How had they given her the hair contract instead of Berenice?
Arsinoe used her fingers to pleasure Berenice, who moaned reflexively, but her thoughts weren’t into it. She gripped her frenemy’s hair and pushed her down. Arsinoe misinterpreted it as excitement and licked harder, but Berenice actually thought about choking her frenemy by using her pussy lips.
She could do it, perhaps pin her in place with her thighs. She was stronger. She was sexier. She had better hair. She was better at everything.
Arsinoe’s skill probably saved her at that moment, since a wave of pleasure crashed all over Berenice’s body and she arched her back, shuddering as it overtook her. She did pin Arsinoe between her thighs but oxytocin flooded her mind and made her feel good. Or, at least, less murdery.
It was Berenice’s turn to get grumpy. She stayed at home more and more, while looking for gigs less and less. She cut ties with her sugar daddies, who were stupid enough to still send her cash for a while, hoping it was just a girl’s phase playing hard-to-get and she’d relent, but months went by and even the last one cut her off.
Berenice would spend her days just listening to music, brushing her hair, caring for them, touching the individual strands softly. She was proud of them, dammit! Why couldn’t they see it?
Arsinoe brought in the CEO of a subsidiary hair-product company one night. Her boss, basically.
Berenice simply barged in the room as Arsinoe was sucking him off on the bed. “You don’t mind doubling up, do you?” she said lustfully and dropped her negligee on the floor.
He gulped. “Uh… No! Please, join us.”
She started playing with Arsinoe as they always did. When she reached in to get her turn of the cock, she sucked it as hard as she could, making the man grunt with pleasure. She kissed the tip and said, “Hold my hair, I love it like that.”
He did so, running his fingers through her hair and holding her head, pushing it down.
“Do you like my hair? Isn’t it soft? And pretty?” she cooed.
“Yes…” he grunted. “It sure is.”
Arsinoe stuck her tongue inside her ear. “What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered, annoyed. Then she took the cock from her and attacked it herself.
Berenice stuck her tongue in turn, and whispered, “I just think the man should have a fair sampling of the goods on the market, don’t you think?” Then she smiled at him, climbed on top of Arsinoe and started kissing him. She pulled his hands and placed them on her head.
He got the hint, and started massaging her head. “Mmm, you like this, don’t you?”
“Yes, so much. You do it better than anyone else,” she said huskily, kissing him again.
Arsinoe let go of the penis and went for Berenice’s ass. She pretended to be making out, and then she bit Berenice very hard, definitely leaving a mark. “Ow!” Berenice exclaimed, slapping her away.
“Naughty!” the clueless CEO said. “I like it.”
Arsinoe started kissing him then.
Berenice stuck a finger inside her frenemy and purposefully made it hurt.
“Ow!” Arsinoe said as well.
“Calm down, you girls, there’s plenty of me to go around.”
Arsinoe straddled the man and pointed his cock straight inside her.
Berenice kept on the playful teasing.
A few rounds of biting and twisting and hurting each other’s skin, and Arsinoe had enough. “Stop it, you wacko!” She grabbed Berenice by the hair, it was long and provided a good handful.
“Ow! You-” Berenice fought back, pulling her away from the shocked and erect CEO.
They fought and said names. Finally Berenice shoved her and Arsinoe fell on the man’s erection.
“Aaargh!” he screamed in pain, holding his crotch.
The embarrassing lawsuit from mangling his penis put both of the girls in serious debt.
Arsinoe kicked her out, as she was the one who had been paying the rent and all the bills for the past six months anyway. Berenice got back with one of her sugar daddies, because it seems that young pussy is always sought-after pussy, even if it falls off the face of the planet for half a year and ghosts you on every call and text you send.
He lived in the better part of Athens near the East, overlooking the sea. She liked that, even if she had to endure his body odour to have it.
In the end, Berenice defaulted on one payment, one single payment, and that was because she had been hungover that day and forgot about it. Adult responsibilities weren’t her strong suit.
