When it was all over and the dust had settled, Harry always wondered whether Professor Chase had known the direction Harry would take her theories. At the time, she’d seemed completely oblivious. But the conversations they’d had… Nobody could be that blind, could they, unless they were just pretending to be?

The Computer Science department at Butler University had been, when it was time for Harry to apply, the place to go if you wanted to make games, even possessing its own ‘indie’ publisher. How it had got this way from its founding in the 1940s with the intention to produce programmers who would help the government advance machine codebreaking, was a long and complicated story involving rich benefactors, poorly worded endowment conditions, famous alumni and no fewer than three ill-advised bets. This was all the more implausible given that Butler U was otherwise second- or even third-rate, depending on whether you wanted to be polite or not.

For the time being, suffice it to say simply that Butler U, in the late 2010s and on into the first half of the 2020s, had developed a comp sci curriculum that encouraged innovation in gaming, and a collection of student papers which would have constituted the most valuable reference library on game design and player buy-in, had anyone but the school’s own graduates known of its existence.

At the start of Harry’s postgrad career there, Professor Chase had scheduled a meeting with him in her office.

“Harry,” she began. “Have you given much thought to your three projects?”

“Well,” he said. “I thought I could clean up my last undergrad project for publication for my solo technical. That’s usually how people do it, right?”

She nodded fractionally, her fluffy bleached-blonde crew cut bouncing from the motion, and he couldn’t tell from her expression what she thought of that. His last undergrad project had been a shortish platformer which played around with backdrops to make movement seem faster and jumps more impressive. The gameplay wasn’t out of the ordinary but the experience had received plenty of positive reviews.

“I haven’t thought too much about the group project. I don’t know what my group will be.”

She was too experienced to actually sigh, but he could hear it in her eyes all the same. “Have you tried looking for a group?”

“We’re supposed to?”

“No,” she said. “But invariably almost everyone does. Never mind. I’ll put you and the others who haven’t reached out in touch and we can meet next week to discuss your plans.

“In the meantime, tell me about your passion project.”

Nobody who did postgrad at Butler would get to this stage without having ideas for their passion project. The technical assessment was to show you could build a serviceable, marketable game, working on your own or with minimal support. The group project let you hone a speciality and get a taste of doing game design as a team. They both had to be projects with broad commercial appeal. That was, after all, what the industry wanted most.

The passion project would, for some graduates, be the only time they got to build a game that was purely what they wanted to make. For others it would be the first chance to experiment with no constraints or restrictions. Not many of them were published, and those which were didn’t sell well, but the fanbases they developed were passionate in a way you just couldn’t buy.

“I want to do something with VR that’s actually worth doing,” he said. “Not just a puzzle game with some pointless travel or something that’s basically a disguised workout.” He was, it occurred to him belatedly, not being at all tactful. “Uh, not that there’s anything wrong with those.”

Her attention had definitely sharpened on him. “Do you have an idea what you’re doing, beyond that?”

“Choices,” he said promptly. “I haven’t properly begun building the structure yet, but for VR you have a controller in each hand. You can manipulate things in plenty of ways, but with two controllers you always have a binary choice; which one are you using? So I want to do something where your choices affect the environment around you.”

She was nodding slowly, her eyes off to the side taking in her bookshelf. Thinking his comments through. “Interesting,” she said. “So you want to take advantage of the unique feedback available in VR to amplify this.”

“Right.” If he’d dismissed that, he knew, the next question would have been, Then why use VR for the project? And saying I just think it’s underused wouldn’t have been accepted. Not for his passion project.

“I had a student who finished last year,” she said thoughtfully, “who designed their passion project as a way for games to train the player.”

“...Sure…”

“She built her game all around choices. No one choice would doom you, but each choice changed the game state enough to make the next one easier or harder. Not on the usual ‘moral good’ or ‘moral bad’ axis we see in games, but on a much more complex interrelationship of ideas,” Professor Chase explained thoughtfully. “It was intended for adolescents, actually. A tool for troubled teens, to help them take better actions.”

Harry was quiet for a while. That felt like too big a scope for one of three projects to deliver in just two years. He admired the confidence to take it on, though.

Professor Chase was obviously waiting for a response of some kind, so Harry said “That’s a huge amount to try to do with a game.”

“Do you think so?” She had a lopsided smile that only came out at certain times; it was in full force now. “She was trying to achieve this without the extra immersion of a VR experience. I’d actually recommended she use VR. You can guarantee what kind of audio you’re dealing with there.”

