At Darwin's Delight

by Xaltatun of Acheron

Chapter 1: Time for a Vacation.

“Done packing?” Mark Ferril asked. He had the rugged good looks of the stereotypical athletic hero, and stood about 15 centimeters under two meters. He was dressed in slacks and an open shirt. His air of easy masculinity gave him the leeway to wear a rather ornate band around his left wrist. The band held a multi-purpose watch and communicator, however it had other, less obvious secrets.

“Just about,” his slavegirl, Lanie, replied. “Maybe another ten minutes.”

Lanie stood about 15 centimeters shorter than Mark. Her shoulder length brunette hair was more than a bit disordered from the movement of packing their apartment before taking a vacation. She was dressed in a standard slave tunic: a nano-fabric garment that hugged her torso like a second skin and moved as if it was part of her. The red ribbon of her control collar circled the column of her neck; a small cameo in the exact center likewise broke the severe circle.

She dropped another piece of stuff into a box and sealed it. “That’s that.” She looked at the last piece and shrugged.

“Right on time. The movers will be here in a few more minutes.”

Lanie looked at the last box and shook her head. “I’d think for once you’d have me travel with you.”

“You know better than that.” Mark shrugged.

“What? You think I care if I set off every alarm in the airport?” She laughed musically.
“That’s your worry.”

“Which is why you’re being packed with the rest of the baggage.”

Lanie bent over and flipped the sides up on the last piece of packing material: what appeared to be an ordinary girl box with its life support unit. She stood again. The shoulder strap on her slave tunic flipped open, apparently by itself, and the tunic relaxed and dropped to the floor.

She picked it up, folded it and put it into her purse. Her chastity shield followed, and then her sandals. She clamped the life support attachment to her groin with a snap, giving a saucy grin as the prong slid in. She took an oddly shaped plastic device with two shiny tubes from the box and made a face at it. Then she shoved the tubes into her mouth and let her eyes bulge out in not entirely faked distress as they slithered down her throat and windpipe, pulling the plastic device after them.

She took a brush from her purse and ran it through her hair, then replaced it, hung the purse on the inside of the box and stepped in. A moment later she sat in the classical pose of the boxed slavegirl: knees spread wide, legs back and hands cuffed behind her. The cuffs also bound her wrists to the bars at the back of the box. The indelible purple numbers of the Slaveowner’s Consortium ID stretched across her belly, just above her legs.
Her fingers twitched almost unnoticeably; the top of the box flipped over, sealing her in. She paused a moment so that her owner could admire her, or just possibly regret not having her for the next few days and decide to take her with. She was sure Mark would be able to handle the airport alarms. However, he just stood there, smiling down on her.

The covering came out of its pack, tightly enclosing the top and sides, leaving the air vents at the bottom uncovered. A moment later, the reader came alive and she settled in to watch the latest episode of Tumbling Through Time. That was, she thought amusedly, one of the few benefits of her owner’s penchant for shipping her freight: she could catch up on the shows. She barely noticed that the apartment sounds vanished at the same time: Mark had turned off her ability to hear anything from outside.

Mark watched bemusedly as Lanie pack herself away. Her half-joking complaint was actually reasonable. Her brunette beauty matched his masculine good looks and would serve to shield him from the hordes of unattached females that resulted from the North American Association’s sexually unbalanced birth control lottery. She knew perfectly well that it wasn’t going to happen, at least if he traveled by air. The scanners in the airports were simply too good: a leftover artifact of the ill will created by the long gone neo-conservative era’s interventionist practices, and maintained out of a bureaucratic tendency to keep doing what they’d always done. Several of her bionic enhancements, while not precisely illegal, weren’t available in the NAA, or in most of the Big 8, for that matter.

The baggage scanners wouldn’t complain; she was properly declared and as long as what they saw in the sealed box matched the declaration they didn’t sound any kind of alarm.
Mark had been juggling considerations like that for the last two decades. He well knew that the computers didn’t correlate every last little bit of information, and he actively exploited that fact. He also knew that he’d finally made a fatal, or at least final, misstep and he was going to have to leave the NAA. Permanently.

Lanie, of course, had no idea that they weren’t coming back. Just like she had no idea where they were going. Or where they would come back to if he had been planning on returning.

He had, he thought, a sufficient safety margin. And his destination didn’t allow extradition.

Chapter 2: Arrival.

The heat assaulted Mark as he left the plane. That was always his first impression of Darwin’s Delight: it was a tropical island, and tropical islands were hot. People adjusted, and he knew he’d adjust as well. The managers of Darwin’s Delight didn’t waste a lot of energy on climate control, or rather their climate control had a higher target temperature than most areas in what was left of the temperate zone. They had a booming tourist business without it, and they had other uses for the power. Besides, all of the ubiquitous slavegirls, the not quite so ubiquitous male slaves and most of the permanent residents had the environmental DNA mods. As did a fair number of the tourists. He didn’t, but that was more of a personal foible than a matter of policy.

“Mr. Ferril?” the neatly uniformed security officer asked as he stepped away from the ID machine.

“Yes?”

“Please come with me. We have a few questions we need to ask you.”

“Certainly, sir.” Mark hid his concern. They couldn’t have gotten on his trail this quickly? And why did Darwin’s Delight care anyway?
After a short trip through the twisty corridors of the airport’s offices, the security officer left him in a nicely appointed waiting room. The slavegirl behind the desk smiled at him. “Mr. Ferril? Lieutenant Muggs will be with you in a few minutes. Please have a seat.”