So she basically lost her freedom. They called it debt-bondage, where they made you a corporate slave basically and you had to do whatever they wanted to pay off the debt. She kinda got what she wanted, Aphrodite bought her debt and put her to good use as a model. Uglier girls had to do other things, yucky things. She got off easy, basically modelling for ads and videos where they needed a young, sexy girl with a sultry voice.
Which was pretty much everywhere.
She hadn’t spoken to Arsinoe in almost a year. She knew that she hadn’t lost the hair-product contract since she kept seeing her ads. Funnily enough, she thought of her best frenemy when they chopped off her arm.
Oh, yeah, it was a thing they could do to you, even if you objected. Basically, you were meat and they owned you. The ads aimed towards the augmented demographic, so they simply augmented her arm and plugged a few more implants into her. She had no say in this.
Even so, she knew that uglier girls had it worse.
Berenice didn’t care about that, though. She had learnt early in life that you made your own fate. And yes, she had royally messed up hers so far, but she could still make it happen. Showbiz was a weird place with massive amounts of money that got thrown around each day. Just a tiny bit would get her freed from the paramone contract and straight into stardom.
If only she could her job back from that thief, Arsinoe.
The black-market dude was nothing like she expected him to be. He was a well-dressed Russian, actually handsome. He presented the box, it was metal and heavy.
“There you go miss,” he said, presenting it to her.
“How do I know it’s what you claim it to be?” she asked.
The Russian smiled and presented a device. He lifted the metal lid just a tiny fraction. The device started clicking with a weird tone. “A Geiger counter. See how it goes crazy when it’s close? That’s how you know.”
“Nice!” Berenice said, her eyes looking wild. “Sending you the cash,” she said and authorised the cryptocurrency transaction. They waited for the confirmations to come in and then the Russian nodded. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
“I-Uh, just wanted to say I’m sorry…” Berenice stuttered in front of her frenemy.
Arsinoe had her arms crossed and wore a mask of annoyance.
“Here, just a small gift. I picked it out for you when I got to Bodrum, remember how we said we always wanted to go there?” Berenice said cowering. She presented an ornate hair brush that was decorated with semi-precious gems.
Arsinoe bit her lip. “Of course I remember.”
“So you’ll accept it? Please?”
Arsinoe’s face softened. She snatched the hair brush and pointed it back at her. “Puh. Alright. Thank you, and apology accepted, even though you didn’t actually say any of the words.”
Berenice beamed at her. “This is so great! Okay, gotta go now, I have an audition to get to. But we’ll talk, okay? Byeee!”
Arsinoe felt ill for months. Nothing she did would make her feel better. She vomited a lot, which the doctors misconstrued as her being bulimic. And a model trying to convince a doctor that she wasn’t bulimic was like a porn star claiming she was a virgin.
Days went by.
One of them, her hair fell in a bundle. She kept staring at it in shock.
They treated her for cancer, then they operated, then they treated her again.
She wanted to die.
Arsinoe lost the contract imme
diately, the very moment she was unable to show up for a photoshoot. It was a clause in the fine print, naturally.
“I… Uh, I know you don’t have to listen to me, but I do have a friend who you can consider for the ad,” she said over the phone, fighting down a coughing fit. She hadn’t enabled her camera, of course. She looked like a corpse.
“Uh-huh,” the manager said, seeming bored. “Send me her headshots or have her send them to me, and we’ll see about it. Not all girls have what it takes, you know,” he said with a nasal tone of voice.
“This one does,” Arsinoe sighed.
Berenice finally got the fame she wanted. AR billboards, her face on every street corner in this part of Europe. Millions of women and girls envying her, wanting to look as pretty as her, wishing they had her hair. It looked magnificent, cared after by the best professionals, digitally retouched of course to become even more divine.
One day, a deranged fan stabbed her outside a beach club. It was quick, it was painful, and Berenice died in the sun, surrounded by people, all alone.
