The story is written at the request and based on the idea of ​​KNUD)))

The anacamera's door slowly rose, the lights flashing over my head went out, the annoying beeping subsided. I stretched, yawned, then sat down with a jerk. The side wall of the chamber gradually lowered.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” came the pleasant female voice right in my head.

I cursed, abruptly pulled the headphones from my ears and put my feet on the floor. Immediately turned on the delicate lights and from the speaker under the ceiling poured a quiet melody. An electronic scoreboard above the door showed 87:21.

I want to eat ...

Still yelping and yawning, I slapped barefoot into the mess room. Of course, walking around the ship barefoot and in negligee is not accepted, but - who will see me? All sleep anabiotic sleep. I would also sleep, but it was my turn to get up and stretch my muscles - in order to avoid atrophy and oxygen starvation. And at the same time and starvation.

Our ship is quite old. On the new models, anacameras with vibromassage and life support systems are installed, they are serviced by specially designed robots and the entire crew there is a captain and a technician who monitor only the condition of the equipment and wake up only when entering the atmosphere. However, these ships are damn expensive, so the company management is not in a hurry to update the fleet. And we have to wake up in the old manner every fifty hours.

“Good morning, Lieutenant,” she stepped out of the niche outside the door of the mess-room, as soon as her movement detectors spotted me. - Anything you want?

- Hi, Steph, make me some coffee.

She turned silently toward the coffee maker.

But with Stef we were lucky. Although, probably, we would not see it as our ears if its developer were not a close friend of our boss, and if he did not offer it to us as an experiment completely free of charge.

Officially, we took it to maintain the engine compartment. Ordinary androids cannot even get there, not to mention any manipulations - the hatch is only one hundred and twenty inches, not every person will squeeze, and the robots have a very rigid frame. There are only five hinges in their spinal column - the junction of the neck with the head, the junction of the neck with the shoulders, two in the thoracic and one in the lumbar. For normal operations, more is not needed. But in order to penetrate the narrow space of this is not enough.

The design of Steph is completely different. Its skeleton very much resembles a human one - between titanium vertebrae there are gaskets made of ostiglass, with the help of the same material they attach ribs to the spine, which gives its body almost human flexibility, which is combined with robotic force and appeasability. Yes, its creator is a real genius. He invented this material, which in its structure resembles something between a bone and cartilage tissue, but is hundreds of times stronger in wear and more resistant to crushing.

And besides a rolling skeleton, he supplied his creation with other signs of a person - with a completely pleasant appearance, a gentle slightly purring voice and human anatomy. It is thanks to the last fact that Steph quickly became the darling of the entire male part of our team, because the only woman on the ship was captain Nancy Sullivan - a lady of extremely hysterical character, because of whom she suffered the most, first of all, herself ...

Steph put a cup of coffee in front of me and a saucer with toast and headed to her niche.

- Wait, Steph, - this is probably the only inconvenience when communicating with robots - you should add a code word to each phrase. Yes, Steph is not a name, but just such a word.

She turned and knelt before me.

And yes, the phrase “Wait, Steph” is a team - a team to give me a blowjob. We specifically programmed it that way. Capital Sullivan usually says: “Wait,” and always forgets to add a code word.Sometimes it seems to me that she perceives Stef as a living person, perhaps even as her daughter. Therefore, she doesn’t approve of our fun with this incredibly complex electronic doll ...

Mmmm ... and yet what a wonderful idea to entrust a job that is too complicated or dangerous for a person to a robot. Mmmm ... there is some kind of magic in all this. Here she stands in front of me on her knees, so helpful and submissive, and she has such strength inside ... mmm ... these fingers, which are now so tenderly and skillfully playing on my "pipe" - I myself saw how easily they unscrew tightly soldered nuts, with what deadly grace they remove the shell of the reactor and break the three-inch glass. And now ... aaaaah ... Yes, the one who invented it is a bloody genius!

- Great, baby ... - she did not answer. Her program is designed not to be distracted until she finishes ... oh, oh, oh ... that is, until I finish ...

“Thank you, Steph,” I ran my hand through her hair — almost like real, even a little softer. She gently pulled the linen on me and rose to her feet. - A cigarette, Steph.

She gave me a cigarette and squeezed its tip with two fingers. I felt bitter smoke in my mouth. She nodded (or simply shook her head) and returned to her niche.

I slowly finished my coffee, finished the cooled toasts, put out a cigarette in the ashtray built into the table and headed for the control panel. Steph silently followed me.

This is another reason why we have to wake up every fifty hours. As I said, our ship is a very old piece, and its software, probably from the last century in general.

New ships are equipped with millions of sensors that read information outside, inside, the program takes into account a hell of a lot of factors, calculates all imaginable and inconceivable coefficients in milliseconds and, in fact, does not need a pilot. The only thing that is required is to periodically check the operability of the sensors, but the child will cope with such a task with the simplest panel, on which their status is marked by multi-colored LEDs. Well, sometimes these sensors need to be changed, but for this you don’t even have to go out into open space - all the equipment is installed under the outer skin, access there from the special service corridor, and the location of the faulty tool is marked by bloody AI. For full nerds.

And our ship for intellectual masochists. The program, written, probably, even before my birth, in its original form counted only the technical parameters of the ship, the first and second stages and the approximate flight path following the example of a school math problem - point A, point B, and between them a straight line. Such navigation is suitable for traveling over short distances - within the solar system, and then you have to manually tack between asteroids and space debris. But when you have to fly to the other end of the galaxy, when you have a particularly valuable and fragile cargo on board, or when you are carrying passengers, such maneuvers should be avoided. Therefore, the initial program was gradually connected with about fifty sensors, the malfunctions of which we had to guess ourselves and, if necessary, go out into space for their replacement, added kilometers of program code that processed data from the sensors and calculated correction factors, monitored the state of the atmosphere in the rooms and for our condition in ankamerami. Yes, the original program did not assess the general well-being of the crew. Of course, all these additional functions were written on the spot, often almost on the knees, many were not debugged and needed constant revisions. Therefore, we had a full-time programmer on board. Joe Patterson is a smart guy, but green. Although we are all grateful to him - he programmed Stef to us.

I entered the console compartment. Steph stepped in behind me and stopped in a niche at the door.

Joe was kneeling at the central control desk. He seemed to be sleeping. Strange, this is not his shift. I came closer to him.His head rested on crossed arms, his eyes were ...