EXTRACT FOR
The Department of Carnal Relations- Book Two
(Paul Blades)
Ruth Silverman was having difficulty seeing the road in front of her. It had been raining for about 2 hours and had stopped about 15 minutes ago. The night sky was still immersed in clouds and there was no moon to help guide the way. There were very few street lights in this part of town and there were puddles and ruts everywhere.
Ruth did not have much experience driving even though she was 32 years old. When she turned 16, back in Jersey, her father had bought her an old 2018 Mercury and she had driven it for a little over two years. But those old fashioned cars were not like the cars today with all their gadgets and luxuries. The brand new 2049 Lexis Realto had a heads up display, a function which showed your route and destination right on the dashboard. The electric battery engine was as quiet as a mouse. And there was the self-driving function, which was just starting when she was a kid. You could watch movies, although they called them feelies now. Everything you saw on the screen was reproduced exactly for the viewer, sound, of course, smell, heat, cold, running, walking, sleeping, and even, for the daring, fucking. She usually turned those functions off when she could remember how to do it.
She had retired as a sexual service worker, (SSW), a little over a year ago. Released IR's were given a $500 weekly stipend for six months to get them back on their feet. After release, a retiring IR was required to find and submit herself to a Responsible Male, (RM), within 45 days. If she failed to comply she could be put up for public auction through the Unsupervised Females Pool, (UFP). Any interested RM could bid on her.
She had spent thirteen long years as a whore. Retiring IR's are subject to six month to one year long call ups if it is determined that there is a shortage of SSW's in the SRZ in which she was serving when she retired. Or she could find her retirement date pushed back six months through a temporary waiver applied for and obtained by her SSF, (sexual service facility), from the local district SRZ representative. This provision is routinely abused for SSW's who have been popular in their SSF, or to obviate the necessity for the operator to lay out the capital required to replace her.
That bastard that ran the place where she was last held prisoner had her lease extended for 6 months twice. She couldn't figure out why he had finally let her go. Her mother had sent an inquiry to the DCR when her twelve years were up to try and get in contact with her and make sure that she was all right, but she never got any response. Her first contact with her mother about a year ago for thirteen long years, was the viddy call they let her make from the CSW Recovery Center, (CSWRC). When her mother had seen her on the screen, she had burst out sobbing. She did too, and all they did for the first five minutes was cry and cry and cry.
Her father wouldn't come to the phone. It hurt her deeply. Her mother explained it to her about 7 months ago when she had been finally been able to arrange for a visit. Ruth was in Ohio, part of the North Central Sexual Resource Zone, where she had been when she was allowed to retire. Her final SSF, (Sexual Service Facility) had been just outside of Cincinnati. Her retirement pass strictly limited her travel for the next five years to within 100 miles of her SSF and banned her from crossing the river into Kentucky, which was in the South Central Sexual Resource Zone. She had been issued a locater which she had to keep on her all the time. Once a day she had to place her thumb on the validator and send a GPS signal to the Resource Management Division of the Female Adjustment Bureau.
That's what she was, a resource. Her discharge pass indicated that she was on five year reserve status, until April 23, 2053, five years after her so called retirement, although it should have been more than a year earlier. She could be called back at any time for a six month to one year stint. She had half expected, no, more than half expected, 95% expected, for Rocco Marchetti, the owner and manager of her SSF, to call her back immediately so that he could have her without question for another year. Rocco was a bastard. He had abused her unmercifully the three years she had served him. He seemed to always make sure that she got the roughest clientele. When there was an overload, it seemed like she was the one who had to always do extra duty, sometimes servicing up to 15 men in one day. Try keeping a smile on your face through all that.
So her mother had explained to her that her father had cursed her the moment the DCR police took her away. "No daughter of mine is going to become a whore!" he cried out as if it was her fault. It was April 21, 2035. She had turned 18 on March 22, and had missed the March lottery by ten days. Although the drawing was on the 21st, the cutoff date was the 12th to avoid the technical possibility of drafting a girl who wasn't quite 18 yet if she had been born later in the day.
