Prologue

Martha Templeton and her computer did not stop discussing the program she was developing when her the manager, Alan Harris, came and looked at the screen over her shoulder. Nor did they stop when he slid one hand inside the front of her tunic and fondled the smooth bare skin of her left breast. After finishing the immediate program topic, she told the computer to do something else for a few minutes while she had a private conversation.

"Mr. Harris, since I know you already have a wife and a child, I assume this is not a proposal of marriage. I think we should discuss what changes you want to make to my duties somewhere else, perhaps in your office away from prying eyes and ears," she said in a quiet, perfectly normal conversational tone.

"Come into my office for a moment, please, Miss Templeton," Alan said out loud.

"As soon as I have finished this module, say in about ten minutes," she replied, "Will it wait that long?"

"Of course," he answered, and with that he moved away.

The module she was trying to program was trickier than she thought, and she wasn't a brilliant programmer, so it was over twenty minutes before she knocked on Alan's office door.

"Where have you been? I was waiting for you," he said impatiently reaching for her as she shut the door behind her.

Slipping away from his grasp she said, "Sit down, please, Mr. Harris," as though it were her office and he the visitor. He realised then that she was a little taller than he had thought, only a couple of inches below his five feet ten.

"Now, I take it you want me in a bed for sexual purposes somewhere," she started, to his amazement.

He hadn't expected a twenty year old junior programmer to be quite so matter of fact about a rather daring sexual approach in her first month in her first job.

"I live with my parents and you live with your wife and child, so I would need an apartment somewhere, at your expense of course," she said.

On the vastly overcrowded Earth of 2088 it was well-nigh impossible for her to get her own apartment until her parents were dead or in a home. Then, of course, she would be thrown out of their two-roomer because she was only one person. Even married couples of her social status only had one room until their child reached puberty, and after it left home. The very wealthy, as ever, had different arrangements.

"If I could arrange somewhere, would you come?" he asked.

"Only if you are a good lover," she replied ambiguously, and walked out of his office.

'That will do for now, ' she thought, 'If he is serious something might come of it, but if he is only trying it on, the demand for an apartment will stop him.'

Staring at the door, Alan thought, 'She was totally in control of that conversation. She even made a pun on her exit line. This is something she has thought through to the last detail. I might have found a real full-time sex partner here. I wonder how experienced she really is?' At the back of his mind was an unvoiced suspicion that he might just have found a woman who could dominate him, and that maybe that was what he wanted and lacked at home.

Returning to her computer, she reflected on her decision to find a rich man and let him buy her virginity. Marriage was now only for licensed couples and that took a measure of time and commitment which none of her boyfriends had been willing to make; each of them professed to love her and each of them wanted her to prove she loved him by going to bed with him.

'Well, ' she thought, 'sex before marriage is silly, because if you give a boy sex, why should he bother to marry you?'

After some encounters in which she came very close to giving in, she realised that her body wanted sex, so if she couldn't have marriage, money was the next best thing. Selling it on street corners didn't seem a good idea, so her conclusion was that the best option would be to find a rich man and grab him.

As she was leaving work that afternoon, Alan said, "I'm going your way today, I'll give you a lift Miss Templeton."

Unable turn this offer down easily, she found herself in his car and, as she expected, heading in the wrong direction. Her parents lived in a solid middle-income housing complex on one edge of town, but Alan was heading into the centre, where only students and the poorest people lived.

Stopping the hovercar, he led her up a flight of stairs (how quaint and old-fashioned, she thought) to an apartment about the size of one of their two rooms at home. For this part of town that was quite large, about six feet by eight. Looking round her, she realised that it was fully equipped to be a home, it had cooking and shower and cleansing facilities as well as a bed and the inevitable 3V wall.

Closing the door behind them, he gave her a sheet of paper that, to her utter amazement, said she was now the occupier of this apartment. Swiftly checking with the Registry via the room's 3V wall, she found she was resident in the apartment, the rent and taxes were paid for the next six months, and she could set the door to admit anyone she chose, or bar anyone but Alan. Moreover, and totally unheard of, the Registry confirmed that she also still lived at her parents' apartment, so they wouldn't lose her room if she moved here. Somehow she had become, officially, two separate people who just happened to share a single identity, right down to the tiniest detail and yet were being treated as two people with double water, food and accommodation rations.