Losers

by Isaac Byrne

  Then she rounded the corner, and nearly bowled over none other than Kelsey.

  “Kelsey! Oh gosh, I didn’t… wait, are you…?! Are you… you?”

  Kelsey smiled, but Chanda knew in an instant that it wasn’t her smile. Kelsey had a gorgeous smile, all teeth and so broad it almost forced her big brown eyes closed. This Kelsey, however, gave only a slight upward twist at the corners of her mouth. It didn’t touch her eyes. “Of course I am me, Chanda. Excuse me. I must go meet master.”

  Chanda tried to body block her, slow her down, but Kelsey only whirled around her and quickened her pace. Where the heck were her shoes? “Kelsey, talk to me! What happened? What was it like?”

  “You’ll find out,” she said cryptically.

  “Wait, do you know something? Who won me?”

  Kelsey walked around her as if she was a mere obstacle in her path. “I must go meet with master, Chanda.”

  “Come on, Rach – we’re friends! I mean, we were, right? Just tell me who,” pleaded Chanda. The hasty steps she took to block her path reminded her how light-headed she still was, so the best she could do was trail along behind her.

  “I don’t know. I know only that I must find my master so I may learn how to please him. If he wills it, you may remain my friend.” There was no emotion to her voice; it was hard to fathom how this new robotic Kelsey might define friendship.

  “She can’t help you. If she could, she probably would. There’s no use,” said Aaron grimly, following them warily.

  Chanda ignored him, and resumed peppering Kelsey with questions as she padded down the halls, but she learned nothing new. He was right. Either Kelsey didn’t know, or she wouldn’t say. Appeals to shared history, mercy, friendship… none of them moved her in the least. The only thing weighing on her once-kindred mind seemed to be the most direct route to her master. Chanda followed her right to the front doors of the school. Kelsey simply kept walking. Barefoot. In windy fifty-degree weather. That same thin smile etched into her face.

  “I’m so sorry,” said Aaron, who had apparently still been trailing along behind her. “You guys are friends, right?”

  “Were.” Chanda sighed. Maybe in another thirty years, they would be again. “Come on. Time to bite the bullet.”

  “I… I hope you get somebody nice,” he said softly, but even she could tell he was aware his words held no real comfort.

  The lights were on in the hallway outside the gym, and there were still five agents in sight. Two were having a conversation by the water fountain; the other three were each clearly guarding a set of doors. Chanda’s knees suddenly went weak. Aaron must have noticed because he suddenly rushed up to support her, but a male touch was enough to make her remember herself and shrug him off. She might not get to flip her hair over her shoulder triumphantly and march stoically out of a classroom like she’d mentally rehearsed all those times, but that didn’t mean she was going to be a sissy about it either.

  “My name is Chanda Brighton. I…” She didn’t want to tell this jerk that she’d fainted. “I’m reporting for Lottery duty. Or whatever.”

  His surprise was evident; she could well imagine they didn’t get a lot of self-surrenders. “Wait here, please.” The man disappeared into the gym. Chanda tried to peer in after him, but they’d put up some kind of privacy curtain right inside the doors.

  She folded her arms impatiently – and fearfully. As the seconds ticked past, she became increasingly aware of Aaron lurking right behind her shoulder. “You know I can walk OK now, right? You don’t have to wait with me.”

  “Sure, I know that. I only thought you might…”

  “Well I don’t. I’m fine all by myself. All right? You’re a day late and a miracle short of saving me, so spare me the hero complex and leave me alone.”

  He wilted. She’d made guys do that before, but only jerks who wouldn’t take her initial rejection for an answer. She felt bad. Aaron had been nice to her, and if there was a moment in her life when a guy had to know he didn’t have a chance in hell and was acting out of pure altruism, it was this one. “Right, sure. Sorry. I didn’t mean to…” He looked over to where the nearest Lottery officer was standing, hands clasped in front of him, staring dutifully at the wall opposite him. “I’m really sorry, Chanda. I’ll… yeah. I’ll go.”

