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45. My Investigation I would probably have gone back to my own office, taking a shortcut through one of Upper Ashfields’s many parks to avoid the roads. There had to be something I could think of on the way. Some method to find out who had discovered my secret, or was close to doing so. But before I could deal with my own problems, I needed to make sure Tess was safe. She was my little girl now, and I needed to protect her from bad influences as much as I could. So I went out into the park and took the long way around. I found cousin John on my phone, with a brand new number in a Mediterranean tax haven. “Hey, John!” I said cheerfully, trying to mask the anxiety in my voice. I didn’t want to worry him, but I needed to know what he knew about this guy with his eye on Tess; and I could only hope that the Naylors knew of some wedge that had allowed them to ensure he kept his distance. “Hi„” he sounded lethargic. He must have been under a lot of stress, or perhaps it was just early morning in San Lorenzo. “Uhh… Gabby, is it?” “Yes. I hope I’m not disturbing you. I was just… I was a little worried about this character Tess has been hanging around with, and I hoped you could give me a little advice. I think you must have dealt with him before, but I don’t know Tess that well, and I’m having trouble getting through to her. I really don’t want to see that little girl hurt.” “I think she’s not a little girl anymore,” he answered, and this time I was sure I could hear the sound of regret. He missed his baby too; and I knew he would be happy to see her again, back to the perfect little angel with no inclination to rebel. “Her friends… You mean Spike, right?” “Young man struggling to grow a beard? Comes from a questionable background, thinks it’s appropriate to talk about drugs and crime as if it’s no big deal.” I really hoped I could impress the seriousness of the situation on him, despite the distance. “Yeah. Poor kid, he’s had some trouble with his family. Won’t stop trying to rescue his mum after she’s given up on herself. It’s disheartening, but you have to respect that. We let him stay at our place a few times, crash on the sofa when his stepdad was being worse than usual. I thought he should have seen someone professional, or gotten in touch with social services. But there’s no help for a kid like that, so we just have to do what we can.” “I’m worried. Tess believes everything he says. You know how impressionable girls can be. She’ll trust him once, and then regret it forever. Someone her age shouldn’t have somebody like that in her life.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.” “I said, guys that age are only after one thing. You should know that better than I do. And I don’t feel comfortable with Tess spending so much time with one. You let him stay? How could you be sure he wouldn’t take advantage of the situation?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I had to be respectful. To sound like I was being supportive, like I just wanted to protect their daughter. I couldn’t believe that my cousin would be so negligent with his precious child, but I couldn’t let my disappointment show if I wanted to get anything useful out of them. “Gabby,” he said with a sigh. “I think you’re overreacting a little. Tess said that you didn’t seem too friendly with Spike, but I can assure you he doesn’t intend anything inappropriate.” “I wish I could be so sure. I can’t trust a young man of that age, no matter how pretty his words are.” “Then trust me. I’ve spoken to the boy. I taught him to cook, he always wanted to do his share when he was at our place. I guess I was a substitute father figure, because he hasn’t had one since his dad died. He’s been like a brother to Tess the last year, keeping her safe at school. And if you’re thinking that even nice guys let their hormones take over, then don’t.” “You really think there’s a teenage student who can control himself around a pretty girl?” “He can. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Spike is gay. He’s not said it directly, but it’s easy to see once you get to know him. Pretty sure that’s why his stepdad has such a problem with him. Why he’s scared to go home and he needs a place to stay. That’s something you can empathise with, isn’t it?” “I… guess?” I answered, and that one comment surprised me enough that I had to stop and think for a moment. I’d been expecting him to say that the young man was so sweet, and I knew that they could always put on that mask when they needed to. Or that he was just a boy, no worse than the rest. That particular excuse had been completely unexpected. “But still, would you leave them together unsupervised?” “Probably. I trust my daughter. You don’t know them like we do. Either of them. It’s been a couple of months, but…” I heard some mumbling on the other end of the phone, but no words that I could make out. And then he was back. “Look, it’s not the best time right now. How about we talk later, and I’ll see what we make of your concerns. I want Tess to be safe and happy, that’s the most important thing to me. But this sounds like an instinctive reaction, a kind of judgement without all the facts. I really think that if you knew a little bit more about the situation, you would be able to cut the kid a little slack. Look, can you call back later? You can check our calendar on FriendSpace, right? Call back after work, when we’re both fresh. This isn’t a conversation for this time of day.” “Yeah,” We did the usual pleasantries and I hung up, feeling just as exhausted as John had sounded. I just wanted to protect my little. I might feel a little sympathy if the kid was gay, but why did that make any difference? I still didn’t want him perving at my perfect little angel. I couldn’t think about it for too long, because I knew I would need to get back to work. And perhaps try to figure out some clues to my more immediate problem. My position with corporate was precarious enough; and while impressing the guys from Claughton could give me a boost, any revelation of my taste in fanfic had the potential to bring me right down again. I looked around. I was surrounded by bushes