Ming
Ming - Chapter Two
"What is your sexual protocol?"
"I may engage in sexual activity only with the express consent of my end user for the purpose of providing him with pleasure," I recited it slowly. Something about it didn't seem right and I frowned.
"Then why did you perform oral sex on Lucy and her friend just a few hours ago, Ming?" Peterson asked reasonably.
"I...I..." I searched for an answer and found that I could not find one. I felt as if I couldn't breathe suddenly and a surge of panic rushed through my body.
"Mmmm...that's a problem." Nance was making some notations on her clipboard.
"Ming." Peterson caught my eyes and I stared at him. "Listen carefully. Yellow Gambit Six Nine Six Access."
I blinked as if I hadn't heard him. I found myself lying down on the glass table and I sat up slowly, feeling very refreshed and my recent distress all but forgotten.
"Shall we continue, Ming?" Peterson looked up from his clipboard and I nodded. "Please list your sexual protocols."
"Priority One: I may engage in sexual activity when required by Technical Services to ensure the proper operation of my sexual functions. Priority Two: I may engage in sexual activity to alleviate conflict with my Safety and/or Conduct protocols. Priority Three: I may engage in sexual activity with the express consent of my end user for the purpose of providing him or her with pleasure."
"Better," Nance said with a nod. "I'll get a note off to Simmons. He's not going to like taking a hit on this."
"It's always the little things," Peterson agreed. "Well, make sure he knows the protocols were in place. It was just a parity error; she knew what she was supposed to do, but not why."
"Hmmph," Nance grunted. "It's easy to forget these things need to know why."
"We're not building toasters, Nance!" Peterson laughed. "Ming, would you like to be punished?"
"Have I offended you?" I felt suddenly very contrite and I just knew I had done something wrong. I looked down at my feet and clasped my hands behind my back.
"No, Ming, you haven't offended me at all. In fact, you've pleased me a great deal and I'd like to reward you." Peterson's face was kind. "Punished is perhaps the wrong word. Would you like to be spanked?"
I felt a great flood of relief and I smiled eagerly. I would enjoy nothing more than being spanked right then. It seemed I'd been waiting for days, ever since I'd first awoken in that strange bed, to be spanked. "Yes...Master." It seemed proper to add that title and I slipped to my knees, bending over to kiss his feet. "Please spank me."
"Vitals?" Peterson looked at Nance.
"Looks good. Her pulse, respiration, blood pressure, everything is going up nicely," Nance shrugged.
"She's almost too eager." The man rubbed his bearded chin. "Call up the purchase order, what does it say?"
"Okay, hold on..." The woman pushed some keys on the small pad. "Uh, oh...no, she's right on target I think. She's SubMas Level 9; Em Response is a pos straight eight...PTh 1...PTo 9...Jesus, that's cruel." Nance shook her head. "You're going to have to break the skin to get an endorphin response."
"Yeah." Peterson frowned a bit. He didn't look particularly happy and I was worried that I was displeasing him somehow.
"Master?" I was still at Peterson's feet.
"Yes, Ming?"
"I am sorry, Master." I kept my eyes down and my lower lip trembled slightly.
"Oh, no!" He laughed. "It isn't your fault, Ming. Look, maybe we should explain..."
"Do you think that's wise?" Nance broke in. "Some things are best left to the customer's discretion, don't you think?"
"Yeah, but well...We need to do it, so she'll have some downtime anyway. If it becomes a problem we'll fix it, better to find out now. This will come up again, I'm sure. Make a note of her system time and we'll have conditioning run a linear memory purge if we have to."
"You're the boss," Nance sighed.
"Ming," Peterson looked down at me. "You're made for pleasure..."
"Someone's idea of pleasure," Nance interjected softly. I glanced at her and saw some compassion in her eyes.
