Chapter 9

Bill signed the non-disclosure agreement and was hired by the resort. For the past two weeks, we’ve had Bill working at the resort since he’s off for the summer before he goes to the local University. He’s helped with landscaping, refurbishing the latest building we’re interested in, serving dishes at meals and of course cleaning. More cleaning than he ever expected. He’s a trooper and just keeps trying to do his best. We’re also paying him double minimum wage so he’s pretty happy. We deliberately haven’t told him anything, we’re just a resort, and we care about our privacy.

He tries to avoid Laura and Beth, but follows Stephanie, Kristen or Ashley around like a puppy.

Steve has been listening to Bill’s phone for a while and to the best of our knowledge, Bill hasn’t said anything.

Every day, for thirty minutes, the brain trust wires him up and tries to figure out what’s different with Bill. Other than that block of time, he’s not allowed in the training building. We don’t tell him anything about what we are doing. He mostly sits there waiting for it to end. I’m sure it’s all pretty surreal for him. I tried to stay away from it, leaving it in the capable hands of Dana, Beth, Amy and Jeremy.

I did take the additional precaution of encouraging Stephanie to get closer to his mom and build a relationship with her.

One weekday, Ashley subtly convinced me to show her the latest refurbished room. As the door opened, I spoke up, “We’re not messing up this room before the weekend!”

Ashley laughed as Sheila came out of the bathroom and said, “All clean in there Master. What’s next?”

Ok, maybe a little messed up isn’t a bad idea. This was the first time I had seen Sheila in a while, everyone kept her busy. I was still pretty annoyed she had thought to steal from us. She teased me mercilessly as she went around the room and pretended to straighten it out. Although she still stirred something inside me, I was somehow able to keep control. I smiled at her and walked out of the room with Ashley following.

“Ashley, please don’t do that again. I’ll fuck who I want to fuck. I know you thought it was funny and sexy, but I did not.”

Ashley threw herself down at my feet, “Master, I’m sorry, I thought you would want your way with her. Please forgive me for assuming that.”

I gently pulled her back up. “Ashley, you don’t need my forgiveness. Sheila represents temptation to me and I’m trying to prove myself against it, at least this part of it.”

I was called to the training building lounge to meet with the usual suspects. Kristen tagged along to hear what they had figured out about Bill. “I need everyone at their best right now, no need for the usual formalities.”

Dana went first, “His eyes are completely normal, it’s something to do with the way he perceives motion. It’s somewhat similar to the unfortunate people with facial blindness, he just doesn’t see some of the effects from the Device. In fact, it’s starting to be called motion blindness. Obviously he’s able to see, but certain types of motion don’t register properly. That’s why he thinks he’s clumsy. There isn’t that much research on this yet, but it will be a very small percent of the population which suffers from this.”

Jeremy spoke up, “I’ve made adjustments to the lower level code. It can now detect when someone has this issue and lets us know. We’re now trying to see if we can work around the effect. If so, we might still be able to induce the full effect.”

Steve chimed in, “I’ve taken over every computing device in his house and we’re listening in to everything. Bill hasn’t betrayed us in any way. He really likes Stephanie by the way, that’s whose name he groans out when he plays with himself.”

Kristen looked around the room. “We’ve been running him ragged and from everything I can tell, he’s all in.”

Stephanie had waited until everyone was done talking about Bill. “I’ve gotten closer to his mother. She knows I have the yoga studio here and I’ve been talking about the wonderful spa treatments. I suspect we can get her in front of the Device without her being suspicious.”