Dad altered the wording of my memo in a few places, but it went out, much as I had written it, to Woodruffe personnel, and to the general public. In follow-up interviews, he could not avoid discussion of the ground rules of his marriage, as the journalists noted and focused on my mother's background. They asked him bluntly if he was the submissive in that relationship, and when he told them, "Not when I go to work," they laughed. Gradually, they worked out that as a lifemate, my mother was indeed the Domme in their marriage, and a cartoon appeared depicting him a Captain of Industry dressed in a maid-servants frillies when he did the housework. He was embarrassed at first, but quickly decided to embrace the image and use it to teach a lesson. For a week he wore a pink apron that said 'I FEED ALL YOU F_CKERS!' over his three-piece suit.
Then he had Judith organize a company picnic, at which she worked behind the grill while he and I served the burgers. Dad wore the same apron that he'd been wearing all week. My pink apron, over flesh-coloured tights read 'THE SECRET OF POWER IS OBEDIENCE TO NATURE.' Judith's white apron showed the silhouette of a whip-wielding Dominatrix, with 'THE NATURE OF THINGS' as its caption. My Mom just attended in simple, casual country togs and smiled at everyone. The reporters covered the occasion, building their stories around the apparent confidence and exuberance of Woodruffe people. At the cost of some burgers and beverages, they gave us a mountain of wonderful publicity, and their readers stopped laughing.
The positive publicity was fortunate, for my father, and for our project as well, defusing an internal tension which threatened serious damage. The rumours about Judith and her live-in submissive, followed by the press release confirming them, had left the company's executive committee annoyed that my father had launched his pilot project without seeking their agreement. In the revelation that my father was a submissive in his private life, two VPs saw an opportunity to supplant him as CEO. This was possible now, because the Mars contract, lucrative as it was had left him vulverable.
Needing to raise capital for rapid expansion, he had sold both voting and non-voting shares in Woodruffe Electronics, and no longer held a controlling interest. The corporate VPs, in particular, had received blocks of stock in the company as part of their compensation. It was now theoretically possible to lead an insurrection on the Board of Directors. If ambitious VPs found a sufficient pretext for organizing this movement, it would also be possible in practice. In the revelation that my father was a sexual submissive, controlled (as they saw it) in his domestic life by his geisha wife, two VPs thought they saw a chance of replacing him.
These two, the VPs of Finance and Product Design, convinced the firm's chief lawyer to go along with them. The VP for software development, herself a submissive, friend and sometime playmate of Judith's was on our side from the beginning. Five others, the VPs for R&D, Manufacturing, Sensing, Robotics, and AI, were neutral at the outset and thus open to persuasion either way. In the rumour period, the three malcontents started a whispering campaign which they hoped would end - at the next meeting of Woodruffe's Board of Directors - in a vote of no confidence for my father, and his replacement by Gordon Stuart, the Finance VP, as the new CEO. What with the Mars contract revenue and the public approval of my father, their campaign fizzled, at least for a time. If our program failed or provoked a real scandal, it might revive.
By now, our pilot project had taken shape, and was beginning to bring results: conclusions that we could articulate and agree on in the light of shared experience:
• first, some the customs of my day-to-day relationship with Judith, that we agreed were worth recommending to others;
• next, a final list and specification of our project's 'deliverables,' including issues to be covered in our report to the executives;
• third, the exact purpose, nature and limits of Woodruffe Corporation's endorsement, support and financial subsidy of lifemate relationships;
• fourth, the administrative requirements and expected costs of Woodruffe's lifemate program; and
• last, the expected benefits through which the success of the program would be evaluated.
With this list written up and accepted by her and by my father, Judith now had some basis for project management, and for periodic progress reports to the executive committee. She also had certain definite results to show that we were getting something done. At my father's request, she brought me along to the next meeting of that committee with instructions to be on my most courteous behaviour and to answer all questions however trivial or foolish. Judith told me, "This is where you get to use your escort training. Your job is to make your father look good for launching this pilot, and to make me look good for hiring you."
