By accepting employment as a creator with Everyone Everywhere Entertainment, Inc. (hereafter referred to as “EEE”), the applicant acknowledges that any thoughts the applicant generates during the course of this employment, in or out of working hours, whether intentionally or unintentionally, are the property of EEE. Applicant waives all rights to control the use of these thoughts, or to profit from them in any way other than the agreed-upon salary.

Applicant attests to possessing all qualifications for the position, including:

·                     Secure neurorecorder with high-speed transponder.

·                     Integrated holoprojector, generation 4 or better.

At no time will EEE be responsible for providing or maintaining any of the above on the applicant’s behalf.

To confirm your understanding of and agreement to these terms, look directly into the sensor.

#

The day Cam first put her retinal scan to the EEE contract had been the happiest of her life.

She had read and understood the terms. She didn’t love them, but it was all standard stuff, and she would have willingly gouged her eyes clean out if that was what it took to get on staff as a creator at EEE, or anywhere, really.

Today was the second happiest day of her life. Today, she had been assigned to collaborate with Ember Kincaid, the visionary behind the Broom City series.

During the days in between — all three thousand six hundred and two of them — happiness had been increasingly difficult to come by. Nothing about Cam’s work for EEE had matched up to the thrill of being chosen for it, but the chance to work on this one project might justify her entire misbegotten career.

Cam had forgotten she could feel as excited or anxious as she did now, sitting in a coffee shop of Ember’s choosing, across from the legend herself. Some of that feeling probably had to do with the designer stimulants this place blended in with their espresso shots. After two sips of her latte, Cam knew she wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight, but she embraced the thought. Tonight wasn’t for sleeping. Tonight was for ideas.

“You… I… I’m a really big fan,” Cam struggled to break the silence after several minutes of staring and sipping.

“Fan of what?” Ember asked.

“Oh, well, Broom City, of course.”

“Of course,” said Ember, with a sardonic twitch of her pierced eyebrow. “Everyone loves Broom City.”

“Not just that though,” Cam backpedaled. “Everything you’ve done.”

“You mean, everything I’ve done for EEE?”

“Yeah,” said Cam. “What else would I mean?”

Ember returned to her coffee without answering. Cam watched with fascination the way she was able to drink so neatly and effortlessly in spite of another piercing on the right side of her lower lip.

She had one in her septum too, and long rows along her ears.

A generation ago, most employers would have forbidden such assertions of self-ownership. Nowadays, corporations like EEE seemed content to allow their creators quiet, out-of-the-way control of their bodies, if it meant they could attract more of them to sign over their minds.

Ember had turned her appearance into a work of art as a counter to EEE’s sensibilities as possible. Even in her slouchy hooded jacket, with her short hair uncombed and brown roots showing through her chosen shade of blue, she had an intoxicating aura of intention about her.

Cam had never taken advantage of that kind of freedom herself. She had no mods, cosmetic or functional, other than what the job required. She was dressed in her usual combo of button-down blouse and pencil skirt. Her hair was long, blonde, and heat-flattened, her makeup designed to widen her eyes and make her resemble the cute characters she worked on, as much as a living being could.

She wondered what it must be like to have the confidence to change things so visible, so lasting, and trust your own guess at whether you would like them better after than before.

“Director Green says your work’s gotten stale,” said Ember, after a moment’s thought.

“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when he vetoes every new idea I bring him,” said Cam. “Or twists it and shaves it down to the same shape as everything else he’s ever approved. Green loves stale. He just doesn’t like me.”

“But you are feeling stale?” Ember pushed.

“As last week’s donuts,” Cam admitted and leaned forward across the table. “How do you do it? Get them to actually use an idea like Broom City, I mean. If I pitched a story about sisterhood, I’d get a lecture about how it’s not cost-effective, because girls are empathetic enough to follow any protagonist, and boys will only accept one who looks like them.” She rolled her eyes. “Or maybe they’d schedule me to work on one of their approved ‘girl stories’ about one isolated woman proving herself. But you, you made something. How—”

“Easy,” Ember answered. “You just wait until the company decides that the girls in the audience are starved enough for something different that they’re temporarily profitable to throw a bone to. Then, they harvest that bone by grabbing one of your ideas and stripping all the flesh from it.”

