This work is copyright 2000-2008 by Xaltatun of Acheron (A Pseudonym). It may be posted on the Internet to any free forum. It may be reformatted to match the forum's look and feel, and the forum editor may make minor spelling and grammer corrections. Otherwise it must be posted in its entirety, including these notices. It may not be sold, or included in any compilation that is sold, or posted on any forum that requires a fee for access, without my written permission. My permission will require payment, terms to be negotiated. For purposes of this notice, sites guarded by Adult Check or similar packages are considered pay sites. Posting on any site must include this copyright notice.
Adult Content Warning - this story contains adult themes, including non-consensual bondage/slavery and forced sexual acts. If you are under the lawful age for such materials (18 in most jurisdictions) or if you would find such material offensive, please go elsewhere.
Safety Warning. This story may contain descriptions of practices that are decidedly unsafe, either in general, or if performed by someone without adequate training. There are a number of good books available on safety in the BDSM scene. Most large cities, and some not so large ones, have organized BDSM groups that will usually welcome a newcomer. I'm not going to point out which practices are safe, and which aren't. Any practice is unsafe if performed by someone with inadequate training and experience, or if performed when not paying attention. Please think before you act. Don't make yourself a candidate for a Darwin award.
Now on to the story...
Chapter 5. They arrive at the stable.
This story is part of the Scatterbrain series; it takes place part way through the Plague Decades. After the first plague, the government barely managed to dig out while holding onto essential services. The prison system, with its multi-year sentences, was way to expensive to survive. In the new system, a first offense gets community service; a second offense gets a year in prison. For a third offense, the felon is trained as a slave and sold to the highest bidder.
It's not quite as draconian as it appears to be on the surface; a single conviction is erased after then years, a second conviction likewise after ten years leaving another ten to get rid of the first conviction. The third convictiion is, however, permanent.
The new system has a number of interesting features. The first time convict is “chipped.” That is, a computer chip (actually a complicated system of chips) is implanted in their brain. It allows real time tracking, and also allows the controller to shut down or turn on specific brain functions on command. The chips are based on the brain maps developed by the secret project described in LabRat, but otherwise they are a separate development.
Community service isn’t a bed of roses; the convicts are arranged in labor platoons, and the platoon leaders are required to do their best to make their charges’ lives miserable, in the hope that they’ll wise up and not repeat the offense.
A third time felon loses most rights. The steady stream of three time losers is routed to various training facilities depending on current market demand. Much of the demand is, of course, for personal servants, although there is a surprisingly large demand for more specialized categories. And the demand for females is always higher than the demand for males, so sex change surgery has become better, simpler, cheaper and safer.
There are restrictions on what condemned criminals can be used for. Those restrictions pretty much eliminate their use for business or industrial workers, except in a few categories. Sex workers and ponygirls are among the exceptions.
One would think that the draconian penalties would deter all but the most desperate from criminal behavior. However, it doesn’t seem to work that way. This is the story of a slow learner.
“The prisoner will rise and face the bench,” the bailiff intoned.
Chuck got to his feet. Chuck was around six feet tall with the wiry yet powerful build of a long distance runner. He was dressed, as tradition demanded, in a conservative suit that would not excite any undue comment. This was so that there could be no complaint that the way the prison authorities presented him during trial had influenced the jury.
“Mr. Wayner,” the judge said as soon as he was standing. “The jury has found you guilty of third degree murder, driving under the influence and leaving the scene of the accident. Since this is your third offense within ten years, and since there appear to be no mitigating circumstances, I have no choice but to sentence you to permanent enslavement.”
The prisoner swayed slightly as the blood drained out of his face. Not that he hadn’t expected the sentence, but hearing his doom made it that much more final.
The judge picked up the paper his clerk handed him, looked it over, signed it and handed it back to the clerk.
“Take him away,” he told the bailiff.
A guard shackled the prisoner’s arms behind his back. Then the guard clamped a beefy hand on Chuck’s arm and half shoved, half dragged the unresisting young man out of the room.
“Oh daddy! Thank you!” Sally exclaimed as she threw her arms around her father’s neck in a hug. “I thought I’d never get approved!”
“You may not thank me afterwards,” Stan told her seriously. “I had to pull a lot of strings to get you that internship, and from some of the things that were said, and even more that weren’t being said, I wonder if it was the best thing to do. Most of the people I dealt with weren’t real happy with your training certificate.”
“But I graduated at the top of the class!”
“So you did. They still weren’t happy about it. There’s something going on that they’re not talking about – at least to me.”
He shrugged. “Well, that’s done, and your assignment starts a week from Monday. If you manage to survive it, I’ll get you your own ponygirl.”
“Oh, daddy!” she squealed again.
The orange prison bus pulled up outside of a fenced-in facility whose sign proclaimed it to be a Medical Facility of the Bureau of Prisons. The prisoners in their black and white striped prison uniforms came off the bus and lined up single file. It was immediately obvious that there were two groups of prisoners. One group wore conventional hand shackles that kept their wrists pinned to a chain circling their waists; they were also shackled together by a chain that connected their right legs. The other group didn’t wear any kind of restraint.
The other obvious difference was that the first group wasn’t quite sure what to do: the line they formed straggled. The second group’s line lay ruler straight with almost military precision, the immobile prisoners staring straight ahead, eyes unfocused and hands clasped behind their backs.
The prisoners in the first group stared openly at the second line as a guard walked down it, pointing a handheld device at each of the prisoners as he checked them off of a list. Finally, he reached the end and closed his list with a snap. He fingered his device briefly, and then pushed a button. The prisoners in the line turned as one, and then walked toward the building, eventually vanishing from sight.
One of the guards with the first group broke the silence. “Wasn’t that a pretty sight, guys?” There were a few mutters in answer.
“Guess how they did it?” he asked rhetorically. Nobody answered him.
“They’ve been chipped!” he said. “Start marching, and we’ll just get you all outfitted with your very own chips.”
They stood there, stunned. “Come on guys. Move it.” He pulled a club off of his belt and began counting. “On the count. One. Right. Two. Left.” The coffle of convicts began to march toward the medical facility.
Chuck Wayner was the third prisoner in the first line to enter the building. He marched in with the rest of the prisoners, keeping perfect step. The line arrived at a largish room with a long desk dominating one side. The prisoners in the line walked into the room and stopped facing the desk, feet precisely positioned with the toes of their prison shoes touching a black line that ran the length of the room parallel with the desk.
A guard walked in and led the first prisoner in line out of the room via a door at the far end. Then he came back and led the next prisoner out, as the remainder of the prisoners simply stood there, eyes unfocused and staring ahead.