He sat and looked at her curiously. Darwin’s Delight was, in some respects, a stew of disparate elements. He’d been here many times before so seeing a slavegirl dressed in the NAA’s customary slave tunic wasn’t a surprise. The one shoulder nanofabric fit her like a second skin, and moved like one as well. Except for the area between her breasts and the skirt that fell from her hips it could have been painted on. All of the Outlaw Nations used it for their slaves: it was eminently practical as well as good looking. What was mildly surprising was what the three ID tags on her control collar said about her: she was a NAA citizen, her contract was owned by the Darwin’s Delight police department, and she was being used as an office worker.

He shrugged and pulled a reader out of his pouch. All of the Outlaw Nations had administrative arrangements with both the NAA and the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that let them trade slaves. What the NAA tag on her control collar meant was that she was to be managed according to the NAA’s regulations, at least most of the time. They weren’t all that different from East Asia’s. From a practical viewpoint it didn’t matter very much: most of the other slaves were managed according to the same set of standards. It prevented all sorts of petty ugliness.

He spent a few minutes looking at the newsfeeds. He needed to start immersing himself in the culture of Darwin’s Delight: he was going to be here for a long time, possibly the rest of his life.

“Mr. Ferril? Lieutenant Muggs will see you now,” the slavegirl’s voice broke into his inspection of an item concerning one of the casinos.

Lt. Muggs’ face showed a good deal of Middle Eastern heritage. “I gather you’re wondering why this interview, eh? We’ve gotten an extradition request from the North American Association for you.”

“I thought you don’t extradite?”

“We don’t. We also don’t offer asylum; that would be a violation of the non-intervention clause of the World Government charter. As a matter of simple political prudence, we will frequently honor a request from a person’s own nation to put them on a plane and send them home. Since you’re a citizen of the NAA, and they’ve given us the particulars of what they want to talk to you about, we’re inclined to send you back. Unless you want to settle this here?”

“Settle it here?”

“We’ll take a deposition under verification on the matters they’ve specified. If it’s all a horrible mistake, that should end the matter and you can continue your vacation without further bother.”

Mark looked at the lieutenant. “Can I immigrate?”

“Certainly. I can handle the details here.”

“Oh?”

“We are a small nation, Mr. Ferril. We don’t have the resources for a massive bureaucracy with specialists for this, that and the other thing. We also don’t want to irritate our guests by having them go from one department to another to yet another. Give me your ID, and I’ll feed in the request.”

He studied the displays that appeared on the surface of his desk and asked a few questions.

“Done. Welcome to citizenship in Darwin’s Delight. There’ll be a list of material to study, and there’s an examination in a couple of months that will determine your grade of citizenship. Nothing too difficult, you’ll undoubtedly pass it with ridiculous ease.”

The Lieutenant sat back. “I’m looking forward to going to Iceland for my next vacation.”

“Huh?” Mark said, puzzled by the apparent non-sequitur.

“It’s not because it’s cooler, although that’s certainly attractive. I need to spend time among sane people to keep my perspective.”

“Oh?”

“I see at least one borderline psychopath a week in this office. I’ve never figured out why anyone with two brain cells more than a politician would think we would want them, or would allow them to run around loose if we had them. Your next stop is to take the Altemeyer-Stonebender Inherent Criminality tests under verification. Then you’ll give that deposition I mentioned earlier. Since I’m sure you’re innocent of the charges, once you’re done with that you can begin to enjoy life here on Darwin’s Delight.”

He motioned to the two security guards that had silently entered the office. When they’d left with Mark, he called up the next case on his queue. Smuggling, eh? Might be a mule, might not. He pressed the spot on his desk that asked the unit secretary to usher in the next suspect.

Chapter 3: Receiving.

A signal flashed on Lanie’s reader, telling her that her box had arrived at its destination. Not that she hadn’t been pretty sure earlier: it was fairly obvious once her box had transshipped at New Rio for Darwin’s Delight. Darwin’s Delight wasn’t situated as a high volume intermediate freight transit hub. Especially for perishables. Like her.

If Receiving at Darwin’s Delight was working true to form, she had between a half hour and two hours. She’d know once they put her in the queue; the computer would tell her the estimated time if she asked politely. Meanwhile, she should trigger the short set of flexibility exercises so she was limber when they opened her box. That was about the only advantage she could see in being shipped freight so many times: she knew the drill.
Eventually, the covering on her box withdrew and it opened. She felt the cuffs withdraw and the life support attachment that kept her frozen to the base release. She stood up in a practiced maneuver and pulled out the throat unit. “Hi guys!”

One of the attendants frowned. “A clown, yet. You’ve been here before, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, wash up, hit the ID machine and get wherever you’re going.”
She laughed as she retrieved her purse, which contained her tunic, sandals and chastity shield, and stepped off of the unpacking slot so they could get to work on the next boxed girl.

Ten minutes later, showered, identified and with the two extra tags added to her control collar, she felt the familiar impulses of the Go To It module directing her somewhere.
Somewhere turned out to be a public kennel. She felt one of her eyebrows rise involuntarily; she’d have expected Mark to have her routed to his apartment, wherever it was.

It didn’t seem to be a mixup. She stopped in front of a locker with her name, images of the three tags on her control collar and her NAA Slaveowner’s Consortium registration number. She swiftly removed her tunic and slid into the one in the locker, noting that there were also two daytime casual outfits and a light beach robe. She shoved her purse in the top and closed it.

A few minutes later she’d navigated a number of corridors and ramps, finding herself in a slave kennel module no different from any of the many slave kennel modules she’d seen in the last 20 years, beginning with the one where she’d been trained and transformed from a guy to a girl. She stopped at one of the cabinets at the end of the rows of slave cages and stripped out of the tunic, neatly hanging it in the slot that her hand went to. She put her sandals into the cubby hole on top and then found herself in front of a top row cage. She flipped open the cage door, bounced on her toes a couple of times and brought herself into the cage. Another acrobatic maneuver turned her around. She closed the door and shot the bolt. Then she reached back and found the reader on the back shelves.

