Research surveillance, Avery’s transfer, commodities

Branding Opportunity

Your fingers race at the keys. So much you want to learn, but a finite time limit before you’re discovered. You relegate the second monitor on the desk to displaying progress and activity on the trace software. For now, it’s pinging security, but they may or may not notice it right away, the guards on duty may or may pounce on it, and when they do, it’s a matter of how much haste will they apply. It could be half an hour, or it could be five minutes. Either way, there won’t be time enough to scour the archives.

The things you don’t know about Monarch feel nearly limitless, so for now, you confine your curiosity to a few topics of immediate bearing on your own situation. First up, it’s past time you discovered what gives with all the surveillance. Who is Will Saxon that he should merit this kind of curiosity? Your first taste feels like ages ago, a recording on Amy’s computer of some hot redheaded custodian – Ingrid! that’s the one – going down on you. That had turned out to merely scratch the surface. You try not to think of all that blood, or whatever it was, dribbling out of Avery’s cat, or what seems sure to lie dormant within Mo.

Since the idea is to get out of here without them knowing who was doing the digging, the trace precludes the simplest means – using your name in the search results. They might be able to guess at their infiltrator’s identity, but no sense making it easy on them. Or if this goes to court rather than some screwed up in-house response, no need to ease legal’s burden of proof. No worries, though. These sons of bitches have given you plenty else to go on.

The archives are enormous; a tooltip on the main screen proudly proclaims that Monarch’s servers contain over twelve million pieces of data. It’s a matter of refining search results. “Surveillance” dredges up thousands of nightly security team logs, evidently a term used in their daily report paperwork. Filtering out that, there’s some data on efforts to fend off corporate espionage from competitors; veiled threats from an overbearing supervisor in quality control to employees “on notice” for past due audits; and then a veritable ocean of projects and communications regarding Monarch’s home security monitoring system.

Just give them a robo watch dog, you think bitterly. Speaking of… The precise language to enter eludes you. Robots? Cyborgs? Some branded term from the geniuses in marketing? At last, you come across project records that provide some answers. Yet so many more questions. The schematics are miles above your head, but as you scroll down through the pages and pages of technical readouts rife with comments and notations, there’s no mistaking the projected results when you cobble it together.

There’s a cat. It’s a digital mock-up, not a photo, but there’s no mistaking the cutaway. Futuristic plastic pieces molded to provide the tactile impression of bones, padding and fluid-filled sacs to further the illusion. Notes on sound dampening for the servos that allow movement, suggestions on how to reconfigure joints to better duplicate the real thing initialed by Monarch engineers, debates on design features you can’t even comprehend. Authentic fur? Impressive. Though it seemed they expected it would require occasional replenishing. Somewhere in this building was a desk for an employee whose job description entailed sticking new fur on fake cats.

Then there’s the meat of it – data collection and distribution. A camera behind each eye, and microphones in the ears. (One commenter protested that there was no need to match the surveillance devices to the corresponding organic equivalents, but it seemed to have been overruled.) Thankfully there were some Cliff’s Notes versions of their intentions sketched in the margins of some of the diagrams, probably to help present it to less technically literate supervisors. A series of bullets in the margins spoke volumes.

• Activate on motion/noise detection
• Transmit via host wifi
• Dormant if range to host > 50m
• Charging cable concealed in tail

Jesus. You didn’t bother with Miss Kittenpuss’s tail. Was she three prong, or two?

Still, “host?” That doesn’t sound at all like they’re designing something for home use. You can imagine there could be a market for a home protection system disguised as a house pet, even if it’s nothing more than some fucked up robot. (After all, Japan.) But that would be customers. Buyers. Home owners. Not “hosts.” Your own list of people hosting the things is exclusively yourself and Avery Parker, though you do remember cats coming up more than once in discussions with your other lovers. Either way, you haven’t exactly been poking around in the homes of other Monarch employees, so maybe that's a coincidence. The whole company might be assigned one for all you know. The schematics are mere function, not purpose. Ctrl+f-ing “dog” in the file gets nothing, but a clever “canine” search finds a note tucked away too casually.

Don’t know why we couldn’t just stick with the Gen 2. Much more room inside, and easier to mimic motion patterns. – EJ

The only reason we even worked up the canine prototype is because AM is allergic to cats. The king still needs performance monitoring though. And let’s keep it focused on the project on this thread. You got tangential complaints, email them, K? – JR

The king can only be one man. Monitoring? Who was monitoring Nolan King? Why? The same people monitoring you, clearly. AM – Aubrey Merriman? What did her allergies have to do with his dog? (Or, well, his “dog.”) If the cat was generation 3 and the dog 2, what was 1?

In any event, you don’t have time to dig deeper. The second monitor confirms what you dreaded, digital fingerprints confirming you’re not the only one who’s accessed the trace. The boys from security know someone’s down here now, and if you squander your time allotment gaping at diagrams, this won’t have been worth what you’ve put yourself through tonight. Yourself and Avery, who’s no doubt beside herself wondering where her cat wandered off to while you had Mia distracting her.

