Babypants

It will be interesting to learn in the end exactly what the AI has been up to because in Tisha's case what you are describing here falls more in the realm of need than love. As Kirababy and Guilend have both noted, the person in real danger here is Beth. So, Tisha should be doing everything in her power to drive Beth away in order to keep her safe. There are times when love really demands this sort of sacrifice, but this is not to date where Tisha's instincts are leading her. So, I'm guessing that the AI is exploring trust issues here, and using blunt force to teach Tisha that, to love, she has to dismantle the walls around her ego to let Beth in. Of course, what the AI is teaching and what Beth and Tisha are learning may not be quite the same thing ...

Terrific first season. One has to wonder how the senior management team was put together. It can't be a coincidence that Heller and crew all share the same extracurricular interests.

The trick when writing a story that avoids the predictable outcome in real life is to offer the reader a plot line that is plausible despite his/her contrary expectations. Stories that involve crime are being seriously challenged in this regard by the ubiquity of surveillance technology. How many traffic cameras did Sean trigger as he drove off? What about the tracking device in his cell phone? The onboard sensors constantly passing information from his vehicle to the manufacturer? Virtually all violent crimes that are successfully solved by the police involve a perpetrator and victim who are acquainted. It is the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time crimes that go unsolved. In The Collector, John Fowles avoided the problem of police involvement by the simple device of having his kidnapper twice take victims whom he was stalking but with whom he had no prior contact.

Kidnapping someone whom you have been dating is a really dumb idea. Once the police become involved, Sean will become a "person of interest" in very short order. And once law enforcement discovers that he has the proverbial cabin in the woods, he's doomed. In 96 hours tops, a SWAT team complemented by FBI from the nearest field office will be at his door. He had better make these hours count.

Laughs. Will Clark's initiation into chastity also be ritualized in the boardroom? This story calls to mind a famous exchange at a high society dinner party, sometimes attributed to Bernard Shaw, or Churchill, or Mark Twain. A gentleman walks up to a well-to-do lady and, without preamble, asks if she would sleep with him for a million pounds. Of course, she replies. And, he follows up, would you sleep with me for a pound? Of course not, she scoffs; "what do you think I am?" "Madam," our worthy protagonist retorts, "we have already established what you are. We are now haggling about the price." It strikes me that Clark is paying an unusual form of tuition to gain access to the top of the corporate ladder. The education that he is already receiving at Ms. Heller's feet over time will prove far more relevant than the classroom education that he is paying a quite different price to obtain.

On the scale of imagination hard at work, this chapter scores ten out of ten. Well done. One question, though: did Clark run out the door, or waddle out?

It has been almost a year since you last updated this story. I'm sure that other readers would also like to see you carry on. It occurred to me that one way to structure these last two weekly settings would be to start on Sunday at age 10, and during the first week reduce the age by one year each morning, with a privilege symbolic of the move from toddlerhood to childhood being taken away each day. On the second Sunday, Victor would be 3, and then 2 1/2 (MO), 2 (TU), 18 months (WE), 12 months (TH), 6 months (FR), and a completely immobilized newborn on Saturday. This would be the full baby experience.

What, he asks, will Clark's starting salary come to? And does his new position come with a benefits package, in addition to the fringe benefits? Perhaps he will be able to afford an apartment of his own (assuming that his boss does not have a nursery at home waiting for his immersion in full-time babyhood). He who laughs last ...

Really good chapter. And isn't it wonderful to be a lowly intern? With the naturally downcast eyes of the lowest of the low, Clark can now check out everyone he passes in the corridors, looking for telltale signs. His forthcoming conversation with Ava should be really interesting, and I'm beginning to wonder whether Lyndie has a real job with this corporation in her near future. It would be absolutely hilarious if, in the end, Clark becomes her underling!

I've seen variations on this menu dozens of times flying Business Class on international long hauls. I am always well diapered (Molicare).

Apache is right. We don't know anything about the boy except that he calls her "mommy" and claims that he is not a baby. If he's 4 years old, then there's nothing here. If he's 14, then you have the makings of a story ... but not as a one-off. Fiction doesn't work if the characters with narrative POV don't have a backstory that makes their thoughts, words and actions plausible to the reader.

One of life's fundamental lessons that we all have to absorb is that we don't know what we don't know. It's personal experience that equips us to write about something and make it seem authentic-- and this is certainly true of the soulless universe of the corporate cubicle. You just have to keep plugging away, keep trying to fill the gaps. Even one sentence or paragraph will often do the job. Here, for example, is how you could have closed chapter 5: "Wait up," Lyndie chortled as she tried to stop giggling. Clark, she mused, was just so cute when he blushed like that! "Here," she said as she grabbed a stack of blank paper off the desk and hastily shoved it into a folder. "You've gotta learn to play the game. And one of the first rules when you're having an office fling with the boss is to have a reason for going into her office. And for God's sake, Clark, when you leave . . . make sure that you have a fresh batch of papers in your clammy little hands!"

