Chapter 11

February 25 2016:

<The True Master>

"What do you mean you found Beth?!" asked Tracy.

I pulled up the schematic on the computer, "I found out where the Company bases its operations in the City. She's apparently being used as the test subject for the newest variant of Doll, her and a dozen other people."

"Test subject!?" said Tracy her voice rising to such a level that I winced.

"If it makes you feel better all of this stuff is experimental!" I said.

Tracy turned to glare at me, Kate leaned over, "Not helping Master."

I nodded and continued, "The building where they are based had their servers slaved to back up to the facility that Jeremy got me access to. I essentially have access to everything but the most secure servers in the building. Those secure servers happen to be the research and they have the source code for the dolls so no joy on finding anything to help me deactivate your chips. It did give me the tracking database though."

Tracy blinked, "Tracking?" she asked.

I nodded, "The older model Dolls, like all of you for example don't have active tracking. You're supposed to ping the Company whenever you're plugged into one of the tablets so they can keep track of you that way. The newer model like Beth have actual GPS tracking."

I pointed at the small red dot representing her location inside the basement of the building she was in, her dot was clustered among a dozen other small red points.

Dr. Song frowned, "could you show us all of the Dolls, not just the new ones?"

I nodded and turned back to my computer, I had seen the raw data for this statistic already and it was not pretty.

It took my computer and the entirety of the server farm I had slaved to my process to sort through and plot the data. The map quickly expanded and flattened out showing the entire world.

A counter appeared at the bottom, and red dots slowly began to appear on the map.

Within moments most of the largely populated sections of the United States were covered, Europe, China, Russia, the Middle East, every continent save Antarctica had at a few. The counter on the bottom of the screen quickly tallied the active trackers, topping out at 22,894.

"They've been at this for a long time, and it's got to be an international effort," I said dejected.

They stared at the display for a long time, looking at all of the different dots representing another woman under the control of a chip. A few men too, the tracking data showed general statistics, although the women were by far the more popular choice.

"This is assuming that no one has done what I have as well, hacked into the dolls to figure out how they work and duplicated the process,"

"You think that's possible Master?" asked Kate speaking up for the first time.

I shrugged, "It's not impossible as I've proven, and this has to be a billion dollar market. You think competing crime syndicates are going to be content to let someone corner the market?" I asked.

Kate slowly shook her head.

"What about Beth? Can you hack her chip or something?" asked Tracy.

I hesitated, "The chips she has, and the programming inside of it are from what I can tell experimental, she's part of the first group they've tried them on, and hell she might have been the first. All of the data on its construction and protocols is stored offline in a non-networked server the data I have only referencing it. The new chip's designed to be in constant interface with a computer, to allow for more immediate and dramatic changes to the subjects programming."

I leaned back and pulled up the analysis of Kate's chip, "And I've only just started to understand how the programming in your chips works. Hers could be based off of it like an incremental upgrade or it could be a completely new framework, I have no idea."

Tracy was now glaring at me, and I sighed, "If I were able to get into it I have no idea what I would be able to do, I'm willing to bet I could hack into it but from there I have no idea what to do." I explained.

She stared at me for a moment looking like she was going to argue, but slowly nodded and backed away from me falling into one of the analysis chairs and put her head in her hands.

I blinked, considering the chairs for a moment as an idea struck me.

"What are we going to do to save her then?" asked Helen.

"I'm not sure, I need to test some things for now to figure out what might work," I hesitated for a moment, "We will be getting her back."

The three of them looked at me for a moment and I glanced over at the clock, it was nearly three in the morning and I was exhausted. I had been up working on getting into the Companies systems until Kate had come down to get me, and then we had woken everyone to tell them what I had found. I had gotten barely any sleep the night before and my head was pounding.

"I need to get some sleep first though," and getting to my feet I slowly made my way up the stairs, my eyes hurt just as much as my head and it felt as if I were walking along the deck of a ship in a pitched storm. The adrenaline surge from finding Beth already wearing away.

I could see that Tracy wanted to argue with me, and for once I was glad that the chip in her head was keeping her complacent.

Collapsing into the large bed I felt Kate lay down next to me, and reaching out I pulled her on top of me. She was dressed in only a thin camisole and I could feel the warmth of her skin through it. On top of me and with my hands on her body I could tell that she was excited, her chip thinking that despite my tiredness I might want her.

For once, their wasn't a dominate thought in my head with her pressed against me. I was tired. I had been going at this nonstop for months since the night Kate had shown up on my doorstep. I was nearing some sort of limit, and near the end of the rope was where people lost concentration and made a mistake.

