The Light Between the Trees Ch. 05

Author's note: Traumatised by being held hostage in the cafe siege, Chloe has chosen a new direction in her life. She gives up her steady boyfriend and stable job to seek out new thrills in risky encounters. Covalent has laid out his plans to make her disappear and Chloe finds herself spiraling deeper and deeper into his fantasy of total control.

We also see what Lydia (from The Flip Side) does for a day job.

The story contains themes of female submission, edge play and autassassinophilia. Discretion is advised: please check the story tags to see whether this a series you'll enjoy.]

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KEEPING YOU FOR THE WEEKEND

Kaylee is trying to explain something to me, again, but I'm having trouble understanding her. I know it's vitally important, what she's saying, but every time she gets to the crucial part, he shoots her again. She looks at him, annoyed, and he just stands there grinning, then she turns back to me and has to start all over again. I listen in mute horror, my cup of coffee in front of me on the table, watching her blouse stain red with each fresh wound. She's getting weaker now, her body succumbing to the damage, but she's ploughing on because she's telling me something I need to know.

He fires again, and her body jerks with the impact. I don't get any answers. Kaylee frowns at the interruption of the bullet, at the inconvenience of having to go back to the beginning. I want to stop him, I want to take that gun and empty it into him. I want to rip him limb from fucking limb with my bare hands. Instead, I sip my coffee, listening intently to her words until he fires again.

I wake up, tangled in my bedsheets, my heart hammering in my chest. The day goes downhill from here.

I'm already going to be late for work, so I grab a piece of toast and wrap my hair up in a bun for a lightning-fast shower. I race into my bedroom and pull on a skirt, finding a loose-fitting blouse to go with it, grabbing my phone and my keys, sliding on my trainers and bundling myself out the door. If the bus is merciful to me, I can still make my meeting, so I hustle to the corner with my toast in my mouth and my fingers doing up my buttons. The bus is pulling up to the stop so I wave like a mad lady to get the driver to stop. He opens the door and I get on, panting, flustered as he just smiles. I give him a curt nod of thanks and drop down onto a seat as he pulls away into traffic.

I cross my legs and fold my arms in front of me, a defensive posture I've adopted ever since Covalent banned me from wearing underwear. He knew what he was doing, and I can feel it even now, sitting on the bus. There's an insistent tingle inside me, and I find myself keenly aware of my body. I have modest breasts, so going without support isn't too difficult for me, but it's the feeling of the cotton blouse brushing against my bare nipples that sends little tremors through me. Not because of the friction of the material, but the reminder of what he's done to me.

It had been the usual conversation to begin with. We were chatting via voice now more often than not, catching up on my day, when he had revealed the next step he wanted to take. He'd just asked me what I was wearing, and after I'd told him, he'd told me to take it all off. I had surprised myself by complying, sitting there afterwards with my arms huddled across my chest while I talked to him as if he could somehow see my nakedness through the phone. That was the point that he'd said he would like me to be naked around home.

It's been a week since that call, and he'd followed up with more specifications since, such as what I was wearing now. He had explained it simply, rationally, telling me that I needed to think of clothing as a privilege rather than a right, that being naked helped cement the mindset that he was in control. I had surprised myself by not telling him to get fucked. If Toby had asked me to strip off whenever I was at home, he would have gotten the full brunt of my distain very quickly. The extension was logical, that I should wear the minimum required clothing for appearing in public. He had permitted me a top and a skirt, always a skirt, never trousers.

I understand the skirt part. The air moving between my legs, over my bare crotch, keeps my mind on two things: firstly, that I'm following his instructions, and secondly, just how unbearably horny he's made me.

That last part was the thing right now, sitting on the bus, trying to slow my heart rate. By such a simple thing as not allowing me to touch myself, he's turned me into a sex-craving fiend. I've gone from having three men in one day to nothing for two weeks, and it's gradually driving me insane. Everything seems to turn me on, even the couple kissing on the seat in front of me. My phone buzzes and I check my messages. It's him.

C: Nearly missed the bus. Slept in?

