Chapter 16

The next morning, Mark woke up at the crack of dawn and extricated himself from between Maren and Annabelle, unsure of how he ended up between them, since he was on the outside when he went to bed.

Without thinking, he just walked to the washroom naked. When he exited the washroom, Beth was standing there waiting to use the facilities.

Her eyes immediately went from his face to his cock, which she reached out to hold. Then sank to her knees, holding his cock with both hands and gave the head a soft sensual kiss with a bit of a lick and whispered, “Someday!” As she got up and smiled at Mark and then proceeded into the washroom.

The interaction had caused Mark’s cock to get hard, and they all noticed when he walked back into the bedroom, so he summarized his run in with Beth on the way from the washroom.

Annabelle smiled, “Does that big boy want some tight little Asian pussy?” As she climbed out of bed, walked over to the Mark, gave him a kiss and a few strokes, then walked out of the bedroom naked, to use the washroom.

Mark just shook his head and said, “What a tease!” as he then went to the clothing synth and got some clothes, as Maren and Rayven were doing the same.

Mark, Rayven and Maren dressed and were leaving the bedroom when Annabelle returned.

Cass was still in the living room area and told them they had ordered breakfast delivery from Phil’s and it should be here within a half hour.

Mark thanked her for ordering breakfast as Maren, Rayven, and he left the residence to get the day started.

Beth and Zack were both downstairs sitting at their desks already and were creating some forms for reviewing the cloud-based CRM systems they had identified the day before.

When the delivery guy came with breakfast, they moved to the lunchroom to eat. Annabelle and Cass came down together, both with big smiles on their faces. Cass went directly to Beth and then gave her a full-on French kiss, after which Beth whispered, “Mmm she tastes good!”

The group ate their breakfast, while going over the forms that Zack and Beth had made.

Today the plan was for everyone to put each of the cloud-based CRM systems through various scenarios and make notes. Then they were going to discuss the pros and cons of each as a group until they had narrowed it down to the one they felt would work the best.

They needed nothing custom or fancy as it was just basic sales, support, communication and billing. They stored everything technical on Atlantean technology, safe from anyone on Earth.

All the CRM programs they were looking at supported the major online accounting systems, so Mark asked Charles if that would work, and since it was cloud-based, all Mark had to do was setup the account and send him some login info for it and he could do all the setup of the accounts remotely.

Mark also tasked Charles with hiring someone to do the day-to-day accounting, which he would then oversee, and preferably someone who could also handle the reception job. Charles said he had some candidates in mind and would get back to him.

The business plan was to partner with existing security companies, who would function as their salespeople, and that would reduce the number of customers the staff would need to take care of.

The unknown in this, was they could get a few or all security companies to partner with them, or all the security companies could band together and boycott or outright refuse his services and then they would have to resort to Plan B, which he really didn’t want to do.

Because of this uncertainty, they planned to hold a sneak peek, a job fair and an open house, in that order. They were already in the headlines and would likely get a lot of resumes quick through the job fair, so they would have people on-hand that they could call up if needed.

The open house was to let the public know that better security was out there and that they just needed to ask their current security provider about it and, if their current provider didn’t offer it, they could refer them to one’s that did.

Finally, to generate business, they were also going to send out sneak peek invites to all the security companies to come and see how they could improve their businesses. The invites said that they would not be selling directly to customers, but it was in their own best interests to at least know the options, in case their existing customers asked for the improved security. As a bonus, any companies that wanted to partner during the sneak peek were welcome to set up a booth to showcase their services during the open house.

They set the security company sneak peek invites to happen on Tuesday, the job fair would be on Wednesday, and they scheduled the open house for Thursday afternoon and Friday.

Through the sneak peek and then the open house they hoped they’d be able to gauge interest and figure out how many people they would need to hire, but at least they had three staff to start, which was perfect as there really was only three jobs available for locals.

Sales and support would work the computers and man the phones. Estimators would be the people to visit a site and survey the area, while wearing a device so Cricket could scan the site and collect all the specifications of the building. The estimators would also ask and record any other information required to protect the site. Installers would be the people to deliver the drones to the site and activate them. Basically, it was a delivery job but, unless business was crazy busy from the start, the estimator could also be the installer.

By mid afternoon, everyone had gone through each CRM system and when they sat down, everyone had unanimously agreed on the same system, so that made debating the pros and cons unnecessary, so the kids began customizing some forms and writing procedures.

Since they were already familiar with the backend system already, Mark trained all of them on the estimating and installation processes ... what to watch for and ask in the site surveys. He wanted to make sure everyone could do everyone else’s job, in case they wanted to mix it up a bit.

