Southwest Shipping - Part 1

[ElJefe]

This was inspired by the work of Gentlemanmariner, Carl Bradford, Mr. Smith, John Doe, and everyone else who writes in that world.
Part 1 is mostly setup and a little nudity, but since this thing unwinds like a Rube Goldberg contraption later, I recommend you slog through it.


Southwest Shipping

"I'd forgotten how small most warehouses look before you start filling them up with stuff."

Natalie followed Will, her business partner, from the offices into the the part of the building where the business would really happen.

"I know. It's bigger than a super Walmart, but it doesn't look it. Once we get everything installed, it'll look huge to most of the people who pass through here."

They strolled across the empty floor toward a tangle of curtains at the far corner, over a football field away. The location rankled Natalie, surely Will must know how much of his personal time he wasted traipsing across the floor from his office to the project and back.

"So, how much are you paying a square for this place?" She remembered a figure from the books, but it had to be wrong. The facility looked much newer than she'd expected.

"Five. Five oh four, to be exact."

"You're kidding me! It looks brand new!"

"Would you believe it's almost thirty years old? Hardly been used in all that time. Seems the owners are snake-bit. Well, long history of bad business decisions, it's passed from hand to hand and none of the previous owners had a lick of sense. You did see we had an option to buy, right?"

Natalie shook her head. "If the sale price is anything like the lease, we should be able to make a little money just buying and selling this place, even if your idea doesn't work out."

"It'll work out. Have faith." They came to the curtains, hanging from tall portable frames. Will pulled one aside, and gestured for Natalie to enter the opening.

"I made everyone on the dev team sign an NDA. Still, it doesn't hurt to keep things from prying eyes. I'm still arguing with the lawyers over whether it qualifies for a utility patent or a design patent."

The curtains divided the smaller space up in a confusing manner, and although she was certain she would have found the prototype eventually, it helped that Will directed her through. It came into view as they rounded one of the curtained frames, a large aluminum box about the size of a small car. She couldn't see over it. Had it not been sitting on some sort of dolly, Will might have been able to do so.

"So this is going to revolutionize the involuntary service industry? It doesn't look that impressive. I don't know whether that's good or bad."

"The longer it takes everyone else to copy us, the better. I think it will revolutionize slave transport the way the 747 revolutionized the airline industry. Before it came along, only the rich traveled overseas. Pack 400 of them in at a time, and everyone can go visit the old country."

She put out a hand and rested against the cool metal. "I'm very familiar with the numbers in your study. But since I'm raising the capital for this, tell me why you think that international market is there at that scale."

He sized her up and took a breath. "It's the combination of the widowmaker virus and the nature of modern slavery. Slavery exists because there's a skill glut, people are irrational, and there are high capital costs to personal advancement. The widowmaker ensures that the best path to male attention for many women is to serve a term of indenture. And the legalization of sex with slaves ensures there will always be buyers, both for pleasure and profit."

She'd heard this part of his spiel before. "That explains the domestic market, Will. Why do you think there's a big untapped international market?"

"It's history. It's not at all like antebellum slavery in the US. Males always commanded higher prices, driven by the demand for field work labor. This is more like slavery in the Muslim world a few centuries ago, when imports of women exceeded men by a three to one ratio in some places. You see, you can't set up a sugar plantation in the desert, so there's not as much demand for cheap labor. Slaves were for pleasure and status symbols. It was a way of evading religious restrictions. You could only have four wives, but most men who could afford them had only one wife and as many concubines as their finances permitted."

"And what does that have to do with...?" Her voice trailed off as she gestured toward the box.

"The current US population is about 210 million, with females outnumbering males about four to one thanks to the war and the widowmaker. If we follow similar cultural trends as those Muslim societies, demand will stabilize at thirty percent of the female population, or around 51 million slaves. That's female slaves, males would stabilize at under three million. That's why programs like a month's indenture in return for traffic ticket amnesty have become so popular. There are a lot of women, and the only thing many of them can sell is their ass. At first, I thought I would just fill that demand as an importer, collecting pussy from all over the world and shipping it here. Then I realized that I could do a brisk business in exports as well. Tell me, ever seen a band in a really small venue, like a club?"

Natalie shrugged. "Who hasn't?"

"Ever hear something like, 'And now, coming to you all the way from Boston, it's Empress Cosmic'?"

Natalie chuckled. "Yeah, the out of town band is always better."

"And the foreign pussy is always better than the local sluts as well. Don't forget that in many parts of the world, American pussy is exotic. They have a fantasy that they're buying a California girl, a Texas honey, a southern-fried sweetheart. And I intend to exploit that fantasy."

