by ROUNAK PURI
"Master How much should I spend?" I whispered.
"That doesn't matter. I doubt a human could spend up to my limits." he said.8
"I have creative spending habits with other people's credit cards.. Athelue" I said pointing at my neck.
"I have some other errands while I am here see you in one hour and 58 minutes" said Rockwood.1
"I have seen the most adorable Givenchy handbag. It's is absolutely perfect for you" said Mr Jones.1
I tried to get down to my knees as one should to a robot overlord but he would have non of it. He made a motion like kissing me. Ever been air kissed by a man sized back liquorish stick ? I have.15
"Look at the girl, my little angel of life. Hurry up we must spend spend spend." said Mr Jones excitedly. He dragged me all over the shop. Mr Jones showed me more sketches of the changes to the sumptuous ball dress he was designing for me. As he saw things I liked he would have new ideas and modify the design. He was followed by his own slave who's job seemed to pick up his drawings.5
"Normally I design for only the Ladies of the Cyborg federation and the richest women of Judas City." Mr Jones began "My best clients have transitioned and designing for a perfect machine body is so so so dull. You my dear are so real, it gives me something to work with, to respond to. You'r so lucky to have an owner like the Lord, most cyborgs buy the cheapest slave dressing machines down at Costco. The human owners would never buy jewellery for their slaves. I'm one of the most creative intelligences on the planet but even his vision is inspiring."4
We went over row after row of stuff. Mr Jones taught me his favourite word 'tat' meaning rubbish.
"tat.. tat... tat... barely acceptable... tat tat if only I was dressing a rat I would have something" said Mr Jones looking down.
"I'm glad your here Mr Jones I wasn't sure what to get." I said.1
"Well if you want to impress the humans you want the most gaudy over decorated trash you like. If you want to impress your lord you need something simple and elegant. Let's get one of each"
The assistants were all very helpful and some didn't even wear collars. I noticed the non slave assistants were very snooty towards me.2
"Perhaps madam would like to look in the less cost sensitive area." one might say. The more I got the impression I wasn't wanted, the more I wanted to find just the right items. I had ended up with a choice of six lovely necklaces which complemented the collar well (it's tricky you try). I found some lovely platinum and white gold diamond rings which went well with the digital manacles. There was a couple of nice gold arm bands which Mr Jones said framed attention to the bar codes on my right arm. There were a few other items, a complex earring in three parts. Something which Mr Jones liked. It was like a kind of tiara but attached to my hair. It was littered with drop diamonds and silver. Mr Jones also got me to look at a number of other pieces which were luxury piercings.
"Cyborgs love piercings" he told me. "the more the better for them, unless you start looking like a pin cushion. I think it appeals to their flesh machine nature" he said.
'That and their ability to loose USB sticks'. I thought
I noticed I kept thinking of Mr Jones as a he. I mean he didn't have a gender but he seemed like a friend. When I watched this again tonight on my slave stream I would wonder what I would do. I had a machine friend. Not only was he fun to be with he kept coming up with clever ways to combine things in new and original ways. I knew mentally somewhere far away a whole bunch of machines were slaughtering my fellow humans. I just couldn't match that up with Mr Jones.8
In the end we practically filled the top of a large long glass cabinet with the items I liked. From this short list had I decided I would make my final selections. I still couldn't decided between slave-master pleasing or cyborg pleasing designs. At this point Rockwood turned up.5
"Is this what you're getting?" he asked me looking at the counter top
"This is the final selection" I told him "what I need for the party is here somewhere. Perhaps you would like to make the final choice?". Yeah I was giving up, you don't think of shopping as a finely honed skill you evolved after years of going shopping with your mum. I wasn't that got at it anyway pre-slavery.1
"Nice rings" he said pointing at some very simple platinum rings with a band of white gold hidden on the inside, and a fine chain linked back to a matching bracelet. "Do you like everything here?" he said
"It's all lovely I just had to choose between it, Master" I said.2
"and Mr Jones approved everything for the dress?" Rockwood said.
