Why I Love My Job Ch. 09

"PLEASE SIR, MAKE HER!"

"Julianne..." I said.

"Ugh. And with you watching?"

"We've done worse with her before, and even if I'm not in here I'll hear it. Anyway, I can truly say that I fought this whole idea. You can't blame me if I find this hot."

Julianne picked up the vibrator and set it to high, and smiled bitterly, then sardonically. "Baby going to get off nice and hard for her mistress?"

Cheryl nodded frantically. Julianne just rolled her eyes again and slid the vibrator down her belly, over her clit, and then, repeatedly, up inside her. It didn't even take a minute, and Cheryl came four times in the next two minutes. The fact that Julianne was clinical about it didn't make it less sexy.

When Julianne was done with her, Cheryl sagged against the sheets, sobbing softly. "I'm a slut for girls now too," she whimpered.

Julianne looked at the tent pole in my shorts, leaned over and kissed Cheryl full on the mouth, walked over and kissed my mouth, then grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me out of the room.

It didn't take long to figure out that some of Cheryl's kiss still worked, and I took Julianne on the floor, her wrists pinned to the floor at her shoulders. I came as quickly as I could. The indirect kiss didn't have enough impact to keep me going, which was just as well.

I curled her against me, panting, but she didn't seem especially affectionate for once.

"Somehow," Julianne said. "If I get her off, and then I get you off, then somehow it's like you're fucking her."

"Huh? Sex is commutative, not transitive."

"Hey, you know big words too."

"Stop it." I said sharply.

"I'm sorry," she said, with all the petulance her eighteen years had taught her. "It's bad enough when a boyfriend watches porn and then bangs his girl. It turns out it's worse when I have to help arrange the porn, too."

"Um... tough, but fair."

"Kissing you with her mouth didn't make it any nicer."

"I think we're discovering that it's one thing to want to help people, and another thing to actually implement."

"I'm finding that, yeah," she said. "So far for you it's just extra orgasms."

"I'm not actually enjoying seeing you unhappy."

She paused. "Alright, I really am sorry. It was my idea but it's just not turning out the way I pictured it. I assumed she'd have a babysitter and we wouldn't have to deal with her much. And jealousy sucks."

"I didn't like it when you were off with Bill, either. But let me check a couple more service organizations. We can't do this, it's just too messed up."

"Guys?" Cheryl called.

"Aw fu- um, for, um, pity's sake," Julianne whined. "Is this what having a baby is like? No wonder it's going out of style."

We went in.

"I think you can untie me now. I'm sane. Um, but it would help if Sir put on some pants."

"Huh, yeah." I dragged on some sweats. "Cheryl, you need to press charges for your beating. And you need to be clear on this -- you need to stay off the drug when you leave. Forever. We think we can cure the other side effects but that one has to be on you."

"Sir... you care and that's wonderful. But... let me go. I'll get a pleasuring license, and leave the Company-"

"And end up like this again," Julianne said. "You can't possibly want this!"

"Julianne... for a straight week they did things to me, over and over. Drugs, forced orgasms, multiple men on other drugs, hypnotism... I know I'm broken. But I don't care. I don't want to press charges. I'll find some nicer... clients. They'll pay extra for a drugged girl. That's something most service girls can't offer. I'll be ok. You're one of the lucky ones, don't you see? You have a guy who cares about you. A lot of girls don't. I never have. It's always been just sex, so... if that's fate, that's fate."

Julianne looked at me. "Has the world always been this way? Really? Because if it was always this way I wouldn't feel this kind of horror, would I? I'd be used to it, we all would. It would feel normal. But it doesn't feel normal. Something is very, very wrong with the world, and something in me knows it. Are the only choices really slaving for low pay, every day, your whole life... or work for the least ethical men in the world who can do this to you" -- she gestured at Cheryl -- "whenever they want? How can that be the only two choices? Why do we have a word for mercy if there's no such thing?"

It was a question that maybe only a poet could ask. I only knew a little history, from what they taught in school. It didn't all make sense to me, but I'd been taught that that was expected because, after all, no one really knew what happened long ago. But as far as I knew, there had always been the Company, and it made everything, invented Madrigal, and offered all the best jobs. And there were Governments to keep peace and everything else was just... work.

