Lingerie was expensive.

It wasn’t as if Lorraine Chase hadn’t known that already, of course. But when you bought one or two items a couple of times a year as and when a dating app brought in results you didn’t regret, expensive meant something different in comparison to when you’d bought a wardrobe’s worth under orders you couldn’t disobey from your horndog postgrad student.

She couldn’t exactly dress down when on campus, but Harry had insisted that she wear sexy underwear in case he dropped by her office or summoned her to somewhere else. In private it was always possible to unbutton her shirt or shed her top, then wriggle out of slacks which she now wore tight enough that their name felt like sarcasm.

She closed the tab full of black and red lacework and sighed, bringing herself back to practicalities with a bump.

Harry was in control, and of course that was good. She was programmed - just as much as the computer in front of her - to serve and obey him, to suck him and fuck him and be bred by him, to worship him, to be his slut.

That programming was all perfectly compatible. It wasn’t as if she’d been programmed to be chaste and bred, or obedient but dislike him, or any other trivial example where the programmed parts of her mind would have been forced to operate in opposition to one another.

All the same…

She was working on optimising the efficacy of the subliminal components to his brainwashing software. The active ingredients that had implanted the seven building blocks of control into her mind, in other words. They had sunk deeply for Lorraine; did that mean they worked well, or did it mean Lorraine was easy prey?

There wasn’t enough data to confirm, so it was one of the things he’d set her to fix about his software.

He had instructed, she obeyed, and she served by that obedience. So all was as it should be. She knew that. It was a logical progression. Another logical progression started differently, instead beginning: She was fully programmed. Harry wanted the software to program her improved. Therefore Harry wanted to use the software on others.

She knew that, not just because of the logical proof, but also because Harry had started telling her exactly who he was after, a list that was slowly but steadily growing.

She worshipped Harry, just as she was programmed to, but the parts of her brain that were not just programming were not all happy about the number of others he wanted to fuck in turn. She was his slut. How many more sluts did he really need?

Come to that, if he added more sluts to his collection, how often would she be invited to suck or fuck? How frequently would she be bred?

There was a lot of complicated, conflicting emotion behind her sigh.

She went back to refining the code, doing her best to ignore her few personal complaints. They all went out of the window whenever Harry laid hands or lips upon her, or when he ordered her to lay hands on him and she hastened to obey.

Everyone else on his list was a fellow student, she thought. Perhaps he was collecting sluts in different categories. That would explain a lot.

Some of this code was shoddy, for all that it was effective. Lorraine tutted under her breath, but reminded herself that he’d built his MVP as quickly as possible. It shouldn’t be surprising that there were improvements to make; it was just frustrating that some parts had to be untangled and improved to give her room to improve the effectiveness or the software itself.

She was in the middle of turning around three hundred lines of spaghetti code, a portion she’d picked simply as a place where efficiencies could easily be found, into eight or nine, reducing and refining it bit by bit so she could be sure she was losing nothing, when the door to her office opened.

She spent a moment trying to remember whether or not she’d locked the door against a colleague entering, as ordered, before her short-term memory offered her up the sound of a hey in the lock.

That meant it was almost certainly Harry. She felt her lips reshape themselves into a warm, worshipful smile. It was, after all, what he required and what he deserved.

She did not look up from the code. She didn’t want to lose track of the changes she was making.

Harry came around the desk toward her, then stood behind her. He put one hand on her cheek, cupping it, and slipped the other one inside her blouse, finding her lingerie-clad tit. Thumb and forefinger circled and pinched her nipple.

Lorraine moaned, but her fingers still flew over the keyboard as she made her amends and corrections. Her eyes didn’t leave the code. The human reflex to give in and embrace the pleasure, to lose yourself in a moment of distraction, even if not more, was suppressed by her programming.

Harry’s hands moved to her shoulders for a moment, then down to her sides, under her arms. This was a signal, she had learned; not a part of her programming directly but she was coming to know what he wanted from his least energetic indicators. She stood, bending at the waist as she did so that her work was not interrupted, shuffling her feet back a short distance from the desk, spreading them wider as she did so.

Harry unbuckled her belt from behind, released the slacks’ clasp, began to wriggle them down. Lorraine moaned again, partly from his touch - she had been used by him so often now that skin to skin contact with him triggered her slutty subroutines - but mostly from anticipation. Her thighs were quivering with excitement, and when he cupped his palm over her silk panties and squeezed, rolling the ball of his thumb across her pussy lips, she was not simply wet but molten.

He hooked a finger into the wet silk and drew it to one side, and then, with his hands gripping her by the hips, he pulled her back onto his waiting cock.

