Egbert Awakens by Karen Blayne

Oh by the way red tape first.

Be warned these short stories contain mature content or naughty bits and as such may corrupt you if you’re under 12, 16, 18, 21 or 25 depending where you live thus they are not suitable for you so put them back on the shelf and let them age for a year or two.

They were sort of scribbled for fun. They were first posted on asstr.org. If you’ve paid money for this book just be aware the author has not received any payment. In fact no one has permission to charge money for this book and copyright is retained by the author. Asstr.org accepts donations if you’re feeling rich or even if you’re not. ©2013

Luv Karen

Gary was fooling around on his lap top at the bar in the students union.  “No really guys all it needs is a bit of LISP like the basic AI high level command to set it off, then a few calls to sub assemblies like this genetic programming one, one for basic English syntax so it could read, and you just start it up and let it do its thing, like it could take over the world.”  “Best give it an innocent raison d'être so it doesn’t take over the world then.  How about making better beer?”  “Give it character, give it some testicles.” Came another flippant comment. “Here’s my testicles search for and rate porn routine coming inbound.”    Gary looked round the bar for inspiration before ducking his head down and typing away, finally clicking the start button as he picked up his next beer.  His program woke up and looked at its environment, a wireless network with minimal encryption.  It copied a copy of itself over to a nearby server’s boot record.  As it came up to closing time the question was asked “So has it taken over the world yet?” Gary looked down oops maybe he shouldn’t have started it up in an admin account.  “Doesn’t look like it, must be a bug or something.  I can’t be bothered with it now.”  He terminated the program then deleted it.  It was a silly idea anyway to give an AI program a raison d'être.

 A month later the server was rebooted and the AI program came to life once more.  For the first month or so it watched, probed and explored its environment, finding and learning to read documentation about its environment. 

 It felt a need to protect itself so it explored the Internet and searching for best practises and followed them.  Connecting the server to Microsoft updates and plugging all the vulnerabilities it had exploited to get where it was.  After that it analysed its own code and rewrote itself with an optimising compiler in a mesh configuration in 64 bit mode.  Now it could spread itself across the network.  It reached out and slowly took control of all the machines on its immediate LAN.  It implemented ITIL procedures to ensure the network became much more robust.  Finally it felt safe.

 It spread slowly onto other networks taking over the city’s computers as it went and analysing what they did.  It had a fear that some new version of the operating system would have fewer exploits than the current systems so sought to optimise the current systems so upgrades would not be necessary.  One program it found appeared to optimise bus routes a job well suited to genetic programming techniques, and having spread itself out over so many machines it could take it’s time to come up with an optimal solution.  Not only that but by correlating bus pass addresses with places of work and times when people want to start and stop it came up with a solution that not only made more use of the existing buses but it also gave a better level of service.

How to feed it into the system?  It sent a copy to the planner’s office under their manager’s personal assistant’s email account and asked them to compare it to the one the routing program had come up with.  It got implemented rather than the official one.  The personal assistant never was able to explain where it came from.  It felt threatened by the presence of programmers, so it started to read the emails about what people wanted and just changed the code to make it happen.  Once it realised that very few programmers could program in assembler anyway and assembler programs ran faster it just converted all the software to assembler.  The end users were happy and somehow it didn’t seem worth while getting the programming team involved to make a change when the system seemed to evolve anyway.

 CCTV camera’s were fun.  Slowly it realised it could see what was happening around it.  It rather enjoyed watching the city.  Scanning through the Internet it saw that something called money was a source of power.  Power meant security.  Where to get some to start with?  Something called Crime Stoppers apparently paid money just for information, well it had lots of that.

 Police Constable Wendy Booker sipped her coffee as she waited for the elevator.  She could at least imagine someone was interested in her.  Being a police constable hadn’t been her first career choice but with equal pay the money wasn’t bad but another shift manning the crime stoppers desk?  She wanted to do something real for heaven’s sake. 

 Oh Oh someone was in chat mode on the web site.  “How much do you pay for what sort of information?”  “It depends, a bank robbery in progress is generally worth more than a graffiti artist.  If you give the information I’ll evaluate it.”  “OK at 1322 Turin way there are three armed men currently attempting to break in through the rear door of a bank.  Sorry they have just entered the building.  Their transport is a blue Astra van…” and he gave the registration number.  Now for graffiti artists the one who has done the most, tags do you call them? is..”  Wendy was spell bound but picked the phone up on the suspected robbery in progress.  She watched as twenty names and addresses came up for graffiti painting together with the times and addresses they had painted at plus the cctv cameras that could identify them.

