A Geek in Mind

The area of the city that I worked in was a fairly typical corporate hub. The building itself was another glass fronted office block in a forest of glass fronted office blocks. Anonymity through conformity. Inside it, on the many floors, I.T. staff serviced contracts for banks and insurance companies, petrochemical conglomerates and trading houses. Everything from desktop calendar software and content management to work-flow automation systems. It was where I had been working for the past decade. My office however, was not on one of the hum-drum worker floors towering above the concrete and asphalt outside. The office that I had been allocated during my tenure was on one of the six sub-levels where the real work took place. The lucrative defense contract work that was brought to us by shady agencies or organizations. Interest groups who prized our discretion and complete lack of morality. It was on one of these projects that I had spent my last eight months of my employment and it was about this project that my manager had summoned me to his office. We all had individual offices because most of the work that we did was top secret, and project teams were not allowed to share information, code or anything else. Project teams were dynamic and people would be moved onto different teams as soon as their projects were complete, but secrecy needed to maintained. This had worked very well in my favor for this particular project.

From an oversight point of view, the project was in trouble when my manager called me into the meeting with him. We had made a little headway initially, however, for the past six months we had made no real progress at all and had nothing to show and Tim, my manager, looked deflated. “They’re pulling the plug on us.”, he said to me.

“All of our backers?”

“Yes, all of them. They’ve sunk millions into this project. The research looked really promising, but we’ve just not been able to produce anything. I know it’s not your fault, hell, nobody has been as committed as you. I’m sorry Andy, I know it sucks wasting eight months on a project that gets canned.”

I gave him my resigned look. “Dude, I have been in this game a long time. At this point in my life, I am fairly philosophical about large I.T. projects. At the end of the day I get paid and there is a bit more money in my retirement fund.”

What I didn’t say was that I had been expecting this, because I had been sabotaging the project, almost from the outset. Once it became clear that we had a real chance of achieving what we had set out to do. What we were working on was too dangerous for me to allow it to be developed. The potential for misuse was too great. Computer hardware and software modules that covert government agencies could place in a variety of different computers, tablets and phones that would enable them to influence the device users. It worked almost like a form or remote, computer-operated hypnosis, and could be dramatically enhanced with other environment factors. Scent, for example, was a very powerful catalyst for creating long lasting influence in conjunction with our hardware. Based on the research, it would be theoretically possible to push victims (they were referred to as participants in our documentation) to think or behave in ways completely foreign to their normal behavior. An operator could implant suggestions and even, potentially, alter memories. The worst of it, at least in my mind, was that the victim (sorry, participant) would think that the altered behavior was normal and acceptable, and would begin to align their own behavior to conform with the suggested behavior, so that over time, people could be, for want of a better word, reprogrammed. Through the use of the conditioning hardware, an operator could tell a participant to take a particular action behave in a specified way, and the participant would unwittingly do it, thinking that it was their idea.

I couldn’t think of any organization that I would be comfortable with having that much power, let alone the security agencies of our government. The thought terrified me. The problem was that the technology worked. I knew it worked, because I tested it, secretly, first on my boss, Tim, and then on one of the developers who worked for me. Once I had confirmed that we were making progress and that we would achieve the goal, I influenced my manager to restructure the development team to report into me. I also “persuaded” him that they should be split up and not talk about the project to anybody (relatively easy due to national security). Having arranged the reporting structure in this way, it became easy for me to control the integration of the hardware and software modules and to substitute faulty logic for working code. You’re probably wondering how I could be morally opposed to trusting a security agency to use the equipment, while I used it freely for my own benefit, given the hypocrisy of that, and my response to that is simply that I am a hypocritical asshole, don’t judge me.

“As you are aware”, he continued, “your employment contract was tied to this piece of work. We are going to be wrapping up by the end of the week, but you can leave now, if you prefer. Our corporate policy is that I should have you escorted from the building immediately, but given our history with you, I don’t feel that’s necessary.”

“I appreciate that”, I said, “It’s pretty humiliating being escorted out of a building by the corporate gorillas. I will clear out my desk as soon as we are done here.”

“Perhaps I can get you on a different project”, he added hastily. “You are a great asset to us and I’m sure, with your experience, that we can use you on other projects.”

