Adaptive

All characters and events in this story are fictional. Any resemblance to real persons or events are purely coincidental. All characters engaging in sexual situations are 18 years old or older.

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This is a step away from my usual writing style and story genres. I have taken on the challenge to explore brave new ideas and "new worlds" by using Science Fiction. I included the use of AI, not to write this story, but as a character in it. I apologize up front to those who are looking for fast or instant gratification by way of sexual exploits of my characters. I can promise you that will happen but for the premise of this story, it was not included in this the "pilot" episode for this tale. Oh, the possibilities are nearly endless moving forward though. I think you might agree if you bear with me and read this entire story. Hopefully, with the end of this episode, I will have captured your interest and curiosity, and you will look forward to more of this tale. Give it a chance, it's all I ask. Of course, if you like or dislike or have suggestions for the story moving forward, leave a comment. Thank you in advance.

Frodov

(Adaptive -1- Pilot)

The blaring alarms were almost overwhelming. So many systems had failed or were failing. Disaster was not imminent, it was happening now. The end was near. It seemed that all effort and daring had been for nothing. The hope for her people was going to die with her. Xiba felt an overwhelming sadness seeping into her very soul. Perhaps she was as foolish as her peers, her siblings and even her parents had said. She had faced humiliation, being marginalized and even frustration time and time again in her life, but this was beyond frustrating. Xiba wanted to rage against the universe and the unfairness of everything. And then... she saw it.

It was barely a flickering speck on one screen that seemed to still be functioning. Amid the alarms and sirens and flashing warnings, the lone little blip flashed at the very edge of the holoscreen. It was almost pulsing. Could it be real, or was it an anomaly caused by the severe damage her ship had sustained in the attack? With trepidation, fearing that it was only her imagination, Xiba redirected her sensors on a vector that focused more closely on that pulsing speck on her screen. Slowly, as if hopeless as she felt at that moment, her sensors turned and refocused for a better scan.

The pulsing speck grew steadier on the screen and data began to scroll down the margin of the screen. It WAS a viable planet in a very small system with a lone star. And more importantly, there didn't appear to be any sign of them. Had no one ever noticed this system and this planet before? Granted, it was pretty secluded out here in the backwaters of this spiral arm. Well off of the trade lanes. Looking at her multitudes of flashing alarms and blaring warnings of system wide failures, Xiba wondered if it were even possible for her to get the ship to that planet... in time. Once more, in a life full of challenges and insurmountable odds, Xiba turned all of her attention and will to the task and began pleading and coaxing her ship in that direction. One last monumental effort...

"Keep the change... loser!" Kyle said as he tossed a wad of singles onto the counter and walked off with his laughing posse, all drinking beer as they left the Gas and Go.

"Fine!" Adam mumbled to himself as he straightened and unfolded the crumpled wadded up singles before placing them into the open till of the cash register. "Just another typical Saturday night."

Adam was working, as usual, while his former classmates and still current bullies were out having a good time doing nothing. Well, maybe not nothing. They were constantly a thorn in his side whenever the opportunity presented itself to them. Granted, that was not nearly as often now that they were no longer seeing each other in the halls at school. Kyle and his cohort had moved on to begin college, albeit the local community college. While Adam's grades would have earned him entrance into the school, most any school he would have applied to, but money was a different story.

He was struggling to help keep a roof over the family's heads and food on the table. His family consisting of himself, his elderly grandmother and older sister. Okay, so honestly, his grandmother was not even related to him nor was his sister. They were former neighbors of his real family, his mom and dad and himself. His dad, or as Adam liked to think of him, his sperm donor had left his mom soon after Adam was born.

Adam's mom had pretty much been adopted by her older neighbor who herself was left to care for her granddaughter Jade after the girl's parents had been killed in accident. Their car had been swept away in a flash flood. Jade had been orphaned. Marna, her grandmother had taken her in and raised her like her own daughter. Marna had seen Adam's mom struggling to care for him by herself and had taken them both under her wing as well.

