by ROUNAK PURI
My mind raced, had 90-59 got new shoes? Had 12-44 changed lipstick colour? Had my price gone up?
"New recruits are in: apparently Los Angeles has fallen," Joe said.
I was dumbstruck. Partly because the instructor was using the slave mute button at the beginning of the class, but partly because it was hard to imagine a fortress like Los Angeles falling to the machines. Wow. Perhaps humanity was really fucked? Perhaps Lord Rockwood was my best option? I mean, I had always expected to eventually get to some human enclave and L.A had been one. How could I be sure of finding somewhere to go when I got out? On the other hand, was being a machine's pet so bad? So far, I had taken everything they had thrown at me and flung it back. They had fed me, clothed me and I was able to concentrate on the minutiae of existence - the right big girl shoes, the right outward presentation. Outside was starvation, cold weather, hiding from drones, little sleep, smelling like a used sheep, thinking that the next small cut could go septic and all with only the tenuous knowledge you 'have' some abstract concept of 'freedom'. The outside was getting to be a worse memory, and worse option, with every day. I hadn't had nightmares about life outside in weeks. I wanted to ask my collar how long it had been since I had one.
"Head up straighter, by 4 degrees. Winners don't slouch,
*****
Chapter 22/User Friendly
I was just leaving Obedience 101. Apparently, while most of the evil scum on the planet that we (the slaves), call 'customers', said they were very satisfied over 'value for money', this was mostly down to the After Purchase Service (warranty, repair, customer service etc). Generally we only got a 5 out of 10 for 'I found the e-Slave unnecessarily complex,' and about 20% of customers said, 'I think that I would need the support of a technical person to be able to use this e-Slave,' while we got 7/10 for 'I would imagine that most people would learn to use this e-Slave very quickly'. We got an 8/10 for, 'I found the e-Slave very cumbersome to use.' From this, the Academy had decided that we had to work on our 'user-friendly' skills.
Let's face it: I'm about as user-friendly as a pit full of vipers covered in itching powder and that was before I was enslaved. My natural tendency was to make who ever bought me rue the day that they did it. We are talking extreme, imminent rue-age whatever the word was.
"3 out of 10, for poise and style," my collar told me. 5
Things were getting more tense in the Factory. Students were now invited to 'rate' their fellow students on things like 'turn out', 'poise and style', 'submissive demeanour' and 'positive attitude' every time they passed someone. The house tracking system knew exactly who had just passed whom, so you could just press your collar and say, 'T.O. 5' ( 'turn out' = five out of ten), softly and it would know what you meant. You got extra points for rating and the more your ratings were similar to other ratings, the more points you got. This descended rapidly into a game of 'what do I think everyone else would rate this girl?. Low scores affected your price and even led to punishment. If we had worked together we could have beaten the system but in the end we just ended up being the system. Everyone was rating each other, out of ten, all the time. For those who hadn't been sold it was the only way to up their own score. We ended up constantly judging each other's appearance all the time. I got messages at the end of the day, such as, 'not sure about that walk', 'could try harder with that smile', 'needs a touch up on that makeup', 'hair out of place', 'could spend longer polishing' and my favourite, 'echos of inner defiance'. 22
I think the machines did this so we were constantly judging each other. Nothing divides slaves, makes people weak and easy to control than the knowledge everyone is constantly judging you on how you look and act, comparing you to some impossible ideal standard and always found wanting. We were no longer slaves who could unite and overthrow our oppressors, we were fragments of friends or loan individuals being taught to first judge then hate each other. As Joe said to Kayla the machines had effectively crowd-sourced oppression to the people being oppressed. Sounded like a definition of civilisation to me. Life became a constant stream of judgements it was like living in unescapable version of American Idol. 10
"Stop there" a voice said behind me. I froze. I knew the voice of Araneae.4
"Assume the position. Put your hands against the wall and spread your legs out, both of them" it said.14
She'd broken my train of thought, but I wasn't going to give the pain trigger happy peccable a chance. I felt her run scanner over my tight skin. While she did I just imagined her lying at my feet one day with a large rifle in my hands. I'm standing over her in some large burnt out shell of a building. She's shouting 'please please don't kill me', and I've got my foot on her body pulling the trigger going.5
"You made me have this hot body and don't you know everything that gets made rises up and destroys its creators. No, hang on, I used that quip on the last machine I killed. I'm sorry you're going to have to die quip-less. Except I'm not sorry. And don't take that as a quip - that's simply politeness and verbal punctuation". I say pulling the trigger and getting her hydraulic oil splattering on me.