“I’m sorry, Professor, I’m not sure what you mean.”

She pulled a pad of yellow Post-its out of the shadow of her monitor and to her. Her other hand plucked a stylus from a penholder; after trying to click a point out as if it was a ballpoint, she realised her error and substituted an actual pen.

“Audio behaves differently out of speakers or headsets,” she said. “The quality of either is something we design as if we can’t control. But if you’re working in VR, any auditory cues you add are issued very close to the ear. This allows us to deliver subtle additional cues, almost subliminal…” She was still scribbling on the Post-It.

“I’m giving you a few previous projects I recommend you look at. The one I just told you about is one of them. But there’s also one that did brilliant things in using VR to evoke specific responses and almost push on an emotional level. You should definitely check that one, too, and a third which looked to have a promising solution to the issue of people wanting to remove the visor after not terribly long.”

She lifted the yellow note from the rest of the pad and offered it across to him. “Look at these, have a play, read their design notes. Then develop your ideas a little and let’s meet again. This time next week?”

His jaw had just finished dropping - clearly he wasn’t going to have time to review all of those in a week - when Professor Chase nodded again, as if he’d agreed. “Same time next week,” she said. “Right. Very good. And I’ll loop you in on the others without a team.”

“Thank you, Professor,” he managed, and he made his way out of her office in almost a state of shock. A little voice in the back of his head said, Is this what it’s going to be like when I have a job?

*

By their next meeting he’d played at least some of all three games she’d recommended and he’d read the notes their designers had supplied when turning in their projects. The notes had taken longer by far, much to his surprise; however, they’d each referenced theses or other research so extensively that he hadn’t been able to understand them until he went to read those as well.

It had taken a long time to get that far, and having done so, he was excited by the potential. He hadn’t thought of games as a way to ‘train’ behaviour before. It still seemed beyond him, but perhaps he could try to imprint one or two minor changes in a player? If those were specified in his notes, and if he produced the specified change, that had to be good for grades.

“The problem,” he said reflectively, “is that I’m not really sure what changes I’d want to make. When I was just thinking in terms of making someone confront an idea and actually think about it, that was quite - you know, it felt easier.”

“Hm.” Professor Chase tapped the tip of her stylus against her desk. “Obviously if we were going to publish this, there would be a substantial ethical consideration to go here.”

“Right.”

“As it stands, only a few people will play it, and we’ll have a clear understanding from your notes what changes you want to make. We can choose not to play if we object. So I would say, simply, pick a behaviour to imprint which will be a positive.”

He must have had something of a deer-in-the-headlights look when she said that because a moment later she laughed. “Alright. I know a universally acclaimed positive isn’t going to be that easy. But you interact with people every day on campus. What one behaviour would make your life better?”

He opened his mouth to answer. Caught himself just in time. “I’ll… have to think about that one,” he said instead.

The way Professor Chase smiled, he was sure she knew what he’d been going to say. “Do,” she said. “Why not make the world a little happier? A little more pleasant?”

He would keep coming back to her words, whenever he wondered about his project. Her words, and her smile. What more clear encouragement could she have offered, he asked himself?

*

Lorraine Chase was, on the whole, an optimist. In her experience, while a lot of college professors weren’t, those who were all shared the same characteristics; they worked at a college where their course was considered important, and the assessments they gave were heavily creative in nature.

As a combination, this meant that their students stood out by being inventive more than they did by being wrong, and that they were usually bright.

She had already forgotten the discussion she’d had with Harry before she got home that night, although she’d made some notes on the kind of game she was expecting before she did so. Her postgraduates didn’t take up much of her focus; their time was expected to be spent either putting their projects together or researching what they needed to do so. She saw them a few times a semester by her own organisation and had several dedicated office hours a week for anyone who wanted her help with a stumbling block they’d hit.

She next checked in with Harry just after Christmas, by which time he seemed much more cheerful about his project. “I’ve been tweaking an MVP the past week,” he said brightly. “There’s a lot that still needs doing, but I can make it do the basics.”

MVP was Minimum Viable Product. In the world of software, it was a way to describe the most basic form of your program, without all of the widgets, user interface refinements, and so on that might be part of the release or sold as add-ons or DLC later. In Lorraine’s opinion, most students set the standard for MVP somewhere incorrect, either deeming many sub-systems as essential that simply weren’t, or treating a program that booted up and took you to a menu as being a minimum viable product.

