VEE 2.0

Chapter One: OneHalf

The smell in the office waiting area was layered. Not unpleasant, but complex. A scent of something soapy and faux-floral at the bottom, possibly carpet cleaner. The floors here were old and worn, but clean. Not enough money, perhaps, to fully replace them, but enough care was taken to keep them as presentable as possible. Over that scent was a dusty, astringent tang of ink and electronics. Printers and circuitry, metal and paper. Something earthy and bold mixed in there as well; given that it was just before 1PM, Veronica assumed it was the remnants of somebody’s lunch from a nearby shared kitchen space. The kind of smell that’d linger for a few more days whenever the microwave was used, leading to muttered complaints and pointed glances in the guilty party’s direction. And most fresh of all was the hanging waft of sweat and body odor – not promising for the hygiene of the staff here, perhaps.

This assumption matched Veronica’s preconceived notions about the people she was meeting. Holmquist Digital Solutions was a small tech company, and their website displayed employee profiles that didn’t exactly strain against any stereotypes. Lots of bespectacled men in white button-downs and poor haircuts, smiling nervously. The office took up half of a floor in an outside-of-town commerce park building, and every bit of it was like the carpets – cleaned but out of date. Kept up as much as possible but past its prime.

Veronica, unable to book a gig for the fifth straight month and coming off of three failed “sure thing” auditions in a row, studiously avoided drawing any connections there.

Besides, she was young. She was beautiful. She was talented. She hadn’t missed her window, she was simply still in the pre-discovery phase of her career. All of this would make great background for her rags-to-riches success story on the late night shows in the near future. Multiple Oscar winner Veronica Day, nervously waiting in some third-tier tech-industry office – can you imagine?

She found herself needing to recite these encouraging little stories to herself more and more often lately.

The receptionist, a woman in her sixties who knit something fuzzy and blue-grey while she sat at her desk, smiled over at her again. “Are you sure I can’t get you anything, love?”

Veronica smiled back, flashing about 40% of her most dazzling smile. “You’re very kind. I’m fine right now, thank you. Do you think it’ll be much longer, though?”

The receptionist’s smile shifted from welcoming to apologetic. “Mr. Holmquist gets like this. Loses track of the schedule as the day goes on. He works so hard to keep everything here humming along, but he’s not the most organized – oh! Here we are,” she said, nodding at a blinking light on her desk phone. She set down her knitting and plucked the phone from her desk. “Yes, Mr. Holmquist?” A pause. “Of course, I’ll send her right back.”

She set the phone down and got up, a tiny grunt of exertion as she straightened out her back and flexed her knees. “Alright, love, here you go!” Veronica got to her feet and the woman guided her through a door, gesturing down the hall there. “Second door on the left, you see it? They’re waiting in there for you. Best of luck!” She gave Veronica a pat on the shoulder and moved gingerly back to her desk.

Veronica murmured her thanks and took a deep breath. Showtime. She strode down the hall in a practiced manner – chin up, shoulders back. Long strides, but slow. Not hurried, but powerful. Chest forward but not in a look-at-my-breasts way, in a I-belong-in-this-room-and-in-fact-all-rooms way. But with that, a warm smile. A charming smile. A familiar-but-intriguing, girl-next-door, all-things-to-all-people smile. All of it working to summon a poise and confidence that still had humility and approachability woven throughout. She was a queen and she was your childhood best friend and she was a mysterious stranger and she was deservedly world-famous, all at once, all overlapping. All made to look effortless.

It was a lot of work.

She entered the room, timing a little toss of her rich copper-red hair as she did. She ended her stride with her left leg extended, hip cocked a bit. A touch of contrapposto to draw the eye to the round flare of her hips, often cited as her best feature. Her skirt and blouse were carefully chosen to look sleek but professional – a vibe she thought these tech-forward nerd-types would appreciate – while still emphasizing the striking ratio her hips and waist possessed. Again, carefully calculated to announce “this woman is a professional, I should hire her” with a subtle secondary whisper of “this woman is deeply fuckable, I should hire her”.

“Good morning!” she chirped. “I’m Veronica Day. It’s SO nice to finally meet you. Thank you so much for seeing me! I’m quite excited to talk with you this morning.”