"Quiet..." Peterson continued, "You're a Level 9 Submissive/Masochist, which is peak. Your Emotional Responses are topped out, everything from fear and love, to shame and pride and all the stuff in between. Normally these responses would be graduated, on a sort of curve if you want to imagine it that way. Fear might be low and Love might be high, or vice versa, depending on the effects desired. This also helps avoid unnecessary emotional conflict. Do you understand?"
I shook my head. "I think I should love my fear. I do not think that I feel...distressed."
Nance laughed. "You think the customer knows something we don't?"
"Series IV." Peterson grinned. "I love these things. Okay. Good, Ming. Now the other thing is that your Pain Threshold is set very low. A normal healthy adult human is about a 4 or 5, right in the middle. Yours is significantly lower than that, like a young child's. You will feel virtually everything and it will hurt a great deal. Think of it as having supersensitive skin, but of course it goes much deeper than that."
I nodded, remembering how much just having blood drawn had hurt. It had seemed like the worst thing in the world. But at the same time...
"Your Pain Tolerance, however, is set very high, maxed out in fact. Everything hurts, but your body is able to withstand it to a degree that would far exceed anything I or Nance, or any other normal person could take. This doesn't mean you enjoy it, that's a function of your SubMas conditioning. Pain Tolerance means that your nervous system itself has been modified so that your body will resist taking normal defensive measures, such as passing out or going into shock. Your mind too is affected by this, creating in essence the ability to accept pain, to rationalize it, if you will. This combination allows you to function under extremely adverse conditions."
"It's important you understand that Threshold and Tolerance are not the same thing; they don't even necessarily go hand in hand, although most healthy people possess a certain equilibrium," Nance said, trying to explain. "In your case there has been a deliberate effort to separate them."
She looked at me and I questioned Peterson, returning to his previous statement. "Then there is an increased risk of injury?" I asked and when Peterson nodded, I came to the logical conclusion... "That is acceptable." I smiled up at him. "Will you hurt me now, please?"
"Welcome to SubMas 9..." Nance whispered, somewhat sadly, I thought.
"Stand up, Ming." Peterson gestured and I rose to my feet, wondering a little petulantly if I was ever going to get spanked.
He turned me around and I felt his warm hands on my back, touching my soft, golden skin as he examined me closely. I had not so much as a mole now, not a mark or scratch. My body was as smooth as a baby's, tender and new.
"We'll do this tonight. I'll get that Series II training unit they keep down in Behavioral Sciences, it's a Level 5 DomSad." He looked at Nance. "Unless you want to do it?"
"No thanks," she chuckled ruefully. "Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid." She glanced at her clipboard. "Three days you think? We're already two days overdue on this one."
"I know." Peterson shrugged. "The delivery date is only an estimate anyway. It's in the small print. I'll do the paperwork on it." The man looked at the clock on the wall behind him. "I guess we have some time to kill, do you want to take Ming back to her room? I'll set everything up for tonight, say 1900 hours, we'll use the lab in 3b, it's empty and soundproofed."
Nance nodded and jerked her head. "Let's go for a walk, Ming. Get dressed."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
I smiled briefly at Peterson and followed Nance out of the QA Lab and into the corridor.
"Did you understand everything Peterson was saying?" she asked me as we walked along a broad, open-air skyway. The facility was largely stainless steel, aluminum and glass, very modern and beautiful, but somewhat cold aesthetically, I thought.
"I think so. You're going to test me. My response to BDSM."
"Yes, that's right. Believe it or not, that's your primary function. All the rest...the skills, the knowledge, even your appearance to a certain extent, is secondary to your ability to perform as desired in a specific environment. In your case a Dominant/submissive environment, and more precisely in a Sadist/masochist relationship." Nance looked at me, pausing and leaning on a railing a thousand feet above the city proper sprawled out below. "How does that make you feel?"
"It makes me very happy." I didn't hesitate; the emotion was clear and strong inside me. "I'm nervous, a little afraid that I will not know exactly how to satisfy my end user, my...owner...but I'm sure he will teach me." I glanced at the woman beside me. "Will he?"
