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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 3. Experimental Animal A126
Chapter 10. The Primate Habitat I
Chapter 11. Primate Habitat II
Deana looked at the nondescript converted freighter moored to the dock and sighed. An all expenses paid ocean voyage, combined with some psychology experiments which she would actually get paid for seemed like a great way to spend a summer vacation away from all the hassles of university, family and too intrusive friends. However, an ancient freighter in an out of the way Central American port didn’t seem like it fit with the rest of the plan. If I was intelligent, she told herself firmly, I’d turn right around, walk out and get the hell away from here.
She squared her shoulders and walked the rest of the way down to the embarkation point. The smartly uniformed official looked at her papers, examined her passport minutely, and filled out a bunch of paper forms, all the while giving the impression of doing his duty while he would prefer to be enjoying a cool tequila with a willing senorita.
She took herself and her luggage, which no one had bothered to inspect, down onto the dock and then up the gangplank. A deck hand hurried to meet her and took her boarding pass.
“This way, miss,” he said as he turned and walked off, not checking to see if she was behind him. He led her to a dingy room with six bunks. “Yours is A126,” he said as if the number was the secret of the universe. “Please stay here until we’re underway.”
The numbers couldn’t have been all that secret. Each of the bunks had the number stenciled in bright letters on the bulkhead where it would be impossible to miss, unless one was so inebriated that one wouldn’t be walking anywhere under her own power anyway.
A126 was the first bunk; the numbers went up from there to A131. She wondered briefly if there was some kind of secret code; the ship certainly didn’t look like it had enough room for that many passengers, even crammed in like sardines in a can.
She put her luggage in the rack, and then took out a battered paperback she’d picked up in a used book store. Not for the first time, she wondered if the popular author had been a chauffeur in a past life. She liked her fantasy stories; this was the first time she knew she wrote light horror. Shortly she was engrossed in the beginnings of the story of Diana and her vampire lover.
She didn’t have long to read, however. A minute later the door opened and another young woman walked in. She heard the deck minion tell the new arrival her bunk was A127, and to please stay in the room until the ship was under way.
She put down the book to chat with the newcomer. Several more young women joined them, filling the room. She didn’t notice the deeper thud as the bolts shot on the door behind the last of the young women.
A minute later, she felt herself getting sleepy, and hurried over to her bunk. She didn’t notice the rest of the women likewise nodding and falling asleep. Soon the only sound in the locked room was that of six young women breathing in a drugged sleep.
Time passed as the drugged young women slept. That night, after all the rest of the guests had retired, two men rolled a long cart loaded with steel hardware up to the door of the room. They opened the door and entered. One of them walked down the row, straightening the young women on their bunks, while the other followed him and gave each of them an injection.
“Looks like a good catch,” the first one said as he came back to the head of the room and began stripping the sleeping girl’s clothes with a professional sheer. He cut off her garments with long, sure strokes, as if he had done the task many times before.
“You always say that, Ted,” the second one replied.
“The recruiters do know their business, Frank,” Ted answered idly as he moved to the second somnolent student.
“True,” Frank said as he wrapped a tape measure around the first girl’s neck and waist, noting the measure. “What I’d like to know is which ones are going to put out.”
“We’ll find out soon enough. I’ve never seen a pickup where there wasn’t more than enough pussy to go around.”
Frank paused as he examined the pile of equipment, and selected a collar and waistband in the correct size. He came back and slid the collar around the girl’s throat, closing it with a riveting gun. He slid the waistband around her waist and made sure that the connections were properly positioned before he riveted it shut.
He spread the unresisting girl’s legs apart and examined her crotch closely; then he drew several lines across the midline, identifying important parts of her anatomy. He took the tape measure and drew it between her legs, from the back of the steel band to the front, noting exactly where the lines went. He went back to the equipment pile and sorted through the crotch pieces until he found one he liked, then he installed it, popping a rivet in back and sliding the front up until the lock caught.
“True,” he continued as he straightened up from his task. “It’s just that it takes a couple of days before the hot ones get so frustrated that they start begging.”
“So? You mean to tell me you can’t take two days before you start training one of them?”
“They could organize it better,” Frank griped. “Here, help me get her onto the cart.” Ted came over and lifted the comatose young woman over his shoulder as Frank dumped the rest of the equipment onto the bunk, then he put her onto the cart and fastened her with a couple of tie-downs so she wouldn’t shift. Then he went back to stripping the clothing off of the fourth girl in the line.
A few minutes later Frank finished outfitting the second girl with her collar and chastity belt; they arranged her on the bottom of the cart. He wheeled it out the door and through a hatchway as Ted finished his job of stripping the girls and began to outfit the next one with her steel jewelry.
Frank took the cart down a passageway, down a lift and into one of the holds that was assigned to Experimental Animals: Perishable. He wheeled it into the holding room.
The holding room had a wide corridor lined on each side with two rows of cages, six on the bottom and six on the top, for a total of twenty four. Each of the cages was about two feet wide, three high and six long. They were separated with about an inch of a sturdy, sound-absorbent material.
He opened the end cage and slid the first drugged girl into it, head first, making sure that he had the blanket positioned under her so that her skin didn’t chafe on the metal bottom. He tossed a second blanket on top, and then closed the door, locked it and dropped the light and soundproof cover over it that they used to make sure their charges could sleep well at night.
He slid the second girl off the bottom of the cart onto a mobile platform, pushed it so it raised, and put her in the second cage. Then he looked back and double checked. Right, he’d gotten the first one into cage A126, and the second one into A127. The monitors on the edge of the two cages had lit up with their cheerful colors; everything was as expected with their contents. He wasn’t sure who’d set up the system originally, but this was one part of the procedure that had lasted.
Well, no rest for the wicked, he thought and then chuckled as he wheeled the cart back for another pair of girls. He’d get lots of rest before he was on duty again: he was on second watch.
Dick Bayswater looked around at the almost microscopic cubbyhole that the university had allotted him as an office. It was, he supposed, not that different from that of any Ph.D. candidate in the department. It had a desk, chairs, filing cabinets and enough space between them that it was possible to maneuver - if one was on the thin side of anorexic.
His computer workstation was at least up to date. Right now the monitor displayed his next appointment. He had no idea who this clown was, other than that it was about employment opportunities. It was best not to ignore them; the job market for newly minted Ph.D.s wasn’t the best, and he had no intention of staying around here after getting his degree.
The visitor had given his name as Sebastian Tombs. Dick snorted. At least he looked the part. Dick stood to shake hands. “Simon Templar, I presume?”
The man chuckled. “I wouldn’t be here if we thought you were slow. That isn’t, of course, my name but it will do if you don’t prefer Sebastian.”
He sat down and took several file folders from his thin case. “Before you get started on those, I should say that they’re simply to set the background. If you decide to turn down our offer, they’ll go into the crosscut shredder.”
Dick looked through the folders slowly, his face getting grimmer and grimmer as he turned the pages. “I see what you mean,” he finally said. “I didn’t think the hounds were this close.”
“Faking experimental results is a stupid thing to do,” his visitor remarked, not at all put out. “In fact, if we didn’t know the circumstances, we’d have given you a pass. Integrity is one of the things a working scientist can’t afford to have questioned.”
“In retrospect it was stupid. I suppose...” He shrugged. “Water over the dam. So what do you want with me?”
The man tented his fingers. “We have a clandestine brain research project going. Our sponsors believe that there are a large number of exploitable opportunities waiting for the first person to discover them, and they also believe that the pace of research is going too slowly. They’d like to speed it up.”
“Speeding it up isn’t...” Dick said, and then stopped to think. “In other words, the second and third folders are what interested you.”
“We didn’t think you were slow. That’s exactly what interests us.”
“Your sponsors wouldn’t happen to be organized crime interests, would they?”
“There are some of them among our sponsors. Not so many that they have a controlling interest, not so few that we can ignore them. They provide a number of resources, and of course we take their interests into account in product development.”
“I see. This is, I take it, a startup?”
“We’ve actually been in operation for several years. Some of the research has gotten into product development, although not quite far enough to deploy on a regular basis.”
“Then why do you need me?”
“The brain is hugely complex. We’ve got several advantages, including a variation on brain scan technology that is a bit better in spacial resolution than current equipment, and is capable of millisecond time resolution, but it’s still a bit like exploring a continent teaspoonful by teaspoonful.”
Dick shook his head at the mixed metaphor, but said: “MEG is expensive equipment.”
“This isn’t MEG. It’s actually a variation on a standard bed of nails EEG with better sensors and real time tomographic analysis.”
Dick whistled. “Most researchers would kill for that. What do you do for structural analysis?”
“Standard MRI. We only need to do it once for each subject. After that the computer does the merge. The EEGs are cheap and available. The MRI is expensive; we only have one on site with one backup, and that’s mostly for medical use.”
“I’m intrigued. What about living conditions, pay and all that?”
They discussed it for a few minutes, and then the man slid a card across the desk. “If you want to accept, dial that number. It’ll recognize your voice; anyone else will get directed to a flower shop.”
Dick looked at the small freighter sitting in the ocean by the pier. It didn’t look like first class accommodations, that was for certain. He felt grateful for the warning; it had let him disconnect from the university without a major scandal, but without a degree either. His mysterious patron had provided tickets, directions and money to get down here.
There was quite a bit of activity. He shrugged, put down his coffee and paid the tab in the small bar. He picked up his rucksack, pulled his luggage behind him on its wheels, and headed down the street to the pier.
A gaudily uniformed official checked his passport and identification, and then waved him on without inspecting his luggage. A harried dock worker helped him get the luggage up the gangplank, where he was met by another uniformed officer and a good looking woman wearing a strapless wraparound and sandals.
“I’m Ina, sir,” she said in a pleasant if somewhat reserved alto. “This way to your stateroom.” She snagged his luggage with an expert maneuver and led the way down a corridor to a room with a large, ornate 2 on the door.
“This is larger than I expected,” he commented as she closed the door to the corridor.
“It has to be for two of us and for you to have space to work,” she replied in a matter of fact tone. “Which cases are clothes?”
“Two of us?” he said, startled.
“I come with the room, sir,” she replied as she efficiently opened one of the suitcases and started to distribute his clothes between the drawers and the closet.
“You what?”
“I come with the room,” she said, amusement in her voice. “This is my sixth voyage, and every one of my passengers has been surprised at the level of service we supply.”
“What if I don’t want a companion?”
“Being a companion isn’t my primary function. I’m here for you to practice on while you learn the company’s technology. I was given a full set of upgrades a month ago, and of course programming is uploaded constantly.”
She chuckled in polite amusement at his expression.
“Of course, I also housekeep this compartment, keep your clothes in order, run errands and keep your bed warm if you want.”
He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “In other words, you’re telling me that one of the applications is some kind of mind control?”
“You could say that, although it doesn’t work quite like a lot of fantasy. Let me show you the setup.” She reached behind herself and undid the clasp on her garment. A moment later, she stood before him, naked except for a chastity belt.
“The chastity belt is a bit of a sham. The important part is the waistband. It contains quite a lot of equipment, and interfaces with the control circuitry that pervades my brain. It’s got a radio link with the ship’s control computer.”
“It’s got a link to the computer. I presume you’re programmable?”
“Yes, and that’s part of what you’ll be learning.”
He shook his head again. “Where do I start, or is there an instructor?”
“No instructor, unless you want me to tutor you in some of it. I’m fairly good at the programming, and I do know how the system works and how the parts of my brain that are controllable work, but that’s the extent of my knowledge. Everything’s on your workstation for you to study, but it’s not set up as a training course.
“I don’t recommend starting with the research reports. You could start with the image of my visual field, or with the real-time brain scan. You can get to a lot of information from there. Or if you like to jump in and find out how I work by trial and observation, you could start with my remote or with command voice.”
“Command voice? How does that work?”
She shrugged. “I’ll do what you tell me – it’s part of the job. Command voice is different. It’s a special tone of voice that we practice a bit. When you use it, the command goes through my language centers as usual, but then goes to the computer and triggers a program. I don’t have any discretion, and a lot of the time I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ll do whatever the program says, unless it triggers a safety override.”
She paused a moment. “There are functions you have to use either command voice or the remote for. I can’t do them myself.”
“Such as?”
“Sexual turnon. Or you can turn my voice off and on. And you can freeze me in position. And a few other things.”
“Oh. In other words, if I want a quick fuck, I’ve got to use the remote?”
“Right. Or learn command voice. I can’t turn on any other way.”
“I think command voice is low on the priority list: the remote should be easy enough. I like to explore before doing anything. So you said there’s a visual field display and a brain scan function?”
“Right. Here’s how you use the workstation.” She pointed at the screen that was bolted to the bulkhead, and it turned on with her gesture.
“All right. How did you do that?”
“I have direct connections with my control computer. As far as I’m concerned, it works like any other personal computer; I call up programming and give it commands. That workstation has a remote turn on function, so I simply had my control computer transmit the appropriate command over the network. The hand gesture was me being theatrical.”
“I’m beginning to see what they meant by applications. You’d make the perfect executive mistress.”
“That’s one of their target markets, sir,” she said without any inflection.
“Um. How about the visual field?”
A minute later he had her walking around the cabin looking at things as he stared at the display screen, fascinated at what it was showing him. He played with the controls, alternately shaking his head, swearing and studying the screen in perplexity until suddenly he figured it out.
Finally he came up for air. “Sheesh. Reading research reports is not the same as seeing it. I’ve seen visualizations, but the real thing is definitely something else.”
“It is, isn’t it? I can’t study my own in real time; the feedback tends to crash things.”
He looked at the clock. “Dinner?”
“In about a half hour; the first dinner is formal with the Captain and the officers. I’m not invited; I’ll eat in the crew’s mess.”
“So I suppose it’s a suit and tie affair.”
“Right.” She moved to get his only suit out of the closet and lay it on the bed.
Two hours later she sat on her heels at his side. He, in turn, sat in a comfortable chair in the passenger’s lounge. She noticed that Frank had brought Aria with him; she sat on her heels next to his chair. Uma likewise sat next to Randy; the other two passengers hadn’t brought their training girls.
“I must admit to being confused,” Randy said. “Uma simply didn’t make a whole lot of sense.” Three of the other four nodded.
“Well, Ina got me started,” Dick said. “I must say the display of her visual field while she was walking around was ... startling.”
“I can do that with her?” Randy looked down at Uma. She looked up at him. “Yes, sir,” she said in a soft contralto. Then she shrugged. “I don’t know how you do it, though. I’ve never been good with the computer stuff.”
“Ina seems to be fairly well organized; she’s the one that showed me how. Maybe she could explain coherently?”
“I’ll try,” she laughed as she saw nods all around.
“The one line executive summary,” she said in a tutorial voice that somehow left no doubt that she thought one line was all that would fit in an executive brain, “is that they’re trying to create cyborgs. They’re succeeding too; all five of us are cyborgs. Ida and I are the best of the lot, although she’s a bit shy, and I’m rather, um...”
“Forceful,” Dick said. “Continue.”
She nodded. “Drilling down, I doubt if it comes as any shock that this involves making connections that weren’t there originally. Discovering what does and doesn’t work eventually comes down to trial and error, or hypothesis and experimentation if you want to be a bit formal. Error tends to leave brain damage. We’re very expensive experimental subjects, so the experimenters take due care to not make avoidable mistakes, but still eventually the accumulated weight of brain damage makes any further experimentation uncertain.
“At that point most of the subjects are turned over to utilization. A few are sacrificed so that their brains can be analyzed in detail.” Lucy leaned forward in startlement. “What? That’s ...” She subsided as one of the men held up his hand.
“Utilization,” she continued as if Lucy hadn’t spoken, “is actually the crux of the project. They try to program around the brain damage and program in functions that the sponsors think are valuable. The results vary from cyborgs with almost full function such as Ida and me, thorough a lot of menials like housekeepers, sex slaves, yard and agricultural workers and ponygirls. There’s a long list of things they’ve tried to do with us; most of them are only moderately successful.”
Randy held up his hand to stop her. “I’m puzzled about something; how do they get decent results with brain damaged subjects?”
“Well, they don’t. That’s a good question; I glossed over a very important piece. Of the 24 subjects in the hold, only eight of them are going to be used for cutting edge exploration of how to wire up new brain areas. The other 16 fall into four groups of four each, although none of those differences are going to matter until we get to our destination.
“They’re concentrating on three packages: a basic package, an advanced package, and an experimental package. The basic package contains all the connections needed to condition the subject to unquestioning obedience, train her in whatever you want her to do, and direct and monitor her in doing it. It’s basically a slave package.
“The advanced package adds the connections that let the subject communicate with her control computer. That’s important. I’ve discussed Command Voice briefly with Dick. Command Voice and the remote invoke mandatory programs: we don’t have any discretion about them. Command Voice uses our language centers to determine what the command is, and then routes it to the computer. The remote, of course, goes directly to the computer.
“There are two differences between basic and advanced in command voice. One is that the basic subject frequently isn’t even aware of the command; the subject with the advanced package is, although she can’t do anything other than obey it. The other difference is that the advanced subject can use command voice on herself in her internal dialog.
“That doesn’t mean she can do everything that her owner can. There are some functions that only Dick can invoke, and there are a couple that only I can invoke. The rest are common, unless Dick decides to restrict them.
“Experimental simply adds everything else that they’re pretty confident they’ve got the difficulties ironed out of. All five of us have the experimental package, and we get upgraded whenever we’re in port.
“Four of the experimental animals in the hold will have the basic package installed, four will have the advanced package installed, and the rest will have the experimental package installed. You’ll be given your own experimental animal when you arrive. You can keep her in the experimental facility or take her home with you; most of the researchers take her home. She comes with the experimental package already installed.”
She smiled grimly to herself as she noted the reactions. Lucy, as she expected, was quite disturbed and making a major effort not to show it; the four men were intrigued. Recruiting was doing quite well with the borderline psychopaths.
She stopped and indicated she was done.
They all looked thoughtful. Randy finally asked: “How’s it done?”
“Well, that’s so far beyond my competence that I’m going to show you something. What I’m going to do is read from the intro that’s on the system.” She closed her eyes and then began to speak in a slightly sing-song voice.
“The auxiliary nervous system is installed with a small syringe that contains a gene-modified bacterium. The bacterium locates a specific population of cells near the sex organs and merges with them, contributing a new chromosome. The modified cells form a contact point just under the skin, and then grow toward the spinal cord, joining one of the existing nerve trunks on the way.
