Posted by Joan Bradley

Intelligence is at the heart of everything I do

2h

A year ago today I had the absolute privilege to advance from VP of Legal to Partner at Mountelligence. The less said about the circumstances, I think, the better - Robert, I hope life finds you in a much better place a year on! - but what a joy and what a challenge. I’ve pushed a few new projects live already, but some time in the next two weeks I’ll be able to make an announcement about one of the biggest goals I had when I took the position and how close we’re coming to being able to do it.

To those of you in the know, I’ll see you tonight in the Twisting Chambers for the monthly event - don’t be mad if I make it my celebration, too.

#careergoals #lifegoals #newproject #iykyk

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*

Joan’s perfectly shaped eyebrow rose when she saw Alice Weston’s name among the others reacting to her latest post. Where do I know that name from? she thought.

It took a while to remember that she’d first heard the name at Twisting Chambers, but not as either a hypnotist or a submissive; it had been in discussions with a business contact who happened to enjoy much the same thing in her sex life, and who Joan would often talk to during lulls in the action when there wasn’t anything entertaining to watch and she didn’t have a submissive’s mind drip-drip-dripping away for her own ends.

She had built up an impression of Weston as being someone trying to ape Joan’s career, without Joan’s native advantages. Where Joan’s first introduction to business had been through her uncle, who took her on as his assistant fresh out of college and made sure she was privy to his most high-end meetings, making contacts and learning how negotiations were done, Alice Weston had (rumour had it) got her first job through hurried fast talking and outright con artistry.

She clicked through to the woman’s profile, which loaded rather faster than Joan had expected, and looked at the profile picture. She wasn’t impressed.

Joan spent thousands on her look, not including the time she put in at the gym or the advice she took from her dietitian. Whether she was slipping into a power suit for work or her signature white leather catsuit for the Twisting Chambers, she looked as if it was effortless - and that, she knew, was a sign to those around her of just how much effort had been spent on the process.

Alice, on the other hand, had no dietitian, had had to blindly trust to nature that her body would fill out in the right places (though Joan would admit that it had; Alice looked curvaceous, even if anywhere she might be in earshot Joan would instead choose the word ‘plump’. Her first business suits visibly hadn’t sat right, and even now Joan was sure she bought off the peg and didn’t even have adjustments.

Joan rolled her eyes in any case and left the office for the day. Most days she had an evening event scheduled, she changed in her private bathroom, but it wouldn’t do for the receptionist to see her in Twisting Chambers gear. Any manner of rumour might get started.

Oliver Hendricks was leaving at the same time she was; he saw her arrive in the parking lot and waited, eyes on her, as she approached. Joan wasn’t in the mood to deal with the man who’d outranked her before she was pushed to partner, but for much the same reason, it wasn’t a good idea for her to ignore him.

She slowed her pace, looked at him inquiringly.

“I’m hearing rumours, Joan,” he said. She thought immediately about her white catsuit, pictured blank eyes, emotionless voices. She’d just been thinking about Twisting Chambers rumours, after all.

“What kind of rumours?”

“That Intreality has versions of three of our in-developments in development. And that they’re further along than ours.”

Joan frowned. “How? We poached their best R&D guys. Did they grab somebody new?”

Hendricks shook his head fractionally. “Far from it. You remember that first conversation we had after you got Bob’s job?”

It had been an awkward one, neither of them willing to talk about the fact she’d leapfrogged him. Joan, at least, hadn’t been privy to the decisions that led to that choice; she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, either. At the time all the rumours were that it was a diversity promotion. Joan, unable to dismiss the rumours entirely, had just seen to it that her work was impeccable, or at least she’d tried.

What they had been able to talk about it was why the job came up. Bob had been found to be selling information to competitors. He was the third or fourth person let go from the company over it; as Oliver had put it, in the end he’d been let go because firing his underlings hadn’t been taken as a signal to stop doing what he was doing and accept that the extra money from selling them out wasn’t going to keep coming. Stupid of him, but some people genuinely thought they were too smart to be caught. She nodded.

