Strange Queens Ch. 04

File: The Foundation
Extracts and Notes from the personal folder on the purchase, establishment, construction, protection and technological installations undertaken on building (with Auditor's notes)
The Project Arbiter (E.J.R.)

"It occurs to me that a truly contained structure of self-sustainable uni-culture calls for an entirely new approach to the more modern style of civilian living, a rethinking of the idea of sustainability. In an average household sustainable living is regarded as comfort, with ease of access to the most usual of produce, the most average of stock, and the most attractive of social appearances. But this is not to be the case for my residence. For I not only require the average living quarters. I intend to revolutionise the idea of a living space and merge that image with that of a work place, a fully functioning, self -sustaining work horse of a building that could easily accommodate even the daintiest of princesses, or, perhaps, the foulest of untamed beasts.

I am not a woman of half-hearted mockeries or contemptuous attempts at stylised, designed housing. Nor am I a woman prepared to settle for anything less than perfection for my needs. This building shall bury itself into the side of the one mountain that overlooks every inch and corner of the city below it, stands tall and proud above the sprawling mess of uncultured and unkempt social suburbia, and smiles as it bends to its knees before it. It shall contain my entire life's work, as well as serve as the single fully featured development station for every future project I come to design in my long and fruitful lifetime. I shall live there in complete peace, utter anonymity, and, most of all, absolute privacy. The secret of my design shall accompany me to my grave, and my house, should I leave it, shall stand open to none other than the queen that birthed it.

Doctor Eliza Julia Roberts, closing footnote to the personal development records for Unit 1, written in exquisite cursive hand-writing on the last page of the design brief filed under her own name for private construction and patented operative installations. Two years before completed building unveiling.

"It was always my goal in life to build something no one else had ever built before. I felt it in my veins, I knew it could be my destiny. Ever since I'd been a little kid I'd known I'd be that guy, The Architect who constructed something completely off the scales as far as building construction of the twenty-first century goes.
What I didn't know then was that that eventuality would indeed present itself, in the form of one completely privately contracted, six point nine million dollar excavation, refit and construction procedure that was estimated to take nearly two years to complete over a seven day, eight hour work regiment.

I still remember the look of absolute shock on my face when I looked at my wife, standing by my side with her hand on her bulging stomach and looking back at me expectantly, as I read out the opening balance of tax-free private payment of nearly three hundred thousand dollars. I can even remember the feeling of that lump that was at that time our little baby inside her pressed into me in what felt much too hard to be medically good for the little one as she hugged me.
I remember the first day I saw the site, saw the state of the art dual bore machine as the pre-planning team excavated the foundation wells for the massive chunk in the side of that mountain, the number of people that came up to me complaining about this problem and that and trying to tell me it why wouldn't work as though I'd never managed a build in my life. All I could think about was how that money would fund our little girl's schooling.

It was the project of a life time, both in pay and in design management. The entire paperwork was concise and crystal cut, mathematically sound and engineered brilliance. I was instructed to perform the build to the very letter, and that's what I did.
As I sit here today, with my three wonderful children rushing about my feet, I wonder, in the casual, hindsight-bathed memories of that project, if it was worth it. I wonder if it was really wise of me to follow the scent of money, and the future I was securing for my children with it.
And then I wonder why I sit here wondering these things, when those kids are sitting before my eyes.

What does it matter that it was the biggest project of my life, the biggest event of my career, now far behind me before I'd even hit forty-five?
It was only a job. A fruitful job, but a job nonetheless.
And so I put my wonders aside, and forget the yearning to know what really goes on in that building for another day.

Personal note from the Supreme Architect, private contract, Unit 1. The only known record of this diary entry sits in a padlocked drawer in the bedside cabinet of the primary architect hired to build the secluded Unit 1 project.

Nearly six hundred metres tall, with deep, curving foundations that burrow nearly that distance again into the earth above, below and behind the structure. Seven and a half hundred tonnes of the best concrete money can buy and ninety tonnes of triple fired steel networking. Six kilometres of network cabling and twenty kilometres of fire-wiring. Four hundred thousand dollar triple glazed heated smart glass, a full outward-facing wall of load-bearable ultra-clear sheeting. Nine hundred thousand dollars of mechanical infrastructure, privately constructed, security cleared installation. Seventy thousand dollars of lifting gear alone. A forty thousand dollar lift shaft and lift. A million dollars' worth of custom made tiling. Nearly that again on heating coils. A seventy-five thousand dollar hybrid power plant prototype, and twenty thousand dollars on state of the art agricultural development. And, as if that wasn't enough, nearly fifty thousand dollars on security installations, wired and wireless backups, a fully automatic gate embedded in the earth rock, a finger and iris recognition system, a next-generation fully self-contained server infrastructure, sixteen separate safes, a completely sterile, vacuum sealable laboratory, and a car park.

I'm told the entire project wells up near the seven million dollar mark, though the architect is tight lipped about it and the assistants know even less than he does.
Who the fuck is crazy enough to build a mansion to make mansions feel sad in the side of a fucking mountain for seven fucking million?

Steven Haynes, head engineer. No source.

