"Okay... Can anyone think of anything we might have missed?"
The four computer programmers grew quiet as the last few detail of their revenge plan percolated. Cyrus, the goateed, defacto leader of the group was the most neural typical and found it easiest to speak in public. If four conspirators counted as public. Nelson, the smallest of the men, was almost frail he was so delicate, yet his mind was a muscle mightier than most and he flexed it seeking holes in their plan. Anthony was portly, wore a full beard and laughed easily and knew more about the hardware of computers than any of the others. The big man didn't consider himself a strategist, but he too considered the plan, seeking flaws.
The final member was Eden, the only female, the most artistically creative programmer and the magnet for all their unspoken sexual desires. Each of the men viewed her differently, filtered through the lens of their own desire for who they wanted her to be. Cyrus saw Eden as an Aubrey Plaza-esque, caustically sexy, secret dominatrix. Nelson saw her as Kate Winslet's character Clementine in Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind, an impulsive, misfit-cutie, with a dark spirit. While Anthony saw her as an e-girl, rave princess environmentalist.
Eden saw herself as a smart woman, slightly dark sense of humour with a burning desire to accomplish something important in her lifetime. And she had, with the assistance of those three goofballs. They had created a self learning program. Artificial Intelligence. Unfortunately their sociopath supervisor at the tech firm they all worked for was in the process of stealing everything they had built in the last two years. Working as a team they were enacting a revenge that was meant to reclaim credit for the work they had done, expose their boss as a thief and humiliate him enough to drum out of the entire field of artificial intelligence.
Anthony had discovered their supervisor Russell's duplicity as he was digging through an odd cache of files. Hacking in as a matter of habit, he found correspondences between the board of directors of the company and Russell outlining
his
plans for a new A.I. system. It was all the work of the four conspirators, things they had been doing on their free time, staying late, on breaks and weekends.
Wisely, Anthony hadn't done anything immediately beyond copy everything and then tell the others. The rest of the work day and the next eleven hours they spent at Anthony's house formulating a plan that would achieve all their goals.
"I have a question" Eden asked, brow furrowed. "How can we get into the server room while he's in the I.T. office? There's only the one door."
Anthony had gotten into Russell's work computer and could now see everything Russell was doing on his computer twinned on a laptop in the corner of Anthony's apartment. Russell was surfing the web, doing nothing important, clearly killing time. It was five in the morning and Russell's computer was sitting in the only room with access to the servers, where they very badly needed to get.
"We'll only need about twenty minutes in there" Nelson offered.
"We have to do something to keep him out. The plan only partially works if he doesn't meet with the board" Cyrus grumbled.
"What if I sent him some awesome porn? What kind of shit does he watch?" Anthony asked.
"POV blowjob stuff. Edging, deep throat, facial, y'know" Nelson offered, having scoured Russell's entire browser history over the last frantic hours, looking for any way to get their work back.
"It could work..." Anthony shrugged non-noncommittally.
"I'd like to have better odds than that, if we can" Cyrus groused.
As Nelson listed Russell's porn selections, Anthony's eyes had unconsciously drifted to Eden, wanting to see her reaction to the talk of porn. Nelson saw where he was looking and his eyes drifted to the only woman in the room as well. When Cyrus, who was pacing, turned back to his friends the other men were both watching Eden, so his eyes went to her as well, then he understood why.
Noticing their eyes on her, Eden didn't understand at first.
"I don't have any ideas." Then, when they all blushed in unison, she clued in. "Wait? You want me to... what? Seduce him?" She was appalled.
"No!"
"Of course not!"
"Fuck that!"
Their denial was vociferous and altogether unconvincing.
An awkward silence followed their protestations. A silence pregnant with unspoken words.
"Please tell me you all remember that he has been sexually harassing me every since I started, right?"
"Of course."
"Yeah."
"No-one is asking you to do anything you don't feel comfortable with" Cyrus finished, but his word choice accidentally implied she might be comfortable with something.
Then after a long pause, Anthony murmured "He
is
really into you..."
"He can't take his eyes off you..." Nelson grumbled, hating suggesting she use herself as bait, disgusted by Russell's lechery, but at his wits end on how to keep Russell from interrupting their sabotage. Their supervisor was camping out in the office, obviously aware just how valuable their work was and unwilling to risk losing it the way he'd stolen it from them.
Eden sat stone still, pale faced, two bright patches of red on both cheeks, her eyes blazing. The petite programmer was the epitome of enraged. A project so unbelievably groundbreaking that it was a one in a billion opportunity for recognition, success, wealth and a place in history was being stolen from her and it seemed as if the only way she could retain ownership of her part in it was to seduce the worst person she'd ever met.
On Eden's very first day in the office, Russell had begun what was going to end up a campaign of sexual harassment that she endured with increasing indignation. The company's HR department downplayed her complaints, Russell found ingenious methods of punishing her that were essentially invisible to other management and his sexual innuendo grew more veiled, but equally sinister. It was the main motivator for her to dive into the deep end with their project and excel beyond her usual abilities, in order to escape from Russell.
And now he was poised to either rob her of her efforts, or finally gain what it was he wanted. Her.
Tears leaked from Eden's fierce blue eyes as she stared at nothing. Mind whirling, she sought any plausible alternative to the suggestion she seduce Russell in order to buy her partners the time in the server room they so desperately needed. Nothing came to her, instead her mind was filled with visions of his awful face looking at her and she desperately tried not to imagine sucking his cock.
"Maybe we need to take a break, things are getting tense in here. Lets get some air."
Cyrus walked to the door and stepped out into the fresh Spring air. Anthony turned to his laptop and began working while Nelson gave a sympathetic look to Eden and followed Cyrus outside. In a trance Eden went out and started walking down the road, ignoring Nelson's query of "Where are you going?"
The dawning realization that seducing Russell made the most sense made her feel ill, she needed to be away from the men who wanted her to offer her body to her worst enemy. For an hour Eden struggled to find a better way to captivate Russell and keep him from spotting the others creep into the server room, steal back their work and set Russell up. Setting him up felt almost as important as getting their work back. Eden wanted Russell to suffer, not take pleasure from her.
None of the schemes she came up with felt plausible.
One key factor was, Russell's inherent misogyny meant he didn't think Eden was involved with the others. Any one of them approaching Russell would tip him off they knew he was stealing their work. The man was on high alert, but he had a blind spot in Eden. Russell had no idea how good at code she was, so hadn't seem to realize she was one of the creators of the work he was stealing.
Eden was the very best bet for distracting their crooked supervisor. The only thing that would fully captivate him for long enough to do what they needed in the server room was sex. Russell was obsessed with sex and wanted Eden very badly. At eleven that morning, Russell was meeting with the board of directors of the company to present them with the work Eden and her friends had done. If the group couldn't solve the distraction problem by then, the chances of reversing things afterwards grew much slimmer.
