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Adult Content Warning - this material may contain adult themes, including general sexual activity, non-consensual bondage/slavery and forced sexual acts. If you are under the lawful age for such materials (18 in most jurisdictions) or if you would find such material offensive, please go elsewhere.
Safety Warning. This story may contain descriptions of practices that are decidedly unsafe, either in general, or if performed by someone without adequate training. There are a number of good books available on safety in the BDSM scene. Most large cities, and some not so large ones, have organized BDSM groups that will usually welcome a newcomer. I’m not going to point out which practices are safe, and which aren’t. Any practice is unsafe if performed by someone with inadequate training and experience, or if performed when not paying attention. Please think before you act. Don’t make yourself a candidate for a Darwin award.
Now on to the story...
Chapter 2. In the Slave Kennel
Chapter 4. The Wedding Reception.
Chapter 7. Care and Feeding of a Big Baby.
The young man and woman walked into the waiting room of the slave kennel building at the Excelsior Stables and Kennels. He wore slacks and an open tennis shirt, both from an upscale manufacturer. She wore a sleeveless blouse and tight skirt, ending just above the knees. Her ash blond hair tumbled carelessly around her shoulders.
“Oh, hi!” the pretty attendant behind the reception desk said as they walked in. “I’m Delia.” The attendant wore the Excelsior slave livery: a single strap sleeveless tunic that fastened over her right shoulder and came down to mid-thigh. It had a diagonal pattern of black and white streaks that started at the shoulder, circled around and came together at the bottom hem. It fit like it had been painted on, only departing from the curve of her body across her breasts and where the skirt fell from her hips. Otherwise she wore a pair of open sandals with two inch heels and some incidental jewelry.
“You’re Eric Sanchez and Eva Donaldson?” she asked the couple.
“Yes, we are.”
“The two of you look too pretty together for you to be putting her in the kennel for what, two weeks?”
“I have to go out of town, and I can’t take her with me this time”, he said smoothly as her eyes flickered.
“It’s your choice,” she answered, smiling to take any disapprobation out of the words. “Your know our rules, right?”
“You board slaves for 20 credits a day,”.
“The other rule. We only accept slaves, and they have to be collared. She has to be equipped with a control collar, muffler and earplugs.”
“How much?”
“That’s 100 credits for the set, and an additional 20 credits a day for stardard initial training”, she answered as she got a tape from a drawer and ran it around Eva’s neck. “I thought it was a medium,” she commented almost to herself.
“Well, if it has to be, it has to be,” he said, handing her his credit card. She put it on the desk and took a ribbon from a cabinet.
“It does have to be. It used to be just our rules; the latest set of legal revisions require that anyone who cedes rights be collared. We don't allow untrained slaves in our kennel. They cause too many problems.
“Next I need to verify your identity,” she told Eric, gesturing toward the ID machine standing against the wall. Eric went first, putting his ID card on the scanner, and then placing his hands flat on the plate while looking at the screen. The camera behind the screen verified his iris and retina patterns as well as the bone structure of his face, while the plate checked his finger prints, hand prints and bone structure.
“You next,” she gestured to Eva. “Wrap the ribbon around your neck.”
Eva looked at her, took the ribbon and wrapped it around her neck. It quivered a bit as it tightened to a snug, but not uncomfortable, fit. She put her ID card on the scan plate and settled the brain wave scanner on her head. Then she placed her hands on the plate.
Messages started appearing on the display.
Brain Scanner Active. Signal Strength Adequate.
Identity Verified: Eva Donaldson.
New Control Collar Initialized.
Current Transferable Unlimited Use Contract with Eric Sanchez. Is This Correct?
--> Eva signaled yes.
Agreement Verified.
Transferable Unlimited Use Contract With Eric Sanchez added to Contract Registry.
Slaveowner's Consortium ID 2053-29857-37680-19.
Please answer the following questions.
--> It asked several questions and told her to do several mental exercises.
Devotion Enhancer installed.
Excelsior Kennel Contract added to Contract Registry.
Kennel module installed.
Control Collar installation finished.
Session Ended.
She looked at it a moment. Then she took off the helmet and walked back.
“Now we need to install the muffler and earplugs,” Delia said. “Open up, dear,” she told the bewildered girl.
She ran a device along her upper front teeth, and then hunted through a drawer, pulling a plastic wrapped object out. It looked like a warped piece of plastic with metal hooks on the ends. She put it into the girl’s still open mouth and pressed up. Eva gasped as she felt the device almost squirm before settling into place against the front part of her palette.
“You can shut your mouth,” she told Eva as she looked into one ear and then the other with a specialist’s light. Then she took another package out of a drawer and slid the two ear plugs it contained into her subject’s ears.
“What are they for?” Eva asked.
“The muffler can be used to keep you from talking. It generates counter-sound. The earplugs are much more useful; while they can be used to keep you from hearing things, you usually use them to listen to music, shows off the net or stuff your control collar tells you. They're also very good for protecting your hearing from loud noises.”
“Oh.”
“Now, take off your clothes.”
“What!”
Delia’s lips moved slightly. Eva’s hands flew to her throat as her mouth opened in a soundless scream.
She took a deep breath, sighed and reached for the zipper on her skirt. A moment later she stood naked, her clothes neatly piled on a chair with her purse sitting on top. The purple tattoo of the Slaveowner’s Consortium ID stood out against her lightly tanned skin.
Just then the door opened and another woman came in, dressed in the same style of slave tunic that Delia wore. “Follow me,” she told the naked woman. Eva cast a despairing look at her clothes and purse, and then followed the woman out the door.
“Now,” Delia told Eric, “we’ve got a few things to discuss about your slave’s stay here. Grab a chair.”
“I thought I just paid you, and that would be it,” he said as he pulled a chair up to her desk.
“Since she didn’t have a collar we’re going to have to do initial training. I’ve already mentioned that. We’ve got a brochure that tells you how to command her.” She took a pamphlet from her desk and slid it across. “We also like to recommend a package of enhancements that will make her a much better property for you.”
“Enhancements?”
“Well, first a very minor one. We’d like to install a grommet in her septum for a nose ring. She doesn’t absolutely need one, but there are times when a nose ring is a very useful device for a slave, especially a female.
“Then the major one; we’d like to install countermotion generators in her breasts.”
“Counter-motion generators?”
“She’s got a very nice set of DD breasts that are just starting to show some sag. You probably love them, but they’re literally hell on the female body if she does any kind of vigorous work. The countermotion generators do just what they sound like: they keep the breasts from jerking all over the place when she moves. There’s still a very pleasing quiver that she’ll find more pleasant than otherwise.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“Let me demonstrate,” Delia said. She stood up and plucked at her tunic strap. Her tunic promptly sagged away from her body and fell to the floor, disclosing that all she wore under it was a very skimpy thong whose straps outlined her Slaveowner’s Consortium registration number.
She did a high stepping jog around the room, and then bent to pick up her tunic. She did a quick twist to put the shoulder strap together and then slid it over her head. It quivered a moment and then contracted to hug her body like a second skin.
Eric closed his mouth. “I’m not sure whether I’m more impressed by your breasts or your tunic,” he finally managed to say. “Install them.”
She checked off a list. “Since she has DD breasts, we’re also going to install a genetic mod to her back; she won’t get backaches from the weight any more.
“Now the next one is a genetic modification that will expand her comfort zone downwards by about 20 degrees. She’ll be comfortable naked in weather that the rest of you would find too chilly to be out in without heavy clothing.”
“That sounds useful,” he said thoughtfully.
“Well, more for the eye candy factor unless you live in the country,” she answered. “The final one is a change to her feet so she’ll find three inch heels comfortable for long term wear.”
“I think I want that one too,” he said. “Now about that tunic of yours.”
“It’s made of a nano-fabric, and it costs about 100 credits each plus shipping and handling from the factory. This particular style is usually used for slave tunics and is the least expensive style available. The pattern on my tunic is registered to Excelsior; there are a half dozen unregistered patterns to choose from. They’re reasonably popular slave tunics for people who know what they’re doing and don’t have so many slaves that having their own pattern is worth the expense.
“Besides the quick off and auto-fit features, it can be worn full time for over two years before showing noticeable wear. It cleans easily and doesn’t need any other care, such as ironing. It also has a very sophisticated temperature control that shifts from insulation to cooling depending on the outside temperature and my current core temperature.”
“Add two of them to my bill,” he said.
“OK. Now for training. There are two courses and four modules that should be done immediately after collaring a slave. They’re normally done in a kennel; that’s why all kennels either offer them or do not accept untrained slaves. They’re not optional.
“The first is the Slave Devotion. It’s a poem that takes about 20 minutes to recite. It tells her what it is to be a slave; the Devotion Enhancer in her collar will boost her emotional reaction so it sets in properly. When she gets back, she should recite it twice a day, usually morning and evening, while kneeling in front of your picture.
“The second is called Basic Collar Obedience. Its purpose is to allow the slave to react to conditioned stimulus-reaction commands given through her collar without second guessing herself. It’s a basic foundation for everything you’re ever going to do with her; a slave without that is considered to be completely untrained. You’ll see a lot of the possibilities in the manual, but they all require something like this.”
“What does it do?”
“It starts by conditioning in a basic set of commands using stimulus-response. Once they’re in, then she’s trained to do them without hearing the actual command. When it settles in, you’ll be able to command her using keyword orders, but you’ll also be able to command her using a remote or over the network. If you want, you can even hook her up to your household computer so she does certain things on a time schedule.”
“That’s...”
“Bothering you, I can tell. A slave is to be used, and it doesn’t matter that she enslaved herself to you in a burst of love or delusion. In fact, once the Slave Devotion settles in she’ll expect to be used, and if you don’t she’ll get rather depressed. If she’s wise she’ll ask to be sold to someone who will use her.
“Now, the four modules are Go To It, basic Intercom, Reader and Exerciser. Go To It is a stimulus-response version of a navigation assistant. She’ll be able to put in a destination by subvocalizing it, and it will direct her to it without her having to know the route. It feels like she just knows which way to go whenever there’s a decision. You can also have her go somewhere by command, either in person or over the network. We use that as the content while we’re teaching Basic Collar Obedience.”
“That sounds useful.”
“Oh, it is. Basic Intercom lets her use her control collar directly for auditory material on the net, including music channels.
“Reader lets her control a reader without using her hands. It runs off the physiology monitor in her control collar. We start her off with it so she can put a reader on the front of the cage, sit back and work with it without having to move around.
“If she works at it a bit, she’ll eventually be able to input to just about any device with an almost invisible twitch of her fingers. That can link up with her earplugs into a very flexible connection with most computerized equipment.
“That sounds useful as well. What’s Exerciser?”
“It’s a personal trainer. It directs her exercise sessions so she keeps in shape. It uses the physiology monitor to stay within her limits. It’s got a management application where you can set goals and monitor progress. It’s mandatory if you ever put her in a girl box for more than a couple of hours.”
“That sounds useful too. Not that she’s ever had difficulty with workouts.”
“OK. Now the next question is going to be harder. When you come back, is she going to go back to your apartment or home and pick up serving you where she left off, or is she going to find her situation changed significantly?”
His eyes shifted. “I’m not sure I understand?”
“You’ve just bought her two slave tunics. Most people don’t have a couple of hundred to throw around without at least some intention of using what they bought. So one thing that you’re thinking of is rather visibly shifting her status from your girlfriend to your slavegirl.
“In the time I’ve been the receptionist here, most of the people who leave their slaves pick them up on time and take them back to the same environment they left. I’ve also seen ones that haven’t picked them up, where we’ve had to sue for back payment. I’ve seen them phone in orders to put them up for auction. I’ve even seen a few come in with a new wife who takes one look at the girl and orders her sold.”
Bingo! she thought as she saw his reaction to the last possibility.
“That isn’t just cruelty to a girl that trusted you enough to enslave herself to you, it’s unnecessary cruelty. If you’re going to put her in that environment, tell us so we can train for it.”
“What would you do?”
“The Slave Devotion is written for the rather abstract concept of serving the Owner, not a particular master or mistress. That’s one of the reasons we recommend that she recite them while on her knees looking up at her owner’s picture.