"We intend to exploit it, you mean."

"Well, of course. Anyone with skin in the game. I want to make us all rich."

"Richer."

He smiled. "Don't rub my nose in it. We all know I'm just the poor dumb slaver with an idea that you're going to claim credit for, and you're the investment fund manager-cum-entrepreneur who's the real brains of the outfit."

She laughed. Will was the sharpest man she had ever met, able to shift from an obscure mathematical analysis to fit a curve to data to discussing the best implement for disciplining a misbehaving slave with contemptuous ease. "Well, I'll be sure to throw a few crumbs your way." She changed the subject. "So, you said IATA approval is on the way?"

"Talked to the man just yesterday, he said no guarantees, but it looks like we'll be certified as a constructor."

Natalie had expected no less; Will was a stickler for good old-fashioned engineering. "Test the crap out of everything," he'd said, "and learn from your mistakes."

"Show me how it works." This was the real reason for the day's site visit. The details were second nature to Will, but she was a newcomer to the industry and found she could learn faster if she could see and touch things for herself.

Will gave his sales pitch. "This is the Southwest Shipping Six-Pack. It's an IATA-certified (we hope) ULD that allows safe and efficient..."

"Whoa, stop. What's a ULD?"

"Unit load device. A shipping container. Airline jargon."

"Our thing is a 'ULD'?"

"Right. That's the technical name for it. Well, we think they're going to give it the designation of LD 40, but I'll let you know whenever they decide that. Either way, yeah, it's this thing."

She smiled. "I've never heard them called 'unit loads' before. Cunts, bitches..."

"Oh, the six of them together are a unit load. Anything you put on a pallet is a unit load. Comes from the Navy, I think, back around World War Two."

"Figures. Sorry, I interrupted."

"No problem. It's a safe and effective way to transport human cargo by air, standardizing kennel arrangements and simplifying ground handling. No longer do we have to transport by individual kennel, and even the kennels the airlines accept don't fit in their planes very well. It's a lot of wasted space, since they don't fit evenly in standard cargo bays. They're all either too long the one way, or too short the other way, and you always end up with empty space to fill. And you can't stack a kennel that's big enough for a slave, so the overhead space is wasted, too."

He stooped down by one of the bottom edges of the box where it angled inward, the bottom being shorter than the top, and followed the contour with his hand as he spoke.

"As you can see, this is shaped to follow the space available in the lower hold of most widebody jets. We use every cubic inch of the space available, and pack in the most product per unit volume."

He walked around to the end, which had three doors in the overhanging part. "The compartment latches are low enough that any handler can reach up and unlatch them. It has an industry standard electronic lock, a protective shipping document cover, and electronic inventory control that lets us track who is in which compartment and where it is from halfway around the globe."

Will opened the latch, and lowered the door, which hinged at the bottom. It formed a ramp leading up into the overhang, perhaps a half meter above the ground. He climbed onto and bounced, using his weight to demonstrate its strength.

"The ridge pattern in the door reinforces and stiffens it, and along with the non-slip coating aids the subject with entry and exit even in wet or slippery conditions. It's rated to 130 kilograms, just like everything we build, so we can handle all but the largest males and 98 percent of all women."

And there would be no reason to ship a 130 kay gee heifer overseas. Utility grade, for sure!, thought Natalie. She knew there were women who were that fat; you saw one every now and then, but she thought it must really suck to go through life that way.

Will continued, opening and lowering the middle door. She tried to peer past him into one of the empty compartments.

"You'll see that the doors overlap the openings, so when they're lowered together like this, there are no gaps to catch a toe and no sharp edges to cut a foot. Inside, the compartments are a little longer and a little higher than the industry standard puppy crate, and just a centimeter or so narrower. There's still room to turn around, though, for even a handcuffed subject. So, we use the extra space for the benefit of the cargo instead of wasting it."

Natalie walked up to the rightmost compartment, the one he had opened first, as close as she could get without stepping on the ramp. She tapped the inside of the bottom of the overhang.

"I understand why this part has to slope, to fit the curve of the airplane. It goes in sideways, right? So the doors are all on the outside and the slaves face in?"

"Right, that adds to the security. The doors open outward, but it goes all across the width of the hold, sideways. So escape is impossible until the container is removed from the plane, there's no place for the doors to open."

She pointed to the ceiling of the compartment at the far end.

"Ok, but what I want to know is why is that part sloped, too? That just butts up against the other girl's space, so isn't that wasted space?"