The two men seated at the table stood up, seeming a little taken aback by Veronica’s polished, punctuated entrance. The one nearest her – younger, bespectacled, neat beard – lifted a hand, reaching out as though to shake hers. But she had moved in with such speed and verve that he wasn’t sure if she was going to close the gap between them or not, and looked terrified at the idea of accidentally touching her. So he retracted the hand a bit, let it linger limply in space, and then lifted it in – oh, god, this poor anxious dweeb – a sad little wave.

The other man - older, heavyset, unkempt beard – smiled at her. His head had an unbalanced look, given the dense birdsnest of a beard and the wispy remnants of hair on his scalp. Still, he had a warm smile and seemed a bit more confident than his younger counterpart. He gestured at the chair across from him, next to the waver. “Ms. Day, it’s great to meet you. I’m Mike Holmquist. This is my son, Andy. Please have a seat!”

Veronica smiled graciously and slid smoothly into the offered chair at the head of the table, between the two Holmquists. Sat up straight, hands folded delicately on the table in front of her. “Please,” she said, her voice warm and friendly, “call me Veronica. I’m so excited to hear about this… project?... that you’ve asked me in about. I have to admit I’m pretty hopeless, tech-wise, so you’re going to need to walk me through it slowly.” She laughed, giving a little self-effacing shake of the head at her own cluelessness. Truthfully, Veronica was somewhat above average in terms of comfort with technology. But it never hurt to flatter a man’s ego and give him a chance to explain things to a pretty girl, right?

The younger Holmquist – Andy – spoke up for the first time. “We’re developing an automated digital process assistance streamlining tool, with a focus on real-time speech and data analysis for rapid calculation and self-indexing personalization. The mechanical development priority is-“

Mike chuckled, putting a hand up, and Andy’s words stumbled to a halt. “What Andy’s trying to say is that we’re working on a digital assistant. You know – Siri, Alexa, Cortana? Except we’re looking at something a lot more personal. Something that adapts. Something that’ll change to suit the user. It’s a complicated process; I won’t bore you with all the technical stuff. The long and the short of it is this: the whole project only works if we put the right face on it. And that’s why you’re here!”

Veronica nodded slowly, her smile holding and disguising her uncertainty. She’d read lines from terrible scripts before, and was familiar with having to nod along at absurd film pitches. That was fine. Booking a gig, any gig, was the goal. But this was outside of her usual territory and she wasn’t sure quite what she was in for. “I see!” she said brightly, leaning on enthusiasm to carry her through. “Are we talking about an ad campaign? Or voicing the product itself? Voice acting isn’t my primary milieu but I’ve done a few roles, I’m sure I can find the timbre and profile you’re looking for.”

Both Holmquists shook their heads, a movement that matched so well it must’ve been genetic. A particular shake that was passed from father to son. Veronica imagined some ancient Holmquist shaking his head in that exact way across a paleolithic campfire. “Well, sure,” Mike said. “The voice, of course. But it’s more than that. This program, it needs a look. An attitude. A personality. And Miss Day – Veronica – we want that personality to be you.”

Both men smiled, as though that cleared everything up. It was an expectant look, mirrored on Veronica’s left and right. She could feel her own smile falter a little.

“I’m sorry. It’s probably just my own, well, unfamiliarity with the product here. But… what is it exactly you’d need me to, well… do? Am I signing over the rights to my likeness, or something? I’m not sure that’s really something I’m looking to do, especially at this stage in my career, you see…”

The elder Holmquist lifted his hands in a conciliatory slow-down gesture. “No no no no no,” he said in a low, husky tone, like he was trying to reassure a spooked horse. “Nothing like that. It’s more just that we need a, well, a baseline. Something to act as a seed for the program to come from. Andy, he’s the brains behind it, he can-“

“It’s a controls issue, essentially. How to induce exponential self-replicating growth but maintain parameters of expression. Axon pathways don’t correlate one-to-one with an algorithmic decision tree but it can serve as a template. After enough recurring iterations with managed overlap, we can allow for the-“

Andy’s words came out like a machine-gun burst, clipped syllables in rapid succession, like he couldn’t hold back from explaining this concept he was visibly excited about. The only problem was that Veronica didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. She blinked, caught in the firehouse of his jargon, trying to look like she was following. She wasn’t.