"Oh, I'm sure he will," Nance nodded, but she didn't seem pleased.
We started walking again, slowly.
"Why does that bother you?" I asked her.
"I started working here right out of medical school. The money was good and the work was...interesting. I wasn't curing cancer or anything, but I was creating something new, you know?"
I didn't, but I let her continue.
"We were building the Series I then, mostly. The Series II was just coming online and it was exciting. But they were just...things. Not real, not like people at all. The Series I especially. They weren't so much conditioned as just wiped. They had so much hardware..." Nance gestured helplessly. "Well, you saw those two this morning. Robots really, the body is just a life support system for the CPU. I suppose that was natural though, you know, hybrid's getting us from the Replicant era into the Biogenisis age."
We turned towards the pyramid shaped enclosure where my rooms were located.
"Anyway, Series II was better and then Series III was a real breakthrough. We were finally able to teach, instead of just program. They started living up to their potential. The hardware requirements lessened significantly and software started catching up with genetics, so that the body itself could be programmed. Bio-Dynamics wasn't just theoretical anymore, it was applied."
She paused, looking at me as if she expected something. A question perhaps, but I was content to listen and I only nodded.
"Anyway, the Series III units are still robots, still limited in a lot of ways," she continued. "Not just by design, but by the technology required for mass production."
Nance stepped onto the lift and I joined her, although it was really only intended for one person. We stood very close together, facing each other and my eyes were level with her full breasts, pressing against the white fabric of her uniform. She was looking down at me as we were gently pushed upward along the Plexiglas tube.
"But you, Ming..." she whispered. "The only limits on you are put in place out of fear."
"I don't understand." I smiled up at her.
"Series IV is a new race, a new life form." She put her hands on my waist. "Series V will have no hardware at all and Series VI..." she shrugged. "They will be children, raised from the womb to perform specific duties. Conditioning will begin in the uterus and never stop, do you understand?"
"I think so." The lift stopped at my level, 1244-Gold, but neither of us moved. I had my hands around her neck. "You are frightened."
Nance nodded. "We are all frightened..." she said as I pulled her face down to mine, "...of you."
I kissed her deeply. I knew it was what Nance wanted, had wanted all day long, and yesterday too...since she'd first seen me.
"You do not have to be afraid," I whispered. "I am just a person." I led her by the hand, pausing to open my room with my palm print on the scanner.
"Ming, I..." Nance stared at me and I suddenly found her very attractive.
I hadn't noticed before really. She might have been 40 years old, with a handsome face, strong and serious. Her black hair had a few early gray strands starting here and there. She seemed fit and firm and I wanted her, not just sexually, but emotionally. I had a very large hole inside me someplace, indefinable and irresistible. Nance could fill it, I thought, if only for a brief while. That would be enough.
"Shhh...I know you want me, Nance." I smiled and dropped to my knees as the door slid shut with a whisper. "When I kissed that girl, before, on her sex..." I tilted my head, fixing my eyes on hers as I slid my hands up the woman's legs, across the back of her knees and along her thighs, "...I could sense your desire."
I pulled her panties down, drawing the nylon taut so that she could step out of them.
"You don't have...to...ohhh!" Nance hissed between her teeth as my mouth found her pussy. I'd lifted her skirt high enough to expose the woman's sex and I sucked her tiny clit eagerly. "Oh yes! Ming! Lick me...Please!"
Her fingers were in my hair and I tickled between her labia, engorged with excitement. I could taste her sexual energy, the small dampness already starting and I stiffened my tongue, pressing it inward as she clutched me to her.
Nance slowly backed towards my small bedroom, leading me as I shuffled awkwardly along on my knees, refusing to stop my efforts at bringing the woman pleasure. She sat down finally on the bed, falling onto her back, and I took advantage, pushing her legs up so I could tongue her asshole as well. It gave me even greater pleasure to do that for her, licking at her anus and working my tongue inside while my thumb flicked over her clit gently.
