Jaxon Research

Hey everyone!

I know I said my goal was one chapter per week, and I set it at 5k words, but Chapter 2 has a bit of a mind of its own and seemed to reach a good stopping place a bit early.

I'm still shooting for another chapter next week, but I wanted to give you another taste as it was ready.

Forgive the sheer volume of exposition. This will begin to taper off in upcoming chapters- I have a lot of world to build, and being a new writer, the easiest way to explain and fill out details is through conversation. Kelley is a useful (and attractive) foil for this. After the sexual tension introduced at the end of the current chapter is appropriately resolved in chapter three, I can bring us back to the present and begin our path through what I hope will be an engrossing narrative.

Thank you for your kind comments so far! It means a lot.

-

-Chapter 2-

Kelley looked at me nervously "why am I here?" "Well," I replied, "Technically, you aren't. Legally, you are a licensed copy of the person named Kelley- it feels like you are her, and for all intents and purposes, you and she are the same- the difference is that you are property. My property."

In reality, I operate in somewhat of a grey area. Human consciousness was never intended to be copied. I mean, we do it all the time- I have several backups myself- not running, but should something corrupt my process and cause failure, there really isn't anyone around to debug and reconstruct me.

I keep a hot spare, updated with a 5-minute delay- should my main process crash, it will be activated on a separate server cluster (hopefully) without whatever offending code caused the crash. Should that fail, I also have a weekly copy in "warm" storage and several rolling backups spaced out to about six months back in cold storage.

And then, of course, there's my initial copy from back when I first uploaded- safely tucked away offsite and disconnected.

All this to say, we copy ourselves a lot nowadays. All copies are governed by standard intellectual property copyright laws *except* the initial copy. Your initial uploaded process carries the (spectacularly large nowadays) crypto certificate assigning to it the arbitrary label of "personhood" with human rights and such.

This cert can be transferred but not copied.

Spinning up a copy while the primary is live is frowned upon, though not strictly illegal, provided you don't tread on government servers without a cert.

Okay, back to Kelley.

Nowadays, I find the moment after realization to be the most exciting part of onboarding. However, I had never done this before when I brought Kelley in. Oh, my partners joined me after we laid the groundwork for the facility (me inside creating the environment, them outside setting up the facility, the trust to maintain it, etc.). Still, they were straight uploads, and nothing surprised them initially.

Well, Kelley raged.

"YOU CAN'T FUCKING DO THIS" she screamed. I replied calmly, "I can. I did." I was struck at how beautiful she was when she was angry. Oddly, she hadn't noticed yet that she couldn't stand.

"THERE'S NO WAY THIS IS LEGAL!" she continued. I replied, a look of quiet amusement on my face "it's all quite legal. You signed a document giving me absolute control over the copy for noncommercial use."

She opened her mouth to reply- "Stop," I said. "I've heard enough yelling." I don't know if I have seen anything quite as entertaining as the realization dawning on her- she wasn't in her avatar.

She was in mine.

She was trying to speak, but her mouth didn't move. Then, finally, she tried to move her body, but I decided it would be best for her to remain still for the moment.

"Kelley," I said, watching as those gorgeous eyes turned to me, fear evident in them, "You are going to listen to me. You are safe. You aren't in control, you have no rights, but you will not be harmed. You will even be given a choice- you weren't selected by chance. I reached out to you because you had a particular set of interests before you uploaded. You were extremely involved in the BDSM group in your city and were owned by a master that, while I might not entirely approve of his methods, you clearly were devoted to. You chose to upload after his motorcycle accident. I suspect I will offer you exactly what you have been missing, but I could be wrong."

Kelley was blinking back tears at this point. She obviously hadn't guessed the depth of information I had gathered on her.

"First off, you have two choices. You may remain here and serve, or I can drop you into cold storage. That is not in any way meant as a threat; it's just reality. You will come to no harm under my care, but everything in this environment is created and administered by me. There is no way for you to be here and not serve me, and there is no way for you to have privacy. I can't send you anywhere; legally, you are not a person. So that leaves cold storage, which, while not exciting, is pretty much the only place I wouldn't (unintentionally or no) influence or use you."

I released my hold on her ability to speak, waiting expectantly.

"Are you saying that if I don't submit to you... you'll essentially kill me?" She said, voice trembling. "No," I replied, "I could, legally, there's nothing to stop me- you are considered to be of no more importance, no more value than a book or a rip from a cd like we made as kids. But as I said, I won't see you harmed. Your data would be preserved, though inactive."

"Well, I don't like the idea of that," Kelly said, continuing impulsively, "what will you do with me if I submit?"

I replied, "whatever I want."

During this exchange, I watched her neural activity closely. So far, I had made no changes to her, wouldn't, in fact, until she agreed.

However, the more we talked, as the initial panic drained from the front of her mind, I saw a new feeling wash over her like the ocean over a rocky beach. "You're aroused," I stated, matter of factly- there was no question.

She began to blush, and I took a moment to appreciate my work as the color bloomed on her naked body, nipples I designed to be comfortably large without being grotesque standing erect on her chest.

"I... I'm not sure how to feel," she replied haltingly.

"If you want to learn about your new life, I need to hear you say it," I said sternly.