Adam got along well with Jade as kids. Though older than Adam Jade didn't have many friends either and the two bonded as closely as any real siblings would. Like Adam, Jade was picked on and bullied at school as well, but while Adam would turn the other cheek, Jade fought back. She was a scrapper to say the least. Small in stature, but big in spirit. Adam envied her in many ways, but loved her dearly, as he loved Marna too.

Marna was his rock though. It was Marna who stood up for Adam and claimed him as her own the day his mother died. Jade and Marna both tried to comfort and console Adam that day and for weeks and longer afterwards. Adam's mother had literally worked herself to death. She held down four jobs while Marna watched after her precocious youngster as a babysitter. Working long hours with very little time off to rest, Adam's mom grew weaker and weaker till she fell ill. The prognosis was pneumonia, or so the doctors had said. Normally it's not a fatal condition but in her weakened state, she succumbed to the fluid buildup in her heart and lungs. And so, Adam became an orphan too.

As Adam grew older, he began to realize that while Marna provided him with warmth and love, the food and shelter for a growing boy as well as her Jade, was taxing the old woman. She was unable to work outside of the home other than in her garden. And what a garden it was. Jade and Adam never lacked for fresh vegetables from spring to autumn, and they had plenty of canned and frozen vegetables for the months that the garden was dormant. But money for things like clothes, shoes and other things that growing children wanted for were hard to come by with her meager income from selling her vegetables and herbs.

Adam began working as soon as he could get hired for a job. Any kind of job that a kid could do. Mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, he also had a paper route and delivered the local newspaper until it went digital and ceased printing. So, it was a financial boon to the family when he had been hired by a kindly old man, Mr. Kellerman, the owner of the Gas and Go market on the edge of town his senior year of high school. The pay wasn't much, and the hours restricted while he was in school, but it was income that was sorely needed. Now, after having graduated and past his eighteenth birthday, he was officially an adult and could work longer hours. Hours the owner was happy to give him.

Being on the edge of town often meant that business was slow, sometimes almost nonexistent. Yet Adam never lacked for things to do to keep himself busy or entertained. His greatest love was learning and reading. So, when business was slow and all his cleaning and stocking the shelves were completed, he would read. Sometimes the reading was educational, sometimes it was for pure entertainment. He also found that he could lose himself in certain websites via his second-hand E-reader that had been given to him for his last birthday by his sister Jade.

Adam hadn't asked where or how Jade had come by the E-reader. He knew that she didn't make much more money than he did from working at the walk-in clinic downtown. But he was grateful for the gift and made sure she knew it made him happy to have it. Every time he picked it up to use it, he smiled thinking of his sister. Some thoughts were banished immediately however. She was his sister, even if not blood related. Adam had little to no social skills and certainly no girlfriends. Who would want to have anything to do with a loser anyway? Other boys were not the only kids to pick on him and bully him through his school years. They had made fun of his old and worn clothes even if they were always clean. They made fun of his quaint homemade lunches. They mostly made fun of his size. Adam was not a small kid. Despite all the hard work associated with helping in the garden and his odd jobs, Adam was chunky. Okay, chunky doesn't quite cover it, he was fat. Maybe not obese per se, but well-padded to say the least. Just one more thing that the other kids would pick on him and make fun of him about.

Reading was his window to different worlds and adventure, and yes, even love. When he discovered Literotica one day using his E-reader, a whole new world opened up to him. First it was the stories. So many different kinds and genres of things to read. Things that he had no clue about before then, things that sometimes intrigued him and excited him, as well as some things that frightened him or disgusted him. Do people really do that kind of thing to one another? And like it? Once more, his open-mindedness enabled him to filter out the things he didn't care for and enjoy the ones that he did find appealing. Then, he discovered the chat rooms.

Adam found people online in these chat rooms that could and did accept him as an equal, even as a friend perhaps. It was a budding friendship with a gal that was a regular in one of his favorite chat rooms, Playful Questions, that began to change into something more. He knew he was infatuated with this gal, SecretDemiGoddess389, but could it be more? She was always happy to see him online and eager to speak with him, even going so far as to pull him into private conversations just between the two of them.

