Chapter 1

 

Conrad de Villiers is the latest scion of an illustrious Sydney family. His antecedents date back to the earliest free settlers and today are considered one of the leading families in New South Wales. His father is a fine gentleman and with his wife are very good neighbours of mine.

I also come from an old family and am its last surviving member. Both families are wealthy and our income is derived from what is known as 'old money'. We both reside in the pre-eminent Sydney suburb of Vaucluse in lovely old houses situated side-by-side on the original grants that have never been subdivided.

Conrad is just nineteen years old while I am thirty-three. My father and mother were friendly with his parents and I continued on with that friendship following the sad demise of my parents last year. My father contracted pancreatic cancer and died within six months and my mother took her own life, saying she couldn't live without him.

My parents left me their beautiful house and a huge fortune to support it and so, although I studied (and obtained an honours degree in) law at Sydney University, have never had the need to work for a living.

There is another thing about me that I need to state from the beginning. I am gay, although I have successfully hidden it from everyone including my parents. I say everyone but there is one exception to that statement: Conrad de Villiers plumbed my sexuality as soon as he was old enough to differentiate. And from then on he lost no opportunity in sneering at me every time our paths crossed and as a result I ceased going next door for the occasional drink and also ceased inviting his parents and him to my house, likewise.

I don't think his parents cottoned on to the real reasons, probably assuming I was finding new friends after my parents' death.

I suppose I am reasonably good-looking with curly blond hair, a good complexion and a well-developed body from my love of gymnastics. Conrad on the other hand, is painfully handsome. He really is matinee-idol material with jet-black shining hair, a beautiful apricot complexion and a physique that I suspect could not be bettered. This came from a life dedicated to all sports but he was no air-head, attending the Kings School and was dux of his class every year. On matriculating, he too enrolled at Sydney University, studying a dual law and economics degree with a view to entering politics.

He was certainly qualified by birth, intelligence, good looks and virtually unlimited resources for this role, nevertheless I didn't think he would make a very good politician. He was far too conceited and self-interest governed his every move. I knew his father, while proud of his achievements thus far, had his reservations about his eldest son's ethics and morality for as one of the oldest landed gentry in Australia, he was everything a patrician of that class should be. And so was his wife.

Conrad cultivated them but used them shamelessly to advance his own status and position. And on the few occasions our paths now crossed, he never failed to sneer at me, ask how my 'boyfriend' was going (I had never had one) while smirking to his friends and companions.

My reaction to this was to ignore him but it still hurt.

My own house, similar to that of his father, sits amid a large garden that is lovingly tended by John Emerson my permanent, live-in gardener while the house is looked after by my butler Hudson and his wife who acts as housekeeper. There is also a cook and housemaid so you can see I am well catered for.

I think Hudson probably knew my secret but he never once has ever referred to it nor to the fact that I never bring my current girlfriend (if I have one) home to stay the night. Of course I don't bring male friends home either. In this day and age and with my enormous resources, I suppose I should have 'come out' years ago but I know it would have hurt my parents deeply and so I pretended that I simply hadn't found the right girl yet. Actually, I have every intention of eventually finding someone to be my wife and the mother of my children for I do wish to have descendants to pass on this lovely old house and my fortune to but I have first to find a lady who will be sympathetic enough to understand my true sexuality and help me to live the lie. So far I have been unsuccessful.

 

I now want to turn to perhaps one of the greatest social revolutions ever to have hit this planet.

Slavery! Yes, slavery. There wouldn't be a person alive who doesn't know what that means. It is an ancient institution that probably started as far back as the caveman and it was only finally abolished (at least on the surface) in the middle of the nineteenth century.

But then, two hundred years later in the middle of the twenty-first century, the state of the world had degenerated so much that it was finally seen that criminal slavery was the only answer.

This decline started towards the end of the twentieth century with crime rampant, rising and seemingly unstoppable mainly from the utterly stupid efforts of the 'do-gooders' who not only just about emasculated the legal system including the ability of police to investigate and prosecute crime; the conversion of jails as places of punishment to just about homes away from home; and finally those same do-gooders efforts to curb the ability of parents and teachers to exert and maintain discipline in the home and school.

This process continued on its downward spiral until street and domestic crime had wives and children, and particularly older citizens going in fear of their lives and with no redress either from the police or courts. White-collar crime also escalated out of control and almost open lawlessness became the norm in previously 'civilised' countries.

There was conference after conference. The United Nations endlessly debated what to do. So did countries.

