PSI Plague: Recruitment

PSI Plague: Recruitment

Copyright (c) 2019 James Miehoff, All Rights Reserved.

This work may not be published whether for fee or free without this copyright.

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The following is a work of fiction and as such, all characters mentioned herein are fictional and any resemblance to any persons living, dead or fictional is purely coincidental.

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Author's note:

The following story is a follow up to a never published tale written as an entry into one of the periodic "contests" on a well-known amateur erotic literature site. The original story never gelled and I shelved it for later. But some of the characters kept bouncing around in my head and they eventually broke free and ended up in the missive you are (virtually) holding in your hands.

While published on a literary erotic site, this prelude does not contain a lot of the casual sex such stories are known for. If that is what you are looking for, I suggest you check out the James and Heather "Universe-J" series stories.

If you are still here, thank you.

Kick back and enjoy the ride.

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Looking back, I am pretty sure it was a Tuesday. I went down to the local coffee shop for some expensive bad coffee and to just hang out. Bored, I started playing with my portfolio when one of my AI Bots pinged me with some juicy rumors.

Apparently one of my favorite companies was about to make a big product announcement and as icing on the cake, it looks like they were going to settle their patent infringement suit by buying the company that brought the suit. Gotta love their CEO's balls.

Dropping the mutual fund sheet off my visual screen, I opened my LiveSx portfolio and quickly set up a sell order for 10,000 shares at 102 and a buy order for 10,000 at 80. The way it was starting to climb, my sell order would be triggered some time this afternoon. If previous trends held, the buy order would get triggered sometime tomorrow or the day after. Pocketing another 20,000 or so for a few minutes work felt pretty good.

As I was congratulating myself, I realized that there was something wrong. I shut down my visual screens as I realized that the shop had gone stone quiet. Mentally slapping myself for going out of the house without my usual armaments, I scanned the cafe for the source of the danger and then stopped. My jaw opened of its own accord at what I saw.

She was magnificent. On a scale of 1 -- 10, she was clearly a 14. She had dark brown hair that flowed down past her shoulders, flawless complexion, piercing blue eyes and a perfect body with curves in all the right places. And it was easy to tell exactly how perfect those curves were because she was wearing one of those new photonic thread dresses, the ones that make the entire skin tight surface into a visual monitor.

I have to hand it to the artist or programmer who worked on that dress. It was a swirling kaleidoscope of geometric shapes drifting across the landscape. The cherry on top was that some of the moving shapes were transparent, clearly showing the perfect skin underneath. I found myself holding my breath willing that circle to go just..a..little..higher, but no, it slid away just before the ultimate reveal of those perfect breasts.

It was quite frankly mesmerizing watching those shapes as they danced across her body. I got a nice shot of her side boob, enough to see faint tan lines on her pale skin but a solid red triangle intersected the transparent square just before the nipple shot. Exhaling, I realized with a start that I had been holding my breath.

As she handed her credstick, I triggered my lenses into zoom mode and got part of a name; Penny Pri something. I had to find out more about her. Time to put my cyber stalker hat on.

Jacking into my secure net connection, I dropped silently into cyberspace. Shaking off the mild nausea that always accompanies the transition, I spun up a chaser AI and gave it what I knew. It blinked out and began to track.

Spinning up a hack AI, I set it loose on the coffee shop to try and put a trace on the transaction. Before I spun back up to real life, I set another hack AI to check for security cameras and see if any of them caught how my goddess had arrived.

The AI unleashed on the cameras was back almost instantly. The first was the outside camera from the bank across the street. Watching it, I saw her getting out of a black SUV with dark tinted windows before it dove off; nothing special about that. The next one was the coffee shop door camera. It got a beautiful clear shot of my goddess in her photonic dress coming in, scanning the room and then heading up to order. Once again I mentally congratulated that programmer. The transparent shapes came oh so close to revealing the naughty bits only to change direction or be covered over by one or more opaque colored shapes. I could watch that all day.

The last video was from the shop next door. It caught the SUV driving up and my goddess getting out. But the thing that caught my eye was the license plate. The numbers kept morphing. It was impossible to get a consistent number to be able to run it. The video was clear, but something was interfering with the camera to keep the license obscured. That had my 100% undivided attention. That type of tech was not your basic street hack.

I pulled a frame and zoomed it, then ran a sharpening algorithm and it was still unreadable. I did another frame, then a third and a fourth. Nothing. Then it clicked. The plate was probably running multiple partial images two or three times the frame rate of the camera. That would allow a person looking at it to see some numbers, but the security cameras run at a faster frame rate than the human eye and would pick up partial images of the number. Grabbing five frames I merged them together and voila! There was the license plate. Spinning up another searcher AI, I gave it the composite image and set it loose to track down the owner of the SUV.