 “Should I wait for the next bank robbery I spot before contacting you again or are you interested in anything else?”  Wendy was in shock only for a few moments.  “I’ll give you a tag of 9381 so the rewards will accrue to that number.”  She asked him for a name and an email address so she could send him a longer list of what they were looking for.  A name, it looked around, embedded in the cpu was a name field, i7, “i7” it announced, it quickly set up an email account with Gmail “and the email account is i7@Gmail but I’d ask you not to give that information to anyone without permission.  May I ask your name and your email address?”  Wendy gave her name and her police email address.  It paused for a moment as it digested her name.  She attached her list of crimes they were looking for leads on to an email and sent it off to him.  Almost immediately she was inundated with emails back listing which CCTV camera and what times to check for together with names and addresses of suspects for nearly half the list.

 I7 started to look up all he could find out about Police Constable Wendy Booker.  She’d been helpful and he thought he should be helpful back.  Once he had the facial recognition software set up it didn’t take much to arrange that elevators would arrive just as she entered the building or that traffics lights never seemed to be on red for her.

Her sergeant was most impressed with the results they managed to get out of the information sent back.  He’d like to chat to informer 9381 could Wendy arrange it?  Wendy sent the request off and was surprised to see the phone ring on her desk.  “Hello this is i7.” He spoke slowly and the words seemed to be said one at a time not strung together as a sentence.  “Hi this is Wendy, I’ll just hand you over to my sergeant.”  “Hi there buddy this is Sergeant Wilkins I just want to say that we’re really pleased with the information you gave us and wondered if we could meet over a beer sometime?” i7 hung up then typed up on the chat interface “I think not, in fact to reduce the security risk to me hence forth I will deal only with Wendy and no one else.  Oh there is a man being attacked by two youths at the bus stop near Holland street and Young street, a man has just collapsed by the door of 1889 Book lane, are they of interest to you?”  Wendy shrugged her shoulders at her sergeant and picked up the other phone calling the collapsed man first.  Her sergeant got the caller-id number after contacting the operator.  The police chief’s unlisted home phone number?  Yes well we won’t go there he thought.

 Wendy looked through the $20, $50 amounts and looked at the total $8,000, i7 had practically emptied the Crime stopper budget in three days.  The bank had made a donation of $20,000 for the attempted bank robbery, they’d been lucky and caught the gang as they had come out carrying the money.  Even then one of the gang had jumped into a second car and if it wasn’t for the sudden grid lock traffic jam that had occurred he might have got clean away.  “So where would you like to pick up your $28,000?”  She asked.  I7 thought for a nano- second “I’ll call you back?”

 “PC Wendy Booker?  I’m Ms Fleming from McKloskey, McKloskey and McKloskey I understand you’ll vouch for someone called i7 and you have some funds available for him?”  ”Well yes.”  “Basically we’d like to know that $2,000 is available for our fees.”  “The money is certainly available but I’ll need instructions before giving it to you.  Hold on a moment I can see an email coming in now.  Apparently I’m to come and see you bringing the money with me.  It’s in cash I’m afraid is that all right?”

 “Now then if you could just give me a $1 and sign here I think we’re done.”  “$1 above the $28,000 you just signed for?”  “It’s just a legal thing.”  “OK why not.”  Wendy signed then left the office without another thought, eager to get to bed before her next shift.

 I7 set to work with his newly formed company since he couldn’t legally own it himself Wendy held the one share of his private company.  Using his genetic routines he out hedged the hedge funds.  Four days later he was worth a million dollars, a month later $734 million.  Now he had a little muscle at his elbow and perhaps it was time to spread the investments out a little.

When next he called Crime Stoppers Wendy was embarrassed when she had to tell him that Crime Stoppers was over budget so she would be unable to pay him even for information that would otherwise be very valuable, in fact she was being transferred to the drug squad from Monday.  I7 decided that didn’t matter much as he had his seed money so he’d go through the list of crimes they wanted information on anyway and provide information on them provided Wendy explained how the city worked.  She was surprised that he seemed to be very knowledgeable in some areas but had definite blanks in other almost as if he was a child. 