This was the April lottery. Rather than do one a year, the county had determined that it was best to do one every month to ease processing. Why make facilities for processing 25 or 30 girls when you could do it two or three at a time? Public relations wise it was a good idea too since parents didn't have to sit on eggshells for months and months waiting for the shoe to drop. Within 40 or so days of your daughter's 18th birthday you would know whether she was going to become a whore or not. Ruth had been scared because a rumor had gone around that the county leader had voluntarily increased the county quota to impress the state Commissioner of Compulsory Sexual Service, (CCSS), which is a polite word for slavery.1
The drawing was at noon. No announcement was made of who had been drafted until the girls had actually been picked up. It was a little after 2. They were sitting in the kitchen. Her mother had just heated up a cup of tea. Her father was in the den watching TV with the local news channel on to see if the selected girls' names would be announced. If they were, that meant that Ruth would be in the clear.
Last month, before the March drawing, her father had appeared at the monthly County Board meeting and spoke during the public session. April Channing and Doris Gillespie had been chosen in February. Doris was a good friend of hers, who she saw in a holding cell in a transfer center outside of Chicago about 6 years ago. They were both gagged and so couldn't speak. Doris just looked at her sadly. Ruth had only been there for about 10 minutes when Doris was taken away.
The March draftees had not yet been selected. Her mother had begged him not to go. But he was upset that the county government refused to disclose the method it used to determine which girls were to be drafted. In their news bulletins, they always referred to it as a lottery, but he had done the statistics over the last four years and their district, and one or two others, all poorer districts, had suffered the most. The richest part of the county, Cherry Hill, had only had one girl selected in the whole four years, and that was the daughter of a black family which had just moved in, the only black family in the whole town.
Her father was also concerned about anti-Semitism. A full 20% of the girls selected had been Jewish when Jews made up only 7% of the county population. Another 30% had been black, and there were only 12% black residents. 20% were Hispanic, when Hispanics only represented 5% of the county population. The remaining 30% were white, but many of them were daughters of families that had been against the 2025 revolution.2
Her father went up to the meeting with charts and graphs showing the disparities. The county commissioners, all appointed by the ruling party in Trenton, who in turn were all appointed by the mysterious National Governing Board in Washington, nodded their heads. There were quite a few frowns. They made no comment to his presentation and didn't answer any of his questions, but moved on to the next speaker. There was nothing about it in the paper the next day and in the viddy recording of the meeting which was broadcast on C-Span, her father's presentation had been left out.
So it was with some trepidation that she and her mother sat at the kitchen table. Suddenly, her mother jumped up. "Is that a car?" she asked frantically. They lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and so there was never much traffic. She and Ruth stood there speechless, listening. Her father came in and asked what was happening. They both shushed him. Then there was the sound of two car doors slamming.
"Oh my god!" her mother exclaimed. Ruth's blood ran cold. Her mother rushed into the living room and looked out the window. "Oh my god! Oh my god! Run, Ruth, run! Go out the back door and run!"
Ruth needed no other warning. She rushed to the back door and pushed it open. There, standing in their back yard were two county officers. They had apparently snuck in while the other officers had come to the front. They were big and burley and Ruth knew that she would have no chance against them.
Her father grabbed her from behind "Stop, Ruthie! Stop! Don't you know what happens to girls who resist? Who run away? They'll mark you as mandatory! That's a life sentence!"
Ruth slammed the door shut and started sobbing wildly. She ran upstairs and into her bedroom, slamming the door shut. She locked the handle and then crawled up on her bed, shaking. She heard the doorbell ring. "Don't answer it! Don't answer it!" she prayed.
And then there were deep voices downstairs. Her mother was wailing. Then she heard heavy footsteps on the stairs. They came to her door. There was a loud knock. She didn't answer. Someone jiggled the door handle. There was another knock. "DCR Police!" the voice stated roughly. "Open this door!"
She was shivering and pulled up into a little ball on her bed. She looked at the closet. Could she hide in there? She looked at the window. Could she jump out of it to the ground below and run? Her field hockey stick was in the corner. Could she grab it and defend herself? Wasn't there anything she could do?
