Mira: A Slave’s Story
7 — The New Slavery
How did slavery return to the world? In a real sense, it had never left.
Lincoln’s Proclamation had ended legalized, economic slavery in the old United States. The key words there, however, were “legalized” and “economic.” Mira had become an expert on the subject. She had read numerous texts on slavery, done research, even written a few well-received articles.
The topic fascinated her.
More than anything else, the abolition of slavery in pre-Republic America had been an attack on the economy of the rebellious Southern states. There was the racial issue, of course, but, ultimately, the move was a pragmatic effort made to disrupt a plantation-based agricultural market dependent on forced labor, which, truth to tell, had been foundering even before the First American Civil War.
Slavery, as practiced in the past, as a means for agriculture, construction, mining, and so on, simply did not work very well. Slave-based manual labor was, and remained still, inefficient, then because the costs of maintaining control over a naturally resistant slave population could never equal the profits gained from their labor, now because modern machinery and industry could do the job of human beings so much better and faster. Proponents from earlier time periods claimed that “slave labor was cheap labor.” As it turned out, it was nothing of the sort: when all factors were considered—housing, feeding, discipline—it was far, far cheaper to hire people to do the jobs people wanted done than to maintain a costly stable of slaves to do the same.
All the Thirteenth Amendment of the pre-Revised Constitution did, aside from the legitimate promise it made in racial equality, and therefore worthy for that reason alone, was kick the crutch out from an already invalid economy. Yet while the practice was outlawed, American slavery, in some form, nonetheless survived, albeit changed.
Because slavery was against the law, it went underground.
Because it went underground, it could no longer make any economic sense whatsoever, however marginal its practice had been before. In other words, the “money factor” went out of chattel slavery altogether, and thus the motivation for keeping a stable of slaves became almost wholly sexual.
Yes, Southern plantation owners would frequently rape their female slaves. That was a given. But such sexual use was never the end-all of owning them in the first place. It was, from their owners’ point of view, a “perk.” Terrible, twisted, and based on wholly abominable racial discrimination, yes, but still just that: a perk.
Only later did sex become the objective of slavery unto itself.
With a near-universal proscription against it in the 19th and 20th Centuries, worldwide the nature of slavery shifted from manual labor to almost exclusively sexual service. Originally, both men and women were made slaves. In later years, it was almost always females who were secretly forced into prostitution and sexual slavery. Mira, along with other scholars, could attribute a number of important factors leading to the reinstitution of chattel slavery in the Republic of America, but this was the core of it right here.
Slavery by its very nature had become sexual. The terms had become synonymous. “Sex slave” was a redundancy, though still commonly employed. The purpose of a slave was to provide sex.
Mira often thought about what it would be like to be a slave herself. To be transformed into a sexual plaything. To be owned! Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night from dreams she could not remember, dreams that left her hot and wet and eager for a Master. It wasn’t just the drug, though that played its part. Mira had always had these fantasies. Surrendering control of herself—temporarily!—had always given her a thrill. Of course, such admissions were dangerous.
There were slavers everywhere. A woman always had to be careful.
Not long after their introduction by BioTrust, Unlimited, the then corporate partner of the newly organized Republic after the Second Civil War, the demand for mind-controlled sex slaves, and, especially, female sex slaves, far outdistanced their supply. Prices rose, but this did little to affect the market. When legitimate sources for new dollygirls, suckfuck girls, biosluts, and so on began to dry out—there were only so many criminals, rebels, or Class-C tenants in financial straits—buyers turned to other means.
During the days of the Republic, for instance, reclamation agencies looked closely at any woman in debt regardless of her Citizenship Class. Mimic drugs, precursors to O, were introduced on the streets to slowly transform addicts into slaves.
Other men, impatient, used more direct methods. The kidnapping rate in America doubled, at a minimum, for every year of Republic was in power. It became so bad before the Collapse that many women never went out without a trusted, and insured, bodyguard.
Most historians laid the blame, inasmuch as blame was attributed, since sexual slavery was all but universally approved in Mira’s time, on BioTech; but that was simplistic. BioTech was only the most successful of the many medical firms that had gained prominence in the wake of the Second American Civil War and the subsequent viral conflicts that war inspired, when artificial plagues and designer diseases ravaged the world with their particular brand of terrorism. The death tolls were terrible, as were the medical problems left in the survivors; but, consequently, the advances in treatment proved equally enormous. The promises of genetic engineering and cloning had been apparent even a century earlier, but the impetus provided their practitioners, when those sciences became desperately needed to preserve civilization, led to amazing discoveries. BioTech became a State Company—in many ways, the State Company—because it first learned how to arrest the aging process, or at least inhibit it to such a degree that, for all intents and purposes, anyone who could afford it could have perpetual youth.
In her own case, Mira was approaching her fortieth birthday, yet she looked and felt as if she were barely twenty years old.
The real discovery, though, not exclusive to BioTech, was that genetics determined almost everything in life. One’s appearance, intelligence, personality, character traits, even the foods one liked, could, by the mid-21st Century, all be attributed to observable, and, ultimately, adjustable, combinations of DNA. By the start of the 22nd, when companies were offering treatments, some as procedurally simple as taking a pill, to then measurably affect appearance, intelligence, personality, and so on, the sociological effects were profound. People began looking at themselves, and others, differently now that they knew almost everything about themselves, and others, could be changed at will. Sociologists called the social effect “Genetic Pragmatism” and claimed people became colder, more mechanical, more businesslike, for once even emotions like love became recognizable as mere biological functions, and therefore reproducible at will, what was once considered above value soon acquired some.