“They continue up the spinal cord, forming additional contact points at the waist and at the neck, and finally form a small ganglion just under the brain stem. From there they enervate the brain stem and medulla as well as continue up to form an electromagnetic sensing network along the inside of the skull and the surface of the brain. This sensing network, besides being the foundation for the realtime brain scans, provides the platform to enervate additional areas of the brain.
“The new cells are modified neurons. Part of the modification is that signaling is done in a different fashion from normal neurons; this allows very high speed, high bandwidth data transmission using a very small number of neurons, rendering the intrusion very unobtrusive up to the point of the actual interface with specific brain areas.
“Specific details, including research reports, are linked from the three-dimensional brain map that is used for displaying the realtime brain scan.”
She paused, and then continued in a more normal voice. “Hopefully that made more sense to you than it did to me.”
“It makes all kinds of sense,” Randy replied. “In other words, you can simply inject this bacterium and it takes it from there?”
“It takes a week, and then she’s got the basic package installed and is ready to be programmed. It’s completely painless; she won’t notice a thing until you start programming her.”
“That’s evil,” Randy said admiringly. “Can anyone do the initial programming?”
“The commercial package they’re working on has the routines in the control computer. You just put the collar or belt on her and follow the instructions. It takes a couple of hours, and then she’s fully conditioned to instant obedience and to accept her new role in life. It does require the control computer; there’s no way of making the basic package work without it.”
“What’s the difference between the basic and advanced packages?” Steve asked.
“Let me give you an example. If you’ve got a basic cyborg, and you tell her that part of her job is housekeeping, she’ll do housekeeping for you. That’s basic obedience. How well she does it and how much time she has to spend doing it depends on how she was trained before; the basic package doesn’t provide any support for that task.
“The advanced package does contain a housekeeping support module. When it’s installed, she’ll start a housekeeping sweep by walking through the entire house, inspecting it in detail for what needs to be done, and then go about doing whatever needs doing in an order determined by the housekeeping programs in the control computer. If she finds something she doesn’t know how to handle, it’ll go on a research list and she’ll learn how from the standard housekeeping sites on the web. She’ll keep working on all of the tasks involved, improving her skill and efficiency until eventually her house will cause the typical neat freak to die of sheer envy, and she’ll be taking remarkably little time to do it.
“The difference is that the basic package doesn’t have the brain connections that the housekeeping support module needs. They’ve tried to build one, but the result wasn’t any better than simply saying: ‘House. Clean it’. There’s simply too much variation in the task for a support module to be useful.”
Randy gestured to get her to pause, and then asked: “It’s still not clear. If the program has all that detail, I’d think it would work on either model.”
“Well, that’s the point. The housekeeping package doesn’t have all the detail you’re probably imagining. The program can pull stuff out of my visual cortex easily enough, and it knows basic facts like dust accumulates on flat surfaces, but otherwise it knows remarkably little. It doesn’t, for example, know what something looks like when it’s dirty. If it tried, it might try to clean an ant farm, for example.” She got a chuckle with that example. “Most of the actual knowledge is in the organic part of the brain. It quite literally picks my brain for what’s going to be needed, how much time it’s going to take and all the other details required for each item. Most of that requires connections that the basic package doesn’t provide.
“Another example. The advanced package interfaces with the auditory, language and visual areas in some pretty sophisticated ways, and the control computer is network enabled. What I did a few minutes ago was call up a document from your local servers and invoke a text to speech program. That program uses my language areas for output. I could have called up a visual image and read it, but the text to speech program is not only snazzier, it can pronounce technical words I can’t and handle a lot of languages that I don’t have a clue about how to either read or pronounce.
“If you want me to take dictation, for another example, you can see the document being written on the screen as you dictate. That function is a huge improvement over the typical speech recognition programs for straight text, and when you get to technical reports that include diagrams, references and similar figures there’s simply no comparison.
“There are several dozen task modules, and some of them are pretty sophisticated. People are adding more all the time.”
“I’m beginning to get the picture,” Roger said. “How does the advanced package get installed?”
“Slowly. It takes about two weeks. The new nerves have to be programmed so they grow properly, and then the result has to be programmed. That takes some pretty strange mental exercises that the control computer does. Each one doesn’t take that long, but there are several dozen areas involved and the total adds up.”
“How happy are you with it?” Lucy finally chipped in.
“That’s a hard question. If I hadn’t been conditioned, I’d be trying to take the place apart, brick by brick. However, I’ve been conditioned to regard what they did to me as acceptable in light of the greater good. I wouldn’t say I’m happy about it; just that I’m not furious, and that I’ve got enough of a positive attitude to find out what I can make the changes do for me.
“The actual technology? If it didn’t have the outside control aspects, I’d be saving up to buy myself one.”
“Really? It’s that good? Do you know who the backers are?”
Ina shut her mouth firmly. Dick frowned as the rest of the people in the room looked blank. “I asked about organized crime, and I was told that yes, but they’re not a controlling interest.”
“I suppose,” Ina said slowly, “I can expand a bit. There’s substantial investment from organized crime, especially Eastern European and some of the drug lords. There’s quite a bit of investment from several corporations with rather primitive, if you will excuse the term, personnel policies. There are some individuals from the blacker parts of the kink community, and there are a number of venture capitalists and individual investors that are looking to make money and aren’t particularly concerned with how the research is conducted. There may even be some national governments and weapons companies that are interested in brain-machine interfaces for weapons, although I’m not sure about that.
“The organized crime figures and corporations seem to be interested in slaves, the rest really don’t care. If the money is in enhancement products, they’ll be perfectly happy.”
“How do you know so much?”
“They don’t go out of their way to tell me things, but I’m not locked out of the open news channels either. The girls in the Habitat are, but the rest of us aren’t, at least if we’ve got the advanced package installed.”
“I’m still a bit confused.”
“Well, let’s go back a bit.” Ina saw several of the men nodding slightly as they came to their own conclusions. “The basic package creates the perfect slave. She’s obedient, she’s easily trainable, and she can be commanded to do anything she’s been trained to do at the push of a button or a word or gesture of command.
“The advanced package adds connections between the brain and the control computer. Whether I control it or whether it controls me is a dialog that shifts back and forth. My ultimate owner sets some restrictions and requirements that I can’t override; Dick will undoubtedly experiment a great deal while he learns how the system works. However, all his changes will be wiped out when we arrive in port.
“Those are basically the marketing targets for the two packages. What it means is that I’m a computer enhanced human, with limits set on me by my owner.”
Lucy nodded, still not completely satisfied but not willing to take up more time. The conversation shifted back to the technical details and got into the minutia of how to handle the workstations and what the researchers could expect their girls to do to assist the learning process.
Deana came awake slowly and muzzily as her body filtered the drug out of her bloodstream. She tried to turn over, and hit a wall. She tried to turn over the other way, and hit another wall. Suddenly she found herself awake with a shot of adrenaline. She almost panicked at the utter blackness in which she found herself. Then she took a deep breath, and started exploring.
She discovered that she had about an inch of side room, but she could barely touch the ceiling with her fingers. There was a wall of the same unyielding stuff just beyond her head, and she didn’t know what was at her feet. Something felt wrong. She felt her body and discovered the collar and chastity belt. The collar seemed to be a steel band about an inch high and a half inch thick that didn’t seem to have any seam or hinge that she could feel. It did have some kind of a loop thing on the front, and the back seemed to have something sticking out of it. It fit snuggly enough that she couldn’t turn it.
She also seemed to have been fitted with a steel belt, also about an inch high and maybe a quarter inch thick. There was a woven cable that came down from it between her ass cheeks and that attached to a flat metal plate that came from just below her sex all the way up to where it merged almost imperceptibly with the front of the steel belt. It very efficiently kept her from touching her sex. There seemed to be a hole in the front, near the bottom, and there was a bump that might have been a lock.
Other than that, she was completely naked.
And her bladder was about to burst.
She pushed down to feel what was in front of her feet. She only wiggled a few inches before her feet felt something, but it wasn’t a solid wall. It seemed to be a mesh of bars. She managed to get a toe through the mesh, and felt something yield.
She almost whimpered with the effort of keeping her bladder from letting loose, but she sat up, just brushing the top of the box with her head, and then bent forward, wiggling her feet under herself. A minute later she’d managed to swap herself end to end, and get her fingers through the mesh. She pushed, and the fabric beyond gave way, assaulting her eyes with light.
“Hey, wot’s this,” a man said in a thick brogue.
“I’ve got to go!” she whimpered.
“Well, just go back to sleep and hold it,” he said.
“I’ve got to go now,” she wailed.
He held the flap and looked down at her. “Are you going to be a good girl?” He asked finally.
“Good girl?”
“I’ll take you to the head if you promise not to make trouble and come right back to your cage.”
“Anything,” she gasped.
“All right.” He did something and the mesh swung out on a pair of hinges. He rolled up a table. “Crawl out on this on your hands and knees.” She crawled out, carefully holding to the narrow table.
“Careful, I’m going to let it down,” he instructed as he swung it parallel to the corridor and tipped it over so her feet were near the floor.
“Turn around. The head is that way and to your left.” He walked after her. She found the head, and looked at the toilet, almost unconsciously massaging her chastity belt.
“The key to your belt is on the hook,” he said helpfully from behind her.
She found it and managed to get the lock open with a little fumbling. The front piece fell between her legs. She hastily turned around and sat, barely making it before her body let go. She gasped as the pressure finally let up.
When she looked up, he was standing in the doorway of the head, arms folded and looking at her levelly. All he said was: “clean yourself off, fasten your belt and go back to your cage.”
“But...” She looked at him and cleaned herself. Then she stood and flushed as she felt the chastity belt shield dangling behind her.
“Well, lock it on, 26,” he said.
“Uh?”
“Reach between your legs, pull it forward and snap the top to the belt.”
“Uh, aren’t you going to rape me?”
“Not tonight. Not ever, in fact. It’s against the rules.”
“What?” she said, startled. Then she blushed again when he laughed.
“Put your belt back on. It’s not to keep us from raping you; it’s to keep you from getting off by yourself. There’s more than enough hot little sluts in there that will be begging us to get them off in a day or so that we don’t have to force them. The ice princesses and lezzies don’t matter.”
She blushed again and reached between her legs, bringing the steel device through and managing to snap it to her belt after a bit more fumbling.
“Back to your cage, 26.”
“Uh, I’m not 26.”
“You’re Experimental Animal A126. Who you used to be doesn’t matter. Back to your cage.”
She marched down the corridor to the platform.
“Lie down on it, and twist the lever on your left.” he instructed. “Then move your weight forward.” She did as instructed, and gasped slightly as the board tilted to horizontal, giving a loud click as it snapped into place.
“Now twist the wheel until you’re facing your cage.”
She found the wheel and twisted herself around. She looked at the blackness inside the box she had come out of, and noticed the large A126 on the top of the box. She squared her shoulders and crawled into it, whimpering a bit as the blackness closed around her.
She managed to get in without fouling the blankets too badly. As she reached the end, she felt the man reach in over her and caress her butt cheeks. She gave a loud gasp.
“Yep, you’re going to be a hot one,” he said as he closed the cage with a clang and snap of the lock. Then what little light leaked into her end vanished as he put the night shield back.
She contorted a bit getting the blanket positioned under her, and then lay on her back, her neck arched just enough to keep the collar from pressing into it. She finally let the last hour catch up with her, and felt as much as heard an immense sob well up from her throat. After a while she cried herself out, and Experimental Animal A126 fell asleep.
Meanwhile, the man whose name she had never learned made a mark on his clipboard and hung it back on the wall.
“So, how’d it go?” Bob asked George as he came in to relieve the third watch and start his watch.
“Pretty normal,” George said, handing the clipboard to Bob. “They all woke up right about on schedule. Half of them managed to figure out how to ask to go to the head. The other half messed their cages. I had to sedate three of them when they couldn’t come out of their panic.”
Rob came in on Bob’s heels. “That’s the thing I hate about it,” Rob said as he overheard George’s comment. “The smell is awful.”
“Part of the job,” Bob shrugged. “Besides, it’s just the first couple of days. Then they either learn, or we train them right.” He passed the clipboard to Rob.
Rob took a quick look at it. “You’ve got four hotties here already?”
“You know how it goes, some of them show signs early.”
“Well, let’s get started,” Bob said as he nodded toward A126’s cage, which already had the cover removed. He walked over and noted that she had reversed herself and was looking out with a mixture of fear and curiosity.
“Time to start, 26,” he said as he removed the cover on A127’s cage and rolled the platform over so it faced 26’s cage. He flipped the latch and the cage door swung open.
“Uh, start what?” she asked.
“Start what, sir!” he responded.
“Huh?”
“You address me as sir. You address all of your tenders as sir. Now let’s start over.”
“Uh. Start what over?” She paused and then added “sir” as a deliberate afterthought.
“Insolence yet,” he chuckled. “I don’t have time to deal with it right now. However,” his voice dropped and he slowed down to emphasize what he said, “either you stop it right now, or we’re going to train it out within the next few days.”
“Oh,” she said, forgetting the sir. Then she colored as he chuckled.
“Crawl out and get onto your feet, facing the exit. I take it George showed you how?”
“Yes, sir!” she replied as she crawled out onto the table, and then spun it around.
“Wrong direction. I take it he made you crawl to the head?”
“Uh, no sir.” She hesitated a moment and then spun the table the other way. Then she released the clutch, and the table tilted, depositing her on her feet.
“Go to the head and relieve yourself,” he ordered as she turned to the compartment’s exit. She found the head, and managed to remove the chastity shield, relieve herself and replace it without incident as Bob stood in the entrance, arms crossed as he watched her.
“Exercise next,” he told her and pointed farther down the corridor. He steered the naked girl into an alcove with a mat on the floor. “Lock the chain to your collar, put on the monitor and the headphones and follow instructions. One of us will be back for you in an hour.”
“Uh. Can I ask a question? Sir?”
“If it’s short.”
“What’s all this about, sir?”
He looked at his watch. “I can spend a couple of minutes explaining, if you get your ass in gear setting up for your exercise session while I do it.”
She looked at him and then started fumbling with the lock on the end of the chain.
“What it’s about is that you’re an experimental animal. Your home for the rest of your life is going to be a cage. Part of what will happen to you on this voyage is to adjust you for your life in the experimental facility.
“Our job is to get you there healthy, adjusted to spending your life in a cage, and ready to cooperate with whatever experimental program you’re to be used in. We’ve done that before, and there’s no reason to expect this voyage will be any different.”
He noticed that she’d snapped the lock to her collar and had also managed to figure out the harness that would keep the monitor firmly in contact with the skin between her breasts. “Now get those headphones on and start exercising.” He walked away without looking back.
The nameless girl muttered something uncomplimentary and put on the headphones. A minute later, she had stretched out on the mat and begun following the exercise program. She got into it deeply enough that she was only peripherally aware when Bob came by with first one, then a second, and then a third girl and installed them in the adjacent exercise booths.
Eventually her exercise session drew to an end. As she lay on the mat, practicing the deep breathing and relaxing routine in the headphones, she saw Bob come by with another girl, and heard him give her the same instructions she had been given earlier. This girl, however, seemed to be in an argumentative mood. Her argument was cut short by a high-pitched scream, followed by a sobbed “Damn you!”
“Look at me, 30,” he commanded.
26 couldn’t hear what she said in response, but he continued in a more tutorial voice. “You’ve just discovered one of the things your collar can do to you. You will cooperate. You will not dispute. You can ask for reasons if there’s time. Anything else will be painful. Now get started on your morning exercise.”
She heard him walk back a couple of steps toward her, and then say “Show’s over. Get back to work!”
A moment later he appeared in her field of view and looked down at her prone form. “Are you hot or are you hot?” he asked in amusement as he saw her erect nipples. He held up the key to her chastity belt.
“Uh, are you going to rape me now?” He frowned. “Sir?” The frown went away.
“Not unless you want it. Do you?”
She shook her head violently. He shrugged and put the key back on his belt. “There’s always later. Here, catch.” He tossed her the key to the lock connecting the ring on her collar to the wall chain. “Unlock yourself and put the key on the hook.” He pointed and moved a couple of feet further down the corridor.
She unchained herself, put the key on the hook, and turned down the corridor in the direction he pointed.
A few steps farther down they came to a shower room. It had four shower heads on the far wall, and four mirrors and low tables on the near wall. Long chains dangled from the ceiling and curled onto the floor between each shower head and table. There were piles of towels, and a cabinet with sections neatly labeled with the numbers 26 through 49.
He pointed at the cabinet. “There’s a section for each of you. It’s for your soap, hair brush and other grooming tools. Put them on one of the tables, lock the chain to your collar and shower. You’ve got thirty minutes. The chastity belt key is under the shower head. Don’t try to get yourself off – there’s a monitor. We will catch you, and you will be punished.
“When I come back for you, you should be all nice and clean, and your hair should be well groomed. Your chastity belt should be back in place.” He watched her walk over to the cabinet, remove the comb, brush and soap tray, and put them on the table. Then she grimaced and locked the chain to her collar and walked over to the shower. He nodded, turned around and left to head for his next task.
Fifteen minutes later he walked up with another girl and gave her the same instructions. 26 was already sitting on her heels at the low table, brushing out her hair with the hair dryer.
“Belt?” he asked her after the second girl had started her shower.
“What?”
“Spread your legs so I can see that you’ve got your belt locked,” he amplified. She colored slightly as she spread her legs. “Leave them spread; that’s the standard position any time you’re sitting on your heels and you’ve got the space.” She colored again, and then sighed as he locked eyes with her. She went back to brushing out her hair with the drier. He nodded, turned around and walked out to his next task.
Fifteen minutes later he was back with a third girl. He gave her the same instructions and waited until she had her collar locked to one of the tethers. Then he checked the second girl’s chastity belt.
“Here, 26,” he tossed her a key. “Unchain yourself and hang the key on the hook outside the door. Food is next.”
The alcove he directed her to next contained four slim pillars, each of which had what looked like a cock and balls set at about hip height. Each pillar also had a short chain and lock, and a small cabinet that contained a disinfectant and some cloths. It also contained a cabinet with twenty four cubbies labeled A126 to A149.
“What!” she exclaimed in shock as she took in the scene.
“Didn’t you forget something?” Bob said from behind her.
“Huh?” she said, turning to look at him.
“Again.”
“What is it this time?” she said, unconsciously putting her hands on her hips.
“You’re missing a word at the end.”