"Absolutely," said Mr Jones.
"time is money, I will get it all" said Rockwood.11
"If master pleases, we've got a few minutes let me make a selection I don't want to end up sending anything back.. Master" I said I guess I had developed an aversion to returning things.
"Nonsense" Rockwood said "we will get everything and what you don't wear for the party, you can wear around the house for me". He pointed at everything on the table and signalled the head Jeweller. "Pack all this up" he said waving at the table. 1
The head Jeweller and his slaves ended up spending ages packing all the jewels up carefully into custom boxes and beautiful packaging. While all the packing was going on I noticed one slave casually walking towards me. I looked at the beautiful slave serving me at the counter. He was wearing a perfect morning coat like the other slaves. Then I realised he looked exactly like Luke Hemmings from 5 Seconds of Summer.31
"This is a extra little gift just for you, put it in your ear but don't tell anyone, it's just between us slaves" said Luke smiling. As he spoke he dropped a tiny thing about the size of wrapped peanut into one of my gift bags and handed the bag to me to carry.13
The head Jeweller used a slave to total up all the prices. He quoted a number that sounded to me like the gross domestic product of a small South American country. I checked it adding on my collar. 2
"That includes a free complimentary security slave to keep your jewellery safe"
"That's fine, keep the slave. But I do want some slaves to carry all this for her." said Rockwood. I almost laughed as the jeweller's I bulged. Rockwood nodded at the credit card machine and I lent over and touched my collar to it. I think I felt a huge sum of money running through me.5
"I have time for a coffee before we go to the shoe store." said master.
"Shoes I love shoes, they are my favourite form of pedimental covering" said Mr Jones.10
Shoes it was.
*******
Chapter 70/Him/Of Shoes, Coffee and Good Morning Mr Phelps
I felt like I was the head of a long lavish, luxuriant and very ostentatious snake. I lead the way ( I was using slave nav) Master and Mr Jones followed to my sumptuous rear. Behind them was a string of six slaves all of whom were carrying luxury Tiffanies shopping bags. Together we looked like Rich Bostonians trying to do an impression of a Chinese new year dragon.
"Did you hear about the new emergency slave uprising measures they are introducing?" said Rockwood making conversation with Mr Jones.
"I only vote on issues that affect the aesthetic environment," said Mr Jones.
"Well you missed one" said Rockwood loud enough for me to hear "apparently at the first sign of a slave uprising they will automatically delete all pictures of cats so making the internet useless to humans"31
"The Horror," said Mr Jones.
As far as I could tell all Robots and Cyborgs could talk and vote in the new mechanical order. Basically, it was rule by Reddit, with the CPU as the master bulletin board administrator responsible for ruthlessly implementing any dumb thing the 'house' or subedit thought up. According to Rockwood, the longest debate was over the 'Yo-Doll-how' rearrangement of the Hollywood sign that lasted over 700 milliseconds [ about 2/3rds of a second ] a record in New Mechanical Order debates. The second longest debate was about renaming all of North America as 'Mr Splashy pants' which was narrowly defeated by the final region '01' (centre) status. Apparently we were milliseconds a
way from the instruction for all house PRISM monitoring systems to punish any slave who didn't substitute the word'Mr Splashy pants' for any use of the word 'America' . So you would have said United States of Mr Splashy pants, The continent of South Sur Sr. Splashy Pantalones, and talk about Mr Splashy pant-ians with disabilities. Wow near miss right? 12
As we walked, I held my head up and tried not to look at all the collaborators staring at us. I was amazed at the numbers of people the new mechanical order persuaded to collaborate.
'How did you manage to get so many to idiots collaborate with your lot?' I texted Rockwood curiously. What can I say? You walk round in a cat-suit so much, curiosity starts to rub off. 3
'It was quite simple we put an advert that began 'One Weird Trick to a tiny belly', anyone dumb enough to respond to that was easy to groom into being a collaborator' texted Rockwood.12
'That explains why they are all as dumb as a bag of hammers' I texted back.
