Prototype Ch. 08

I wasn't sold yet, but her arguments were fairly affective at smoothing out any feathers that had been ruffled by my instinctual fight or flight reaction. "I did want a co-conspirator in all this. Can't get mad at her for putting it all together on her own if I left the clues out in the open for her to find. She might even have some good suggestions for..."

A pair of tugs on my arm interrupted my train of thought- as if I was escorting a distracted toddler instead of a self-declared sex-slave. "Master!" She half whispered, half whined. "What's the point of having just one slave, when you could have anyone you wanted!"

"Stop that," I chided her, if only half-heartedly as I swiped her hands off of my sleeve. "Besides, I can't do it to anyone. It's not a ray gun or some sort of hypnotic eye beams. You have to want to be trained. I don't think it is something we could do by force. Not to mention the risk of someone coming out of it or it just not taking for some reason."

A few more moments of silence accompanied us on our walk before Rachel spoke again. "Okay- but what if we split the difference? I am proof that all we need is some reason for them to sit down and try the machine, right? Once they're blip is centered I bet you could say just about anything and they wouldn't even notice. Too bad it looks like such a mad-science experiment though. Be a lot easier to get someone to give it a try if it was... I don't know... like, a VR game or something."

"You know what they say," I started. "Wish in one hand, and shi-"

"Yes, yes... no need to finish that one. You're the brains of this operation. Just think about it. All of it. Okay?"

"Think about what?" Mike asked from the back door to the warehouse. It seemed our walk back had come to a close as well. "Kind of a long lunch, eh Ben?"

"Entirely my fault," Rachel said, slipping back around me and pulling me into another surprise kiss. At first I thought this might just be another show for his benefit, but the way she melted into me quickly took my mind off of any implied competition between Mike and I. Especially when she guided both of my hands down towards her ass for another taste of that delicious flesh beneath her jeans.

"Yeah, yeah- I get it," Mike said as we finally pulled ourselves out of the kiss, though I left one hand firmly on her ass. "Consider your territory clearly marked. You can stop anytime now."

"Actually, we do still have a bit of unfinished business to take care of," Rachel said, tracing a finger down the line of my chest until it caught at the top of my pants- tugging gently. She turned the mischievous twinkle in her eye towards my jealous co-worker, looking him up and down. "You're not so bad yourself there- Mike was it? Short for anything?"

"Ah- uhm... Yeah," He stammered. "Michael. But I always thought..."

She left me, sauntering towards him. I was surprised at how strong the sense of sudden emptiness at her absence felt as it flared within me. Well, it was either that, or jealousy at her attention shifting so quickly to a 'friend' from work I had never so much has invited over for a few beers.

After her comment, I couldn't help but give the man a once over. Kept himself clean enough, I suppose. He was on the taller side with almost black hair and brown eyes. Struck me as sort of Italian- if such a thing really meant anything nowadays. It just seemed like he could fit right in as any street level thug on the Soprano's- though not quite as broad in the shoulders as most of them. Not that he had ever spoken with anything even resembling an accent.

Moving things around in the warehouse meant you had to maintain some upper body strength as part of the job. That didn't mean you couldn't put on more than enough padding to really bring down the property value. Thankfully that was something Mike and I had yet to do.

Yeah, I guess he was cute enough. For a guy. A guy who was suddenly the sole focus of Rachel's attention.

"Michael. A good strong name." Rachel said, her voice suddenly dripping with sex. "Michael, I might be taken, but I have a friend who might like to meet you." She reached up, running a finger down his chest now, instead of mine. He took a half step back, his eyes flashing at me for a moment before concentrating on her as if she was threatening him with a weapon. I suppose she was, at that. "Would you like that?"

I could almost hear him gulp from where I stood. "I uh- Yeah. That would... I mean... if she's half a hot as- I mean..."

"Is that what I sound like when she's pouring it on like this? Maybe I do need to work on my confidence a bit." I attempted to use the not so gentle mirror I was watching to push down the flare of my own jealousy flickering on the edge of my vision. A part of me I barely even recognized couldn't help but react with a single overriding thought: "Mine! ".

