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Adult Content Warning - this story contains adult themes, including 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 5. Let’s Get Our Act Together!
“Well, Mrs. Delios, what can The Basic Robot do for you?”
“Call me Fran. I’ve got a slave and a non-slave that I want trained for a couple of different objectives, and I’m not sure exactly what I need or how to go about it.”
“Yourself and your slave?”
“No, not myself. My sister Tina.”
“That’s unusual, normally any non-slaves would be here in person.”
“Well, she’s unusual. She’s, um, developmentally disabled. She’ll tell you she missed a couple of developmental stages in adolescence, and she’s quite correct. She’s utterly clueless about male-female bonding, female social networking or separating from her parents. What she won’t tell you unless you dig a bit is that she’s somewhat of a sex maniac specializing in self-bondage and computer controlled sex toys, she milks her condition for every bit of sympathy she can get, and she’s got another wire crossed somewhere so she giggles to release tension. Frequently.
“On top of that she’s very intelligent and more than somewhat of a tomboy. The only saving grace is that she learned fashion because she likes pretty clothes and got tired of her mother buying them for her before she kicked her out.”
“She kicked her out? Oh, her mother kicked her out, which I presume is why her sister, that’s you, right?, is talking to me.”
“Exactly. She’s living with me. On balance she’s more fun than she is trouble and the financial drain is minor.
“The crux of the issue is that she asked for my slave, that’s Eva here, to become one of her sex toys. Eva sort of likes the idea as long as she gets hers, and I’m more than inclined to go along with it; it lets several problems solve each other.”
“I think I see.”
“Part of the bargain with Tina is that she back up Eva on her housekeeping duties, which means she has to take Basic Robot and Robot Housekeeper. That’s a relatively minor imposition on her time; Eva normally manages by herself without too much hassle. However if I send Eva out for training or if she’s otherwise occupied I want Tina to drop into the slot smoothly. If I understand Robot Housekeeper it ought to allow an almost seamless transition.”
“Almost. If you intend to use one of them as primary, then the other will always remain somewhat behind on actual housekeeping skills. That shouldn’t be an enormous problem unless you’ve got a really unusual housekeeping situation.”
“We’re fairly standard.
“Now the other part is that I want both of them trained to be sex dolls; I want them to switch off as to which one is using the other. I also want Eva trained to be able to give Tina an experience that will wring her out and leave her limp.”
“Your focus is on keeping your sister happy?”
“Right. I’d like to keep Eva reasonably happy as well; while that’s important it’s not important that her end of the experience be quite as, um, intense.”
“Enough to stay within the intent as well as the letter of the Slave Code. I understand. Keeping slaves happy is important.”
He sat back and then leaned forward again.
“Let’s see. You want your sister Tina trained in Basic Robot, Robot Housekeeper and Robot Sex Doll. You want your slave trained in Basic Robot, Robot Housekeeper, Robot Sex Doll and Robot Dominatrix. You probably want Robot Sex Doll tailored to the way they’re going to use each other.”
“Oh, Eva already has Basic Robot and Robot Housekeeper. She was here last month, in fact, and is quite satisfactory.”
“So does your sister have Basic Collar Obedience yet?”
“Yes. Also a fair amount of the Owner’s course. Eva has part of the Owner’s course as well; she’s trained as a Nurse for a Baby Doll. She’s also got Living Doll, but I don’t want Tina trained in that.”
“So. That clarifies things. We’re going to have to do Living Doll anyway; it’s the base, or at least one of the bases, for all of the Dolls, which includes Sex Doll.”
“Oh?”
“Living Doll looks simple; there are only two commands: freeze and unfreeze. It’s a fairly intricate state to train for: she’s got to paralyze herself, let herself be moved around and repositioned without losing the paralysis and then release the paralysis. It’s also got to interface smoothly with Exerciser. Sex Doll needs the same frozen state; adding the freeze and unfreeze commands for Living Doll is so simple it’s hardly worth mentioning.”
“I think I understand.”
“The other reason for doing Living Doll is that we’d subcontract it to the Doll House. It’s best done by a specialist. Sex Doll is just Living Doll plus a number of behaviors. They’re not particularly flexible; they’re the kind of thing you could get in a mid-level sex mannequin toy at a sex store. Once you have Living Doll, then just about any boutique can add the Sex Doll behaviors.
“Since Eva has Living Doll, I presume that you know that all the Dolls can be run through the Robot Controller package. Turning a Doll into a Robot Doll mostly means that we make sure the interfaces between various Robot and Doll packages work smoothly. It’s standard practice to do the integration whenever a boutique adds a major package.”
“That makes sense.”
“Robot Dominatrix is a different matter. The basic concept is that the Dominatrix, or whatever you want to call her, is in charge of giving the subject a sexual experience. Exactly how she does it depends both on the subject and on the general scenario, which is why sex workers in that area specialize.
“The Robot Dominatrix program builds a map, I suppose you’d call it, of the subject’s, that’s Tina, right?, sexual responses, and then uses the actual Robot, which will be Eva, right?, to administer the stimuli.
“One thing that’s useful is that Tina already has a control collar, so it can use the physiology monitor. That’s going to simplify training Eva enormously. Otherwise she’d have to be trained in rather fine grained recognition of the subject’s state; that takes time, and it can’t be hurried. The neural networks in the brain adapt at their own pace.”
“That’s good. I’m not really concerned about Eva’s resale value.”
“Excellent. Now about conditions.”
“I’m going to put both of them in a kennel while you train them. From what Eva says, the training is intense enough that they’re not really good for much for the rest of the day, and Tina doesn’t think it’s wise to come back right after a session.”
“Tina’s right, but I wonder how she knows.”
“She and Eva were in the same cage room while you were training Eva and Tina was almost failing Basic Collar Obedience.”
“So she got to see the effects first hand. How does one manage to fail Basic Collar Obedience? I thought it wasn’t possible. Unless, of course, you take it from the Goodwife Institute.”
“She says she took 19 days before she was fluent.”
“That is unusually long. Not unheard of, but still it’s good to know. It may affect how fast she can assimilate the other trainings. So how do you want to organize it?”
“In separate sessions, with time in between. Tina first for Basic Robot and Robot Housekeeper, then Eva for Robot Sex Doll, then Tina for Living Doll and Robot Sex Doll and finally Eva for Robot Dominatrix. If it’s possible, I want Tina to go through Nanny training for a Big Baby and Baby Doll.”
“I see. You really are serious about Tina serving as a backup for Eva.”
Fran shrugged. “Feeling good about supporting my idiot sister is one thing, and she’s certainly amusing, but I’m getting quite used to having someone else do the housekeeping. I think she’ll feel a bit better knowing she’s actually contributing, and of course she’s going to milk being forced to do slave work by her cruel sister for every tearjerk she can get out of it.”
He laughed. “You could sell that to Hollywood.”
Fran looked at the ballroom she had rented for her major society party of the year. It was, she thought, a pretty good event. Not one of the top level society parties of the city’s social calendar. She wouldn’t be eligible to give one of those for another couple of decades at the absolute earliest, and even then she doubted she’d ever be at the social stratum where she’d be on the must attend social calendar.
This one had a bit of a theme; up and coming young predators, mostly. It attracted the younger and more extreme crowd without become a major sex event.
The band, Wild Girls, bustled around one end setting up. She spent a moment watching them set up the girl cages for their vocalists.
The two girls looked on from where they sat in their girl boxes with mild interest. They were actually, Fran noticed, more interested in checking out the room and the people. That made sense; they’d undoubtedly seen the setup any number of times over the last few years.
The boxes and cages didn’t look all that strong, but looks were deceiving. The slim rods and hoops of the cages and boxes didn’t look like they’d stop a well motivated midget, but the nano-fabricated material was guaranteed to not even flex under any pressure a gorilla could manage, let alone a girl.
The 5 mm bars were spaced 15 cm apart, which set the geometry of the boxes. They were 75 cm wide and 90 cm high and deep. These had the life support unit on the bottom, which added another 15 cm.
The cages used the same materials; 5 mm bars spaced 15 cm apart. The cages were tall cylinders about a meter in diameter and a bit over two meters high, organized as vertical bars and circular bars. The bases of both devices were a somewhat soft and moisture absorbent material that felt perfectly natural on bare feet or bottoms.
To set them up they put the circular package down. One set of vertical bars traveled around the rim and then lay down flat, forming a stable base that kept the cylinder from tipping. Then the second set of bars traveled around, forming the vertical skeleton, and finally the circles slid up the bars, led by the latticework of the top.
The final part was to transfer the girls from their boxes to the cylinders. They slid the boxes up so the front touched the cylinder, and then the bars slid aside making a hole that was the exact shape of the box. The front of the box slid up, and the girl, hands cuffed behind her, crawled into the cage and stood up. The cylinder and the box closed themselves. The girl’s cuffs released and she stretched and fluffed out her hair. Then she sat, the Slaveowner’s Consortium tattoo between her thighs very obvious, apparently waiting for the first set to begin. The second girl produced a reader from somewhere in the floor and was soon immersed in something.
One of the attractions of Wild Girls was that the girls in the cages were, indeed, wild. They both had a severe allergy to the Slave Devotion, and they made no secret of their intention to escape at the earliest opportunity. The band egged them on, it was great advertising.
Both of them had been music students at university when they made the typical mistake of giving their boyfriends a True Love and Eternal Devotion declaration. The band had bought them cheap; slaves which couldn’t be tamed with the Slave Devotion weren’t a highly prized item.