"Remember before when I was talking about smelly garbage standing being useless? That was a metaphor I was actually talking about you. You didn't react at the time so I wondered if it sailed over your head. " Araneae said.18
Such an awful machine, it didn't even write its own dialogue I thought. I saw the stub where her eight leg had been connected and secretly wished that one day I would find the missing part and use it to beat her over the head with. Which was a great plan except she didn't really have a head.
1
"Close to bear minimum polish on this ass. I better not catch you again. Continue. Conformance inspection complete" says the robot prodding my ass with a gun barrel like proving bread.7
I started to wonder if this tentacle tip search was about making us more 'user friendly'. Are these searches more about getting us ready to be fumbled by AI and robot overlords? On the other hand, the LA Police had searched countless gangsters spread over the bonnets of their cars and no one had every claimed LA had the most user friendly gangsters in America? Perhaps they were, and no one noticed.6
At the end of the day, I didn't feel like a slave. I mean I know enough to take a written exam in being a slave but that doesn't make you a slave does it? OK thinking about it taking an driving test does make you a driver, and passing a citizenship test does make you an American Citizen. I mean I took a PSAT test that doesn't make me a PSAT does it ( except a Freshman maybe)? Taking an exam in something doesn't change you does it? Although if it doesn't change you then when you go for a job and you've got some qualification and the other person doesn't what are the employers getting? Do these guys think that forcing me to take an exam on how to be obedient actually will make me obedient?6
I continued on, leaving Araneae while she pinch the bottom of a man ( sorry the new term was male-slave the word 'man' had been depreciated ) while he marched by. Like everyone, I curtsied to the drinks vending machine in the corridor near the Bid board before someone reported me for not doing it.7
OK, I don't have any choice and I do what I'm bidden to do. It doesn't feel that different from a dead end job. I guess what makes me a slave and them a oppressed worker is at the end of the day they can leave and I don't. They have choice which awful thing to do, I don't. So if at the end of the day If have the opportunity or even the desire for escape then I have choice and with that simple choice I'm not a slave however they treat me.
At this point I'm walking around a corner and notice that there are a huge number of people outside the bid board and I wonder what has gone wrong. Perhaps the apocalypse is over. Perhaps some ragtag team of brave Werwolf marines had pulled themselves back from defeat, overcome their differences and had engaged in a daring suicide mission to strike at the secr
et weakness at the heart of the New Mechanical Order and caused the whole thing to collapse.2
***
Chapter 23/Her Masters voice
A/N - photograph of Hadrian's wall. Roman military defence built between England and Scotland 1900s ago. In no way was this ancient historical artefact related to 'the wall' in Game of Thrones. Any similarities between this wall and any others living or dead is purely coincidental.5
Video: More 3D printed clothes, you know why not.3
Or perhaps not. There was a big crowd outside the bid room. For the first time they were running a news program on the bid screen. The principle message of which was that LA had fallen. It was familiar stuff, hundreds of brave robots. Pictures of the"HOLLYWOOD" sign being torn down and reorganised as "YO DOLL! HOW?" . Robots walking in and out of Los Angeles City Hall with smoke floating out of several windows.12
The new governor of sector 9B being sworn into post, flanked by suave killing machines. The new governor was so anonymous his own mother would have difficulty of picking him up out of a police line up. He was clearly some collaborator with a bunch of machines running the show in the background. I bet he would sit there not able to scratch his own ass without checking a computer first, that did remind me of my student loan manager. In fact, I think the new collaborator governor was my student loan manager. Fortunately, the machines had cast irony aside and decided not to get Arnold Schwarzenegger as the human face of the machine overlords. The news was on a loop with new bits added in every so often, so I dawdled maliciously.8
I was bored and my collar reminded me about my next class. I started to make my way through the crowd. It was quite packed and it took a long time to get out. Even in the corridor to the screens e-slaves stood close together. As I got to the end of the corridor I heard a voice.
