HyperCorp

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Board of Directors of Hypercorp met today following recent events of note featuring former Hypercorp CEO, Jason Castor.

While the Board acknowledges that until the trial is concluded it cannot be confirmed that Jason Castor is also the man known to the public as Vulcan, they recognise that it is unlikely courts will permit bail in the case of someone thought to be Vulcan.

The Board wishes to stress that they and all at Hypercorp were unaware of Castor’s apparent double life, if indeed such a thing exists, but that no further comment will be offered on the subject except that they have elected to end Castor’s time with the company by triggering the unacceptable public behaviour clauses in his contract.

A search will be carried out for a new CEO but in the interim, the former VP for Human Resources, Tracy Hathor, will take on the role on a temporary basis.

Hathor has only lately arrived at Hypercorp and was not part of what the press have often termed “Castor’s Inner Circle” but has C-Suite level experience in her past, making her well suited to this role.

The Board wish Tracy the very best in her new position.

*

“You could just quit,” her brother said mildly, and Tracy nearly threw her phone at the wall.

“If I do that, my career is definitely dead.”

“Didn’t you just say it was dead if you do this?”

Which brought her up short. The distinction was clear to her, but really there was no reason that it would stand out to him.

“I mean, it almost certainly is,” she says. “Being appointed to this job right after that news? The Board asked who they didn’t mind losing if it doesn’t go right, and between them, clearly they came up with my name.”

The news in question being the revelation that the company’s founder and CEO had been a supervillain the whole time, a case blown wide open by his frequent rival Paladin, alongside two visitors from out of town - Ms Miracle and Mercy.

Details were a little sketchy, but while Paladin alone had never been able to shut down Vulcan’s suit effectively enough that the villain couldn’t escape, it sounded a lot like Ms Miracle had managed to pin him down. Rumours that Mercy had remotely hacked Vulcan’s suit were flying wild - it was commonly claimed, after all, that the heroine was only being gendered because of her physique, but was in fact an android.

It didn’t really matter. When Paladin had unmasked Vulcan, four separate bystanders had been streaming the fight from behind cover, and Jason Castor was on magazine covers and TV profiles far too often not to be recognised instantly.

Hard not for the HyperCorp brand to be affected. Every big public works project they’d ever pitched on was suddenly suspect, especially the ones around San Francisco themselves. Two upcoming projects had been terminated, after the company had invested a lot of money in planning and preparation, and it was anyone’s guess if they’d be able to recover what their contract entitled them to if the project was cancelled. There’d definitely be a court battle before they saw any of it.

The odds were stacked against a new CEO. HyperCorp had a lean time ahead, and that wasn’t something shareholders enjoyed - not that Castor hadn’t always held more than half of the shares.

All the same, if Tracy stepped down, that was it; she’d never pick up another gig at that level again. Whereas if she took the challenge and she ran with it…

…well, there was a chance. Not a great chance, but she’d be at least partly in control of her destiny.

She had to stop calling her brother when all she wanted was a sympathetic ear. He hadn’t learned yet to stop trying to sold her problems; she was perfectly happy to solve them for herself, and when it came to work problems she was much better equipped to solve them than he was.

“Are you fighting them on this?” he asked, and he sounded nervous. Worried on her behalf. Which he’d certainly say was his prerogative as an older brother.

Tracy didn’t exactly disagree with him on that, either. There were times when she liked it, and there’d been a time, the best part of twenty years ago, where she’d been glad that he was there to at least try and solve her love life issues - she wasn’t sure if he was better at sorting out a love life or if he just didn’t need as much to be happy, but certainly he’d done better than her consistently on that field.

She sighed. “Not openly. Look, at the end of the day, HyperCorp is viable as a company. It might be more viable than ever, assuming Castor was siphoning money out of it, and I’d bet good money he was. The Board would love me to succeed; they just know the odds are good that the first person in after Castor will have to take the hit.”

“For what crimes?”

“The crime of not being profitable enough for the shareholders. If I can keep the boat steady, at least, then I’ll make it a year or two, and if I do that there’ll be new opportunities for me even if I get canned. If I can do better, well, my career plan jumps about ten years.”