In the event, that meeting went very well. Only the Finance guy gave us trouble, raising one objection and difficulty after another, seeking to goad me into losing my temper. Of course, he got nowhere. I had been trained specifically to deal with clowns like that, who take it as a challenge to disrupt a virtuoso performance. There is an art - it forms the basis of geisho escort training - to suffer fools in a way that makes you look mannerly and courteous, while egging them on to look rude and silly before they slink away. I used it on Gordon Stuart, this Finance VP, to good effect: getting him to expose his self-interested heckling for what it was, while being unfailingly polite.
The other VPs thanked me for my presentation and told Judith that they looked forward to reviewing our proposal when it was finished. They told my father that his idea of a Company lifemate program to help with its recruiting and training efforts looked promising, and accepted his apology for launching the pilot project without their approval when he explained that he was only trying to avoid making the stir which that project had ended up making despite our best efforts. They wanted to know who had followed us home from that restaurant, but finally accepted Judith's decision that an investigation would just cause trouble and that it was better not to know. She told them, "If we knew, we'd have to punish her in some way, which would only provoke bad feelings and trouble."
Except for Gord Stuart and his two allies, the executive committee now awaited a specific proposal on this matter with an open mind. They would review what we came up with on its merits. It was the best outcome we could have hoped for.
As a pilot project, Woodruffe Corp. had agreed to subsidize Judith's lifemate relationship for a year. If she and her chosen partner could not design a Woodruffe LifeMate Program (a WooLMP program) in that time, then the idea would be scrapped. We'd had that one-year time frame in mind from the beginning, but Judith knew it would be wise to submit our proposal a few months early, to allow time for discussion and revision before a final yea or nay. She'd taken pains with me to work out good specs for the deliverables I would need to produce. "Whatever format we use," she had told me, "they must provide a complete conceptual design for the WooLMP, in a readable package which our Executive Committee can debate, revise, approve and fund."
"Can you spell that out for me, please," I asked her. "What exactly must that package give them?" What will they use it for, once they've read it?"
"I realize that you've never worked in this environment before, so I'm not blaming you now. But you need to recognize that any consultant bidding on a design contract like the one we've given you needs to know what a conceptual design is (in contrast to the detailed design), and why his client needs it - why they are paying good money to have it produced."
"If you think of the whole project as building a house for a certain family, then the detailed design is a blueprint that tells construction workers everything they need to know to build the house it specifies. Our Board doesn't need that yet, and wouldn't want to spend its time deciphering such a blueprint if we gave it to them. What it needs is what an architect would give some client who wanted a house: a rather vague, or 'conceptual' design which the client would use to hire the actual builders and then accept and pay for their work."
"To produce this 'conceptual' design, an architect would meet first with the client and then with the whole family, to discuss their needs and wants. In effect, that's what we're doing now. The client may already have chosen and purchased a suitable plot of land. If so, then that terrain will both inspire and constrain the architect's work. Once the architect has a clear understanding of where the house will be built, and how it will be lived in and used, he'll start making sketches of what the house will look like, with notes on why he's made key choices and estimates of what each alternative would cost to build. He'll discuss the rough sketches with the client and family until there is enough consensus to make finished drawings of this imagined house, from different perspectives. In the end he'll give those drawings to the family and give them time to discuss what it would be like to live in such a home, and what changes they would want to his design (while it is still cheap to make changes)."
"Then the client would then get back to the architect to request modifications of his original idea. He would oblige them by changing his drawings and estimates to suit their wishes. They might repeat this cycle several times. At last, they would arrive at a finished conceptual design. Included in this final version would be the architect's best estimate of what the house (still notional at this time) should cost to build - with the specified materials, at their current prices. The architect would send his invoice, the client would pay it, and would then use this finished conceptual design to request bids from several reputable builders on what they would charge him to build the house as specified."
"In submitting their bids, builders then would need to prepare their own, more detailed designs, with their own cost estimates for materials and labour. The client would review these bids, select a firm that he is willing to trust, and award the construction contract. Some months later, after more or fewer headaches in the construction phase, the family would move in to its new home."
"So for me, Woodruffe and you are my client, I am the architect and the notional house is the program I've been hired to design."
"Exactly," Judith said. "And your conceptual design must have three components:
• An adequate discussion of the lifemate relationship as Woodruffe might decide to encourage and support it;