Fran suspected that their declared intention to escape was becoming a bit hollow; the band had owned them for a good three years, and from what she had heard, they had never even mooted the notion of being sold, let alone asked formally. A good part of the reason might well be that they were working in their chosen field, although not quite under the conditions they had expected. They were also still learning and improving. Rumor had it that the blonde had written the lyrics to several of the songs.
This year the setup on that end of the ballroom was a bit different; there were two stands, one on each side of the band. One was for Eva, the other for Tina. Both the blonde and the redhead wore matching slave tunics. Tina had bitched for days. Fran had ignored her sister; her real attitude was obvious enough from the amount of energy she was putting into the Robot routines that would be running them tonight.
“You expect that to magically refill?” Frank asked Mary, who was holding her empty drink glass up.
“Of course,” she answered him with a chuckle as she saw Eva walk up with a serving tray.
“Your drink, madam,” Eva curtsied as she offered the tray to Mary.
“So all I have to do is hold it up?”
“You’ve got to be on Fran’s A list. Everyone else gets to go to the bar.”
Ted shrugged. “Walking is good. So how are they doing it?”
“Fran didn’t say, but the odds are that she’s spotting right now.” She waved her hand in the general direction of the band, where Tina was standing on one of the platforms, frozen in the middle of a curtsy.
“That’s wild. I’d heard her husband had given Fran a housekeeper as a wedding present, but two Living Dolls?”
“Oh, the blonde that was just here is the wedding present. The redhead up there right now is Fran’s sister Tina.”
Frank almost choked on his drink.
“She enslaved her sister?” Ted asked, admiration warring with something else in his voice.
“I doubt it. Fran is Tina’s guardian, and Tina is, um, different. She’s probably going to make Fran’s life miserable for a few days, but she wouldn’t be doing it if she hadn’t agreed.”
“Guardian?” asked Frank as Ted said: “Different?”
“Tina’s got some kind of problem that led her to be legally declared incompetent a few years ago. I’ve never asked about the details; you just don’t, you know. From what I’ve heard, though, she’s incapable of forming an adult relationship, and she’s gotten into a few scrapes that you’d expect from a ten year old pretending to be an adult. A ten year old that you’d want to keep on a leash.”
“That I can believe,” Ted said. “With those looks, she ought to have guys all over her like flies on honey.”
“She would, except she doesn’t like the kind of guy that isn’t interested in a relationship, and the rest aren’t interested in her. It’s a conundrum I’m just as glad I’m not involved in.”
Frank shook his head as the band struck up their lead song: “Shake the Bars and Scream.”
“Do you think they’re losing it?” Ted asked when they’d finished the set.
“No losing it so much as a bit of a change,” Mary answered. “I don’t think the girls had quite as much fury in Shake the Bars as I’ve heard before, but the rest was better. They’ve obviously been practicing.”
“And Ring Gag was hilarious,” Frank added. “I think it’s a new one for them.”
“Definitely good,” Mary agreed, holding her drink up for a refill. “It makes up for Shake the Bars.”
“Hi,” Don said to the girl sitting on the floor in the girl cage.
“That,” she replied, “is a real limp opening line. But then I suppose it doesn’t matter. Unless you want to do it though the bars?”
Don almost choked. At least, he thought, she wasn’t laughing at his discomfiture. “I think our hostess would object,” he tried to retrieve the situation.
“Pah,” the blonde replied. “I’m too far below her league to care. Although I suppose the band wouldn’t thank me if we didn’t get invited back next year.”
“I’m surprised you care about that.”
“So am I, frankly. Last year I could have cheerfully seen them all in Niffelheim, and turned the thermostat down, too. This year?” She shrugged expressively, causing her breasts to do interesting things. Fascinating things, even.
“You still interested in escaping?” he asked.
“Of course I’m still interested in getting out of here. Why do you ask? You brought a file?”
“Shake the Bars was a bit limp.”
“I suppose a girl just has so many really good screams. I seem to have used up my quota a few months ago.”
“So they’re looking for a replacement?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes they talk where we can hear them, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they let us stick in an opinion. I think they’re looking to move on a bit. Maybe not.”
“So what about you?”
“You really want my opinion?” She sounded surprised.
“Really.”
“I don’t see it matters. But for what it’s worth, I either want them to let me go, or tame me. Or sell me. But not quite yet.”
“Oh?”
“There’s more songs I want to write. You knew Ring Gag was mine, right?”
“Really? It’s certainly, um, different.”
“This Wild Girl is changing. Staying in a cage this long will do it.”
“I’m surprised you want to be tamed.”
“It’s out of my hands; that’s one of the lessons of being a slave, I suppose. If they tame me, I can be of more use than being kept in a cage except when they want to screw me.”
“I didn’t think they could tame you.”
“Oh, it can be done, it just can’t be done with the Devotion. So far it hasn’t occurred to them to ask how.”
“That’s surprising.”
“What, you think the Devotion just suddenly appeared on someone’s reader, complete with the Devotion Enhancer and Devotion Neutralizer modules? No way; the people who wrote it worked on it for a decade before releasing it.”
“I didn’t know that!”
“Few people do. I certainly didn’t before I started digging. The fact is, they tried a lot of things, and quite a few of them worked fairly well. The Devotion turned out to be the best in the lot; it’ll tame 98 or 99 out of 100 girls. The other one or two? There’s a dozen other things in that toolbox, and they never found a girl that they couldn’t tame with something.”
“I’d think it would be public by now?”
“Why? One or two out of a hundred? The old permitted zone and invisible fence works well enough; nobody was interested in learning something they’d use two or three times a year, if that. Besides, the Devotion is dead easy to teach. I’m not even sure you need a warm body.”
“So you really want to be tamed?”
“Of course not! I want out of here. I want to be free!” She shrugged again. “But this whole gig being kept in a cage has gotten real old; I suppose I could milk it for a few more songs in the next year or two, but that’s it. Then it’ll be free me, tame me or sell me, and there will be precious few buyers. Probably. Being tamed will give me a bigger cage. Maybe even as big as yours.”
He blinked at that statement. “So what would you do if you were free?”
“Probably turn right around and apply for the job of lead vocalist with Wild Girls.” She laughed at his expression. “Why not? You think Public Aid is going to let me take a year to make up my mind? I know the repertoire and the patter, the tattoo doesn’t come off easily, and if I had any real objection to performing in a girl cage it vanished a long time ago.” She paused a moment. “There’s nothing in it for them, though. They’d have to pay five or six times what they’re spending on me now.
“On the other hand,” she mused, “they’d have to raise their rates, and that might actually be a good thing. Lots of people think a more expensive band has got to be better. And we might actually be worth it in another year or so.
“Anyway, you’d better scram. Break’s almost over, and I need to take a quick look at the next set.”
“What,” Frank asked, changing the subject, “do you think of the initiative to repeal the anti-slavery clause in the NAA constitution?”
“Worst idea I’ve heard this year,” Ted answered.
“Oh? Why?”
“Mary, Mary,” he shook his head. “Think about it. It draws a line you do not cross with a slave. It’s a negative line, which is why I suspect a lot of people don’t see it.
“I occasionally dip into history. All slave societies have had slave revolts. Except this one. Colonial America constantly had slave revolts.
“Take a look at those two girls in the cages. They say they’d escape at the first opportunity. Would they? Really?
“Maybe. The fact is that if they hadn’t of been stupid and given their contracts to their boyfriends, they might be exactly where they are now – vocalists with a decent but not outstanding band. They haven’t got anything to revolt about.
“Or take her,” he waved at the blonde frozen in mid-curtsy on the stand. “Fran’s little conceit tonight is outstanding, and both of them are probably enjoying it. The way she’s swapping off with the redhead means they’re not in that position for long enough to strain anything.
“Or consider the international situation. The fact that we’ve got contract slavery rather than legal slavery puts us above average in the human rights standings. We can point to the fact that we don’t have a separate legal category for slaves; they’ve got the same civic rights, entitlements and protections as everyone else, including the right to vote and the duty to serve on juries.”
“Really?” Frank asked. “I didn’t think they could vote.”
“They could if they had the income. I think tying voting rights to paying more in taxes than you get in entitlements was brilliant. It keeps the trash from voting, and I’m not talking about the slaves.”
“I could get used to not having to clean up after a party,” Eva told Tina.
“Well, don’t,” Fran’s sister said. “Most of our parties are here.”
Eva laughed. “Too true.” She efficiently set three places at the small table and turned to putting the ingredients out for their usual breakfast. Tina slid into her chair as Fran and Eric walked in.
“Why,” Fran asked her sister, “are you wearing that thing?” That thing was the second outfit from the slave livery she had worn at the party.
“I thought you wanted me to,” Tina answered, barely missing self-evident sincerity by a hair.
“You...” Fran began and then caught on. “Almost got me with that one. Change into a regular outfit after breakfast.”
“I don’t want to,” Tina managed to fake petulance beautifully.
“You should have outgrown that years ago.”
Tina shook her head. “Must have been a good night; I can’t get anything by you. I really do want to wear it, at least around the apartment. It’s a lot more comfortable than I thought it would be.”
Fran shrugged. “OK, just make sure you know when we’re expecting guests.
“The two of you were quite the hit last night. I got three offers to buy the pair of you.”
Tina almost choked on her egg.
“Oh, don’t worry. Court approval is so unlikely that it didn’t even rate a vagrant thought. However, I also got several requests to rent you for a party. And that made me think.”
“Start a business? I don’t think either of us has the time.”
“Not us,” she told her husband. “Tina.”
“I’m not sure how it would work.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t as any kind of a full fledged business. It’s been tried and has always flopped; there just isn’t enough call for the kind of low level VIP care our crowd wants to pay for the inventory of slaves to do it. However, a fair number of our crowd has personal slaves, and they’re either left at home or bored at the party.”
