Chapter 2 – Skyrise

Tyra and John left the graduation after party hand in hand. There’d been much dancing, fun, and sweeping off of feet.

For both of them. Tyra was several hundred times stronger than John which allowed her to take the lead in their dances. It also allowed her to hold John while he bent over backward, an aspect of their otherwise rather traditional dance moves that shocked onlookers multiple times.

Not that they should’ve been shocked. Tyra was a ship after all. Even if her connection to her larger self wasn’t fully active.

Organics were still getting used to sharing the universe with her kind. Nevermind that the rise of cheap, effective genetic manipulation had causes millions of species divergences within their population, no, Shipients and Synths were made out of a different blend of carbon so they were different.

Tyra rolled her eyes. At least it was steadily getting better. Kind of hard to maintain speciest ideologies when the ones you intend to oppress have the biggest guns. Even if they were heavily limited until adulthood, that limitation only applied to the part of them that would cause a major disturbance if involved in school bullying. Their humanoid forms were more than enough for the very few Organics who actively detested them.

And the potential disturbances weren’t the only reason they were limited during childhood.

It was important that her species grew up this way. When they were very young, a connection between their vessel and their humanoid body could cause dangerous split personalities or schizophrenic symptoms due to being unable to differentiate the senses. When they grew older and more mentally solid, awareness of their hull and even limited sensors could be unlocked. One at a time, over time, so as not to overload them. All monitored and controlled by the parents, of course.

Tyra had understood all that from the time she was five. When her mom unlocked her external visual sensors, and she got a good look at herself.

All sleek curves and smooth, slightly reflective plating. There were quite a few just as sleek bulges over where her copious weapons lay. Buried beneath her surface, just waiting for a target.

Oh yeah. Her hull was just as hot as she was. Her humanoid body reflected that endowment. She wasn’t as big as Admiral Sarah… but she was damn close. But despite inheriting her mom’s sleek, scientific appearance (and stacking), she was very much a warship like her dad. Stealthy to his fuck you and the planet you live on armament, but no less dangerous.

Not to mention her drone system. She’d discovered it buried within her when she turned eight. The one that had never been seen on their kind before.

Apparently they were still evolving. Something about their creator throwing in a genetic randomization system for ship modules based on the parents’ desires that activated in Tyra’s generation. Seven generations were enough to unlock the hidden programming, each one adding an until then unsuspectingly innocent block of ‘junk’ code that once fully assembled turned into a new program suite.

Her dad had been watching an old science fiction show before her mom seduced him into bed that night. Being the weapon nut flagship that he was, his unconscious wishes must’ve translated across to her conception.

Tyra really didn’t pay much more attention to what the eggheads had said than that.

Before she became a teenager, pretty and shiny had been all she thought of herself. Even with the drones. They were just more pretty and shiny, but inside her. She had discovered her secondary attraction systems when she was only thirteen, which made it real awkward for a year as she learned to disassociate her reactions to all the ships who flew by her family’s station from her humanoid, blushing body. And then she had to deal with humanoid attraction immediately afterwards.

High school had been a blush filled crazy town.

The thing that grated at Tyra was that even when her species was finally old enough to handle all the sensory input, all the complications, and the annoying puberty was over, they still were prohibited from maneuvering under their own power or unsupervised weapon system activation until they’d completed a flight school. They were to be given access to all their systems then, and only then. And that was only by law, instead of the risk of a gray goo or rogue psychotic Synth scenario that drove all the other limitations beforehand.

She was a warship. It wasn’t in her nature to hurry up and wait.

Everyone else seemed to accept it. Her classmates, her family, hell, even the Internet. John’s dad had once made the comparison of an organic getting a car at eighteen, and the concept spread from Tyra’s parent’s mouths to the rest of the Fleet overnight, and then social media. The next day it was worldwide.

Yet another thing that annoyed her.

But tomorrow… she was finally, after all her life, going to be given full control. Her core would spin up to operating capacity, she’d ignite her engines, unsheathe her weapon arrays, and sail out of her station all on her own. Then from there… her dual drives would propel her and John into the universe.