“So you’re saying there’s a chance?” he asked, and she could hear the smile in his voice. The old childhood joke would make both of them smile any time.

“Oh I’ve definitely got a chance,” she said.

“That’s all I needed to know.”

“Thanks. Tomorrow’s the first proper day of this nightmare, so I’m spending it looking at his office, digging into its secrets if I can find them, and trying to get a sense of where we really stand.” She took a deep breath. “It won’t be easy. But it’ll definitely be interesting, too.”

“I’d better let you get your brain sleep, then.” Another old childhood joke; she knew he was still concerned, but he was much more at ease than he had been at the start of the call. “Good luck, sis.”

“Thanks. Have a good night.”

She rang off and tried to take his advice. A fully-charged brain would definitely be an advantage here, but to get to sleep, she first needed her mind to stop racing.

She did eventually get to sleep, but when her alarm went off, she felt like she’d barely rested.

*

Castor’s office, which was only accessible via private stairs or elevators, took up the entire penthouse floor of the tower HyperCorp had acquired. “We should have seen this coming,” Tracy muttered as she looked over it.

“Pardon, ma’am?” Her PA, Sofia, was standing nearby and fidgeting nervously with her tablet.

Tracy laughed. “Nothing. Just… with real estate costing what it does in San Francisco, you’ve got to be some kind of megalomaniac to take up an entire floor for yourself.”

Sofia hesitated nervously before nodding with a small smile. “Right.”

“Anyway,” Tracy said. “You put the call in to IT?”

Sofia nodded. “We should have someone here any minute.”

“Good.” She made her way over to the desk, oversized and polished and heavy, and sat down in what had been Castor’s chair. The man had invested in a very comfortable chair, and she was grateful for that. “The sooner we can see what’s in his computers the happier I’ll be.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll have hidden his secrets better than that,” Sofia replied.

*

He hadn’t. Or, at any rate, not all of them. If someone in IT had ever been asked to log into his official account with admin privileges, they’d have found a number of documents that, when Tracy examined them, turned out to be useful evidence at his trial - plans, for the most part, that she could recognise from things Vulcan had done in the past.

She’d passed these on to the legal team with the instructions to supply everything they could to law enforcement, so long as it wouldn’t cause damage to the company, twitching slightly at the need to do that.

Then she’d started going through other files, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Any flags.

After about an hour, she sent Sofia out for coffee. This was clearly going to be a long haul day, before she even got to the work that needed doing.

Reminding herself not to overdo it, that too much time staring at a screen could mean missing key things that were on the screen, she rose at length and walked to the windows, looking out over the bay.

It was a beautiful view, and she made a note to make sure she enjoyed it while it was hers to enjoy. However long she had with that.

Her hands clasped themselves behind her back; it felt oddly natural to stand like that, with a few like this, even though she knew the reason it was ‘natural’ was simply seeing it in so many movies.

She walked along the edge of the room, attention on the view outside, thoughts not on the problem immediately in front of her but on the potential rewards if she could succeed in the challenge. It would be nice, she thought, to get out of San Francisco again; a beautiful city but there was no escape from techbros here. Not a situation she enjoyed.

Click.

She froze, a half-dozen panicked thoughts going through her head. The click had definitely sounded when she put her foot down, like she’d hit a switch somewhere.

She really, really hoped Castor hadn’t booby-trapped his office. Maybe whatever he’d done would only arm once someone had gotten into his account with admin privileges. Maybe he’d rather that snoops got in so he could deal with them. Maybe there was a bomb under her foot, or poison gas was about to fill the room, or-

Tracy went from unaware of the motion in her peripheral vision to focused on it very quickly, as it passed a certain threshold of movement. She turned at the waist, somehow not willing to move her feet, and watched as a section of the floor in the empty centre of the room lifted up on some kind of automatic system.

And the thickness of the floor section made it very clear that whatever lay below was reinforced.

Open-mouthed, she stole over toward it, seeing -

There must be a whole other floor, she thought, hidden by the way the private stairs and the private elevator were set up. The darkened room below was some kind of engineering lab, to judge by the shadowy shapes; and perhaps - oh God - an armoury too.