“So you’re thinking I could weave them into my program?”
“That’s the idea.”
“They’d need Basic Robot and Living Doll, and both of those packages are unusual.”
“They might not need Living Doll,” Eric put in. “Most banquet halls have surveillance systems you could use for spotting.”
“Hum.” Tina sliced into a stack of pancakes. “I like the idea of having Dolls to do the spotting.”
“So does everyone else,” Fran added. “It makes us all feel deliciously evil, flouting the Slave Code like that, even though we know it’s an illusion. Tell you what, I’ll call around and see if the people who mentioned it would contribute their personal slaves during parties, and you dig into the programs.
“Which reminds me, how did we do last night?”
“I’m not sure,” Tina answered.
“I think,” Eva put in slowly, “we could have used one more on the floor. I seem to remember having three and four drinks on the tray when I picked it up from the bar, and that’s got to have impacted serving time.”
“I heard a rumor today,” Tina said as she cut into the pork chop.
“And how much is this one going to cost me?” her sister replied resignedly.
“Oh, lots. We might make it back, though.”
“So what’s the rumor?”
“Wild Girls is going to break up.”
“Why would that cost me anything? No, don’t answer,” she held up a hand. “You want to buy the two vocalists, right?”
“Right. A lot of our parties are too small for a band, and quite a few of them are too small for a real DJ as well.”
Fran chewed a piece of the pork chop thoughtfully. “Eric?”
“Tina and Eva are actually making some money on their system. I wouldn’t have believed it, but it turns out that everything else sucks in comparison.”
“And if it doesn’t work out, I think I can improve their resale value considerably.”
“How? They aren’t trainable.”
“I don’t think so. They’ve got an allergy to the Devotion, so apparently nobody tried to do Basic Collar Obedience, let alone any of the Robots. They don’t even have Exerciser loaded.”
“Now that is stupid,” Eric pronounced. “And of course you’d think of it.”
“It’s simply not Wild Girls without that scream,” Mary said to her two hangers-on.
“They screamed.”
“Sure. A pale imitation of the original. I’m surprised they even bothered to tell the police they were performing.”
“I’ll admit the first time I heard them was the first time I really knew what hair-raising meant,” Ted contributed. “You could have rented them out to raise the dead.”
“And send them fleeing for their after-lives,” Frank added.
Mary laughed. “This one would barely raise the rent.”
“I suppose,” the band leader said to introduce the last set, “you’ve all heard the rumors that we’re disbanding. “They’re true; this is our last gig as Wild Girls. It’s time to move on. We’ve got one last announcement. It’s quite true that our two Wild Girls aren’t tamable; they’ve got a serious allergy to the Devotion. We’ve shopped them around to several factors, and the bids we’ve gotten so far have been barely worth the cost of the phone calls. So...” He let the pause build as the two girls in the cages looked at each other, wild hope in their eyes.
“We finally got a credible bid, and they’ll be in someone else’s cages tonight. Let’s hit Shake the Bars, guys!”
“I guess,” Mary said after the song, “they really did have it in them.”
“I’m surprised the bars held up,” Frank answered, clearly shaken himself.
“I think,” Tina told Fran, “I’d better go put them out of their misery.” She walked up to the stage and looked at the blond sitting huddled on the floor of the girl cage.
“Look up at me, Sheena” she said, putting a hint of steel in her voice.
“You’re my new owner?”
“Almost. Fran Delios is your owner of record; I’m her sister Tina.”
The blonde looked at her. “Haven’t we performed at a couple of her parties?”
“Yup. You may remember me doing the Doll thing at the last one.”
Sheena suddenly stood up. “You were switching off with a blonde?”
“That’s our housekeeper, Eva.”
“So what are you going to do with us? I presume it’s us?”
“Right. Fran bought both of you together with the rights to the Wild Girls act. You’ll be singing at parties. It’ll still be a Wild Girls act, but not this one. Here, put this on.” She shoved a package through the bars.
Sheena unfolded it. “Bless you!”
“Five years is long enough without clothes; three weeks is too long as far as I’m concerned, but kennels have their rules.”
Sheena slid into the thong and then managed to get the slave livery over her head and settled. Then she put her feet into the sandals, and sighed blissfully.
“Hands behind you, pet.”
“Huh?” Sheena said, but obediently put her hands behind her where the cuffs froze them into position.
“I’m going to take you out of the cage,” Tina told her. “Now, mind you, I’m not going to claim to be a past mistress of collar programming; there’s too much chance the gods would get upset and prove I’m nothing of the kind.”
“In other words, if I don’t follow orders, I’ll regret it.”
“Got it in one.” Her lips moved slightly and the horizontal rings of the cage fell to the floor, then the vertical bars shifted position to make a half circle.
“Follow me a half meter to the right and one pace back,” she told the surprised girl as she picked up her leash. She walked over to the other girl cage and slid a bundle through the bars. “Put it on, Jill. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Five minutes later the two vocalists were sitting on their heels next to each other.
“This,” Tina announced to her two new slaves, “Is where you’ll be staying. It’s a single person efficiency, but we put in a pair of slave cages instead of the bed. I’ll start training the two of you tomorrow in Basic Collar Obedience. That’ll be fun!
“The music system is kind of old; we got it at a sale. Start practicing a decent pop repertoire. We’ll be doing some of the songs from Wild Girls, but not all of them. It’s definitely time to retire Shake the Bars anyway, especially since I don’t want you performing in a cage where you’ll have bars to shake.
“You’ll be performing at different size parties. Some of them will be too small for a DJ, some of them will have one that you’ll supplement. You might even get some gigs with a band that’s between vocalists, but don’t expect much if any of that.”
“Pickups,” Jill said with a shrug. “It’s different.”
“You said training? You know we’ve both got Devotion allergy.”
“Devotion allergy just means I’ll be managing you with the old permitted zone and invisible fence system. It’s got nothing to do with Basic Collar Obedience or any of the Robot or Doll stuff. I’ve been trained in all of that, and I’m not a slave; I’ve got the Devotion Neutralizer in my collar. I’m surprised the band didn’t at least have you trained for Basic Collar Obedience.”
“I don’t think they knew what they were doing on slave control,” Sheena said. “They never figured out that the Devotion is only one way to tame a girl. There are several others that work reasonably well, and one of them is likely to work on us.”
“Your point?”
“I. Am. Fucking. Tired. Of. Invisible. Fences.”
“Likewise,” Jill said. “If you’re not going to let us go, condition us so you don’t have to confine us.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Five years in a cage changes a girl’s viewpoint.” She shrugged. “I still want to be let go, and conditioning me will put that beyond reach, or at least practical reach. It’s still better than looking at the damned permitted zone and invisible fence system.”
She shrugged again. “I made a classically stupid mistake five years ago. Asking you to condition us may be another mistake, but at least it’s a calculated one.”
“I’ll put it on my things to look at,” Tina promised. “You may not be anywhere near as irritated at the way I’ve got the fences arranged. I think the band deliberately kept you on the boil to spice up the act.
“Back when the permitted zone system was the norm, a wise owner set it up so the slave never ran into a fence if she was doing what she was supposed to. The only fences you’ll run into are on the doors and windows, and you shouldn’t be trying them anyway. You won’t run into any others unless you try to go through the walls or dig through the floor or ceiling.
“Now before I leave and you crawl into your cages for the night, let’s take a quick tour of the apartment. Shower, toilet, sink. Kitchenette. The menu is Slave Chow for breakfast, lunch and dinner unless Fran wants you to eat with us, which is, by the way, likely to happen occasionally. Music system. Open spot to exercise. Here’s where your spare uniforms go; Eva or I will take care of laundry. Readers are in the usual place in back of your cages. We had them soundproof the place, feel free to sing as loud as you want.”
“One question. Do you have a song list for us to study?”
“No. I’m not a musician, and I’m not all that up on current popular songs. In fact there’s a major category that I’m possibly the worst person in the world, or at least the worst person easily available, to give you an opinion on. That’s part of your job, and I mean it. Smaller parties won’t have a DJ, let alone a band. I’ll teach you how to control the music system from your control collars so you can synchronize and won’t have to fiddle with buttons and all that stuff. You’ll be the whole show at small parties.”
Tina left through the side door.
“She said there’s a fence here,” Sheena said, walking up to the door that Tina had just exited. “Yup,” she said as she backed off.
“Why bother?” Jill said. “She seems to know what she’s doing, and if those lackwits in Wild Girls could make a system we couldn’t get out of, she certainly can. If the only fences are on the doors, I’m quite prepared to ignore the issue. I’m more interested in that it seems like a possible step up.”
“Oh?”
“If we’re working with a DJ or a band, we sing what they tell us and we use their treatment, but if we’re working by ourselves, we’ve got a chance to build a rep for something besides vocals.”
“We’re slaves, Jill!”
“So? Lots of bands have slave vocalists. It may not get us free, but when I entered the music school, I had a career goal in mind that involved singing, not climbing the ladder to super-maestro, owning a music school or running the Philharmonic. This looks like it just might be a step.”
“Maybe.” Sheena grinned. “She did say we could pick the repertoire, right? What if we do Wild Girls the way it should be done?”
“She said to forget Shake the Bars.”
“I don’t think I could duplicate that last scream if my life depended on it.”
“Good point, and we should be good little slave girls and follow orders to put together a current pop list. Let’s do that tomorrow morning.”
“Good idea. You know, I think I could get to like Tina.”
“Oh?”
“This cage is the right height.”