Lorraine cooed in ecstasy. Her vision swam, but her fingers continued to type, and when her sight cleared she could see she had made no errors.

Her brain was a peripheral in his system now, focused on obedience. The rest of her, her body as she perceived the divide, was a slut in his harem. Her body could be busy fucking him, being bred by him, being a slut for him, and could luxuriate in the way it made her feel, in the sheer rightness of what was happening.

Her doubts, her hypothetical jealousies, vanished. As his program had taught her, she didn’t have room for independent opinion and his cock, not at the same time.

So she was now braced against her desk by her wrists, her knees, ankles, and elbows flexing so that firmly planted hands and feet could still hump back against her programmer with the eager neediness she felt, could squeeze inside to milk his cock with each thrust.

A part of her, the professional which still lived somewhere inside the mess of programmed changes and steadily-developing conditioned lust and need, wondered if programming like this could be the next step for humanity. A world where everyone lived out their pleasures while their mind, staying afloat on the tide of bliss simply because it was programmed to, took on their actual jobs.

Or was that the hallucination of a machine generating justifications for its own actions because no real ones existed?

It didn’t matter. Harry mattered. The hope he would breed her mattered. Self-replicating code.

She felt him spend inside her and came silently, her programming muting all the noise her instinct wished to make. Harry pulled out and she sagged forward at the knees and shoulders, her own juices and his cum trickling from her pussy, but her fingers never left the keyboard and her eyes only briefly left the monitor.

*

Harry’s list of desirables included a wide assortment of Butler students, not all of whom she knew. But there were a few, of course, who were on the same course as Harry, this presumably being how he’d encountered them long enough to begin to lust after them.

Lorraine’s own private doubts about whether or not there’d be enough breeding to go round with more women available to him notwithstanding, she might otherwise have approved of his choices. They were good-looking women, and certainly that was his main interest, but of those she knew, she judged that almost all of them were smarter than him.

Of course, she was too; but then, her computer possessed a programmable ‘brain’ capable of performing feats she couldn’t. That didn’t mean it outranked her, any more than she and these others being smarter than Harry meant he shouldn’t have them. And there was something admirable about a man striving for more.

She had said none of this to him, of course, it not being her place to offer her opinion (nor did she consider her opinion sufficiently worshipful - she was hoping that he or she would hit upon a way to change that), and had already decided that if he asked her opinion, she would lie unless directly instructed to tell the truth, it being essential that she obey.

The necessity of obedience and her worship of Harry were both to be tested that afternoon, she felt. She wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened when he offered Mae Collins the headset, telling her he’d been working on a game and would value her feedback, but her opinion had evidently been explosive.

As Harry’s worshipful breeding slut, Lorraine had learned, the ability to read between the lines was highly valued. She gathered that the encounter had convinced Harry that any other attempt he made wasn’t going to succeed.

He had therefore ordered her to take responsibility for exposing Ms Collins to the software instead. “I want her sucking my cock inside the week,” he had added.

She had sat for some time in thought over that line. It was not a command, in that it wasn’t structured like one. She could plausibly, after the fact, say that she had considered it an optional extra; if she said so in a break from sucking his cock herself, she was all but sure she could secure forgiveness.

There was a thing she did with the tips of her fingernails, running them lightly over the skin of his balls, that provoked a full-body shiver and a hissing intake of breath whenever she did it… well, suffice it so say she knew already it was a persuasive tool when used on him.

It was tempting to delay, just for that reason. To serve only through obedience to the letter of his instruction, not the intention contained in the context he provided.

But it would have been petty. It would have been wrong. It would have been utter egotism, putting her own anxieties ahead of the one she worshipped, the one who used her as his breeding slut.

It hadn’t been necessary to schedule an additional meeting with Mae, or to create a pretext for a seemingly chance encounter. She and Mae already had an hour scheduled together in the midweek, over Mae’s projects.

And so, in the leadup to that hour, Professor Chase had Harry’s program, as refined by her, loaded up on one of the machines in her office, with the controllers and headset to hand. Harry having visited her office earlier that day, she also had the window wide open so that Mae wouldn’t notice the scent of his cum in the air.

She fidgeted behind her desk, glancing again at a section of Harry’s code which implanted the subliminal messaging, wondering if the changes she wanted to make to it would result in more effective code or in more efficient code lacking the effect that made his subliminals so impactful.

It was something she’d wondered a lot that week, and she still hadn’t decided whether or not to edit the code. For the time being it remained as he’d written it.

“Professor,” Mae said, smiling quickly as she opened the door and peered around it. “I’m not late, am I?”