“Well, it looks like maybe it’s happening again.”

Joan frowned. “Do we know who?”

“No. And honestly, Joan, you need to get out in front of this.”

She couldn’t read his expression as he gave her that advice. He might have meant it as friendly advice. He might be laying the groundwork for trouble ahead of time.

She’d find out, she supposed, depending on how messy things got, and how fast they got that messy. “Do you have anything you can email me?”

He shook his head. “But I can tell you who told me.”

“Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”

“I’ll drop you an email tomorrow,” he said, and they both understood what he meant; there would be a lasting record that he’d done his part and she needed to do hers.

“I’ll pick it up then,” she said.

“No problem. Oh, and Joan, one other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re lead on all three of those projects.”

Joan swore, then stomped off to her car.

*

Twisting Chambers was held in what, six nights of the week, was a regular if high-end nightclub, with two major dancefloors that became public mingling spots, a number of cages suspended above the bigger of the two dancefloors, and several private rooms or alcoves which could accommodate a small group.

Joan had a private room booked - always had a private room booked for the event, and Matilda and Eric would be waiting there all throughout, ready to wait on her if she wished. One of her other submissives, Blair, was also attending the event, but would not be serving as part of it, unless Joan tracked her down and entranced her.

Joan preferred to collect new submissives at any such event, though, and partly for that reason and partly simply to enjoy herself, she was working the big dancefloors first.

Seeing who else was out there.

She almost always wore the white leather catsuit when she attended, the zipper strategically low enough to show sufficient cleavage to attract attention.

Joan did enjoy attention to her body for its own sake, but mostly the zipper’s role here was to draw attention first to her cleavage and second to the thing that always nestled at its upper tip, the blue sapphire pendant she wore on her silver necklace.

Seeing whose gaze slid past the pendant and whose gaze lingered was always interesting.

She spoke for a while with her friend Alistair, who’d been the one who first introduced her to the hypnotic community in Seattle, a community she’d come to love, a place where the rich and powerful came to dabble in another kind of power.

He’d never had the same drive for success she had, but she knew people who did had a fascination for him, and that he could be pushed into hypnotic battles with them if they brought ego into the picture as well. Joan had always been careful not to show him the kind of ego and arrogance she knew other people she dealt with saw. All the same, the two of them enjoyed each other’s company.

“…you know if Alice Weston will be here tonight?” she overheard someone ask, and felt herself tense with irritation. It was probably, she thought, unfair; on the other hand she didn’t like Weston anyway, and the fact the woman kept cropping up at a time Joan was juggling too many work concerns didn’t help. Twisted Chambers was meant to be a release.

“Let’s go into the other room,” she said, and Alistair, after studying her closely for a moment, agreed.

If there was a problem talking to Alistair at all, it was the way he smirked when he noticed something. Just what he’d noticed, and how, she chose not to ask herself.

She wasn’t even sure why the woman had started to occupy such a prominent position in her thoughts. It might just be that her name kept coming up, but if Joan was honest with herself (and she frequently took pains not to be) she might have admitted that it hurt her a little to acknowledge someone else on the rise when she was perhaps slipping down the pecking order.

In the other big room most of those present had gathered into a loose semicircle, the biggest part of the dance floor empty except for three people, two of them sat on bar stools about a yard apart. Joan recognised all three of them almost immediately; Elowen Alonant, whose behaviour almost merited her being stuck with such an appalling name; Janice Huttlestone; and Molly the Dolly, longterm hypnosub and majordomo to the event host.

Molly was in the bustier with the thick black and white vertical stripes and matching boots, which meant she was acting as a referee. Immediately the attention being given to Janice and Elowen was explained; this would be a duel.

“Who challenged who?” she asked one of the others in the audience, a hard-nosed bottle blonde in an elaborate PVC concoction that interspersed black panels with transparent but darkened panels, producing a strangely patchwork titillation.

