Corporate Slave

Chapter Three-1

Chapter Three

The Dress was tiny. Properly speaking it wasn’t even a dress, just a long roll of material mostly not much wider than a bandage. She had to spend time studying the instruction booklet that came with it.

The booklet showed four ways to wear it. Cassie chose the fourth one. She found the middle and draped the material around her neck, making the beginnings of a halter top. The lengths crossed over to cover and support her breasts, then wound around her body a couple of times. When they came to the front, both lengths fed between her legs, and looped at the back over a couple of the windings that had gone around her waist. That left her with two lengths falling at the back to the level of her knees. But the trick was this: those two lengths seemed to stick together to form a seam, and were stretchy enough to pull round to the front again. When she pulled them, Cassie discovered they became a tight, ass-hugging micro-skirt that was fixed at the front because those edges, too, flowed into each other and joined up.

It felt teensy, tight, stretchy and flesh-baring. Exactly the kind of thing for going to The Club.

The instruction book said that after three or four minutes, the Dress would take power from the electrical conductivity of the wearer’s skin. Then it would start up automatically and the function menu would appear.

Huh?

But then there it was, the menu, silver and gold, on the front of her right thigh so Cassie could sit and study it. The Dress was so much more than just an item of clothing. Circuits within the fabric made it a computer in its own right, able to scan radio frequencies, send and receive messages and net pages, and run a bunch of programs that she wasn’t familiar with. In addition, the fabric itself could change strength, flexibility and insulation properties. It could, for example, change color depending on emotion. Not emotion, exactly, but the skin’s electrical conductance, which was analyzed and broken down into five basic states—calm, happy, frustrated, aroused, excited. The menu warned these weren’t exact and could vary according to the wearer, so they should only be used for their amusement value.

It also stated: Please note: under extreme circumstances the material may become transparent.

She left most of the Dress’s settings on automatic. There wasn’t time to go through them all, because she had other plans.

The Club.

She was curious, though, about what had happened to Lorne. They’d been friends. Not lovers, not often anyway. But close, supportive of each other. They’d auditioned for their jobs at the same time, met in the alley at the back of the store, then been called to the manager’s cubbyhole of an office. “You know what the job’s about,” he’d said. “You want to work here, show me you can flash the gash.”

He’d been fair, not tried to pull any tricks on them. Cassie had half-expected he’d get them naked and then say he’d only employ the one that could suck him off fastest. It turned out he was just an ordinary guy trying to get through his day with the minimum of hassle. He didn’t ask for it, but because he’s been cool with them, they’d given him a double-header blowjob in gratitude.

They’d shared food. Hell, they’d lent each other money—and even paid it back, a rarity these days. It was that sense of sistership driving Cassie to find out if Lorne was OK. It wouldn’t hurt to swing by her place on the way to The Club.

She pushed at the door. It swung loosely on broken hinges.

Not a good sign.

Light from the corridor spilled in, showing Cassie the smashed furniture and clothes strewn across the floor.

It could have been anyone. Public security? Corrupt as hell in this city, just another organized crime racket. Cassie had her own stories to tell about that. But if Lorne had been in trouble she’d kept it a secret.

Dealers or enforcers? Same story. Hand-in-hand with the police for the most part, anyway, but as far as she knew Lorne didn’t use anything more serious than the occasional hit of dreamcrazy, and didn’t deal.

An old boyfriend? She’d never said anything about trouble with exes.

An old debt was the most likely scenario. Ever since the Debt Recovery and Labor Act, kidnappings had been rising. The Act had meant when old debts were sold to debt recovery companies they could get court judgments without informing you, and the judgment gave them powers to take you into “indentured labor custody”. Or, as most people thought of it, they could kidnap you.

There were supposed to be safeguards, especially about making sure they got the right people and that there really was work for people to do to pay off the debt. But the companies, of course, played fast and loose with the rules when they even bothered to follow them. And because they didn’t have their own “indentured labor facilities” they mostly just sold their victims on to places that, whatever fancy names they had, were no more than private prisons.

