Chapters The Service Model Chapter 1
The young barista went to hand the man his coffee, her hand shaking a bit as it rose to the countertop. This was one of her most difficult customers and she absolutely refused to mess his order up again, but it really wasn’t her damn fault he was so particular! Once the cup was safely on the counter, she glanced at him, not-quite-ready for that potent look of disapproval he often wore.
He was honestly not much to look at, not unattractive but at least fifteen or twenty years older than her, a little soft on the sides, unexceptional in every way, but his order was always different, always over-complicated. It was like he was testing her or something, otherwise he would have faded into the nameless line of people needing their caffeine fix for the day. Now that she thought about it, the only thing she liked about him were the monster tips he left when she got his order perfectly.
“Here you go, Jasper.”
He nodded in gratitude after sipping, “Thanks Lily.” dropping a green portrait of Andrew Jackson in the jar on his way out.
Walking down the quiet suburban street towards his office, Jasper pulled a notepad from his coat pocket and crossed out the last two X’s. Damn, he thought. Just one more mistake on his “three strike” game he played to himself, and an Acquisition Team would have been in her flat tonight. He mused on what she would look like under that uniform, how much she would go for on the secondary market. Of course, he was just amusing himself. Abducting some perky twenty-something a block from his office could only lead to problems. It was another case of the mondays, and a weekend off always had his imagination running. Jasper sipped at his hot, overly-sweet coffee. Maybe this game wasn’t worth it, how much foam was on this thing?
He rounded the corner, his building down the block just another three-story office in some semi-industrial suburb. Ascending the staircase, he checked his phone to remind himself what was on his schedule for the day, but the whole afternoon was penciled-in “SERVICE CART TEST PROJECT.” Oh, of course, his latest pet project was due soon. Well, not due per se… but investors were itching for something new. When he opened the triple-locked access door to his space on the second floor, he heard a little squeal and something fall. Looking around the fire door, Jasper was wholly unsurprised to find Bunny on the ground again.
Now, to someone unfamiliar with the offices of Anything Co., the sight of a completely naked woman laid out across the industrial carpet would probably have sent them reeling with questions, but it was really quite simple: Bunny was the office pet. And you could tell just by looking at her, once you were aware that this business was a key peripheral to the luxury human-trafficking industry. Once you understood that, you would probably notice that her facial expressions were flirty but a bit dull, and her movements were repetitive, limited, nearly robotic. Even now on the ground, she was still ‘hopping,’ ankles together as they had instructed her to keep them, silently kicking, trying to right herself fruitlessly.
Bunny had been an early test, taken off the streets of some tiny new england town and subjected to hours and hours of hypnotic training – really quite crude, early work of theirs – until she was self-limiting her own behaviour. It wasn’t long before she couldn’t speak intelligible words, then she found it hard to keep her legs apart and hands anywhere else than supporting her heavy, augmented breasts. Jasper lifted her back to her joined feet, and the blonde hopped to steady herself, looked at Jasper with her blank expression, cocking her head like a curious dog, using those hands to jiggle her ridiculous tits for him. This was her way of asking if he wanted to use her, which was her only way of communicating, but to be honest not much went through her head these days, or that was the assumption of the development team (whom Jasper was head of when he wasn’t running the business). Since it was such early work, fresh out of his medical engineering degree, before they were even professionals really, Jasper couldn’t quite remember whether or not Bunny was still awake inside, watching her body offer itself and hop around the office endlessly in search of someone to satisfy.
Worrying that he had not understood her question, she turned around and – without changing her stance – bent over nearly 180 degrees to present her bare pussy and ass to him, but he simply spanked her and walked on. Maybe later, her well-used body didn’t entice him as it once had.
It didn’t really matter if she was awake, Jasper thought, cause nearly fifteen years had gone by and what was left of her sanity would probably be in tatters from the inane and degrading life she had been forced to lead. Now, times were different. ToyGirls they developed were only ever left with their original consciousness and identities when requested by a client. Jasper understood of course, for he had to be somewhat of a sadist to do his job… to have built this company, but leaving someone awake inside with their memories of conversion and life beforehand was cruel and, more importantly, risky. A slip up anywhere and authorities would have a firsthand witness to a side of humanity most people were blissfully unaware of.
