I Was a Star on Goblin Reality Tv

Irene did not enjoy being the star of an alien reality TV show, even if millions of viewers were watching her every move. She had not even volunteered; the "recruiters" who had abducted her from Earth and brought her to this horrible planet and sold her to the horrible goblin-like alien producers had not left her any choice. She had no idea where she was, and how far from Earth, except that it had taken several months to get here.

It was not as if her day-to-day living conditions in her new life were all that bad, at least as long as she could avoid losing the Game. She had been placed in a luxury apartment, with every possible amenity, and she had a robot butler, whom she had immediately named Jeeves, to anticipate her every need and obey her slightest wish. She had silk nightgowns and lingerie that she could wear inside the apartment, and a refrigerator full of delicacies, ready for Jeeves to prepare gourmet meals and snacks whenever she asked. There was a liquor cabinet full of booze (none of which she dared to touch, of course).

The producers had even arranged for her to have a full-time job in a glossy downtown office building, to which Jeeves led her back and forth every day, to contribute to the pretense that she had a normal life her.

(Wasn't the whole robot butler thing cliched? Irene felt like it had been done to death. The show's producers were not about to accept any creative notes from her, though, even if she was supposed to be the star. This irritated her, but it was the least of her problems.)

She had no privacy whatsoever, of course; every surface was studded with cameras, even inside the human-style toilet bowl and in the enormous soaking bathtub with its bubbling jets, to ensure uninterrupted access for her gloating audience. She was being livestreamed every second of every day. She had never felt so exposed and vulnerable, or so naked, even in her cage on her abductors' starship.

She tried hard not to think about it; she knew that the very visible cameras were intended to have a psychological effect on her, as if she could be even more demoralized than she was. At least she could not hear her watchers talking about her; that was something, she supposed.

Of course, the token salary she was paid was far from being enough for her to afford her current housing, much less a state-of-the-art AI like Jeeves, who, she knew, was far smarter than she was. It seemed to be a universal truth that no matter what planet you were on, a TV apartment or house was far grander than its inhabitant could plausibly afford. If she were not on the show, and were somehow freed, in real life she could only afford to sleep naked in an alley somewhere.

Her pay was definitely not enough to let her save up enough money to buy her freedom and passage back to Earth, especially with the frequent "emergency" expenditures that maliciously drained her bank account. Her staged job was part of the show, and she was not free to look for a better one, even if she had the qualifications for one. No, her only hope was to win the Game, if she could somehow escape for long enough all the countless traps that had been set for her.

Winning the Game seemed impossible, since it was so heavily weighted against her; but losing the Game was unthinkable. The knowledge of what her likely fate would be in that case was what gave her the nightmares that kept her awake and shuddering in her bed at night. The producers, with sadistic pleasure, had fully briefed her on what she could expect if she lost. They wanted her desperately motivated to fight against her dismal fate, even if they were counting on her to lose; that was what made good reality TV.

They had promised her freedom, and even transportation back to Earth (probably in a cage again, but she would take it gladly), if she actually managed to win. She had no particular faith that they were telling her the truth and would ever let her go, but she had no choice but to play along and do her utmost to win. Anything else would mean immediately losing the Game, and herself. She really missed her mother and her friends, but ever seeing them again seemed unlikely. If the producers chose not to play by their own rules, what recourse did she have?

The best she could hope for would be to be dumped back on Earth without a cent and without a stitch on (her clothes were long gone). She would be promptly arrested for indecent exposure, but a human jail now seemed like a joyful prospect.

Could the goblins even afford to let her go back to Earth and warn people that the goblins' agents there were abducting human women? Maybe they would just abduct her again to shut her up, and put her back in the Game, which would be awful. Of course, nobody would believe her anyway, and even if they did, women went missing all the time, and no one really cared except for their families.

