by Moshe Ben-Or
Her section leader had strict policies, too. His PTSD was worse than the floor manager’s. Among other things, apparently, his platoon had cornered a whole basement full of Looters during the Counterattack. They’d smoked them out with phosphorus grenades. Anyone who didn’t burn up or choke to death got bayoneted trying to climb out. Even the children. Then they’d blown down the building on top of them. Those were his orders, and he’d carried them out to the letter. He could still hear the screams, and smell the burning meat.
Her cell chief had gotten around to having her in the afternoon. He was the mellowest of the bunch, and he was getting better the fastest. A gunner. Early on, he’d doze off at lunch, sometimes, and then he’d wake up, shouting a fire command and grabbing at a non-existent saber. Sometimes he’d scream out a warning that it’s gonna burst instead, or yell for more powder and shot.
He wasn’t really all that interested in her. She’d looked much the worse for wear by that point. He was kind about it, almost gentle, in a way. But he still needed a break after the Monday planning meeting, and she was new. So off to the storeroom they went.
In the meantime, while she’d sat sobbing at her desk, digesting her rude introduction to life as an ownerless girl at Power Coil, there were other girls walking around campus with not a care in the world.
Like the one at the next desk over. The one who told her to stop sniveling and get to work, unless she wanted the cell chief to bend her over for more stripes on her ass, to add to the ones the floor manager and the section leader had already put there.
Even a Senior Lecturer couldn’t touch that Other Girl. If her man didn’t shoot the rapist first, the Campus Police would arrest him instead, and he’d hang by the next Assembly.
Didn’t matter that Other Girl’s man was a sophomore red-tabber who replaced bulbs and lugged crates of office supplies around the building, and she was a white-tab freshman who fetched lunch and made tea for the bay. There was a Law.
Isadora Marcos’ consent to any superior was de facto assumed under all circumstances. Her rights consisted of the right to shut up and the right to do what she was told. Her superiors’ responsibilities toward her began and ended with their responsibility not to endanger her life, limb or eyesight without good reason. “Good reason” being very loosely defined.
Other Girl had given consent to her man once and forever. She couldn’t legally give consent to anyone else. De jure, she couldn’t even be loaned out or given as a gift, on pain of a public switching. Forty strokes with steel. They’d be carrying her man straight to the hospital on a stretcher. Put him into the next bed over from the man he’d loaned her to.
No floor manager would be switching her black and blue without a Proceeding. No section leader would be forcing her to stand with her skirt up and insult herself in front of a bay full of laughing men while he whipped her between her legs.
Other Girl had a whole slew of real rights, and her man had a whole bunch of actual responsibilities to go with his power over her. Both were written out in Regulation. Black and white and might as well be chiseled in stone. The Dean would protect the former, and he would force Other Girl’s man to fulfill the latter. With the switch and with the noose, and with the full sweep of his unlimited dictatorial powers, if necessary.
While Isadora Marcos was getting on her knees in the storeroom for her cell chief’s work break, there was a meter-thirty-two, thirty-kilo acceleree sitting on the edge of her desk, chatting up her friend Other Girl. Instead of screaming and pitching a fit, the floor manager was sweetly plying the nine-year-old with tea and cookies.
That nine-year-old walked around campus with a gun in her pocket. She’d already used it once, and the Campus Police had promptly ruled it a justifiable homicide. She had the Director of Power and Grid at her beck and call, and woe be to the man who as much as plucked a single hair from her head.
That’s how the new world worked. There were girls with real power and real freedom, and then there were idiot relics of the old world. Losers like her, who’d been too stupid to ditch the baggage and get with the program.
They’d wanted to keep their freedom. Well, they got it. They were free in five ways. They were free to complain to their superiors and be laughed at, if not worse. They were free to go to the Campus Police, and be told to go away. They were free to refuse to come to work, and get stripped naked and beaten bloody before six thousand pair of male eyes at an Assembly. They were free to be an example for the edification of others. And they were free for the taking to anyone with sufficient power.
