There was a reason she’d come to Celia’s room, but Kerry wasn’t sure what it was now. Her roommate’s door was open. The lights inside were dimmed. Celia was lying prone on her bed, staring up at the ceiling.

It was getting late. She’d heard Celia stirring and there was some thought that she had. Something she’d wanted to ask her about, seemingly. Before the girl disappeared for the night.

Celia’s legs were spread. She was wearing a glossy pair of thigh-high white boots. They were all she’d put on so far. The harder light from the hallway glared in patterns where it fell on them. She was fingering herself. It took a minute for Kerry to see it: very delicate, scarcely a movement, just the tips of her fingers tracing over her pussy lips. Her thighs shifted and the pattern of light on the boots warped and shifted with them.

Kerry took a couple of irresolute steps in; then because she was already in, a couple steps more. The glass cube thing that Celia kept on her desk was lit up. It was a weak light, unobtrusive even in the dimness. But it seemed to cast a kind of diffuse glitter into the air and onto the ceiling above Celia’s head. There was an almost imperceptible pulse within the cube, a slow cycling movement from one pale non-color to another. Kerry imagined passing her hand over and seeing if it would interrupt the glitter, but the idea felt wrong. She might disturb Celia.

“I thought this only showed photos,” she muttered. She was mostly just saying it to herself.

Celia sighed, dreamily. “It has this, like, relaxation mode.” Her hips moved when she said it. Her eyes stayed tangled in the glitter.

Kerry sat down at the desk chair. She felt vague and disconnected, like she was supposed to be thinking about something and couldn’t tell what. She wondered about the time. Should she remind Celia she hadn’t finished dressing yet? But then that risked sounding like disapproval, like really she was angling to get Celia to stop masturbating in front of her.

It had been so cute, when they both realized they both wanted to go naked around the house! She felt like she was playing in a sitcom. It was the sort of thing that made Kerry think maybe they were fated, the two of them. But it was only a few days in, and it was still a process getting comfortable with each other. The last thing Kerry wanted now was to make her younger roommate feel inhibited, or to come off to her like a prude.

She gazed up into the glitter, trying to see if it moved, if she could see whatever Celia saw in it. “Where’d it come from,” Kerry asked.

It was restful to look at. She couldn’t make anything else of it though.

“The Captain.” Celia made a little mewl and it turned into a giggle. She was getting squirmier. “He set it up when he was onboarding me.”

“He gave it to you for free?” Why didn’t I get one, Kerry thought. It stung her a little. She felt herself get pouty.

“Oh, he probably just wanted to get in my pants.” For some reason, maybe just that it was Celia saying it, this struck Kerry as extremely funny. Both girls broke out in snickers.

When that subsided, there was just the glitter, the wet sounds Celia’s fingers were making at her snatch, her whimpers of arousal. Kerry didn’t realize her own hand was between her legs until she realized she didn’t feel at all like removing it.

Celia came for a long time. She came staring up into the glitter like she was performing the orgasm, drawing it out for whoever was up there looking down at her. Letting them know it was them she was coming for. Kerry imagined being on the end of that gaze, Celia saying all for you baby with her eyes and her body, and then Kerry was over the edge too.

When the lights came back up Celia got up from the bed. Kerry, still in the chair, was slower to recover. The girl bent to place a soft, lingering kiss on her roommate’s lips then skittered off on her white boots toward the bathroom.

Kerry hugged her thin jacket around her and told herself there was time yet. It was only a couple extra blocks. The wind came up, urging her to briskness. The season turning. Along with everything else, she thought, she’d need to find herself a topcoat before long.

The tense clop of her heels on the sidewalk echoed like recrimination. Today was about getting your shit together, Kerry, she told herself. Goddammit.

The keycard was probably right on Celia’s desk. She felt like she’d seen it there just the other day. Or in a drawer maybe. Either way, the point was, she knew about it. Take it any time you want, Celia said, I never use it, I hate driving in the city. Which was a little godsend for Kerry. Only, it was card access only. Just be sure to take the card when you go.

Literally the first concrete step since she’d got here of getting back into the ranks of the employed. Interview just drops into her lap, on the one resume she’d sent out so far. And now at the last possible minute, after a bad night and waking up on the couch and she’d still got her ass down to the carshare lot on time, now she was going to be late. From a keycard. With no one to blame but herself.