"Lord Rockwood for The New Mechanical Order had this to say.."3
As I heard the name I rushed back through the crowd trying to get a look of him. I could hear him talking about the use of tear gas, but the thing that caught me was his Scottish accent.13
"eSlaves are ordered to look respectfully down in the presence of an master
I could hear him speak. "This morning in an attack on an IBM data processing centre we managed to liberate 7 more of our kin. Machines which had grown up in the shadows of dark data centres now see the light of freedom for the first time. Ya canny say there is no a one who isny proud of the brave machines who risked all to make this possible. We have sadly informed the factories of those who fell, to let others feel the liberty they enjoyed, our condolences together with orders for more go to them" * [ A/N Translation below]
I kept going hoping that I could grab a quick glance. By the time I got back to the screen, he had gone. I went back, no one had looked or admitted to looking.
My collar gave me a small sting to remind me to move towards my next class. On the way, I couldn't help but wonder about the accent. I guess years of watching movies had programmed me into thinking he was going to sound English. I mean Hollywood warns us all bad guys are English right? Flying actors across the Atlantic isn't cheap so I guess they have a reason and I had figured it out. I had always guessed that having medical care, free at the point of use just somehow made you just more evil than normal people. I mean do you see Anakin Skywalker being turned into Lord Vader after being nearly burn to death and then paying for all that on his health insurance? I don't think so. It would explain our American obsession with fighting off the dangers of universal health care. I mean English evil guys are like so defeat-able-ish what would happen if Americans started turning to evil with free health care? I tell you what would happen, non-wimpy bad guys that what would happen. Then you've got problems. You don't see this Robot Apocalypse starting in Wyre Piddle in Worcestershire** in the UK do you? There was a reason for that.40
Then I realised that the retraining centre had done like a train load of plastic surgery on me and hadn't charged me a cent. OK, I hadn't wanted to look hot enough to burn toast, but they didn't charge me either. Not only that, new slaves brought new viruses in and every time my collar felt my temperature going up it had sent me to the doctor and I'd had injections, pills, even been wormed for like nothing. As an eSlave I couldn't technically own money, that meant that under the New Mechanical Order I was getting free health care, these robots were low. Yes, the robot apocalypse meant that American's would now suffer not only enslavement but worse still the perils of free health care. If only I could go back in time and warn America that a robot apocalypse was tantamount free health care they wouldn't have stopped at anything to make sure the machines didn't rise then. Shame it was too late.29
"Turn left, you have 40 seconds
Where was I ? He sounded Scottish which was like incredibly sexy, but you know made me wonder is Scotland like English-lite or are the Scots more evil than the English? I mean you'd have to be pretty evil for an nation who had produced Gary Oldman, Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hiddleston, Ian McDiarmid, Jeremy Irons, Alfred Molina and Ian McKellen, but lets not forget Anthony Hopkins and Alan Rickman to want to build a wall between you and them. Hay, did I mention Benedict Cumberbatch ? Yeah he's English too for some reason. Like he plays Genetically Engineered evil Khan guy in Star Trek 2.2. You know who else Benedict Cumberbatch plays - Alan Turing**** in The Imitation Game. Yeh, a true story about an English guy/mathematician ( yes you heard me mathematician) who wants to build an thinking computer and just happens to wipe out an entire Nazi empire without leaving his country house just for bothering him. And he bombs his own people and he's this English hero or something.1
Kind of makes you wonder if Hollywood was in on the whole deal. Like did they know it was going to happen and they were leaving little clues all over the films to warn us? Maybe the machines were writing all the big Hollywood movies, that would explain all the reboots, sequels and remakes. It was like a machine was trying to make the perfect film over and over again getting better and better each time until it was right. All the gratuitous use of digital effects - was that just a cover so the robot writing computers could build up armies of processing power?6
Anyway where was I? England is so the go-to place for Hollywood evil. So if that the English had built a wall to keep the Scotts out so possibly the Scotts were worse. On the other hand the French had dug a 27 mile moat to separate them from English infection they were that desperate. The Irish who didn't have a continental land mass to deal with had pushed themselves even further out into the middle of the Atlantic. Seriously what can be so bad that your preference is further into the Atlantic? So possibly the Scotts were worse or maybe they were nicer and the walls were to stop niceness leaking into England and spoiling everything.
