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“So you… didn’t tell her to do… that?”
He’d made that completely obvious, of course, so I spoke only to have something to say while my brain attempted to process all the thoughts, emotions, and sensations roiling through my body.
He shook his head.
I didn’t intend to say anything more, but to my dismay my voice seemed to develop a will of its own. It went on, “Do you… I mean… Master, do you…”
There I managed to stop myself. My cheeks now felt like twin suns in some sci-fi solar system. I hoped Master Hendryk wouldn’t have understood, but the smile that appeared on his handsome face told me that he knew precisely where my unfinished question had been headed.
“I had them give Candy that module,” he told me. “But I turned it off so that she wouldn’t do something like this. She’s designed so that when she gets horny she gets more extreme, just like a regular person.”
I felt my mouth twist to the side as I tried in vain to tell myself that he hadn’t just described me—but it seemed like that very realization had formed part of my tutoring session with Candy. She had brought out the shameful need for such extremity, and used it to make me progress in my self-knowledge, and—I felt sure—in my submission, too.
Even more, I suddenly had a curiosity about what Master Hendryk did for a living that I hadn’t had before—educational theory had, without any warning, become something I wanted to know much more about. And hadn’t he said something about a career for me, in relation to it?
I felt the incongruity of thinking about my professional future in that position—on my back on Candy’s bed, with my face still bearing the signs of my queening and my hands still opening my bottom lewdly and submissively. That awkwardness didn’t dim my interest at all.
“She taught me… things,” I told Master Hendryk. “So she did tutor me that way, I guess?”
He nodded. “That’s right. Whatever’s going on in her deep systems doesn’t seem to be disturbing her higher order functions, which is what makes me think it’s someone who’s gained access but is trying to conceal their tracks.”
I blinked, suddenly forgetting all about educational theory.
“Spying, you mean?”
A look of distaste crossed Master Hendryk’s gorgeous face. “Yes. A competitor, possibly. A random hacker, maybe.”
“So you’ll have to send her back?” A strange, conflicting mixture of happiness and disappointment came into my chest at the idea.
He shook his head. “We need to get to the bottom of this. You’re going to help me figure out what’s going on—with the help of a little educational theory.”
CHAPTER22
Hendryk
I released Candy from her isolation room only a few minutes after sending her there. Time was of the essence. I didn’t feel at all sure that I hadn’t already alerted whoever had hacked into Candy’s brain, but I suspected I could count on them to take a few hours at least to analyze the data she was sending.
Clearly the glitch they had caused in her parameters—resetting her jealousy level and activating the Water Sports module—didn’t represent something they’d intended. Much less could they have meant Candy to speak out loud the transmission message Renee had heard. So they didn’t have perfect control over her, and maybe I could take advantage of that.
The interrupt code I had used to keep Candy from peeing on Renee, though, would appear in her system log. I had to believe the spy, whoever they were, had access to that—and I had to hope they would take some time to realize what it meant.
I shot an email to Janice Derling to alert her to the situation and to run a deep diagnostic on her own AI concubine, as well as to tell her what I planned to do.
Ugh, she mailed back a few moments later, then, for good measure,ugh ugh ugh. Russians at it again? Very not good. I’ll alert R&D. Your plan seems like a longshot, but definitely worth a try. Go ahead and get Security and Research involved.
The rest of the afternoon I spent alternately reading up on Selecta’s intel concerning the megacorp’s shadowy quasi-competitors in eastern Europe, emailing with Security and Research, and watching Candy and Renee over the house’s video feed. Candy seemed to be acting normally, and Renee had apparently taken to heart my admonition to stay cool and pretend nothing had happened besides a little naughty fun and a successful first tutoring session.
Six weeks before I purchased Renee, I had gotten an alert from Selecta’s security division that ‘eastern European interests’ had developed a keen interest in the activities of the education division. I had felt flattered, really, that the loosely affiliated group Selecta execs tended just to call the Russians—despite the increasing irrelevance of traditional national borders in that part of the world—had noticed my efforts.
Really the kind of education I did needed a functioning governmental apparatus, whether controlled by a corporation or a sovereign state, to have its beneficial effects. It seemed that one or more of the eastern European warlords, however, had decided to try to create their own kleptocratic enclave, and they wanted to do it along the lines of Selecta’s New Modesty program.
I had to admire their spirit, whoever they were: a utopia of old-fashioned husband-led families formed on the backbone of firm, loving discipline seemed like an ideal, if perhaps farfetched, solution to the lawlessness currently prevailing there. I didn’t even think it outside the realm of possibility that it might work—the problem was that the Russians clearly didn’t want to pay for my secret educational sauce, despite their fabulous wealth. The alert from security had told me the warlords’ hackers had started probing our networks in a more focused way than usual.
The few reports from Research didn’t give me much to work with as I planned my attempt at counterespionage, but I did run across one intriguing detail that seemed as if I might be able to put it to use:
We currently theorize (ca. 75% certainty) that the instigator of the effort to steal Selecta Education’s proprietary methods is the warlord Jaroslav Dubinski. Dubinski is known for his love of corporal punishment and his established interest in the New Modesty, though with important modifications: an intercepted document indicates that his ambition is to implement a polygynous version of the program, where he and his lieutenants keep households with multiple consorts, the junior concubines under the authority of the senior ones.
I planned accordingly, hoping I might catch Dubinski’s hackers unaware. I had, after all, created a highly suitable situation with mymenage à trois. With luck, I thought as I made my way back to the west wing, I might even score a victory for Selecta.