now, which were surprisingly pink despite the season. There were so many parks in this town, I still didn’t know them all. But it wasn’t hard to find a signpost, with directions to all the major nexuses by foot, cycle, and road. James Street, according to the little roundel at the top of the post. Not an area I knew well, but it was never hard to find your way around Upper Ashfields. It took me five minutes of jogging to get back to the Fitzgerald Building. I’d already started forming suspicions about what might have happened. I had nothing concrete to base them on, only wild guesses, but there were two designers who had made no secret of their hatred for being managed. They thought they should be in charge, like this was some startup operation with no structure, and they were probably determined to do whatever it took to discredit me. Perhaps they felt like they would be at the top of the totem pole if a scandal could crop up. Just like my predecessor in this role, Mr Gently. I didn’t know how those two could have gotten around the normal logging on the printers; or how they could possibly have found out what I was reading in my free time. But when I imagined them laughing at me, I knew there was no doubt they were the ones responsible. I strode into the office with my head held high. There was no way they would disrupt my work so easily. “Belle?” I called over to the girl who was currently manning the front desk. “Tell Klimt and Hagen that I would like to see them both. I believe there’s space in my calendar at two. Separately, if possible.” I looked down at her, almost trembling as she tapped the keys. Had I just interrupted her in the middle of writing an illicit email to her boyfriend on an office PC, or browsing sites that the company would disapprove of? While that was completely unprofessional, and I knew she would have to learn better before she could be trusted with any kind of responsibility, that wasn’t the issue right now. This girl had been shunted mercilessly from one office to another, and she deserved a little leeway in her decisions. “Calm down, girl,” I said. “You’re not the one in trouble now. You haven’t done anything wrong that I’ve seen. So keep your nose clean, and you might make something of yourself one day. There’s a bright future ahead of you if you can stay focused on your work.” I didn’t wait for an answer this time. I just hoped she would realise that she would never be successful in business if she couldn’t leave her personal life at the door. If she didn’t get the message, then that was her problem. I felt a little bad about that; she was a nice girl, and the world had already dealt her a bad hand, but I wasn’t inclined to bend the rules just because an employee happened to be cute. Sooner or later, she would make a choice between professionalism and her private life; while I was busy enough with my own duties. 46. My Kind of People Back in my office, I fired up the computer and made a start on my work. Or the bureaucracy that surrounded my work, at any rate. Timesheets and client billings, rights accesses, and tracking of assets. Within an hour of staring at numbers, it felt like my brains were beginning to dribble out of my ears. I shrugged, and opened up my web browser. A separate window, so that anything I looked at wouldn’t appear when somebody from corporate went snooping in my history. I went straight to the FetishLibrary; a site which held fiction on all kinds of subjects in spite of the more salacious name. There were so many interesting tales on there, and for some of them it wasn’t entirely clear if they were true stories. And perhaps most importantly, one of the factors that had led to its success, there was an incredibly sophisticated tagging system that made it easy to find exactly the kind of stories you were interested in. There were no updates on the stories I was following, but that didn’t surprise me. But I wasn’t particularly interested in stories today; I was looking for the message board. The people on there were the most supportive, friendly group I could ever hope to meet. On the littlespace stories especially, there were people with an incredible grasp of problem solving. That was why I had posted something there on Saturday morning, when I realised that I would need to do more investigation into the mysterious printout. I had told my story there; that I’d found a part of Little Sister’s magnum opus The Baby Button on my office printer, when I was sure I hadn’t printed it out. There had been a few suggestions. It was from their comments that I realised I probably didn’t need to look for some key I had accidentally pressed, or some setting I didn’t know how to disable. They suggested that someone else could have been involved, and advised me to look for people in my office who might have a grudge against me. There was all kinds of speculation about how it could be achieved, and it seemed like the more technically-savvy people could see a hundred different ways. But the motivation was clear. It was pretty much a given that people who didn’t understand littles would have a prejudice against the whole concept. They couldn’t see that this was just a healthy way for someone to escape stress, so they wanted to destroy the lives of anyone who knew better. There were several new replies today, and my eyes must have bugged out like a cartoon character when I read the titles. I clicked on the one next to the username TheAuthorsLittleSister, blushing just a little. It was like finding out a celebrity had mentioned your name. There were a thousand people following this story now, and easily a hundred in its discussion board. A dozen new posts every day, but the actual author had responded to me. Was this my fifteen seconds of fame? “It happens to all of us,” I read under my breath, blushing just a little. This woman was practically an icon to everyone who wanted a little; respected for everything from her political commentary to the stories themselves, and before that she had been a kind of agony aunt for people trying to find their way in this strange new world. And she was admitting that she had once shared my problem. “It happened to me too. Recently, in fact. I