= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
GreyHacker keeps his promise and Alex now has the technology for the ultimate hunt game.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
After the session with GreyHacker on "Anything For You" the popularity of the website increased to even greater than it had been before. Much to Alex's relief, GreyHacker never returned. Alyce remained on the site, but only as host. That was not the case on "The Hunt."
"The Hunt," as GreyHacker had promised, was far beyond anything that Alex could have ever imagined. It was more than a website, it was an interactive game experience of epic proportions. Everything had been in the files, the coding, the specifications, even the drawings to create the game centers.
The game centers were not hand-held controllers or even small platforms that sensed motion. When constructed, terminals for "The Hunt" were room-sized domes with a special floor that was somewhere between a touchpad, a treadmill, and a giant finger-wheel mouse ball. You could walk in any direction and yet always stayed in the center of the pad. Once the entry door was closed, the 360 degree projection was flawless. There was a fine mist in the air inside the dome that allowed a form of 3D projection. You were wherever you wanted to be and the game surrounded you.
There was true surround sound so that if you heard a cricket chirp and looked at where you thought it was, you could see it starting to hop away. More amazing was the surround smell. If there were roses blooming to your left, the smell of roses would waft toward you from your left.
Alex had sold just under forty of the units at 3.7 million each. They cost under a million each to actually produce, so the profit per unit was over 2.5 million. And the connection fee was $10,000 per month.
"Yes that is a lot of money," Alex would say to a prospective client, "but what would you pay in lawyer's fees if you did any of this in real life? All of the enjoyment. None of the risk."
Then Alex would explain that there were even some add-ons that give such realistic neural response that "you would swear that there is a naked girl kneeling between your legs sucking you off as you draw that final bead on your fleeing target."
The one drawback for Alex was that Alice/Alyce's avatar was hard-wired into the code as one of the prey. Alex had tried to remove her from the coding, but GreyHacker had, for some reason, locked many of the subroutines to her and the level of code was so far beyond Alex that he was unable to remove her. Even his trick of renaming her avatar specifications subfolder didn't work because she showed up in the game even if all of her avatar files were deleted from the drive.
Alex weighed the risk vs reward of going ahead with "The Hunt" using Alice's avatar and decided that the extra millions were worth the risk.
Alice would not have agreed with him. She was once again sleeping naked and running to the bathroom on a nightly basis to throw up in the toilet.
This was worse than it had ever been on "Torturing Alice." Most nights she found herself with others in prey pens like cattle in stalls. Men - not lizards, but real men with bulging muscles and perfect bodies - would drive the prey out onto the savannah with long, flexible black whips that looked very much like the paddles from Alice's other nightmares except that there were metal studs evenly spaced in rows down the paddles. The impact of the black rubber, or whatever it was, was painful enough, but the studs were electrically charged so that along with each impact there was a jolt of electricity that tore through her body. Often the shock was sufficient for her to loose control of her bladder - or even her bowels, and that was not just for avatar Alice. The real Alice had now taken to making sure her bowels were totally empty before going to sleep each night.
