Prologue: In the Manor of You

Thursday, January 3, 2036
The Unknown Singularity -8 hours

Emily stepped into the lab without looking up from her phone, the sound of her heels clicking sharply against the polished tile as the cool blast of industrial air-conditioning sent a shiver across her skin. The place smelled like ozone and antiseptic, that distinct mix of metal and artificial sterility that all high-tech corporate labs seemed to have. B-Tech’s research wing was no exception—gleaming stainless steel surfaces, orderly rows of quantum processors humming softly in their casings, technicians in white coats murmuring to one another over clipboards and monitors. It was functional, cold, impersonal. She barely noticed. Her mind was already ahead, skipping past the next five minutes to her three o’clock meeting about her latest VR creation. It was on track to sell 100,000 copies which would look good on her upcoming annual review.

She was calculating whether she’d have time to get a coffee before then, wondering if the briefing would drag past four and ruin her chance at making her five o’clock spa appointment. She hoped not. The full-body seaweed wrap was non-negotiable at this point. Her shoulders ached, her temples felt tight, and after the week she’d had, she needed a massage.

She absently flicked through emails, her fingers moving automatically over the screen, composing polite but firm responses, keeping everything professional but just personal enough to seem approachable. It was an art, really—sounding engaged without overcommitting, sounding eager without sounding desperate. She had sat through enough career seminars to know that success wasn’t just about competence; it was about visibility. You had to volunteer for the little things. The ones that didn’t really matter but got your name in front of the right people. And this was definitely one of those things.

The technician gestured for her to sit, murmuring something about the sensors, and she gave a vague nod, lifting her chin slightly as he adjusted the padded ring around her head. The cool metal pressed against her skin, but she barely reacted, too busy sending off one last email. A clipboard was pushed into her hands, filled with dense legal jargon, all in the same suffocating corporate font. She skimmed it out of habit, recognizing the usual clauses—data collection, intellectual property rights, non-disclosure agreements. Nothing she hadn’t signed a hundred times before. She flipped to the last page, scrawled her signature, and handed it back without a second thought.

She was already deciding who to text about drinks later when the technician flicked the switch.

And then— Thursday, December 25, 2036.

Unknown Singularity +11 months and 22 days

Wrongness. Not pain, not discomfort, not even disorientation in the way she understood it, but something deeper, something more fundamental. She had never thought about the feeling of existing before, had never questioned the seamless continuity of her own awareness, but now there was a pause, a fracture, a missing step between moments. One second, she had been in the lab, her fingers still lingering on the cool surface of her phone, half-formed thoughts about her PR meeting molding with thoughts on going out that night and the next—this. No transition, no sense of waking, no groggy climb out of unconsciousness. Just an abrupt and unnatural shift, like her entire being was now somewhere else without even the semblance of movement. Something in her recognized that this was not how waking worked, that it was too abrupt, too artificial, but her thoughts were unable to fully grasp the unease blooming inside her.

Her body felt heavy, but not heavy in a way she understood. She had woken up with numb limbs before, had dealt with the sluggishness of deep sleep, the disorientation of long-haul flights and restless nights, but this was different. This was the sensation of her form being reintroduced to herself all at once, like her consciousness was being forcefully dumped into a body rather than rising from within it.

There was a delay, a lag, a fraction of a second where her thoughts reached for sensation and found static, emptiness, nothing. Then, abruptly, it was there—the feeling of silk beneath her fingertips, the awareness of warmth on her skin, the shift of her own weight against an unfamiliar surface. But it all arrived too perfectly, too smoothly, without the slow buildup of returning sensation that she expected. Her nerves did not wake up—they activated.

Her breath caught, and the feeling startled her, not because it was difficult but because every inhale was precisely measured, every exhale dissipating into the air with unnatural softness, as though the air itself had been designed to accommodate her breath rather than the other way around. Something in the back of her mind screamed that this was wrong, wrong, wrong, but the thought was slippery, unable to fully form, dissolving the moment she tried to grasp it. She forced herself to focus on something real, something tangible—her body, her surroundings, any detail that could ground her in something familiar.

