What's the Frequency Kenneth?

I've always been a bit of a nerd, though the label doesn't bother me.

When I was younger, the other kids would be off exploring the woods on hot summer days, having the sorts of wild adventures that they'd talk about for weeks afterwards, their faces beaming with the memories.

Whereas I'd be in the garage, either taking something apart or putting something back together.

At Christmas, amongst the lego, barbie and hotwheels toys being opened by siblings, I'd be unwrapping circuit boards, soldering irons and transistors.

Long wave radio became a bit of a passion and there was a poetic irony in the fact that my closest childhood friends were literally thousands of miles away. We had to plan our conversations in advance, factoring in all the distractions that threatened to get in the way of us spending time together, as well as negotiating transatlantic time-zones.

As I grew older and technology advanced, I got into computers and coding. But my love of radio, and audio signals more broadly, never went away. I began volunteering at a local observatory that was supporting the SETI programme, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence.

Most people think that the key to finding life amongst the stars is in 'looking', when in fact it's 'listening'. So as well as listening to the background radiation of the universe and seeking out the rhythmic pulses that are the telltale distress call of Quasars, I was delighted to be invited to contribute to a new project involving the study of the semantic content of whale songs. The intention was to see if we could glean any insights that we might apply to the cosmic signals we intercepted and whether it might infer they came from another intelligent species.

This in turn, saw me getting increasingly involved with the study of all manner of animal sounds, which eventually led to me becoming somewhat of an expert in the field. I was disappointed to have to eventually leave outer-space and the whale song behind; but unfortunately the demand for expertise on a more grounded, planetary level far outweighed what the universe could offer.

So this is what my career became. I was an expert forensic audiologist. Not only did I have a specialty in the tonal resonance of animal sounds, but I knew the exact range of hearing of pretty much every mammal on planet Earth, and what the upper and lower frequency thresholds were.

And as dull as it sounds, it made me independently wealthy. My services were much sought after from a whole raft of private, public and governmental agencies.

My big break came after publishing a research paper into canine behavioural techniques. You'll no doubt be familiar with the dog whistle. This emits a high-pitched sound that can be heard by dogs but is completely indiscernible by human ears. Well, after compiling a huge mountain of evidence of how dogs react to each other based on the pitch and tone of each other's growls, it was quickly apparent that just as with the whistle, much of what a dog 'communicated' went unheard by the human ear. In amongst the wooofing and snarling was a whole pattern of other sounds, hidden in the other audio signals. And it was these hidden sounds that triggered reciptors in the dog's brains that played a key role in establishing hierarchy and confirming the associated dominant and submissive roles within the group. Those dogs whose barks and growls contained more of these hidden signals were more likely to become the alphas.

Using this knowledge, I created a series of synthesised recordings that mimicked the pitch and tone of the most assertive noises we'd logged. I then mapped them to a handheld keypad that was linked to a small bluetooth speaker attached to the test dog's collar.

The results were immediate. Combining strict verbal commands with the use of the high-frequency sounds led to instant compliance. I wasted no time in patenting the keypad and collar and though I came away with a small fortune, the majority of the profits were syphoned off by the private equity fund that had sponsored the research.

After that, things got really interesting.

With the money I'd made, I opened my own laboratory. I hoped my future findings would be just as lucrative and I wanted to be sure that I kept hold of any earnings.

I'd taken on a small number of staff; two research assistants, Erica and Joel, who could look after the more mundane aspects of the experiments as well as progress separate projects of their own. There was an office manager, Casey, who could take care of admin and logistics in and around the lab. And finally an Executive Assistant, Naomi, for managing my diary and email.

We were a small but perfectly formed team. At 32, I was the senior figure and it was often a little too evident for my liking that I'd hired kids that were still closer to being college students than they were to their 30th birthdays.

Naomi was 24 and by virtue of her April birthday, she was the next oldest in the group. Joel was also 24, but he was a July baby, making him Naomi's junior by a few months. Erica was 19, though she was very mature with it, and Casey was fresh from celebrating her 18th birthday only a few weeks before accepting the office manager's role.

