CHAPTER 3: Expansion
Confidence was a frequency, and Viressa had learned to broadcast it like a radio tower.
She no longer questioned her youth. Twenty was not a limitation--it was a blade. Fresh neural pathways, uncorrupted by compromise, unslowed by the accumulated scar tissue of disappointment. When she moved through the underground forums, her age preceded her like a signature scent, intoxicating and dangerous.
The city was beginning to notice.
Viressa had moved beyond mere identity forgery into something approaching art. Her avatars didn't just fool cameras. They rewrote the observer's assumptions about reality itself, using advanced neural perception hacking that bypassed conscious analysis entirely, targeting the limbic system through micro-expressions calibrated to trigger primal recognition patterns. Corporate executives used her faces to attend board meetings while fucking androgyne prostitutes in off-the-books pleasure houses. Politicians employed her voices to deliver speeches while their real mouths whispered sweet violations into the ears of constituents' daughters.
But it was the submission work that set her apart. Word travelled through encrypted channels about the girl on Tier-13 who could make grown men kneel through interface alone. Not through coercion or blackmail, but through something more subtle--a kind of digital charisma that reached through fibre optic cables and rewired the fundamental architecture of control, exploiting vulnerabilities in the anterior cingulate cortex that governed social dominance hierarchies.
The offer came through a cut-out proxy, seven layers of identity obfuscation that eventually traced back to Xerion Labs, a Tier-4 AI development consortium. She was twenty. No degree, no formal training, no corporate credentials. Just a reputation and a demonstration reel that made their senior architects salivate.
Data-immersion internship, the contract read. Specialist in identity architectures and behavioral modification protocols.
She accepted without hesitation.
What she didn't tell them (what she didn't need to tell them) was about Eidolon. He wasn't her assistant, her partner, her support system. He was her submission node, her root folder of obedience. The base-level code on which she had built her empire of control.
The orgasm protocols had evolved into something approaching ritual.
Monthly resets happened automatically, his neural collar interfacing with her biometric scanners to create a quantum-locked credit system. His arousal was tracked, measured, graphed across time like a financial instrument. Dopamine levels, oxytocin concentrations, prostatic pressure measurements logged at 0.1-second intervals. Every spike registered through piezoelectric sensors, every plateau monitored by thermal imaging arrays, every edge mapped with scientific precision using neural oscillation patterns in the gamma range (25-100 Hz).
On the twentieth of each month--her birthday, real or artificial--the reset occurred. His accumulated arousal data zeroed out. His release permissions returned to binary zero. And then the games began.
She called them cum-flag ceremonies. Eidolon would be positioned in the centre of the room, naked, collar gleaming under the omnipresent glow of surveillance. She would command him to edge; that specific torment of approaching orgasm without crossing the threshold. His body would betray him with pre-cum, sweat, trembling. His cock would leak like a broken faucet while his brain screamed for resolution.
And she would watch, sometimes working on other projects, occasionally bringing lovers to witness the spectacle. She would edge him for hours, days, until his entire existence narrowed to the space between pleasure and release, until the only reality was her voice guiding him to the precipice again and again without letting him fall.
When she finally granted permission, biometric scan confirmed through retinal and vocal pattern verification, voice-print verified against a database of 10,000 previous commands, collar synchronization complete with zero packet loss, his orgasm would detonate through his nervous system like localized nuclear fusion, every parasympathetic nerve firing simultaneously, generating measured peaks of 2,847 units of electrical activity across his neural grid. Every synapse firing at once, every pain pathway temporarily rewired for pleasure through endorphin cascades exceeding 400% of baseline, every shame response converted to euphoria via precise manipulation of his reward circuitry.
But permission came only for her victories.
A new contract with Tier-8 clients. Cum. A successful identity forge that earned six figures. Cum. Breaking a rival's security systems and stealing their client list. Cum. Fucking someone who had previously been untouchable, unavailable, above her station. Cum.
"I'm letting you cum because I got fucked better this week than I ever have," she said one night, her voice lazy with satisfaction while she idly stroked his collar's interface. "Isn't that nice?"
She had been with a Tier-3 executive's daughter. Barely eighteen, privately schooled, with skin like virtual porcelain and a submission reflex trained by the finest tutors money could buy, her responses calibrated through years of behavioral conditioning using positive reinforcement protocols that had shaped her neural architecture for perfect malleability. The session had lasted twelve hours, streamed to select audiences, generating enough revenue to buy a larger space on Tier-12.
Eidolon's orgasm, when it came, was almost religious. His back arched like a bow, cum painting the floor in arcs that were immediately documented by the camera system--trajectory analysis calculating precise velocity (3.2 m/s), volume measurements (7.3 ml above average), viscosity readings indicating optimal seminal health. She saved the biometric data. The exact pattern of his neural firing frequency (47 Hz sustained gamma oscillation), the specific cocktail of hormones (prolactin spike of 340% above baseline), the precise muscular contractions recorded by embedded pressure sensors, all archived for later analysis and potential replication.
The Xerion Labs job opened doors she hadn't even known existed.
Her first week, they put her through standard evaluation protocols. Written tests, behavioural assessments, skill demonstrations that she passed with the kind of easy competence that made senior staff suspicious. They gave her a small project: create an avatar for a client extraction operation. The target was a cognitive scientist who had developed inconvenient moral objections to the company's neural implant research.
