Aprille

Chapter 2

Werner Richter turned out to be a highly attractive man. To Aprille he looked to be somewhere in his mid thirties. Studs had to be good looking as well as healthy, of course, but since the aim was to produce beautiful girls, most had rather feminine builds and features. Richter had a curly mop of almost-but-not-quite-blond hair. His sharp blue eyes were much like her own. His wide build and squarish face gave him a strong look. He was not terribly tall, only five or six inches taller than she, but he certainly appeared fit and trim. She hoped he would exercise his stud privileges so she could see what was under his all-black attire, even though any girl resulting from his sperm would probably only make Grade 2. His features were far too masculine. But she was a healthy female and her sex centers began to tingle just thinking about him (with generous help, no doubt, from the O-drugs she'd been getting since becoming an active brooder). She snapped her man-killing smile in place.

"Guten Morgen, Herr Richter. Du heisst Werner Richter, n'est-ce pas?"

The man's eyebrows shot up and he stared back at her, as if uncertain of how to answer. Suddenly she realized why and clapped a hand to her mouth in embarrassment. The anguished look on her face made him burst into laughter.

"I'm so sorry," she blurted. "That was . . . that was . . ."

"That was charming!" he said. "I've never before been addressed in two mangled languages at once. I appreciate the courtesy, but I think we'd better stick with English."

"Yes, Sir. I'm really sorry. I've been studying German but I've never used it and I keep mixing it up with French. Will you forgive me, Sir?"

"Forgive you?" He laughed again. "I can hardly wait to hear what you'll say next. Are you Aprille?"

"Yes, Sir. I'm to escort you on a tour of the facilities. I really can do better than that, Sir. I'm just a little nervous. I hope you'll give me another chance, Sir. You're my first tour guide assignment and I'd really like to do it right. They'll pull me off it if I don't."

His mirth subsided to a crooked grin. "And I'd really enjoy having you do it. I'll make sure they don't pull you off it. I think I'm going to enjoy having you do a lot of things. You're a truly lovely young woman. Breeding stock, they tell me."

"Yes, Sir, but I haven't had any babies yet."

"You want one?"

"Oh yes, Sir. They won't keep me as a brood-girl unless I start producing soon."

"Uh huh. Well, maybe I can help you out in that department a little later on."

He wanted her! That made her breathe easier. If she got kicked off this job, it could have disastrous consequences. But she had been with enough men at this point to recognize the look in his eyes, in the way he was appraising her figure, wondering what she looked like naked. If she didn't make any more stupid slips, he might want to fuck her two or three times before the day was over. She licked her lips.

"How would you like me to address you, Sir? As Herr Richter?"

"Hell no. Call me Werner."

She swallowed. "Are you sure, Sir? I've never been allowed to call a man by his first name before. I don't know if I can do it."

He smiled a little more broadly and asked softly, "Have you been trained to obey all men?"

"Oh yes, Sir! Yes!"

His voice had been gentle, but the words were ominous. Her own words gushed out in a torrent.

"I'll do whatever you say, Sir. Whatever you want. I'll call you Werner, Sir. Please forgive me for asking, Sir."

"You're a little nervous, you say."

"Yes, Sir. Sir, I'm very nervous!"

He laughed again. "Well don't be. I think you're an absolute delight. I want you to calm down, take a deep breath and give me another one of those smiles."

She tried, but she had lost some of her original confidence.

"Not quite as radiant as the first one," he said, "but an endearing smile nevertheless. Put your hands in mine."

He held his hands out, palms up. Hesitating only a moment, she laid her small hands in his much larger ones and looked up at him, puzzled. Did he want to take her now? Should she offer to lead him to a pleasure room? She decided to wait and see what he did next. What he did was look down into her eyes for several long minutes as he gently squeezed her hands. She felt sexual tension growing in her loins. Far from becoming calmer, she was growing more horny by the second. Could he read it in her eyes?

Finally he spoke. "You and I are going to have a terrific day together, little Aprille. You're going to show me all you know about this facility from your point of view as part of the stock. You will include, as part of that education, a personal demonstration of how the breeding stock is inseminated. A role-playing demonstration. Does that fit in with your expectations of today's tour?"