In spite of yourself, you can’t help but wonder what’s becoming of Avery. Does the records system have personnel files? Hmm. Not organized as such, evidently. HR must keep their own records. Still, there’s a variety of files on “Avery Parker.” You start with the most recent, but there’s nothing in the system with her name attached since last week, and none of it referencing a transfer. They must still be in the process of updating records. So what do they have, then?

The most recent is a surprise, to say the least. “Avery Parker” is tagged in a recent video compilation. The quotes are actually used in the file tags around her name and each of the other employees in the long, steamy video of your post-cookout orgy. There’s no doubt as to the file’s origins; the angle is unmistakable to you as Mo’s outpost in the corner of your bedroom and his second bed in front of the TV downstairs, and it’s obvious the shots in the living room and back yard are all from his perspective as well. You hit pause, the frame stuck on a shot of Giada sixty-nining Missy’s sister (Crissy’s sister, that is) on the floor near your sofa while you thrust determinedly into Giada. Mia is enjoying a ride on her face while Crissy and Sasha thrust their tits in your face just to not feel left out. Nothing novel there. Avery is tagged in several such videos it looks like, and you wonder how many times you dragged the woman into your unfortunate limelight.

There’s a single comment on the video. Our boy looks energetic. Hopefully a dopamine dump this big will calm him down a bit. The name on the comment is none other than that of Denosha Woods herself.

You shake your head and remember you were looking up Avery, not your own unwitting pornographic career. As you sift through the results, it becomes apparent that there’s not much on the woman. Oddly, not a single email sent to or from her account except one from you notifying her that you were running a few minutes later to pick her up a month or so back. Neither commendations nor rebukes, only spreadsheets with calculations under her name. Nothing revelatory. There’s a short pdf purporting to be her “asset background” sheet. Not that you disagree that a tiger like Avery is an asset, but it’s more odd verbiage. As to the sheet, it reads simply:

Standard variations on existing background

_1.7 updates:___

• impaired vision (near-sighted, corrective eyeglasses)
• _breast reduction (8%)___
• heightened oppositional defiance (erosion rate reduced 25%)

What the fuck? Did… did they do something to her on 7?

In any case, none of it explains anything, and the clock is running. Back to the video results. You click them open and drag the slider to the middle of the runtime to dive into the meat of it. There’s you fucking her on her doorstep the other night, shot through Miss Kittenpuss’s eyes no doubt. Coffee in her kitchen on a handful of mornings. Fraternizing with her the night you went out to the Whisper.

“What the…?” Speaking of the Whisper, you stumble across a recording taken within the Whisper itself. The footage is grainy, not like the crisp recordings your so-called pets gathered, but you recognize yourself dancing with her and Ingrid nevertheless. You don’t look half bad doing it, either. Plenty of eyes are on the three of you, men and women alike. On a lark, you briefly check for more Whisper footage and find a recording of your recent date with Amy, fucking on the dance floor to the sound of raucous cheers and applause that plays only in your head, not on the silent video. But there’s scores of others, too. Does Monarch have a deal of some kind with the club? They must, to have these recordings – though it still explains nothing of the patrons’ behavior, nor your own. But why?

Right – Avery. There’s nothing in the system about her transfer, but backing out, you find in the outer layers of Mia’s system all the files still in need of sorting. There’s quite a backlog, several weeks worth easily. A second search for “Avery Parker transfer,” and there’s but a single file, time stamped only last week.

It’s… a receipt. A dead end. Shit. Though, just to be sure, you double-click.

“What the…”

It’s a hell of a receipt, too, the sort of thing you’d expect to see for someone buying industrial grade equipment or marking the transfer of possession of hazardous waste. Avery earned her salary going over this one. Pages of legalese in tiny print, complex notations of the financing including layers of VAT taxes from multiple countries. All told, $172,255.70. You don’t know the first thing about corporate finance, but again, good old ctrl+f Avery Parker is there to give you hints.

She’s mentioned 73 times, sprinkled in yellow highlighter throughout the document. It seems like a lot of mentions of the accountant filling out the paperwork though. It’s just weird enough to keep you perusing, racing the ticking clock. She had to be involved in the transaction somehow. Was this some kind of sub-contract, leasing her accounting skills to another company? You try transfer, and at last, there can be no more doubt.

Asset Avery Parker hereafter remanded to the possession of Edward Brocksmith in perpetuity. Transfer of ownership is to be encoded in asset’s CPU no later than 96 hours following receipt of payment by Monarch Innovations, though this shall not be construed to substantiate any claim denying full copyright of all components, data, files, manuals, and fabrication techniques appertaining to the asset itself.

