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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 3. You want me to do what?
Chapter 5. At the Basic Robot.
Chapter 6. Housekeeping Class.
Chapter 8. Boxed and Delivered.
Chapter 9. ... Who Only Stand and Wait.
“Terry Winthrop,” the woman standing in the door leading from the waiting room to the back office called.
Terry got up from the hard plastic chair and walked over, following his case worker to her desk in the office.
“You have,” Denise Steele said after they had settled, “a week to find a job. If you don’t have a job within a week, or some other method of guaranteeing your financial responsibility, you’ll be arrested as having no visible means of support. The penalty, as you well know, is being assigned to a labor battalion.”
The young man in front of the desk shook his head resignedly. “I’ve tried.”
“I know you have,” she told him, gesturing to the screen in the corner of the desk. “You’ve had four jobs in the last two years. The longest was for two months. You were discharged from all four of them as being unsuitable.”
“I tried,” he answered miserably.
“I know. Unfortunately, trying isn’t good enough. Your high school grades are bad and you haven’t made a successful attempt to improve enough to get into a university. Public Aid isn’t going to support you indefinitely while you try to find a stable job. Your parents are not allowed to support you for more than a year after you leave school. As of this meeting, you’re out of options.”
“Isn’t there anything else?” he pleaded.
“Either you wait for the sheriff to pick you up, or you see a factor and sign an indenture. Or pray that you win the lottery while you wait for the sheriff.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“It’s your choice,” she said as she escorted him out of the office.
Indenture or labor battalion, he thought as he walked dejectedly away from the Social Services building. Or find a job in a week. He drew in a breath and straightened up. Labor battalions were supposed to be the pits. All the disadvantages of being a slave, and none of the advantages.
He found the factor readily enough. Metro Slave Dealer maintained a modest office in the front of the Slave Warehouse building. He looked at the door from across the street, a feeling of trepidation building up in the pit of his stomach.
“It’s this or the labor battalion,” he reminded himself. He straightened up, pulled his shoulders back and marched across the street.
The young woman sitting behind the desk smiled at him as he closed the door. “You’re here to indenture yourself, right?” she asked.
“Uh yes, how’d you know?”
“It’s that death march look.” She grinned, taking the sting out of it. “Take a deep breath, let it out, pull up a chair and we’ll get the preliminaries out of the way before you see the boss.”
He relaxed as he exhaled, and managed to really look at the woman. Or rather the slave girl. She wore the single shoulder sleeveless tunic that was the standard style for slaves. This one had a distinctive pattern he’d never seen before; he assumed, without really thinking about it, that it was registered to Metro Slave Dealer. The red ribbon around her neck was obviously a control collar; it had a pretty little cameo on the front that was also most likely registered to Metro Slave Dealer, Inc. She looked, he thought, completely comfortable with it.
“Let’s have your ID card,” she said. He handed it to her. She put it on the desk for a moment and then handed it back.
“Terry Winthrop, right?”
“Uh, yes.”
“So tell me a bit about yourself. We like to know how to present you for auction.”
“Well, uh, I can’t find a job.”
“I know that,” she smiled. “So what happened on the last one you had?”
Terry slowly relaxed as the calm voice asked questions and listened sympathetically to his answers. He didn’t notice that her fingers twitched as she entered the data into the file, nor that she occasionally paused to look at something displayed on the surface of her desk, or to listen to something only she could hear.
“I think that’s enough,” she finally said.
“Do you want me?” Terry asked as he slowly realized where he was.
“Of course,” she said as she got up. “The boss wants to see you next.”
“Mr. Neville, here’s Terry,” she said as she ushered him into the office.
“Grab a chair Terry. I’m Jack. We’ve got a bunch of stuff to get done.”
“I thought I’d just...” Terry dribbled off.
“Just what? No, don’t answer, if it isn’t on the telly, I expect you don’t know. All the detail is too boring to be on the telly.
“So. You’re here to sign an indenture. When you’ve signed it, you’ll go to a slave cage to be trained, and then put up for auction.
“Before we do the indenture, there are a few things we need to cover. First, how much do you know about what male slaves do?”
“Uh, nothing?” Terry ventured.
“Good. Males do a lot of different things. Mostly they’re outside, doing landscaping, maintenance and similar tasks. Since you’re completely unskilled, your first owner will train you in whatever he wants you to do. If you turn out to be good at it, you’ll be given more and more training in the same area. If you aren’t, you’ll probably be stuck in a relatively low level slot. Understand?”
“Uh, yes.”
“The next thing you need to understand is that there’s no exit. You’ll learn something called the Slave Devotion. You know what that is?”
“I’ve heard of it,” he said a bit doubtfully.
“Well, it’s two things. One is a description, in poetry, of what it is to be a slave. You memorize it and then recite it twice a day.
“It’s also the thing that keeps a slave from exiting the indenture contract. Technically, you can terminate the slave contract any time you can get to a contract machine. However, practically you can’t. Once the Devotion has had a chance to set, you’ll want to have someone who uses you. Thinking about not having someone to use you will be unsettling, and actually terminating the slave contract is likely to put you in the psychiatric unit at the health service.”
Terry frowned.
“To put it simply, there’s no exit. Once the contract machine accepts the contract, that’s it. You’re a slave, and you’ll stay one until you die.”
“Oh. That’s what I’d heard.”
“Good. Now we need to settle your affairs.”
“Huh?”
“Your apartment, bills, whatever.”
“Oh. I’m paid to the end of the month.”
“Good. Put your ID card on the reader so we can clean up.”
They talked for a few minutes, covering how he wanted his few possessions disposed of.
“Good. That’s all we need to cover. Next we do the contract. Take your clothes off and put them over there.” He gestured at a small table.
“Uh?” Terry looked at Jack. Jack looked back. Terry sighed, got up and stripped while Jack got a red ribbon, two pieces of what looked like white cloth and three plastic objects out and set them on the desk.
“Now put on the collar and cuffs,” he instructed.
The thoroughly confused young man obeyed him, taking the red ribbon and wrapping it around his neck. It quivered a moment and then tightened, fitting snuggly but not so tight as to leave a mark. He picked up the two pieces of white cloth and wrapped them around his wrists where they tightened to a snug, but not uncomfortable, fit.
“Good. Go to the contract machine and answer the questions.”
Jack nodded as Terry went to the waiting machine, put his ID on the plate and put on the brain scanner helmet. Then he took a deep breath, straightened up, put his hands on the plate and looked at the screen.