His Goddess said she thought his screen name was cute and it intrigued her to talk to him and learn more about him in the beginning. Adam hadn't been terribly creative in his choice of screen name. Choosing to use his name combined with the manufacturer of his E-reader, and the street number of the Gas and Go where he worked... AdamApple1313. Okay, so the 1313 struck another chord in his mind too, being unlucky his entire life or so it seemed to himself. Yet the goddess was intrigued. This made him both happy and curious himself.

Unfortunately, Adam knew that he'd likely never meet his goddess in real life. And honestly, he thought that might be a saving grace. I mean, she would likely take one look at him and run screaming or worse...laughing... away. So, instead of dreaming of meeting in person, he simply enjoyed their repartee while online. She was funny, flirty and even a little sexy now and then. The stuff of dreams, or so Adam thought. Tonight, however, was not one of the nights that he would get to spend some time online and chatting with his Goddess. He was working later than usual, but at least it was almost time to clock out and go home. Seeing lightning in the distance through the storefront windows made him grimace a little though. Yeah, it was going to be raining soon. Nothing quite as fun as bicycling home in the dark, uphill, in the rain. Adam sighed and finished running out his till to turn it in along with his receipts for his shift.

Xiba was shaken violently as the ship rocked and bucked as it smashed through a cloud of rocks and debris on the outskirts of this lonely little system with the flashing icon near its center. For a moment she wondered what all this debris might have been and where it may have originated. Perhaps it was the remains of many asteroids or even meteors that had settled into this debris cloud. Maybe it was the remains of some unfortunate planet that didn't quite coalesce during the formation of this system. She would never likely know and at the moment it was not a priority in her thoughts. She once more used the manual override of the faulty navigation system to maneuver the ship around yet another large asteroid. Carefully trying to hold her ship together long enough to make planet fall on that little speck blinking on her sensor screen.

For the thousandth time, Xiba ran a diagnostic of the ships functions and systems and it only seemed to be getting worse and worse. Still, she coaxed and pleaded as much as guided the ship towards that beckoning little speck of a planet. At this rate of closure however, she knew that the gravity well of the planet would likely tear the ship apart completely if her approach was even slightly off the ideal trajectory. It was best to plan for the worst. While maintaining her vigilance with the navigation, she initiated her life pod protocols. The pod was powered up and charged as she ran through the checklist item by item.

Adam looked up at the night skies as he slipped his arm through the straps of his worn knapsack settling it on his back. His bike was resting against one hip as he secured the straps and listened to the distant thunder. Even the crickets and cicadas seemed to be heralding the coming rain, as if they were excited... or were they warning everyone? Adam shook his head and threw a leg over the bike and mounted up, pedaling out of the parking lot of the Gas and Go towards the road that would take him up the hills to his home. He was used to the climb, his legs had pushed his pedals up these hills many, many times. Yet, gravity always tugged at his mass, his size, making him work maybe harder than someone thinner.

Adam tried not to heed the burning his legs soon felt. He thought, instead of what his Marna might have made for dinner tonight. Everything she made was delicious of course, but sometimes he dreamed of something different, some fish or even chicken now and then would be welcomed. Lost in his pondering, Adam didn't notice the car fast approaching him from behind until the blaring horn nearly caused him to run off the road. The splash of a nasty water filled pothole as the car passed didn't help his mood any at all. Neither did the raucous laughter and loud music coming from the car driven by none other than Kyle and his friends. Just then the rain began to fall. Adam hung his head and sighed before pushing off to resume his ride home. He did opt for an alternate route however, one that was a bit longer but it was a road bordered on both sides by old dense trees. The overhanging limbs would shelter him from the worst of the rain.

