Meet The Freelance Gals

You’re a man of your word. But you’d still like to get a piece of Tessa. Stepping into the hotel, you find yourself a bit preoccupied as you register at the front desk. You finally open Tessa’s request, which, even though you’ve been buried in work the past couple days, has been left unattended:

“Hey there stranger, I guess it’s my turn to return the favor. What’re you up to after you finish the app? I know you were set to finish soon, so I thought I’d just make that ‘preemptive strike’ and catch you before you get swooped up in more things.”

Swooped up is right. Heading into the elevator, you select the floor you’re heading towards and the doors reel closed as you type out your response:

“Today is a pretty good day — I had a lot of people asking to catch up after my project was over. But I guess you can tell now that I’m out of that hellhole, so why don’t we think about tomorrow?”

The elevator, rushing to the 40th floor, hasn’t even reached it’s destination when you get a reply:

“Busy busy boy. Come over to dinner tomorrow, why don’t you?”

Followed by an address ping that you’re sure is sent by mistake — it’s somewhere in the woods, about a half hour outside the city.

“When you get to the first gate, just press the intercom, I’ll let you in.”

That washes away any doubt you had about the location. Just then, the mechanics whir to a halt, and the elevator doors swing open to a carpeted room, where you step out. As the lift proceeds back down, you’re left with a quiet, low hum of the air conditioning circulating through this building. You make your way down a hallway that branches off in either direction, easily finding the suite booked for the three of you. As the door clicks unlocked, you enter to a view of the city, given to you generously by the floor-to-ceiling windows of the suite. As you sit your stuff down and place your laptop on a nightstand, you explore the space. A clear definition of living and sleeping space is made by a shoji screen, as is the bathroom and private balcony. Before you step outside, though, you hear a knock on the door.

“Mel, quit it! I already got a key-“

“Well I just wanted to see if he’d open the door- hey! Okay okay fine it’s unlocked, go in…”

Just then, the two girls stumble in through the door, and you watch as they straighten themselves out, eyes hovering up and down their figures.

At first glance, Kiara isn’t much of a sight — frizzy black hair, glasses that cover much of her face, and baggy clothes that make her look as straight as a bottle of toothpaste. But behind that: an Afro worth snuggling, a cute ebony face, and curves that dart in and out of her loose fitting outfit. Melonie, on the other hand, had no problem wearing clothes that pronounced her figure. A beauteous redhead, she probably has the biggest breasts you’ve seen on a ginger babe before, and the proportional curves to boot. Dressed like an office siren, her shiny red mane shakes down to her chest line in waves. It’s rare you see the brains paired with the looks like this, but oh, does it hit like a train when you see it.

“Heyyyyyy, you made it!” Kiara speaks up, adjusting the hems on her shirt as she sheepishly looks towards Melonie, “so, are you ready for the group reveal of what we’ve been up to for the past…”

“4 months? 5?” Mel picks up where Ki trails off, clearing her throat as she moves her glasses up on her nose. She pulls out her laptop — a pairing device between augmented visuals and the physical to help with coding — and plops down on the couch, her thighs pooling out as her curves become accentuated under the pressure. With Ki, you too follow suit, pulling out your coding pad as you sit down beside the two brainiac babes, booting up your app in private mode, just to see that everything is in working order first.

Kiara clears her throat as she projects a small display onto the table in front of you and pulls up her big project: “Well, you two, you’ll be surprised to know that I’ve been building a ground-up platform that enables potential workflow optimization by installing the first shadow-style code checker! It comes up behind your keystrokes — by a few at a time, although it’s adjustable — and points out any typos or syntax errors that may be present in your work. I know that’s already a thing, buttttt it does something more.” She opens up a dummy programming window and starts typing away as if she were continuing a project. By making a few obvious mistakes in her lines, the errors — even slightly more complex ones like line separation and bool statements — fix themselves in mere moments. “The shadow checker also learns your preferences and common mistakes, and will also begin picking up on more complicated things. Isn’t that amazing?” The two of you clap with every ounce of enthusiasm for Ki and her work — truly, you’d be able to finish up a similar project within half the amount of time it took you to make this one.

