Chapter One

 

Wren's fingers waggled above the keyboard as lines of code appeared before her eyes in the holoprojector. She paused here and there to examine one portion, then either backspaced to retype it or continued on as soft music played in the background.

She finished and lowered her hands, eyes skimming the code which floated in mid-air above the desk. This, she thought, ought to address the problem. And if not, well, it was worth a try, and would shut off one avenue of exploration.

"It's getting late, Wren."

She chewed her lower lip and turned away from the desk, blinking in surprise as she saw it was dark out. The floor to ceiling, wall to wall screen showed the lights of downtown Manhattan aglow in the night.

She looked down at the 300^th floor of the Kayasoma building and the other skyscrapers crowded around it and yawned. It was getting late.

"I finished anyway," she said. "You want to have a look?"

"There are no obvious bugs," Daemon said. "That does not mean it will satisfy the client, of course."

She snorted. But then, one of the reasons she was paid for this was that writing porn software was not really something the AIs did very well. It was also not something skilled software engineers had a lot of interest in - at least professionally. It certainly wasn't something you wanted to tell your family about.

She glanced again at the lines of code floating over the desk, then waved her hand. The code, and the keyboard, disappeared from view as the holographic program shut down.

"Send it to them and give me the beach," she said.

The view shifted instantly. Now it looked like her apartment was on the ground floor of a Hawaiian estate, looking out at a white sandy beach, palm trees swaying in the breeze, and waves washing ashore. The muted sounds of the city coming through the closed 'window' were replaced by the muted sound of waves and birds on a bright sunny day. Hawaii was five hours behind New York, after all.

"Number 4 dinner, Daemon," she said.

"Nine minutes," he replied.

"Open the window," she said.

Now the 'glass' slid aside and the sounds became much more audible as a wave of fresh ocean scented air spilled into the room. The image was so perfect it looked like she could simply get up and walk right out onto the beach.

Not damned likely. You had to be rich or a servant of the rich to get into Hawaii these days. Her pay rate was higher than most, but that didn't make her rich, nor anywhere near.

She turned back to the desk and brought up the news and entertainment menu. Her eyes moved through the top items Daemon had selected for her. Her finger pointed briefly at each in turn, then flicked the menu closed. On the other wall screen, the news came on. The CGI newscaster, resembling a Greek God in a suit, sat smiling warmly at her, waiting.

She watched the headlines scroll up. The moment her eyes lingered he started to speak in his warm, calm, friendly voice, reading the news which corresponded to what she had paused on.

He? Don't personalize, she thought. It.

The newsreader wasn't a real person, after all, but a computer-generated image.

First were images of riots in Brooklyn where the Puerto Ricans fought it out with the Haitians. Then a story of a large terrorist explosion in Queens which had destroyed a robot factory. There was a report of the delays at the bridges and tunnels as State Security tightened up inspections again. Then political discontent as the politicians fought over raising the basic income stipend.

The Democrats argued that the BIS wasn't enough to give people a meaningful life while the Republicans argued that too high a BIS caused people to drop out of the workforce.

Which made her snort in amusement. It was AI and computers which were pushing people out of the workforce. Only about a third of people were employed at anything these days. And if her work came to fruition she'd even put the prostitutes out of a job.

She glanced at the package in the corner. The newest iteration of the body sheath had arrived from Chiyan Corp just this morning. It was supposed to be even more advanced in terms of tactile sensory realism, incorporating nanobots.

Her work was on the developmental enhancement of sexual entertainment media. But it wasn't cutting edge. Those were the people working on projects which would someday be able to plug directly into the cerebral cortex to directly control the senses.

But that was medware stuff. Not in her zone. And as far as she knew it would be at least a decade before that sort of stuff hit the streets, especially for the masses.

"Dinner, Wren."

Daemon's mechanical rolled across from the kitchenette carrying a tray with a hot bowl of chicken ramen and Wren began to eat as she flicked through other headlines. Various wars in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia were continuing.

The Muslim Caliphate and the Hindutva war was in its third year. The Caliphate continued to insist that polytheism was an offense against Allah. The Indians had better mil-spec, and their killbots and drones tended to slaughter their Caliphate counterparts fairly easily. The Caliphate refused to give up, though.

