The Last Slaver

by Zen Master - Seeking Enlightenment through Bondage

email: <zm  a t  weitampa dot net>
Part of The Third Foursome Moresome Challenge

Author's note: This story is set in the shared "White Slave Act of 2000" universe, about 40 years in the future, and discusses it at length. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to www.darkeroticfiction.com and read any story there. Read it first; much of this won't make any sense if you don't have the background. I'm all about B&D, but that story-line is too dark for me. This is my answer.

I was the first resident in the dining area, just like most days. Even at my age I was healthier than most of the other residents and could still move around on my own, and just couldn't stand to sit in my room any longer. Every morning, as soon as the clock said "6:00" I was out of there. I needed a walker -I'd finally given up on just using a cane a few months back- but other than that I was ready to go anywhere they'd let me.

These days that wasn't very far. Every one of us was here because of medical problems, and the staff fussed over us until I wanted to use the cane on them. In fact, that was one of the reasons I'd fought against the walker so long. I couldn't very well pick a walker up and use it to clear some breathing room, now could I? Still, the staff was as pleasant as they could be. I'd been other places, and I appreciated the effort that management had gone to, to hire staff that liked helping others. Either that, or the staff was paid well enough to pretend to like it. I was pretty sure that we had some of both kinds here.

Dammit! I hated staying here, doing nothing every day until my mind went, or (even worse) I found myself "of whole mind" but trapped in a useless body that couldn't do anything, which would, of course, lead rapidly to my mind going....

Being helpless -against my will- had always been one of my greatest nightmares, but that hadn't happened for a long time. Of course, being helpless -with my consent- had once been one of my greatest pleasures, but, well, that kind of thing hadn't happened for a long time now, either.

Note to self: When Georgina gets here, try again to talk her into smuggling a gun into my room. I'd been trying to talk my granddaughter into that for almost twenty years -I started that almost as soon as I woke up in my first "home", which happened soon after I fell down the stairs at my last real home, and my children recognized that they couldn't take care of me any more.

She didn't want to think about her grandmother blowing her own brains out, but lately I thought I was making some progress. I'd been idly musing (after ensuring that she could hear my mumbling) that perhaps poison wouldn't be TOO painful, if I had to do it that way. Silly girl. She may have three degrees, but she's barely 40. I've spent more than twice her lifetime learning how to manipulate those around me.

Never mind; Georgina won't be here until after lunch, anyway. And I've got my job to do.

I run the home's gossipvine. The other old biddies have to ask the staff how Samantha is doing, or why we haven't seen Michael for a while. I don't have to. After ten years of watching them, I can tell how everyone is doing, just by how they look when they come in for breakfast.

Mrs. Smithers -she won't answer to Mary; it's too informal- looks like shit, almost literally. Good. Another week or so, and they'll be taking her breakfast to her, in her room. I'll enjoy telling everyone that her colon is acting up again.

Others trickle in, pretty much in the same pattern as every other day, everyone going to the same table they always sit at. Not much changes around here, which is why my spin on our social scene is so popular. I sit alone, by my own choice. I almost always found my own thoughts to be more pleasant than their mindless chatter. Uh, oh. The Johnsons hadn't come in, and it was almost seven. Not that anyone cared about the time -we would all get fed whenever we showed up- but this was very unlike them. I waved my hand. "Jim!"

When our waiter (Jim was not just a waiter; he was far more than that, but pretending that I was enjoying a delightful breakfast at a corner cafe along the Seine always helped my blood pressure) had walked over and leaned down, I whispered in his ear "Are the Johnsons okay?"

Another thing that Jim wasn't was stupid; he had a lot of things to keep track of, and he had benefited directly from my observations more than once. Jim looked at their table, pulled his talker out, and started mumbling about their room number. I hoped that this wasn't one of those times. The Johnsons kept to themselves, but I liked them.

The Johnsons really kept to themselves. In the five years or so that they had been here, they never had family visits, and didn't fit in with the other residents. They were so much younger than the rest of us that they probably couldn't fit in, but they didn't even try. But, they were always together. If you saw one, you saw the other. I'd often wondered idly if they used the bathroom together.

Ah. There they were. I watched as they sat down and ordered, then did their weirdness thing. Their easy friendship was something I always enjoyed seeing, but..... They'd order breakfast and then without words they would each grab a slice of toast and offer it to the other.

This time I could see her eyes and they twinkled with inner amusement when she noticed my fascinated stare.

I blushed when she winked and deliberately bit into the toast he offered her.

I couldn't stop my smile. But, I couldn't help wondering, either: Five years I'd been an observer of their ritual -and I didn't even know their names. Would I ever know the story behind their morning toast?

