Chapter 8

The world was foggy, hazy. The bleary-eyed return from sleep’s warm embrace was not something that I had missed in the time since my awakening, but in a massive break with recent tradition, I had fallen asleep the old-fashioned way. My sleep-addled brain didn’t quite register the shifting of weight on the bed next to me, and I was halfway through the process that would have returned me to my bunker for a proper rest when my manhood was enveloped in a warm, wet set of lips.

The touch was gentle, tentative, affectionate and the soft groan that escaped my throat only spurred on the one that was trying to swallow my whole length. I managed to crack an eyelid open, the sheet-covered mound hovering around my waist started rhythmically bobbing up and down. Slow and steady strokes, measured and deliberate suction, the expert application of tongue to all the sensitive areas of my crown. This was a mouth intent on providing the most amount of pleasure it was capable of. I smiled and rested my head back into the pillow. “Good morning, Evie,” I said through the curl of my grin. Only a cute little giggle vibrated around my shaft before my newest lover shifted her attention back to the task before her.

There are many stories like this one. The erotic section of your local library, not to mention the scores of websites out there, are filled with them, and in each of them the hero of the story is some noble, benevolent, altruistic, larger than life character who always does the right thing and puts the needs of others ahead of his own. This is not one of those stories. At least, it hadn’t been until now.

It had been a month since my departure from the hospital and although I had kept contact with my nurses, the promised night of drinks and the rendezvous with Becky had yet to happen. With so many of the nursing staff being invited to the party, a whole new shift rotation had to be devised to accommodate them all being off on the same night and it was taking some time. That month, however, had been filled with what I can only accurately describe as the abject abuse of my powers. I told myself that I needed to practice, to explore and master my new abilities, and I had practiced ... A lot.

I’d had more random and anonymous sex in the past few weeks than I’d had in my entire life before that combined. The methods that Charlotte had taught me of gaining access to an Evo’s mind, I quickly realized, worked just as well on the average human. Instead of intricate cities and their curtain walls, there was just an avatar of that person standing in the middle of a meadow. Mute and motionless, anything I said to them in the mindscape – as I came to call it – was akin to direct mental control.

Okay, I admit it, I had used the last of those examples more than I would like to think about, but the effect of this practice couldn’t be denied. I may not have had the opportunity to duel with another Evo but entering the mind of a normal human had become child’s play.

You are now bisexual for the rest of the evening, and you desire nothing more than to make out with that girl over there.

You are going to put your name down for karaoke. You will sing ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey whether you know the words or not. You will be physically incapable of reaching the high notes.

It had all been so easy. Until I saw Evie.

It was just like any other night; the same bar, the same nameless faces, the same crowd of college girls ready to be bent to my every whim. Then I saw her, her eyes capturing mine in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar, and I say it that way intentionally. As soon as I saw her, every other girl in the bar ceased to exist. They drew me in like a magnet, like the gravitational pull of a star. I may have turned my entire focus onto her, but I was as incapable of walking away from her as she was from me.

I sucked in a deep breath, Evie’s tongue working its magic on the vee of my frenulum pulling my mind back to the moment. I flicked the sheets off her head to gaze down at her, her eyes sparkling mischievously back to mine before she pulled them back over her again with another giggle. My replying chuckle was strangled in my throat by another long moan as she took my entire length into her throat.

It wasn’t her face that had drawn me in, although she was astoundingly beautiful. It wasn’t the memories of her kind words or smiling face over the past two years; although, there were plenty of them. It was her mind.

Like every other human mind that I had seen, her avatar had been alone in the field, just as I had expected. But unlike theirs, hers was neither mute nor motionless. Hunched over a small campfire and warming her hands, she had immediately looked up to greet me as I approached. A smile curled at her thin, but friendly lips as her eyes took me in. But this was more than an appraisal of my vastly altered outward appearance. It was as if she was looking into my very soul, and in a moment that I couldn’t fully explain, I felt an overwhelming urge to gain her approval.