A few seconds later she had it mounted on the cage door and had arranged herself in her favorite seated position: knees spread and legs to her sides and behind. The reader turned on as her fingers imperceptibly twitched. The first page, as she expected, said her name: Lanie Wickersham, showed the three symbols on her control collar and then gave her NAA Slaveowner’s Consortium registration number. Below it was her owner’s name: Mark Ferril.
Then there were the usual menu entries for schedule, kennel facilities, personal services and net. There were no entries for surgeries or training, not that she expected any. However, with Mark she was never quite sure: he seldom told her in advance if he was going to have something else done to her while they were here.

She flipped to her schedule’s day view and studied it for a minute. There were the usual morning and evening routines, two more meals and two exercise sessions. There was a block for kennel maintenance. She frowned at that; girls that were kenneled for a long time got kennel maintenance so they had something to do. She flipped to the rolling month view and got a surprise: she had an appointment at police headquarters in two days. Curious, she flipped to look at it. As she expected, it said nothing, although it did reference a message to her that she hadn’t yet read.

She flipped to the message and frowned. Apparently Mark was in big trouble. She was to relax and have fun. She was not implicated and there was nothing she could do about it. She had a not entirely penurious spending account, and please stay out of trouble. Oh, and she might spend a few minutes writing a paragraph about what she liked to do for inclusion with the listing when she was offered at auction, if it came to that.

In other words, she thought, Mark wasn’t just in big trouble, he was in terminal trouble. Almost unbidden, she felt the stanzas from the Slave Devotion on the situation surface in her mind. She took a deep breath. This would be her first auction; she’d gone directly from training to Mark without going through an auction, which, now that she thought about it, was definitely unusual.

The size of the small spending account raised her eyebrows again. Small was the wrong word: it was bigger than Mark had ever given her for time off when they were here. It was big enough that she wouldn’t have to spend most of her time at the slave playground or on the beach not acquiring a tan. She also wouldn’t have to eat in: Slave Chow was healthy, filling, came in a wide variety of excellent flavors, and had all the textural appeal of oatmeal. It was fine for the occasional breakfast but wasn’t a substitute for real food. One of Mark’s good points was that he had her eat the same as he did, at least most of the time.

Chapter 4: Explorations.

Now that she had time off, Lanie reflected, what was she going to do with it? She got onto the net and started looking at the advertisements. She shuddered. Most of them were both too expensive, and not her idea of fun. Not at all.

She sat back and thought. She’d been here what, six times before as Mark’s slavegirl. She knew several of the places from when she’d been dancing attendance on him. She was still staring, sightlessly, at the front of her cage when the kennel system gently nudged her into putting the reader into the back, dropping to the floor and heading to the food room with the dozen or so girls that were still in.

She joined the line, picked up a bowl, ladled some Slave Chow into it, and joined a pretty blonde and a prettier brunette.

“Hi,” the blonde said. “I’m Kim, she’s Jose and you’re?”

“Lanie. You been here long? I just came in this morning with the freight, and discovered
Master was in some kind of trouble with the police.”

Kim said: “Wow! I’ve been here a week; my last owner ran out of money and had to put me up for sale.”

“She did what?” Lanie asked. The blonde had an NAA tag and one that said she was a personal servant.

“I think she drank it all. She was an OK mistress when she wasn’t drunk. I was waiting until we got back to the NAA to ask to be sold. I didn’t want to be stuck here.”

“Yipe. Master very seldom drank. When he did he slept it off.”

“That’s lots better than being all maudlin and weepy and everyone’s so unfair and so mean.”

“I’d have called the health service for verbal abuse,” Jose said.

“Believe me, I was tempted. Well, like the Devotion says, she’s past and the bidders gather. I’m thinking of putting a note on the auction that I want a mistress that doesn’t drink.”

Jose giggled. “Do it. Otherwise they might think you like lushes.”

“Um. You could be right. I’ll have to talk to my factor.” Her eyes unfocused for a moment and her fingers twitched as she put a note in her file.

“You know anything to do for entertainment?” Lanie asked. “I’ve been here enough times that the slave playground is a bit old.”

“There’s a slave playground?”

“Of course there is. If you’re here under NAA or East Asia rules you get time off, and the rest of the slaves do too to avoid causing trouble. They know you’re not going to spend money or buy anything. It’s cheap, and they do pay attention to what attracts people and what doesn’t. It keeps us out of the paying customer’s way. Besides which, a lot of the local slaves go there too.”

“If it’s cheap, how do they keep everyone else out?”

“They don’t. They also don’t provide any service personnel. You want food, you use your collar to order it and pay for it, and you pick it up yourself. You patronize it, you clean it.”

Kim giggled again. “That would keep the owners out! I don’t have a spending account.”

“Oh? I thought factors were required to supply one.”

“Really?” Her eyes unfocused as her fingers twitched slightly. “Hey! You’re right! I do have one. It’s even bigger than my old mistress gave me.” She looked at her empty bowl.

“Let’s go!”

That had been a fun couple of hours, Lanie reflected. The handball game had let her shake off the lingering effects of being boxed for three days, and she’d had a chance to chat with several of the locals. If the police were suggesting she might wind up being offered at auction, she’d better start thinking of the local scene like a resident. Any purchaser was unlikely to want to ship her back to the NAA.