“She kind of slid by mentioning she’d spent time in a kennel.”
“Yeah. All the cages are too high or too low.”
“Unless you’re an amazon.”
“Then you couldn’t sit up in one.”
“So how do we kick the lights from in here?”
“No need. There they went.”
A few minutes later the girls in the cages were fast asleep.
“Girls,” Tina said, looking down on the blond and brunette head.
“Huh?” Sheena said. “Oh.” They scrambled to their feet and curtsied.
Tina clapped delightedly. “Beautiful, but don’t bother next time.”
“Oh?”
“Your owner does not particularly want all that curtsying, siring and ma’aming. Unless, of course, it’s funny or you’re trying to make a point. I’m Tina, you’re Sheena and Jill. You’ll see a blonde in a slave tunic shortly, she’s Eva. You might recognize her; she was the blonde on the other pedestal. The other woman around the place is my sister and your owner, Fran, and the guy is her husband Eric. There’s also a Big Baby named Kelly, but you probably won’t meet her for a good while, if ever.
“One thing I seem to have left out is chairs. Oh, well. Floors never hurt anyone. Sit.”
They sat.
“Now,” Tina said when she arranged herself in front of them, “I’m under the impression that you know almost nothing about what being a slave is all about. You gave your contracts to your boyfriends in a burst of love and delusion, and then you found yourself in a kennel. When they tried to teach you the Devotion your brain went ‘Tilt’ in a rather spectacular fashion, so you spent some time in a cage, and then you found yourself with that band. Right?”
“Well, we read some and watched the telly.”
“Ancient history, romances and Tumbling Through Time. Right?”
“Um. Yes.”
“So if I told you there was no such thing as slavery here and now, what would your reaction be?”
“You’re joking!” Sheena said.
“Well, yes and no. There is no legal category for a slave. It’s prohibited by the anti-slavery clause in the NAA constitution. What you signed was a contract that allows the holder to require you to do anything within your physical and mental capability, and also allows the holder to use any means to insure the performance of the contract. Within fairly wide limits. The contract cannot be enforced legally, and you can, in principle but not in practice, disavow it at any time at any contract machine.”
“That’s a mouthful,” Jill observed.
“Really. That’s why we call it a slave contract, and the contractee a slave. The point here is that your owner can take measures to insure that you perform and don’t renounce the contract. For most slaves, that’s the Devotions. For you, that’s what?”
“The permitted zone and invisible fences,” Sheena said disgustedly.
“Exactly. The contract terms let me use them to keep you under my thumb. We don’t bother with Eva because she’s internalized the Devotion. We do with Kelly because at the Big Baby’s assumed age she can blithely ignore any instructions to stay where she’s put, and she will if she thinks she can get away with it.”
“So the whole thing is a private contract?”
“Right.”
“Damn!”
“You got it. There are laws about what can be ceded and under what circumstances, and what contract forms are permissable, but that's a relatively small part. The rest is custom that’s grown up around it, like the fact that a tunic in the style you’re wearing is a slave tunic, but that’s not law. In fact, I wear one to lounge around the apartment. The darn things are comfortable! The Slave Code isn’t law; it’s just the Slaveowner’s Consortium’s compilation of law, custom and advice.
“There’s one more thing to cover on this bit, and that’s that you’ve got full rights to all social services I do, or anyone else does. So if you have to go to the health service, and the complaint is something that could be battery, I’d be in deep trouble. Now that’s not going to happen; if it comes to having to use physical force, we’ll just sell you. No slave is worth the trouble.
“So it’s my duty to make sure your working environment is up to code and your work assignments are something that you find enjoyable, or at least tolerable. I take it that you don’t find continuing your career as vocalists to be anathema?”
“I’d sure prefer it to being a housekeeper!” Sheena said as Jill nodded.
“Well, you may get that too, but not for a while and not as a full time assignment.” She paused. “The other side of that is that it’s also your job to tell me, or Fran, or Eva, or Eric if you find something wrong so we can fix it. In the worst case, you can ask to be sold. We might or might not act on that request, but it’s your privilege to ask.”
“OK,” Sheena said slowly. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”
“I’m pretty much done with this topic at the moment; the basic learning is that you know very little about what’s acceptable behavior for a slave. Whatever you do is what you do, and we’ll tell you if we want you to change it. Don’t do something you saw on Tumbling Through Time because you think it’s the way slaves should behave.”
“I can live with that,” Jill said dryly.
“I figured you could. Now the next topic is some remedial training; you should have got most of this when you were in the kennel waiting to be sold, but it seems they got totally confused by the Devotion allergy and didn’t do the rest.”
“Why would they get confused? I’d think they’d know what to do?” Sheena asked.
“You shouldn’t have been allowed to enter the contract. Today nobody really wants a slave they have to manage with the permitted zone system, and that was true for several years before you got yourselves in trouble. I can understand the kennel having problems; their usual staff isn’t noted for either intelligence or initiative, and it had probably been several years since they’d seen someone with Devotion allergy. What I can’t understand is why it happened at all. However, it did, so...” she shrugged and then giggled.
“It wasn’t actually a slave contract,” Jill said. “It was one of those ‘True Love and Eternal Devotion’ contracts, and I didn’t realize the sting in the tail when I went and renewed it after the first six months. Boyfriend exercised the option, and here I am.”
“I haven’t looked into those,” Tina admitted.
“Same thing happened to me,” Sheena confessed. “The two of us met when the band bought our contracts.”
“Humph. Well, let’s get back on track. Here’s the program. There are three basic command modes: tell her, conditioned response, and Robot.
“I’m going to be working with you for a couple of hours a day on the conditioned response thing until you’re fluent. That’s what’s called Basic Collar Obedience. Devotion allergy does not prevent you from learning that; they’re completely different.
“We’re also going to be working on a lot of the standard modules and some things you’re going to find very useful in handling sound systems. So what do you think the conditioned response stuff is about?”
“That’s when George pushes a button and Natasha gets him a beer?”
“Right. In fact, that could be done in any of the three ways. The button could trigger a voice in Natasha’s earplugs telling her to get George a beer. It could trigger a conditioned response, or it could trigger a Basic Robot routine that would do the same thing. In fact, for both Eva and me it’s a Basic Robot routine. Eric has a button that will make Eva get him a beer unless she’s got something that can’t be broken into, in which case I’ll get him one. If neither one of us is available, it’ll beep back at him.”
“Just a second. It’s running you and you’re not a slave?”
Tina shrugged. “I wrote the program that runs us at parties. The rest is a bargain I made with Fran. Eva belongs to her, or rather her marriage association, and I wanted her for something major on an ongoing basis. So I agreed to back her up on her duties. Part of that is that I took the same Robot trainings she did, so unless I’ve fixed the programs, the Robot Controller can use me for just about anything it can use her. It just picks her first and she does more of it.”
“Color me confused,” Sheena said as Jill laughed.
Tina giggled. “Let’s get back on track. The key point of the conditioned responses is that your collar triggers them usually in response to a command. That can be a verbal command you can hear, it can be a command over the network you’re not aware of. It can be internally generated. If you didn’t notice the command, all you’re aware of is that you’re suddenly doing something that you hadn’t planned on.
“The point of the training is to let it flow and not second guess yourself. That takes a while to learn, and it ought to be done in a kennel because something about the kennel kind of tells your unconscious you’re not really in control anyway. However, Fran doesn’t want me to spend any more than I have to until you start paying for yourselves, and she thinks that my training you will consolidate what I know.
“So just let it happen, and don’t worry about my getting on your case about how long you’re taking. I took twice as long as average, so I’m not one to talk.”
She paused. “That’s item one. Item two is the Exerciser module. You’ll do two one-hour exercise sessions a day. Exerciser is a self-installing Robot module. At the beginning it’ll tell you what to do in your right earplug while it’s training you in the Robot commands for Exerciser in the left earplug. It gradually drops the instructions and lets you just react to the stream of Robot commands. It comes with a management application that will let you plot progress and set training goals. I’ll set your goals initially and then when you’ve got time to learn it I’ll put it on your readers. It will challenge your limits but never push you past them; it’s not a ‘no pain, no gain’ type of coach.
“As long as you’re keeping yourselves fit, I’m not usually going to get involved with your exercise schedule. There’s one exception: I’ve put all of the stuff you need to keep from cramping and keep blood flowing while you’re in a girl box onto the to do list. Your former owners could have gotten in real trouble for neglecting that.” She paused again.
“The third thing is something else they should have done when you were in the kennel the first time. You should have learned the Devotion with the Devotion Neutralizer going. The Devotion tells you a great deal about what it is to be a slave; if you’re ever in a kennel again, you’ll find the people you chat with during meals quote it all the time.
“So that’s another assignment: learn five stanzas a day. If you run into any difficulty more serious than an aversion to bad poetry, stop. You shouldn’t, but I don’t want to take chances. Once you’ve learned it, we’ll go over it in detail so that you know what each of the stanzas means, what situations it covers, and can explain it coherently to someone else.”
“So the exerciser is automatic?” Jill asked.
“Oh, right. To start it subvocalize your name, then the word ‘start’ and then the word ‘exerciser’. You can say it out loud if you want, but learn to subvocalize; it’ll make a lot of things a whole lot easier. Make them distinct words, and make sure you’re standing on the exercise mat at the time. It’ll tell you when it’s done.”
“So that’s the only command you’re giving us right now?”
“Right. I’ll give you more as I teach you the standard modules. We’re going to do the first Basic Collar Obedience class now, and there isn’t room here, so we’ll go into the main room.” Tina got up and opened the side door. Sheena and Jill looked at each other and shrugged. Sheena walked forward carefully and found the fence was no longer in her way.
