MARKET DAY
I live in a quiet little northern town in England. For those of you consulting an atlas, I’m about halfway up Britain and a little to the left of centre. I think that’s as narrowed down as I want it to get, really.
It would perhaps be more accurate to say I live near that quiet little northern town; I’m a farmer by trade, a cattle farmer. Cashflow’s down at the moment., as you might expect between the BSE panic and the supermarkets squeezing prices down. While some of us can get government subsidies, most of those that do have big farms down south. Not much filters through up here, for one reason or another. We have to make up the shortfall in other ways. For example, my father turned some of the land into a caravan park, showing commendable and high-income foresight.
The cattle market is a specially-built set up. For those who aren’t familiar with a cattle market (bloody townies) there is a large backstage full of pens containing animals that haven’t yet been sold. This area leads, via a tunnel, into a circular room the floor of which is straw. When one of your cattle is being sold, you led it through and walk it round the circle a few times, so that observers a few feet above your heads can scrutinise it. Meanwhile, the auctioneer is selling it with his voice going at the sort of pace that means it takes you a couple of outings before you’re entirely sure what he’s saying.
I drove the Landy up to the market gates; one of the staff opened them for me and I went in.
“Thanks, Pete.”
“Pleasure, Michael,” he replied, with that touch of a Welsh accent he has. “I see you’re selling today, isn’t it?”
“Too right. Can’t afford to bloody buy anything...”
I pulled up into my usual space, climbed out, and went round to deal with the trailer. I let the trailer flap down, providing a ramp to the ground, and said, “Get out.”
“Yes, master.”
A chorus of thirteen highly female voices greeted me. In two columns, my merchandise for today marched out, all tastefully decked out in their crotchless Lycra shorts and collars—full nudity is considered bad form in the market grounds. “Follow me,” I said.
“Yes, master.”
I walked into the backstage area of the building until I found the pen allotted to me. Opening the gate, I said, “Get in there.”
“Yes, master.”
I rolled my eyes. Total obedience is what the buyers go for, but I dislike it, myself. It’s the unquestioningness of it all. Much rather have someone who can think for herself, even if she has to obey in the end, but I have to step all the sale stock up to Stage Two of the process.
I’ve already told you that the market for cattle has gone down pretty badly recently, so that sometimes we make almost no profit on the sale and sometimes selling the cattle actually loses us more than keeping it would. The same can be true of the slave market; people don’t just disappear off the face of the earth without trace any more, if they ever did; I suspect the tales from the first, second and third waves of white slavers are ninety per cent fictional romances. In any case, the ease with which global communication is carried out nowadays makes it far more likely that a relative will check up on their missing family, which is a bad thing; of course, in this age of high-tech mental reorientation techniques the various communication nets do make it simpler to nail anyone who’s likely to notice. Particularly as, in the hypnotic depths the McCabe method reaches, a subject can recall anything—their entire address book, a scrawled change-of-address card they haven’t got around to transcribing yet and in fact have barely glanced at until now, their appointments diary for the future—and at these depths information extraction is simple.
This being the case, when a likely candidate comes for a week’s holiday at the trailer park—the joys of being near a series of scenic attractions; we get all sorts around the place—if she arrives on, say, a Saturday, then by Sunday night the McCabe treatment has reduced her to a motionless idiot-savant. By about three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon her entire selection of contacts will have been sent a tailored hypnotic virus in their email, sent into a trance by subliminals over the phone to the subject, simply told she’s got personal problems and won’t be able to continue their e-correspondence any more or away but with a hypno-virus waiting in their mailbox. In any case, their memories of her are buried to be disinterred only by a post-hypnotic routine if they ever told someone an anecdote about the subject and are called upon to recruit it or by a hypnotherapist who knows three things; the McCabe method, what he’s doing and what he’s looking for, and they’ll be buried once immediately after the event.
By this time we can work on her for as long as we like and no one will notice—no one who isn’t one of the staff on the caravan park, anyway. We begin the processing as soon as we have her contacts out of the way. But the technique we use steps her up to Stage One mental control—my preferred level—by the Thursday evening. Attaining Stage Two is much more difficult, but we generally have the subjects at that level by midnight on Saturday and can replace the subject with a new family on the Sunday. We’re working on getting it down in time for a seven-day turnover, but that’s a project for the future.
Of course, not every family who comes to stay at the park has a suitable subject. On the other hand, we have two hundred caravans set up; twenty of these are taken up by legitimate park staff and the scientists who work on the subjects’ mindsets. We generally get between ten and fifteen subjects each week. At thirteen, this was just above average.
I went to the bar and bought a pint of cider. It’s not as good as the stuff the Newton farm along the road from ours distils, but none of the commercial ciders are. They’ve been fucked about with and had all sorts of chemical crap added.