"That's for life support and other systems." He motioned with his hands. "There's a v-shaped spine that runs down the length of the unit past all six compartments. It adds strength to the container so that it doesn't rack so much, uh, that means it doesn't twist so much if you try to bend it. But there's a water dispensing system in there, so that they can drink in flight. And there's a hole in the floor about so big around, with a screen over it that goes down into some kitty litter so they can pee. I mean, flying from here to Miami is one thing, but all the way to Dubai is another. Nobody can hold it that long. Ever fly with a slave for like, ten hours or more? Pissy puppy cages. It sucks."

"No, I've never owned one. But God, that must be embarrassing. She'd stink like pee, too, until you hosed her off. And how can you clean her up at the airport?"

"Exactly. I mean, they're going to be a little worse for wear, everyone is, even if you ride upstairs in first class. But there's no sense in needlessly torturing one to the point of requiring medical attention."

Less loss in shipment. Smart, she thought.

He continued. "But as I was saying, it's not just water, it's life support. If the pressure in the hold drops too low, each unit seals itself off until the pressure returns. Empty, it weighs less than 300 kilograms, so even loaded, it floats. There's an automatic distress beacon if it gets that wet. There's onboard fire suppression, and it seals off if it detects smoke in the hold. There's even heaters that come on in an emergency, for as long as the batteries hold out."

His tone changed. "Look, if the plane goes down, they're probably doomed. But most accidents are survivable, and I'd like to give them a fighting chance."

She met his gaze. "Why do you care? You must have processed hundreds, thousands of women. Why go to such trouble?"

"We are entering an era where 90 percent of all women will serve at least a short term of enslavement. It's a rite of passage, a way to pay off a loan, a way to finish school or start a business. Those are our daughters, our sisters, our best friends. Now, when she wears the collar, it's game on. She exists for one reason, and that's to make my cock happy. But after it's over? They're free human beings, same as you or me. Besides, a lot of what we'll be shipping is high value cargo. Cuts down on insurance."

Natalie was reminded of the old saw, that there were two reasons that anyone did anything: A good reason, and the real reason. At least Will was in the habit of laying both of them out together.

"So, how do you move them around? I see it's on this thing here." She gently kicked the dolly.

"Yeah, that's a dolly. In the old days, they moved them with forklifts, but that's passe now. I don't know if you noticed, but we have one of the loading docks fitted with a conveyor so we can get it into a truck. And at the airport, it's the same thing. All conveyors and dollies. They even have conveyor wheels in the cargo hold, the bigger planes can hold 14 of these things. We can fit four on a truck. Did I tell you the airport is all of 15 minutes away?"

"You got a place like this 15 minutes from the airport for five a square?" She grinned. "That's such a steal that someone should call the Sheriff."

"So, what else?"

"You don't have grilles between the compartments?"

"Yeah, there's ventilation back and forth, so they can smell and hear each other. But like, one can't pass an object or stick a finger in another girl's area and get it bitten off. We used the standard for nonhuman primate boxes to help design the thing, so you could probably ship a chimpanzee or a small gorilla in the thing. Legally."

"I see you put some thought into security. I suppose international shipments are at a high risk of diversion, and this is much more secure than a puppy cage."

"So, would you like to try it out?"

"What!?"

"Give me a half hour of your time. Think about it. We'll be shipping thousands of women, all for hours at time. Wouldn't it be worth a half hour of your time to understand transport from the perspective of the stock? Besides, if you can figure out a way to get out of that thing, we'd better get back to the drawing board fast, before we launch."

Natalie remembered an article she read about a university professor who designed slaughterhouses. It said she was successful, because she understood as much as any human could what was running through the minds of the animals as they made their way to their life's end. Her designs comforted and soothed the animals as they made their way down the chute, so that they literally didn't know what hit them when they reached the end of it. They were completely stress-free, right down to the end.

Not only were the processing costs lower, but the meat tasted better, too.

"Ok," she said, nodding, "You're on."

"Good," he replied. "I think you'll find this both entertaining and enlightening." He removed a cloth drape from a nearby stand, and retrieved a hoop-like object. "Collar." He wasn't describing the object, the word was a command.

"Collar? That's the one where you're supposed to lift up your hair, like this, right?" Natalie wore a stylish cut that just reached her shoulders, and she grasped it in back with both hands to lift it away from her neck.

"That's the idea, but you're supposed to go down to your knees and do it with only one hand. You've never been trained, have you?" He slipped the metal band around her neck and closed it with an authoritative click. Now it wasn't coming off until he released it. Or until she could get a key away from him.