“So soon?” she asked. Harry nodded. “I just wanted to get the structure in place,” he said, “and a process that runs the full way. There aren’t any choices yet, it’s more walking simulator than that, but one of the directions is fully fleshed out.”

She couldn’t deny that she was excited. “May I?” she asked, and he nodded. “Let me pull it through to your machine,” he said, moving toward her keyboard. Lorraine picked up her controls and slipped the wristloops over her hands to keep them close, then lifted the headset and fastened it into place.

She heard the rattle of fingers on keyboard, the fast riff that confirmed someone spent a lot of time at the keyboard, and a few moments later the headset’s eyescreens glimmered into life, still black but now the active darkness of a screen deliberately showing black rather than the passivity of a device in hibernation.

“Is it obvious how to use it?” she asked. Tutorials were never part of MVP.

“I think we’re about to find out,” Harry said.

Lorraine remembered suddenly that the game was intended, in part, to induce behavioural changes. He probably hadn’t got that far, but she’d said at the time they could skip the lengthy ethics review process if the intended changes were made clear to the user before they went in.

She opened her mouth to ask, but the screen was lighting up properly as she did so, and a chord played in her ears, and she was distracted.

The world she saw around her was a blocky one, no graphical delicacy to it, but she had expected that. Green floor suggested fields; the sky was blue. She turned her head slowly, panning a full circle to take in her surroundings. The ground seemed featureless, the sky unbroken except for a white disc in the sky that had to be either the sun or the moon.

Harry had evidently spent time in a library of sounds. The soundscape was much more developed, with birdsong prominent. Careful timing of different snatches of birdsong shaped it into a melody. Lorraine looked around again, trying to get her bearings, and when she turned toward the disc again she saw, below it, a yellow-brown dome resting on the ground. She couldn’t see past the halfway point of the dome, so as far away as it might be to appear small, it was at least as tall as she was, or would be once she got there.

“This isn’t at all what I expected, Harry,” she said, smiling slightly under her visor. She adjusted her grip on her twin controls and began moving toward the dome, which was obviously the next part of this ‘direction’ as Harry had put it.

What was going to be next? The dome was a different colour to the grassland around it, so her guess was that it was a construct of some sort.

The disc in the sky seemed to grow closer faster than the dome. Lorraine paused, tilted her head back, and studied it now she was closer. It wasn’t just a flat white disc. She’d picked up that much at least. There was something else in it, some detail in a very light yellow, perhaps a cream, that she hadn’t initially been able to see it all. She couldn’t make it out even now, though she tried. If it was present in MVP, that suggested a deep intentionality to it, or he would have just used a plain white disc.

The birdsong-melody was still playing, loud enough to be ever present but not quite loud enough to be annoying. There was something else to it, too…

A thought struck her. Tilting her head forward, she studied the green ‘grass’, which when viewed more closely proved to also not be an unbroken paste of green. The grass grew in shapes which left shadows almost like letters on other grass. She wondered whether these were letters placed intentionally, or whether for MVP he’d just taken text from somewhere and pasted it in to whatever code produced grass grown so that words would appear in the shadows.

Probably that, she thought. There were definitely words in there; she’d made out ‘undress’ and ‘smile’ with some degree of confidence.

She was smiling already, she noted. And she wouldn’t be undressing. She doubted the controllers even had an option for it, and she couldn’t see her own avatar in the world. Another casualty of MVP, no doubt.

Besides, they were probably just pulled from some dictionary he’d dropped in, just so that he could test text generation.

She tilted her head back and looked up at the disc again. It was, she thought, even closer than it had been. The finer detail on it was no more certain than it had been at her last glance.

The birdsong was prettier when she was looking at the disc. That was interesting.

“Slut,” she said under her breath. She toggled the controls to take her closer to the dome, then wondered if she’d said it out loud, and then wondered whether the word had really been slut. That didn’t sound like her, after all.

Nearer the dome the disc almost seemed to hang directly over her; she had to tilt her neck to study it. The birdsong was still beautiful, but she thought there might be whispers, human whispers, buried in it too. “Suck,” she whispered.

She wondered where that had come from.

Lorraine pushed herself further along toward the dome, which resolved itself into a thatched yurt or similar, still very low-res, basic textures. To see the disc from where she now was she had to arch her back as well as tilting her head backward; she stretched out her arms to either side as if to compensate. “Fuck,” she murmured.

She was saying these things, she was now prepared to accept and acknowledge that, but she didn’t know why. Looking up at the disc of the moon, the compulsion to say them seemed to be even stronger. “Slut,” she said again. She was smiling. Saying the word made her smile wider.