But I’m not a lager drinker, so I drink cider.
I picked up the catalogue the market organisers put together and flicked through, out of curiosity. Colour photographs—not entirely surprising the mag was a glossy—and a short section of vital statistics(name, age, cup size, instruction method and height), and the starting price for each slave.
I flipped through to my section:
KEOGH CARAVANS
Then I pulled a calculator out of my pocket and started calculating. At the starting prices alone, I’d make a profit. I smiled. It’s quite hard to turn a profit, given the size of the mindfucking team and the astonishing size of their wage packets.
...and so on. The total starting price came to £152,500—which put me a whole £24,500 into profit to start with, if I ignored the market’s commission. On a bad week, the only reason making the run is economical is because it’s an auction rather than a straightforward sale; the auctioneers aim to increase their commission by as much as possible, resulting in a corresponding hike for us. Most of the bids for the Monday market come in by internet; a private members club, with a webcam set up peering into the ring and a chatroom equivalent of phone bidding. For the e-bidders, the market organises delivery. There are a couple of locals, as well—and a couple of these sell their slaves on; George Archer, for example, was making his money out of brainwashed slaves at about the same time the CIA were groping toward MKULTRA. If he’d heard about what they were doing, he’s often heard to lament, there’d be about three people left in Russia in control of their own minds, and they’d all be working at embassies—in his day, he was the best breaker of them all. Now, though, he doesn’t have the energy for the thirty-six hour days a typical break took, or the cover-up time. Brainwashing is a young man’s game, even though profiting from it can often be the purview of an older man.
The first slave I ever recruited was older than I was at the time; Rebecca Wilson, her name was. I remember the breaking as if it were yesterday.
Her looks are beginning to slip, now, but I keep her around, the way you might keep a teddy you’ve had from childhood. There are a thousand and one memories in her, and she’s still lithe and attractive enough for the occasional half-hour.
When I see George, he often jokes that when she really does get too old, I’ll probably have her kill herself, then get her head stuffed and hang it on the wall.
I wouldn’t do that, though; bad taste, like having your slaves walk into the market naked. It’s just not done; some concession to decency must be made, hence the Lycra shorts.
I finished my cider and went back to the pen, and settled down to wait for the announcement. Soon enough, there it was: over the tannoy, the voice of Sandra, secretary to the market and once George Archer’s subject -
“The next items are courtesy of Mr William Keogh, of Keogh Caravans. First, we have...”
I knew the rest of the routine backwards. In alphabetical order, just like the catalogue, lead your subjects out into the ring, a couple of circuits thereof so that everyone can see their points. Then just wait as the auction goes on, keep your eyes on the wallscreen display and watch the price skyrocket. Then condition the girl to obey her new owner and tell her the market staff are going to be in control of her until she reaches him. Back to the pen and fetch the next girl.
I picked up the dog lead and clipped it onto Nicole Ackland’s collar. Then I opened the pen and tugged gently. Unresisting, she trotted out behind me, and I closed the pen once more.
Such precautions aren’t really necessary, but are traditional; they’re a long-standing part of the cattle market, and cattle market is how this market started. So as a mark of respect, we go through these routines.
I walked along the corridor into the arena proper and led her in a wide circle. The webcams, and the five or six local observers, got a perfect view of every inch of her—except for those parts covered by the shorts, and it was pretty easy to imagine those. Lycra’s a wonderful substance for the trade, even if the people who supply me are starting to get puzzled by the sheer volume of orders I give them. Another circle followed, just to ram home the points, as it were, and then into the centre of the ring.
“Pose,” I said, flatly.
She dropped immediately to her knees, chest thrust out in a way that should have seemed proud and independent but doesn’t when the person in question is kneeling in a circle of straw wearing a collar and on a leash, and bowed her head in submission. I looked across at the auctioneer, and nodded. He cleared his throat magisterially, and glanced for a second at Sandra, sitting beside him and ready to type the new bid as fast as he could say it.
“Ladies and gentlemen, start the bidding.”
Ladies? I was suddenly very glad one of the mindfucker team always conditions bisexuality. Never really seen the point until now. If a master wants to see his slaves go at each other, he can always order them to. They don’t have to get over-excited.
Of course, if your slave is having sex with you some kind of reaction is preferable to none, and total ecstasy the best—provided they don’t lose concentration because of it.
I wondered why he’d added ‘ladies’ to the introduction. He doesn’t, normally—another throwback to the cattle market traditions we use; very few female farmers, and the tradition for excluding ‘ladies’ there goes back centuries.
One of the e-bidders must be female, and must have already made a purchase, I concluded.
I looked across at the wallscreen, on which the sum £15,000 was prominently displayed, and as I looked, it changed. The auctioneer’s voice began to rattle off numbers at that alarming rate they use, and I smiled...