“I think you could probably guess,” she said, amused. Joan registered the woman looking her up and down; her eyes paused on the sapphire pendant, but only for a moment. “Alonant said something rude, but Janice demanded satisfaction and didn’t accept a simple apology.”

“So Elowen then challenged her,” Joan filled in, to confirm that she was right. The blonde smiled.

“You could, and did, guess,” she said. “I believe a few people have opened a book on this.”

Joan’s nose wrinkled as it occasionally did when confronted with something that wasn’t an easy choice. “I think I’ll pass on that,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “I have five thousand on Alonant.” And the blonde turned back to watch the action, leaving Joan to roll her eyes quietly to herself.

Janice was immersed in adjusting her decolletage as Molly the Dolly, having withdrawn a blue handkerchief from within her capacious cleavage, dropped it to signal the start of the contest.

“You know,” Elowen began, her voice soft and low, “your whole situation here, it’s a strange one, and it’s very… suggestive.”

Janice, having finished adjusting her top to show off more of her chest, sat back, lifting her head, and shimmied her shoulders, setting her impressive chest moving, more of a bounce than a sway but, as she continued to roll her shoulders, her breasts’ motion fell into a very clear pattern. “Why, Elowen,” she purred, her voice insinuating itself over Elowen’s, “are you going to talk to me about suggestibility? When you, yourself, are already staring?”

“Oh, I may stare, but only because I look on the spoils of my conquest,” Elowen parried. “Your body, and my eyes, are not the question here. It is your mind I am thinking of. And it is your mind that has drawn you in, your mind which allowed you to get into this situation.

“And from that I can say with some confidence that you desire this.”

Joan noticed her hands; she sat with one hand gripping the other arm just behind the wrist, and as she spoke, her wrist tiled back and forth, slowly, but certainly according to a rhythm, the casing of his watch catching the light, flashing it steadily over Janice’s face, back and forth, back and forth…

“And you desire this,” Janice returned. “Your body knows, even if your mind doesn’t. Which is all to the good as, I’m afraid, sir, you’re wrong on that score too; it’s not about our minds. It’s about the body that will betray you, that wants to drop deep, to surrender, to obey…”

It was, Joan thought, interesting to watch the two of them essay their different styles against one another. Janice was all about the physicality, Elowen all about the mental side. The joust continued, with rebuttal after rebuttal, both of them interrupting the other and talking over them, a heavy dispute, an enthusiastic conflict.

Joan listened to their voices, waiting for the telltale wavering, slurring, or misspeaking that often preceded a descent into trance, wondering which of them would fall first.

She hadn’t seen either of them work before, had idly wondered whether there would be anything to steal from them.

She was wondering whether she could adapt Janice’s approach, unzipping her white leather catsuit instead, and have it be as effective as she’d want it to be, considering that if it wasn’t effective it was likely that sooner rather than later she’d find herself feeling embarrassed.

And then Janice slipped forward from her chair, moving bonelessly from seated to her knees with a loud thud that didn’t seem to wake her. She stayed upright on her knees for a long moment, staring glassily.

Elowen extended a leg, her foot angled daintily, and Janice bent her head to kiss the boot of the other woman.

There was, from the assembled watchers, a burst of conversation, mostly in low voices, and Joan was aware of a number of notes being taken on watches to make payments later (Twisted Chambers very much forbidding anyone to have a live phone on them while inside, out of respect for the privacy of their customers).

Joan could feel the wave of eager, watching tension leaving the crowd, and she could also see she wasn’t the only one; referee Molly the Dolly had clearly also felt the effects of the mutual inductions pretty heavily, and with that release her expression was more vacant than it usually was when her owner wasn’t directly to hand.

Elowen had also noticed. “Molly,” she said, “dear Molly, I can see that you, too, understand now that while the mind controls the body, the mind can easily be controlled in its turn, don’t you?”

The majordomo nodded slowly, sluggishly.

“And you can see, too, just how important it is that you express your gratitude to me for showing you this, just as Janice has, can’t you?”