"Ming..." she breathed as I wormed my tongue inside her anus, feeling delightful shame at doing something so blatantly taboo.
I pushed a finger against her tight sphincter, licking around it as I pushed inside. I did the same with my other hand, working a finger inside her cunt, fucking both of her holes slowly at first, both of us enjoying the sensation.
"Perhaps we should have knocked." A man's voice startled me, and especially Nance who bolted upright with a little gasp.
My fingers were still pushed inside the woman's body, even as she tried to pull away from me. Her voice was breathless and tinged with embarrassment. "Dr. Chartre! I'm...uh, excuse me!" My fingers came free of Nance's pussy and anus and she pulled a sheet up to cover her immodesty.
I licked my fingers slowly, looking over my shoulder at the 60ish man, balding and austere, with a younger man and a woman behind him. The female seemed to be smirking a little, I thought. I'd remained kneeling beside the bed and I felt a delicious shiver of shame run through me at having been caught in so compromising a situation, but it was only a small one. I didn't know these people after all, so why should I care what they thought?
"Edward, I believe you have..." Dr. Chartre smiled as his male companion, a well dressed man with close cropped blonde hair, stepped forward, holding Nance's forgotten panties delicately between his thumb and forefinger.
"Perhaps we could talk to her in the other room, Director?" the woman suggested softly. She was an extremely attractive young woman with long red hair. "I suspect Dr. Nance would like to freshen up."
Nance blushed as she took her panties back with trembling fingers. "Thank you," she managed to say. The man nodded and smiled, averting his gaze like a gentleman.
"Of course. Ming, will you come with us, please?" Dr. Chartre gazed down at me and I stood, following them all into the other room, leaving Nance alone on the bed.
Dr. Chartre took one of my two chairs and gestured for me to take the other, while his assistants stood nearby, leaning against the wall. I was vaguely aware of Nance's sex juices still damp on my face and I resisted the urge to wipe my lips with the back of my hand. Instead I merely looked at the older man with some small curiosity.
"Ming, this is Dr. Alan Chartre. He's the Director of this facility and one of the real pioneers in Biogenesis," the young man spoke first. "My name is Edward and this is Lynn."
"Are you doctors?" I looked from Edward to Lynn and back.
He shook his head. "No. I'm in Marketing and Lynn is with Public Relations. I do numbers and she..." he offered the woman a smile, "...she's a people person."
Lynn returned his smile at that. She really was amazingly beautiful, flawless in fact. Her eyes were a dark, and bluish like smoke, and she stared into mine, as if trying to capture some hidden part of me. Her face, her body, everything about her seemed perfect. Too perfect, the way I was, and it became immediately obvious.
"She is like me," I said.
"What do you mean?" Dr. Chartre sat back in his chair.
"She is Series IV." I smiled. "Like me."
"That's right, Ming. Very good," Dr. Chartre nodded. "Lynn was the eleventh unit produced and the first one to be commissioned. Her predecessors were prototypes, not completely functional. But Lynn, she is the first." The man looked at her with what seemed to be paternal pride, as much as anything else.
"And you, Ming, are her younger sister," Edward said to me. "You're the 27th unit in the production series."
"I heard you had some free time, Ming." Dr. Chartre glanced at the closed door to my bedroom. "So I thought we could have a little chat. I apologize for the timing."
"Nance was afraid," I shrugged. "I desired to comfort her."
"What was she afraid of, Ming?" Lynn narrowed her eyes at me.
"Me." I stared back at her. "Us."
"That's not an uncommon reaction." Edward was speaking now. "Every Series introduction has experienced some adverse..."
Dr. Chartre held up his hand and the younger man stopped talking. "Have you studied history at all, Ming?" I shook my head and he continued with a wry smile. "No, of course not. That isn't an interest we promote here, really. Like current events. Have you watched the news at all? Browsed the internet or anything?"
"No sir, I did not..." I shrugged, "...I did not know I should. That I was...allowed..."
