The Light Between the Trees Ch. 08

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.

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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ARRANGEMENTS

They're going through the numbers and I'm just waiting for the part where I speak. It's the Kikster monthly leadership team meeting, and this time all our advisory board is in attendance. I'm not usually invited to be here, but my boss, the illustrious founder of our company, needs me along to go through the maths if required. He sure as shit can't, and he doesn't want to look like a chump. He just wants to show that the AI is back on an even keel, that the Everything Engine is kicking goals just as his board presentation predicted it would when he went looking for that capital raise. He wants to look like the genius, as if he knew all this was gonna just play out all along.

I shift uncomfortably in my seat, crossing my legs and then uncrossing them. I'm wearing a long-sleeved polo-neck top and a skirt with ankle boots. It's not my best combination but I'm out of options because I need to cover up the bruises. The ankles aren't too bad, and I would have been able to get away with it in jeans, but Covalent hasn't relaxed the dress code and I have to wear a skirt, so the ankle boots are all I could think of. The wrists aren't too bad and I could have maybe used a dab of concealer on the worst bits. They're yellowing now, anyway. My throat is the worst part, yellowing now too after the best part of a week, but still too blatant to cover up with makeup so I've rolled the neckline up as high as it'll go.

That night, Covalent had led us both out of the water and back up into the boatshed. He'd produced chocolate and we ate in the dark, sitting naked on the edge of the deck, legs swinging over the water. Later, he had inflated the camping mattress and pulled a blanket out of his bag, gathering me up in his arms and we slept.

When I woke up, it was already morning, and the mattress was empty. I'd been startled, but then his voice called out from the water. He was bobbing up and down some way out from the boatshed, and swam towards me in a few powerful strokes, pulling himself up onto the ramp, dripping, naked, smiling. I was staring at his body, getting a good look in the morning sun. He told me to get in and have a swim, patting me playfully on the bottom. I wanted to ask him about the previous night, about the things he'd said, but he shooed me down the ramp and into water. I splashed around for a few minutes, looking back to see him rolling up the mattress and packing up.

I swam back to the ramp and hauled myself up, calling out to him, but there was silence. The boatshed was empty, as if we'd never been there, save for a plastic bag on the table. I recognised it as the one I'd stuffed into the bin by the coffee shop when I got off the bus, the bag I'd wrapped my shoes and my phone in. When had he gone back for it?

This time, it contained my black summer dress, a croissant and a bottle of water. Beneath, I found my shoes and to my relief, there was my phone. I turned it on immediately, but there was no message from him. Covalent had vanished.

I was left to make my way back up the track to the main road. I saw the rock next to the bus stop sign, and found the ticket that Covalent had left there. When it arrived, I hauled my battered and aching body onto the bus back into the city, taking a seat at the back and watching the countryside rolling past. I didn't message him.

Instead, I sat in silence, feeling the effects on my body of what he'd done to me. I felt something else too, something unexpected: relief. Not relief at making it out of the situation alive, but something infinitely more nuanced, the aftermath of a rush. In that singular moment, suspended by his hand out over the inky water, I had faced it all, finally.

"Chloe, could you share the numbers?"

I blink, looking up at expectant faces around the table. Quickly, I share my screen, context switching back to the meeting. I show the landscape graph again, but the data has evolved since the first time I'd presented. The lofty spires have thickened in the intervening time as more and more people have been drawn to the content they represent, which is why we're having the meeting. The Everything Engine has finally worked it out, how to direct people en-masse down the rabbit holes it's found for them, locking them into a pattern of greater engagement with the product. My boss had directed me to colour the heights green.

He begins to talk, detailing the way that the AI was now searching for the best content to get the users interested in, directing them away from general posts and links into a world of deeply engaging content from the further corners of the online world. Jeremy, one of the advisory board members, the guy who knows a lot about cloud-based software, raises a hand.

"Just curious," he says, "But what happened? The metrics are good now, but for a while there, it was looking pretty bleak."

My boss nods to me. This is the bit where I step in.

I make good eye contact with Jeremy and begin my spiel. "The AI needed to work out how to start putting other posts into your feed, ones that you weren't asking for. It needed to come up with a set of content that was enough to nudge you in the direction of one of the rabbit holes, but it had to pick content that was mild enough that you don't get deterred straight away. It had to lay out a set of breadcrumbs to lead you across the landscape, until you reached the edge of the pit it chose for you."

"What Chloe's trying to say," my boss interjects hurriedly, "Is that it found way markers to lead you to more engaging content."

He shoots me a look. I need to be quiet now. He needs to sell the new vision to the board and I need to not fuck this up for him.

"Would you agree with that interpretation, Chloe?" Jeremy asks me.

I know this game. Covalent played it with me in the boatshed. I'm forbidden to speak, except with yes, no and thank you. I will be punished if I don't comply: a proper submissive is expected to obey.

I look around the boardroom, at the faces. There's a buzz in the room and it's because of my results. The Everything Engine is going to make them all a lot of money; the AI is their servant, directing content to users, increasing dwell time, turbocharging advertising revenue. They're all so very, desperately keen, and all I need to do is nod along. My options will vest and I will be able to retire in three years and never have to work for the rest of my life. It's that easy.

But there's a darkness here. I know, because I've seen it. I've seen it because I was the first one the AI chose, sending me down dark paths, metaphorical car crashes that I couldn't tear my eyes away from. I'm smart enough to know that my history and circumstances have made me more susceptible, but in a few short weeks, it's turned me from a confident, ball-busting boss bitch into a submissive fuck toy with a deathwish.

I tap the screen, changing the vertical axis of the graphic.

"We're changing the way people think," I tell them all, "The Engine directs people towards the most shocking, the most outrageous content it can find, and then it keeps them there, locked into the little echo chambers it's building."