Mike saw the confusion on her face and laughed, thumping his palm on the table once to shut his son up. “I know,” he laughed as Andy blushed and furrowed his brow, falling silent. “The technobabble is rough. The point is, we need a personality profile for the program. And we need it to be able to learn and grow and adapt. Honestly, that part’s easy. We can make an AI that develops and changes. The hard part is making sure the growth and adaptation don’t go too far. If the model’s too eager to learn, all of a sudden it drifts away from that pleasant, sunny, personable self that users fell in love with.”

Veronica nodded. That made some sense, if she was understanding correctly, though she still didn’t see her own role in this. Mike continued.

“So we need two things from you, tech-wise. Two stages. Stage one is a profile download. It’s got a lot of more complicated names, but to sum it up, we just scan info from your brainwaves and use that to direct the AI. We’ll have you answer some questions, do some light physical activity. Easy stuff. Stage two is even easier. It’s just using your brain as a kind of… home base, so to speak. Every so often, the program will access a digital link to your brain and check in. Make sure it hasn’t drifted too far from the baseline. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time it won’t even need to be active.”

Andy interrupted. “Ninety-five percent.”

Mike looked at him, his train of thought broken for a second. “Sorry – what?”

“Ninety-five. The percentage of time the uplink won’t need to be active. Maybe closer ninety-two percent, realistically.”

“Fine. Ninety-two.” Andy made a thoughtful noise, as though to recalculate more precisely, but Mike waved him off. “The point is, it’s barely anything. Heck, it’ll be while you’re sleeping most of the time. Even if you’re awake you won’t even be aware of it. It’s a quick digital inventory, a chance for the program to settle itself in, and then business as usual.”

Veronica’s smile had been growing more brittle and tenuous as this meeting had gone on. Here, at least, it gave up the ghost. Her expression serious and concerned now, she looked from one man to the other. “So you’re… leaving something in my brain? A chip or something? Permanently?” She fought to keep the quaver out of her voice, and she succeeded. For now.

Mike’s eyes flicked to Andy. It was an expression that said a lot. In just that gesture, Veronica confirmed that while the father ran the company and had the business skills, his son was in charge of the tech. Had the knowledge. A power struggle, maybe? Youth versus experience, future versus tradition, the hard-science tech genius against the soft-skills businessman. Veronica imagined the Shakespearean paternalist drama these two might act out behind closed doors. And she’d clearly asked a question that the pair had discussed and possibly disagreed on. There was a heady pause before Andy spoke.

“Not permanently. Six months,” he said. “Maybe less. But within six months the program will be developed enough to support its own boundary states. We don’t anticipate a need for check-ins after that point.”

“Of course we’ll need the stuff you’re more used to,” Mike said, smoothly sliding in. “Line readings. Motion capture, to get the physical sides of things. She’s gonna have a fully three-dee model, after all. It’s not going to be you exactly but, well, you’re a gorgeous woman, Miss Day. If you don’t mind me saying so. We’d love to have Vee keep as close to you as we can.”

Veronica blinked. “Vee?”

Mike’s eyes went wide a second, and then he laughed, self-effacingly. Shook his head. “I never was great at keeping secrets,” he chuckled. “That’s what we’ve been calling it. Her. The program. Vee. Started as just, y’know – vee-one. Like, version one? Beta test v1, that kind of thing. But with something that’s meant to be so lifelike, you personify it, right? We all started using ‘Vee’ as a placeholder name pretty early on, and it’s just stuck.”

He paused, smiling at her, like letting her in on a little joke. “And when we read your file, watched your reel, you just seemed perfect. And well – ‘Veronica’? ‘Vee’? I don’t know. Just seems like kismet to me. Don’t you think?”

She smiled at him. Gave him about sixty percent of the full-dazzle, blinding-white-teeth, high-octane red-carpet magazine-cover smile she’d practiced for years. “Like it’s meant to be!”

Mike slapped the table again, enthusiastically this time. “That’s the spirit!”