I couldn't stand it any more. This place is driving me insane. They won't let me leave, they won't let me do anything, they won't let me die.... Hmmm. Maybe they can die? Maybe I could talk Georgina into smuggling in enough dynamite to blow up the whole home? I can't stand it. I've got to do something. I reached for my walker, and got up.

When I got to the Johnsons' small table, I gave them "Sir, Madam, the lord of the manor is very strict about seating for his formal dinners. If he extends an invitation to an event, you would do well to be on time. Embarrassing him by not attending would be unwise. Now, I would hate to see you flogged for your ignorance, so I sent one of the servants to collect you. I do hope I never have to do so again!" finishing as prissily as I could manage.

They had been smiling at me when I came up, then frowning as I chastised them, but now Mr. Johnson started laughing. "So, you don't mind us getting flogged, you just don't want it done for ignorance?"

"Certainly not! A good flogging for anyone who was late would brighten up everyone's morning! But, it should serve a purpose besides entertainment, shouldn't it?

Jim had watched me get up and change tables, of course. Sometimes I felt that he never took his eyes off me. I wished he would watch Georgina half as much as he watched me. Georgina was much prettier than I was, and I thought it high time she had some children. Now he walked over, but this time he didn't lean over, and he didn't whisper. "Jasmine, please! You're upsetting the other residents."

I didn't whisper, either. "Well, they shouldn't have to worry about it. If they are on time and follow the rules, then they won't get flogged." Then I lowered my voice so that only Jim and the Johnsons could hear me. "much." Now, Mrs. Johnson was laughing, too.

Back to harassing Jim. "Master, would you like to give me a flogging?"

"Yes," he growled, "but I don't think it would make you any more reasonable."

I cocked my head. "Jim, what would you give to make me reasonable and obedient?"

He put his hands together and lifted his face in prayer. "Anything, God. Whatever you want."

I tugged on his shirt until his ear was in front of my mouth. "Spend enough time with my granddaughter to give me some great-grandchildren, and I'll do anything you want."

When I let Jim back up, I could see the change in Mr. Johnson's eyes. Always before, when he had seen me, he had seen old Jasmine Burke, an old person, useless and ready to die. Now, he looked at me with a man's eyes, and saw a woman, a fellow human being. Being 97 just meant that I was no longer as attractive as I once was, and maybe had some health problems.

He got up and pulled out the chair in front of me; one that to my knowledge had not been sat in since old Abe had died five and more years ago, leaving no one at that table until the Johnsons joined us a month later. "Please, Jasmine, join us for breakfast. Jim, when her breakfast arrives can it be brought here?"

"Certainly, Fred. It would be my pleasure to do so."

I sat down and pushed my walker away, and Jim helped push my chair to the table.

"So, you are Fred...."

He reached across the table to his wife. "...and this is Sarah. She has been keeping me happy since the day we met."

I reached out to shake her hand. "Pleased to meet you, Sarah."

"and I, too. So, Jasmine, tell us about flogging. Were you the flogg_er_, or the flogg_ee_?"

"I could never be the one holding the whip. I'm not cruel enough. Um, sometimes I was the floggee though, when I didn't do everything right. That wasn't much fun. How about you?"

"True stories, after five years of ostracism? Hmph!" Sarah reached out her hand to Fred again. "Somehow, I have never angered my Master enough for him to whip me. I don't know why."

I felt myself becoming aroused. THAT hasn't happened in well over twenty years. Is it even possible, in a woman three years shy of 100?

Fred snorted. "Of course not, my love." He turned to me. "We met in a bar. I was drunk, and she was stoned. I told her to do some things, and she did them. I told her to come home with me, and she did.

The next morning, when we were both thinking straight, I told her to stay with me and keep me happy. She did." He shrugged and smiled. "In forty years, Sarah has never failed to obey an order I gave her. After a couple of days I decided that having her do nice things for me was more important than testing her, so I stopped giving her stupid orders just to see if she'd do it. I'm pretty happy the way she is."

Sarah smiled sweetly at me. "Our room has two beds, but one of them has never been slept in. Last year, when Fred had that infection and they gave him an IV drip, they told me I had to let him sleep alone so that we didn't pull it out. I got in my bed, but after they left I laid down next to Fred. Every time they came back in to check on him, they would make me get back in my bed, and as soon as they left I'd go back to him. Eventually they gave up and let me sleep." Once, there had been a time when she would have been strapped down in her bed, but not any more. Any man who did that to a woman nowadays would be burned at the stake before dawn.

"Why don't they take the bed out and give you some more room?"

"It's one of their rules. A bed for every resident. I don't think retirement homes are set up to deal with submissive slave girls who must please their Masters."

I choked back a laugh. "Not even submissive slave girls in their sixties?"

"It's a gray area, I think." She looked down, saw her toast where she had dropped it to shake my hand, and picked it up again, offering it to Fred.

"Okay, this is really why I came over here this morning. I've seen you do this every morning since you got here. What the hell is that all about?"