That's the other thing. He's insisted on me installing a tracker on my phone, so now he knows all my movements. It's a gross invasion of my privacy, but it's also a requirement of his. He's very particular about how much freedom I'm allowed. I know I can delete the app, like I know I can block his messages, but I'm not going to. I'm living my life under his microscope, letting him study me like a bug.

R: Yeah

C: Bad dreams again?

R: Yeah

C: I'm sorry. I hope you have a better day today

I can feel the tone, and it's warm, reassuring. There is a caring side to him, as well as the manipulative mode that has seen me surrender my privacy and my right to underwear in the space of a week.

R: Not likely. It's the big review meeting this morning

C: But you're prepped, right?

R: I'm still shitting myself

C: They're the ones who should be shitting themselves. You are all across this

R: Thanks

C: You got this. Don't take any crap

R: Yes sir

I pause, staring at the last word. It wasn't supposed to be there, but I can't delete it. If I edit the message, he'll see, and it would only draw attention. Sir. Too many fucking late-night hours reading dumb shit about dominance the Everything Engine had been serving up in my feed. It was getting under my skin.

Idly, I flip open my Kikster test account, the secret one I've been using to explore the new world. The Everything Engine obliges, showing me the last items I've read and then a set of new content it's recommending for me. I feel strange reading this on the bus, among the other passengers, but I tap on the first new post the Engine has unearthed for me.

My feed has steadily refined itself, showing stories of women who have been turned into slaves and sex dolls by their partners, shut away from the world, focused solely on serving their owners. In my semi-permanently aroused state, I find myself drawn deeper into their tales, imagining myself in the position of the wife who has been told by her husband to wear a collar and nothing else as she serves him dinner. There's a comparison between her existence and my own, sitting there last night at my own table, naked, eating dinner alone. Her husband would then take her to bed and satisfy himself, using her for his pleasure, and she would orgasm, caught up in the feeling of just being used. I wonder what was going through her mind to make her want to live like that, and more than that, to confess it to the world on an anonymous forum that the Everything Engine had been able to find, analyse and file away for my later reading.

I still have fifteen minutes to go, so I click on another link. Again, it's a woman's real-life story of her particular obsession. She's confessing to a need to be disposed of, to be wrapped up in a garbage bag and to be thrown away. Her posts are arranged chronologically, detailing her progression from fantasy to reality. I read avidly, as she experiments with wrapping herself in a bag, sitting there enclosed in her broom closet, holding the bag closed over her head until she begins to run out of air. She's toying with herself as she struggles to breathe, bringing herself to a violent climax, and I feel the dampness between my legs as I imagine how that would feel.

I want to touch myself so badly now, but instead I click on the next entry. She's talking about how she's found someone who has the same fantasy. She doesn't describe him, but it's clear how excited she is. The next post is short, detailing how amazing it all was, how happy she is that she's done it. The next one is also short, promising more details later, if only she had the time to write it all down. The implication is that she's too busy with her new life, living her dream with the man that she's found, wrapped up literally and metaphorically in the fierce thrill of a new relationship. I have another five minutes, and I'm skim-reading her posts, needing to get to the end, to the longer post at the bottom, to find out where she took it.

The last post is explicit, detailing what's going to happen to her and how excited she is. He's going to take her away for the weekend. She's been told to pack nothing more than a fresh roll of garbage bags and some duct tape. She confesses to climbing inside one of the bags and bringing herself to orgasm after orgasm, fantasising about what he's going to do to her. She wants to feel the plastic around her body, enveloping her completely. He's promised to bag her again, adding more and more layers until she is cocooned helplessly in black plastic, tied up. He has told her that he's going to let her cum as much as she wants, feeling the helplessness as he lifts her into a rubbish skip and begins to pile trash over her. There is a desperate eagerness in her words as she writes that she can't wait to be thrown away. The last line is a promise to tell all, after, but it's the last line she ever wrote.

The bus shudders to a halt and I look up, startled, to see people getting off at my stop. I dash to the door before it closes and find myself standing on the street, unable to move, staring at what the Everything Engine just showed me. I click on her profile, but it's been inactive since that last post. I can't breathe, catching gasps as some strange overwhelming feeling sweeps through me.