“But,” Veronica added smoothly, her voice laced with buttercream and silk and pleasant caresses, “I do think we should discuss payment a bit. I wasn’t aware the ongoing aspect of this role. The… ‘home base’, I think you called it? I understand it’s not much work, which I of course appreciate. But if you’ll need access to my, ah… axon pathways?... I think it’s only fair I be compensated long-term as well as for the short-term work of my performance here. That’ll help ensure my stability and availability to help you keep Vee up and running how you intend.” She threw the name in there and was pleased to see a flicker of warm recognition on both men’s faces.

Another look from Mike to Andy. This one involved an inclined head and lift of the eyebrows on the father’s part, and a little flare of the son’s nostrils. A look that said I told you so, and aren’t you glad we planned for this?.

“We totally understand,” Mike said. “If you’re interested in the role, we’ll be happy to pay you the already-offered rate for your services performing and scanning today, as well as a year’s salary for ongoing work. By which I mean, allowing us remote access to the home base – let’s just use that name, huh? Better than whatever the actual technical term is. Remote access to the home base as needed going forward. Andy’s pretty sure we’re only talking six months, but we’ll commit to a full year’s pay, so long as the Vee program is running. And if we need you beyond that time, we’re open to extending that contract in full year increments.” He shrugged. “What can I say, Miss Day? You’re exactly what we’re looking for, and we want to sign you on. We’ll do what it takes.” He sat back, rubbed his palms together dryly. “What do you think is a fair number for salary?”

Veronica was taken aback. She dreamed of moments like this – of being the one girl at the audition the director couldn’t live without. The only one who could make the project work. The one actress would can keep a movie from withering. She’d never dreamt it would happen in a tech firm office that smelled of burnt coffee and last week’s jelly donuts, but still. It was happening.

She had minimal prospects and had recently taken a dead-end office job to make ends meet. This wasn’t a big break, she knew. This was a make-ends-meet-until-the-big-break type of gig. And so she had to milk it. Get as much as she could.

“I was thinking thirty thousand dollars a year,” Veronica said. She put everything – voice, posture, eye contact, smile – into making that sound as reasonable and obvious and perfectly wonderful as she could. In her heart she felt it was a truly obscene amount of money. Sure, it wasn’t actually that much, not in the city. Not compared to what her old friends with business degrees and real careers were making. But this was for doing nothing. This was all part of the dance, part of the script. Obviously Mike would now say no, talk her down to something much lower, and she’d gracefully accept basically anything. This let him know she valued herself, though, and it gave her the opportunity to be equanimous and accepting. He’d see that she was reasonable and it’d be a good way for her to-

“Deal,” Mike said.

Veronica blinked. “Huh?” she said, losing her movie-star poise at last.

Mike was standing, hand extended. “I said, we’ve got a deal. Thirty K seems fair to me. You’re the girl for this job, Miss Day, I’m convinced of it. If thirty thou is what it costs, I say it’s a bargain at twice the price.”

Veronica stood as well, lightheaded. Mike’s hand, soft and heavy, wrapped around her slim, manicured fingers and they shook. Veronica had a thought occur to her in that moment: this could mean one of two things. These two expected to make so much money of this program that thirty thousand was a drop in the bucket, or they expected the whole thing to tank fast enough that they’d be bankrupt long before they had to pay out for anything.

Regardless. Veronica was in it now.

There were, unsurprisingly, piles and piles of papers to sign. Contracts and documents. Holmquist Digital Solutions had an in-house lawyer who sat with Veronica and answered all her questions about pay structure and likeness rights and every other thing she could think of. The lawyer was a middle-aged woman either named Shannon or Mrs. Shannon – Veronica missed it in the rush of new information and things to do. She hated when that happened. It was important to always note everyone and make them feel like you’ve connected with them. Shannon Shannon didn’t seem to mind, though. She was patient and professional and walked Veronica through a dense forest of paperwork.

And then it was time for the scans.

The home base device was actually the first thing installed, which took Veronica aback. She’d pictured something grim and foreboding – strapped to a chair, some sort of massive drill looming over her skull, Andy Holmquist softly rattling off technical jargon about what he was doing as he plugged circuits into her brain.

Instead, some young technician with striking blue eyes showed her a surprisingly elegant little device. It was thin, silvery, and shaped like an oversized fishhook. He slipped it delicately over her right ear, and she was able to press the delicate metal and plastic into place. It was like a very subtle cochlear implant, scarcely visible. Veronica made a mental note to stick with hairstyles that favored covering that side of her head.