There was another heavy knock. "In the name of the Federal Department of Carnal Relations, open this door immediately," the voice screamed angrily. "If you don't open the door and we have to break it down, you will be charged with resisting induction. I'm going to count to three! One! Two! . . . ." and then there were low voices outside her door. Then silence. Then another voice spoke.
"Ruthie, this is Ben Harper. You remember me, don't you?"
Yes, she remembered him. He had asked her to his senior prom. Her father wouldn't let her go because she was only a sophomore. She had seen him around town a lot since then, but not for a while. Belinda Millbank had told her that he had signed up with the DCR police. Ruth hadn't believed it. He was such a nice guy. But here he was at her bedroom door.
"Ruthie, you're going to be coming with us one way or another. Don't make a stupid mistake. You'll only make things worse. There's not a power on heaven or earth that is going to stop us from coming into that room! Please! Please! Don't make this harder than it has to be!"
There was another pause. She could hear her mother wailing downstairs. She heard the man with the gruff voice say, "Get back down the fucking stairs or I will fuck you up!" Her father must have started to come up. Come up to save his only daughter, his only child. But there was no saving her. She could only make things worse. Worse for her and worse for her family.
"Ruthie?" Ben's voice called out again.
"Yes!" she screamed as loudly as she could. "I'm coming out! I'm coming out!"
She had stopped sobbing. A dreadful peace had come over her. She was lost. They only way she could save herself would be to take her own life there and then, but she had no means of doing that. She bet that plenty of girls did. If there was ever a fate worse than death, this had to be it.
She got up from the bed. She was wearing the regulation miniskirt required of all 18 year olds. She had on a pink and blue pullover shirt. On her feet was a pair of brown flat sandals. No socks. She would remember what she was wearing almost every day for the next thirteen years. She walked over to the door. There was another heavy knock. "Open this fucking door!" the gruff voice screamed.
Calmly, she put her hand on the handle and turned the lock. She stepped back about 10 feet. "It's open," she declared flatly.
1For many years it was thought that the funds raised by sales of SSW's, and taxes assed on their transfers or resale, together with 'user' fees paid monthly for each SSW to the DCR were insufficient to sustain funding levels necessary for classification, training, regulation and enforcement. It has recently been shown by a review of DCR archives that this was never the case. Even from the beginning, revenues far exceeded costs, which is not surprising when you consider that the 'product' was obtained pretty much free of charge, the costs of raising, feeding and maintaining the recruit having been born mostly by her parents or other relatives. These preliminary findings raised the prospect of unprecedented levels of graft and have been cited by some as the true rationale for the continuation of compulsory sexual service, (CSS), as well as for the increasingly high level of MR classifications. Professors Roger Cannel and Esther DeMarco's study of these early records was terminated abruptly by the National Governing Board and their findings mostly suppressed. It is rumored that the 32 year old Professor DeMarco was declared "subversive" and classified MR in a sealed "in abstentia" hearing before the DRC judicial tribunal but that has not been confirmed. There has been no confirmed contact with her in over three years. Some speculation exists that she is being hidden by one of the numerous Female Resistance Cells, (FRC's), which have sprung up over the years, but this has not been substantiated and is highly unlikely because of the limited lifespan of these groups before discovery and the high degree of penetration of the so called "Women's Liberty Movement" by agents of the DCR. Professor Cannel died in a freak accident at his Aspen vacation home shortly after the limited publication of their findings.*
*Editor's note: This footnote will not appear in the published version of this article.
2The loose regulation of the method any one county would use to conduct its draft was known to lead to vast corruption since wealthier families were able to bribe their daughters' way out of selection. Some counties blatantly sold exemptions which would take particular females out of the running, or skewed draft quotas so that the less wealthy areas had higher quotas than the silk stocking districts. DCR attempted, futilely, to weed out such venality. In 2031, in Gordon, Missouri, for example, DCR vacated the entire SSW draft process for the last three years and ordered the induction of every 18 to 20 year old girl in the county.