“If there’s a good possibility that she’s going to find herself sold to someone else when she leaves here, we can have our trainer slant things so it isn’t as much of a shock. There are several stanzas in the Devotion that are specific for being sold and changing owners; emphasizing them is pretty standard stuff to get over the emotional attachment. We do it all the time for slaves that are here while the auction is proceeding.”
He sighed. “Even if the marriage falls through, I was getting tired of her. You’re right, either I should have freed her and kicked her out, or had her properly trained.
“Do it. How much do I owe you?”
She turned to total up the bill.
“Follow me,” Lizzie said after she opened the door and saw the naked woman standing by a small pile of clothes, a purse neatly toping the pile.
Eva took a last look at her clothing and walked out of the room, her ample breasts bouncing in time to the movement.
“I’m Lizzie,” she said. “You’re Eva.”
“How do you know?”
“I know lots of things,” Lizzie said mysteriously and then giggled. “For example, I know that you’re completely untrained so you go into this cage room.” She stopped and gestured to herd the nude into a side room.
The first impression Eva had of the room was that it was lined with cages. The corridor was about six feet wide, with two tiers of cages on each side. The cages seemed to be about three feet wide, close to four feet high and extended fairly far back.
Several of the cages had naked women sitting in them, some with their legs crossed, some sitting on their heels and some with their knees wide and their legs back against the cage sides.
“This,” Lizzie told the stunned woman, “is your home for the next couple of weeks. Your address is Room 6, Row L2, cage 5. That’s L as in left from the outside door. If you have trouble climbing in, use the stool.” She gestured to a high stool sitting by the far door.
“This is not what I expected,” Eva muttered as she got the stool. Several of the other caged women laughed.
“Now I’m going to explain the facilities, and I know you’re asking: ‘What facilities’?”
“First, this cage does not lock. This is a sliding bolt latch that works from both sides. There is no way I can lock it against you, there is no way you can lock it against one of us. It’s there to keep the cage door from swinging. It’s also there for when you need to shake something and feel it totally ignore your futile efforts. Finally, if you tend to thrash around at night, it will keep you from falling out and injuring yourself.
“In back there are several shelves. You’ll find blankets on the bottom and a reader on top. Our library has a huge number of books. It’s rather heavy with stories of devoted slaves serving their masters, and with instructional manuals about how to serve your master, but what did you expect? Instructions on sawing through prison bars?
“Besides which, there’s lots of other stuff.”
“The setup here is the same as most other kennels. It’s arranged in modules. The cage room opens into a corridor that has four cage rooms, a meal room, a lavatory, a shower and a combined exercise and Devotion recital room. There are invisible fences at the ends of the corridor. There’s a very obvious stripe that marks the fence. If you haven’t dealt with one, we suggest you try it out so you know what one feels like. Gingerly. Don’t try to go past it.
“Your schedule is fairly simple. You’ve got a beginning of day washup, devotion and breakfast, two additional meals and two exercise periods, and an end of day devotion and washup. You take all six of them with your cagemates. Outside of that you may have several training periods that you may take individually or with a class. Otherwise you sit here, read, study, watch shows, meditate or memorize the cracks in the ceiling.
“You’re not allowed to talk to your cagemates. You can talk all you want during meal breaks, but that’s it. The rest of the time your muffler will be turned on.
“If you need to go to the bathroom, just climb out and go. Come right back when you’re done, get in your cage and make sure it’s securely latched.
“Got it?”
“Uh, no.” Eva answered.
“Well, I’m not going to explain it again. It’s on the reader if you want to check it.”
She backed up a moment, and then held her hand up as if casting a spell. “Eva. Mode. Muffler. On”.
Lizzie turned around and walked out.
“...” Eva said to her back. Then she stopped, startled when she didn’t hear herself.
“...” she said again. Then “...”. She still couldn’t hear herself, but she could hear the sound of an unsuccessfully suppressed giggle.
She took a deep breath. “Calm down,” she told herself. Then she shrugged mentally. Why?
She took another deep breath, grabbed the bars firmly and gave a cage-rattling scream. When the echoes died down, she heard several women clapping. One of them held up both hands, all five fingers on one and three on the other.
“...” she said, and then sat back to think. There was something weird about this place, and it was that nobody was talking. So, she thought, that thing they’d put in her mouth was the muffler, and it muffled speech but not screams. Or laughs or giggles either. She shook her head and giggled.
Just as she’d been told, she found a reader in the back. It was like just about every large size reader she’d ever seen, about six inches across, eight high and a half inch thick, with the screen in the middle and enough of an edge so she could hold it while her fingers rested on the sensor plate on the back. Too big to fit into a purse, but just the right size for lying around the apartment.
She unplugged it from the charger and looked at it curiously. Menu was where it should be. She pushed it and the screen lit up with several entries: 1. rules 2. Eva 3. Books 4. Videos 5. Music.
She pushed 1 and sure enough, it seemed to have all the stuff that woman, what was her name?, had said. There was a more, so she pushed it and was rewarded with a schedule line that had six blocks marked, two as washup, two as meals, and two as exercise. She looked closely. There was a time line down the side, with an arrow. It looked, she thought, like she had a half hour to the next meal.
She backed out and tried Eva. It turned out to have her name, Slaveowner’s Consortium number and a couple of other statistics, and three lines that puzzled her. They said 1., 2., 3., followed by heavy black lines as if they’d been marked out. She tried expanding them and discovered that the first expanded to another list, likewise with heavy black lines.
She was about to try another entry when another woman in a neat slave tunic rolled a cart up and opened the cage door.
“No dear, you don’t have to get out. I’ve got to get some blood and then pierce your nose,” she said.
“...”
“That’s all right. I need a finger. Good. Now tilt your head back, dear. That’s good.” She looked up both nostrils with a light and then swabbed the inside with something.
“Now hold on, this is going to hurt,” she said as she put something like a pair of pliers up both sides of Eva’s nose and pressed it closed. Eva felt a jerk and then the woman took the gadget out and proceeded to swab her nose again.
“Good. I think that’ll do it,” she announced, neatly putting everything away on her cart before shooting the bolt on the cage door and leaving with a waggle of her tunic skirt.
Eva shook her head to clear it, and then looked around. She realized that the women she could see clearly all had rings in their noses. Fairly big rings in their noses that pressed against the sides of their noses and came down to just above their upper lips.
She shook her head again. She hoped if Eric put a ring in her nose it would be a bit smaller. Then she got the reader out and looked under Eva again. Sure enough, when she expanded the first entry it said: insert grommet for nose ring.
She sat back and considered whether she had made a mistake when she had enslaved herself to Eric. She shrugged. She’d had this suspicion she should have walked out a couple of months ago. Now, she thought, she was going to become a slave in fact as well as in name.
Suddenly the activity in the room picked up. The women were opening their cages, dropping to the floor or crawling out, and closing the doors neatly. She put the reader back and opened her cage and managed to get out without damaging anything. They walked out the far door and down the hall into a large room with a counter at the far end stacked with bowls and spoons, and large pots of something that smelled a lot better than it looked.
“Cabbage Soup?” one of the women said.
“That’s a new one,” another answered her.
“I’ve had it before,” a third one put in.
“What is it?” she asked as she took a bowl and ladled some of the goop into it.
“Slave Chow,” a petite blonde told her, gently guiding her to a spot on the floor where they sat. “There’s about fifty varieties. They bring out new ones and retire old ones all the time.”
“I haven’t seen the beefsteak one in a while,” another woman said as she joined them.
“It tastes better than it looks,” Eva contributed.
“It always does,” the blonde said. “This one seems to be an oatmeal base. Some of them are wheat based, some corn, some rice some other stuff. It’s supposed to be cheap, nutritious, filling, tasty and not cause a slave revolt.”
“They’d better bring the beefsteak one back or I’m going to revolt,” the brunette said with a giggle.
“I’d just as soon not,” another brunette contributed. “I suppose protein is protein, but I was raised a vegetarian.”
“Not like we’ve got a lot of choice,” a newcomer added.
“Speak for yourself,” another blonde chided. “Master makes me buy this stuff, but I do the shopping. I’m probably better fed than he is, his preferences are so unbalanced.”
Eva looked at her bowl. Somehow it seemed to be empty.
“You’re new, right?” the first blonde said.
“Uh, yes. How can you tell?”
“Your breasts wobble all over the place. Your master should buy you the countermotion generators.”
“He probably did,” another one said. “The nurse just pierced her nose for a ring.”
“Well, back to the cages,” the second blonde said as she got up and put her bowl in the dirty dish tray. Eva noticed that the rest of the women were also getting up. She joined the throng as it left the meal room, and noticed that the chatter stopped when they went out the door as if it had been cut with a knife.
No sooner had she gotten settled than another of Excelsior’s slave staff walked in and dropped the stool in front of her cage. “Time for a lesson, sweetie,” she said as Eva climbed out. She turned around and left the room, Eva following.
“Let’s start out by turning you back on,” she said when they had gotten into a small room. “Eva. Mode. Muffler. Off.”
“I can talk now?” Eva asked.
“Obviously,” her guide said dryly. “I’m Muriel, by the way, and I’m going to teach you the Slave Devotion.”
“The Slave Devotion?”
“Is there an echo in here?” Muriel laughed quietly. “It’s something that you’ll recite twice a day from memory, probably when you get up and when you retire. It usually takes about 20 minutes to recite properly, so you’ll be learning it for most of your stay here.
“First, we need to rearrange ourselves. Most slaves should be on their knees when they recite the devotion. If you have a picture of your master or mistress, it’s good to have it in front of and slightly above you so you’re looking up at it. If your current owner is an organization, like Excelsior is my owner, you can use the corporate logo. Right now you’re going to be looking up at me as your trainer.”
Muriel sat on a low couch, her feet neatly tucked under her, and Eva knelt in front; she found that her head was just low enough that she needed to look up slightly to see Murial’s face.
“Recite after me,” Muriel commanded. “I am a slave.”
Eva echoed “I am a slave.”
“Good. Now recite: I live to be useful.”
Eva echoed: “I live to be useful.” She gasped slightly.
“What happened?”
“That seemed to hit me in the gut.”
“Good. Now recite: My use is my owner’s.”
Eva echoed: “My use is my owner’s.”
“Good. Now recite: I am my owner’s tool.”
Eva echoed the phrase, breaking out in a slight sweat as she did.
“Good. Echo: I am a slave.”
“Now, how did that feel,” Muriel asked her student.
“Intense.”
“It’s supposed to. Now do it again from memory.”
Eva stumbled through it.
“Not good enough. Do it again. Repeat after me...”
An hour later a sweating Eva returned to her cage, where she sat, staring ahead, until the rest of the women assembled for dinner.
“Your first time with the Slave Devotion?” Janice asked her when they had found a spot on the floor for the Egg Drop Soup flavored rice porridge.
“Um, yes. How could you tell?”
“It always hits that hard at first,” Janice answered.
“And it’s not like Excelsior is going to teach a newbie anything else,” Trica put in, blowing on a spoonful of porridge.
“Why not?” Eva asked.
“Well, they’re really not a training house,” Janice answered. “At least for us slaves. They do real basic training the first time an untrained slave is put into their kennel because it simplifies things all around. Then they’ll do some additional training if the owner wants and there are standard training materials, but that’s to fill in kennel time so the slaves don’t get bored and restless.”
“Tell me about it!” Ida Mae said. “Every time Master puts me in here I catch up on all the shows.”
“What are they for? Muriel didn’t say.”
“They teach you what it is to be a slave,” Janice said.
“Here.” Ida Mae patted her stomach.
“We do them every morning and evening,” Trica added. “You’ll see tonight.”
Eva hadn’t been back in her cage for very long before another of the slave women showed up and dropped the chair under her cage. “Come along,” was all she said. Eva followed her to a larger room.
“Now,” she said, “I’m your trainer for the Basic Collar Obedience course. Collar obedience is all about getting your head out of the way so you can react to commands the way you’re trained without thinking. I have to teach you some commands to react to. Most of this set is what’s called Go To It; you can think of it as a personal navigation assistant. Once you’re trained, you should be able to set a destination to someplace you’ve never been and you’ll go there without needing directions. You’ll simply know which way to go whenever you’ve got a decision to make.