“Is that it? Really?”

“Really,” Blue Eyes said. “Don’t fiddle with it or anything, though, okay? I know it doesn’t feel like much, but it’s got about six hundred nanometer-thick needles attaching it. Plus, if you took it off, it’d probably fry your brain.”

Veronica blanched, and he immediately laughed apologetically. “No no! Bad joke, I swear. It’s totally safe to take it off, it just needs to be removed carefully. Having it slip free accidentally would skew our data, that’s all. So we want it fixed in place. I’m really sorry! I spend all my time in this lab, I forget not everybody’s got a sense of humor about these things.”

Veronica composed herself and smiled back. “It’s totally fine,” she assured him. “I’m just a little jumpy! This is all brand new to me. Nerves, that’s all.”

“Well, let’s get down to business, maybe that’ll settle you in.” He pulled out a tablet, tapped a few things, and showed Veronica a screen that didn’t mean much to her. It was a series of rhythmically shifting lines along a finely gridded graph of some sort. It looked like a monitoring device you’d see at the bedside of a coma patient, but infinitely more complex and dense. “Do me a favor – list the names of five US states, out loud.”

“Delaware,” Veronica said. “Massachusetts. Nevada. Idaho. Arkansas.”

As she did, the lines pulsed and spiked and plummeted and surged in wild, complicated patterns. There looked to be at least a dozen different data points being tracked there in real time. A huge list of summarizing data populated in a scrolling field below the graph, font too tiny for the human eye to read.

“Perfect,” Blue Eyes said. The lines continued to jump and shift as she listened to him speak. “Just confirming it’s reading correctly. All of these represent different brain waves you’re putting out. Motor control versus cognitive load versus different stages of memory. Sensory data, vestibulo-ocular reflex, serotonergic modulation, cortical excitability. It’s complicated – honestly, I only understand my own portion of it. This is huge project with lots of specialties. But the main point is, this readout lets us get broad-spectrum data on your mental processes. Just overview stuff. Don’t worry, we can’t read your mind or anything! We won’t know if you’re having the occasional dirty thought or whatever.”

Veronica smiled at his teasing, lowering her eyes and blushing. The color in her cheeks was pretty, and it made Blue Eyes blush as well. He cleared his throat awkwardly, and went on with the rest of the scans. The data he gathered seemed to be somewhat random - making her recite lists of words, or hold her breath, or touch her finger to her nose like he was giving her a field sobriety test. The requests got more and more convoluted and absurd with each passing exercise.

“Please try to recite the alphabet backwards while you squeeze this baseball.”

“Please recite the sevens multiplication table while watching this video of the ocean.”

“Please name as many dog breeds as you can in thirty seconds while jogging in place.”

“Please think about the color red while miming brushing your teeth.”

After over two hours of these tasks, Blue Eyes finally set down the tablet and smiled at her.

“I’m sure that was really bizarre. I know how weird the testing protocols are. We’ve found we get the best data from combined outputs. Not just mental exertion, but physical, too. We get a much richer profile of how your brain’s doing all the magic it does.”

Veronica blushed a bit once again. He was pretty handsome, this nerdy young lab tech, in an angular, indoors-y way. She spent most of her time around performers and actors and dramatists, people who worked hard to perfect their appearances, people who were outward and expressive. There was something charmingly casual about how Blue Eyes’ shirt didn’t fit him exactly right, how he repeatedly flicked his eyes away from hers when he talked, nervously. She enjoyed the way his haircut was actually shaggy and messy, as opposed to that being a carefully-crafted artifice. And there was a unique sort of intimacy that came with spending the afternoon working together on something as strange as this. The two of them, sharing knowing smiles at the silliness of their tasks, and yet still toiling away to complete them.

All the while the tablet gorged itself on information, fattening its memory banks with numbers and readings about Veronica’s brain.

In the end, it took three days of work to gather everything Holmquist Digital Solutions needed. Veronica was scanned, both physically and cranially, a dozen times. They mapped how she walked, how she smiled, how she moved her hands while she spoke, how she sat, how she ran. She recorded an endless library of voice lines, starting with full sentences, working down to individual words, and finally a couple of hours of just isolated phonemes and sounds that could be used to stitch together anything Vee might need to say. They spent an entire morning just capturing various laughs and subvocalizations tied to specific subtle emotions. She was prodded and questioned and pushed and worked. It was exhausting, frankly.

