WVTF366:
Alain Camar has agreed to accept the terms of contract, per your requirements. Please proceed to nearest disembarkation point. Your passage is secured. You must present code ORL5210.
Sincerely,
John J. Dees, Att.
Savana, Orleans
1840
75th year of colonization
Jana frowned, asked the computer to repeat the message several times more, and finally told it to delete the message and then erase it from it’s hard drive. She stood puzzling over it for some time, but could not come up with a clue as to what it might mean. The designation explained why she’d received the message in error. The Jana it had been intended for had an almost identical designation.
Of course, that meant nothing at all as far as Jana was concerned. The designation could be anything. Only someone familiar with a broad range of codes would’ve been able to decipher it’s meaning, and Jana had heard very few. Her own designation stood for White Virginal Female.
It was possible the WV in this Jana’s sig. meant the same thing--it was also possible it could mean a lot of other things.
What sort of contract could a female enter into with a male? Jana wondered.
The woman the letter had been sent to must be a free-woman. She surely could not otherwise have entered into any sort of contract at all, let alone set her own terms, so it seemed unlikely, to Jana’s mind, that this was any sort of arrangement for a sexual partner.
Then again, she knew little of what went on in the outside world.
She had been bred at Bondage Inc., and had spent the past year at the House. The only contact she had with the outside world was the men who were her customers and they didn’t come to her to talk.
She moved back to the bed and sat down, thinking.
She could not decipher the message. She knew nothing about the woman it had been intended for, nor what would be expected of the woman upon arrival.
She did, however, have a code that would take her off planet.
She might know very little about the outside world, but she lived in Carter City, Earth. The message was from Savana, Orleans. Furthermore, the message spoke of disembarkation. That could only mean that the woman was expected to travel beyond Earth.
Marty had said he could pick up her IT signal anywhere on the planet.
She knew little about these devises, but it seemed very unlikely to her that he’d be able to pick up her signal if she wasn’t even on the planet anymore.
A mixture of fear and excitement filled her. She could escape! All she had to do was to find a place to disembark, use the code that had been provided, and she could go somewhere where Marty would never find her!
But doubts immediately surfaced.
Could she, after her last failed attempt, manage to elude Marty’s surveillance and leave the House?
If she succeeded, could she find a disembarkation site?
If she found a site, would the code be any good, or would she find that the other Jana, the one it had been meant for, had already used it?
Lastly, supposing everything worked out, and she escaped--what if the place, and the man, she went to was even worse than those she’d left?
***
Jana realized she had not properly appreciated the depths to which terror could plunge one until the night she escaped the House. She had not managed to leave without tripping the alarm.
The chase that had followed had pushed her to the very limits of her endurance, but it had not been her own abilities that had shaken the guards. She had managed to elude her pursuers only because she’d blundered directly into the most dangerous portion of the city—her pursuers had simply refused to go in after her.
By the luck of the truly stupid, she had blundered out in much the same manner, after hours of terror in wandering a nightmare world that seemed to be in a constant state of warfare, complete with explosions, gun and phaser fire, screams, curses, dying and wounded.
When she’d finally left the sounds behind her and
Alain Camar has agreed to accept the terms of contract, per your requirements. Please proceed to nearest disembarkation point. Your passage is secured. You must present code ORL5210.
Sincerely,
John J. Dees, Att.
Savana, Orleans
1840
75th year of colonization
Jana frowned, asked the computer to repeat the message several times more, and finally told it to delete the message and then erase it from it’s hard drive. She stood puzzling over it for some time, but could not come up with a clue as to what it might mean. The designation explained why she’d received the message in error. The Jana it had been intended for had an almost identical designation.
Of course, that meant nothing at all as far as Jana was concerned. The designation could be anything. Only someone familiar with a broad range of codes would’ve been able to decipher it’s meaning, and Jana had heard very few. Her own designation stood for White Virginal Female.
It was possible the WV in this Jana’s sig. meant the same thing--it was also possible it could mean a lot of other things.
What sort of contract could a female enter into with a male? Jana wondered.
The woman the letter had been sent to must be a free-woman. She surely could not otherwise have entered into any sort of contract at all, let alone set her own terms, so it seemed unlikely, to Jana’s mind, that this was any sort of arrangement for a sexual partner.
Then again, she knew little of what went on in the outside world.
She had been bred at Bondage Inc., and had spent the past year at the House. The only contact she had with the outside world was the men who were her customers and they didn’t come to her to talk.
She moved back to the bed and sat down, thinking.
She could not decipher the message. She knew nothing about the woman it had been intended for, nor what would be expected of the woman upon arrival.
She did, however, have a code that would take her off planet.
She might know very little about the outside world, but she lived in Carter City, Earth. The message was from Savana, Orleans. Furthermore, the message spoke of disembarkation. That could only mean that the woman was expected to travel beyond Earth.
Marty had said he could pick up her IT signal anywhere on the planet.
She knew little about these devises, but it seemed very unlikely to her that he’d be able to pick up her signal if she wasn’t even on the planet anymore.
A mixture of fear and excitement filled her. She could escape! All she had to do was to find a place to disembark, use the code that had been provided, and she could go somewhere where Marty would never find her!
But doubts immediately surfaced.
Could she, after her last failed attempt, manage to elude Marty’s surveillance and leave the House?
If she succeeded, could she find a disembarkation site?
If she found a site, would the code be any good, or would she find that the other Jana, the one it had been meant for, had already used it?
Lastly, supposing everything worked out, and she escaped--what if the place, and the man, she went to was even worse than those she’d left?
***
Jana realized she had not properly appreciated the depths to which terror could plunge one until the night she escaped the House. She had not managed to leave without tripping the alarm.
The chase that had followed had pushed her to the very limits of her endurance, but it had not been her own abilities that had shaken the guards. She had managed to elude her pursuers only because she’d blundered directly into the most dangerous portion of the city—her pursuers had simply refused to go in after her.
By the luck of the truly stupid, she had blundered out in much the same manner, after hours of terror in wandering a nightmare world that seemed to be in a constant state of warfare, complete with explosions, gun and phaser fire, screams, curses, dying and wounded.
When she’d finally left the sounds behind her and
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