Which had reminded her of the other major attraction. It hadn’t occurred to her before because she didn’t classify it as something to do on time off. However, it never hurt to make a few contacts and mention that her contract might be available. There really was only one thing she knew besides housekeeping, maid service and sex.

That was art, antiques and antiquities. Darwin’s Delight had a decent market, and Mark was a familiar figure from the times he was here, as was his slavegirl. She debated briefly about going back to the locker room and changing into her tunic, and decided against it. She wasn’t here for Mark, she was here to make some contacts and possibly line up a new owner.

Chapter 5. News.

The invisible hand of the Go To It module guided Lanie to a comfortable waiting room in the police headquarters. She’d decided to wear her slave tunic for the occasion. She felt uncomfortable wearing a daytime casual outfit for a formal interview, and anyway a mandated talk with the police about her owner couldn’t be construed as time off.

The slavegirl behind the desk was a petite beauty who showed Chinese ancestry. The tags on her control collar confirmed it: they announced she was an East Asia subject, and she was an office worker. She wore a standard NAA slave tunic in the pattern used by all of the slavegirls that Darwin’s Delight’s government used in their administrative process.

“Ah. Lanie. You’re on time. Lieutenant Fedora will see you in a few minutes.” She waved at the row of comfortable chairs.

Lanie produced a reader from her purse, called up a quick and easily abandonable game and relaxed. A few minutes later, the girl announced that the Lieutenant was ready for her, and led her into an office.

“Grab a chair, Lanie,” the man behind the desk said. “We’ve got a bit to go over. By the way, I’m Ken.”

“What happened to Mark?” she asked as she sat down.

“The interrogators are still working on him,” Ken said. “However, we already know enough to know what we need to do. The rest is just detail that we’re getting for the NAA; it’s not going to affect what we do here.

“This is one of those cases where there are simply too many victims. Mark plied his trade for over two decades, and I’m thankful that most of his victims are in the NAA; they’re welcome to sort out the mess.”

“I didn’t know he was doing anything illegal?”

“He cut you out of all that; we saw it early on in the interrogation which is why we didn’t pull you in for interrogation as well. He was quite clever using you as a cover; it kept suspicion off of him for quite a while.”

Lanie nodded. “That explains quite a bit. When he didn’t want me to know something, he’d turn off my hearing, and sometimes my sight. There was stuff around his apartment that I literally couldn’t see. He had me trained to not think about it.”

“That’s what we found. The first issue is that you’re one of his victims.”

“What? I don’t think he ever mistreated me.”

“Oh, not for what he did to you while he owned your contract, although we’ve got some concerns about that, which I’ll get to in a bit. What you may not know is that he was behind the trouble you ran into in collage that led to your becoming a slave. He was also the person who got the factor to have your sex changed. Your becoming his slavegirl was not an accident, although he rigged it to look like one.”

“He did what?” Lanie leaned forward.

“He was the prime mover in having you enslaved and turned into a woman.” Ken repeated.

“You can see the sections of the interrogation for yourself if you want.”

“No, no. I’ll take your word for it. He was always a manipulator. So that’s what happened,” she said a bit reflectively. “I can’t say it explains a whole lot, but then I never understood him. He was my master, and I did what he wanted.”

“The issue right now is that you’re one of his victims. You’re here, the rest of the victims are in the NAA. We may find another victim here, but I doubt it; he was intelligent enough to not foul his bolthole.

“That means you’re due restitution. We don’t follow the NAA’s quaint victim choses the punishment laws, but as a matter of intergovernmental courtesy the court will take your opinion about appropriate punishment into account.

“That won’t be for a few weeks, though. The more immediate issue is that, since he effectively was the one that had you enslaved, we need to let you make a free decision as to whether you want to continue to be a slave, or you want to cancel the contract.”

“I don’t think I’ve got a choice, Lieutenant. The Devotion is permanent.”
Ken laughed. “Well, that’s debatable. The Gordian Conditioning Research Institute has pioneered a process for pulling the teeth of the Devotion. Right now there’s a lot of discussion going on about whether to keep it as a special service or to put it into widespread use. As long as the subject is here and their owner approves,” he shrugged,
“that’s not an issue. In your case it’s more a police and administrative matter than owner approval, but it’s the same principle.”

“I’d have to be insane not to take you up on that, Lieutenant!”
Ken laughed again. “Your personality and educational profile certainly don’t indicate that you would consider slavery as a career. I made a tentative appointment with the Gordian Institute for you for this afternoon. If you want me to confirm it, you can start then. They tell me it’s about an hour a day for a week or so. Once it’s complete we’ll push through the action to judicially cancel the slave contract. That will keep the records at the Slaveowner’s Consortium straightened out.”

“Sounds like a plan, Lieutenant.” Lanie smiled. “Let’s get that appointment on my schedule!” She nodded as the Lieutenant’s hands moved over his desk and it appeared.

“The next piece is disposing of Mark’s assets. He’s got a lot of assets here in the Outlaw Nations in opaque accounts; those would normally go to whoever he’s given the keys. We sometimes coordinate with other governments, but in this case since you’re here and you’re due reparation for a couple of decades of enslavement, we’re going to give them to you. He’s spilling the accounts and the keys in the interrogation. In about a week you’re going to be quite wealthy.”

“Oh, my!” She licked her lips.

“The next thing is what to do with you.”

“I thought you said I wasn’t going to be a slave?”

“You’re not, or rather you’re probably not. I’ve never heard of the process at the Gordian Institute failing, but there’s always a first time. If you’d have wanted to remain under contract, we’d pick it up ourselves. There are several departments that can use your services. Since you quite understandably don’t, all the enhancements he installed give us a bit of concern. We know about the art, antiques and antiquities business: your bionic eyes and image processor makes assessing an artifact’s condition, spotting fakes and finding real deals absurdly easy. That doesn’t bother us; it’s all the other enhancements.”