But it was enjoyable, in its own way, because for the first time, Veronica Day had the spotlight all to herself.

She always knew she wanted this. She wanted a whole operation to revolve around her. It wasn’t just about the glory or the attention, though she was self-aware enough to recognize that she did love those. More than that, though, was the glow of knowing that everything hinged on her. Her performance, her attitude, her ability. Everyone needed her to rise to the occasion and be her best, and she was certainly not going to let them down.

So Veronica endured it all, smiling all the while, thanking every person who filmed or recorded or tested her by name. She wanted the whole HDS team to think of her as a star and a leader, someone who they could count on through this whole grueling process. She wanted all of them to talk one day about working with Veronica Day before she was famous, and how they knew even then she was born to be a star.

At the end of the third day, once the data was collected and the home base was installed and the recordings were completed, Veronica was exhausted. The rest of the team, however, was just getting started. They had their data. They had audio and video. They had more information about Veronica’s brain, body, and personality than any group of people had ever had about one person in history. And that meant they really didn’t need her anymore.

So Veronica went back to her normal life.

The three-day lark at HDS was an exciting little foray into something new, but it wasn’t real life. Real life meant spending evenings and weekends and even lunch breaks at auditions. Auditions that were slowly but surely grinding her down. She talked to her friends, who unfailingly supported her. Assured her that she was pretty and talented and destined for success. But every audition meant sitting in a room with two dozen other women, all of them pretty. All of them talented. All of them similarly wrapped in destiny. And every audition ended with one of those other women succeeding in place of Veronica.

She worked. Four years ago, Veronica had taken a temp job doing data entry for a financial consultancy firm. She didn’t even know what ‘financial consultancy’ meant at the time. If she was honest, she still wasn’t really entirely sure. She’d never intended to stay. That job was just a stopgap, a way to pay the bills until her acting career took off. She liked to believe it still was, but it was harder and harder to ignore how long it was taking. She still spoke of it as a temp job, but her paychecks came direct from the company now, the temp agency long forgotten.

A few weeks after finishing up at HDS, Veronica moved back in with Trevor, with whom she’d been juggling an on-again-off-again relationship for years. Trevor was a fellow out-of-work actor, though he was slightly less out-of-work than Veronica was. Trevor had the body and jawline of an action hero but he struggled with believability and relatability. He booked more work than Veronica ever did, but it was always vapid, go-nowhere parts. The hero’s old friend who shows up for an episode of a teen drama and is never mentioned again. The third in a line of silent flunkies for the direct-to-streaming action movie’s cliché villain. He drew a steady enough paycheck that he could afford his own place, but it was clear he’d plateaued.

They’d done this three times before, moving in together. Each time it lasted about four months before they were so sick of each other that they split entirely. Two months later they’d fall into each other’s orbit again. Hard to avoid another actor in the circles they ran in, after all. A month after that and they’d have a sudden, passionate tryst that rekindled everything. Then they’d gradually build towards living together again, assuring themselves this was the time they’d sorted everything out and would be great.

Her life felt like it was on pause. Like there was a loop she was stuck in, until something came along to jar her out of it. The thing she was waiting for. Success – that’s what it was, she knew. Success would shove her right out of these stolid routines, and it was lurking at the edges of everything she did. Observing from the periphery of her life and just waiting for the preordained moment. It was only a matter of time, she felt. Soon she’d get her big break and everything she’d waited for would pour forth. All the rewards and joys she always expected from life, they’d be hers, and she’d have worked hard to earn them. Soon every eye in the world would be on her.

But until then, Veronica just worked.

Trevor pulled his shirt up over his head. The streetlights outside the apartment window illuminated his torso, casting orange sodium-vapor bands over his abs and pectorals. The cheap radio at his bedside played its tinny refrain, some soul song just loud enough to drown out the muted clanging of the old pipes in this building. Veronica ignored the noise. She was focused on Trevor. How he looked, and how he smelled. He always smelled so vibrant, so present. He was an active, physical man, so his scent always had a warm undercurrent of sweat. There was some new cologne he was trying, something with cedar and chocolate. And as he tossed his shirt aside and moved forward to kiss her, she could smell how the detergent clung to his skin.

