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PROMETHEUS

L ucian Ward Rucker stood silently in the sterile, smooth-walled observation booth.

He was, uncharacteristically, alone.

He’d come without even Victor, which was practically an accomplishment on its own, and usually required tying Victor to a chair, or throwing him out of a moving vehicle and locking the doors. His longtime personal assistant rarely dared wander out of Lucian’s shouting distance for any reason… primarily because he was a spineless worm who knew precisely what would happen to him if he did not happen to be there when Lucian wanted him.

Still, the thing that bored Lucian about Victor was also the thing that made him invaluable. Loyalty was invaluable.

Unquestioning, unhesitating loyalty was all that truly mattered in an employee.

In the end, it was the only true requirement. Anyone who broke that trust in Lucian was not only blacklisted from his companies, his personal presence, and any part of his social orbit, but they would be utterly and completely destroyed without mercy.

It was the reason Victor was still around, when most of Lucian’s employees were not. Lucian even brought the obsequious little toad with him on his honeymoon.

He smirked at the memory.

Gabriela had not been pleased.

Perhaps that had been the beginning of the end of his shortest marriage yet.

The death knell, of course, had been Gabriela finding him in their hot tub at home in San Francisco, a few weeks later, getting his cock sucked by that black-haired, teenaged starlet he’d met at one gala or another. He hadn’t specifically meant to be caught that way; he’d thought his lovely, naive, doting, imbecilic new wife would be at her modeling job in Zurich, or possibly Oslo, or… wherever… but she’d come home a few days early.

Well, or perhaps he’d gotten the dates wrong. He’d never listened that closely when she spoke of her work. Her work was trivial garbage, anyway, unworthy of him spending any portion of his mind on, so what did it matter?

It certainly did not matter now.

He’d found much more intriguing companionship since Gabriela.

The thought made his cock twitch inside tight, designer jeans. He glanced at the clock, smiling a little in spite of himself.

Their anniversary was coming. It was sometime this month. What would he do for this one? What would he give her? What would he have her give to him?

Two whole years. Or was it three years now?

He glanced upward in thought.

Three. He brought her to Rome at the end of their first year together.

Last year, it had been the Maldives.

It was unbelievable it had been so long, yet he could not imagine life without her. He never tired of her, never grew weary of her face, her body, the sounds she made, her smell. He never grew tired of any part of her. Never.

That was beyond rare, beyond incredible.

It made her a miracle. It made her a goddess.

He glanced at the clock again, forgetting he’d just done so.

God, moving her to San Francisco had been his best idea yet.

He’d kept her in Europe for almost all of those three years, at his place in Morocco, knowing the authorities would look the other way if anyone did happen to notice anything. He’d had her in Dubai for a short while after that, for pretty much for the same reason.

But now, all the big things in Lucian’s life were happening in the United States.

His companies were all based here, in San Francisco.

He’d wanted her with him, all the time, not just when he could pull himself away from work. All the private jets in the world couldn’t close the distance fast enough to scratch that itch as often as he wanted. In the end, he’d decided the risks could be damned. He had his house modified to accommodate her, loaded her on his jet, and moved her here to live with him full time about three months ago.

She was a distraction, but genius needed time to recharge, did it not?

Brilliant minds required outlets, recreation.

He could already feel himself losing interest in the view overlooking his labs.

Still, he would make her wait a little longer.

He liked her hungry.

He liked her hungry, wet, grateful… most of all, amenable to his demands. As power kicks went, he doubted he’d ever tire of this one, or of just how amenable she could be, no matter what his insistence, no matter what his whim, no matter how bizarre he got, or depraved.

Absolutely fucking insatiable.

She was, by far, the best purchase he had ever made.

That even included the companies that had made him billions in the years since he acquired them. Companies came and went. There were millions, tens of millions of companies out there, all waiting to be acquired, all waiting for the touch of Lucian’s golden hand. His pet, on the other hand, was rare beyond rare… one of a breed so exceedingly rare, he doubted there could be more than a handful left in existence.

He’d never encountered a creature who liked cock so much. He’d never bedded a female so utterly unable to get her fill of being fucked brutally and often. He grinned as his erection fattened more. He shifted his weight between his feet, and refolded his arms.

He didn’t have to rush. He still had that party to go to in North Beach.

Of course, he could bring her with him to that.

He could have his driver go fetch her, drive her down to the bar to meet him wearing nothing but a see-through top, six-inch heels, black thigh-highs under a schoolgirl’s plaid skirt, jacked up so high every male in the place would yearn to stick their fingers between her legs, a collar around her pretty neck.

He quite liked dressing her, and demanding she wear the most revealing, degrading, slave-like ensembles he could think up. He would search porn sites and fetish sites and anime sites for hours sometimes, looking for just the perfect thing, just the detail or extravagance that would have every asshole he knew positively raging with envy when they saw her.

He’d always enjoyed instructing his women on how to perform for him in front of an audience. Most weren’t as pliant as this creature, of course; even after all this time, he was still testing the limits of just how far she would conform to his most outrageous fantasies when it came to public exhibitionism.

He quite liked the idea of showing her off with this crowd, especially.

They had never seen her before; he’d been waiting for the right time to present her, the right collection of his peers. He knew she would evoke insane jealousy, even fury in some of his rivals. But would any of them even know what she was? Would they guess that her eyes were real, not contact lenses or cosmetic surgery?

Would they know what it meant? How rare and precious she was?

Just how much she had likely cost?

He was intrigued to find out.

He loved the risk it entailed, parading her around openly, brazenly.

He loved the thought that some of them might know, and hate him even more.