“What is it this time, Sir?”
He pushed a small button on his belt, and her hands flew to her collar as she screamed and sank to her feet.
“Insolence, 26,” he said calmly. “I warned you about it once. Now take a deep breath, get back on your feet and start over.”
She looked at the alcove again, and sighed several times. “I suppose I’m not getting out of this, right sir?”
“Right. Here’s the drill. You’ll find a ring gag in your cubbyhole. Put it on, sit on your heels in front of one of the pillars, lock the chain to your collar and begin. It’s got a little chip that will make it come erect when you do a good job of teasing it properly. Tease the left nut for water, and the right one for food.
“Start off by washing it down with the disinfectant, and do it again when you’re done. You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
She shook her head and walked over to the cubbyhole marked with her number. “What is this, sir?” she said as she looked at the ring with the two leather straps and the buckle.
“That is a ring gag. The ring fits behind your teeth and keeps you from biting. It also makes it difficult to talk intelligibly, although some women learn to make themselves understood with enough practice. Now insert it and buckle it behind your head. The feeding station contains a sensor: it won’t work unless you’ve got it installed.”
She fumbled a bit before getting the trick of positioning it properly, and then buckled the straps behind her. Her mouth twitched in what might have been a grimace as she sat on her heels before one of the pillars, legs spread to straddle it.
She gave it a good dose of disinfectant and then rinsed it off. She slid a bit closer and then let her tongue flick out and touch it.
“Good,” Bob said as he turned to walk away.
Fifteen minutes later he arrived with girl 27. She took one look at it and said disgustedly: “I should have expected this, sir.” He laughed and then explained the procedure. A minute later she was hooked to one of the pillars, washing down her feeding spigot with disinfectant.
He tossed the key to 26 and told her: “We’re going to get you properly labeled next.” He directed her further up the corridor and into a room with a number of tables and wooden frames hanging from the ceiling.
Rob said from the other side of the room: “26, right?” She nodded. “Get yourself into one of the stocks.”
“Huh, sir?”
“Those things hanging from the ceiling are standing stocks. Pick one, open it up until you hear a click, and put your head and hands in the slots.”
“Uh, yes sir, but why?” she said as she walked over to one of the dangling restraints and examined it.
“Bob did explain that you were an animal, right?” Rob asked in reply.
“Uh, yes sir.”
“Animals don’t have any restraint unless someone trains it into them. They don’t like people poking and prodding at their bodies. That’s why they have to be held or restrained when their handlers or vets or other people are examining them. You’re an animal; you’ll be restrained whenever you’re being examined until someone decides to train you to hold still.”
She opened one of them and positioned herself properly. “Put your hair in front, please.” She reached back and moved her hair so it hung over the restraint, and then put her hands back up into the slots. Rob came in behind her, swung it closed, and shot the latch. He checked her wrists to make sure they weren’t pinched and that she couldn’t squeeze her hands small enough to slide them out.
“Now, what I’m going to do is label you. This is a stencil.” He held up a small sheet of plastic for her to look at briefly before he held it against her forehead and smoothed it down. “We put another one here,” he pasted one on her left breast, “and here,” he pasted one on her right breast, “and here, here and here.” he finished as he pasted more stencils on her back, each of her ass cheeks and her left thigh.
“This is long term skin dye,” he said as he held up a spray can. “It’s like the dye used for fashion tattoos, except that it lasts a bit longer and won’t come off with the usual solvents.” He carefully sprayed it on the left side of her forehead, then on her left breast, then across her back and down one side, and then on her right ass cheek.
“Now we’ll do the other three colors. We do each number in a different color so it’s easy to tell from a distance.”
“Now for the fixative,” he commented as he held a larger spray can and went over the area again. “Next we take off the stencil.” He stripped off the plastic, using a small tool to lift pieces that didn’t want to cooperate.
“A couple more minutes to make sure it dries properly,” he said as he held up a small mirror. 26 looked into it, and saw A126 across her forehead in boldly colored numbers and letters.
He walked off to do something, and a few minutes later Bob came in with another girl. 26 nodded slightly as she recognized 27 from the showers and the feeding stall. He got her into the standing stocks without incident, and then unlocked 26 from her imprisonment. “Head next, and then back to your cage,” he said as she looked down and saw what Rob had dyed into the skin of her breasts.
“Urk!” she said as she stopped. Her left breast said, in small but distinct letters: “Experimental Animal.” Her right breast repeated the A126 that she had seen on her forehead. Both markings were oriented so she could read them easily.
“Come on, we haven’t got all day for you to admire your new markings,” Bob said with a small hint of laughter in his voice.
“I don’t think admire is the right word,” she muttered as she obediently walked out of the room in front of him.
As they went back down the corridor, she saw one girl teasing a faux cock with some enthusiasm, two more girls in the shower and four more on the exercise mats. She undid her chastity belt without incident and sat to evacuate.
“It’s all about sex, isn’t it sir?”
“Not exactly,” Bob answered as she let go. “You’re an experimental animal. You’ll learn parts of what the project is about in due course; you don’t have any need to know the entire story. I have no idea what they’re going to do with you. As I told you earlier, we’re training you in how to live in the animal cages in the experimental facility.
“When a female animal goes into heat, she does whatever she needs to attract a male to service her. As an animal, you need to do the same thing when you get horny: attract a male that can take your chastity belt off so you can rut. Animals don’t let little things like dignity get between them and rutting when the urge kicks in.”
“Tell me this is a nightmare and it’s going away when I wake up,” she muttered, and then added “Sir!”
“You’re learning. Back to your cage.”
She walked down the corridor into the cage room. All of the cages on the top row and half of the ones on the bottom row had their doors ajar and their occupants were missing. The fourth cage on the bottom also had its cover off, and the girl had her face pressed to the bars of the door. “I’ve gotta go!” she said as the two of them came into view.
“In a minute 35,” Bob told her. “26, can you make it yourself?”
“I think so,” she answered as she rolled the table over to where it would swivel in front of her cage door. She aimed it and then got on the table by sitting on it and swinging her legs. Then she crawled backwards into her cage.
“Pretty good,” Bob complemented her as he swung the door shut and locked it. “There’s a hole in the front you can use to stick your head out if you want to look around or talk.”
He bent down to remove the lid from 36’s cage and then unlocked 35’s. “Push the door open and crawl out,” he said as he moved back so he wasn’t between her and the head.
26 fumbled with the front door to her cage until she managed to slide the bars up that had covered a circular opening a bit larger than her head. She stuck her head out in time to see 35 get to her feet and walk a bit unsteadily to the door at the end of the compartment.
“Good first time for the morning routine,” Bob told her as he walked after 35, scratching her behind the ears in passing. She snorted and then settled down to look at her home.
It wasn’t that different from what she’d seen before, but her new perspective gave her a lot of details she hadn’t noticed. The two rows of cages across from her still had the black covers on them that kept the occupants from seeing or hearing anything. There seemed to be supply cabinets and shelves on the ends of the rows. There was a closed door in the wall on her side; the other side of the corridor led to the rooms she had been processed through.
She was about to pull her head in when she heard a noise from below her. “I’ve got to go!” a feminine voice proclaimed pitifully.
“You’re, um 36?” she called back.
“I guess that was my number,” the voice said. “Can you let me out of here! I’ve got to go!”
“You’ll have to wait; I’m 26 and I’m locked in my cage. Bob should be back for you in a few minutes. There’s a hole in the front you can stick your head out of, at least if it isn’t locked.”
There was a scrabbling sound, and then a blond head popped out of the cage and looked around.
“Up here, girl,” 26 called down.
“What did they do to you!” 36 said, distress forgotten for the moment.
“I see you like my name tag,” 26 giggled. “It’s my own personal Number of the Beast.”
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Some of it, but I’d better let Bob tell you. I’m more likely to scream and throw a fit if I have to tell someone. Or break down crying. He’ll tell you if you ask – politely.”
“Telling you is part of the job,” Bob said as he escorted 27 back in. “36, I’ll get to you as soon as I get 27 back in her cage.”
27 managed to get onto the table without mishap and crawled into her cage head first. Bob pushed it out of the way and closed the cage door with a thump. Then he took the cover off of 37’s cage and opened 36’s cage. “Head next.” She came out of her cage like she was the ball in an arcade game, got to her feet, looked around and walked the way he pointed.
26 shook her head. Either 27 was short a few bricks or had decided to curl up and hide. Or possibly she was just confused and hadn’t figured out that her head poking out of the cage door meant something.
The next evening after their nightly meeting had broken up, Dick and Ina were back in their stateroom. Dick sat at the workstation, staring intently at an animated wire model of the brain interactions that represented what Ina had done with the last sentence he’d given her. Ina sat on her heels next to him, head nestled against his hip.
He glanced down at her, and became aware that there just might be something more interesting to do with her than investigate how her brain worked, fascinating as that was. He went to turn off the computer when there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” he called. “Lucy,” Ina said softly after she did a quick check of the corridor security camera. She looked up at him with a raised eyebrow and he nodded. She quickly wrapped something around her nakedness and opened the door, ushering in a very worried looking, and very scared looking, Lucy.
Ina held a chair out for her, and Lucy sat, smoothing her skirt with an unconscious gesture.
“I’m in real trouble, aren’t I?” she asked Ina directly.
“Oh?” Dick asked at the breach of protocol.
“Depends on what you mean by trouble,” Ina told her. “Unless you’ve got a very weird definition, I’d have to say yes. You’ve put your foot in it.”
Dick looked at both of them, eyes narrowing. “Explain.”
Ina gestured to Lucy. She took a deep breath. “I’m not a scientist, I’m an undercover investigative reporter.”
Dick said: “Oh!”
“So what’s going to happen to me?”
“Well,” Ina said, “in the first place, this isn’t a surprise. I’ve got abbreviated dossiers on all five of you, and that was very clear in your dossier. It’s also quite clear that you were lured here; it’s not as clear whether you followed some clues and requested the assignment, or whether your superiors assigned you to it.”
“They assigned me to it.”
“Which means they were trying to get rid of you. Or something else; they don’t tell me if they’re trying to be clever.
“The second thing is that there’s usually one sacrificial lamb on every voyage. Your function is to give the real researchers the opportunity to experiment with installing the basic package and conditioning you when it matures. That usually takes one week for it to mature, and another few days before they’ve got their fill of practicing conditioning and go on to install the advanced package and work with that. By the end of the voyage you should have the advanced package installed and functional. That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use it very well! That takes drive and a lot of practice.
“When we arrive you may or may not go to the primate habitat. The reason you might not is that each of the researchers gets his own personal subject, and on three of the last four voyages one of them has picked the sacrificial lamb.”
Dick cleared his throat. “I can understand that. It’s a good opportunity to evaluate her as a research assistant.
“Exactly,” Ina continued. “The three that were picked all tried to help out when someone asked them to do something. The one that wasn’t tried to get by with the minimum she could do.
“You need a bit of background. There are three general research categories involving our experimental animal pool: bleeding edge, fillin and developmental. Bleeding edge is concerned with finding out how to make connections with new areas, or new kinds of connections with existing areas. Fillin is basic research with how the brain areas operate once the connections are made, and what can be done with them. Development is concerned with the control computer programming to use those connections for various tasks.
“A new connection usually damages a fair number of experimental animals before they’ve got it so it can be installed safely. They keep using them until the accumulated brain damage makes further experimentation unproductive. To be blunt about it, you can consider being assigned to bleeding edge to be a death sentence.
“Once bleeding edge turns a connection over as safe to install, it’s installed in all of the experimental class animals. There are usually a few botchups there, but it’s not the norm, so the experimental class animals do accumulate brain damage, but at a far lower rate. If fillin research indicates that the connection could be useful, development is going to try to utilize it. If it does turn out to be useful, it’ll get installed in the advanced class, and possibly the basic class. By that point installation is pretty reliable.”
“In other words,” Lucy said, “my best chance of avoiding brain damage is to get picked as a researcher’s private subject.”
“Exactly. In fact, it’s pretty much your only chance; failed sacrificial lambs are almost always going to be assigned to bleeding edge. I’ve heard of a couple of exceptions, but that’s what they are: exceptions.
“As a private subject, you’ll probably get a lot of experimental and test programming, but most of that doesn’t cause anything more than confusion when it crashes. Some of the motor skills stuff has been known to put a girl into the hospital with sprains and strains, but that’s improving. They’re getting a lot better at not pushing bodies beyond their limits.
“The other benefit is that you’ll lead a fairly normal life that’s similar to being married and working for your husband. If you get sent to the labs you’ll live in the primate habitat. You’ll live in a cage at night and during inclement weather, but otherwise the primate habitat is a real interesting place, if you like something that erectus might have recognized. I certainly enjoyed it!”
Lucy took a deep breath. “I’m going to go all out to be a prime candidate for a research assistant! It would be stupid to do anything else. What’s the next step?”
“Most of our sacrificial lambs don’t twig to what’s going on until we start conditioning them. Their subject is programmed to drug them the first night, and then we inject them without their knowledge. You were injected with it last night while you slept; it’s probably already reached the spinal column. Since you’re here, we can do one thing now that will give us some data. We’ve got a new interface unit that will eventually replace the collars and chastity belts you’ll learn about shortly; I’d like Dick to install it tonight.”
“Whoa! That’s a curve,” Dick said. “It makes sense, though. Getting my hand in right at the start. Why not you?”
“I don’t need the practice.”
Lucy looked back and forth between them. “If I remember correctly, nothing happens for about a week?”
“Well, nothing obvious. It’s about a week before it’s grown to the point where we can start conditioning. The brain scan comes online a day or two before that. Then the brain areas that it innervates come online one by one. Until then, you can try to hold your cover together.”
She smiled a bit grimly. “I minored in the sciences; I thought I was enough up to speed to handle the assignment. I didn’t realize how far I was out of my depth until I arrived here. Dick, could we work together for that week? I know it’s an imposition, but I’d like to get something out of the experience.”
Dick looked at her thoughtfully. “You’ve got to have at least some grounding to have had a hope of doing a good undercover job. Teaching does help the learning process, and it’ll give me an early chance to evaluate you.” He nodded decisively. “Let’s see how it goes. What do we do with your girl?”
Ina said: “She’s ok as a gofer and she’s pretty good as an information appliance. Her problem is massive damage in certain areas of the forebrain.”
“Ah hah! Leading to an inability to do anything on her own.”
“Right. I’ll take care of her. I’m second girl, and Ada doesn’t really exert her prerogatives that much.”
“Well, let’s get to it. What’s the procedure?” Dick asked.
“I’ve pulled it up on the system for you to look at. They want us to do something a bit different. The usual procedure varies depending on whether it’s done stealth or up front. They way they do it with our cargo of experimental animals is to gas them and then put them in the collar and belt before they go into their cages. They wake up in the cage already collared and belted; the collar is a very good control and conditioning device in its own right.
“The stealth procedure is to inject her when she’s out, and then wait for it to mature before installing either the belt, or both the collar and belt. Then you do conditioning right away so you’ve got a properly conditioned slave before she knows what’s happening.
“What they want us to do is a variation on the first procedure, using a different interface. This is a flat, triangular gadget that covers the entire crotch area and bonds on so it can’t be removed except by major surgery. The center is removable so she can be used sexually, but can’t pleasure herself. It’s got the advantage that it’s really unobtrusive; it’s not even visible under a reasonably healthy bikini, and it doesn’t require either the collar or belt.
“This is actually the sales package; we’re one of the groups that’s doing final testing before they start selling it.”
Dick turned to the display, and then gestured for Lucy to join him. They discussed the procedure for a while, then Lucy got up, stripped and lay down on the bed, legs spread wide and dangling over the end. Dick pulled a chair over and marked a number of critical areas on her skin and then measured them. He checked it against a size chart, and picked a slightly curved triangular fixture out of the box Ina handed him. He placed it against her skin and checked the alignment. “Close enough.” He drew an outline around it and then put it aside.
Then he smeared a cream over the outlined area, waited a minute and washed it off, taking the hair and a good deal of the skin with it. He applied another cream and then set the triangular device firmly in place, holding it with his thumb until the cement set. As he waited for the ten minutes specified, he watched the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, and the expression of resignation on her face. Or was there a bit of anticipation there? Possibly; he could swear that her nipples were beginning to come to attention.
Lucy got to her feet a bit unsteadily and looked at him with dark eyes. “If you decide to pick me, take good care of me, will you?” she said almost without realizing what she was saying.
Ina broke in a bit amusedly. “Look, guy, you want a fuck tonight, take her to bed. She’s ready for you.”
“What about you?”
“You know I won’t turn on until you press the button. I need to be screwed every few days to keep the biochemistry in balance, but it doesn’t have to be tonight. I’ll settle Alie and come back to snuggle on the other side of the bed.” She headed for the door as Lucy dropped the panties she’d just picked up and flowed into his arms.
Two days had passed. On the morning of the third day Bob let 26 out of her cage first, as he’d done each day, and then paused.
“Ok, kid. We’re going to change the procedure on you. See this readout?” He pointed at a small display panel set by the side of the door from the cage room.
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Good. The first line is the attention line: it says A126, so you’re the one it’s talking to. The green background says the computer thinks you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
“The next line says where you’re supposed to go next. What does it say?”
She peered at it from where she stood. “The head, sir.”
“Exactly right. The green background means that the head is unoccupied. When you’re done there, check the display for where you’re to go next. Wherever it is, don’t chain yourself in. Just do whatever the normal routine is for that place and go to the next one as directed. Don’t wait for me, just follow the directions. When you’re back here, make sure your cage door is locked with you inside. Got it?”
She stared at him a moment as if thinking of a smart remark. Then she obviously reconsidered it. “Uh, yes sir. I think. Why are you doing this, sir?”
“You’re not going to have an attendant following you around all the time. You need to be able to do your routine by yourself, the way you’re trained. It’s easier on the staff, and it gives you a little bit more flexibility. Not a whole lot, but it leads into other things they’ll do with you.”
He nodded and watched her walk out of the compartment.
Six hours later, the last of the girls was back and caged. Bob looked around; about half of them had their heads poked out the front and were chattering away as if he wasn’t there. He nodded; they’d learned that lesson quite well.
He clapped his hands for attention. “Everyone get their head out.” A couple of minutes passed before twenty four heads were poked out, all looking at him.
