no reason for bulky uniforms or boots. It was always 22 degrees aboard ship. There was nothing that could fall that was heavy enough to smash feet. Syntho-cotton shorts and pullover shirts were what was comfortable and practical. Synthetic leather moccasins—called ‘mocks’ by everyone—were what even the ship’s security and engineers wore. And the crew wore uniforms, the color dependent on function, but the uniforms were also shorts and pullover shirts.
The two travel companions passed a pipe between them without ceremony.
It was small and ugly and had clearly been machined for durability, not aesthetics. Nate took a slow pull, held it for a moment, then exhaled upward, letting the ventilation grab the smoke before it could hang. He handed it to her. Darla took it, mimicked him, then leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes for a second.
“Good shit,” she said. “I ain’t never smoked no shit like this before.”
“Yeah,” Nate agreed. “Having real money is badass.”
She snorted quietly. “Fuckin’ A.”
A beer sat near each of them, already half gone. Real beer. Cold enough to be convincing, warm enough to remind you that nothing here was quite what it pretended to be. Nate took a sip and glanced up at the clock mounted high on the wall.
09:20.
Breakfast had wrapped about half an hour earlier for the last rotation. The roach pit was already quiet again, the tables wiped down, the machines humming softly. Officially, it was still morning. In vermin society there was a mild taboo against drinking before 1700. It was perhaps the most violated taboo since Prohibition itself. The kind of taboo you needed to acknowledge while violating it and that was all.
Darla did so. She tilted her head toward the screens and said, “It’s after seventeen hundred somewhere, ain’t it?”
Nate huffed a laugh. “Fuckin’ A.”
“Then we’re fuckin’ civilized,” she said, lifting her beer slightly.
He clinked his hemp cup against hers. “I won’t argue.”
They didn’t push it. Just slow sips. One more pass of the pipe. Enough to take the edge off without tempting fate.
Nate had his aptitude assessment session at fifteen hundred. The session was how they would evaluate him for the job he would be assigned on Mars. Nate was eager to start the process. He knew instinctively that he was smarter than the average vermin. That should count for something, shouldn’t it?
Everyone knew the rule about the assessment sessions—they had driven it into them in every way, shape, and form they could think of. No intoxicants within four hours of assessment. They would test you. Show up under the influence and it was an automatic two days in the brig.
The brig.
Nobody had actually been there. There were no posted guidelines. No official descriptions you could pull up on your clinker. But everyone knew what happened in the brig. Everyone had heard the same thing.
Vegetable soup. Bread. Nothing else.
No one knew who had started the rumor. No one knew if it was true. But nobody wanted to be the one to find out.
Nate glanced back at the velocity display. Still 55.0 km/s.
“Feels weird,” Darla said.
“What does?”
She nodded toward the screens. “Knowing we’re moving that fast. Doesn’t feel like anything.”
He shrugged. “That’s the point.”
She considered that, then nodded. “Yeah. I guess.”
They sat there a while longer, passing the pipe once more before Nate capped it and set it aside, wiping his hands on his shorts. The beer disappeared not long after. When Nate checked the clock again, it was 10:02.
Time to sober up. Time to be boring. Time to be compliant.
Darla stared at the forward screen for a while longer, watching the red point that was Mars refuse to get any bigger.
She finally said, “Can we hit something out here?”
Nate glanced at her. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. A rock. A chunk of whatever’s floating around. Space junk. Seems like if we’re movin in kilometers per fuckin’ second that hittin’ anything would be bad.”
“That’s what you’d think,” Nate said. “But no. Not really.”
She frowned slightly. “That’s not reassuring.”
He smiled. “Okay. A little reassuring. The ship’s got an electromagnetic shield around the whole hull. Same kind they use on Martian cities, just tighter and tuned different. Anything big enough to actually do damage gets detected way out and pushed off course.”
“Pushed how?”
“Fields,” he said. “Doesn’t have to touch it. Just bends its path enough that it misses. And if something really stupid comes in hot—like an actual meteor or a chunk of ice—they’ve got anti-particle lasers. They don’t blast it like in the dramas. They just destabilize it. Turns it into a spray instead of a chunk.”
Darla looked back at the screen, then at the bulkhead. “So we’re not gonna get ass-fucked?”
