Chapter 30

The 178th floor was an empty luxury office with no one there. Sam moved on fast and slipped into a stairwell, away from security who seemed uninterested in looking for anyone, as if they were in a trance just going through the motions of pacing up and down.

Pushing out of the door onto floor 179, Sam found out why the executives weren’t on the floor below. She walked into a cavernous room, dimly lit by decadent chandeliers. It took up floors 179 and 180. The walls were painted a deep burgundy, and oil paintings of erotic scenes covered the walls. The centre of the room drew Sam’s attention most. A churning mass of bodies, writhing all over one another, women, men, legs and arms everywhere, bodies gleaming with sweat. They didn’t even notice Sam. A low-hanging light spun above them, flashing in a strange pattern that made Sam feel a mixture of arousal and sleepiness. Speakers pumped low, thumping bass, mixed with a whispering voice saying erotic things that could barely be heard. The urge to join the mass of flesh in the centre of the room, people fucking and sucking each other, to squeeze in between the tits and the cocks and the abs and the…

Sam slapped herself hard in the face. Someone in the fleshy pile heard and glanced in her direction.

“Again slut, harder.”

Sam’s face flushed red. The head that emerged from between a pair of legs resumed pleasuring another lump of flesh and Sam slunk back into the stairwell and walked up to find no door at 180 as expected. She continued to 181 and looked through the small slit of a window in the door. This time there were no red walls, no high ceiling, no orgy. Just a massive, thrumming, humming series of servers. Hundreds of them, all flashing green and red and yellow. She slipped out the door and walked down a corridor between the massive black towers. Wires looped and spooled from them. Their low sound like a beating drum in her brain, a constant insistent drone that demanded she switch off and stop thinking.

Sam ignored it, another strange, alien impulse she did not want to feel. All of the wires wrapped around each other, not unlike the bodies below, and wove their way around the machines to the centre of the room, where a glass tube clamped them together and they rose up to the floor above. The humming grew louder, as each machine seemed to pump information, light and sound, through the wires into the centre column, up to whatever waited at the top. Calia’s computer for controlling the world or something, thought Sam.

Nothing good could be there, that was certain. The sounds were obnoxiously loud and Sam felt the same lack of control that gripped her on the floor below. The feeling of being close to something powerful and secret was deafening. The sheer force of that feeling made her reel backward, stepping into a server then spiraling back, toward the exit. Sam tripped and fell and found she could no longer rise. Instead, she crawled, which felt so natural all of a sudden, toward the door. Her progress became slower, and she felt as though she were moving through molasses. The sensations gripping her body were a terrible combination of fear and doubt and need. She needed someone to take away the fear, the worry. She needed to crawl forward. She belonged on the ground, on all fours.

She didn’t believe that.

Sam grabbed the side of one of the massive machines and pulled herself to her feet. With heavy steps she inched toward the door as the sound seemed to flood the room, echoing and bouncing from all over it. Telling her to obey and submit and surrender.

She reached the door and pulled it open, falling into the stairwell and letting the door slam shut behind her. As soon as it did, the sound stopped, and she felt normal again. Whatever she was doing, wherever she was going, something big lay ahead. She stood a staircase from the top of the building, and who else could be there?

Sam climbed the stairs slowly. Trepidation sent sweat pouring down her neck but she had to know, had to find out what was really going on. She needed to go quicker because she had been seen. Surely once the people finished their fun, they’d call someone to come find her. Quickening her pace Sam jogged up the last few steps and reached a huge golden door emblazoned with an enormous ‘C’.

Calia.

Sam pushed through the doors and entered a corridor lined with screens, each one playing a video of her, Calia. Brown hair, red lips, blue eyes. Same every time. Sometimes in a costume, sometimes a dress or a skirt. Always perfect, always flawless. The videos were overlaid with spirals and pocket watches and pendants dangling and spinning and rocking back and forth. Sam felt overwhelmed. There was just so much stimulation and the videos began to shift and change and she could see herself on the screen, kneeling, kissing someone’s boots. Calia’s boots?

Never, thought Sam.

But the image kept evolving and the camera moved up as the screen Sam focused on seemed to grow, the image spreading, taking over the other screens. As the camera moved up Sam found herself staring slack-jawed, knowing but not wanting to accept what she saw.

Trish stood over her.

Sam staggered back against the wall behind her, crashing into screens and making them shake and shudder, scanlines breaking across them. She pushed onward down the corridor as the screens showed more, Calia and Trish putting a collar on her. Whipping her. Leading her on a leash. It was too much, utter fantasy and fetish and danger.

At the end of the corridor stood another door, a double door covered in cushioned red velvet. Above it read the word ‘Calia’, embossed in gold. Sam pushed it open.

“Samantha,” came a voice, a very familiar one. “I’ve been expecting you.”