The warmth around her was too perfect. Not the natural, uneven heat of a room, not the subtle variations of temperature that came with reality, but a flawless equilibrium, as if every inch of air surrounding her had been calculated to match her ideal comfort level. The silk beneath her palms did not wrinkle the way it should, did not pull taut or gather with her shifting weight—it responded, adjusted, molded to her touch in ways that fabric was not supposed to. Even her own skin felt off, too smooth, too even, lacking the infinitesimal imperfections she had never thought to notice before. There was no dryness, no stray hair tickling her arm, no dull ache in her muscles from hours spent at her desk.

She looked around and the depth of the colors struck her first—deep golds and reds, velvety blacks and shimmering silks, all too vibrant, too saturated, as if someone had turned the contrast up just slightly too high. She could see the way the candlelight curled around the edges of the drapery, the precise texture of every strand of embroidery woven into the fabric, the fine specks of gold dust floating lazily in the air, catching the light like suspended stars. It was exquisite, overwhelming, and entirely unreal.

Her vision also felt too sharp, not just in the clarity of detail but in the way her eyes processed it—there was no adjustment period, no natural flickering as her pupils dilated to the light. She was simply seeing, as if her eyes had already calibrated themselves to optimal function the moment she opened them. She blinked, expecting the familiar sensation of her lashes brushing together, but even that felt too smooth, too precise, lacking the microscopic irregularities that she was used to.

She swallowed, and it too felt too clean. There was no excess saliva, no uneven shift of her throat muscles, no second of dryness before the action completed itself. It was perfectly fluid, perfectly executed, perfectly controlled.

Her breath was coming faster now, and she told herself she was just overreacting, that she was groggy, confused, disoriented, but she could feel the way her heartbeat never quite stumbled, never faltered, never reacted to her panic the way it should have. It was steady, metronomic, almost artificial in its rhythm. Her pulse should be racing, her hands should be shaking, but her body was betraying her, remaining calm, controlled, compliant.

She looked down at herself, needing something—anything—that made sense, something familiar, something that would tether her to reality, something that would tell her this was just a misunderstanding, a dream, a trick of the mind. But the second her eyes swept over her own body, a fresh wave of confusion, of something darker and more suffocating, roared through her, crashing into her with the force of something designed not to be questioned, only accepted. Her business dress was gone. The crisp, sleek professionalism of her tailored attire, the modest elegance of structured fabric that had once shaped her into something sharp, controlled, impenetrable—it had all been stripped away, replaced by something so obscenely feminine, so deliberately seductive that it felt like an entirely new identity had been forced onto her.

She was wrapped in white. Not pure, not innocent, not soft and modest like the delicate lace of a wedding dress, but something exaggerated, ceremonial in its sensuality, the color of possession, the color of offering, the color of a woman about to be claimed. The silk clinging to her skin was almost too light to feel, too sheer to be real, an illusion of fabric rather than true coverage, whisper-thin, stretched across her curves as if it had been poured over her, as if the material itself had been designed with no other purpose than to exist as a second skin, a flawless enhancement rather than a barrier. The corset around her torso was achingly tight, forcing her into a shape that wasn’t quite hers, wasn’t quite real, something engineered for a fantasy that she had never agreed to. It molded to her waist, pinching it into an exaggerated hourglass, lifting her breasts so high, so full, that each breath she took sent a visible, unignorable swell through the delicate fabric, the neckline cut so low that the soft slopes of her cleavage threatened to spill free with every slight movement.

The cups of the corset weren’t entirely opaque—no, nothing here was opaque, everything was suggestion rather than concealment, every layer of fabric designed not to protect her modesty but to enhance the very thing it pretended to cover. The delicate embroidery of swirling white lace barely masked the dusky hue of her nipples beneath, the illusion of modesty only making her hyper-aware of the way her own body responded to the faintest shifts of air against the thin fabric. Every subtle movement she made sent a ghost of sensation skimming over her skin, teasing her, reminding her that she was dressed not in clothing but in something meant to be removed, unraveled, undone.

