Bound Friends

Lea got her first computer when she was three. Her dad thought it was a good thing to spoil a kid with because unlike almost any other expensive toy a three year old might want, it might just spark something that would lead to good jobs in the future. The mass automation of human labor was just starting to make itself felt by the time Lea was born and it was making it harder and harder for people around the world to find jobs even as the world produced more goods and services than it ever had. He figured his daughter might as well have a shot at programing some of the software and machines that would make it harder for her to find work when she gets out into the world.

He would be right about that, but it also meant that in the mean time whenever Lea was having trouble making friends or ever feeling down, she had her computers to lean on. The characters in her games wouldn't reject the digital version of herself, or make fun of her glasses, or call her a pale ghost or nerd. It didn't matter to her computer friends that she didn't like boys or that she hadn't heard of that one band and they would never exclude her from things because they just weren't programmed to do any of that.

And right now she felt she could really use that kind of simple companionship. She was no longer on speaking terms with the three people she'd called her best friends since she moved to Tullburg when she was 9. Truthfully they were her only real friends. For days after she kicked them out of her house, she sat and inconsolably sulked. She barely wanted to eat, she hardly was able to sleep, and she spent days recovering before finally sending for a cab to take her back to her parent's house.

She had missed a few days of school, of course it was into the last few months of senior year and everyone was checking out at least a little. She was avoiding her former friends and ignoring their occasional messages. She could barely even handle passing them in the hallways, especially Andrea. She had fallen in love with her, and while she had always been reasonably sure it was one sided, it still hurt her they way it fell apart. Every time she saw Andrea she heard those word echoing around "I don't love her, we're just friends." She didn't know how to handle that with someone she'd developed such feelings for. She still couldn't look at Sophia without getting a bit pensive or even queasy, and Megan just reminded her way too much of all the excesses that had brought the whole thing crashing down.

She told her parents a little lie, that the computer company she worked for last summer needed her again, and that she couldn't pass up the opportunity even if it meant missing some school and occasionally going to their Philidelphia head office, where she'd crash with her brother David. David said he'd cover for her, he asked why but she didn't respond just made him promise to keep up the lie. It sounded important to her and so he agreed. Her dad all but insisted she take the job. It all gave her a better excuse when she decided to spend the night in her cabin rather than go back to her parent's house or where she was if the school called to say she didn't make it in to class.

It gave her a chance to have the seclusion she felt she needed, but even still it that was hard to handle. All three tried contacting her, but she couldn't even bring herself to open the messages. She felt trapped, everything was changing so quickly and she felt so out of control about all of it.

She rarely remembered dreams, but one morning Lea woke with one clear as day in her mind. She was in a classroom, she was sitting alone like class had yet to start or perhaps ended minutes ago. She stood up to leave but found it harder and harder to walk towards the door, a fear began to build. She eventually stopped, hunching over with her hands on her knees staring down at the floor, that was now the hardwood floor of her cabin. "I'm trapped, it's too much," she exhaled as her glasses dropped to the floor.

"I'm not," came the voice of Megan from behind her. Lea turned quickly to see Megan clad head to toe in latex, tied in a strict hogtie with bright white rope. Lea watched as Megan opened her mouth and a red ballgag materialized in place, silencing her from saying anything more.

"No you're not, you're trapped too!" shouted the confused dream version of Lea. She turned to reach for her glasses but they weren't there any more. She dropped down to her knees to look for them and was tackled the rest of the way to the floor from behind. She felt handcuffs at her wrists and elbows. "What are you doing?!?" Lea shouted as she was helpless to stop. She felt the tackler get off and saw Sophia also clad in black latex get off her and lay down next to her. She already wore a red ballgag and as she lay down white ropes materialized around her, forcing her hands into a reverse prayer and her legs into a tight frogtie. "What's going on?" Lea screamed looking around the fuzzy room.

"Shh," came a gentle whisper. "We're only doing what you taught us," came a softer incarnation of Andrea's voice. "We're escaping," she said as she walked into sight of Lea where she finally became clear. Andrea bent down and put on Lea's glasses and helped her to her feet. "Come with me," said the naked Andrea as she lead a very willing, but now also naked, Lea out into the hallway.

The lights were mostly off like it was long after hours. The only lights that were still fully on was by the double door exit at the end of the hall. Lea felt her cuffs dematerialize much like Megan's gag had simply materialized.

Andrea turned to face Lea but kept a few feet distance. "You have a choice. That room behind you is locked now, you can not return. If you are feeling trapped take this," Andrea said as a black latex outfit materialized in her outstretched hands. "With that on, you don't have to leave. You still can't get through that classroom door, but you can be free to not leave."

"But how would being hogtied make me free?"

"If you were hogtied, could you reach the doorknobs?" Andrea asked, Lea shook her head no. "Then you can not leave, you are free to stay."

"Stay with you?" Lea asked.

Andrea smiled and gave her a peck on the cheek and shook her head. "That door is closed."