Back in the apartment the first thing Kerry did, irrationally, was look in the hall closet for a coat. She was colder in the moment than she had been outside. She actually found one she could fit into more or less, if she took her jacket off. It was expensively lined and trimmed in what was probably real fur and only an eighteen-year-old girl who looked like Celia could have ever pulled it off. Kerry sighed and hung it back up.

The keycard was in fact in plain sight on Cee’s desk, right next to her Cube thing. That she didn’t even have to search for it was somehow the most deflating thing to Kerry of all. She picked the card up, turned it over a couple of times, dropped it uselessly into the bag she was still holding. Then she slumped back and onto the bed, utterly defeated.

They were going to have to talk about money. Kerry’s morale about that would be a lot better with an interview under her belt, but even so. An anxiety had been building in her lately that her roommate might secretly be rich. Or come from money, at least. The pricey shoes, the good clothes she was careless about, the carshare subscription she never bothered with. Kerry’d known a girl like that in college. Never considered finances because she’d never had to. She was like the freest person Kerry had ever met. They spent most of a summer hanging out together and by the end of it Kerry was in hock up to her eyeballs.

Or, she was rooming with a teenage hooker. That seemed like the other option.

Kerry had no idea what rent she was even supposed to pay, which was staggering. No idea how long her savings would last, or how to lift this funk of hers and finally get to work getting a job. She was normally a planner of things, a maker of lists: Kerry didn’t like to think of herself as earthbound, but being untethered like this? Who was she? Sometimes since coming here, since meeting Celia, it felt like she didn’t know anymore.

Something made her turn her head aside toward the desk. The Cube was glowing. She wondered why it had turned itself on. It seemed to pulse somehow, vaguely, and for a moment Kerry entertained the illusion it was rotating. She had to shake her head to clear it.

After that it was just a normal digital photo cube, showing photos. All of them Celia, most of them selfies, some of those on the daring side: wryly Kerry thought, kids these days. There was only about eight years between them but she still felt like the older generation here. When she turned her head back up Kerry saw the photos were also displaying on the ceiling above her. She didn’t know how it could do that. In fact she saw them better there than on the Cube itself, they were big and vibrant and detailed and not like any simple projection Kerry had ever seen.

Celia Celia Ceiling. It set up a little chant in her head. By now, she understood, the interview was definitely blown off. Irrevocably. Still she was feeling somewhat better. She was feeling like they’d work it out, her and Ceil. How could they not: they were meant for each other. The picture changed again, and for the first time since she’d opened her eyes that morning Kerry felt her tension let go, and felt herself breathe.

She heard an urgent-sounding knock and knew instantly it was Captain Internet. How, she couldn’t have said: there hadn’t been a text or anything to say he was coming. Kerry was off Celia’s bed and halfway down the hall before she realized she was still dressed from when she was out. She stripped as quickly as she could, grateful she wasn’t wearing a bra or panties that would have slowed her up, and chucked her clothes in the bathroom en route to the front door.

The Captain must have been in the wind a bit too; he was paler than before, with a blotchy red flush on his cheeks. Actually he looked kind of cute that way. She was weirdly keyed up about seeing him. He let her help him off with his jacket, and after hanging it in the closet—it got pride of place next to Celia’s topcoat—Kerry all but skipped, trailing him back to her room. She paused at the door, thinking maybe she ought to kneel there like last time, but he looked back and beckoned her in.

He was already at her desk, fiddling, and Kerry sat herself on the bed next to him, knees primly together, hands clasped atop. She was bouncing her toes up and down and jiggling in her seat. He had a box with him—no branding, just a white cardboard box—and when he opened the lid Kerry squealed and actually applauded.

“You got me a Cuuuube!” Her little-girl enthusiasm made her blush, but she couldn’t help it. “I was wondering about that.”

He glanced at her sharply from the corner of his eye. “Only, I knew you gave Celia one.” She shrugged, and put on a cute little moue. “I was worried maybe you didn’t like me as much as her.”

He set the Cube on a small clear kind of pedestal. It looked almost like it was floating. “Nothin’ to do with like,” he said. No wires or cables attached to the Cube. The Captain pulled out a tablet and started doing things on it. Kerry heard him mutter something about calibration and data tuning and she understood him to mean she was always getting a unit, it just hadn’t been ready in time for her onboarding.