She was, in fact, five minutes early, and Lorraine was sure she knew it; on the other hand, very few people in Butler’s comp sci department didn’t have one harmless little behavioural quirk or another, so she didn’t point that out. “Not at all,” she said, smiling warmly in turn. “I was just waiting for you.” She gestured forward. “Please, take a seat.”

Which Mae did. Lorraine assessed her silently, quickly, from a physical perspective. Brunette, where Lorraine was blonde. Hair long, where Lorraine’s was short. Wiry and athletic, where over time Lorraine had filled out somewhat and become softer. They were a contrast. This felt better, somehow, than if Harry had picked a younger version of herself.

“How’s the work going?” Lorraine asked. Mae pursed her lips as if slightly displeased.

“It’s… well, it’s coming along,” she said. “But I’m struggling to get some parts to sync up.”

“Tell me more about that,” Lorraine answered. Again she felt aware of the level of her which was programming operating separately from her own thoughts, the professional educator a separate process. The underlying programming would hijack or completely cut that process once it had an opportunity to obey its orders, of course; until then, she had again this strange multipart sense of herself.

Mae did not articulate her frustration well, but after a few minutes of questions, each of which she probed for a plausible opportunity to bring up the headset, she began to see the specifics of the issue; the basics she had already guessed. It was rarely easy to persuade two distinct systems to play nicely together where they overlapped, not unless this had been planned for from the start and was part of the design.

Lorraine’s programming noted the comparison to her own situation, where a pre-existing self had been provided with a constraining new framework and several new drives. These didn’t always line up. The reason the parts of her which were not programming were conflicted suddenly became clear, and a part of her mental programming began to devote its attention to the question of fixing the issue, now she understood it.

The aspect of her which was still a good Professor nodded along. “I think I see the problem,” she said aloud. “How deeply into the project are you?” After a moment she added, “And by that I mean, have we reached a point where a hack would be a better idea than starting by redesigning your structure so the two processes run smoothly together?”

Mae hesitated. Lorraine liked to see them hesitate; it usually meant that they were paying attention, not just saying what they assumed she wanted them to.

Before she could actually answer, Lorraine’s programming kicked in. “I think you might need to give your subconscious time to pick that over,” she said. “So let me distract you, so that it can.”

Mae’s expression was puzzled, but Lorraine pressed on. “Let me load up for you a game where I had a similar realisation, but far enough in that I had to hack the two systems together. I’m not going to tell you which two systems; I want you to see whether you can work it out.

“That way you may see more clearly the real stakes for getting this question right.”

Mae looked at her oddly, but she took the headset all the same when it was offered. “This is your game?” she asked.

Obedience meant she had to give Harry the truth, if he told her to. It certainly didn’t mean she couldn’t trick anyone he wanted to make into a worshipful breeder slut. “That’s right,” she said. “It’s not finished yet, but it’s past MVP. My problem was I realised what I was missing quite late on. Hence its relevance.”

Mae settled the headset into place and held out her hand for the controllers. “I still say VR’s not going to get big for another generation,” she said. “Didn’t they try it in arcades in the 90s?”

Professor Chase decided not to bother answering her. It was a rabbit hole, and not one they needed to explore. Instead, she sat and waited, watching the young woman, occasionally glancing at a monitor feed that showed what she was seeing.

The landscape Mae found herself in was very different to the almost empty plane that Lorraine had encountered. Quite simply, if she hadn’t been reviewing a student’s work, Lorraine wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to get snared; nobody else would have any reason to do so. So she’d added a number of different locations all visible from the same starting position, and positioned the disc so that anyone who didn’t travel to one of them would encounter its effects earlier.

Mae, however, set off almost immediately for the hill, and was there moments later. This woman played games aggressively, Lorraine noted; she was probably very proud of her achievements count. That or simply the number of games beaten.

From the hill on the horizon a viewer found themselves effectively with the same locations laid out in front of them, in the same apparent locations. While working on her redesign, Lorraine had been thinking a lot about her programming, how it had felt.

There had been a long period where, in hindsight, she felt like she could have broken free if she’d only pushed harder to take the headset off. After a while, though, it had become an inevitability, her actions simply echoes of her own future. The hill was designed to reinforce this feeling of inevitability; any time Mae went there, she would be faced with the same choices as before.

Because there was no choice that could solve their state.

Mae went on to the hedge maze. Lorraine couldn’t help but smile; she had used Harry’s initial breakthrough in subliminal messages through leaf shape and shadow for the whole maze. It wasn’t her favourite part of the redesign, but she was happy to see it put to the test.

“This is interesting,” Mae said aloud, and then, “Sorry, Professor. I was just getting my bearings. I don’t know if you’d rather hear my thoughts as I go or not?”