“Probably not.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “What about radiation and shit like that? Solar storms. Cosmic whatever. People always talk about that.”
“Same shield,” Nate said. “Does double duty. Deflects charged particles. Works basically like Earth’s magnetic field, just artificial and way closer in. That’s why Mars has them built over the cities. Radiation protection. Mars doesn’t have its own magnetic field like Earth.”
She considered that. “So the ship’s pretending it’s Earth.”
“Pretty much.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “But it works.”
Darla nodded slowly, absorbing it. Then she tilted her head and squinted at the velocity readout.
“So if all that stuff’s handled,” she said, “why can’t we go faster? We’re just ... coasting and shit. Feels like a waste.”
Nate took a breath before answering, not because it was complicated, but because it always felt a little stupid once you said it out loud.
“Fuel,” he said. “Or, I guess, propellant. Liquid hydrogen. That’s the limiter.”
She snorted. “The limiter?”
“The engines can make more power than we use,” he went on. “That’s not the problem. Problem is every second you’re accelerating, you’re throwing hydrogen out the back. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. No gas stations out here.”
“So they baby it.”
“Exactly. Hit cruise speed, shut everything down, coast. That way you still have enough left to slow down at the other end instead of screaming past Mars and never being seen again.”
“That’d be fucked up.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
She laughed at that, then glanced sideways at him. “How do you know all this?”
He shrugged. “I read.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know you read. I mean—where do you even get this shit?”
“Same place you get anything,” he said. “The welfare net. It’s all on the clinker.”
She blinked. “It is?”
“Yeah.”
“You mean the entertainment tab?”
“No. Systems. Reference. Manuals. History. All that.”
She stared at him for a second. “You’re telling me I could’ve been reading this shit the whole time?”
“Yep.”
“Huh,” she said, amazed. “Nobody ever told us that.”
“No one tells vermin a lot of things,” Nate said, not bitterly. Just stating weather.
She leaned back against the wall, processing. “So you just ... look stuff up?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Mostly when I get bored.”
She snorted softly. “Jesus. I just smoke.”
“Also valid.”
They sat there in companionable silence for a bit. Finally, Darla nudged him lightly with her shoulder.
“You ever think,” she said, “that if more of us read like you do, shit might be different?”
Nate didn’t answer right away.
“Maybe,” he said eventually. “But then again, if shit was already different, more of us probably would.”
She nodded, satisfied with that, and reached for the pipe again.
The velocity readout didn’t change. The stars didn’t move. And the Green Horizon kept coasting, wrapped in invisible fields and finite fuel, carrying nine hundred people who were learning—slowly, unevenly—how the universe actually worked.
The shower room was already warm when Nate stepped in.
Steam hung low under the ceiling, drifting lazily toward the vents, the air heavy with the faint, clean smell of soap. The space was utilitarian—rows of identical shower heads mounted along tiled bulkheads, drains cut cleanly into the deck, no curtains, no partitions. Privacy was limited, but no one cared. This was not a place where anything happened except getting clean.
Nate keyed one of the stations and the water came on immediately.
Hot.
Not lukewarm. Not “close enough.” Actually hot. Forty degrees or so. The kind that made his shoulders drop as soon as it hit his skin. He stood under it for a long moment without moving, letting it pour over his head, down his neck, along his back, rinsing away sweat and ship smell and the stale residue of the dorm.
This was his second shower of the day. He would take another one before he went to sleep. And another in the morning. There was nothing that said he could not.
Back in the pee-hue, hot water had been a myth from previous generations. Not for his entire life—not for the lifetime of anyone in the building—had there been anything but ambient temperature liquid flowing from those pee-hue pipes. The ambient water flowed twice a day if you were lucky, three times if maintenance was feeling generous, and never for more than a few hours at a stretch. People learned to plan around it. You filled buckets. You washed fast and infrequently. You did without.
Most vermin showered once a week if that. More often in summer, less in winter. Nobody smelled good. Nobody expected anyone to.
Here, the water did not stop. It ran all day and all night and was hot and fresh.
Nate reached for the soap container he’d bought from the vending machine and took a large handful. The soap was thin and unscented and worked just fine, both for his hair and his skin. He scrubbed slowly, methodically, rinsed, scrubbed again. There was no pressure to hurry. No one counting minutes. No one banging on a door.