“It’s funny you brought up your code checker, Ki, because I —“, Mel stands up, tapping on her code pad to bring up a couple of screens, all playing silent videos, “managed to finish up the beta testing of the world’s first commercially available speech-to-code plugin for all languages.” She zooms in on a video of someone talking to their coding pad, bringing up the sound, and on its screen you watch in amazement as their screen writes out code — they speak it, and the pad automatically starts to generate the appropriate lines for their commands. Simple things start out like ‘Hello World’, and ‘if (img) bool cat, then true(pet) false(identify)’. But the more complicated the lines get, the more you’re blown away. With the capabilities of these two systems at your fingertips — from your friends, no less — you’ve walked into a powerhouse of one-person coding armies.

“I’d like the plugins for both please, holy shit you two are amazing,” you grin from ear to ear, matching their happiness and pride in their work. “I don’t even know if I’m qualified to show you my project, now, it looks like kiddy play compared to-“

“Nooooo, nuh uh mister, you’re not getting away from show and tell that easy,” Mel leans over the table, her perfectly defined cleavage hanging before you like a silent invitation. “And don’t downplay your work — I’m sure you’ve got a great project to show us.” She places a hand on your shoulder, that friendly warmth from her as radiant as her sex appeal.

Ki nods in agreement, having already sent you her app on your coding pad, “Yeah, and that’s not coming lightly from either of us. I mean, the team was undervaluing your performance by like at least tenfold. That’s why you left, right?”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

Mel and Kiara nudge you to stand up, pulling you this way and pushing you that. Finally, Melonie faces you, mere inches away from your body: “So, come on and stop stallinggggg, show us what you got!”

You throw up your hands in mock defeat and make a joking scoff, “Alright, alright, you got me — now take a seat and hold on to it, because I think you’re going to like what I’ve got to show you.” As you pull up the user interface, you see the same dialogue pop up that you’ve worked on for the past couple hundred days:

Target Selection: Target choice: 3. Please select target(s) by dragging highlighter function to desired body.

But this time, you see the plugins begin their work, enabling that coveted speech-to-code function that’s doubly covered by an auto checker — it’s perfect, such that you don’t even need sliders anymore. You decide to give it a little test drive.

“Well, you two, I’ve devised a program to seize activation proteins in stem cells to change the way someone looks — while in the testing phase, I can assure you it works. Say, if I wanted Mel’s hair to become half a foot longer…”

You wait as the screen works in motion, selecting Melonie as if you had dragged the aura yourself, then identifies the slider for ‘Hair Length’ and raises it by 6 inches. Mel lets out an involuntary sigh accompanied by a soft moan before her red waves extend exactly that length down her body. Kiara lets her mouth hang agape as she stares at Mel’s elongated hair, stunned at watching her friend literally get extensions with just a simple word activation.

“No… way…” Melonie whispers, her head sitting perfectly still while her hands run down the length of her crimson curls. “You- you just did that. Oh my god…” You can tell by the way she breathes that her response is more than that of shock, but also that of pleasure — of sensitivity.

The silence lingers in the air like a momentary pause in time, the two women flitting their eyes back and forth between you and Mel’s new hair, faces and bodies unmoving. You let it all sink in, allowing them to process the capabilities of your combined efforts.

“You made… a program that can change people’s appearances?” Kiara’s voice breaks the silence with her gentle tone, just hovering above a whisper.

You nod. As you make the screen display visible for the two girls, you watch as their eyes go wide, staring at the numerous options you’ve curated over the past couple of weeks, with everything from foot size to eye color to waistline. Melonie, jaw dropped for the second time, gives you the stare that just oozes shock and complete awe: “No way… you mean to tell us that anything can change, on anyone?”

“Okay, I’m gonna put this on record that there are stipulations to this, first. Although the target doesn’t have to be willing, you do have to be interacting with them. Plus, I think it would be violating a lot of anti-harassment laws if you just went around randomly changing people without their consent, so… there’s that to take note of.”

“Well,” Melonie perks up, her body straightening and her chest more pronounced, “you have permission from me.”

“Likewise,” Kiara hastily follows up, her alertness joining Melonie for a split second before shrinking back down a little, “about changing me, I mean.”

“And you two… have permission from me, too,” you swipe a few times towards Mel and Ki’s coding pads, giving them the same UI and program you had coveted for some time. “This was technically a coding swap, right? You gave me yours, now I give you mine.”

The girls pour over everything on your app — not just the selection of sliders, but the intricate lines of code as well, fawning over the performance optimization and design quality to access bodily functions. “So…” Ki starts, sounding like her confidence is growing, “what do we do first? You’re the boss, big man… being that you made this app and all.”