Cam felt the awe in her chest deepen. “If that was the stripped version, what was it like to start with?”

Ember evaluated her for a moment longer, then smirked. “Well, they weren’t sisters, to begin with.”

Cam smirked back as the understanding set in. “Oh.”

“Would you like to see some of the original concepts?” Ember asked.

Cam nodded. “Very much.”

Ember activated the holoprojector mounted to her collarbone and adjusted the beam to produce a bubble of light on the table between them, only a little larger than her fist. Inside that bubble, she visualized the two co-heroines of Broom City into existence.

They were rendered, as always, in EEE’s mandatory visual style — clearly adult humans, yet with mathematically cute, doll-like faces, designed to elicit protectiveness and attachment. Cam could follow that template in her sleep.

A scene played out. It was the one with the love pledge between the two women, who had never really felt like sisters to Cam, if she was honest, with their different complexions, close ages, and easy, rivalry-free affection. This time, instead of joining pinkies, they joined lips.

“More?” Ember asked. “Past this point, it’s not appropriate for ‘Everyone, Everywhere.’ And that’s me talking, not Green.”

Cam compulsively checked over her shoulder. The coffee shop was nothing like the open-concept collaborative spaces in the EEE office building, and she was beginning to understand the appeal of its high-backed booths, flashing menu lights, blaring music, and touchscreen ordering system. It would take a lot for anyone to discern what they were doing here.

“I want to see it,” she said.

Ember closed her eyes briefly, moving them under their lids as she summoned the next images.

One of the Broom City women reached for the laces of the other one’s dress.

“Keep watching,” Ember instructed, low and direct, as the dress slipped down to reveal perfect, fully detailed breasts. Naked breasts weren’t supposed to exist in the same world with those mathematically cute faces, yet they fit together seamlessly. “Focus on the images while I talk. Whatever you do, don’t think about anything I say without also thinking about those precious broom girls making graphic, carnal love.”

“What—”

“Shh,” Ember stopped her. “Don’t interrupt an explanation to ask for what you’re already getting.”

Cam listened in electrified silence, watching one woman’s mouth find the other’s nipples.

“Do you know what happens to all the sexually explicit thoughts creators have while under contract with EEE?” Ember asked.

“They go into the smut vault,” answered Cam.

“Yes,” said Ember. “Their own, separate, vast archive, just for all the dirty, filthy things that aren’t worthy of Everyone, Everywhere. The thoughts never die — the company doesn’t throw anything away — but the chance of them ever being seen by human eyes is almost zero. The algorithm sorts them away instantly, so the executives can focus on sifting through what they might find usable. And if anyone ever does access the smut, it’s usually someone sneaking in and picking a recording at random, to masturbate to in a quiet corner with the sound off. Someone with no motivation ever to tell anyone else about it.”

Both Broom City women were naked now. One had mounted her signature flying broom and was teasing the polished front handle of it along the other woman’s pussy, preparing to slide it in.

“Dirty thoughts are the next best thing to privacy,” said Ember.

“I guess they would be,” Cam said neutrally, watching the receiving woman toss her head back with delight as the broom-wielding one began to thrust.

“I’m tired,” said Ember. “You take over. Keep us in the vault.”

Cam searched her own work for comparably forbidden potential. It was unsettlingly easy, like kicking over a carefully constructed sandcastle wall and letting the tide flow in.

She activated her projector, narrowed its beam as Ember had to form a little globe between their coffee cups, and summoned the image of a sentient dragon in flight. Zooming in on its back, she presented two characters who had never canonically met. One was the hero’s dragon-taming, daredevil love interest, the other his sweet, nurturing, very dead sister.

Cam had always thought the two of them would get along, and they certainly were now.

Riding completely naked through the sky, they held each other’s hands for balance and lowered themselves onto the conical scales that stuck up out of the dragon’s back in two neat rows.