“Nah, it’s ok”, I smiled, “A change of scenery will be nice. What’s the severance on my contract?”

“We will pay you four week’s notice as per the contract, and the bonus was ten percent of the remaining allocated project budget. In this case, that’s just short of two hundred million dollars, so your bonus will be just shy of twenty million dollars.”

My jaw hit the floor. “That’s a staggering amount, bud”, I managed to say eventually. “Are you going to have any trouble over this?”

“It’s as per the contact we have with you. We have to honor it. The backers pulled the plug while there was a significant amount of allocated budget unspent. It’s your good luck really.”

“I’m pretty much speechless, ” I said, once I had collected myself sufficiently. “I do have one request, please keep Sam on. She’s a great dev and she has been very dedicated to this project. She’s pregnant and I think they guy who knocked her up has bailed on her, which she doesn’t deserve.”

“I’m sure we can make a plan for her, ” he replied. “I agree with you regarding her ability, and I have another project in mind for her. I’ll do what I can to keep her on.”

I walked out of the meeting in a daze. It was like winning a rollover lottery jackpot. Certainly, I would take some time off. Whether I would work again formally was something I would need to contemplate.

The contract that Tim had mentioned was a new deal that had been brokered through another manipulation that I had carried out on him using the hardware, but I had never imagined it would net me so much money. Initially, I implanted the hardware module in Tim’s machine by arranging a meeting with him, spiking his coffee with a powerful diuretic and popping it into his machine when he went to the toilet. I was nervous as all hell doing it, certainly no master CIA spy operating in the field. It worked, though, just like it would in any good James Bond film. He drank the coffee and very early on in our meeting excused himself and bolted for the men’s room. The hardware module looked and operated exactly like a memory module, and it was easy for me to swap one of his computer’s memory modules out, after shutting down his machine. The software bundle installed itself into the machine’s BIOS once it was turned on again, and when he returned, I apologized and said that I had accidentally kicked his power cable out, which is why his machine rebooted. My early experiments on Tim were really trivial behavior manipulations. I got him to bring me coffee a couple of times and to reschedule meetings. Once I was sure that I could influence him, I started changing the reporting structure to give myself a lot more power and control. I also upped my salary and changed the contract to have a completion bonus for me regardless of success of failure, which is why I was now looking at that significant pay-out. I also used him to run interference whenever it looked like we might get some additional, unwanted (by me) oversight. Other than that, and making him like me a lot more, I didn’t do too much to manipulate him, up to my final day at the company. I had a lot more fun with one of my direct reports, the dev I had previously mentioned to Tim, a young, and importantly, female software developer. I left Tim’s office, cleaned out my desk, and then swung by her office on my way out, reminding myself as I walked there, how she had ended up pregnant with my baby.

Several months earlier, I had started my experimentation on her. Samantha, or Sam as she liked to be known, was a brilliant programmer on my team. She had graduated a couple of years before from M.I.T. with a number of distinctions and she had been recruited by our corporate talent scouts, first as in intern, then junior programmer, then fast-tracked to senior developer. In her early twenties, she was a slender, toned, bookish woman, who spoke softly, but with authority and confidence. As a female programmer she stood out, but she was not knock-out beautiful. She was a little better than plain with mousy brown hair, and, although her body was firm and athletic, she did not dress to show it off, typically wearing baggy sweaters and shapeless pants. But she was the only woman in the team, hell, the only woman on whole damn floor. Ultimately, my idea to take advantage of her was born out of conversation we had where she had, probably inadvertently, bruised my ego with an off the cuff remark. We’d had a couple of late-night development sessions trying to meet some of the early project milestones. On on of those occasions, I had jokingly remarked that I hoped my wife didn’t start thinking that we were having an affair. Her response, which I would always remember, was a scornful reply of “Well, there’s not much chance of that.”