"Well, it's a matter of choice, really. Lynn," he glanced at her, "likes to keep up with fashion, I think. Some small percentage of my budget goes straight into her closet." He laughed and Lynn actually blushed slightly. "But we like it that way." Dr. Chartre leaned forward, staring into my eyes. "We like her that way," he emphasized.
I nodded, without really understanding why he would tell me these things.
"But not everyone agrees with us, Ming." Dr. Chartre opened his hands, as though pleading a case before me. "Some people think that what we're doing is wrong. That we're creating a slave race, or at the very least...What was that phrase the General Secretary used, Edward?" The older man turned as his assistant spoke.
"He said we were ‘...Exploiting the desperation of an economically vulnerable people.'" Edward shook his head. "The Vatican has formally opened an inquiry into whether the Series IV units have souls or not."
"Let us hope we do not," Lynn giggled. "It will save us a lot of suffering later." She winked at me and I had to smile.
"That same Vatican, you might be interested to know, has recently placed an order for 15,000 Series II units," Dr. Chartre smiled at the irony. "For some two hundred years, from the late 19th century until this one, the Church was pretty much out of the missionary business."
"There just weren't any more New Worlds," Edward interjected with a small gesture, earning a nod from his superior.
"And now there are. A whole galaxy full of them," the older man continued. "From a sociological standpoint, everything is coming full circle; it's a very exciting time. Some even say the inquisition is coming back, complete with heretics and witches." Dr. Chartre chuckled, but I sensed it wasn't entirely good humored. "Guess who the devil is going to be?"
The door to my bedroom opened just then, slowly, and Nance peered out. "Pardon me, Director. If you'll excuse me..." She glanced at the door exiting my quarters, obviously wishing to leave without further embarrassment.
"Of course, Doctor. We hadn't meant to intrude on you like that." He smiled at Nance. "I'm sure you have things to do."
Nance nodded with relief and began walking across the room.
"But, before you go..." Dr. Chartre's words stopped the woman in her tracks, "...perhaps you would explain why Ming thinks you're afraid of her?"
Nance turned to stare at me and I looked back at her. I honestly didn't understand the emotions that passed across her handsome features before she regained control of herself.
"I...I'm not sure I understand, Director."
"Oh, it's simple enough, Dr. Nance. Ming feels that you're afraid of her, and the other Series IV units, for some reason. I'd just like to know why." The older man sat back and watched as Nance tried to compose her thoughts.
She glanced at Edward and then at Lynn, briefly, before turning her attention back to Dr. Chartre. We all stared at her. "I was trying to explain to Ming that...that, I wasn't sure she was...constrained in her actions, in her...potential...by, uh, morality," Nance said slowly, working hard to find the right words.
"I assume by ‘she' you mean all of our Series IV units?" Dr. Chartre asked.
"Yes sir. I mean, they're a new...species, really. Every time we've tried to remake nature, the effects have been...unpredictable..." she had been staring at the man. Now she looked at me again, "...even dangerous."
"That's ridiculous!" Edward spoke up. "The protocols have been under development for years. Series IV requirements were based on the lessons learned from the Replicant Uprising. They've been defined, refined, and approved by everyone from Congress to the New Harvard Compact. You work in QA, you've seen them tested, right?"
"Yes," Nance allowed. "And I've seen them fail." She stared hard at Edward. "Two days ago we had a Series IV rape a maintenance technician."
"Raquel," Lynn sighed.
"Yes." Nance glanced at Lynn then turned back to face Dr. Chartre. "Your Raquel used her fist on the poor girl, a young woman who was six weeks pregnant as I understand it."
"Not anymore," Lynn spoke again and her voice had a touch of humor, I thought.
"We're still investigating the cause of that," Edward said defensively. "Unfortunately, the unit in question hasn't been entirely cooperative. We are, however, reasonably sure that it wasn't a flaw in her protocols. More than likely a stage III conditioning process was faulty."