“He never had me use most of them for anything except training exercises.”

“I wouldn’t be quite so sure. That trick he had of turning off your ability to remember things covered a lot of what he had you do. You’re not culpable for any of that; you didn’t know and you were under orders.

“You’re quite welcome to stay here and maintain your NAA citizenship, although you may want to consider changing it. Take your time; there’s no reason to hurry and every reason to look into things thoroughly and consider options.

“If you do stay here, the same departments that wanted your contract would like to talk to you about using your talents. As long as you’re not doing anything we would regard as criminal, it’s more a matter of keeping track of what you could do for us if the need arises.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“It should. Now the last thing is that the court will ask you to recommend a punishment. That’s strictly advisory, but it’s quite within the realm of possibility that if you asked for a judicial enslavement, with you being his first owner, the court would do it.”

“I’ve got real mixed feelings, Lieutenant.”

“Well, consider it. You may see things differently in a week or so.”

Chapter 6. Plans.

“When we talk about pulling the teeth of the Devotion,” Falia said, “we’re not talking about removing it so your mental structure is the way it was before. We’re talking about giving you Devotion immunity. That’s not just a whole lot simpler, it’s actually possible. Restoring you the way you were before isn’t. Or at least it isn’t this century, and most likely the next.”

“Interesting,” Lanie said.

“Oh, very. It’s one of those things that’s obvious in retrospect, although still hard to do. The background is that you, like most people, make hard and fast connections between concepts that are only loosely connected in reality. What the Devotion does is connect the concept of having an owner to serve with the concept of being worth something, that is, not worthless, and it makes it a hard and fast connection. No alternatives. Worthless is actually a hard wired concept for most people. It’s part of what makes us a uniquely social species: our brains are hard wired so that we have to believe we’re contributing. If we’re not, we’re worthless and that leads to depression and eventually to death.

“What we do is break that connection so you can see the many possible ways to be worth something to someone or to society. When we’re done, if you decide to get rid of the slave contract, you’ll need to find something else to do with your life that matters, but whatever it is will be your decision. That’s not different from life in general: we all need to do something that we think matters.

“That connection is the Devotion’s teeth. We don’t interfere with the way the rest of the Devotion has wormed itself into your brain. Our experience is that it generally doesn’t matter; the only result is that you’ll have more of an instinctive appreciation of what being a slave is all about. That’s useful if you own slaves, and if you ever wind up in a situation where you give your slave contract to someone, it’s still there as a reference.”

“So how does it work?”

“We use a research quality brain scanner. We’re making very precise changes to a number of fundamental belief structures, and we have to map them out first. That’s one reason we need to do it over several days; the brain consolidates memories during sleep, so we’ve got to let you have consolidation time between steps, and then check whether the consolidation worked the way we want it to go.”

“It sounds like it ought to work. Will it? I’ll have to trust you. A couple of questions. First, if this is the case, why does the Devotion work at all?”

“It works because most people don’t have very good structures. They’ve got a hodge-podge of special cases that work well enough. The Devotion Enhancer uses repetition and conditioning to replace them with what’s in the Devotion. What we’re putting in place immunizes you by being a more comprehensive structure than the Devotion Enhancer can create. Whatever it tries to insert isn’t news. It’s already got a place to fit so there’s no net change.”

“Why haven’t I heard of it before?”

“Mostly because Devotion immunity doesn’t show up like Devotion allergy. There’s no way of testing for it like you can test for Devotion allergy. Devotion allergy is obvious, frequently after just one or two stanzas. Devotion immunity doesn’t cause pushback, so it looks like the Devotion takes. You could notice that the slave doesn’t have any reaction to imagining that they don’t have an owner, and nothing bad happens when they suddenly don’t have one. Most people with Devotion immunity don’t know it so they never cancel their slave contracts because they’ve been told it’s dangerous. The result is that people think it’s a lot rarer than it actually is.”

“So, Ms. Wickersham, what can Custom Slave Modifications do for you?” Pete Torrence asked.

“I suppose, to be honest about it, I’m looking for a bit of retribution. More than a bit. A lot. My former owner is about to be sentenced for a multitude of sins, and I’m petitioning the court that he be enslaved and given to me.”

“Retribution can be fun. For a while. You do know the old question about whether the jailer or the prisoner is the least free?”

“I can always sell him when I get tired of him. Her. But I don’t think I will. The Gordian Institute got rid of the Devotion, but it didn’t get rid of my attachment to him. I spent two decades serving him, and I feel like he’s mine. Also, I’m coming into enough money where having a maid is reasonable.”

She paused a moment. “Here’s what he did to me.” She sent the list to Pete’s desk.

“Wow. Half of that would qualify you as a deadly weapon! You know we don’t do most of the changes on this list.”

“True. You do, however, manage multiple contractors. That list is what he did to me. Some of that doesn’t seem to have worked out, and there’s been quite a bit of progress on a number of the mods. If you want to put together a list of upgrades for me, I’d be interested in looking at it, but it isn’t really my purpose here.

“It’s been interesting trying to clarify my feelings. Mark turned me into his dream girl; I want to do the same to him: turn him into his dream girl.”

“His? You mean yours?”

“His. I’ve been female for 20 years, which is about half my life and most of my adult life. I can barely remember my dream girl from when I was male, and even if I could, I wouldn’t be attracted.

“He even named his dream girl: Marsha. I’ve heard him mention her enough times to know she’s not someone he used to know. He even calls me that occasionally. That’s going to be her name. As far as anyone else is concerned, I want to turn her into my identical twin.

