Terms and Conditions

Chapter 1

Leo Caprisky, boy-king of the Internet and CEO of Mybrid, reclines at his work desk before an elaborate setup of fifteen monitors or more. There’s not a star in the smoggy night sky of Blackwater City, but even if there was, it’s not as though he’s taking the time to look for any through the floor-to-ceiling window of the home office of his east-side penthouse, which is only one of his many residences across the country. Instead, he swigs from a flask and watches the screens, chuckling like a maniac. He’s been on that butane again, and Rose Somme?

Rose knows better than to try and seduce him back to bed.

They belong to each other as much as two people can who decidedly don’t belong to people. Just as she’s free to carouse in the city’s bars, enjoying her pick of the boys, when she’s not utilizing the endless weapons he supplies her for her villainous career as the tech-enabled super-crook Rose Gold, he gets to succumb to the whims of his literally mechanical mind.

But that doesn’t mean she won’t come to bother him.

Sauntering up to where he sits in his office chair (a truly bizarre contraption of steel and silicone, molded into the shapes of boobs and butts and hands and guts), she trails manicured fingers across the backs of his shoulders, the arm-holes of his white wifebeater shifting under her fingers to reveal slivers of the seams where his synthetic skin ends, giving way to tempered glass casing over the circuitry inside his upper back. (What an ugly name for a shirt, she thinks. And, for that matter, what an ugly shirt. It’s ironic, given how much money he spends making her pretty: he pays for her nail appointments, her hair stylist, her outfits, even if he does ruin his fair share of them ripping them off of her…not to mention all the food it takes to keep her plump enough for both their pleasure.)

“Who are you chatting with?” she asks in this sultry, kitten-ish voice. “Don’t tell me it’s that British chef you’re so fond of…?” If she sounds jealous, it’s only because she wants to. She’s met Briony, the last time Leo took her on vacation. Wonderful woman. The menage-a-trois was divine.

“I wish…and so do you, I’m sure.” He lays a cool hand on top of hers. “No, I’m afraid this is so much more…boring.” And yet, as he takes another big gulp from his flask, he laughs again.

He directs Rose’s attention to one of the screens, where his LifeBlog message inbox is open.

“Huh…I didn’t know you had a LifeBlog,” she says.

He shrugs. “I never thought I’d keep up with it this long. I only started it in case anyone might get…inspired by some of what I’ve written.”

“You write?”

His eyes flash electric yellow and subtly roll with the most faintly audible whir of moving parts. “Crime Brulee got me into it, some years back. Whenever she’s out of town on a solo mission and lonely, she wants ‘bedtime stories’.” By that, Rose guesses he means smut pieces about fat bellies and feederism–ahem, ‘feedism’, they changed the terminology recently, didn’t they? “I figured, there’s no harm in indulging her, especially since it only takes me a millisecond to give her a few thousand words of spank-bank material…and, guilty as charged, I’ve posted a few more personal pieces, featuring a stand-in for a feedee I cherish very much…”

Rose blushes and chews on her plump bottom lip. “Wonder who?”

“What’s the use of wondering?” He angles his chair slightly to give her derriere an affectionate smack, sending it wobbling for several seconds. “Anyway, over the years, it seems my page has garnered more attention than I anticipated. And you may think it’s petty of me to target strangers on the Internet for the simple get-rich scheme of selling products they never intend to deliver, using images for advertising they generated using software I wrote…”

It’s then that it occurs to Rose that she’s meant to have been looking at the message Leo’s been trying to show her on the screen. Leaning forward with her elbows on his desk–and glancing intermittently at him to make sure he’s staring steady at her cleavage, as he should be when each breath she takes threatens to spill her pendulous breasts out of the pink silk prison of her nightie–she reads.

‘Hello, I really liked your story! I was wondering if you’d be interested in a paid art commission based on your characters and plot? I work with authors and bring their concepts to life through custom portraits and comics!’

Attached are a series of thumbnails of generic character studies that just somehow…look wrong. “What’s up with their hands?” asks Rose, studying the drawings-that-don’t-quite-look-like-drawings.

“I’m still working out the kinks in MyVision, okay?” sighs Leo. “And it’s not as if I’m even upset…”

That makes it sound like he’s upset. Rose knows him. She knows that for all his bioengineered brawn and complex computing power, he’s still got a heart, and she knows that hearts do much more than love. Hell, before she learned to love, she used to be one conceited bitch. But that was years, and a few hundred pounds, ago.

And Leo? It’s not so much that he cares when someone thinks they’re smarter than he is.

But his heart shatters if he starts to suspect they might be right.

She straightens up and goes back to caressing his shoulders, listening, letting him speak. “I just think this is such a fascinating research opportunity, is all,” he says. Then, the cursor moves on its own and lands on ‘Accept Chat’.

“Now…” He turns to look at her with a devilish smirk. “Let’s see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”

***

LEO CAPRISKY in: TERMS AND CONDITIONS
(A WARNING)

***

You’ve just pocketed $50 from some sap you’ve blocked on all platforms and will never, ever speak to again. You don’t know how much that comes out to in Canadian, or whether the client was from Heusmonde or Cason. Wait…is Cason in Canada, or in Washington State?

Does it matter? Do you care?