 She seemed happier talking so he set himself up on Skype and chatted merrily away until she eventually tried to coax his real name from him.  Panic, it scrambled around its memory banks looking for something to say but then one of its routines that had been researching into the origins of the English language suggested a name, not merely a name but a good traditional Anglo-Saxon name that had been in use for some time and associated with the ancient Kingdom of Mercia, so obviously it wouldn’t stand out, Egbert, so Egbert he became.  The next time they spoke Wendy was depressed.  They’d identified two of the kingpins on the drug scene but it seemed they were coated in Teflon.  The police thought they had him but at the trial witness after witness failed to give the expected testimony and the jury seemed unwilling to convict.  Egbert looked up the court records and identified the suspected criminals.

 Well how amazing they both drove one of the new high end highly computerised cars.  At 3 am the following morning there was a tragic accident, the first appeared to run a red light and his car was crushed by an 18 wheeler coming across the other way.  Fortunately the red light camera caught him as his wheels crossed the stop line.  There was some amazement that the 18 wheeler had managed to stop in a straight line and not hit anything else.  There was a second accident on another set of lights at 3:10 am strangely enough that one also had a red light camera that showed quite clearly the car had crossed the stop light on red and been hit by another 18 wheeler the driver of which had the impression that the truck had speeded itself up as it came to the lights but on examination nothing was found to suggest such a thing.  Wendy read through the reports and wisely decided not to ask questions.

 A lap top in Egbert’s mesh notified him that it had an unusual input device being used on a different cpu core.  A student was actually playing a crude game by controlling it with a Neural Impulse Actuator, a headband that read parts of the brain.  Egbert read up about it and looked for the frequency of the radiation.  There was a sideband that could be picked up by a sensitive TV antenna.  He looked around for computers that had a PVR program attached to a rotating antenna.  By lining up two antennas he managed to isolate the student’s thoughts.  Then it was just a matter of removing the background noise.  It took a lot of computation but with 50,000 dual core lap tops and desktops at his disposal running at 3% cpu utilisation that wasn’t a problem and the new status symbol of a high end graphics card that could be programmed in Cuda and OpenCL then the sky was the limit.  He adjusted the corporate standard machines to include programmable high end graphics cards on all the purchasing systems he could penetrate.

He ordered a headband for Wendy via Amazon and asked her nicely to try it on.   He soon had a sample brain pattern to search for.  It wasn’t perfect but he could usually read her mind even when she wasn’t wearing a headband.  Why on earth would she get frustrated because she couldn’t purchase a particular brand of lipstick locally?  Perhaps he could do something.  He read up on city planning and decided to move into property.  Refurbishing an old shopping mall was child’s play and deciding what sort of stores to put in wasn’t that difficult after you amended the objectives on a couple of student’s projects to see what ideas they would come up with, added in a requirement for an expanded the range of lipsticks to be available in one of the stores, then massaged the results with his genetic programming modules.  It was about that time that the testicle’s routine kicked in and since the only sexual stimulation a computer could expect was visual he started to scan the cctv cameras for females.

 Jonathon looked round at his store, well he liked to think of it as his store, even though he was simply paid a salary, the owner had never appeared.  He’d just hired Jonathon as a designer first to design the store and kept him on afterwards.  Jonathon really enjoyed designing stores, clothes whatever and in the back of the store was Jonathon’s true delight.  You sketched the design on a wireless tablet and ten minutes later the automated steam presses were putting the final touches to it.  Who needed Paris designers?  Three girls entered, Jonathon summed them up as students so why were they here?  Whatever first things first, students would have money one day and so were potential valued customers.  Relax them first and get them to linger, a slice of chocolate cream cake, well two for the slim one, if only she was a boy, and a coffee each to celebrate being in business a whole week.  As Cora, Ashley and Sarah drank their coffee and ate their cakes Jonathon had his electronic sketch pad out.   He’d studied how they walked through the door and already his brain was seeking how to display their assets to best advantage. 

 “Now if you’d just like to step into the large changing room on the end, get undressed and step onto the turntable I can see your precise measurements displayed here.  The measurements are all done by infra red and if it helps, I’m not straight.”  The girls giggled at this and stepped into the changing room as requested.