System after system was failing or shutting down but the alarms only seemed to be getting louder and more persistent. Xiba knew that at this point her fate was left only to the whims of chance. She had done everything she could to steer her ship towards a relatively isolated and unpopulated area of the planet she was about to crash onto. Now with the navigation controls unresponsive and almost no control over the ship at all, she made to enter her life pod. She was just about to close the hatch when she nearly panicked and bolted back into the command center to grab the reason for this mad situation, the only vial of Adaptive in existence... The last and greatest hope for the survival of her entire race. Billions of lives hung in the balance that seemed to be tipping in the wrong direction.

Xiba snatched the vial from the cryogenic chamber and clambered back into the life pod even as the ship bucked and shook around her. She had just slammed the hatch and was sealing it when the ship shuddered and rocked violently from an impact with something in orbit of the little blue and white planet it was falling towards. It altered the trajectory of the ship. Unfortunately, there was no way to correct it now. All Xiba could do was hold on and hope for the best.

The ship had hit something. It had obliterated a very expensive and high-tech communications satellite owned by one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on the planet. The people on the ground had no idea what had happened. One moment the satellite was functioning perfectly and the next it was if it didn't even exist. There was a mad scramble with questions being asked and answers being sought out. Meanwhile, the ship had begun to tumble as it burned through the atmosphere. There would have been a brilliant shooting star across the sky for anyone who might have looked up to see it, but the storm that happened to be in that particular patch of the skies masked it so much it hardly even looked like a bolt of lightning.

In the final moments before the ship hit the surface, the life pod was ejected in the opposite direction thereby negating some of the kinetic energy and inertia that would have had it hitting the ground like a bullet. Instead, it was further slowed by crashing through the boughs and limbs of many very large old growth trees along a hillside before crashing into the ground and being half submerged in an embankment of a culvert alongside a lonely dark road. The ship itself continued on, downward only to hit the surface of a small deep lake, first skipping a couple of times, then plowing deeply into the stormy surface and then sinking below to the depths... out of sight for any who might have even been looking in that direction. No one was.

No matter how securely Xiba had been strapped in, the only occupant of the life pod, the impact with the ground had stunned and disoriented her. The pod's sensors and diagnostics were still functioning perfectly however. Information on her new surroundings was streaming down the holoscreen in front of her face even as she brought her eyes into focus and regained her awareness. Good news was that the atmosphere was compatible with her present form, though far richer in oxygen than her own home world. The pod's AI informed her that the current location on this planet was in its nocturnal phase and that there was a storm raging outside the life pod.

Despite the advice of the AI, Xiba decided she needed to exit the life pod to get a look at her surroundings first hand. She released the locking mechanism for the hatch. The transparent latch cracked open a few centimeters and then stopped. The outside air hissed in through the open seals briefly just before the hatch jammed. Xiba toggled the switch a couple of times trying to get the hatch to open fully, to no avail. She then tried to re close the hatch, but it was jammed somehow. Worse still, water began running over the edge of the opening and into the pod itself. Not a reason for immediate concern until she realized that the orientation of the pod in relation to the outside surroundings put her feet well above her head and shoulders. As the water began to fill the pod she would soon be under the surface of the rising liquid invader. Now, a real sense of panic began to fill her.

Adam plodded along, pedaling steadily uphill. The rain felt cold on his back and it was soaking through his hoodie chilling his neck. Coming around a bend in the road, he had to brake to a sudden stop as several large trees had been felled across the road. He wasn't sure how many exactly as the rain was falling so hard it was like trying to look through a moving blanket of water, in the dark. Well, dark except for the frequent flashes of lightning still lighting up the stormy night skies.

It was in one of those brilliant white flashes that Adam caught site of something on the side of the road in the culvert. Had a car ran off the road due to the fallen trees? Was someone still in the car and maybe hurt? Adam threw his bike down and ran against the rain in the direction of the image the lightning had revealed. In the dark and the occasional overly bright flashes, it was hard to make out what kind of car it was... or if it was even a car. He saw no wheels, and it was roughly cylindrical in shape... maybe it was a small airplane that had crashed in the storm...that would explain the fallen trees.