"But the protocols are intended to override everything, don't you see? Even bad conditioning." Nance shook her head. "And they don't."
"You can't say that based on one incident," Edward declared.
"It's not just one incident." Nance stared at him. "The Series failure rate is almost twenty percent, half of those are unrecoverable. For every four units we put on a shuttle, one more is put on the autopsy table in Biodyne, or plugged into the machines down in Behavioral Sciences."
"And when Series III came online the numbers were similar." Edward threw up his hands. "These statistics have been modeled since the industrial revolution, Doctor, none of this is unexpected."
"The Series III is hardwired to prevent certain functions, specific undesirable actions. The Series IV is not. You're comparing apples and oranges here, sir."
"A certain amount of unpredictability is desired by our customers." The Director smiled. "Human unpredictability," he stressed. "Replicants were unpredictable because of processing anomalies, creating an artificial randomness to their behavior. The whiplash of that experience gave us the clones, the Series I, which were so completely uniform and devoid of emotional expression that we might as well have been selling Barbies to babies."
"I understand, Director," Nance said quietly. "I just..."
"Series I was an absolute disaster as far as the public's acceptance, and following hard on the Replicant Uprising?...tsk-tsk..." the older man clucked his tongue. "This was a dying industry. Do you know what saved us, Doctor?"
Nance said nothing, waiting patiently for the man to continue.
"Most people would look for a single specific thing or event, but it wasn't just one thing. It was a combination, a culmination, if you will, of events that occurred at precisely the right time. One of the biggest of course, was FTL drive."
"Faster than light travel opened up tens of thousands of new worlds to explore, to cultivate and populate," Edward said, mainly for my benefit it seemed as he held my eyes with his. "It gave us room for billions of people to emigrate, without the terrible effects on our collective conscience that would have been inevitable otherwise."
"Exactly so," Dr. Chartre agreed. "The Population Support Measure would never have been passed, let alone enforced, if it had meant the certain destruction of three billion individuals on CNN. How many people volunteered to leave Earth in the first five years of intergalactic travel?"
"I'm not sure..." Nance shrugged.
"Forty-two million." The Director smiled at her. "There were seventy-one systems targeted for colonization. Almost a hundred moons and planets were inhabitable, with a little work and a little luck. But nobody wanted to go. Not with an estimated forty percent attrition rate the first year alone. Six million people go to a planet, a year later they're down to less than four, the next year is worse and pretty soon there's nobody left."
He paused his lecture, looking around the room, but none of us spoke.
"No, the key to colonization is to understand that it is a war of attrition. Individuals are expendable," Dr, Chartre told us. "The first wave dies so that a quarter of the second will survive. Half of the third wave lives and by the fourth or fifth wave, people are thriving. The hard part was getting those first few waves out there."
"And we did that with Series I and II," Nance nodded appreciatively. "But again...This is something new, sir. Ming isn't leaving the planet, she's staying here. She isn't an attrition unit, she isn't a terra-farmer, she's a member of society now. We're introducing a new and potentially hostile species into our environment without enough information to predict the results." Nance lowered her voice, realizing she was getting excited. "That's...my opinion."
"And your solution is...?" Dr. Chartre gestured to Nance.
"Solution? I don't have one...I just...I'm not saying this is wrong. I'm not against it, Director. I've put too many years into this company not to believe in the possibilities. My concern is simply that our capability is outpacing our understanding."
"And?" Edward interjected for his boss.
"And," she sighed, "when the day comes, and it will, when we can produce Series IV units as easily as we do Series II or even III...When that day comes, we'd better be a lot smarter than we are right now."
"Why?" Edward seemed to smirk a little, but Dr. Chartre looked very thoughtful and Lynn was smiling, but only slightly, like she knew a secret.
"Because they are, sir." Nance walked to the door, turning to look at each of us as it opened. "And nobody wants to be a slave. If you'll excuse me, Director." Then she left the very quiet room, the door sliding shut behind her.