“This,” Sheena said as she touched the tab that released her slave tunic so it fell at her feet, “has been one interesting day.”
“Wasn’t it just,” Jill replied. “I know one thing, the people at the kennel were just as incompetent as the band.”
“The band had an excuse, the kennel didn’t. Whatever the Devotion Neutralizer is doing, it’s working. I can feel myself trying to assimilate the thing, and something is stopping it. It’s just words now.”
“I didn’t get as much music done as I wanted.”
“I think I did. Tina only took up a couple of hours, the exerciser took up a couple and our memorization session couldn’t have taken more than an hour. I don’t think I could have kept on with the music all day straight.”
“You’re probably right, it’s just that getting out from under the band feels so good!”
“Well, almost.”
“You miss them?”
“Only inside me.”
Jill laughed. “I wonder if we could get Tina to give us a vibrator or strap-on.”
“We can ask.”
A few minutes later the two of them were stretched out in their cages, asleep.
“The next thing on the agenda,” Tina told her two slave vocalists, “is to get our act together. I don’t think you’ve had the time to discuss it yet, which is just as well since I know what I want.”
“Oh?”
“The first thing is that I want to keep the name Wild Girls. We bought all the rights at the same time we bought you, and it’s a fairly obvious continuation. We’ve already done the opening scene.” Tina paused for a comment.
“The opening scene?” Jill asked. “Some street theater? You mean when you took us out of the cages?”
“Partially. What was strange about it?”
“You gave us tunics, cuffed us and led us out on a leash? So that’s the look?”
“Precisely. I want to continue the Wild Girls theme, but the naked girls in the cages isn’t where I want to go with it. There aren’t enough party dates on my normal schedule, so I want to expand out, and naked girls in cages simply aren’t suitable for a lot of venues.”
“Good point; I think that was one of the things that the band was finding to be a problem.”
“That and Shake the Bars and Scream coming off more like Slump Against the Bars and Whimper.”
“Geeze. It was that bad?”
“Worse,” Jill said.
“It wasn’t quite that bad, but still Shake the Bars is off of the repertoire until we can find a way to give it some punch. I’ve got some ideas, but there are more immediate issues like your picking up a suitably broad current pop repertoire. It’s your theme song, so put your collective minds to some opening patter that will let people know not to expect it back for a while. In a good way.”
“So the look is what? Slave tunics? Chains?”
“Slave tunics, your hands cuffed behind you and a light chain from your collar ring to a bolt or something. I’ll put the ring on the back of your collar. We’ll probably get a registered set of cameos sometime, but not yet. Part of the act is that you’ll be cuffed and leashed at all times when you’re out of your cage.”
“Our cage?”
“The two apartments.”
“Oh. Sumptuous cage.”
“Of course. Remember what I said yesterday. There’s a big difference between the act I want to project, and actually mistreating you two.”
“At least it’s better than the band!”
“Now you’re going to need practice, so you’re going to wear the cuffs full time; they’re part of your standard attire. They’ll be on your wrists so they’re instantly available.
“It also means you’ll practice with your hands cuffed behind you, which means I’m going to show you how to lock and unlock them and also how to operate the music system from your control collars and how to use your mufflers as network microphones.”
“You know,” Sheena said, “this could be a really hot scene!”
“Depending on how you play it. I want you to do several treatments ranging from really wild parties to entertainment at a family restaurant.
“I also want you to play the Wild Girls scenario straight, which is why you won’t be able to unlock the cuffs yourselves while you’re out of the apartment. Of course they’ll have the usual emergency stuff programmed, and I’m going to give you an utter emergency bailout word that’s hidden behind a hypnotic barrier.”
“We’re the Wild Girls,” Jill said experimentally. “We’ve got Devotion allergy. Our owner has to keep us under strict control or we’ll escape and wreak havoc.”
“We could do something with that,” Sheena nodded. “I don’t think the Devotion allergy story was really played up.”
“How about switching off?” Jill asked.
“Switching off?”
“One day I get to control her cuffs, the next day she controls mine.”
Tina laughed. “That’s up to you. If you want I can certainly rig it that way.”
“Which reminds me,” Sheena added. “We were going to ask about getting some sex toys; possibly a dildo, vibrator or strapon?”
Tina laughed again. “Let’s cover how you do the cuffs and all that stuff, and we’ll look at the inventory on the way back from Collar Obedience training.”
“Inventory?” Sheena looked at Jill.
Jill shrugged.
“Pretty good for day two,” Tina said as the two bewildered slave vocalists finished up. “I did say I’d show you the sex toy inventory, didn’t I?”
“Uh, yes,” Sheena said.
“Well, it’s in my room, and hold onto your aplomb.”
The first impression of Tina’s room was that part of it was dominated by a bed. The second impression, however, was that the rest of it was a dungeon. And the bed suddenly shifted into focus with rings for chains and other attachments.
“Your sister makes you live in this?” Sheena gasped.
“Oh, no. Sis likes playing with Dolls. I’m the one with the weird disharmonies. I really do like the combination of sex and bondage, and I learned a lot of the computer stuff to, um, deepen the experience. As well as make it a good deal safer, of course.”
“Since when is a real Damsel Distresser 3000 safe?” Jill asked in awe as she looked at a contraption that seemed to be mostly robot arms with cuffs, dildos and other less identifiable objects at the ends.
Tina shrugged. “It’s a step up from being stretched on a rack while a computer controlled dildo and vibrator does it to you. I finally got rid of the rack; it took too much space. I still use the DD once a week or so.”
“We’re in the hands of a genuine madwoman!” Sheena said theatrically.
“Isn’t it fun?” Jill riposted.
Tina giggled. “The inventory is over here,” she pulled out some drawers in a cabinet. “And behind this sliding panel. Take your pick, I don’t use most of them any more.”
“The Damsel Distresser is better, eh?”
“Actually,” Tina almost seemed embarrassed, “Eva is better.”
“Oh?”
“Sis had both of us trained as Robot Sex Dolls, and Eva trained as a Robot Dominatrix. We swap off on which one gets to use the other as a Sex Doll; then every few days she puts me through the wringer and hangs me out to dry.”
“It’s the drip, drip, drip that gets to you?” Sheena asked, wide-eyed.
Tina giggled. “It’s the whole thing. I still use the Damsel Distresser because I want to ration Eva. She’s addicting. Besides, if I use her too much the housework piles up and the household computer uses me for it.”
“You don’t sound all that unhappy about it,” Sheena said as Jill examined a wicked looking dildo attached to a battery box.
“Frankly, I’m not. The fact is that I do like bondage, and having the Robot Controller running me is a mild high.
“Also, you’ll undoubtedly find out anyway, so you might as well know; I’ve been legally declared incompetent and sis is my guardian. I didn’t have to wear a control collar, but I wanted it for my own reasons, so when the kennel installed it sis got complete authority. She gave me access to almost everything, but I still have to ask her if I need more authorizations.” She shrugged. “I missed most of the adolescent instinctive checkpoints; you could say I’m still 10 going on 23. Sis is effectively mother, so when she tells me I’m going to do housework if I want to use Eva, it’s a ‘so what else is new’.”
“Are you sure the band was that bad?” Sheena asked Jill.
“I think so.” Jill answered doubtfully.
Tina giggled at the byplay.
“What is this thing?” Jill held out something that looked like a skimpy thong with two slim rods.
“That’s the Girl Steamer. I used it with the rack,” Tina said. “It also goes good with any bondage like the chains on the bed I started with. I don’t use it any more because it doesn’t fit with the Damsel Distresser. If I didn’t have DD or Eva it would be my favorite.”
“How does it work?”
“It’s a nano-device like the control collars. It can stimulate every point on its surface, and it’s thoroughly programmable. She paused a moment, “I haven’t used it since getting the control collar; I bet adding the feedback from the physiology monitor would do wonders.”
Jill turned it over in her hands. “I’ve heard of these things,” she mused. “Hard to find.”
“They don’t make a whole lot of them,” Tina told her.
“I wonder.” She smiled wickedly and flicked the latch on Sheena’s slave tunic.
“Hey!” the suddenly naked blonde exclaimed.
“Hold still,” Jill told her as she slid the blonde’s thong over her hips to where it dropped on the floor, on top of the tunic. “This should be interesting to watch.”
Tina faked Sheena’s hands behind her, where the cuffs suddenly took hold. Jill settled the device around Sheena’s waist and groin. “Doesn’t need lube. I like that. Now how does it turn on?”
“Network,” Tina said, her fingers twitching slightly.
“It’s not ... eep!” Sheena said, contorting slightly as she tried and failed to move her hands to the sensitive spot. She took a deep breath as her eyes widened and she shifted her feet a bit farther apart.
Tina guided her to the bed and then shoved her over. Sheena gasped and then started panting, her legs pulled back and spread wide.
“Is she getting into it!” Jill said in awe.
“That’s their ‘hard and fast’ program,” Tina said a bit clinically as Sheena suddenly convulsed and screamed. She relaxed bonelessly, a blissful expression on her face. Then her eyes widened as she said: “eep!”
“That’s what, four?” Jill said, shaking her head.
“And that’s quite enough,” Tina added. “She’s getting a bit frayed.”
“I may be out of line,” Sheena said slowly, “but you mentioned something about settings a while ago. What’s that about?”
Tina looked at her a moment and then shrugged. “The Slave Code recommends not telling you because it’s useless information. There’s nothing you can do with it. On the other hand there’s nothing stopping you from taking the Owner’s course on the net on your own time; if you do you’d find out there sooner or later anyway.