"Yes, Sir," she answered with obvious relief. "Very much so. Would you like to start with the demonstration?"

He smiled. "Highly tempting. But let's begin where you had originally planned to begin. I'd like a chance to explore your mind a little before I explore your body."

She beamed back at him. "I'd like that too, Sir. Just let me know when you're ready." She squeezed his hands, hoping he'd change his mind. She was ready to get laid right there on the Hospitality Desk. "Why don't we start by taking a look at the quarters where the various grades of stock live?"

"Fine."

She kept her left hand in his and drew him out of the main lobby and into a glassed-in walkway that led to an adjacent building. Inside was a long corridor lined with doorways. She stopped at one of them and led him through it. They were looking into a room just large enough for two double-bunk beds, a huge four-drawer bureau and a walk-in closet packed with clothes. There was no one there.

"This is my room," she said. "The B1's have the best accommodations. Only four to a room. This whole corridor is for B1's."

"What's a B1?"

"You don't know the grading system?"

"I've never been to a breeding facility before. I've eaten the final product, of course, but I've never seen how the stock is raised, handled or prepared for market. That's why I'm here. You'll have to explain everything as we go along. Except, maybe, the breeding part."

"If you've never been to a breeding facility, I think you'll have a few surprises there, too," she said with a giggle. Anyway, B stands for Breeder or Brood-girl. Brood-girls are expected to produce at least one baby girl every eighteen months. They begin breeding us at age seventeen and continue until our productivity tapers off. I turned seventeen three months ago and had my first stud on my birthday."

"They don't waste time, here. Do they use artificial insemination?"

"No. They charge the studs for servicing us, so they make some money off us in the process of breeding us. Oh they won't charge you , of course. You're a special guest."

"I'm honored."

"You should be. We don't come cheap. Anyway . . ." Her eyes widened and she grabbed his nearest arm with both hands. "I'm sorry, Sir! That was disrespectful of me. Please forgive me. I shouldn't say such things. I know better, I really do."

He put his other hand behind her head and pulled her to him, kissing her and sliding his tongue into her mouth. He broke it off with kisses to both corners of her lips. "You're cheeky and I love it. Be yourself. I'm not one of your masters here. I won't punish you or complain. If you get to be a pain in the ass, I'll ask for a second girl to go with us and stuff a sock in your mouth. But for God's sake, stop apologizing! Okay?"

"Okay, Sir," she said weakly, still reliving the kiss.

"And stop calling me Sir."

"We're trained to call all men . . ."

"Yeah, yeah. You're obedient. That's nice. Well, now you have new orders to obey. You will from now on call me, personally, Werner."

"Okay, S . . . Okay, Werner. I'll try."

"So what happens when your productivity tapers off, as you put it?"

"First we're put on probation, to see if it picks up again. They add a 'T' to our classification. I'd be a B1-T."

"And if it doesn't pick up?"

"We're reclassified as M's, Sir. Oh! Sorry about the 'Sir,' Sir."

He sighed. "What are M's?"

"Meat. Most of the girls here are M's."

"How long do most brood-girls go before . . . tapering off?"

"Late thirties. Sometimes our mid forties."

"Then you're reclassified as M. Then what?"

"We're activated."

"Activated?"

"Processed as meat."

"So whether you're B or M, in the end you still wind up as meat."

"Yes. That's why we were bred. That's what we are."

"No using freedom as a reward for top producers?"

"No! That's illegal. If you're bred as meat, you die as meat."

"But Musgrave also buys females at auctions, females not bred on farms. Do any of them become breeders?"

"Some, if they're young and pretty enough and genetically suitable. But it's the same thing. Once a female is sold as meat, the law prohibits returning her to freedom. She must be processed as meat, just as if she were bred for it."

"Okay. Now tell me what the 'one' stands for in B1."

"It means Prime. There are three grades of meat. One is Prime, two is Standard and three is Economy. Only girls who make Prime grade are selected for breeding, like me."