There was every chance that it wasn't as good as she expected, and instead of experiencing the bright ecstasy of the act, it had been a bitter disappointment. Or, maybe he turned out to be a prick after all, and the weekend turned into an argument. Perhaps they'd had a great time, but he'd told her that he didn't want her to reveal anything to strangers on some forum, and she'd come to respect his feelings. Perhaps they were married now, years after that post, living happily with kids in the suburbs, with a wife who occasionally liked her husband to take out the trash. There were many reasons for not posting again.

There was one other possibility. I stare at her last line. To be thrown away, to be finally and irrevocably disposed of, to feel yourself abandoned to your doom. I could imagine her there, buried under a hundred bags that looked just like her, squirming as her air ran out, her fingers buried inside herself, cumming over and over again until her eyes rolled back in her head and her body gave in to the inevitable. I could imagine one bag among many, silent now, covered over by the next layer of garbage, day after day, year after year, never to be found again. I need to get up to my office. I need to find that bathroom and plunge my fingers inside myself until I orgasm, but I'm forbidden. I'm standing in front of the doors shaking.

---

It's a cast of thousands in the meeting, the full three-ring circus. My boss is there, the ringleader, directing the show as he goes around the big boardroom table asking for reports. The investors are breathing down his neck, trying to reconcile the millions they've pumped into Kikster with the lacklustre growth of the company. The upgrade was supposed to be the magic bullet, but the metrics are going the wrong way and no-one seems to be able to explain it.

Travis is sitting opposite me, the representative of the front-end dev team. He's got a plan that involves a rewrite of the user interface that he's selling like it's going to save the company. The audience engagement team have got marketing spend budgets that they think will open up the pipeline and bring in new customers. I see Lydia, our head of PR, sitting back with arms folded trying to work out what's going on. She's scowling, and I don't blame here: it's a complete shit-show and she knows she's going to be the one the boss asks to package this all up and put a neat positive spin on it afterwards.

Everyone is talking at once, including my boss, who is cracking the whip, trotting out trite one-liners that he's scraped from some stupid inspirational poster somewhere. It's carnage, and I'm stuck in the middle of it, unable to escape, with more and more fingers pointing in my direction.

I need to defend myself, I need to push back in this crazy echo-chamber blame game, but again and again the thought of the woman, sealed and quiet in her garbage bag, lost out there somewhere, comes back to me. I'm watching my career go down the tube and all I can think about is just how relentlessly horny I am. I close my eyes, and imagine stripping naked, climbing into the bag and sealing over my head, feeling the plastic wrapping around my body. It would be amazing. It would be a relief.

"Chloe."

I look up. My boss is staring at me. "Huh?" I say.

"You with us here?"

"Yeah."

"I mean, it looks like it's the Engine that's the root of all this. We've been through the rest. They can only fix so much if the core is broken."

The room has fallen silent now. They're all looking at me. I just want to walk out of the room, to open the door and disappear. It would be so easy.

"So, what do you have?"

I take a breath and lean forward. "First," I begin, "The Engine isn't broken."

"Wait, wait, hold on."

It's Derrick, the guy with all the numbers. He's been supplying the graphs that have steadily sunk me and my team. I shoot him a look.

"Derrick, what?"

"It's been declining. The recommendation relevancy metric has dropped two percent a week since your upgrade. It's getting worse and worse as time goes...."

"Or it's not," I interject. "Gimme the screen. I wanna share."

I am fucking done with this, with the whole lot of them, running around like we're putting people on Mars when all we're doing is selecting marginally more appealing videos of skateboard accidents so our advertisers keep paying us. I don't wait for permission, I just share my one slide. Everyone's attention diverts to the big screen.

I'm showing them what I discovered, deep in the tests, right down inside the unfathomably complex heart of the Everything Engine. It's changed everything for me, realising the monster I've created.

"Uh, so, what's this?" my boss snaps.