If people think that my slavegirl really is my identical twin, well ...” she grinned. “I seem to have picked up some of his attitudes.”

Pete looked off into the distance a bit. “I’ve seen the dream girl scenario a few times, although mostly it’s a guy turning his slavegirl into his fantasy. I usually have to convince them that some features simply don’t work out in practice.”

“Like super-large boobs. I was feminized in the NAA; he had me turned into his dream girl the first time we were here. Then he had to have the boobs shrunk before we left. I could still stand to go down a cup size, but that’s hardly a crisis. Also it would require redoing all the equipment in them.”

“It would give you a bit better balance, although they really do meld well. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be anywhere near your beauty index of 150. Hmmm. I’d need to think about that. One thing you may be missing if you want your slavegirl to get the full impact. Heh. Part of the fantasy is usually her screaming in ecstasy while you screw her brains out, and you don’t have the equipment. Of course, we could fix that for both of you.”

“She-male?”

“My read on you is that you don’t want to go back to having male sex, or rather only male sex. I was thinking of both of you being full hermaphrodites, with internal stowage of the penis so there’s no bulge. You have to watch out, though. There can be interesting repercussions if you’re going girl-girl with someone who doesn’t know you, and she suddenly discovers what is, to all intents and purposes, a built-in strapon penetrating her.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Now that you mention it, the way he did sex really was one of his better features. He was always a touch studied, but by the time we really got into it I wasn’t paying attention! That’s a good thought. Put it on the list.”

Pete played with the surface of his desk a moment. “A couple of other things to mention. First, we may have to make changes to you to get the effect you want.”

“Oh?”

“Part of the reason you don’t see a lot of rich women and rich men’s slavegirls at a perfect 200 BI is that, the higher you go, the more you’ve got to change to make the whole system work. Until the genome designers get into it, they won’t know how hard it’s going to be to turn, um, Marsha into a visual duplicate. It can be a lot easier if they’re allowed to tweak you as well.”

“That makes sense. I think,” Lanie frowned.

“Improving the Beauty Index is easier if the beauty enhancement programs have a fairly free hand at creating the result. It’s relatively easy if all they need to go for is a noticeable increase while making sure she still looks like she could be from the same family. That’s what the health services do. If the comps can promise a BI above 100 and she still looks like a close relative, they go for it. Create the DNA mod, inject, come back in two weeks. Nobody looks at the details.

“The more specifics you try for, the harder it is. That’s the secret behind George and Natasha. The designers went through a lot of genetic data to find those patterns. They had to balance two objectives: first, the patterns had to pull people into identifying with them, and second they had to be central enough so they could find a reasonable number of candidates they could transform cheaply. They did quite well; there are currently four Natashas and three Georges.”

“Interesting. You mean that people do this all the time?”

“I wouldn’t say all the time, but many of the child actors you see are adults who have been shrunk to the right size and who have behavior modules in their control collars so they act right. Of course, they image process out the control collars so you don’t see a five year old wearing one.”

Lanie shook her head. “I suppose I’d know if I watched the celebrity feeds regularly, but Mark always kept me too busy. You said there was a second consideration?”

“Um, yes. If you want to do the ‘screw her brains out while she screams in ecstasy’ bit, I’d suggest a professional sex worker course. We’ve got one for hermaphrodites.”

“You know,” Lanie smiled wickedly, “that would be interesting!”
She paused thoughtfully. “If we’re going to have to do me, and you’re making a good case that you will, I’d like to meet in the middle: take about 8 centimeters off his height and add it to mine. Take a cup size off my breasts, and see how easy it would be to boost our beauty index to around 160.”

“That ought to be possible,” Pete said, making some more notes on the images on his desk.

“I think the rest of this is fairly obvious. Make a list of where you think my mods need to be brought current to match the ones you’re going to install.

“What else I want that isn’t on the list is deep conditioning for total and permanent loyalty and devotion. I don’t want it to look real obvious. I also don’t want the cat declawed. If I aim her at somebody, I fully expect the somebody to wind up neatly sectioned for the cook. I don’t want her to be able to go off on her own.

“I also want to be able to micromanage her. I know what Mark did to me was kind of a lashup; see what you can come up with that makes turning various pieces on and off a bit smoother.”

“I see. Sex change usually takes about three months to finish” He played with a timeline on his desk for a bit. “I make it about six months. We’re going to need to let the skeletal changes settle down before doing some of this stuff. Then the combat training is going to take a month or so, and the deep conditioning is going to do likewise. By the way, why the deep conditioning? That isn’t on the list of what he did to you.”
“He’s a borderline psychopath. Changing his sex will tone some of that down, but I don’t want a lapdog. Making her totally loyal and devoted will keep me safe.

“A lot of those enhancements will make her a decent sparing partner. The rest? As you pointed out, I’m a deadly weapon, so I’ve got to figure out something to do that’s going to be at least marginally socially useful as well as keep various government departments satisfied. I’m finding using a lot of those capabilities to be, um, intriguing. Turning her into a weapon isn’t going to make much difference in that.”

“Good point. Strictly out of curiosity, what did he use you for? Besides housekeeping, maid duty and sex.”

Lanie laughed. “I did lots of that. Mostly the bionic eye and image processor. I am, or at least I was, one of those very rare males with four color vision, so the multi-spectral capability in the bionic eyeballs let me see a lot of things directly that otherwise would need specialty instruments and analytical software. I got quite good at assessing art objects, antiques, secret doors, that kind of stuff. My bionic ears help on that as well. Mark was making good money on it. If he’d made that his main line instead of using it as a cover for what he really did, he wouldn’t be in trouble and I’d still be his slavegirl.