Molly the Dolly nodded once again.

“And I’ve no doubt you can see, too, that I have an extra boot.” She extended her foot, angled slightly in invitation, and a series of good-natured titters ran around the room as the watchers caught where Elowen was going. There were, too, a few tuts of disapproval; Molly’s owner was well-liked among the people who attended his event. Alistair, however, was among those smirking. Joan gave him a half-frown of disapproval, but he just laughed.

Molly was still nodding, and the amount her head moved up and down had increased with every prompt to nod.

“Molly, my dear,” Elowen said, “you know what you need to do.”

And there was a second loud pair of thuds as the Dolly’s legs folded out from under her and her knees hit the floor heavily, and her head bent forward, and she began to kiss and lick and worship the other’s boot.

“Mr Twist won’t be happy about that,” Alistair said. Joan had been thinking the same thing but, unlike Alistair, she didn’t find it amusing; the bottle-blonde fake titted bimbo who’d trotted up to join him smiled at them both with vacant sycophancy. Her corset had been modified, a small slit open just above her belly button to reveal an elaborate tattoo reading DUMMY in red.

Joan excused herself politely and went to her own private room.

*

Janice’s loss stayed with Joan for the next several days, niggling at the back of her mind intermittently when she had far more important things to be thinking about. This happened occasionally, Joan had found, and it usually meant that something she’d thought was a minor frustration was actually something at odds with how Joan believed the world to work. When it was revealed that this was not the case it always stayed with her until she had the time to work it through and process it.

Unfortunately, having that time didn’t seem like something that would be likely in the near future. Oliver Hendricks appeared to be backing Joan; the problem was that he’d even had to say that, because that meant that a challenge had been made. Someone - probably more than one - with power in the company was upset, and because it was her department (and because she was a woman, she was well aware), she was the target of that upset.

Even the excitement of the Mentality app launch was muted, because Mentality had been designed to grab attention and create a potential customer base for the upcoming paid version, and by the time Mentality was getting influencer plugs on release, Intreality had already announced their competitor for the paid version, and as well as looking like it had a weirdly similar back end under a different UI, it had a few features they just couldn’t compete with.

To Joan this was the absolute confirmation that there had been leaks; a part of her had wanted to deny it from the moment Hendricks told her, but for Intreality to have outperformed them, given that they’d systematically gutted Intreality’s software development arm with corporate raids a year and more ago, they had to have been getting support from somewhere.

The only logical place that support could have come from was inside Joan’s division, and that meant she had to concede that her division was at fault.

She did not, however, have to like it.

This was the first time Joan had conducted an internal investigation, and she hadn’t received any training in the traditional way to do it; however, she had decided to see that as an advantage rather than a drawback, and as such she had determined that she would put her other skills to use, and find ways to make sure they were effective.

It began, in the days after the Twisted Chamber party, with a spreadsheet. Joan spent far too much time with her head buried in spreadsheets these days; studying data while time rolled by outside, unheeded, until she finally surfaced and wondered how she could possibly have lost so much time.

By the end, though, she had a spreadsheet, and on that spreadsheet she had everything Intreality would need to have received as a leak, that they couldn’t have done for themselves or that it seemed implausible they would have thought of for themselves.

On the other axis she had everyone in her team who knew about each aspect.

The reasoning was simple. The more people you approached with a bribe, the more likely it was that someone fed the information back to their employer for a payout on that side and a raise; or at least, Joan knew that R&D had plenty of people who’d do that kind of thing. Leaving your employer was part of the game; betraying them tended to go badly when you did, finally, have to look for somewhere new.

Therefore it was likely that there was one leak, not several. And there were three key products Intreality was getting ready to scoop Mountelligence on. There couldn’t be many people who knew about every aspect that had been leaked on all projects.

