Chapter 1

 

My name is David Lewis and I am recently married to Helen, the pair of us having just graduated from Griffith University on the Gold Coast of Queensland, Helen as an industrial chemist and me as a mechanical engineer.

A rapidly spreading wave of religious terrorism, an out-of-control crime wave and the total inability of prisons to make any inroads on these very worrying trends led to emergency meetings of the United Nations wherein it was decided to abolish the extremely costly prison systems and replace them with a new institution entitled Criminal Slavery.

It was still very new and people were still coming to grips with the implications of purchasing a slave and maintaining it in strict discipline and long hours of work as required by the laws of just about every nation in the world.

For a start, a slave was not going to be permitted clothing of any kind. This humiliation and discomfort was seen as an extremely good deterrent to further crime and even more importantly the fear that everyone felt of the possibility of a horrible, murderous event in their locality and perhaps even involving themselves. And to add to the shame as well as to improve the visual appearance of a naked slave, they were also required to be depilated nude of all hair below their eyes.

But there were others: by law, a slave was going to be required to be worked for fifteen hours a day, seven days a week and this in itself imposed an enormous workload on its owner or supervisor, especially as that work was to be continued non-stop for the whole period of their working day and at their fullest effort.

They were not permitted to sit. They had to assume a certain position immediately when confronted with a free person. They were not permitted to look a free person in the eye. And there were many other small rules placed on them, the breach of which was to merit them severe corporal punishments, all of which were to be maintained and administered by their owner or supervisor.

Helen and I, right throughout university years, used to spend many hours sitting over a cup of coffee and cogitating on this intriguing new invention and how it was going to develop in the future and gradually it gelled in our minds that becoming involved in this institution would be absolutely fascinating. Our discussions therefore slowly changed to how we could use our new skills and qualifications once we graduated to make a decent living together.

In the four years of our courses we slowly developed a game plan. I would devise and fabricate items that would be useful in supervising and disciplining a slave, while Helen would use her skills to invent new products peculiar to and useful for a slave owner. But we both knew these activities would not by themselves generate an adequate income for us and so we endlessly discussed other ideas such as items to use a slave for pleasure and/or profit such as pony gigs to trot an owner around the streets either for pleasure, shopping or the like.

Accordingly, even before our graduation I had designed a small gig and a larger carriage for two that might be suitable while Helen had developed a product that could be dispensed in an aerosol spray to protect the slave from severe cold, for the rule relating to total nakedness and nudity was absolute. The moment a slave was declared as such in the court, he or she was immediately stripped naked by the bailiff and then had to stand in the dock to hear the rest of the sentence. And from that moment on even a tiny cod-piece or vaginal triangle is forbidden. SlaveSkin, as she dubbed her product, we both rightly saw as being a real winner right around the world and so we immediately began the process of patenting and then marketing it.

For my part, I considered the problems of feeding anything from one to thousands of slaves. As part of my course, we had visited numerous factories using complicated and expensive machinery to create the end product for that particular company and one of those I visited manufactured chook pellets, used commonly both for home and industrial poultry farms with great success.

They involve huge steel hoppers into which all the right ingredients are inserted in their proper proportions, the hopper is sealed and its contents cooked under extremely high pressure steam for just a few minutes after which the machine's inner works masticated the cooked food to a paste which was then extruded from five millimetre diameter nozzles which also dried it in the process and cut them off at one centimetre lengths.

I discussed this process with Helen and she immediately saw where I was going. "You are going to invent a similar machine designed to do the same thing for human consumption by slaves, aren't you?"

I grinned at her. "I have almost completed the design in my own mind, Helen, but while it would be based on those machines I saw today, mine would be different in many ways and I would therefore be able to patent the design and if I'm correct, we could create a factory, first of all here on the Gold Coast but later the rest of Australia and perhaps the world. Your aerosol spray and this machine might I think, make us millionaires in a very short while.

"I'm going to spend the next few days and weeks consulting with dietitians as to the best but cheapest foods that would constitute an adequate diet for a slave and then work out the costings. The machines themselves will not cost us a lot to make and we could start small in our local area and gradually expand as required. I suspect the dietitians will tell me that cheap foods are just as healthy as expensive ones and I suspect we are going to learn that a double handful night and morning, followed by plenty of plain water to allow the pellets to reconstitute into mashed food, will be a perfect diet for a slave.

"They will not have any sensation of the pleasure of eating as the pellets will be virtually tasteless and that in itself will gain the approbation of governments everywhere. As you know, the whole purpose of this new institution is to so demean and humiliate the criminal that they would think a damn sight more than twice about committing offences when this is what will almost inevitably follow."

"Oh, I agree with you all the way, David. It sounds like an incredible invention and if as you suspect the costs are minimal, particularly of the end product, a slave could be fed very quickly and simply and most importantly cheaply.

"I can see that in a small number of slaves the ration could be doled out to them from a sack or the like but what if there were a number of slaves?"

