Chapter 1

 

The reintroduction of legal slavery worldwide came about because of a rampant escalation of serious crime and religious terrorism in the middle of the fourth decade of the twenty-first century. But until the Great Depression in the sixth decade, only convicted criminals could be made into slaves.

That depression was the worst to hit the planet since the former event in the 1920s and thirties and during it, governments ran out of money, unemployment and aged pensions were cut and people came close to starving.

I was one of the few to see it coming and made my preparations. This is my story...

 

The uncontrolled inflation of share prices was exactly the same as had happened a hundred and thirty years ago in the 1920s. People were even mortgaging their real estate to buy ever more and more shares. All the signs were there but few in my profession, economics, saw the similarities. After all, governments could now control economies, couldn't they? Alas, they couldn't.

I warned my friends and neighbours but most ignored the warnings.

I began to sell off my portfolio, keeping some of the true blue chip stock but converting most of my other investments - excepting only real estate - and by that, I mean title deeds to properties, not shares in real estate stock. And in converting it, I bought gold and diamonds. Real gold ingots and real stones and I locked them away in a secret vault I had built into the cellars of my country seat. I also retained a significant sum in currency although I knew it too would probably soon lose its buying power. But in the short term, it would still be the only practical medium of exchange and so it would be necessary at least in the short term.

My name is Roger Scott and I was trained at Oxford as an economist. I was also the only son, only child actually of two caring parents who brought me up to consider my position as a duty and not a privilege. They both died in an air accident ten years before the depression when I was still just eighteen and half way through my degree.

We weren't titled but my father was of the landed gentry and he had built on his ancestors' good business sense, owning outright, Grantley, a very substantial estate in Kent as well as stocks and shares in many large companies and other enterprises.

By the time the crash occurred in 2056, when I was just twenty-eight, I had divested myself of most of the share portfolio and now just waited for the disaster to hit.

The bubble was so big and so thin that when it burst, the ramifications were very quick to snowball. Large companies folded and hundreds of thousands were out of work overnight. Over-extended landholders had their debts called in by banks that were now panicking and eventually going under themselves. And it just got worse and worse.

As governments across the globe became unable to pay pensions and unemployment relief, people began to go hungry and then to starve.

As a result slavery was now extended to a voluntary act when any citizen over the age of eighteen could sell themselves as a slave. And that put them into the same status as a criminal slave: total nakedness; total nudity (the permanent removal of all hair below the eyes); and a loss of citizenship and all protection under the law. This had been seen as a necessary method of identifying slaves and of keeping them under control for it was well recognised that slaves were a quite different kettle of fish to paid employees. And when slavery was extended to private individuals selling themselves, it was merely continued as the most convenient and practical way of administering the slaves. There was therefore no differentiation between criminal slaves and the voluntary kind.

Thus a slave could be used for any purpose at all; the hours of labour were uncontrolled and he could be bought and sold as an item of property.

Of course, when share prices tumbled, so did the value of real as well as other property. Goods could be bought for a fraction of their former price and so could slaves, houses and large estates.

I didn't act immediately, of course. I sensed this was going to be a long, long depression and it was going to take the concerted minds of the best economists world-wide to nut out and begin the healing process.

My neighbours came to me for help and I gave it where I could, initially giving them food from my farms and eventually, if they asked, buying their properties for their new and heavily deflated values.

Was I not taking advantage of the times, you think? No. I reasoned that I had warned them and they had ignored my words of advice. I paid them the current value of their properties and let them stay on them for the time being. I maintained the properties but there was no money for luxuries and neither did I indulge in them myself.

I also began to buy slaves.

No, not so much the criminal variety. I had no wish to be responsible for these misfits but when one of my employees departed for whatever reason, I replaced him or her with a slave. They were cheap - everything was cheap by now. And I could see a future in building a holding in good quality slaves for the future for I reasoned that once created, slavery would be here for the long haul and not just during the tenure of the depression.

 

Perhaps here, a word about myself and my own morés.

I am still single and I am bisexual being about equally enamoured of male and female sexual partners. As a young student at Oxford, I had made and broken liaisons with friends of both sexes and had enjoyed them but as the heir to a vast estate, I was very cautious when it came to anything permanent, knowing that I was a ripe target for some predatory female after my position and money.

Once having left university, I returned home and settled down as the local squire and became engrossed with taking over the management of the estate and later, of my long-term project of converting stocks and shares to currency, gold and diamonds.