“It has a lot to do with the way the collars work. Let’s take a trivially amusing example. The latch on your slave tunics is a network device; if I wanted to I could issue a command that would make your tunic fall off.” Tina giggled at the image.
“The interface is the Tunic module. Your authorization is set so that you could take your tunic off with a command. My authorization in your collars is set the same way; I can take your tunics off with a command. Nobody else in this household has that authority over your tunics.”
“She really is a sex fiend!” Jill said, wide-eyed.
Shenna giggled. “You have an objection?”
“Goddess, no!”
Tina giggled at the byplay. “Fran and I can change that; nobody else in the household can, and that includes you. The key notion here is that your owner is Fran and Eric’s marriage; their governance system has policies for how your control collars are set. Those policies give you a very small amount of control; you can, for example, install games you download from the net, which is something that does require you to be able to authorize them. The policies give me a lot more control, and Fran even more. Right now they’re set up pretty much the way the Slave Code recommends.”
“So we could ask you for more privileges?”
“I’d suggest having your reasons lined up ahead of time. I might be able to grant whatever it is, but it’s not very likely. Fran is going to want reasons, and if it goes to the family council, I’m going to have to make a coherent presentation.”
“Family council?”
“That’s Fran, Eric and me. Because the family is my legal guardian, I’m technically a child at home, which gives me voting rights on things that affect how I’m treated, housekeeping and this business. Eva has talking rights on how she’s managed and housekeeping, you and Kelly have no rights, although I’m treating you as if you have explanation rights on how you’re managed and the business.”
“Talking rights? Now you’ve lost me,” Jill said.
“That’s a bit complicated. The key point is that we’re a complex family, with a marriage, a ward and four slaves, one of whom is a pet and two of whom are being used in a family business. That means we have to set policy formally. Trying to run it informally would be asking for trouble. We have several policy categories, including housekeeping, four groups of people that are managed in different ways, and this business.
“You’re connected with two of them: how you’re managed and this business. The family could give you either explanation rights or both explanation and talking rights on either or both of them. I’m assuming you’ll get talking rights in a couple of years. That means you’ll sit in on family council meetings for those two policy categories with full discussion rights, and you’ll have the ability to sign off on policy changes either that you agree or that you participated in the discussion.
“So you’re saying we’re going to have more of a voice in how we’re treated?”
“Eventually. Sis is a control freak, but she doesn’t micromanage. Thankfully. You’re never going to have voting rights, but for the most part that doesn’t matter. We make most policy decisions by consent, which means that there’s no reason to vote.”
“So how’s it going?” Eric asked his sister-in-law.
“About like I figured. They were intending to be professional musicians before they put their foot in it, and I’m herding them along their chosen career path. They haven’t forgotten that they want to be free, but I think I’ve got that wired enough into the act that it’s not really bothering them.
“It’s only been a week, so they’re not fluent on Collar Obedience, but they seem to be coming along. The training AI is doing its thing.
“They’ve memorized over half of the Devotion and have settled down to where they don’t let it affect them. I ran a couple of quick tests and they really do have Devotion allergy; it wasn’t simple incompetence at the first kennel that had them.
“They’re picking up repertoire a couple of songs a day. The only place where they disobeyed orders was when they started practicing Shake the Bars, so I tried my idea out on them. It almost scared me to death!”
“Did it ever,” Eva contributed from where she was standing. “Talk about hair-raising!”
“You’ve been listening in?” Fran asked.
“Yes. As far as I can tell they’re coming along nicely on the repertoire, and they’ve started to develop a few really funny routines.”
“Well, that wasn’t the problem,” Tina added. “I was in the room with them, and the way they jumped at me when I turned them on they almost shoved me through the wall! I’m making them wear the chains now while they’re practicing, and the way they come forward and strain at the chain on the refrain is like to scare anyone out of a year’s growth.
“I’m specifying heavier chains, too, and I’m going to check the bolt. I think that the chains and cuffs let them go all out in a way the cages didn’t, but I don’t want them loose in the audience while they’re doing it.”
“You think they’ll be ready by next week?”
“Right on target; the only thing I’m worried about is them damaging themselves when they rush on the refrain.”
Eric frowned slightly in thought. “I think you’re right to be worried. There’s only so much that a collar can do to distribute the stress. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some extreme sports type neck guards. I’ll look into it.”
“Great! We’ve got a DJ lined up to debut the new act; it ought to be fun!”
Fats cleared his throat into the mike. “Well, folks, it’s going to be an interesting night. The club wanted to team me up with a couple of up and coming slave vocalists tonight, so I said, sure, why not?
“Turns out the vocalists are the Wild Girls, minus the band that was backing them. Their new owner has changed the act around, which is why you might not have recognized them. I listened to a couple of their practice sessions, and I’ve got one thing to say: if you need to hit the facilities, do it now. I really mean it.
“Sheena and Jill have got a little intro before the first number.”
The two girls swayed to their feet, making it obvious that their hands were cuffed in back and that they were tethered to a ring in the floor by their necks.
“We’re the Wild Girls,” Jill started out conversationally. “It’s a cute name, but there really is a story behind it. We’ve both got Devotion allergy, which means we can’t be tamed by the Slave Devotion. All of that ‘we’re going to escape’ and ‘when are you going to let us go’ banter with our former owners wasn’t just banter, we meant every word of it.” She paused slightly. “We still do.”
“Which is part of the reason we’re cuffed and chained,” Sheena took up the narrative. “Our owner doesn’t let us out of the cage except when we’re cuffed and on a leash. A good, strong leash.”
“In principle, that’s not really necessary; she could use the old permitted zone and invisible fence system.”
“Remember how it all started, Sheena?”
“I sure do, Jill,” Sheena said as the music came up.
“We gave our contracts to our boyfriends,” they sang in a duet that sounded like a love song.
Four lines later, they belted out:
“Shake the Bars and SCREEEEEAM” as they lunged to the limit of their chains, fists clenched behind their backs. Then they took a deep breath and walked back before they started the second stanza.
“Didn’t that sound like they’re back in form, guys?” Fats said into the stunned silence as the song ended and the two girls took another deep breath and settled back, sitting on their heels below the DJ’s desk.
“Let’s do a couple of pops while they recover their voices,” he added as he cued up Natasha’s theme song from Tumbling Through Time: ‘George’s Slavegirl’.”
“They’re definitely back,” Mary said, running a hand through her hair.
“Back?” Ted said, “That’s new territory.”
“I think,” Frank added, mopping up his drink, “the chain and cuffs are brilliant.”
“Necessary,” Ted told him. “Just as well that buffoon bumped us from the first table.”
Scribe About Town, Morning Edition.
Your scribe had decided to take the new flame on a date to hear Fats, a rather decent DJ. Fame has its perks; we got the front table even though the hostess and Fats warned us against it.
Fats had two cute chicks chained in front of his table, hands cuffed behind them. Unusual, I thought. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place them. Your scribe badly needs a memory transplant; those weren’t just any cute chicks, they were the Wild Girls. If I’d have recognized them, I might have taken a table farther back. Then again, I might not; their theme song lost its punch a long time ago.
One thing I’ve got to say right off; getting rid of that band was a huge improvement. Of course, the band got rid of them when it broke up, but they’re still around and the band isn’t. They started out with a low key intro that explained the name Wild Girls, and slid smoothly into Shake The Bars and Scream.
Your scribe doesn’t know whether they stripped the paint off the walls, but they certainly broke several glasses at the bar with the first scream. I’ve heard them before, both in the beginning when the song still had a lot of primal fury, and later when they’d lost it. It wasn’t the same fury, this was more the big cat’s paralyzing scream as it springs on its prey.
Your scribe almost ducked under the table; Sheena was less than a foot from my face when the chain took her up short, and I can guarantee you she wasn’t faking. Jill, I think, went after someone else. I hope you’ll pardon me for not noticing who.
They did the rest of the night still in the cuffs and chains; their owner’s sister, Tina Delios, came out several times to let them drink and once to give them a snack, which they daintily ate out of her hand. It’s a brilliantly minimal act with no false notes.
I managed to look at their chain and have a few words with them afterwards. They’ve got a clever arrangement so that the sudden stop is properly cushioned. Tina said they got it from some extreme sports, and I can well believe it. The girls say that they like the arrangement; it lets them totally cut loose on the refrain without having to consider when to stop. It’s a completely different dynamic from the girl cages, and it shows.
The rest of the evening showed Fats’ usual expertise in selecting the playlist; it alternated between the standard pops and some of Wild Girls’ more successful songs. The duo sang their own songs and about half of the pops, several of them better than the original artist.
They’re a pair to watch, but Tina says they’re not going to be in a fixed venue. If you do run across them, stand well back and don’t have a drink in your hand when they do Shake The Bars.
Sheena sat looking at the reader in puzzlement, ignoring the occasional grunts as the Exerciser module put Jill through her first workout of the day. New pops were always interesting, but there was something wrong with this one, and it simply wouldn’t come clear. She shook her head and got to her feet, automatically putting her hands behind her so the cuffs could lock her wrists into place.
She sang a few bars and shook her head. Maybe if she changed the pacing just a little on the third bar? She tried it and shook her head again. That was better, but then the seventh bar was totally out. She sent a command and her wrists unlocked so she could sit down and stare at the score some more.
The intercom module prodded her with an incoming call. She called up the info and then shrugged. “Wild Girls, Sheena speaking.”
“Is Tina in?” the voice said.
“Oh, hey Fats! No she isn’t. Looking to rent us for a gig?”