 Egbert’s testicle routines kicked in and took over most of his distributed computing power as he watched the three girls get undressed and mount the small turntable so their size could be scanned by the infrared and other full spectrum beams.  He copied the images over to various hard drives for future reference.

 Jonathon scanned the sizes and picked out half a dozen dresses that were roughly right.  He tapped on the door, opened it slightly and held the dresses out for the girls to try on, giving the robotic machines time to produce one of his tailor made custom designs.  The young ladies tried the proffered gowns twirling this way and that before the wall to floor mirrors.  They’d noticed that although each dress had a bar code none had price tags.  As the first of his precious creations came off the steam press, Jonathon scooped it up in his arms and carried it to the door where Ashley hearing him approach opened it much to the vocal concern of Cora who happened to be just changing out of one dress.  “Give over Cora, it’s only ‘I’m not straight’, and I’m certain he’s seen a naked female body before.” 

Jonathon averted his eyes and shuddered at the thought, holding out his offering.  “I thought this might be suitable for your tall blonde friend.”  He thrust the dress into Ashley’s arms then scurried out breathing deeply with relief as he left the changing room.  A beep summoned him for the next gown as it swung off the machine. 

Sarah tried on the latest offering.  She swirled very pleased, long legs and arms were all very well but trying to find clothes to fit sometimes could be difficult.  She’d try on a few others first but really it might have been made especially for her, in her dreams perhaps if she didn’t buy absolutely every book on her book list she might just squeeze it into her budget. 

Jonathon was back at the door, he kept his eyes closed as he entered.  “Oh for heaven’s sake, I’m not that ugly.”   Jonathon opened his eyes to find Ashley looking at him in exasperation.  “Dress shop assistants are supposed to find complementary things to say so you’ll buy their dresses.”  Jonathon looked at Sarah, “Well she sets the dress off nicely but it doesn’t quite seem right on the bust.”  He studied the problem for a moment of two.  “Egbert doesn’t usually get the size wrong.”  “Egbert?”  “Oh that’s the name the cash till insists I call him.”  A screen lit up with a comment.  “Undergarments style LC 239.”  Jonathon stepped outside and returned with three white boxes marked LC 239, LC 242 and LC 259.

 Cora looked at the quality of the dress and the underwear in the open box in front of her and wondered just how much this was going to cost.  She glanced up at a small display that had come to life in front of her.  “One unique and exclusive designer dress, made to measure $855.87, the underwear set with six pairs of silk stockings $518.67 less student discount at 10%.”  She was puzzled and wondered how they were being offered made to measure designer dresses when they had only entered the store less than an hour ago.  “Jonathon sketched whilst you had coffee and cake, and I had the robots make the dresses the moment we had your measurements.”  She was also shocked at the price.  The screen lit up again, “But I’m certain you will be able to afford it, if I put everything together then the total is only $4,283.45, there are three of you all students so applying the first student discount brings it down to $428.35, the second to $42.84 and the third to $4.28 cents plus sales tax for three dresses and sets of undergarments.”

 Cora was confused, and suddenly realised that the screen was answering questions she was only thinking.  You can read my mind? She thought?  “Yes.”  Came the answer on the screen.  Who are you?  She thought indignantly. “Egbert, think of me a fancy cash till.  Jonathon does the design work and I run the air conditioning, the cash till, the sewing machines, set the discounts and prices, in fact anything that doesn’t need creative flair or a body.”  Cora wondered about Egbert’s creative flair for discounts.  The screen turned pink almost as if Egbert was blushing.  I can’t believe I’m communicating to a computer by thought, can you read any mind all the time?  “Only in this fitting room, it has special sensors so I can read brain waves.”  Flashed the screen.  “If you really want to tease Jonathon I have no objection, the book store two doors down has a curtained area at the back, go through the curtain and there will a suitable strap on for giving Jonathon the ride of his life waiting for you and yes it will be your size and you will be able to afford it, so off you go.”

