Cheryl awoke sweaty and hot, from dreams she couldn't remember.
Must have been good ones, though, she thought, because she was feeling pretty randy. Her panties were damp—and not just from perspiration. Though certainly there was plenty of that, too, because the humidity had risen in the last several June days and she'd yet to turn on the air conditioning.
She slapped the alarm, headed to the shower and closed the curtain behind her. The hot water hit her solidly across the chest, refreshing her and washing away the saltiness from last night. It felt tingly on her stomach and breasts, and she was tempted to add some rubbing and stroking to the tingles, but she did have to get to work in under an hour, and there really wasn't enough time for that kind of indulgence. She inhaled the steam and began to lather.
* * *
The wire-frame drawing of the figure onscreen bent to the knees, tipping its head down slightly, arms parallel to neck in a manner suggesting worship. It still didn't look right to Penelope, so she selected the waist area and dragged the cursor across the hips, pulling them slightly backward.
Mmmm, much better,
she thought. She clicked on Render, and sipped at her coffee while the powerful machine under her desk translated the position of the onscreen figure into something entirely more realistic—and intriguing. Where transparent quasi-figures had been in the preview screen was now supple, toned, and even curvaceous flesh. The kneeling mesh became a brunette with long hair, nude, and the object of her fixation became a blonde, similarly clad, legs akimbo, and arms beckoning. Much, much better. With this as a preview image, I think I'll get a bunch of new members.
Penelope ran a website which specialized in manufactured images. At first, she'd spent her college time and effort learning the ins and outs of placing figures in rooms, and having them interact with the furnishings in a realistic manner. This was harder than it sounded, as the three-dimensional environment took a different kind of thought process to manipulate on the computer screen. But she'd mastered the techniques soon enough, and moved on to illustrating scenes from novels—
A Tale of Two Cities
being the first. Well, the first chapter, at least. She'd grown bored at that point and switched to generating some more fantastic figures—warriors fighting dragons, a huge wedding of fairies, and a witch's coven.
It was the latter which had taken her down her life's new path: someone online had been impressed with the somewhat... unorthodox... attire of the witches, and had asked if she ever did more erotic scenes. Penelope had never considered it—these renderings, real as they seemed, were still a far step from reality. But as she experimented, she saw that despite the vaguely doll-like nature of the onscreen figures, skillful manipulation of the figures could produce surprisingly sensual imagery. Her website had been frequented to some extent before by other artists interested in computer-generated images, but after posting
In Darkest Orgasm,
the hit counter had reached six figures. At first she'd tried to save and answer all the fanmail, but it soon became ridiculous to try. She was so impressed with the feedback she'd received (and, to be honest, intrigued by some of the suggestions she gotten) that she produced several more pictures in the same genre in short order.
She found that she enjoyed this type of work much more than the mundane stuff, but she was utterly shocked when a website visitor offered to actually commission a work from her. Money, for drawing naughty pictures on a computer? A week later and a hundred dollars richer, Penelope wondered how long this kind of scam had been going on, and a week after
that
she'd ordered a faster computer and a high-speed internet line to keep up with the new website she'd established for her more avant garde works. The first month's worth of memberships had paid for the upgraded computer, and memberships just kept going up after the
Extravagant Orgy
preview scene began to circulate on the internet. The second month not only paid for the apartment lease, but allowed her to pay off one of her smaller student loans early.
She told no one, of course; the last thing she needed was on-campus publicity about this. She'd be beset with Campus Crusade for Christ and other idiots objecting to her presence, and simultaneously she'd end up with various crude offers from the men on campus (some of them, likely, from members of the Campus Crusade for Christ), if the emails she constantly received were any prediction. Plus, if the university knew about the extra source of income, they'd be lowering her financial aid significantly—and while the extra income was nice, it certainly wasn't enough to finance her entire four-year education with. No, she kept quiet, and didn't even let the other girls she shared the apartment with in on the secret.