The screen lit and messages started appearing.
Brain scanner signal OK.
Terry Winthrop identity verified.
New control collar recognized. Initialized.
Transferable Unlimited Use Contract of Terry Winthrop to Metro Slave Dealer, Inc.
Is this the contract you wish to enter?
--> Terry signaled yes.
Answer the following questions:
--> The machine asked him a number of questions and had him do several mental exercises.
--> Terry answered all the questions affermatively, and passed all the exercises.
Contract accepted.
Contract registered with the Slaveowner’s Consortium.
Slaveowner’s Consortium ID assigned: 2070-38596-84937-38
Contract entered in contract registry.
End.
“Hands behind you,” Jack said before he could turn around.
He automatically obeyed, and felt the cuffs lock his wrists together.
“Now we need to tattoo your Slaveowner’s Consortium number,” Jack said. “Over here.”
Terry looked and then walked over to an oddly shaped piece of equipment.
“Shove into it,” Jack instructed. Terry pressed himself into it as it shifted a bit to fit. Then Jack wrapped a strap around his back, tying him to the machine. A moment later, Terry felt a prickling across his lower abdomen. He sighed again; he knew that when he stepped away he would have a number permanently tattooed below his belly.
“Open your mouth,” Jack told him. He automatically opened it. Jack stuck in a dental block to keep him from closing it, and then held what looked like a piece of plastic against the roof for a full minute. Then he slid a pair of earplugs into the young man’s ears.
“Now for the last item. Bare your neck.”
“Huh?”
“Head back so I can put the cameo on the collar.”
“Oh.” Terry tilted his head back and Jack held a little oval to the front of the ribbon, where it stuck.
He pulled a cage from a closet and put it in the middle of the floor.
“All done,” he pronounced as he unbuckled the strap. “Into the cage.”
Terry turned around to see the cage. It was made of 3/16th inch rods six inches apart, and was 30 inches wide, 30 inches deep and 36 inches high. The floor was made of a somewhat springy and very absorbent material. The top and the front were folded back.
Terry shrugged slightly. It wasn’t like he had never seen a slave box before, although usually they were called girl boxes, and they contained pretty slave girls being moved from one place to another. At least on the telly.
He managed to get himself seated the way he’d seen the slave girls: cuffed hands against the back bars, knees spread wide and legs straight back.
Jack flipped the top and front closed. Then he took a handcart and moved it out the back door of the office, leaving it against the corridor wall.
Jack walked into the front office. “What do you think?”
“He’s not dumb enough to be euthanized. Quite.” Becky looked up at her boss. “He doesn’t have the build to be a ponyboy, and I can’t see him as any other kind of pet. He’s never had a steady girlfriend, which means he’s got to be horrible in bed.”
“Becky, Becky,” Jack shook his head. “He’d have to be at least 10 IQ points lower for a board to even consider putting him down. He might not be interested in maintaining a relationship. Which leaves?”
“Good point. He would make a pretty Statue.” She shuddered slightly.
“Could be. Have to see how it goes.”
“Ready for lunch?”
“Yep.”
Her fingers twitched slightly as she looked at the array of menus displayed on the surface of the desk. She pointed at one. “Italian?”
“Sounds good.”
Her fingers moved slightly, and then she slid out from behind the desk and left the office. He knew she’d be back in under five minutes with the lunch she’d just ordered. Having her pick it up was both cheaper and faster than having it delivered, and it wasn’t like there was anyone waiting in the office.
Terry settled back in the cage, wondering what was going to happen next. Several people walked by, glancing at the naked young man in the cage but otherwise minding their own business.
He didn’t have long to wait. A few minutes later a pretty slave girl came by with a handcart, slid the prongs under the cage and guided it down the corridor. She took it up a couple of ramps into another corridor that seemed to be lined with some kind of doors or hatches every 20 feet or so.
She positioned the cage in front of one of them. The door and the front of the cage slid up. “Time to get out!” she said. His cuffs unlocked, letting him crawl forward to the other side of the wall, where he managed to stand. He found himself facing another slave girl.
“You’re Terry, right?” she said.
“...” he answered.
“Oops! Forgot to turn your voice back on.”
“Uh. Yes, I am.”
“I’m Mimi. This is your cage room; you’re in cage L4T.”
“Huh?”
“That’s L as in left from the other door, 4th counting 1 to ten and T as in top.”
“Oh.” She backed up and let him look. Once he got turned around he managed to find it.
He looked at it a bit doubtfully. “How do I get in?”
“Use the stool until you learn.”
“Oh.”
“Now,” she said after he’d managed to clamber in and got himself seated facing front, “the first thing to know is that this door doesn’t lock. Safety regulations prohibit locked cage doors. The bolt works from both sides.” She made sure he knew how to operate it.
“The shelves in back have a blanket, a reader and a gadget that lets you mount the reader on the door. Everything you need to know is on the reader.”
He nodded.
“You know what your daily schedule looks like, right?”
“Uh, not really.”
“OK. You do several activities a day. Everyone in this cage room does them together. In the morning you get up, shower, have breakfast and recite the Devotion. During the day there are two exercise sessions and two more meals. In the evening you shower again and recite the Devotion.
“Since you’re untrained, you’ll do several classes, starting with memorizing the Devotion and learning Basic Collar Obedience. They’re individual instruction.
“The rest of the time you stay here in your cage. You can use your reader to study, watch shows or listen to music. You can meditate, stew, memorize the cracks on the ceiling or shake the bars and scream. As long as you don’t do it too frequently.” She giggled.
“What you can’t do is talk to your cagemates. Your muffler is set to prohibit speech except when you’re eating or taking a class.”
“Uh? How do I take a leak?”
“Oh, right. You’re allowed to leave your cage to hit the facilities. Then you need to come right back. There are invisible fences blocking you from any other part of the building. If you hit one you’ll feel some pressure that builds up to pain that increases until you black out. Try it to see what it feels like; there’s no punishment for experimentation.
“Got it?”
“Uh. Not quite.”
“Well, it’s on the reader. Now shut up.” She made what might have been a mystic gesture.
“...”
“Good.” She turned and walked away, leaving a confused Terry sitting in the cage.
Terry looked at her walk away and shook his head. Then he remembered she said it was on the reader. He turned around and found the device on a shelf at the back of his cage. It looked, he thought, like any other large size reader. He held it with his fingers resting on the back. It lit up, showing his name, Terry Winthrop, Slaveowner’s Consortium registry number and owner. Below it there were several items: schedule, courses, surgeries, rules and entertainment.