Of course my parents had staff and tenants at home. Of these, William Temple and his wife Mary, were my butler and housekeeper and were my stay and buckler during the early years after my parents' death. They were both ultra-efficient at their work but were fair and kind to the other staff, as long as they did their work.

Many of the paid staff had already been replaced with slaves prior to the crash (as this was a new trend) and I had become used to seeing them moving about and performing their work stark naked and under the duress of the tiny silicon chips glued to the males' right testicle or a female's clitoris and Temple and his wife wore small brooches on their collars that allowed them to apply disciplinary shocks to these so sensitive organs if they slacked, were disobedient or otherwise remiss in their attitude. They also controlled their whereabouts so escape was impossible.

Did I use them for my own sexual pleasure?

Yes, of course I did. It went without saying that this was a perfectly legitimate use of a slave especially when, as in my case, I had no permanent girl of boyfriend to consider. And as I am a rather highly-sexed person, this was most nights.

I took for my valet, now termed a body-slave when the position was occupied by a slave, a young male of just twenty-four years. Yes, he was of course a criminal, for that was the only kind of slave then, but he was no thug or misfit, having been convicted of major fraud of his employer and had been sentenced to slavery for life for it.

His name was Peter and he had been surnamed Jones but slaves lost their family names upon conviction so he was simply Peter to us all. He had a superb body having been a gymnast at school and beautiful skin and he was blond with fine, golden hair and brilliant blue eyes.

Temple trained him to be a perfect valet and I developed his sexual skills for he was straight and had never indulged with a man before me. But he learned, under the cane, whip and a zap to his testicular chip to serve me well when I took him to my bed.

On other occasions, I might select one of the female slaves for that pleasure. By the time they died, we had only one remaining paid staff at the manor, other than the Temples, and that was Dad's secretary who of course I kept on as being invaluable in his knowledge of the estate and other affairs.

One of my favourite female slaves was a black girl by the name of Nora who was pretty, also had a superbly athletic body and was a most efficient housemaid. She was also a real virago in bed. By that I don't mean a shrew, but one of the most energetic sexual partners I have ever experienced. She delights in sex and is anxious to please me with her body.

She also enjoys it when I order Peter to pleasure her in my bed while I watch their frenetic contortions for that is the kind of sex I most enjoy myself.

From the foregoing, you will begin to appreciate that I am a highly active sexual performer myself and to enjoy it to the fullest, have pursued the sport of gymnastics all my life. This activity, above all others develops the human body to its peak and I still train for at least an hour every day.

 

And so, having set the scene, let me now move back to my new project of acquiring slaves as well as real property during the early years of the depression.

With the crash in prices and the almost complete destabilisation of the rural (as well as the manufacturing and marketing) economy, all landowners, big and small lost a sizable part of their income and having no cash reserves because most had spent it on buying shares that were now worthless, they were quite unable to pay rates and taxes and many of them were seized by the government and sold; others were, as I said earlier, lost to banks and I bought many of those surrounding or near my own estate as well as some more distant ones.

I didn't go overboard for I had no idea how long the depression was going to last and had thought it would be a long time. But with prices at rock-bottom, I decided that I would acquire the properties of friends and hold them in the short term. Later on, when it was all over, I might consider selling them back - or I might not. That I would decide as our new economy developed.

So far as my neighbours offering their bodies for sale, some I took; others I did not. I was prepared to help if I could but not to the point of stupidity. Thus if the son or daughter of a neighbour was handsome or pretty and had a good body, I might buy him or her; but I wasn't going to acquire middle-aged and older men and women who would be useless to me.

What was I going to do with them, you wonder?

First of all, train them physically and vocationally to fit them as expert servants of various classes according to their abilities. I was prepared for this to be a long-term project for I doubted there would be enough men and women with the resources to pay for them for many years ahead.

In this regard, I put out feelers to try and ascertain how many people like me there were who had seen the coming disaster and prepared for it and I was quite pleasantly surprised to find there were actually thousands of them, in pockets all over the country and some of these whom I knew slightly I contacted to compare notes.

But in the meantime, I converted one of the home farms, a very small property that was really too small to be much use for anything except a market garden and built my slave school on it.

The school comprised accommodation for the several hundred slaves I intended to acquire, a very large gymnasium where we would use gymnastics to hone and tone their bodies to the standard I was going to aim for, and various classrooms and other training rooms where skills would be imparted to them.