The upshot of this greater genetic self-knowledge was the belief that since most things in life were determined by one’s biology, changing one’s biology could change most things in life. As a positive principle, Genetic Pragmatism advocated a greater sense of personal responsibility. If one was a happy, generous person, it was because one had elected to be a happy, generous person. On the other hand, if somebody was an asshole, people came to believe it was his deliberate, conscious choice to be an asshole, and they reacted appropriately. A century onwards, hardened by viral warfare and “enlightened” by scientific achievements, the Corporate Lords of Mira’s time held a general lack of sympathy for other people’s problems. Gone was the time when others expressed compassion for the slighted or the socially maladjusted, the criminal whose parents were abusive to him, the celebrity with the drug and rehab problem. Mira’s age was brutally Darwinistic: it was a personal failure if one was unhappy or in trouble with the law.
Even before the Republic, businesses became more overtly concerned with profit and bottom lines at the expense of consumers. Trials became short, and the sentences handed out, sometimes even for trivial offenses, by past standards, grew increasingly severe.
It was during this early Republic growing period of callousness that BioTech began manufacturing, simple at first, genetically-engineered “bioservants” and “bioanimals” for pets and household tasks—maintaining lawns, tidying up, babysitting children—while, at the same time, working under the provisions of the Revised Constitution, helping the government to categorize its citizenry according to their economic potential and contribution, these measurements not the least of which were made by looking at DNA.
Race was not a factor. Neither was gender. Who could afford the best genes definitely was, though.
This was the foundation of the New Slavery, which evolved during the last years of the Republic, through a series of increasingly plutocratic amendments to the Revised Constitution, promulgated by members of a Restored Congress who had grown increasingly wealthy, supported by constituents that had grown more and more separated from the rest of the population by health and chronological age. It continued through the Collapse and ultimately the Rise of the Estates and Towers so that by Mira’s time appearance alone was all that was necessary to tell the rich from the poor.
The rich were perpetually young, healthy, and beautiful. The poor were not. With one exception: slaves too were given youth, health, and beauty, at the price of their freedom.
How did it happen? BioTech’s, and others—but usually BioTech’s—genetic constructs matured.
Eventually, the genetics companies started offering humanoid servants, biological constructs that could do anything physically a person could do, and, in time, better. They weren’t called slaves, yet, but that is what they were, and, in the greater pragmatism of the Republic, tacitly acknowledged.
And as they were slaves, people being people, their owners soon began having sex with them.
Soon enough, too, BioTech was offering genetic constructs whose purpose from the start was sexual. These first XTC pleasure models sold very well. Very well indeed, and inspired a whole menagerie of later designs.
Everyone knew the advanced “bioservants” were based on cloned human genetic material. Fringe elements tried to pass legislation to ban them, then later to protect them, even to grant them human rights, but they never gained popular support or financing. The rich liked having their desires catered to. The middle class wanted to be rich and own their own servants. The poor just wanted to be left alone.
Nobody saw them as human, though from a scientific viewpoint that is what the creatures obviously were, as BioTech itself proved when, purely for “experimental value,” company scientists successfully converted a condemned criminal, a volunteer whose family was financially rewarded, into a Bioworker Mark III through gene-transfer therapy. Subjected to thorough testing, it was later determined that there were no important physical differences between this Bioworker Mark III and any other Bioworker Mark III produced solely in a vat, or at least no difference seen initially. Later, cost became the difference. In following years, further such experiments were conducted, and to the surprise of nearly all but the genetics companies, it was demonstrably proven cheaper and, eventually, as the technology improved, faster, to convert people into bioservants than to grow them from scratch.
It was around this time that they started to be called what they were, “slaves.”
Naturally-born people had experienced neural infrastructures—brain and nervous systems—skeletons and muscles, their own stable DNA; all this took time to design and grow in vatborns. Conversion was more efficient.
Conversion, too, once the processes were perfected, came to be considered the perfect punishment, a pragmatic way to recoup value from the valueless (execution, as the preferred type of capital punishment, had at first risen in the Republic, one further indication of the growing callousness of the times, then fell into decline and was ultimately entirely subsumed by conversion, either method being far cheaper than keeping someone in a comfortable cell for life). That the tasks to which they were assigned in their new lives as “bioslaves” was menial and/or depraved—as established, slavery had become, by definition, a sexual activity, and the sexual-service conversions were by far the most popular—was seen as deterrent. Pains were taken to make everything scrupulously legal. There was no discrimination practiced in the New Slavery, save, perhaps, for the economic, and even that could be mitigated by good lawyers. Human beings could not be enslaved, and the Estates even in Mira’s time still reflected that notion; it was just that the Corporate Lords now somewhat abstractly defined what a “human being” was and how that “humanity” could be transferred, surrendered, or confiscated.
By Mira’s time, there was a dozen sex slaves for every elite class in the governing Estates, and often more, and their services were readily available to the working class as well.
And their population only kept growing.