Norah Wilde and the Case of the Missing Heiress (Patreon)

Same old story. Society girl goes missing, discretion is paramount so the parents don’t go to the cops. This time it was the Prager family, retail stores and small munitions. Their own private security came up empty: no ransom demands, no credible threats against the family, no leads. That’s when they came to me. I’ve got a rep, I get things done. The results are sometimes messy, but I’m still walking around free.

The fact that Jessica Prager was still missing after two weeks told me a good deal. She obviously hadn’t run off with a boyfriend, as the family’s security would have found him and returned the girl home, along with the boyfriend’s testicles as proof of their thoroughness. Sure, she could be dead and buried, victim of a random serial killer, but a girl that good looking had value, and since no one had seen her, that could only mean she was being kept under wraps.

Which was why I began following the tuna cans. A misnomer if there ever was one, tuna cans don’t always carry live cargo, and even then the occupants are most often male. The little robots trundle around the city carrying sex toys for all occasions and all types: dildos, amyls, lubes, whips, butt plugs, ring gags, and inflatable love dolls, etc.

But sometimes those love dolls don’t need to be blown up. Meat puppets aren’t legal, strictly speaking, but it’s an understood thing. Want to make a few bucks? Just don the VR headset and let technology do the rest. The saying goes, ‘Let your mind go and your body will follow.’ The VR rig doesn’t let your mind go so much as it puts it in a little box, putting your body entirely within the power of others, the perfect sex toy. I’ve also heard rumors of people’s bodies being put under computer control, technology making possible ever more creative and offensive acts.

That technology also makes it a great way to keep a body on ice. Why? Think about it, a dead kidnap victim can’t be brought back to life, but a meat puppet can be stored off the premises and summoned by simply touching a screen. And who would think of looking for a missing heiress to a multi-billion dollar fortune inside a tuna can? It wouldn’t be all that difficult to pull off: sedate her, slap a rig on her, and stuff her in the can. The can feeds her and keeps her hydrated, and the VR rig tells the puppet when and where to go to the bathroom, wash up, etc. Pretty slick system, and you can even make a few bucks on the side while you make up your mind what to do with the body.

Three days I searched for her, tailing every damn can that was riding low enough to indicate that a human occupant resided within. I would have liked to pop their tops in the street, if for no other reason than all this walking was hell on my feet, but the Prager family was paying for discretion, plus it is next to impossible to open a tuna can without the thumbprint of the recipient. 

The clients were sore as hell when I busted in on them, their dicks or tongues buried in the human sex toy they’d ordered. Most of them bitched about being caught bare-assed in their living rooms with their living dolls, but they calmed down after a pistol whipping. The ones who didn’t bitch were the ones who enjoyed being pistol whipped, for which I charged them fifty percent over my going rate. I’m not normally so mercenary, but my feet really were killing me and new boots don’t come cheap.

I found her on the third day. Bog only knew how many times her body had been used for sex since she’d gone missing, dozens certainly, possibly hundreds if some frat house had ordered her for a little weekend hi-jinx Then again, some meat-freaks don’t go in for mindless sex, preferring to play dress-up with their virtual dolls. To each their own, I suppose.

The fat bastard who’d bought her hadn’t laid a finger on her, just took a few pictures, which I confiscated. He wanted to argue that they were his property, but my forty-fives convinced him otherwise. I had Tubby stand in the far corner of the room, face to the wall while I went through the little bot’s delivery history. Criminy, it had made almost a hundred and fifty deliveries since she had been put inside it, that date coinciding with the date of her disappearance!

Two weeks in a virtual prison, sucking and fucking all sorts of people, and sometimes maybe not even people. That put paid to any notion that she was just out joyriding, as most meat puppets I’d ever heard of never went more than a few days in the can, and those were the ones who were in it because they needed the money.

Physically she was fine, but her mind might well be mush by now. Fearing the worst, I checked the settings on the rig. Thankfully, its memory storage was set to off, meaning she wouldn’t remember any of her fembotic escapades of the last two weeks, not even a bad dream. That also meant that her abduction and incarceration weren’t the work of some random sicko or someone out for revenge. Someone wanted her out of the way, even to the extent of destroying her mind. 

I had Tubby load her back into the can and used his thumbprint to pay for the journey to my office. I’ll call her parents, who will come and pick her up, and that’ll be the end of my involvement in the case—at least officially. It’ll take her parents around an hour to get to my office, more than enough time to download the bot’s memory and geo-history data. I’d done a little digging into the Prager family when I had taken the case, and had uncovered some curious tidbits about them, most especially a younger brother who had spent the last few years in a boarding school in Austria. They have a lot of boarding schools in Austria. They have some world class sanitariums there, too.  

If I discover a connection between the tuna can and Jessica’s brother, let’s just say I’ll make damn sure he receives the full measure of what she got—plus I’ll make sure the rig’s memory is set to full.