Episode 1 - The Beam

hence needed to be taught a lesson.
    “Where are you going?” he slurred around the bra in his mouth.
    “What fucking business is it of yours?” She gave him the smallest of sexy smiles, to make sure he understood that this was all still just part of the play.
    “Come back here,” he said.
    Kai turned, fast, and grabbed her client by the chin. “You’re bad,” she said. “You ask too many questions.”
    “I’m bad,” he mumbled between his compressed cheeks. Further down, his biology indicated that the way she was treating him wasn’t a problem.
    “I’m going to have to punish you.”
    “Oh no,” he said, falling back onto the bed.
    Kai reached into the endtable and removed a pair of handcuffs. Before closing the drawer, she also palmed a small vial with a tiny sponge on its top.
    “I’ll have to restrain you,” she said, securing the first handcuff to the headboard.
    “Mercy,” said the man, now smiling openly.
    Kai straddled him to reach the second cuff and he responded beneath her. As she raised his arm to secure the second cuff, she discreetly swabbed her neck with the sponge on the vial. Then, as she lowered her face toward his, she tucked the vial under the mattress.
    The man inhaled, drawing her scent. As he did, his eyelids fluttered.
    “Hey Ralph,” said Kai.
    “Hey,” he said. “I’ve been bad.”
    “ Very bad. Kiss my neck.”
    She pushed her neck against his mouth, moaning. It would take at least a half hour for the engineered pheromone to soften his brainwaves, but it didn’t matter. She was a girl of her word, and the man had paid for a service. So she removed the rest of their clothing and delivered.
    Afterward, with “Ralph” satisfied and flagging, Kai resumed kissing his neck, giving him more of the pheromone. After a while his movements grew sluggish. His eyelids started to flutter again as he drifted into something between sleep and wakefulness.
    “Hey Ralph,” she said.
    “Mmm,” he said.
    “Relaxed?”
    “Mmm,” he repeated.
    Kai reached behind him, untied the bra gag, and tossed it aside. She ran a red-painted nail down his chest, idly. “What’s your name, beautiful?”
    “Ralph.”
    Kai laughed girlishly. “No, silly. What is it really?”
    Ralph started to snore lightly. She shook him.
    “What’s your name, baby?”
    “Ralph,” he slurred.
    Then he fell asleep. But it was okay. His brainwaves should have loosened even if his tongue hadn’t, and he’d be imperturbably asleep for hours now. She could get what she wanted directly from the source.
    “Let’s get you online, ‘Ralph,’ ” she said, picking up her diagnostic tablet and setting it beside him on the bed. Something inside her was sizzling. It shouldn’t bother her so much that she couldn’t get “Ralph’s” identity, but the only people she’d run into before with a level of identity encryption she hadn’t been able to hack like a cheap lock were a few unlucky subjects during her dalliances as an amateur assassin. Usually, when someone was locked up this tight, someone else, somewhere, wanted him dead. What were this man’s secrets? And if she didn’t discover them, might those same secrets come back to haunt her, as a girl who’d once given him a good time?
    Kai unfolded her sleeping client’s hand, laid it on the tablet screen, and scanned it. No identity came up. No surprise there, but it wasn’t what she was after. Usually, a person could access their personal array of upgrade diagnostics via their Beam ID, voice recognition, retinal scan, or fingerprint/palmprint, and usually those first-degree cross-pollinations were vulnerable to one such as Kai. “Ralph’s” Beam ID might have been hidden, sure… but unless whoever had done his encryption was especially thorough, his handprint and Beam ID should still both be connected — not to his identity, but to each other — in the lesser-protected protocols within his upgrades.
    Kai swiped the surface of the wall behind the bed. A screen appeared. She watched the tablet scan his hand, then began poking around in the diagnostic tools. He’d had a few upgrades (there were several types of nanos in his system and he seemed to have an extra memory buffer, for instance) but she couldn’t access stats on any of them. Kai tried to use his palmprint to identify him to the system, but found she’d need a password.
    And… FUCK . There was a firewall between her canvas, the tablet, and the lowest identification protocols.