What occurred in the lab below was far more important in the broader scheme of things. It was significant to more than just himself; it was important to the entire world. But the thought of bringing out his little trinket for show was a lot more fun.

He grunted as he refocused on the lab.

It would help if he had a team with half the brains he needed.

As it was, he could not afford to take his eyes off his fucking employees for even one second. He’d learned long ago, he could rely on no one but himself. Even the best scientists he could find were too risk-adverse, too chained to their primitive belief systems. They were too constrained by outdated ideologies and narrow views of what is possible.

Men of vision always shouldered the burden of the cowards who surrounded them.

Lucian didn’t exactly have the government or the industry regulators or even much of Wall Street on his side. He was a rogue in his field, which suited him, but it meant high risk with the high reward. Thus the secret lab. Thus the extensive bribing of customs officials. Thus the siloing of scientists to keep them away from one another, to keep them from knowing too much about the overall project. Thus his shadow investors, not to mention his people in government, inside regulatory bodies, artificially pumping his assets on Wall Street, and on the world markets, pre-selling them to competing governments… and so on.

The whole point of being rich was to not have to give a fuck about any of that.

It also meant not being burdened by outdated views of morality or ethics.

Small minds always wanted to restrain genius.

It was why they remained small.

On the plus side, everyone had a price. Lucian had few real impediments these days, and would have none at all once his project was successful.

A tone vibrated softly in his ear.

Lucian used his mind to trigger the augmented reality interface.

The view morphed and changed around him––oddly subtle, but with noticeable quirks. He glanced at a deep-black, spiky-tailed dragon where it clung to the window to his right, then scanned the words on the virtual text bubble that appeared in front of him.

Check news, the message read. Stock spiked ten points from latest social media campaign. Investors pleased.

An emoji of a smiling devil leered at the end.

A second emoji followed it, of a knife.

Lucian Ward Rucker, “Luc” to the media… and sometimes to his friends… and especially to anyone who wanted to ingratiate themselves, which was everyone… smiled. He chuckled a little when he re-read the message.

Some days, it was difficult not to feel like a god.

Still, it rankled him that his investors were always surprised.

He was tired of people underestimating him, even if he knew he should be glad of it. It meant he could roll out his plans unhindered, even as lesser minds thought they were manipulating and constraining him. Underestimating him was inevitably their downfall.

But yes, it rankled.

He was fucking Prometheus.

If they could not understand it, they could at least get the fuck out of his way. They were more like Sisyphus, wondering why the rock rolled down on top of them every time, instead of reaching the top of the mountain, like he did. The old guard was a little too used to seeing themselves as kingmakers, as the men holding the puppet’s strings.

The end of their era had come, too.

Roland Rucker, his father, had been one of those. He was an impressive man, an impossible to please man, but he hadn’t attained the heights of his son. There had been a half-dozen bestsellers written about Lucian already, and books would continue to be written about Lucian long after he was dead.

His father saw money as the penultimate goal.

Roland James Rucker had been content to do that invisibly, in the shadows, pulling the levers of power while remaining faceless and unknown. He didn’t care if no one ever recognized him, if no one had heard of his name.

Lucian had no intention of living in the shadows.

He didn’t believe in it, even if it might have made him safer.

Truthfully, he loved the notoriety, too.

What was the point of manifesting extraordinary things, if no one knew you were their author? No, Lucian didn’t give two shits about being “safe.”

He liked living dangerously.

He liked being infamous, notorious, feared, even more than he liked being adored.

He checked the time inside the augmented reality view that made the empty observation room glow and blink and swirl, then shut it off.

He’d waited long enough.

It was time.

The car waited for him downstairs.

He would wait on revealing his bauble. There would be time enough for that later.

It was time to make his entrance as the king of kings.

He made his way unhurriedly down the black-metal, circular stair that led to a private elevator only he and Victor could operate via their augmented reality headsets. He stepped through the elevator doors––doors he’d spent a ridiculous amount of money to have programmed to make the sound of the original Star Trek television show doors when they opened and closed––and turned his augmented reality back on.

He hit through the virtual keys.

The dragon puffed blue fire at him from over his shoulder. Lucian’s hands changed inside the virtual interface, too. He noticed he still wore the metal gloves from his last little game with his pet, where he’d been her torturer in a medieval dungeon.

The thought made his cock hard all over again.

He thought about his pet the entire ride up from the basement floors.

He thought about what he wanted for their anniversary.

The elevator reached its destination, the doors pinged, and made the Star Trek noise again as they opened. Lucian walked down a dark passageway decorated with virtual paintings, opened the thick metal door that led to the back lot of the building.

He stepped outside into the cold night wind, which gusted around the South San Francisco building in icy blasts of brine-smelling air.

He didn’t hear a thing.

He felt, somehow, something unusual was happening.

Something unprecedented.

Something spiritual, perhaps, like when he last did L.S.D.

There was a strange sensation of pressure. His ears rang. Color and light exploded behind his eyes. He felt himself moving backwards, possibly even very rapidly, but he felt weightless, and it didn’t hurt.

The sound echoed only after it was done.

It filled his ears, rolling, thunder-like.

It lingered there, an echoing report that blanked out all thought in his highly exceptional mind. Sunlight flashed despite the darkness of the night. Everything went very very bright, like the sun had come out only for him, only inside his mind. He imagined himself looking into it. He imagined some meaning there.

Then, the light of that sun began to fade.

Lucian Ward Rucker… “Luc” to the media and to absolutely none of his friends, as for years and years he’d felt he didn’t really have any, a thought that made him sad sometimes at night, although he never would have admitted it… lost the light of that shocking sun.

He fell into darkness and silence and oblivion so effortlessly and uneventfully, it was as if he’d never existed at all.