Casey hadn't had to fight too hard for the job. She'd been a volunteer at one of the SETI projects back in the day and we'd done some work together. She was only a kid back then, young but enthusiastic and quick to learn. She'd written an essay on me as a homework assignment following some of my early successes with my dog training technology. I'd been invited to a couple of events by her parents who'd been grateful for my good influence on her. It turns out that since getting involved in the sciences, she'd really knuckled down at school and was projecting much better grades than her parents had originally been anticipating.

Over the next couple of years I did some further mentoring for Casey and became good friends with the whole family. In fact, I'd become much too friendly with Casey's mom, Liv. I'd been a bit too naive originally, mistaking her flirting and forwardness for simple friendliness. She'd obviously seen my lack of a rebuttal of her advances as a clear sign to make a move. Which she did one night after a long day of barbecue and beer in their backyard. The guest list had thinned out a little, the kids had gone in the house to play Xbox and I was sitting at the edge of their pool, with my feet in the water and my back to the house.

I'd seen the silhouette of someone else climbing stealthily into the pool but it wasn't until she surfaced between my legs that I realised it was Liv, in a one-piece swimsuit that was straining to contain her overflowing cleavage. She didn't say anything. She just smiled and looked over my left shoulder (I realised afterwards, to make sure that I was blocking her from anyone else's line of sight).

Liv could have stepped onto any of the 'Real Housewives' sets and felt right at home. She was gearing up to celebrate her 50th birthday, though she'd spent a small fortune making sure her face could never betray her real age. She'd had just the right amount of other work done too, so that her body wouldn't give the game away either.

Over the years I'd seen her in all manner of outfits, from body-hugging gowns to skin-tight gym wear, and she was always a knock-out. She wasn't particularly curvy, but her breast augmentation surgery made sure she was always the focus of admiring glances, which she courted, covetously.

She liked to bleach her hair blonde, though the water of the pool had dulled it a couple of shades as she rested her hands on my thighs for support.

Without so much as a word, she winked at me, before pulling the waistband of my shorts down to reveal my flaccid cock.

I was hugely embarrassed and it was all I could do to stop myself from yelling at her. But I didn't want to cause a scene and in truth, I was more embarrassed at the sight of my own, naked manhood in its mediocre, unaroused state. Sitting hunched forward like I was, did nothing to enhance the situation. I instinctively shunted my shoulders backwards, raising my crotch a little and bringing it forward. And though this posture did improve the size perspective as I'd intended, it also gave Liv the leverage she needed to pull my shorts further down, and eventually off completely.

She was in no way perturbed at the lack of inches initially on show and after another quick glance toward the house and the barbecue, she took me fully into her mouth without a moment's hesitation. Within just a few seconds, the feel of her warm lips around my shaft had the desired effect and my cock hardened impressively inside her mouth.

I'd always loved oral sex and it was as though Liv knew this was the route to my soul. She took my full length into her throat, making a 'glug' 'glug' noise that only heightened my arousal. Within moments, I'd gone from startled protest to whimpering submission as she sucked every shred of defiance from me, directly at the source.

Looking fully into my eyes, she released me from her mouth before turning her attention to my aching balls. She had to sink a couple of inches to achieve this and as she sucked each of them into her mouth in turn, wanking me firmly with her right hand, I had to wonder how she wasn't drowning.

Up she came again in short order, returning to the expert blowjob she'd started just a few minutes earlier. She slowed her pace, once again taking me all the way into her throat, this time ensuring that I felt each individual millimetre as she made her way to the hilt of my shaft. As she silently gagged, she worked her tits free from her swimsuit and brought my toes to her chest. Gesturing with her hands on my feet, I followed her instructions, grinding her tits with the soles of my feet and flicking her nipples with my toes.

I suddenly heard the voices in the garden grow louder, though my brain was incapable of discerning words. Eventually, through the haze of my increasingly orgasmic thoughts I heard my name.

"Kenny!" came the shout. And then a little quieter. "Jesus, I think he's fallen asleep over there."