Reaching around her I pulled Kate up until her head was on my chest, my arms around her shoulders simply holding her to me. I couldn't make a mistake, one slip up and she would be taken from me.

<The True Slave>

I woke up first, to find that I was still in the Master's embrace his arms around me and the musk of his skin and sweat flooding my senses.

I took in a deep breath, feeling like I was melting away completely in his arms.

"You awake?" asked Tracy.

Turning over slowly so as not to wake the Master I looked at her, "yes."

"Do you think we can get her back?" she asked.

"Why wouldn't we be able too? The Master doesn't give up."

Tracy nodded, "True, but despite that he's not any closer to turning off the chips is he?"

I frowned, "You don't think he will be able to do it?"

"It might not be possible for a single person to do it."

I glanced up at the Master's face, it looked different when he slept the stress that was usually on display gone.

"He will, we've made it this far."

Tracy sighed, "We have, but even after all of this, after we save Beth, after he deactivates the chips our lives aren't going to be the same. We've got the proverbial mark of the devil now. We can't go back to what our lives were, even looking back on it now I can't imagine doing that," she hesitated for a moment.

"Looking back on my life it feels like I was half asleep until the Master saved me. Like I wasn't really living, just going through the motions," said Tracy as she adjusted herself on the bed.

"It's like everything is clearer now, more focused and precise."

"We have implants in our heads. That's bound to do something to the way you see the world, reprograming people is possible, the rich and powerful are more corrupt and powerful than any other time in history, and they control the technology that could destroy the world. If those facts don't change your world view something is wrong with you."

"Do you two have to be talking this early in the morning?" grumbled Helen.

I glanced over at her, and then looked back at the Master and reaching out poked his cheek. He remained dead to the world and I turned back to Helen, "It's not bothering the Master."

"It's bothering me," she groaned and turning back around she collected half of the comforter on the bed and disappeared.

Shaking my head I slowly began to disentangle myself from the Master, in his sleep his arms were more relaxed and after some wriggling I managed to escape.

Standing up and silently stretching I made my way to the bathroom and turning on the shower stepped into the hot stream of water. For several minutes I simply stood in the stream of water luxuriating, my mind wandered to what the Master had discovered yesterday Beth's fate.

The Master would not stop, he would not leave her in the hands of the Company, not unlike how he refused to leave me under the control of the chip. Going up against the Company though was dangerous, and they wouldn't hesitate to kill us.

I opened my eyes as the door to the large shower opened and the Master stepped inside.

His eyes raked over me and demurely I struck a pose, extenuating the curves of my body for him to enjoy.

The Master smiled, "Mind if I join you?" he asked.

"I'm not sure Master, what do I get?" I asked even as he stepped into the water next to me, his body making it very obvious what he was going to do.

The Master reached out and casually flicked my left nipple, sending a shock of sensation through my body.

"What is it you want?" he asked.

"I'm not sure Master," I said as I let my hands drift down to grip a particular part of his anatomy.

He grinned, "I think I know exactly what you're after."

"You sure you don't see anything you want Master?" I asked.

"I see plenty of what I want."

The Master carefully stepped around me his hands trailing across my skin as he moved, keeping me to him.

I shuddered, the Master was always in control of me, but when he took me like this used me like this was when I felt it the most.

"No cumming until I say so," he said.

He pushed me up against the tiles of the shower and quickly entered me.

I gasped, the Master was usually careful and he usually played with me before using me. I had told that he didn't have to, that I was always ready for him to use me but it had taken him a long time to get used to the idea.

The Master moved slowly in and out, his hands on my hips holding and controlling me, directing me in how best to serve him. The warm water was streaming down my back, a pitiful amount of heat compared to what was building up inside of me.

The Master grunted and his hands moved away from my waist and up to my shoulders. Moving away he turned me around and pressed my back up against the tile and continued.

I put my arms around his neck and closed my eyes reveling in the feeling.

The Master continued for several minutes, his slow pace beginning to quicken.

"Now," he grunted.

The pleasure inside of me, the heat spiked and a let out a shout. The Master froze still buried inside of me. For a moment the two of us hung there, until slowly he let us fall to the floor of the shower.

"That's quite the morning greeting Master," I said as I got my breath back.

He smiled.

Everything was right in the world.

<The True Master>

Looking over the helmet for a moment I weighed the thing in my hands, it really was an insane to try this. The consequences of implementing a completely new protocol based on something I had hacked together from the basic code of the Doll control protocols wasn't really the best way to test a theory.