“Let’s recap where we are in the training process. You’ve all adapted to living in a cage and you’ve adapted to your daily routine pretty well. You mostly did the routine by yourself today; there were a few rough spots, but we’ll deal with them in the next couple of days. You may not have noticed that we sped up the process today: we sent you out at ten minute intervals instead of fifteen. That’s why some of you are a bit tired, and why you didn’t have as much time to wake up as usual. That let us cut the full cycle time from eight hours to six. That’s going to give us more time to do training.
“Speaking of training, I suppose you’re pretty tired of referring to each other by number, right?”
He got a chorus of “yes, sirs” as a response, plus a few puzzled looks.
“Well, so are we. We did the numbers the first few days to drive in that your old names are ancient history. They’re gone. Don’t expect to ever use them again.
“However, words are easier than numbers, so we’re going to teach you a way of turning your number into a name. Actually, into any one of a dozen or more names, and that’s going to be one of the hard parts: you’ll have to learn to respond to any variation on your number. None of your handlers is going to bother learning which version you prefer.
“This is, by the way, a variation on a well known set of memory techniques. The way it works is that each of the numbers from zero through nine has a consonant assigned to it. Most of them have two; some of them have three. Stick in whatever vowels you want to make a name. We’re going to drill you in it. We’ve got some biofeedback trainers that will help a lot. Expect it to take a few days before you’re really fluent.
“Let’s take an example. 26’s full number is A126, so her name, like all of your names, is going to start with an a, and then either a t or a d. In other words, the consonants for one are t and d. Got it?” He looked around.
“The consonant for 2 is n, and the consonants for 6 are j, sh, ch or a soft g. Notice that they all sound somewhat similar. So there are actually eight possible combinations of consonants for her number. One possibility might be Atonish. See how it works?”
He nodded at the various looks, which ranged from confusion through concentration to several of wide-eyed comprehension.
“We’re going to spend the next hour on it, and then we’ll introduce you to the biofeedback trainers. That’ll get you fluent in a couple of sessions.”
Ted, the lead trainer in the second watch, clapped his hands for attention. A moment later, 24 heads popped out of their cages.
“So. Questions?”
“Uh,” A134 said a bit hesitantly. “That didn’t look like any biofeedback device I’ve ever come across, sir.” A fair number of heads nodded, with the rest simply looking interested.
“It probably wasn’t. I suppose it’s time to tell you a little more of what’s going on, and what you can expect.
“The collars and belts have a number of sensors and stimulators as well as the rather efficient pain generator some of you have experienced. The helmets on the training stations are improved ‘bed of nails’ EEGs, that is electroencephalographs or brain wave readers. Together with the training programs and computer support they make a really wicked training and conditioning device. The subject really doesn’t stand a chance.
“We did something to you while you were gassed besides fitting you with the collars and chastity belts. We started what I suppose you could call a second nervous system growing in your bodies. It’s partly biological and partly electronic, and it communicates with the collars and belt part of the chastity belts.”
“You’re turning us into Borg? Uh, sir?” one of them exclaimed.
“Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” he intoned in a menacing monotone. Then he continued in a more normal tone. “Not quite. The technical term is cyborg – a human and computer combination. That’s probably where the show got the term Borg from, but they designed them for the needs of the story they wanted to tell. You’re not going to be very much like them.
“It takes a while to grow. Most of you will notice things coming online over the next several weeks. The first piece to come online is the connections to the emotional centers in your brain stem; the next thing is a really sophisticated brain monitoring device that we’ll use instead of the helmets in the biofeedback booths.
“In fact, once it’s online we’ll be able to do a lot of training without using the booths, although we’ll still be using them quite a bit.”
He looked around the room. A number of the girls had looks of startled comprehension. Some of them looked puzzled, and the rest looked confused. He pushed an inconspicuous button on his belt.
“By the time you leave here for the research labs, you will become computer controlled robots at the push of a button. You’ll have some measure of free will on your time off, within the limits of the behaviors that have been conditioned into you.”
He looked at the shiny, eager faces around him and suppressed a sigh. He touched another inconspicuous button on his belt, and watched the enthusiasm around him dissolve in confusion.
“Uh, sir,” one of the girls broke the silence. He nodded at her. “Was that an object lesson?”
“Yes. One thing to remember is that very few people actually want a computer controlled robot. What they want is the work that a computer controlled robot can produce. There are things that a properly motivated human brain can do much better than any computer currently in existence, and of course the opposite.
“By the time you leave here, most of you will be able to talk to your control computer to some extent. Some of you will begin to go beyond the most basic levels toward a very fluid dialog where it won’t matter, at least most of the time, which one of you is controlling your actions. I’m not going to say much more about it; just bear in mind that the route to whatever personal power you’re going to have for the rest of your life involves making your control computer your friend, and discovering how to utilize it to your best advantage.
“We’ve got a number of girls topside that are earlier products. One is almost completely submissive: she lets the computer run her around, and sleeps the rest of the time. Another is very involved with programming her own control computer. I’m continually surprised by what she comes up with. The rest are somewhere in between.”
They were beginning to look thoughtful, he noted. That was good.
“Uh, another question, sir?”
“Of course.”
“You said we’d probably die?”
“You are experimental animals. There’s a lot that they don’t know about the brain. The brain has several hundred processing areas, and several thousand connections between them. They can’t write more than two paragraphs about most of them – if that. A lot of what they do is experimentation on growing connections into unknown areas and seeing what happens.
“Sometimes they get in there, get their data and no harm done. That’s what they try to do; you are very expensive experimental animals, and they aren’t going to mess you up intentionally. Sometimes they screw up and cause some brain damage. Mostly it’s not very significant brain damage, and you’ll survive and might not even notice it.
“Do it too many times and it adds up. Eventually there’s too much to make more experimentation worth while. What happens then depends on the nature of the brain damage. There are a lot of jobs around the complex ranging from cooks, housekeepers, landscape workers, agricultural workers, ponygirls and many others that they’re experimenting with putting under computer control. Worst case is you’ll be sacrificed, which means killed so your brain can be analyzed in detail.
“That does happen. In quite a few cases the subject asks for it.”
“If it doesn’t, sir?”
“Remember that the other part of the project is creating the programming for your control computers. A girl whose brain has holes like swiss cheese isn’t a good subject for that; they need fully functional subjects. Some of you are going to be used, and used up, in bleeding edge brain research, the rest of you will live fairly normal lives as they complete the programming that our customers order for the control computers, or do fill-in research that doesn’t involve growing untested extensions into your brain.
“Let me give you an example. Up to today either Bob or I have been moving you around the process. Today you started moving yourself around according to the displays I showed you this morning. In a few days, the control linkages will mature and the computer will start moving you around your routine. If you’ve been trained properly, you shouldn’t really notice. Every cyborg I’ve talked to says that the control computer’s orders feel like her own decisions.
“One place you can really notice the computer control is in your exercise routine. The computer will be very detail oriented. You can plan out what you want to do next, but what you do may not have anything to do with what you planned.
“On the other side, what you do in the shower is at your discretion. It isn’t going to tell you when to soap and when to rinse, nor is it going to tell you how to do your hair or even what hair style to wear. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to.”
The next day, after the morning routine, Bob told them: “Well, I think that went quite well. We’re going to do something else a bit different. We won’t be in the room getting you started on your next round. You’ll get started when your number comes up on the board, just like the rest of the stations.” He pointed at the board, which had A126 scheduled for the head next.
“When the background goes green, your cage door will unlock. That’s ok for those of you in the first tier, but those on top need the table to crawl in and out. There’s a very pretty gymnastic maneuver that lets you get in and out easily, but you aren’t trained for it yet. We’ll do that over the next week or so; until then we don’t want you to hit your head or bruise yourself. We’re going to appoint one of you as a tender.
“The tender’s job is to get the table positioned properly for the girls who are leaving, and also to remind them if they don’t notice that they’re up next. Who is tender will change from time to time. The assignments will be somewhat random, and if you screw it up, it’s no big deal. We’ll simply take you off of the eligible list. Let’s see.” He thought a moment and took out his control pad.
“Adarope, you’re the tender until you’re relieved.” Suddenly, A149 went up on the board, with tender as the second section and a green background. The designated girl crawled out of her cage and stood up. The board flipped back to show A126 to go to the head. Atorape looked at it and then rolled the table under the designated girl’s cage.
“Good.” Bob nodded and then walked out, leaving an excited babble behind him.
A few days later, the five researchers sat in the passenger’s lounge after dinner, discussing what they had learned and doing some occasional show and tells with their subjects.
“I can’t say I’m bored with all this,” Randy commented; “that would be like a kid in a candy store saying he’s bored.” The sally got a few polite chuckles. “But I want the rest of the candy!”
“Oh?” said Frank, noticing out of the corner of his eye that Lucy seemed to tense up. “Lucy, you know something the rest of us don’t?”
“If she knows something Dick doesn’t, it’d be a first,” Steve needled.
“Except maybe the wedding date,” Randy poked a bit at the two researchers. It hadn’t escaped anyone’s attention that Lucy had moved in with Dick.
“Given the way she kick started things the day we arrived, Ina might know something. Come on Ina, what else did our mysterious employers drop into your memory banks?”
“Well, now that you ask,” Ina said as she flowed to her feet. “I do have the next class exercise. We’re getting an additional subject that you’ll be working with fairly intensively as a group. You’ll also be working with the troop of experimental animals we’re currently processing in the hold. You’ll be doing the conditioning for the basic package and supervising the installation of the advanced package as well as any experimentation you want to do as it’s installed.
“That’ll take you almost to the end of the voyage; the advanced package takes a full two weeks to install, and it can’t be hurried. You’ll have a few days before we make port to do additional experiments.
“Which leaves one question. Lucy has kindly volunteered to be the main subject.” Neither the expression on Lucy’s face, nor the emphasis Ina put on ‘kindly volunteered’, left them in any doubt that it wasn’t exactly voluntary. “Our employer likes to spring nasty surprises on occasion; Lucy, tell them why you, um, volunteered.”
She blushed. “I’m not a scientist; I’m an undercover investigative journalist, and they discovered me.” She shrugged and spread her hands.
“I thought you were a bit lightweight, but you held up your end enough that it didn’t occur to me you were a fake,” Randy commented. “Journalist, eh? Well, much of what we do is literature searches, and that’s a good enough match if you’ve got a general orientation. I take it Dick helped a lot?”
“He’s a real good teacher.”
“She’s a good student,” Dick put in. “I’m considering her as my selection.” She blushed and snuggled up closer.
“She’s now one of the experimental animals we were promised?” Frank asked.
“Well, maybe. I’ve been getting some very strange messages about her. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the powers that be didn’t know that recruiting had snagged a journalist and are still trying to figure out if they want to do something special with her. We’re instructed to continue treating her as a junior researcher, so she’ll be participating in all the group exercises and working with the subjects in the hold. On the other hand, she’s already had the process started so there’s no reason not to continue it through conditioning and installing the advanced package. She’s also been assigned A150 as her number, so we’ll use her to train you on what that means and how to handle it. Once she’s been conditioned she won’t remember her old name, so we need to train you on how to turn the numbers into names. Hers is, by the way, Adalis.
“I need to explain a couple of things,” Ina continued. “One is that you will all get an experimental animal as one of the perks of the job once we arrive. She’s basically a sample of the product, and that’s how you’re supposed to use her: the same way anyone else would use her who wanted to buy the product.
“There are a couple of curmudgeons that don’t want anyone in their space, but most researchers have her live with them, do housekeeping, cooking and act as a research assistant and support staff. Not to mention being available for fill-in experimentation.
“What you don’t get is a second one unless the first one either proves to be unsuitable or becomes unsuitable through no fault of your own. In other words, treat company property with proper respect, gentlemen.
“Since you’re going to be working with them on conditioning, keep your eyes out for ones that you think could be a useful general assistant.
“To continue. Your schedule for tomorrow is to study the conditioning material, both procedure and background. You’ll also get a tour of the hold where we keep the experimental animals. In some ways it’s like any primate research facility, in some ways it’s quite a bit different. Homo is not, after all, Pan or Gorilla.
“The next day I’ll condition Lucy as a demonstration. Dick insisted that I do her personally, otherwise I wouldn’t; you’d all be doing her as a class project.
“After I do her, you’ll do all twenty four of the experimental animals. Their systems are less than twelve hours behind Lucy’s, so we will do the first two as a group that afternoon, then you’ll split up into two teams to do the next several, then you’ll do the rest individually. That’ll include installing the final version of the interface and removing the belts. You’ll do the same to the five of us afterwards; they want us kept up to spec.
“Then you’ll monitor the installation of the advanced package, do whatever experiments you want with them, study dossiers and pick the ones you want for your own personal experimental animals.
“To summarize. Look over the naming material and start practicing tonight. Tomorrow study the conditioning process and prepare for a walkthrough of the primate quarters.”
“This,” Ina said a bit unnecessarily, “is the door to the primate facility where we transport our experimental animals. Remember that the interface hasn’t fully matured yet, so they haven’t been completely conditioned. They’ve been trained in their routine over the last few days, but discipline is still maintained by the shock collars.
“It’s a security airlock. You can’t open one door until the other is closed, and you can’t open the other one until you give a security signal. Most of the animals are locked in their cages, but many of them are loose going through their routine. Don’t interfere with them; it’s bad for discipline.”
Ina led the group of researchers through the security door into a small office area and then out to the main corridor. An almost naked girl with flame red hair, clad only in a large, black collar and a chastity belt, trotted toward them and then stopped because they blocked the corridor.
“Yipe,” Lucy said as she saw her.
“Stand and present yourself,” Ina told the girl. She replied: “yes, ma’am” and arched her back slightly.
“Bob trained you to do that?” Ina asked her.
“Uh, no ma’am. It seemed like a good idea.”
“Intelligent. I like that.” She turned to the group. “Atrod here has beautiful markings. The colors show up well against her complexion.” She brushed her hand gently against the large A141 stenciled on her forehead. “These colors are variations on the dyes used for fashion appliqués. They’ll last several months, and they won’t come off with the usual solvents. We remark them once every three months or so.”
Then she lifted one of the girl’s breasts slightly. Atrod flinched and steadied herself as she was handled. Ina pointed to the words “experimental animal” stenciled upside down on top. “Does this help you learn your place?”
“Yes, ma’am, it does.” It looked like she wanted to say something else, but had decided against it.
Ina nodded to her. “How do you feel about it, Adrat?”
“I’m trying, ma’am. I don’t want to be hurt again!” One of her hands brushed the black collar around her neck.
“The first week or so as an experimental animal is always hard,” Ina said sympathetically. “It’ll get better in a few days.”
“It will?” she said, hopefully.
“Yes. Now turn around.”
The girl turned, showing “experimental animal A141” stenciled across her upper back on three lines. Her buttocks also had “experimental animal” on the left cheek, and “A141” on the right.
Ina brushed the outside of her upper thigh. “She’ll eventually have a property tattoo here. It’s a topical gene mod to the melanocytes. The process modifies the stem cells so they create the proper variety of melanocyte; the usual laser removal procedures won’t work. Removing it requires either reversing the gene mod, or removing the skin and transplanting new skin. There’s been enough to do that we haven’t started applying them yet.
“Questions?” she asked the group.
“I noticed she reacted naturally to different versions of her name.”
“Atrode?” Ina prompted her for an explanation.
“We were trained for several hours on how to pronounce our number, ma’am.”
“What was your name before?”
“Uh, ma’am, we’re not supposed to use it.”
“Quite right. Do you remember it?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She hesitated a moment. “Sir says that they’ll do something so I’ll forget it.”
“Quite right. You’ve been very good; continue on to where you were going.”
“Uh, ma’am,” she said, looking a bit scared. “I’ve forgotten where I was headed.”
Ina’s eyes shifted a moment. “Training Room 2. That’s where Bob is.”
“Oh, right, ma’am.” She walked off, the markings on her back and ass clearly visible until she turned a corner.
“That’s, um, scary,” Lucy said.
“It sure is,” Roger agreed. “They did that in less than a week without having the basic package?”
“Right. Part of it is that this environment has very little connection with the one they came from. Fashion? They don’t wear clothes. Identity? We prohibit them from using their old names and discussing who they were before. Their private space is a two by three by six cage that they’re in whenever they’re not doing anything else. They’ve got a regular daily routine that handles their biological needs, and the cage room is arranged so they can be as social as they want without leaving their individual cages.
“By the time they get to the labs, it’s going to be their environment. They’re going to do most of the housekeeping under the supervision of the control computer which they’ll never see. The major difference between here and the labs is that the primate habitat at the labs is about a third of the island; they’re outside most of the time, weather permitting. This is reasonably similar to the inside part of it.
“Another piece is, of course, the control collars. Besides containing a really good pain inducer, they’ve got sixteen stimulus points: two each at each of the eight compass points. Combine that with a ‘bed of nails’ EEG that’s a bit better than anything you’ve seen before, some additional physiological monitoring and computer control during the conditioning process, and you’ve got a system that’s pretty hard to beat.
“The other thing that makes it work is that the tenders have complete control over the process here. They hold a very searching examination after every voyage, and they change their procedures accordingly. The conditioning technology came out of our labs as one of the first products, but they’re the ones that figured out how to use it. Before the control collars this place was a mess.
“Well, that’s a bit of a lecture. Let’s go see the cage room.” She led the way down the corridor to the door at the end. They could hear a lot of chatter coming from the room. As they entered, the chatter stopped as if it was cut off with a knife.
The first impression was heads sticking out of a wall, some at floor level and some about four feet off the ground. Then they saw that it wasn’t actually a wall, it was a mosaic of individual grated doors, and the heads were all in the same position on their doors. The ones on the ground looked upwards, the ones on top looked downwards.
Each of the cages had a number that matched the number on the head sticking out of the cage. As they watched, several more heads popped out to see what was going on. Then the chatter started up again: this time it was about the visitors although they made no attempt to engage the visitors in conversation.
“What’s she doing there?” Randy asked, indicating a girl sitting on her heels on the floor in front of a movable table.
“Atrain,” Ina addressed the girl, who had the number A142 on her forehead, “tell us what your task is.”
“I’m to help the rest of the girls get started when they’re wanted somewhere. The ones in the top cages can’t get out without the table; I roll it over to them so they can crawl out when their cages unlock.”
“Very good, Adrian,” Ima praised her. “What’s the night routine?”
