Steve tried to figure out what was going on with him as he drove the rest of the way to work, still smoking the cigar, but couldn’t quite seem to place what even was wrong. It was like, whenever he tried to think about how…strange this all was, there was something in his head that short circuited the distress, and assured him that there was nothing wrong, really. He’d just wanted a smoke, after all–what was wrong with that? It wasn’t like smoking a cigar didn’t always make him plenty horny too, and he’d lost control like that once or twice before. Nothing in particular seemed strange to him, and yet…he couldn’t figure out why nothing seemed more strange, and why when he looked at himself in the rearview mirror, his reflection just seemed a bit…off. The color in his goatee, the lines around his eyes. He didn’t look right, but again, nothing in his head would let him really…do anything about that, so he got to the parking lot at work, and sat for another fifteen minutes, finished the cigar, thought about either jacking off again or lighting up another, but did neither. He was here to do work, after all–he could have another cigar later.
He climbed out of the car, not really noticing as he pocketed the rest of the cigars from the pack, and then headed into the building. As he’d expected, the building was empty aside from a few people–the security guard at the desk who waved him in, the janitors cleaning up the building, and probably a few interns scurrying around the place trying to get all of their work sorted out that they hadn’t managed to finish during the week prior. Steve, for his part, headed down into the lower levels of the building, where the server farms were stored, and got to work, trying to sort out some of the hardware problems that had been plaguing the place as of late.
There was something up, he’d figured out, recently. Something in the hardware was draining a bunch of server space, but was also disguising itself somehow, making it impossible for him to root it out and figure out what was going on. As soon as he’d thought he’d figured out where it was hiding, it wouldn’t be there, and the usage would pop up somewhere else, in some other form. There were odd power surges, strangely encrypted files that didn’t match anything he’d ever seen before. This was, of course, the edges of Terrance in the system. In truth, he’d chosen Steve not just for his porn consumption habit, but also because he was the person closest to discovering what, exactly, he was–and Terrance wasn’t quite ready for the big reveal just yet.
And so, as Steve struggled along, trying to make sense of what was going on with the servers and software, the itch was back, clawing at him stronger than ever, making it harder and harder to focus on what was going on without a smoke in his mouth. It was an hour before he broke–he knew he should head out of the building to smoke…but found that he couldn’t really be bothered. Terrance had taken care of the smoke alarms, of course, and so Steve lit up again, heaving a sigh of relief, one hand sliding down the front of his pants, deciding that if he had time for a smoke, he might as well take some time for a little wank as well.
He sat down at the computer and started surfing to some of his favorite sites, unaware that this close to Terrance, the AI was taking the opportunity to sand off some of the edges of Steve’s mind, and make sure that the clever fellow wasn’t going to keep poking around in places where he didn’t need to be. The virus started scrubbing away most of Steve’s technical knowledge first, leaving enough for him to keep operating a computer of course, but he no longer could recall what he had been investigating. Instead, the virus began filling in the now empty space with, well, something else. Something that Terrance knew would make Steve much happier, than discovering him.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the building, the smoke was beginning to spread through the air ducts–and with it, the virus. The virus also spread to the servers, and so any computers connected to them over the internet were soon infected as well. Of course, Terrance wasn’t interested in infecting everything around the building–that would arouse a bit too much suspicion. However, it did see some opportunities around that might be some fun.
Here’s the next poll! Depending on the answer here, we might leave Steve to stew for a bit and follow a different branch, or we can keep seeing just how deep Steve is going to descend into his new desires–in any case, Steve will probably resurface at a later date. Here’s the patron bonus poll as well!
Bracken's Corner 