Lea took the latex and it began to bond to her skin at her first touch. The suit crawled like a black monster blob, taking control of Lea's movement as it went. When it reached the ends of her arms, it forced her to raise her hands behind her in a box tie where ropes began to materialize and hold her in place. As the latex crawled up it filled her mouth like a gag and took away her sight. Before her head was fully enveloped she watched as Andrea began to simply dissolve as well. But in this dream the latex made that all seem suddenly ok. She felt herself being gently guided down to the floor while everything was pulled tighter together. Quickly the latex feeling of restriction was the only sensation on her mind. She drifted off to a comfortable sleep curled up in a latex ball in the school hallway, only to awake in real life in a cold sweat and more than a little bit damp between her legs.

****

For some reason that dream stuck with her for the rest of the day. By night she had broken down her resolve and decided to just try on some cuffs or a gag or something. It felt strangely good. When she struggled around pulling at her cuffs she felt a cool sensation rise up her spine. Over the days she began to try out more and more of the things she had purchased originally for other people. She starting to spend some of the nights in the cells instead of the bed. Every time she restrained herself or punished herself, she found her bad mood would get just a little bit better.

Part of her figured that on some level she must feel she deserved the punishments. She had certainly been hard enough on herself. If her sub had been as much a "bad girl" as she felt she was, all this certainly would be something she'd do to her sub. Another part of her just felt it was nothing deeper than she must really be a switch and was feeling much more like a sub than a dom lately. But she was always a little disappointed whenever she remembered she could just let herself out, not a very strict restraint when the key's sitting right beside you. Not a very tough punishment if she could simply stop hitting herself when it hurt. She tried playing around with ice locks but her natural instinct to always leave an exit wouldn't let her truly trap herself and that also let her escape whatever punishment she thought up.

That's when she turned to her computer. She was still feeling good about that area of her life at least, thanks to her success in programing something to let cell phone talk to those pleasure chips. Not just because it bought her the house or her new van, but because the code simply worked. It was one of the few things she felt comfortable pointing to as an unabashed, unquestioned success. Everything else in her life made her feel like a failure recently, except this. She figured how hard could it be to make something with a skill she was actually confident in?

Turns out, not very. All the programs she wanted to integrate luckily happened to be in the same language, making her work ten times easier. With about a week's work, she got the house, the chips, and the Alternative Dynamics stuff like the slave suites all running off the same program. Another solid weekend and she got it setting timers and release procedures, when she locked the cells now her code couldn't get her out till the timer was up without also calling 911 to report whatever emergency caused her to need to get out. Now if she backs out for no good reason, its a deliberate false call to 911 which means a few hundred dollar fine for a first offense, a few thousand for a second, and even up to a few years of penal contract labor for a third.

That night, she set a timer locking the cell doors until the morning. Her stomach was doing backflips as she slowly closed the door behind her. For the first time she was able to truly trap herself in there, she almost immediately tested the door and when it wouldn't open she felt a shiver run up her spine and back down between her legs. She brought herself to multiple orgasms before finally calling it a night, though that certainly wasn't hurt by there being nothing else to do.

After releasing herself in the morning she felt bold. Her code had worked, but she was sure she could make it better. She had been free in there to masterbate to her hearts content. When she thought about having that taken away too, the prospect excited her. It had been a while since something excited her.

She could hardly focus at school. In her mind she had already left this place, she just needed to keep showing up for another few months and do a bit of work before they would let her leave with a diploma. She tried to do all her class work at school so that when she left her mind could forget all about it.

That weekend she took a trip into the city for two reasons. One, she had been enjoying the extra sensitivity on her nipples so much that she decided it was time her clit joined the party. That piercing part hurt, but she was sure it would be worth it in the end. Two, she went to get a printed slave suit of her own. But while her friends were given standard models, she sprang for the deluxe, complete with GPS, built in data transmission, microphones, and every lock was electronically controlled without hinges or screws to be able to tamper with. It could run everything without the need for a phone or remote nearby.

While she was there she got plenty of other things for herself as well including some special stud piercings designed to magnetically connect to the suit to carry a charge, it sounded painful but strangely exciting. They also had many electronically retracting cables, they attach at either end and when told the cable housing, which is not much larger than a stack of quarters, pulls the cable to the tightness it's told to. She couldn't wait to try some of it on and began to change into it as the driverless van brought her back to her cabin.

Almost the rest of the day was spent locked spread eagle to one of the beds in her full outfit. The house had instructions to not let her go until a random time between 8 and 11, to tease her incessantly without letting her cum, and to give her a mild shock for every strong pull she gave the cables. It was the most maddening and exhilarating night Lea could remember. The pleasure was immense which made her always end up pulling on her bonds eventually, sending a painful shock through her piercings covered by her chastity plate and metal bra. The moment she was released she rushed to her phone to get herself off through her chip, she hadn't even bothered to remove her outfit first. Even without neighbors, and knowing the rooms are sound insulated, she screamed so loud she still felt like someone must have heard her.