When he came back, Chuck walked after him through the door. They went down a corridor, and then another corridor into a third corridor that had a row of cells lined on either side. The guard swung one of the cell doors open, and Chuck marched inside. The guard closed the door with a clang, and the lock snapped shut with a final sounding thunk.
The chip finally released. Chuck took a deep breath and looked at his surroundings. It seemed to be a standard single prisoner jail cell: a cot next to one wall and a television set with an unbreakable plastic face set into the back wall. There was a slot in the floor in back with a roll of toilet paper next to it. That completed the arrangements.
The two side walls were solid concrete for about a meter and a half, with bars up to the ceiling. The wall itself seemed to be most of a meter thick. Chuck looked at the arrangement, and sighed. It let him talk to the prisoners in the cells next to him, while it kept them from doing anything more physical than holding hands. At least, the designers probably thought that’s what it did.
His lips quirked as he remembered climbing up on the wall so he could have sex with the inmate in the next cell. Far from prohibiting it, the guards thought it was amusing. They kept shuffling inmates around and had betting pools on just about every aspect of the inmate’s sex lives.
It was too early for there to be anything interesting, besides the next cell had a guy. He shrugged. For some reason, all of the convicts in his line were guys. He watched as the guards continued to bring in convicts and stick them in the cells, filling them up one by one.
Eventually the cells filled up and the guards quit coming. Then the door on the other end opened, and two people dressed in the pale green of hospital attendants wheeled in a gurney. They opened the first cell door, and pointed one of the control boxes at it. The inmate walked out and lay down on the platform. Then they wheeled the gurney out.
After a while, they came back in with a gurney, and took the guy in the next cell. After another while, they took the next guy. And then the next. Time passed as the two hospital attendants slowly unloaded the cell block.
Eventually, they wheeled the gurney up to the door of Chuck’s cell. The door unlocked with a quiet snick, and creaked open. One of the attendants pushed his button, and Chuck felt his body get up and walk himself out to lie on the gurney.
He watched the cell bars go by as the gurney creaked its way down the corridor. Then he was in something that clearly seemed to be a hospital. The two attendants parked the gurney by the wall and walked away. A nurse came up and took his blood pressure and drew some blood. Then she walked away.
Every once in a while, the attendants wheeled the gurney on the end with its unresisting cargo further down the corridor into an operating room. In between, they added a new gurney to the end of the line.
The two attendants wheeled his gurney into the operating room. They pressed a button, and Chuck lost consciousness. The surgeons promptly got to work.
Several hours later, Chuck woke up back in his cell. He was lying on his back on the cot, naked and facing the ceiling. As he came awake, he realized that various parts of his anatomy seemed to be anesthetized. In particular, he couldn’t feel anything in the area of his crotch. His breasts, however, seemed to be itching. He swung himself to his feet, and noticed that his cell had acquired some new furniture. There was now a table and chair placed under the television set, and a tall cabinet next to it.
When he looked down to check himself, he saw his entire groin area covered by a white plastic shield with a small hole. He looked at it a moment, and then went pale. A quick check confirmed the worst: he no longer had any body hair.
He took a deep breath and sat down at the table. Then he reached out to press the control on the television that turned it into a mirror. He grimaced as he saw that he didn’t seem to have any beard, either.
He held his head in his hands for a moment, and then sighed. He opened the cabinet at the back of the table, and confirmed his suspicions. Makeup.
He got up slowly and looked at the cabinet. Then he reached out to open it as if he was afraid what he would find. He nodded with a grimace of distaste as he saw the contents. A sleeveless dress, or rather a tunic, a very flat bra, and a pair of very high heeled sandals.
It wasn’t like this was totally unfamiliar. His labor battalion had been assigned to a very rough neighborhood on prostitution suppression. The battalion supervisor had decided the easiest way to suppress the prostitutes was to undercut their prices. So she had dressed the battalion members up in skimpy tunics, enormous falsies and spike heels, and had chained them to the lampposts.
It had definitely worked. By the time he was three weeks in, he quit counting the number of cocks he’d sucked off and the number of times he’d been taken up the ass on any given day.
They’d lost a few initially as the whores and their pimps had attempted to eradicate the new competition. A couple of times he’d almost bought it before the undercover cops had tackled the guy who was trying to eliminate him.
By the end, though, the battalion had simply faded into the background of the neighborhood; one more thing that the inhabitants simply took for granted. He had a fair number of regular clients, and knew quite a few of the neighborhood people enough to exchange greetings by name.
At least, he thought as he took out the bra and examined it, they weren’t making him wear falsies. If he had it scoped, he’d be a reasonably decent substitute for a she by the end of the week. He slid his arms into the straps and fumbled a minute until he got the hooks fastened. At least the garment protected his suddenly tender breasts.
Then he slid the tunic on over his head and let it slither down his body. He noticed it was fairly tight around his hips. He slid his feet into the sandals and took a few trial steps around his cell. He shook his head in resignation as he noticed his hips sway in time to the movement. It was all coming back, and he had devoutly hoped it wouldn’t.
Well, he was a realist, but he did wonder what they were going to do with a fake female that was taller than most men, even standing barefoot.
Two weeks later, an orange prison bus pulled up outside of the facility gate, under a large sign that declared the installation to be a restricted area. A smaller sign proclaimed that Ponygirl Training Facility 6 was part of the Bureau of Prisons. The four nude women in the back of the bus looked out the windows curiously, but didn’t seem to see anything to excite their interest.
A few minutes later, the bus started up again and drove through the gate. It stopped in front of a guard shack. One of the guards came out and stuck his head in the open door. “End of the line, girls. Come on out and line up.”
None of the four women moved. The guard frowned. Then told the driver: “You’ve got them turned off,” in an slightly accusing tone.
“Of course,” the driver said. “It’s easier that way.”
The guard got back in and waved his arm toward the door. This time, after looking at each other and then back at the guard, the four women got out of their seats and walked out, single file. They walked to a red line painted on the concrete and stood there, toes touching the line, hands at their sides, eyes gazing blankly down the road they had just traveled.
The guard looked at the list on top of his clipboard. He had one blonde and three brunettes. Check.
He looked further at the first entry. Brunette one was six feet tall, B cup breasts, 34 – 25 – 38. He looked admiringly at the picture. This one was named Chuck Wayner. The technicians at the transformation facility had done their usual excellent job. There were only a few traces of the male he had been. As the guard knew from long experience, those would vanish in the next few weeks. By the time she was ready for shipment to the auction facility, nothing short of a DNA scan would show that she had ever been male.
He pointed his reader at the patiently standing woman and looked at the display. The chip seemed to be in working order, and it agreed with the paper on his clipboard.