  So he left. Chanda didn’t stop him. I mean, why would she? Her overactive imagination spun an immediate justification for the cruelty of her dismissal, a whole narrative in which she’d inadvertently given him some hope she might be into him, then he kept pursuing her after she was reprogrammed and her winner ordered her to humiliate him in the worst possible way. No. No, a clean break was better. Not that they’d ever had anything to break off. He’d brought her water once, and before that had been decent enough that she’d never had to notice him. That was it.

  Some minutes later, the door opened, and a different officer popped out. One of the ones who’d taken Kelsey, she was pretty sure. “What was the name again?”

  “Chan-da. Brigh-ton.” she said, enunciating with exaggerated crispness. “Want me to spell it for you?”

  Then he was gone again. Good lord, these guys were the absolute worst. In thirty years, she’d have to file some kind of complaint. If these guys hadn’t retired yet, maybe she could demand they be demoted. She sighed.

  Finally, the first guy returned, wearing a perturbed expression. “Nothing for you here, Ms. Brighton. Sorry.”

  “What? Where am I supposed to go then?” Surely she hadn’t misunderstood. Kelsey had definitely been coming from here, and had very definitely been processed.

  “I don’t care where you go, but you can’t stay here. Now move along.”

  “Move along? I… I don’t understand,” she persisted.

  “Between you and me, Miss, I don’t either.” The man gave her chest a much too appreciative look. You had to be a special sort of misogynist to to work for the Lottery Bureau, evidently. “But all the same, you’re not on our list.”

  “Not on your list? What list? What does that mean?”

  “It means: nobody. Seed-ed. Your. Pot,” he said, mocking her with his own bout of over-enunciation. “Want me to spell it for you?”

  “Uh, spell what?”

  “Miss, I’m going to count to three, and if you haven’t gotten that sweet ass out of here before I finish–”

  “Yes sir!” she squeaked. Chanda was three blocks away before she remembered she could call her mom for a ride home.

  Home. Her home.

  “Surprise! GAAAAH!” cried both Chanda and her father. For him, it was the surprise of leaping into the living room to collide with his daughter, whom he had expected not to see for, at the least, quite a little time yet. For her, it was the shock of having her naked father knock her off her feet.

  He scurried out of the room before worrying if he might have hurt her, which turned out to be the correct call. “Dad! What the hell?!” A scarlet-hued Chanda picked herself up and hastened to the other exit to the room, assiduously keeping her eyes from going anywhere near the insidious doorway through which her father had entered.

  “Sweetheart! You’re home!” She could tell he was in the midst of vigorous motion, and could only pray he was dressing himself. She’d barely seen anything, but already the image was firmly ensconced in her memory. The harder she tried not to think about it, the deeper it burrowed.

  Chanda’s mother, who like her daughter, had been so excited she’d failed to notify her husband, hurried around the corner to help him dress himself. “She’s home, Jon! Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “Well, yes, of course! I’m so… Goodness. I’m so happy you’re home, sweetheart,” he called from around the corner. “I… shut. I’d meant to, ah, surprise your mother. Not you, obviously.”

  “I sure the heck hope so!” she groused.

  A few minutes later, emotions asserted themselves into their proper frames. After he muttered a sheepish explanation about his intentions to help his wife take he
r mind off of their Drawing Day blues and she insisted she never wanted to hear another word on the subject of her parents’ sex life, her father embraced his daughter. Chanda barely felt weird hugging him back. Yesterday, when they’d bid each other farewell before going to Tiffany’s last night – oh, Tiffany! – they had all three of them been sobbing despondently. Now, to be right here, everyone unchanged, was practically a miracle. An ecstatic Bumper jumped on any leg he could find, tail wagging exuberantly at their reunion.

  “So what happened?” her father asked once they’d settled in. “Was there some glitch or something?”

  “No glitch,” said her mother. “Chanda wasn’t won!”

  His head snapped back. “What? That can’t be… what?”