“I don’t think you could do that to him; from what little I know the brain modifications to add a fourth color need to grow while the brain is developing. They can’t be added later.”

“I think you’re right. I’ve heard of some research, but they had to terminate the subjects after they finished. So, um, Marsha is never going to be quite as good as you on visual processing.”

Lanai shrugged. “I’ll be a bit faster. The visual processor can do everything my brain can do, it’s just noticeably slower.

“The police aren’t telling me what else he did, and I’m not really interested in finding out. He was quite good at managing me so that I didn’t see most of it. He also used the ability to turn off my ability to store memories quite a bit; now that I know about it I’m finding some interesting holes.”

“I noticed that! It’s a quite unusual modification. It used to be used for research, but that line is pretty well complete, and there’s no current research that needs it.”

Chapter 7: Sentencing.

“All rise!” The traditional bailiff's call rang out in the courtroom. Everyone rose as the judge walked into the room, taking his seat behind the raised desk. He nodded to his clerk. “Call the first case.”

“Sentencing in the case of Government of Darwin’s Delight vs Mark Ferril, for being a useless and dangerous borderline psychopath.”

The judge nodded and looked at the tables before him. The government’s table had the convicted criminal as well as the prosecutor, who he knew quite well. Mr. Ferril had the red band of a control collar around his neck, the three symbols indicating that he was a Darwin’s Delight citizen, a convict and awaiting sentence.

The other table had a quite beautiful woman and a local shyster, who he knew by reputation. The lawyer was quite competent but had a tendency to craft unusual, and in many cases quite bizarre, legal arguments and solutions. So far, she hadn’t gone far enough to be censured.

“The defendant has previously been convicted of the charge. Since there are several people present who are not familiar with the way Darwin’s Delight’s law works, I will explain the reasoning behind the sentence I am about to pronounce.

“Like many modern societies, Darwin’s Delight restricts the occupations which are allowable for people with pronounced psychopathic tendencies. The North American Association, for example, tolerates them in the business sphere. We find them quite useful in many of our research and service enterprises as long as their attention is focused on their subjects. We expect them to stay out of trouble in their ordinary lives, and not cause undue difficulty because of their inability to empathize with other people.

“Mr. Ferill has demonstrated by his actions in the North American Association that he will cause a significant amount of social disruption unless he is restrained. This is confirmed by his score on the Altemeyer-Stonebender Essential Criminality test, and by other factors, including his making a rather handsome living with his cover occupation. In other words, he did what he did because he liked to do it, not because he needed the money.

“The usual sentence in a case of this type would be to condemn him to the pool of subjects that are available for medical and psychological experimentation, and then have him terminated when he was no longer usable.”

Mark’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. The guard behind his chair kept his hands on Mark’s shoulders, preventing him from rising.

The judge nodded thoughtfully. “In this case there is an additional consideration. One of his long time victims has asked that he be judicially enslaved and given to her. This is a fairly common request in the North American Association, which has laws which allow the victim to choose the punishment. We have no such laws, however, we will, on occasion, take requests like this into consideration.

“Ms. Wickersham has filed her intentions with the court, with supporting documents from the services she has engaged to modify and train her new slave. The service that will manage the project states that the combination of modifications and trainings should provide a good deal of new material on how various modifications integrate.

“The court takes judicial notice of Ms. Wickersham’s capabilities, and calls her attention to the need to find an occupation that the government of Darwin’s Delight will find appropriate, both for her and for Mr. Ferill after she gets done with her planned changes.

“Mr. Ferill. Please stand and face the court.” The guard that had been holding him down stepped back. Mark rose.

“The court sentences you to judicial enslavement, and gives your contract to Ms. Wickersham to do with as she pleases. Your contract is restricted such that, if she should decided she no longer wants you, you will come back here to join the pool of experimental subjects.

“The court will take a short recess while the clerk executes the sentence and Ms. Wickersham takes charge of her new property.”

A court functionary brought in a girl box as Lanie got up and walked to where Mark stood stunned, still staring at the judge. She held a small cube against his arm.

“Marsha, we’re going to have such fun,” she told her former owner. “Now strip, put on these cuffs and get into the box.”

“Marsha?” he asked a bit woodenly.

“I changed your name. Marsha is so much more appropriate for a girl than Mark. Especially the girl you’re going to be. Now strip before I have to get strict with you.”

“You’re ...” he tried to walk forward and then jerked back.

“Invisible fence. Strip. Now.” She looked him in the eye. After a long moment his gaze fell and he reached to unbutton his shirt.

“Don’t bother to pile them neatly; you’re not going to wear guy clothes ever again.”

A few minutes later, Mark had managed to arrange himself in the girl box. Lanie looked at him thoughtfully, idly noting the red of the control collar and the way it contrasted with the green of the Outlaw Nations’s slave number indelibly inscribed across his belly. The final tag on the control collar had already changed to indicate he was a personal slave; presumably at the same time the ID function in his control collar had changed to say his name was Marsha. She nodded as one of the court’s workers slid the tongs of a handcart under the box and moved it out the door. It seemed fitting that this would be her last memory of Mark: the next time she saw him, no her, it would be as Marsha.

Love, she had heard somewhere, usually resulted in the two people growing closer together. If everything worked out as planned ... . She grinned. If this was love, so be it. She certainly didn’t intend to let Marsha go until the guy with the hourglass came for one of them.

Chapter 8: Collecting Marsha.

