Let me introduce myself: people call me Roe at the moment, but that could change at any time. Officially I am 799.2.590.636.7.33. The numbers describe my position in The Library's huge collection of slaves, just as they might enable a reader to find a book in a university's collection. The 799.2 says that I am for hunting, and the 590 that I am an animal, which means that I exist to be hunted, not to assist the hunters. The 636.7 suggests that I am best hunted with dogs, while the two threes show that I am presently kept in the West Indies, and that I am the third slave in that sub-collection to be so classified. Many members find this numbering unnecessarily fiddly. In practice I am a sex-slave who is regarded as particularly well-suited to all kinds of hunting games, but my more detailed profile makes it clear that I am versatile enough to be put to many uses.

Like many Library slaves, I was brought up by several pairs of foster parents, all in England, and was ignorant of my servile status until just past my eighteenth birthday, when I was seized without any preliminaries whatsoever. Many such girls and boys are introduced to bondage by men or women pretending to be their lovers, but I just went to sleep as a carefree student in Lancashire and woke up in a cage in the West Indies. I was a lazy girl who lacked ambition and had met life's limited challenges fairly easily, doing well at school but not well enough to attract attention. Unlike the girls who had harboured the hope of becoming scientists, doctors or politicians, I had little to lose and adapted to slavery quite easily. My trainers did not find it quite so easy to decide what to do with me. I am a pretty girl but not a glamorous one, with a round face, full lips, flashing eyes and mousy hair. I was not quite beautiful enough to be developed a pleasure slave. My breasts are quite large now, but then they were much less prominent, and could not be grown enough to make me a hucow. My legs- which were a little shorter than the ideal- were strong enough to make me quick and agile, but not powerful enough to suggest that I would be a good ponygirl. My trainers felt that there was something about me that deserved to be recognized, and were reluctant to designate me as a general-purpose slave. On the training island, however, we were made to play elaborate games of hide-and-seek, skulking among the sand dunes and scrubland with our hands locked behind our backs, and I usually did well. Faute de mieux, therefore, they made me a quarry-slave, to spend my life being hunted in many ways and many places. The dogs were a later addition. It was, as they knew, a relatively harmless designation that would not bar me from being used purely for sexual pleasure, or for anything else. I have always been thankful that they reached that decision. Apparently I writhed very attractively under the lash, and thin-tailed whips made clear, well-defined marks on my pale white skin, so there was a minority view among the training staff that I should be made designated a painslut. I had no idea, in those days, what a proper whipping felt like, or what I had so narrowly escaped. They secured one concession, just in case it proved necessary to reassess my classification. My bottom was never plugged, keeping it tight enough to cause me pain when I was sodomized. Frequent use has slackened it now, and it no longer hurts. On my twenty-first birthday I was given clitoral cell implants there, and in my mouth and on my nipples. It was the easiest way to increase my effectiveness as a sex-slave without producing the kind of addiction that makes it impossible for a pleasure girl to go without sex for more than a few hours.

During hunts, slaves are often almost free, usually with their wrists lightly chained in front of their bodies. They retain, however, the wrist and ankle irons and the collars that contain sensors and transmitters. Hunting grounds are usually covered by dozens of cameras, for the sport attracts tens of thousands of spectators online. The quarry cannot, therefore, safely break the rule against masturbation. We might, on occasion, escape capture for a whole day or even more, so we have to be able to go without sex if necessary. We are given enough of the libido-enhancing drugs to ensure that we always welcome sex, and with either men, women or both, but we do not always bring to our couplings the kind of hunger that characterizes a fully treated and trained pleasure slave. We have to work to ensure that our users are fully satisfied, for the whip and the cane are always there to punish any shortcomings, however slight. A succession of adequate but not outstanding performances, either in bed or in the hunting grounds, is likely to result in a few weeks' loan to a less desirable billet, a favourite being the members' retirement home on an otherwise uninhabited island. My memories of it are mixed, but the description of duty there as 'rest and recuperation' is a flagrant untruth. I will try, however, to put that place out of my mind for the time being.