Each of the women settled onto a scale and slowly, carefully, eased it deeper into her ass.

Ember deactivated her own projector and watched with solemn approval.

“I requested you for collaboration,” she said, staring at the image.

“Why?” asked Cam

“I could see pieces of the kind of person you are in your work.”

“Really?” Cam’s heart did a bittersweet dance. “I can’t.”

“Tiny ones,” Ember acknowledged. “But once I took an interest in you, management let me take a closer look at your thought archive. Creating a flagship property for them does come with a few perks.”

Cam winced. Her thoughts had not belonged to her for most of her adult life, but this still felt like she’d been handed a disadvantage. Her projector sputtered for a moment, trying to give form to the uncomfortable feeling of exposure before she sharpened the image again.

The women on the dragon were still firmly holding each other’s hands and gazes, blending cooperation with competition over who could stretch themselves the farthest, and get closest to the scales’ wide bases.

“I know what you’re like,” said Ember. “I know that you’re full of potential, frustration, and enough repressed depravity to keep us off the radar all night long.”

“Okay…” Cam said slowly. “But what good does that do? We have to come up with a pitch that EEE will actually use, or we’re just talking to ourselves. Not that that’s not fun, but if you just wanted to be friends, you could have asked. You requested me to help make something important. Something specific.”

“Yes,” said Ember, turning on her projector to take over. “Do you like men, by the way?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure,” said Cam.

Ember’s projector bubble formed another of her famous characters, a woman with impossibly long hair. Her roguishly cute boyfriend sat naked in the chair in front of her. Under the EEE stylebook, his maleness manifested as a larger nose, flatter chin, and the faintest of shadows outlining where his facial and chest hair might grow.

Contrary to the EEE stylebook, this version of him had a raging erection, lovingly depicted down to its raised veins.

The woman skipped around him, tossing sections of hair around his limbs, his torso, and his neck, binding him in place with increasingly intricate loops and knots.

“Is hiding in the smut vault some sort of meditation you use to shake the discouragement? So you can keep coming up with decent material?” asked Cam.

Ember shook her head. “They get good material from me, as good as they’re willing to accept, because when you’re humming and sparking and alive from doing something that works, you can’t help daydreaming. Sooner or later, they’re bound to catch some bits and pieces that they like enough to harvest and repackage in a lesser form, but that’s not important. What’s important is what it distracts them from.”

“Which is?” Cam whispered.

Ember stared contemplatively into the light on the table, where the woman was tightening a braid around the man’s neck and beginning to polish his erection with a ticklishly soft lock of hair.

After a few moments, she said, “Your turn.”

“You’ve studied my unedited mind,” Cam pointed out. “Are five more minutes of watching my characters fuck going to change how much you trust me?”

Ember snorted. “Fair enough. Do it anyway, though. I don’t want to split my focus more than necessary.”

Cam brought up a pair of adventurers from Confection Kingdom, both men. One of them had been frosted all over, from the neck down, like a prize-winning cake. The other one, still dressed in his usual gumdrop-studded overalls, cracked a red liquorice whip once in the air for practice, and then began applying it to his friend, slicing away the spectacular swirls of sugar to bring his naked skin into view, one section at a time.

Staring hard at the swings of the whip as they worked their way toward the frosted man’s crotch, Ember tapped a button behind her right ear, next to the maintenance panel for her neurorecorder. A transparent chip the size of her thumb ejected from a well-hidden slot.

“Is that—”

“Keep your eyes on the cake man,” Ember reminded her. “Yes, it’s a local storage drive. Yes, they’re illegal, shut up. Do you know the Trash Compactor?”

“The underground porn channel?” said Cam. “I know of it.”

“It’s not just a porn channel,” Ember whispered. “It’s a community.”

“I… have no idea what you mean.”

“It’s an outlet, a communication network, and a support system,” Ember explained. “Everyone who contributes gets a cut of the money their piece brings in. And I don’t mean five percent, I mean fifty. The other fifty, plus whatever we decide to donate, goes to group projects. Buying up land, supplies. Funding our other operations.”