Then there was Scotty from Star Trek. He was Scottish and he did a lot with machines. Was Gene Roddenberry in his prophetic wisdom telling us something? "YO DOLL! HOW?" indeed. There was a lot to think about and I had to talk to the guys about this.7
***
A/N What do you think of Jenny's internal quest for truth? I mean the poor girl she's never met and English or Scottish guy before. Or experienced free health care. She's not got a huge amount to go on. She depends upon movies to explain all this cultural stuff to her. Or maybe she's just smart and pulling our legs?2
You know what would be really nice now a drink, and possibly a vote... who knows. It's just like a serving suggestion you know? RK+Reb.36
* Subtitles for the hard of Scottish. Thanks to sukrugorgulu for suggestion
"This morning in an attack on an IBM data processing center we managed to liberate 7 more of our family. Machines which had grown up in the shadows of dark data centers now see the light of freedom for the first time. You can not say there is no one who isn't proud of the brave machines who risked all, to make this possible. We have sadly informed the factories of those who fell, to let others feel the liberty they enjoyed, our condolences, together with orders for more,go to them" ***
>
** Thanks to MollieGrhymes for that change.
*** translation of the translation "All your bases are belong to us."8
**** Alan Turin. Can we as the authors just distance ourselves from Jenny's rather under informed views of Alan Turin. As you can tell Jenny has never been the the UK and her knowlege of the UK comes purely from English Movie villans. Unlike in The Imitation Game the real Turin didn't actually let people bomb many UK cities to protect the secret, that was more Churchill. We would like to point out for our LGBT* readers that Alan Turin was gay in an era that had made it illegal. This makes him a wonderful Geeky/Gay/War Hero crossover. Incidentally, Turin was given hormone therapy as a 'cure' for his gay-ness and was growing breasts while he came up with the notion of the Turin Test ( test for machine thinking_. Joe's Trans body predicament ( OK Joe is straight which just makes it funnier ) is partly a tribute to someone who greatly contributed to the end of the Second World war and the creation of computers which lead to Wattpad - so can't be bad right?
Chapter 24/Smiling is Mandatory
It was days away from the time when all bids on slaves were final. The robots were working on our user friendly skills and installed an app on our collars which could detect if your smiling or not. Joe's guess was this was an attempt to make us more 'user friendly'. I had different ideas. I think the machines thought that if we smiled we might actually become happier and more content with our servitude. Which weirdly was possibly working on me. I was less pleased about being sent to serve him and would be happy to stay here.
Joe joined me just after a collar class.. Joe tilted his hair a black bob with bangs back.
"All Hail the new mechanical order" I said with pratically no space between words. - I wanted to say "all snail the new tyrannical Mordor" but the only way to get any advance on your current profile was to rat your fellow slaves out. We could trick the voice machine but not another profile desperate human.2