The voice belonged to Jeremy; Liv's husband, Casey's dad. He was an ex fire-chief, built like a reinforced wardrobe and with a crew cut haircut and bushy walrus moustache that made him look like a civil war veteran. I had no desire to be beaten to a pulp by this man. Something that I'm sure he could achieve without breaking a sweat. And something he'd happily treat as an appetiser to the main course of breaking every bone in my body if he found out what his wife was currently doing to me.

"Kenny, for fuck's sake," he yelled. "Are you still alive over there?

I looked down at Liv. She didn't even pause for breath. Continuing her passionate assault on my cock, which was now thick with a mixture of her spit and my own pre-cum, she just rolled her wrist in the circular motion that is the age-old, silent gesture of "get on with it then".

I looked back over my shoulder, taking care not to shift my body position and accidently reveal Liv while she once again gurgled with the effort of slurping on my stiff pole.

"Sorry Jeremy," I stuttered feebly. "I was drifting off there. Is everything OK?" I asked.

He looked at a couple of the other men huddled round the barbecue with him, like neanderthals around a campfire.

"No... Everything is not fucking OK." He boomed. The men exchanged worried looks. My blood turned cold, then turned very quickly hot again as I started to feel an orgasm growing in my loins. 'Shit!' I thought. Expecting him to come marching over any second to begin the inevitable beating.

Instead he just shouted back at me. "You're a lazy bastard, you know that?"

He laughed and the others followed suit.

"You've not lifted a finger at this barbecue all day." He flipped a couple of burgers for effect. "It's a good job my wife likes you." He said. Liv began stroking my cock with tightly clenched fingers, sensing my impending orgasm.

"If it was up to me, I'd tell you to bugger off and never darken my door again, you lazy fucker." Jeremy shouted.

With my cock firmly in her grip, Liv lovingly cupped my ball sack with her other hand and began massaging it gently. I was nearing the point of no return.

"I'm only joking." I heard Jeremy say, though his words were wrapped in cotton wool now. I was in a different place. A place filled with stars and whale song.

"You can come here whenever you want." He concluded.

And at that moment I did. Right down his wife's throat.

Liv and I had had an on-off affair since then. Nothing too heavy. No declarations of love or even exchanging sexy text messages. Just the odd meet-up at a hotel and the guarantee of a blowjob any time I was at their house.

When she told me I should give Casey a job at my 'swanky, new lab' I couldn't really refuse. Not that I thought I should. So here she was, the baby of the bunch. Despite her lack of experience, she'd acquitted herself well from the start and though her role wasn't really one of science, she'd slotted right in as one of the team.

The key project we were working on was designed to take my patented dog behaviour technique to a new level. I wanted to see if I could deliver actual commands via the keypad, rather than verbally; mixing them with the audio signatures of the hidden sounds.

This meant collecting a whole new batch of control noises from a new set of test animals, as well as many hours of me sitting at my desk repeating simple commands into a microphone, such as "sit," "stay," "lie down" etc.

This allowed me to take individual audio files, manipulate the frequencies and overlay the synthesisedd control noises into one command that I could play via a keypad. The final audio file should be inaudible to people, but within the optimum range of a dog's hearing spectrum. I'd instinctively considered the sweet spot to be right in the middle of the range. Recently though, in an ever-increasing attempt at efficiency, I'd become curious as to whether pitching the frequencies at either end of the spectrum, rather than plum in the middle, might yield even better results.

I asked Naomi to come into my office to help me calibrate the new settings.

"Sure thing 'K'", she said.

I much preferred to be called 'K' than any of the alternatives. 'Kenneth', my full name, seemed old fashioned and formal even to my ears. But I didn't like Ken either, and Kenny was a non-starter. One of the reasons I'd got over the guilt of giving Liv a belly-full of my cum whenever I visited the house was because Jeremy insisted on calling me Kenny, even though he knew I disliked it.

Naomi walked into my office. As she took off her white lab coat to hang it over the back of a chair, I found myself absently admiring her. She was tall and slender. Her parents had moved here from Ghana just prior to her being born. She had long, jet-black hair which she always wore stock-straight and her skin shone like roasted coffee.