He swiftly checked the other three women standing in the hot sun. One of the brunettes had been born female. That was mildly unusual. They had standards for ponygirls, and most women simply weren’t tall enough. Besides, it didn’t matter how well they trained them, it seemed that a born female was usually better in the sex and housekeeping department than the ersatz females the transformation facility turned out. Part of the game was filling market demand, and ex-males made very acceptable ponygirls.
He signed the driver’s delivery book, and watched as the orange bus made its way back out of the facility. His four charges still stood looking at nothing.
He picked up the phone on the wall, and punched in a code.
“Tom,” he told the man who answered. “I’ve got your delivery. Three brunettes and a blonde, as described.”
“Right on time,” Tom answered. “I’ll be out shortly.”
“Take your time,” the guard said. “I’m going to play with them a bit.”
“What’s up?”
“The driver turned off speech and hearing; they can’t understand a word I say. And it looks like at least two of them need to go real bad.”
“Have fun. It’ll take a few minutes to get ready to receive them anyway.”
The guard hung up the phone and looked at the line of feminine charms. The first brunette really did need to go. He caught her eye and pointed at her, then moved his arm to a spot on the dirt that surrounded the guard station. The woman looked at him, until he gestured again, this time more forcefully. Then she walked over and stood there.
He gestured her to the side until she stood with one foot on either side of a small depression. Then he made a patting motion with his hands. She looked at him blankly. After a couple of tries, he shrugged his shoulders and got out the little controller he’d used to check their chips.
He frowned a moment and then pushed a few buttons. Then he pushed the red “execute command” button.
A moment later, her face contorted and then reddened in embarrassment as the stream of yellow liquid spurted out. Then she relaxed in relief as the relentless pressure vanished.
When she was done, he waved her back to her place in line and pointed to the next woman. This one swayed over to the designated spot, giving him a nice wiggle of her hips, squatted and let loose as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
On the way back, she gave him a bright smile before she resumed her stance, gazing off into the distance. His mouth twitched as he tried to suppress a grin. The saucy ones were nice; at least as long as it lasted. He guided the other two out and back, and then noticed someone coming down the road. A closer look verified that it was Tom, in a chariot pulled by a pair of ponygirls.
The ponygirls were in a light working harness: just a leather girdle around their waist. The traces pulled them tight to the shafts so there was no slack. Their hands rested on the shafts, kept there by cuffs and a light chain.
The bells on their nipple rings swung freely as they trotted down the dirt road, legs swinging in unison, dust spurting from between their horseshoe shod high-heeled boots. The sway of their tails matched the sway of their hips as they trotted along.
Today, he had decorated them with ostrich plumes sprouting from the top of their bridles. It was hard to see their eyes: besides the leather flaps of the blinders on the outside, they had a strip of leather glued between their eyes that came from the cross strap of the bridle down to the tip of the nose. That strip kept them from seeing anything except what was directly in front of them with both eyes; anything else they could see was with one eye or the other.
Tom swung his team behind the four naked women and pulled them to a stop. “Sit” he commanded. They dropped in unison to sit on their heels, the tips of their horseshoes digging into the dirt and their tails puddling behind them.
“Well, Jake, what do we have here?” Tom asked as he stepped out of the chariot and walked around in front of the lineup. “Pretty good set of lookers this time.
“Well, let’s get them haltered.”
He walked back to the chariot and took out a bundle of ropes. He turned them over in his hands and then walked up behind the first girl and slid them over her head, pulling the slipknot tight under her throat.
Her eyes widened and her shoulders hunched as she felt the rope around her head. Then she took a deep breath and relaxed in place, apparently not noticing the ten foot tail of rope that dangled between her breasts onto the ground at her feet.
Tom repeated the procedure with each of the other three girls, never once allowing them to see what he was doing by stepping in front of them. The second girl shook her head as he tightened the rope, and then licked her lips suggestively as her nipples hardened. The other two repeated the startled and shocked looks of the first one.
Eventually, he was done haltering the four fillies. He walked in front of them and gathered up the ropes, and then walked around dragging his captives at the ends of their tethers.
He knotted the ropes to a ring on the back of the chariot, and then got in without a backward glance. “Up!” he commanded.
The pair rose to their feet in a single, well practiced movement. He shook out the reins. “Giddy up!” They strained at the traces a moment getting the chariot moving before they moved into a high stepping walk, dragging the chariot behind them without apparent effort.
The four girls moved behind the chariot, their leads extended before them. Three of them still looked shell shocked from their first look at the two ponygirls. The other one, the brunette that had licked her lips, tried to bring her legs up the same way the team in front of her did. After stumbling a bit, she quit trying and trotted along with her companions.
The chariot led its four soon to be ponygirls around a building into a large yard. Tom guided his team to a hitching rack in front of a weathered wood building. He tugged on the ’girl’s reins, but it was hardly necessary. They slowed the chariot expertly as if they’d stopped here many times before, and then dropped to sit on their heels. In a moment they could have been statues. The rise and fall of their chests was a movement that was too slow and minute to disturb the bells hanging from their nipples.
The four girls tethered to the back of the chariot stopped as well, and then stood there, looking around with expressions that ranged from horror to resignation to unfeigned interest. There was quite a bit to look at, in fact.
The big weathered building in front of them was a barn. Part of the wall was in front of the hitching rack, but the rest of the wall was open, the door rolled to the side on a rail. Inside they could dimly see a row of stalls against the far-side wall, two of which held ponygirls standing facing the wall. Over to the right were two open horizontal wheels, each of which had several ponygirls attached to the spokes. Another ponygirl was restrained with her hands and arms at the corners of a vertical frame, being washed down by a groom.
Two other ’girls were also stretched out on one of the racks, but instead of being washed, they had what looked like enormous red balls in their mouths, and a circular device around their necks with little rods sticking up toward their heads.
The captives didn’t have very much time to examine the scenery, however. Three women walked out of the building at the other end of the yard.
“Hey Tom,” one of them called. “These the new catch?”
“Of course, Debbie,” Tom responded good-naturedly. “You’ve got it all figured out which of us gets which one?”
“Well, since you’re partial to blondes,” she drawled.
“Of course I am, minx,” he said as he slid an arm around her waist and pulled her into a clinch.
“Later, big guy,” she said, slipping easily out of his embrace, silver hair swirling with the movement. “Just you remember who you sleep with!”
“As if I’d forget,” he chuckled, giving her a light swat on her leather-clad bottom, which she wiggled in response.
“Seriously,” she said, “you’ve got the blonde. I’m going to take the bean-pole there,” she said, pointing at the brunette that used to be a man named Chuck. “Sally will take the girl with the original equipment, and Fran will take the one that thinks it’s a big joke.”