*

The building named only as Unit 1 is a single frame, multi-levelled construct designed to house an entire lifestyle on each of its floors with room to spare. Featuring a fully functional, hospital grade chemical lab, a dynamic hydroponics bay capable of sustaining everything from vegetables to marijuana, extensive vacuum sealed perishable storage compartment and an array of the most technically superior server and database systems on the lowest level, this level is the only one that has no front-facing windows. Instead, skylights with refractive mirroring in them reach up through the mountain ceiling and provide six to eight hours' of authentic sunlight for the plantation below. A massive expanse of fully automated, self-cleaning hydraulics here function as the beating heart of the hangar-like raising platform that runs up the spine of the building, as well as the compact and silent magnetic lift system that runs passengers all the way up from the car park to the top level.

This level also backs onto the car park, an extension buried behind the structure, further inside the mountain.

As wide as the building and curving, like a semi-circle with its face pressed against the butt of the house, the car park is high-ceilinged and can comfortably and securely store forty standard cars, or about twenty trucks. It has a secure tunnel entrance that is locked off by a separating gate with advanced DNA recognition algorithms, a vehicle transponder check and is lined by hidden cameras that run without a single blind spot all the way up to the exit out onto the freeway some nine hundred metres up the tunnel and a winding dirt path.

Rising up a level is the research and confinement sections, including the expansive, bulkhead-sealable left wing that forms the cell rooms for Eliza Julia Roberts's experimental subjects, and the rooms in which Chelsea and Jordan found themselves. Seventy six separate rooms in total, eighteen all-purpose rooms like Chelsea and Jordan's, twenty-four smaller, essential supply cells, twelve restraining rooms mounted with full size bondage and suppression devices, and twenty-two special purpose "template" rooms pre-prepared for incorporating any particular tool or device Roberts might be in the process of testing. These particular rooms feature fully self-functioning cleaning and monitoring, and can be left for years without changing state. On this level also is a restaurant-sized kitchen, with a massive twenty foot main bench and an enormous sixteen-seater table and comfort facilities.

This is often where Roberts would spend her nights, given that there are four small private bedrooms beside this part of the level which can be accessed by a corridor that runs between them and then splits, granting access to the rooms from the opposite side to the living space. Small, cosy, and solidly, built, these rooms are mostly soundproof and, like all levels in the building, feature heated floors. Their only drawback to all the other living spaces in the building is that they feature no windows or view to the outside world. It is in these rooms, and in the living space outside, that Roberts would often store her completed projects, including her early templates into physical hypnostimulation.

Her crowning achievement is a completely self-contained mountable device with shaped leg cut-outs. Designed for a woman to sit in the moulding, once in place she is almost completely powerless to move, and is assured as such by the gentle sucking material that grips and holds the skin massage-style. Containing a thin layer of electrically charged nerve stimulant, the device then disables the woman's higher muscular function, turning her ability to resist down like a knob, whilst attacking her exposed genitalia with precision built, emotionally targeted erotic stimulus. Roberts developed a later prototype which added four hundred per cent more electrical diodes and double that again on the conductors in the skin, reshaped the unit to form a stylish, sleek weighted egg shape, and the bonus of authentic solid tubes that formed a rigid insert to further stimulate the female body. The skin itself, previously highly effective, was found to be somewhat underperforming when used on older women or women with overtly widened entryways.

The tube addition also added the sensation of being fucked, a helpful link when combined with the hypnotic audio feature. This model was a design she created exclusively for the porn industry, with one buyer, a multi-billion dollar entrepreneur and businessman with a fetish for slave women and money to spend on all the girls in the world, taking the only working copy and one hundred per cent of the private-use only rights. The model was lost upon the man's untimely passing, much to Roberts's partial dismay and partial delight. Though she hated to see her proud early work on female submission hardware lost, she knew that it would only be used to turn some delectable girl or girls into horny, sex driven slave sluts. That she could live with.

This level also acts as the primary kitchen supplying food to the cells adjacent, as edible sustenance is the only supply not able to be provided automatically in the rooms. The three sections, cell block, restaurant and bedrooms, are split by thick, load bearing dividing walls, the only breaker to this wall being the raiseable platform that is the spine of the building. This level is the first to feature a wall of full length, heated glass facing outwards from the mountain, and both the kitchen wall and the cell blocks show off the view. Chelsea and Jordan's cell was one of these, affording the two girls a prime, unbroken view over the world outside. The only room that reaches the outermost wall not to have a window is the bedroom, which ends just shy of the mountain face and as such is hidden from existence. This level is also the only one to feature exits to the mountain side, being the first level built above ground level and protruding out of the mountain. At several points along the length of the wall, doors can be found that allow exit onto the relatively flat slope of the hill. This is a naturally formed cleft in the rock and makes for a natural balcony for the cells and kitchen. However, it slopes away quickly to a steep fall not far away from the building.