"So there are no B2's or B3's?"

"Oh yes. As we get older and have lots of babies, often we lose our figure, or our tits get too heavy and sag too much, or we just start looking too old. As long as we keep turning out good product they'll keep breeding us, but our meat grade is lowered as our appearance degrades."

"So it's all a matter of looks?"

"Absolutely! Prime grade girls, like me, are considered suitably attractive for live spit-roasting and command the highest prices. Standard grade girls are considered suitable for spit-roasting after slaughter. The Economy females are slated for either oven or chuck grade meat. They don't have to be beautiful because no one ever sees them on a spit. They just have to taste good."

"And how does anyone know how good they taste until they're cooked?"

"We're bred for flavor and tenderness as well as beauty. That's why they use only the top grade girls to breed."

"But not all babies turn out to be Grade One, of course."

"That's right, Sir. I mean Werner. Sorry, Sir." She looked stricken and bit her lip.

He laughed and kissed her forehead.

"It's awfully hard to go against my training, S... Werner. But I'm trying."

"Yes you are. Getting back to your lecture: is there a quota in terms of the quality of your babies?"

"Yes, Sir. Sort of. The Breeding Commission reviews every Breeder's production periodically — they don't tell us when — and if the quality or quantity of our offspring isn't profitable, we're put on probation."

"And then? If things don't improve for you?"

"They convert us to M."

"So a B2 becomes an M2?"

"That's right."

"And a B1, like yourself, becomes an M1?"

"If I'm still young and beautiful at the time."

"Do you have to be young, or will just beautiful do?"

She laughed — a bright, trilling sound. "Beautiful is all that counts on a spit. I plan to work hard to keep myself Prime until I'm activated."

"Which would mean live spitting?"

"I hope."

"You hope? Doesn't 'live spitting' mean you'll be put on a spit and roasted alive?"

"Well, yes. But I'm looking forward to it."

"Looking forward to being cooked alive over a fire???"

"I know. It sounds improbable. But you'll see. I've been a server at many live roastings and the girls die happy in spite of the pain. It's much better than just being slaughtered. You'll see."

Werner shook his head in wonderment. "So where is everybody? Where are all these gorgeous B's?"

"Lot's of places. Most live in the birthing facility we'll see later. Some are off-campus working at regular jobs. Others are in training, in classes, taking special courses, doing activities, getting natal checks, all kinds of things."

"Getting laid?"

"Especially that. Why? You want to dally here for a while?" She ran a hand over the front of his pants and felt a quickening beneath the fabric.

He lifted her hand away and put it to his lips, kissing her fingers. "We'll dally later. Let's see where you Breeders live."

She kept her hand in his as she pulled him back out into the corridor, excited now by his teasing delay of their union, more curious than ever about his equipment. She led him through another glass-enclosed walkway into another large building and another long corridor lined with doorways. She picked one at random. The room was the same size as Aprille's but more crowded. The two bunks were triples and the bureau was divided into six drawers. A pretty dark-haired girl was lying on her back in one of the middle level beds; she turned her head to see who had entered and absently massaged her swollen belly.

Aprille called out to her cheerily. "Hi, Miranda. This is Herr Richter. He's a guest of the Company here to look over the facilities and how the operation is run. Miranda is a B2-T, Herr Richter."

"Good morning, Sir," the girl said politely. "Please forgive me for not getting up. I was ordered to stay in bed today. I had some bleeding."

"Good morning, Miranda," Werner replied, silently assessing her quality as a Breeder. She was pretty, but more sturdily built than slender Aprille. She was a girl most men would feel fortunate to bed or wed, although she was not quite up to Aprille's level of perfection. She had rounder curves, however, and would provide a slightly more generous supply of meat, when the time came.

"As you can see," Aprille plowed on, "the quarters for B2 breeders is not quite as good, but still a lot better than the B3's get." She went over to the girl. "Do you have your alert button on, Miranda?" The girl raised her left arm to display a green bracelet with a red button on the top. "Good. Don't take any chances, now. If you start feeling cramps or pains or anything seems to be wrong, call for help. You promise?"