Basically, she stung my fragile male ego. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the hottest guy on the planet, and certainly, I was a fair bit older than any crowd that she would normally hang out with, but I didn’t think that she was out of my league. In my mid thirties, I was in pretty good shape. I hit the gym three to four times a week, cycled plenty and did yoga. I was toned, fit, had a full head of neatly cut, dark hair, and I thought I looked pretty good, particularly compared to most of the geeks that we worked with, and, as I mentioned, she wasn’t exactly a bombshell. So, really, it was spite that caused me to choose to test the full manipulative power of our product on her. We had been peer programming at her desk when she dropped that careless line, and as I walked back to my desk through the sterile corporate corridors, blue and gray carpeted floors and beige walls, my indignation morphed into a cold, sullen anger. One of the perks of being a project lead was having a pretty decent office. Mine was big, with my desk and workstation, a sofa, a couple of armchairs, a coffee table, pod coffee machine, bar fridge, whiskey decanter and, of course, a security camera. The first hack I had done in the office was to remove all the monitoring software from my computer. The second had been the security camera. I could now let it record what was happening in the office or redirect it to a previously saved video stream. I poured myself a whiskey, sat down on the couch and started plotting out my revenge for a slight that she never intended. Not much chance of that? Well, we were going to see. In hind site, my anger was probably fueled by the relationship problems that I was having with my wife and my frustration with how long it had been since I had had decent sex, but at that point in time, it was focused entirely on Sam.

The first step was to access her full psych evaluation in her employee file, which Tim had made available to me, with a little push. The equipment that we had developed could be tailored to be more affective based on the participant’s personality and typical behaviors. It took me a couple of days working late to customize the software that I was going to use on her. I also decided to test the catalytic effect of environmental factors parameters. It was easy to get this done with minimal disruption because Tim was running interference for me and I could just close my door. Then, I put a pine air-freshener in her office that had a wireless interface that allowed me to trigger the release of the pine scent. Over the course of the next two weeks, I subjected her to romantic images of couples, mixed with different images of me and colors and images tailored to generate positive and happy feelings. I would trigger a release of the pine scent with bursts of these images. After a couple of weeks of conditioning, I noticed that her attitude to me had definitely changed. She was more attentive, doting even. She smiled at me a lot more often, and would play with her hair and get almost bashful when I was around. I decided to take things a bit further and approached her early one afternoon.

“Hey, Sam, we’ve all been working really hard over the past few weeks, let’s go grab some coffee and head over to Red Mountain park for a breather. There’s a great picnic spot there near a waterfall. It’s a really beautiful place.”

“Yeah, sure”, she replied quickly, “that sounds great. Shall I notify the rest of the team?”

“Sorry, Sam”, I said, “but we can’t all meet up. It’d be a national security violation. This time it’ll be just the two of us. I am meeting up with each of the guys individually.” This, of course, was a lie.

“Ok, sure, that makes sense. ” Although it actually didn’t. I was pleased with how easily I had persuaded her. “Are we going in one car?”

“Yeah,.no point in polluting the planet more that necessary,” I grinned. “I’ll swing past your office a little later this morning and we can head out.”

“Looking forward to it,” she smiled at me.

We headed out at around eleven in the morning. She chatted freely in the car and opened up to me about her personal life, friends, family, aspirations. The park was no more that a twenty minute drive from the office and we got their easily enough, traffic being quite light at the time of the day. There is a coffee shop at the entrance to the park, next to the ranger office. I picked up a couple of coffees for us, before continuing on the the parking area close to the picnic spot that I had in mind. It was a short five minute walk there, though a pine forest. She breathed in the air deeply and smiled at me. “I love that smell”, she said as we walked. “It’s a clean, and natural smell. It makes me feel good, relaxed.”

“I know what you mean”, I replied. Of course I did, I had been programming her to feel that way for at least two weeks. The place really was beautiful. I had been there many times with my wife. There were a number of wooden tables with benches spread throughout the designated picnic area. We sat in comfortable silence for a while at one of the picnic tables, taking in the surrounding natural beauty of forest. She absent-mindedly put her head on my shoulder and I put my arm around her. Seizing the moment, I turned and looked into her eyes. “I am really feeling a connection with you that I can’t explain”, I said softly.