“More to the point, your owner will be able to tell you to go somewhere over the network, and you’ll go there, again without either needing directions or even needing to know where you’re going.
“There are a few other things we’ll condition into you during this course that we use for kennel management.
“To repeat what I said at the beginning, the actual learning is to let it happen fluently without second guessing yourself. Your owner may very well have you trained in some other behaviors at a training boutique later; they all operate the same way. She gives the stimulus, which may be a command you can hear or it may be something over the network, and you do whatever you’ve been conditioned to do. Clear so far?”Eva nodded cautiously.
“One thing you may be curious about. I don’t know how your current owner prefers to order you about. Some masters like to tell their slaves to do something, some like to use commands that trigger the response they want. Most like some combination of the two. If you’re sold to a new owner, or I should say when you’re sold because most slaves have several owners in their useful lifetime, your new owner will undoubtedly have her own preferences in the matter.
“Part of being an effective master is getting over silly concerns about hurting the slave’s feelings by using conditioned responses. A properly trained slave doesn’t care one way or the other how their master commands them any more than a hammer cares how the carpenter swings it. Her only concern is that the master finds her a useful tool.”
Eva nodded in resignation.
“Well, you’ll see it a bit differently after you learn the Slave Devotion,” the so far nameless trainer told her. “I’m going to show you how to do something, and then we’re going to drill it. Most of the time all I’m going to do is snap out command words or phrases, you let yourself react.
“We’re going to start with simple directions.”
When Eva finally staggered back to the room she found that the women were assembling for the evening devotion and shower. She followed them into a room where they knelt and recited the Slave Devotion in unison. Eva followed it for the first few stanzas, and then started to listen. It stirred feelings she didn’t know she had, and wasn’t sure she wanted.
After that they went to the shower room, went through the shower line and then went back to their cages. As soon as the last bolt was shot, the lights went out, leaving the room to utter blackness. Eva felt for the blankets, gathered them around her and was soon asleep.
Eva walked back into the cage room with her cage mates, letting Excelsior’s computer guide her to her cage. She flipped the door open, put both hands on the bottom of the cage, bounced a moment on her feet and then did a jump and twist that left her sitting in the cage, feet dangling over the edge. She slid in the rest of the way, mounted the reader on the front and then paused to think.
It had been a bit over two weeks. Eric should have picked her up yesterday. Something had happened, and it wasn’t like him to not tell her. Her fingers twitched almost unnoticeably, and the reader obediently showed her training schedule. There were two new items: Living Doll and something called a micro-cable surgery. Living Doll? She thought she’d heard something about that. She opened the item. It said it was going to be done someplace called the Doll House.
About ten minutes later it occurred to her that she needed to be somewhere else. She put the reader away and slid out of the cage, dropping to the floor with a bounce. She hesitated at the closet at the end, then she opened it and slid into a slave tunic.
A few minutes later she found herself outside, standing by a small bus with the Excelsior logo on the side. She slid in with several other girls.
She tuned in one of her favorite music channels, and prepared to wait until she got wherever she was going. The bus made a number of stops. Hers turned out to be the third.
The outside of the Doll House, she reflected as she walked in, didn’t look like much. The inside, however, was a different matter.
She didn’t have all that much time to look, but she did notice three life-sized dolls in display cases as she walked by. She suspected that they weren’t dolls.
Two floors up, she found where she was going. Four women and two men stood, frozen in position, by the sides of the room. Both men and three of the women wore slave tunics; the fourth woman wore a skirt and blouse.
She noticed a rack of slave cages. Three of them held pretty girls. She headed to an empty one, and slid in.
That, she reflected as she shot the bolt on the door and sat back to think, was ... interesting. Going somewhere completely strange without any instructions or directions should have felt rather frightening. What was interesting was that it felt so normal.
She barely had time for that thought when she felt the urge to go somewhere. After a couple of turns, she arrived in a room. Her first impression was that it was lined with equipment racks. On second impression, that wasn’t quite true; the equipment racks alternated with low stands, several of which had Dolls frozen into position.
“Puzzled?” a light tenor asked.
She turned to see a man in a traditional lab coat. “Uh, yes.”
“Let’s get that out of the way first, then. As you can see, I’ve got four Dolls I’m working on at the moment. Let’s see. Steph is fairly far along. Spend the next few minutes playing with her.”
“Huh?” Eve stared at him.
“What do girls do when they play with dolls? You move them around, put them into different positions. Living Dolls are trained to hold their pose and let their owner move them around. They’re a bit like an artist’s or sculptor’s model, except more so.”
“Oh.” Eve walked up to Steph and then gingerly touched her arm. It didn’t move. She tried again, and found that it took definite pressure to move her arm so that she had her hand out. After a minute she started getting into it, moving the Doll into various positions.
“Good,” the trainer said. “Leave her in that position.”
“Won’t she...” Eve trailed off, looking at the contortion she’d put the Doll into.
“Sooner or later. Probably sooner according to the monitor.” The trainer nodded toward a display on one of the equipment racks. “One of the things you need to know about Dolls and Statues is that they will break pose if holding it would damage anything. We make very sure of that; going beyond a limit would be unsafe working conditions.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Now let’s get started on you.” He gestured to an empty stand.
Eva stepped onto it, and tried to stand the way the other Dolls were standing.
“We use a brain scanner for the first few sessions,” he told her as he settled the familiar helmet over her head. “Now just breathe in and out. Find a rhythm where you’re still. Just totally still. Good. A bit shallower. Good. Now focus your attention on what you can see and hear. Let your gaze rest straight ahead. Good.”
His voice continued on, in a soothing hypnotic cadence. She barely noticed when he guided her right arm so it came rigidly out to her side.
“Pretty good for a first time,” the trainer said as she came back to awareness. “Go clean up. The Excelsior van should be here in a half hour or so.”
Eva got back to the cage room just as her cagemates were assembling for the midday meal.
“You look out of it,” Estelle said as she dropped into place next to Eva. “Outside class?”
“Living Doll,” Eva answered as she blew on a spoonful of Turkey and Dressing slave chow to cool it down.
“I’ve never met a Living Doll,” Nancy said as she sat next to the two of them. “What’s it like?”
“I don’t really remember. This is my first day; the trainer said some Dolls simply go blank and some are fully aware and can think while they’re paralyzed. Most are somewhere in between. We’ll find out later how it works for me.”
“I think I’d go nuts!”
“Well, he did say not everyone could take being a Doll. We’re going to be finding my limits.”
“What do you do while you’re standing there?”
“He said that if you’re aware of what’s going on, you can do just about anything that doesn’t require moving. Intercom is supposed to work. If you aren’t, I suppose it doesn’t matter.”
The Living Doll training, Eva reflected a few days later, seemed to be like the Basic Collar Obedience training. Things definitely seemed to be happening. On the third day they’d taken an hour for a surgery. She spent fifteen minutes or so with her head in a box while the robot surgeon did something, and the rest of the time recovering, not that she felt particularly out of it. After that they quit using the helmet. She noticed the micro-cable item had been checked off.
She had started becoming aware of what was happening on the fourth day. It was kind of a peculiar, mildly curious state where she simply watched what they did with her. After that they seemed to be working on lengthening the time she could stay frozen in the Doll state and at the same time alternated between moving her to various positions and having some kind of computer control move her limbs.
Finally they were done. She started to wonder whether Eric had forgotten her.
The station wagon with the Excelsior Stables and Kennels logo on the sides pulled into the banquet hall parking lot. Tom Stanley pressed a couple of buttons on the underside of the steering wheel and looked at the display panel. He nodded. The area controller had kicked in right on schedule, his passenger was now inside of the permitted zone around the banquet hall, and the invisible fences were activated. He opened the door to get out when a man with a camera waved him down.
“You’ve got Eric’s gift?” he yelled.
“Uh, yes. Why?”
“I want to get a shot of her getting out of the car for the wedding video.”
“Well, shoot away,” Tom told him. “She’s in the front seat.”
He opened the door for her, making sure the photographer had a good angle, and waited while she slid out. She turned away from him and put her hands together behind her back. He checked that the cuffs had locked and that the network release was active.
Then he attached a large pink bow to her hands and another to her hair, with a card and pamphlet hanging from the ring on the front of her collar.
“Eva. Follow.” he commanded as he turned to the banquet hall.
The girl in the skin-tight slave livery followed him into the hall, staying a precise pace behind him and to his right. He looked around.
“That’s Eric’s gift to Fran?” a woman in a party dress asked. “Now where do I want to put her?” she asked herself.
“With the housewares, I’d think,” another woman answered.
“Good idea May. What’s her name?”
“Eva.”
The first woman stopped in her tracks. “Do you mean to tell me that Eric gave his old girlfriend to his bride as a wedding present?”
Tom spread his hands. “That’s what the dossier says, under special considerations.”
She shook her head. “I have no idea what Fran will do.”
“Probably think it’s cute,” May answered.
“Oh?”
“Our Fran has a weird sense of humor. Nastily weird.”
“That’s true. Housewares it is. Over here. Do you know how well she’s trained?”
“The dossier says basic training.” He handed the first woman the delivery sheet.
She looked at it. “I see what you mean. No housekeeper, but she has Living Doll.”
She positioned the girl where she wanted her. “Eva. Freeze.” The slave girl shifted her position minutely and then seemed to freeze in place, the only movement being a slight rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed and the occasional blink of her eyelids.
The Excelsior station wagon had only been gone a few minutes when another wagon, this one with the Sissy’s Dream Boutique corporate logo on the side, pulled into the lot. Two men got out, opened the back and slid a gaily decorated pink box onto a cart.
“What’s this?” the first woman asked as they came in the door. She flipped open the card. “To My Darling Husband: May I present my first baby. Your Darling Wife.”
“Aw, isn’t that cute,” she said as she opened the top and saw what was inside. Then she said in a voice that carried through the hall: “It’s times like this I wish I was a Victorian.”
“What’s the problem, June?” her sister bustled up.
“I could faint and let you handle it.”
“What is it?” she peered into the box. “She didn’t.”
“She did. Now what?”
“Layette,” May decreed. “Over here.”
“Tina,” June called. Her niece hurried over to see what had gotten her aunt June in a tizzy this time. She looked in the box and shook her head. “That’s Kevin, isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“I have to give it to her, she definitely topped Eric. What I wonder is how she did it.”
“Turned him into a baby?”
“Sissy’s Dream Boutique did that. Reducing its skeleton to under a meter has got to smart. I’m wondering how she ever got him to sign a slave contract in the first place.”
“We can find that out later,” her Aunt June decreed. “The question is what we do with her now.”
“What can we do?” Tina answered. “I assume that Eva will take care of him. Her.”
“Eva’s got to be trained as a housekeeper before they get back from the honeymoon.”
“Good point. Let me look something up,” Tina hurried away as the baby girl that had been Fran’s rather spineless boyfriend began to fuss.
“Now it’s wet its diaper,” the aunt moaned. Her eyes lit on Eva. “Get over here,” she snapped. Eva didn’t move.
“Oh. Damn this command mentality. Eva. Unfreeze. Eva. Cuffs. Unlock. Eva. Mode. Language. On.” Eva relaxed and then put the bow that had dropped from her hands carefully to one side.
“Change its diaper, go take a leak and find me when you’re done.”
“Yes, mistress.” Eva hurried over to the baby and began hunting under the crib.
“We’ve only got a couple of minutes!”
“Don’t worry, Aunt June,” Tina said. “Eva, over here. Right next to the baby on the housewares side.”
Eva hurried into place. “Hands behind you. Great! Eva. Position. Eva. Freeze.” Eva froze into her living doll position.
Tina put the bow over her hands, straightened the bow on her hair and made sure the card and instruction pamphlet hanging from the ring on her collar were neatly aligned. Then she stepped out of the array of gifts and joined the reception line just as the doors opened and the band struck up the entrance song.
The bride and groom stepped in and walked up to the two thrones on the end, Eric carefully seating his bride first.
“You didn’t,” she whispered to him as she saw Eva standing next to the baby’s crib. “I’m going to have such fun with her!” She squeezed his hand.
“You present her,” Aunt June hissed to Tina as they started to present the gifts.
