Chapter 2

I got up bright and early the next morning, not sure if I was hoping to avoid Candi at the house or hoping to see her again. She wasn't around – or at least wasn't upstairs in the common areas – so I hustled out the door and drove straight to the office.

And found a stunning note from Dick Wallace on my chair. In it, he breezily announced that he had decided to switch up a few assignments and that he wanted me to cover ARMCON, the big trade show for defense contractors like Megacorp.

Actually, the biggest trade show for Megacorp and all our competitors, year-in year-out. For sales guys like Grossman, it was Carnegie Hall, Fenway Park, and Westminster Abbey all rolled up in one. The biggest stage, with the brightest lights; a place capable of anointing the chosen with untold fame and riches, but where failure brought ignominy, or worse.

Every time he went he spent the next several weeks – often the next several months – bragging to everyone who would listen about how many billions of dollars worth of contracts he signed at the show, and therefore how many sports cars and second homes "he" had bought for each Megacorp employee and shareholder.

Now, Grossman was an asshole, through and through, but he was also one hell of a salesman. By sending me instead of him, Wallace was essentially bringing the Grossman v. Hawkins competition to a head. It gave me a chance to step up and prove myself right, which was great, but it would take a truly Herculean effort to pull it off, which wasn't. The conference started the very next day – I would need to be on a plane that afternoon – so even despite my legitimate worries about the scale of this challenge, the chance to one-up Grossman was intoxicating.

Buoyed with this new opportunity, I went to see Vivian eager to share my big news and to get one last dose of confidence from the training program.

She was the only one in the HR offices when I got there, and she greeted me warmly when I knocked at her door.

"Hey big guy," she said with a big smile as she walked with me back towards some new, more elaborate treatment suites.

Damn, she looked good today. At least a couple too many buttons left undone on that blouse, allowing me a fabulous view of those gorgeous tits. And, though it was hard to be certain, even after a good hard stare, I had to wonder: was she even wearing a bra today?

"You're early, aren't you?" she asked.

"Yeah, I know," I replied, however, tearing my eyes from her chest and trying to play this cool. "You wouldn't believe how much I've got on my shoulders right now. I need to be on a plane by about four o'clock this afternoon, but I had to make sure and get a little training in before I leave town."

"Oh yeah, ARMCON, right? Well congrats, big guy, go knock 'em dead," Viv replied with a big smile. (Make no mistake: the HR people where you work know everything.) "In that case I'm glad you're in early. In fact, this is really better – we're not quite ready to roll out all the new systems to everyone just yet, but we've made so much progress with our in-house development that I'd love to show you how far we've come. I think you'll be quite happily surprised."

"Sounds good, but I hope you didn't change too much," I replied. Would hate to have to give up my afternoon hard-ons, I didn't add...

"No, it's fundamentally the same concept, but lately we've just made some huge strides in the development of both our hardware and our software. The whole system, really, is just much more focused and efficient. We had been evolving steadily but slowly for the last several design iterations, but some of Candi's ideas have led to some really revolutionar--"

"STOP," I practically shouted, "whose ideas?"

"Candi, John. You know, your housemate?"

"I know her name, Viv, I just frankly can't quite believe what you're telling me." I chose not to mention the incident with those heart-stopping pink panties from the night before, but instead focused on using my "tough guy big business executive" tone.

And yes, if I were to be candid, I would have admitted that at least part of my annoyance was about turf: whatever was going on with this system, especially if it was really going to turn into something meaningful it didn't belong in a backoffice department like HR, it belonged in Bio-Electronics. It belonged in my department.

But since I wasn't ready to be that candid, I kept the focus on Candi: "She's about six months out of grad school and you're letting her damn near redesign the whole system?"

"Wait John, you don't underst-"

"No, you wait," I said, stopping our walk and interrupting just like a big, tough, all-business guy, "I want our junior people to have as much opportunity to do real work as the next guy, but you're making it sound like this 'Candi' has damn near taken over your whole office. She's a trainee, Viv, and my point is that especially for someone as good as you are at management, you really seem to have made a stunning mistake in overempowering her like this. And if you're not careful that's going to bite you in the--"

"Shesagenius," Vivian blurted in a rush, cutting me off awkwardly. "No, literally, John," she continued, before I could respond, "a genius."

Vivian said all this with a practically infatuated flush. The thought crossed my mind as to whether there was more going on between Candi and Vivian than just work. Which, upon another glance at Vivian's bountiful cleavage and a mental review of Candi's high, firm little tits, was a not at all unappealing thought.

While I mulled those possibilities, Viv started walking again, and continued, "She's worked here for three weeks and she already knows more about our system than I do. She's made more progress in the last four days than the rest of us had accomplished in the last three months. She wrote feedback loops the other night that increased retention 36 percent; the best improvements from our last round of iterations were measured in tenths of a percent.

"Last week, she just kind announced in passing that one of our problems was the effective bandwidth available through our hardware, since we had been pushing most of our data through the optic nerve. We all more or less laughed at her, since we couldn't even imagine running out of bandwidth through that channel unless we were moving more information per session than most people process in a month.

"Now we've got six people evaluating four of her proposals on connecting erotic response and obedience in parallel, through a constellation of inputs hardwired directly between the frontal lobes. She's like a savant with this stuff, John. We'd have to be fools not to give her all the running room she wants."