It turned out that there were three people on the team itself. Joan pulled their records, spoke to HR, and found nothing to indicate any of them were unhappy with their role, their colleagues, or their pay (well, no more unhappy than any worker tended to be; it was a known fact that everyone believed that personally should be paid more than they were). None of them had recently cashed out any stock options, suddenly used all their paid time off for the year, or anything else that might have suggested they were preparing to vanish.

With no frontrunners, it was clear to Joan that all of them would need investigating. She opened up their schedules and looked for a window where she could get them into a private meeting. Didn’t send any of the invites immediately. Not until they were actually at work on the day when they had availability. It was going to be easier if bolting was difficult.

Joan had no idea what any of them might expect from her one-to-one with them, but that didn’t worry her. She was confident that whatever they expected, they wouldn’t have prepared a good defence against what was actually going to happen, for one simple reason.

Her plan was to hypnotise them.

It was the first time she’d worn her blue sapphire in the Mountelligence offices. There was at least one other Mountelligence staffer who attended Twisted Chambers, and there were a few people she’d worked with who knew about her hypnotic exploits - but almost all of those people were C-Suite, and couldn’t say anything about it because any negative response would have been brought down on both their heads.

Mutually assured career destruction.

The R&D techs, on the other hand, had no idea. If they’d been paying enough attention to the seedier side of tech forum gossip, they might know that their betters were often to be found at one hypnotic event or another, but they’d hardly know which. And Joan didn’t think any of them would know what to watch for.

Just in case they did recognise a typical induction, though, she decided to change up her style. She took some inspiration from Janice Huttlestone - her induction might have failed on Elowen, but Joan was confident that with her cleavage and her pendant she could get each of her suspects into a primed state before they even realised what was happening.

Philosophically, Joan agreed with Janice. You could think of hypnosis as using the mind to exploit the body, but to Joan hypnosis used the way the body was built to exploit the mind.

For her, this was an erotically charged equivalent to hacking a business computer network not by stealing passwords or brute forcing their way through but simply by noting that the wireless printers always had terrible security and you could get in that way.

Janice had built her induction for Elowen around the same idea and had made her physicality, the sexuality of the way she moved and talked and existed, into her primary tool. Joan’s primary tool was the sapphire pendant and probably always would be, but she didn’t think there was any good reason to have only one tool.

All four of her suspects had been somewhat surprised to see Joan’s sleekest power suit and her most demonstratively-cropped ‘blouse’ beneath as she entered the room after them.

Joan didn’t exactly dress frumpily at work, but from the very start she’d been conscious that the older men who owned and operated the companies she was likely to work for had certain opinions on how women should present themselves at the office, and they split women into two camps based on how they showed up.

Sell yourself with too much sex appeal and you were never rising beyond a job title with a word like ‘assistant’ in it, and keep yourself buttoned down, straightforward, and above all make sure it was always a pantsuit and you could just about bluff them into…

…well, if she was honest, what you could do was closer to letting them grant you ‘honorary man’ status than actually treating you like a man; the asterisk was just always there, and she was sure it always would be.

The inductions had been swift and effective, and for the first three candidates, Joan hadn’t seen any indication that they’d known what she was doing until they were deep.

As the fourth’s eyelids started to flutter, he suddenly said “Is… this… izzis zat… hyp oh tizzy thing…”

“I could tell you,” Joan told him, two fingers under the silver chain of her sapphire pendant, just up from the stone itself, gently twisting to help the gemstone to catch the light and seem to glitter and dance. “But you won’t remember anyway, when you wake up. And besides, you’re already so very… very… tired…” She drew out her words, letting them taper off one at a time, and watched the man’s blinks draw out in the same way, his eyes closed for longer and longer with each word, his mind teetering on the edge of dropping.

“You don’t understand why you feel this way,” she said. “But you do.” She rose abruptly, leaning across the desk, her hands planted on it, wide apart, her cleavage suddenly even more obvious to the glassily staring man, her sapphire sparkling. “Give in,” she said, and saw his lips shape the words, unconsciously agreeing.