Ownerless girls were ownerless property. Ownerless property was free for public use. It was that damned simple. She’d spent her whole adult life trying to get out of the barrio, and then the barrio had come to her instead. The only difference was that there were clearer rules here than there. The Dean had written all the really important ones down, and put them out in a Regulation for everyone to read. And if she’d paid attention to that new-world reality instead of her stupid old-world baggage and Lucia’s moronic clucking, she wouldn’t have ended up back in the barrio at all.
She’d seen the glorious leader of Campus Feminist Action just the other day, for the first time in months, illustrating the inevitability of the Vile Patriarchy’s speedy defeat, and the price of her own stupidity. Twice in one day, at that.
She’d bumped into Lucia Lopez around South Campus Grocery in the evening, after class. Artistic silver spoon baby was hauling a load of bags behind a pair of snot-nosed A-tabbers owned by an engineering freshman. Probably the same freshman who’d had her up against a stack of shelves in the basement storeroom earlier that afternoon.
Clearly, she’d ended the interview well enough to land an evening job, for all that she’d started it by earning a split lip. By the time Isadora had come around the other stack and seen the two of them, she was undressing all by herself, like a good little ownerless white-tab bitch. Quivering lips didn’t count.
Who knew, maybe even Lucia Lopez wasn’t completely beyond instruction. She looked pretty good naked, when she wasn’t all bruised up.
Maybe her freshman would let her stick around, if his A-tabbers liked her enough and she kept her damned mouth shut, and jumped immediately when he said “frog”. But odds were, she’d start talking her dreck to his girls and they’d beat her bloody for it. Or he would, when he learned about it. And then she’d be back in the white-tabber dorm with the rest of the free meat.
As for Ingrid...
Ingrid she would never see again. She’d taken half her advice, from the last time they’d talked. The wrong half.
Ingrid van der Bruijn, spoiled-brat daughter of Mirandan aristocrats in exile, had come crying to the Accounting dorm three weeks after her transfer from Agronomy to Campus Police Records, dragging her bestest buddy Lucia with her. The moron had actually run off work.
The two of them had probably expected sympathy, or solidarity, or some other such doltish dreck. What Ingrid had gotten instead was advice to run right back immediately and beg her cop sergeant for forgiveness on her knees, before he filed a Report. And then give him a blowjob, if he agreed not to file it.
“Deepthroat it all, swallow and smile, then tell him he can have you whenever he wants you, however he wants you, and that you’ll never, ever, say a single nasty word to him again, you dumb bitch!” that’s what she’d told Ingrid, word for word.
The man had actually asked the ninny, twice, before he’d gotten tired of her attitude and just bent her over his desk the way most would have on day one. He’d only slapped her once, and that one slap was her own damned fault. When they told you to undress, you undressed. When they told you to bend over, you bent over. You didn’t give them lip, much less try to fight them.
They didn’t have to ask anymore. The Dean had as much as said so. The ones who still did were the really nice ones. You wanted one of those. There were fewer and fewer of them every day.
Ownerless red-tab girls at Power Coil got passed around the
whole damned floor, unless someone claimed them informally. Not just between men. Some of the owned women had them, too, or at least slapped them around if they talked back or cried too much.
Just that morning she’d watched an ownerless red-tabber get stripped naked in front of a whole bay for being fifteen minutes late and then talking back to her section leader. They’d passed her desk to desk. Never mind walk, she couldn’t stand afterwards. And here was stupid cow Ingrid van der Bruijn, interrupting her dinner to complain about a man who’d asked her, and not once but twice!
Heck, if she was good enough in the sack, he might Pin her when he made First Lieutenant. Or she could keep ticking him off. After her public switching, maybe they’d transfer her to Reconstruction. Blond hair and pink nipples ought to go over really well at one of their Samplers. They liked exotica over there. They wouldn’t mind a striped back one bit.
She’d been wrong about Systems Reconstruction, thought Isadora. Reconstruction was a great place to work. They always asked. Director’s policy. But they didn’t take ownerless techies. No ownerless Survivors at all. Doctor Vargas didn’t want bitches, losers and failures around his Teams. All his ownerless girls were RT Camp Girls. Acceleree red-tabbers, aged fourteen through sixteen, every single one. All preselected at Induction, with enough spares to replace projected losses and accommodate planned expansion two years going forward. No exceptions.