It was hard to describe, much like the rest of the night. It wasn’t hard to win her favor; she already seemed to be harboring a certain level of affection towards me from the time she had known me before the accident, even if the immediate target of her amorous intent had been Jimmy. I had no idea why but I wanted to be a better man for her. The internal monologue from her that had been so clear with everyone else was like trying to listen to a conversation from underwater. It was muffled and garbled, I could only make out parts of it with intense concentration and direct physical contact. I had spent a lot longer than I cared to admit trying to get her to lick the rim on my glass – yes, I know it was juvenile, but I had cut my mind-controlling teeth on a lot stranger commands - my frustration at her resistance building the more I pushed, but I simply couldn’t get her to comply.

I am the kind of guy who is very much in favor of calling a spade a spade, so you will understand that all notion of Evie being simply another experiment went out of the window very early in the night. I could have manipulated my way into the panties of a hundred other girls in the bar. But Evie was special, her mind was unique, and her eyes captured me in a way that no others, before or since, ever had. I felt myself falling for this angel long before I brought myself to admit it. Then I started singing to her. Even now, after all these years, I still feel the heat burning in my cheeks and inwardly cringe when I think about how I butchered Elvis Presley to a girl I had known properly for less than an hour.

But the more her mind resisted, the more I wanted her.

Eventually, I had given up on the brute force approach that had worked so well with the other humans and had simply asked her avatar if I could join her by the fire. With an adorable smile and a simple nod, she had moved over on the log that she had perched herself on to make room. As soon as I sat down, her hand curled itself around mine and I was hers.

It was another part of the night that was difficult to describe, let alone explain. It was as if her acceptance of me around her campfire was a direct route to her mind, both in terms of her feelings towards me and mine to her. The only thing that I could compare it to was the kiss that I had shared with Charlotte outside the walls of my city, complete and undiluted trust, and affection. I fell for her in an instant, and she fell just as hard.

Love is an impossible emotion to describe at the best of times. I felt no small amount of it towards Becky, a different, albeit no less substantial version of it towards Charlotte after our kiss, and now the same could be said for Evie. I had made a point of not thinking too much about it for the rest of the night, but it was something that Jeeves and I would have to discuss in great detail at some point in the near future. But as soon as I wrapped my fingers around hers and accepted her into my heart – and my place in hers – her mind opened to me, just as Charlotte’s had.

The monologue became crystal clear, not coming from some disembodied voice as they did with other humans, but directly from the lips of her avatar. I was given a running commentary as each touch, each gesture, each word, and each kiss drew her inextricably closer to me. By the time we had made it to my apartment, she was so overwhelmed by the emotion of it all that I thought I might have broken her. Yet, that single tear, wiped away by another almost instinctive gesture, was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It was at that point that she dropped the last of her resistance. From that point onwards, there was little question in her mind where the night was going or how she felt about me.

I may have had a slightly better idea of what was going on than she did, but not even I could adequately explain the depth of emotion that we suddenly felt for one another. I had mentally influenced or outright manipulated countless nameless girls over the past few weeks, dozens of them, yet not a single one of them had left a fraction of the impression on me as Evie had. I couldn’t even begin to expound upon the differences between her avatar and theirs.

The lack of a city discounted her being an Evo, the lack of an Aura meant she was not an inquisitor, even if I did have trouble reading her thoughts to start with. There was clearly more to her than the average human, but where she fit in my admittedly limited understanding of this new species hierarchy was beyond me. Maybe that’s what drew me to her, maybe it was that feeling that I felt from the moment our eyes met that, had my walls not been up, she would have been as capable of reading me as I was of her. Despite my ability to hear her thoughts, I could not plunder the depths of her mind like I could with the others. I couldn’t access her memories or get her to divulge secrets to me, if she wasn’t thinking about them at that precise moment, it was beyond my reach. There was no other way to describe it; she fascinated me.