Veronica was already nearly naked, cross-legged on Trevor’s bed in just her panties. She moved up to meet him as he came in, mouths meeting hotly there. She pressed herself up close as he ran his strong-fingered hand through her thick hair. Lifted up a bit and wrapped her legs around him. This was their routine, the dance they did every night lately, their relationship in the most warm and golden part of its cycle. Every night – and most days, in fact – they’d come together like this. They were talking less and less while together, another familiar marker of where they were in their always-cycling relationship. Edges starting to fray. The days could be drab; the nights were routine but glorious.

Trevor worked his other hand under Veronica’s ass, lifting as he leaned back and held her to him. She ground against his chest, breaking their kiss so she could nibble on his bottom lip and plant kisses along his stubbled, well-formed jaw. She loved the way they felt against each other. Her softly almost-pale skin against his gleaming year-round tan. His firm musculature and her sloping, yielding curves. He slid her panties aside, thumb brushing – accidentally? Likely no – against the warm wet folds of her. He felt how ready she was. How inviting. And so he accepted her invitation and slid himself home inside of her.

Veronica nuzzled her face into his neck, moaning out a low and pleasurable sound as he filled her up. Trevor’s cock fit perfectly with the rest of his physique – strong, thick, solid, and perfect for the task at hand. He leaned slightly back and allowed Veronica to lower herself down onto him at her own pace, which she took her time doing. Veronica let him watch her, her lips half-parted and her eyes half-closed, sighing out a breathy syllable of bliss as she slid down, and down, and down. She loved how she could feel every bit of him in this moment. Every little pulse and throb. Every wave of heat from his body to hers. Every small hitch in his breath as she worked her way fuller and fuller. Every millimeter of how he curved inside her. It was perfect. It was as though she could fully visualize his shaft just from the thousands of nerves he was currently stimulating so well down there.

As she visualized and let herself sink onto him even deeper, Veronica had a flash of a mental image – the tablet, back at HDS, recording the complex data of her brain in real time. She shuddered as Trevor lifted his hips at just that moment, pressing in the final inch of himself, filling her completely now. Her whole body gave a liquid shiver and she poured herself against him, thinking of how those lines would be spiking right now. Jittering and flailing across the screen. She wondered if anyone was watching.

She thought of Blue Eyes, thoughtfully and attentively tracking her responses.

Would they know what she was doing? Did they have her mind so well mapped that they could see raw data and read the moment – see when she gasped, how her nipples were diamond-hard? Could they see how she was digging her nails into Trevor’s sculpted pecs now? Did they know she was moaning loudly, rolling her hips, trying to take him deeper? The thought of it made her wild. The staff of HDS, gathered around the tablet, scrutinizing her data. Seeing how Trevor fell back underneath her, unable to keep up with her sudden burst of raw heat. The uncharacteristic way she rode him, forcefully, like an animal. Even as he came, shocked at how she’d aggressively worked him to completion already, Veronica didn’t stop for a moment.

When she came, it felt like a performance. An excellent one – no pretension or falseness to be found. Veronica came like a meteorite tearing itself apart through the atmosphere. She came like a wave battering a ship. She came and she hoped the staff was watching. Not her body in the dingy apartment light, just the unfiltered sensory array of everything her mind divulged. Her physical experience purified into crystal-clear data.

She fell off of Trevor, who was shocked to near unconsciousness already. She lay back next to him, listening to their paired ragged breathing over the slight static over the radio’s music. He murmured something to her, words of pleasant surprise at her enthusiasm, but she didn’t really hear them. She was still thinking of that tablet screen, of her many rattling lines slowing down to normality. Of the staff dutifully recording them. The small hot thrill of that idea glowed like an ember in the lowest part of her belly.

She smelled how both of their bodies filled the room – sweat and salt and sex – and she felt sleep claim her.

She wondered how the Vee project was going. She’d gotten her monthly payments, which helped a lot, but weren’t really life-changing. No interruption there meant things were still happening, though. Veronica missed the staff sometimes. She missed the feeling of being part of something big like that. Being in the center of it. She assumed they were utilizing the home base, but she could never be sure. Occasionally she convinced herself she could feel things happening. A feeling like static in her brain, making her thoughts a little sharp and difficult to hold onto. Exhaustion without much of a reason for it. Loss of focus for an afternoon. Nothing severe, and all possibly unrelated or even imagined. But Veronica was sure. She just knew that happened on days they made major progress with Vee.