Mark still wanted to hire a manager, as that would be the person to go through all the resumes and do the hiring. Mark had considered doing it himself since he had hired the breakfast club, but then thought better of it as he wasn’t sure of his time availability once he became king.

Cricket had built a fork routine of herself that would take the data from the CRM system and pre-program the drones that got fabricated on the embassy, then she created a small, automated drop ship that would carry the drones from the embassy down to the surface.

Since Solara’s original drones, Cricket had done some modifications for the security business. She had boosted the scanning range, so depending on the size of the area they needed to protect, they wouldn’t need as many drones per site. They would not have a standing perimeter like they originally had at the ranch. More or less one roaming drone per access point with a 50% variance, so the drone could move quite a distance yet still not leave the access point unprotected.

Another upgrade she had done was what she called, ‘glow bubble’. Upon detection, the violator would have a force field bubble placed around them that would glow different colours depending on what they detected. So with a suicide bomber, the only person who would get killed would be the bomber themselves. No innocent bystanders.

All the drones would communicate with the security guard’s earpiece and given common names, and they would check in every hour, or immediately if there was any issues. Just so they knew the system was working, since they wouldn’t be able to see it.

Upon any identified issues, the drones would bubble the violator and notify security, and if the situation turned dangerous, it would incapacitate the violator and the security guard could take it from there.

As if fate had heard Mark’s thoughts, Charles called him Sunday afternoon and said he had candidates for the manager, accounting and reception positions and said that they would be there within the hour.

Roughly an hour later, Charles showed up at the building, followed by two other vehicles. A woman got out of one vehicle and a couple got out of the other vehicle. As they walked into the building, Mark greeted them and suggested they use the boardroom, so everyone went in and sat around the big table.

Mark didn’t think the staff or girls needed to be in this meeting, so he left them to continue to work on customizing some backend forms and writing up procedures. Having procedures and detailed instructions written, in-place and being practiced would make getting new staff up to speed a lot easier.

Henry was a stocky man, Mark guessed him to be in his mid to upper 60s, he used to be a government auditor. His wife, Amelia, appeared to be in her mid to upper 50s and used to be an admin assistant for a service company.

Barbara was a professional CEO who liked challenges. She was in her mid-60s and was very business savvy. She had been the CEO for many companies, she would build them up from nothing, or restructure them, to become profitable companies and, once they got established, she would move on to the next challenge. Mark figured she wouldn’t be cheap.

Charles had Mark explain his business plans and his vision for the companies and the positions. He explained the roles he was looking to fill, and that his primary goal was to show that their technology was for the good of all people, but that he wasn’t sure if the public would accept the new technology. Since there were a lot of unknowns, he wanted to pay basic salaries and then bonuses, if the business was successful.

Immediately Barbara stated that she didn’t think this would be a fit for her, since Mark’s focus was not on profits and she did not want to be in charge of hiring staff, so she excused herself and left. Charles apologized that he had obviously misread what Barbara had been looking for.

Henry and Amelia liked the bonus idea, so they said they would both work for a base salary of $150K per year total, plus the performance bonuses. Henry also said that Amelia could help with the day-to-day accounting stuff and that he could fill the role of manager, if Mark wanted.

On their insistence, $100K for Henry and $50K for Amelia, and they would cover what he thought he’d need three people for, was incredible, so Mark said they were both hired and they said they could start immediately.

Henry had recently retired from the government auditors, but since he had known Charles for so long, he was coming out of retirement to get the company going. He later acknowledged that part of the reason for coming out of retirement was because he wanted to work with his wife and boredom.

Mark went out and invited the breakfast club in to the boardroom. They all came in with scared looks on their faces, seeing all the dressed up business people around the table.

Mark introduced everyone and then had the breakfast club to go over what they had done so far. They seemed impressed with what the club had accomplished and then the conversation turned to the sneak peek, job fair and open house.

Henry thought they wouldn’t get quality candidates from the job fair, but he did like the fact that, in a crunch, they would have a pool of people to pick from, but one thing he stipulated was that he didn’t just want resumes. He wanted people to fill out a form, with a section to collect contact, age and level of education, then a section to write why they want to work there, and finally to know their availability. If they had to wait two weeks for people to give notice at an existing job, that obviously wouldn’t work if they needed lots of people immediately.

He also asked if they had made any placards or graphics to display at the sites they protect?

Mark explained that they had made no graphics or placards and for good reason, “By not advertising, it increases everyone’s security as criminals will get caught and punished, getting the criminals off the street. By advertising, all you’re doing is pushing them to easier targets.”

Afterwards, everyone seemed to think it was a pretty talented team to start with.