Tina walked up, trying to avoid giggling, and took the card. “To My Dear Bride, Your Very Own Living Doll And Robot Housekeeper. Your Adoring Husband.”
“Eva.” she said in a low voice, “Unfreeze. Go kiss your mistress’ feet and then kneel at her feet.”
Eva walked up and gracefully bowed, taking one of Fran’s feet and kissing it. “Mistress” she said, looking up with something that could have been adoration in her eyes. She sat on the dais next to the bride.
Fran turned to her husband and kissed him, then she looked at the slavegirl sitting at her feet. “Eva. Cuffs. Unlock. Go help them with the presents.” She snagged the instruction manual as the girl rose and walked down.
“Now what?” Aunt June asked once the bridal party had gotten well on its way to the airport and most of the guests had left. She surveyed the shambles and shuddered. Cleanup after a wedding reception was always a chore.
“We’ve got extra hands,” her niece said. “Eva. Unfreeze. Eva. Cuffs. Unlock.”
“Eva I understand. We send her out to be trained. Where? I hope you’ve got an idea!” She threw up her hands. “It’s that I’m baffled about.” She pointed at the crib with the baby that had been Fran’s former boyfriend. It had started to fuss again.
“Gotta be a Big Baby,” Tina said, feeling under the crib until she found a small pamphlet. “Right. Big Baby and Baby Doll. What name did they program? It can’t be Kevin.” She looked at the pamphlet. “Kelly?” She shrugged. “OK.”
“Why does it have to be a, what, Big Baby?” Aunt June asked.
“It’s illegal to change a slave so she can’t service herself or survive in an emergency.”
“So we could just tell it to take care of itself?”
“Could, but I wouldn’t want to. It’d break the flow.” She fished a small reader out of her purse. “We could put her in day care and make a special arrangement with whoever we find to train Eva.”
“So what do you have?” Aunt June bent to look at the reader.
“What’s Eva’s current training?” Tina asked.
“Fran took the pamphlet with her.”
“Darn. Eva. Doc. Training. Report.”
Eva opened her mouth, and something that definitely wasn’t Eva said: “Training Summary. Slave Devotion. Basic Collar Obedience. Go To It. Living Doll. Reader. Basic Intercom. Exerciser. End of Training Summary.”
“No housekeeper,” Aunt May noted.
“No Basic Robot either,” Tina added. “So we need Basic Robot, Housekeeper and Robot Housekeeper.”
“What about?” Aunt June pointed.
“Ask whoever trained her for suggestions?”
“Should work.” Aunt June looked at the list on Tina’s reader. “Elite Slave Maid Training has a very good reputation.”
“Too focused,” Tina said absently.
“They’re not good?”
“Oh, they’re good. Sis is going to want to play with her new toy, and that means that she’s going to want to program her robot. Elite doesn’t really train for a hands-on mistress.”
“She would, too,” Aunt June confirmed. “So which one?”
“I think The Basic Robot. They’re not the best on any one thing, but they’re good and they put the pieces together smoothly.”
“Fran’s going to want the apartment done her way anyway. I’ll make the arrangements.” Aunt May pulled a reader out of her purse and transferred the information.
Ten minutes later she came back. “All arranged. The Basic Robot uses The Slave Warehouse for residential trainees, and The Slave Warehouse has got a nursery room for Big Babies. Basic Robot didn’t even blink when I told them we wanted Eva trained to take care of the Big Baby. I told them two hours; we should be pretty much done by then.”
“If we can figure out how to arrange the apartment quickly,” June said.
“Arrange? Oh, right. We’re going to need a nursery room.” May pulled the reader out again and looked at the layout. “Right here.”
“Sewing room? Since when did Fran do any sewing?”
“The closest she’s ever gotten is embroidering a story.”
“Point to you,” June said as Tina giggled.
The Slave Warehouse, Eva decided, seemed to be laid out the same way as Excelsior’s slave kennel. At least as far as she could see from her position sitting on her heels in her assigned cage.
The door in front of her consisted of the same lattice of dull gray 5 mm bars on a 15 cm grid. The bolt was in the same position, as were the hinges. The bolt worked from her side; the attendant who had brought her here had made sure she tested it.
The shelves in back contained a reader as well as a plastic contraption of some kind. The attendant hadn’t mentioned it, so she pulled it out and turned it over curiously. It seemed to be a holder for the reader.
She clamped one end to the bars, adjusted the height and put the reader in the holder. Now this, she thought, was living. Then she giggled at the thought of calling being a girl in a cage living.
She found her pages and looked at them thoughtfully. Nothing there that she couldn’t have expected. There was a list of her current training, including Basic Collar Obedience, Slave Devotion, Go To It, Reader, Living Doll, Exerciser, Basic Intercom and Kennel Procedure. She frowned. Kennel Procedure? Excelsior hadn’t mentioned that, but maybe they wouldn’t.
The new courses included Intercom, Scheduler, Nurse for Big Baby, Owner’s Course, Basic Robot, Housekeeper, Robot Housekeeper and Robot Controller. Nurse, Owner’s Course and Basic Robot both indicated additional stuff. She expanded Nurse curiously and saw: DNA mod for Mammary Gland Expansion, surgery for countermotion generator, DNA mod for back support. The surgery and back support were marked as having been done by Excelsior, the Mammary Gland Expansion was supposed to be done by Sissy’s Dream Boutique. Nurse, Intercom and Scheduler were going to be done in-house by The Slave Warehouse. So were the three parts of the Owner’s Course she was scheduled for: Collar Organization, Collar Control Language and Network Interfaces. There were several other parts that were lined out.
Basic Robot, Housekeeper, Robot Housekeeper and Robot Controller were going to be done by The Basic Robot.
“Ah, there you are,” the voice said from outside the cage. “Time for a conference.”
The speaker, or what Eva could see of her from her vantage point in a bottom tier cage, seemed to be dressed in a calf length green skirt, slit in the back, with three inch heels. The skirt length and heels declared the outfit to be this season’s office worker formal. Not a slave.
Eva swiftly dismounted the reader, slid the bolt and crawled out.
The woman turned and walked to the end of the cage corridor and stopped. Eva noticed that she had the red ribbon of a control collar on her neck, which was mildly puzzling. It must be a Goodwife Ribbon, she thought. Then she found herself turning to a small closet. She shrugged slightly and opened it. The closet, as she expected, contained slave livery in several different sizes.
She hesitated a moment, and then decided that she wouldn’t have been stopped here if they hadn’t wanted her to dress, so she slid into a thong and one of the changes of livery. Sandals and she was ready to go.
“Good,” was all the woman said as she started down the facing corridor, Eva automatically dropping into place a step back and to her right. After a couple of twists and turns they walked into a small office. The woman gestured to a spot on the floor and took a chair for herself.
“I should probably explain myself,” she started, her voice tone making it clear that she shouldn’t have to explain herself to anyone, let alone the peons. “My name is Dorothy, and I’m in charge of specialty training. Right now this means the Big Baby nursery and training for Big Babies, Baby Dolls and their Nurses and Nannies. The reason I come off as a status and class conscious bitch is that I am a status and class conscious bitch.” Her expression made it abundantly clear that she meant every syllable, and that Eva had best comport herself appropriately.
“Your first quiz question. Why am I in charge rather than a motherly type that makes everyone feel wanted and important?”
“Uh. Because most of the owners are going to be like you?” Eva answered cautiously, surprised that her voice had started working without any commands.
“Good answer. Owners that like Babies and Dolls are usually on a power trip of some kind. Sometimes that’s true for Robots as well, but not always. They’re also pretty kinky, but it’s the power trip that’s important. Most of them aren’t the same trip I’m on, but a power trip is a power trip.”
“And I’m the one that has to adapt.”
“Precisely. I suppose you’ve got a few questions before we get started.”
“I haven’t really organized them,” Eva answered. “It looks like a bevy of subcontractors, and I’m puzzled by the mammary gland expansion and the Owner’s Course segments.” She momentarily cradled her generous DD breasts.
“We’re not going to expand your breast size. I think DD is way too big, but Excelsior’s countermotion generators and back support take most of the problems out of them. The mammary glands are the actual milk producing glands, and they’re pretty much the same size, regardless of the total breast size. Yours need to be expanded because part of being a Nurse for a Baby is breast feeding her with your own milk, and that takes four to five times what the usual mammary glands can produce. You, of course, are going to be eating more so you can produce that milk.”
“So we treat her as a real baby,” Eva looked thoughtful.
“Well, mostly. That’s part of what you need to learn. First another question. You know the difference between a Big Baby and a Baby Doll?”
“Uh. No. I just found out about it at the wedding reception.”
“Good. Babies, or Big Babies if you want to be formal, are pets like ponygirls. That means?”
Eva frowned. “She’s trained to act like a baby?”
“Exactly. Big Babies are trained to act as much like babies as possible, considering that they’re actually adults. They’re treated like babies as well. Since they aren’t actually babies, there are a number of things you have to be aware of and take care of.”
“I think I see.”
“We’ll get to the details in a minute. Now what do you know about Baby Dolls?”
“Some kind of a Doll, but I don’t know what that involves.”
“A Baby Doll is a Doll with some programmed behavior. It’s like a mid-range toy you could get at a toy store. The behaviors are programmed and not particularly realistic.”
“Oh. So you could push a button and get her to wet her diaper, or something?”
“Exactly. You seldom see Big Baby and Baby Doll in the same slave, although it makes sense if the owner wants to have something to do with a Baby Doll while she’s not playing with it.”
“I see.”
“What that means is that there are two different training curricula you need. First, the training to care for the Big Baby will be done here. You’ll get Robot Controller at The Basic Robot; that’s the course in programming Robots and all that fun stuff. Robot Controller also handles Dolls, which is part of why you need to learn how to use it. The rest is that your Big Baby also comes with Basic Robot.”
“I wondered what that was.”
“That’s it. Right now we have several Big Babies in the nursery, although yours is the only Baby Doll. Much of the stuff you need to do is dead obvious. It’s what happens when nobody is watching that takes all the training.”
Eva raised an eyebrow, and Dorothy chuckled.
“One of the major rules with Babies, Dolls and Robots is that you can’t keep them in role all the time. How much time you have to let them have out of role varies, but it’s one of the things that the owners have to know and allow for, or their property is going to go sour. If they’re lucky, it’ll ask to be sold. If they’re only moderately lucky, it’ll wind up in the psychiatric unit at the health service, and they’ll have a big bill due to unhealthy working conditions.
“If they’re really unlucky, they’ll face a court, and juries really don’t like Babies, Dolls and Robots, or rather they don’t like owners who like them. That’s going to put both you and your owner into an interesting scheduling predicament, since you’re going to have to have a fair amount of down time as well, at least if your owner actually uses you very much as a Living Doll or Robot. You may or may not be able to absorb it into your mandated time off. That, however, is something you’ll have to work out amongst yourselves.
“Babies have three or four modes: Baby time, Doll time, playtime and dressup time. The first two are obvious: during baby time she’s only allowed age-appropriate behaviors for her assumed age and during Doll time she’s frozen into position. Your Baby should be in one of them whenever anyone but you is in the nursery.
“Playtime is when you allow her to use age-inappropriate toys. I’ve only seen one Baby that didn’t want to use a reader. It’s possible to get a reader that looks like a baby’s play toy but which you can turn on and off over the network so it actually works when you’re giving her playtime. All by itself, a reader will make at least a third of all Babies perfectly happy. The rest are going to need more toys that range from older children’s toys to adult stuff. You’ll just have to figure out what, although since we’ve got her for a month we’ll probably know before the owner comes back.”
“Makes sense.”
“The other part is dressup time. That’s when you let her do anything she wants for herself, except stand up. You want to keep her crawling. However, if she wants to go potty by herself, change her own diaper, dress herself, feed herself and so forth you let her. The only time you let her stand is during the exercise sessions each day.”
“OK,” Eva frowned at the instructions.
“That brings up feeding and diaper changes. You’ve got three ways of handling the timing: you can let her fuss and cry, you can use her control collar as a baby minder so you’re there before she’s uncomfortable, or you can give her some commands that will trigger you into feeding her or changing her diaper. How you want to do it is between you and your Baby, with some input from your owner.
“If that isn’t enough flexibility, then Baby or Baby Doll is simply inappropriate for that particular slave. That’s an issue for the owner, though, not for you.