The graph renders itself on the screen again, flipping the vertical. The green spires are replaced with precipitous red pits.

"Uh, I don't think we need to engage in negative connotations here," my boss tells me, but I'm ignoring him now.

"The AI is building black holes and tipping people over the event horizons. It doesn't care who. Women, men, teenagers, kids. We've created an auto-radicalisation machine."

Jeremy is staring hard at me. "What would you recommend?" he asks.

"Pull the plug. Do it now."

"Okay," my boss interjects, "I think that's enough."

I can see their faces, and I know that all I just succeeded in doing is pissing them off. I look across the table at my boss, and his face is like thunder.

"We need to have a discussion on this offline," he tells me.

"No need. I quit."

I get up and walk out. I can feel them staring at me, but ask me if I care. I'm so done. The boardroom, the entire fucking company, is an echo chamber itself: they're all spiralling way down their own personal black hole already. I need to change orbit, I need escape velocity. As the door closes behind me, I look back at my colleagues. Behind them, the graphic looms large on the screen, a forest of red teeth pointing all the way down into the dark.

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I guess we should have a check-in, because everyone seems to love a good check-in, don't they? Even Travis checked in with me after the meeting, after word got around that I'd just cashed in my chips. Everyone is acting like it's out of the blue, and then the narrative starts. They reframe it as suicidal ideation or post-traumatic stress disorder from being held hostage, and it's gonna get put down as stress leave rather than quitting, that the job's there for me as soon as I've got my head back together again.

Am I suicidal? I know that what that fat, twisted fuck did to me, on my knees in the café, that was an existential moment that I've got myself hung up on and I need to work through it. I read up on it, about the ideation, the feelings of worthlessness, the disassociation. It just doesn't sound like me. There's a difference between a deathwish and suicide.

It's hard to explain, but I don't think about him and what he did and just want to cease to be. No, I wanted to bring him back to life for a long time. I'd lie there in my bed in the dark and imagine myself with my hand pressed against the wound on his throat, talking to keep him awake, stopping him from bleeding out until the medics arrived. I'd forgive him, go and see him in hospital, maybe build up a rapport, show the world that I'm trying to bridge the gap with the man who wanted to kill me. I'd let him be friends, and we'd talk. When he was well enough, I'd take him out to the park and we could go for a walk, just the two of us talking about his feelings and working through his reasons why.

Then we'd find somewhere peaceful, and I'd grab the fucking largest branch I could find and bring it down on his skull, over and over until I finally got the satisfaction, the closure, of having ended that piece of shit myself.

No, my ideation is purely around this inescapable fury. When I think about the siege, it's about getting revenge. My problem is that I don't have anyone to pay the price. I could go piss on his grave, but that feels like sour grapes.

But enough about me, what do you think? Am I going crazy? Maybe that's your heartfelt, considered opinion, that I'm a soul in pain and this is all just some giant, misdirected coping mechanism. Do you feel sorry for me at all? Do you worry that I need to get help? Would you like to see me get through this and back onto the straight and narrow?

What about this for an idea? Can you entertain the possibility that the entire mechanism itself, the job, the people, your opinions, it's actually all fucked? How do you know that you aren't already down the rabbit hole, spinning endlessly in your own gravity well, guzzling the echoed regurgitation of your own skewed opinions, that it isn't you who's really the one who's crazy? What if the only sane one of all of us is actually me?

I'm not crazy. I know I'm not. I'm just seeing the truth, more and more. Fuck this endless, remorseless pressure from everyone. I need to find the exit ramp from all this. If it does end me, the so be it. I need to disappear. I need to go, right now.

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I'm sitting, waiting, and it's getting to me. Idly, I get out my phone and re-read my messages from two weeks ago, from the day I quit:

R: I'm in

C: Clarify

R: I'm your perfect victim. What's the next step?

C: Are you sure?

R: Oh yes

C: I thought the boatshed was enough for you

R: No. I need all of it

C: You know there's no coming back

R: You getting cold feet? I thought this was your fantasy?

C: It is

R: How long have you been looking for someone who's willing to be disappeared by you?

R: Here I am, offering to give myself to you and you're stalling

R: C'mon. I am your fantasy. I want this more than anything

R: Are you still there?

C: I'm still here. I understand. Let me come up with a plan. There can be no traces

R: Okay. I swear, nothing will lead anyone back to you. You're safe

C: Okay

R: How do we start? What's the first step?

C: Let me think. I'll get back to you

R: When do we start?

C: I need to finish off a contract. Two weeks. Saturday

R: Saturday. Fine. Send me my instructions

C: Okay

R: I can't wait

I'm lying on my bed, going back through the conversation. The studio apartment is bare. I've packed my life up into four cardboard boxes and I have a couple of bags of clothing I'm going to donate. My precious laptop is also packed away. I post a message on my socials, telling people I'm going travelling, as per Covalent's plan. Gradually, I get pings from friends to wish me bon voyage. My mother pings too, and I fob her off with the lie that I've been given to tell. I check the time. They're late, so I have to sit there with nothing to do, waiting for the doorbell.

When it rings, I shoot to my feet and let them in: two guys in their twenties in overalls who pick up my stuff and haul it out to the van to take to the storage place. I check around my apartment, pick up the bags for donation, and lock the door behind me. After years of project management, of impossible timelines and heroic measures under unrelenting pressure, my to-do list has boiled down to four things:

I need to drop off the donation bags.

I need to give back my keys to the landlord.

I need to go to the storage place and sign the papers, then lock up my little unit.

Then, I have a train ticket and a set of instructions to follow. I don't know what happens after that and it chills me to the bone.

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[Next chapter: Chloe begins her journey to becoming Covalent's plaything.

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