Learning More About the Fog

"I can't just stay up here forever," Gina said aloud. She considered crying out for help, but the mansion was huge, and this wing of the estate was big enough that Agnes probably wasn't going to hear her anyway. There were probably more than 100 yards and half a dozen closed doors between them.

She was comfortable, at least. The seated position left her feet dangling, but the pants were supporting her body pretty evenly. In fact...whatever was in her pants was still messing with her now and then--and it seemed to respond to Gina's own actions in some ways. The room ran a program on the workstations--and Gina didn't seem to have anything to do with that. Was there any intelligence involved here?

"Are you just going to keep me up here?" Gina asked, testing the water. She didn't know if she expected a verbal response but--"Oh!"

Gina lifted a little higher into the air, feeling specific pressure against the lower side of her ass, near her thighs. It was like she was hoist up by strong hands, lifting from under her. She reached under her butt and traced her hands along the pants, feeling clear indentations where she felt herself being lifted. Gina thought about how she just posed her question, and decided to try something.

"And then you're going to...massage my thighs?" Gina asked, narrowing her eyes. The ghostly grip eased from her ass, and her pants began restricting around her upper legs--tracing emulated fingers along the length of her quads and hamstrings. She smiled a little, closing her eyes and enjoying the feeling a little. Now being all by herself made her appreciate the situation a little more. "Hmm...okay. That's good to know." She looked down at her legs. "Let's take that massage...a little higher up the legs." Gina giggled a little as the fog responded again, pressing against her glutes and her haunches as well as her upper legs.

She took a deep breath, looking down at her phone on the ground again. She rocked her hips side to side against the moving pants, letting the fabric ride up between her cheeks a little higher. Fun was fun--but she needed to get actually get somewhere in figuring out this room and how this fog actually worked. It responded to verbal commands--so far as she knew--but there was also a program that ran on the workstations called "orb_freewill.bat". What kind of 'freewill' did that mean? Was this thing operating on an algorithmic set of instructions that allowed it to interpret verbal commands, or did it actually exhibit free will in the form of some kind of nascent sentience?

"They can't be that far along," Gina muttered aloud, responding to her own spooling thoughts. Even if these things were using some revolutionary form of propulsion that's allowing them to use enough energy to keep her aloft--intelligence was a whole different beast. Right?

Gina's eyes rolled back a little as her ghostly fabric masseuse worked closer and closer to her more sensitive parts--and it took every ounce of self-control to not take that situation farther...not yet, at least.

"Okay, okay," she panted lightly. "You can keep all that up, but can we take me over to one of these workstations so I can have a look at what's going on in here? Maybe that main one in front of the big glowing screen there?"

Gina started moving through the air immediately, and she pulled in her arms, placing her hands on her lap as she sailed gracefully between the rows of workstations. Whatever controlled the responses of this fog--it was absolutely intelligent. It didn't jerk her around any corners, it didn't create tension points in carrying her, and it seemed to understand natural commands.

"There's nothing else like this," Gina said, rubbing her fingers up and down her thighs as her strange massage continued. "You little lovelies are one in a million." She wondered if Aeschelon had any idea what they'd obtained here. She floated next to the workstation, hovering next to the chair beneath it. "Oh, right," She said. She grabbed onto the back of the raised stool, pulling it out from under the workstation and pushing it behind her. The moment she did, her pants reoriented her and hovered her right under the desk. "Okay, now--let's see what we've got here."

The screen scrolling the sample's data was still up when she hit the escape key, returning her to some kind of proprietary menu.

It was an array of samples. 23X-1 through 23X-5 were highlighted. When she looked back at the four remaining canisters, sure enough, they corresponded to the block of samples highlighted on the screen. 1, 2, 4 and 5 all had solid green bars at the end.

"God, who uses a trackball?" Gina asked, rolling the ball embedded in the desk and clumsily moving the pointer over one of the green bars. A pop-up message read SECURED. She scrolled it down to the flashing red bar next to 23X-3, and a new pop-up read RELEASED-LIBERATED. She took a deep breath, looking down at her pants. "Released and liberated," she said, running a hand down one of her thighs again. "You seem to be behaving, though--don't you?" She started scrolling the trackball again, frustrated with the navigation. "God--the most advanced technology I've ever seen, and there isn't a better way to navigate this UI?"

In the darkness under the desk, some of the fog freed itself from the fabric around her lower legs. It sailed into one of the drawers of the desk, and Gina gasped a little when one of the desk drawers shot open. She looked down at the open drawer to her right, her jaw going slack when a small device started rising out of it.

"What the--" It looked like a pair of eyeglasses, but only one of the eyes had a lens fitted to it, glowing with illumination. There was an attached earpiece on the same side as the lens, and as it hovered above the surface of the desk, she could see the faint glittering of the fog in the monitor glow.