Then lights began to flicker on in the room, dim amber lights that were, just about, enough illumination as each one blinked on, spreading out from the stairs down that rested right at this hidden hatchway.

She’d been right about the machining tools, she thought. And the armoury, she realised, once the light reached it; weapons and suit modifications, enough pieces that a Vulcan suit could probably be reconstructed from them.

And in the centre of the back wall, a glass cylinder, five feet in diameter, stretching from floor to ceiling, and there was a woman floating in it.

Tracy’s eyes went wide when she saw that. Looking at the wall by the stairs she saw a red button that was pretty clearly the way to shut the hatch. She bolted down, slapped the button, and scrambled back out - and she had to scramble; it barely gave her enough time to climb the stairs before it might have closed on her.

She was standing in the centre of the room doing her best to catch her breath when Sofia came back into Castor’s office with the coffee. “Is something wrong, ma’am?”

Some instinct told Tracy not to say anything about this yet. She’d wondered, for a moment, why she’d panicked when she saw the captive. Only now that she’d had a moment to recover did she realise why; if someone else saw her, too, this situation would be out of Tracy’s control. They’d be forced down a path for dealing with it.

They might still be, but Tracy wanted to know more first. She forced a wan smile. “Everything about this is wrong,” she said. “You know that as well as I do.”

“I guess.” Sofia sounded far from convinced.

*

How soon, Tracy had asked herself, could she tell Sofia to head home for the evening without incurring suspicion?

Like most big businesses, HyperCorp had long fostered a corporate culture that encouraged workers to be there before - and long after - their official scheduled hours. Salaries meant the extra time wasn’t paid, after all, except possibly as bonuses. And so what if people burned out? There’d always be others looking for work.

For the first time, Tracy was beginning to understand that there could be a downside to this; you couldn’t explore a supervillain’s lair alone when your PA worked on the assumption they’d be there as long as you were.

She settled for eight p.m., flat out telling Sofia to head home for the evening as there were some calls she had to make. It wasn’t an excuse that would work night in and night out; she’d have to come up with something new in the long term. But night one was the priority right now.

Even then, she gave it another hour before she went looking again for the hidden footplate that opened the lab again. If she was going to take care on this, she really had to take care.

It took a few minutes to actually find the hidden pressure plate. When she did, she paused for a little while, looking around the room carefully, fixing in her head exactly the angles she saw the room from. She wanted it to be easier next time.

By the time she was certain the hatch had fully opened and the lights had clearly activated, so she ventured forth into the room.

It was still quite dimly lit, but once she shut off the lights from the main suite she acclimatised fast.

The first thing she did was approach the cylinder. Closer up she could see that the woman trapped inside wasn’t so much floating as suspended in something that might be a liquid or some kind of gel - the way her long blonde hair had splayed out from her head underlined it, though with her head slumped forward, her bangs hid part of her face.

The woman had the near-impossible physique common among metahumans; there was so much research focused on why the superpowered often had such astonishing curves on such slim frame, and so little of it agreed with the rest. She wore a black, high-waisted swimsuit with a logo on the left breast; the logo wasn’t entirely visible in the murky depths, though if Tracy fetched a flashlight, maybe that would change. As it was she wouldn’t even be prepared to bet on its colour.

She had wristbands, too, metallic bracers covering perhaps three inches of skin, and a pair of knee-high boots in the same black as the swimsuit, with something on the outer calves that might be the same logo; it was hard to tell.

There was something familiar about her, Tracy thought, but there was nothing in the outfit she felt confident she recognised, and the face was obscured.

Worriedly, Tracy fell back from the cylinder to investigate any control systems or panels she might be able to find.

The problem turned out not to be finding them; it was that there were so many of them, and while switches had been labelled and calibrations had been set against dials, that labelling had been done by sticking tape in the appropriate place and writing on it in Sharpie.

Castor’s handwriting wasn’t great, and it took her a long while to start getting a grasp on what all of this did. There were quite a few sections where, once she felt she had some idea what they did, she wanted nothing to do with them.

On the other hand, she eventually found a switch that turned on a number of other lights.

It was strange, how different the lair became when it was properly lit. Shadows became gleaming expanses of stainless steel. The armoury went from a forbidding set or shapes to an even more worrying selection of weaponry, each item (or almost each item) designed to be held in a power-suited hand or otherwise attached to the dark green power suit segments hung up on the wall beside them.