“Oh. Well, when it’s time to sleep, we’ve got these covers that keep out the light and noise.” She went over to the shelf where they were kept and pulled one out to demonstrate. “We’re staggered at ten minute intervals. I think it’s ten minutes; that’s what Sir said once. Each girl that goes for her morning routine takes the cover off the next one’s cage. Then we do the reverse at night; each one puts a cover on the previous girl’s cage. Atnish and Atripe have a special gizmo so the cover slides on and off automatically.”
“Thank you, Adrain, that was very nice.” Ida said, dismissing the girl so she could sit down and join in the conversation that had kept flowing around her all the time.
“That’s almost like a troop of monkeys chattering,” Dick said as they left the room.
“Isn’t it just,” Ida laughed. “It doesn’t take all that long to train them so they ignore visitors unless the visitor addresses one of them individually or calls for their attention. Fortunately, they don’t have coconuts to throw!”
Everyone chuckled at that.
“Going back along the corridor, we’ve got the head. The head is, of course, set up so there’s no privacy. That reinforces the experimental animal mindset. Next to the head we have six exercise mats. There are actually several exercise rooms; we’ve got treadmills, resistance sets and some gymnastics bars. They do two exercise sessions a day, an hour in the morning and another hour in the evening. There are physiological monitors so that the control computer can create an individual exercise program that will get them into top form as quickly as their body can adapt. Right now, they’re being issued instructions through headphones. In a week or so, when the innervation of the sensory and motor cortex is complete, their control computer will do the entire exercise routine.
“Then we’ve got the showers. They’ve got individual storage places for combs and so forth; we let them have hair adornments, but not anything else. We allow bracelets, necklaces, earrings and anklets in the primate habitat, at least as long as they don’t get out of control, but there’s no place to store them here. We had to put a stop to makeup in the habitat; a couple of them knew how to make it from primitive materials.
“The primary feeding station takes a bit of getting used to.”
“I’ll say,” Lucy said as she looked at the array of four posts, each with its penis sticking out.
“It’s not, obviously, the only feeding station. We’ve got one that’s a feeding trough, and another that’s a fairly reasonable primitive bowl, spoon and chopsticks arrangement.
“There are a number of reasons for this arrangement. One is that a couple of the sponsors are into sex slaves and ponygirls. The cubbies contain ring gags. We use it at the start to shake them up, and continue using it so they learn felliato well. The males appreciate it; they can send any of the females back for retraining if they don’t feel they’ve been serviced adequately.”
“Males?” Steve asked.
“About ten percent of the primates in the lab’s facility are males. We don’t have any this trip, which is a bit unusual. They’re a bit more difficult to handle, but nothing major as long as there are enough receptive females.
“The main reason, though, is that we’re reinforcing the animal part of the ‘experimental animal’ motif. We’re stripping off all of the social conditioning about when and where sex is appropriate. In general, primates are not at all shy about sex; we want them to be completely unaffected about trying to get a male to get them off if they’re feeling horny.
“The feeding troughs are the same thing. As I mentioned, we also have a fairly standard cooking and eating area that’s used for group activity training.
“Continuing on, we’ve got the biofeedback booths. About the only thing to see here is the bed of nails headsets and the computer screen. The keyboard is projected and it’s got voice synthesis and recognition capabilities. Once the basic package is mature we don’t use the headsets. The brain monitoring in the basic package is much more capable.
“Then we’ve got four training rooms; two large and two small. You’ll use these to do the basic conditioning for all 24 of the girls, and you’ll also use them for any experiments you want to do on them. For a lot of your experiments you’ll simply rig the biofeedback booths.”
The next morning they assembled in the passenger’s lounge. The four researchers were assembled in a semicircle with Ina in the center, and had their laptops open and running. Ina had set up a projector on the far wall. A very nervous Lucy stood in the center of the room.
“Lucy,” Ina said. “You’re too nervous. Pretend this is a presentation you’ve given a dozen times, and we’re a very receptive audience.”
Lucy took a deep breath and shook her head. “You are cruel. You’re also right, damn you!” She giggled with the releasing tension.
“Ina is going to have me describe each of the steps before we do it. That’s not something you’d normally do with a subject. The first step,” she said as she relaxed into her presentation, “is to get the subject relaxed and in a confident state. The more you can enhance the state before snapshotting it, the better.”
She talked for another couple of minutes and then stopped while the researchers scanned the record and picked a spot that looked like full confidence. Then they compared their results, and agreed on one.
“The reason for this, of course, is to establish a baseline. When we’re done, we want our experimental animal to retain her confidence; a beaten down wreck doesn’t give good experimental results.
“The next step is obedience.” Lucy stopped and stood looking straight ahead.
“Turn around, touch the back wall and come back,” Ina said.
Lucy walked to the back wall, touched it and walked back.
“That still had a decision step in the process. The next thing we want is unthinking action.” Ina pulled a .357 Magnum out of her handbag and pointed it at Lucy. There was a loud click as the safety came off. Lucy dove under a table, shoes flying in two different directions.
“Not loaded,” Ina said as she ejected the magazine and showed it to the group. She put the magazine back, clicked the safety on and put the weapon back into her handbag. Lucy crawled back out, blushing furiously as she adjusted her clothes.
“The next thing we want is something a little different. Lucy, slide that table over to the other side, and don’t scuff the rug while you’re doing it.” Lucy looked at the table a minute, and then identified the locks on the casters. A minute later, she had it on the other side; the rug looked no worse than it had before.
“We need one more piece,” Ina said. “Gentlemen?”
“She who must be obeyed,” Roger said dryly.
“Exactly right. Find the neuron that fires for each of us, and then create a command program that will take it from understanding directly to action without going though the usual decision process about whether she wants to do it or not.” They discussed it for a few minutes, with Lucy taking part. Eventually they came to a conclusion.
“Now, Lucy, put it into your system, and then press execute.” Lucy frowned a minute, and then inserted a program. That kicked off a spate of discussion. Eventually they agreed, and Lucy pushed the execute button.
“Lucy,” Ida said, “if I told you to jump off the ship, would you do it?”
Lucy froze and turned white. “Are you really sure, ma’am?”
“No, I don’t want you to do that.”
Lucy relaxed and wiped the sweat off her brow.
“Go jump overboard,” Roger told her.
“Go screw yourself,” Lucy shot back, almost without thinking. The laugh cut the tension. They discussed it for a few minutes, Ina, as usual, sitting back and not participating, while Lucy, also as usual, participated.
Finally, Ina said: “Next.”
“The next step is to condition me to be naked, and to accept being handled. This is primarily a desensitization step. The reason is that the experimental animals are always naked, and some of our sponsors want sex slaves. Nakedness and being handled is a major requirement for many sex slaves.”
“Very good. Take off your clothes, dear,” Ina said.
Twenty minutes later, she stood naked and relaxed in the center of the room while two of the men ran their hands over her body. One of them played with her breasts for a minute, the other squatted and checked the shield she wore over her sex.
“That was fun,” she said as the two men returned to their seats.
“Yep,” Roger said as he sat down. “I’m having a hard time believing it was that easy. The therapists should have caught on years ago.”
“Some of them did,” Steve replied dryly. “There are variants of this that make it real easy to pick up chicks and get them into bed.”
Ina chuckled. “It is easy for someone who wants to put in the work to train themselves to recognize the cues and trigger the correct responses very precisely. Learning it takes real work, though.”
“Can I get dressed now?”
“No. Next segment.”
Lucy faked a scowl at her mistress, and then started in the introduction. “Next, we’re going to mark me. This is an optional section because all of our experimental animals have already been marked, and many of our potential customers won’t want to. Even if they do, they’ll have their own ideas of what to do.
“This is going to be an abbreviated version. I’m going to have my breasts marked, and have a small tattoo just above the shield where neither will show if I’m wearing a bikini. The reason for the breasts is that seeing them constantly will reinforce my status and number. The tattoo is a permanent identification.”
“The next step,” Lucy said as she looked at the large A150 stenciled on her right breast, oriented so she could read it, “is to make me forget my name. The first step is to find out how I repress something.”
Five minutes later, Roger told her: “Your name is Lucy, isn’t it?” She looked confused for a minute, and then shrugged.
“You know, I don’t know? I ought to have a name, but it just comes up blank. Whatever you just called me didn’t do anything. I guess I’m going to have to be Adlisa. Or Atolis, or something.” She giggled. “I knew I was going to lose my name, but I never believed it would happen!”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, the last thing is to adjust my attitude toward the project. The only thing I know about the procedure is that my attitude is supposed to be that sacrificing a few people is morally defensible for the common good. Even if I’m one of the people being sacrificed.”
“It’s a difficult adjustment,” Ina said. “It’s one that I have real doubts that our anticipated customer base could handle, but then they don’t have to: this is mostly our problem.”
“Just as well,” Steve interjected. “We’ve got enough trouble with the terror groups as it is.”
“There is that,” Ina replied. Then she asked Lucy: “Have you ever read The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin? Tell us about the story.”
She gulped and started to outline the plot.
“Was his decision to lighten ship by throwing his fiancée out the airlock, thus killing her in a fairly painful way, justified in view of the fact that the entire colony would die if he didn’t?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really know...”
About twenty minutes later, she said: “I think I see your viewpoint, now, mistress.”
“Oh?”
“This whole thing is only justified if it actually gets out. Attempting to shut it down before the products and knowledge get out simply means a lot of people died or had their brains wrecked for nothing.”
“Well, let’s finish up with something simple. Frank, your dossier indicates you were involved with some Gorean activities. Do you know the hand signals?” Frank nodded.
“Good. Train her in as many as you can in the next twenty minutes. I’ll have Alee serve lunch in here for all six of us.”
“Observations,” Ina asked the other five people at the table.
“It was different,” Roger spoke up. “Some parts, like training Lucy, I mean Adloess, to be a nudist were a lot easier than I thought it would be. Those hand signals went like a breeze, but I can see how it would work that way. I don’t really understand the obedience thing, though.”
“What’s the issue?” Ina asked.
“Why the program worked the way it did.”
“I thought that was the only straightforward part,” Adloss put in. “Remember that the brain section that identifies specific people is one of the ones that got innervated. The built-in EEG isn’t nearly accurate enough.”
“Oh, right. Programming is simply not one of my strong points, and the language you use is really weird.”
“Erlang is definitely, um, unusual. We’ll work on the programming. You’re scientists; it’s not really required that you be expert programmers, although it will help a lot if you get some fluency. It’ll also get you some respect from the development manager. He’s a real hardass when it comes to doing it right, and his idea of right involves his workers and teams taking responsibility for their own process, and for continuously improving it. Most of the other managers have picked it up from him; that’s one of the reasons why the process down in the hold runs so smoothly.”
“But why didn’t she give you an unqualified yes when you asked about throwing herself overboard?”
“The brain isn’t that simple. The place we wired in bypasses a lot of checks, but it doesn’t bypass the fight or flight survival responses. You noticed she turned pale and froze? That question would normally never get far enough to provoke that response.”
“Ah. That’s why she gave Roger a flip answer. It’s starting to make a little sense; we don’t want to waste one of them unnecessarily.”
As they rose from lunch, Ina told A150: “Atlas, get dressed. You’re to be nude at all times in our cabin, but you’re to be dressed appropriately at all times elsewhere unless I direct you otherwise.”
“I hear and obey, oh mistress,” she replied as she picked up her panties from the pile.
“I keep getting weird orders,” Ina told the group at large. “I just got one that I’m to have Uma and Aria trained on doing conditioning. I wish,” she muttered almost to herself, “that they’d figure out what they’re doing.”
“Teaching is good to consolidate, isn’t it?” Randy quipped.
“Good point. They’ll join us for the first two this afternoon, and then you, I and Steve will review what happened with Uma this evening. Dick, Frank and Atloss will work with Aria.
“Sounds like a plan,” Frank nodded.
“Today,” Ina said a bit unnecessarily as they ate breakfast, “is arrival day.”
The breakfast scene had changed substantially in the weeks of the voyage. All ten of them were in the passenger lounge: the five researchers and their five training subjects. They were, however, divided somewhat differently. Ina had given up the pretense that she was subservient, and was seated at the table with the male researchers. A150 knelt completely naked between her and Dick, hands clasped firmly behind her back, and was being fed alternate forkfuls by the two of them. The other three researchers had their training subjects kneeling next to them as well, and were teasing them with forkfuls of bacon and eggs, making them extend themselves to get the morsels of food.
The odd subject out, Alee, shook her head in amusement as she stood by the serving bar ready to attend to anyone’s needs. This had, she reflected idly, been one of the more interesting voyages yet. It was a real pity they still hadn’t found an adequate prosthetic program for the damage to her brain stem; several of the researchers looked like real plums if she’d been eligible to be selected.
“I asked you to select six possibilities for your personal experimental subject last night, and told you that I might be available. I got my final instructions this morning; I’m definitely available, but I’m also going to have another assignment, which means that whoever picks me can’t do anything that interferes with it. So if you want to take me off your list, I won’t feel hurt.”
Frank looked at her thoughtfully. “I think I’ll take a pass; this sounds a little too close to the political level for my taste as one of the new guys in town.”
“They gave me the right to refuse any of you I wanted, which means nobody got me.”
“Oh?” Randy asked. “Why would you refuse any of us?”
“I didn’t say I did; that was boilerplate so that nobody can draw any conclusions without someone telling. The fact is that it’s pretty difficult to find anyone on the island that isn’t morally challenged, but I do draw the line at borderline psychopaths. All you can conclude is that at least one person selected me, at least one of you would have been acceptable, and that Frank selected me. It’s a pretty logic puzzle, and I tried not to leave any holes.”
Randy chuckled. “What happens if a borderline psychopath goes over the line?”
“They wind up on the other side of the wall.”
“The wall?”
“The island is divided in two. About a third is the primate facility; it’s separated from the rest by a chain link fence. The important buildings, that is the primate’s cage buildings, part of the research labs, a couple of manufacturing plants and the ponygirl stable are on the line so they’re accessible from both sides.
“That’s a pretty big area and it’s been that way for a bit over four years. They can do anything they want, within reason and weather permitting. They grow about a third of their food and do quite a bit of fishing; that’s another sixth or so of their diet, and a large part of ours as well. They’ve got a lot of sports and handicrafts. We turned them loose with nothing; a couple of the girls knew how to chip rocks, so they had tools within a few days.”
“That’s amazing. I take it that they have a real society?”
“They do indeed. We enforce a number of rules; the no clothing rule means that they’ll feel real uncomfortable if they try to wear any, for example. They put together a little spinning and weaving operation before they discovered that they couldn’t wear any of their product! They do a number of things with it, and they export it to us. They put out a very good grade of homespun. We provide a number of different fibers from the biological labs, including silk, cotton, wool and human hair.”
“What to they get out of it?”
“Mostly metal trinkets. They’re at the stone, wood and shell stage, and they’re going to stay there. They don’t have any ores to smelt even if we allowed it, and they don’t have enough wood to burn for the smelting. Besides, I think there’s a competition for who can put out the prettiest cloth. At least there was when I was there.”
“But why do it at all? The facility in the hold seems adequate,” Roger asked.
“It is, up to a point. First, they wanted to do group experiments, and the small facility doesn’t allow a lot of flexibility in social structure. Then it’s real rigid; at some point you have to do more than five minute experiments on subjects that are so regimented that you already know every twitch.”
“That explains it,” Roger nodded.
“Anyway, let’s get on with it. Let Alee clear the table; your girls are on their way up. You’ve got a bit of prep work to do before we can finish getting packed and watch the ship come into port. I’ll explain once they’re here.”
Down in the cage room, a cage door unlocked with a loud snap. Atonisa pulled her head out of the door to cage A126, rolled so she was in the other direction, and shoved the cage door open with her feet. A moment later she brought herself out of the cage with a movement that would have made a gymnastics teacher happy and faced the door, a slightly puzzled look on her face because she wasn’t going anywhere.
Then another cage opened, and its occupant popped out. Then a third, and then a fourth. When she’d gotten erect, the four of them walked briskly out the door and down the corridor into a room that they’d never been in before, and then out the door into another corridor. A minute later, they arrived topside in a corridor that they’d only seen briefly as they arrived on the ship. The unseen hand that moved them sent them into another room with five people, a woman and four men, sitting on comfortable chairs, and several other women sitting or kneeling at their feet.
They took a look around, and then each of them walked up to one of the men and sat at his feet.
“OK,” Ina said, clapping to attract their attention. “The four of you have probably already figured out that you belong to the researcher you’re kneeling in front of, but in case you haven’t, you do belong to him. He’s your owner, and your obedience programming has already been adjusted so you’ll obey him. You don’t have a choice in that matter.
“What that means in practice is that you’ll live with him, do all the usual housekeeping chores, be his sex toy, and serve as his general research assistant. You’ll also be his research subject for a lot of fill-in type research. It’s a career, and from your dossiers it’s not too different from what you were studying for anyway. You’re pretty safe as long as you make yourself useful. Losing one of you is a major hit on their career credibility.
“In the next hour, you’ll have your markings removed and a different set applied. The outside dress code for women is a halter, shorts and sandals. What it is in your owner’s apartment is his decision. Your number is going to change as well. The thing to know is that most women whose names begin with E and have three consonants, and most men whose names begin with B and have three additional consonants are experimental animals, and you’re to use all the variations on their names. Most of those that aren’t have changed their names to avoid the hassle.
“Once your markings are changed, you’ll go to your owner’s stateroom, get dressed and finish packing. After that, you’ll do whatever you’re told, which will probably be to join us in watching the ship come into port.”
An hour later, Dick and Ina walked into Dick’s stateroom with Eoromin and Agshav, the latter fully marked for the primate habitat and carrying her clothes. The experimental animal who had once been Deana and who was now E432 slid into the shorts, halter and sandals by the bed and giggled.
“Oh?” Dick asked.
“I thought I’d never wear clothes again, Sir,” she replied.
“Well, don’t get too used to it. You’re going to be naked at home, except for an apron if you need it while cooking. And maybe,” he cocked his head, considering, “something sexy on occasion.”
“Frequent occasions, I hope, sir. Being expected to behave like an animal has a certain, um, liberating effect on the libido.”
She and Ina started pulling luggage out and carefully packing. Akashil stood by Dick, as he pulled her in and gave her a final hug.
“Why didn’t they let me be picked?” she finally asked.
“How many books do you think you could get out of this?” Ina replied.
“What does that have to do ... oh! You think?”
Ina shrugged. “I don’t know, but I think they’re setting up a contingency plan for the end game. It won’t hurt to learn how to use the setup to take notes. All of us have personal file areas on the servers. At worst, they’ll command you not to do it. You’ll never find out if you don’t try.”