“That ought to do it,” he said as the other two trainers nodded vigorously. “Let’s get the prep done.” They unclipped control boxes from their belts and bent to check them. In a moment, they had the four hapless girls sorted out, and were busy setting in the control patterns they wanted.
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to get used to it,” Sally griped as she pushed buttons.
“What?” Fran asked absently.
“They’ve already turned off language. I like to be able to tell them things for the first few days.”
“Well, I don’t,” Fran said. “I’d rather they learned properly from the beginning. It’s a bit harder, but I think they turn out better.”
“You can always turn it back on if you want,” Debbie shrugged her shapely shoulders. “I agree with Fran, I don’t want.”
Debbie bent over to untie her trainee’s lead, exposing her tightly encased bottom. Tom took advantage for another swat. Debbie straightened up swiftly. “You’ll pay for that, big guy,” she laughed.
“When?” he pantomimed putting his tongue out and panting.
“Business before pleasure,” she chuckled, stroking the bulge in his pants. Then she turned around.
“Welcome to Stage One,” she told the uncomprehending brunette on the end of the lead rope as she gave it a tug.
Debbie led her trainee into the building she’d just walked out of. The first floor was one big room with stalls on the walls and various pieces of equipment scattered over the floor. She pulled the hapless girl along to a stall that had “Debbie # 1” on a sign on the far wall.
The stall itself was about a meter wide and two deep, separated from the next stall by a wooden wall that was about a meter and a half high. She reached around her charge and took a light chain from where it dangled from a ring set in the far wall, and clipped the end to the cinch in the pony’s halter.
The lock on the end of the chain had a fairly large barrel to contain the network interface. Once it was closed, it wouldn’t open unless it was instructed to from the network. This prevented the ponygirl from opening it herself. In fact, the controls were set so that if she tried she would get punished, with gradually increasing intensities until she got the idea and quit trying. The punishment routine was fairly clever. Once it had been triggered a few times, it would begin to act randomly: sometimes it would punish an attempt to remove the lock, and sometimes it wouldn’t. Intermittant negative reinforcement tended to set the pattern much more solidly than consistent negative reinforcement.
The ring was set about a meter high in the center of the wall, and the chain was about a meter and a half long, giving the ponygirl enough slack to stand and move around a little, and also to lie down with her head toward the wall and her feet to the center of the room.
The most unusual feature, however, was two sets of cocks and balls sticking out of the back wall. One of them had a small picture of a glass set above it; the other had a small picture of a bowl with a spoon.
The ’girl looked at the wall with a bemused expression on her face, her head bobbing toward the icon of the glass of water, and then jerking away. The movements were very slight; an average observer wouldn’t have noticed them.
Debbie’s mouth quirked upwards observing the byplay. The ’girl was clearly having a hard time associating sucking a cock with getting a drink of water. She moved back into the stall and gently stroked the ’girl’s neck, getting a startled reaction for her trouble.
“That’s a good girl,” she crooned, watching her charge’s reaction minutely. After a few strokes, the ponygirl relaxed. Debbie grabbed one of the bridle ropes and drove the ’girl’s head forward to the penis jutting from the wall. The ’girl’s eyes flared, but her mouth stayed stubbornly closed.
Debbie reached over and held her nose with her other hand. After a moment, the ’girl opened her mouth to breathe. Debbie lifted the penis and held it out, jamming it into her captive’s mouth.
The trainee tried to jerk away, pulling on the rope bridle still firmly held in her trainer’s grip.
Debbie started stroking the ’girl’s neck again. After a moment, she relaxed and began sucking. Water spurted out of the fake penis, startling the ’girl. She swallowed. After a few swallows, Debbie let loose of the halter. The ’girl kept sucking and swallowing for a minute. Then she quit and backed away from her drink.
“Good girl!” Debbie exclaimed, obviously pleased.
The ponygirl stood there, obviously thinking things over. Then she shrugged her shoulders slightly and took the second penis in her mouth and began sucking. A moment later she was rewarded when something spurted from the opening. This was a specially prepared mixture that contained everything the ponygirl needed. However, its main quality was that it tasted like jism. The ponygirl sucked away, either not aware that she was being conditioned to regard a man’s penis as a source of nourishment, or not caring in the slightest.
A few minutes later, she pulled her head back. Debbie caught her eye, pointed at the floor of the stall, and pantomimed sleeping. The girl sank to her knees and then lay down, getting herself tangled in the restraint chain and then untangling herself easily. She pulled a blanket over herself and promptly fell asleep.
Debbie frowned intently as she studied something apparent only to her, and then nodded as her mind sent a number of new instructions through the chips in her head onto the network.
Once the girl was firmly asleep, the trainer pulled the blankets off and rolled her onto her stomach. She slept easily through the maneuver.
“Next step,” Debbie thought. “Tail.” She carefully spread the ponygirl’s ass cheeks so she could inspect the tailbone. The surgeons had modified it so that there was now a circular socket flush with the skin. The socket was a bit more than a centimeter wide. Debbie probed at it with her finger; it resisted the probe solidly. Good enough.
She went to the supply room and returned a moment later with a brown tail. It had a shaft shaped to fit the socket, and a long core with a mass of brown hair falling from it. Debbie slid the shaft into the waiting socket, and felt it seat with a definite click.
Now for a systems check. She frowned a moment, setting up a series of codes with the chip embedded in her head, and was rewarded by seeing the tail thrash back and forth. She smiled. That tail was an amazing piece of machinery. It drew power from the ponygirl’s body heat, and it linked up with the chips installed in her brain. It remained to be seen how much control the ponygirl would be able to exert over it. Most of them eventually got a fair degree of control, easily enough to swish it fetchingly and keep it out of the way when they had to squat.
She drew the blanket back over the sleeping girl, and then uncovered her feet. She spent a few minutes flexing the girl’s feet, noting how limber they were and how much tension she could put on the muscles. Once she’d done that, she went to the storeroom again and came back with two half-shoes.
These were only the front part of a shoe. They were shaped to keep the ’girl’s heels three inches off the ground. They were also open toed; it wasn’t part of the program to cause more foot problems than necessary.
She slid a shoe on one of the sleeping ponygirl’s feet and fastened the top straps around her ankle. Then she fastened one restraining strap around the girl’s instep, and a second one around her heel. These two straps had small metal nubbins on the inside that would make it very uncomfortable for her to rest her weight on her heels. She swiftly did the other foot and sat back to examine her work.