Another hissed breath and another guttural groan were pulled from my throat as Evie picked up the pace and once again yanked my thoughts back to the present. Increasing her suction and working some voodoo magic with her tongue, she sucked my entire length back into her throat, withdrew to the tip, and then repeated. Over and over again she inhaled the whole of me, the throat muscles and tongue both working in tandem to fulfill one of her more memorable internal thoughts from the previous night.

I will make him beg for me tomorrow.

I sucked in another whimpered breath as Evie held her rhythm, her lips, tongue, throat, and the relentless suction was edging me closer much faster than I was used to. Of course, it was well within my powers to hold off my orgasm indefinitely; the internal editing station had seen to that, but through the tangled maze of her thoughts came one overriding desire. She wanted me to cum. No parlor tricks, no build-up, no input from me whatsoever, she wanted the simple satisfaction that she alone had brought me to climax. Who was I to refuse such a siren?

I flicked the sheet off her head, her eyes coming up to meet mine as our gazes burned into each other. The sparkle of mischief had gone from hers, replaced by a pang of hunger that spoke volumes. The look on my face was no less obvious. I started to roll my hips into her mouth, matching the pace of her bobs, pressing deeper into her talented throat each time she sank down and relaxing my hips as she pulled away. One of her hands came up between my legs to cradle my heavy balls; this wasn’t the desperate, pornographic fondling I had received so many times over the past month. This was gentle; an affectionate caress designed to bring pleasure, not to hurry along my release. The involuntary, strangled moan in my throat told both of us that it was having the desired effect.

My neck was arguing with itself, torn between the desire to hold my head up so that my eyes could watch Evie work and the almost overwhelming urge to let it loll back into the pillow. My eyes were being forced to stay open as her throat contracted, swallowing the copious amounts of precum leaking from my tip and sucking in deep, labored breaths each time my crown was pulled out of her throat. Her eyes remained locked on mine.

“Jesus ... Evie.” I panted as the cum-ladened balls beneath her featherlight fingers started to pull up into my body. The creases of her eyes stretched as her full mouth smiled around my length. “I’m close.” She arched a single eyebrow; we both knew what she wanted to hear as she held me right on the very edge. “... please!... ”

The final begging plea was all she needed, despite my mind vowing playful revenge. Her fingers squeezed a little harder, milking the cum from my balls like over-ripened fruit. She pressed herself all the way forward, my balls and her fingers resting against her chin as her nose buried itself into my pubis, the suction increased, her tongue swirled and pirouetted around my shaft, rubbing against every millimeter of skin it could find and she swallowed. Again and again, her throat muscles squeezed around my crown as my manhood started to swell between her already stretched lips.

With a final whimpered groan and another revenant call of her name, I let go. My throbbing cock started to pulse, twitching as my orgasm raced up the length and exploded into her mouth. The first blast was almost explosive, firing straight into her throat before she pulled back, resting the head on her tongue and allowing the rest of my climax to splash against the roof of her incredible mouth before pooling on her tongue. My legs were trembling, my whole body was almost vibrating in orgasmic pleasure, my ragged, panting breaths were the only sound in the room as I looked down at her in wonder.

Evie swallowed. There was no dramatics, there was no desire to show off the load she had coaxed from me, nor was there a need to over-emphasize what she had done with it. She simply swallowed, her eyes never leaving mine for a second. “Wow,” I gulped. “Just ... wow.”

She popped my manhood from her lips, her eyes briefly flicking down to it before pressing her lips affectionately against the tip and smiling up at me. “Good morning to you, too,” she said with a wink.

She shuffled up the bed, finally resting her head on my shoulder, sighing contentedly as I turned my head to press my lips into her forehead. My mind almost instinctively wandered to hers, her avatar leaning affectionately up against me as I sat next to her on her log. At first, the silence confused me; expecting to hear some form of internal monologue, it took me a few minutes to realize that it wasn’t a difficulty in reading her that accounted for the silence, but an overriding sense of contentment. She was basking in the glow, enjoying it, and there was nothing in the world that needed to be thought about instead of living in this moment. A small part of me fell in love with her all over again at the realization. Not even Becky had been this happy just to be with me. No sex, no conversation, no motive, no desires--just simple happiness. I seriously doubted that anyone else in my life had ever been this content to just lay with me.