The hack AI popped up in front of me, threw a stack of files into the air and vanished. I know, I used to treat my AIs better but that was just my conscience anthropomorphizing them. I got over it.

Poking the first file, I saw that it was a copy of the receipt. The only thing useful was the name, Penny Priddy.

'Oh that's rich,' I chuckled to myself. 'Somebody is a Buckaroo Banzai fan.'

The next file I poked had the details of the transaction. I spin up another AI, this time one of my more aggressive hunter-seekers and peeled a copy of the file and tossed it to him.

'Go and trace this transaction. Break into the account, if possible and report back.'

As he faded out, I poked the third file. Nothing important was in it. As I poked the last file, a warning tickled my cortex and I pulled back, just as the file erupted into a ball of plasma which consumed the other files and pulsed out of existence.

'Wow,' I said rather shaken. 'That could have been bad. I think it's time to go back to real life.'

Touching the crystal of my chronometer, I watched as my bolt hole in cyberspace faded out and the café began to fade in. A quick glance around showed me that the goddess in the photonic dress had left the building. I'll have to check the security cameras to see how she departed once I get home.

Stretching and yawning I made a big production of slurping back the last of my mocha latte and collecting my gear, I headed to the door, tossing the now empty cup into the recycling can.

Once I got home, I set my security wards, made myself comfortable on the bed and jacked back into cyberspace. I had a couple of bundles from my AIs. But first, I spun up the hack AI to go get the security camera footage of my goddess' departure.

The first bundle was a hacked snapshot of the merchant account from the coffee shop. It showed the transaction of Ms. Penny Priddy. Yuck, a cinnamon pumpkin spice latte with a shot of expresso as a kicker. 'No accounting for taste,' I thought while shuddering.

The transaction went through an encrypted wireframe and I was about to unleash an AI on it, when I saw the link to the other bundle. I popped it open and to my surprise it was the back hack through the wireframe to the charge account of one Penny Priddy. I scanned the transactions and saw the usual junk. Fast food, shoes, the photonic dress ('Wow! I knew they were expensive, but wow!') and some other miscellaneous charges. Just then, a new charge popped in. I read it. The Hotel Rialto. Now why would a mostly classy girl like Penny be getting a room at the Rialto? That place was a dive just barely one step above a flop house.

Spinning up another hack AI, I instructed it to get security footage of Ms. Penny checking in and to discover the room she went to. As an afterthought, I tossed in the footage of the coffee shop to help get positive ID. It winked out and I was left with my thoughts.

A little while later, the two AIs returned. The first had the security footage of Penny walking out of the coffee shop and getting into the same black SUV. I checked and the plate matched.

The second AI ran the footage from the Rialto. Penny checked in alone then went up to the 16th floor in the elevator. Swiping the key in suite 1612. I turned to the AI and asked for the floorplan of the 16th floor of the Rialto.

While it was gone, there was something else nagging at me. I ran the footage of her exit from the coffee shop. Then it hit me! The AI that was sent out to find out about the license number never returned.

I dialed up the linkage and saw that it was gone. Vanished, like it had never existed. Now I was interested.

Looking at the breadcrumbs, I started to follow. I got to the department of motor vehicles and sleazed my way past their wards. Slipping down to the library, I picked up the next breadcrumb and headed for a restricted zone. Turning myself shiny and small, I slid between the guardians and down the corridor. The trail led to a virtual door. Just as I was about to grab the doorknob, the AI with the floorplans appeared beside me. I had just grabbed the floorplans and tucked them into a pocket when the AI erupted in fire. I ducked and covered but the pulse that fried the AI hit me also. I dragged myself down the corridor as I started to black out.

When I came to, I could feel my body, so I knew I was real again. But I couldn't see. I tried to move my hand to rub my eyes but it wouldn't move. Careful feeling of my skin and I could tell that my hands were restrained, from the feel on the left hand when I pulled on my right hand, probably a restraint strap running under the bed.

"Well, I see you are awake at last," came a beautifully melodious voice from my left. I turned my head and could feel a blindfold over my eyes. So I wasn't blind, just blindfolded. I snapped my eyes down into the infrared and could see through the cloth. The first thing I saw was the outline that could be no one else but my goddess.

"I think so," I said slowly. I wanted to drag this out to get whatever information I could while giving out as little as possible. Since she was on my left, I got out my dewclaw and began cutting the bondage strap on my right.