The video dramas and adventure tales had all gotten this wrong.
They always portrayed space water as precious—rationed, locked down, counted to the drop. People wiping themselves with damp cloths, apologizing for waste, treating a real shower like a forbidden indulgence. It had made sense when he read it. It fit the story people liked to tell.
Reality was different.
Water aboard ship was plentiful. They had a huge tank along the outside walls of the passenger area to store water in, both for drinking water and cooling purposes. More than ninety-five percent of it was recycled, looped through systems that had been perfected generations ago. Loss rates were low enough to be boring. And if they ever needed more, they could make it—pull hydrogen from the propellant tanks, oxygen from life support reserves, bind the two together and call it done. Fusion energy was plentiful aboard a ship.
The water kept coming because there was no reason for it not to.
When he was finished, Nate stepped out of the spray and into the air-dry chamber. Warm air rushed over him from all sides, steady and quiet, drying his skin without the roughness or waste of towels. He stood there longer than necessary, eyes closed, letting the last of the dampness vanish.
Then he stepped out the other side.
Clean clothes waited for him—fresh shorts, a pullover shirt—still warm from their own auto-clean cycle. He pulled them on and felt the difference immediately. Clean on clean. No grit. No lingering sweat.
It was a small thing.
That was what surprised him most.
Not the engines. Not the stars. Not even Mars hanging out there ahead of them like a promise that refused to get any closer.
It was the water. Unlimited, hot, unremarkable water.
Nate stood there for a moment longer, listening to the steady hiss of other showers, the low hum of ventilation. Then he headed back toward the main room of the dorm, already knowing he would be back here again later, and that the water would still be waiting for him when he was.
Darla had told him that she took four showers a day and loved every second of them. She too had never experienced hot water before. And with off-record sibs in the home, her shower ration at home had been maybe once a month or so. Sometimes less.
He thought about Darla now that he wasn’t in a public shower area with his probe standing free and others able to see that it was extending for operations. She really did smell good when he was sitting next to her. And her bare legs ... they were so soft looking, so smooth, so girly. It wasn’t like he was thinking about fucking her or anything, it was just that she was ... attractive. And she had fucked before. That should have disgusted him but it didn’t. Yes, they were taught that fucking was gross, something that was done only briefly among those who were married when they had their reproductive blocks—the implants that had been required for them at the age of eleven—turned off so they could have a child. And even then, you did it in the dark, didn’t look, and got it over with as quickly as possible. And yes, you could do it legally if the blocks were active but ... why would anyone want to?
That was conventional wisdom anyway. But Nate had had a girl “do him”. And it had felt incredible. He had touched her bare tits. And they had felt incredible. His logical mind was forced to ask if merely having a girl polish his missile for him felt that good, what would actual fucking feel like?
He let these thoughts go—with some reluctance—when his probe began to stiffen up beneath his vending machine shorts. He would resume the thoughts tonight, after lights out, while under the blanket in his bunk. Then he would be able to properly address the status of his probe and simulate the docking procedure with his hand.
The call for the thirteen-hundred testing group was announced.
Nate rose with the rest of them, folded his blanket once, twice, and slid it back into place at the foot of his bunk. Fifty people peeled themselves out of Dorm A and drifted toward the indicated corridor, clustering loosely the way vermin always did when no one told them exactly how close to stand.
He counted without thinking. Twenty-nine men. Including himself. Twenty-one women. Darla was not one of them.
She was stretched out on her bunk, one arm thrown over her eyes, hair loose against the pillow. As Nate passed, she shifted, her arm sliding away from her face. Her eyes opened and focused on him immediately, like she had been awake the whole time and just waiting.
She smiled.
Not polite. Not casual. A real one.
Nate felt it hit him everywhere at once—chest, stomach, arms, face—like his body had decided to warm itself all at the same time. No one had ever smiled at him like that before. Not like it meant anything. Not like it was meant just for him. Not even Kay-Rin had smiled at him like that.
He smiled back and kept walking before he could overthink it.
The group was met by two guards at the corridor junction. They did not shout. They did not hurry anyone. They simply turned and walked, and the group followed.
It took nearly ten minutes.