Which suited her fine; it was one thing to draw this stuff, and collect cash from people who wanted to look at it on the net. And it would have been a difficult thing altogether to explain to another how much of the perverse work was inspired not by books, or movies, or even photos, but from the twisted depths of her own imagination. But if she were to tell them the
method
she used to get the poses just right... well, would her apartment-mates stay around if they knew she spent much of her time in her room naked in front of a mirror masturbating and making lust-faces at herself?
The rendering process was done at low resolution, and it was entirely satisfactory. A little too satisfactory, perhaps, as Penelope was now a bit distracted by the finished image. It wasn't entirely rare for her to get turned on by her own work, but the frequent masturbation sessions (all for her art, of course!) tended to keep her hormones down to a manageable level. For some reason she really got off on looking at this one, though. Or, more accurately, she was about to. After starting the final high-res render as a background process, Penelope called up the low-res image, undid the drawstring on her pajama pants, leaned back in her seat, and began to "let her fingers do the walking"...
* * *
Linda finished downloading the song from ZKaamrZ and ported it out to her MP3 player.
This band truly rawks,
she thought; and on further reflection she sent copies of the song to a couple of her friends in the dorms. She once would have avoided sending such huge attachments to friends since it would take like a billion years, but with the new high-speed connection this was a trifle.
Penelope's new high-speed connection,
said the little inner voice that would have been her conscience, had she owned one; instead, she grinned at her duplicity. There were outlets in every room, and technically you could only hook in to the high-speed connection at one box—in Pen's room—but with the grey-market LoopOut box she'd bought and that Skimmerz software she'd downloaded from a warez site, she could piggyback her own high-speed transmissions on top of her apartment-mate's without being detected (and, more importantly, without paying a nickel). Skimmerz even sent dialing noises out of her sound card to complete the deception, making it appear to the unaware that Linda just had some really kickin' dial-up which somehow downloaded miraculously fast. Skimmerz was shareware, but it was a fully functional demo so she had never bothered to purchase it. There were some annoying pop-up boxes now and then asking her to buy it, but she could live with that as long as the damn thing worked.
Which it usually did, but sometimes if Penelope was using her system at the same time, one of Linda's downloads would get corrupted, or a window would open with some fragment of what Penelope was working on, and then shut down a minute later. This last part was totally creepy; the first time it had happened, she'd seen part of Pen's history essay, but several times thereafter she'd peered in on some kind of porn Pen was apparently looking at. Sometimes lesbo porn, in fact, which gave Linda the wiggins, but she hadn't let on that she was aware of Penelope's questionable sexual preferences—after all, how would she explain how she knew? At any rate, to save herself from further gross-outs, she'd soon enough found a setting called "Frame-Display Duration" in the Hacking Options menu and dropped it down to the minimum level possible, and the window problem had not recurred (though downloads still got corrupted now and then— but what could you do?).
She was about to shut down the system when there was a knock at her door. "Come in," she yelled.
It was Cheryl, dressed in what Linda privately called her YuppieWear. The clothing boutique she worked for apparently made her dress "appropriately" (whatever that was) for work, and she was dolled up in a fancy-schmancy suit—skirt, jacket, pantyhose, and all. In June. And she'd have to walk to the train stop in those heels—hope she didn't have to run to catch it! In a way, Linda pitied her. Cheryl was the same age as Linda and Penelope, but she hadn't attended college because she hadn't been all that bright a kid. Which was no excuse, really—Linda's high school record was hardly spotless—but Cheryl's parents were dirt poor, and no college was forthcoming with financial aid to make up for it.
Anyway, Cheryl wanted what she always wanted: to borrow Linda's computer to send an email to one of her friends. Linda wished she'd get her own damn machine instead of freeloading on hers, but it wasn't that important and it never took all
that
long, so she stewed about it silently. She gestured toward the chair, got up, and went to fix herself some breakfast.
