Corporate Slave

Chapter Two-1

Chapter Two

Ten minutes to get from the 34th floor back to ground level, because the elevators didn’t work above the 25th floor and smelled of piss anyway. Fifteen minutes on the public transit to the stop nearest her work. She looked out of the carriage window at run-down tenements and fortified stores like mini-forts, spray painted slogans on them like “Wealth creates slavery”. One time, “Hungry? Eat a pig for dinner!” Public security guys in their armored truck cruising past the graffiti, looking nervous. No prizes for guessing the dissidents were strong in this neighborhood.

You knew when you were in a “safe” area. There were billboards and video displays that said things like “You’re only safe because we kill dissidents,” “Terrorists need information: don’t talk in public” and “Stay safe, report anything suspicious NOW.” And they hadn’t been completely obliterated by spray-paint, or were only partly vandalized.

Where she was walking, none of those informational messages existed. They’d all been destroyed, months ago.

Five minutes walk at the other end, past a burned-out van that been there a month, a pile of rotting plastic sacks, a broken-down basketball court that had been colonized by illegal gambling stalls and vendors of stolen goods. Past pawn shops, cheap electronics stores and a secondhand bookstore—as if anyone these days knew what a book was. Or even, for a good proportion of the population, knew how to read.

She slipped in the door on the back alley, waved her old-fashioned QR-code staff pass at the camera, read the screen that told her she was 23 seconds late, cumulatively three minutes and 11 seconds late for the month, one minute 49 seconds remaining before it triggered a late penalty. She sighed, went through to the changing cubicle and got ready for her shift.

Her uniform comprised a corporate G-string and handkerchief top, shoes of her own choice. Bare feet were considered a health and safety risk. Cassie used the strappy high heels she always left in her locker as a backup. Mostly she alternated between her dominatrix-style thigh boots, and her “slave” boots—the name given to the design when she’d bought them. They were high heeled and mid-calf length, but with cutaways at the toe and the back of the heel, and an open back with a series of straps and buckles. In her hurry to pick up the Dress, though, she’d left both at home. The backup pair would do fine.

A corridor led past the stock room and opened out into an alcove opposite the manager’s office. The alcove contained an upturned plastic crate used as a coffee and card-playing table, and four plastic chairs in different states of serviceability. Only one of the chairs was occupied, but by two people: Jude, a tiny slip of a girl with long corkscrew hair was sitting on the lap of Edmund, one of the security guards. His left hand was working between her legs, facilitated by the fact that she was naked. Cassie didn’t so much as blink an eyelid. Edmund was probably on his break and Jude must have just finished her sales routine. The only odd thing was that Lorne should have been there, but wasn’t.

Jude looked at her with wide, dark, blank eyes. Her rasping breaths meant she was going to come soon but the void in her eyes wasn’t just the s*x. It had the depthless quality that came from doing too much dreamcrazy.

Officially the shop had a “no drugs” policy, but the manager’s interpretation of it was that he didn’t want to know how his shop assistants got through ten-hour shifts, seven days a week. He had targets to meet. Cassie had been tempted sometimes, just to get through the back end of a hard day.

Technically it wasn’t illegal, but you were only supposed to be able to buy it from licensed dealers at places like The Club. No one worried about that, though. Everyone knew someone who dealt – Edmund, for example.

As far as Cassie knew, she was the only assistant there who stayed completely clean while working in the shop. Not that she stayed clean when she had a night out at The Club, because that would be perverse. The whole point of going there, for Cassie, was the casual s*x, and the dreamcrazy made it even better.

Jude orgasmed suddenly, harsh guttural sounds that would almost certainly be audible out in the shop itself. Cassie smiled to herself. Whatever the customers could imagine going on out of their view had almost certainly happened at some point.

Cassie was used to seeing Jude f*****g in the back room, seeing her beg, wail and scream for it. And if that failed, she was usually in a corner with her own hand between her legs. She didn’t think anything of it, apart from the fact that she wouldn’t have wanted Jude’s life. Almost everything she earned went on her habit, and while she could dance well enough—very well, in fact—she could rarely manage more than two or three words at a time. s*x was important to Cassie, but she’d never let herself get s*x fogged on the drug, brain fried to the point that the only two emotions it registered were needing s*x and having s*x. True, s*x was important. True, it was her recreation of choice and she did it as often as possible. But she tried, sometimes at least, to do other things. Cook. Clean her room. Have conversations, some of which didn’t take place during s*x and weren’t even about s*x. Watch newscasts about the dissidents and how they were being crushed. Stuff like that.

The dissidents were always being crushed. The newscasts called them worse than that, often: they were rebels, revolutionaries, fanatics, terrorists. They were a tiny band of misguided fools, just handfuls of people here and there. They were a constant threat, an invisible menace. She wondered, sometimes, how come they could be both at the same time. And how come there were always more of them? More of their graffiti on the streets, day by day? Only one conclusion to be drawn from that: don’t believe everything you see on the news.