Debbie did not like these devices, but admitted the necessity. Over the next several weeks they would increase the height of the training shoes until finally the ’girl was standing on her toes without strain. Until then, she would get lots of opportunity to sit, kneel or lie down to avoid damaging the tendons and ligaments while they were being shifted into the new configuration.
Once her feet had reshaped themselves, she would be fitted with hooves. Usually this meant that she would be ready for the auction block as soon as her feet finished stabilizing in another month or so.
Debbie grunted a bit as she next rolled the sleeping girl over so she was lying on her back. She ran a finger down the girl’s face, from the center of the forehead to the bridge of her nose. After a few strokes, she had the curve memorized.
Another trip to the storeroom brought a strip of leather and several tools and bottles. She squeezed a line of white gunk from a tube in a straight line from the center of the sleeping ’girl’s forehead to her nose, and then sprayed it with the contents of another canister. After a moment, she removed the hardened mold and laid it horizontally against the leather strip.
She frowned in concentration as she cut the leather along the line described by the mold. Then she painted a vertical stripe down the ’girl’s forehead and pressed the leather strip against it, holding it until the surgical glue set solidly.
The leather strip stood jauntily out of the girl’s face. It certainly didn’t improve her looks, Debbie thought to herself, but it helped in one very important respect. The ’girl could no longer use both eyes to look at something unless it was right in front of her.
As usual, she wondered whether it really worked as advertised. She’d been told during training that it forced the girls’ brains to discard old patterns and form new ones that unconciously associated with being ponygirls rather than independent humans. She’d never tried training ponygirls without it, and didn’t know anyone who had, so she retained a mild skepticism about the explanation.
Most of the ponygirls dealt with it, at least initially, by turning their heads to look at things. It made it very easy to tell where they had their attention focused. After a while, many of them simply made do with using whichever eye was able to see, and a few learned to look at two different things at once, one with each eye.
Now that she had the center blinder installed, it was time for the final adornment. She took a brass ring from the tray and tilted her subject’s head back so she could look up her nose. As expected, there was a hole in her septum. She slid the ring into the girl’s nose and rotated it so that the opening was on the bottom, then she took a pair of pliers and squeezed the ring so that the two ends met.
Debbie stood and surveyed her work. It was time for the ’girl to wake up. A moment later, the wench on the floor stirred and tried to stand, discovering her new footwear in the process. She staggered around for a moment, and then stabilized. Debbie nodded. Part of the sex change had been training in walking with heels. This one seemed to have been at least adequate.
Debbie stroked the ’girl’s shoulder and crooned into her ear until she relaxed. She unclipped the restraining chain and led the ponygirl out of the training area to one of the horizontal wheels. A moment later, the ’girl had her halter lead knotted to a ring on one of the spokes. The trainer hung a small monitor between her breasts.
The ground under this wheel had a series of low barriers radiating out from the center. The barriers would make the ’girl lift her legs in order to walk around the circle. The trainer turned a knob on a nearby pole, and the wheel began turning slowly. The tethered ’girl took a hesitant step forward, and encountered the first barrier. She lifted her leg over the obstacle, and then took another step, having to lift her leg over that obstacle as well.
Debbie watched her charge for a few minutes as she got the rhythm of lifting her legs in a drum major’s step. Then she turned the knob again, speeding up the carousel to a walk. The ’girl began stepping faster. A few minutes later Debbie punched several buttons on the keypad and walked away from the control panel. The robot monitor would take care of the ’girl’s exercise session.
While she had been dealing with her charge, Fran and then Tom had come out with their girls and hitched them to the wheel. Sally, however, hadn’t. Debbie walked back in to check on her new trainer.
Sally, it turned out, was doing nothing besides watching her girl on the monitor.
“What’s the problem?” Debbie asked.
“She won’t go to sleep so I can put her tail and shoes on,” Sally complained.
“Well, put her to sleep,” Debbie instructed.
“How?”
Debbie frowned for a moment. “Here, let me show you.” She took Sally’s controller and held it up so the other trainer could see what she did. “You do it like this,” she punched a few buttons, and the brunette in the stall suddenly stretched and lay down on the floor. A moment later, she had pulled a blanket over herself and was fast asleep.
Sally frowned at the plate of spaghetti in front of her, and then looked up. “I’m the new girl on the block. Why is it better not to give them understandable instructions?”
“What did your instructors tell you?” Debbie answered.
“That there were times we had to tell them in plain English. That’s why I’m confused.”
“Well, think about the time you spent with language shut off,” Fran put in from the other side of the table.
“What?” Sally exclaimed. “We never did that. Besides, how would they do it?”
“The same way they do it to the ponygirls. Through your chip.”
“I haven’t been chipped,” Sally responded without thinking. “You mean you have?”
“We all have,” Debbie said.
“Why?” Sally asked, honestly confused now.
“We each screwed up and got sentenced to community service. The chip comes with the sentence, and they don’t take it out. I was at a beer bust that turned violent.”
“Oh.” Sally seemed to shrink back a bit.
“Well, it’s not that bad. I spent the year in a labor platoon that was tasked for disaster cleanup. That was the year we had two hurricanes, a volcano, three major floods and two planned forest burns that got out of control. In between we worked on restoring the ecology in the non-agricultural reserve.”
“That sounds nasty.”
“Mostly it’s just hard work; no problem if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty and sleeping like a log at night. The problems are the supervisors and other people, and our platoon never had any problems with the civs. We were either away from them, or they were real glad we showed up to help dig them out of the mess. The ones that have it hard are the ones permanently posted where the people treat them like criminals.”
“Huh? But they are criminals.”
“So what does that have to do with it? You think that someone else’s screwup relieves you of the obligation to act like a responsible adult toward them? The nasty part is what the supervisors do with your chips.”
Sally’s eyes got real wide.
“That too,” Debbie laughed. “I lucked out. My platoon supervisor was hard as nails, but extremely fair. He knew the jobs cold, and felt it was his mission in life to try to turn us into law-abiding citizens. Besides which, I was his mistress for most of the year.”
“Huh?”
“The way the platoons work, they’re all single sex, and the supervisor is the opposite sex. So I had a male supervisor that was surrounded by a dozen young women. A dozen very horny young women. It makes for some competition, let me tell you!”
“So how’d you win out?”
“As I said, he was fair. I’d already decided that running around with people that liked to get drunk wasn’t a real good idea, and I’d also decided to get as much out of my year as I could. So when he decided to give me a test run, I didn’t get bent out of shape. When Tiana finished her term, I was the only candidate that really put out for him, and was doing well enough for him to use me as an example. I was,” Debbie continued, “only too happy to be made an example of – that way!”
“There are other ways?”