Surgeries?
His fingers twitched in the ingrained patterns and the menu item opened up. Grommet for nose ring. Oh. He shrugged. He’d noticed some slaves wore a nose ring, and some didn’t. It didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference.
He looked at schedule next. It looked, he thought, like every daily schedule he’d ever seen. It was organized vertically with a pointer down the side that showed the current time. It showed lunch as the next item, in about ten minutes. Lunch he could deal with.
A few minutes later he noticed cage doors opening and men dropping out of them, or crawling out of them, onto the floor. He turned to put the reader away and reached for the door. A voice said “Wait until I tell you” in his ear. It sounded like a computer.
Most of the men had cleared out when it said: “Now.” He slid the bolt and managed to climb down. Then he followed the rest of them down the hall into the eating room.
He found the line fairly obvious: wait to pick up a bowl and spoon, and put some stuff from a large pot into it. It looked like gunk, but it smelled like, what? Lamb chops? Weird.
He filled his bowl and saw a heavily built guy wave him over to where he was sitting with a couple of other men.
“New guy? I’m Jacob.”
“Yeah. I’m Terry. Just signed an indenture. No job.”
“Tough.
“I’m Kent, and this is Rick,” a slim middle-aged man announced.
“Good to meet you. What is this stuff?”
“Slave chow,” Rick answered. “Looks like slop, tastes great most of the time.”
“Better than my mother’s cooking, that’s for sure!” Kent announced.
“There’s around 50 varieties,” Rick added. “And they change them all the time. If you’re here for the two weeks of an auction, you’ll probably get a different one each meal.”
“Uh,” Terry looked embarrassed.
“Well, out with it,” Jacob said.
“How do you get laid?”
Jacob laughed and Terry looked pained. “I guess you haven’t found it yet. It’s under facilities. Ask and it’ll schedule a room and a chick.”
“But...”
“Shocked you, didn’t I?” Jacob laughed again.
“It’s actually simple,” Rick said. “Remember there’s five or six women here to every man, and most of them want it up them regularly as well. You don’t get to go to meet and mates while you’re in a kennel. At least, not if you’re in with the new catches. Whoever you’re matched with has asked to get laid as well.”
“One thing to remember,” Kent added. “The system monitors how well you enjoyed it, and how well she enjoyed it.” He tapped his control collar. “If you give them a good time, you’ll get the hot chicks. If your idea is get in, get off and get out, then you’ll get the ones that just lie there, legs spread, and you have to lube them up first.”
“Oh.” Terry frowned at that.
“You’ve been here for three weeks. You know there haven’t been any bids.”
Terry looked at the woman in astonishment. She was some kind of a supervisor. He’d given up trying to remember names once he had figured out that the only people he would see more than once were his trainers, and he never had the same one for more than one course.
He knew she was a supervisor because she was dressed in the style that people called office worker casual. He wore a slave tunic with the Slave Warehouse’s pattern. Well, one of the two patterns: the slaves that worked there had a different one than the slaves that were being held in the cages. He’d gotten used to wearing what was, to all intents and purposes, a dress. It wasn’t like it was a surprise; quite a few male slaves on the telly wore slave tunics.
“I didn’t know that!”
“You haven’t figured out how to monitor the auction?”
“Uh, no.”
She shrugged. “You can do it from your reader.
“Not having any bids means we have to find something to do with you. You’ve pretty much memorized the Devotion, and you’re solid on Basic Collar Obedience. You’re doing moderately well with Exerciser. There are still a couple of pieces of the standard initial training that you need to finish, but they’re not critical.
“We shopped you around to Excelsior and the PPO, and they didn’t want you.”
“Excelsior?”
“To see if they wanted you as a ponyboy or some kind of pet. We didn’t think they would, but with Excelsior you never know.”
“Ponyboy?” he asked weakly.
“Let’s face the facts. You’re not very intelligent. If I wanted to be cruel I’d say you’re stupid. There’s no getting around it. That means that you’re not going to do well anywhere you have to learn from what’s going on around you, or that you have to learn by studying. The only jobs that you’ll be able to handle are ones that you can be trained in all the details.
“In the world today there aren’t that many jobs where you can be trained to do one thing and then perform acceptably. The girls that do the work around here are all generalists. They range from average to a bit below, but they’re encouraged to learn as many of the jobs as they can handle. It eases scheduling and the diversity keeps them interested. That same diversity would have you totally bewildered most of the time.
“If you had the build for it you might do well as a ponyboy. Since you don’t, there really aren’t a whole lot of options.
“One thing that’s in your favor is that you’ve got a high tolerance for routine, and you’re quite comfortable doing what you’re told, as long as you know how to do it. In fact, you prefer to have someone or something tell you what to do.” She paused slightly.
“That’s true,” he answered.
“So what do you think that means?”
“Uh. I don’t know?” he frowned.
“It means that you’ll be going into someplace that a computer will be telling you what to do. I take it you watch Tumbling Through Time regularly?”
“Natasha’s cute!”
“How do you like the way George runs her?”
“He treats her like a household robot?”
“How does she like it?”
“She loves it!”
“Have you ever imagined being Natasha?”
“Uh,” he stammered. The blush told his inquisitor everything she needed to know, not that it wasn’t pretty clear from the initial interview.
“I’m not a girl.”
“You’re going to be.”
“What?” The mixed expressions that chased themselves across his face spoke volumes.
“We’re going to change your sex. Most of the jobs where you can be thoroughly trained in the details and a computer organizes what you’re doing and supervises your doing it are household jobs, and those are mostly for women. The other ones are specialty items like ponyboys and Big Babies; you aren’t physically suited for the first, and the other is totally outside of your psych profile.”
“So you’re going to turn me into a household robot?”
“A pretty household robot. What do you know about how sex changes work?”
“Uh. Nothing?”
“Meaning you’ve learned that what’s on the telly isn’t reliable. That’s good. What you probably know is that it’s a major gene mod. It takes about three months. What you probably don’t know is that it’s not that big a deal to adjust.”
“I thought...”
“That it was a big deal. Well, shows on the telly make it a big deal; they wouldn’t get an audience otherwise. They’re showing transsexuals, who are people whose brains are miswired. They’ve got mixed sexual signals, and the conflict makes them miserable. It’s really routine gene surgery and supportive therapy.
“You’re reasonably happy being male, but you’re not really committed to it. If your psych profile suggested difficulty adjusting, we wouldn’t consider the change.”