By this time China's influence on world affairs had risen to equal that of the United States and it finally announced that it had had enough and that it was going to embark on a total re-evaluation of its socio-economic and of its police and penal systems.

It started as vague references but then sharpened to the point the world now realised that China was going to reinvent slavery as the standard punishment for all crime apart from the most minor.

The European continent by this time had returned to individual nations, the experiment of a unified Europe having failed and so the president of the United States called the Prime Minister of Great Britain (which had once again become a first rate power due to its furthering of the Commonwealth of Nations as a powerful economic cooperative) and they both agreed that China's initiative was probably the last remaining chance to save Earth and its people from total anarchy.

To cut a long story short, the world quickly adopted these initiatives and criminal slavery was now the standard punishment for all middling to major crime.

What became standard was that the courts would retain their authority to hear cases and sentence offenders (but with a major reform of the evidentiary process that brought common-sense back into the law) and then passed them to what became known as State Slave Centres who would process the offenders and then offer them up for sale at weekly auctions.

Part of this process required that once convicted and sentenced to slavery, a person lost his citizenship for the period of sentence and with it the right to wear clothing of any kind so that a slave would be instantly recognised by its nakedness. Furthermore, and I suspect this was more for cosmetic reasons than any other, each slave was also permanently depilated nude of all hair below his eyes, enhancing his shame even more as his or her genitals were now totally open and visible.

Once sold, the slave became the total responsibility of his or her owner. They had to ensure the security of their property but they also had to work them for a minimum of fifteen hours per day every day of the week.

It was clear that governments wanted slavery to be seen as the absolute bottom of the pit. Nothing. Nothing at all could be any worse than years and years of slavery under these conditions.

Furthermore, as the years passed, more and more offences merited slavery-for-life - and that meant for the term of your natural life. You would never be free again until the day you died.

At first, slaves were fed plain if normal food. But then someone realised this was both expensive and unnecessary. It was a certain John Jones who owned a chook pellet factory in Melbourne, Victoria, who came up with the perfect solution. He reasoned that leftover vegetables and substandard meat from their markets and second or third grade grain could be purchased and steamed together in giant cauldrons in the correct proportions and the result masticated into a paste and extruded in the same way as his chook pellets were and then dried, bagged and marketed.

This so practical man consulted dietitians and came up with the perfect mix and the end result was a product that was dirt-cheap and could be issued to a person's slave herd night and morning (a double handful each time was determined as the absolute ideal) followed by ingestion of as much water as the slave required and which combined with the pellets to reconstitute the food in his belly. The pellets are totally tasteless which is yet another plank in the horror of the institution of slavery.

Mr Jones also invented, produced and marketed the machines by which larger herds could be fed. The size of the hoppers feeding these machines varied according to the size of the slave herd but the actual delivery mechanism that was affixed to the wall and up to which the slaves to be fed would queue, comprised a chute under which the slave cupped his hands and a flat plate above it which he pressed with his forehead, achieving the measured dose of the pellets.

The slave then moved away swallowing the pelletised food as he did so then fronted up to a water spigot to take in as much as he could. Each delivery took just a few seconds and so a large herd could be fed very quickly.

For smaller herds, the hopper might be situated on top of the machine and fed from a sack, but for larger bodies of slaves, it could be situated on the outside of the wall and topped up by a bulk delivery truck. He was wise enough to patent his recipe and the designs of the two machines he had invented to create and distribute it and within a couple of years he was a multibillionaire.

 

It didn't take very long at all for all the former prisoners in the thousands of jails around the world to be processed and either released or converted to slavery and within a year or so it was as if the institution had never been abolished.

Of course, slaves in the past had never been subjected to a regime as ruthless and inhumane as this one. But then neither had the world ever degenerated to such a degree of lawlessness and anarchy before, either.

No-one had any idea what sort of price a slave might bring but neither did they care. The ancient law of supply and demand would take care of it and then so would their owners determine how useful they were.

The minimum wage in Australia around these times was just short of forty thousand dollars per annum. Given that a slave must be worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week or three hundred and sixty-five days a year, that equates to 5,500 hours a year compared to 1,976 for a thirty-eight hour working week, not far short of three times the labour and if that was equated with the minimum annual wage above, would raise their value to say, $100,000 and that just for one year's labour.

Then there is the matter of the numbers of slaves. Australia's prison population at the time of the re-institution of slavery was only around 50,000, a vastly smaller proportion of the population than in America where the ratio was 1:140 (compared to Australia 1:610). The above statistics underline the difference between different countries and made guessing the results of the first few auctions rather academic.