“I feel it too”, she said and then she blushed and looked down. I put a finger lightly under her chin and lifted her head up gently. “I want to make out with you”, I said huskily. She blinked, looked confused for a moment, but then she shifted her face towards me. I leaned in to kiss her and she met my lips with hers. The kiss was electric. Gentle at first, and then I felt her tongue flick my lips. I opened my mouth and our tongues met and we started kissing properly. Her arms linked behind my neck. I had one hand on her back and I stroked the side of her face with my other hand. She sighed into my mouth as we continued to kiss deeply and slowly, our tongues dancing around each other. My hand slid down her back until it was resting on the top of her ass. She was wearing her usual shapeless work pants, which, with her belt fastened, were stopping me from exploring further. My cock was rock hard and straining against my jeans, months of pent-up sexual frustration were taking their toll. We were brought back to earth by the sound of clapping. We broke the kiss and she blushed, putting her head against my chest. I looked up and saw a group of college kids, five of them, clapping and whooping for us. They had obviously just arrived. I nodded to them, and the two of us got up and headed back to the car. We drove back to work in contemplative silence, leaving the peaceful tranquility of the forest for the bustle of town. I parked the car in the office car park and turned to her with a smile. She smiled back at me bashfully, squeezed my thigh. As we walked to the elevator, I said, “You know, Sam, you have a great body, you should wear more flattering clothes to work, I’d certainly appreciate it”.

“I’ll do it, for you Andy”, she replied after a pause. “I’ll keep it professional, though, don’t want everybody thinking I’m a slut.”

“I doubt anybody would think of you like that”, I said as I patted her ass. We had a quick kiss outside the elevator before returning to work.

The rest of the afternoon, I spent running over what we had done in my mind (and libido). While I was expecting to notice a change, I was surprised by how impressively effective the conditioning had been. I went home in a state of extreme horniness. Our house was large double-story building in a leafy, affluent suburb towards the edge of town. Allie, my wife, was home when I arrived. She was marking a pile of exam papers and she looked up at me, brushing an errant lock of her dark hair out of her eyes, and smiling as I came in the door. “Hi, honey”, she said, “good day?”

Allie was a teacher at our local high school. She worked hard, but felt that she had been overlooked for promotion a few too many times. This only made her work harder, however. She was determined to make a career of being an educator. She had worked her way up to department head, but, her ultimate ambition was get into a position where she could drive education policy for the district, county or even the state. The unfortunate by-product of this was that our relationship was taking a back seat. Judging by the work piled up in front of her, I had a sinking feeling that I was in for another lonely evening, which was going to be a problem, given how badly I needed to empty my balls after my sensual make-out session with Sam. Oddly, I felt no guilt whatsoever about it, rationalizing that if my wife was paying more attention to me, it wouldn’t have happened.

“It was a great day”, I replied as I walked over to where she was sitting and gave her a light kiss on the lips. “I had a deep collaborative session with a member of my team. I really think we had a breakthrough.”

“That’s nice”, she replied, half listening.

“Babes, I was thinking, it’s time we should consider starting a family.”

That remark drew her attention back immediately.

“You know that it’s not a good time for me”, she replied sharply. “I don’t want us to be all about your career and me, the housewife. I have a career too, and it matters to me. I am certain to get promoted to the management team next semester. I don’t want to jeopardize that by being pregnant. It’s so hard to break into the boy’s club when you are a woman. No, it’s not time for starting a family.”

“Ok”, I said, massaging her shoulders, “I know you feel strongly about it, but we are both in our thirties now, if we leave it too long, it might end up being too late for us to try. Anyway, how about some regular old loving in the bedroom without any baby making?”

“Oh, honey”, she replied, confirming my fears about another evening of no sex, “I’m sorry, but I still have a ton of work to do, and I am pretty bushed. Let’s take a rain check.”

More like a monsoon check. “Alright”, I grumbled. “What’s for dinner?”

“Whatever you feel like arranging. I haven’t had time to do anything.”

“Chili ok?”, I asked.

“Yeah, fine, whatever. I probably won’t eat it until later anyway.”

I made a kick-ass chili and ate mine in the living room while watching the Punisher on Netflix. She was still working when I went upstairs to hit the sack. I jerked off thinking about my afternoon with same and shot a huge amount of jizz all over the bed clothes, before falling asleep alone.

The alarm woke me up at six, and I shaved quickly, then grabbed my gym kit for a work-out session before heading to the office.