“Lots. There are things they don’t tell you about the chips. For example, there are data hookups. They’re not very high quality and they’re different for everyone. They also need an outside computer to make them do anything interesting.”
“Data hookups?”
“Yep. If I focus just right, it’s kind of like a data pad, except that the pads are a lot better. With a control computer for interface, he had direct access to each of us without having to use one of the control units. Anyway, as I was saying, the platoon supervisor was an expert at making people miserable through the chips. And other things.”
“Other things?”
“It wasn’t all bad, although I suppose it depended on what you thought was bad. One thing he did was condition all of us so that he could push a mental button, and we’d turn on and start to pleasure him sexually. It could get really bizarre at times; a couple of the girls were real argumentative until he conditioned them.
“He pushed his little mental button, and Bunny would tear off her skirt and fall on her back, legs spread. Peony just flipped her skirt up and fell onto hands and feet, legs spread and ass in the air ready to be taken from the rear. Of course, both of them were turned on big time. The rest of us were just conditioned to fall on our knees in front of him, pull his zipper and suck him off.”
Sally shook her head in wonder.
“Well, one of the two figured it out and learned to keep her mouth shut. When I finished, she was beginning to practice making nice to everyone. The other one was still falling on her knees and sticking her naked ass in the air.”
“Mine trained us to pleasure each other,” Fran chipped in. “He was too thoroughly married to be interested in having us do him.”
“Mine had us dressed in skirts the whole time,” Ted said. “She claimed it make it easier to change our diapers.”
“Change your diapers?” Sally said, aghast.
“That’s how she punished us. If we misbehaved, she rendered us incontinent for a day. Or longer if it was more serious.”
Sally took a deep breath. “I’m beginning to see,” she said. “I thought that community service was, well, not as, well …” she let the thought lapse.
“From what I’ve heard, those three were relatively mild,” Fran said. “If you want me to scare you to sleep…”
“No, thank you. But what does that have to do with training ponygirls?”
“It’s somewhat the same process,” Ted filled in. “The thing is, you learn that someone else is in control, and there’s nothing you can do about it other than suck up to them so they don’t do it to you. That’s the point: there are some things you just do the way the man says because your ass is grass if you don’t. It doesn’t have a reason, it doesn’t have any fairness, that’s simply the way it is. Period.
“Our ’girls are in the exact same position, except that there’s no way they can just gut it out and have it eventually end.”
“Besides which, how do you think they conditioned us?” Debbie asked rhetorically. “By the time my supervisor got done with me, it was totally automatic. One minute I’d be standing there, the next thing I knew I had his cock in my mouth and I was horny as hell. Those chips are great for reinforcement.”
“Oh. We learned about reinforcement, of course,” Sally said, a bit doubtfully.
“Did you learn how to reinforce or quench behaviors just using body language?”
“I saw one of the instructors do that! I couldn’t make anything of what he was doing,” she finished up a bit despondently. “But then, neither could anyone else. We thought he was faking it.”
“It’s definitely an advanced technique, girl. But it’s one that you’re really going to need without the chip to chip link. We can all do it to some extent, and we keep working to improve. It makes a real difference in how fast and how well we train them.
“Well, you’re part of the team now, for better or worse,” Debbie continued. “They twisted my arm so hard it practically dislocated my shoulder to get me to take you, and I’m darned if I’m going to let you fail just to spite them. You’re going to be learning a lot in the next few months.
“What I’m going to do is give your girl to Tom. Genetic females seem to react better to male trainers. With four trainers, we should be able to handle eight trainees, and we’ve only got six. Tom will have two new girls, and Fran will take over the one he’s just about finished with. You’ll work with me full time on improving your skills.”
Sally nodded. “I have to say I’m relieved. This is nothing like what I thought from my classes.”
The four trainers walked into the stage one stable and looked around. Their six ’girls were sleeping soundly, chained in their stalls.
Fran and Ted went directly to one of their charges, while Sally trailed Debbie to her lone ponygirl.
“So,” Debbie asked as they stood looking at the ponygirl sprawled on the stone floor of the stall, “what’s the next step?”
“Uh,” she hesitated, “they told me I’d have to learn it when I got here. It’s different for each training facility.”
Debbie looked briefly at the ceiling. “It’s not that different, girl,” she said quietly. “The next step is to wake her up and do the morning grooming. How do you do that?”
Sally picked up her control unit hesitantly. “With this?”
“Good answer. If she doesn’t wake up by herself, you can use that until you’ve got her trained to wake up on a verbal command. I don’t normally mess with their sleep patterns unless they’ve got a real problem, and then I check with an expert.”
Sally started to press buttons on her controller and then frowned. “It’s not working?”
“True. I turned it off until I get to know what you can and can’t do better. I’ll wake her up.” She pointed to the blanket covered form and said: “SHAZOOM!” The ponygirl promptly rolled over and stretched before opening her eyes.
“Shazoom?” Sally asked in confusion.
“I’m pulling your leg, kid. I felt like being theatrical; just pushing a button in my mind and having her wake up is so, you know, anticlimactic.”
“Now what?”
“Let’s just see what she does.”
What the ponygirl was doing was sitting up and clutching the blanket to keep herself covered from the stares of the two trainers.
“That’s a good girl,” Debbie told her brightly. The ponygirl sighed and then stumbled to her feet, dropping the blanket on the floor. She turned her head to look at each of the trainers around the piece of leather stuck to her forehead, and then her mouth quirked and she deliberately turned her back on them, stepped to the wall and started sucking on the water penis.
“What?”
“That’s all right,” Debbie said in a soothing voice. “There’s no reason why she shouldn’t have a drink when she gets up. Unclip the chain when she backs away, and then bring her out of the stall.”
A moment later, the nameless pony drew her head back from the bizarre waterspout. Sally reached around and unclipped the restraining chain from the halter’s friction lock and let it drop.
She brought the ’girl out of the stall.
“Good,” Debbie said. “Notice that she’s high stepping. Now bring her over to the grooming station.”
The grooming station was a keyhole shaped slot in the floor with short posts sticking up at the corners. Each of the posts had an open manacle sticking out of it. Sally led the ’girl over to the pair of posts that straddled the wide part of the keyhole, and swatted her lightly on the inside of her thighs so she spread her legs. As soon as her legs got to the posts, the manacles snapped shut around them, securing her.
“Good girl!” Sally stroked the startled pony until she calmed down. “Now down we go,” she continued in a firm voice, pushing on the hapless captive’s back and holding her hips in the front. After a moment of resistance, the ponygirl got the idea and bent over, reaching out to stabilize herself with her arms. They came down close enough to the other set of posts for the restraints to snap into place with a loud click.
“Next step?” Debbie asked.
