My thanks to MormonJack for edits and crits.
Chapter 3
Another annoying email from S21 arrived a few days later. S21 was an annoying client anyway, insisting on using plain email to communicate in clear in spite of repeated warnings that no one, especially a start up in stealth mode, should communicate in a method that's less secure than a postcard. It forced me to use a proxy account and send my replies in secure packages that I had to teach them how to use. They'd contracted me to find them a CTO, which they clearly needed desperately. Now they were changing the requirements again for the position. For the third time. I'd told them previously that each time they changed anything I'd have to abandon the server node cycles I'd already burned, a considerable expense, but they just sent me more funds and said start over. I like money as much as the next consultant, but I also dislike being jerked around at least as much.
If that weren't bad enough, Beaver5 was acting up. I use my beavers to communicate with the big cloud server sites. 5 was seeing dropouts and bad packets. Well, at least it was the one running the S21 search, so corrupted results wouldn't be a problem.
Wait a minute!
I thought. In my business, twice is enemy action. The coincidence of a beaver being disrupted while the client on the beaver was disrupting me was too much to ignore.
I have my own, very private servers that I call moles. I began setting up a few moles to dig underneath the Internet to see what they could find.
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New toy remote try it out?
Avery is endlessly inventive. That toy I described earlier is not a one-off. Besides doing whatever she does for her startup (and making a nice salary) she has, in the work/live space she rents, a workshop to make sex toys. Not a business, a labor of love, because the sex toys are specifically designed for her own sexuality. I
like
the message.
Now?
Soon. Technical problem.
WFH. Coming over.
When she comes over, running up the stairs in her usual fashion, she's wearing, top to bottom, a baseball cap promoting Ulysse Nardin (she's also a watch nerd), her usual tan overcoat with her backpack, knee-high black socks in multi-colored sneakers, and— she reveals as she flashes her little tits at me at my desk— also giving a hint of multicolor fabric that could be the wildest shorts yet underneath.
I rub my face over her flat stomach and little mounds as I sit at my desk. But I'm not done defending my business. "Sorry, I need to finish this. Make us some drinks?"
She pouts but heads for the kitchen.
Mole1 had found something immediately, like within milliseconds. That put a ceiling on the skill level of my attackers. Still, they'd got through Beaver5's first defense barrier. I booted up moles 2, 3, and 4, optimizing each for different possible penetration vectors, tuned them a bit, and watched the console logs to make sure there were no glitches. The process now would run automatically, watching and waiting, ready to dig underneath anything suspicious that came through.
Avery returns with a tray. She's ditched the overcoat and is as cute as can be with the baseball cap turned backwards and her little nips sticking straight out. The tray goes on the desk in front of me, pushing my keyboard out of the way. Okay, work time's over, I can take a hint. On the tray, besides the Cuervo Gold I keep for her, is an open bottle of Barolo, the contents of which she's already decanted (I taught her how), a shot glass, and a wine glass. And a long, shiny plastic object that might have come from a Star Trek movie— the NC-17 scene from the director's private edit.
"Here." She hands me a phone, already open to an app I've never seen before. "I've been working on this a while. The software's still alpha but . . ." she says, caressing the object, a totally new design.
Maybe I've imagined the wrong movie. The long protrusion with the bulbous tip is translucent, hinting at a mechanism within. It might be something Tony Stark cooked up for a special night with Pepper Potts. There are more protrusions, smaller, emerging from a stainless steel base and collar. Or maybe that villain from the Spiderman movie, the one with the mechanical octopus tentacles sprouting from his back, has cooked up something for his girlfriend. The app is pure nerd, a list of obscure variables such as peristaltic_amp and helix_pch, each with a slider.
Avery smiles at me broadly, eyes wide, almost shy, like a teenage girl presenting a project she's worked hard on all semester, to a professor she has a terrible crush on. She'll do anything for me, her smile tells me. I check her shorts. They're a wild plaid that would make Burberry cringe, a style I've never seen before. She cuddles up to me and we sip our wine and tequila.
After her second shot she picks up the object to show how the parameters control it. "I call it my Transporter." So my Star Trek guess was correct. She explains her app, or tries to. Dozens of parameters, no graphics. I try to follow how the Transporter's protuberances wriggle and vibrate as her fingers move over the phone screen, but she's babbling, she's so excited, a combination of creative pride and eager erotic anticipation. It doesn't help my comprehension that she's also massaging my cock through my pants.
We neck for a while, passionate, tequila and Barolo-flavored French kisses that progress, as usual, to tongue sucking. Avery has been quite open with me about her past, at least as she views it. Not much about previous boyfriends, whom she dismisses as just boys with the wave of a hand. Much more about her personal history, her most personal physical history which, she says and I believe, she's never told anyone else.
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She's always loved to suck. Her mother, according to her, had a lot of trouble weaning her, and as a little girl she craved lollipops, popsicles, and such. Her parents had to be strict about them, ostensibly to protect her young teeth. Her epiphany (my term) occurred when she was a teenager. She'd just graduated from high school and was waiting for her freshman university year to start. She had a sister a couple years older. One afternoon she came out of the basement workshop (even back then she loved to invent and build things) and heard strange sounds. Her sister Alexis was back from college then and their parents were out, so the noise had to be due to something her sister was doing. She traced the sounds to Alex's bedroom.