Lorraine’s lips twitched with amusement. “I’m curious,” she said.

*

“Slut,” Mae mumbled under her breath. Blushing slightly, hoping the Professor hadn’t heard her, she continued rather more loudly “So far I’m not seeing any additional systems like the ones you mentioned, but there’s a lot to explore here. I’m going into the maze…”

She licked her lips, which were unaccountably dry, and tried not to think about other things those lips could be doing. Usually sex was the furthest thing from her mind unless she actually had a partner close at hand, and even then she had to get worked up before she focused on it.

She didn’t even know where the word had come from. It was a very strange thing to suddenly say. Thinking about Professor Chase, she did seem to have been glowing a little more lately; it was possible that was sexually driven. Mae had assumed not, had guessed on an article approved for publication or a book offer, some very professional pleasure being the thing that lit her up from within. And yet here she suddenly was calling the woman a slut, and in her own earshot too.

“I’m going to use the traditional solve,” she said, now she was in there. “Always turn left.” It was actually: keep your hand on the left-hand wall of the maze, as you might still end up turning right but one way or another it would take you to an exit. If there was something special in the centre of the maze, of course, she might miss it. But she probably wouldn’t. Mae’s experience was that VR games were simpler than their non-VR counterparts. The solution probably had one path lead you all the way through.

“Suck,” she murmured, a little louder than her first utterance. She flushed, startled that a second intrusive thought had escaped to be spoken aloud. She didn’t know where it had come from any more than she had the first one. It had only escaped her lips because she was distracted, she told herself.

She heard the wind whistle and moan through the maze. That was astonishingly lifelike, she thought, although the moan had been almost human, someone moved beyond silence by skilled hands or tongues. She was definitely blushing.

“Is this maze a fixed place?” she asked after a while. “No, don’t tell me. I shouldn’t be asking for tips that another player couldn’t get.” Tips, she thought, and the image in her mind’s eye was not of a hint; it was the ultimate limit of an erect cock. What had even got into her? She shuddered with disquiet, and then hesitated.

She was back at the same crossing again, the one with the decorative fountain at the centre. But that meant she’d walked in a loop after she left it, and had come back in from the same direction as before.

“This isn’t fuck,” she said. Tried not to think about the fact the last word had come out as a whimper. “Fixed,” she blurted, when not thinking about whimpering led to thinking about the fact she hadn’t intended to use that word. “Sorry, Professor.”

“Don’t be, Mae.” There was amusement in the older woman’s voice. “You’re developing nicely.”

That… was a very strange way of putting it. Disquieted, Mae tried one of the other exits, on the basis that games were solvable. “Breed,” she breathed when she saw the fountain again. She wasn’t thinking about the word she’d said, because she was instead staring at the statue. Trying to work out if she hadn’t noticed, or if it had changed.

The statue was of a woman, curvy, nude, and smiling, her head thrown back, the fountain emerging from her mouth and rising up to splash down all over her. Her belly was swollen, but she carried herself upright and proud. One hand, by her side, carried a shield; the other, extended out at the shoulder, held a sword vertical.

Mae stared at it for a long moment. Surely if it had been like that when she encountered it the first or second time she would have registered it?

“I’m getting lost,” she said softly.

Professor Chase did not improve her mood by simply answering that with “Good.”

She realised suddenly she had still returned to the statue by the same entrance. What if she left by it?

“Slut,” she said, partway through the path, as she took one corner. She wasn’t thinking about what she was saying, was just speaking words aloud to mark her turns. “Suck,” she added at the next turn. “Fuck. Breed.”

There was a dim awareness somewhere in her consciousness that these were none of them words she should be using in earshot of a professor, but for the most part Professor Chase was forgotten. Everything but the puzzle of the maze was forgotten.

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed. Slut -”

She was face to face with the statue again. The body was still the same, earthily sexualised in the way that older art venerated the pregnant form. But what had been a shield on her arm was the folds of some carved fabric, draped over her forearm, with a tray above that. There was something on the tray, but it was not a part of the statue.

Her head had turned to face the other hand, which now gripped not the hilt of a sword but the shaft of a stone cock. Her mouth was open in a way that could have been a foolish, lovedrunk smile, but which could also have been simply parted ready to receive the gift she cradled in her hand.

Mae stared at the statue, her head swimming. “Slut,” she said again. “Suck. Fuck. Breed.” There were, she was sure, things she should say or feel now, but none of them were happening, and she did not see thoughts or feelings as things she could affect. They affected her.

The main thing affecting her was how incredibly horny she felt. Mae preferred women to men, refused to let a cock touch her lips even when a man had enough of her interest to be taken to bed.