“She should evacuate,” Sally said a bit primly.
“Exactly correct. How would you do it?”
“Stroke her belly?” Sally didn’t seem inclined to hurry the procedure.
“Put off a bit?” Debbie teased, and watched her newest trainer turn beet red.
“Well, get over it. You’ll do your share of shoveling shit until you quit being embarrassed. However, I’m going to wait a minute to see if she evacuates naturally.”
“Why?”
“Mostly to see if she’s figured it out, and is willing to do it.” A moment later, she said, “Good! See that?”
“What?”
“She’s straining to break her toilet training and let loose while we’re standing here watching. Now she’s turning as red as you were a moment ago.”
Sally watched, fascinated in spite of herself. A moment later, the ’girl managed to let loose, the stream of golden liquid falling into the hole in the floor. In the middle, her bowels moved as well.
“I didn’t think she could turn any redder,” Sally said, admiringly.
“She’ll get over it,” Debbie retorted. “Bring her up and groom her.”
Sally studied the controls on the wall a moment, and then twisted one. The four pads on which the shackled beauty’s hands and feet rested rose from the floor, lifting her a half meter into the air. The brunette shifted around a bit before she steadied down. When the posts stopped rising, her back was level because the front pads had come up farther than the rear ones.
“Well, groom her,” Debbie said, keeping her tone light so the ponygirl wouldn’t react.
The shower head was on the end of a flexible pipe. Sally unclipped it from the wall and wet her down from head to tail. Then she went over the ’girl again, applying soap and working up a good lather. The horizontal nude purred in pleasure as her groom stroked her skin.
Then Sally rinsed her off, using a spray setting. Her subject stretched a bit as the water fell off of her back, and streamed off of her breasts and down her arms, legs and tail. Once all the soap was gone, she took a drier off the wall and proceeded to blow hot air all over her subject, beginning with her head and ending with her tail. As a final touch, she combed out the brunette’s short hair and tail, finishing with a few strokes of the brush on her pubic thatch.
“We’re done?” Sally asked as she hung up the drier.
“Yes. Bring her down and take her back to her stall on all fours.”
Sally snugged the halter around the ponygirl’s head, and then walked over to the wall and twisted the knob on the wall, causing the pads to slowly sink back to their position flush on the floor. When they got there, the shackles sprang open. Sally took one of the ropes that made up the halter in her hand and pulled the startled girl horizontally, not giving her a chance to rise to her feet.
The puzzled girl pulled back a moment, and then hesitantly put her right hand forward, followed by her left leg. The she switched sides. In a few paces, she had the rhythm down and followed Sally docily into her stall. Sally clipped the chain to the friction lock on her halter and said: “Good girl!” as she scratched her behind the ears. Then she stepped back.
“What’s next?”
“Breakfast. How would you do it?”
“I guess wait and see if she does it herself,” Sally answered readily.
“Exactly correct. While you’re waiting, think of a name for her.”
The two trainers stood back and watched. After a moment, the nameless ponygirl turned her head to look back at them with her left eye. Then she snorted and stood up letting the short chain pull her forward until she stood at the wall. She took a quick suck of water and then settled into sucking on the food penis.
“Good. We’ll do Dawn Song next.”
As the two trainers walked away, the nameless ponygirl who had once been a man named Chuck reflected on what had happened, all the while still sucking on the penis that provided her food.
It wasn’t, he thought, as if he didn’t know what a ponygirl was or how she was supposed to behave. His community service battalion had one; the supervisor used her to get around and to pull the chariot they were tethered to on their way to and from their assigned street lamps.
So he, no she corrected herself, she, was going to be a ponygirl. There were worse things; he’d seen a couple of pets once. So the program seemed to be simple: suck up to the trainers and ingratiate herself with them. It wasn’t as if it was a new idea. Sucking up and ingratiation were things she had done as long as she could remember; it had gotten her out of a lot of trouble. Do what they trained her to do and see what she could get away with.
Sally looked at Debbie in puzzlement as they walked to Dawn Song’s stall. Debbie saw the expression and explained: “Tom has got two new girls and one that is just about ready to go to stage 2. Three is a bit much, so we’re going to do her morning routine for him.”
When they arrived at the Tom # 2 stall, Dawn Song was already standing up, her tail swishing with impatience.
Dawn Song was a natural redhead who stood close to two meters tall, partially because she was standing on her toes as if she was wearing heels, which of course she wasn’t. Like all of the ponygirls, she had relatively small breasts, on the low end of a B cup. Otherwise, she was very solidly built, with the glow of good health that came from exercise.
Debbie noted that the blankets in her stall had been neatly folded and stacked in a back corner. Debbie reached up as the ponygirl brought her head back making it easy to unclip the chain. Then she pranced out of the stall and high stepped over to the grooming station and fell on her hands and feet, leaving an open mouthed Sally in her wake.
Sally closed her mouth as the shackles snapped on Dawn Song’s wrists and ankles. A moment later, the ’girl flipped her tail up on her back, squatted down and let loose.
“That’s…”
“A bit much, pet?” Debbie chuckled. “Remember I said she’s about ready to go to stage 2. In fact, I could take her over today except there’s a couple more things we want to try with her first.”
“Why did you let her go by herself?”
“It depends on the ’girl. Dawn Song is still the same overly aggressive personality that got herself sentenced to this. The sex change has toned her down a bit, but she’s still going to take the bit in her mouth if we let her. It’s easier on everyone to have her take the initiative on her routine.
“We’ve got one pair in Stage 2 that puts their own tack on and hitches themselves to the chariot. We don’t even bother to chain them in their stall.”
“I don’t understand?”
“You’ve had pets, right?” Sally nodded. “Do you train one so it can’t make a move unless you’re there to supervise it? No you don’t. You train it so it does as much of what you want by itself, without your having to get more involved than the activity warrants.
“Ponygirls aren’t dogs or horses. They’ve still got a full set of human style brains, even though they can’t use human style language. As long as they’re inclined to be cooperative, we let them do as much of the routine as they want and can handle.
“Of course, that depends on their staying cooperative. Dawn isn’t likely to be a problem as long as we give her the opportunity to take the initiative.”
“So that’s why you were talking about conditioning last night.”
“Exactly. I’m going to give Dawn Song her final exam tonight by leaving the chain off. If she stays in her stall, she’s ready. If she doesn’t, it’s no big deal either. We just keep her chained up. In fact, she’s intelligent enough to probably connect the dots.”
“So she’d stay put even without the restraint chain?”