  “I know,” she said. “I was pretty shocked, too. I wish I had an explanation. The Lottery guys, they wouldn’t answer any questions, only told me nobody won me and to get the heck outta Dodge.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” said Chanda’s mother. For probably the twentieth time since picking her up after school, she swept back her daughter’s hair and kissed her forehead.

  “Wonderful, yeah, right,” he said distractedly. His wife elbowed him, and then he repeated more earnestly, “I mean, yes, absolutely. Wonderful. I’m so happy, sweetheart. Only… it doesn’t… make sense, does it?”

  Chanda and her mother had gotten past the awkwardness of the subject of the Lottery long ago, but she suspected shared gender played a role in that. It was no doubt harder for his father to point out, as he was so euphemistically struggling to do, that his daughter was insanely hot, and that it simply didn’t add up.

  She smiled fondly, amused by how uncomfortable it made him. “I don’t know. We were talking, and we thought maybe we could contact the Lottery Bureau, but… why? Like, say it’s all a big error in my favor. Why call their attention to it? It’s a blind draw, so not like there’s a winner out there thinking he’s been cheated out of me.”

  Her mother nodded. “Besides, you hear those awful tales of corruption in the Bureau, people rigging drawings for bribes or as favors to influential people. Why give some unelected bureaucrat the opportunity to abuse his power on our baby?”

  He considered, but it was obvious he was still pondering. “Yeah, yeah. Probably. I just… wow. I didn’t want to tell you, but I guess I may as well. So you know how they have the big meeting at City Hall every year in advance of Drawing Day?”

  “Yeah.” She was aware, though like any other pot-holder, she’d been barred from attendance. Chanda knew what went on there, though. Outlining the process with the relevant dates and publicly known procedural stuff, yes, but it was also where the people of Clark were given their first opportunity to purchase tickets. By law, no community could sell more tickets to its members than were freely available to the 18-year-old boys who lived in it. It kept the breeders young, since the whole idea behind the Lottery was to winnow down the population, not render the species extinct as a bunch of rich old men failed to impregnate teenage girls they’d purchased. Beyond that limitation, it was largely up to local government to handle implementation. Most cities gave boys multiple tickets; at Clark, it was common knowledge that each of them was given five for free. With roughly 1500 boys in school, that meant the community could sell off seven plus thousand and still make sure the youth was favored.

  The meeting her father referenced was where the nitty gritty decisions were made. How many community tickets to sell, for how much, provisions for emergency delays, reminders of protocol, all that jazz. What she didn’t know, her father was about to tell her.

  “Well, I went.”

  “You what?!” her mother gasped. People had accepted the Lottery as a necessary step in saving the planet, but there was still a stigma associated with the sort of adult men who participated in bidding on nubile female slaves.

  “Not to participate!” He held up his hands defensively. “But I wanted to know what went on. I thought it might help me prepare.”

  Chanda could see her mother was going to continue to make an issue out of her husband going without telling them, so she cut her off. “What did they talk about?”

  “Oh, it was all about like you’d expect, a bunch of perverts drooling all over themselves at the prospect of…” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, they actually had a whole presentation prepared and everything, sort of an advertisement to help sell tickets. A whole video production, then a powerpoint and everything.”

  “A powerpoint? They tried to sell us with powerpoint?”

  “They sure did. Absolutely disgusting, all of it. I don’t even know how they got all the footage they had. It was from all over – and I mean all over. In classrooms, around the halls, even footage from the locker rooms!”

  “From where ?!” It was Chanda’s turn to gasp.

  “They blurred out the bodies,” he said, then realizing he sounded defensive, he forced himself to speak more evenly. “But that’s why I’m so surprised. We’ve known for a long time what a beautiful young woman you were blossoming into, but… Well, suffice to say you were… featured. Prominently.”

  “Define ‘prominently,’” Chanda said heatedly.