“Meaning,” he said slowly as he tried to work it out, “I won’t have much difficulty?”
“No more than you do with anything,” she assured him.
“Now the next thing is you get to choose your look.”
“Huh? I mean why?”
She laughed. “A large part of being a woman is looking good. That’s why pretty is the minimum attractiveness standard for women; you have to dig into history to find women who aren’t at least pretty. Bringing a girl up to that standard is part of the basic health service. We need to find a look for you that you’ll like and that can be done by the health service’s medical computers, that is, inexpensively; we’re not going to spend money on a custom gene tailoring job.”
“That makes sense, I suppose.”
“Good. The health service will be doing the sex change. You’ll be going to The Basic Robot for Basic Robot and Robot Housekeeper. That’ll take the first month. Then you’ll go to Industrial Maid for maid and housekeeper training, and you may be going to Living Doll for Living Doll and possibly Statue. Besides training, Industrial Maid will have you working so we get some return before we put you up for auction again. Also the health service likes to see how you’re adjusting.”
“That sounds like a lot.”
“It is. I think you should just take it as it comes.”
He shook his head ruefully. “I’d have to do that anyway. Explanations...”
“Don’t tend to do anything for you. I understand.”
“So I’m going to be a girl. Huh,” he said a bit reflectively.
“Right. Now scat back to your cage.”
She looked after the young man in the slave tunic as he walked out the door. She knew he wouldn’t have any difficulty getting back; he had taken to having the computer run him around through his control collar as if it was the only logical way to get anywhere. The less intelligent someone was, the faster they managed Basic Collar Obedience. He’d only taken 7 days; the average was 10.
She shook her head. Unintelligent males were a problem. She hoped this one would make it as a slave maid and housekeeper but she wasn’t going to bet on it.
The next morning, his reader showed that he had a health services appointment. He looked at it, a bit puzzled. The woman yesterday said that they’d be doing the sex change, so that wasn’t a surprise, but how was he going to get there? He shrugged. That was the Slave Warehouse’s worry; he supposed he’d find out when it happened.
A few minutes later, he felt that he needed to be somewhere else. He put the reader back and slid out of the cage, dropping to the floor with the flexed knee bounce that he’d learned. He shot the bolt on the cage door and walked to the exit where he stopped in front of the cabinet. He slid into a thong, tunic and pair of shoes.
He followed the invisible urges that his control collar triggered out of the building onto one of the vehicle strips. An empty car slid up, and he got in. As soon as he closed the door, it slid smoothly out of the bay into traffic.
Five minutes later, he got out at the vehicle strip in the health services complex. The same invisible urges took him to an entrance labeled: Gender Identity Services.
The pretty nurse at the desk looked up as he walked in.
“You’re, um,” she said as her eyes flicked to the screen, “Terry Winthrop, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Great. You’re right on time. The therapist is ready to see you now.” She gestured at a door. Terry walked into the office.
“Hi, Terry,” the woman at the desk said brightly as he walked in. “I’m Janice, and we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other in the next few months. So grab a chair and tell me what you’re feeling about your factor deciding to change you into a woman.”
“It was kind of, um, sudden.”
“It always is. So are you looking forward to it?”
“Well.” He frowned in thought. “Kind of and kind of not. I want to be useful, and if this is the only way to do it...” He shrugged.
“So you’re not really enthusiastic.”
“Right.”
“I’m not surprised. Very few people actually want to change sex unless they’re transsexuals, and you’re not one. However, since your owner wants you to, you’re here and we’ll work it out. Now the first thing is to figure out what you’re going to look like. Put on the helmet, sit back, relax and look at the screen on the wall.”
Terry settled the helmet onto his head. The screen cleared, showing a picture of a young woman standing against a vague background. She was wearing a slave tunic and sandals, and was otherwise unadorned except for the bright red of the control collar around her neck.
“That’s me?”
“That’s a compromise between what you would look like if you’d been born female, what you look like now, and what the computers can deliver without a human genome designer. For example, she’s as tall as you; it’d be extra work to take the three or so inches off to match what you’d be like if you’d been born female.”
“Oh.”
“Now what we’re going to do is tweak it so it matches what you’d like a bit better.”
A half hour later Terry looked at a different picture. It was, he thought, still almost recognizable as him, or at least someone who could be from his family. However, she was blond instead of brunette. Longer legs had added a couple of inches to her height. Her hips had come in maybe an eighth of an inch, her waist had shrunk an inch and a half and her shoulders were an inch wider. Her breasts had expanded an inch as well. Her skin had lightened slightly to match her hair.
“Now that,” Janice said with some satisfaction, “is a much better look. It’ll boost your sale price considerably.”
“That’s important?”
“Very. I know Metro Slave Dealer; they’ll spend more on training if they think they can get it back at the auction, and that look is far enough above pretty to justify quite a bit. Sometimes the program outdoes itself.”
“Well, I like it.”
“I know. That’s what the brain scanner was for.” Janice laughed. “Now for the rest. You’ll be coming in a couple of times a week for the next three months or so. We’ll spend an hour each time practicing girl stuff. Your exercise sessions will be set up so you can practice moving like a woman as well.
“Slave Warehouse will move you into a different cage room that contains girls making their transition. That’ll be in a couple of days. Partially that’s for their own convenience, but it also gives you a chance to practice girl talk with girls that are farther along.”
“I was wondering.”
“It’s easier all around, especially since you won’t be looking feminine for a month or so, and you won’t be looking really good for three months.
“Oh. So it takes time.”
“Right. Everything takes time. Now the next thing is to get you over to Gene Surgery for the shot. They should be ready for you in a few minutes.”
“That’s fast!”
“It certainly is! I can remember when a patient had to come back the next day for her shot. You know what’s going to happen, right?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you get the shot. It takes about two days to saturate your system, and you might have a bit of a reaction. You won’t need to come back here unless it gets really bad; Slave Warehouse has a quite competent clinic on site. We’ll check on progress when you come for your sessions with me. It saves extra trips.”
“Oh. Good.”
“It had better be. I think we’re going to have a bit of fun with this; now get over to Gene Surgery.” She waved her hand at the door.
Terry found himself getting up and walking out.
Janice looked after him and shook her head slightly. She hoped it would work out for her; she hated to spend all the effort to turn out a lovely young woman just to have her wind up as a Statue. Not that statues were useless: there was actually a decent demand, especially for the better looking ones.