As he walked down the hall, passing each workroom, he saw Andrew finishing off three ToyGirls. These naked, silent figures were the run of the mill brainless bimbos which knew how to suck, fuck, and say “Yes, Sir.” Blonde hair, huge lips, permanent makeup, breast and buttock implants; these clients had absolutely no imagination! Jasper caught himself underselling their bread and butter, these “basics” gave Anything their best margins, and their personality development had only gotten better and better. But Jasper had long since let others handle those simple orders, unless they were a security risk, and his company’s process was so effective that they hadn’t had an identity rejection incident in over three years. Besides, Andrew was his best technician.
Another room had Sarah, their nurse, running the identity rewrite machine on a new patient. This was next door to the intake room, where the new patients were kept sedated after Acquisitions brought them in. She had been a recent “hire” in the last couple years. A precocious thing that had discovered some patients disappearing from her emergency room after they came in for overdoses. Morals as they were, her silence couldn’t be bought, so after they brought her in Jasper personally refined her implant’s programming to retain her skilled identity, but continue to believe she was helping her new patients live a full and fruitful life. Like right now, she thought the identity rewrite machine was an MRI, but she still called it an IRM so no one got confused. The words were synonymous in her little head, it was truly simple.
Jasper had embedded a couple other trigger phrases, but if an old friend somehow ran into her three towns over and asked what she had been doing lately, she would respond with a rosy pride that she was working in a private clinic, still helping people just like she had always wanted. They had practiced the script together once and her mind recited it often to ring true to her. Andrew watched over her: just call it a perk of the job.
Their whole system was absolutely flawless. He had trusted employees, a steady backlog of orders, and his supply chain was solid.
This left Jasper to development, which he usually had an assistant to help him with, but currently he had to make due with his current staff after the last post-grad left for a competitor. But research continued on, it had to. The Company could throw out housepets, ponies, bimbos, dolls, and other simple requests with hardly a hiccup, but the investors wanted innovation, disruption; showboats that filtered down techniques to refine the normal requests. This was also the riskiest step. He had gone through four patients just figuring out how to implant his signature control interface in the patient’s heads. That had been the make or break moment, when he might have run out of money, lost the edge to a competitor, just from the expense of developing such a thing. Big pharma had billions to play with, and Jasper had maybe a couple mil from an investor to get the most advanced neurotech in the world out the door.
But of course that device had saved the company, and they were unstoppable now. No more make-or-break suggestibility/submission indexes, no more traditional hypnosis. This implant was an irresistible little bug in their head. A flaw in their defenses. With concentrated wireless power supplied by the rewrite machine, it had the strongest subject blank in three hours, no problem, after which it maintained that equilibrium, whispering, training away constantly on glucose energy alone.
And, amongst the right crowds, they were known for it.
He walked into his workshop and, like the others down the hall, this was part doctor’s office, part engineering lab. Two hospital beds sat in an attached recovery room, one was occupied, and as Jasper dropped his coat and briefcase down he checked the patient’s vitals on the monitors, and found them to be sedated like Sarah had assured him. A visual check was always a good idea, and when he walked in, he found a 20ish, Japanese-American girl, naked but soundly asleep, just like he had requested. Quite a beautiful face too, shame about that, his request had been more related to her necessary physique. The telltale bandage on her left temple meant Andrew had been working over the weekend, and the implant was already in. Fantastic.
Glancing at her chart, the subject was Asa Sumimoto, a 21-year-old track and field athlete with no remaining family and few friends (a usual prerequisite for acquisition), taking a year off college to focus on training. The report in his hand told him she had a history of sexual experimentation and her submission index was high, both unnecessary details which could only help him. Jasper inspected her, and found her to be a tiny, fit girl; most definitely a long distance runner. She was from over thirteen hundred miles away, across multiple state lines, and because they were located in the suburbs of a second-rate city in the Midwest, their office had no logical connection to her big-city life. No one would look for her here, and if Acquisitions did their job right, there would be no trail to follow.
He left the room to prep the operating area. It was going to be a long surgery.