The next level up, one floor down from the top, is Roberts's primary research station, as well as the central hub of the facility. Here is held the most diverse range of equipment in the entire building. Ordered out into a symmetrical, radial formation, the rooms inside this floor are specifically catered to particular activity, arrayed around the edges of the building and accessed from a wide, spacious and brightly lit central room. In the centre is Roberts's operations epicentre, an experimentation and development office complete with full writing desk and its own dedicated hardware, a central pillar utilised as a full three-hundred and sixty degree oscillating video screen and work bench, and plenty of wide open floor space. The back section of the room is, as with every other level, completely empty and services the enormous movable platform, looking very much like something out of Iron Man, except with bigger windows. The spacious specialist rooms around the two sides and part of the glass front are home to everything from gym and training equipment to relaxation and recreation, games and activities, and even an indoor pool. Several of the rooms boast no interior walls or remote retractable walls, including the pool room, to allow for open access between them. There is both a heated and untreated pool, as well as a lowering divider inside them to turn both pools into an extended lap pool.

The final level, the top floor, is a living space. Modern, cool, and crisp white, this space boasts modern ingenuity, stylish presence, and futuristic features. Separated only by a single load-bearing wall which reaches approximately two thirds across the floor lengthways, this level is completely self-sufficient and features a large kitchen, food storage, lounges and entertainment units of all kinds from console games, the entire internet's supply of video, and a row of brand new, top of the line PCs, this space is wide and vast and breathtaking. A dining table bigger than four conference tables combined adorns the rightmost side (looking in), and can comfortably seat twenty four people with room to spare. This level can be accessed by a stairwell on the far wall which runs down the interior of the building with exits on each level below, out past the toilets either side of the pools on level three, into the bedroom access corridor on level two directly ahead of the doorway out into the kitchen, into the lab holding bay -- into a closed off sub-room which holds the liquidly frozen forms of carbonised slave subjects, including the solidified forms of Chelsea and Jordan's organically born bodies -- and out on the far end of the car park on the ground level.

It can also be accessed by the central lift, which opens double-sided in the centre dividing wall and can stay as such to grant access between the two partially separated halves. The same lift runs down a slim block right outside the glass-walled personal office in the centre of the activity level, symmetrically perfect with the office room and the outer equipment area and, furthest out, the individual entertainment rooms. It exits, single-doored on a third side of the lift this time, into the main corridor of the stark cell blocks on level two, and, using the same third doors, into the building-side wall of the carpark below. The only level, or rather the only room, as it is only a separated room that shares a level with the cell blocks, it does not access directly into is the private store room, the room in which the biochemical remnants of the girls hang in their liquid suspension. Entry to this room is only a tens of metres away from the lift exit on level three.

This top level also features four lowerable glass sleeping chambers, constructed entirely of the super thick, triple glazed electrically warm-able glass that forms the entire outward facing side of the building. Carpeted for comfort, with lavish, poster-less beds and slim, elegant side tables, the rooms are stored inside the unseen ceiling of the building and can be lowered down as needed on command by a control panel mounted on the front face of the dividing wall. Once in position the rooms can be rotated completely and are accessed by rising steps in the floor underneath them. Heated and controlled entirely by two HUD-like interfaces by the bed and by the door, the units offer the sleeper a nearly un-broken view of the dark city outside and are topped by skylights which utilise refracted mirrors to widen the angle of viewing from inside the chamber, making it possible for the actual skylight to be much smaller than the view from inside the cell to look and showing the sky in real time rather than a relayed camera-to-screen recreation.

This helps minimise the view of suspicious glass panels in the mountainside from airborne vehicles while maximising the viewer's pleasure inside the chamber. While nearly invisible from outside the glass room, the view above the bed is nearly full panoramic vision, blocked only peripherally by the ceiling around the cell. These chambers all offer pumped, filtered water and an array of entertainment materials, including electrically raiseable bed, lowering projector screen with access to console games, TV and internet video feed and an under-bed drawer of other interact-able private goodies.

Each chamber features a double size bed, storage, and can support over half a tonne of weight comfortably thanks to the super strong glass --and-gas sheets and the reinforced, polished steel rods that affix it to a circular motor housing in the ceiling. Entirely hollow in the centre, the motor housing allows the contained room to rotate freely in full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees' motion and can even tilt to a degree, all while allowing a very generous view directly up through the skylights. While nothing of its kind has ever been publically built for consumer use, it could be estimated that this singular chamber alone could well be worth upwards of three quarters of a million dollars each, if a price could be put on it.

And so Unit 1 stands, buried in the side of a freeway mountain, only visible from the sheer mountain's face, impassive and secretive, covered in camouflage and overgrowth and home to beyond-state-of-the-art remarkable inventions tooled towards the sexual control and enslavement of women -- and known only to four people in the world.

* * * * *

'So you'll come?'

'Yeah, we'll be there in twenty minutes.'

'You don't have to wake her up, though. This isn't her responsibility, and I know she's got a lot of work to catch up on. Let her sleep.'

'Are you kidding? Did you think the phone call would only wake me up? Besides, she'd never let me go on my own a second time. She's in, I don't need to ask her to know. We'll be there in twenty.'
Click.
Jordan held the phone against her ear for a few seconds after Rachel had hung up before she gently flipped the case closed and set it down on the table. She took a deep breath. When she let it out, she shuddered. She took another one, and did her best to rest her nerves.