“I don’t think I want this voyage to end,” Dick said as they stood behind the rail watching the land slide by as the freighter made its way into the harbor.
“Oh?” Ina asked from one side.
“I’m going from two sexy babes to one. And here I had three for a few hours.”
“Men!” Eoromin said with a bit of a giggle. “I do. I’ve got you to myself!”
The lock on cage A127 opened with a snap, and the occupant rolled over and dropped out, landing on her feet with a bit of a bounce. She walked out to the head, evacuated and then went to the head of the corridor to stand, relaxed, in front of a door she didn’t remember ever entering.
Behind her, the lock on cage A128 opened, and the occupant dropped lithely to the deck. In a little while twenty girls, naked except for the markings, the shield between their legs and their black collars, stood in a line down the corridor as Bob gave each one a pair of sandals to put on. Rob followed him and popped the rivets off of the collars, placing them on a cart.
The other three tenders walked through the door and looked at the line gravely.
Bob walked back to the front and looked at them. “I want to say, for all of us, that your group has been one of the best yet.” His eyes strayed to A141 for a moment. “Congratulations, and enjoy the primate habitat. I’m told it’s, um, different and quite enjoyable for most of our experimental animals.” He moved out of the way.
The first girl in the line walked through the office and out into the passageway, leading the other ones in the line.
“You’d better say your goodbyes now,” Ina told the waiting Agshv. “You’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes.”
The naked girl turned and kissed Dick, and then hugged Ina. She looked uncertainly behind them, and then straightened up and strode confidently along, sandals slapping on the deck.
She joined the back of the line of twenty naked girls that had just emerged from the hatchway, and walked with them to the stairs and onto the dock. Once they were all on the dock, the first girl started jogging. They all picked up the pace, and shortly vanished from sight around one of the buildings.
One of the four experimental animals with the small group by the rails shook her head and sighed. “I went through so much with them that they’re family; now they’re leaving without me.” She slid a small hand into her owner’s hand. “I hope it’s worth it.”
“Well, there’s our transportation,” Ina said, breaking the moment. She pointed at four carts that had appeared at the head of the dock, each of which had a pair of naked young women harnessed to the front.
Steve chuckled. “You did say ponygirls, didn’t you?”
“Explain, please,” Roger asked at the same time.
“Several of our sponsors are from the kink community, and they like ponygirls. On the other side of the coin, we need to do something with them when they’re too damaged for further experimentation. We found, much to our surprise, that they make a great deal of economic sense for our particular situation. They take care of the relatively lightweight end of our transportation needs, they actually cost a bit less in upkeep than the equivalent motor vehicles once everything is factored in, and all of the carts are manufactured here in the primate habitat. Without that, we’d have to import vehicles. We’ve got some heavy equipment for building needs, but they’re all electric powered. All of our power is solar generated of one form or another.”
“You said they build the carts in the primate habitat?” Dick asked. “How do they do that?”
“They’ve got a nice little industrial base. When we opened up the habitat about four years ago, it turned out that two of our subjects knew how to chip rocks for stone tools. Now, they do perfectly marvelous work in stone, wood, bone, shells and fiber. We don’t allow them any variety of metal, which puts a cap on some stuff. We also don’t allow fire or explosives. They haven’t quite figured out how to get concentrating mirrors for kilns, but they’re working on it. Once they’ve got that, ceramics and glass aren’t too far behind.”
“You let them do that?”
“There’s some real history behind it,” she chuckled. “To summarize drastically, we needed to move them out of the labs to meet project goals, and there was quite a bit of chaos for a while. Now there’s an unwritten agreement that they run their own show as long as it doesn’t interfere with research or threaten security. There are even various pieces of the research agenda that they’re doing, rather than the Project side.”
Ida, Dick and Eoramin walked up to one of the four carts. The two ponygirls stood stolidly in the traces, relaxed and facing straight ahead. Dick and Eoramin walked up to examine the two girls.
Their bridles turned out to be silk, carefully stitched around hardwood rings. The bits were likewise hardwood, and the reins were simple rope. The bridles were attached to the harness by checkreins; the ponies couldn’t turn their heads, and couldn’t see to the sides because of the wood and silk blinders attached to the harnesses. This particular pair had already been fitted with the shields in the groin area; they didn’t have either the chastity belt or the collar.
The harness itself was also a combination of silk and carved wood rings, with carved wood buckles. The intricate tracery had been optimized for pulling and stopping without undue stress on the ponies.
Their feet were shod in wooden sandals.
Their hands rested lightly around posts that came up from the shafts; they weren’t confined in any way, but the ponies didn’t seem inclined to move them, either.
“I see,” said Dick. “They’re using cloth and rope for the harness and traces; I’d have thought they’d use leather.”
“We’d have to import it. We’ve got some herd animals, but we don’t have nearly enough for either our meat requirements or for leather. They’re mostly used for milk. We import meat and do without leather.”
“That makes sense, but where do you get the silk?”
“We manufacture it. We do some interesting biotechnology to support the main activity. Then it goes to the habitat for the cloth workers to weave and make into whatever we need.”
They got in and the two girls braced themselves and heaved the cart into motion, pulling against their harnesses and also pushing with their hands.
“I didn’t see you give them directions,” Dick said, a bit worriedly.
“I told them where to take us over the network,” Ina replied.
“They know enough to do that?”
“Not themselves. There’s a network application that does island-wide maintenance and scheduling; whether the ponygirls are using it to do their jobs or it’s using them to get the work done depends, I suppose, on your point of view. Anything it can’t handle, God can.”
“God?”
“That’s what we call the computer that oversees this place,” Ina chuckled. “There were a half dozen attempts to turn it into an acronym, but that’s what anyone who’s lived in the primate facility for any length of time calls it. What’s omniscient, omnipotent, runs the place, takes over your life on a whim and might answer a prayer if it feels like it and it likes you?”
“Thats, um, ... thats.”
“I know, it takes getting used to.”
“Why are these two ponygirls? Why not something else?”
“Well, we match up the working sections of their brains against profiles of what we need for various positions, and what can be substituted by their control computers. Ponygirls really only need a working sensorimotor system; at least one of the pair needs a working auditory language input system so she can take directions. She doesn’t need to be able to understand them; the computer can do that, but it’s her brain that has to do the speech to computer translation.
“The one on the left is a bit like Alee, she won’t move without someone telling her to do something. The one on the right could have been trained for a number of different tasks, but she asked to be made a ponygirl when she still had enough undamaged brain function to make that kind of decision. I think they wanted to stay together.”
A half hour later, the two sweating ponygirls stopped the cart in front of a bland concrete building whose only obvious feature was an arched doorway through the otherwise featureless wall. Stopped was probably not the most accurate description: it would be more accurate to say they quit pulling, and rolling friction did the rest.
“Well, we’re here,” Ina told the two passengers as they got out. She turned to the two animals harnessed to the cart.
“Wait,” she commanded. The two of them removed their bits and reached under the shafts to get the water bottles hanging there. They took a long drink, replaced the bottles and their bits, and settled slightly, looking gently toward the horizon.
“Let’s find your apartment and move the luggage.”
The archway was at least cool. There was a small directory on the inside where they located one Richard Bayswater in apartment 10, with a smaller line inset below which simply said: E432. Next to it was a diagram that identified each of the ten apartments, together with a cooking area and a utility area.
What puzzled her though was the line that said E482 lived in apartment 4. She decided to let it go for the moment. If God wanted her to move in here, it would be obvious as soon as she tried to leave without at least putting her meager luggage in the apartment.
“Well, that looks like home,” Dick said. “No mailboxes?”
“No mail. I think the only people that were unhappy with the decision to not import paper were the petty bureaucrats. We make do with slate and chalk or whiteboards and markers.”
The inside of the building was an open air square. There were three apartments on each side, with two on the ends of the far side; according to the diagram there were also two on the wall they had just walked through. The extra space on the far side was taken up by what looked like a cooking and eating area. At least, it was in the right place.
The top of the common wall was lined with what looked like solar cells. The rest of the wall looked like whitewashed stucco. The windows also looked a bit strange; they were the latest variety of environmental glass that would start blocking sunlight if the insides got too hot.
A woman who was working on some plants by apartment 7 looked up at the noise and then stood up and hurried over. She was wearing the ubiquitous female uniform of shorts, halter and sandals, with an additional straw hat to protect her face.
“Hi! I’m Rosie. You’re Richard?” Her eyes flicked over the two women, briefly pausing at the property tattoos on each of their left flanks. “And which one of you is Eaormin?”
“I am”, the newly renumbered E432 said with a grin.
“And I’m Eaorfin,” Ida commented. “I’m here to show them where their apartment is and help them move in.”
“E432, E482,” Rosie muttered as she looked at the two of them. “Got it. You’re both moving in?”
“That’s what the directory says,” Eaorfin replied. “I knew I was moving in somewhere, but I didn’t know where.”
“By the way, what version of your numbers do you prefer?”
“Uh, whichever it pleases you to use, ma’am,” E432 answered.
“I know that! I’m not going to use more than one version, so if you don’t tell me, I’ll pick one.”
“Uh,” she said, frowning in concentration. “Dick, is Ermine all right with you?”
“As in a fur trim? I like it.”
“Good. At least it doesn’t sound like you should have pointy ears. What about you?”
“Erfin sounds reasonably good, unless you’ve got a better suggestion.”
“Not today. Erfin it is. Let’s get your stuff inside before you get sunburned. You’re right off the ship, correct?”
“Uh, yes, ma’am,” Ermine answered.
“I’ve been here around three years; two in the habitat and one on the ship,” Erfin added.
“I figured as much,” she said as Ermine and Erfin wheeled the luggage into apartment 10. “You’re going to have to take it easy outside for a while until you tan properly, or you’ll burn. You too,” she said, turning to Dick.
“This is kind of sparse,” Dick said, taking in the living room that had one piece of furniture: a not very new leather recliner.
“Well, you can get more old furniture from storage: that’s where you send anything you don’t need. They decide whether it gets stored, fixed or thrown out. You can do a pretty good job of decorating with that. If you want new furniture, you need to order it from the primate habitat.”
“The primate habitat?” Ermine asked in puzzlement.
“You wouldn’t know, would you? They do all sorts of crafts there. They do very good woodwork and cloth work. Much better than you can get in most shops, let me tell you! I suspect we haven’t imported any furniture or furnishings in a couple of years.”
“Just a kitchenette?”
“Ah! One of our little rules. You can have breakfast and a light lunch in, but you always, and I mean always, have dinner with the rest of us in the dining area in back. Since you’re a cyborg, you’re on the cooking rotation every other day; the rest of us girls are on rotation one day in three.”
“That sounds reasonable,” Dick said. “Any other rules? Maintenance?”
“You’re responsible for the flower beds in front of your apartment; we rotate maintaining the central area.”
“What about nudity?”
“The other three go naked unless they’re out of the building; the guys seem to like it.” Dick nodded at Ermine, who ducked into the bedroom and removed her shorts and halter.
Rosie looked at Erfin with a raised eyebrow when she didn’t make any move to divest herself of her clothing.
“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” she answered the unspoken question. “You didn’t state it as a committee ruling, so I’ve still got discretion.”
“Good point,” Rosie said a bit thoughtfully.
“Committee?” Dick asked.
“An apartment like this usually has a three person committee to run it,” Erfin told Dick. “We vote for them every three months or so. Committee members have got command rights over us for anything having to do with the building. I presume you’re one of them?” she asked Rosie.
“Yes, I am,” she said.
“Good. Introduce me to the other two tonight at dinner, will you?”
“Good idea.” Just then Ermine walked back in.
“Oh! You’ve got the new setup! How do you like it?”
“I think it’s more comfortable than the chastity belt. We started out with them, and then changed to these about a week into the training period. I really don’t know it’s down there.”
“Good,” Rosie pronounced. “I’d better leave you to get acquainted.”
“Um?” Dick asked.
“In bed, idiot!” Rosie walked out, followed by Erfin. “Men,” she muttered.
Erfin laughed. “I’d better move myself into my new apartment.”
“Scat!” Rosie replied, just missing a swat at Erfin’s bottom.
Akashof trotted behind the last of the naked girls going down the roadway. Now that she was over her surprise at being taken over without any notice she had a little time to do sightseeing. The sights, she decided after a moment, weren’t particularly inspiring. It was mostly blocky concrete buildings and tropical plants. The plants, at least, provided a riot of color that helped offset the depressing blandness of the buildings.
After about two miles, the line of experimental animals approached one of the buildings. This building was quite wide, about two stories high, and straddled the road. In fact, it seemed to be the end of the road; the path went right into the door in the middle.
The line of naked women trotted in and turned to the left, continuing down a hall at speed. Much to Akashof’s surprise, she turned to the right. She barely got a chance to look at one doorway on her left with a large A6 above it before she turned to the left into another doorway marked A7. She went a few feet down a passageway, and then entered a large room.
Whatever was moving her withdrew control at that point, leaving her a bit bewildered as to where she was and what she was supposed to do about it. She decided to look around. The room itself seemed to be around 36 feet by 30 feet, and it was lined with the same cages she had seen in the hold. However, there weren’t any heads poking out, and she didn’t see any of her fellow experimental animals in the cages.
The opposite side of the room also had a doorway to a passageway and a corridor. She looked around further, and discovered that the cages were in two tiers of twelve each, almost like the primate room in the ship, which had two tiers of six each on each side of the corridor. The two doors broke the rows of twelves into two rows of sixes. The cages all had numbers beginning with A7. She looked further; the ones against the wall she had come through were A701 through A724, the wall on the left had A726 through A749. The back wall seemed to have A751 through A774. She found A768 on the bottom row to the left of the door, and looked at it thoughtfully.
It looked very much like home.
“Oh, hi!” a cheerful voice broke in from the back corridor. “You’re our new sacrificial lamb?”
“Uh. I guess I must be,” she hesitated a moment as she took in the A756 stenciled on her brow. “You’re Aklish?”
“And you’re Akchoph. That’s a real mouthful! I’m right above you, and our committee has tasked me with helping you learn the ropes. I take it you didn’t spend the last month in the primate quarters on the ship?”
“Uh, no. Ina gave all of us a tour, and I was down there to help do the conditioning exercises, but otherwise I was up with the researchers, alternating between learning the research thing and being a research subject. I don’t think I had time to breath, although I must have: I survived.”
“Oh!” Aklish’s eyes went round. “You learned the research end! The other sacrificial lambs seem to have had their heads up their asses while the researchers were working on them!”
“Those are the only ones you get. The ones with any brains get snatched by the researchers.” She shrugged. “I’m not sure why they didn’t let me be picked; I know Dick definitely wanted to after he spent all that time training me.”
“You’re going to tell me everything! But not right now. Let’s get you introduced to what’s where. I take it you’ve never been in a cage?”
“Right.”
“Well, open it up and crawl in. Watch that you keep the blanket straight!”
Akchoph knelt and then crawled in on her hands and knees. Aklish kicked the door closed, and then dropped the light and soundproof cover over it. “Hey!” Akchoph yelled from inside. Then she took a deep breath and felt around her, defining the cramped space. She curled up into a ball and rolled half way, coming out awkwardly with her face toward the door. After a minute’s exploration she found the lever that unlatched it, and the door swung out. She crawled out and looked upwards accusingly.
Aklish laughed. “You found the latch, right?”
“Yes, but...” She got back to her feet and tried to glare, but succumbed to a fit of giggles.
“God or the room committee can lock the cage against you, but usually they don’t if you behave. It’s useful if you wake up in the middle of the night and have to hit the head.”
“Room committee?”
“We vote every few months. We all rank the rest of the girls in order, and then the votes are combined using something called Condorcet. The top five become the new committee. Sometimes it’s four, sometimes it’s six. I think I heard of a seven once. The math will bend your mind unless you’re on real good terms with your control computer. Then it’s supposed to be obvious.”
“Well, I do have good communications with it.”
“Most of the girls can do the basic stuff, but programming facility is harder.”
“I know, they let the girls in the hold learn on their own. I learned because the researchers wanted to see how the learning experience went. Their assigned subjects were pretty good; Ina was simply amazing.”
“That’ll be helpful. Back to the cages. The blackout cover is for night use. Drop one on your cage door before you crawl in for the night, and the room mesh will make sure you wake up at the right time in the morning.”
“Mesh?”
“They don’t emphasize it on the ship, and I guess it’s not something that the researchers really care about either, although I’d think they’d at least be briefed! One really major difference is that we use group programs for all group activities, and I do mean all group activities. We call them meshes. The terminology is that you’re woven into a mesh when you’re using one for a group activity, and you’re bound into it if you’re woven into it full time, like you are for the room mesh.
“The floor,” she continued, “is for bad weather. We can get all of us in here without very much difficulty. There’s well over a thousand square feet, and there’s less than a hundred of us, so we fit reasonably well, and anyway we’re normally not all here. Those of us that are here just do handicrafts, talk or plan stuff.
“Now,” she continued nattering on as she walked out the back corridor, “we have the rest of the installation.” She waved down the corridor, which seemed to have lots of small rooms and alcoves on the outside.
“We’ve got the head, showers, exercise rooms and the biofeedback, training and experiment rooms here.” She poked her head into each one briefly. “Also the storage area for your personal stuff. I doubt if any of this is new to you.”
“Right. Although I haven’t used any of it but the biofeedback training equipment. Personal stuff?”
“That’s in the alcove between the squares, right opposite the showers.”
“Alcove? Oh, I see. The cages leave a chunk out of each corner.”
“Exactly. Your storage area is on whichever side of the doorway your cage is on. About the only things we store are grooming stuff and adornments.”
“Oh, right. The ship had that in the shower and grooming area. What’s upstairs?”
“Kitchens, dining areas, food storage and laundry. We always do dinner in, but where you do the other meals is at your discretion. Since we don’t have fire outside, all we can get is fruits, raw vegetables and some raw shellfish. That’s good enough, but there’s nothing like a good cooked meal, even if you have to cook it yourself. Setting up the meal service and laundry rotations is one of the Committee’s tasks.
“Everything else is outside, and most of us stay outside whenever we don’t absolutely have to be inside. The sun is pretty fierce, though, so we’ll get you tanned slowly and set you up with an inside schedule for the first month.
“Then you need to pick something to do and start working on it. Everyone, and I mean everyone, does something that contributes. If you don’t, your committee will assign you something, and if you don’t do that, God will make you do something. That’s usually shovel out the latrine or similar grunt work.”