The stillness of the moment was interrupted a few minutes later when my front door swung open and Jimmy walked in, followed closely by a grinning Lori. There was a small squeak next to me as Evie pulled the sheet over her head to hide from the sudden intrusion. I arched an eyebrow as my eyes met Jimmy’s. “I am gonna regret giving you a key, aren’t I?”

Jimmy smirked and sat down on one of the bar stools next to the breakfast bar in the kitchen area. “Hey, blame her,” he nodded at Lori who only giggled in reply.

“Lori!” Evie scolded with a sheepish grin of her own as she uncovered her head again and glared at her friend. “Why? Just ... why?”

“It’s about time that I get to be the disapproving friend.” Lori shrugged, still laughing.

Evie turned to look at me at the same time as I turned to look at her, our eyes meeting for only a moment. Her thoughts told me what she was thinking: aside from the unexpected intrusion, she had no regrets about our night together “Are you embarrassed?” she asked me playfully.

“Nope.”

“Good, me neither. Now, if you don’t mind...” she eyeballed both of our new guests, lifted her arm and twirled her finger around, gesturing for them to turn their backs to us. Jimmy chuckled and spun around in his seat. “You too!” She scolded Lori again, drawing another giggle as Lori turned her back to us.

She leaned out of the bed, my eyes roaming the bare skin of her back as she reached out for my shirt which was still sitting in the place it had fallen the night before. She stepped out of bed, my eyes taking in her naked figure as she pulled the shirt on. I hadn’t paid a huge amount of attention to it the previous night, but her body was magnificent, even from the back. Her shoulders narrowed down to a delicate waist before flaring invitingly out to her hips, and her ass was a sight to behold. She turned to look at me over her shoulder, flashing a little wink as she noticed where I was looking and wiggling her ass playfully before covering it up with the garment. I smiled widely in response. “I may need to borrow a toothbrush.” She said in as calm a voice as she could muster.

I nodded to the door to the left of the bed, the only other one in the room. “Help yourself. Do you want me to bring your clothes in?”

“This one’s a keeper!” Lori called from across the room, still laughing to herself.

“Shush you!” Evie shouted back, a smile pulling at her lips before thanking me and heading into the bathroom. I swung my legs out of bed, retrieving a pair of loose sweatpants from the chest of drawers next to it, and was pulling them on when Lori turned around.

“Yup, definitely a keeper!” She called out, her widened eyes fixed on my groin before I had the chance to turn around and make myself presentable.

“I knew you’d look!” Evie laughed from behind the door.

“No wonder you and him get on so well.” I laughed, nodding towards Jimmy and tying the drawstring before collecting Evie’s clothes and passing them around the door. The lyrical, almost musical sound of her thanking me echoed out of the bathroom just before being replaced with the sound of the shower being turned on.

I arched an eyebrow at Jimmy as he turned back to face me and he knew what I was thinking. “I think he’s pissed ‘cos he can’t join her in there,” he whispered comically to Lori. She only laughed again.

“I think I’m gonna have to invest in a deadbolt,” I said with a wry grin as I walked over to the kitchen, flipping the switch on the Keurig and pulling a bottle of Dr. P from the fridge. “Keep out unwanted visitors.”

“Might be a good idea. Wait, you’re drinking coffee?”

“Not for me,” I answered as the machine hissed and hummed to life. I poured a large glass for myself before putting the Dr. P back into the fridge. “You want one?” I asked, looking up at Lori.

“Oh, no thank you. I already drank this morning.” She winked at Jimmy who almost choked on his own tongue. I didn’t need to be able to read minds to know what they were talking about. “So,” she said, drawing out the syllable as she leaned over the kitchen counter, her dress from the night before doing nothing to hide her cleavage as she looked at me. “Have a good night, last night?”