After Charles left, the crew emailed sneak peek invites to every security company in the city that they could find. They also invited many other organizations that weren’t necessarily security specific, but had security requirements, including the Calgary Police, the school boards, the airport authority, post-secondary institutions and so on.

Amelia was a whiz with the presentation software, so she was creating a presentation that they could run on a loop in the reception area.

To step things up to the next level, Mark had Cricket compile some scenarios that she could animate with holograms, to show what the system could do. Cricket also setup the drones at the office, to mimic what they would install at other sites. They gave them common names and would have to check in via a speaker at the reception desk, and another speaker they would setup in the demonstration area on the upper level.

For the sneak peek, the drones inside the office would be visible, so they could see them in action.

She also tied the drones into her hologram scenarios, so the companies would actually see and hear what real scenarios would be like. Scenarios were setup for someone trying to break in after hours, another with a guy pulling a gun, one with a kid pulling a fake gun, one for a guy pulling a knife, one for a guy with drugs, one for a guy with a contagion and finally one for a suicide bomber.

Some scenarios were so realistic that he had her make an announcement 15 seconds before the scenario began, and again as it was beginning.

They got back replies from many of the security companies that same night, which was something Mark wasn’t expecting. One invitee called to ask if they could bring some of their gear to test his system. Mark agreed, but said they couldn’t complain if they hurt themselves. They laughed and said they looked forward to meeting him Tuesday.

Over the weekend they also setup a lift service between the office and the visitor centre at the ranch. It was simply two lifts that flew cloaked between the destinations, they would always be opposite each other.

Annabelle took the lift back to the ranch Sunday evening, leaving his truck in Calgary for Mark to use if he needed it. Maren then went to the Embassy and picked up Liyana. When they got back to the office, the breakfast club, Mark and Rayven were still at work.

Mark and Rayven were trying to follow their instruction manual on how to do things, while the breakfast club was making notes on things to adjust or correct. When he finished, they changed their documentation and then as a genuine test; they had Maren and Liyana try to follow the manual.

A little over an hour later, they had completed all the basic tasks. One thing Mark noted was that they had to have two monitors on all computers, that way they could have the program open on one monitor and have the manual, policies and scripts open on the other. The email was actually internal to the CRM system they were using, so no need for extra software, all they needed to run the business was an Internet browser, which is what made it easy for Cricket to interface with the system, she was simply another user.

While Liyana and Maren were working through the manual, Mark had ordered pizza. It arrived right after they finished going through the procedures manual.

Everyone got to know each other a bit better over the meal. The breakfast club again asking all kinds of questions about life on other planets, since they now had more aliens to ask. Then they turned the topic on Mark, asking him where he was going to live when he became King?

He hadn’t really thought about it until now, which prompted him to ask Liyana, “What’s the deal when I’m King? Do I have to live in a palace or some designated royal abode?”

“I’m not exactly sure. Yes, there is a palace and the Prince currently lives there, but I don’t think the last King lived there,” she answered as she pulled up her holographic console.

After a minute she added, “According to the laws, you can live wherever you want, as long as it is in the Federation.”

Mark asked, “Sounds reasonable. So what are my duties as the King? Don’t you have elections and government officials that run the Federation?”

Liyana explained, “Yes, we have elected officials, like mayors, which handle community organizing and politics, then we have governors that represent the population and speak to their elected senators who meet a few times per year on each of their planets. Elections are typically every 5 years and there are no political parties, you represent the people of your region. As King, you are in charge of Federation security, interplanetary affairs and any issues the senate cannot resolve. You are also a figurehead and make appearances at important events, etc.”

Mark smiled, “So more or less I can continue doing what I’m doing, but adding a few off-world meetings and events to my schedule? Would working with Earth classify as interplanetary affairs, since it isn’t in the Federation?”

Liyana smiled in return, “Yes it is, you are the figurehead of the Federation. It is your job to do the politicking and negotiations with governments and planets.”

Monday morning, Mark was up early and weaselled out from between Rayven, Maren and Liyana, got dressed, went to the washroom and then downstairs to make breakfast.

The girls followed soon after and the group was just finishing eating when Henry and Amelia came in, followed within minutes by the breakfast club.

Mark informed them they had completed the demonstration scenarios overnight, and they were going to go through them after breakfast. Today was going to be a last run through for everything before the sneak peek tomorrow.

They went through the demonstration scenarios and suggested a few modifications, then they went through the manuals and made tweaks. They had some discussions about the embassy and getting visitors up there and updated the website to tell people they needed to get to any of the airports on the list or, if they were in Canada, they needed to get to the office in Calgary or to the ranch to catch a shuttle.