Still, I couldn't ask someone else to do it. Kate would volunteer without much input from her chip, Helen and Tracy would volunteer because of the chips, Dr. Song wasn't an option since she was crazy enough to want the helmet on in the first case, and Jeremy like any sane individual would refuse.

Looking at the computer monitor I sighed and slowly lowered the thing on my head. For once I was being careful, the door to the basement was locked and Dr. Song was in the back room doing whatever it was she was trying to do with the second helmet. Taking off the thing in the middle of the test would cause a whole host of issues.

Slipping it on I winced as the cold metal contacts touched my skin and interfaced, the points where the microwave inducers would fire their pulses into my brain and pick up the responses.

I had stripped the program down to its basics, my computer was running in parallel with a cloned system so a crash wouldn't be detrimental and I would have enough time to safely exit the system. Still even with all of the precautions in place this was a dangerous operation.

The helmet booted up and the computer showed that the connection had been made and it was ready to perform a POST. Leaning forward I pressed the button.

It felt like someone had dunked me in an ice cold lake and set me on fire, my vision flickered in and out as my brain was bombarded by what was most likely a very unhealthy amount of radiation. The link was stable though, and it was so far working despite the discomfort I was feeling.

Slowly I activated the next step of the test, a simple AES encryption brute forcing algorithm utilizing the parallel properties of the tertiary processor currently attached to the system to try and guess the password of the encrypted files.

I actually felt the spike in the helmet as the program was offloaded into my own head.

The human brain is despite the abilities of modern supercomputers still the most powerful processor in the known universe. Quantum computers come close in their abilities but besides the incredibly delicate one inside an NSA facility in Utah they were still mostly theoretical pipe dreams. The human brain though had been tuned by billions of years by evolution, and its capabilities were untapped in modern circles mostly due to the ethical considerations which I was for the moment trying to ignore.

The processing power was not in the terms of calculations per second, the human brain is chemically driven. It will not keep up with the speed of an electrical system like a computer. The advantage is the parallel abilities inherent to it. A computer can only do a single task at once, sure it can do that one task incredibly quickly but still only a single operation at once.

The human brain juggles and operates hundreds at once sometimes thousands.

I winced as the computer began to run the program, and I felt my arms go dead. I couldn't stop the process now if I wanted too. My consciousness was overridden, it was after all irrelevant to the current process towards which I had set my brain to complete.

I had no sense of time or consciousness, I was asleep.

The next moment though I opened my eyes, and glanced at the clock. It had apparently taken only just under twenty minutes for the program to complete.

The encryption key was sitting in front of me, the data files unlocked.

What had taken the commandeered servers' days to go through had taken me less than half an hour.

Smiling I took the helmet off of my head and set it down on the desk, berating myself slightly to even consider it I turned off one screen and looked at my reflection in it checking to make sure my eyes did not have a burst blood vessel, or that my nose or ears were bleeding. All common side effects in the movies of fucking with one's own brain, I wasn't bleeding though. Not that I couldn't have damaged something in my head but still, the bleeding would mean I had internal hemorrhaging of the brain and I would be dead in a moment or two anyway.

Still it had at least worked, a direct interface from my computer to the human brain, and not to simply reprogram myself into some willing slave but to perform an actual function! This application alone, cracking an encryption scheme would mean I could in practice steal millions, no billions from banks. Hack into companies and governments for data!

Shaking my head in wonder I stood and slowly made my way back up the stairs to the first floor of the house. I had tested it and not messed anything up, so moving forward with the next idea was possible.

Kate, Helen and Tracy all looked up at me curiously as I opened the door. They were lounging in the living room the magazines and books strewn around them as they entertained themselves as I worked, none of them had much in the way of clothing but otherwise it looked like a perfectly normal scene.

"Tracy, Kate, could I borrow you two?" I asked.

"Yes," said Kate not missing a beat she put her book down and stood. Tracy nodded and stood as well.

Leading the two of them back down to the basement I went into the back room, "Dr. Song You're going to want to see this," I said.

The woman looked up from the helmet in front of her and multitude of books and other electronic components she was working with.

"Alright, what are you doing?" She asked.

"Experimenting with something like the helmet for you." I said.

Her eyes widened and she stood brushing herself off and followed me back out into the main basement room.

"Sit down in the chairs and plug yourselves in," I said pointing at the chairs addressing Kate and Tracy.

The two looked at me and then back at one another.

"What are you going to do?" asked Tracy.

"I'm going to try and put you in Beth's shoes."

Tracy blinked, "What?" she asked.