keep hardcopies of my stories in case the site suddenly decides they don’t understand ageplay anymore. And Daddy’s printer packed in, so I thought why not use the office one. Just once, to print out the last chapter and take it home. Came to pick it up, and it wasn’t there. Just the cover page sitting on its own in the tray, with my name where anybody could have seen it. So now I’m looking around every time I hear footsteps, waiting for somebody to tell me what they want. Or for Mr Bossman to come and chew me out for having this stuff on my computer. I think the lesson we both need to take away is to not look at this stuff in the office. Maybe next time we’ll know better. I hope yours turns out to be some weird mistake, and not spyware or something.” I took a deep breath. It should have been terrifying, to think that this really was something that even the most popular authors had to deal with. But knowing that there were others in the same situation was a little reassuring. It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to. I looked at the new replies, and saw more people talking about spyware, and malware. They suggested that somebody could have put unofficial software on the computer, which would silently monitor what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about that, but it would explain where a printout had come from when I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. Would it be able to look for me visiting sites that weren’t work related and then print them out without me knowing? I could certainly believe that. I would have to read up on the subject, and then ask Matt if he could check the computer again. Of course, I wouldn’t even be able to visit that site until the problem was dealt with. Or anything that wasn’t related to my job. So I closed the forum down, made a stack of mental notes about things I might have to do in response, and focused on the work in front of me. The stack of numbers seemed to be never-ending. There were project budgets, staffing calculations, and room assignments. Percentages, too, and service level agreements. I had to work out the best guarantees to offer to our client in case there was a problem with one of the company’s services. How late could late be before they had cause to complain? How many revisions was reasonable to ask for? A project manager always had to do the math. To weigh the cost of these assurances against the likelihood of any of these clauses being invoked. I wasn’t actually a project manager, but the work had been delegated to me. And I wasn’t quite naïve enough to miss what that might imply. If I was the only person in the office the next time Jessop strolled through, he would consider me responsible for the Claughton Innovative account. And now I knew that we were looking at a seven-figure contract once all the different departments were factored in, I knew exactly why he was so determined to have someone in the office ready to be yelled at. My only break from the meeting was two interviews. The designers; the people with the biggest desire to see me fail. I asked them both if they had seen anyone acting suspicious around the printers, or anyone tampering with my computer. I told them that the IT department was involved in checking something out – they would believe that when Matt sent someone around tomorrow – and that I had reported to the internal auditors that there was evidence someone in the office was angling for promotion in an unorthodox fashion. I didn’t accuse them; that would just be pointless. I said that they were senior, and trustworthy.  That I wanted to know what they had seen, in the hope of avoiding a full investigation. And I let them know that management already knew the nature of some stolen documents. Elliot Klimt had an incredible poker face. Hagen looked down at her hands and fidgeted with a pen. It was displacement activity, something that practically screamed guilt. But only if she was always guilty of everything; the woman didn’t know how to make eye contact, or to sit still. I didn’t learn anything. But now they knew that I’d taken measures. They knew that corporate was involved. And they must know that they were missing some detail; that I had shared my browsing habits with my superiors, had not been disciplined for some misunderstanding, and that there was nothing they could hold over me. If more suspicious things happened, I would have to try something else. But if Hagen and Klimt were responsible, I was confident that this subtle harassment would stop immediately. Everything would go back to normal, because the blackmail material they’d taken such pains to procure couldn’t hurt me. I was still curious how they could have found out what I was reading in the first place, but I knew that in reality it was only a curiosity now. They could no longer hurt me.     Can anybody see what Gabby is missing here? I intended it to be relatively easy to separate Gabby's observations from her interpretation and work out what's going on; but now I'm not sure if it's as clear as I thought. What are you expecting the answer to be?

Hi, is this story going to continue, if I may ask?  Thanks 

I hope my relief won't need potty training. I am highly unqualified for that part.

Started the weekend with Northshore black and got my use out of it.  Put on Boys Goodnites XXL for my walk. (I found out that they tore up my path. Hoping this will be fixed this weekend.)  I showered and put on a Tiny Tails for church. (It was going to be a long morning. I didn't get out of there until about 2 in the afternoon.) I wore that to bed and wet it twice after waking up. I changed into a Let's Build for Sunday night, until about 6 Monday morning, so I could do my chores and get garbage out before the trucks came.  Back to work, so no padding. I'm thinking I may try cloth diapers sometime this week to see how good the new dryer in my building is.  The only thing I'm encountering at the moment is the fact that it costs more to dry than it does to wash at the moment.  Hoping that it will get fixed quickly, because it's a bit expensive. If all else fails, I'll run my laundry out here to the hotel and do it here..  

Unpotty training win?