They passed no windows. There were none on this ship—not in the passenger sections, not even on the bridge. Cameras and sensors provided all the outside references necessary. The corridors curved and branched, rose and narrowed, lighting shifting subtly as they climbed. The air stayed the same. The deck felt the same underfoot. If you hadn’t known better, you could have been anywhere.
They climbed to the very top of the housing section and were ushered into a large room.
Desks filled the space in neat rows, each one fitted with a flat screen and an input pad. No two seats were obviously grouped. No clusters. No separation by gender that Nate could see. They were assigned places one by one, a guard pointing, people moving without comment.
Nate sat where he was told to sit.
To his left was a girl he recognized from the dorm—short, dark hair, sharp eyes—but whose name he did not know. To his right was a guy about his age with a scar across one knuckle. Nate had seen him in line at the roach pit more than once. That was the extent of their relationship.
No one spoke.
Talking was not merely discouraged, it was forbidden. The silence was tight and absolute, the kind that didn’t need to be enforced because everyone already understood the consequences.
An instructor stepped to the front of the room.
He wore a green AgriCorp polo shirt and red shorts, clean and pressed, with a small logo stitched neatly over his left chest. He looked rested. Comfortable. Like this was not the most important thing happening in his day, but also not an inconvenience.
“My name is Carter,” he said. “I’ll be overseeing this assessment.”
His voice was neutral, practiced.
“This is a standard evaluation. It is used to determine reading level, ability to comprehend written instructions, mathematics proficiency, spatial awareness, and other skills relevant to placement and training.”
He paused, letting that settle.
“You are to answer to the best of your ability,” he continued. “If you do not know an answer, do not guess. Leave it blank and move on. No clinkers are to be held or accessed during the assessment. They will remain in your pockets at all times.”
A few people adjusted theirs accordingly.
“Bathroom breaks may be requested,” he went on. “One at a time. Your clinker stays behind. A guard will escort you.”
Still no questions.
Carter looked out over them once, then nodded.
“You may begin.”
The screens in front of them lit up.
Nate rested his hands on the desk and took a breath, feeling the lingering warmth from Darla’s smile still humming quietly through him.
Then he started reading.
The test was easy.
Not simple, exactly, but straightforward in a way Nate trusted. Read this. Do that. Answer only if you were sure. Move on. He did.
The reading sections barely slowed him down. Long passages followed by questions that asked what the author meant, what followed logically, what had been implied without being stated outright. Nate read them once, sometimes twice out of habit, then answered and moved on. Reading comprehension had never been a mystery to him. He read constantly. What else was there to do in vermin land? When you were not working, not standing in line, not waiting for something to break or get shut off, you read. Or you stared at a wall. Or you joined a gang.
He had chosen reading.
The math took a little longer, but not much. Arithmetic. Ratios. Word problems that pretended to be about trains and pipes and work crews but were really about whether you could translate words into equations. Nate had paid attention in school. What else was there to do there if you did not want to be in a gang? Virtual teachers taught from holo stages. You either listened or you did not. He had listened. He had also had a small knack for it, enough that numbers behaved themselves when he lined them up properly.
The spatial section surprised him.
Shapes folding. Unfolding. Rotating in ways that did not exist on paper but made sense if you let your head tilt a little. Nate slowed down here, not because it was difficult, but because it was interesting. He liked the feeling of seeing the answer before he could explain it to himself. He checked his work twice anyway. He was fairly sure he had gotten them all right.
When the screen finally told him he was done, he glanced at the clock in the corner without thinking.
Two hours.
He looked around the room. Most people were still working. Some looked tense. Some looked bored. A few stared at their screens like they were being personally offended by the questions.
Nate raised his hand.
An instructor came over, checked his screen, nodded once, and told him to stand. Nate was escorted out without ceremony, taken to the bathroom down the hall. He used it, washed his hands, dried them in the warm air blower. When he came back out, a single security guard was standing there.
The guard gestured and turned.
They walked back the way they had come, retracing the same windowless corridors, the same gentle curves, the same uniform lighting. It took nearly ten minutes again. The guard did not speak. Nate did not try to make him.
When they reached Dorm A, the guard stopped, nodded once, and left.
