Steel World Inc. Chapter Seven

 

Arabella wasn’t taking or returning my calls. I sat at my cubicle desk the next morning and gazed at the list of seven missed phone calls I’d made so far.

 

“Typical behaviour from a girlfriend who’s pissed off with you,” remarked an off-hand James as he sat perched on the edge of my desk, nursing a cup of strong black coffee. It was basically multiple espressos poured into a normal coffee cup, for he looked a little worse for wear from the night before. If he could wear dark glasses in the office to hide the state of his eyes, he probably would have done so. 

 

“What am I going to do? She’s got this all wrong.” I had told James of the bizarre encounter with Karl Magnus in the VIP area, and of the two high class escorts who were playing some Master Slave game with him. I told him how Arabella had caught me looking at the girls, though I stressed I really hadn’t been guilty of much, and how annoyed she had been in the taxi back to her block of flats.

 

“Yeah, well, you have to be careful when you stare at other girls, mate. Don’t you know that?”

Steel World Inc. Chapter Six

 

I felt a stab of pain as I touched my nose, and my hand came away smeared in blood.

 

“Join us for a moment, Miss Whitlock,” said Karl Magnus as he leaned forward from where he sat. “I feel obliged to offer you some hospitality.” His accent was unusual – obviously foreign, but not a nationality I was familiar with. 

 

“I was just leaving,” she said as she felt the bouncer release her elbow and step back so as not to crowd her.

 

“You surely have time for a drink though?” Karl Magnus tried to smile, but it wasn’t really a smile, more like an absence of direct menace. 

 

“Well, I was…”

 

“I really must insist.” His eyes were steady and bore into her as she nodded. When she didn’t move, Magnus indicated a vacant space on the sofa where one of his two associates was sitting. As I picked myself up from the floor, Arabella smoothed down the back of her skirt and sat down, facing Magnus, keeping as much vacant space between herself and the man on the sofa as possible. As Magnus gazed at her, she made sure the fabric of her skirt covered her knees and that her knees were pressed tightly together.

Steel World Inc. Chapter Five

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NV6Rdv1a3I

 

 

We’ve come too far

To give up who we are

So let’s raise the bar

And our cups to the stars

 

She’s up all night ‘til the sun

I’m up all night to get some

She’s up all night for good fun

I’m up all night to get lucky

 

Kissy was throwing herself around on the dance floor with wild abandon, waving her arms in the air and shaking her hips. She wore a classic ‘little black dress’ and sheer 10 denier tights that made her legs look natural but flawless. She had kicked off her high heel pumps and was dancing and laughing with James with the grace and ease of a nightclub veteran. 

 

James of course had his hands all over her body whenever the chance offered itself. As far as I could tell, Kissy didn’t mind in the slightest. Girls never did when James was doing the touching. 

Steel World Inc. Chapter Four

 

“Do you ever wonder what it might have been like to actually live in the ancient past?” 

 

I gazed at the lovely Miss Whitlock as she asked that question. We had met at One o’ Clock on Saturday afternoon to look around the British Museum, situated on Great Russell Street, with the intention of having coffee together afterwards. The primary exhibition this month was entitled ‘Byzantium Endures’ and featured treasures form the various periods of the Byzantine Empire.

 

Miss Whitlock wore a comfortable sweater in light grey wool, and a long ankle length skirt of mid blue cotton, that swished about her ankles as she walked. Her small blue handbag was draped over her right shoulder, and she held it in place by the strap as she walked between the exhibits in my company.

 

“I suppose it would be a bit like Game of Thrones?” I said, as I continued to gaze at her rather more than I did the exhibits.

 

“Oh, you watch that, too?” She turned round with a smile. She wore flat pumps today, and so was a good three to four inches shorter than she had been on Friday lunchtime. In contrast I towered above her. Again, it made me feel improperly protective towards her. It was such an outdated way to feel in the presence of a woman. I had to remind myself that Miss Whitlock was a person, and she most certainly did not need a man to look after her.

Steel World Inc. Chapter Three

 

James hadn’t been kidding when he said it would be a long working week. Each day began at eight in the morning and rarely finished before eight at night. I was thrown right in at the deep end, assigned to writing translatable code for some foreign programmes that seemed to be navigational systems for an airship, though it was hard to tell exactly what I was working on as the code only came through to us in packets. 

 

“Is this a military contract?” I asked James on my third day. “It’s just, this isn’t what I expected.”

 

“How so?” He sat on the edge of my desk drinking coffee from the coffee franchise on the ground floor. The coffee was top quality and free, like most things here. 

 

“I’m obviously working on an interface for existing code, and someone else has designed the bridge that connects to the existing code, but it all seems to be a weird way of working. Normally I’d get to run test to see if my interface works with the existing code.”

 

“Someone else will be running those tests,” said James. “There are teams in the US. Probably them.”