The girl nodded, her eyes closed. Aprille kissed her forehead, drew a blanket over her and pulled Werner quietly out of the room.

"Miranda's had a tough time with her last five deliveries. The last two babies had defects and were snuffed before their first birthday. That's why she's a 'T' — on probation. If anything more goes wrong this time, she'll be converted to M. If that happens she'll almost certainly be activated immediately. Too bad. She's a sweet girl. Come!"

As they took a circuitous route through the building, Werner took the opportunity to ask about the bracelet. "That emergency button she's wearing calls in medical help?"

"Yes. If she were further along she'd be in the birthing facility, but she's only in her seventh month. She works as a housekeeper for this building, so she lives here. They don't want her walking around a lot."

"Why don't they have her work at the birthing facility, then?"

"There are tons of women living there who take care of everything that needs to be done. Because of her past failures, Miranda is low priority and can't get a permanent bed there."

"Will they give her a C-section if they have to?"

"Oh no. We have to deliver normally here with a minimum of fuss. If we can't do that, we have no business being B's. They save the baby, if they can, but downgrade the mother to meat. If we die in childbirth, they butcher our carcass and that's that. They certainly don't want to pass on flawed breeding genetics to another generation. It's not like we're freewomen. Medically assisted birthing is much too expensive for a livestock breeding facility like Musgrave."

"I can appreciate that. I notice that you and all the girls here wear silver bracelets on the right wrist. What's that about?"

She held her right arm up to display it. "It's for I.D. and locating. You can't see it, but there's a bar code that identifies me when I want to enter a restricted area or leave the campus. It also identifies my personal belongings. Plus, it contains a GPS locator so Musgrave Security always knows where I am, especially when I'm off campus."

"Discourages runaways."

"Yes, and abductions. We're all vulnerable to rustlers off-campus. They grab us, rape us, kill us and sell the meat on the black market."

"It's a gruesome thought, but wouldn't rustlers just cut off your hand and remove the bracelet before carrying you off?"

"There's another GPS locator hidden inside our body. No one can leave the campus until it's been implanted."

"An operation?"

"They use an injector. A big one! But it numbs the surrounding tissue as it goes in so we don't feel anything. And it makes just a little teeny puncture hole that heals over and disappears."

"When do they do that?"

"When we're fifteen. That's when the P-girls get trained. But they can't start work on the outside until they've reached the legal age of consent outside, sixteen." "I understand they get sterilized, too."

"That happens as soon as they're classified as M. It's laser surgery. Only leaves a dot sized scar which they cover with a tattoo. The girl gets to choose her own design. They do the little diamond tattoo on the forehead at the same time. It's a big deal for the girls. A rite of passage, sort of."

"But you have the diamond tattoo, as well."

"Yup. Can't go off campus without one. And we're not allowed to cover it up. That earns us a quick D."

"So everyone will know who and what you are when you're outside."

"Exactly. Works, too. We get quite a range of reactions when people spot that diamond. From leers to snubs. Men think of us as meat and whores. Women just tag us as whores."

They arrived at yet another long corridor and another doorway. This room was even more crowded than the last with eight beds stacked in two multi-tier bunks and eight small drawers packed into a bureau the same size as Aprille's four-drawer version. A teenage girl was playing checkers with a woman who appeared to be in her forties. The woman was wearing jeans and a tank top that accented the dumpiness of her figure. The girl was attractive, but she wore no makeup and looked bleached out. She was stark naked. Both were obviously pregnant, the girl more so than the woman. Aside from an initial quick glance, both seemed oblivious to their visitors.

Aprille introduced them to Werner as Janet and Brooke. "This dorm this is for the Breeders who've been reclassified as B3. Kinda tight, but still considerably better than M's get. Janet here is seventeen and this is her first baby. She's a B1 and just visiting. Brooke is . . . what are you, Brooke, forty-four?" The woman nodded without taking her gaze off the board. "This will be, what? your twenty-third child. Right?"

"Twenty-fourth," the woman mumbled.

"She's a B3 and hoping for at least one or two more babies before her plumbing gives out."