This has been a fun read, in no small part because your young, beta male is drawn so well. Indeed, all of the lead characters have real depth. But I don't recognize the setting. In my experience, when a nobody like Clark goes into the office of a senior corporate officer, especially when said officer is an older member of the opposite sex, the rumor mill starts churning. Long interludes behind closed doors and shuttered curtains guarantee that, the second time he walks out of the office, everyone in the building will be on the gossip train. So, where are the smirks, the half smiles, the eye contact broken too quickly, that should greet Clark every time he walks down the corridor? Why doesn't he carry a sheaf of papers into her office, to give his presence their at least some verisimilitude? He has little to lose here, but the boss has a career and a reputation to protect, and he should be helping, especially in an age where every corporation fears not only litigation for sexual harassment, but the attendant bad publicity as well.

Back in chapter 30, the officer says to Trisha that "this one got all the way to the main road." This would seem to imply that there have been others caught in Trisha's web. I'm surprised that Brent, who heard this, hasn't probed Zoey.. Are they being prepped for future sale?

Love that last line. From what I read yesterday, the boards at Google and Twitter would agree with you.

LOL. A very nice twist.

Thank you for taking the time to write a chapter that addresses some of my comments attached to recent chapters. For future reference, you should know that Trisha made a serious mistake early on. What she should have done, and should still be doing at periodic intervals, is giving her victims injections (saline solution is the norm) as a form of misdirection. You want your victims to pursue a red herring while you are wearing down their ability to resist. Tactically, in this chapter it would have been a more effective lesson if she had left the doors unlocked and her victims unsupervised. They would have wasted time planning an escape that was doomed to fail from the outset. Confrontation, because it is inherently challenging in the "I dare you" sense, inspires resistance rather than undermining it. It is unclear to me whether Trisha could be making more effective use of Zoey. "Good cop, bad cop" is par for the course in these situations, but Zoey's regression may be too advanced, or her intellect and cleverness too shallow, for Trisha to make good use of her. In closing, let me ask whether or not the house is equipped with an automated sprinkler system.

In chapters 12 and 13, both see Trisha fiddling with her phone, so both know that it isn't magic they are up against. It's programming, and absent direct injection, it has to be something ingested into their bodies that responds to the phone's input. To fight back, a prisoner does not need to know the specific agent, just the delivery mechanism.

The chastity device is tangible, and therefore psychologically counterproductive because it gives him something to focus on defeating. It's the nanobots that make resistance futile because they are inside the body. How do you overcome them? I doubt if Trisha is sharing that particular piece of information with her victims!

Very well crafted chapter. I'm wondering whether you know a Lyndie in real life, and have modeled your character upon her. On this side of the pond, we would call her a "bad ass."

The chastity device seems a very odd feature of this story. Surely Trisha would use her nanobots to induce erectile dysfunction.

Interesting that you make the millennial cohort the bad guys here. As I was reading this, I was idly wondering how much stock in companies manufacturing adult diapers and other infantile gear Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul would have been purchasing during the mark-up phase for the legislation that brought the Dependent program into being. Maxwell would be ill advised to venture down this particular rabbit hole. If I may pick a few nits: 1) In real life, the girl would have slit the caregiver's throat. You never leave a threat to your rear that can divide your attention. 2) She would have shot Maxwell for the same reason-- and taken his communications gear. 3) A professional would never have gone bounding down the stairs; she would have set up a diversion in that direction beforehand, and made her exit elsewhere during the ensuing confusion. Molotov cocktails and living room curtains are, for example, a nasty combination. Of course, in real life she would have disabled the one caregiver, ambushed the second upon her return, and then set to work torturing one in front of the other. As long as you don't mind a bit of blood and gore (extracting teeth with pliers and scooping out eyeballs with grapefruit spoons are time-honored favorites), it generally takes about 45-50 seconds to extract the desired information from the person not being tortured. Disable the system, slit their throats, and off you go. A well-trained Dependent on the loose, and on a mission to bring down the corrupt system. Now, there's a story with a lot of potential because you have already created the context in which the narrative would unfold. I'm very impressed with how few words you needed to set the stage on which the action here unfolds. Well done.

I'm curious as to how the boss sanitizes her office to keep the cleaning staff from catching on. And Clark and Lyndie should be considering more possibilities ... will the boss want to take this from a 9 to 5 to a 24/7 relationship? Does she already have an adult baby at home? When something seems too good to be true, it generally isn't.

Emphasizing yet again how important it is for site administrators to review submissions carefully to make sure that the age of story characters in sexual contexts is clearly set at 18 or above. Readers should also alert the administrators when reading a story that seems ambivalent in this regard.

It was obvious from the outset where this was going, and for me your description of the date called up memories not of modern art museums (the one in Bangkok is stunning) but of the Daytona 500. I had made the mistake of buying the most expensive tickets, and found myself surrounded by people who clearly knew nothing about superspeedway racing, if they knew anything about racing at all. One encounters the same pretentiousness at the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl-- indeed, at every celebrity strewn event. There is a certain type of personality that one dreads meeting at high-end parties ... the person who, with artfully feigned world weariness, makes sure that you know that they have been to all the right places and all the right events, and are prepared to tell you in authoritative detail the meaning of it all. And here, you have captured the absurdity of it all. Well done.