“I did.” I smiled back, making a point of maintaining eye contact as Jimmy did the exact opposite.

“Care to share the details?”

“Nope,” I said with a wink.

“Aw, come on,” she teased. “You know she’s gonna give them to me anyway.”

“No, I won’t,” Evie called out as the door to the bathroom opened and she stepped back into the room. She looked dazzling with her damp hair tied in a loose ponytail and cast over one shoulder, still wearing my shirt over her top from the night before. I had almost forgotten how good she looked in those jeans, but there was something indescribably sexy about the way she looked in my shirt. She smiled and blushed a little as she noticed me looking before turning her attention back to Lori.

“Spoil sport.” Lori playfully pouted. “What if I told you what we got up to last night?”

Jimmy choked on his tongue again.

“No, thanks,” Evie and I said in unison as she stepped off the raised part of the room which contained my bed and into the kitchen area, kissing me on the cheek as I handed her a cup of steaming coffee and not questioning for a second how I knew how she liked it.

Even Jimmy noticed the smile on my face as he tried to remember how to breathe.

Lori huffed and checked the time on her phone. “Oh, we’ve got to be going soon.”

“Have we?” Evie asked, looking confused.

“Yeah, dress shopping, remember?”

“Err ... No. What dress?” Evie was squinting now, eyeing Lori from over her coffee cup.

“The dress ... for the thing?”

“What thing?!? What are you talking about?”

A simple perusal of Lori’s thoughts told me exactly what she meant. There was no dress, and there was no ‘thing,’ as if anyone needed mind-reading powers to tell that. Lori genuinely wanted to grill her friend for the details, not necessarily the sordid, blow-by-blow account of our time together, but all she knew for sure was that Evie had spent the night. She was excited and happy for her friend. Apparently, Jimmy had spent a good portion of the previous evening telling Lori how much of an outstanding guy I was, so neither of them was entirely sure if we had done more than just sleep.

It would appear that Jimmy’s vow of celibacy hadn’t survived the night with Lori either, and I had to force myself to tune out of her mind as pictures of her own escapades began a slide show behind her eyes. Contrary to ‘looking for trouble,’ as they had put it, they were up the stairs and into Jimmy’s apartment less than five minutes after we were. I managed to tune out at the point where Lori had shredded Jimmy’s shirt in her long-awaited conquest of my friend. As far as I could tell, the offending garment was still in pieces on his floor.

I did a quick mental sweep of the room. Lori was joyous; absolutely delighted that she had finally scored with Jimmy, but also inordinately pleased that Evie had come out of her shell a bit, and with an apparently decent guy, no less. Evie was in an almost euphoric state of mind. She thought she should be feeling awkward as she had done in every other one of her previous relationships after the first night together, and more so at the arrival of our guests. But the only thing that was even remotely concerning her about the whole situation was how utterly content she felt. She felt like she belonged.

Jimmy was just plain happy. Jimmy had gotten laid. Jimmy was always happy when he got laid.

I chuckled as the back and forth between the two ladies continued. By now, Evie had caught on but was still making Lori work for it. The slightest hint of a smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

“Evie, how could you forget? I’ve been talking about this ... err ... wedding for ages.”

“Wedding? This is the first I’m hearing about it. Who is getting married?”

“My ... um ... my cousin.”

“Oh, Jonny?” Evie asked, still trying to hide her smirk. “I thought he was already married.”

“No, Gwen.”

“Isn’t Gwen like, fifteen years old?”

“Shut up, we’re going dress shopping.” Lori had given up on maintaining the lie. Evie rolled her eyes and finally let her smile show as she looked towards me. “Oh, I hate you.” Lori had finally caught on and poked her tongue out as the rest of us burst into laughter.

Evie put down her finished cup of coffee and stepped towards me. “Well, apparently, I’m going dress shopping,” she laughed and leaned up to kiss my cheek again. A small squeak escaped her mouth as I turned my head and pressed my lips against hers, surprising her.