Kat had already sent out a notice to all their boarders in Calgary and updated the ranch website to inform people they could use the new lift service to travel to the ranch from the Federation headquarters. She figured that would be a huge draw since it reduced the travel time and put them in direct competition with the expensive boarders closer to the city.

Which prompted them to set up a second CRM system for the shuttle service. They used the same system for familiarity, but changed the colour scheme to differentiate. This made having the two screens even more important, and they also used two different web browsers to help keep things differentiated as well.

Liyana got a message from a friend of hers on Atlanterra, and apparently the Prince was starting a smear campaign trying to discredit Mark. His claim was that Mark was violating their laws about technology, impersonating a king, and that he wasn’t familiar with their way of life and he would return them to a primitive state like Earth, etc.

Liyana confessed that she thought he might do something like that, and that she’d been relaying the TV interviews and news articles to her friend, who was a reporter for the Atlantean Federation News Network or AFNN. They couldn’t actually broadcast anything, as it would upset the Prince and they would get fired, arrested, banished or various other punishments or penalties.

Mark then got a reply from the Jacob, the inventor of the recycler, and he had some ideas for a few different methods of self-destructs if given to non-Federated planets. He was just updating his schematics and designs to incorporate them and would send them later.

Jacob also confirmed that the Prince was trying to discredit him, but said not to read too much into it. The public knows exactly what he is trying to do, and everybody he knew was looking forward to having a new king, just from the little they had seen or read about his accomplishments in the short time since they had discovered him.

Liyana then smiled as she said, “Recently several of the videos have somehow, miraculously, made it onto the network for all to see and the source of the leaked videos was untraceable!” She then added, “If he was a true royal, with access to an AI, he could easily trace the source of the videos.”

Mark smiled, knowing that even though he was flying by the seat of his pants, people liked and supported him.

During the day, Maren had returned to the Embassy, leaving Mark, Rayven and Liyana at the office to oversee the sneak peek tomorrow.

That night, they were in the middle of watching a movie when Rayven got up to go to the washroom and when she came back was just wearing a bathrobe. Liyana then did the same thing.

Rayven’s cock was soon poking out of her robe, and Liyana took it upon herself to take care of it. But after a minute of fellatio, they decided Mark needed to be naked too, so they both stripped him.

Soon Liyana was alternating between sucking Mark and Rayven until she progressed things a bit further and climbed on top of Mark and impaled herself on his hard wet cock. After a minute or two she got off, mounted Rayven and rode her.

Mark got on his knees and watched Liyana fucking herself up and down on Rayven’s cock. He could see Rayven’s pussy dripping juice, so he positioned his cock between Liyana and Rayven’s legs and slid into Rayven’s pussy. He fucked her slowly as Liyana was rubbing her ass up and down Mark’s stomach as she rode Rayven.

Liyana was entering her second orgasm when Rayven looked like she was about to cum. Mark had learned to read her cues, and he was rapidly reaching his own orgasm. As soon as Rayven started to cum, Mark also started erupting into Rayven.

Once the orgasms subsided, Mark lay down on the carpet. Liyana got off Rayven, but then moved down to lick Rayven’s cock and pussy clean. Leaving her own dripping pussy near Mark’s face. Mark grabbed her ass and guided her to straddle his face and he eagerly licked Rayven’s sweet tasting cum out of Liyana.

Once everyone cleaned up, they went to bed to rest up before the sneak peek tomorrow.

Mark woke up at the crack of dawn as per usual, but he failed at extracting himself out from between the two sleeping beauties. So Rayven also got up, but Liyana went back to sleep.

Rayven and Mark used the washroom facilities and got dressed. Mark then pulled up the workout website and picked a 45 minute workout.

They did the workout, showered and then started making breakfast in the kitchen. Liyana eventually joined them, wearing only a robe.

The breakfast club was there around 7:30, so Mark introduced them to a food synth. So they sat down and had breakfast with Mark and the girls, ecstatic that they were eating ‘free space food’.

Zack then asked, “Could we just eat here all the time? It would save a lot of money on groceries.”

Mark said, “Sure! Just make sure you keep the kitchen clean,” then he joked, “You might as well just move into the office then, since you’re going to be here all the time, anyway.”

Beth said, “Could we?”

Just then, Henry and Amelia showed up carrying a box of supplies each. They dropped the boxes off on their respective desks and then Mark introduced them to the food synth.

It impressed Henry. Free meals would be a tremendous bonus for anyone looking to work here!