"Then what?" Werner asked.

"Then I'm fuckin' chuck meat, is what I am!" the woman snapped at him, and went back to studying her checkers.

Aprille gently pushed Werner out of the room and down the hallway. "Please don't report her for that," she said. "She's desperately afraid they'll activate her as soon as this one is born. It's terribly humiliating to be snuffed for chuck."

"What do you mean? What's this 'chuck' thing?"

"It's the lowest grade of meat. There's Prime, Standard, Oven and Chuck. Prime gets live spit-roasted; Standard is slaughtered and spit-roasted; Oven is slaughtered and butchered for steaks and fillets and other cuts; Chuck is for ground meat, soups, that sort of thing."

"But dead is dead. What do you care what happens to your carcass?"

"Do you care what happens to yours? Do free people care whether they're buried in dignity or left out on the street to rot?"

"Maybe I'll stuff a sock in your mouth anyway."

"I'm sorry, Sir. Please forgive . . ."

"Or maybe I'll stuff my dick in it while I lick your pussy."

Her eyes lit up.

He touched her cheek affectionately. "If you're going to be meat, you prefer to be stylish meat. Is that it?"

"You got it."

"By the way, I haven't seen any bathrooms attached to your living quarters."

"They aren't attached. Each corridor has a communal toilet and dressing area. I'll show you."

She led him to the center of the corridor and an arched doorway quite different from the others. She ushered him in. It was a huge room. Two walls were lined with sinks and open toilets, no enclosures. Half a dozen young women were on the toilets and unperturbed at his entrance. The other two walls featured open showers, the tiled floors pitched to drain the water. Three girls were lathering up, equally undisturbed by the presence of a male observer.

"If you need to go," she said airily, "go ahead and use any of the toilets." When he didn't move or say anything, she realized he might be a bit put off. "I realize in the outside free world males and females don't get naked and take care of bodily functions in front of each other," she said, "but here we do. There are no separate toilet facilities. If you want to empty your bowels or your bladder or take a shower, you have to do it in the open, just like this. Are you bashful about that, Herr Richter?" She gave him a coy look.

He grinned back at her and winked.

She showed him an adjacent room, longer but not as wide, both sides filled end to end with mirrors and dressing tables. Nude girls sat and worked on their makeup and hair.

"Okay," Werner said. "I've seen the high class suites. Now show me where the meat lives. The M's."

"You'll find it's rather different," she told him as she walked briskly beside him, holding his arm and steering him through a web of hallways and another closed-in walkway to a long, tall, rectangular mammoth of a building with absolutely no architectural distinction. It was solid concrete with five stories of barred windows. "We call this The Barn. It's one of six dorms for M class girls. The others have informal names, too, but they're officially known as Dwelling Units Five through Ten. This one is Unit Five. Units One through Four are for Breeders. Mine is Unit Two."

An electronically controlled door snickered open and admitted them to a vast space that encompassed nearly all of the building. The center of the building was a concourse dividing two walls of balconies stacked five floors high and faced with wire cage. If someone wanted to jump to her death, she couldn't do it here, Werner noted. Stairways wound from floor to floor at four points along each side. Aprille escorted him up the first one on the right.

To Werner's surprise, there were no rooms. Only bunks, bureaus and closets. The bunks, stacked five high, were perpendicular to the outside wall. Small tables with chairs were set up along the wire mesh wall overlooking the concourse, leaving an aisle about six feet wide as a walkway between the tables and the foot of the bunks. In the space between the bunks was a six-drawer bureau, two drawers across and three deep, with doorways on both sides leading to a walk-in closet that ran behind the bureau and the head of the bunks. Over the bureau and above the top of the closet was one of the barred windows he had seen from outside. Skylights over the center concourse poured added light into the building. Some of the tables and bunks were occupied by young women sleeping or reading, some wrapped snugly in their blankets, some propped up on pillows, others sprawled out nude.

"Where is everybody?" he asked his escort. "Where do they all go during the day?"

"Working, training, classes."

"Classes? What sort of classes?"

"Reading, English, languages, math, sex . . ."