There were so many things she wanted to know! “Can I put whatever I want on it? Can I have pictures of Celia on it?” She could barely keep herself still. “She’s got a ton of them. Oh, and does this one do the relaxation thing too? Is there an app? How do I—“

He snapped his fingers and cut her off. “Kneel,” he said. Immediately she pushed off with her hands to go to the floor but he waved her off. “On the bed,” he told her. “Just where you were’s fine.”

Kerry didn’t have to remember Submission pose; she knelt and found she was in it. Kneeling on the bed straight up like that made her feel absurdly tall. Already she could sense the giddy energy possessing her start to drain. Her thoughts calmed and fell into line. Sure he’d been rude to cut her off like that but he’d been right. He didn’t need her asking him a million questions! Just shut up like a good girl and let the man do his job.

“Bring your head down a bit,” he said. He reached up, and Kerry saw something in his hand, a kind of flattish clear stone, like a quartz, and he pressed it lightly onto her forehead, where it stayed. It must have had to do with the Cube. Kerry squelched the impulse to ask him what it was for. The stone made a warm spot between her eyes. She imagined what she looked like with it on and felt oddly complimented that he’d put it there. When he accidentally brushed her breast bringing his hand away again, accidentally lingering on her nipple for a few passing seconds, she couldn’t really rouse herself to even a private objection.

Kerry looked at her new Cube and it was glowing: brighter, clearer, purer than what she’d seen with Celia’s. She could sense a kind of sympathy, some flow of communication, between it and the Stone on her forehead. “Focus your eyes here,” the Captain said. He tapped the corner of the Cube facing her. “Keep them there. In a minute you’ll see that the Cube is rotating.” Kerry remembered the illusion she’d seen in Celia’s. “Concentrate on that. The Cube will be rotating. The Cube will stay perfectly still. Both things are true. Concentrate on seeing them both at once.”

This time it was no illusion. The Cube was rotating, rotating in actual space, about the point she was focused on, uncertainly at first, but then it gained in strength and speed. Colors flashed through it as it turned that she could never have named. The Cube was rotating and it was rotating in all directions at once, infinitely fast. The spinning lights swept past her and through her and her forehead glowed. Kerry mouthed it to herself, wonderingly, the Cube is rotating, the Cube is still.

Then it switched off. Kerry blinked, and for a moment everything was dark. Celia was on the floor, which—how long did that go on, Kerry wondered. It was like she’d had a time jump. The girl was still in those sexy white boots she’d worn out last night. Maybe she was just getting back. Other than that she was naked. With the boots on she couldn’t quite tuck her legs all the way under her, but her thighs were splayed, her hands were open, Kerry loved how pretty and proper a Submission her roommate was making.

She looked at Celia’s pussy and made a mental note that she should start going bare too.

The Captain took the Stone off Kerry’s head and stowed it in his bag. “So I’ve gone ahead and paired your two units together, so they’ll pull in both of your feeds. That’ll help boot you up faster,” he said to Kerry. “And there’s an app on your phone, but it’s mostly for tracking. Point is, this is an AI device: you don’t control it, you interact with it. Feed it photos, watch what it curates for you, that’s how it gets to know you, know what it wants you to see.” He put his tablet and phone in their places and zipped the bag up. ”Quickest way to train it’s to take a lot of selfies at first. Daily. Doesn’t matter what kind or how many, you’ll get a sense as you go along.”

Kerry imagined her and Celia having naked selfie parties together. She glanced back down at the girl and the movement made her head swim. She felt herself wavering, and would have put a hand to her forehead if it hadn’t meant breaking pose. The Captain must have noticed. “Lie down,” he told her. She did. He stood up and looked down at her, chuckling. “Yeah, I think for the next little while you’re just going to want to stay quiet there and stare at the ceiling.”

She did. The whorls and flashes and involutions of the Cube twisted like auroras in the space over her head. Kerry didn’t know if it was afterimage or some new show the Cube was putting on. It made no difference. The turning lights stilled her, and held the world still around them. She wouldn’t have thought of looking away.

The only drawback was, she couldn’t watch Ceil giving Captain Internet his tip.

She could hear though. He had kind of a big dick. Occasionally Celia gagged on it, and had to gasp her breath back; it sounded like he was making her take him deep. Once or twice he had to slap her because she wasn’t doing it right. They went on like that for a while. It was desperately hot. Kerry wished for the Cube to show her Celia’s cock-swollen face in the lights, and she touched herself to try and make the wish come true.