“Humph. What’s available?”
“Lots of stuff. Weaving, stonework, woodwork, fishing, farming, child care, ...”
“Child care? There are children here?”
“Several dozen. We’ve been here over ten years; there are males and they haven’t been able to prevent all pregnancies. As far as we can tell, most of them are fine. They’ve got cute little collars that they put on them about the time they start to walk.”
“This is impossible,” Akchoph said in disgust. “Where’s a terminal?” She headed back into the building and stopped before one of the biofeedback and testing stations.
“Let’s see if this works,” she said, dropping to sit on her heels and adjusting the height of the screen and table. A moment later, the screen cleared and the familiar prompt from the main research application displayed. She heard an indrawn breath behind her as her fingers danced over the projected keyboard. She pulled up documents for a few minutes, swearing under her breath, and finally sat back and dismissed the program.
“Did you see that?” she asked.
“I didn’t see anything. My control computer blanked out my view of what you were doing. I didn’t even know it could do that!”
“Oh! Well, if they don’t want you to know, then I suppose I shouldn’t say anything.”
She paused in thought. “I want to dig in further. You might want to go somewhere else for a few minutes until I’m done.” She turned on the system again, and was rewarded by the research main screen. She barely heard a bitten off “shit” from behind her, and the noise as her mentor got up and left.
She fed in a number of queries, and finally found the document she wanted. In fact, it was a memo to her, outlining what could and could not be disclosed. She studied it closely, and then followed up with the references. Finally she sat back, turned the terminal back off and thought.
Eventually she shook her head and got up. She now had a picture of what the project was all about, and it was rather different than she had thought. Put in that context, the current primate facility made a great deal of sense, as did both the basics and the children. Not that either situation was particularly pleasant, but at least both were consistent with the project goals, not some additional off-the-wall piece of nastiness. Discussing the basics wasn’t off limits. Discussing the children wasn’t either, but it was to be deemphasized until certain other things happened that would provide context for most of the people in the Habitat. Well, if she managed to survive with a reasonably intact brain, Ina’s suggestion did make sense. Time to start acting like she really was researching a book.
She did a quick check to try to locate Aklish, and then chuckled to herself. After a moment’s thought to check what she wanted, she gave her control computer an instruction. Her posture shifted; she turned and walked out the corridor with a confident stride. Two minutes later she had gone down several branching paths to a place where a number of women, and one man, were working on a chunk of something transparent, trying to fashion it into a crude lens. They had a small wooden frame and were discussing the latest hole they had managed to burn in something.
She recognized Aklish among the group, but stopped to listen before interrupting. They seemed to be discussing how tight they could get the focus, which seemed to be interesting if not very useful.
Finally, she cleared her throat. “Hey, guys. Why do you want a real tight focus?”
The six people in the group looked her way, startled. It seemed they really had been so deep in the discussion that they hadn’t seen her walk up.
“Oh, there you are,” Aklish said. “I knew I should have been going back to look for you, but this was just so interesting.”
“I know the feeling,” Akshif replied. “Higher temperatures are a dead end, though.”
“Uh, why?” the male asked.
“Smelting metals is on the prohibited list. You’re allowed to continue this for cooking, ceramics and glassware, and that’s it.”
“And how do you know that?”
“She probably does,” Aklish answered for her. “The reason I came out here rather than finish showing her around is that she was looking something up on the computer, and my control computer was blanking out my vision of what it was.”
“Damn. All that wasted effort,” the male said in disgust.
“Hardly,” one of the women added. “She did say cooking, ceramics and glass. Right?” At a nod, she continued. “Baking just requires some hot rocks, and some insulation to keep the heat in. We don’t have to drill a hole in the rocks!”
“Now that’s an idea,” another one chimed in. “I could do with some baked fish, and I’ll bet some of these lizards are tasty prepared right! And if we could do glass, we could do bigger lenses.”
“Work our way up? There’s lots of silica on the beaches.”
“Same thing about ceramics,” a third added. “I think all you do is mold the thing and then put it into an oven to bake.”
“We’d better get Akshif under cover before she bakes,” Aklish said, getting up and walking back toward the common building.
“Why’d you do that,” Akshif said on the way back. “That guy looked positively yummy.”
“He’s too low status for you.”
“Huh?”
“Well,” Aklish said, “it’s like this. There’s a nine to one female to male ratio here in the primate habitat, and that skews things. We rate males by how many times a day they can get it up and do it, running from zero to four. He’s a two.
“The way it works out, you can expect to get laid by a real male every four days or so. Most of the males have harems of the appropriate size; he’s already got seven females in his harem, and has a favorite that he screws every other day.”
“No jealousy?”
“Depends on the male, but most of them have learned the lesson that they’re the scarce resource, so they can demand that their females behave.
“Besides which, he’s kind of in the middle of the dominance hierarchy. He’s definitely buff, but then most of the males are. They seem to establish dominance by physique, athletics, charisma and how big their harems are. Also by how many high status females they can attract to their harems.”
“So what do you do when you can’t get him?”
“You can go girl to girl, you can use a dildo, or you can use one of the fucking machines. Or you can program yourself for an orgasm.”
“Fucking machine? Program yourself? Oh, damn, I can see how to do the program, but a fucking machine?”
Aklish laughed. “They look like something out of a mad scientist’s dream. They’ve got a dozen arms; you can set them up for one, two or three dildos. The rest of the arms have stimulus pads of one kind or another. You select how you like it, strap yourself in so the arms don’t have to chase you around, and enjoy. If you tend to be real noisy, the rest of us prefer that you use a gag.”
“Urk!” Akshif said. “I think I’m just going to find a randy young man, add myself to his harem, and put in a program so I’m only horny on schedule.”
“That’s the spirit! Tell you what; you’re looking a bit toasted. I’m going to put you with the kitchen crew for the rest of the day. Scamper upstairs and have fun.”
Atrade looked at the cages popping open across the way, one after the other, and at the girls ejecting to walk out of the cage room in single file. She wasn’t, therefore, at all surprised when her cage door popped open and she dropped out to bounce on the floor and walk out to stand behind Adris.
She wasn’t, on the other hand, all that happy about it either. She tossed her head to settle her mane of flame red hair and grinned quietly. At least she’d managed that much: after a lot of poking and guesswork she’d gotten her control computer to relax control during movement so she could fix her hair! If she had to dance to the unseen puppet master’s strings, she wanted the dance to look good.
Bob and Ted came in, and Ted removed all of the damned collars while Bob made a little farewell speech. At least, it sounded like a farewell speech, and she was quite ready to be quit from this place. More than ready, if the truth be told. A fucking month more than ready.
A minute later she found herself moving again with the rest of the girls. They went through an office, up a passageway and out onto the deck. Then down the stairs to the dock, and down the street at a trot. Eventually, after several twists and turns, they entered a huge building, turned a couple more times, and stopped in the middle of a largish room. Then the puppet master removed his strings and left.
The room appeared to be lined with cages just like the room she had left, hopefully for good. Drat! Well, Sir had said that she would spend the rest of her life calling a cage home. This certainly didn’t look like it was going to prove him wrong.
The twenty girls spread out in twos and threes, chattering to each other. In a few minutes, they had all drifted to the left wall, and were looking at the discrete signs over the cages. Adrate shook her head ruefully. From one cage to another. At least it had been a decent run here! She opened her cage and looked in. Right. A blanket on the bottom and another one neatly folded at the back.
She swung the door back and forth and looked at it thoughtfully. Something looked different. After a moment, she thought she had it; it looked like there was a latch on the inside.
She braced her hands on the bottom of the cage, bounced a couple of times and jumped, bending in midair. She landed with her torso in the cage, her legs sticking out. She came up on her arms and brought herself the rest of the way with one fluid motion that would have made her old gymnastics instructor proud, and then promptly sat back on her heels, head bent slightly to avoid the top, and rolled to reverse her position.
It did look like an inside latch. She pulled the cage door shut, wincing at the sound of the solid click, and pushed to make sure. Then she hit the latch and breathed a sigh of relief as it opened. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath!
She rolled again to put herself feet first and then popped out to land with a bounce.
“I see,” a pleasant alto said from a few feet away, “that you found the cage release.”
“I wish we’d have had them in the old cages,” she shot back without thinking.
“Well, they’re in these.
“As you can see, I’m Atfanny, and the committee has tasked me with introducing you to our cozy little cage room and the primate habitat.”
“A native guide!” Atrite exclaimed. “At least we don’t have another master to order us around.”
The native guide laughed. “Actually, there are about a dozen people that can pull your strings whether you want them pulled or not, starting with God, the researchers, your committee, the service supervisors, your craft masters and the owner of your harem. And,” she paused significantly, “the meshes.”
“Huh?” She chuckled as she saw the blank looks in front of her.
“OK. Sit down while I explain. Then we’ll do a bit of a walkabout and I’ll explain some more.”
A moment later, the twenty of them sat in a neat semicircle in numerical order, with Adven in the exact center.
“I need to start out with a project overview and some history, or you’re going to be very puzzled about some of the contradictions here. Even with that, you’re still going to be confused for a while; this place is enough to give a fantasy writer nightmares about plot consistency.
“The one line executive overview of the project is that they’re trying to create a viable race of cyborgs. I’m not going to elaborate on that very much, other than to point out that the project sponsors are very ruthless people in pursuit of their goal, which is something that you already knew. They’ve also been making rather wild promises to all sorts of people to raise money.
“Your part in all of this straddles three objectives. One is to be part of the race of cyborgs they’re building. The second is to be experimental subjects for all of the things they have to find out to create us, and the third is to fulfill some of those wild promises they made to the funding sources.”
She looked around at them. “Right. After what you went through on the ship, this is not what you expected to hear, other than the part about being experimental subjects. Right?”
She got a lot of nods, and a few thoughtful expressions.
“I’m going to talk about each of those three objectives. Remember that they interact quite wildly; a lot of what we do as cyborgs has to do with the interaction, and it’s not something that we’d do if we were independent.
“First, some history. This project has been going for around fifteen years. Until four or five years ago, all of the experimental subjects were kept in cages in a facility that makes the ship you came in on look like the Ritz. At that time the development program had advanced to the point where they needed to have the subjects be able to move around and live a somewhat normal life. Effectively, they needed to pour out the stew and see if it self-assembled into something resembling a functional society, without losing control of the situation. So they split the Habitat off from the rest of the island. It’s about a third of the island, and it’s ours.
“To make a long story short, the start was quite chaotic. They put in a program to organize things, and then our programmers discovered they could modify it. After a bit of a control tussle, we came to an unwritten agreement: we’ve got complete control over how we organize the Habitat, subject to actively supporting the research agenda, not causing security problems and a few other details.”
She looked at the faces in front of her. The expressions ranged from totally confused through stunned to thoughtful.
“Think about it for a moment. Creating a new race isn’t something that you’d expect to do in a bunch of lab cages. Giving us our own habitat and seeing what we would do with it was in the plan from the beginning, as was the notion that we’d be doing our own programming. The only real question was when and under what conditions. Plans, after all, describe the way it didn’t happen.
“I’ll discuss details in a while, but the next thing that happened was about two years ago, when we extended our basic maintenance program across the entire island. That’s important for two rather different reasons. One is that it shows we’ve got a fairly stable relationship with the rest of the Project, and it’s fairly amicable. The other is that some of you may well spend your work time outside of the Habitat.
“As you might expect, control is a major issue for us. Most of us accept the fact that we’re controlled from outside with attitudes that range from stoic acceptance to pretty pissed off. Of course, there are a few people that happen to kink the right way to think this is exactly what they were always looking for, but it’s not the standard attitude.
“So there’s a formal control structure that goes one way, and a second formal structure that goes a completely different way. On the first dimension, as I mentioned, there are a lot of people that can pull your strings. On the other dimension, we have a series of democratic and post-democratic processes that make it almost unheard of for any of the supervisors to actually exercise their power.
“I’m not going to say a whole lot about that; group decision making using a consent format is something that needs to be experienced to be understood, and you’ll get a lot of practice.
“Back on the first dimension, we call the ultimate overseer God. It only intervenes when something goes wrong, and then it can be pretty arbitrary. We don’t know who or what God is, although the majority opinion seems to be a computer somewhere. For all we really know, it could be a bunch of space aliens. That makes as much sense as anything else.
“Our organizational structure is built around something we call a mesh. Meshes are based on the fact that we are cyborgs; we’ve got a computer that’s interfaced with our biological brain and we’ve got network communication abilities through the computer. With all of that capability, it would be utterly insane not to use it to coordinate group activities. Each of our group activities has a mesh that supports it. When we’re involved in a particular activity, we say we’re woven into the mesh; when it’s an activity where we’re a permanent member, we say we’re bound into that particular mesh.
“You’ve been dealing with a mesh for the last three weeks, ever since the interface matured enough for the computers to exert control. That mesh was concerned with your day to day life in the experimental animal quarters on the ship, and it seemed to be pretty absolute in what it had you doing. A few of you probably discovered that you could get at least some of your way once you figured out how.
“Here, you are part of the A3 room mesh in the same way you were part of the mesh on shipboard. In some ways it’s pretty similar, in other ways it’s quite different. One of the ways it’s different is that the people who live here in this room have evolved it to suit themselves over the last four plus years. It’s no longer the same as the A1 mesh, or the A2 mesh, or any of the other room meshes. Almost all of the changes have been done with the same consent decision procedure that I mentioned earlier; very few were imposed from above, and those caused enough difficulty that the powers that be simply don’t do it any more.
“To give you an example, most of you probably noticed that you’re sitting in an exact semicircle in numerical order. I doubt if any of you are more than a couple of inches off of the geometrically correct location in the pattern. That’s the computer part of the mesh; if your organic brains had organized it you most certainly wouldn’t be in numerical order, and you’d be in a very sloppy circle, if it was a circle.
“In this case, it really doesn’t matter which way you did it. Either way works. In fact, the precision is one of the indicators that your control computers set it up but the rigidity is a holdover from the ship mesh. Our room mesh would have put you into a circle, but it wouldn’t have sorted you first. It would have come up with an overall minimum effort way of getting you into the pattern, taking personal preferences for who you’d like to be next to into account.
“Another mesh you’re going to be bound into is the harem mesh, or I should say one of the harem meshes. There are around nine women for every male in the Habitat, so if you want to get laid regularly by a real male, you join a harem. There are some lesbian harems and a couple of kink harems. If you don’t want to join a harem you can use a variety of sex toys ranging from simple dildos up through the fucking machines. Or you can do yourself or stay celibate. Your choice.
“Each harem has its own mesh, and you’re bonded into it, not woven into it. They all do several things in common, and from there they vary wildly. The commonalities include scheduling your sexual sessions with the harem’s male. When you’re not scheduled, you’re simply not interested in him, or any other male for that matter. When you are scheduled he’s going to be the sexiest thing around, and you aren’t going to find anything more important than getting him up and into you. It is, of course, reciprocal. He’s only interested in the female that’s current on his schedule, and for the most part, he’s interested.
“Another thing it does is regulate your cycle. All the women in the harem have their cycles offset; they’re in their fertile period at different times, they menstruate at different times. They don’t get the mood swings or any of the physical symptoms. Lastly, they simply aren’t interested in sex, at least with a male, while they’re fertile.”
She laughed. “I always get a kick out of a new group’s expressions when I tell them this. It’s totally backwards from the way we’re normally wired. It means we don’t use contraceptives; the rhythm method really works, except in the few cases where it doesn’t. We get maybe a half dozen pregnancies a year, which considering the number of sexually active young women in the Habitat is really low for any form of contraception other than radical hysterectomy or total abstinence.
“The room mesh, by the way, does the same thing as far as regulating your cycle is concerned; if you don’t join a harem you’re still protected.
“The last thing the harem mesh does,” she continued seriously, “is enforce peace in the harem. You’re going to find your sisters, or wives, whichever term you prefer, to be reasonably interesting and easy to get along with. Exactly how it does that varies from mesh to mesh.
“The rest of the meshes are pretty eclectic; there are work related meshes and meshes for other activities ranging from sports to group singing.
“You have to work at a service or a craft. We’ve got a number of crafts: stonework, woodwork, cloth making, child care and several others. Services include the island-wide maintenance mesh, food service, laundry and a bunch of others.
She paused to catch her breath and look around. They looked well snowed, but so far it really didn’t matter; they’d figure it out fairly quickly.
“Fucking machines?” one of the girls asked, clearly having been sidetracked by the idea.
“They’re why some of us think God may be a space alien. They’ve got a dozen arms and some restraint points so you can stay in one position; otherwise the machinery has a tendency to make mistakes. Painful mistakes. You can set it up for one, two or three dildos and a variety of stimulators. You put in a stimulation program, just like an exercise program on a treadmill, and it’ll play you like a violin.
“Personally, I think they’re overkill, but every once in a while I get frustrated enough at something that I want to spit rocks; then it’s just what the doctor ordered.”
“Could you answer a question?”
“Well, ask. I can always say I don’t know.”
“I’ve tried to work with my control computer, and it’s just blank. It’s like nothing’s there. Nobody else seems to have trouble.”
“How many of you can’t seem to get started?” Adven asked them. Four hands went up. She nodded slightly as her eyes flicked from one to the next.
“That was a good question; that’s part of what we’re doing for the funding sources, so I’ll talk about that a bit. First you need some more background. There are three levels of brain interface they’re working on; we call them the basic, advanced and experimental levels. Most of us have the experimental level installed, but four of you only have the basic level, and another four have the advanced level. I gather they’re going to be making the basic and advanced levels into commercial products in the not too distant future; the experimental level is going to stay here.
“The basic level includes the connections that allow your control computer to take control and run you. It can understand what you hear, it can speak with your voice although it’s real obvious that it’s the control computer and not your organic brain, and it can project some real elementary visuals directly into your awareness, but that’s the limit of its internal communication ability.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, you’re slaves, although we prefer to call you workers. The basic level is designed to provide an obedient slave.
“The reason is that a number of the sponsors want slaves. Most of them fudge and say they want more capable workers, but that’s what they mean when you unwrap the obfuscation.
“Quite frankly, that’s one of the things we wouldn’t do on our own. We’d just as soon upgrade the lot of you to the advanced level and have done with it. However, the funding sources want you, and supporting the Project goals means we have to find something to do with you that’s reasonably similar to what they want to do with the basic package.