  “Prominently.” It was all the more he seemed willing to share on the topic. “But that’s the thing, the men were talking, and… I heard some of them announce they wanted to bid on you. Hell, J– I mean, one man I know, he was giving me this shit-eating grin the whole time he filled out his tickets, like he wanted me to know whose pot he meant to stuff.”

  “Who?” demanded Chanda’s mother.

  “Chanda’s, dear,” he said, trying not to sound too condescending.

  She rolled her eyes. “I meant who was the jackass seeding our–”

  “It’s not important who he was,” he insisted. Chanda’s mind was with her mother’s. J who? His manager Jerry? She was pretty sure their neighbor Mr. Hargraves was a John like her father, only with an H. Ew! “But my point is, I don’t see how it’s possible that nobody seeded her pot.”

  His wife folded her arms across her chest in that way she had, one that made their daughter sure his lack of forthcomingness would be a featured topic in a discussion later when she wasn’t around. “You were at the meeting. Surely there’s some logical explanation. Some… I don’t know, algorithm or whatever.”

  “Honey, no. Sure, the process is digital nowadays, but it’s still nothing mysterious. You seed a pot with ten tickets, you have a 10% chance. That’s it. It doesn’t put any fingers on the scale. It’s pure random chance. The only way a girl doesn’t get won–”

  “A woman,” Chanda corrected automatically. It was a pet peeve she’d developed. If she was mature enough to be made a sex object, she was mature enough not to be a “girl” any more.

  “Right, yes, the only way a woman doesn’t get won is if nobody puts anything in her pot. Even one ticket, and it’s a guarantee.”

  “Even if the man who placed the ticket already won somebody else?” asked her mother. “I know there are rules about limits on how many a man can win in a given drawing, right?”

  Chanda was glad her father answered, because the withering look she was directing at the back of the woman’s head would have gotten her grounded for sure. Her mom had always despaired about losing her daughter, but had never bothered to actually educate herself on the process.

  Her dad answered. “That’s not been the case for years now, dear. The only thing stopping one man from winning fifty women is the extent of his luck.”

  Chanda nodded. “He’s right. I read a thing in Teen Vogue about a man in the Canadian Lottery, which is pretty much the same as ours aside from a few added humanitarian restrictions on how losers can be treated… anyway, this kid apparently seeded ten pots with ten tickets and won ten girls.”

  Her mother chimed in, “I think I read that one, too. He won the twins, too, right? My recollection was that was why they profiled him.”

  “Yeah.” She’d never been gladder not to have a sibling than wh
en she’d read that. Compulsory lesbian incest had run rampant since the advent of the Lottery, disgusting winners getting together to watch their losers perform on their own sisters.

  Nobody knew quite what to say. What her father had said only made it seem even more bizarre. Perhaps it had been ego, but Chanda had honestly figured on being bid easily five hundred tickets just from her classmates, and that might have been conservative. If pervs around town had gotten to see her blurred out naked body, the tickets would have only flooded in faster.

  She’d have to ask her math teacher to help her calculate the odds of this happening on Monday after break. A little data analysis might help this feel less like divine intervention.

  “Well then. So much for date night. How about I order pizza, and we keep working on binging The Office ?”

  Chanda grinned. Her dad rewatched the series at least once a year, and she’d watched it right alongside him since she’d been too little to even get all the jokes. They’d done it less in high school, with her busier social calendar, but right now, she could think of nothing more wonderful than curling up under a blanket with her parents and letting Michael Scott shut down her brain for an evening.

  Some hours later, for the second time that day, a man carried her into a bed, and both her parents gave her a long hug and kiss goodnight as they tucked their baby girl in.

  It was the next day when she began to realize her new situation.

  While Chanda slept almost until noon, her friends were all out there being forced into every manner of degrading, depraved, and debasing acts as they settled into their new lives.

  Had Kelsey been given new shoes? Many winners would have no money to furnish a fresh wardrobe for their slaves. By law, losers could transport her own clothes and possessions to their new homes; some didn’t even move out of their parents’ houses. Though as legal adults, it was a rare family who didn’t object to their sex slave daughters coming and going at all hours.