Arsinoe dug up her grave as soon as she felt well enough to walk. She was still walking with the aid of a cane. She had someone else do the actual digging, she wasn’t that crazy to attempt it herself. A few euros could get you what you wanted and the silence of those involved. The hired work dug it up and neatly opened it for her on the side, by the grass, in the night.
She reached into the coffin, touched that wonderful mane of blonde hair. She always did love her, and especially her hair. She had since the moment they first met. Arsinoe cut it carefully from her friend’s corpse and then put it on a net, slowly forming a wig with her dexterous fingers.
“This way, you’ll always be with me,” she said, crying over the grave.
The End
You can read the Cyberpink books here: https://cyberpinktournament.com
Closely Guarded Secret
The mayor sighed. “I believe we’ve gone through the official unfinished business.” He slapped the tenth pile of papers on his desk and slid it across to the other man.
The mayor-to-be took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Yes, we’ve been hours at it.”
“Nobody claimed that being the mayor was an easy task, son.”
“I understand that, sir.”
“Alas, there are more…”
“Of course there are,” the mayor-to-be said, resigned. The city was big. There were so many things to learn in record-time. It had all been a blur, the campaign, the election, the debates, the race to the finish. The current mayor hadn’t ran for some reason after his first mayoral service. That had been weird, and nobody had given the new mayor a straight answer as to why. “Okay, sir, hit me. What else?”
The mayor pulled out a couple of physical security keys, the ones that you needed to plug in physically to a computer to get access to some system. He held the two of them in his fingers, holding them in a ‘V’ pattern, looking them over. “This one,” he said, pointing at the blue one, “opens the city’s vault.”
“Just one key?”
“One of a pair, the city’s treasurer holds the other. Neither of you can open the vault without the matching key.”
“Okay, sir. Makes sense.”
The mayor smiled. “You are looking relieved, thinking that this is relay is coming to some kind of an end.”
“Don’t get me wrong, mayor, I’m excited, and anxious, and honestly shitting my pants here. But yes, I believe it’s been about twelve hours non-stop.”
“Of course I understand,” the mayor smiled. “You’re forgetting that I went through this exact rite-of-passage four years ago, to the day.” He stood up, by chance standing right next to his holoportrait on the wall.
The mayor-to-be was shocked for a moment. He could see the mayor as he was now, compared to how he looked when he won the mayorship. It had been only four years, but his face was now ridged with crow’s feet, his hair was grey, his eyes were sunken. He could have sworn that the holoportrait was of at least a decade ago, but he knew that it wasn’t.
The mayor buttoned his suit and walked out. The mayor-to-be, buttoned himself too and followed him. They went down to the lower level.
“What about the second key, sir?” the new guy asked.
“That’s what I’m about to show you.”
They went towards a huge vault door, the kind you only saw in movies with big bank heists, tons of metal arranged in a complex locking mechanism. Unlike the movies’ vaults, this one wasn’t shiny. It was old, probably as old as the city was.
The mayor-to-be stood, but the current mayor kept on walking. “What? Aren’t we going to open this?”
The mayor waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Ah. There’s nothing interesting in there. Just garbage, paintings and golden bars and other crap.”
The new mayor raised his eyebrows. “Okay…” Then he followed.
They went to another secure location, further down the hall. There was another security door here, albeit more of the ‘lab’ feel, rather than a bank vault’s. The mayor did the entire thing slowly, he held the digital key and pushed it in. “Here, watch carefully. This sticks a little, just feel the give.” He turned the key reverently, and then a screen lit up above the key hole. “5638829. Say it back.”
The mayor-to-be repeated it a couple of times, memorising it. He had learnt of a couple dozen passwords these last few days, so he was in a bit of a groove.
The door opened, and the smell of chemicals came wafting out. It was dusty, with a tinge of ozone in the air. It was air conditioned, the mayor-to-be felt kinda chilly, even with his suit on. Or, perhaps it was the creepiness of the place.