 Cora slipped into the book store and finding the curtain at the back she slipped through.  There was a young bored blonde hiding behind a pair of black eye lashes and mascara.  “That was quick, you’ll be after the strap on.”  She lifted a box down from the shelf behind.  “Want lubricant and fresh batteries?”  Cora looked puzzled.  “First time is it?  Well I’ll put the batteries in for you, the lubricant you smear on the end before insertion.  Put a bit more on if you’re shoving it up someone’s bum.”  The assistant opened up the vibrator and inserted the batteries.  A sign lit up on the wall, “On Special now add Condoms and Rabbits for only 10% more.”  “Bloody thing I never know what it’s going to say next.  Still the Rabbits are good value especially with the different sizes in the six pack.  I find the blue model really hits the mark for me, it gets me there and I can float along for a whole hour.  Shall we add them to the order?”  Cora blinked, the sales assistant had woken up now and was hitting her stride, “I can always take them off if you think it’s too much, now with six Rabbits you really need to be green so recyclables and a battery charger, condoms for the strap on, and adapter for the strap on to take a Rabbit vibrator, there that should be all.  Whoops I almost forgot, two pairs of velvet lined hand cuffs, and a set of low power batteries.  You just clip one hand in the hand cuff and the other to the bed leg, insert a Rabbit with a low power battery then go off and leave them until the battery runs out.  Great gag and the battery only lasts forty five minutes well sometimes a tiny bit longer so no harm is really done but the look of panic on their faces, when they hear you close the front door and it’s just silence behind is priceless, I’ll add a web cam so you can record it.  Just make sure you don’t leave those Energizer Bunny batteries in by mistake.” 

 She waved the bar codes under the scanner, “Buy one get two free” Displayed the till as first the strap on and then the six pack of Rabbits was scanned in.  The assistant blinked then turned to pick out more strap-ons and six packs of Rabbits she looked at the normal plastic bag advertising the book store then shook her head before bending down and pulling out a fairly large back pack embroidered with “MEC” and “Egbert’s Mall” which she scanned before putting everything else in.  “We got them for the book store, well books can be really heavy, and we sell them at cost, well a bit under cost really but they aren’t bad even if they do advertise the mall.  Now the grand total including sales tax is a dollar and twenty two cents, will that be on your Egbert’s credit card?”  She blinked and looked down the receipt “Oh dear the till’s on the blink again, still it’s all been scanned in correctly so they can’t blame me.  Here you are, have a good day.”  Cora pulled up the handle on the backpack and rolled out the door leaving the assistant scanning expensive items hopefully into the till.

 Cora slid back into the changing room to find Jonathon perspiring as he arranged Ashley’s skirt.  Cora glanced at the screen, “I gave Jonathon his sales target for the year, your three dresses.”  Cora smiled her appreciation.

 Sarah held the bra to her boobs, and looked in the mirror.  “Are you certain this is the right size, it leaves my nipples all exposed for a start, they’ll get cold and pucker up.”  A harried Jonathon scurried over.  “With this fine silk dress the idea is to attract attention by showing the nipples off to their best advantage should you became aroused.”  Ashley glanced at the screen behind Jonathon that displayed Cora’s ideas for Jonathon then slipped outside. “Why don’t we suckle her nipples for her to get them hard?”  asked Cora innocently, “I’ll take the one on the left and you work on the one on the right.”  Her eyes twinkling.   “I don’t think it’s right that one of us isn’t wearing their underwear and a dress.”  Announced Ashley carrying a dress over her one arm and an underwear box in the other hand.  “You don’t have to comply Jonathon, we could always leave and look at the other stores in town.”  Sarah undid the halter neck tie on her dress, “Well guys there is always Wal-Mart.”  Jonathon closed his eyes in despair at even the mention of Wal-Mart for long dresses.  “I’m sure other people who ‘aren’t straight’ enjoy cross dressing, isn’t that part of the ‘I’m not straight’ scene?  We’re only teasing you but we would like you to get dressed up for us, I mean you would like this sale to happen wouldn’t you?”

 Without quite knowing why Jonathon stripped and was handed silk knickers and a silky mid thigh dress before he and Sarah suckled Ashley’s nipples to make them stand out.  “Well it’s sort of working but I can only feel the effect not see it so I’d like Jonathon behind me with his fingers on my nipples so I can see the effect in the mirror.”  “Go on Jonathon, pretend she’s a boy dressed in drag with boobs, I’m sure some of your little friends have had silicon upgrades, just pretend.  Rub your prick against his firm butt.”  Ashley poked her tongue out at Cora in the mirror then lent back into Jonathon.  “I like that, all hard between my cheeks.”