Three days later Terry found himself getting off the Slave Warehouse’s van at an office building. The sign over the door proclaimed that it was “The Basic Robot Slave Training Boutique.” He and two pretty young women, likewise wearing Slave Warehouse slave tunics, ascended the stairs and found themselves in a small room with a comfortable bench and a chair. A couple of minutes later two more women entered. One was dressed in the office casual style, the other wore the shirt, shorts and sandals combination that had been the standard female daytime casual style for the last several decades.
The first woman took her seat on the chair, the other took her seat on the end of the bench. “Hi folks,” the first woman started out. “I’m Beth, and from your left to right you’re Terry, Sue Li, Danni and Nancy. Since this is your first visit to The Basic Robot, I’m going to tell you what Robot training is about. The Slave Code requires that we tell you, and we find that knowing a bit helps settle most people.”
She looked at her four new trainees. They all nodded; the guy who was transitioning to being a girl seemed a bit hesitant, but she wasn’t surprised. The dossier she had read indicated he probably wouldn’t understand much, but it didn’t matter since he also wasn’t likely to try to second-guess the process. The transition was far enough along that he’d lost all of his body hair, and his skin seemed to be shifting to a more feminine complexion.
“To make it simple, what we’re going to do is use a very sophisticated computer controlled virtual reality biofeedback system to program you to recognize and automatically obey a command stream in your left earplug. You’ve all got some experience with that; the Exerciser package does the same thing, but it’s self-installing. Most people don’t recognize Exerciser as a Robot package.”
She nodded. Most of them had gotten it.
“We do two trainings that are fairly common, plus a number of specialty trainings, and quite a bit of custom work. The common ones are Basic Robot and Robot Housekeeper. The specialty trainings are mostly for various kinds of Dolls and Statues. We also integrate the packages so they fit together smoothly, and we teach a course in how to control and program Robots that’s called Robot Controller.
“Basic Robot is what you see on Tumbling Through Time. George pushes a button on his control box, and Natasha does something. The actual package is mostly of the ‘go here, do this, take it there,” kind of thing. Anything more complicated requires a bit of a program; the Robot Controller class teaches you how to write those programs. A lot of owners don’t bother; they get a program off the net for what they want. That is, of course, one of the advantages of Basic Robot and Robot Housekeeper; if the programs are in the household computer, they’ll operate any Robot in the household. Cleaning services depend on this, so do rental maid services. They maintain the programs on the household’s computer so they can send whoever’s available without having a lot of client familiarization time. It also means they don’t have to know everything about their clients, which protects their client’s privacy.”
“So Robot Controller is kind of a specialty class?” Nancy asked.
“Right. We don’t usually teach slaves how to program themselves, but there are exceptions. There’s nothing that prevents one from taking a course on the net, but it’s useless information unless her owner authorizes her for the Robot Controller programs. That is, by the way, the real reason the Slave Code frowns on teaching slaves very much about how the control collars and similar facilities work. It’s not that it’s illegal or unsafe or anything, it’s that it’s a waste of time.”
“I see. Doesn’t the Goodwife Institute teach the same course?”
“Well, almost the same one. We think ours is better; we’ve got slaves to practice on, and a number of programmers in house to consult if the student has difficulty.”
Terry nodded. Something he didn’t need to learn.
“Now Robot Housekeeper is a different animal. It’s a planning program for keeping house. The slave has to know how to do all the housekeeping tasks; the Robot program does the planning for which ones are done in what order. It also keeps track of supplies, notices things that need fixing, and maintains needs to improve lists.
“If the Robot is diligent about working the needs to improve lists, she’s going to find she’s spending less time on housekeeping for a better result. Housekeeping services usually monitor the needs to improve lists and make sure their staff keeps improving. A lot of them take care of cleaning supplies as well. Clients that use housekeeping services usually also contract with maintenance services to fix whatever gets noticed.”
“So if I’m sold to a housekeeping service, all I’m going to have to worry about is the pieces?” Sue Li asked.
“If you want to spend the rest of your useful life cleaning people’s houses. The services like to promote from within, so if you want to get to be a team leader or supervisor, you’d better pay attention to a bit more than just proper dusting technique. It’s your choice.”
“Oh!”
Terry nodded again. Not having to think about how to organize his work sounded wonderful.
“I’m here for Robot Housekeeper,” Nancy said. “Why would I want to take Basic Robot as well?”
“There are two primary reasons. First, it can substitute for willpower. If you want to set up an exercise and housekeeping schedule and keep to it, Basic Robot can interface with Scheduler to make it happen.
“The other common reason is that some women like to play Natasha to their husband’s or boyfriend’s George. If they’re serious they’ll get a control collar and training, and pretend it’s a Goodwife Ribbon socially. Kennels will usually install a couple of the most common behaviors as part of their training, but anything beyond that needs to be installed at a boutique. Basic Robot is a one time expense while boutiques charge for each behavior. Get five or six installed, and Basic Robot is less expensive. If you’re going to do that I’d recommend the collar organization and management section of the Owner’s Course. Otherwise you could be setting yourself up to lose more control than you really want.”
“That makes sense,” Nance frowned a bit. “This is more complicated that I thought!”
Beth laughed. “It is, isn’t it.
“Well, that’s the overview. Now let’s look at the cage room and get you started.”
The cage room turned out to be an open room with a dozen truncated slave cages on one side. Several of them held girls dressed in slave tunics. A couple of the girls looked up from their readers, the rest simply ignored the interruption.
“This is where we keep you when you’re on the premises and not actually in a training exercise. We use The Slave Warehouse for residential trainees; they come over in a van and leave in one. Non-residential trainees come in off the street and stay here until we’re ready for them. Then they leave after the session, or stay here if someone is coming to pick them up.”
She nodded, and Danni and Sue Li found empty cages and climbed in. Terry and Nancy followed Beth out the door and down the hall. A minute Terry found himself in a large open room with booths along one side. Some of the booths were occupied with girls that had large helmets that covered their heads almost completely. Many of the girls wore slave tunics; a couple wore shirts and shorts. More girls wearing the helmets were walking around the floor, apparently at random. Some of them seemed to carry non-existent objects. He saw one of them curtsy to no one.
“The first thing,” Beth said, “is to get the VR helmet on your head. This has a more sensitive brain scanner than the ones in the contract machines so we’ve got to be careful that it’s positioned right.” She led Terry to a booth and then settled a frame over his head. She fiddled with it a moment, adjusting various pieces until she was satisfied.