"I went to a private school where that was frowned on. So no, I don't know very much about it. I've never been backstage at a slave market, either, although I suppose I'll see quite a bit about that part of the business eventually."

"Let's see if you know this one. Back hands!"

"Back...hands?"

Will sighed, and spoke to her as if she was a child, dangling a pair of handcuffs. "Put your hands behind your back."

"Oh." She started to reach behind her, then hesitated. "But you don't really transport slaves like this, do you?"

"What do you mean? Collared, cuffed, and stuffed in a poodle cage. Or in one of these, now that we've invented it."

"I mean, you usually have them naked, right? Slave naked?" She was proud of herself, at least she remembered the term, slave naked, although she wasn't sure from where. She started unbuttoning her blouse.

"Technically you wouldn't be slave naked unless you were enslaved, but yeah, naked. Naked pretty much all the time. So, if you want to make it a little more realistic, just take off as much as you dare."

She held her blouse hesitantly in front of her, not wanting to lay it on the floor.

"I'll take that if you'd like. You'll be needing that when you get out." He laid it on the little table where he'd gotten the collar and cuffs.

She started taking off her shoes, sensible low heels since she'd planned the facility visit. "Just don't get any ideas, buster. This is strictly business no matter what you see, and I'd like you to treat me like someone else's high value property, one you do not have permission to fuck."

"Standard bailment contract allows reasonable sexual use, but occasionally people request no sex boarding. It's an upcharge, the sex is considered a tip to the bailee, and if you want service without tipping, we usually want some other consideration. But ok, high value, no sex boarding."

She was down to her underwear, and reached to unhook her bra. "Admit it, you're grading me with your eyes."

In truth he wasn't ogling her half so much as any other man might, as befitted the delicate nature of their partnership. "I do use all five of my senses when grading, so yes, my eyes are one of them." He hadn't expected her to go this far, and admired her pluck if not her knowledge and foresight. But then, she was worth a lot more to him as a business partner than as a slave.

Natalie stepped out of her panties, handed them to him, and placed her hands behind her back. "So, what grade am I, in your highly professional opinion?"

"I couldn't possibly do a proper grading under these circumstances, but from your appearance and what I know of your demeanor, I would say choice, straight choice. Top ten percent. Choice plus if you got trained," he added.

"Not prime?" Even if they abhorred slavery and had no intention of ever becoming a slave, nearly every woman aspired to the top grade.

"Prime minus is possible, but only if you sold high at auction." He ratcheted the cuffs onto her wrists.

"Hmmf."

"Three quarters of choice is choice minus. Straight choice is actually a pretty good grade." He led her to the foot of the ramp. "Wait, you want to really understand this, one minute."

He fetched something from the table. "Open wide, I need to see your teeth."

Just like a horse, she thought as she opened her mouth. But before she had time to react, he caught her head, shoving a padded bit between her teeth with one hand and fastening a strap that held it fast behind her head with the other.

"Mmmph!," she exclaimed. "Vuff err oo ooing?" She stamped a foot on the hard concrete.

Will grasped her shoulders and turned her to look at him, lowering his eyes to her level.

"Natalie Mortellaro, look at me! You want to know if this thing will work, play along. How much of your own money do you have tied up in this thing? I said a half hour. 30 minutes and you won't think if this will work. You'll know. If you really want to do this thing, just back your pretty butt up that ramp and give me 30 minutes. Then if you want out, we'll dissolve the business. Fair?"

Every fiber in her body wanted to scream at him. It was the outrage, how dare he treat her this way? He was treating her like...a slave. Well, of course he had. Hadn't she stripped naked for him, slave naked? How did she expect to be treated, with hugs and kisses of reassurance? Get a grip on yourself. This was a damn good demonstration, she had to admit, even if she had added to the intensity by her own actions. All right, 30 minutes. If he was half the man she thought he was, she could give him 30 minutes. And she'd be inside that thing, that ULD. Who could stare at her when she was inside a metal box? He couldn't and wouldn't. She was just being silly.

Natalie's shoulders slumped, her head nodded.

"Ok, backwards up the ramp, doing good, watch your head." He pushed down on her head as she crouched low to inch backwards through the opening. She had to step down about 30 centimeters on the inside to the cool metal floor. He held her by the collar with one hand, a small object in the other.

Beep! She'd been scanned.

"Just entering you into inventory. You'll see when I let you out."

She stared as he lifted the door, the powerful latch closing with a clunk. There was a second beep as he assigned her collar to her compartment.

It was dark. Light filtered in through the ventilation openings, but precious little of that. It was far too cramped to stand upright, so she began to crouch lower, when a window opened near the top of the door. Will appeared.