To further complicate the matter, the first few slaves to be auctioned had come directly out of the prisons and not the courts. They were an unprepossessing bunch and the end result was a rather depressed sale price. The average for the first few batches hovered around the hundred thousand dollar mark but then, as the weekly auctions began to include the later convicted criminals those prices began to rise with the arrival of better looking and younger slaves.

A couple of years into this new era and people began to comment that while the crime rate had dropped significantly the attitudes of children in the home, school and out in public had not changed at all. They remained cheeky, unwilling to learn and extremely difficult to control and then the President of the United States suggested another radical change to societal rules.

"Let us require that all children remain in school until the age of eighteen and then if they failed their final examinations due to their own negligence or lack of attention, they be relegated to automatic slavery under the same conditions as criminals."

It is surprising that this wasn't rejected out of hand but by now people were commenting on how wonderful the results of criminal slavery had been in turning around the crime rate and perhaps if the same rules were applied to school students, might not similar results obtain?

It took a few years but in time, this new rule was introduced and its results just as remarkable. I should note that if a child was deemed intellectually incapable of passing his exams it would not apply. But otherwise, almost overnight, students behaved themselves, learned their lessons, studied diligently, were polite and eager to learn and everyone breathed a sigh of relief at the change.

Of course, just as with the criminal elements, some people just won't learn and as a result there were tens of thousands of eighteen-year-old former students now translated into slaves at the end of each academic year.

This had a remarkable effect on the price they would bring. They were young, for the most part good-looking and possessed far better bodies then their older criminal counterparts. And they therefore brought in much higher sale prices than the others...

 

And what has all this got to do with Conrad and me, you ask?

A great deal, actually.

I have already said that he was by nature supercilious, overbearing and dismissive of those he felt beneath him, particularly me as someone he perceived of as a gay man. Yes, I know he was right in that but in this day and age male homosexuals and lesbians are now by and large well accepted by the community.

Not Conrad, though. What he did to me was so evil that I really wondered that someone so intelligent could really have imagined that he would get away with it and particularly as he had set his eyes on a political career and that demands a totally clean slate.

What he did was to pay a male friend of his to accuse me of rape. Good God, I didn't even know the man and it was relatively easy to prove both medically (these days tests can reveal recent sexual activity in a man) and circumstantially that I was elsewhere and when the police realised this, they delved further into my accuser's charges upon which he broke down and informed them that Conrad had paid him to make up the story.

Conrad tried to bluff his way out of it which only made it worse and he was charged with conspiracy which carries a penalty of life slavery. His father was appalled at his conduct and although he provided legal counsel, at the moment of conviction and sentence he rose and left the court.

Yes, of course the judge sentenced him to slavery for the rest of his life and it was then I decided I was going to finally reap my own revenge for all those years of taunting and vilification at his hands.

It was customary in such cases for the bailiff of the court to strip the prisoner, now a slave, naked and as Conrad stood there, totally shamefaced in the dock, the big, burly court officer ripped his expensive silk suit jacket down off his shoulders tearing off its buttons in the process, then tore open his shirt, ripping it in two and otherwise slowly removed every item of clothing from his so splendid body while the judge and the rest of the people in the courtroom sat and watched as this young aristocrat passed through the rite of passage from free man and member of Sydney's upper crust to nothing but a naked slave.

Once naked, the judge banged his gavel and adjourned the court and the bailiff removed him from the dock and down to the cells below the building.

That night, Mr de Villiers asked me around for dinner. Intrigued, I accepted although I hadn't been in their house for some years as a result of Conrad's rudeness to me. He asked me into his study for a pre-dinner drink and then apologised profusely for his son's behaviour. I protested and said it was nothing to do with him and that he was as fine a man as any I had ever met or known.

"And so what are you now proposing to do about him, James?"

I stared at him for a few seconds and then smiled. "You have guessed, haven't you, sir?"

"If you are intending to buy him and make his life a misery, yes I have."

"You've hit it in one, sir. I think you're aware how he seemed to delight in putting me down because of my sexuality but then to have gone so far as to frame me for rape which would have resulted in me being in his place instead of him, really set the seal on his evil nature and so yes, I fully intend to buy him no matter what it costs and then he is going to really understand what it means to be execrated..."

He nodded and smiled grimly at me. "And that is no more than he deserves. The reason I asked you here tonight, James, is to give you my full endorsement for such an action and to thank you for your forbearance over the last few years. And to enforce that, Emily and I would be pleased if you would address us by our Christian names from now on. Now let's go in to dinner..."