“The other major piece that takes place mostly behind the scenes is that you need to know how to control your Baby Doll as if you were the owner. That means I’m going to teach you how to use both your and your Baby Doll’s control collars.”
“Oh! That’s what the Owner’s Course segments are all about. Isn’t that...”
“Frowned on by the Slave Code? Yes, but not for the reason you’re probably thinking.” She paused, obviously expecting an answer.
“I thought it was control.”
“And that’s the usual mostly wrong reason. It’s not entirely wrong, but the actual reason is that the slave should be given access to the commands she needs to be useful to her owner, and trained in how to use them. She should also be given access to the recommended standard set. Anything beyond that, including the background about how it works, is a waste of time. If she wants to waste her free time on the net learning things she can’t use and can’t change, that’s up to her.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Good. Now the first thing to know is that you can always issue commands to your own collar by subvocalization. I presume you also know how to do it with the Reader module?”
“Yes. That’s neat! It even works while I’m frozen.”
“It’s one of the better things about the control collars. Now, there’s a basic set of commands that the Slave Code recommends; your owner adds any additional commands that are needed to make you useful to her. That’s called the authorization environment.”
Eva frowned. “Oh. I think I see.”
“Conventionally a slave is only allowed to make relatively minor changes to her authorization environment, like installing a game so she can play it. We’re going to teach you how to make changes, but your owner most likely won’t allow you to change your own authorizations. You’ll be given limited authority to change your Baby Doll’s authorizations.
“There is a back door where you can change your own authorization environment or the details in the contract registry. You have to jump through hoops to get to it, and if you actually do you’d better have a real good explanation for your owner.”
“Why would I want to change the contract registry?”
“It’s the way of terminating a contract,” Dorothy answered.
Eva frowned in concentration. “You mean I could use the back door to renounce my contract?”
“Yes. You know what the Slave Devotion says about that.”
“Without an owner, I am useless.” Eva’s face showed a momentary panic as she said it.
“Right. Statistically, you’re very unlikely to disavow the contract, by that or any other means, without very good cause. The Slaveowner’s Consortium always investigates, as does the Anti-Slavery Society. No intelligent owner pushes their slaves so far that they’re even tempted to disavow the contract.
“The other major thing to know is that your ability to issue commands goes out along the network. You owner can authorize you for quite a few network resources you might not think of, including things like her household computer, other control collars and the clasp on your slave tunic.”
“The clasp on my tunic?”
“Yes. Normally it’s either open or closed, right? If you’re going to nurse a baby you need to expose your breasts so it can suck on them, and you don’t usually want to take your tunic off completely.”
The nursery, Eva thought as she followed Dorothy in, was definitely chaotic. Two jumbo size baby girls and one baby boy were sitting or crawling on the floor. A fourth baby was on a table as a pretty woman in a slave tunic changed her diaper. She spotted Kelly right away; she was one of the baby girls, and was sitting in front of a big stuffed bear, happily babbling at it and listening to the bear babble back.
She suddenly swatted at the bear, causing the robot toy to duck and hold its paws up in front of its face.
Dorothy gestured to an older woman who was sitting in a threesome with a younger woman and the other baby girl. She scrambled to her feet and came over, dropping a curtsy as soon as she stopped.
“Sheila, this is Eva. Eva is going to be Kelly’s nurse. Sheila is the room supervisor. How’s Kelly doing?”
“Pretty good so far. I’ve had to tune her out to keep from giggling; she’s telling the bear a story and playing both parts.”
“That could be amusing,” Dorothy said. She turned on her heel and left. Eva stared after her.
“She gets to you,” Sheila said.
“She sure does. How can you hear Kelly? All I hear is babble.”
“Her muffler is in babble mode. You know the modes, right?”
“On and off?”
“There are normally four: on, off, silent and speaker. Babble is a special effect for Babies. The muffler can put the original on the net, so I take it she hasn’t told you the commands yet.”
“I’m still swimming from the first lecture.”
“Understandable. What’s your take on Kelly right now?”
Eva looked at the Big Baby thoughtfully. “She’s swatted that bear three times in the last minute. She’s about ready to start fussing?”
“Exactly right. It’s feeding time. Since she’s on schedule, it’s best to let her start fussing before you start feeding her. They haven’t started your mammaries yet? It’ll be at least a week before you can breast feed her, and she needs solids this feeding anyway. So...” the two of them walked toward the counter at the back of the room.
“This should be it,” a voice said from above Eva’s cage. She looked out and saw a cart and enough of a woman wearing sandals to see that it was another slave from the bottom of her slave tunic. “Don’t worry about getting out, just reach a hand through. I’ve got to take some blood.” Eva reached her hand through the bars. The woman squatted down, expertly swabbed her wrist and drew some blood into a syringe.
“All done,” she announced to a slight clink as she stored the sample somewhere. Then she shoved the cart away.
The next morning, Eva heard a cart stop in front of her cage. “Still in the same place,” the voice said. “Don’t get out. Just turn around so your ass is against the bars. Good. Now hold still.” She felt the coolness as the woman swabbed a patch of skin and then the prick of an injection.
“That’s the DNA mod for the mammary expansion. You know the drill, right?” She didn’t wait for the answer Eva’s muffler prevented her from giving. “It’s about two days for the new DNA to saturate your system. Your breasts should start itching a bit the next day, and we’ll be around a few times to find how the mammaries are growing. You should be ready for the prolactin in a week or so, and to start nursing your Big Baby a couple of days after that.”
She’d just gotten turned around and settled when it occurred to her that she really needed to be somewhere else. She put the reader away and crawled out of the cage, stopping at the closet to put on a thong, tunic and sandals. Somewhere else turned out to be outside the building in a van that was pulled up in a loading slot. The van had the Slave Warehouse logo on the side: a girl cage that held a pretty, naked girl with a red ribbon around her neck and sitting with her legs spread.
She got in and found a seat. A few minutes later the van was full, and the driver pulled out. He stopped at a nondescript office building where several of the women got out from the front. Then he stopped at another where the next couple of rows of slaves exited. Then he stopped at a third, where it was her turn with four other slaves.
They all entered the building without saying a word; three of them going one way; Eva and another girl going a different way.
They walked down a hallway into another room where a woman wearing the gaily patterned knee length dress that was this season’s office casual outfit sat studying something on a reader.
“Ah, there you are,” she said as the two slaves entered. “Grab a spot.” She gestured to a couple of soft mats.
“Eva. Muffler. Off. Beth. Muffler. Off. I’ll bet you’re wondering what’s going on, right?”
“Uh, right,” Beth said. “Mistress said I was going to get some more training while she took a company course, but she didn’t say what.”
“If this is The Basic Robot, I’m scheduled for Basic Robot, Housekeeper, Robot Housekeeper and Robot Controller, but I’m mostly in the dark about what they are or what my new mistress wants.”
“You’re in the right place. This is The Basic Robot, and both of you are scheduled for three courses: Basic Robot, Housekeeper and Robot Housekeeper. Eva also has Robot Controller; Beth doesn’t. We do mostly individual instruction, so you won’t be taking much together.
“These courses are difficult enough without the additional confusion of not knowing roughly what you’re being trained to do, so I’m going to give you a thumbnail description.
“The term Robot itself is a little confusing. In one sense the Kennel package that the slave kennels use, and that includes our cage room, is a robot package. It controls the slave’s movements pretty much full time while she is in the kennel. In the trip over from your cages at The Slave Warehouse to this room, you were robots. Everything you did was the result of your control collar triggering a conditioned response. However, it’s not considered a Robot package because it depends on conditioned responses.
“The Robot package you’re probably most familiar with is Exerciser. Even though it’s not named as one, it’s a Robot package because the slave’s movements are controlled by a stream of commands in the earplug. Like all robot packages it’s a bit insidious. It can start with an untrained slave and, over a period of time, train her in the command language while increasing her ability to do things like isolate muscle groups and move very precisely.
“Basic Robot is a package that controls the slave in the large: that is, where she is, where she’s going and so forth. It has some fairly common detail activities built in like curtsying and delivering a serving tray, but by and large its job is to get the slave somewhere and then turn control over to another package, or leave her on her own.
“Like all Robot packages the slave gets her instructions through the earplug. The instructions are a series of words and sounds that we will train in to the point that obeying them is very fluid and does not require any conscious thought.
“Let’s take an example. Eva has been trained as a Living Doll.”
Beth turned to look at her incredulously.
“A standard Living Doll can be positioned by her owner and then told to freeze in position. Her owner can move her limbs around while she’s in the frozen state, but she can’t tell her to go somewhere else. If she wants to do that, she has to unfreeze the Doll and tell her where to go and then position her and tell her to freeze in the new position. Right, Eva?”
“That’s the way I was trained.”
“It’s not quite that simple. Since a slave always has Exerciser before she gets Doll training, they train her to respond to Exerciser commands while she’s in the Doll state. The owner can use that, and the Robot Controller, to program in sequences she wants. It’s not really fluent unless the slave practices the sequence, and Exerciser doesn’t support moving from one place to another.”
Eva nodded. “So that’s what they were doing.”
“Correct. What Basic Robot brings to the mix is movement. The entire sequence can be programmed, from the unfreeze command through the movements required to get to the next room and position herself to the freeze command. From the outside it would look like she just started moving, went somewhere else and then froze into a new position. From Eva’s viewpoint she might or might not remember that there were some Basic Robot and Living Doll commands. She definitely wouldn’t remember the specific commands, except possibly the last one or two. If you asked her why she did it, and she doesn’t normally remember being commanded, she’d probably say it seemed like a good idea.”
She paused.
“Housekeeper is just what it sounds like; the million and one details for keeping everything clean, organized and so forth. We really don’t bring anything to that task that you couldn’t get better elsewhere; you wouldn’t contract with us if all you wanted to do was train a housekeeper. What we do is fill in on the way to Robot Housekeeper.
“Robot Housekeeper is what the name implies; the actual housekeeper is a computer somewhere which commands the wearer via a series of earplug commands. Unlike Basic Robot, Robot Housekeeper generally issues an unbroken series of commands, and takes a pretty intense set of status in return.
“To take an example, if you had a kitchen with stacks of dirty dishes to clean, the computer would send a series of commands that would cause the housekeeper to inspect the kitchen and report on what was where, in detail. She might inspect various pots to get an estimate of how hard they would be to clean and what cleaning materials were required.
“Once the inspection was over, the computer would issue a series of commands that would get the work done. From the outside, the work is getting done and the organization may be quite intricate. From the inside she probably would not remember very much about the details, and certainly would not remember why she did anything at any particular time. Time simply passes.
“One real advantage of the process is that it learns over time, and it notices details and remembers them. If there’s a broken tile, it’s going to be noted so it gets repaired promptly. If there’s a difficulty cleaning a particular kind of pot, it’s going to be noted so you can research alternative methods at leisure. It keeps track of all of the cleaning supplies so they get restocked when needed.
“Another thing to note is that this is not exclusively a slave process; a fair number of ordinary housewives are using the exact same mechanism for their housework. Goodwife teaches a watered down version of the technique in one of their Yellow courses.
“The final thing to note is that all these things are integrated; when the housekeeper is done, it turns control back over to Basic Robot, which can route to the next task. In Eva’s case you might think it could ‘put her away’ as a Living Doll until she was needed again.
“That goes great on the telly, and it makes a nice little background for impressing guests, but it doesn’t work in real life for one very simple reason. Why?”
“Uh. The Slave Code prohibits it?” Beth guessed.
“The Slave Code goes into quite a bit of detail about why it’s a real bad idea. However, there’s an underlying reason. Eva?”
She chuckled. “I got told chapter and verse on that. Slaves need down time or they go sour. Especially Dolls and Robots.”
“Exactly. How much and what kind is something you need to find out by trial and error, but the slave that thrives on being kept as a Living Doll or Statue whenever she isn’t being used for something by the household computer is a very rare bird. In fact, she probably doesn’t exist.”
“The last piece is the Robot Controller. To put it simply, it’s the programming interface for a control collar. A rather primitive version runs in the control collar; full versions run in a computer somewhere. It isn’t just Robots. It handles Dolls and conditioned routines. It’s got the management console for Exerciser and the Housekeeper part of Robot Housekeeper. Training is a combination of self study, network exercises and simulations, and hands-on practice.