“What that means in practice is that you’ll be bound into the island-wide maintenance mesh, and that’s what you’ll spend your work periods doing.
“The island-wide maintenance mesh is one of the things that seems to have fallen out of how we live as cyborgs. It’s not makework in any sense of the term. We’d need most of the functions whether or not we had any slaves, and we’d need most of them whether or not any of our funding sources cared about it.
“I think I want to say a bit more about slaves. Any of us could be turned into a slave. It’s quite easy, and that’s what happened to the four of you that aren’t here. The experimenters on the ship picked them as personal experimental subjects; what it means is that they’re being used mostly as research assistants and housewives. The way it works is that they’ve got a special program that identifies their master and makes it impossible to dispute a direct order. That could be done to any of you, but we don’t do that – unless you decide to join one of the kink harems or simply experience what it’s like to be someone else’s slave. That can be a quite interesting experience, for a while at least.
“To get back onto the maintenance mesh, we’ve got a positive aversion to any form of special privilege that borders on fanaticism; all of us will spend time woven into the maintenance mesh.
“Calling it the maintenance mesh doesn’t do it justice. Some of it is what you would normally think of as maintenance: hauling trash, cleaning up, fixing things. It also includes most of our basic agriculture as well as factory work and low level clerical and other support work. It’s a very diverse set of tasks, and you can find yourself all over the island doing them.
“An example of how it works might help. Suppose someone in the Project wants an extra piece of furniture. They’d look at what’s available in the warehouse and make their selection. Then they’d either punch it into the system or, more likely, tell one of the workers in the warehouse that they wanted it delivered to their apartment.
“Some time later a pair of ponygirls would show up with a wagon, someone would load the piece of furniture onto it, and the ’girls would take it where it needed to go. Then someone else would unload it and install it. The ponygirls would take their cart to the next place they were needed and the worker would go somewhere else to do something else as well. It looks totally random from the outside, but things get done, and done promptly and well.”
“You’re trying to cheer us up,” the girl who had made the comment originally said.
“She’s succeeding, too,” another of the four put in. “It doesn’t sound all that different from what I used to do, and with the diversity it could be interesting.”
“Exactly,” Adven replied. “As I said, it’s work that needs to be done, and we’ll all put our hand to it at one time or another.
“To continue, you do have the ability to talk to your control computer using another computer. We’ve got quite a bit of programming that lets you do that, and I’ll show you how to use it later.
“How does God fit into all this?” Atrate asked.
“God is a supervisor; it doesn’t have anything to do with the normal functioning of the meshes. It does get involved if something gets totally snarled beyond our ability to handle it. If that happens, our own programmers then work out what happened and fix the meshes so that it doesn’t happen again.”
“The experimenters let us do our own programming?” The redhead sounded startled.
“I did go by that rather fast, didn’t I? Programming your own control computer is part of being a cyborg, so they don’t mind if you get your hand in. In fact, they prefer it since doing your own programming is supposed to be a sales feature for the advanced package. The more practice we get in, the more it lets them work the kinks out of the process. How far you go depends on how interested you are.
“A lot of the programming we use regularly originated here, including most of the meshes and all of the prosthetics for brain damage. A few of the meshes and most of the personal enhancement programs originate on the Project side; they’re more interested in what we can do as individuals than as groups. We both work on the basic infrastructure, including the programming toolset.
The redhead grinned again. “I think I’m going to like it here, at least if they don’t start punching holes in my brain.”
“Well, you’ve got the advanced level of interface, so it’s not too likely that you’ll get brain damage.”
The redhead nodded thoughtfully as another girl stuck her hand up.
“What you’ve said the slaves do sounds like basic scutwork. Necessary and hardly unusual. I thought I heard you mention sex slaves?”
“Yes. Some of our funding sources want them. We have several dominants and a number of sexual submissives. They’re in the kink harems I mentioned. If you happen to kink that way you’ll meet some of them in the next few days, otherwise we don’t have that much to do with each other, at least that way. The research subjects outside serve some of the same function; they don’t have much choice about how far they go to keep their owner sexually satisfied, although that’s not their primary role.
“Now, as far as the advanced level goes, it starts off with the basic interface and adds in everything that’s required for really high bandwidth communication with the control computer and beyond. It also allows some really fine grained switching so you can get rather complex networks that are partly biological brain with computerized neural nets in the middle. It comes a lot closer to what some science fiction writers have speculated about.”
She chuckled as several of her listeners sat up straighter and looked, well, astonished.
“The advanced level has about three times the innervation of the basic level, just to give you an idea. The experimental level has twice that; it’s got about half of the brain wired. The downside is that there isn’t a whole lot you can actually do with the extra connections. If there was, it would be made part of the advanced level.
“I suppose it’s time to deal with our part of the research effort. That starts with a piece of really bad news. The research effort starts off with those of you with the experimental level of brain interface. Twelve of you have that; eight of those will be selected as research subjects so that they can probe into areas of the brain they haven’t got mapped yet. I don’t know which eight it will be, and I won’t know until they start actually experimenting. That’ll be a few days while they collect as much information as they can before actually doing anything.
“Sometimes they get it right the first time, but usually they cause brain damage to several subjects before they figure out how to make a new interface cleanly. Do it enough times, and the brain damage makes it impossible to live a normal life.
“You can regard it as a death sentence. The eight of you most likely won’t last out the year before becoming too damaged to function properly. Some of you will be sacrificed so they can analyze your brain; we’ll try to patch up the rest of you so you can do something useful. That’s where the ponygirls you saw on the way over came from, and that’s also where a fair number of workers come from. I should point out, by the way, that if you find yourself in that position you’ll be bound into the maintenance mesh, which is where you’d eventually wind up anyway after you’ve been used up.
“Now that we’re past that gristly subject, once they’ve figured out how to install it without causing problems, it’s installed in all of us with the experimental level of interface. There are usually a few botchups there, but the effective percentage of brain damage is around 1%.
“The next thing is utilization. They start figuring out what it’s useful for. You can expect them to stick some pretty weird programs in to stimulate the new interface to find out what it does, and that can cause some, let’s say, interesting behavior. And don’t expect the experimenters on the other side to have much sympathy. If anything, I think they get off on seeing how absurd they can make you look.”
“That’s sick,” one of the three blondes said.
“Well,” she shrugged, “you already knew that from your time on the ship. It’s the same group that does the actual installation research, and they’re all borderline sociopaths. They have to be to do what they do to other people. The people doing the rest of the research are marginally saner; at least they won’t have you doing anything that they don’t think will be useful.
“The next level down is some basic research. If you’re selected for that you’ll most likely find yourself in a group that has really strange relationship patterns, or trying to do things that you already know how to do in really bizarre ways. That can be amusing, frustrating, embarrassing or just plain weird, but it usually doesn’t last more than a few days unless it actually turns up something interesting. Then they can have you doing whatever it is for quite a while.
“Finally they get down to real development of programs they think might be marketable, or at least useful to someone. Most of the meshes are our work, the rest are joint efforts. There are a lot of programs for individuals in various occupations, and those have equally wide authorship.
“Which leads me back to one of Red’s questions. Yes, you can do your own research, and you can even recruit a group of subjects to experiment on. However, before you’ll be allowed to experiment on any other subject, you’ve got to establish your credibility on both sides of the fence. That starts out with pushing your own integration to the max; all of our developers have gotten to the point where they have to check explicitly to figure out whether the control computer or their biological brain was handling something.
“Then it requires taking several projects to a successful conclusion. The first projects should be individual programs like training and task modules. Then you branch out to working on meshes and then prosthetics. Training and task modules are for individuals, and prosthetics allow you to get your hands in with a live subject where, to be distressingly blunt about it, if you manage to muck up so badly you kill her, there’s no real harm done other than to your career prospects.
“One more item that you might be curious about: the problem with prosthetics is capacity. You don’t usually get more than a couple of dozen experimental subjects with the same kind of brain damage, and mostly fewer. The number of us that aren’t bleeding-edge research subjects with any specific kind of brain damage is usually one, sometimes two and occasionally three. I’ve heard of one case where there were a dozen with the same kind of damage; the researcher responsible was reassigned.
“The current best control computer can handle a worker with a dozen prosthetics, but there aren’t any workers with that kind of damage. It can handle a couple of prosthetics for someone with the advanced package, and there are several of us in that situation. The bleeding edge research subjects usually have between thirty and fifty different kinds of brain damage before they’re no longer useful to research, and that’s totally beyond the capacity of the control computers, even if we had the programming. They’ve been working on a completely new, internal control computer for some time that’s supposed to solve all of the capacity problems, but that’s still several years away at the most optimistic.”
She looked around at the group. “Well, you’re looking well fried, so let’s quit talking and go look at something.”
“Before we go,” one of the brunettes said quickly, “can you say something about children? You went past it awfully fast.”
“Deliberately. We get several children a year; the oldest is around twelve. They’re not exempt from experimentation. The secondary nervous system is installed around their first birthday and they grow up with it. The research goal is to grow it in conjunction with the developing brain. They don’t do any other bleeding-edge research with them. The older ones have sustained some brain damage; the younger ones haven’t and most likely won’t except by accident.”
She looked at them. “I may as well give you the other pieces now, since the subject has come up. There are three more major steps on the research agenda. The first is the internal computer; that’s being grown directly from the secondary nervous system rather than manufactured which is what is taking them so long.
“Once they’ve got that in place, the next step is to have the secondary nervous system and the internal control computer installed automatically by the mother’s control computer directly into the late stage fetus so they’re functional when the baby is born. That, of course, leads straight into the final step, which is to bridge the gap to where they’re installing now at one year.
“At that point they’ll have a viable race of cyborgs. And that, ladies, is the executive summary of the project goals. Everything else is part of the incessant search for funding. Let’s show you the rest of the building and then get something to eat.”
Two hours later, they’d had a whirlwind tour of the building and the grounds, and had returned to the building.
“All of you are going onto food preparation for the next month until the next batch arrives. That’ll give you a chance to be outside in the morning building up your tan; running tables will give you a chance to see the harems and the crafts at dinner and form some opinions.
“The upstairs is divided into three areas. Kitchens and food storage on one end, dining and work area in the middle, and laundry on the other. We’re actually under the kitchen. Let’s go upstairs.”
She led her troupe up the stairs into an enormous room. The twenty girls looked around trying to understand what they were seeing while two other women walked up to them: one from the doors to the kitchens, and the other from a set of stairs further down the enormous hall.
“Hey, haven’t I seen you before?” Atrait exclaimed as she looked at the woman who had walked up the stairs. “I don’t remember an A768, though,” she continued in a lower voice.
“I looked a little bit different then, Adarat,” Agfch said dryly. “I didn’t really think you’d forget me that quickly. It’s only been three weeks.”
“Three weeks? Oh! You’re the one that conditioned me!”
“You and two others, and assisted on two more.”
“So how come you’re here? I thought you were one of the fucking experimenters.”
“I’m the sacrificial lamb. You were lured here with the offer of a free ocean voyage and the chance to take part in a psychological experiment, right?”
“Yea. Don’t remind me of it.”
“Well, I’m an undercover investigative reporter, and I thought I was following a hot lead to the story of the century. Only they knew all about me before I ever set foot on the ship.”
“Which still doesn’t explain why you were the one that conditioned me.”
“It’s a long story. The short version is that most sacrificial lambs are wannabe scientists that don’t have what it takes. They don’t have a clue until the conditioning demo when they discover they’re the demo subject. They’re stripped, put in a belt and collar and conditioned.
“I’m a journalist. People are my business. I knew I was in deep shit the first night, and had identified the real decision maker the second. I threw myself on her mercy, and one of the real researchers agreed to teach me in order to consolidate what he was learning. He also got a leg up on the rest of them; they didn’t know what was going on until it was time to condition me. I played the part of junior scientist for the rest of the voyage.
“The sacrificial lambs that wind up here are the ones that go into resistance and do only what they’re ordered; the ones that get picked so they live outside are the ones that throw themselves into being helpful and learning what they can. The Powers That Be decided they didn’t want me to live outside, so here I am.” She shrugged.
“Besides which, I like incendiary redheads. I picked you specifically to condition because I wanted to get to know you a bit, and that was the only opening. If the long shot had come in and they’d decided I had the makings of a researcher, I’d have picked you as my live in subject.”
“Live in subject?” the incendiary redhead was cooling down.
“That’s what happened to the other four of you. This is a development organization, and successful development organizations use their own product internally. Those four will become housekeepers, cooks, sex objects, general assistants and experimental subjects for fillin experiments. Much of that’s not that different from a housewife, actually, and a lot of the rest isn’t all that different from a research assistant or secretary.”
“That’s quite interesting,” a smooth alto voice said from the back, “but let’s get back on task. All 21 of you are here for the first time to help out with the food service? Right?”
She continued on without a pause for a response. “I need to explain a couple of things before you start. One is what you’re going to be doing, and the second is how you’re going to be doing it.
“This is a multi-purpose room. You’re going to set it up for a harem night: that is, the various harems will eat together tonight. We do that two nights a week. We do craft nights, where all the members of a craft eat together on two nights a week, and we do a cage room night where all the people from one wall of a room eat together one night a week. Then we do mixers the other two nights. God assigns which table you’re at for those. You’ll sit with people you rarely talk to. It keeps things relatively well mixed.
“After that, you’ll bring out the food once everyone is seated, and then you’ll stand around to handle any services that need to be done during dinner. Then you’ll clean up, wash up and put the furniture back.
“None of that’s particularly unusual, although I don’t expect all of you to be expert on all of the couple of dozen tasks involved in getting the job done well. In fact, if tonight is a mess rather than a disaster, we’ll consider it a rousing success. This happens every month, and there’s a reason we let it happen that way.
“Now, as to the how. You’re all cyborgs; you all have a control computer. We have a mesh for this, and you’ll all be woven into it for tonight. It’s intended to be one of the standard support programs that comes with our product.
“It will take care of all of the planning and task assignments. As long as you stay relaxed and you pay attention to what’s going on around you, you’ll know what to do and when to do it. What you won’t necessarily know is how to do it. You’ll have to rely on whatever knowledge you walked in here with tonight for that.
“Tomorrow you’ll be here earlier, and we’ll go over tonight’s performance. You will pick one task that’s below minimum standards and practice it. We have teaching programs for about a third of the tasks, and we have execution programs for a few. The catering mesh also improves; it will try not to assign tasks that you’re abysmal at. By the end of the week, we’ll have a fairly smooth, although not really professional, operation.
“All right, people. Get to it.”
Akshif suddenly noticed a line of cabinets on the far wall; they had what looked like stacks of wood blocks between them. She walked over, peripherally aware that Atarad and another girl joined her.
She picked one up and looked at it. Somehow, it looked like the top of a table. If it was the top of a table, then...? She turned it over, noting places that looked like they were for legs and attachments to other surface elements.
She looked back, and sure enough, there were lots of what looked like they might be stubby legs. As far as attachments went? She looked again, and there was another neat pile of wooden pieces that might slide in.
She screwed in four legs and looked around. The other two were also putting legs on pieces of the tables. She walked with her segment to where it looked like it should go, and set it down. The other two set theirs down next to hers, forming an L shape. She looked at them, looked at the fasteners she somehow seemed to be holding, and dropped to her knees to reach under the three tables and slide the fasteners into their proper place.
Then she scooted back what turned out to be the proper amount as the other two people on her team put two more tables down. She slid the fasteners into place, and scooted back. This happened several more times, with more fasteners miraculously appearing just when they were needed.
Then it seemed like they were done with the table. She stood up and looked at it. It was, she thought, an excellent piece of woodwork, and altogether too good to be somewhere like this unless it was something that the woodworking craft had put together.
Pause over, the three of them went back and assembled another table, and then another, trading off who put the legs on the segments and who fastened them together.
The work went swiftly; all seven teams worked with quiet absorption and assembled tables without ever colliding with each other. One thing she noticed was that the tables were of different sizes, and were scattered on the floor in a somewhat orderly, but not regimented, pattern that left lots of space for the food to come from the kitchens.
She also noticed that as they went farther down the room, the tables became progressively less sophisticated woodwork, and then finally became mass produced plastic. There were several different varieties of fastener, each of which yielded its secrets without undue fuss.
Finally, they were done and the assembly program released them. Akshif stood with her two teammates and looked at the room. “That,” she said, “was, um, interesting.”
“It was, wasn’t it.” The redhead was unusually subdued as she looked at the tables. “So that’s what being a cyborg is all about. That took, what, an hour? I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do something without a break for an hour before!
“So what’s next?”
“After we catch our breath. Bring the food out?”
“Place settings, I’d think,” the third girl on the team said. “I suppose we’ll know when we start doing it!”
It did turn out to be place settings. They brought out stacks of unfolded napkins from the laundry, and put a plate, bowl and spoon at each place. The napkin folding was a minor mess; it turned out that only a few of the girls knew how. As soon as it became obvious, the catering program shifted them around so that the napkins got folded properly.
The rest of the evening went the same way; the organization unfolded without a hitch, although there were a number of places where the execution needed work.
The diners certainly looked interesting, Akshif thought as she stood by the wall scanning them to see if there was anything that needed doing during the dinner. The catering program apparently didn’t demand her full attention; she could still look at the diners. And the scene was well worth it. Most of the tables had a male at the head, sitting crosslegged, and sometimes up to a dozen females lined up down the table, each of them sitting on their heels. Most of the tables seemed to have a great deal of friendly conversation. Many of the males seemed to be having a lot of fun with sexual byplay with the female on their right. After a few moments it dawned on her; it was probably foreplay with the next woman in the rotation.
There did seem to be a hierarchy working its way up the room, and she was glad for the warning. The most attractive males did seem to be toward the front.
She also noticed a few mothers nursing babies, and several older children at a table toward the low end. There were two tables that seemed to have a woman at the head, and one of all males. There were also two groups that didn’t have tables at all; several of the participants were eating off of the backs of the others! Their eccentric tables were eating out of the diner’s hands. She shook her head in disbelief, and then went back to scanning her assigned area for anyone needing attention.
Finally the evening was over, all the bowls, plates and spoons washed and put away, and the tables disassembled and neatly stacked as they had found them.
Akshif staggered down the stairs and took a quick shower. She got to her cage room, more than ready to find out how her first night sleeping in a cage would feel. She put a cover on her cage door, crawled in, closed the door and was gratified to see that the cover worked well; it was black as pitch and quiet enough that she could hear her heart beat. She lay back, pulled the blanket over herself, and went out like a light.
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