"It?" she asked.

"You must submit to me and consent to my ownership- understanding that every inch, every bit of what you think of as yourself belongs to me now. To use, modify, and take pleasure in however I see fit."

"Well," she replied, "that certainly sounds better than the alternative"

"Say it," I repeated.

"I consent. I am yours, sir."

"Excellent. Cum."

The look on her face was priceless. Remember earlier when I mentioned that her touch receptors were far more sensitive than usual? Well, that has no impact on this, as the way I triggered her orgasm required nothing physical.

But it should give you a fair approximation of how intense her sensations were at that moment. Had she been in control of her legs, I have no doubt she'd have fallen on the floor; the shaking of her upper body was so intense it resembled a seizure, her moaning almost a scream.

Perhaps I overdid it.

I made a few adjustments to the settings, reducing the strength of the sensation, and the shaking subsided.

I continued to wait. As the algorithm controlling the process ran its course, she took deep breaths- out of habit, as breathing isn't a necessary process, just a comfortable one.

I smiled and snapped my fingers.

In an instant, our surroundings changed. The poorly designed and rendered room around us disappeared, and we were in my living room. I meticulously designed my home to be as close to absolute realism as I could manage. Everything, from the soft leather sofas to the downright ridiculously plush carpeting, exuded qualia at the lightest touch. Couple that with her heightened senses, and I could tell Kelley was getting overwhelmed.

"Look at me," I said, dragging her attention away from what must have felt like a limitless display of wealth. "How can you afford this level of detail?" she asked. "Well, the models for everything I created myself, and as for the rendering..." I trailed off, pulling up a live feed showing the server farm I, that is, my perpetual trust, owned. "Holy shit," she swore. "How... how wealthy were you?"

"Not very," I replied, "at least, not at first. I connected the dots around the time direct neural interfaces became mainstream. It seemed obvious, to me at least, that the next step would be actually mirroring a person's neural net. I quickly discovered after installation that I didn't need an artificial environment to interface, which gave me quite an edge in tasks such as coding and designing, so I set to work preparing for my immortality."

I stood up, motioning that she should follow "Let's engage in a bit of Sorkin-style walking exposition, shall we?" Kelley rose, falling into step beside and slightly behind, a fact I noted with quiet amusement. "You were quite well trained, weren't you?" Kelley blushed, dropping her eyes. "I spent 10 years owned. He was extremely strict about certain things," she said.

I smiled. "I suspect you will fit right in."

I took her through my home, pausing as she stopped to pet the two cats lounging on their perches in the hall "the black one is Lexi, the grey is Clara."

"Those names sound suspiciously human," she said, eyeing me. "They are, in fact," I replied with a smile.

"They are my partners- as they both talked endlessly before uploading about how much they wished they were cats, and I found the idea amusing. So when I need peace, cats they become" Kelley stepped back, "wait, I was just petting people?" I heard a slight cough that sounded suspiciously like a cat attempting to laugh coming from Lexi. "Yes, you were; neither of them ever turn down attention when offered, as you can see" Kelley just stared.

"Moving on," I said, winking to the girls as we resumed walking.

"Once I discovered my ability, I set to work. Considering my speed advantage, I found that my best bet was to freelance, charging by the job, not the hour. There are precious few intuits, and even less in the early days- children's neuroplasticity gives them an edge, but even when connected at a young age, most still need a virtual environment to work in. I found my strength lay mostly in working on very large, complex codebases and in debugging. Not having to physically read the code is a huge advantage; finding an error became almost second nature."

"All this gave me an early edge," I continued. "So I saved my money and laid the groundwork for this facility. It's all self-contained and, barring an end of the world scenario, should continue indefinitely. Even if the power goes out, we'll be okay running at a lower capacity for quite some time. With the solar on the roof and batteries to store and dispense what we gather, we would be fine for years. Plus, we can even go out and forage for materials with my telepresence bots- only for 10 miles or so away, but that's enough for grounds and facility maintenance and to take a look in town. This place is out of the way, but not that far."

Kelley turned to me. "It sounds like you spent a lot of time planning the future." I did indeed," I replied, "If you knew you would live forever, would you want someone else to be in charge of that eternity, or would you prefer to handle it yourself?" "Well..." she hesitated. "Ah, sorry, dumb question," I laughed gently.

The home I designed is enormous. Extremely large. While talking, we walked through the hall up a flight of stairs, and out onto a beautiful lounge/dining area. This space had a clear view in every direction, with glass walls capped by a vaulted roof filled with skylights.

Kelley looked around, eyes sparkling, before suddenly pulling back, looking anxious. "I'm naked!" she exclaimed.

"Kelley. You have already met everyone here." Kelley blushed, realizing two things at once.

One, she had begun to forget that this was an elaborate virtual environment- to her, virtual environments were kludgy, poorly made things.

And two. Kelley's first encounter with the other two people living in her new home was in the nude.

I took her arm, gently leading her to the floor-to-ceiling window, pressing her naked body against it as I wrapped my arms around her. The glass was cool to the touch, and as I stood behind her, I slid my right hand up to wrap gently but firmly around her neck.

"All mine," I said, whispering into her ear. "Everything you see. Mine."