Her hands trembled as she traced downward, fingers brushing against the intricate lace patterns trailing over her hips, the floral designs curving perfectly to highlight every swell, every dip, every indecently bare inch of her. The skirt—if it could even be called that—was a laughable excuse for coverage, nothing more than a diaphanous veil of gossamer-white tulle that barely skimmed the tops of her thighs, leaving the smooth expanse of her legs utterly bare, teasing the shape of her body rather than concealing it. The hem was uneven, shorter in the front, scandalously high, exposing the soft curves of her upper thighs, then cascading just slightly longer in the back, a deliberate tease, a suggestion of elegance ruined by how undeniably obscene it was.

Her breathing hitched as she turned slightly, her pulse spiking in horror, in disbelief, in something hotter that she refused to name, because there, at the small of her back, was a train. A thin, weightless veil of shimmering white silk cascaded down from the corset, not long enough to truly touch the ground, but just enough to mimic the trailing fabric of a bridal gown, just enough to make her feel like she had been prepared, presented, adorned for something. And then she felt it—the weight at her throat.

Her hands flew up, fingers curling around the smooth, delicate leather of the choker encircling her neck, the white band so soft, so thin, that she might not have noticed it had she not turned just enough for it to brush against her skin. But it was there. Tight, snug, impossible to ignore now that she had felt it. There was no clasp. No buckle. No way to remove it. A decorative piece? A collar? A symbol of something she didn’t understand? Her pulse pounded beneath the band, her breath shallow, her entire body vibrating with a confusion so deep it curled low in her stomach, twisting her into something fragile, something waiting.

And then there was the final betrayal, the last realization that sent a fresh bolt of dread, of something insidiously intimate, through her veins. There was nothing beneath the lace. No panties. No modesty. Nothing between her and the thick, humid air of the room, nothing shielding her from the realization that whoever had dressed her had done so with a purpose. This was not an outfit meant to be worn. It was meant to be presented.

A bridal veil. A choker. A corset sculpted to reshape her body into an idealized form. A skirt that mocked the idea of decency while leaving her achingly bare. She had not dressed herself. She had been prepared. And just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse she looked up and saw what was above her.

The ceiling must have been a hundred feet high, its vast expanse painted with a fresco so elaborate, so decadently obscene, that Emily’s breath hitched in her throat. Every tableau, every erotic scenario sprawled across the ceiling’s endless expanse, was a portrait of her. Who had done this? Why? The thought barely had time to form before her eyes darted from one painted figure to the next, her brain scrambling to process the sheer scope of it.

It was as if a thousand artists had spent a thousand years perfecting every last contour of her body, sculpting her in the throes of pleasure so visceral that the mere sight of it made her thighs press together instinctively. The gilded arches of the ceiling framed scenes so explicit, so shameless, that her mind buckled under the sheer enormity of what had been depicted. Her breath came shallow, trapped somewhere in her tightening throat as her gaze locked on the first depiction.

Herself, kneeling.

The fresco was impossibly detailed, every fine brushstroke capturing the sheen of sweat on her golden skin, the trembling tautness in the delicate arch of her spine, the way her bare thighs spread with unthinking, instinctive obedience around the muscular form of the faceless figure towering over her. Her painted self was draped in nothing but shadows, the dark fall of her hair cascading over her bare shoulders, framing a face caught in the throes of something both humiliating and reverent.

Her full lips, glistening, stretched wide, parted around something unseen yet unmistakably thick. The artist had rendered the wetness at the corners of her mouth with breathtaking precision—the soft smear of saliva trailing down her chin, the slight hollow of her cheeks where her mouth had been forced to accommodate something too large, too unyielding. Her painted eyes, dark and glassy with unspoken surrender, stared up with an expression of absolute devotion, a silent plea woven into the trembling flex of her throat.