And I thought to myself... Really? I believe that?

"Julianne, you're a little more... sensitive to wrong than most. I don't know anything about the past. Most people think everything's fine. People in the Company anyway, I guess service people all think it kind of blows. But everyone's hoping for a better life. That's what Governments do, try to make life better."

"Then they suck at it."

"Yeah. Eric keeps mentioning he has books from a different... time, almost a different world. Maybe I'll read them and then I can answer your question. But for now, Cheryl-"

Cheryl shook her head. "No. I know what you'll say. But in the end I have to leave the Company. Sooner or later it happens. We'll just... let it happen. It's ok. Not everyone gets to be Julianne."

Julianne left the room, quietly. I looked at Cheryl, and frowned. "I'm going to unlock you. Lock yourself back up when you start to feel crazy again. Don't pounce on me, I don't want to fuck you. I'll do everything I can to get you safe, but in the end all the decisions are going to be yours."

I undid the locks, and went out to find Julianne, as Cheryl limped towards a bathroom.

Julianne was crying, and when I settled next to her she put her arms around me and just sobbed silently into my chest. I pet her hair until she could find words again.

"We live in such a horrible world," she whispered. "I thought war was the worst. But in war there are heroes. Here not even being a hero does any good."

I stroked her back, and thought...

+++

The next day I was able to find a group of people who did what you'd loosely call social services, except not Government affiliated or Company funded. It turned out they were an animal rights group, but they did humans on the side when people couldn't use hospitals. For a fee they'd watch Cheryl. I didn't see any other move, so I agreed, and they took her off my hands. At least she'd be harder to find if the Company came looking.

I cuddled a very relieved Julianne against me... and did some more thinking.

+++

"Call Eric."

"Yeah Scott. Julianne around to call me names again?"

"You're funny. Your collection of books..."

"Yeah?"

"I want access."

+++

The reading was fascinating, if mind bending. We spent a few solid weeks on it. During that time the Company figured out that Cheryl was missing, but by then Bill and I had found another placement for her, far out of town. I didn't visit.

Bill spent a lot of time at my apartment, as we went over material from Eric's collection. Julianne showed a genius for correlating sources and tying things in the books together. Bit by bit, we started to piece together a history that none of us had learned in school. Some of the philosophical and political terms were utterly unfamiliar, but there was a dictionary to help. Bill fell in love with the dictionary; he finally knew what a torx screw was.

The history we discovered was as disturbing as anything I'd ever imagined. But it was the fiction that consumed Julianne. One night she got into the copy of Narnia, and we lost her for two straight days. When she came out of the bedroom, there were tears trickling down her cheeks.

"Good and evil," she said, simply. "They used to believe in them as actual things. They used to teach them to children. I took Applied Ethics in school three years ago. We learned how to calculate everything, every decision, in terms of profit and loss, social stability, and societal benefit. I thought the only philosophers that ever mattered were Ayn Rand and John Mill. No one mentioned any other way to think. Give me that copy of Lord of the Rings next."

"Haven't you already cried enough?"

"The more I understand the more I'll cry. Don't even think of trying to stop me."

When we were done -- when we'd finally pieced together a basic understand of the events, and were as shocked and horrified at the Company and Governments as we thought it was possible to be - Bill gave us one additional gift of information. He told us what the Company was really after.

Julianne went mute with horror. I just cursed, softly, vehemently and continuously.

+++

A few nights later, Bill came in and opened with "They're coming for you. They've worked out that you had to be involved in Cheryl's disappearance. They'll put together an HR trail, fire you, question you, and soon after you'll vanish. If you're ever going to act, it has to be now."

"Then we do it. Tomorrow. Are you sure you can arrange an ethics hearing?"

"It will be unusual coming from a historian, but I have the right to call one. They know you and I talk and they'll assume I'm just turning you in for a pay increase."

"And you're certain our nameless CEO will call in."