After breakfast, they went through the scenarios one more time, to show them the final versions, and then they went to their offices to unpack their boxes and settle in before anyone showed up. It turned out that the boxes had very little for each of them, just some knick knacks for the desk, but mostly they had a variety of office supplies, so each desk now had pens, notepads, sticky notes, paper clips, staplers and batteries for the mice.

Between 9:30 and 10:00, representatives from almost 30 security companies showed up, including the security reps for the colleges, universities, school boards, the airport, the mayor’s office and the police force.

Mark greeted everyone, introduced himself and then directed them upstairs for the demonstrations, coffee and donuts.

At 10AM, Mark walked to the middle of the room and got everyone’s attention, “Welcome to our sneak peek, ladies and gentlemen.

As you are probably already aware, I have access to some technology that is literally out of this world. Earth, and especially the city of Calgary, is my home and I’d love to just give it to you make the world a safer place, but that would be against Atlantean Federation laws. Instead, I’ve created a company that can use that technology to help you do your jobs better and safer, without actually giving it to you. This office handles all administration, support and billing, but we will do the actual monitoring and manufacturing from orbit.

We are offering a subscription service that you can price into new contracts or use for negotiating upgrades to an existing contract. It’s up to you how you price or market it, but know this, you cannot touch or manage it! You can request changes to the service, but any requests have to go through us.”

At that point, Mark walked over to a box, reached in and picked up a deactivated drone and said, “Here is my security system,” as he held up the softball sized drone for everyone to see.

Two guys snickered, but Mark just smiled and said, “You may laugh, but I can guarantee you’ll change your mind once you see it in action! Each drone is self-aware, intelligent and can detect many weapons, explosives, viruses, even drugs and can dynamically deal with situations. Think of a drone as a roaming guard that never leaves their post and can detect problems without having to approach a person and then can deal with them in a non-lethal manner and, best of all, it does it invisibly.”

Mark then tossed the drone in the air, where it hovered and then it disappeared, as they all gasped. So he picked up two more drones and tossed them in the air, and they also vanished.

“For our demonstrations, though, we’ll disable the invisibility,” as the drones re-appeared.

“From blueprints or a site survey, we program the drones with the patrol perimeter and all access points. Each drone has a scan range of around 100 metres, so they will roam about their zone, but with a 50% range limit, so at no point in their roaming is an access point unmonitored.”

One lady in the crowd raised her hand in the air, “If they’re invisible, why would they need to roam?”

Mark answered, “It’s so that no one can ever touch them, they’re invisible, but they’re still solid. If they didn’t move and intruders knew they were somewhere near an entrance, what’s stopping them from wildly swinging a bat or using a net to damage or capture them?”

Everyone seemed satisfied with that response, so he continued, “Each drone will check in every hour, but will also check in immediately when triggered ... the priority is to protect the innocent. I’ve created some scenarios for demonstration, but I will warn you that our demonstrations are probably a little more realistic than anything you’ve seen before.”

He paused and then explained the first scenario, “Let’s take a school, any post-secondary institute or even a public event, since they’ve often been the targets of terrorist attacks. This scenario is just the main entrance to a school. The drones can move fast, but obviously they can’t go through doors, so while they can monitor a large area and multiple floors, a single drone can’t patrol multiple floors. My suggestion would be to patrol the area around a school and deal with issues before they enter the building.”

Just then a typical school entrance appeared with teenagers walking up the stairs and into the school. There were a bunch of gasps and wows from the crowd.

A kid gets off a bus and pulls out a realistic-looking gun. The drones do nothing and the kid runs up and squirts another kid with water and laughs and the wet kid chases the other kid.

“Freeze!” Mark said as the simulation paused, “Unlike human security, you can’t always tell if a weapon is real or fake ... our drones can! How many people have died needlessly, because they were carrying a realistic-looking toy?”

He waited a second for effect, then said, “Proceed!”

A shady looking teenager in a hoodie approaches the school entrance with a real gun concealed in his jacket. You hear the drone check in, ‘Weapon detected near the front entrance,’ and as soon as he steps onto the school property, the drone immediately puts an orange glow around the kid and you hear, ‘Weapon detected! Do not move and put your hands in the air,’ as chaos ensues, the kid moves to pull the weapon and suddenly he drops to the ground. A security guard shows up, takes control of the weapon and secures the teenager.

Mark said, “Freeze! What just happened was the drone first informed security since the problem was approaching, yet still outside the patrol perimeter, it then issued an audible warning when they breached the perimeter and then paralyzed the violator. It’s non-lethal and will temporarily paralyze them for about 5 minutes, which should be enough time for a security guard to reach and take control of the situation. Totally safe and no one, including the security guard, was ever in danger.”