“Most likely. It’s hard to know what’s going on between their ears without language, but there really aren’t that many options. If she wanders off where we can lay hands on her easily, she knows she’s going to get punished, and she won’t like it one bit. She’s intelligent enough to know that we’ll catch her if she tries to escape. Besides, what would she do if she did manage to escape? With the chip in her head, we can find her any time we want her, and she’s not really adapted to surviving in the wilderness.”
“So we’ve got all the bases covered.”
“That’s certainly true for the more intelligent and cooperative ones. On the other hand, we get a lot of stupid or obnoxious ones here too. The sex change does tone down most of the real troublemakers, but there’s no cure for stupidity.”
Dawn Song let out a rather plaintive sounding whinny.
“She wants us to get on the stick and groom her,” Debbie grinned, nodding at the pinioned ponygirl.
“That’s a pretty good sounding whinny,” Sally said as she walked over to the cleaning equipment.
“She practiced. That’s the next thing we’re going to train our new pony to do. That’ll tell me a lot about exactly how fast she picks things up.”
“This is nothing like my tutor explained,” Sally muttered as she reached for the spray nozzle.
“There’s one thing first,” Debbie interjected before Sally could turn on the water.
“Huh?”
“Sex.” Debbie grinned at her student’s stunned expression. “Use this on her until she has an orgasm.” She picked an object off the wall and tossed it to Sally, who caught it and then blushed again as she examined it.
The vibrator was just a plastic cylinder with a short cable and control box attached. Sally took a deep breath and then started brushing her captive’s sex. In a moment, the ’girl went rigid as her juices started flowing, and the musky odor of a female in heat rose in the air. Sally switched the vibrator to low and shifted to using it to stimulate the aroused animal in front of her. A moment later, she brought it up and began easing it into the hole, listening to the sounds of her subject panting in arousal.
She thrust it in and turned it on high and began fingering the little nubbin at the top of the ’girl’s slit. Suddenly Dawn Song let out a bray like a donkey, startling Sally into a step back and not incidentally jerking the vibrator out.
“Dawn has quite a sense of humor,” Debbie said. “She trained herself to do that a couple of weeks ago. Well, she’s done.”
The younger woman shook her head as she reached for the spray nozzle again. “I don’t understand,” she said as she turned the warm water on and began lathering her charge. “So what am I missing?”
“She can’t pleasure herself,” Debbie said. “The chip is set so that if she touches her cunt or breasts she doesn’t get any arousal out of it. In fact, if she does while she’s aroused, it snaps her out of it. The only way she gets sexual relief is if we do it for her.”
“So you dole sex out as a reward for good behavior.”
“Well, not exactly. We use the chip to associate sex with pleasing her handlers. It’s not immediate enough to use for reinforcement for anything specific. As long as she keeps up a good attitude, we see she gets off regularly.”
Sally thought for a while as she finished soaping the body in front of her. “Wouldn’t she tend to imprint on her groom rather than her owner, then?”
“Some do, some don’t. Remember she’s a human, not an animal, so it’s not all that cut and dried.”
“Take her back to her stall and tack her up. Bridle, bit and waistband. We’ll put her on the endurance wheel for a couple of hours while we take care of our trainee.”
A few minutes later, Sally led the ponygirl out of the stable to one of the wheels. She snapped the two straps from one of the spokes to the ’girl’s waistband so she was standing in front of the spoke. Then she attached the reins to a column that jutted up from that same spoke. She walked over to a control box on the side of the stable and studied it for a moment before pushing a few buttons. Behind her, the mechanical driver shook Dawn Song’s reins and said “Walk!” Dawn dug her hooves into the dirt and pulled forward, causing the waistband to tighten around the muscles in her waist. The carousel began its slow turn, giving the straining ponygirl exactly the right amount of drag to simulate the carriage she would shortly be trained to pull.
When Sally walked back in, Debbie held out a pair of what looked like bracelets. “Here, put these on,” she said. The puzzled trainee slid the circlets onto her wrists and snapped them shut, noticing that they fit snugly but not tightly.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
“Well, I was thinking about your not having a chip last night, and then I remembered these,” Debbie told her. “Every once in a while some research company comes up with a brainstorm about how we can be more efficient. I’m told these are used to control machinery when the operator can’t be right there. They thought they would be better than the control units for most things. We gave them a good workout.
“They’re quite a bit better than poking at the control units, but they aren’t quite as good as the chips, so we put them in storage and forgot about them. Since you don’t have a chip, I thought that you might find them useful.”
Sally looked at them again. “They don’t look all that special. How do they work?”
“I’m told it’s biofeedback. They sense the tension in your muscles or something. There are two circles of eight feedback points on each wrist where they can stimulate your nerves so you feel heat, cold, or pressure there. They’re hooked up to the network just like our chips and the ponygirls’ chips. There’s a training program; it takes a few hours to get used to them and get some fluency.
“What I’ve done is reactivated your control unit, except for the execute button. You can work on using it to put programs into your unit, and I’ll check them before you execute. We’ve still got the simulator program; you can work on that tonight for an hour or so. You should be up to speed in around a week.”
“I must say,” Sally’s father said after the family had finished welcoming her back and they had some time to themselves, “I didn’t quite expect the glowing report I got back on your progress with a real team.”
“Why not?” She looked at her father with a bit of a frown.
“Unlike a lot of people, I did some research when I started getting pushed back on getting you a summer internship.”
“So you knew that the trainers were all convicted criminals,” Sally said flatly.
“Ex criminals for the most part. The Bureau has reasonable standards; they all had “I think they’ve learned their lesson” evaluations from their team leaders. I’d have dropped it if they hadn’t.”
“Well, that certainly matches the discussions we had over dinner! I had no idea that the labor platoons were that nasty.”
“They’re not intended to be a vacation. So you learned something?”
“Some things might be fun, but they’re simply too risky.”
“That’s one step toward learning to pick your battles wisely,” her father nodded in satisfaction. “So how did you manage without a chip?”
“Manipulator cuffs. They wouldn’t let me take the set I was using with me, so I made sure I got the manufacturers and part numbers. As well as the computer interfaces and the software.”
“It’s that complicated?”
“There’s a lot they don’t tell you,” his daughter said. “It seems that every set of chips works a bit differently, and it’s the software that adapts. What I found is that you can’t do a whole lot without a computer in the loop.”
“This works,” her father motioned to the controller sitting on his desk.
“Well, yes. They tailor all the basic stuff and write it into the chip’s memory when it’s installed. What you can’t do is training the way the trainers do it.”
If you enjoyed this story, please e-mail the author and let him know. He likes to hear from his loyal fans, and it gives him some motivation to keep writing this stuff. Of course, if you're a publisher and you'd like to buy some of these stories, please let him know. The starving author in the garret makes a great story, but it sucks in real life.