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.It paddled busily through the foam, bumping into the smooth marble sides, andWarrick watched it with a slight frown.Someone had been at the artificial life programming suite again.Not that he minded in fact, he encouraged it but ithad been careless to leave this installed.Corporate sponsors on a surprise visitmight not be impressed by the abuse of their very expensive facilities.He caught the duck and turned it over.It quacked protestingly, and thenstopped when he stroked its smooth belly.Nice touch.The legs were rathergood as well.Letting the duck go, he watched as it disappeared under a moundof bubbles.He must find out who d created it, and apply a little carrot andstick.Not too much stick, though.That would require a fair dose of hypocrisy,considering that he had cancelled a fluid dynamics test this very afternoon inorder to mind-fuck a stranger whose name he didn t even know.A scandalous waste of sim time and he would have been furious to catch any ofthe others doing it.Still, the fuck, mental or not, had worked out well.Notsurprising, since the deck had been unfairly stacked in his favour, but that wasthe way he preferred to play any game.Especially with dangerous opponents.Accepting the invitation to dinner had been a silly mistake, but one easilycorrected by a message left at the hotel.Time to call a halt while he had adecisive victory to his credit.The duck bumped into the edge of the bath, corrected its course, and circled fora while.Its collisions with the edges were now far less frequent, he noted.Nota bad little learning algorithm.He pushed a wave of water towards the duck, setting it spinning, and laughed.Hypocrisy aside, he d had a good afternoon.To start with, he loved showingpeople round his sim.( His sim.In a formal sense, Warrick acknowledged thelarge team behind the project.But, in his heart, it was his alone.) God, he lovedto see visitors faces when they first looked round the meadow or the coral reef,and Toth had appreciated it.At least, he amended, Toth had appreciated it to begin with.Then he d turned acoldly professional eye on it.Just a particularly unsavoury example from anendless procession of Administration vultures, picking over his creation fortheir sordid little purposes.Warrick fully intended to resist as long as possible,and to make them pay dearly.However, in the long term, they would no doubttake it away and cut corners, rip out features, and cripple it until all its beautywas gone and it became a cheap, mass-produced tool.A tool of oppression, asthat suicidal idiot had said in the lecture. Warrick didn t object to the idea of the sim generating profit he hoped toprofit extensively himself but he intensely disliked the idea of the uses thesim would be put to in somewhere like the Investigation and InterrogationDivision.If Toth s reaction hadn t been so obvious, Warrick might not havegone through with his little scene in the bedroom.On reflection, he d never done anything quite like that before.Oh, he d shownpersonal guests round various sims, and he d even abused the expensivefacilities from time to time.Nothing, however, so deliberate and, well, cruel.Not, Warrick told himself, that he d done anything wrong.Toth could havestopped the sim any time he wanted to.He hadn t, so he d enjoyed it.But hadhe been frightened, too? Perhaps a little.A little afraid and a lot out of control.That was something in the sim reality Warrick couldn t duplicate for himself.He knew intimately how very safe it was.He d designed it that way, and thatwas how he d always liked it.Still, he felt an unexpected touch of envy at theunattainable experience.How had it felt to be so controlled? Held there, soabsolutely in another s power.Old fantasies stirred, unexpectedly revived.Itmust have been&He stretched out in the warm water and thought about what he d done, howhe d constructed the encounter.He d enjoyed doing it, which was perhaps alittle disconcerting.At the time he d been concentrating too hard to appreciateit fully, but now, replaying the scene in his mind, it brought a flush of arousal the man s face had been so responsive
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