"Sex classes I can understand, but why bother teaching girls all that other stuff when they're just going to be turned into meat?"

"Because clients and studs aren't willing to pay our prices for some dumbfuck. They want more than just a quick poke. Most of them expect a girl who can hold an intelligent conversation before and after the fucking."

"But how about the M2's and M3's? Why does Musgrave spend time and money teaching them things they'll never use?"

"As soon as the Classification Commission decides a girl is Grade 2 or 3, she's pulled out of all but the training classes for her work here on campus."

"When does that happen? At what age?"

"Depends on how fast a girl develops physically. Anywhere between eight and fourteen. They start giving us hormones to enhance breast development at age nine, so by the time a girl is twelve they can tell if she's going to have really good tits. Then it's just a matter of the face and the shape of the limbs."

"And what is that work here on campus? Where are they all?"

"Mostly tending to children. There's a lot of little girls! I've only taken you to the adult areas so far. By the time we're five years old, we're expected to help take care of all the kids younger than us."

"And the girls lounging around in here? Where do they work?"

"For the most part they're Pleasure Girls who work night shifts."

"So it's not just pretty B girls I can screw," he said, wrapping an arm around Aprille's shoulder, his hand landing lightly on her breast.

"Indeed, no. There are many thousands of M girls here who will be more than happy to relieve your tensions," she replied, patting his increasingly tense organ.

"There must be several thousand right here in this building alone," he said. "How many girls are kept in stock?"

"Including both B and M stock, I'm told about eighty thousand at any one time. Each of the dwelling units holds from seven to twelve thousand."

"I see a six drawer bureau serves for five girls. Who gets the sixth drawer?"

Aprille walked over to a bureau and pulled out the upper right drawer. "Like to see?"

"Aren't we invading some privacy here?"

"God, no!" she laughed. "Nothing here is private. The guards go through our drawers and closets and beds every day. And they can strip us at any time."

"Looking for what?"

"The usual. Drugs, smokes, candy, junk food. They're very strict here about keeping us on a healthy diet. They want us trim and our meat drug free, organically wholesome."

"Except for the tit hormones."

"The consumers never ask about that, and we don't tell."

Werner peeked into the drawer. It was subdivided into six compartments and each was packed with cosmetics and beauty aids. "Don't things get stolen?"

"The makeup and stuff? Naw. It's all free. What would be the point?"

"How about clothes, blankets, all that?"

"Clothing, shoes, blankets, pillows — all those things are impregnated with that bar code ID I told you about. If you get caught with someone else's stuff, you earn a D. No one wants that."

"D for discipline? What, you get a whipping?"

"You get immediate activation and a painful slaughter."

"Just for wearing someone else's top?"

"Without permission? You better believe it!"

"Wow. They don't mess around here. But what if some girl loans you a pair of shoes, say, and then claims she didn't?"

"You're fucked. Smart girls don't borrow stuff. Except the younger girls; it's a popular way of proving you trust somebody, or for getting into cliques."

"Which reminds me, with all the B girls having babies every eighteen months, the birthing facilities must be pretty busy. I'd like to see them," he said.

"Certainly. But do you need to release any tensions yet?"

He laughed. "You're a horny little bitch, aren't you?"

"Only with certain men. I have tensions, too, and it just so happens that you're my type."

"Oh? And what type is that?"

"You're strong. You're sure of yourself. You're incredibly good looking. You talk to me as though I had more intelligence than broccoli. You make me tingle all over. You're male. What can I say?"

"You said it all. I want to undress you and lay you down on one of those bunks right now. But I'm going to hold off until we see the birthing facility. I want to see what trouble my seed will get you into if it latches on to one of your eggs."

"It's quite a factory," she said. "But if that's the only way I can get your pants off, come along."

On the way he said, "I gather the M girls have been sterilized, or they'd be getting pregnant, too. At least the Pleasure Girls would."

"That's right. As soon as a girl is classified as M, she's sterilized. If they're Prime and over twelve, the next step is to be prepped for live roasting."

"Ah! You didn't mention that before. What does 'prepped for roasting' entail?"