Africa had eighteen wars ongoing, but she bypassed that. Africa was a shitshow without resolution. Meanwhile, the Europeans continued work on the string of artificial whirlpools they were building across the Mediterranean in hopes of stopping further migration. The civil war in Sweden seemed to have ended with the last of the Muslims taking ship for the Caliphate but the French were still fighting it out.

She moved on to industry news and saw Sony had come out with a new sex robot that was super realistic. That was a dying industry, she thought. And she was helping kill it. Why have a robot for sex if you can do it online with artificial reality that had full sensory feedback?

Instead of having sex with some robot in your apartment, you can have sex with a sheik in his harem, or a king in his castle or a caring, sensitive lover in a sunswept meadow or before a crackling fireplace. The artificial reality was nearly perfect. All that remained was to get the sensory feedback down right.

"Your mother is calling."

She sighed, then glanced down. She was wearing a tank and scruffy shorts, neither all that clean.

"Focus head and shoulders only," she said.

The newscaster disappeared and her mother appeared on the screen.

"Wren, what are you up to?"

"I was working," she said.

"So late? Don't use it up or you'll wind up on the BIS."

"There's plenty of work to do, Mom."

Her mother looked a lot like Wren. A lot. She'd had facial enhancement laser treatments to make her look a lot younger than she was. The two could have been sisters rather than mother and daughter. Her mother had a better nose, courtesy of surgery, and had dyed her hair blonde while Wren remained a brunette. Wren was a lot more slender, though, despite the gym-work her mother put in.

"Your grandmother wants us to come to dinner Friday."

Wren made a face. "I hate Staten Island."

"It's a perfectly respectable housing project, with very little violence."

"And I hate her talking about how it was when she was young."

Her mother sighed. "You know Millennials, dear. They love to relive their youth."

"Fine. I'll be there."

Wren signed off and ran her fingers through her hair. Seeing her mother reminded her she needed to get some exercise or she'd turn into a blob. Well, she couldn't do it right after eating. But she made a mental note of it. She considered telling Daemon but didn't want him nagging.

She gave herself a mental slap for personalizing the AI. She could just tell it to shut the fuck up, after all.

"Remind me to exercise," she said.

"As soon as your food is digested," he - it - replied.

"Yes, mother," she snorted.

She brought up the menu to see what was happening in her social circle - such as it was, and checked her messages. Her cousin Sannia was rock climbing, the budgie sized drone standing off recording her as she made her way up a wall.

"Why?" Wren demanded. "What's the point!?"

Her friend Arabella was shopping - in an actual store - holding up this and that to the drone-bot as she chatted away. Maverick was... what the fuck was Maverick doing anyway? It looked like he was throwing rocks. Oh, he was at some sort of protest. Maybe the one in Brooklyn. Did he really think his ziplock on this wasn't going to get broken by the SS? What a dorp. He'd probably be arrested as soon as he got home.

She skipped through various other vids, some live, some recorded, of various people doing mostly uninteresting things. Her mother showed her gardening. Bleh.

"Incoming call from Silas Parker."

She made a face.

"Fine."

The screen was replaced with Silas Parker, her work manager at Cutting Edge People Power. Or at least, what he wanted her to think he looked like. She'd never met him in person, of course. She doubted he was as handsome as the video image she was seeing.

She was slouched on the sofa in her shorts and tank but his video feed would show her in business-wear sitting upright at her desk.

"Ms. Farrington," he said in a warm, pleasant, and thoroughly fake voice. "I was wondering how you were getting along with the Chiyan project."

"Fine," she said. "I've completed the rewrite of the interface bridge and sent it to them for inspection."

"And the suit? You've tried it out yet?"

She glared at him, knowing Daemon would remove the glare and show her face alert, attentive, and friendly.

"Not as yet," she said.

His face took on a sad look. "It is part of the contract, Ms. Farrington. They will be expecting a report. The development costs of the new suit were extraordinarily high."

"I'm sure they've had many testers so far," she replied.

"Of course, but they like to have input from a wide variety of people."

"Fine. I'll get to it."

"Soon," he said, his voice hardening slightly, his eyes doing the same.

"Of course."

He hung up and she gave the empty screen her middle finger. She was a coder, not a tester of sexual entertainment gear. That the requirement was part of the contract had made her uncomfortable from the start. And she suspected Parker was some lecherous middle-aged male who liked the thought of her using the latest sex gear to get off with. Well if he asked her for a report she'd simply tell him she'd submitted it to Chiyan.

