Kathie, The Star Traveler by Justin W. Sher

Kathie had made a habit of waking up at 6am, Europa time, much to the annoyance of her asteroid-prospecting boyfriend, Jason. Her neural implant smoothly integrated into her skull, recognized she was awake, and turned the lights on. The automated system turned on the lights that carefully followed her around the room, ensuring Kathie did not awaken her boyfriend. That is until she manually roused him from bed. "Rise and shine. You need to get up. We're morning people now," she said.

They went down to the deck overlooking the beautiful glaciers of Europa outside, its vast oceans providing plenty of fodder for life support here. Kathie sighed as they admired the scene through the metamaterial translucent bubble surrounding the resort. She had to get used to breathing again. However, Kathie didn't need to breathe since she had her legs. When she was in space transport, and there was limited food, oxygen, and water, she needed to wrap her legs in leggings with brilliant LED lights on the inside that, when pulled up and put in place, bathed all her photosynthetic proteins in her legs in intensely bright light transferring all the energy they needed and more so she didn't have to breathe, eat, or dispose of bodily waste. Kathie also had the upgrades that maintained her in optimal health, including regular boosts of NAD and exosomes, to keep her young forever. She looked pretty good at 150 years old, after all.

The leggings were crotchless, and she wore shorts and panties over them. Although her digestive system was inactive when the leggings were attached, if she ever needed to use the parts of her body that her leggings didn't cover for a medical test or intimacy, she couldn't take off the leggings because she'd literally suffocate if in a space not maintained for the proper mix of atmospheric gasses that humans needed. Hence, those gaps in the leggings were necessary, not merely for being salacious, as some from previous eras would assume.

"It's so lovely to see your legs uncovered, dear; they're so beautiful," Jason said. Kathie knew they were; she had paid a lot for this body modification. They were covered top to bottom in highly supple, flexible, iridescent blue synthetic skin with a vastly complicated network of self-healing microwires and photonics just below the protective surface. Underneath that layer of skin, an army of nanobots worked tirelessly to maintain and monitor the vast network. Trillions of proteins, designed by advanced AI and carefully assembled to be powered and respond to various types of light, ran her breathing, generated nutrients, and recycled waste. Like advanced photosynthetic organelles evolved by astoundingly advanced plants, these parts of her generated power for the titanic complexity that composed the top outer half inch of her legs.

"Why won't you come with me? You have your legs now. You don't have to stay in those cramped space colonies for the unmodified and eat flavorless nutrient bars. With those legs, you can live anywhere with me, and you don't have to eat, breathe, or drink anything," Jason said.

"I'm just getting used to it. It's so weird. It's great you took me out here to this Europa resort among the moons of Jupiter so I could use my lungs and digestive system again. I worry they'd stop working if I didn't use them for anything, like the three weeks on that space transport out here. I worked for 50 years to save up for those legs, so I guess I better get some use out of them traveling around the outer planets. You said there were 20 billion people out here, all with legs like me, right?"

"Yeah, we're a different breed out here, us outlanders. It's freedom, though, unlike anything you've ever seen. It reminds me of reading about the old American West. Just a wide-open frontier with nobody to stop you from living how you want to live. Back home, where you lived, what was there to look forward to. How big was your room? 200 square feet? My space cruiser is 2000 square feet of living space, and it'd all be for you and me. We could go back there right now, my dear," Jason said as he grinned seductively and gently squeezed her forearm.

"Our relationship is not all about sex, you know," Katie said, smiling. "It is nice having a boyfriend for a week, but I don't know if deep space is for me after this. What exactly are you doing out there anyway?"

"We'd be going out with a set of robots and equipment to set up some mining operations on some prospects. Some of the asteroid probes I sent recently have had good strikes."

"Can't you just send robots to set up the mining operations?"

"It's not a big deal to send me and you since we only use a nominal amount of electricity to power us. I can be there to handle any unexpected situations in real-time. There's a lot of equipment here, and I can't afford to be on a two-hour lightspeed delay link if anything goes wrong and the mission fails because of that. Sure, it would have been too costly if we had to have oxygen recycling, food, bodily waste management, etc. The trip will be for 1 year, which in the olden days before your beautiful legs would be impossible without resupply and a logistics network along the way. Now, we just go on a whim, and the solar panels and the small, fast reactor onboard provide everything we need. The place will be packed to the gills with robots and mining equipment on the way out, but we'll have a small area for us and then the whole place on the way back. We'll even have big open spaces inside the ship. It's so easy when we don't have to maintain oxygen in the atmosphere and just have the whole place filled with nitrogen."

"I'll miss my friends," Kathie said.

"You don't want to return to that cramped atmosphere-controlled station anyway," Jason said. When I've finished setting up a few of these mining colonies, we won't even have to go back there. We can get a house on Earth. You can invite your friends for temporary stays, and they'll love you for it."

"I don't know about Earth. Will I even fit in, having grown up as an offworlder?"

"You'll fit right in if you stick with me because people will know you made your money in good, honest asteroid mining. It's an honorable profession, after all. Nobody cares about pollution in uninhabitable deep space, and it keeps us from having to mine on Earth."

Kathy considered the possibility of being stuck with Jason in deep space, unable to leave, but she trusted him. His ship wasn't bad, and it was good to have a steady boyfriend for once. He was handsome and had a good business. Something better might come along for both of them, but right now, she wanted stability and to forget about the colonies she had been stuck in throughout her life.

"Ok, we can go. Can we just take a week-long trip on the new ship to make sure I'm going to like it? The years you say this will ultimately take are a long commitment if I don't like the ship. You'll teach me a little about the asteroid mining business on the way, right?"

"Ok, you got it! We are going to have such a good time," Jason said. Finally, he thought, someone to sleep with and talk with on these long missions. Life otherwise gets so boring without eating and drinking, he reflected.