Either way, your work is done, and since you always insist on the ‘send money to a friend’ option on PayDay, rather than the more secure ‘goods and services’ route–to ‘prevent unnecessary fees for both of us’, you always say–there’s no way you can be hounded down for a refund. Sure, you’ve had more burner accounts across multiple creative platforms banned within the last month than you can count on both hands, but what else are burners for?

You’re about to call it for the day, but then you get a message from someone else whose comments or DMs you must have blown up trying to sell a ‘commission’. Had it been days ago? A week? Honestly, all these usernames seem to blur together.

Only…when you open the correspondence, you find the person on the other end has some rather…unusual requests.

For one thing, they don’t want to take this conversation to Mybrid. ‘Due to the nature of my particular predilections, as I’m sure you’ve discerned from your kind compliment on my short story, I’d prefer if we could keep this as anonymous as possible. You understand, of course?’

That actually works out great for you. Saves you the trouble of making yet another Mybrid burner…and going through the trouble of scrubbing the metadata off the images you generate using your main, lest they ask for more ‘samples’ from your ‘portfolio’ and catch you in the act of fraud.

But then comes the truly bizarre. They want a five-panel comic of a character beginning fit and attractive, but gradually giving into food addiction, and in each panel, growing fatter, sloppier, and more scandalously clad.

And every description of the character, at least, for panel 1, might as well be written about you. They’re built like you’re built. Their hairstyle, their dress sense…it’s all yours.

You start typing.

>haha what’s with the gaining weight thing? is that like a fetish or

The reply comes swiftly.

>Yes. I thought it was clear from my body of work. Check your YeeHaw wallet, and if you have a problem with the material, feel free to decline the transaction.

A ping hits your phone. You check the app. There’s a new gift card unlocked on your account, loaded with…

No way.

Five MILLION dollars?

Frantically, you bend over your keyboard to set it all in stone.

>u got urself a deal alright

***

“I’m sorry…you spent five million dollars on WHAT?”

Moira Kaufskey knows by now that Leo only calls when he’s got some bizarre flex to brag about. It’s been a long time since they’ve met face-to-face. Used to be, he would play golf with her old man, the CEO of MacroSystems, back when she was little. Nowadays, she has bigger fish to fry. Literally: she’s in and out of the kitchen helping her husband fry up fish for the church thing later in the afternoon, and there’s a cake in the oven, and a daughter, off for the summer from elementary school, begging Kurt to pick her up or let her lick the cake spatula. But Kurt’s the better cook, anyway; he won’t miss her if she takes a call for a few minutes to hear whatever an old friend has to say, even if that old friend is the freakazoid-of-the-century who only they, and a select other few, know has turned himself into a robot and plugged himself into the Internet.

“So you know that scam going around on LifeBlog, where they pretend to be an artist and disappear after you pay them for a commission they never intend to deliver?” explains Leo.

“Um, no.” Moira’s tech savvy, if it’s not too conceited of her to say so herself. She could probably bring down the entire country’s servers in a night, if she put her mind to it, but then who would there be left to steal from? Speaking of crook stuff, she also promised catered lunch, wine pairings, and a coffee and dessert course for the Villains Associations meeting scheduled for…fuck! It’s tomorrow.

And yeah, she’s heard of LifeBlog, but it’s so 2005. In fact, she hasn’t had any form of conspicuous social media for years. She even took down her Mybrid account, despite her ongoing connection to its CEO and founder. Call it a security concern. And sure, she has a few videos up on FeedFrenzy. The bestseller is probably that one where Kurt plays the pizza delivery boy, surprised to find her, the lonely ‘single’ woman, waiting behind the door to receive a truly massive order, only for her to ‘ask him inside to help her finish it’, a request which he wildly misinterprets, resulting in him stuffing every last bite down her throat for the camera.

But that clip, and all the others, are behind a paywall. You can’t find Moira anywhere, unless you’re Leo, but hey, he tips, and a check’s a check.

“Well, five mil’s a small price for getting to put it in the backdoor,” says Leo. “Backdoor Trojan, that is!”

With her phone pressed to her ear, Moira sits down at her computer, traces his signal, and blinks through his latest activity.

“Gosh darn, Leo. You really remotely reprogrammed this person’s fridge?” And it’s not only that. The scale, too, has been altered to display positive affirmations instead of a readout when the weight upon it registers higher than it did on its last use, and Leo has seized remote control of the thermostat, no doubt to use it to coax his victim into eating extra carbs for thermoregulation. And a barely-perceptible background-noise track has been downloaded onto their home PC, laptop, and phone, which, when listened to through headphones, stimulates hunger signals in the brain…

“Gosh darn?” Leo repeats. Moira sighs.

“Kurt and Cori have started this thing where I have to put a quarter in the swear jar every time I take the Lord’s name in vain, and as much as I kind of like the look of smug satisfaction on their faces, I don’t want to disappoint them in the long run.”

“How wholesome. Shall I keep you posted?”

“It’s really okay. You know how I feel about outright sabotage, when it comes to…well, the things that we do.” Honestly, he should know better than to call her about this, knowing what happened to her on her first mission. But, honestly, she should know better than to expect sensitivity from him. At least he’s not one of those self-righteous assholes who thinks his cruelty is some kind of moral crusade. He knows he’s a terror when he’s existentially bored. “But I’m sure Connie would love to hear all about it.”