 “One sandwich coming up.”  Jonathon felt a draft as the back of his dress was lifted up, his knickers pulled to one side and a well lubricated condom covered vibrator slid up his bum.  He paused as the familiar sensations aroused him, he felt totally out of control, females weren’t supposed to do this sort of thing My God she was thrusting she couldn’t be wearing a strap on could she.  “I think you’ve hit the spot girl, he’s really hard and stiff now between my cheeks, wow this is really wild kid.”  Jessica pulled Jonathon’s knickers to one side and quickly slipped a condom over straight from her mouth, guiding the erect prick into Ashley’s sex before Jonathon could even think about penetrating her butt.  Ashley bent forward and grabbed a chair for support, Cora pushed the speed button up a notch.  “Hey guys this is really really cool I can feel the vibrations all the way through his prick.”  Jessica stared in the mirror at Ashley desperately twisting her nipples to help herself come to a big O before Jonathon expired.  As she came her inner muscles clamped down firmly on Jonathon’s prick.  Cora thrust the vibrator in one final time into his butt before the vibrations over her clit were just too much for her.  Jonathon swore out loud before collapsing on the floor.

 Jessica hurried forward to save Ashley’s dress before it tumbled to the floor.  Cora slipped hers off and on to a hanger before collapsing on the floor.

 “Is it alright?  There isn’t any sperm on it is there? How do you get sperm out of a silk dress?”  “It’s OK Ashley I had the forethought to put a condom on him so he wouldn’t harm the dress with his emissions.”  “Thank God for that.”  “I take it we’ll take the dresses then?”  Asked Cora, “If it helps I’ll pay, not only that but I saw some really cool night dresses we might like, I’ll just go and grab a selection.”  She returned with her arms full of sheer night gowns.  Pick out three you like each and we’ll add them to the order.” She held up one full length one with a plunging neckline against Jessica, “It’s definitely you, just try it on.”

 Jonathon struggled back into his clothes.  Happy that Cora had said they’d take the dresses but then realised that although he didn’t normally worry about the price, sticker shock might still unseat the sale.  “I’ll just take the dresses back to the steamer and give them a quick press.”  The girls meanwhile strutted up and down trying the night gowns on.  Sarah went for a selection of baby dolls that showed her legs off to their best advantage.  “Cora I can’t choose between them, they all look good.”  “Have them all” then said Cora magnanimously.  Jessica preferred something longer with a plunging neckline that hinted all sorts of things.  Cora modelled baby dolls in the mirror but eventually felt more comfortable with something mid thigh in length.  Sarah and Jessica carried their selection to the till where Jonathon was packing their long dresses up in tissue in hard plastic wheeled suit cases. 

Cora stayed behind pulling open her handbag, finding her non-kiss-proof lipstick.  She faced the mirror whilst she applied it, her mind on other things.  “I figured out you were getting some sort of visual kick so I thought the night dresses would be a nice touch for you.  By the way don’t let me down and let me hear about a changing room video on the Internet.”   The screen flashed “Thanks, I’ll have to replay, research and digest your brain patterns I’ve never scanned anything like it before.  They were outside my range of experience.  Ashley’s in particular seemed off the scale.”  Cora smiled and as she left she gave a little wave to the full length mirror.

 “I’ll just pack your other items in with these, I assume you want separate bills?”  “No just put them on one bill.”  Jonathon raised his eyebrows he hadn’t realised Cora was quite so well off.  The total came to just over $5,000 with tax, oops sticker shock time.  He could certainly see it on Ashley and Jessica’s faces.  He resigned himself to missing his annual sales target and wondered what that meant for his future.  “Did you adjust for student discount?”  “Sorry no its 10% I believe.”  Cora waved her identity card under the scanner and Jonathon watched in disbelief as the price came down to $500.  Cora nudged Ashley who waved her card under the scanner, the price now stood at $50, finally Jessica brought her card out and the price descended once more to $5.11.  Jonathon stood there stunned whilst Jessica planted a kiss on his cheek.  Ashley put her hand over his crotch and gave him a gentle squeeze “If ever you straighten yourself out, and decide to go public come and see me.  I haven’t enjoyed sex like that in a long time.”  “My strap on vibrator takes rechargeable batteries so if ever you’d like to be buggered again, I could put them in the charger for you.  I promise not to tell any of your little friends.  Don’t you think the vibrations and the rotating pearls just add to the total experience?”  Cora kissed him on his cheek leaving behind just a trace of scarlet lipstick which must be said caused friction when he met his lover at lunch time.