And beyond that, there was loose talk, seditious talk, about how the people being kidnapped weren’t just debtors. It was a backdoor way to hold dissidents, rebels, without officially calling them that. The authorities didn’t even have to hold them on suspicion of any actual crime. A corporation could just issue a backdated invoice for some spurious service, get a warrant and pass it to their “debt recovery” people.

Cassie’s best guess was that when Luke was watching the webcast, what he was really watching was people kidnapped as suspected dissidents. They were being held in the “indentured labor facilities” and the tortures they went through were just a way of having them earn their keep. They were literally being put through hell to earn a meal, if indeed they got fed at all.

There wasn’t anything more to see. There wasn’t anything more to do. If Lorne had been kidnapped it would be impossible to find her, dangerous to even try. And for what? Cassie certainly didn’t have the kind of money that would spring her from custody.

Strange sensations at the back of her neck, as though the Dress was buzzing.

It was. Cassie stopped, wondering what it was about. When she looked down, a dialog box popped up on the skirt to tell her “electronic surveillance detected”. She frowned, wondering what that was supposed to mean: whose surveillance, and why? She pressed the fabric next to the dialog box and got a menu: communicate with surveillance device, make invisible, evasive action, countermeasures. She tried evasive action and the dialog box changed to a schematic of the building. She was at the center, a flashing arrow suggesting the direction she should move in, which appeared to be a stairwell. A red dot was at one side of the screen. It wasn’t moving and she was thankful for that, until she worked out that it occupied a space that in reality was a lift shaft.

Thoughts in Cassie’s head: friend or foe, flee or fight?

The thoughts were still in her head when an arm folded itself round her neck and pulled her backwards through an apartment door.

“You don’t want to know,” he said. “If you’re involved, they’ll be coming after you.”

“But they already came after me!”

He smiled tightly. “Yeah, but they didn’t know it was you—it was just that they’d left a remote sensor and something triggered it. Could have been a pigeon coming in through the window. A moth or fly, even, if it settled directly on the sensor. They wouldn’t have known the score.”

Cassie looked doubtful. “Just a sensor? Not a picture of me?”

“Your Dress told you what kind of surveillance it was.” Nat fumbled with her thigh, manipulating the screen. “Look here: device type equals infrared motion sensor, it says.”

Cassie took note of this, also of the fact Nat’s hand was pressing on her thigh.

Nat was the guy she’d seen at the convenience store, the one who’d put his hand on the glass of the cubicle, against her own hand. In this environment he didn’t look scruffy; he just looked of a piece with the whole broken-down ambience of the room and a hell of a lot tidier than the entrance to the block and the winos and druggies who inhabited it.

He had, he’d explained, taken a risk in coming to the store—but he’d wanted to eyeball her, because Lorne had talked about her and he’d figured she’d be the one to come looking after she disappeared. He hadn’t been able to save Lorne, but he could at least deal with the fallout. Cassie, weirdly, was the one he could protect.

“So what happens next?”

Nat looked at her, almost speculatively. “Sooner or later they’ll decide the sensor was set off by something random—maybe just by a drunk staggering against the door. Then it’ll be safe to go, and I can get you out of the building without being seen.”

It made sense.

“You’re sure I’m safe here?”

“Safe from everything except me.” He waved a hand at a table on the other side of the room, littered with electronic gear she couldn’t put a name or a use to. “That stuff keeps out any electronic intrusion you can think of. As far as anyone’s concerned, the place is unoccupied.”

“So while we’re waiting…?”

That look again. The same direct eye contact she remembered from the store, earlier.

“When I saw you in that cubicle I thought you danced extremely well. And stripped well, too.”

Cassie laughed. “And if I don’t want to do that…?”

“Well, then I’d probably end up telling you what really happened to Lorne. And that would be guilty knowledge. If they knew you knew, they’d want to find you and kidnap you too. That would put me in danger, so I’d be forced to keep you here as a prisoner.” He said it lightly but a serious undercurrent flowed through his words. He was involved in some heavy s**t and wanted her to know it.