"I wanted to tell you we have a little inspection port in the door. Too small to fit through, and it secures from the outside. Handy when you want to check on their condition, or ask them a question. If they aren't devoxed or gagged, that is."

Just as quickly, the window cover closed, and she was in darkness again. Her ass made contact with the floor, the metal cool and smooth below her. She began to scoot backwards in the narrow chamber, stretching out her legs as best she could.

Will's voice rang out. "Ok, she bought it, bring them out!"

What? Who else was here? She knew Will worked with a team of experts and developers, but she hadn't heard a sound during her visit and assumed his team was elsewhere, either having coffee or enjoying time off while the boss's partner visited. Only now did she realize how odd that was, most startups had very collegial atmosphere, and an investor's visit would be welcomed (so long as she didn't prove too much of a distraction). She tried to struggle to her feet but only managed to bump her head on the ceiling.

The warehouse now echoed with sound. People moving, the whine of machinery, orders being given that she couldn't comprehend. The ULD's latches were unfastened, more orders...she distinctly heard, "back in" more than once...then the sound of doors closing and the latches pounding once again. Amongst it all, beeps and numbers being called out and movement. What was happening? This wasn't part of his demo, was it? She'd heard him say "she bought it", had she somehow been duped? Tales of people being tricked into slavery were common in both the established and the unestablished media. Was this all an elaborate scheme to press-gang her into wearing a collar? Why? Without her money, he'd have a hell of a time launching the business. But if she was enslaved, all her possessions would revert to her owner, unless her contract said otherwise. And if they were illegally enslaving her, why not steal all her stuff, to?

Natalie started to shake. She hadn't felt that kind of fear since the bank scandal, the one that had swept up several of her co-workers, some of whom weren't allowed to plea down to private indentures and had to serve a term of judicial enslavement. That was shocking, that wasn't supposed to happen to nice white-collar criminals when they exchanged their white collar for a metal one. Natalie hadn't done anything wrong, at least she'd thought that she hadn't done anything wrong. But the amount of nastiness and false accusations thrown around by those desperate to save their own skin had convinced her to leave the firm and strike out on her own. She'd never looked back since.

But she remembered the day that she'd been called in to talk to that federal inspector, the one who wanted to know what she knew about Benita and how she lived, where she vacationed, what sort of things she expensed. On one level, she understood that Benita was the target, not her, and that the woman just wanted to build a case against a cheat. But still it seemed like it was she, not Benita who was being targeted, probably by the investigator's habit of touching the frame of her glasses whenever Natalie gave her an answer she didn't like.

Are you sure you don't know where Ms. Rodriguez was on the 5th of April? I'm having trouble understanding how you wouldn't know.

She'd shaked in that chair, talking to the older woman then. She was shaking now. Instead of being afraid that she'd be accused of something and fitted with a collar, she was already wearing one.

There was a loud metallic sound, some sort of mechanism at least as large as her hand. Then the container lurched beneath her, toppling her backward until her head bumped the dividing wall down the center of the box. There was the whine of a machine, nearby, incessant.

The box...and Natalie...was moving.

[Carl Bradford]

A great conception, and (presumably) a new means of enslaving someone without any restrictions on overseas sale. Given the supposed excess supply of young women in the US, that might not be necessary, but this is still an excellent beginning. Please keep going.

[Mr. Smith]

Nice start! This story is going to get interesting really fast. Looking forward to the next chapter to find out what happened to Natalie.

[jeepster]

Neat! A plane slave shipping cargo container! What will they think of next?

[jeepster]

Neat! A plane slave shipping cargo container! What will they think of next?

[jeepster]

Whoops! Accidental fingers!

[ZeeChromosome]

Looking forward to the next chapter to find out what happened to Natalie.

Gee, I wonder?

[gary]

Nice start, though I'm curious why you use the figure of 210 million for the population of the United States, when the real world number is almost 333 million?

[ElJefe]

"The current US population is about 210 million, with females outnumbering males about four to one thanks to the war and the widowmaker."

In this world, after the war and the unleashing of the highly selective genetically engineered widowmaker virus, a lot of our brothers didn't make it. A moment of silence for all the fictional lives lost, please.

And although there were no real winners, the US didn't lose that conflict. There are a lot of residual bad feelings toward some countries as a result. I've give a non-spoiler, that doesn't affect the story much, although it might affect future stories set in this world. But you really wouldn't want to be one of the surviving women in the countries that did really poorly. Life slavery in the US would probably be a step up from your current existence...if it was available.

[ElJefe]

Thank you