“Now for the helmet.” She dropped it on his head and checked that the visuals were seated properly. Then she gave his shoulder a squeeze and walked away.
The scene around Terry lit up. “Watch what she’s doing,” a voice said into his ear. A young woman stood in front of him. Then she walked away and stopped. “Now imagine you’re walking” the voice said. It gave him instructions for a time, and then told him to turn around. He found himself facing a corridor that certainly hadn’t been there when he walked into the room.
The patient voice gave him more instructions on where to go and what to do. He didn’t notice the voice in his left ear that whispered apparently nonsense syllables. After a while the voice in his right ear quit giving him instructions. He found that he somehow knew what to do, even though the rooms he found himself in made no sense. Corridors kept changing, and usually what he was supposed to do wasn’t the most obvious thing. He relaxed into letting it happen.
When he got back, he found himself walking into a different cage room. A quick, startled glance into the cages showed that they contained women.
He barely had time to get his reader out and mounted before he had to put it back for lunch. He was right. Most of his companions were obviously women, but they didn’t look all that good. Well, some did and some didn’t. He frowned and then shrugged. He thought Janice had said something about that.
Today’s lunch was something Chinese. He thought he remembered it from earlier, but it didn’t really matter: Slave Chow tasted good. He frowned a bit; it didn’t seem that all of these naked women were getting him aroused. Strange.
“Over here,” a fairly tall woman waved at him. “You’re new, right? I’m Doris, by the way,” she said by way of introduction. “You’re?”
“Terry,” he answered. “Yes, they just gave me the shot a couple of days ago.”
“That’s Terri with an i, right?”
“Uh, no.”
“Well, it is now,” she laughed at him. “If your counselor doesn’t put through the name change, remind her. Who’ve you got?”
“Uh. Janice. I don’t remember her family name.”
“Doesn’t matter; there’s only one Janice in this region. She’s supposed to be real good. She also likes to turn out beautiful women, so you’re going to be a stunner if she’s up to form.”
“That’s what the picture looked like.”
“That’s Janice! You’re looking a bit frayed around the edges.”
“Just got back from The Basic Robot.”
“No wonder you look out of it! That’s intense. You know why they’re sending you through?”
“Not really,” he shrugged. “They said something about not being able to find a bidder, and that I’d do better with a computer telling me what to do. They’re probably right.”
Doris looked at him a bit strangely. “Did they tell you anything else?”
“Robot Housekeeper, and possibly Living Doll. They’re going to send me to Industrial Maid for training later.”
“Well, pay attention! You wouldn’t want to wind up as a Statue.
“Anyway, we like to catch the new girls and tell them a bit about what’s going to happen here.”
“Something different?”
“Yep. There’s only so much your counselor can do for you. Once you’re far enough along to look reasonable, you’ll be going out with some of the rest of us to learn how to wear women’s clothes, shopping and how to be a girl at a meet and mate.”
“Oh. That sounds useful.”
“It is. I can remember being scared the first time I went out to a show wearing an evening informal outfit. A dress is more complicated than a tunic! Especially when you add makeup and accessories.”
“I can wear something besides a tunic?”
“It depends on your owner. People assume that a girl in a tunic is doing something for her owner. How you dress on your time off reflects on them; most owners want a good impression so they’ll spring for something that looks good on you and that advertises their social class.”
“I didn’t know that!”
“Well, shows on the telly don’t emphasize it.”
He frowned. “That means makeup?”
“Absolutely. Your counselor will teach you how it goes, but you need to practice. Girls get to practice a lot while they’re growing up.”
“Right.” He shook his head.
“It is... Oops. Time’s up. Dump the bowls and let’s get back to our cages.”
The next few weeks passed quickly. Terri had graduated to the next size of slave tunic: her rapidly growing breasts had passed the capacity of the smart nano-fabric to adjust to her new shape. Her hair had shown a vigorous growth spurt, and now tumbled around her shoulders; they’d cut the brunette ends off so she looked like a natural blond. Her waist had pulled in, but her bone structure hadn’t finished. That was going to take another couple of months.
The van pulled up in front of a forbidding gray building whose sign said: “Industrial Maid Service.” Four young women wearing Metro Slave Dealer’s tunics and cameos got out and walked, single file, into the entrance. The van pulled out for its next stop.
How, Mai thought as she did at the start of every month-long basic housekeeping class, did you get six young women who had no previous housekeeping experience? It shouldn’t happen. She shook herself slightly. Three of them were obvious. One was being converted from male to female by her factor. She was shaping up quite well, but she’d never met a guy who knew jack about housekeeping.
Two were rich bitches who had probably never done anything more useful than lifting a jar of makeup – assuming their maids didn’t do that for them as well. They’d been kicked out of university and their families had given them the alternative of spending a year as slaves or getting disowned on the spot. She’d never met one that was quite stupid enough to take the other alternative, but then she probably wouldn’t. Disowned heiresses tended to wind up as Statues.
One of the others was a lower class girl whose mother probably didn’t know how to keep a reasonable house, and the last two had mothers who used the Robot Housekeeper package and hadn’t taught their daughters housekeeping. That was inexcusable. It ought to be classified as neglect.
She gave them one more look. “All right, girls. Let’s get started. This class assumes that you know nothing about housekeeping, and if by any wild chance you do know something, it’s probably wrong. Or at least inefficient. You’re going to spend a solid eight hours a day learning how to clean and cook, and you’re going to learn how to organize it yourself. I know that five of you have the Robot Housekeeper installed, and you’ll learn how to do it under Robot control as well. You might be wondering why we bother to teach you how to organize your housekeeping.”
She paused, looking for an answer.
“I won’t always have a computer available?” Tina answered a bit hesitantly.
“Could be. The Robot Controller can run out of your control collar, but it’s much better with a household computer. Control collars aren’t really adapted for that kind of program. Somebody else?”
“The computer can’t do everything?” That was Stephanie.
“Got it! The housekeeping program can do a lot, but it’s not going to teach you how to handle something you’ve never been trained on. It’s also overkill for small apartments, and it’s not really adapted for the kind of little stuff that keeps coming up. It doesn’t mesh well with minding the baby, or with keeping other things moving at the same time.
“It’s intended for one job: weekly cleaning. Our crews use it because cleaning is what we do, and it’s useful for large buildings because they either do daily cleaning, or clean part of the building every day. In other words, if you can block out a half hour or more for cleaning, it’s useful. Otherwise, not.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Stephanie said.