I grinned at her. "Oh, I've thought of that, too. I would presume that in that case slaves would be accommodated in the basement of the factory or similar and if this is the case then a machine I have invented in my mind would be a fixed to an outside wall somewhere near their ablution facilities. Depending on the size of the slave herd, this machine might have its own hopper immediately above the dispensing unit but if a large number of slaves was involved, the hopper could be very big and affixed to the outer side of that same wall and capable of being topped up by a delivery vehicle, the works of which I have also invented in my mind.

"Instead of the driver having to measure the quantity of the product, the dispensing unit would do that itself after which it would automatically bill the customer and at the moment the bill is complete, it would be delivered to the owner's computer. If he wished, he could also authorise us to charge his bank account and credit ours without going through that latter process although of course he would be given a copy of the invoice and the bank transfer details."

She looked at me with a huge grin right across her lovely face. "My, my, you really have thought it all through right from beginning to end, haven't you..."

"Well, you know me, Helen. If I'm going to think of something, my mind seems to see all the problems and their solution as part of the design."

"I know. I think you were born to be a mechanical engineer so have you patented what's in your mind, yet."

I laughed. "If it was possible, I would but you know very well that a patent application requires an enormous amount of paperwork including plans and fine detail and while I've started on that, it's going to be quite a few months before it's ready. In the meantime, I'm going to make such a unit and then test it and refine it and test it and refine it until I'm sure I can't improve it at all.

 

The foregoing will give you some idea of how Helen and I gelled together and complemented each other in our various projects. We both still lived at home with our parents but by now were well ahead in our plans to rent an apartment on a temporary basis with a view to acquiring a small factory with a space that we could adapt to our living quarters in the first instance.

Of course we kept our parents abreast of our plans and they were most supportive of us, I think seeing that in the future we were going to make a great business as well as a family team. They even agreed to support us financially until we began to receive an income.

And so while Helen worked on the formula for her SlaveSkin, I did the same with my machine so that by the time of our graduation her formula was already in production in our small plant at Currumbin, not far from where we both lived while I was just about ready to patent my Slave Chow machine, as I had named its product.

We both believed our inventions would be extremely popular once they became known and so did our parents, who of course were sworn to the same secrecy as the pair of us observed in everything we did in that little factory.

To cut a long story short, the moment both patents were registered and we were therefore protected, we began to market them ourselves, purchasing a used utility truck and then supplying the local supermarkets - not the big chains at this stage, but testing the market on such smaller outlets as IGA and the like.

We did all the work ourselves at first. Helen producing her formula and bottling it into the aerosol can machine we purchased while I worked on manufacturing another couple of machines so that I could produce a reasonable quantity of Slave Chow and at the end of the week allow us to do the rounds and deal with our clients personally.

It is always said that the personal touch gets results and we can certainly attest to that old adage. Our clients had been more than helpful in pointing their own clients to our product, showing just how effective Helen's spray on skin was in keeping out the cold and my pellets to very cheaply feed their customers' slaves.

Helen's spray is totally invisible creating a thin elastic plastic skin over the feet, and for that matter any other part of the body the slave's owner thought vulnerable to the cold. The beauty of this product is that it allows the skin to breathe but still insulates the slave against cold, or for that matter, excessive heat, and it also contained an ingredient that protected them from ultraviolet light and thus screening them from the sun's harsh rays.

This product alone sold out within a couple of days of us delivering it to the supermarkets and we quickly realised we were going to have to do buy more machines and hire people to produce the product and can it in the spray cans.

My product was even more successful as people realised that feeding their slaves with normal human food was both expensive, time-consuming and a most unwanted chore resulting from their purchase of their slave or slaves. It was just so easy to issue a ladleful of the pellets to each of their slaves twice a day and the cost was a fraction of what the purchase of the raw materials for their feeding would be.

And so after having helped Helen develop her side of the business, I did the same with mine and soon we had the little factory humming with the manufacture of both products. We continued to market them ourselves but extended our range to other suburbs and areas of the Gold Coast and within a year or two, realised we needed a much larger factory with many more assembly lines to satisfy the ever-growing demands of our customers.

By now, we had repaid our respective parents every last cent we had borrowed from them and definitely including a very high rate of interest. Both sets of parents had hotly refused us doing this but we had insisted that they hadn't had to support us financially as they had all through our university and early days in our new business and we wanted to show them how grateful we were.

Those first few years were extremely busy for us, simply in satisfying the now burgeoning demand for our products and any thought of inventing new ones was very far from our minds. We well knew that if we were unable to satisfy that demand, its popularity would plummet and we would have lost everything.

And therefore within the bounds of sanity, we purchased slaves to work in the factory under the watchful eye of our existing paid employees and eventually created a proper marketing department with its own staff.

I have already mentioned that slaves must be employed fifteen hours a day and this suited us down to the ground. Of course that meant that we had to employ two sets of paid staff to supervise them but as they are required to be worked far faster and harder than paid employees and with no breaks whatsoever for morning and afternoon tea, lunch, et cetera, their output was a great deal more than twice what a single paid employee could create in a day. And as a result, we were easily able to accommodate the ever-growing demand in the widely spreading area of our sales region.