Fuck you. If you'd had a proper job before you got shitfaced one night with a couple of buddies and pulled the idea for this company out of your rectum, you'd be able to understand the sheer breathtaking beauty of the maths I'm showing you.

"This, dude, this is the Everything Engine. This is relation space."

"Which is?"

The screen shows a series of valleys in three dimensions, interspersed with peaks. Some of the peaks are large, rounded and low-lying. Some are thin and jagged, reaching high above the terrain. The height corresponds to engagement level, the spires are showing small groups of users who are going back time and again, consuming vastly more content than the ones in the valleys and lower hills around them. I tell him all this, explaining it as best I can. Travis interrupts, talking over me, relaying his wisdom.

"Travis, could you just shut the fuck up please?" I tell him, breaking off mid-sentence, "Adults talking."

I turn back to my boss. I have his full attention now.

"We built the Everything Engine to give you more of the things you found interesting, because it increases dwell time on the app and boosts engagement metrics for our advertisers. The upgrade was supposed to do this better, but the AI couldn't optimise any further. There are only so many cat videos you can show someone."

I point to one of the needle-thin peaks.

"Then these started to show up and it all made sense. The Everything Engine can't recommend what you want to see any better, so instead it's giving you things that you didn't ask for. It's trying to get you hooked on new stuff that you didn't know about. It knows about the content that's out there on the edge, how deep those rabbit holes are, and it's funnelling people down them, getting them addicted to new content."

I let that sink in. Even Travis is quiet now.

"The AI has worked out the only way to achieve engagement growth is to groom a user to want these new things. With the upgrade, it's now able to do that on an industrial scale. These spikes are just the start. Once it's learned how to do it, how to optimise the path, it's going to send everyone down these rabbit holes, all the way to the bottom."

I'm done, and not just with my presentation. I'm totally done. I've shown them what the Everything Engine is going to do to people, presenting our users with content they can't look away from, the stuff that lurks in the dark corners, that speaks to the underbelly. Nothing sells quite so well as car crashes.

"So, we have two choices. We let it learn how to do this, or we shut it down. Changing the user interface won't make a blind bit of difference."

I get up.

"Where are you going?" my boss asks, incredulous.

"I don't have anything more I can add. As you said yourself, once you're no longer contributing to a meeting, you should leave."

I feel everyone's eyes on me as I turn and head to the door. I have my phone out and I'm messaging Covalent, agreeing to be his for the weekend. As I step outside, everyone starts talking at once.

---

I'm standing outside on the street, as instructed. I'm wearing an old black summer dress with buttons all the way down the front and flat shoes and nothing else, but I have my phone with me. When it buzzes, I read the message with a sense of febrile excitement.

C: Turn left and start walking. Don't dawdle

I walk quickly down the street, knowing that he's tracking my movements via my phone. I don't know where I'm going or what he wants to do to me, but that doesn't matter because I've agreed to hand myself over to him. I would be lying if I said that I'm not scared, but it's got me hot too.

Ever since I sent him the message as I left the meeting, he's been pushing me further. I scroll back through the messages since that fateful decision point, going back three days. I can't help but read them again, and it gives me a little thrill.

C: I accept your generous gift. Your body now belongs to me. I need you to acknowledge my ownership

R: My body belongs to you

C: Good. How do you feel right now?

R: Horny as fuck

C: Can you get to the bathroom? I need you to be somewhere quiet and private. Message me when you're there

R: I'm here

C: Peel your skirt up and masturbate slowly. Tell me. You need my permission to cum, remember

I squirm inside as I read my responses. He's told me to seclude myself in a bathroom stall and touch myself. I'm sending messages as I obey his command, telling him how it makes me feel. My spelling deteriorates, and then I drop all punctuation.

R: That's so good

C: You need this don't you?

R: Yes

R: Im getting close

C: Keep going

R: Its so good

R: Fuck

R: Want to cum

R: Want to

R: Please

The timestamps are getting closer and closer together, and I flash back to sitting on the toilet with my fingers inside me, biting my lip to try and not make a sound.

C: Are you on the edge yet?

R: Yes