There was no music. There wasn’t anything in the room, really, apart from the electronics, a couple of chairs and a mattress. But that didn’t stop her dancing.

Or stripping.

Or…

It was surprisingly difficult to get him erect. Like his mind was elsewhere, jumping around with thoughts of—what? Crime? Espionage? Revolution?

“So what did you enjoy doing to Lorne? And what did she enjoy?” A wild guess, there, because they might not have had a f**k-relationship. But here was a flicker of interest in his c**k…

“You know, I don’t think everyone enjoys the same things she did.”

Cassie used her wide-eyed, innocent look. It was a look she was good at. Sometimes it got her out of the wrong kind of trouble, but mostly it got her into the right kind.

In this case, the right kind meant hands tied behind her back with some electrical cable. And not just hands. Cassie was flexible; she could put her elbows together behind her back, and the cable kept them that way. His belt across her buttocks was painful in the pleasurable way that pain could be when she felt she needed it. It was enough sensation to make her squeak, not so much that she yelped or screamed. So far as she was concerned, he was just being playful.

And then he was large, and he was inside her. Which was to say, he was in her mouth and working the head of his c**k firmly into position halfway down her throat.

She didn’t make a habit of being tied up by random strangers. f****d by them, yes, but not tied up. Normally that was something that happened with people she knew. People she’d known for longer than a few hours, anyway. She’d heard people say bondage used to be a big deal, weird and fetishistic. Not in her lifetime, though, and not in her life. But then a lot of things older people said used to be weird, like the whole shop assistant gig, were just normal these days. Just like a lot of things that were once-upon-a-time normal, like a regular job that paid a salary, or couples living together in a house they owned, sounded like fantastic fairy stories.

Cassie wasn’t in a position to think clearly, but that didn’t stop her having random images and associations in her head. Firstly, that it was strange that men wanted her to “flash the gash”, as the store manager had put it, but f**k her mouth. It was a cultural thing, someone had once said to her. Someone had made a film once about a woman with a clit in her throat. After that, it was the only type of s*x man wanted. Secondly, that since she didn’t have a clit in her throat, how come it was usually down to her to bring herself off? It just seemed unfair, unequal. Thirdly, since this was strictly a one-off fun-f**k, she was going to get that c**k in her p***y no matter what, and the flex around her arms wasn’t going to stop her.

She opened her mouth wider, allowed her throat muscles to slacken off, allowed herself to drool. Nat was holding the back of her neck, giving himself leverage to insert his c**k further and faster, but Cassie began to relax against the hand to make him do more of the work while shifting the angle just enough to change his comfort level.

Nat snarled faintly, moved away and used the pressure on her neck to guide Cassie down to the mattress. She ended up with knees spread wide and her forehead down on the fabric as the third point of balance. This, of course, presented her ass to Nat as a perfect target, and one he took full advantage of. Again. This time he didn’t hold back with the belt, leaving hot streaks of pain across her ass cheeks. This time she did yelp. The mattress probably absorbed most of the sound, though Cassie’s yowls sounded loud in her own ears.

The electronic counter-surveillance had better be good.

Her buttocks felt like they were burning, and then his fingers trailed across it, cool. They made their way to the inside of her thighs, stroked the material of the Dress which also, with the way she’d tied it between her legs, worked as an undergarment. His fingernails scratched gently, setting up an insistent vibration that communicated itself straight to her clit. They pushed the material to one side, exposing labia warmed and made slippery with her own juices.

She felt dirty-greasy, captured and forced. But in a good way. A good way that would be even better if…

On cue, she felt the head of his c**k rubbing against her, parting the lips, using the lubrication of her p***y and her own saliva, working its way into her. Despite the length of time he’d taken to get erect, Nat was now as stiff and long as a… she couldn’t think of a comparison, but size-wise he was right up there. And on her knees, with him taking her from behind, he could go deep. Did go deep, forcing air from her lungs in response. Cassie felt his movements, his thrusts, as if they were still deep-throating her—but from her p***y, not her mouth.