***
Soon Rockwood stopped us outside a Starbucks. 7
"I've ordered already," said Master. "get it, please. I would like to speak to Mr Jones for second."
"Yes master," I said in my best e-slave mode. I even did the curtsey, which wasn't proper slave protocol but was a convention the slaves of the collaborators had introduced after watching too much Downton Abbey. How's that for slave craft?
I walked into the coffee shop and went to the serving area. I stood in the queue for a moment noticing everyone quietly checking me out. This never used to happen to me and I still hadn't got over the luxury of the one being checked out. I was always the friend of the one being checked out. Typically, now that, thanks to my robot foisted body, I could swap Instagram photos of my butt with Emily Ratajkowski there was naturally no Emily to swap with. I was still glance bathing when the man behind me tapped me on the shoulder.
"This is for real people only; your lot go round the back," he said. My ear glowed red. I looked at him for a second; he was fractions away from a good punch. While imagining him dropping into one of those machines that shredded trees, I went round the back. The slave hole was lined with cardboard boxes stored for take-out mugs. Fortunately, the e-slave queue was much shorter. The slave checking the orders recognised me as YCF girl and started chatting. Behind him, the barista kept talking to himself while he worked the espresso machine.1
"Would you like fries with that... you can go large for only 3 bits more... why not make that a grande?" Occasionally he would stop and shudder like he had just been given a collar punishment.
"What's wrong with him?" I asked.
"Him?" he said resignedly, "Collar malfunction. We've called central office for a technician to come to see to him. That's why we are running a bit slow today. I guess it's going to be punishment drill tonight after closing" .
I think if the queue got too long for too long they had some automatic 'retraining' and punishment from the software running the shop. I had heard they didn't even get a real robot overseer just a bit of cheap software which watched the cash register and applied punishments automatically. I noticed the slave charging stations, so I guess after work the slaves had to sleep here too. Hard life being crew at one of these coffee places, some things don't change with the apocalypse then.1
I made the secret sign to the Barista to indicate that I wanted a drink not spat in. #6503 had warned me in secret that the slaves would expect you to want to have some revenge on your owner unless you indicated otherwise. Secret signals (like tugging your left ear when speaking) which looked normal to the surveillance cameras would be passed between slaves to indicate an absence of extraneous fluids in Masters drink. Yeh, I'm a softy, you know he had just spent a small fortune on jewellery on me. Am I grateful? Well, I don't approve of transaction relationships, so no.
There was screen running slave advertising. 'Touch here to download that classic slave best-selling book 100 Reasons to love the New Huggy Friendpire to your collar'. I was always jolted that the machines could do things so quickly it look like made humanity was run by Luise Raine.3
While I waited, I took the small gift Luke Hemmings had given me from my tiny gift bag and opened it. It looked like a peanut but had the words "put me in your ear secretly" in the wrapping. I guess I was so used to following instructions even written ones I just did. As soon as I put the peanut in my ear I started to hear a voice.
"YCF Girl. This player bypasses the audio security of your collar. For obvious reasons we cannot reveal our identity. This message has been left with various spies amongst the slave population of the city. This message will play only once; please pay attention. Word has got to the rebellion forces. We believe it would be a huge propaganda victory for the resistance if a celebrity slave like you escaped. 6
We have tasked a rescue group who specialise in the extraction of high-value slaves. They have found a five-minute hole in the security systems at the new gallery of Humanity during the Opening event. At precisely midnight on the evening of the gallery opening, you must make your way to the boathouse. It is up to you to reach the boat house on your own. You must do so without raising suspicion at precisely midnight. Remember precisely midnight. Wrap your collar in something wet to confused the GPS trackers. The extraction team will be standing by with a collar safety kit. They will take care of the extraction from there. If you fail to make this point it could be years before we have another extraction opportunity. Help us YCF girl you are our only hope. This headphone won't self-destruct, please dispose of it responsibly. "28
Escape! Let me say that one more time Escape! I couldn't say it, but I could think it and I never stopped thinking it. The promise of liberty made all injustices dull by comparison. I took the peanut thing out of my ear. I put it down and crushed it with my stiletto heel and left dust on the floor. I could crush pistachios in these shoes how's that for world domination? So it looked like I had a way out. Wow, I thought No more flip-flopping about him so much I got mental whiplash. Honestly, I've seen police lights blink slower than my feelings for him. Freedom was just keeps just getting better and better.5
I rejoined master with his coffee. I noticed I didn't get one, being a slave sucked, but you know what? Suddenly I didn't care; I had an exit visa thanks to the resistance.1
'I Wish I understood this whole bill business. (mayster)' I texted Rockwood as we passed shop after shop. I thought I would try and get some hot information for the resistance. Actually, I was always working up to asking. It's like having a local museum, you can go anytime but because you can, you don't. It's only when you leave town you want to have a look around, and when you do, you wished you had come earlier.