The training room turned out to be a large, mostly empty room with a row of booths on one side. Most of the booths were occupied by standing women wearing some kind of ornate headset. Some of them were naked, some were wearing slave livery. Two were wearing comfortable looking shorts and shirt outfits. Eva nodded; she’d already encountered two women in her cage room that weren’t slaves. They were staying at The Slave Warehouse so they could be trained in Basic Collar Obedience.
Another naked woman, complete with headset, was walking around the open space, apparently at random. She’d stop, turn, move somewhere else, take something from a table and put it on the floor, take something from the floor and put it on a table, curtsy to nothing.
“First sight looks kind of bizarre, doesn’t it?” their guide laughed. “Almost all of Basic Robot, and a large part of Robot Housekeeper is done with the Virtual Reality helmets. Now, Eva, let’s put you somewhere for the moment while I get Beth set up.” She pointed at a spot against the wall between two low tables. Eva walked over, and the guide said: “Eva. Freeze.” Eva felt the familiar conditioned response of the Living Doll kick in.
She took about ten minutes to do something with Beth’s hair before putting the helmet on her head. Then she walked back. “Eva. Unfreeze.”
“These VR helmets contain a high quality brain wave scanner,” she said as she positioned her subject kneeling in front of her. “That means we’ve got to get the pickups in closer than the contract machines need, which means we’ve got to go through your hair. A long time ago we used to have to shave our subjects, but the owners really didn’t like that, so time marches on, and now we’ve got better pickups. We still need to place them manually, though.” Eva felt her apply a comb, and then she felt a pattern of five spots each on the top and each side of her head.
“Good.” Then she dropped a VR helmet on Eva’s head, completely covering it. “Stand up and follow the instructions.” The voice sounded a bit odd, but Eva couldn’t quite place what was odd about it.
The training exercise was nothing she could have imagined. The voice in her right ear started out by having her imagine several simple movements, including the sensations of her muscles moving and the balance of her body shifting. Then it told her to imitate the image in front of her the same way. At the same time, she could hear words in her left ear, but she couldn’t make them out. At least, she couldn’t spare enough attention to try.
It continued on that way for some time. The voice in her right ear slowly quit giving her instructions other than correcting movements she didn’t copy properly. Sometimes she felt her body making a movement when there wasn’t anything in front of her to copy.
Then it shifted; she felt herself walk out into the empty room, except it wasn’t empty. It seemed to have corridors, rooms, furniture and several people. The not-quite-understandable voice in her left ear would say something, and she’d do something.
It always seemed like there was more than one possible thing to do, and most of the time what the voice seemed to be having her do wasn’t the most obvious, or didn’t flow from what she’d been doing before. Besides which, the virtual rooms and corridors didn’t make sense; they kept changing.
Then she went back to the booth, and then back to the room, and back to the booth. Finally a different attendant took the helmet off her head, and she found herself walking down several corridors to the Slave Warehouse van.
It was fortunate, Eva thought to herself as she found her way back to her cage, that the kennel’s computer took care of moving her around. If she’d have had to follow directions, she’d have gotten lost. It wasn’t that The Slave Warehouse was laid out confusingly; it was more that her head felt like it had been used as the white board for a class in advanced whichness of the why or something. It felt like mush. Slave Mush. She giggled.
She checked the schedule on her reader. Ten or fifteen minutes to lunch. The last thing she felt like doing was look at the damn thing any more, so she sat back and concentrated on her breathing. She’d heard somewhere or other that it helped.
It did seem to. When she felt it was time for lunch, she actually felt that lunch was a good idea. It even occurred to her to wonder which of the fifty kinds of Slave Chow they would be serving for this meal.
It turned out to be a slightly toned down version of Genuine Extra Hot Texas Chili on a rice base. She took a bowl and sat down with a girl who seemed to have sapphire blue skin. Whoever had done the gene mod had managed to blend in really red hair and green eyes. Even the brown of her aureoles fit into the color scheme somehow.
“You look slagged over,” the sapphire girl said.
“I was at The Basic Robot for Basic Robot this morning. My head feels like porridge. Porridge that’s way past the sell by date.”
“Don’t worry,” another girl said as she sat down. “It’s only going to get worse.”
“Gee thanks. Just what I wanted to know.”
The brunette laughed. “My last owner had them train me. He had this idea of the Totally Programmed Slave Girl. He finally had to give up.”
“You didn’t work out?”
“Oh, I worked out. With all due respect, his programming sucked.”
“So he sold you?”
“Nah, he would have gone on forever. He ran out of money and the bank foreclosed. I was part of the collateral.” She shrugged. “As it says, ‘the old owner is past, the bidders are gathered’. I’m keeping my eye on the auction.”
“So what was it like to be a Totally Programmed Slave Girl?”
“Boring. I was about ready to ask him to either sell me or assign me something I could get my mind into.”
“I mean what it felt like?”
She shrugged. “I don’t remember command streams; it just felt like I did what I wanted to do. That got a bit strange when I wanted to run into walls.”
“Which is why you said his programming sucked.”
“Partially. He left a lot wide open; I got to look at his code. He’d have been a lot better off having me do part of it, but no, he was the great genius.”
“So you know programming?”
“A bit. At least I was passing the courses handily.”
“So what happened?”
“Financial problems. Got sucked into something I should have seen coming, and finally went to a factor before the bill collectors could file suit. So here I am.”
“You sold yourself?”
“Of course. The factors work it out with the bills up front. If you wait for the collectors you’ll be sitting in a kennel forever while they wrangle in court, and nobody’s going to pay for advanced training. The factors will do additional training if they think it’ll pay for itself in the auction.” She shrugged. “The penalty of stupidity.”
“Tina?” Eva said a bit uncertainly as she saw the late teen ahead of her in line for a bowl of Slave Chow. Well, either late teen or very early twenties.
“Eva?” Tina turned and then giggled. “Funny meeting you here.”
“I thought you were part of my new mistress’ family,” Eva said as she herded the redhead to a spot on the floor.
“I am. Should we be talking?”
“Probably not, but so what and what are you doing here?”
Tina giggled again and touched the red ribbon around her throat. “I finally wore Aunt May down so she let me get one of these. On condition I stay here until I get the basics down properly.”
Eva looked at her strangely. “I may be way out of line, but why did you need anyone’s permission? You look old enough to agree the kennel contract yourself.”
Tina looked like she’d been caught, and then she shrugged. “You’ll find out anyway, so I might as well give you my side first. Uncorrectable brain damage.”
“Should I sympathize or just listen?”
“Just listen. Whatever was supposed to happen to my brain when I became a woman,” she gestured to her breasts, “didn’t. I’m still instinctively around ten to twelve.”
“Sexually?”
“No, not that. Sex is fun, but it’s not, um,”
“Something you do to bond with a guy?”
“Exactly. But don’t get me wrong. I like having a guy inside me. The whole bonding thing still doesn’t make any sense, though.”
Eva thought for a moment. “Social networking?”
“Same thing. Also I’ve never felt any desire to separate.”
“Must be a hassle for your mother.”
“April kicked me out last year. I’m staying with Fran. I got put up with Aunt May when Fran went on her honeymoon.”
“So you’ll be part of the household I’m serving.”
“Sure looks like it.”
Tina hesitated momentarily and then began following the woman who had summoned her from her cage, a step behind and to her right. From what she could see of her guide’s back, she was dressed in a very upscale version of office formal. They turned a couple of times, eventually arriving in a small room.
Tina hesitated again in momentary confusion, and then sat on the floor, facing the woman, who had occupied a low couch.
“I’m Dorothy, and that was an abysmal performance,” she began.
“...” the usually vocal Tina said.
“Your turns on the way here. You hesitated on the instruction to follow me and you missed all the turns; you followed me rather than letting the collar guide you. You hesitated before seating yourself. Fortunately, your instructor in Basic Collar Obedience still thinks there is some hope, or we’d call your aunt to come and get you.”
Tina opened and closed her mouth.
“Good. You’re learning.
“I’m one of the instructors who does specialty and advanced training. Your instructor for the Slave Devotion says you have memorized about two thirds of it, and can explain roughly a quarter of the stanzas both correctly and coherently. The amount you’ve memorized is adequate for the week you’ve been here, and you’re ahead of target for learning what it all means. You’ll have to go a bit faster if you want to get it all before you’re scheduled to leave.
“The instructions your aunt left, and which you agreed to, include a number of items which we normally do not teach slaves. You, of course, are not a slave. Her overview was that you wanted to use that bauble around your neck for something other than impressing people about classes you haven’t taken at the Goodwife Institute.
“The next item on your curriculum is the Collar Command Language. Your aunt indicated you were fairly comfortable with the more common uses for vocally controlling slaves; we are going to discuss how it is used across the network, and how it is used to interface with computers. Understand?”
“Uh, yes. Thank you!”
“No need to thank me now, girl. Thank me after you prove you can apply yourself. I’m aware of your developmental problems, and also that you have well above average intelligence, are more than somewhat of a tomboy, and can do just about anything you set your mind to, always assuming the brain regions involved exist and have matured.”
“Uh,” Tina said, a bit nonplussed.
“There’s going to be a considerable amount of studying you’ll need to do while you’re in your cage. You’ll find the pointers on your reader. For the moment I need to find out what you already know. So tell me what the key difference is that makes the slaves around you regard the Devotion as something just short of Holy Writ, and you regard it as an uninspiring piece of bad poetry that is only interesting because it says a lot about how slavery works, here and now.”
“Uh.”
“Speak up girl. I can’t hear you.”
“There’s a Devotion module somewhere?”
“Which ones?”
“Uh. They’ve got to have a different one than I do.”
“You’re on the right track. They’ve got the Devotion Enhancer, you’ve got the Devotion Neutralizer. Now what else is needed?”
Tina frowned. “There’s some kind of contract module?”
“Is that a question or an answer?”
“I think it’s an answer.”
“You’re close. There isn’t a contract module as such, but the Devotion Enhancer won’t work unless there is a Transferable Unrestricted Use Contract in the contract registry. Now let’s see you get a list of all the modules currently loaded into your collar.”
Tina’s lips moved slightly. “Uh. Devotion Neutralizer, Kennel and a bunch of others. So Kennel is your module and the Devotion Neutralizer was the right answer before?”
“Precisely. Make sure you know the relationships between those modules. Now list the first few users.”
“Um. Fran is listed as a controlling user and Aunt May is listed as an authorizing user.”
“So tell me about why your sister is a controlling user.”
“Um. It’s saying she’s listed on the incompetency as my guardian.”
“Good.”
An hour later Tina walked back to her cage, waving hello to Eva in passing. Eva didn’t notice, which wasn’t at all surprising; she was totally focused on her reader. Tina crawled into her cage and thought about the interrogation she’d just undergone. Socrates, she thought, should have been executed a lot sooner. Preferably before he met Big Nose. Dorothy had exposed so many holes in what she thought she knew that it didn’t even look like a healthy outline.
She looked at the reader. Homework. Ugh. She shrugged, making her ample breasts bounce.
Well, she’d asked for it and she had better make the most of a personal tutor. Even if the personal tutor clearly thought she had quite a way to rise to the status of common dirt.
She pulled up the diagram of a common module organization for someone who wasn’t a slave, and began closely examining what she’d only skimmed before. She was halfway down the corridor to the eating room with the rest of her cage mates before she realized she had reacted to the invisible prompt of the Kennel module without thinking about it.
“This,” June told her sister, “is a big barn of a place.”
“It always looks bigger before we’ve got the furniture moved in.”
“What furniture?”
“Fran’s.”
“You didn’t know? She sold everything from her old apartment before she left.”
“She What?” May screeched. “Oh, well. Eric’s got to have something. And Tina’s should be OK.”
“I wouldn’t give his stuff to a junkyard, and Tina’s goes into Tina’s room.”
“That bad?”
“He’s a guy, Aunt,” Tina’s voice came from where her legs stuck out of her skirt, which in turn seemed to stick out from a pile of equipment, cables and blinking lights.
“Point to Tina,” Aunt June said. A giggle seemed to come from somewhere in the depths of the racks.