Her wide face of dark ebony eyes and full, luscious lips, had a perpetual joy to it. I know plenty of women that rejoice in having 'resting bitch face', but Naomi had 'resting angel face'. And it was contagious.

She caught me staring at her and I was thankful that it had been her face I was enjoying and not her body. For though she was slender, she also sported a generous set of breasts. They were very rarely on show as she wasn't one for cleavage. Nevertheless, her work outfits were usually a combination of a grey or navy pencil skirt, leaving just a hint of slim calf above a generously heeled shoe, and a pastel sweater which was often figure hugging. So, despite her tits never actually being 'on show', they were always present.

"Don't tell me I've got food 'round my mouth," she said, finding her own excuse for my stares and dabbing at her dimpled cheeks with a tissue.

"Well, I think you did, but you got it," I lied, gesturing toward the Kleenex.

She balled up the tissue and tossed it into the wastebasket before taking a chair on the opposite side of the desk from me. She crossed her legs elegantly and I admonished myself for paying such close attention. I hadn't appointed any of the staff because of a particular attraction to them, though I did admit the girls were all beautiful in their own way.

"What can I do for you K?" She asked.

"Ah, yes." I recovered my train of thought. "I'm having a tinker with the frequency ranges for the audio commands. I want to see if pitching it at either the upper or lower end of the range has any tangible impact." I explained.

She nodded, though I could tell she was still confused as to where she fitted in.

"I can't bear to manually input all the frequency changes," I said. "The trial and error nature of it is driving me insane."

Again, Naomi nodded.

"So, if you could," I said, finally getting to the point. "I'm just going to play the commands and twiddle my dials until you say you can't hear them any more. I'd do it myself, but I'm hearing these damn commands in my sleep so I'd probably hear a psychosomatic version of it anyway."

"Cool." she said with mock boredom. "If you want to tear me away from tidying up your horrendous email inbox so I can be your pet poodle for the afternoon, no problem."

I was about to protest before she held up her hand.

"Seriously, it's cool," she repeated.

"Treat me nice and I might let you rub my tummy!" She said without even a trace of flirtatiousness, and she let out a loud giggle.

"Let's get started," I said, seeking to hide the light flush that turned my cheeks a half-shade pinker.

I clicked the right mouse button and the speakers attached to my computer immediately came alive with my voice speaking the word 'show'. Show was a command given to a dog in order for it to present itself for inspection. It was almost like having them stand to attention, with their buttocks and shoulders pressed backwards and their heads upright, elongating their necks.

Naomi tapped the desk with the end of a ballpoint pen to indicate that she'd heard the command. I adjusted the frequency with a small turn of the dial and played it a second time.

'Tap'.

A further adjustment.

'Tap'.

More tuning.

'Tap'.

This went on for some time. I exhaled in frustration and twisted the dial hard to the right.

No tap. Of course not. In my frustration I was now well outside of the human range of hearing and I knew it. As I'd also suspected, my brain had played me a phantom rendition of the sound inside my head the moment I'd clicked the mouse button, proving I'd been right to enlist Naomi's help. I couldn't have trusted my own data.

Now I had to work backwards to try and find that sweet spot just outside what Naomi could hear, and hopefully, just at the edge of what a canine would be able to distinguish.

It took a further seven slow methodical turns before something extraordinary happened.

I'd inadvertently crossed back into Naomi's hearing range on the sixth attempt. I made a fractional adjustment and played the audio command again. This time, there was no sound of the pen tapping the table, and instead, Naomi stood up in a smooth, fluid motion, pushed her shoulders back and her chest forward and jutted out her chin, showing me the elegant lines of her slender neck.

I thought she was playing some sort of game but I was so confused I just sat watching her for a moment, my eyes locked to the sight of her bra straining against her cotton pullover as she presented herself to me.

I don't know now why I thought to do so, but I immediately made a note of the exact frequency I'd played the command at.

Still, Naomi just stood there. On show.

My heart pounded and my palms had become clammy with nervous excitement.

'Calm down,' I told myself silently. 'She's just messing with you.'