So she said, “Sleep.” And his eyes closed one last time, and his head fell forward onto his chest, and he slumped in his chair.

“Aren’t you a good boy?” she asked, smiling with satisfaction as she made her way around the desk. “You’d heard of hypnotism, had you? Just let your words spill out in answer, they don’t need you to think first.” And besides, if he thought first, he might be able to lie; but if she didn’t give him the chance, she could depend on whatever he said, though it might not be as detailed as she’d prefer.

“Yes…”

“But you don’t really know what it does?”

“No.”

“Does it scare you?” She had reached his chair by now, her hand resting on his shoulder as she moved to stand behind him.

“Yes.”

“Does it excite you?” She put a lot of emotion into her voice, pushing for the yes, looking to cash in on the priming work she’d already done.

“Yes.”

“There’s a good boy.” She leaned down over his other shoulder, her free hand coming around, her fingernails dancing lightly over his crotch, remembering the way the others had squirmed and reacted, even dear straight Lisa, who had discovered not a new field of attraction but instead just how helpless she was against her body’s desire to be aroused and teased and toyed with. “Now, listen carefully. I need the truth, and if I get the truth, you get a reward. And you even get to remember that reward, echoing through your dreams, just never when you’re awake.” Once again, she put into her voice an inflection that prompted the right answer to the question. “You like that idea, don’t you?”

“Yesss…”

She unbuckled his belt with a practiced tug and slide, and her hand slid inside his waistband. “Do you know anybody working for Intreality?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anybody working on projects like your own for Intreality?”

“Yes.”

Her fingers found his erection, slipping around it, and she squeezed very gently, making sure his attention wasn’t on what he was saying. “Have you ever discussed your work on projects with these people?”

“Nooo…”

It didn’t sound like a lie, but it was as much a moan as it was a word. Joan wasn’t at all sure her vict - her subject even could lie at the moment.

She began to stroke his cock, a reward for the fact he hadn’t just casually chatted. “Have you ever supplied your work or samples of your code to anyone at Intreality?”

“No-oh-oh…”

“Have you ever supplied your work or samples of your code to anyone outside this company?”

“Nuhhhhhhh…” It was one long, shuddering breath, and Joan realised just how much she was enjoying him. But this wasn’t getting her any closer.

“Do you have any idea how someone outside this company could get hold of work done in our software laboratories?”

“Yessss…”

Well, this definitely needed encouragement; the fingernails of her free hand ran gently down the side of his neck and she watched him shudder, felt him jump and spasm in her hand. She wasn’t at all sure the sudden surprise wouldn’t have made him cum under other circumstances; sometimes subjects found they didn’t orgasm without prompting, even when they absolutely should have.

Joan always loved that reaction; there could be, she thought, no greater demonstration of her power over somebody than them finding they couldn’t even cum without her blessing.

“Tell me,” she purred, her lips by his ear.

“An executive could easily leak part of our code vault,” he said, and it was obvious that some part of his hindbrain was desperately focused on his diction, his words not only not slurred but more precisely enunciated than they had been before she began her induction, “and the system wouldn’t record who had done it, because your logins have a different privilege configuration.”

Her fingers still stroking his cock, Joan was silent for a few moments as she considered the testimony. It wasn’t wrong - and now that it had been pointed out, it was obvious. But it hadn’t been obvious, or at least it hadn’t been obvious to her, until that moment. Everyone logged into the same system; it was easy to forget that some people did so differently.

“Good boy,” she said softly. “You’re going to be very useful, I think.

“Now cum for me…”

And he did, a long groan of pleasure escaping his mouth, and she withdrew her hand from his pants and licked herself clean, and then she said, “Wake up in five minutes. Believe that after our conversation you sat here and fantasised and came in your pants, just from thinking about how you want me and can’t have me. And if I send you a meeting request again, accept immediately and without thinking it.”

As she left, she smiled to herself. It wasn’t the deduction she’d wanted and she didn’t have the results she’d been hoping for yet, but she was, at least, now pointed in the right direction.