"Wait, back up, Viv, connecting what kind of response?"

"Oh, John. I'm pretty sure you heard me."

Silence.

"Come on John, you and I go back a little too far for you to play dumb with me. Are you really going to pretend not to have realized this yet?"

More silence.

"Human Resources is all about motivating people, right? Well if you ever come up with something more motivating to the human race than sex drive, by all means, please shoot me a memo on it. Besides, you're about a month into the program, and I sure haven't heard you complaining."

She had me there.

"Now look," she continued, "I'm willing to discuss all this in as much depth as you want if you've suddenly discovered a deep interest in the science behind it, but five minutes ago you had a plane to catch. Assuming you still do, we're going to get crunched for time. So get on in here, sit back, and let's get you hooked up."

Whatever, I thought, still not really satisfied, but also faced with a small conflict of interest. This ARMCON trip was going to be the make-or-break opportunity of my career, and if Viv's training sessions could help me go into it like a master of the universe I figured I would debate staffing and corporate ethics with her a little later. And far be it from me to get prudish about anything having to do with "erotic response."

"So OK," she said, pulling out stirrups as I walked up to the training chair. "Go ahead and slip your pants and your shorts down and then hop up here."

"Sorry?" I asked. "Slip what down?"

"Your pants, dummy. Look, if you want just climb up here and I'll take care of the rest."

A little stunned, and at least a little bit intrigued, I glanced around the empty room. No one around besides Vivian, I figured, and since she had sure seen (not to mention sucked, and fucked) it all a few dozen times before, I just kicked off my shoes, opened my belt, and the fly on my trousers and slipped everything below the waist right down and off. My dick, never one to pass up a party, was already rising to the occasion.

"That's it, big guy," Vivian added with a wink after eyeing me over, "go ahead and lean back and I'll finish getting you prepped."

She slipped a new headset over my ears and eyes, much smaller than the previous version, and flipped a small switch on the side. The unit popped into life, and immediately bathed me in kind of a static-y, grey deluge of sight and sound.

It was overpowering, and instantly took me straight from wide awake to the edge of a trance, but as I teetered on the brink I could vaguely feel Vivian stroking something slippery and cool up and down the crack of my ass.

"Wai ... Whaaa's tha?" I asked dimly, my head lolling as I tried to hold it up to get a better look.

"Shhhhhh," she replied, soothing me as she used two fingers to spread a large dollop of slickness, and sexheat, right across my anus and deep inside. "Just breathe deeply and relax."

The deep breathing was a problem, for a second, as each thrust of those hotly probing fingers seemed to push more and more air out of my lungs. And push more and more blood into my dick, the deeper they ventured inside me. My breath caught again as Vivian used the same hand to spread lube across the tip of a menacing black-colored buttplug, and then nudge the tip just into the tight pucker at the center of my ass. My iron-hard cock was the elephant in the room, seemingly disregarded by both Vivian and myself despite all eight inches standing straight up, all twitchy and drippy.

After a minute I kind of caught up to all the sensation, and my breathing leveled out to nice, long deep breaths as Viv fed the rest of that warm, firm dildo into my ass. Occasional low moans accompanied each deep breath, especially when Vivian clicked the vibrator into life, with a nice, low, soothing hum.

The relaxation followed the breathing. As this tidal wave of sensory overload mellowed out, I gratefully fell back into a warm cocoon, my whole being made all tranquil and docile by the soothing rhythms of the headset and the assplug.

Then the training program kicked in, and I joyously began the process, still basically similar but yet so much more vivid than all the prior times I'd done it. Now I didn't just hear questions and see choices; I was just subsumed into visions and transports of sensation all so powerful and engrossing. Like the man once said, I heard angel trumpets and devil trombones, all proper. "Like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now," as I slooshied among the lovely pictures.

This time, unlike before, I was deep in the grip of the training program right from the jump. "Obey," I gasped, joyfully. "Submit. Tits. Hips. Worship. Pussy. Obey."

My cock twitched harder with each response, each throb adding to the thin line of precum drooling down the shaft from the slit at the top. "OBEY!" I groaned again, this time with gusto.

It was heaven.

Shuddering back to consciousness (hours later? weeks? months?), I found Vivian seated between my open legs, with my cockhead buried deep at the back of her throat. She hummed a little as she fellated me, the pressure in my balls already at war emergency levels. The orgasm I was headed towards portended to be epic, and yet each passing second left me agonizing, no further away and yet no closer to all that bliss.

Viv smirked at me a little when she noticed me noticing her, but - incredibly - neither that smoldering glance nor the long, slow lick that accompanied it, from the base of my balls to the tip of my cock, sent me over the edge.

In fact, somehow, moment after each excruciating moment kept passing without bringing me either the relief of a step back from the precipice, or the release of the leap and the ecstasy of the plummet back to earth.

"Oh hi babe," she said coolly from behind the tip of my dick, "hope you don't mind that I helped myself - you always have had such a beautiful cock." When she leaned back to talk to me I could see that she had opened all the remaining buttons on her blouse; and while the shirt technically remained on, it certainly didn't cover her huge, gorgeous breasts as much as it framed them.

Incapable of speech, I just stammered out a long moan.

"Yeah, I know," she said, "you really need to come, don't you." She cupped my balls with one hand as she hotly stroked the other up and down my hard, wet cock.