I pulled up the specs for the new brain chip they had put in her, and how it hypothetically hooked up to the brain, "The new chip has access to almost every section of the brain, If I can put you in control of it she would be a puppet under your control."

Tracy looked at me for a moment, "You want me to have control of Beth?" she asked.

I nodded, "Although for the test it's going to simply feed her visuals into your own. Once we've got it working well enough you could simply walk her out of the building."

Tracy looked skeptical but she nodded and sat down in the chair plugging the lead into the jack in the back of her head.

I turned back to my computer, Tracy was already successfully connected and integrated into the system.

"I'm not going to be able to see anything that you are, the data being streamed in is going to be in the raw format," I said.

"What?" asked Tracy.

"The computer has no way of making heads or tails of the data, so despite everything you're going to be seeing going through it first and then to your head we're going to have to rely on what you tell us about Beth's situation to form a plan to get her out."

"So you can't take pictures of what she's seeing?" said Tracy.

I nodded, "She's not a camera, heck you're going to be getting a direct image stream from her brain, I'm just betting that your brain will be able to adapt. But every brains different, like how we don't know if we all perceive the same color spectrum."

Tracy nodded again, "Alright, but what should I be looking for?"

I shrugged, "I could give you something to let me have greater access to the computer systems but for now all you're going to be doing is looking through Beth's eyes. So it's going to be disconcerting since you won't even be able to control your own gaze, just keep an eye out for anything that looks useful."

"Very specific," deadpanned Tracy.

"This is fascinating!" said Dr. Song as she looked between me and Tracy, "To even think that we have the ability to place someone's perception in front of your own!"

Tracy rolled her eyes at the doctor and leaned back into the chair.

"You might want to close your own eyes," I said.

"What do you need me to do Master?" asked Kate.

"Oh, yeah! I'm going to be borrowing your brain."

Kate pursed her lips looking skeptical.

"I figured out how to use the human brain as a parallel processor to break through encryption schemes, something that not even the biggest supercomputers can do."

Kate blinked, "So you can hack into anything?"

I shook my head, "No, I can break encryption schemes. I have to already have access to the data to do so. And at the moment I've only tested it on symmetric encryption like AES, I'm not sure how it would fare against something like RSA or similar. The mathematics involved are different and I haven't written a program to test them yet."

"So you can hack more stuff?" she asked, her face easily communicating that she had not understood a word of what I had said.

"Yes," I said.

"Alright then, let's do this!"

I really needed to bring in another computer programmer, or hacker. I was doing things that were supposed to be decades off but I couldn't get any recognition for it or explain it to anyone.

I turned around to my computer, the program already up and running I quickly began to assault on the Companies servers. To anyone observing the majority of the attack would look like a standard DDoS attack. In fact the majority of it was, the traffic originating from the collection of servers I already had under my control routing their traffic all over the world to make it look like a botnet attack.

This was something that network engineers had to deal with on a daily basis and was the most common type of attack that showed up on the news, although it hardly qualified as hacking since all it did was slow things down.

While that was keeping the Companies network engineers and firewalls busy though I was running a brute force attack on their SSH terminals. With Kate acting as another processor and my own successful tests of the scheme I was fairly confident we would be able to get access to their network.

"You feeling OK?" I asked Kate as the program ran.

"You started it? I don't feel anything," she said.

I frowned and glanced back at her, she did appear to be handling it better than I had. Probably had something to do with her brain being better adapted to artificial input and processing.

"Tracy? As soon as we break in we're not going to have much time so be quick," I said.

"Ok!"

It took only fifteen minutes to break through the Company firewalls, now that I knew where they were hiding them inside of their network and I had a way to break encryptions schemes, It seemed like it was almost too easy.

"We're into the network Tracy, I'm looking for Beth."

I was scanning all of the devices on the local network of the Company building I had no idea what Beth would look like on the network so it took a precious few minutes. I sorted out anything that had a standard office operating system which left me with a pool of over a dozen networked devices any one of which could have been Beth.

The serial numbers inside of the addresses matched up though, and looking back at the data I already had on Beth I quickly narrowed the search.

"Found her, this is probably going to feel weird Tracy," I said as I started the connection, a few hundred miles away the input from Beth's eyes was being funneled into a computer network and out of the Company servers into Tracy, who would hopefully be able to interrupt them.

"I'm good!" she said.

Tracy stiffened, her hands gripping at the chair's faux leather her nails almost puncturing it.

"She OK?" asked Dr. Song concerned.

"Should be, it's a one way street for data."

Dr. Song stepped up to Tracy and pinched her arm, the woman didn't respond.