"They insert a plastic tube in us from the womb to the throat. It's only a quarter of an inch in diameter and it's inserted through a tiny incision next to our navel. When it comes time to live-spit us, the spit is inserted into our vagina and punches through the uterus into the tube. The spit is about an inch and three-quarters in diameter, but the tube expands as it screws its way up through our body, guiding it safely and fairly painlessly through the various membranes and between the lungs and out our mouth."

"None of that hurts?"

Her laughter had the bell-like sweetness of a Christmas carillon. "Well, yes! But we're drunk on sex stimulants when they tube us and when they spit us. It's actually an incredibly erotic experience." She saw by his expression that he was still a bit shocked. "Really, Werner, they do what they can to make it a happy time for us. When you set up a factory in Austria, or wherever, just, please, make sure that you're as considerate of the meat there as they are here. None of us really wants to die, especially when we're only seventeen or eighteen. But since your girls have to die, at least make it as pleasant for them as possible."

They passed groups of girls scrubbing floors, washing windows, changing beds and doing a variety of housekeeping chores. Werner saw that many of them were just children.

"How soon do they put you to work here?" he asked. "Other than taking care of four-year-olds, I mean."

"That's it. About five years old. It's the principle method of keeping us out of trouble. We don't just take care of the little kids, we get put to work everywhere: the grounds, the kitchens, shipping and receiving, laundry, bathrooms — everything but guard duty and security."

"I notice that everyone is well behaved and the dorms are as quiet as tombs. How do they maintain that kind of discipline, aside from issuing D's?"

"We get rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad. Rewards include perks and clothes and stuff. Punishments range from loss of privileges to confinement in the cages, or the boxes. If that doesn't do it, they subject us to intense electrical torture. If even that fails, which is rare, we're snuffed."

"Even little kids?"

"You better believe it! The law allows for the termination of unruly livestock. They don't have a lot of patience around here. Either you shape up or get shipped out as meat."

"What are the cages and boxes?"

"You'll see. I'll show you some."

They reached a large building painted in colorful patterns of greens, yellows and purples. A vast playground area stretched out on three sides of it, enclosed with hurricane fencing and overrun with little girls running about having noisy fun.

"This is the birthing and infant care facility," she said. "This is a lot more chaotic than the dorms. But I love it! I spend as much time here as I can."

In fact, inside was bedlam. Babies, toddlers, nurses and young women with milk-engorged breasts were everywhere. State of the art acoustical sound reduction kept the noise level down to a pleasant roar.

"Are all the women here pregnant?" Werner asked.

"God, no! Half of them are just here to nurse the babies. Once you have the first child, they like to keep you nursing constantly. See, they're all wearing those support bras that hold them up without covering the nipples. I guess they figure it keeps our boobs attractive for the studs while letting us nurse unhampered."

"So you sometimes nurse other women's babies?"

"We always do. Most of us brooders spend our whole career in this facility. I know I'm hoping to. They don't let us keep our own babies. We share all the nursing babies on a rotating basis between deliveries."

"You don't keep your own child?"

"Absolutely not. No one is allowed to keep her own baby after the first nursing."

"Why not?"

"They don't want us to bond with it. So once it has ingested the initial post-natal enzymes from our milk and is able to digest any mother's milk, it goes into the rotation schedule."

"But why? That seems unreasonably cruel."

"Not at all. It's to protect the brooder from later psychological trauma. Many of our brooders are still producing babies in their mid forties. Imagine how it would affect you to see your own child put on a spit and roasted, or slaughtered for steaks."

"I guess you're right."

"They don't even give the kids actual names until after they leave this facility at eighteen months, only numbers that are tattooed on their arms. And the number is changed when they leave for the Toddler Dorm. A brooder never knows which of the grown meat girls are hers."

Werner thought about this as they walked past the glass walls separating them from rows of newborn infants in bassinets awaiting their next feeding, through rooms filled with young women nursing little girl babies who would one day be meat. His heart began to grow heavy and he decided he'd better leave this place before he was overcome with career damaging doubts.