The back wall of the alcove had two doors with timers above them, counting down to zero. One had about a minute to go.

“So what happened to Lorne?” she asked Jude. If she’d been sacked, or arrested, or whatever, it would throw the schedules out and they’d be covering for her all day.

Jude didn’t answer because she’d slipped to the floor and had pried Edmund’s c**k out of his pants, running her tongue up and down its impressive length. The sight, unsurprising enough in the back room, gave Cassie a sudden flashback to an hour previously and brought the taste of Ben back into her mouth again. Unconsciously, she entwined her hands, using the fingers of each to rub the purple lines on the opposite wrist. The marks left by the handcuffs she’d been wearing. The handcuffs that had only been removed, now she thought about it, less than an hour previously.

Jude was employing one of the tricks of the trade, though. Suck off one of the security guys, keep it in your mouth, and let globs of it leak out from between your lips when you were in front of the customers. Never failed to get attention.

No wonder the shop gigs were popular with security staff. It wasn’t the work that attracted them, but the perks. Especially with the girls who did dreamcrazy.

Edmund reached one hand to the coffee table. There was a small cylinder on it that looked like it should contain lipstick, but the blue smudge it left on his forearm told Cassie it was a stick of dreamcrazy. She twitched her nose in disapproval. Her experience was that hopped-up security tended to over-react when they were on it.

Cassie sighed. She wasn’t going to get an answer to her question.

The counter pinged down to zero, the door opened and Marnie slipped from behind it. Naked, of course, and carrying her G-string and top loosely in one hand. She was statuesque, fit from working out and doing weights, with cropped blonde hair and distinctive tattoos—a smiling sun on her left shoulder, an old-school set of entwined roses around her right thigh, and a suggestive, curvy female form in the small of her back, but with a death’s head skull instead of a face. Cassie had never even dared ask if it had any particular significance for her. Marnie was the longest-serving of all the girls at the store, and there was a running joke that her fourth tattoo, a small square of dots midway between her navel and p***y, was actually her security QR code. If she ever forgot her staff entry pass she could just flash her belly to the camera to open the door. Her mere presence could almost intimidate punters into buying stuff, and those who weren’t intimidated bought it anyway because they liked the tattoos.

She nodded at Cassie, a wry professional greeting.

“You’ve got yourself marked up. They’ll like that.”

Cassie looked down. The bruises from the cuffs were plainly visible. And she could work with that, include it in her act. That was another trick of the trade. Marks from rope or chain, or a spanking or a whipping, even a scar from a cut, were all things a lot of the punters liked to see. Little Annie, who worked the night shift, had done a lot of self-harming as a kid. She was nothing to look at physically, almost boyish, but had those thin white scars on her legs, belly, arms. They went wild for her.

It was a sick society.

“Good experience, or not?” Marnie asked. It was a sensible enough question: being cuffed was a common enough part of almost anyone’s s*x play these days.

Cassie shrugged. “It was okay, I guess.” She didn’t want to explain the circumstances, the deal, and the blow-by-blowjob of it. She changed the subject instead.

“Lorne?” It was worth asking.

Marnie shrugged, a gesture that in her made all kinds of muscles bulge and twitch expressively. “We don’t know. Word is, she got arrested. No one seems to know what for, though.”

Cassie shuddered. Getting arrested wasn’t like the old days, time in a cell and then the judge giving you probation. She’d heard what happened if you got arrested.

It was a sick, dangerous world out there.

The counter above the door gave a shrill buzz.

She was on. Stepped through the door into the Plexiglas cubicle, picked up the beat of the piped music, began to dance.

That was business at the 121st Street Convenience and Liquor Store. That was business at almost all the convenience stores. Shop assistants, the way they used to be, weren’t needed any more because the products were chipped. They were scanned automatically on the way out along with your credit chip, and security stopped you if you didn’t have enough credit.

So instead, shops attracted customers by having the assistants dance – and strip. Four minutes clothed, four minutes stripping, four minutes naked. Then four minutes when the cubicle was empty. All the time, logos and ads were playing on the back wall behind the strippers, a form of almost subliminal advertising. Good strippers kept punters in the shop, and they tended to buy more—in short four minute bursts. A big shop might have several cubicles, one in each department—groceries, liquor, s*x aids and so on. At 121st Street they had just two, one facing out to the foodstuffs and the other to the toiletries, medicines, s*x toys and liquor.

Shop assistants weren’t supposed to compete with each other. Marketing people had worked out the timings on the booths so different assistants were naked at different times to create a flow of customers around all the product lines. Plus, the point of the cubicles was that while customers were watching you they were also taking in the advertising, and you didn’t want to compete against that because if you did, it drove sales down, not up.