“Suck,” she added, and her smile was wider still. Her scalp tingled. Why was she saying these things? Her lips lingered, fleetingly, in the shape of an O, her tongue tracing their outline before she returned to the smile. The image crossed her mind of a woman, blonde like her, with a close-cropped hairstyle like her own, her mouth open in that same O around a cock. Her own mouth returned to the wide-open gape of invitation at the thought.

Lorraine was wondering why she hadn’t just imagined herself in that position when she realised that it must have been an image she’d seen, glimpsed so fleetingly she hadn’t consciously registered. A subliminal suggestion. Perhaps in the disc? “Fuck,” she said, now at a conversational volume, her tone full of dreamy wonder.

There was a student listening to her, she reminded herself. This was highly inappropriate. And then she imagined that same blonde quasi-doppelganger, lying on her back on a bed, her hips and buttocks resting on the side of the bed, her long legs extended up in the air, completely naked, being fucked by someone.

It took several seconds before she realised that this had been no more her own imagination than the first such image. There were subliminals in the game, and they were sinking deeply inside her.

“Slut,” she said again. “Suck. Fuck.” Her lips curved into a dreamy, sensual smile. “Breed,” she purred softly.

There was so much hidden in the disc, she thought, and yet it was all becoming clear to her.

She was vaguely aware of someone putting their hands on her hips, as if cupping them from behind. It had to be Harry, she thought, there had been nobody else in the office.

But her office seemed far away, distant, uncanny. The plain on which she stood was reality, beneath the disc of the moon. Weren’t there cultures that considered the moon an icon of feminine fertility? Lorraine wasn’t sure.

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.” The pace at which she recited the words was picking up, carrying her along with it. “Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.” Harry’s hands had crept up her sides from her hips, finding their way under the loose polo shirt that was her usual departmental fashion. His fingers were stroking her breasts through the padding of her soft cotton bra.

This was wrong. For all that she was smiling, this was wrong. She knew it. It was time to put a stop to this. She let go of her controls, reaching back with her hands toward the headset.

Her fingers were actually touching the plastic and rubber of the headset before she hesitated. “Uhm,” she managed. She had to take the headset off. “Slut.” Stop the subliminals affecting her. She knew it. She reached for the buckle, then hesitated again.

Why was she hesitating?

Harry’s hands had frozen in place. She could imagine he was watching her prepare to exit the game early with bated breath, knowing what would be coming. Knowing he’d brought it on himself.

All she had to do was take the headset off and she could deal with him appropriately. “Suck,” she said firmly.

Her fingers lifted away from the buckle, away from the headset. Things seemed more comfortable like that. With her not touching the headset.

That didn’t make any sense, she told herself fiercely, and reached for the buckle again. She felt herself tense in discomfort as she did, and hesitated again.

“Fuck.” Lorraine tilted her head back and looked at the disc again, torn between the desire to let her arms fall and feel more comfortable again and the need to remove the headset before the subliminals influenced her any further.

She whimpered.

Harry squeezed her breasts (her tits, a voice at the back of her head corrected herself immediately). Maybe he thought it would help him. Maybe he just figured that if he was going to be in this much trouble anyway, there was nothing to lose.

“Breed,” she said uncertainly. Her thighs ground against each other and Lorraine realised just how much arousal she was feeling. She hadn’t noticed that before. How long had she -

No.

Biting her lip against any further utterances, she reached up to the headset again, intending to unbuckle and discard it just as soon as she could. She got as far as unfastening the buckle before hesitating again.

If she removed the headset, would she be bred?

The thought had come out of nowhere, but it seemed suddenly to be impossibly important. Harry was right there, groping her. He would let her suck him like a slut, she was sure. He would fuck her til she was bred.

Had she wanted to be bred before this moment?

She couldn’t remember. Why couldn’t she remember?

Why was she trying to remember? It wouldn’t matter. Not in the least. Not when she knew now.

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed,” she moaned rather than said. Her fingers fastened the buckle back in place against the risk of her session being interrupted. “Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.” She was smiling again, a slack-jawed, dazed, wide open smile. Harry began to grope her tits again, and she pushed her hips back, pressing her rear against him.

Her buttocks, she realised, were right on his crotch, and so she began to grind against it, swaying her hips lazily from side to side, a rolling motion she could keep up, if required, for hours.

