The receiving dock was crowded with girls in their cages. I had introduced adjustable metal frames which allowed cages of various sizes to be stacked, up to twenty to thirty feet high. It wasn't particularly pleasant to be in a cage 30 feet in the air, waiting for a forklift operator to retrieve you, but it was even less pleasant to be in a lower cage, where the girl above might pee on you.
Too bad, so sad: my redesign of The Big D was about profit, not pleasure.
I was surprised at how crowded the loading dock was, but I didn't have time to count the unhappy girls around me as the Asian girl controlling my handcart quickly wheeled me away from receiving, using my cage to BANG open two swinging doors with the ominous word PROCESSING on them.
The black woman in coveralls and the woman in the suit with the long red hair were waiting for me there. As I entered there was a conversation in progress, and in my cage, I stared at the black woman's leather working boots and the woman's cheap low heel shoes hoping to learn their identities.
"Are you sure you don't want to just walk through each section?" The black woman asked.
"No, I'd rather follow one slave through the entire process," the redhead replied in a clipped British accent. "It might be better for my readers to personalize it a bit and see how one girl goes through the entire system. I can get some pictures of her, too. I'm not sure if we can use them in the newspaper, but my editor said I should get them anyway."
"I bet he did." The black woman in the coveralls shrugged.
The British reporter's accent wasn't cockney, exactly, but it wasn't Royal RP. She sounded like she was trying to sound better than she was. She was a little striver, with cheap shoes which were a pale imitation of my Gucci shoes back in Becky Lou's office. This limy cub reporter was going to do a story about me? How insulting! But soon I had bigger problems.
Unlocking the absurdly tiny metal lock which had held me firmly in place for the last several hours the Asian girl grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and yanked me to my feet. I could feel a surge of pain in my wobbly legs as I was finally allowed to stand.
"Oh, my!" the British reporter said. "She is a tall drink of water, isn't she?"
"Yeah, that probably helped her get her Prime Minus grade," the black woman said, reading my grade off her iPad. The iPads had been my idea - they were faster than shuffling papers.
The Asian chick reached up to pull back my upper lip, which was easy to do since I was still gagged. She did a read-back of my Slave Registration Number tattoo, which the black woman checked against the number on my bill of lading. She did a second read-back, which the black woman used to pull up my file on her iPad.
This "double check" of the SRN had been my idea - it only took a few seconds but making sure the receipts and shipments were correct was the key to proper inventory control. I had redesigned The Big D's inventory control system. Now I was inventory.
The reporter was about 5'6", and the black woman was only a bit taller. I was nearly a foot taller than Miss Saigon, who I supposed was in college but was the size of a little kid. I could have easily kicked her ass, but my hands were cinched behind my back, and I was still gagged. Without even looking at me she snapped a slave collar around my neck. The prongs were much sharper than the "play collar" I used at home, and there were pointy metal prongs in both front and back. I winced into my gag as she snapped it on, and the automatic locking bolt SNAPPED into place.
"Oh, my," the reporter said. "Do those collars hurt?" I glared at her. Stupid English bitch! Of course it hurt!
The black woman held up the remote control to my collar. "You're a Prime Minus, so you know what happens when I press this button, right?"
I nodded obediently, and sincerely. The battery pack on my neck was large, and she'd get no trouble from me. I also knew that if I made a run for the gate with the collar on, the perimeter security would drop me like an insect running into a bug zapper before I got ten feet from the building.
The black woman turned her attention to me. "Prone!" She barked. "Nose on the cement."
My hands were still cuffed behind my back, so I had to kneel first, and then sort of fall face forward onto the concrete. As per her instructions I pressed my naked body and nose hard against the freezing cold cement.
"Oh my, she is... obedient," the reporter said stupidly.
"You'd be obedient too, if they put a shock collar on you, bitch," I thought.
The next part of the conversation was so horrible it didn't fully register in my brain.
"You got her lot tag?" The black woman said.
"Yeah, right here," the Asian girl replied.
"Let's get her clipped."
I winced when the black woman's work boot clenched down on the back of my neck, holding me in place. "Hold still," she commanded flatly. "This is going to hurt."
"Tagging" had been my idea, inspired by a tour of the lot where I had noticed that the cattle had color-coded plastic tags hanging from their ears. The odd part is that although I had introduced the idea of tagging slave girls, I didn't even realize, until I saw the Asian girl take the belt punch off her belt and clip the blue tag into the punch gun that it was going to happen to ME.
It should have been obvious, but it was not. Many of the slave girls in the cages I had passed had the demeaning plastic tags stapled to their ears. But that was THEM; I was ME. After all, it wasn't like I was livestock! Surely they couldn't tag ME!