All the exotic looks weren’t by design. It just ended up working out that way, somehow. A weird side effect of Doctor Vargas’ selection process.
There were lots of blancas. Not a majority, but lots. Lots of foreign girls, too. Dean’s Exemptions, across the board. Imperials, mostly, but also Jagobarans, Mirandans, a few Leaguers, and heaven only knew who else.
There was even a girl from the Archduchy, of all places. It should have been impossible, but she was there. She looked like Homo purus, she had Homo purus brain structures, she showed up as Omicronian on any cursory test. But the Omicronian brain structures were dysfunctional. They had never developed properly after birth, and never turned on correctly at puberty. Her IQ was around 130 and her full DNA print came back as slightly odd Homo sapiens, comfortably within the Interbreeding Range. Projection showed that her offspring would inherit her IQ. The Omicronian structures would go vestigial and disappear within three to four generations. That’s what had gotten her the Dean’s Exemption. That, and her psych profile, and the other Camp Girl, the one who’d rather starve to death on the coast up by San Cristobal than go without her friend.
Before the War, she’d literally been an alien among her birth people. Spawn of Satan. Couldn’t even interbreed with them. If they’d found out what she really was, they would have crucified her. Not figuratively, either. Cross and nails and barbed wire wreath, the whole shebang.
When they found out, actually. It would have been inevitable when she didn’t get pregnant from her husband.
Jimena Fernandez, born Jane Sanford, had been hunted her whole life, like an animal. It was a miracle she’d survived to fourteen, much less managed to make it to Paradise. For all the rest of them, the War was a disaster beyond words, but for Jimena Fernandez, the War was her first chance at some semblance of a normal human life. The only thing she was miffed at, apparently, was that they’d stuck a contraceptive implant inside her. Those didn’t exist in the Archduchy. That girl wanted babies. Bad. One from each Team member, to make it even and fair, in the spirit of her Director’s policies. Her RT loved her.
A Camp Girl lived with her RT. She deployed with her RT, and she came back with her RT to the RT barracks inside the Systems Reconstruction compound. She never went anywhere outside those walls, on campus or off, without at least one Team member to escort her and a gun on her hip. She was as safe as an ownerless girl could be.
A Camp Girl was neat, clean, organized, presentable, pleasant, agreeable and pliable to her teammates, and even-tempered under all circumstances. She was handy with a stove, handy with a broom, handy with a wrench, a welder/cutter or a logic probe, handy behind the wheel of a truck or the control stick of an aircar and, push come to shove, just as handy with a gun, a knife and a field medic’s kit. RT members worked twenty-hour days on deployment, and she was there to care for their every need.
Their every need, physical and emotional. She was the only girl those six men took with them when they went out.
A Camp Girl never favored one Team member over another, and she never said no to her men. They asked, they never hit, they never forced, and they were kind and polite. They would even wait, if it wasn’t their turn or she asked them to. But their Camp Girl never said no.
The flip side was, she could say no to anyone else. In fact, she was expected to. Her Team would back her, with lethal force if need be. And all the other Teams would back their fellow Operators. And Doctor Vargas would back his Teams. And then all of Reconstruction would be up on the walls of their compound at the drop of a hat, with enough firepower in hand to fight a not-so-small war.
Past that point, the one time it had gone that far, it went straight to the Dean and ended up with no less than Doctor Martín as Independent Investigator. There’d been no hangings, in the end, and no switchings. But a cop lieutenant lost his pips, for starting Firefight Number Two while trying to force his way past Reconstruction’s front gate.
He’d gotten off lightly, with just a hole in his gut and a demotion. RT Seven had sent the two cops who’d laid hands on their girl to molder in the graveyard. Another two had ended up there when the lieutenant came to arrest the RT, and four more had filled up hospital beds alongside their commander.
That’s when Doctor Vargas got the Dean’s permission for his Camp Girls to wear field uniforms and carry guns on campus. That’s when the escort policy got started, too.