"God damn it," I turned back around to my computer, the data stream was still active. I looked at it more closely, there was a lot of data nearly ten gigabytes a second.

"Tracy!" shouted Kate.

I turned around, Tracy was standing but her stance was wrong, her limbs were stiff and the only expression I could use to describe her was robotic.

Her eyes were open, and she was staring directly at me. I shivered, the look in her eyes was not Tracy.

I glanced back at my computer, the data stream was spiking again going far past what my ISP should have allowed. Whatever was going on here it was beyond my control.

"I'm going to cancel this!" I said.

I began to quickly type in the commands that would cancel the link.

"Master!"

I glanced back around Tracy had turned to the laptop that was next to her analysis chair, and her hands were moving more quickly than even I could type.

"Shit," I strode across the room towards her, she made no move to stop me when I reached up and pulled the jack out of the back of her head.

For a moment Tracy remained standing, and then pitching forward she collapsed into the chair limp.

"Don't unplug yourself!" I said to Kate.

"Song!" I shouted.

It took a moment but the resident doctor made her way out of the back room where she had set up her lab.

"What that hell happened?!" she shouted.

"I was running an experiment, Tracy started behaving weird and I couldn't shut down the process logically, so I went for the physical shutdown."

Dr. Song nodded, and stooping down she slowly rolled Tracy over on her chair. Pulling a small penlight from somewhere she opened on of Tracy's eyes and shined the light in.

"She's responsive at least."

I nodded, and moving back to the computer I ran the shutdown command. Within moments the normally very loud computer was turned off and the basement was suddenly very quite.

"You can disconnect now," I told Kate.

She nodded and disengaged the cable.

The two of us went over to stand next to the doctor and Tracy.

"It looks like she went into shock, but she should recover," said Dr. Song.

"Good," Leaning over I picked up the laptop.

"What happened?" asked Kate.

I looked at the laptop for a moment, and studied the commands that Tracy had entered.

"The Company's a step ahead," I breathed.

"What?" asked Kate.

"The Company hacked us instead of the other way around. Tracy just sent our IP to the Company. We need to leave," I said as I read through the commands. Here I was thinking I had the upper hand that we were going to save Beth.

Furious I threw the laptop down on the ground watching its screen crack. Stalking over to my computer I unplugged the laptop and the two redundant backup drives.

Leaning over to the side of my server of a computer I flipped a switch, the power supply units inside the things switched on and dumped the full AC current into the motherboards and peripherals. We didn't have time for a more destructive solution.

"Grab anything you want we're leaving in five minutes," I said.

Kate and Dr. Song looked at one another, "We're leaving?" asked Kate.

"The Company know where we are, she just sent them our location. We have to go!" I said.

<The True Slave>

The Master was shouting different things yelling at everyone to get warm clothes on and get into the cars now.

Tracy was still out of it, and I had to half carry her upstairs and help her get dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

"Let's go!" shouted the Master as he burst into the room and grabbed his jacket from the closet.

"What about all of this?" I asked waving my hands around the room and the house in general.

"I would say we should burn it but that's liable to get out of control too quickly. The Company knows where we are Kate, they might even know who we are. We have to leave now!" he said.

The Master blinked and looked at Tracy, "she feeling better?" he asked.

"What happened?" asked Tracy her voice barely audible still sounding like she was out of it.

"We'll figure that out later, we have to go!"

The Master hurried the both of us back down to the garage, two cars were idling in the driveway, Jeremy and Dr. Song in one and Helen was behind the wheel of the Master's car. He quickly opened the back door and threw his laptop in and then gestured for me and Tracy to get inside.

Slamming the door behind us he jumped into the passenger seat.

"Let's go!" he said.

Helen hit the gas and the car jerked forwards.

The Master pulled out his cell phone and quickly dialed.

"You and Dr. Song should be safe, ditch the cell phone when we get back to town. We're going to have to go on the run again and set up somewhere else."

The Master listened for several moments and I heard Dr. Song shouting through the phone.

"That's just stupid!" said the Master raising his voice as well.

He listened again for a moment.

"Fine, still toss the phones."

The Master disconnected the call. Rolling down the window he then tossed the cell phone out the window.

"What happened?" I asked.

"They don't want to split up, or rather Jeremy doesn't really care and Dr. Song doesn't want too. They're being stupid."

"What do you think happened?" I asked.

The Master turned and looked back at Tracy who still seemed a little bit dazed.

"My guess is they put a call home protocol in the dolls after what happened with you, and enough of that programming filtered in through Beth to Tracy for it to operate," he sighed.