"Hmm... Do you prefer blondes or brunettes?" Rachel asked him, almost giggling as he was limited to a simple shrug in response. "Good answer. Thing is... I'm going to need, maybe..." She turned to me, as if checking to see if I would agree. "Twenty minutes or so?"

"I think that would be enough, sure." I said, my voice sounding considerably more smooth and confident than I felt. "Fake it till you make it, right?"

She nodded, turning back to her victim. "Yeah. Twenty minutes. Can you cover for us for that much longer?"

"Sure, yeah... I- uhm..." He cleared his throat as cover to regain his confidence. "I can do that."

"Great!" She said, bobbing just enough to give her breasts a nice bounce to accompany her excitement. "You're a cutie. I'm sure my friend is going to just eat you up..." Then she turned, quickly closing the distance between us and picking up my hand to lead me past him and into the rear recesses of the warehouse.

"Are you really going to set him up with someone?" I asked her as we found a place secluded enough that even I was willing to risk what she obviously had in mind. Mike wasn't going to say anything if he thought he might get some tail out of the deal. But that could easily turn against me in the future if it turned into an empty promise.

"Sure," She said, her hands reaching down to grab the top of my jeans as she leaned back against a large crate. "We trade favors all the time. Helps keep things running smoothly. Same rules apply- he's not guaranteed anything, but if he plays his cards right he might get lucky. He's cute enough for a Mr. Right Now."

I eyed her suspiciously as I sent one had back to her ass and another up to her neck to draw her into a kiss. "Exactly how big of a favor did you just trade for a chance to get covered in decades old dust?"

"Master, how about you concentrate on where you going to stick this," She purred as her hands finished unbuttoning my pants and pulled out my cock. Shortly thereafter consideration of anything beyond kissing her and her hands as they slowly milked my cock were the only things on my mind.

"No time for foreplay, Master," She whispered breathlessly as she pulled away from me, shimmying one leg out of her jeans as if by magic. Then she turned around, arching her back as she leaned up against the crate to shake her ass back and forth in front of me. Her head turned back towards me as she whispered. "Fuck me, Master! Stick that beautiful cock inside me until you cum!"

"Well, when you ask so nicely, how can I refuse," I said- stepping in and sliding my cock deep into her dripping pussy.

"Ohh god you feel so good, Master!"

After the earlier denial it didn't take long before I was getting close. It felt like Rachel had already cum at least once as well. I couldn't be sure- we were both attempting to be quiet. Her legs were almost thrumming against me as I fucked her from behind. "You- are mine!" I growled over her.

"Yours Master!" She cried out in a whimper, biting her own lip as we both tried our best to muffle our mutual orgasms.

Like I said in the beginning. I'd like to think I'm not stupid. I'm sure you can understand how tempting it was to ditch work and run straight home. I had upgrades to the machine to work on, and they weren't going to code themselves! Thankfully, Rachel had given me a nice firm reminder of the need to be practical as she left.

Her hand had been firm and warm against my chest. "Stay. Work. For now at least you still need to be able to pay the bills." I had time on my side- for the moment. And the work was mindless enough to give me time to think. Which was something I needed to do a lot more of if I was going to accomplish anything more than just collect a few hot women willing to do anything I wanted. And I was beginning to realize I wanted a lot more than that.

Rachel had given me more than a few nuggets to digest that afternoon- more than she had meant to I was almost sure. Back when I had first gotten started I had been forced to use myself as the test subject. But ever since I had tricked Rachel and Maggie into taking my place I hadn't spent any time on the machine at all. Perhaps it was time to take a bit of my own medicine. I was conflicted about making any adjustments on myself thought. At least not without putting a lot more thought than I had put into theirs.

"Still, there are a few things that could use some improvement." I admitted to myself. But using it to silence the few voices of protest my meager conscience had managed to rally to the fight? I wasn't sure. I pushed my broad broom around the corner of a stacked pile of unwanted desk chairs, arguing with myself. "In for a penny, in for a pound." Or so the saying goes. And then there was the one about absolute power doing what absolute power always does.