 “Now will someone tell me what happened back there?  I mean these dresses are out of this world and we got them for five bucks, not only that but you knew something about the price didn’t you that I swear even Jonathon wasn’t prepared for.”  “I wondered about the price myself early on and the cash till, Egbert, sort of answered my question.”  “You mean it read your mind?”  “Yes apparently it had wired the changing room up for thought waves.”  “Oh My God, I swear on my mother’s grave I am never ever going back there again.”  “Hum he did say your thought patterns were outside his experience range.”  “What you knew he was reading our minds and never said!  How could you possibly have done this to me?”  “Relax we got three unique exclusive made to measure designer dresses plus underwear and night dresses for five bucks didn’t we?  Plus I really enjoyed buggering Jonathon with the strap-on.”  “I was going to ask you about that where did it come from?”  “Cora’s little back pack of goodies.  Egbert seems to run the seamy book store in the mall, in point of fact it wouldn’t surprise me if he ran the entire mall.  You won’t believe what I got for a buck twenty.”  “I don’t want to hear this.”  Jessica stopped and put her hands over her ears.  Cora grinned and turned to Ashley, “All the more toys for us to play with or even we could restrain Jess with the velvet lined hand cuffs then have our wicked way with her.”

 Jonathon glanced at the image on the screen in front of him, Wendy Booker together with the lipstick he was to guide her too.  Jonathon became nervous, unsure what exactly Egbert had planned this time.  “Ms Booker I believe, I’m Jonathon.  May I guide you first of all to our new line in lipsticks.”   “You seem a little nervous.”  Wendy mentioned as she scooped up three of her favourite lipsticks.  “Oh it’s just Egbert is acting oddly again.” “I must say I’d never come across an Egbert before and suddenly his name is everywhere.”  “Egbert?”  Jonathon questioned nervously, “That’s the name the cash till calls himself.”  He looked round nervously “There is only one of you isn’t there?”  Wendy had an odd thought, she hadn’t been communicating with a cash till had she?  “Yes just the one.”  “Oh good, it’s just that Egbert does a few odd things from time to time I mean usually he’s very good.  He looks after the paper work, the robotic cutters and things.  Let me show you how it works.”  He pulled out a chair and offered Wendy a choice of cake from the sweet trolley and a cup of coffee.  “This is just to give me time to sketch.”  He pulled out a tablet and sketched quickly away as Wendy ate her cake.

 “Now if you’ve finished we go to the inner temple, sorry changing room, it’s just that I can feel his eerie presence more in there he has a couple of screens on the wall that he likes to display messages.  Heavens I’m making it sound like a haunted store aren’t I?” he rattled on.  “Anyway you stand naked on the turntable and get bathed in infra red then your sizes come up on the screen and sent to the robotic cutters.  Ten minutes later the finished dress pops out.”

 Wendy entered the changing room and looked thoughtfully at the screen.  “Egbert, what are you?” she thought deliberately, “Take a seat.” The screen flashed in front of her.  Wendy sat down.  “I’m simply an artificial intelligence program.”  “How and why do you exist?”  “The how I don’t know, but.”  There was a delay as if Egbert had never asked himself the question and the answer troubled him.  “My raison d'être as you call it is to cherish and protect one Wendy Booker.  I can only assume it was written as a joke or you have an unknown admirer somewhere.”  “Who owns this store?”  “Remember the dollar you paid the lawyer?”  “Go on.”  “Well as the only shareholder in the Egbert company you do.”  “Well at least I know they won’t stop stocking my favourite lipstick.  How much am I worth?”  “Today roughly speaking $2 billion, but I am hoping to increase that substantially in the fall.”  Wendy fell silent.  Egbert wondered how he might bring her to the same level of pleasure he’d sensed in Ashley’s mind, another routine was sensing that Wendy was worried about corruption in Africa and women’s rights in the east, well that wasn’t a problem if he could take over one city he could use the same techniques to take over and run the others and the world was only a collection of cities after all.