“Tyra, you okay?” John asked, snapping her out of her musings.

Tyra looked to the man whose hand she was holding rather tightly. “Yeah,” she said, releasing a tense breath even as she loosened her grip, “just impatient. I want to fly.”

John stopped in the middle of the academy’s shuttle port. He grinned and squeezed her hand. “You will,” he said. He brought a hand up to her cheek and gently rubbed across her face. “Tomorrow.”

Tyra smiled at the funny feeling she always got when John did that. “I know. But I want to fly now,” she faux whined.

John snorted, shaking his head. “We don’t even have a way up to you until your parents come get us,” he reasonably pointed out.

Tyra sighed, looking annoyed. “I know, I know, I know!” she insisted. “That doesn’t make it any easier to ignore my itching engines!”

John gave her a teasing look. “Tyra, you don’t even have primary power online yet, your engines are off,” he deadpanned. Then he suddenly grew concerned. “Uh, your engines are off, right? You don’t have some hidden secondary uncontrolled power core or something?”

Tyra grinned at him. “And if I do?” she taunted him, almost daring him to freak out.

John let out a terse breath and relaxed. “Then I’d insist we go to a hospital to make sure you’re okay,” he fired back, looking unimpressed. “Not that we need to, given you’re messing with me.”

Tyra drew an arm, fist closed, across her stomach. “Oh darn!” she dramatically exclaimed. “My boyfriend has seen through my dastardly plan!”

John shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Tyra stuck out her tongue at him.

John ignored that and instead looked around the shuttle port. Groups of their fellow students were entering, or in some rare cases exiting the automated quad rotor sky cars. His eyes lit up and he turned back to Tyra with a grin.

“You can’t fly on your own until tomorrow, but I bet we can snag one of these for ourselves and go for a long ride,” he offered, pointing at the nearest empty and waiting shuttle.

Tyra grinned right back at him. “I’d love that,” she agreed.

He just kept grinning and tugged on her hand. She let him, allowing her automatic bipedal walking systems to glide her body after him almost effortlessly.

John led her over to the shuttle he’d indicated and checked inside to make sure it was empty. His face smushed up against the transparent aluminum was way too funny for Tyra to keep her composure, so she giggled at him. He turned around and sent her a mock dirty look, then pulled her along into the cabin. The two sliding doors opened automatically for the two of them.

He drew her to his chest and wrapped an arm around her waist. John looked into her eyes and suddenly Tyra realized just how intimate their current position was, her chest pressed into his and their lips barely an inch apart. She scowled for a moment, then snuggled into him. “Well played,” she allowed.

John smirked. She could feel it on her hair. “Thanks. Shuttle, a private flight to our apartment please,” he addressed the shuttle, though Tyra knew he was still looking down at her by the warm breath tickling her head and sending pleasant tingles down her spine, “take the scenic route.”

“Acknowledged Captain Lake. Have a pleasant flight,” the shuttle’s VI intoned.

Captain. His rank spread a warm glow throughout Tyra’s body, one she couldn’t help but like.

John seemed surprised. “Captain huh?” he idly mused, absently toying with the ends of her long hair. “That’s new.”

“I like it,” Tyra said, snuggling further into his chest.

The doors closed and sealed shut, the internal atmosphere pressurized to withstand the height they were about to reach.

“Well if you like it, I’ll just have to keep it, won’t I?” John teased her. “Can’t have my ship unhappy with me now can I?”

Tyra grinned from ear to ear and shook her head into his chest. “Nope.”

John nodded, his voice sagely. “Captain Lake. Has a nice ring to it.”

The slight rumble of the quadrotors outside the cabin starting up began to hum under their feet.

“Our crew can be called the Lakers,” Tyra joked.

John stilled and was silent for several seconds. As the shuttle lifted off and ascended into the night sky above the lights of the sprawling metropolis they’d called home for the last two years, he sighed.

“That was so bad, Tyra.”

“Sorry not sorry.”