There was no need for kitchens and a mess for them for with the advent of criminal slavery, some bright spark had invented Slave Chow, a product made in a factory where cheap (but nutritious) food ingredients including meats, vegetables and grain were mechanically loaded into the mouth of giant steam cauldrons, cooked under steam pressure, pureed into a coarse thick paste and extruded as pellets a single centimetre in diameter and two, long, dried as they were extruded and then bagged.

The product was highly nutritious, cheap and required no cooking. A double handful night and morning, followed by about a litre of plain water (that allowed it to swell up in their stomachs and then be digested normally) made for a perfect if tasteless diet for them.

You could buy the pellets in kilogram paper bags, fifty kilogram sacks or have it delivered in bulk and emptied into the hopper of your in-house dispenser that was designed to be fitted to the wall of your slave quarters, the outside part including the hopper (of various sizes depending on the size of your slave herd) while the inside part comprised the dispenser unit that allowed a queue of slaves to front up to it, hold his hands together under the chute and then press his forehead against the delivery bar that then issued the measured ration into his hands. He left the unit, swallowing the pellets as fast as he could and then fronted up to one of the spigots nearby and filled his belly with water.

In my case, I situated the dispenser unit twenty metres away from the spigots and they another twenty metres from the waste removal chutes where they had to squat to urinate and defecate, after which they moved into the cleaning race - rather like a car wash - where they could clean their backsides as well as their bodies before moving either out to work (in the mornings) or to their sleeping quarters if it was at night.

Thus, the feeding, waste removal and cleaning process was ultra-efficient if rather soul-destroying for the slaves. But my researches had told me that if you were going to have slaves, you must treat them as such and not as human beings. In fact, they must be treated as less than the animals on your farm, kept under strict discipline and worked to the limit of their capacities all day.

Then at night, they slept naked on the bare concrete floor divided into one metre by two rectangles painted on the floor and once each was in his or her place and lying down, the guard in charge issued the command: "Global - Lock."

This meant that if he or she allowed even his hand or a toe to stray over the line, they were zapped. And those zaps were horrible, I can assure you. They weren't allowed to talk, either. The surveillance system was so good it could pinpoint the offender and zap him or her.

Inhuman? Of course it was. But slaves were not to be considered as human. Remember, this modern slavery had started out in response to a worldwide crime wave that was threatening the very existence of the planet and fanatical religious terrorism had seemed unstoppable also. And so the measures to counter it were draconian. The point was, they worked.

When the religious fanatics saw what happened to their people: stripped naked, depilated nude and sold like cattle, they backed off and shut down their operations. Major criminals melted away also and society had slowly moved back to normality. Everyone remarked what a boon criminal slavery had become and how effective it was. There was no disapprobation for it at all.

And so when the depression hit and private citizens were given the opportunity to opt to sell their bodies as slaves, no-one thought to differentiate between them and the criminals. A slave was a slave was a slave!

All this I watched and then made my plans and as I have just described, they accommodated, fed and cleaned the slaves cheaply and efficiently.

The gymnasium was big for each of the slaves would be spending two hours in here every day of the week. Slaves didn't have days off - what would we do with them at those times?

So were the classrooms and other training areas. At first, I was only aiming for domestic slaves: cooks, housemaids, chauffeur/mechanics, gardeners, etc. but I wanted each class to be as good as the best servants in our nineteenth century great houses, such servants being renowned worldwide for their skill and dedication to their work and to their employers.

Accordingly, I went looking for people to act as their teachers/trainers. Temple was a great help to me here for he was of the old school of butler: efficient, quietly achieving a top standard of household management that was so unobtrusive I hardly knew the servants (and later the slaves) were there.

I won't go into the details of the various men and women I employed to staff these areas. Suffice it to say, each was highly competent in their skill and in their ability to impart it to the slaves they were training.

I oversaw the 'school' myself, hiring the staff, selecting the slaves and planning the classes and timetables for everyone and it was a labour of love as I discovered I had a real talent for the organisation necessary for such a project.

As its scope expanded with my mind's eye now contemplating a veritable technical college for domestic and perhaps other classes of slave, so did the need to find slave trainees away from my local scene and what had started out as a project to help starving neighbours, now became something much bigger.

Accordingly I redrew my sketch plans for the buildings and by the time I was ready to begin, they had become a true slave college and Roger Scott was now being regarded as someone to watch in the field of slave training.