Irene only had the vaguest idea of this planet's history, but she understood that at some point in the distant past, there had been a climactic struggle between its human rulers and their servants, the ones she called goblins. The latter had joined with enslaved AIs in an unholy alliance, and the humans' decisive defeat in the uprising had led to a new world order in which the former servants, both green flesh and metal, were now the masters of the surviving humans.

Humans could not even be considered slaves; they were firmly treated as domestic animals. The goblins and the AIs all held an grudge that would never fade, and they wanted to make sure that humans were kept in their proper place, and would never rise again. Their vengeance against their former masters had been on an epic scale; but they still hated and despised them, and their vengeance would continue forever, generation after generation, and until the end of time, if the goblins and AIs could help it.

Irene could see the outcome of that revolution with her own eyes whenever she was out in public. Naked women thronged the streets, with goblin riders on their backs; some were pet dogs, and were walked on leashes. Most human females, she knew, were cows, either already imprisoned for life in huge dairy barns, or crawling on all fours across miles and miles of wilderness on their way to the barns as part of mass cattle drives.

AIs had no use for human milk; but goblins loved it, and it was a huge commercial industry, with barns all over the planet, in which human cows were worked even harder than their hard-working sisters in the cities. The breast milk commercials on TV made her shudder, but she watched them anyway as if hypnotized; and she drank the breast milk she was given, trying not to think that it could be her own.

Goblins and humans might be living together in harmony now, but it was not a very equitable relationship.

Even surrounding themselves with domesticated humans was not enough for the goblins and their AI allies, however. They seemed to need to keep reliving their triumph over the humans, and see them mastered and debased over and over again. This was where Irene came in--she and all the other Earth women who had been abducted before her, and who had been shipped to this planet in cages. Defeating Irene and others like her would be yet another symbolic victory over the hated humans who had the colossal effrontery to pretend they were intelligent. She had no idea how many women had played the Game before her, but there must have been hundreds or thousands, at least.

Irene found it hard to care very much about this planet's humans. It was easy to believe the goblins' version of events. Knowing how cruelly humans could treat each other (homo homini lupus was a truism for good reason), Irene could well imagine how they would have abused a "less than human" slave race with sexually compatible genitals, which goblins happened to possess, to their misfortune. If karma had eventually punished the former master race for their arrogance and cruelty, then probably their descendants were right where they belonged. It was fine with her, and she was certainly not going to try to organize any liberation movement on their behalf.

She just did not see why she should have to be punished for their sins, too. She had never abused a goblin in her life, or even seen one before she had been brought here! She was only guilty of being human, but apparently that was enough to condemn her.

In theory, the Game was simple. All Irene had to do was avoid being officially reduced to animal status. She was hardly considered the equal of goblins, but she could provisionally continue to be a person, as long as she could avoid being sold as an animal. Once that happened, she would be doomed.

Under the Game's rules, Irene was perfectly safe inside her apartment, or when she was at work. The problem was that she could not just stay in hiding. She had to go outside to get to work and come back home, and that left her vulnerable. While outside, she had to obey goblin law, which said that no humans could wear clothing, or speak in public, to avoid offending goblins' cultural sensitivities. Post-hypnotic commands ensured that she could not speak outside, just to make sure. Irene was actually grateful that she had turned out to be so susceptible to hypnosis; it was a lot better than the traditional shock collar.

For the same reason, she had to be leashed in public, and led back and forth by her faithful Jeeves, barefoot and with her naked breasts bobbing up and down as she strode along. This left her more or less indistinguishable from the rest of the human animals while she was in transit.

Outside her apartment or workplace, Jeeves could do anything at all to her. He was free to sell her to a pet store, or to a riding stable, or worst of all, to be added to the herds being readied for the next massive cattle drive. For all she knew, there were even more dire fates available (she was pretty sure she knew what kind of lab animals were used by goblin medical researchers). She had no choice but to place herself in his hands anyway. She could not fail to report to work, or else she would automatically lose the Game. Even on her days off, she was required to spend a minimum number of hours outdoors on her leash, or lose the Game. She could not even leave the apartment unescorted and off leash, or she would be taken into custody as a stray, and lose the Game.