Before she’d opened the envelope this past Saturday afternoon, Isadora would have killed to wear that baggy, olive-green mess of canvass and oilcloth instead of her tailored blues and pretty, gold-colored beret.
A Reconstruction patch was the ownerless girls’ Holy Grail. Legendary and unreachable. No way the likes of Ingrid van der Bruijn would be let anywhere near Doctor Vargas’ Directorate.
Samplers she’d been wrong about, too. They were nothing like what she’d thought they were. Reconstruction started them because some Camp Girls had asked, and their RTs had backed them.
They were people. They got attached, down underneath, no matter how they acted on the surface. RT men got attached, too. It was almost inevitable, in the long run. Men got promoted. People got burned out, and needed off RT for a while. And Doctor Vargas didn’t want girls from outside his Directorate cluttering up the machinery. He hadn’t set up all that entry testing just to end up with random strays coming in off the street. He had other outfits beside RTs. Sustainment Teams, for example. They worked shorter hours, normally, but they stayed out longer. Their work was less dangerous. Personal Staff girls were allowed out with STs. One girl per man. Sometimes more than one, if they had the right skills and there was Operational Need. So it had all dovetailed together.
Samplers were for men who had an empty Personal Staff slot to fill. New promotions, almost always. Everybody had them now, not just Reconstruction. Nobody would Pin a stripe-backed bitch like Ingrid van der Bruijn at a Sampler, yummy curves, exotic creamy skin and rose-colored nipples notwithstanding. Nobody would even let the likes of her into one. Who wanted that kind in his house?
It wasn’t enough to look good in nothing but a skirt and a pair of earrings. You had to be graceful and pleasant, and smile, and make engaging conversation while you poured them drinks. They could look, but they couldn’t touch. The skirt could swish around, but it had to be a regular uniform skirt of the regular prescribed length, no modifications allowed. There was nothing underneath, but it didn’t get flipped up and it didn’t come off.
The girls didn’t leave the room. They picked their girl, and they Pinned her at the end of the evening, or they went home alone to their o
ther girls. If there was a tie, she chose. Those were the rules.
Samplers were the ultimate competition in this new world, with the ultimate prize at stake. They were nothing like the usual way an ownerless girl got into a man’s home nowadays.
Being let in the door because you were good in the sack would get you a tiny bit of extra safety and a few little gifts, for as long as he didn’t get tired of you. A Sampler could secure your future forever. It could shoot you from the lowermost depths to the top of the food chain, overnight.
What you were, outside that room, didn’t matter. White-tabber or azure-tabber, acceleree or grad student, all were equal. He didn’t even know, coming in through the door, unless he knew you from outside. He could guess, but you were wearing no tabs. All you had was a number stuck to your waistband. And he didn’t care. He knew you were ownerless and he knew that he could Pin you. That’s what mattered.
He looked. If he liked what he saw, he walked up. He said hello. And then the game was on. He wasn’t the only man, but you weren’t the only girl. There were always more girls than there were open slots. There was a lot more at stake for you, and for every other girl in the room, than for any of the men. And it was a long Saturday evening.
The competition was fierce. To win, you needed looks, taste, wit, intelligence and an agreeable disposition. And you needed a good reputation. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even let you in the door.
Ingrid van der Bruijn had gone off to join her mommy and daddy at Lady Katarina’s Castle after her public switching. The forty-seventh moronic, baggage-afflicted failure to have done so since Pin Day.
Apparently, Lucia had been there, watching with the rest of her little band of throwbacks as the campus cops pulled the corpse off the rafter. Probably whispering about revenge and resistance, and Evil Patriarchy, or some other such nonsense. Plotting their own trips to the public switching post, if not to to the gallows.
That was exactly the same evening, remembered Isadora, when she’d gotten the note from the registrar. Lora Duarte’s TA had scored her quiz on the required readings in the ninetieth percentile, she’d passed the psych exam with flying colors, and her kinesthetics profile was acceptable. She was on the short waiting list now. Four weeks later she was sitting in Professor Duarte’s evening intro class.