Can I actually pass out here? Lianne had no idea, other than that there was no way she should have been able to endure such a vicious beating under normal circumstances. Marlon’s wizardry was still mostly beyond her ability to comprehend, but she understood enough to know that the pain she was experiencing was being transmitted straight to the appropriate part of her brain.
She remembered an accident she’d had at school, during a games session, when she had badly torn a tendon in her ankle. The pain had been excruciating and she fainted; apparently it was the brain’s way of saving its owner from things when they became too bad. Vaguely, she wondered if the priest’s intervention was Marlon’s way - VESTA’s way - of achieving the same effect. Certainly she’d felt herself on the verge of losing consciousness after the last lash.
Amazingly, the burning sensation in her supposedly ravaged flesh began to subside almost immediately the whipping ceased. Closing her eyes, Lianne concentrated for all she was worth, repeating to herself over and over again that the whole experience was illusory and that the pain was not real pain at all. It worked, and not only did the pain in her back, shoulders and buttocks evaporate, but she realised that even her arms and wrists no longer hurt. However, the respite was short-lived.
‘Begin again!’ the priest ordered and, as the lash cracked across her skin again, even the utmost concentration could not stop the fresh pain. True, it did seem to hurt less than the first onslaught, but it still hurt, and Lianne was quickly bucking and writhing under the leather braid’s wicked kiss.
Ten times the whipping was ended temporarily, only to begin again after a few minutes’ respite, and now Lianne was beginning to fear that something had gone wrong. Maybe VESTA had become locked into an automatic cycle, but then common sense told her that Marlon would be sure to sense an error of that kind and bring her out of this cruel scenario.
Fighting to re-establish mastery of her senses, Lianne hung panting through her nose, little rivulets of saliva escaping at either side of the gag and trickling down over her jaw to drip onto her heaving breasts as they were pressed out to each side of the upright support pole. She felt a hand probing between her buttocks, forcing the tops of her thighs apart to permit a finger to explore inwards and trace a line along the lips of her sex, and she realised she was very wet there.
Surely that could not have been simply as a result of the whipping? Yes, it was true she could get off on bondage and rubber, and even a spanking or strapping as well, but the physical pain thing was not her particular bag. Ellen had told her of girls who did get turned on by being whipped, but Lianne didn’t consider herself as being among their number. No, she reasoned, VESTA had to be applying some extra stimulus somewhere.
The two assistants were reaching to free her wrists now and the box was pushed back beneath her feet, but she was not left unfettered for more than a second or two. Her arms were forced cruelly behind her once more and fastened there, presumably with the leather cuffs she’d originally worn in the cell. A second set of cuffs locked about her ankles as soon as the strap that had bound them together was removed. These cuffs were joined by a stout chain of no more than seven or eight inches, preventing her from taking anything other than very tiny steps. The reason for this quickly became apparent.
Looking down, Lianne saw the crowd had divided into two, leaving a narrow avenue between them, the front row of which now comprised figures that looked far more solid than those in the main body. There were men and women, she saw, all dressed in archaic costumes that she guessed were either sixteenth or seventeenth century, and each one now clutched a long cane.
A gauntlet line, she realised, and a whimper forced its way past the gag, for at its far end, where there should have been the cell building from which she’d been led to this scaffold, there now stood another raised platform, from the centre of which rose a blackened stake and about the base of which was heaped bundles of kindling wood and twisted sections of either large branches or thin tree trunks. It was, Lianne understood, a pyre - a pyre designed for one purpose only, that of burning a witch.
Her.
Clarissa had never believed it was possible to feel so wretched as she did now, perched astride the horrendous display pole, the thick dildo filling her vagina and stretching it to an impossible extent, the plug in her anal passage all but forgotten in comparison to this monstrous invasion. How long it had been since the massive blonde had mounted her so lewdly, she had no idea, but there had been several visitors since to admire Christina’s handiwork.
Thanks to the rubber ball gag the Dane had forced between her teeth, the wretched captive could do nothing but stare back at the procession of strangely garbed voyeurs, trying vainly to shut her ears to their mocking comments.
‘Hang a couple of lights on those tits and she’d make a great standard lamp,’ one woman had laughed. ‘I’ll have to ask Christina if we can have her up in our suite for tomorrow night’s party.’
‘Might as well use her for furniture,’ her male companion had sneered. ‘By the time she’s spent a few more hours like that, her cunt will be too slack to be of much use.’
‘Maybe for you,’ the woman mocked, ‘but I know one or two who could still really make her yelp. Maybe I’ll make a couple of phone calls tonight. She’d look a treat, wriggling on the end of Max’s cock.’
Clarissa felt her face burning with shame and she would have closed her eyes, shutting out their leering faces, but the ice cold drops Christina had put in her eyes seemed to have frozen the muscles that controlled her eyelids, so that she was forced to endure the maximum humiliation.
‘Still here then?’ Christina said, when she finally reappeared. Her gloved fingers toyed with the clitoral ring, which she had carefully ensured had been pulled into full view when she mounted her trophy earlier. ‘What do you think of my slut stand then, eh? I had it specially made, though not for you. There’s a certain little whore who’s going to spend most of what’s left of her miserable life where you are now.