The lights came on as soon as they stepped inside.
The new mayor gulped.
It was a lab. And in the middle of it, was a big tube of glass, with a girl inside it. The girl was connected in multiple places of her body, and she was floating in a relaxed, foetal pose. The liquid was hazy but he could see that she was a cyborg.
“What in…” he whispered, stunned.
The mayor raised a finger, “You-You’ll understand. Please be patient for a minute.” He stepped close to face her, but she had her eyes closed. He pressed a button on a pedestal in front of the vat. “Kallipolis,” he said softly as if speaking to a little girl, “I’m back, sweetie.”
The girl moved a bit in the liquid but other than that, she gave no outward signs of reaction. Only her voice came from the pedestal speakers. “Hi daddy! Where have you been? I missed you so much. Did you bring me anything?”
The mayor sniffed and rubbed his eye. “Yeah, yeah…” he said, waving the mayor-to-be to come close.
He hesitated for a second, then did so, leaning in to see the pedestal controls. There were various buttons on it, with many icons.
The mayor pressed a button that indicated a flower. “I got you flowers, honey. Do you see them?”
“I do!” Kallipolis said, excited. “Oh, they’re lovely daddy! They smell so nice. Mmm… Lilacs.”
The mayor-to-be was shocked. His mouth agape, he checked out the other buttons. A teddy-bear. A chocolate. A dress. What was this? He had a million questions, but decided not to interrupt.
“Glad you like them, sweetie. Now, I need you to do something for me, okay?”
“Anything for you, daddy!” Kallipolis said, excited.
“Remember a while ago, when you had to remind me how to do some things in the city?”
Kallipolis tsked. “Oh daddy, did you forget again? How silly of you.”
“Yes dear, I am silly, I know. Now, over the next few days, I’ll need you to remind me how to handle some things about the city, okay? The hydro dam, the security drones, the sewage system…”
A giggle came from the speaker. God, it was so… normal. The mayor-to-be looked around the lab. Everything in here was ancient, decades old. Who had built this thing.
And, more importantly, why?
“That’s great, sweetie. Lets try it
out. For example, show me how to see the Citizen stats.”
“Tsk, daddy, that one is easy. How could you forget?”
“I know, dear. Just tell me how.” The mayor nodded for his successor to work the pedestal.
He stepped in front of it, waiting.
Kallipolis spoke. “Press square, then enter the command, ‘citizen stats,’ then hit enter.” He did just that, there was nothing complicated about it.
A screen lit up on the side, an ancient cathode-ray tube with a greenish tint. It showed rows upon rows of stats about the city’s population.
“You did it! Wee! See, daddy? It wasn’t so hard.”
The mayor nodded for his successor to respond. He pressed the button. “Yeah… it wasn’t hard, thanks.” His voice was timid.
“I know, daddy. You’ll get the hang of it, I know you will.”
The mayor-to-be bit his lip, then pressed the button again. “Kallipolis? What can I do with the citizen screen?”
“Well, anything! You can issue new mayoral decrees, see birth rates and death rates, and even ostracise some people if the city becomes too big to sustain. But that last one is bad, daddy. Don’t do that,” she pouted.
“No, I won’t do it, just checking,” the mayor-to-be replied, getting the hang of it. The mayor nodded in approval next to him, staying in the sidelines, as he would be come next morning.
“What else can’t you remember, daddy?” she asked cheerfully, her lips not moving, her eyes ever shut.
“How old is the city, Kallipolis?”
“It’s two-hundred and fourteen years old, daddy. Why?”
“Oh, just checking, I had a crossword puzzle I couldn’t crack. Thanks, dear.”
“Why, it’s my pleasure, daddy!” She giggled.
“Kallipolis, do you control all the systems in the city?”
“Yes daddy. Police, fire department - I love those firemen! - sanitation, city grid technicians. Do you want me to tell you about all of them?”
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 100