I'm a Cyborg's Pet (girl X cyborg)

Chapter 22/User Friendly

A/N - Funky Friday! Did you know Reb and I originally conceived of I'm a Cyborg's Pet as the script for a Bollywood movie? We thought we would include something which would give you an idea of what we thought the music should feel like. You've probably spotted all the scenes which are little more than feeders for the big dance scenes. Votes!!! We need Votes!!! Like who ever has enough votes?

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 whoever 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. 

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, 'echoes of inner defiance'. 

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 inescapable version of American Idol. 

"Stop there," a voice said behind me. I froze. I knew the voice of Araneae.

"Assume the position. Put your hands against the wall and spread your legs out, both of them" it said.

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.

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 a 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?

I continued on, leaving Araneae while she pinches 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.

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 an oppressed worker is at the end of the day they can leave and I don't. They have a choice,  which awful thing to do, I don't. So if at the end of the day If I have the opportunity or even the desire for escape then I have a 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 beneath 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 secret weakness at the heart of the New Mechanical Order and caused the whole thing to collapse.

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A/N Sorry about the continuity problems we've been playing with our new time machine. RK+Reb.