Sarah didn't take her eyes off of Fred while he took a bite. "I guess it really is true confession time. Do you know anything about Christianity?"

"Yes, I was raised as a Baptist."

"At the Last Supper, Jesus took a loaf of bread and gave it to his disciples, and told them to eat it, as it was his body which was given unto them, right?"

"Yes....."

"Well, about a month after we met, my Master took me to his church, and they had a communion service. The light bulb went on over my head, and as soon as we got home I went to the kitchen and grabbed a roll. I knelt before my Master and kissed his feet -he likes that- and said 'Master, take this as a symbol of my body, which is given to you for your service and pleasure, until the end of time.' And I did that every day, until the Virus came out."

I started to understand. "What, this was during the White Slave Act idiocy?"

"Oh, yes. That was why I did it. The laws were getting worse and worse, and I needed a protector, but I couldn't trust any of the men I knew. I could tell that they were all looking for an excuse to enslave me. Eventually I decided 'better the devil I don't know', I did some doobies, went to a bar, and gave myself to the first stranger I found who didn't drool on my tits."

Fred stepped in. "I never bothered with all the paperwork. I didn't care what her legal status was, as long as she kept the 'eager fuck toy' act up. She did anything and everything I wanted, and I did whatever I thought would keep her happy enough to stay. I thought that paying all the fees to make her my official slave was just a waste of money."

Sarah leaned forward. "And he really was good to me. He never tied me up, or beat me or anything! I wasn't going to do anything that might get me taken away from him."

Fred again, with a smile: "There's a lesson there, I think. If someone is doing something you like, you get better results if you reward them before they stop, than you do if you punish them after they stop."

"Well, duh!"

They laughed, then Fred stopped laughing and said "If Sarah hadn't been so good to me, I'd have been one of those men."

I just looked at him. I had some pretty unpleasant memories of the three years I spent as a slave to those bastards. I had no problem at all with the way they died.

He recognized my look. "You were a slave, too, weren't you."

I nodded, and expressed my thoughts. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of men."

In 2007, the abolitionists came up with an answer to those bastards at NMG. An objective observer might have called it a diabolical answer, but I believe that the devil would have protected his own, if he'd been given a chance. It took them a couple of years of inspired genetic engineering, but their end result was almost a specific for "Exploitive men working for or with the National Media Group", the company behind the White Slave Act of 2000.

They had started with a virus that lived benignly in human saliva, but spliced in some material from a virus with a strong affinity to the human Y chromosomes, gave it a trigger-behavior of explosive growth, gave the modified virus a whole year to become pandemic in the slave community, such as it was, throughout the whole world, and then supplied the trigger in a standard docility-producing drug. Yes, the drug had application in psychiatry and medicine, but only three out of every million doses were prescribed by licensed doctors. The rest of the drug was used on "persons of limited rights" - us slaves. Almost every slave "management" company and office used it.

The results were, well, dramatic. Some areas got hit first, others later, but the end result was pretty simple: Any man who received oral attention of any kind -a kiss, oral sex, a tongue bath, anything- from a slave who had passed through a slave kennel in the last month, or from anyone who had kissed such a slave, or, well you get the idea, they all died. Pretty quickly. A lot of slaves did too, of course, when they got trapped somewhere without food or something, because until the epidemic vector had been traced, no one was willing to get near the "infection sites".

Funny thing was, by the time the CDC had figured out how it was happening, the general public had already seen the big picture: Generally speaking, any man who had "used" a slave -and female slaves were the only kind of slave there was- in the last month, was dead. And, no one was upset about it, since the only people who would have gotten upset about it couldn't. They were all dead. As I said, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of men. The only thing wrong with it, from my point of view, was that not all of the slavers were male.

It also didn't take long for everyone to realize that it was not killing the slaves, or any women at all. After that was understood, free women could go into "infected" zones and rescue any surviving slaves. I was one of the rescued ones. I and my fellow slaves had been stuck in our kennels, with our automated feeders and sanitary systems, for two weeks after our owner and his friends and employees got sick and stopped coming to see us, before we were rescued.

Fred shrugged and said "When the news started talking about a new epidemic that seemed to be killing anyone with a slave, we stayed home, glued to the TV, trying to find out what was going on. When they finally came out with the pathology report on exactly what had happened, I was sitting on the couch like usual, while Sarah knelt on the floor in front of me like she always did. I played with her while I thought it over until I'd figured out why I was still alive, then told her to stay where she was and got up. I went to the kitchen and got some bread she had baked for the next day's 'ceremony', and brought it back to the couch."

Sarah again: "He fed me the same way I had fed him every morning, same words and everything, except he called me his Mistress."

Fred: "She had never been part of the system. She'd never been inspected, trained, branded, or anything. I had never done anything to her, to allow her to become infected. So, because I was satisfied with what I had and was nice to her, I got to live."