At the same time, if you were in the business, it was human nature to want more attention than the other assistants; have people come in to see you, specifically.

So there was competition, but it was discreet.

The marks on Cassie’s wrists were a subtle advantage, a tipping of the scales in her favor.

Dancing as a s****l come-on for strangers wasn’t the same as dancing in a club. It was slower, more sinuous, more posing and more suggestive moves. It came from the hips, a hard grind that pushed the p***y forwards like you were displaying it to the punter. It was a stylized offer of s*x, working through postures of submission.

Cassie was good at it. Enjoyed it, even, and not just because she knew she was good. She was separated from the punters by the plastiglass of the cubicle. She could be as suggestive, obscene even, as she liked, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Every so often one would throw himself at the glass, batter it with his fists, or expose himself and wank while she was on. Not a threat; not her problem. It was down to Security to deal with the losers.

Looking into the cubicle from outside, it was a well-manicured wonderland. But that was all in the lighting. Looking at it from the inside, you saw a different world. The dimensions were such as she could stand with her back against the wall and touch the glass in front of her and to each side. The floor was scuffed industrial tiling, two small crosses marked on it with insulation tape. If a girl put her feet on the crosses, the theory was the tiny spotlights in the floor and ceiling would highlight thighs and t**s. The floor tiles were grimy with stuff the sales attendants had been told to incorporate in their acts, probably because manufacturers paid for it to happen. Cassie didn’t know or remember all the stuff, but at one time or another it had included honey, yoghurt, some beer they’d had to clean off the plastiglass two or three times a day, and (she shuddered at the memory) frozen hot dogs made from some unidentifiable meat product.

With an effort of will she put another image in her mind—the time they’d had to perform wearing n****e clamps. Her body remembered exactly what it was like, the pull on her n*****s as she moved, with the chain that joined the pair of clamps swinging from side to side. Painful, yes, but they’d had her climaxing as she’d danced.

She’d ended up with a pair at home.

Above the glass, almost at ceiling level, was a small screen that scrolled automated instructions: DANCE, STRIP, POSE, END SESSION; occasional special ones like SMILE, SEDUCE and DISPLAY ASS, and for the days when they had to deal with honey, hot dogs or n****e clamps, USE PRODUCT NOW!

Dance. The memory of the n****e clamps was visceral. Cassie could feel her body responding just to the thought of them and eased into the music, winding her hips out, stretching arms above her head, playing with her hair. She knew exactly how this made her look—wild, abandoned, lost in her own sensuality. She was showing a lot of inside thigh, getting attention now from some of the shoppers. A pirouette ended with her ass to the glass, bending at the waist as much as the confined space allowed, the G-string showing the customers almost, but not quite, everything. And she spanked her right buttock a couple of times. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the customers shiver with anticipation. When she squeezed her own t**s and then pinched the n*****s, it took her right back to the n****e clamp moment… she felt herself come, hard enough that she lost the beat of the music and had to put a hand out against the glass for support. When she looked at her hand Cassie realized there was another one, on the other side of the glass, mirroring hers. It belonged to a lean, hungry-looking guy, sharp-featured but fashionably scruffy. Day-old stubble, there, but eyes that looked straight into hers, direct and questioning. Moved his hand away when she took hers off the glass. Like it had been a signal, but she didn’t know what or why.

Cassie dismissed it as a fantasy; she’d read too much into it just because of the eye contact. She wouldn’t boot him out of bed, though. Except he’d have to lose the stubble. It’d make friction burns on her thighs.

Strip. Four minutes to remove two miniscule items of clothing. This meant a lot of tease and peek-a-boo, mouthing words to the customers—the glass was almost soundproof—and making gestures that meant you’re a naughty boy. Or girl, of course. A couple of women among the punters, there, because who wasn’t bisexual, really, these days?

Pose. Two wrists side by side with marks on them from the handcuffs. Displayed in front of her body, then spinning round to put them behind her back, then facing outwards again, holding them against her mouth in a mime of oral s*x. One of the guys watching was salivating and Cassie could see the engorged n*****s of one of the women…

She remembered, though, to run through the standard mimes of using certain products as their images played out behind her. She mimed as though her life depended on it. Which in a way it did, since her income was a percentage on what was sold in the twelve minutes following the end of her stint.

End session. Cassie slipped gratefully through the door at the back of the cubicle. Jude was waiting there to replace her, vacant-eyed, little more than a s****l automaton.

Edmund had returned to his post at the front of the store. Eena, who would have been halfway through her routine when Cassie started, was sitting where he’d sat. Marnie, now dressed, was behind her, rubbing body lotion into Eena’s shoulders. Cassie knew they were friends, knew they f****d occasionally, but could never work out how. Eena—short for Angeleena—was about half Marnie’s size, a tiny stick-thin waif.

She didn’t know what had happened to Lorne either.