“Other operations?”

“We’re working on something big right now,” said Ember, watching the frosting-streaked doll of a man take a lash right to the head of his erect cock. “If we can pull this off—”

“If you can pull what off?”

This time it was Ember who checked over her shoulder, before looking back to the table.

She refocused her projector, taking over for Cam with an image of a braless centaur woman being transformed into a human in a shower of magic sparkles. The former centaur explored her new human vulva with tentative fingers and an expression of wonder on her face.

“We’re going to steal the CEO’s private hospital,” Ember whispered.

“The CEO of EEE?” asked Cam.

Ember nodded.

“How do you steal a hospital?”

“Not the building,” said Ember. “But most of the staff, some of the equipment.”

“Doesn’t the CEO live on the east coast?”

“Hence the scale of the op. We have to relocate over thirty people across multiple state lines, get them set up in one of our bases, and prove that we can take care of them.”

“In return for—”

“All kinds of medical care,” said Ember. “But most importantly, neurorecorder jail-breaking. With their help, people like us will have the option of disappearing from our employers’ systems, instantly. One day you’re an EEE creator, the next, you’re a ghost. No exit exams to check that you’re not escaping with ‘company property.’ No begging to have your thought stream into the archives turned off.”

Cam let out a whistle, watching the ex-centaur woman slide her fingers inside experimentally, blissfully, inside herself.

“I’ve been assigned to send the instructions for the caravan to find us,” said Ember. “If I stop thinking about sex for one moment while I’m doing it, EEE will find out, and all our work will be for nothing. I can’t do it alone. Two people can keep each other on task much better than one.”

“So, you need me to keep you horny?”

“Every minute. Every second. Can you do that?”

There was no debate. Even if Cam had not been suffocating at EEE, this was the request she had been living to answer.

Cam reactivated her projector, determined to keep her next turn going for as long as she could, to let Ember know what mental stamina she could expect. She called upon image after image in a machine gun volley.

Two semi-humanoid robots, one with its data probe in the other’s port, rocking back and forth with rapturous beeps and flashes.

The woman from that psychedelic bit of nonsense she’d worked on a few years ago, growing fractal vulvas all over her skin, and frolicking through a garden of dancing penises, all of them smiling and eager to please.

The incredibly boring main couple from last season’s romantic epic, sandwiching the other man, the one who rounded out their love triangle, between them. The woman gasped with joy, more expression than she’d ever been allowed to show in the actual story, with the two men stacked on top of her, one inside the other inside her.

In a split second when Cam sensed an oncoming lull in her ideas, she looked up at Ember, and a different pair of figures appeared on the table.

They followed the same template of cuteness that Cam’s mind now used as automatically as her native language, but they were not from any existing EEE property.

One wore a hooded jacket and an assortment of piercings no EEE character had ever been allowed.

The other wore a blouse and a pencil skirt.

The one in the skirt kissed the one in the jacket, unfastened her jeans, and descended to her knees to offer to lick her.

The real, full-sized Ember smiled and projected back the same image, merging the two fields of light.

“Do you want to come home with me?” Ember asked.

“Yes,” Cam nodded. “Definitely.”

#

Ember’s studio apartment was in the exact center of a glass skyscraper and was the only room on its floor that was completely windowless. Cam wondered if she lived there so she could donate more to the movement, or if she had chosen to forego a view of the city lights, digital billboards, and passing aerial traffic in favor of greater privacy.

Sitting next to Ember on the fold-out couch, with her projector pointed at the clearest patch of floor, Cam spun an image of a young woman in a checkered dress, skipping along a brightly painted road. Her skirt bounced up and down with each step, making it clear that she was wearing nothing underneath it.

“We’re taking people on a road trip, right?” Cam asked, careful to keep her mind on the image while she spoke. “So, I figure, start with a classic road trip story, and tweak it from there?”

“Yeah, that’s good,” said Ember, watching the stylized woman as if her life depended on that cute, round, half-hidden ass. “I’m just thinking about how to do this.”

Cam put her arm tentatively around Ember.