Sarah finished their story: "The next morning, when I offered him my devotion like I always did, he picked up another piece of bread and did the same thing to me. We've done it every morning, ever since. He never asked me for enslavement papers back then, and I'm never going to ask him for marriage papers now."

Fred kept talking, though: "Eventually we stopped saying the words in public, because, well, you know how society reacted. Sarah wouldn't leave me, and, well, I wouldn't die."

Yes. Almost all of society's leadership systems had been gutted. The President and the first hundred or so people in line of succession -all men, of course, you couldn't have a woman who could become enslaved as a political leader, now, could you?- were all dead, more than half of Congress was the same way, and it was just as bad in the rest of the Federal, State, and local governments. Many large corporations found no one left within two or three layers of the CEO, except for an occasional female "asset slave", a woman who was felt to be so usefully skilled that she actually earned her daily breath doing something other than sex. Most other countries were even worse, although some of them -Norway, Sweden, and Denmark particularly- had resisted the slave culture, and weren't hurt too badly by the virus.

Naturally, every surviving male in a leadership position was an Abolitionist, by deed if not by word. The White Slave Act was repealed on the first day that Congress was back in session, because the junior Senator who had succeeded to the Presidency came back and attended the Senate vote for the expressed purpose of signing the bill into law on the spot. Another age might have raised questions about the law, but no one who knew how to challenge it, wanted to. Most of the lawyers had died, too, which again none of the survivors were unhappy about.

That same session also made it a capital offense to physically restrain anyone not convicted of a violent crime (Clarification was needed immediately; government police and security agencies were allowed to use force if resisted, and to "Restrict the Location" of a crime suspect by locking them in a room, or the back of a squad car, but the use of any kind of arm or leg binders was outlawed. The police got around that one by tasering, then sedating, anyone they arrested, until they could be put in a jail cell. Private police and security people had to call the police, although they could use "lethal force" to prevent a crime). That law didn't specify gender, but the meaning was obvious. It specifically authorized a violent crime victim trying to avoid said crime to kill their (meaning "her") assailant, if their (meaning "her") attacker attempted to physically restrain them (meaning "her") during the crime. This gave rise to the oddity that it was okay to kill a perpetrator caught in the act, but not to handcuff him.

Socially, the vast majority of the ex-slaves wanted nothing to do with men, even though the ones they should be mad at were all dead, and many of them started their own women-only communities (which of course had some pretty obvious long-term viability problems, but they didn't care), and the occasional female ex-slaver was found dead, in pieces, soon after having been identified. No one had any idea how they could have died, and the surviving police didn't seem too interested in investigating the "accidents".

The epidemic had also changed the world's demographics significantly, since the 4:1 gender skew was still present. Men were even in shorter supply than before, with the more passive men and less-passive women surviving, and this led to a female-led society, where women were in charge, and men who could be pleasant company were competed over and cherished. That, in turn, led to companionable men having easier access to the things they wanted from women, so there was no reason to rock the boat, and the new system was just as stable as the earlier one, but with far less social strife. Young men with hormone problems had them taken care of by lonely women long before they became unstable, antisocial, and violent.

It became common for older women to have their young men picked out, just waiting for them to become sexually mature, and thus the young men were guided through their most stressful growing years by older and wiser mentors. The most common household type became a single man, with several older women as partners, all trying to keep him happy. So, in the end, NMG's goal of every man having multiple women at their beck and call was accomplished by the women themselves, just without the men being in control. Suggestions that a woman was being forced to serve a man were not well received by the post-WSA "moral majority".

Sarah again: "I don't know how many times I saved Fred from a lynch mob, just by insisting that the idiots kill me first before they killed him. Eventually, we started trying to act like a married couple, in public at least, and eventually people stopped bothering us. But, we have no family. I can't have children, and neither of our families will have anything to do with us. We have no friends, either, but we didn't even notice for a long time, because we were all we needed."

"Did you stay as a couple, then? That's not very common any more."

"Yes. We tried having other women join us -my Master may have sex with whoever he wishes- several times, but it never worked out."

"Because they wanted to be in charge, and you wanted Fred to be in charge."

"Exactly. And Fred likes being in charge, too. Eventually we gave up and lived alone. Until he started losing his health, and we had to move here. The staff has tried to be open-minded, but there has been a lot of stress. They don't like looking at the monitors and seeing me on my knees begging to be allowed to please him."

Yes, it is arousal. And at my age, too! Well, I've always had more courage than was good for me.

"So, Fred, you want another submissive slave girl for when Sarah has a headache?"

"What?!" Sarah didn't even blink. She'd already seen it coming.

"You'll have to beat me sometimes, Master. I'm not very good at obedience."

(c) Copyright 2006 by Zen Master. All Rights Reserved