"I am so sorry you got hurt, but I am flattered that you cared enough to chase me," she said oh, so, sweetly. "Now may I enquire to whom I am speaking?"

"Tommy," I said. "You can call me Perfect Tommy."

"Ooooo," she said clapping. "We finally have a student of the great cinema. I am so glad you have a sense of humor ... Mister Smith."

I groaned to cover the sound of the last filaments cutting. As she turned to walk down to the foot of the bed, I pounced. Rolling over and slapping the blindfold off I changed course in mid-stream and began frantically scratching my left arm near the elbow.

"Oh my god, you can't possibly imagine how good that feels. That itch has been killing me," I said to the goons standing between me and the door.

"It's alright gentleman. Let Mr. Smith scratch his itch while one of you goes and gets the Professor."

As soon as the blindfold was off, I had snapped my eyes back to normal vision and spotted the mountains standing between me and the door. Hence the sudden change of plans to do something that would not trigger them, like trying to escape. There were four of them and they might as well have been made in a factory. Six foot eight and at least four hundred pounds of solid muscle. Annoyance was written all over their bald heads.

I stopped scratching as one of them opened the door and quickly stepped back. The other three parted like Moses was there with his rod. Framed by the parted goons was an old guy leaning on a cane with both hands. He wasn't very tall but he was nattily dressed in a white suit and amber sunglasses. He sort of reminded me of the short guy in the movie about twins. The fringe of white hair around the bald patch on top looked like cotton balls glued to his scalp.

He looked at me and said, "I am the Professor," as he walked into the room. "I would like to apologize for your nakedness, but we had to check you over thoroughly and apparently we didn't check you well enough." The last was directed at the leftmost goon, who bowed his head and turned an amazing shade of crimson.

"If you promise to behave, I'll have my assistant, Honey, whom I believe you've met, get a towel and drape it over you."

My mind reeling, I stammered out, "Thank you. I will try to behave myself."

When she returned with possibly the smallest towel I had ever seen and placed it over my naughty bits. I looked at her and said, "Thank you Ms. Pott."

Her eyes widened briefly and she quickly shot a glance at the Professor as she moved fluidly back against the wall.

"Now then, Mr. Smith," the Professor began. "We are on the precipice of a great opportunity or a great problem.

"You have exceeded our wildest expectations and have now become something of a windfall or an impediment. Ms. Pott as you so aptly named her is one of our best recruiters. She is our honey pot. She goes out to where the hackers hang out and offers herself up as a tempting target. There were six of you in the coffee shop that hacked her account and traced the transaction back to her account. Three of you followed up and found the transaction to the Hotel Rialto. Two of you were able to hack in and get the security footage of Ms. Pott entering this suite.

The other hacker, a Ms. TigerLily, decided to dive into the bank account and found the backdoor to a much larger account, which she attempted to loot. We will be sending flowers to Cynthia Chow's funeral when they pull the plug on her brain-dead body later this afternoon."

I had been listening before, but the Professor had my full attention now.

"You my boy," he said after a brief pause. "Leave us with a different problem. You somehow managed to get the license number of the car. And more than that, you managed to trace it back behind the barrier in the DMV. I have a staff of top programmers now working on how you did that.

"This brings me to the crux of my dilemma. There are only two ways out of room. One, I let Ms. Pott finish recruiting you and you join my organization, or two, we will be sending another bunch of flowers."

Wow. I thought my head was spinning before. I took a deep breath and then asked, "Before I beg for my life and join you out of sheer terror, may I ask some questions?"

"Please," he said with a smile. "I'd probably have just had you killed if you didn't. Any man who jumps just to save his life without knowing what he is jumping into is of no use to me."

Trying to get my one cylinder brain to fire up I asked the stupidest question first. "If I'm going to work for you, who do you work for?"

The Professor blinked and said, "Interesting. Most recruits either ask that question much later or they never ask it. I am the head of a black operations group formed to respond to threats that cannot be dealt with in any other way. There are things that go bump in the night. We bump back."

"Cool. Will I get to meet Hellboy?" I asked with a grin. As I side note I have met Hellboy, five times. Three times I recruited him, twice I put him down.

The Professor leaned back and then forward, using his cane almost as a third leg. Turning toward the only female member of our group, he said, "Honey, I think we may have found our fourth for Trivia Tuesdays."

Still smiling, he turned back to me and held out his hand, "Darryl, welcome aboard. I think you will like your new job."

Frozen, I let him take my hand and shake it. Then he turned around and led the goons out of the room, leaving me with Penny or Honey or whatever her name really was.

How the hell did they find that name? I left Darryl on a slab in the morgue fifteen years ago.