She went with the texture, the smoothness of it and the roughness of it, feeling the familiar spasms and sparks from labia to G-spot and from there reaching out into an ever-denser network of pleasure that encompassed her and then turned in on itself. By that point she no longer even felt she was in her body. Somehow it was in her, she was mashed to a pulp, and her brain simply wasn’t in the right gear to understand that this was an orgasm until afterwards, when she’d pitched forwards, half-on and half-off the mattress, Nat pressing on her shoulders, breathing harshly in her ear but no longer pumping inside her.

They rested that way for what seemed like hours. Cassie finally stirred, shuffling her shoulders to get Nat’s attention.

“That was good,” she murmured finally. “I was in a completely different headspace there for a while.”

“Mmm…” He rolled off her and relaxed, still semi-conscious, spaced out. She wondered if he’d f****d anyone at all for a while. Maybe whatever heavy s**t he was into meant he didn’t, or couldn’t, have s*x. It happened sometimes. She remembered Marnie, back at the store, talking about soldiers. Marnie liked soldiers, and when they came back from the war they were horny as hell—but the things they’d seen in the war were things no one should have to see, the things they’d done were things no sane person should be expected to do. Most of them came back hooked on one or several of the old-style street drugs, and what played out in their heads when they were having s*x was stuff most women wouldn’t tolerate. And despite being horny, a lot of them couldn’t climax properly. Marnie seemed to have something special about her they could relate to, though Cassie couldn’t even guess what it was—and didn’t think she’d want to know, anyway.

And the even weirder thing? No one seemed to know who the solders were fighting, or why. Mostly, as far as Cassie could gather from Marnie, the soldiers didn’t know either.

She sighed and started work on the knots. Electrical cable didn’t take knots well, so her “bondage” had been more symbolic than real. It didn’t take long to get out of—a couple of minutes of twisting and pulling on the flex meant she could free her hands. The rest of it just unwound and fell loose as she wriggled.

Half an hour later Nat was conducting her though an old service tunnel. He’d finally come round, but insisted on playing with the Dress. Not with the material and the way it fell across her body, but with its non-clothing functionality. He’d tried to program it in some way that wasn’t clear to her, but whatever he’d done didn’t seem to affect any of the menus she knew about.

“These old buildings,” he explained as they walked, “have been remodeled and retrofitted so many times there are always dead spaces in the walls, tunnels and ducts that run out all over the place. If you know the layout it’s faster to get around through those than it is on the streets.”

He gripped her arm and pointed to a faint light in the distance. “Down there is a doorway that leads out into a public footway, a pedestrian underpass that runs under 163rd and 12th. Just don’t scare anyone by jumping out as they go past, and make sure you leave it looking closed.”

She nodded and set off towards the light, high heels picking their way over old fast-food wrappers. Near the light—an emergency light, set in the ceiling—was a battered metal door.

And then she was out into the underpass. Within a hundred yards or so she’d melted into the throng of people out shopping, drinking, getting drunk, or looking for a good time. It was a warm night, and the only things that obviously set Cassie apart from any of the other women on the street were the marks from the electrical cable where it had cinched her arms together. And the warmth between her thighs and the residual feeling of absence of c**k.

She had a choice.

It had already been a busy night, and a disturbing one. Lorne kidnapped, evidently, some kind of surveillance that could have picked her up if the Dress hadn’t warned her and Nat hadn’t dragged her into his apartment. Bondage and s*x. Cassie felt jazzed, not quite able to process what had happened to her.

Maybe she should just go home.

On the other hand, the whole point of giving Ben his blowjob had been to get the Dress, and the point of getting it had been to wear for a night out.

So maybe a few hours of dancing, a couple of quick f***s, and a couple hours sleep before work would put her right. Especially, it would satisfy that ache that came from having been f****d and yet needing more.

She didn’t bother to pick up any dreamcrazy. The adrenaline in her system would do. She didn’t need contraceptives or s*x protection, because like most people these days, her subdermal implants dealt with that stuff. The store sold them off the shelf right along with the s*x toys and they came with their own applicator.

She set off in the direction of The Club.