She wiggled out, stood up and settled her skirt. Then she turned back to the pile of electronic equipment and made something that could have been interpreted as a mystic gesture. The lights turned on and started blinking in response.
“If I didn’t know better,” June said.
“It’s all timing, Aunt,” Tina said, grinning. Her lips moved slightly. “Seems to be working.” She closed the door behind it and took out her reader.
“Um?” June asked.
“I’m checking that it’s loaded what we ordered. It all seems to be there.” She looked a bit more and then dropped the reader back in her purse.
“How do we hide it?”
“Oh, come on. I’ve never seen a household where the slaves didn’t know where the computer was. As long as it keeps working, they don’t care.”
June shrugged. “If it works. We can always rent furniture.”
“True,” May answered. “Looking at that pile of deranged electrons reminded me, though. What is that thing on the front of your Goodwife Ribbon, Tina?”
“It’s a mood ring.”
“It’s a what?”
“A mood ring. Something I found from the Dark Ages. I was pissed enough at your putting me in a kennel that I decided to throw convention to the winds. I found a displayer that fit on the front and put a routine in my collar to color it by my mood. Maybe it’ll start a new fashion trend.”
“More likely tell onlookers when to get out of your way.”
Tina giggled.
“You were the one that wanted a working Goodwife Ribbon.”
“But did you have to do it that way?”
“Is there any other way that really works?”
“Uh. But three whole weeks naked in that cage?”
“And how long did it take before you were fluent?”
“Uh.”
“How long, Tina?”
“19 days,” she admitted. Then she giggled.
“Where do we put Eva?” June asked as they penciled in the furniture they wanted to order.
“Stand her in a corner somewhere?”
“That’s illegal. Unhealthy working conditions.”
“We can’t give her a room of her own.”
“That would be silly. She belongs in the nursery, but there’s no space. Unless...”
“So that’s the color of an evil thought,” June said to her niece.
“Oh, she probably won’t mind,” Tina said.
“She’s not supposed to, but how do you know?”
“We talked a few times.”
“Oh?”
“She was in my cage room.”
May stared at her. “So you gave her all the family dirt?”
“She’s going to find out anyway, and I wanted to get my side in first.”
“We could put her in your room,” June threatened, half jokingly.
“Chain her to the foot of my bed?”
“She goes in the nursery,” May decreed.
“We want to get Eva and Kelly in here first,” June said.
“Why?”
“Eva’s an extra pair of hands, and I’d think Fran would appreciate her knowing where everything is right from the start.”
“And you figure Kelly should come with so she can nurse her. So we move stuff into the nursery first, and then work from the back forward?”
“Kitchen past the nursery. That way Eva can make lunch.”
“Good thought.”
Trust her owners to throw a party the night they got back from the honeymoon. Eva looked at the bars of her cage door and stretched in place. Then she slid the bolt, got out and looked around.
Kelly sleeping peacefully. Check. Owners sleeping. Check. Tina sleeping. Check. Apartment condition. Shambles. Kelly was unlikely to be awake for another hour and a half. Fran. Unknown. Eric probably wouldn’t crawl out of bed for four unless his new wife got him up. Tina might be up earlier, but she probably wouldn’t be a distraction.
She took a quick shower and then knelt in front of the wedding picture they’d hung in the nursery. She turned her muffler to suppress her voice, and then silently recited the Devotion.
Then she slid into a thong, sandals and her slave tunic, told the computer to start the Robot Housekeeper and walked out to survey the apartment.
Two hours later the apartment was practically spotless and Kelly was beginning to fuss. Eva dropped into the nursery and held her while she nursed, changed her diaper and set her on the floor to play. She turned Kelly’s earplugs so they would transmit regular speech. “Think you can play by yourself for a while, sweetums?” she asked. Then she handed her the reader.
Two minutes later, Kelly was sprawled out on the middle of the floor, feet waving in the air, bottom of her diaper cover sticking out from under her play skirt, propped on her elbows and absorbed in whatever she had called up.
Eva bent down to kiss her and then slid out of her tunic and sandals. Another hour of sleep would help. She set the apartment system to wake her if her owners got up, and then slid into her cage.
Kelly heard the slight sound of the door closing and the bolt being thrown. She turned and waved a small hand, thumb up, and then turned back to her story.
The girl in the cage fell asleep almost immediately.
It was several hours later that Fran and Eric staggered out of bed. Tina had been up for a couple of hours, but had contented herself with a quick bowl of Slave Chow and then had holed up in her room. Eva had woke up a little bit later, just in time to change Kelly’s diaper, much to the Baby Doll’s disgust at having her reading interrupted.
“I could get used to this,” Fran said as Eric seated her at the small table where Eva had laid out three places. “Tina, aren’t you going to have more?”
“I had something earlier,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“A bowl of Slave Chow,” she admitted.
“Where did you learn to like that stuff?” her sister asked.
“In the kennel,” she mumbled even more quietly.
“In the where?” Fran asked, almost dropping the coffee cup that was halfway to her lips. “Aunt May didn’t.” She stopped.
“Clearly she did. How much did you learn about using that thing?”
“Basic Collar Obedience, Collar Control Language, module organization, authorization environment, Intercom, Scheduler, Exerciser, Computer interfaces.”
“You were studying.”
“When Dorothy tutors, you study. It’s a law of nature.”
“So you put Eva to work when you got up? The apartment looks very good; I’d expected it to still be a mess.”
“She’d already finished when I got up.”
“Oh? I appreciate the initiative, but how did you do it?” she turned to ask Eva.
“The Robot Housekeeper package. You had me trained; it works.”
“You shouldn’t have been able to turn it on by yourself?”
“The computer isn’t blocked against me.”
“Should I?” Fran asked.
“Why?” Tina answered. “A slave is to be used; if you can’t trust her, get another one.”
“How did you manage it? Eric says you had no experience.”
“I had Dorothy for most of the list Tina gave you,” she told her owner. “It was part of my training as a Nurse for a Big Baby; the rest was my training to control a Baby Doll.”
“Now it makes sense. How is Kelly, by the way?”
Eva’s fingers twitched slightly, and her head tilted minutely as if she was listening to something. “Amusing herself reading a story. Should start fussing in a half hour or so; her diaper needs changing and she’s about ready for a feeding.”
“You can tell all of that from here?”
“I control her reader,” Eva grinned. “So I know what she’s reading. There’s a status routine in her collar that condenses all of the normal baby stuff. It isn’t quite ready to start yelling at me about the diaper, but it will when she starts fussing.”
“Why is she reading anything? She’s supposed to be too young to read.”
“She’s on down time. We call it playtime; she’s allowed to play with more grownup toys. I should put her on either baby time or doll time before you go to play with her.”
“I suppose there’s a reason?”
“Mostly to keep the illusion. Whether you want it kept is up to you, but if you do she shouldn’t see anyone except me when she’s on down time, and you only see each other in role. Which reminds me, do you want to see her as a Baby or as a Doll?”
“Makes sense. I think I want both at one time or another. So what else do you let her do on playtime?”
“More grownup, or at least older age-appropriate toys if she wants them. So far she seems to be quite content with the reader and that toy bear. She does more than read stories; she watches some plays and does quite a bit of art. We talk a bit; we like to discuss books and plays. She hasn’t shown an interest in anything else yet.”
“What about changing her own diapers?”
“That’s dress up time. She doesn’t show much interest in any of that. She’s quite content to let me do it for her.”
“That,” Fran laughed, “sounds exactly like Kevin.”
“Doesn’t it just,” Tina agreed.
“I should take her off of playtime anyway; she’s been on it since she woke up, and that’s more than long enough for one day.”
“By the way, sis, how did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Trick Kevin into agreeing to a slave contract? He vanished a few months ago; I thought you’d managed to pry him loose.”
Fran grinned maliciously. “I got tired of telling him to quit being such a big baby, and then I ran across an article on Sissy’s Dream Boutique. So I made arrangements and then the next time he did it, I told him that if he wanted to be a big baby, he could sign an agreement to be one, or he was out. Get his things and leave. He agreed. Surprised the heck out of me. He found out it was a slave contract at the lawyer’s, and then he surprised me again by agreeing. He went right to the kennel and then to Sissy’s Dream.
“That sounds exactly like Kevin”, Tina pronounced.
“Well, the fact I told him I’d quit guaranteeing his expenses may have had something to do with it.”
Eric leaned back and laughed. Eva’s smile was a bit forced.
“She’s putting up quite a fuss,” Fran said as she walked in with Tina. Baby Kelly was waving her arms and legs and babbling angrily, while Eva had her pinned to the changing table.
“She didn’t like it when I shut down her reader.” Eva shrugged and shoved a large size pacifier into the big baby’s mouth, and then slid a set of miniature cuffs on Kelly’s wrists.
“Can’t you shut her up with the muffler?”
“Oh, sure, but a pacifier gets the point across a whole lot better.”
Kelly glared over the pacifier, but made no attempt to remove it. Eva started tickling the baby’s feet. Kelly convulsed in suppressed laughter and then relaxed. She gave Eva a disgusted look, but then stretched out so her nanny could take the rubber panties off and remove the sodden diaper.
“You’re going to nurse her next?”
“This feeding should be mostly solids. She should get one bottle and about half a normal serving of Slave Chow.”
“Which variety?” Tina asked as she surveyed the cabinet.
“Pick one. I usually let her pick it, but she’s been a bad girl.”
Tina looked at the array and then grinned as she took a canister and measured some into a bowl.
“Clam chowder?”
“Should have discontinued that last month.”
Eva chuckled. “Tastes differ.”
“We all agreed.”
“I believe you’re right.”
Fran looked back and forth. “How’d you know?”
“Oh, we were in the same cage room. Talked a bit during meals.”
“My idiot sister and my robot housekeeper are conspiring against me!”
“I am not an idiot!”
“You act like it.”
The two sisters glared at each other and then burst out laughing.
“So I pick her up, hold her like so, remove pacifier and insert bottle.” Fran got a good hold on Kelly. “Oof, she’s heavy.”
“Around fifteen kilos.”
“I suppose they couldn’t have made her smaller.”
“She’s about average for a three year old girl. Any smaller and they’d have had to reduce her head too much. That’s a no-no. ”
“I don’t think anyone would have noticed.”
“Point to Fran,” Tina said and giggled.
“Now for some fun,” Fran announced after she fed Kelly the last spoonful and took the cuffs off of the little wrists. Kelly looked around and then crawled over to the shelves of toys, plopping the robot bear down in front of her.
The four of them left the big baby happily babbling at her bear. Tina giggled as they left.
“What’s funny?”
“Oh, Kelly’s telling the bear how put upon she is. And she’s reading the bear’s lines, too.”
“How can you tell?”
“Her muffler is putting the original on the net.”
“You’re having way too much fun with that ribbon.”
Tina giggled.
“So,” Fran said as they followed her into the workroom, “how do I program Eva?”
“You didn’t take the course?”
“Which one was it?”
“Robot Controller.”
“It was on the list, but...”
“I don’t know,” Tina confessed. “I had enough to do.”
“If mistress would allow me,” Eva said very formally.
Fran looked at her. “You studied how to program yourself?”
“How to program Kelly; she has Basic Robot installed.”
“So she does. I was pissed enough at Kevin that I had them do everything they suggested. What do you use it for?”
“Right now there are only two routines; one positions her and puts her into Doll mode and the other makes sure she does her exercise on schedule. You might have fun using it to move her around remotely.”
“So show me.”
“It’s pretty simple once you get the idea. Pull up the Robot Controller program from the household computer,” her fingers twitched slightly as she entered the command, echoing it on the big display so Fran could see what she did. The program popped up. “And you’ll get a list of everyone with a control collar in the household.”
“You and Kelly I understand. What’s Tina doing on the list?”
“It’s your household computer. The installer probably took all the defaults. Since you’re her guardian and she’s got an activated control collar it just plugged her in.
“She’s got Exerciser, Go To It and the stuff the kennel uses for kennel management. Exerciser is a Robot program. This is one place you can enter your exercise goals and monitor results. You could program her as well, but it would be kind of pointless.”
“You could do what with me?”