“Reasonable or not, that’s the way it works. Now, we’re going to start with floor scrubbing. You use gloves and knee pads. Why?”
Terri felt his eyes begin to cross as Mai continued her instructions.
“As you may have figured out, Industrial Maid does not want you. You didn’t exactly fail the housekeeping class, but I doubt if anyone will want you for your housekeeping skills. You’d probably be acceptable as a backup housekeeper if you had something else you did for an owner.”
“I tried,” Terri said miserably.
“I know. It’s the same as your previous work record. Not bad enough to be really horrible, but not good enough to keep you on. So we’re going to send you to the Doll House next. Do you know what Dolls and Statues do?”
“That’s how George freezes Natasha on Tumbling Through Time?”
“Exactly. Natasha is a Living Doll. He can freeze her in position, and then move her around so she’s in the pose he likes. Your psych profile suggests you wouldn’t like being a Doll but you would like being a Statue.”
“Oh?”
“Owners who get a Doll like to play with them. Your psych profile strongly suggests you wouldn’t like that. They also like to use them for other household tasks, and that’s a problem with you; we haven’t found anything else that you can do well that someone wants you to do.
“Being a Statue is generally a full time assignment. You hold a single pose for around eight hours. You can do anything you want as long as it doesn’t break the pose or involve talking. You can listen to music and shows on your earplugs. If your owner lets you, you can talk to other Statues over the net. If there’s a display in sight, most owners will let you use it.
“A lot of clothing stores use Statues as floor models; they can be programmed to go through display routines as well as just stand there. Statues are also quite popular with the really rich; they use them as information kiosks around their mansions.”
“Information kiosks?”
“They answer questions and take orders to pass on to other people in the household. They don’t actually have to know anything; they’re trained on what to do to answer questions and who or what to send it to.”
“Eight hours at a time?”
“Good question! Partly it’s training, partly it’s things the Exerciser module will teach you about keeping your body working, and partly it’s the Advanced Life Support attachment.”
“Advanced Life Support?”
“That’s what they use when a girl has to be in a girl box a lot of times for more than a couple of hours. It’s a modification that takes care of your bladder and squirts food directly into your stomach. They usually tie the equipment to the Statue’s leg and dress her in something with a skirt that hides it.”
“I’d wondered. Some of the pictures show a tube?”
“That’s for when the girl doesn’t have the modification. When she’s got the modification, there’s a throat unit to prevent choking that’s used for girl boxes, but it prevents talking, so it’s not used for Statues.”
“Uh. I think I see.”
“Well, they’re not going to do anything that damages you.”
“Oh, right. That would be illegal.”
“Exactly.”
The Doll House, Terri thought, looked like its name. She could see one of her sisters keeping her dolls in it. If she was a lot bigger and it was a lot smaller.
A couple of months ago, she would have winced at the idea of going in there, but that was when she was a he. Well, that level of fussiness wasn’t her, but it was OK. If that was what her still unknown owner wanted, then fine. Something about frills, bows and general fussiness seemed somewhat attractive.
The Doll House’s computer recognized her amazement when she walked into the lobby, and decided to let her look around for a couple of minutes. Terri recognized the feeling that she had nothing to do at the moment and walked over to a woman standing by one of the walls. She looked like she was frozen in position.
“What are you doing?” Terri asked almost to herself.
“I’m on exhibition today,” the Statue replied. “You’re Terri Winthrop?”
“Uh, yes,” the startled Terri answered.
“You’ve got a couple of minutes to look around before you’re to go upstairs. You might want to look at the Baby Doll over there.” She nodded to another corner of the lobby, and then resumed her frozen pose.
Terri obediently walked over to the corner, where there was a neat placard in front of a girl lying in a large sized crib. The placard said: “Baby Doll – feeding time 9:00”.
The girl was dressed in a pull-over top that showed a lace-lined diaper cover. She also had on a pair of cute soft baby shoes, and had a pacifier in her mouth.
Terri could see her eyes move, and she thought she saw a slight rise and fall as she breathed, but otherwise she was completely motionless.
It was almost 9. A girl came out of a side door and smiled brightly at the audience. She put down the baby bottle and feeding bowl she held and sat down next to the crib. Then she briskly rearranged the Doll’s limbs as if she was a real doll, leaving her sitting up.
Terry watched, fascinated.
“This model is a Betsy-Wetsy,” the girl told the watching audience. “Betsy-Wetsy was a model of doll from a long time ago, just after they started making dolls that had a bit of behavior. The original Betsy-Wetsy had a hole straight through so that anything you put in her mouth came out the other end right away. This Doll has been trained so that when she takes a swallow from the bottle, she does a little wee-wee a few seconds later, and when she’s fed a spoonful, she does a little poo-poo a few seconds after. It looks like it goes straight through, although it doesn’t, of course. She’ll need a diaper change right after I finish feeding her.”
“Why would they do that?” one of the watchers asked.
“It puts feeding and changing its diaper together, which I suppose makes it more efficient if the owner wants a Doll she can feed and change. It’s one of our more popular models.”
Terri shook her head slightly. The Statue was kind of spooky, but she could see that it could be useful. This was something she didn’t want anything to do with.
“What if you don’t want that linkage?”
“All of our Baby Dolls come with a command that will make her mess her diaper. If you don’t want to change your Doll’s diaper, then you need to take her out of Doll mode so she can service herself. How much you use your Doll as a Doll, and how much you get into it is really your business; we train our Dolls so it doesn’t matter to them which way you do it.”
Just then Terri felt that she needed to be somewhere else. She turned and entered an elevator.
A minute later, she found herself in a comfortable little room on the third floor with a woman dressed in the office worker casual style.
“Oh, hi! I’m Narelle, and you’re Terri, right?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Downstairs shake you up a bit?”
“It sure did!”
“So what did you think of the Statue?”
Terri frowned a bit. “She could be useful, but...”
“Why would anyone bother?”
“Right.”
“To be depressingly honest, our products go to people with more money than is really good for them. People who don’t want to be bothered with readers like the rest of us. Statues stay out of the way and brighten up the decor until they’re needed.”
“I see.”
“So, how much do you know about how Dolls and Statues live?”
“Uh, nothing.”
“Great. Nothing to unlearn. Dolls and Statues are very different. Dolls are mostly pretty ordinary household slaves. They do various things while their owners aren’t playing with them as Dolls. Mostly standard housekeeping stuff. Most owners only play with them as Dolls for a couple of hours a day, if that.”
“OK,” she said a bit doubtfully.