She fumbled her controllers back into her hands. He was hard, she thought fleetingly, but he was also getting harder, and that lit a flame of satisfaction in her mind. “Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed,” she intoned. She lowered her head to look forwards again, and was rewarded, perhaps, by Harry’s head coming forward to kiss and bite and nuzzle at her neck.

The hut was directly in front of her.

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.”

The game, she thought woozily, was MVP. It had to have some purpose.

She moved forward with the controllers, finding a door. She opened it and moved through.

The birdsong disappeared as she did so, though the words underneath did not. She could hear them now clearly as Harry’s whispered voice. “Slut,” he told her. “Suck. Fuck. Breed.”

And then the voices died away, and all was silent.

The dark interior of the hut was replaced by a video. No matter how she turned her head, it was in front of her.

Harry was on the video. He was sat on a chair, legs apart, fly open, cock erect and out. He looked directly out at her through the video, his expression closed and unreadable. One hand was stroking his cock, slow and gentle, nothing likely to push him over the edge, a pace he could keep up for some time.

In the VR world, in the silence, the only things entering her senses were this video and his hands and lips against her in the real world. She half-laughed, excited and aroused.

His voice began to sound in her ears again. There was no birdsong to conceal it. If you had reached this point, he evidently thought there would be no need to conceal it. “Serve,” he told her. “Worship. Obey.”

Her vision swam momentarily. She felt overcome emotionally, struck by the significance of the moment. The feeling was bittersweet; Lorraine wasn’t sure if any of this was good or bad even as her tongue flicked out, licking suddenly dry lips before she echoed him. “Serve. Worship. Obey,” she said. And then, a few moments later, again. “Serve. Worship. Obey.”

His hand was on her belt buckle, made clumsy by reaching around her for access; but she felt him work at the strap and open it in due time. “Serve. Worship. Obey.” Her voice had synchronised now with the recording of Harry’s voice. “Serve. Worship. Obey.”

Between each repetition of these three new words her head echoed silently with the four originals. Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed. “Serve. Worship. Obey.”

Four concerning lust and instinctual desires. Three covering more cerebral concepts. Acts of will. Rational purpose given to her over a more natural foundation.

Lorraine had a brief glimpse of something else, of a logical next step in the chain, but he had pulled her pants down to her knees, her panties following with them through a too-hasty grip.

The effect was to moan as it happened, during her next recitation of ‘Worship’. For a few moments she stood there, exposed from the waist down, chanting the words she heard like a mantra, completely heedless of how she must look to him or of what he might be thinking or planning.

Then he was pulling her backward onto him, impaling her in the most delicious of ways, giving her something she had only discovered she needed through the intervention of the headset.

In her view in front of her he was still slowly stroking his cock, so she had an incredibly clear idea of just what was filling her pussy. She moaned again, much louder. This was, apparently, what she had been missing. This was a satisfaction, a use, a worshipful fucking pleasure, that she had never achieved before, not with her high school boyfriend, not with the string of gamer boys at college, not with her ex-husband.

They had made love to her. Harry was fucking her. Harry was breeding her. She served by being a warm, welcoming slit for him to breed. She should be proud of such service, and she was. His cock thrust into her and she worshipped it; he bred her and she obeyed. Everything was right with the world. She couldn’t explain how she had never before realised that this hadn’t been the case.

She was humping back against him, moaning and giggling and crying out, and she could feel him getting more and more excited the more she did. She was so happy, and then he was coming inside her and she realised that what she had thought was the pinnacle of happiness was only the start.

He was still inside her when he turned off the headset and his recorded voice and video vanished from her awareness. Instantly the sensation of cockwarming for him was the only thing Lorraine was paying attention to. She sagged back against him, euphoric.

He unbuckled the headset and lifted it off. “You enjoyed that,” he said. “I can tell.”

“Yessss...” she sighed delightedly.

“It could be better, couldn’t it?” She was about to answer no, but realised just in time that he was talking about the game. If game was the right word. She didn’t think it was. It was a training simulation, but service and breeding were too important for it to be just a game.

“Yes,” she admitted meekly.

“You’re going to help me with that.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Good. By my next test, I want it working far better. I think you nearly broke loose at one point.”

She wanted to deny it, so shameful was the idea of breaking away from her training. But it was true, and she would do him no service by pretending otherwise. “Yes,” she said.

“Well, we’ll see about that. You don’t want to disobey, do you?”

The idea felt chilling. “No!”

“Good. You’ll be driving me back to yours tonight, and we’ll get started.”

Her heart was so happy. “Yes, Harry.”