I decided to table that consideration for later as I headed into the break room. I had finished sweeping the floors and Mike was 'supervising' some undergraduate workers unloading a few more filing cabinets from another renovation of some building or other. That would keep him busy for a bit, but it wasn't exactly a two-man job. The room did double duty as the 'office' for the janitorial staff. It wasn't much- a desk with a single computer on it, an old beat up couch, a coffee table with decades of water marks on its surface, and our small collection of tools hanging on a wall organizer. With Mike busy I had the room all to myself for a while. I pulled out my phone and took a seat on the couch- avoiding the shared computer for obvious reasons.

My education, at least before I had been forced to drop out, had given me just what I needed to be able to take that prototype machine apart, make heads and tails of it, and then put it back together without so much as a missing and/or extra widget laying around. I might have had a few setbacks this past week, but those were squarely in the arena of psychology and interpersonal emotional intelligence. Not too bad of a start consider I was not especially well versed in either of those two subjects. Still, it was time to get back to what I was good at.

First order of business was that wire-mesh cap. Rachel was right- it was rather daunting, both visually and functionally. I knew from personal experience that getting that blip centered in the zone on the radar screen overlay was critical to effective 'learning' when working with the machine. I wasn't ready to try a VR rig yet, afraid it would add too much movement into the equation. But as far as I could tell, there wasn't anything special about the original cap in particular that made it necessary for the machine to work. In theory, virtually any EEG cap should do the trick. As long as it gave the same output in raw data for the software to analyze.

I wasn't sure what the technology had been like when it had first been developed near on a decade ago. The wire mesh monstrosity that it was today had more than likely been the cheapest way to make a functional prototype at the time. Obviously they had upgraded it at some point or the original wouldn't have been lost in the legal limbo that had allowed me to make it disappear in the first place. It couldn't be that hard to replace it with something considerably less threatening. Cause I was an expert, right?

"Hell, copy the software and I bet I could replace the entire thing with more streamlined equipment- then either get rid of it, or slip it back into the warehouse and no one would ever know!" But let's not get ahead of myself. Before attempting to reinvent the wheel, I thought it wise to check how much more user friendly EEG tech had become in the last decade.

Turns out, ten years can make a big difference. There were a small handful of options between companies that were selling relatively inexpensive EEG caps and hardware. The real money seemed to be in the software licensing and training to make heads or tails of the data- something I didn't need, or already had covered- depending on your point of view. I wasn't sure how useful it all really was but people were selling the tech as a way to get information on all sorts of things, from product feedback to focus group analysis.

I narrowed it down to one of two options, both from the same company. It still looked a bit awkward, like a black plastic hand with twenty or so knobby fingers spread out all over your head. But it was wireless, and easily adjusted to different head sizes to ensure proper contact- something I hadn't even known to be concerned about up until that point. I just needed to compare their electrode placement with the prototype waiting for me at home.

With that taken care of I was left with the other problem Rachel had inadvertently pointed out before I tripped over it. A potential solution to my own greatest fear- that some fragment I included in a training file would go too far, be so out of character, that it would break them out of the training. If that happened, would they remember what I had been trying to do to them? At a minimum if they hadn't already removed the offending fragment it would still be on the screen- clearly visible. A shrug and a joke about 'just a bit of harmless fun' would only go so far. How would they react?

Watching Rachel and Maggie's reactions during their training made me relatively certain that once you had managed to get that blip centered in the zone that there was little to no conscious thought going into solving the puzzles. My own memories of the machine from before and after I realized the need for the random fragments were similar. It was almost like you were running on auto-pilot.

Problem was my early experimentation had proven the outliers were necessary for the machine to work in the first place. But that didn't mean I had to use the same ones to get someone into the zone as the ones that would brainwash them once they were there. If the machine knew how close you were to the optimum state of mind for training, couldn't it just wait until the subject was so in the zone they wouldn't know the difference before adding in the questionable ones?

