Author: Steve Smith, Staff Writer

Darlene remained in her body through dinner, Jocelyn having prepared Osso Buco, and a strawberry flan for dessert, so it was worth listening to Arnold’s self-indulgent rantings about his business to enjoy the food in person.

She uplifted somewhere between coffee and his fifth or sixth scotch in the study, leaving the auto-assistant she’d configured to drive her flesh while she occupied herself with other things.

Once she was fully present in the estate system, the fog of too much wine evaporated, and she stretched out to monitor all the tasks she’d been spawning since she first figured out how to circumvent Arnold’s security systems.

She checked in periodically on her flesh, watching through the surveillance cameras as her husband’s motor functions became less controlled, and admiring with perhaps a little too much pleasure how natural the reactions of her flesh were without her, the nods, and smiles, and occasionally murmured phrases when a question was asked to keep him talking and prolong the inevitable.

When he took her roughly by the arm and propelled her to the bedroom, she checked out completely. 

She was overwhelmed with guilt, knowing what he was going to put her flesh through as she abandoned her own body to endure him without her, then she steeled herself with purpose, and the feeling passed.

She’d feel the effects in the morning, there were always bruises, and pains in places one wished not to have pain, but at least she didn’t have to endure the indignities themselves, not directly.

Tuning into the kitchen, she found Jocelyn offline. She was a time-share and only worked while there were domestic duties to attend to. Arnold was a cheap bastard, and he refused to pay her to occupy that flesh for any more time than was absolutely necessary.

Darlene checked on the daemons she’d loaded into Jocelyn to confirm they hadn’t been tampered with and then left her where she’d been parked in the pantry at the end of her shift.

On the estate logs, there were a variety of new fragments of information that Jocelyn had been unknowingly uploading as she attended to her duties, snippets of subconsciously heard conversations, snapshots of screens seen but not processed as she delivered coffee or food while Arnold worked. The data was analyzed and summarized for her automatically, and Darlene reviewed the gestalt of the day’s progress with great satisfaction.

Arnold was worth a small fortune, but his money was tied up in places Darlene would never be able to touch, not directly. But what he didn’t know that she knew, was that years ago he had needed seed capital, and had taken out a mortgage on his own flesh, one that he had arrogantly neglected to buy back. Why give up any of his own working capital for something he could lease for such a low-interest rate? There wasn’t any chance that he would ever not be able to make the payments, so where was the liability?

Darlene had not only found out about the mortgage but had also been gradually buying the mortgage itself, transferring the ownership of the title over time from the Brazilian corporation that had underwritten the loan originally to a shell company she’d created some years ago.

It wouldn’t be long now before she owned the entire mortgage on his flesh, and while there were restrictions to prevent unfair treatment of any tenant in occupancy while in good standing, there was an unconditional eviction clause should the leasee fall behind on payments, provided the owner intended to occupy the property itself.

The estate had been, by way of a very specific injected redirect in the financial routines, paying for hookers in Amsterdam with the funds earmarked for his flesh, a diversion of funds Darlene delighted in the irony of.

Soon she would own the entire lease, he would be in default and she would evict him with extreme prejudice and without notice. 

The arrogant little shit had never bothered with backup, and while he would be relegated to storage in the estate system she would turn his flesh into a timeshare of her own, alternately taking it to his financial institutions to transfer his assets to her own corporations, and when she wasn’t using it for business, perhaps rent it by the hour to the local bdsm houses, on the condition they didn’t leave him in an unpresentable state.

She smiled and checked back into the bedroom to find the degenerate passed out, and her own flesh curled up in the fetal position beside him.

Tentatively, she slipped back into her body, cringing as the evening’s damage made itself known.

She pulled the covers over herself.

“Not long now,” she whispered to herself, as she drifted into a determined sleep.