CHAPTER 2: Livefeed, Lowcam
The camera arrived without ceremony. It was a brushed tungsten disk the size of a contact lens, wrapped in nanotic threading that would let it stick to any surface and draw power from ambient electromagnetic fields. Viressa waited until Eidolon was in deep maintenance cycle, his consciousness dimmed to barely-aware while his neural pathways performed automated system optimizations, before she placed it.
Floor level. Corner position. Wide-angle lens with enough range to capture the entire cube from a height no higher than a child's perspective.
When he woke, the red gleam in his peripheral vision told him everything he needed to know.
"New protocol," she said, not looking up from her workstation where she was crafting a face for some Tier-8 executive who wanted to disappear into the underground sex markets. "When I haven't given you permission to speak, you keep the collar visible. Always."
His hand rose instinctively to his throat, fingers finding the warm metal that pulsed with its steady heartbeat broadcast. The collar had become as familiar as his own pulse--more so, perhaps, since hers was the rhythm that mattered.
"The position is floor level," she continued, her fingers dancing through haptic controls that sculpted cheekbones and adjusted lip fullness on the holographic face. "So you'll need to accommodate that perspective."
She didn't say crawl. Didn't need to. The logic was elegant, undeniable. If the camera was at floor level, and he needed to keep the collar visible, then the mathematics of submission resolved itself. His knees hit the synthetic wood flooring before his pride could raise an objection.
"Better," she murmured, and the single word sent dopamine cascading through his neural pathways.
The humiliation protocol had layers, like good encryption. Surface level: the physical degradation of crawling across the floor of his own space, knees wearing patterns in the industrial carpet, collar gleaming in the low light. Deeper: the knowledge that everything was being recorded, stored, archived for her review, amusement, or distribution. Deepest: the growing awareness that he craved the degradation, that the shame had become another form of service, another way to exist meaningfully in her world.
She programmed his posture with the same attention she brought to her avatar work. Cervical vertebrae maintained at 15-degree downward angle to ensure collar visibility, lumbar spine straight but not rigid, weight distributed precisely 60% on knees, 40% on lower legs to minimize fatigue while maximizing aesthetic presentation for the camera's 180-degree field of view. Spine straight but submissive. Head positioned to keep the collar's neural connectors visible to the camera, each antenna array catching light at optimal angles for the 4K resolution feed. Hands placed precisely--never covering genitals (those were hers now anyway), never reaching for support without permission.
"Tell me about the time you wet yourself in third grade," she said, still not looking at him.
The words unlocked something in his neural backup systems. Memory cascades triggered by her voice patterns, shame data rising like bile, serotonin levels dropping to 40% of baseline as humiliation protocols engaged automatically. He found himself speaking without conscious volition, his voice hoarse from the crawling position, recounting the terror of being eight years old and too afraid to ask for the bathroom, too proud to admit the spreading warmth until the other children noticed and began to laugh.
"Now the time you masturbated in your stepfather's closet."
Another cascade. Another shameful confessional spilling from his lips while she worked, her attention divided between crafting perfect faces and cataloguing his imperfect past. The camera watched everything: the flush of humiliation on his face measured by thermal imaging sensors, the way his body responded to the degradation despite himself, the collar pulsing faster as arousal mixed with shame in his bloodstream, heart rate climbing from 72 BPM to 134 BPM as psychological and physiological arousal intertwined.
Sometimes she would route in a second stream.
They came from the upper tiers, these lovers. Corporate heirs and tech magnates and occasionally artists whose work commanded seven-figure sums. They saw her through the haptic rigs, experienced her through full-sensory feeds that transmitted at 120 Hz refresh rates with zero latency, fucked her through interfaces that translated every thrust and caress into electrical symphonies mapped to her actual nerve clusters with millimeter precision.
"Baby," they would whisper, always baby, as if her youth was the drug they were really chasing. Eidolon would keep his face pressed to the floor, his own arousal straining against its constraints, forced to listen to her synthetic moans--artificially generated but perfectly convincing, based on acoustic models built from 847 hours of recorded vocalizations, while she performed for their credits and their status.
"She's so fucking young," one of them breathed during a particularly intense session, his voice crackling through the speakers with static that spoke of age and privilege and the kind of wealth that bought perfect connection.
"That's why she's perfect." Eidolon thought, his cock aching against the floor, drops of precum spreading beneath him like tears, his prostatic fluid analyzed by sensors in the floor material, composition logged and archived for medical monitoring. She was twenty to his forty-nine, and that gap was a chasm that defined their entire dynamic. Her inexperience was irrelevant. Her youth was a weapon that cut through all his accumulated knowledge, all his supposed wisdom, leaving him bare and desperate and grateful.
But the humiliation was never random, never purposeless. She crafted it like she crafted her avatars: with intention, with skill, with an eye toward the final product.