This new suit was supposed to be extremely intimate. The last one could do a lot to make virtual reality sex seem realistic, like squeezing in on her breasts and buzzing like a vibrator over her pussy. The new one was supposed to be able to reshape itself, to stretch and harden its fabric, and essentially to penetrate her as if it was a man.

That was going more than a little too far for a coding contract as far as she was concerned! But the pay rate they were offering had been too high to turn down. Plus she had a good record at Cutting Edge and if you pissed off your manager there you'd find fewer contracts coming your way. There were lots of eager coders out there, after all, pursuing fewer and fewer jobs now that the AIs could code routine software.

She got up and padded across the room to examine the new sheath suit, then stripped off shorts and top and stepped into it.

It slid along her legs like a second skin and felt very much like one. She pulled it up over her hips and slid her hands into the arms, shrugging the suit up, then pulled the hood over her head and down over her face to fasten around her throat.

Every inch of her body was now covered by the sheath. It was surprisingly breathable, though, either through the mouth or the nose. She could see through the fabric, too. At least for the moment. She swept her hand over the desk to bring up the keyboard, then linked the suit into her home net as she walked to the VR box.

"All right. Let's give you a test," she said to herself after strapping the suit in.

She brought up the magic carpet ride. The blank walls, floor, and ceiling faded away. She sat down on the carpet which had appeared on the floor. It even felt like a soft carpet courtesy of textual modeling. She had it rise and zipped off a cliff, then was racing downward at a steep angle as the wind blew into her face. Below her, the 'carpet' was tilting down at an angle to add realism. The straps held her suit in place preventing her from sliding off. But she didn't feel any pressure from them through the suit.

The towers of New York appeared suddenly and the carpet leveled off at about two hundred feet or so, racing between them, zipping around them at an often steep angle as she turned. The display was very nearly real-time, so she could see the traffic below and see what was going on.

She zipped down Broadway to south Manhattan, then across the bridge to watch the riots for a bit. The crowds surged back and forth, screaming abuse at the police bots, who stood stolidly in rows, ignoring them. Occasionally they'd fire off tear gas or splat guns if people came too close.

Idiots, she thought. You couldn't really hurt a pol-bot without heavy weapons, and you sure couldn't push it aside. So what was the point? Just to get the story on the net? People were just bored, she figured. They needed her software.

Speaking of which... She brought up a menu and then shifted to the porn program. Why not give it a try since she was here?

The carpet turned back for Manhattan, slowed and rose for a better view. Now the city shimmered and the towers began to shrink. She hovered, watching as tower after tower disappeared, replaced with something smaller and older.

The city was going back in time.

Eventually, even the aircraft stopped flying as the city dropped back into the nineteenth century, then the eighteenth, then continued to sink back into time. The buildings turned to wood, and more and more greenery appeared. The last building disappeared and the carpet landed. She stood up and looked down at herself.

She was wearing (or so it appeared to her), a long, heavy dress and clunky shoes. She could feel rough ground under her feet as she walked. She knew the floor below her was moving in time to the program, much like a treadmill, that she was just walking in place, but it sure didn't feel that way.

She walked past flowers, bushes, and trees as she followed a dirt trail, wondering what was supposed to happen. She should have checked, she told herself. This particular program was only called "Dutch Girl Settler Meets Handsome Indian". It sounded like a typical enough sex fantasy to her.

Anyway, her software was guiding the interface with the suit, not the progress of a particular fantasy.

She was getting hot under the bright sun. Or at least, the suit was. Was that on purpose or a design flaw in the suit? She rounded a curve in the trail and there before her was a lovely pond. This would be an interesting test, she thought.

She stepped to the edge of the little pond, then kicked at the water. It felt like she was kicking at water!

"Stuns!" she said, which meant, approximately 'cool.'

She stripped off her 'clothes'. Her body was, of course, perfect.

Then again, it is anyway, she thought a little smugly.

She stepped further into the water, which cooled her down nicely and lapped around her thighs very realistically.

She dove forward and slid into the water. In the real world, of course, the straps attached to the suit kept her from diving flat onto the floor, suspending her in place. It didn't feel like it, though. The suit spread her weight out so it felt as if she was actually floating! The suit was doing some remarkable work!

"Excellent!" she said.