‘Actually, I might have a few more made and then I can mount you as a pair,’ she mused. ‘And the sissy writer bastard, too. Yes, that would be a nice touch, I think. Three unwise monkeys - two cunts and a cock - speak no evil, see all evil, suffer all evil.
‘Well, Miss Clever Bitch,’ she went on, her mood changing in an instant, ‘your dear brother knows the situation exactly, now. He should be getting in contact within the next half hour and, if he does, I’ve agreed to take you down from there.’ She laughed, harshly.
‘Of course, whether I really do or not depends on my mood at the time. And on your attitude,’ she added.
‘Ready to suck my cunt yet, are you?’
Clarissa stared down at her, grunting through the gag, and shook her head as vigorously as the stiff perspex collar would permit. The thought of doing what the amazon was suggesting revolted her and, in any case, she suspected any relief earned by co-operating with her would be short-lived indeed.
Christina shook her own head, smiling crookedly. ‘Suit yourself, sweetmeat,’ she said. ‘You’ve only had a couple of hours up there so far. I’ll ask again in another two.’
Two hours! Clarissa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had to have been on the stand for far longer than that. Ten hours must be more like it. Christina seemed to sense her disbelief.
‘Yes, it seems like a lot longer, doesn’t it?’ she growled. ‘Well I can assure you, by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll feel like you’ve lived another complete lifetime.’
‘It’s still not quite right,’ Ellen said, relaxing back into the deep armchair. ‘I mean, the action’s all very convincing at the time, but those blackouts between scenes are a bit off-putting.’
‘Yeah,’ Lianne agreed, nodding. ‘It’s all too much like isolated video clips. There’s no proper build up.’
Marlon stood up from where he had been perching on the arm of Nadia’s
long sofa and paced across to the huge fireplace. He turned and faced his waiting audience and eight pairs of eager eyes sparkled back at him. ‘I understand what you’re telling me,’ he said, ‘and I guessed it was coming, but it’s just a matter of time now.’
‘How much time?’ Nadia asked, crossing her long legs and smiling encouragingly. Marlon gave a small shrug.
‘A day - two at most,’ he replied. ‘As you will all doubtless appreciate, my energies initially have been concentrated on setting up the hardware itself and then developing a software package powerful enough to handle what amounts to an entire new world. VESTA is so far in advance of anything else in her field and now has the capacity required, as well as the necessary processing speed, but as you so rightly say, she does not have all the necessary background resources.
‘To date, I have managed to programme her with sufficient data to create quite a variety of scenarios, but this all takes time. Now I have to concentrate on getting enough additional data into place to enable VESTA’s world to become continuous, without breaks and with all the subtleties of build-up and apprehension that the real world contains.’
‘Sounds like a huge undertaking,’ Paul said. ‘I’m no computer buff, but I understand enough to know that what you’re talking about is no one or two day job.’
Marlon nodded. ‘Ordinarily,’ he said, ‘you’d be perfectly correct in that assumption.’ He made a wry face and a touch of red appeared in his cheeks. ‘However,’ he went on, ‘I long ago gave up on the concept of “ordinary”.
‘The idea of a realistic virtual world is not a new one and I have been working on various aspects for quite some while now, even before I first met Nadia and she agreed to finance the project to a conclusion. Of course, with my own limited resources the big stumbling block was always constructing the hardware, without which I could only ever test out the main software programme in theory.
‘However, I was always well aware of the fact that, once the main system was in place and working, realism would require that VESTA digested a massive amount of background material, the sort of amount, as Paul suggests, that would require hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours work. However, computers should save labour, not create it, and so I used much of my then spare time in developing a little programme ready to cope with that.
‘I shan’t baffle you with the intricacies of what I perfected. Just suffice it to say that this little wizard will not only accept material from a variety of sources, it will actually go out and actively seek, evaluate, dissemble and repackage anything it finds that fits within a certain set of parameters I’ve given it. It is also capable of making comparisons and adjustments to those parameters, altering its predestined agenda as it goes.’
‘That’s artificial intelligence!’ Simon Prescott exclaimed, his gaunt frame suddenly tensing with excitement. ‘Good grief, man, you could write your own ticket in the world with that!’
Marlon shook his head. ‘Not quite yet,’ he said. ‘Intelligence suggests an ability to think and react to any given situation, no matter how new and how unexpected. VESTA can’t do that, not as such. She still is bound within certain confines and only rewrites within the spectrum I have created for her. It’s a wide spectrum, it’s true, but it nevertheless has limitations. Fortunately, for our purposes, those limitations are far more than adequate.’
‘So, where does VESTA search for all this…?’ Lianne began, but a light suddenly dawned in her eyes. ‘Ah, I get it!’ she cried, clapping her hands together with a loud crack of rubber on rubber. ‘The Internet! You’ve got VESTA surfing the Internet!’
‘Indeed I have,’ Marlon confirmed. ‘But I’ve also got her scanning pages and pages of every magazine and book I could lay my hands on. The recognition software was a bugger to get right, but I made it in the end.’