“Program you, but what it could do is real limited. About the only thing that would be even marginally useful would be forcing you to do your daily exercise on schedule, and I have no idea if that’s even an issue. Exerciser routines would just result in a mess without the Living Doll freeze, and Go To It might be amusing, but utterly useless.”
“Oh.” Tina nodded. “I can see how that would work.” Then she giggled.
“Makes sense.” Fran looked at the screen, frowned and then shrugged.
Eva clicked through to Eva and then to Robot Programs.
“Notice there are no programs entered. So what do you want to start with?”
“Um?”
“How about ‘get me a beer’?” Eric put in.
“From Tumbling Through Time? Do you have a control box anywhere?”
“Here,” Tina rummaged around a moment and then held one up.
“Tina, you’re probably better at finding it on the net than I am.”
“OK.” Tina fiddled for a moment, and suddenly an image of a remote popped onto the screen. “It’ll remember it for next time.”
“Now, let’s create a program and attach it to button 1. We want to start out with sending the robot to the fridge, so that’s the ‘goto’ command, and we get the target from the housekeeper.”
“OK,” Fran said slowly.
“Now we want her to get a serving tray, so we ‘get’ from the housekeeper and the target is a special called ‘assembly area’ where we put something together. Next we get the beer from the fridge, so that’s another ‘get’ and the source comes from the housekeeper again.”
“So now she’s got the beer on the serving tray, right?” Tina asked.
“Exactly. Now we want her to deliver it, so we’ve got another ‘goto’ this time with a ‘carry’ and the target is the remote.”
“OK, it’s beginning to make some sense,” Fran said.
“Now to finish up we add a curtsy with the target being whoever is holding the remote, and then a ‘present to’ with the same target.”
“So I presume we file it next?”
“Almost. We want to run the rationalizer.” She clicked on a button, and suddenly the program sprouted a number of additional lines in gray.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a sanity checker. It fills in lots of little details. If it thought there was anything really wrong it would put it in red.”
“Right. Now we save.”
Eric pushed the button on the remote, and Eva got up and walked out. A minute later she came back carrying a beer on a small serving plate. She curtsied and said: “Your beer, sir.”
Eric took it off the plate, leaving Eva to look at the plate in her hand in confusion. “Oh. We forgot to have me put it back. I’ll take it when we’re done here.”
“I don’t like that confusion either,” Tina said. “What’s that about?”
“The program ended. I don’t always connect with what I was doing before when the robot controller is running me.”
“So we should end programs with you somewhere specific?”
“Actually we should wrap them with a special save and restore command. The first makes me say a few words about what I was doing, the last one reminds me. They’re special because they’re context dependent; if Eric triggered the ‘get me a beer’ routine while I was housekeeping, I would just get him one and then the Robot Housekeeper would pick up again.”
Eric saluted them with the beer. “Natasha couldn’t have done it better.”
“Now let’s play with my doll,” Fran said with a grin. “I have to go back out to get to it?”
“Not all the way. You want the command console instead of the programmer. That lets you put in commands one at a time.”
“I see. Which commands?”
“You’ll mix Doll commands, Basic Robot commands and Exerciser commands.”
“Explain?”
“You normally position a Doll by physically moving her around. If she isn’t frozen, you use Basic Robot commands to move her. If she is, you use Exerciser commands.”
Fran nodded. “Makes sense. So we’ve just used the Basic Robot commands, and I assume Tina knows the Exerciser commands.”
“Well, kinda.”
“The other issue is that there are a number of conditions that will break the paralysis, and the Doll training doesn’t include the ability to go back into position once it’s handled. Statue does, but I don’t have that training.”
“Such as?”
“Full bladder.”
“Point to Eva,” Tina giggled as Eric saluted with his can of beer.
“Ignoring that for the moment, if I wanted you to go into that corner and freeze, what would I do?”
“Start out with a trigger, and then do a ‘goto’ for that corner. Then pick an orientation and a position from the list, and finally use the ‘Living Doll freeze’ command.”
“I see.” Fran pushed the button and Eva walked over to the corner, turned around and felt herself shift into the familiar self-imposed paralysis of the Living Doll. She looked at the scene in front of her. Fran and Tina were bent over the system; Eric hoisted the beer and left the room.
The next hour saw them moving Eva around the room from place to place and having her assume almost every imaginable position.
The session ended when a full throated scream cut through the air. Fran and Tina looked at each other. “Damn, we forgot about Kelly.” The two of them rushed from the room, leaving Eva frozen in a corner.
Kelly’s diaper was full enough that it was leaking. “Where’s Eva?” Fran asked.
“Oops. We left her frozen. I’ll get her,” Tina dashed off leaving her sister with the mess.
“Eva. Unfreeze.” Tina snapped as she entered the room. Eva didn’t move.
“Huh? Oh, damn!” Tina pulled out her reader and aborted the program. Eva stretched and then made a mad dash for the nursery, Tina following at a slightly more sedate pace.
“Set four places tonight,” Fran told Eva.
“You’re having guests? What do they prefer?”
“For you. And no Slave Chow; you’re eating the same as us.”
“May I ask why?”
“You’ll find out.”
“Today,” Fran said after they’d gotten started on the meal, “has been quite interesting. I don’t think I’ve quite overextended Eva, but forgetting Kelly wasn’t on. And I’ve got lots of ideas for Eva.” Her grin was hardly reassuring.
“The idea that’s been germinating, though, is a bit different. Tina, what were your impressions of how masters were treating their slaves. Standoffish, friendly, keeping them locked up when not in use, what?”
Tina looked at a stalk of asparagus and then bit off the end. “I’m not entirely sure. I mean there were probably 60 to 70 slaves in my cage room at one time or another while I was there, and the ones that said anything about their relationships with their owners were all over the place. I’ve got the impression that a willingness to simply use their slave for whatever happens to come up kind of goes together with regarding them as just another member of the household.”
“That makes sense,” Eric said. “It’s the ‘of course’ factor. The fewer qualms there are about using her, the less reason there is to set up anything special.”
“That’s one of the things I was thinking; I just wanted to check if there seemed to be a consensus I wasn’t aware of. Eva, I don’t want you calling me ma’am or Eric sir.”
“Except when it’s funny, of course,” Tina broke in.
“Funny?”
“The ‘get me a beer’ routine.”
“Point to Tina,” Eric chuckled.
Fran laughed. “Now, your standing duties are to take care of Kelly, do meals and housekeep the apartment. I doubt if any of that is a surprise. Do you want to use the Robot Housekeeper for housekeeping?”
“Most of the time. Besides being fast, it checks things and makes notes.”
“How does it feel when you’re using it?” Tina asked curiously.
“I know I’m under Robot control, but other than that I’m not really all that aware of anything but what I’m doing at the moment. It’s very intense.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” Eric asked.
“No. Why should it?” She looked at him. “I’m here to be used. When the Robot Controller is using me I hear the command stream, so I don’t question whatever I’m doing.” She paused thoughtfully.
“I’ve never been inspired by housework. It has to be done, and I’d think Fran was awfully strange if she didn’t use me for it. The Robot Housekeeper lets me get the job done faster and eventually better. What’s not to like?”
“I’ve heard that,” Eric said slowly, “but I’m not sure I believe it.”
“Well, all the sessions I had at The Basic Robot, there were usually two or three women in the VR booths wearing shirts and shorts. The rest of us were either naked or wearing slave tunics. I figured they weren’t slaves.”
“Probably not,” Tina added. “I wasn’t the only non-slave in the kennel room.”
“Just the slowest learner.”
Tina took a mock swipe at Eva.
“Oh?”
Tina blushed. “I took almost three weeks to get Basic Collar Obedience down fluently.”
“It usually takes?”
“A bit less than two. That’s why slaves are held for two weeks before the auction; it gives a chance to rough train a new slave.”
“That happens a lot?”
“I met several that were collared in the lawyer’s office and went right to auction.”
“That’s got to be tough,” Fran said.
“Not really. They knew it up front, and the kennel tries to slant the Slave Devotion so it cushions the impact.”
“That’s what was so spooky about it; they were all so matter of fact about being sold,” Tina put in.
“Why’d they do it?” Fran asked.
“Bunch of reasons, lots of debt. A couple couldn’t find jobs.”
“I thought Eric giving you to me was a wild gesture, and then you really did the gift up proud.”
“That was Tina, she said to kiss your foot.”
“I thought it was charming, and then you pitched in without so much as blinking when I told you to. You don’t seem to have any animosity for Eric?”
Eva shrugged. “I’d given him my slave contract months before. They wouldn’t take me in the kennel without a collar, muffler and earplugs. That was my last chance to back out. Once I got to the cage room I knew I was going to be trained. My trainer emphasized the Owner aspect of the Devotion, and when it went past two weeks without him showing up and I got sent out for Doll training, well, let’s just say I was prepared to never see him again.”
“The Devotion says something about: ‘The old owner is past, the bidders gather’,” Tina said.
“Exactly. I didn’t expect to see him again, but he isn’t my owner any more. Your marriage is.”
“That’s what’s spooky,” Tina shivered. “You’re so matter of fact about it.”
“If I look at it logically, it makes no sense that if I don’t have an owner who uses me I’m so useless that I should just curl up and die. But that’s what the collar, the Devotion and the Devotion Enhancer does. It drives it in until it’s part of the fabric of your being. I’m matter of fact about it because, for me, it’s a fact. It’s an emotional fact, but it’s still a fact.”
She paused a moment in the silence. “Looking at it from where I am now, he should have either said: ‘that’s sweet’, and rejected my offer or collared me in the lawyer’s office and sent me right out to be trained. Once he did, he had every right to use me the way he saw fit, and giving me to his new wife as a wedding present was certainly his prerogative. If anything, I respect him for it.”
She paused thoughtfully. “Of course, now he doesn’t get to screw me unless Fran approves.”
“Fat chance.”
“I figured as much. Which is a real pity; I could use it up me.”
Tina looked at her speculatively.
“Tina!” Fran said.
“Oh?” Eric put in as Tina giggled.
“She’s got the most amazing collection of sex toys on the market.”
“Can I help it if I like sex but I don’t like the kind of guy who wants it without bonding?”
“That’s why I keep buying you toys.”
“I was just thinking ...”
“She wants to turn me into a sex toy?” Eva said, amusement in her voice.
Fran looked at her strangely. “You don’t mind?”
“I’m here to be used. I’d just like to get an orgasm out of it.”
“Deal?”
“Oh, all right,” Fran said. “I want to see the plans first.”
“That bad?” Eric asked.
“She goes in for bondage and computer controlled vibrators. That’s why her room is soundproof. And monitored. She hasn’t killed herself ... yet.”
“So you’re thinking of a robot sex doll?”
“Ummm ... yes.”
“I think Basic Robot does that one. And I heard someone mention Unique Slave Training.”
“I wonder,” Fran said, looking at Tina.
“Oh, no,” Tina said, looking more than a little scared.
“You’re still mad about Aunt May putting you in the kennel?”
“Well, she did get my agreement, sort of. And it worked out.”
“But you’re still pissed.”
“Damn right.” Then she giggled again. “I suppose I’ll stay pissed until I can’t milk it any more.”
“You think you can here?”
“Nah, you’re no fun. May, now...” she giggled.
“She caught on a long time ago. That’s why she let you maneuver her into getting the ribbon and having you trained.”
“Aw, you’re no fun.”
Fran shook her head amusedly. “If you want it, you’re going to have to contribute something. You back Eva up on housework.”
“You’re serious.” Tina giggled. “Sounds reasonable. But she’s first on the list.”
“Of course.” Fran paused a moment. “Basic Robot first, I think. You want to commute or stay in the kennel?”
“From the way Eva was slagged over after the sessions, I’d better be kenneled. I could depend on the car to get me back safely, but I wouldn’t be much use for the rest of the day.”
“Good point.
“I think that’s enough for one night,” Fran added. “Eva, check Kelly and then clean up. The rest of the evening is yours – unless Eric wants a beer.”
Tina giggled.
If you enjoyed this story, please e-mail the author and let him know. He likes to hear from his loyal fans, and it gives him some motivation to keep writing this stuff. Of course, if you're a publisher and you'd like to buy some of these stories, please let him know. The starving author in the garret makes a great story, but it sucks in real life.