Each and every day, she absolutely had to place herself within the absolute power of an AI who was intent on selling her as a beast, and who had every financial and patriotic incentive to do so.

Her authority to give Jeeves orders while still in the apartment, which he had to obey to the letter (naturally ignoring the spirit of those orders) was her only leverage, if she used it correctly. Her only way to avoid the horror of losing her humanity and becoming a domestic animal forever was to use her authority over Jeeves inside the apartment to limit his freedom of action with her outside it. The producers had generously warned her that her commands would only be valid for the current day. Actually, this was not all that generous, since they simply did not want the Game to be over with too soon. It would be more fun to watch if they could keep her frantically wiggling on the hook for a while.

So, she could not given him a command like "Never sell me as a cow!" and expect it to have any lasting effect. She had to start over from scratch every single day, and pray that she had not forgotten anything, or left him any loopholes that he could use to seize possession of her. She was being forced to pit her intelligence against his, with the full knowledge that Jeeves was smarter than she was, and had trapped countless human women before her.

Her calling him Jeeves was probably apt. The original Jeeves, the archetypal butler, had considered his employer Bertie Wooster to be "mentally negligible," and she was pretty sure that this summed up how her Jeeves viewed her, too.

The ultimate outcome thus seemed inevitable, though she would never give up. It was no wonder that her life was filled with dread and anxiety. All the alcohol in her apartment was a constant temptation; it would have been lovely to lose herself in a bottle at least temporarily, but she could not afford to dull her own wits with a hangover that might make her forget a crucial detail in the long list of precautions she had to memorize. She knew that the millions of goblins and AIs watching her and relishing her plight were betting heavily on when--not if--she would lose.

So far, she had managed to avoid the most obvious traps, partly thanks to her crucial discovery that reruns of past episodes of her show were available on the TV in her apartment. She was a little surprised that she was even allowed to watch them, and wondered what the psychological effect on her was supposed to be. Was the message that even forewarned, she had no chance?

She had watched a TV rerun in which a corpulent blonde had ordered her Jeeves to take her for a walk in a nearby park, to fulfil her required time outdoors. Unfortunately for the blonde--whom Irene considered an embarrassment to dumb blondes everywhere--she had, incredibly, completely forgotten to tell her Jeeves to bring her back afterward. (Irene was never sure whether there was just one Jeeves, or multiple identical models. Irene had no way to tell.)

Once outside and unable to speak, the poor fleshy blonde had no way to give him that command, so she was already doomed, though it took her a long time to realize it. Her Jeeves had led her on a nice leisurely walk jiggling around the park, and then was naturally at liberty to do whatever he wanted with her. So, he took her next on a nice leisurely walk all the way to the closest cattle pen where cows were held until the next cattle drive, giving the jiggly blonde plenty of time to realize what was happening to her. The chubby naked woman, however, just looked confused at first; why were they going the wrong way? And why was it taking so long?

Finally, at long last, she understood, and the horrified look of betrayal on her pretty face as her Jeeves handed her leash to her buyer and abandoned her had been priceless. A raucous laugh track had been added to that episode, along with a sanctimonious voiceover about how stupid humans were, and how this proved they truly deserved to be treated like mindless beasts. (This seemed to be a common theme, which Irene heard over and over again as she watched more and more former contestants meet their fates.) The goblin commentators hosting the show had fallen over themselves laughing hysterically.

Irene had to agree that the blonde's loss was pretty funny, even though Irene was reluctant to admit it, and she felt guilty about thinking that the blonde deserved it; that could easily have been her. The abysmally stupid blonde had managed to set a record by being caught on her very first day on the show, though. Irene thought that the dumb bitch was probably predestined to become a cow; she certainly had the tits for it, and she was clearly ill-equipped to win a battle of wits even against a potato, much less a superintelligent robot. She had had no business being a contestant.