It made no sense that she wanted to climb that statue, open her mouth, and slide it down the stone cock so she could suck like a slut, but she did. (Fleetingly, without consciously realising, she had assessed it as a thing she could ride, could fuck herself with, and had dismissed it. Stone cocks bred nobody.)

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed,” she said. Quite apart from how they had felt when she had started speaking them aloud earlier, they weren’t a source of wonder or disquiet anymore. They were soothing, a comforting refrain. Saying them made her feel better.

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed.” She gripped her controllers tighter, moved forward, began manipulating them in the complex ways necessary for her VR avatar to start climbing the fountain.

Part of her could almost feel the spray of the fountain on her body, the coarse stone under her hands. Most of her knew that for the illusion it was. Still, she climbed toward the stone cock.

“Slut,” she said. “Suck. Fuck. Broooumph.”

For as she had nearly reached it, something had seemed to fill her mouth. She tasted rubber but she recognised by lips and tongue the shape of a cock, and did not protest at its presence, instead sucking eagerly, her head bobbing up and down on the shaft. Inside the virtual world, she saw the results of that movement..

Dimly, the small still-thinking part of her mind wondered what had happened, how her mouth had been filled, and could conclude only that Professor Chase had had a dildo close to hand for just this use.

That should have raised questions, but those involved thought. Mae wasn’t thinking. She was sucking. There wasn’t enough room in her head for thoughts and cock at the same time, and she knew which was more important to a good slut like her or the Professor.

Some of the tension in her head eased at that. Of course she’d called Professor Chase a slut earlier. Obviously being a slut was a positive quality. She was just respecting a role model.

In the lower left of her vision, Mae’s headset showed her a side view of herself from the shoulders up, simplified down to a wireframe, and the statue-dildo in her mouth. Using the data from the headset as her head bobbed, it was measuring how deeply she was taking the dildo. The visualisation was flashing.

Again no thought was needed. As someone who’d been playing games her whole life, Mae knew exactly what a HUD element like that meant; it meant she wasn’t going hard enough. Her jaw strained to open fractionally wider and on the next downthrust she plunged herself further down the shaft, growling needily as she did.

This was deep enough, or fast enough, or whatever metric the headset had been looking for. A musical chime sounded in her ears and the view she had around the statue’s cock had changed.

On the next upthrust she blinked, trying to take it all in.

She was no longer outdoors, no longer surrounded by the vivid green of the hedge maze. Instead she was surrounded by the rich, deep browns of polished wood, the soft greys of stone, the muted, tinted lights of stained glass.

Mae found herself in the heart of a chapel, something ancient and abandoned but still holy, suffused with an atmosphere of importance.

The dildo slid out of her mouth, guided by a hand she could not see, and she couldn’t move with it because Professor Chase’s other hand was in her hair, holding her back. By the time she could move freely again it was unseen and out of reach; lifting her head (and just when had she slid from chair to her knees?) she looked about herself.

The stained glass windows were moving, digitised and filtered video she instinctively diagnosed. On one side Professor Chase, dressed in a short white shiftlike garment that might or might not be a white teddy, gazed up from her knees, smiling, before opening her mouth to a perfect, welcoming O.

“Serve,” Mae whimpered.

In the other window was Harry, sat on a chair, legs apart, fly open, cock erect and out, looking down on her, 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.

“Worship,” she breathed, and was dimly aware of another woman’s voice joining her.

She watched Harry stroke his cock and it was all she could think about. He could tell her to do anything with the promise of his cock at the end and she would. “Obey.” Again the echo.

Her tongue danced out over suddenly dry lips and she tried the three words together for size. “Serve. Worship. Obey.”

She’d had a very different opinion of Harry just a few minutes ago.

Hadn’t she?

Had she?

“Serve. Worship. Obey.”

She could hear a door close out in the real world, which meant a door must have opened while she had the headset on. “Serve. Worship. Obey.”

It wasn’t her place to have an opinion on Harry, of course. He was too far above her for that to make sense. That was probably the confusion.

“Slut. Suck. Fuck. Breed. Serve. Worship. Obey.” She’d been very rude to him a few days ago, she thought. Had she simply been overawed by his presence?

There was no good explanation. She would simply have to make it up to him when she next saw him. She was, after all, his worshipful breeder slut, good for sucking and being fucked,

“Slut. Suck. Mmmmph…”

The headset still showed the window of Harry masturbating, but there was someone right in front of her; she knew this because their balls were on her lips, their cock in her throat.

It could only be Harry, she decided. And with that, she gave into the slutty need to suck.