“The restaurant has already got you penciled in, but I’m wondering. It’s not your usual gig, and I wanted to talk to Tina about it.”
“Well, talk to me, it’ll just come to us anyway. I’d route the recording to Tina except she’ll listen to it anyway.”
“OK. It’s a family restaurant, and there will be kids present.”
“Got it. Tina told us to do a treatment for that in our original planning, but I think it dropped under our horizon. Um. You’re concerned that Shake The Bars would give the kidlets nightmares?”
“Exactly. Also Ring Gag isn’t appropriate.”
“Scratch Ring Gag from the playlist. We’ve got some ideas for a toned down version of Shake The Bars, but it needs work. Lots of work. Tina’s calling it Slump Against The Bars and Whimper.”
Fats laughed. “That’s about what the last couple of months with the band sounded like.”
“Too true. Um. If there’s kids, I assume there’s some age-appropriate pops you’d like?”
“Six or eight. Also I’d like to go over the patter with you beforehand.”
“Um. Good idea. Just a sec while I check the schedules. How about 10:00 tomorrow or will you still be asleep?”
Fats laughed. “Music is a nighttime business, isn’t it? Will Tina make it?”
“If she doesn’t, Eva will let you in. The permitted zone and invisible fence thing isn’t just patter. She’s blessedly discrete about most of it but we can’t reach the doors without her – unless the building is burning down or something.”
“How firm is this?”
“Tina will call to confirm or change it.”
“This is a first in a couple of ways tonight, folks. It’s the first time we’ve had the Wild Girls here, and it’s the first time they’ve worked the family restaurant circuit. So I’ll let them do their leadin to the first song.”
Sheena and Jill swayed to their feet, showing that their hands were firmly cuffed behind them, and letting the light chain from their collar rings dangle.
“We’re the Wild Girls. It’s a cute name, but there’s a story behind it. We’ve got Devotion allergy, so we can’t be tamed the way the restaurant’s servers have been tamed.”
Jill continued: “If any of you remember us from the days we fronted for a band, you remember that we always talked about wanting to escape. That wasn’t just banter, we meant every word of it.” She paused. “We still do.”
“So,” Sheena said, putting a slight edge of disgust in her voice, “our owner manages us with the old permitted area and invisible fence system. We’re only allowed out of our cage cuffed and on a leash.”
“Here’s where we’d usually do our theme song,” Jill continued. “However, we’ve got children present, and I don’t want to send them home with running nightmares. I don’t think the manager wants the liability suits either. Tina, now...”
“She hasn’t been that bad!”
“Well.” Jill cocked her head as if considering. “Maybe.”
“So what are you calling the new version of Shake The Bars?”
“Slump Against the Bars and Whimper.”
“That needs work, Jill.”
“I suppose so. So what we’ve got for an opener tonight is something that was a popular children’s song way back in the 20th century.” The music came up, and they started “The Unicorn Song.”
“It can’t be that simple,” Sheena said on one of their rare nights between gigs. They had gotten into the habit of using the time to study collar programming.
“I wouldn’t call it exactly simple,” Jill answered.
“Yeah. The procedure does seem to provide every possible opportunity to mess up imaginable.”
“Plus a few I wish I hadn’t imagined. I know what you mean, though. It’s right out in plain sight if you know where to look.”
“It does make some sense, though.”
“Oh?”
“Consider. We can use it to renounce the contract. It looks like we might be able to change the authorizations, but with the collar manager in the loop I’m not at all sure of that. But why? If she’s succumbed to the Devotion, she won’t want to renounce the contract, and intelligent owners don’t make it all that difficult to discuss adding authorizations. Tina certainly doesn’t.”
“True. Now that you mention it, they’re testing for Devotion allergy now and rejecting the contract.”
“So obfuscation is more to keep slaves from doing themselves a mischief?”
“It may have been more at one time, but that’s the way I’m seeing it now. There can’t be enough of us with Devotion allergy still under a slave contract to really matter. It’s been, what, over ten years?”
“A bit more.”
“Do we really want to do it?” Sheena asked.
“I’m not sure,” Jill replied thoughtfully. “Knowing that I’m five minutes away from freedom puts a real different complexion on things.”
“Good point. Part of the original energy behind Shake The Bars was that there were bars. Now that we’ve got the key to the lock, it’s different.”
“I’d have bailed out of the band without looking back.”
“Oh, absolutely. Fran and Tina have always played fair, though, given that they bought us and own us. We’re musicians, they’re using us as musicians, and giving us every opportunity to grow so we enhance their investment.”
“We are making a profit for them, aren’t we?”
“Some. I don’t know if it would sustain us if we were independent. From Fran’s viewpoint I suspect we’re a useful hobby to keep Tina occupied, and the fact that we’re actually making a bit of money is icing on the cake.”
“So there’s a loyalty issue,” Jill said. “I wouldn’t have believed it, but there it is.”
“Really. Let’s keep the possibility on the back burner. There’s got to be more pieces that would help if we ever make the jump. Or if we’re forced to.”
“Forced?”
“We may not always belong to them. The only constant is change.”
“Would they?”
“Face it. Tina is a sex-obsessed flake, Eric betrayed his girlfriend, and Fran changed her boyfriend into a Baby Doll. A girl Baby Doll. The Spring Sisters have got to practice; nobody could be that zany naturally.”
“April managed to raise two children.”
“Yeah. Fran and Tina.”
Jill laughed. “Point to you.”
“Now that I don’t have to, I don’t want to depend on their continuing to be good owners.”
Jill sighed. “You’re right. Our interests are aligned at the moment, but that could change on either side, and it could change quickly. Do we want to push it beyond that?”
“That invisible fence still rankles, even though the only place we can possibly hit it is the doors.”
“Which is real different from the band. I wonder if we could defeat the fence without bailing out?”
“Let’s put that on the agenda.”
“Might check out the cuffs too, but if we figure it out I don’t want it where I can get to it easily.”
“Um. Good thought. We’ve put too much into this act to destroy it accidentally.”
“Now look,” Sheena practically spat in the director’s face. “Either you tweak that script so we don’t need to do a full-out lunge, or we use proper safety equipment. Or else we tell Tina to cancel the gig.”
“It won’t look right!”
“Look right, shmook right! This is, what, the 967th remake of Jungle Girl in the last hundred and thirty years, and there are so many anachronisms and stupidities in the script that one more isn’t going to matter. Starting with the whole Jungle Girl notion in the first place. Tarzan in a leopard-skin bra for the goddess’ sake!”
“Who’s running this video, anyway?”
“You sure aren’t!”
“Cool it,” Jill said. “Sheena’s right about the safety equipment; we can’t do a full-out lunge without it. We’re conditioned against it. Safety regulations.
“The whole thing is an anachronism. Either you’re going to process the video to remove our control collars and replace them with an iron slave collar, or you aren’t. If you do your artists can fix it, if you don’t it’s one more anachronism. Besides, if you’re leading a properly tamed slave around, the chain works best on the front of the collar; if you’ve got a barely under control wild animal straining on the leash, it works best in back.”
“Prima Donnas,” he muttered as he stalked away.
Sheena laughed as they walked back to the sidelines and sat on their heels, hands cuffed behind them.
“Isn’t that coming on a little bit hard for a slave?” one of the student journalists that infested the shooting lot asked.
“Not really,” Jill answered. “It depends on the slave. First off, we haven’t had the Devotion pounded into our brain cells, so we cooperate because it’s the easiest way to get fed.”
“More to the point,” Sheena added, “even the ones that do have the Devotion saturating their synapses run the gamut from the ‘eager to please you’ puppy dog all the way to very strong personalities that are going to shove makework right back into your face.”
“You’re talking about my girl,” the actor playing the Great White Hunter commented. “She almost asked to be sold twice before I figured out she was a lot more use to me researching possible vehicles and treatments than my money-grubbing agent! It’s almost at the point where I might buy another one to keep the apartment clean.”
He shrugged. “She says she likes housekeeping. Mindless work lets her wash some of the characters in the business out of her system.”
He turned. “Hey Sally! Do we have their safety equipment?”
“Right in the trailer, Dave,” the makeup girl yelled back.
“So let’s see how it would work. Into the cages so she can change your chain.”
Ten minutes later the two ‘local wild animal handlers’ thought they had a firm grip on the chains when they opened the cage doors to let the girls out. Jill and Sheena looked at each other, ferociously anticipatory grins on their faces, and then lunged at the Great White Hunter, who was talking to a circus operator. The lunge ripped the chains right out of the handler’s grips and almost bowled over the two actors before they caught on and scattered.
The handlers recovered first. They grabbed a couple of folding chairs and prop whips, and managed to get the two girls back into the cage before everyone on the set dissolved into laughter.
“That’s more what I had in mind,” the director said as he watched the video streams. He paused thoughtfully. “You weren’t acting, were you?”
“No,” Sheena told him. “As Jill said earlier, we can’t do that lunge without the safety equipment on. We’re conditioned against it. At the same time, if we’ve got it on, we not only can, we’ve got fairly short fuses. Having the cuffs and chains while we’re out of our cage is street theater, but if we’re wearing our safety gear because we’re going to a gig where we’ll do the lunge as part of Shake the Bars, it’s necessary. It’s probably saved a couple of would-be paparazzi’s lives.”
“I hate those people,” Dave muttered.
“Well, tell your publicist that he’s not to approve any photos. Period. Unless it’s part of a shoot you’ve both agreed on in advance. We’ve fried a few photogs and the publications that bought them in court. Let them get the idea that there are any exceptions and you’ll never get rid of them.”
“That’s about the only decision of the Ultra-Conservative Supreme Court I approve of,” Dave added.