Nate stepped back into the familiar noise and smell of the dorm. People glanced up briefly and then went back to what they were doing. Darla was still on her bunk, awake now, propped on one elbow. She looked over and smiled again when she saw him.
He smiled back.
Whatever the test had measured, whatever AgriCorp was about to decide to do with him, one thing was already clear.
Reading had been worth it.
Dinner that night came out of the machines just like all their meals did.
Hamburgers slid into the trays fully assembled—bun, patty, lettuce, onion—still steaming faintly. If you wanted cheese, you selected it first and the machine slapped it onto the patty. Ketchup and mustard were added afterward from dispensers that never clogged and never ran out. Alongside the burger, the machine dropped a neat fifteen-centimeter sphere of potato salad and a single slice of tomato, glossy and firm.
For drinks, you had options.
Water was free. Cold, clean, unremarkable water (the fact that it had been recycled from urine and gray water countless times did not squeam anyone in this day and age). If you laid derm and parted with a few actual dollars, you could get beer, juice, soda, or milk. Real powdered milk—the good kind. Classy shit.
It was not food like moms or dads or nanas or papas used to make. Nothing here carried memory or nostalgia. Nothing here had love baked into it. But for roach pit food, it was remarkably good.
Nate was developing a taste for real beer.
He and Darla sat together at one of the long tables, trays pulled close. A few others occupied the far end, eating quietly, not part of their conversation. Darla had her burger half gone already, one leg hooked around the bench rung, beer resting near her hand.
She nodded with her chin toward another table across the room.
“See them?” she asked.
Nate followed her gaze. A man and a woman sat close together, shoulders angled in, voices low.
“Yeah,” he said.
She shifted her focus subtly, scanning without making it obvious. “And them. Over there. And those two by the far wall.”
Nate looked again. Once she pointed it out, he could see the pattern—pairs sitting apart from the clusters, bodies angled inward, attention focused narrowly.
“I don’t know any of them,” he said.
“I do,” Darla replied. “Names, mostly. Nothing deep.”
He glanced at her. “What about them?”
She smiled into her beer. “People are talking about them.”
“About what?”
“About who is thinking about doing what with who.”
That made him pause. “What do you mean?” he asked.
She took a bite of potato salad, chewed, swallowed. “Word is a couple of them are getting ready to find a little dark corner somewhere and have some fun.”
Nate felt heat rise up his neck before he could stop it.
His mind jumped, uninvited, to bushes and shadows and Kay-Rin’s hands clutching at his member while they tried not to breathe too loudly. He pushed the thought away immediately and took a long swallow of beer to cover the reaction.
“That is disgusting,” he said, because that was what you were supposed to say. The correct answer. The safe one.
Darla turned her head and looked at him, really looked this time.
“Is it?” she asked, not challenging, just curious.
He shrugged, eyes on his tray. “That’s what they teach us.”
She smiled slightly. “Yeah. I know.”
They ate in silence for a moment. Around them, the roach pit hummed—machines cycling, voices overlapping, trays clattering softly. Nate finished his burger and felt pleasantly full, the beer warming his stomach. Darla’s words warmed his face.
She nudged his knee lightly under the table. “You blush easy,” she said.
He scowled without conviction. “Guys do not talk about that kind of thing.”
She laughed, low and brief. “Girls do.”
He did not know what to say to that, so he did not try. He took another sip of beer and stared at the far wall, where the light reflected dull and steady, thinking about rules he did not quite believe but had to pretend that he did.
“Have you ever done it?” she asked softly.
“You mean ... like ... all the way?” he nearly gasped.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I was never married,” he said. “I told you that.”
“That doesn’t mean you never did it,” she said.
“Actually it does,” he countered. “Unmarried people don’t have sex. Why would they? Their reproductive blocks are active. Why would they do something as gross and disgusting as sex if they weren’t trying to have a baby and get a two bedroom pee-hue?”
She looked at him with affection. “How did you know it’s gross and disgusting if you’ve never done it?” she asked.
“Because everyone says so,” he said. “It’s a known fact.”
“Has anyone who has actually had sex told you this?” she asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Everyone knows it’s gross.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Or are you just assuming? Has your mom or dad ever told you sex was gross? Your grandparents? Anyone close to you who is married? Think about it. Don’t just spit out a fuckin’ answer.”
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