"My accusation will be that you kidnapped and coerced information out of Cheryl, and boasted about it to me. Something about project Fountain, I'll say. He'll be there and he'll run the show. He goes by Mister Dark to his direct underlings, by the way. You wouldn't know that -- I shouldn't either -- so when you address him that way you'll rattle his cage even more."

+++

Four guards escorted me to a conference room in the basement. The proceeding was very much like a jury, but run by the Company's Ethical Assessment Council, with charges read aloud. Since the charges included an accusation of murder and the clear threat of a Police report, this was obviously nothing more or less than a tactic to get me to reveal Cheryl. But I said nothing.

"Mister Gladgrind, do you wish to address the council?" prompted a slightly synthetic voice from a completely black screen. The voice of the CEO, the world's most anonymous man.

I stood up, and out of the corner of my eye, I was able to see the prearranged signal. Bill's little 20^th century tech trick had worked, and it was game on.

"I do. I'll ask the council's indulgence while I present what amounts to a history lesson. It's relevant -- and it's not the history you know, perhaps not even you, Mister Dark. The history I'm going to present was covered over and replaced with a Company approved version, quite a long time ago. But in those days some people still recorded things in non-electronic media, records that can't be erased with the swipe of a hand. Dig hard enough, look in enough dark corners, and it's still possible to find diaries, letters, the handwritten memoirs. Eyewitness accounts."

"I see no relevance to the matter at hand," Mister Dark's voice replied.

"There is some, but it will take a little time to get there."

"Those records would be unreliable in any case," Mister Dark said. "Individuals are subject to bias and faulty memories. That's why there are collective bodies that exist to ascertain and present truth."

"The Company has been using that to justify the slow rewriting of history for decades, Sir. And not just history. I found the original versions of some fictional literature from 1911, 1950... I compared them to authorized versions available today. Except for some character names, there's nothing in common. Not plot, not dialogue, not style, not meaning. They are new books with old titles, but they are presented as 'historically faithful'. The same body that did that work, tackled history itself. With the same amount of accuracy: the accounts I found show a lot of similarity to each other, and almost none to officially taught history."

"You can't claim to understand the ramblings of uneducated people writing things on their own and without peer review. The world was different then, and would be incomprehensible to you."

"I didn't find it so hard to understand. No one would. They were people who wrote plainly and honestly because they were desperately worried about the direction society was taking. They wanted to leave a record of decisions made, institutions fallen, people silenced, governments coerced, morality collapsing, economies shredding. They thought they were seeing the end of the world. The curious thing is, they were right. A few thousand years of political and social evolution got swept away and replaced. In what turned out to be just a few decades. The world they watched fall apart was very different. Many small governments, some ruling only tens of millions of people, sometimes even less. Different languages. Different cultures. Individuals had the right to make, sell and even self-publish in much of the world. There was a time before the Company, ladies and gentleman and it was almost impossibly different, but not incomprehensibly different."

"Why do you think books were burned, Mister Gladgrind. Project Four Fifty One, I'm sure you read about it. They were all fiction. They didn't agree on anything."

"That's why I believe them. They were written by different people at different times, people who believed different things, but shared substantially the same reality. The accounts agree in large general terms, differ in small details. Exactly what you'd expect from eyewitness accounts that people tried to record as faithfully as they could. When you see a series of accounts that agree as well as our modern histories do, you know one thing -- they were all written by one committee, with one common agenda and one agreed-upon viewpoint. It's consistent alright -- but it's easy to make fiction consistent.

"Anyway, the point is this. Once upon a time, in the real world, wealth got concentrated in the hands of a small number of people. At one point, 25% of the world's measurable wealth was in the hands of 1% of the population. Not long after, it was 50%. Then, even faster, 75%. The world was being divided into owners and workers -- and the workers were rapidly becoming a servant class, something like what we'd call Services today. It caused trouble -- there are a lot of accounts of riots, and whole cities burning. But something else happened, not very long before the sudden and widespread collapse of the economies, and that was the invention of Madrigal.