I'm not going to go on any more about how those aspects of our company developed. I'm sure you can imagine how it first encompassed the whole of Queensland, then New South Wales, followed by the rest of the states of Australia and then overseas. It was a long and rather demanding time for both Helen and me but we relished the work, particularly as we saw the profits rising almost exponentially and enabling us to establish more factories around Australia and then overseas.

By this time of course, we were able to afford our own rather nice house in Palm Beach, which is in the middle of the Gold Coast area and we had a couple of slaves to look after it while we were absent at work or wherever.

 

What I would like to do, is to move off into the other aspects that we were soon able to begin.

One of the things that had concerned us both is the matter of how to maintain discipline in a slave and particularly when there is more than one in a household or other place of employment.

It needed to be automatic and capable of recognising a number of no-no's and then respond to them automatically. My expertise lies in mechanical engineering but the faculty of engineering at Griffith includes both electrical and electronic engineering as well as civil and mechanical and I had a number of friends in both those departments. When I put the problem to an electronic engineer graduate friend of mine, he said he'd think about it and get back to me ASAP.

What he came up with is a small silicon chip that has the capacity to monitor a number of things in the body such as lack of movement denoting taking an unauthorised break, and even speech and to punish the slave accordingly.

I have always been fascinated with the silicon chip and what it can now do. My parents had in our house one of those very old wireless receivers that required half a dozen large electronic valves and all manner of circuitry and loudspeakers, et cetera. I used to love to turn it on and watch as the valves warmed up and then the extremely crackly broadcast came out of the speaker. And then later when computers were first invented, they grew so big as to occupy huge rooms in company buildings and even the first home desk-top computers were rather large and cumbersome units.

Nowadays one tiny silicon chip can do the same things as those giant computer machines with huge spools of magnetic tape spinning backwards and forwards, lamps blinked everywhere and there was a constant sound of relays and other noises. How it all works is beyond me but my friend Peter Reynolds understands it all perfectly but knew of the fact that it was all a mystery to me and he grinned as he later delivered the chip to me at home and we inserted it on our house-slave's right testicle.

Even this was simplicity itself. He merely bathed James' organ with methylated spirits, made a tiny incision in the scrotal wall in the area of the right testicle, peeled off the wax paper from the back of the chip, revealing its glue, and then simply inserted it through the incision in the scrotum and onto the gonad itself. A Band-Aid was all that was necessary to prevent infection of the wound.

Helen and I watched this tiny operation in some awe but when he finished we both looked at him with our eyebrows raised as if to say, "Okay, now what?"

He grinned and then produced one of those small controllers with buttons and a small screen on it. This, he had apparently adapted to issue commands to the chips and receive feedback from them.

He first of all explained to James what the chip would be doing glued to his testicle, indicating that it could give him one of two zaps, the first of which meant that he must find whichever of us had issued the signal (and then turned to us explaining that there were two different sensations in that single zap so he would know if it was Helen or me who had called him). He then went on to advise him that the next sensation was going to be extremely painful but would not be used on him unless he erred in a significant way.

James obviously prepared himself but he couldn't have known exactly how painful that punishment zap was going to be. It only lasted a couple of seconds but in that time he had doubled over, his face had drained of blood, his mouth had opened and he was obviously trying to scream but couldn't as his larynx was obviously paralysed.

Peter indicated that we could now send the slave back to work knowing that if he took a breather, even, he would be punished.

Helen and I were ecstatic in our praise for this wonderful little chip that he said cost so little and yet packed an enormous punch. During the dinner that followed that little demonstration, we asked him what he proposed to do to market this extraordinary little device.

He looked at us in puzzlement. "Market it? I'm not going to market it. I made it just for you two. Why, do you think it has marketable value?"

Now the pair of us looked at him in absolute astonishment. "Peter, that tiny little chip is going to be absolutely revolutionary. It is going to mean that every slave around the world will no longer have to be directly supervised by expensive paid staff or if in single ownership, by his owner which of course is going to be not only costly but boring and time-consuming."

I looked at Helen with my eyebrows raised knowing that she would guess instinctively what I was about to say and she nodded.

"Peter you could set up a company and a plant to make the things in their thousands and millions but if that isn't your scene, we would like to invite you to join our company as an equal partner with Helen and me and we will set up a production line for it and then begin to market it as you know we are doing so successively with our products and making a nice profit from them.

"The first thing to do is to patent this device to protect you and if you agree to the above suggestion, our company from poachers..."

As the enormity of his invention sunk in and he began to see the possibilities for himself, he responded as we hoped. "I must say David and Helen, that I haven't got a business atom in my brain. I wouldn't have a clue how to proceed with what you are talking about but you two obviously have and as we are already very good friends, I would be more than willing to join with you to in your operation and then begin to develop these chips and market them around the world.