“Alright, you two. Get a room.” Jimmy chuckled.

“You’re in my room.” I quipped back before turning my attention back to Evie. She had picked up my phone and was tapping the display, waiting a couple of seconds before her phone dinged and then repeated the procedure on her own.

“There, numbers exchanged,” she said with a smile. “I’ll text you later in the week?” Her smile faltered a little as her confidence left her for a moment. As much as she knew how she felt, she was suddenly worried that she had overstepped.

“I’m looking forward to it,” I smiled back before kissing her again. The two ladies said their goodbyes, Lori and Jimmy sharing a chaste kiss before they headed out the door. With one look over her shoulder at me and another happy smile, Evie followed Lori out of the apartment.

Jimmy turned and looked at me. “Should I even bother to ask?” he smirked.

“Nope,” I smiled back and made my way over to my desk.

“Thought not.” He laughed before crossing the room, dropping himself onto the couch, and loading up the Xbox as I went back to work on my college project.

A games engine, for those not in the know, is a difficult concept to explain. Imagine, for a moment, that you are trying to build a house. You don’t just walk up at an empty plot and start building. There are zoning laws and planning permission to take into account, the availability of power and water supplies, the cost of materials, tools, and equipment, architect and engineering plans, and even the laws of physics and the local weather come into play. Then there are the tools--where you get them from, knowing how to use them, which ones are needed, and who is going to operate them. When you build a house, a hell of a lot of work has already happened before the first brick is ever laid.

Essentially, this groundwork – for lack of a better description – is what a game engine is: it is a platform on which a game developer can build their game. It determines the level of graphics that can be used in the game, the number and complexity of the assets within it, the physics algorithms that will determine how each of them will interact, and the coding structure that will allow the programmers to develop their games.

Load up any game, any one at all, anything from Minecraft to the newest Grand Theft Auto title, and what you are looking at are the assets – the blocks, the people, the cars, the buildings, the guns, the everything – interacting with each other via the physics engine and rendered through the graphics engine in a way that the programmer wants them to so that you get a playable game.

It is the architecture behind any game. Maybe that would be a better way of putting it. But however you wanted to describe it, that is what I was trying to build. The problem with game engines is that very few of them are truly unique. Almost all of them are improvements on previous iterations and even the new ones that had been built from the ground up still heavily borrowed their construction from older generations. It was very much a case of ‘this part works, so we will keep that, but we can improve this other part and call it new.’ The one area in which these engines could be distinguished from their predecessors was in the field of artificial intelligence.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: we aren’t talking about some science fiction Skynet type of AI here, just a generic – albeit elaborate – system of “if this happens, then do that” to the point where the computer is able to manage the game assets without the programmer having to account for every single variable in a world of increasingly complex games. The final area of improvement was size. The better the engine, the bigger the game that could be fitted onto it. That is why even open-world games like Grand Theft Auto, or the Fallout series had to have border. The maps couldn’t go on forever.

But what if they could? Sports games took up a large chunk of the gaming market, but there are only so many football fields in existence. It was the ever-increasing number of ‘sandbox’ games and first-person shooters that dominated the market. What if the next Modern Warfare game had the ability to generate huge, randomized maps, each one different from the last? What if the next GTA spanned not just a single intricate city, but an entire country? What if the newest addition to the Fallout or Skyrim franchises weren’t restricted to a single, albeit large, map, but instead spanned an entire planet? And what if the game’s AI was capable of populating those areas with enough visual detail and randomly generated tasks and quests – without a programmer’s input – to keep them interesting and playable? That is what I was aiming for.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it, I have said many times throughout this story that I was a shy and isolated child, mainly thanks to my parents, but I had tuned out my own bleak existence by delving into the world of video games. I had mastered every single one in my possession. I had built soaring cities whose residents lived in perpetual bliss. I had led grand armies on historic campaigns. I had battled demons, monsters, and zombie hordes and lived to tell the tale. From the seclusion of my bedroom, I had dominated galaxies and conquered worlds.