Well, if the stuff could hold her 115 lb. frame clear in the air, carrying a dozen-ounce device would be base-level. She reached out for the device, and it darted out of her reach for a second. She sneered a little, holding her hands up and placing them on the desk again. As soon as she did, the device hovered back toward her, orienting itself in front of her face.

The moment she held up her hands to take hold of the glasses again, they pulled away once more. Gina couldn't help but laugh.

"Okay, okay," She said. "Very particular, aren't you?" She closed her eyes, putting her hands squarely on the desk until she felt the headset on the bridge of her nose. When she opened her eyes again, she watched as the fog drifted a few seats away, glittering in front of one of the darkened monitors as the keyboard in front of it began clicking. The monitor clicked, coming to life and glowing, and now the computer started navigating menus with lightning speed as the trackball and keyboard animated themselves with the fog hovering over them.

Gina didn't know what it was up to over there, but shimmying her hips again--she realized it didn't effect her pants. They were still caressing her legs--very nicely--and they didn't seem to have any issues keeping her in the air. When she glanced at the main monitor again, the cursor moved with her eyesight.

"Oh, damn..." she said, turning from side to side a little. A double-blink seemed to function as a click, and the cursor followed the focus of her eyes. "Thanks!" She said, looking over at the workstation busying itself. "You're getting more and more useful by the minute."

Now Gina could really start hunting through this info. As she started looking through all the visible menu options, she wondered who in their right mind would allow this company to be bought--even if it was by a massive company like Aeschelon for what she imagined had to be an insane price. They clearly had some absolutely groundbreaking work, and this was literally only the first laboratory she'd stumbled across. One of these canister samples had the power to effectively keep her levitating while another part of the SAME SAMPLE was off on a workstation, doing god knows what.

If there was intellect here, was there a chance at some kind of communication in the other direction? Maybe not, if these things were working within a set of limited parameters...but even if she couldn't get raw answers, the stuff seemed conveniently helpful. Gina felt like she'd come across a palatial storehouse of wonders.

She needed some help. Someone she could trust--and not necessarily anyone higher on the command chain. Maybe someone from outside of Aeschelon entirely. She tensed up as she considered breaking the rules, and immediately her pants responded with a deeper tissue massage on her thighs and ass. She let out a muted but pleased sound as she put both hands on the desktop, steadying herself. The stuff could feel stress, and responded to it. Insane.

"Listen, I don't mean to distract from--whatever you're helping with over there...but could I have my phone?" She asked, trying to sound as sweet as possible. She didn't know if politeness made any difference, but it probably couldn't hurt.

The moment she said something, the main screen shifted from reflecting her own workstations--embedded in the desk itself--to the workstation the fog was working at. Some servo on the row of samples whirred, and now the other four canisters hissed, popping open. Gina watched the data scrolling through the main monitor as the fog ran the same "orb_freewill" command through the other four 23X samples that were just released. They each dispered in different directions. One glittering mass seemed to disappear as it headed toward the open door of the lab. another mass headed in a beeline to Gina's phone, and she watched as the device lifted itself into the air, bobbing slowly toward her. Before it reached her, another sample of the fog flowed into her blouse--and she inhaled sharply, feeling it trace over her skin. As the sample with her phone dropped it into one of her waiting hands, it joined the other in her blouse, and Gina giggled madly as it traced under her armpits and all around her breasts. Was it...flowing into her bra?

Gina was shuddering, trying to hold back her laughter with all the new sensations tracing over her body. Suddenly, her black pants popped open, her zipper crawling down its track as she felt the waist of the pants loosen on her--through she remained suspended without an issue as something seemed to pull inward at the open flaps. She hovered out from the desk just enough to see her own exposed panties, and now the final sample flowed into her pants, centered around its obvious destination...her underwear.

"Oh, godddd--that's..." Gina flexed her thighs against the pants--her pussy responding to the motion inside her intimates. It was getting, like, really hard not to think about some of the naughtier implications for...solo entertainment. In just a few seconds, the fog had settled into place, and she watched as her pants dutifully zipped back up and rebuttoned themselves, sliding her back under the desk. She placed both palms squarely on the desktop again, her phone next to her left hand. She took a few deep breaths, wondering what to expect next--but the unbelievable technology sharing the occupancy of her clothing hadn't gone any farther than that. Her pants continued the massage she requested, and nothing more. She smirked, knowing better than to verbalize a joke about expecting them to take advantage of her. Still...

"I know who to get a hold of," She said, grabbing her phone again. Even if it did break the rules--was anyone else going to believe the things that were happening here? She didn't want to go much further with this strangeness alone--and to involve the chain-of-command right now? If she was being honest with herself, she didn't want to take any risk of reassignment. Whatever else was in here--it was probably worth more than a trillion dollars. She knew she'd only scratched the surface, and the last thing she wanted was to be frozen out on account of some overzealous corporate prick. After all, she'd seen what lengths Aeschelon went to in protecting IP that was magnitudes less interesting than this.

No...for the moment, she had to stay the team leader in all this exploration. And she knew exactly who would happily follow.