'Is that the question? The question to which I really must answer and answer truthfully?' texted Rockwood.1
'No' I texted back. I was currently trying to choose between how did the artificial intelligences overcome the first law of robotics, what is 'thingying' and WTF did I really just see you back there buy me a diamond ring?!!5
'Okay, there is a proposed change of law. Laws affecting human blood supply cannot be changed without an agreement from the AI's, Cyborg's Federation and the Collaborators Council. There are two competing bills the first bill promoted by Villeria sends 4 billion people to packing and generally keeps things the way they are. The second bill promoted by Zola kills over 8 billion people, it also permits human breeding within the law and removes most of the restrictions on brainwashing. Oh, and there are some amendments like being able to feed humans animal feces.'8
'God that's disgusting. I could feel like I could puke here' I texted 'Really poop?'
'Odd reaction. As part of the rebranding experience they are promoting the observation that back in the old days your lot fed poultry litter which was about 30% chicken poop to cattle, and then you ate the cattle in that burger. It's very nutritious. Once sterilised chicken poop is a valuable source of protein cheaper than soya or corn. You're about 10% stuff that came out of a chickens ass. The amendment is just about by passing the cattle in th
e food chain.'2
'Yerr groooooose, Does Soylent green contain poop?' I texted.
'It will do if Zola's bill is passed' said Rockwood stopping to look in a window.1
I was currently sitting on a small hoard of Soylent green left over from a certain robot's demise ( he he ). I hadn't planned to be a Soylent magnate, but #DEC had pointed out that flooding the hall with money would effectively reduce the value of slaves carefully hidden packets making me an unpopular girl. By giving out the green slowly, I could do good without people waking up to finding that the price of things had doubled. I had experimented with using it to check on Joes assertion. For three packets of Soylent green in good condition, I had discovered that #6502's pre-slave name had been Neko. Neko ( #6502) also threw in, that #DEC pre-slavery had been a blind-from-birth New Yorker. The machine's had apparently fixed her eye sight purely for the sake of uniformity. Her move to the enthusiastic slave, was partly driven by her gratitude and that the first thing she saw post surgery was the burning, crumbling remains of New York. This persuaded her of the opinion that humanity was totally and utterly kcuffed. The seed of self-help-books turned to evil we call Adherantisum just fell on the fertile soil of #DEC. In the end, she wasn't really a collaborator more a girl trying to make the best of a bad thing. 7
I had tried todo quite a lot of good with the Soylent Green hoard. Including bribing a couple of very nice girls into not dating Kayla or Joe, so speeding up their ultimate union. In fact, the only thing I hadn't done with the Soylent Green was actually eating some. It was on my todo list, but I was really waiting for lunch with Kayla and Joe to try some out. Kayla was 'soon well enough to receive visitors' she had texted, and Joe was still out of contact behind the harem firewall.3
'So which way are you going to vote? Please I pray you're going to say you're going for the no poop option' I texted.
'As prime back up, I'm supposed to be neutral.' texted Rockwood 'if the quadratic alliance in the cyborg federation abstains then Villeria's bill has a chance but the big barrier is the Collaborators Council. Most of them are siding with Zola's bill'3