Ember much less tentatively grabbed Cam’s hand and pushed it under her shirt to her breast.

Cam happily followed the invitation and rolled Ember’s nipple back and forth between her fingers.

“Harder,” said Ember.

Cam obliged.

“Yeah,” Ember breathed. “Keep doing that.” She scrutinized the projected image. “Change her a little more from the source material. Leave the inspiration obvious, but make her technically unique.”

Cam blinked, replacing the skipping woman with the same mockup she had made of herself in the coffee shop, now clad in the checkered dress. The cute template kept her face too generic to be truly recognizable, but the long, flattened hair was enough to make Ember smile sideways at her.

“Oh, you’re coming with us, are you?” she asked.

“After all this, I sure hope I’m invited,” said Cam.

Ember nodded. “You just keep me hot enough to read the directions safely, I’ll tell them to you, you hide them in the sex, I’ll watch, polish them up a little in my head, and save them to the chip, okay?”

“You got it,” said Cam, keeping up the attention on Ember’s breast.

Ember tapped her own forearm, prompting a separate, hidden implant to begin glowing with code symbols. “Start from the hospital and go south,” she said.

The projected version of Cam was immediately joined by a crowd of nurses and doctors, all of them with similarly short hems, regardless of gender. They fussed over each other for a while with thermometers and tongue depressors, until the sun set in front of them, and they took a left turn onto an open road.

“Take the second bridge,” said Ember. “Not the first. The second.”

That was easy enough. The heroine from the original road trip adventure was due to meet a lonely woodsman. Instead, the projected Cam and her crowd of medical personnel happened upon two of them, both with those cute little shadows of beards that would never grow.

After a brief dance of greeting, the two woodsmen leaned back into the bridge position, hands, and feet on the ground, backs arched, pelvises raised to the sky.

The traveling party evaluated the men, listening to them with the stethoscopes, opening their pants to gently squeeze their testicles and test their erections with blood pressure cuffs.

After a few minutes of consideration, all of the travelers lined up in front of the second of the two woodsmen. One by one, they climbed on top of him, inching forward from his legs toward his arms. Most of the women stopped to use his upward-reaching cock for a few quick thrusts, before making way for the next person in line.

When the last nurse in line had made it all the way to the woodsman’s face, she sat there a moment, reaching back with her hand to give him the last few strokes he needed to ejaculate skyward.

The first of the two human bridges remained dry and unused as the party continued down the road beyond.

While the scene played out, Cam slid her free hand down the front of Ember’s loose jeans, gently rubbing the folds of her pussy, in time with the rolling of her nipple.

Ember took in a pleased breath and reached for the zipper of Cam’s skirt so that she could do the same.

“Next, take the old forty highway for as far as you can,” Ember whispered.

The projected Cam turned to address one of the doctors, who happened to look exactly like the cutesy mockup of Ember she’d made, only with an added lab coat.

“That little bounce on the bridge wasn’t enough to get you there, was it?” asked projected Cam.

“Of course not,” Doctor Ember scoffed. “Do you know anyone who’s that easy to please?”

“Maybe not that easy,” said projected Cam, ruffling her skirt. “But I bet I could get you where you need to be with forty.”

“I’ll take that action,” said Doctor Ember, sitting down on the curb of the painted street to await projected Cam’s best efforts.

Projected Cam lifted up her skirt to straddle Doctor Ember, sliding her hand between them to add targeted pressure to each grinding motion of her hips.

“One,” projected Cam counted the strokes. “Two.” She lowered the peasant top neckline of her checkered dress to brush her breasts back and forth over Doctor Ember’s face. “Three. Four.”

Real Cam found the movements of her hand under real Ember’s jeans syncing up with their imaginary counterparts. Ember’s hand fell into the same rhythm under Cam’s skirt.

Moisture gathered on Cam’s fingertips as she stroked Ember’s outer lips, and on the next pass, she slipped a little deeper between them, rubbing right along the left side of Ember’s clit.

As usual, Ember matched Cam’s boldness and outdid it, using her thumb to trace Cam’s clit, so that her fingers were free to penetrate her at the same time.