She was probably a high-yield dairy cow by now. Irene could not really see the blonde being much use as a pony, not with those fat udders flopping up and down, though conceivably she would have made a very cuddly dog. Oh, well--at least Irene could profit from her example. She vowed that she would at least manage to last longer in the Game.

She had learned from watching reruns starring failed contestants that your orders had to be as specific as possible. It was like trying to make a deal with a genie in a fairy tale; you knew that he would choose to interpret your wish in the worst possible way. "Take me to work" and nothing else would let Jeeves take her to work, and then take her away again, to some place she did not want to go. He would have complied with the letter of her command, right?

Even "Take me to work and leave me off there" would be a blunder, because of the way that the holding area for humans was set up. The large lobby of the office building had an automated storage system for humans, generally goblin mounts who were not needed while their owners were upstairs in their offices. It reminded her of the automated garment racks at a dry cleaner back on Earth, with multiple racks of suspended garments that could be moved back and forth until the proprietor found the right tag to match a particular claim check.

In this case, it was warm breathing human women that were suspended from the racks by wrists and ankles, with metal tags hanging from a big toe or labia ring. Their wrist and ankle clamps were locked shut, and could not be released until their owners came to collect them at the end of the day, paid the storage fee, and inserted the claim check that matched the woman's tag, after which she was ejected and turned over to be mounted again. It was a very efficient system, if humiliating and dehumanizing (which was the point, of course). In theory, Jeeves could drop Irene off there, and have the claim check sent up to her boss; who could come down and collect her at her leisure.

That assumed that everything would run smoothly, with no malice on Jeeves' part, though. The problem was what happened when no one ever came to claim you, as Irene had seen several times. When you disappeared into the dark maw of the storage area, a timer started running; and if no one came to collect you in 24 hours, the system automatically crated you and shipped you off to be sold at auction to cover your storage fee. It would all just happen, with no goblin intervention needed at all. This, of course, in her case meant losing the Game. All sales were final.

Irene could not imagine anything worse. If she had to lose, she would rather get it over with quickly. The idea of hanging there sweating in the stifling dark, feeling the rack to which you were fastened move left or right as other women were released, sometimes bumping into another plump hip if the bay next to you happened to be occupied, then gradually realizing that the movements had stopped hours ago and you were left all alone in the dark, and that you had many long hours left to contemplate being taken out and sold, while you were getting even more hungry and thirsty, and your joints were aching from the suspension, and you were unable even to cry out for help... It was a horrible way to lose, especially if you happened to be claustrophobic like Irene. She really pitied the women she had seen this happen to.

No, Irene chose to avoid having to hang there and hope that somebody would remember to come and claim her. Maybe Jeeves would deliver the claim check to her boss, or maybe he would just disappear with it, and show up at her auction the next day. It seemed much safer to have her leash put directly into her boss's hands when she was delivered to the office building. She was being passed back and forth between Jeeves and her goblin boss, like a tennis ball being whacked back and forth between two tennis players, and she really wanted to remain in play.

Irene would have loved to watch herself on the show, and listen to the running commentary from the goblin hosts, to get some hints about what traps might lie ahead. Even knowing whether the betting odds against her were going up or down would have been helpful. Her show was only broadcast during the day when she was at work, though, probably by design. A streaming subscription to the raw feeds for her cameras would not have helped; she needed the commentary, though it would have been even nicer to hear Jeeves boasting about fiendish surprises he had in store for her.

Irene's first trip outside had been daunting. She had been trembling in fear the whole time, and very self-conscious about being naked, even though she knew none of the human animals around her had ever even seen clothes. She was aware that everyone was looking at her, goblins and animals alike, and realized that it was because of her tan lines, which none of the other women in sight had. Her pasty white tits and ass were conspicuous, and she blushed red. She realized that even the evidence of past clothing would be considered wrong and obscene here. Now that she had an all-over tan like everyone else, she somehow felt more relaxed, and less exposed and naked; she was at least less conspicuous.