You drag yourself out of your moment of shock in time to realize the trace is now being actively deployed to forcibly log you out of the system. The attempt is caught just in time. It’s an old trick, activating an admin-level virus scan, the failsafe embedded therein treating their attempt to log you out as a malware function and suppressing it. Such a tactic wouldn’t hold long against any member of your team upstairs, but it’s more than enough to thwart night security. Which means they’re going to be resorting to something they can be sure will work. Namely, marching down here and applying some muscle to the problem.

Time is nearly out. The revelation still attempting to mire your brain in quicksand, you slog on. In time, you can make sense of Avery. Right now, you have a limited opportunity to find out what in the holy hell a commodity is. It can’t be an asset. You even double-check, making sure “commodit” doesn’t show in the receipt, and it doesn’t, the word left incomplete to allow for singular or plural. So if she – that – is an asset, what the hell is a commodity?

At a major corporation like Monarch, your next delving into the archives swiftly confirms that it’s a term bandied about all too often. Veritably every product the company sells, except Avery, is labeled as such in one promotional campaign or another. It’s in thousands of emails going back years, in projects and memos and announcements so often that it looks to be useless to your purposes.

With little time to spare, you narrow results to those from Amy Marchiano. She was the one who’d told you about the whole “commodity” deal, a discovery which had transformed you from an opportunistic slut into a man who fucked any hot piece of trim he saw. As you hit enter, though, you roll your eyes at your stupidity. Amy is the junior VP of marketing, so she’s going to be copied on almost all of those–

2 results

You blink. What the hell? The company isn’t keeping its own executive informed of the work of her own department? You shake your head and enter a new search.

Amy Marchiano asset

There it is, her Amy Marchiano Asset Background.pdf. Of course. No wonder she’s unfazed by the emergence of one cat after another if she and they both were all assembled in the same lab.

You steer back to those two results. The first is a message from you, to her, no doubt from right after she made her revelation to you. If you’re making up this commodity stuff, I’m going to be so embarrassed, you wrote. Cool. Way to slide into those emails, Will. The second, however…

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: “Amy”

“Satisfaction” doesn’t cover it. Reassign her somewhere closer by. He wasn’t merely amused with her flesh (though he had plenty to say about that), but they seemed to genuinely bond, if you can call it that. King seemed to get a kick out of her awkward affect, if you can believe it. Play up the woman of a thousand failed ambitions aspect; my sense is that part of the allure for him is his predisposition towards the pity fuck. Actually, she and I actually happened to share an elevator ride, by coincidence; she wouldn’t stop raving about him. Seemed to think he was quite the commodity. I suppose he is that. ;) Perhaps a new branding opportunity? Better than “boy toy.”

Still, his appeal isn’t quite universal – not every woman is looking to be bowled over by confidence, charisma, and a dick to rival the Eiffel Tower. Maybe it’s worth the time to tweak our beloved alpha? I’m loath to give him up, but… now I’m just wondering out loud. I’ll think on it.

Oh, and lose her surname, replace it with something European. Her physical aesthetic definitely works, but clearly isn’t fully Asian, so giving her something less than obvious will let them wonder. My random name generator gave me “Marchiano” – I kinda like it, but feel free to let your people workshop something. Personification, Dr. Woods.

Original Message:

From: <[email protected]>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: “Amy”

Still sifting through the data, but it’s fair to say we can call Amy a middling success. She certainly didn’t have the easiest time attracting his attention, but he seemed satisfied once she had it. Our internal marketing reports suggest her shell wasn’t making any significant headway in the Asian market, but it’s holding its own out our way.

The new paradigm seems to be working well, and I’ll be writing a more formal recommendation to the board that we continue and expand on it. Allowing staff to serve as product testers was a waste of company time and money that only confirmed what any idiot on the street could tell us – our dollies are fuckable. It’s done nothing to give us guidance to refine their AIs, which as you know is what sets us above and beyond the competition. Finally we’re getting real data! We’ll no doubt have to keep using them as favors – take away that carrot and we’ll lose half our staff – but we’ll spare them the post-coital reports and they can spare us their tedious praises for synthetic beauty.

If you have any specific data for little Amy, let me know. I’m scheduling her for a retuning early next week.

Your ears perk up. In the otherwise silent building, your senses, heightened by adrenaline, detect the sound of the elevator opening in the distance. They’re coming. Hands trembling, mind racing, you power down Mia’s machine and creep for the exit. A trio of burly security guards strides briskly towards the records room you just departed, but in the shadowy corridor, they miss you slipping into the stairwell and hurrying to the lot. It’s empty there, and quiet, the perfect contrast to the storm raging inside you.

In a flash, you’re gone.

Decision time! Voting is open to all patrons $10+ on my patreon.

• Confront Aubrey Merriman with your suspicions.
• Confront Denosha Woods with your suspicions.
• Talk to Nolan King one on one, see what he might admit.
• Approach Amy. Maybe she’ll confide more in you.
• Pretend this never happened and get back to your routine.
• Quit your job, leave town, and never look back.