‘So right now VESTA is going through a huge pile of pornography?’ Nadia grinned. Marlon looked aggrieved.
‘Not just pornography,’ he protested. ‘There’s all manner of stuff she needs to assimilate, everything from Shakespeare to… to…’
‘The Marquis de Sade?’ Paul suggested, and there was a general ripple of laughter around the room.
‘Your dear brother is trying my patience,’ Christina snarled up at the hapless redhead. ‘If he thinks delaying tactics will help you, he’s very wrong - very wrong indeed.’
Clarissa scarcely heard what the big blonde was saying. Time had long since ceased to have any meaning for her and her entire body had become numbed. Her entire body, that was, apart from her vagina, which seemed to have acquired a life of its own, throbbing and pulsing in response to the sporadic attentions of the vibrating mechanism within the dildo that filled and stretched it.
‘Perhaps I should send him an update,’ Christina sneered. ‘You’re definitely beginning to look a bit jaded up there, slut. Or perhaps I should hang you up and give you a good flogging, take that gag out and let him listen to you screaming for mercy.’ She walked slowly round her immobile captive, apparently considering her options.
‘One more hour,’ she said finally, reaching up a gloved finger and stroking the shaven mound just where the cleft began and just above where the huge phallus had entered it. Clarissa felt a new series of tremors beginning, but she no longer had the will, nor the energy, to try to fight them back down. The cruel amazon could now make her climax with the simplest of touches and they both knew it.
‘One more hour,’ Christina repeated. ‘Then we’ll have to start work on you properly, beginning with that hair of yours.’ Clarissa’s eyes betrayed a total lack of comprehension, but Christina quickly removed any doubts as to what she intended.
‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘that lovely red hair of yours; we’ll shave it all off and polish your skull until it gleams. And we’ll have the eyebrows off, too.
‘There’s a lot we can do with that body of yours, just to fill in the time. You’re not the only artist around here, I can assure you!’
Marlon banged down on the return key in frustration and pushed his chair back from the desk on unresisting casters, staring at the VDU screen with a mixture of annoyance and disbelief.
‘Clever bastard,’ he said, speaking as if to his unseen adversary. ‘Very clever indeed.’ He sighed, stood, and walked up and down the narrow room for a minute or two, his muscles, cramped from so long being in the same position, complaining at every step. He stopped, turned, went to the desk and opened the top drawer, taking out the packet that had lain there unused for three months; three months during which he had not once lit up a cigarette.
‘Deep layered, triple encryption, double firewall and at least three proxy connections,’ he intoned to himself, taking out a cigarette and rolling it between his fingers. ‘You know your stuff, my friend, whoever you are.’
After the initial shock of seeing Clarissa’s tormented situation, Marlon had quickly re-gathered his senses, for he was nothing if not practical, at least when it came to something he understood and loved. The bastards who were holding his half sister were relying on the gargantuan anonymity of the Internet to protect and hide their identities and location, but huge as the web was, there were always ways of following a trail.
Or so Marlon had thought.
Until now.
Whoever had put up this particular website was good, there was no doubting that. Using his own unique talents, Marlon had quickly penetrated the first couple of layers of defences, convinced that it was only a matter of time before he came up with something that would give him a clue as to where these people were based, but there was nothing. Every avenue he explored led to a dead end and even the phone number that had been used to post the site onto the net turned out to have been registered to a district nurse in the highlands of Scotland.
Marlon had even tried dialling the number and the woman had answered it herself on the third ring, excusing herself to pull her car over onto a verge before c
ontinuing with the conversation. No, she hadn’t lent her phone to anyone and no, it had been neither lost nor stolen and she’s had it for nearly two years now. Where had she bought it? A telephone shop in Fort William and aye, they were a very reputable company and why did he want to know anyway?
Marlon mumbled something about consumer research and an article about organised gangs cloning, or ripping-off people’s mobile phones for fraudulent use, and then broke the connection as quickly as he could without arousing any further suspicions. He cursed out loud, for he had been so sure of himself to begin with.
Random cloning, that had to be the answer. Not easy - in fact the phone companies claimed it was impossible to do, though Marlon knew different - and no good for continuous use. But for someone who just wanted to make a handful of calls over a period of one or two days, it was an ideal barrier against being tracked down.
‘Damn!’ Marlon thrust the cigarette angrily between his lips and scrabbled in the cluttered drawer for a lighter. Already his fertile brain was heading off at an entirely different angle, but he needed time and time was something he did not appear to have very much of.
‘You’ve been a bit quiet since the big run,’ Ellen said. Lianne looked up from her book, her expression temporarily blank. ‘And it’s not like you to just slop around the place in a robe, even if it is silk. You’ve hardly been out of something rubber in all the months you’ve been coming here.’
‘Except in VESTA’s little world,’ Lianne muttered.
Ellen raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh?’ she invited. ‘Only you still haven’t told me what happened. I told you about my little experiences, but you’ve said nothing and that’s not like the usual you.’ Lianne gently closed the book and set it onto the table beside her armchair.
Vesta - Painworld Page 6