"One simple drug. It gets referred to as the origin of the Company sometimes -- and that happens to be literally true. We take the stuff for granted -- slip some into Betsy's drink and Betsy will the cock-craving slut we all want her to be, ha ha. But when it invented it was revolutionary in a way no discovery since fire ever had been. Even the early formulation was effective on 98% of the female population, and it made women give men something men in those days didn't have -- full compliance, on demand. Women could be turned from saying no to the vast number of interested men, to saying yes to just about any cock they saw.

"The problem was... humanity, by which I mean males, was not ready for that brave new world. We'd been conditioned for thousands of years to strive and fight and woo and seduce as almost the sole activity we do, so we can have a shot at reproducing. We're wired to want it hard, because women set very high barriers to sex. You need to want it persistently, even ruthlessly, if you want to win. Evolution has been tuning us from the start, to want it hard, and do just about anything to get it.

"And suddenly technology reduced that whole struggle, the whole battle of career and courtship and achievement to impress women, to dropping a pill in their drink and waiting about three minutes.

"Nothing could have stopped the spread of Mad. It was the must-have drug, with the must being driven by the full force of evolutionary pressure. The company that developed it -- a bunch of thugs with science degrees and a lot of luck -- took to wholesale violence to control manufacturing and prevent knock-offs. They became vastly rich and answered to no one, and proceeded to grow in power and scale the ways governments do -- but without borders. The rich and powerful backed the new company -- the rich always back the winning horse. Laws were passed against the stuff -- the laws did nothing. Once a guy had his girl on Mad even once, he'd laugh at any law, any ethics, any system of philosophy that tried to tell him he shouldn't do it again. We talk about how addictive some of these drugs are -- we never mention that the real addiction is in using these drugs on others...

"Mad polarized opinions and redistributed wealth, at a time when wealth distribution was already a critical and world-wide problem. It was a trigger that fired at just the wrong time. Institutions collapsed, governments lost control of economies and populations, and people rioted, furious at a world where people worked eighty hours a week but salaries were shrinking, and ethical people told them not to drug and fuck the pretty girls, and governments increased taxes and tried to take away the awesome party drug that could get almost any loser laid. In metaphorical terms, everyone was sick and tired of getting Fucked by the Man, and wanted to try fucking a lot of women instead. Quite a few were willing to kill and burn their way to this brave new world, a glorious world in which women said yes, and powerful and rich people got beaten and stolen from. It was the great Lashing Out, and once it started to happen it happened quickly. A governing body once called "Congress", rule makers for the most powerful country in the world, were torn limb from limb in a flash riot that formed when fifty five thousand people hit the streets of a single city in a single night. Military organizations didn't step in to restore order -- a lot of them actually broke from their governments and backed Mad distribution, because the ones that did got it for free.

"It was the newly formed Company itself, which restored order. The rich cannot survive in a world of chaos -- they need obedient and organized sheep to run the moneymaking machines, if they want to stay rich. The rich had all backed the company that produced Mad -- so they simply organized all their resources behind it, turning it into an Everything Company, and nearly a shadow government. Existing legitimate governments merged, to aggregate the power needed to survive. The first task was to restore order. The solution there was free distribution of Mad -- for one week, to every male on earth. In many countries they simply spiked the water and food supply. It got the riots to stop, simply because everyone was suddenly too busy to riot. Not long thereafter, women had pregnancies to care for, because this was the era before widespread anti-fertility shots. It turns out the pregnancies quell rioting, too. In the chaos, the militaries were transformed into our modern day Police, governments reorganized... and a new social order emerged.

"It's a carefully managed order. Services people -- something like three quarters of the population, but it's hard to get exact numbers -- are managed to the poverty level. The Governments call it Fairly Managed Wealth, which is proof that you can give any name to anything. The rest of us run the great machine which keeps them fed, poor and exploitable. We harvest the brightest to do the actual work and the prettiest for other purposes, and let the ruthless rise to the top. It's a very stable system. Everything is in balance. It even cures overpopulation. The war in Europa -- people make all sorts of claims as to what's being fought over, the rhetoric and polemics go on and on, but I've seen the data. Two governments agreed to fight a war because they both had excess population. There's no other reason for it. The Company backs it because weapons sales are always a bonus and the food supply is a little squeezed."