Steel World Inc. Chapter Two

 

Miss Madison’s personal office was situated on the fifth floor and was the size of an open plan apartment, with a glass window wall view of the Thames. A large curved desk topped with frosted glass dominated the room, on which three iMac screens were fixed in place. Close by was a rectangular sunken floor with two L-shaped sofas and a low table of irregular shaped timber sealed in a dark amber veneer. 

 

I watched as Miss Madison wiggle-walked to her desk, smoothed down the back of her pencil skirt, and sat herself delicately down in the large executive swivel chair, with her back to the Thames facing window wall. The careful way she moved to be seated suggested I had guessed correctly about the body support corset under garments that gave her such a sexy hour glass figure.   

 

“Sit,” she said, indicating the two chairs facing her. 

 

She smiled as she recognised the look on my face. “You’re impressed. Good. Take a look around and understand this is your possible future, Simon Rogers. Whatever you want, if you want it enough.”

Steel World Inc. Chapter One

 

Surprise! A serialised short story that you didn’t expect, which will run alongside Secrets of Gor. Basically, I’m well ahead of the hard working Chloe in the writing vs art stakes (because art always takes much longer to complete than writing – just ask any comic book artist) so I have a bit of time to offer something else between the Secrets of Gor chapters (which, as you know, will be quite a long serial). 

 

Steel World Inc is much shorter – basically a serialised short story/novella, and something of an ‘origin story’ for Simon Rogers. We all know (from Panther Girl of Gor) that Simon was brought to Gor by the Kurii to service the computer systems on their submerged drop ship, but until now the details of how he ended up on Gor have been left vague and undisclosed. So, let’s head back to London in 2015, a good year or so before Emma is abducted by the slaver Udumi Ayeola, where a young ‘feminist’ Simon Rogers, with an iPhone 6 Plus full of Brit Pop Indie tunes, and a sincere love of Game of Thrones, has just graduated from university with a First in computer science, and the world seems, apparently, to be his oyster as he begins his first day at work with Steel World Inc. 

 

I mean, Steel World Inc? That’s obviously the Kurii, right? I mean, obviously…

 

*rolls eyes*

 

Sooo obvious…

Secrets of Gor Chapter Thirteen

 

Not surprisingly, my entire body felt sore and stiff next morning. It was impossible to tell what hour it was as the basement was perpetually dark and gloomy without the aid of an artificial light source such as a lantern. What little light did filter through from the surface came from small slits close to the ceiling that must have been set to the street level above our heads. I felt tired too, as I’d had little sleep on the rough mattress. The single blanket had done little to keep me warm, though Cath’s body pressed close to mine had helped. 

 

We had spoken quietly in the darkness to begin with.

 

“Talking often helps a girl when she is new to bondage,” she had whispered as I shivered under the blanket.

 

“I have nothing to say.” She was a slave. We had nothing in common. It was ridiculous that she should even be speaking to me. 

Secrets of Gor Chapter Twelve

 

“It tastes bad, mama. I don’t like it,” cried Mary as she stirred the lumpen stew on her plate.

 

“The suls are hard in the middle,” added Aefic. “I don’t think they’re cooked properly. Yuk!”

 

The Lady Donna sat with her children at the dining table, and none of them were at all impressed with my first attempt at cooking.  

 

I had told Raisa that I didn’t know how to cook, but the slave bitch had ordered me into the kitchen anyway. The tears and snot had barely dried on my face from my painful switch whipping before I was ordered to begin work, and my first chore was to prepare and cook dinner for my so-called Mistress. I had gazed at the kitchen, with its unfathomable array of pots and pans and cooking utensils, a cold iron stove, and a larder full of raw vegetables, grains and meat still on the bone, and I despaired. 

 

“I have never cooked a meal in my life,” I cried. “I don’t know where to begin, Mistress.”

Secrets of Gor Chapter Eleven

 

“What did she cost, Mistress?” asked Raisa as she inspected me in view of the courtyard of Donna’s house. The children, Mary and Aefic, were in a state of constant excitement as they hovered around the doorway, gently held back by Donna’s second slave, Cath, for the arrival of a new slave was always an exciting time for them.

 

“Seven copper tarsks,” said Donna. As she watched Raisa at work, she wrote some notes at a small desk. Raisa had stripped me and was inspecting my brand site. As far as I could tell, Raisa had no idea who I really was. She wasn’t that good an actress that she could pretend otherwise. It had taken almost an ahn to walk back to the small town house that Donna shared with Victor. Normally I would have been carried the distance in a palanquin, but Donna couldn’t afford such luxury. While the distance wasn’t a problem, the rough ground was. I was soon reminded how soft the soles of my feet were as I walked over stones to reach the quarter that Donna called home. 

 

“New slave!” cried Mary as she tried to rush forward. “We have a new slave!”