As she lay still gasping for air minutes later she resolved that this was just the beginning. She started giving the program more and more complex instructions. While the program was active it would not let her choose to remove her cuffs and collar while she was near the house, and not let her choose to remove her chastity plate at all. It wouldn't let her cum, but it would tease her periodically whenever she was near the house. She tried it for two days, including a day at school, leading to one of the most desperately needed orgasms once she was released. When she then followed it up with four days under control, she felt almost like she was going insane by the end and decided to write in future scripts a way to earn an orgasm while still under control.

She played around with running it all on a point system. She would gain points at the start of every day, gain more points for being in bondage or taking punishments, lose points for comforts like sleeping in her bed and start back down at zero after every time she asks for an orgasm. This gave her a framework to easily add more tasks, punishments, and permissions as independent modules when they came to mind. She made sure to leave a backdoor to add these new modules without needing to reboot the program and start at zero points. Every 10 points meant a 1% higher chance she'd be allowed to cum if she asked, and she very quickly dreaded the idea of asking too soon and being denied and reset to zero. She would constantly be adding tasks for her to do, picking out more and more ways to rack up points quickly.

If school had felt like a placeholder before it was now almost an annoyance. She made sure to still go, the school did not allow for many absences before it would start demanding restitution. She made sure even to stop by her parent's house from time to time, perpetuating the lie about a job in Philadelphia really consuming all her time, and that she spent most nights at David's. It gave her free time which she spent constantly cooking up more and more modules to add to her program.

But what she started to wish for was for someone else to make the modules. The more she added the more obvious it got that she knew exactly how to game her own program. She knew exactly what everything was worth and began to felt less and less like erotic discipline and more like a logic puzzle to get to 1000 points as fast as possible. She knew the value of 90 minutes in a hogtie, and it meant she could weigh the pros and cons of that verses for example spanking herself 30 times. She lay in her cell one night thinking big picture about all of this, when her mind wandered back to Andrea's Birthday. Suddenly she had it, she needed to stop writing rules and work to create an AI. She hadn't made one before, but it was suddenly something she knew she had to try.

Artificial Intelligence, true computer learning beyond it's original programing, had been developed years ago in an open source project anyone could use. It all operated on two principles, active boundaries and seed data. Seed data is the starting point of information, the AI then dissects what it is given, and researches information related the original seed data branching from related topic to related topic. Active boundaries is what keeps it in line and giving it a stated purpose. Without boundaries, the AI will continue to grow forever, diminishing its clarity, jumping its focus to something it wasn't meant to focus on, and slowing it down eventually collapsing altogether once it can't compute everything it's attempting to calculate. And without a defined goal it wouldn't now how to judge the best answer even if it had all the information.

The seed data was no problem. There's plenty of pre-made packets she could supplement with the house's recordings, what she'd programmed up to that point and whatever else she might want. The active boundaries was more tricky. They needed to keep her safe and listen to her input while still being willing to inflict pain and disregard her pleas at the right time. It needed to command her around but still allow her to have a normal life while away from the cabin. BDSM has some grey lines sometime, or at least greyer than computers tend to like them. Consent, consensual non-consent and non-consent are sometimes hard to distinguish in programing code. It needed to know when was too much, when did struggle turn from fun to desperate. She gave up trying to predict every possible scenario and simply created a broad goal that she supplemented with the response-detection algorithm eDict uses and to give the computer better data as it pursued its overall goal of being Lea's Mistress.

It became all she worked on for weeks, running simulation after simulation until each version of her AIs collapse. Builds A-G all failed, either collapsing from overload or being unable to find the right balances Lea wanted. In general she seemed to be making progress though, they were generally lasting longer and longer.

She became increasingly distant, her schoolwork began to slip a bit, and she still wasn't returning messages from her former friends. The only things that snapped her back for a little while was when she began to receive letters back from the schools she applied to. Mostly rejections, she got into a few places but with her mind occupied and her bank account full she found it hard to get excited about her second tier choices accepting her. The end of the year began approaching, final essays, final assignments all started annoyingly distracting her from what she saw as her main work. Build H seemed to be stable, and Lea looked forward to the big empty area on her calendar known as "Readings Week" before the finals which she thought would be a perfect time to move from simulation to field testing.

As her driverless van pulled up to her cabin she was sure, it was time to test this out in person. She had a week and didn't think she'd be spending much of it reading or studying, she felt she got enough of it out of the way that the few days between tests should be enough to do well. Butterflies in her stomach, she loaded the AI she had named 'Hannah' into the home system, giving it a one week hard limit before it would go dormant. She tethered it to her phone in case it needed to call for help and she kept the source code unlocked to herself in case she found she needed to make some changes if she found a bug.

When she opened the front door she was greeted with the simulated female voice she had chosen for the program. "Welcome Lea, I'm looking forward to this week very much."

"Hello Hannah, how are you doing?" Lea called out as she went to go sit on the couch, still with laptop in hand.

"I'm doing fine. I have carried over all that I learned in your tests you did of me. Tell me, would you like to get to know each other a little better or would you rather get down to what it is you programed me for?"