“Eighteen. Nineteen,” whispered both Cams.

At twenty, the projected Cam turned around in Doctor Ember’s lap, grinding backward against her. Her skirt rode up completely as she reached down between her own legs to continue rubbing Ember behind her.

The real Ember reached her free hand behind the real Cam to squeeze her ass through her more confining pencil skirt, feeling the resemblance for herself.

“Thirty-two. Thirty-three.”

Doctor Ember’s breathing naturally grew shallow, her hips restless, right on schedule. The audience had to see that forty was indeed the way to the finish line, after all.

How closely the real Ember’s restlessness matched her imaginary counterpart was more surprising.

At stroke thirty-nine, just as Doctor Ember took in an extra sharp gasp, the real Ember’s hand froze under Cam’s skirt, and she let go of her ass to grab her wrist instead, holding her still.

“Slow down,” Ember panted. “Not yet.”

Cam split her focus between the rapturously orgasming Doctor Ember projected on the apartment floor, and the tremblingly unfinished real Ember beside her.

“Are you okay?” Cam asked.

“Too okay,” said Ember. “Can you stay sex-mad right after you cum? Keep reality from solidifying in your head? I can’t.”

“No,” Cam admitted, trying to keep any disappointment out of her voice. They were here for something so much bigger than their own momentary enjoyment. Ember was counting on her to remember that. “What’s next?”

“They have to follow the old river trench,” said Ember. “Follow it down, until they see the red banner.”

Within moments, the projected Cam and Ember and the rest of their traveling party happened upon a river. It was the idyllic kind worthy of the fairytale in which they lived, tree-lined and clean. There was nothing about it to remind anyone of the concrete trench with the puddle in the middle that the hospital staff would be traveling down to reach this city. Nothing except the shared word, “river.” Hopefully, that would be enough for someone who was already at a crossroads, evaluating the possible ways forward.

The group piled onto a rustic fleet of log rafts, which hung magically still on the steadily moving water, without being tethered.

“Red light green light,” the projected Cam announced.

Needing no further explanation, the whole group began to touch themselves, their raft mates, occasionally a friend whose raft was passing close by on the same current. The faster their hands moved, the faster their rafts cut their course downstream between the green trees.

The trees didn’t stay green for long.

When the rafts reached the first grove of orange leaves, the travelers put up their hands and sat perfectly still, coasting forward on their momentum, waiting with straining difficulty for the orange to pass and the green to return, so that they could resume their touching.

More stands of green and orange trees passed by, switching back and forth with increasing frequency. At one point, a nurse waited too long to lift her hand from her pussy, and her raft immediately flipped sideways, upside down, and right side up again, dunking her through the water.

Delayed orgasms began breaking out with each new stand of green. Soon, most of the group had taken a turn and were only gingerly continuing to touch themselves while allowed, in order to keep their rafts in motion.

The river took a slight turn, spilling the rafts out of the forest and into a field of bright red flowers.

“Red. Last stop, no more!” projected Cam announced, limping off of her raft and beckoning the others to follow, whether or not they had been satisfied.

Real Cam sympathized with those still wanting. Real Ember’s hand had barely moved since she’d asked to slow down, but it was still under Cam’s skirt, with two fingers still inside her and the thumb resting on her clit.

“Meet the contact at the Sapphire Lounge,” Ember whispered.

“Don’t worry,” projected Cam told the group, “The best is ahead of us.”

An entire sapphire city rose into view on the horizon as the weary travelers stumbled forward.

“Good?” asked Cam, letting the projector go dark.

“Perfect,” said Ember, hands stirring into motion again, trying to finger Cam and undo the buttons of her blouse simultaneously. “This could really work,” she murmured, pulling Cam’s skirt all the way down around her knees. “We just have to never remember anything we thought or did or said tonight, without remembering the sex.”

“Don’t worry,” said Cam, kissing Ember’s mouth and tumbling forward to lie lengthwise on the couch with her. “I couldn’t forget that part if I tried.”

***

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