Most startling was that there were three other cylinders of the same kind the woman was trapped in, though these were - thankfully - empty.

It was later still when she found the control for the cylinder and, when she found it, she’d initially thought it was something else.

Set into a wall over one of the most high-tech looking machine benches was a screen, and while the remote control Tracy found had been nowhere near it, it seemed obvious to her that this was what the remote control was for.

She pointed it at the screen and hit the power button. When nothing happened, she tapped 1, hoping to get something on the screen.

There was a long hiss from one side of the room, but it started out so quietly that she only noticed it when it had been happening for some time.

She turned to look in time to see a huge bubble of air rising up from the base of the cylinder with the captive superwoman; a few more, smaller bubbles became a steady stream in its wake, and in moments Tracy realised she was seeing the gel draining away.

The woman stayed in place even as the gel went from around her, some kind of harness keeping her in the air, and when the gel was almost entirely gone - less than two minutes after she picked up the remote control - the cylinder rose smoothly up into the ceiling, and when that was done, the harness evidently released and the woman fell forward, landing on her knees, head bowed, just in front of the cylinder, traces of the gel giving her hair a wet look and marring whatever hairstyle she’d usually have, and lending a wet sheen to her skin.

“Are you OK?” Tracy asked. The woman stayed perfectly still and silent for long enough that Tracy started counting in her head, then she coughed, twice, abruptly.

And then she leaned forward on her knees, put her gel-sticky hands on the lair floor, and began to move toward her on all fours.

Tracy couldn’t help herself; she backed up until she backed into something and couldn’t get further away. There was a possibly untold level of physical strength moving toward her, and its owner had been kept in captivity for who knew how long. Now that she was moving, it was suddenly very clear how big a mistake this might have been.

The superwoman reached her, and Tracy closed her eyes, bracing for the worst, only to hear a soft groan.

She opened one eye cautiously and looked down to see the blonde kissing and licking her shoes, moaning and whimpering as she did so with what sounded like real arousal and delight.

So much power, dedicated to such a pointless act of worship…

Tracy felt herself responding to that in a way she didn’t understand and wasn’t sure she liked. She bit her lip against any appreciative noises of her own, even when the superwoman’s soft lips brushed against her stockinged ankle for a moment and sent shivers up and down her spine.

Looking down, she noticed something and frowned, stooping even as the woman transitioned to start cleaning the other shoe.

It would normally be hidden, she reflected, by that luscious mane of hair that was currently weighed down and parted around her head by the gel, and by her costume, but a slick, flexible green metal cylinder started about level with the top of her shoulderblades and descended three inches or so, in line with the woman’s spine, and disappearing into her body at each end.

The green was the exact same colour as the Vulcan suits. No question that he’d implanted someone in this woman.

Tracy didn’t know what to say or how to address this, and her voice was silent until after the woman felt she’d finished licking her shoes clean, at which point she moved to kneel with thighs spread, head still bowed, hands resting palm-down on her thighs in a stance of abject submission.

When Tracy finally did find her voice, it was to breathe “What the fuck.”

The other woman finally lifted her head, and her expression became one of deep confusion as the glassy emptiness in her eyes faded slightly. “You said you might have to change how you looked, Master, but I didn’t expect this.”

Tracy was quiet for a long moment, then shook her head. “You have to promise me you won’t attack me if I’m not your Master.”

“I promise, Master,” came the answer. “But you are. You hold my control.”

She looked at the remote. “This?”

“Yes, Master.” There was a pause, and the glazed eyes of the other woman became clear. “You’re not Vulcan.”

“…No.”

The woman sighed. “I am compelled to tell you I must still obey, Master, so long as you possess my control.”

Tracy was stumbling for words. “How about we discuss this somewhere else?” she asked.

“Anything you wish, Master.”

“I really don’t like being called Master.”

“Would Mistress be acceptable, Master?”

That had been pretty far from the point Tracy had intended to make, but she felt that same surprising excitement as when this woman had begun to worship her feet. “I… I guess…”

“Thank you, Mistress.”