"You said you'd show me the cages."

"Don't you want to see the delivery room, and the new babies being born?"

"No!" Why was he suddenly squeamish about that? Why did it bother him to be picturing Aprille giving birth to a little girl who would be snuffed and roasted seventeen years later for meat? So what? But he couldn't watch it.

"Show me the cages," he said.

"Okay." Aprille was puzzled. Why wouldn't he want to view the beautiful process of giving birth? But she knew her place and took his hand to lead him out of the building with its muffled background of infant cries and rows of babies sleeping in their little beds, crawling about on the padded floors or sucking happily at ample teats.

"Do you want to see the children's cages or the ones for the older girls?" Aprille asked.

"Older."

"Okay," she said. "We'll go to a dorm for the ten to sixteen year olds. Once we reach age seventeen, they don't bother with punishment. They just activate us for the next shipment."

They trudged to another dorm that was much like the earlier one. But instead of taking one of the stairways to an upper floor they went down into a subterranean level. A heavy door unlocked at the touch of Aprille's ID bracelet. She swung it open and preceded Werner into another hallway. This one ran the length of the building beneath the concourse above, but was lined with wire mesh doors only three feet square, each secured by an electronic lock. It was extremely dim, the only light coming from the open door behind them. The air was foul with the stench of urine and fecal matter, despite the roar of an unseen air-exchanger. Werner bent down and peered into one of the cages. A pair of dark eyes blinked back at him in obvious misery. It was a girl in her early teens, maybe thirteen or fourteen, naked and crammed into the three-foot cube. Her wrists were bound together with plastic cuffs and she was biting on a leather strap cinched tightly through her mouth and around her head, locked in place with a small padlock. Her eyes were teary and pleaded for release, but she made no sound or movement.

"How long do they have to stay in these cages like this?" Werner asked.

"Depends on what they did and how often they've been punished. Anywhere from a day to a week."

"Were you ever punished like this?"

"Oh yes. Three times. Once when I was six for throwing a tantrum; I don't remember what I was mad about, I just remember the cage. Once when I was thirteen for being where I wasn't supposed to be. Then once when I was fifteen, for sassing a guard."

"How long were you kept in the cage?"

"The first time, a day. The second time, three days. The third time five days, followed by electro-torture. That was the end of my rebellious streak. I never want to go through that again!"

"Why? What exactly do they do?"

"Well, to begin with, scrunched up in a little cage like that for days at a time, sitting on a wire screen over your own piss and shit is a horrible ordeal in itself. And you're looking at the light punishment cages. For repeat offenders they put us in those steel boxes further up the corridor. They're the same size, but the doors are solid. It's like being buried alive. Some girls go mental after a week in a closed box and have to be activated.

"For the torture part, they chain our ankles to the floor and our wrists to the side on slack chains. Then they wet our tits and cunt and tongue and several other sensitive places with a conductive gel and attach electrodes to them. Finally, they pull our arms out straight and strap liquid switches on them so that if we raise or drop them more than half and inch we get shocked. The pain is indescribable! After twenty minutes your arms are on fire but the pain of letting them drop is so extreme pain you keep holding them up anyway. I was sobbing and begging them to kill me long before they let me go. And they have worse. Sometimes they spreadeagle you on a tiny little table so that you have to hold up your legs as well as your arms and your head. It's not something you ever want to do twice!

"All I want now is to have sex and have babies and enjoy being alive as long as I can, then have a happy death on the spit. In the meantime, I'll do whatever they tell me to do whenever they tell me to do it, and smile."

"I guess it's really effective discipline."

"Try it sometime. You won't like it."

"I believe you. I also think it's time I followed through on my offer to help you get pregnant. Where can we go that's private?"

"Why? Are you shy? We can fuck anyplace. Nobody cares." She pressed up against him and licked his throat. "I've been ordered to make you happy and, as I've just told you, I always obey orders." She nibbled on his chin and rubbed her pelvis against him."

"I want a better venue than the reeking dungeon of a dormitory. Lets go back to your room."

She licked back and forth across his mouth. "Wherever you say. Come on."