She turned on her back and floated, her bare breasts bobbing along the water. Everything was very realistic, including the feel of the cool water across her naked skin. The one exception, of course, was that she couldn't drown. Still, she could feel water splashing against her face as she moved.

She stood up and waded back to shore. She could feel her long dark hair heavy with water and reached back to wring it out.

And there was the handsome warrior brave, no doubt, she thought.

He stepped out from behind a bush, smirking at her. He was tall. The top of her head came to just below his shoulders. He was also broad of chest and shoulder, muscular and lithe.

She supposed she should pretend to be coy or something and try to cover her nudity, but she wasn't embarrassed in front of a software character.

He spoke, but she didn't understand the language. Was that deliberate or a flaw?

"Sorry. Don't speak barbarian," she said with a shrug.

His big hand swept out and caught her long hair, and she gasped as she felt an actual pull on her hair that made her scalp sting! It forced her head back as she brought her hands up against his chest! And she felt his chest against her hands and fingers!

"Hey! That hurts!" she gasped.

He chuckled throatily, then kissed her hard. She felt the pressure against her lips, against her mouth, and felt a sense of wonder at how great the nanobots were functioning. It felt like a man's lips were on hers! It felt like a muscular man's chest against her fingers and hands!

And it felt like a tongue sliding along her lips as he pulled her body in against his! Her breasts pillowed out against his chest, and she felt her nipples hardening as real excitement began to fill her.

His tongue eased into her mouth and she blinked in astonishment behind the mask. The suit must be able to extend itself inward through her open mouth too! That was fab! The nanobots could shift and stretch and bring pressure in at any point along the suit, but she hadn't really considered how far the material - covered in nanobots - could stretch.

This suit was truly next generation!

She moaned into his open mouth as the brave kissed her passionately, gasping as his hand slid up to cup and fondle her breast.

It felt so real!

He jerked back on her hair again and again she cried out.

"Shit! That hurts!"

But the warrior had bent her back and was now feasting at her breast! She moaned as his mouth closed around the center, his teeth digging into her soft flesh as he sucked and chewed! His tongue licked rapidly at her rigid nipple, and she felt it quivering in response, hot tendrils of excitement driving much deeper into her breast than his teeth!

He drew back and flung her onto the grass, then dropped to his knees. He seized her legs and yanked them up and apart, then dropped his mouth down onto her sex.

She giggled for a moment, thinking this was hardly historically accurate. Then again, the program wasn't made for that. It was made to excite.

And wow was it doing that! It felt like his tongue was whipping across her flesh with impossible speed! She shuddered and moaned as his hard fingers squeezed on her thighs, forcing her legs wider, and his tongue plunged into her body!

She opened her mouth in shock! It felt like a tongue inside her! None of the previous generations of suit could do that! Then again, they also couldn't move into her mouth. This one was amazing!

Just how far could it move, she thought, with a dawning sense of wonder. Previous generations of suits had required additional sexual toys to be more realistic. That included dildos which could be attached to movable arms to be pumped in and out.

She hadn't bothered this time because she was simply testing the suit. She hadn't intended for it to actually excite her to this degree!

Her entire body was flooded with heat as that tongue and mouth ravaged her pussy! He was sucking on her clitoris with powerful, rhythmic suction even as he thrust a finger deep inside her!

"Eeeee!" she cried as his finger was joined by a second!

"Holy Fuck! Oh my God!"

The two fingers felt so real as they pumped in and out! As he licked her Wren's upper body writhed and twisted and arched as pleasure and sexual heat built up inside her.

The orgasm exploded inside her and she cried out, losing herself to the pleasure and passion, arching and twisting wildly. Her hips bucked violently, but couldn't move against his powerful hold on her thighs, and her bare feet slapped and bounced on the ground!

He pulled back and flipped her onto her belly, then yanked her hips into the air.

Crack!

"Ah!" she gasped at what felt like a slap to her buttocks.

He spread her legs as her bare breasts were ground into the dirt. Then she felt him entering her. His cock was thick, pushing in against the mouth of her sex, slowly forcing her opening wider and wider before sinking into her hot, sopping pussy.

Oh my fucking God! she thought in amazement.

The cock pushed deeper and deeper. Then it began to move in and out, fucking her. She squealed and squeaked and cried out in startled excitement as the cock seemed to grow thicker and push deeper! It was hard to even remember this was just the suit and that she was in her VR booth!

It felt so real!

And he felt huge!