"Even better- I could have it default to a generic fragment file at first, and then switch to the password protected ones with only training fragments once it was safe to use them." If I coded it so that the questionable fragments were only displayed when the subject was ready for them, it would also protect me from a sudden break in the training. Once the system recognized they were out of the zone and lucid again- it could immediately clear the fragments, switching back to the generic ones instead.

"Perfect!"

"What's perfect?" Mike asked me, nearly giving me a heart attack on the spot. "I mean aside from your girl-friends body that is. Whoa! Take it easy man!"

I had been so lost in thought that I was evidently oblivious to the world around me. I would have kicked myself if hadn't already smacked my hand against the coffee table in a near-failed attempt to catch my phone. For some reason it had briefly developed sentience and immediately decided the best thing to do was to try and end it all by diving out of my hand and hurtle itself towards the floor. Or I could have just tossed it into the air like a victim of a cheap jump scare in a slasher flick. Hard to tell.

"Where the hell did he come from?! Fucking ninja. Good thing I wasn't on the shared desktop. He could have been reading over my shoulder for minutes!"

"You okay, man?" Mike asked me as I shook my hand to calm the tingling nerves that were still sending tendrils of pain up my wrist. "I didn't mean to scare you. You really think she'll set me up with one of her friends? Your girlfriend, I mean."

It took me a moment to answer him. "My girl-friend?" "Oh, Rachel? Yeah. She wouldn't have offered if she didn't mean it."

Mike just stared at me for a moment, though I was still too distracted to really register his incredulity. "So... Not your girlfriend then? Does she know that? Cause..."

"I'm quite certain she knows exactly what she is," I said absently, ensuring that my phone had actually survived its ordeal.

"Well, if she's on the market then I'd be happy to-"

I didn't let him finish, but I didn't precisely tell him off either. "Feel free to give it a try, but don't come crying to me when she crushes your hopes and dreams."

"Right," He shrugged, raising his hands in the air to surrender. "Totally not your girlfriend. Got it. Whatever floats your boat man. I'm just saying- that's the first girl I've seen visit you in the two years I've worked with you."

"Has it really been two years?" I knew Mike had been working here a while, but was I really that disconnected from everyone here? Evidently so. That realization was immediately followed by a cascade of thoughts and emotions that must have been scrolling by on my face as much as they were in my head.

"Look, Ben- I didn't mean to upset you or anything," He apologized- with absolutely no idea what he was apologizing for. It wasn't his fault I had been lost in my own depression and self-doubt pretty much since I'd been forced out of school.

I think that was what did it- pushed me over the edge and past the indecision that was still holding me back. "Maggie was totally right. It really is time to make a change. And not just to her, or Rachel."

"Don't worry about it, Mike. It's not your fault," I said, trying to absolve him of any guilt he might have just picked up. I tried to think of something nice to say to follow it up- but due to my recently mentioned distance I could only come up with one thing. "I really appreciated you being willing to cover for me earlier today while Rachel and I... uhm..." I wasn't sure how to finish that.

Thankfully, my pitiful attempt at being a good friend seemed to have worked. Mike gave a short chuckle before slapping my shoulder. "Fucked your not-girlfriend in the back of the warehouse? Yeah- no problem. You'd do it for me, right?"

I just nodded like an idiot. "Would I?" I wasn't anywhere near as positive as he had sounded. "He was likely just joking," I told myself.

The staccato sound of a car horn being pressed repeatedly blared from the front of the building. "Who the hell-" I was saying just as Mike answered the question.

"And... that would be my sister. One big bag of anxiety wrapped in a soft outer layer of impatience."

"Your sister?"

"Yeah, that's why I came in. I'm cashing in that favor sooner than I would like, and on something not nearly as fun. My parents volunteered Anna as my chauffeur until my truck is out of the shop. She's got some court thing coming up though, and this was her only window to get away to pick me up tonight. You got this, right?"

I nodded in agreement. "Yeah, sure- so she's a lawyer?"

Mike chuckled again as he turned to go. My curiosity piqued, I was following close behind him. "Who, Anna? She wishes. Couldn't get into law school because of her test scores or something. She's just a paralegal, her words, not mine. Just a paralegal still makes almost twice as much me. Not that that's saying much."