“It’s like George and Natasha. George doesn’t have Natasha frozen in the Doll state all the time.”
“Oh. Right. He couldn’t, could he?”
“Not and get anything else out of her. Now Statues are different. They stay in one place for eight hours a day, and that’s their job. They’re off duty the rest of the time, or they fill in on other tasks for a few hours.”
“Um?”
“Consider the one you saw in the lobby. She’s not there all day every day. We need three Statues for the position because they do eight hour shifts. We also give them a day off every week the way the Slave Code recommends. So we need at least six. We actually have a couple of dozen; we have Statues in several places in the building.”
“I think I see.”
“Well, it’s not really your responsibility to know how it works. The key thing is that owners who use Statues seldom have just one; they’ve usually got quite a few, and they rotate positions.”
“I see.”
“Good. Another thing to know is that owners who have a lot of Statues also have a lot of other slaves that do housekeeping, groundskeeping and similar stuff. What that means is that they’ve usually got their own slave kennel on site. It’s normally a bit better than the Slave Warehouse, but it’s still not going to be private rooms, or even dormitories.”
She shrugged. “I’m used to the Slave Warehouse.”
“So it’ll probably be a step up. Now let’s start programming you.”
“Uh?” Terri said as Narelle walked out of the office. Terri followed her down the hall to another room that seemed to be lined with computer equipment racks. She recognized that it wasn’t quite true; there were low platforms between the racks, or maybe racks between the low platforms. Several of the platforms had young women standing on them, frozen into position.
Narelle nodded to one of the lab-coated men in the room. “Which one?”
“First sessions?” a tall blonde asked. “Use Donna over there,” he nodded at a brunette standing frozen by the left wall without waiting for an answer.
“Play with her,” Narelle told Terri.
“Uh?” Terri answered, a bit flustered.
“You’ve never played with dolls? Just move her about into different positions.”
“Uh, why?”
“To get you familiar with how it works. You need to get past feeling that it’s strange.”
“Oh.” Terri walked over to the Doll and decided to have her hold her arm out. She tried to move it, and found that it was a bit stiff; she had to apply a bit of pressure. After a couple of minutes she began to get the way the Doll’s limbs moved from the joints.
Narelle stood back and watched until Terri seemed to relax into moving the Doll into different positions.
“That’s good,” she finally said. “Now get up on that platform over there.”
Terri looked at it and shrugged slightly. If this was what it took to be useful to someone... She climbed up on the platform.
“Now we put on the helmet,” Narelle told her charge. “You’ve seen these before, right?”
“It’s kind of like the one they used at The Basic Robot?”
“Exactly. We need a brain scanner; the physiology monitor in your collar isn’t accurate enough for this. Now just stand there and imagine you’re relaxing on a beach...” her voice went on and on in a soothing tone as Terri’s control collar gently shaped her brain patterns toward a state of waxy paralysis.
“That’s very good for a first session.” Terri snapped back into consciousness as Narelle praised her. “You held it for four hours. Go hit the facilities; the van from Slave Warehouse should be here in about ten minutes.”
Terri looked at the girl box. She shrugged slightly. They wanted to ship her in a box, well that was their business. It wasn’t like she was going to try to escape if they just gave her a ticket and an address. She slid out of her tunic and put it aside. Then she held the fixture to her crotch, and felt it snap into the new socket that they’d installed. It also fit snugly into and against her sex, and slid into her anus.
She stepped into the open box and settled down the way she’d been trained, hands behind her and legs beside so that the crotch piece fit on the floor and attached to the life support unit.
The attendant flipped the front up and attached a reader so that Terri could see it easily. She put the top on, and then pulled a cover over it. The cover quivered a moment, and tightened snuggly, leaving the air ports on the life support unit free.
The naked slave girl settled back inside of the cage. She turned the reader on and selected a video to watch. As she watched it, the attendant slid the prongs of a handcart under the cage and took it to the dock in back of the Slave Warehouse building.
Terri was on her way to her first owner.
“Oh, good. Our new Statue,” Annabelle said as the porter delivered the box to the slave kennel.
“Be good to see a new face around here,” the porter answered.
“Probably,” she said. “How do you like the picture?” She showed him the sales photo.
He whistled. “She’s going to brighten up the place, all right. With those looks, why’s she a statue?”
“Thick as a plank. Mistress Victoria doesn’t care about that as long as she can recognize people, report and answer questions, and she’s fine on that.”
“That’s what a Statue’s for.” The porter waved as he took the handcart to wherever he kept it until it was needed again.
She touched the receipt card to the cover; it obediently sagged slightly and then rolled up into a neat package revealing the boxed slave girl.
Terri, she thought, didn’t look any the worse for wear from having sat in the box for three days while it was shipped across the country. Not that she expected anything else; they’d been shipping boxed girls for decades. The life support module did a great job on keeping the internal climate exactly right to avoid sweating, and the trained exercises kept their bodies in good condition.
She flipped the top open. “Terri. Stand.” The girl stood a bit awkwardly. Well, she probably hadn’t practiced that. “Terri. Open Mouth.” Terri opened her mouth; Annabelle removed the throat unit. Terry cleared her throat, making sure that everything still worked. Annabelle tapped her leg, and Terri obediently shifted her posture to where Annabelle could remove the crotch unit.
“Terri. Speech on.”
“Oh. Hi. I’m Terri, you’re?”
“Annabelle. I’m the kennel and Statue supervisor. You know what your first task is, right?”
“Uh. I’m supposed to memorize all the people who live here?”
“Exactly correct. You can take a couple of days to do that before we put you on a shift. Right now I need to show you around the kennel and what you do while you’re off duty.”
“Oh.”
Definitely dumb, Annabelle thought. Dumb was fine for a Statue.
“Follow me. The cage rooms are this way...”
Three days later, Terri walked down a beautifully landscaped corridor to a foyer that opened to a formal garden. She recognized the Statue who stood in a small circular plot that had a low fence around it. The Statue recognized her and broke her pose with a bit of a shake. She stepped out of the enclosure and Terri took her place.
She settled the strapless gown she wore with a slight shake and looked around, making sure she could see everything she was supposed to watch. She froze into position. Her fingers twitched slightly as she checked in with the household computer. Then she selected a music program and let go of time the way she had been trained. She knew she would remember almost nothing of the shift she was going to spend here.
This, a vagrant thought said just before she quit thinking, was a job she could handle.
“They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait” is the last line of one of John Milton’s sonnets: On His Blindness.
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.