The kennel’s system gently prompted the slavegirl who now thought of herself as Marsha, telling her that she needed to be somewhere else. She shut off the video she had been watching and neatly replaced the reader and its mount. Then she dropped out of the slave cage with the flexed knee bounce she’d learned by her second week living in a cage. She paused to put on a tunic and sandals, and found herself in the locker room.

This time she changed to a new tunic with a different pattern. She frowned a moment and then packed the two casual outfits she had been using for time off, dropped her purse and the package over her shoulder, and left the empty locker behind. She didn’t notice as her name vanished from the display.

Ten minutes later the car deposited her on the other side of town. She found herself entering a small apartment building, and then stopping before an unfamiliar apartment. The door opened to her touch.

Then she stopped.

“Hi, Marsha,” the woman on the other side of the room said, from where she stood next to a standup desk.

“You... You’ve changed,” Marsha said, almost accusingly.

“So have you,” Lanie laughed. “Your purse goes over there.” She waved at a rack next to the door that contained an identical looking purse. “Let’s admire ourselves, shall we?”

“You turned me into your twin?” Marsha asked as they examined themselves in the bedroom’s wide mirror.

“Well ... sorta. The first time we were here, Mark changed the way I looked. Why did he do that?”

Marsha blushed. “He turned you into his dream girl.”

“And found out that super large boobs really don’t work. I had two decades to learn to like the way Mark made me look, so I when I decided to create Marsha, I used Mark’s dream girl. Of course, I did want to make us identical, so we are.” She grinned wickedly “And we’re going to stay that way. We’re going to use the same styles and the same shade of makeup. I’ve put a module in both of our collars that will make sure we stay within a couple of ounces and have the same mannerisms.”

“Oh. Mistress wants to pull a scam?” Marsha sounded genuinely interested.

“Not really. I like the idea of confusing people. It’s really only possible if you’re wearing a daytime casual outfit. You’d need a lot of training to wear anything besides that and your slave tunic well, and I’m not going to wear a tunic. Besides, there’s no way of hiding who we are from anyone who can read our collars or ...”

Lanie grinned again and then waved her hand. Marsha’s tunic unsnapped and fell to the ground. Lanie shrugged out of her shirt and shorts.

Marsha giggled. “You’d have to be colorblind to miss the difference in our id tattoos!” She paused. “You’re wearing a shield?”

“Twenty years of wearing one, I feel undressed without it. The ruleset I’ve given my AI isn’t quite the same as yours.”

“I’ll bet.”

Lanie smirked. “There’s one more piece of Mark’s dreamgirl fantasy.” She twirled Marsha around and pulled her in for a long kiss. Then she gently pushed her slavegirl over onto the bed.

A half hour later, Lanie had finished showering; Marsha was still sprawled on the bed, coming back from being totally wiped out.

“Up and atem, girl! Shower, get me some lunch, have some yourself and do a housekeeping pass. I want to start confusing the art dealers in about an hour.”
Marsha pulled herself off the bed with a small groan. “You turned yourself into a hermaphrodite too. Figures.” She managed a wiped-out giggle as she staggered into the bathroom.

Chapter 9. New Beginnings.

The Peaceforce Major who headed the small World Government Peaceforce unit in Darwin’s Delight looked at the two apparently identical women who sat in front of him. The one sitting in the guest chair was dressed in a fashionably modish outfit in the current daytime informal style. Her control collar said she was from the NAA, and she was an honored guest of Darwin’s Delight. Or at least a paying guest.

The one sitting on her heels on the first woman’s left was dressed in a slave tunic in one of the unregistered patterns; her control collar said she was a resident of Darwin’s Delight, and she was a personal slave.

The ID function in their control collars said the one was Lanie Wickersham, and the other was Marsha. No family name. His desk, at the same time, told him that both of them had enough built-in armament that he would do well to send a full platoon to arrest them, if it ever came to that.

“Ms. Wickersham, we’ve been wondering if you’d show up in this office.”

“Oh?” Lanie arched an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine why.”

“Oh, come on. Your reputation not only precedes you, it seems to have hired a marching band and a pair of tumblers to make sure nobody missed it. You might not know of our office pool on exactly when you’d show up, but you can’t be so naive as to believe we wouldn’t find your, and your slavegirl’s, capabilities quite useful. As well as our being one of the few organizations that could use you legitimately. What I’m wondering is why you’re interested in the recently restarted space program rather than, say, intelligence operations? We could certainly use you in the latter.”

“It’s one of the few things that my maid and I agreed on back when we were both guys, Major.”

“Which was?”

“Women are space cadets.”

Author's Note:

There are currently 13 stories, either written or planned, in this series, which is part of a new universe I've created. If you want to put stories in this universe, please read as many of them as you can first and then contact me. I have a considerable amount of background (currently on a wiki - I need to figure out how to distribute it.)

1. 2040 Betrayed (Ponygirl) ----------------------------- At Sir Jeff's
2. 2041 Becoming A Ponygirl (Ponygirl)
3. 2055 Girl In A Cage (Slavery)
4. 2060 Second Generation Ponygirl (Ponygirl, sort of)
5. 2058 - 2068 Shake The Bars And Scream! (Slavery)
6. 2061 Transmogrification Prep. (Ponygirl, gene mods)
7. 2069 Wild Girls, Inc. (Slavery)
8. 2069 Fiona (Slavery) --------------------------------- Submitted to Leviticus
9. 2070 They Also Serve... (TG, Slavery, Statue) ----- at Stardust ( stardustr.us )
10. 2070 The Girlfriend Contract (Slavery)
11. 2070 Trouble: Two Girls Under One Roof (Slavery)
14. 2070 At Darwin's Delight (TG, Slavery)
20. 2070 The Long Road (?)