“Oh? You’re going to sell your slavegirl?”
“That’s the other.”
Scribe About Town, Morning Edition.
Your scribe went to see the new remake of Jungle Girls a few nights ago, and since it’s a slow day I thought I’d do a review.
It was reported to be bad, and it was. The only reason your scribe went to see it at all was that the Wild Girls, Sheena and Jill, were playing themselves in it.
The first few scenes were so-so. They had to cover for the fact that the only times Sheena and Jill appear in public is in a cage or with their hands cuffed behind them. That meant that the early scenes had to be done with distance shots of stunt doubles. They weren’t bad, but they likewise weren’t all that good, either.
I found out later, from Sheena, that nobody had asked if they could do the opening without the cage or the cuffs. They both have a pronounced dislike of being confined with invisible fences, but if the money was there, they’d have done it.
Sheena and Jill actually come on stage when the Great White Hunter is selling them to the circus, and that scene, for a miracle, worked. I understand it was extemporaneous; the script hadn’t called for them to get loose.
Dave DuBois played the Great White Hunter. While he’s a mediocre actor in general, he towered over the material, only being matched by the Wild Girls. The rest of the acting was up to sub-par, and if the scriptwriters had any decent lines, they didn’t bother wasting them on anyone except Dave and the Wild Girls.
The best part was the title: Jungle Girls CMLXVII. It’s puzzled everyone, and it can now be revealed what the numbers mean. They came from an argument between Sheena and the director, where she called it the 967th remake of Jungle Girl.
It’s worth spending a few credits if you like either Dave DuBois or the Wild Girls. Otherwise you can leave it on the remainder racks.
Tina made her way up the aisle to the stage where the annual City Arts awards were being given. It was, she felt, fortunate that Fran had insisted she wear a fashionable gown, otherwise her inner ten-year-old would have been tempted to do cartwheels. It was all she could do to avoid giggling.
Sheena and Jill followed her as she led them on their leashes, their hands cuffed behind them in the pose that was the only way anyone outside of the family had seen them in the last ten years. The two walked with a sprightly step, slave livery flattering their early 30ish bodies, and somehow giving the impression of predators barely under control.
The announcement was still ringing in her ears. “Best vocal duetists: Tina Delios’ Wild Girls.”
She took the coveted award and waved the microphone away when a quick check showed that the sound technicians had set up the link to her control collar.
“This is an occasion for secret pride and formal humility, and I suppose I have more reason than most for the humility: Sheena and Jill are much better than I am at all varieties of music. If I can claim any credit for their achievement, it’s that I provided a space where they could concentrate on their music to the exclusion of most other distractions.
“So I really see two awards here. One to me for providing a space for two outstanding young musicians to flourish, and one to Sheena and Jill for taking advantage of it and flourishing. So I will ask your indulgence for a moment. They have outgrown me. This is not a musical statement; they had far surpassed me musically when they gave their boyfriends their slave contracts fifteen years ago. It’s a statement of environment. My sister and I are creatures of this city, and they are on the threshold of outgrowing it.
“So I have a gift for them.
“Jill. Sheena. You’ve grown past me, and I would not tarnish your memory, or put your future career at risk by selling you, even to the most carefully selected master.
“Go Free.”
Tina fought successfully to suppress a giggle at their expressions as the cuffs unlocked and she gravely handed them the leashes.
“You say it,” Jill hissed at Sheena.
“Say what?”
“I don’t want to go free any more.”
“You know, you’re right. I don’t either.”
Sheena stepped up and gave Tina a firm hug.
“I have to say this is a total surprise. At one time it would have been the most welcome of surprises. Tina has been an interesting mistress; she has never been interested in using us to establishing a venue for herself. We started out as the Wild Girls, and she established our current look on the second day she had us. In one sense I think we’ve been the most cloistered of musicians; this is probably the first time most of you have seen us without our hands locked behind us. In another sense we are the most versatile of vocalists. I think we have sung just about everything we possibly can without our hands, and I think we have done most of it well.
“There are a large number of masters of the vocal arts we could learn from, but that is no longer sufficient motivation for me to want to brave the world outside. All I can say is that the Wild Girls have learned to love their cage.”
Jill said: “I’d like to add a few words. When I entered university as a music student, I had a modest career goal: to make my living as a vocalist. That’s a career goal that less than one of twenty graduates actually manages; so I felt it was high enough to be a challenge. I didn’t anticipate that it would be as a slave vocalist, but our owner has made no secret of the fact that Wild Girls is turning a healthy profit. Which makes this gift all the more precious.
“I’m not at all sure that I want the challenge of creating a new life for myself. Ten years ago I would have accepted this most generous gift with alacrity. Five years ago I would have accepted it, and not at all reluctantly. Today I have to agree with Sheena: this Wild Girl has learned to love her cage.”
“Since I see that our owner of record has already canceled the contract, we are simply going to have to enter another contract, if Fran and Tina are prepared to accept it.”
They handed their leashes to Tina and put their hands behind them. The cuffs took hold, and did not release. They smiled at each other; their carefully prepared but never tested program had worked.
“How,” Tina whispered when they got back to Fran’s box, “did you do that?”
“Do what?” Sheena answered, an obviously faked expression of wide-eyed innocence on her face.
“Give us control back? I didn’t think it was possible. Unless,” she suddenly paused and pulled out her reader.
“I see. You’re still using our household computer, but you’re no longer on our marriage’s policies. You ran in a bunch of policies for yourselves that give us most of the control. I take it you can turn it back off again just as easily?”
“True, but so what? We’ve been able to renounce the contract for the last five years.”
“And you didn’t?” Fran leaned over to talk. “I thought you didn’t want to be slaves.”
“It changed the picture when we found out we could walk out any time we wanted. It’s true we’ve got a slave contract, or rather had, but without your ability to prevent us from renouncing it by keeping us away from contract machines, it’s really no different from any business deal with a bunch of weird terms.”
“And our situation hasn’t substantially changed,” Jill added. “Originally we felt the act Tina dreamed up was something we’d never have agreed to if we were free. When we found we could break out whenever we wanted, it became a neat piece of street theater.”
“It’s even a bit of a giggle that we took everyone in for the last five years.”
“So the next step?” Fran asked.
“Is to see a lawyer about renewing the contract. If it’s even possible; it may no longer be possible to do a slave contract if the slave has Devotion allergy.”
“We’ve got some ideas for contract terms that will protect both our interests, but that’s for discussion with a lawyer.”
“I’ll admit I’ve come to like having you around. You’ve been very good for Tina. So let’s keep on for the next few days as if nothing had happened while we negotiate.”
“I don’t get a choice?” Tina asked plaintively. Then she giggled.
“Tina,” the MC at the after the awards party at Posh Place called. “Want to come up with your girls and say a few words?”
“Sure,” she said, giving Sheena’s face a quick wipe. She’d been holding one of the little appetizers-on-a-toothpick for Sheena to nibble on.
“So what happened?” he asked as the three of them came up. “Was that planned, or what?”
“Tina really did free us,” Sheena said. “and it was a total surprise. Technically we’re between contracts right now, but we’ve agreed to explore entering a new contract once we can get the lawyers lined up with a few terms to protect both of our interests.”
“I must say it certainly surprised me, and your wanting to go back surprised me even more.”
Jill said: “We’ve been the Wild Girls for what, fifteen years now? Being kept in a cage and only let out with our hands cuffed and on a leash is a neat piece of street theater, but it reflects a couple of underlying truths. We do have Devotion Allergy, and for most of that time we would have made a mad dash for a contract machine to renounce the contract if our owners had left us a hole.”
“Our cage is a nice little efficiency apartment, and there really is an invisible fence that keeps us away from the doors.”
“Tina could just as easily keep us under control with another fence while we’re out, but keeping the act up in public is great advertising, and I think she enjoys having us need to eat out of her hand. There are times I suspect she’s kinky that way.”
They paused a moment while Tina struggled to keep a straight face and Fran almost broke up back at the table.
“The final piece is that when we do that lunge, we really are the Wild Girls, and we’re not faking. It’s almost an alternate personality. There’s a very simple signal about which is which: if we’re wearing the neck protector we’ve also got a real short fuse and an utter unconcern about attacking anyone who happens to irritate us.”
“Anyway, about five years ago we learned that one of the old scriptwriters’ conventions was true. There is always a hole in the bad guy’s plans, and we found it.”
“Then we learned another of the old truths: we build our own cages. Once the door was open, what we were doing didn’t seem all that oppressive any more. The real cage was in our heads; what we wanted to do somehow didn’t seem like it justified the effort to go independent. That’s as much of a cage as the girl cages we performed in while the band owned us.”
“So maybe we will leave Fran and Tina some day, maybe we won’t. Right now the issue is to negotiate contract terms so both of our interests are protected.”
“And that really is a step out of the cage for us. Whether we take another step? Only the gods know, and they aren’t telling us.”
“You said there was a hole?”
“It was new for us; anyone who’s taken the Owner’s course and studied the authorization system knows about it, or at least they should if they stayed awake. It’s done that way by design, and I suspect there are legal reasons for not closing it completely. It’s not, by the way, something that a slave who has assimilated the Devotion could take advantage of, or at least it would be incredibly risky for them to do so.”
The MC shook his head. “So do you have any advice for us?”
“Everything we have to say in that area is in our first song.
“Sheena, do you remember how it all started?”
“Sure do, Jill.” They put their heads together:
We gave our contracts to our boyfriends,
They sold them to a factor.
The kennel choked the dream to death:
Shake the bars and SCREAM!
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.