It was a nice idea. A connection she could feel and maintain. Something to link her with that pleasant few days. Occasionally, when she felt a little nostalgic or whimsical, Veronica would focus her memory and visualize someone from HDS. Blue Eyes, smiling shyly at her and glancing away to study the tablet while she recited some piece of doggerel poetry he gave her. Shannon Shannon, patiently explaining a confusing legal concept for the third time. Eric, the older programmer who kindly brought her a water bottle unprompted one day during a long stretch of voice recording. The doting receptionist. Mike and Andy, quietly and subtly jockeying for primacy in the conference room.

She tried to imagine them all clearly enough that the tablet might show what she was thinking. Sending a signal, however opaque, that she remembered them all and was wishing them well. That she hoped they were thinking of her, too.

After some months of waiting, Veronica got a call. There was an update to share with her, and would she mind coming down to the HDS offices as soon as she could? She took the afternoon off from work and hurried over.

Mike and Andy met her in the lobby, positively buzzing with excitement. The whole office was full. All hands on deck, it seemed. They ushered Veronica into a meeting room. Only her and a dozen or so other were able to fit. The rest of the staff waited outside, peeing through the windows, watching her reactions.

“Miss Day,” Mike said, his posture and voice carrying a much more serious and ceremonial bearing than Veronica had ever seen from him before. He stood before a large television screen mounted on the wall, currently showing a slowly rotating HDS logo. “This is a big day for us. There’s a lot of work to do still, but it’s important to celebrate milestones as we go. And today’s a significant one. There’s been a lot of long nights here.” The staff around him murmured their agreement, nodding. “A lot of effort and teamwork.” More nods. “I don’t think we ever made it to the point of punches being thrown, but there was some frustration, for sure.” Laughs at that, the crowd shaking their heads as they recalled the way tempers must have flared. Jealousy scraped at the inside of Veronica’s heart, not being able to be a part of that team experience, struggling through for better or worse.

“But in the end, it’s all worth it to go through that kind of thing. It’s all worth it for moments like this.”

Mike stepped aside, and the screen behind him lit up. Stark white, with a light feathering at the edges, giving a sense of some depth there. Like the screen was a window into a seamless white room.

And then Veronica watched herself walk into frame.

Not actually herself, she immediately realized. The woman there was a little too smooth, a little too perfect. Her figure was different, but not dramatically so. Her features were different – more symmetrical and somehow exaggerated in ways she couldn’t yet pinpoint. Her skin had a gloss to it, a faint and almost plastic-like sheen. Her hair was a little unrealistic with how it didn’t have a single stray or flyaway. But really, she looked like nothing other than a sleek, shining, perfected version of Veronica.

The room held its breath, watching the figure on the screen. She seemed to look around, scanning the crowd. Veronica’s heart was thudding in her chest. She knew what she was getting into with this project, but this – this was striking. So lifelike and so alien at the same time. Could it actually see into the room? Were there cameras or something? That seemed possible. Honestly, what wasn't possible anymore? And the way she smiled, gave little waves, made eye contact – it was like she was seeing the people there and recognizing individuals.

The woman on the screen moved strangely – smooth and fluid but purposeful. The tiniest hint of something robotic to her, something mechanical. It was in the way she seemed to snap into place in whatever pose she ended up in. Every movement, however tiny, was perfect and put her exactly where she wanted to be.

Veronica realized she was locked in place, that soft rigidity the woman on screen displayed showing itself in her own muscles, too. The woman on the screen stopped, and Veronica realized the digital gaze was fixed on her.

Her face slowly lit up into a warm, wide smile. Recognition. Fondness. A modulated digital voice – Veronica’s, but not – filled the room. Veronica felt that static buzz in her head kick up powerfully.

“Hi, Veronica,” she said, so perfectly warm and welcoming and loving and idealized. A perfect voice, a perfect tone. Exactly what Veronica was always trying to achieve. “I’m Vee. It’s SO nice to finally meet you.”