-- Anon Guest
[AN: Nonny wanted to link to this particular song, but it was found in this playlist. Enjoy at your leisure]
If there was one upside to the situation, then Bo would never run out of things to do. There was always something that needed doing. Something that needed fixing. Something that needed sweat and muscle and time to do. The downside being that Bo had swapped life in one crapsack situation, for life in another.
At least in a prison, there was an end to the sentence. The contract had sounded tempting and, thanks to an entirely engineered education disparity, Bo could barely read very much of the contract at all. Boilerplate, they said. Standard stuff, they said. You'll never serve another day in a cell, they said.
Technically... they weren't wrong. Bo didn't see any such thing as a prison wall. No barbed wire, no chain link, no guards. There was no point. Even if he ran from the colony in progress, he would not last long. The native flora and fauna required extensive processing to be edible or non-toxic, and there wasn't enough of it in easy reach to even try surviving on. It was stay in range or run off to die. He was free to make that. Some choice. Work his butt off or run away from it all and slowly starve. He'd seen a few who'd tried Option B. One look was too many.
The Body Corporate was benevolent, they kept telling him. He should be grateful for the daily gruel that gave him enough strength to work the next day, for the medication that kept him functional to work for longer. For the accommodations that were barely better than an eight by ten but only because it wasn't bordered by bars.
There were no fights, because there was no energy to fight. There was no politics, because they were all in the same pestilence-ridden boat. Why care who had the better skin tone when everyone was all over sores from bug bites and mud and sweat from their labor? It was a daily struggle to reach quota and therefore earn shower privileges. Water clean enough to bathe with was premium, you know. Corporate had to be certain you'd done enough to be worth it. And oh yes. There was a fine for leaving a filthy bed in the morning. And a fine for being caught out of your bed after lights-out. And a fine for sleeping on top of the one blanket that was allotted to each contractually obligated subject of the new order.
They said it was all for the greater good. They said they were making a better world for tomorrow's contractually obligated subject. The alleged boilerplate had also signed on his descendants on world as permanent guaranteed employees. He would, the contract said, be assigned a woman at the earliest possible opportunity. Women, they said, were also premium.
The debt he had incurred with his extant prison sentence, the debt his fines accumulated, and the assorted fees and charges were to be worked off with his daily labor. Don't worry about the accounting, they said. Management is taking care of everything, and that includes you, you dirty little debtor.
Every other month, for as long as the wormhole lasted, there was fresh blood. Another smallish transport ship full of others who had taken this devil's deal and landed themselves in the next worst thing to Hell.
He only saw one come in because he was laid up in the base hospital with two broken limbs, and also made aware that he was being charged for premium services. He had little else to do, because using the entertainment system - even the news - was billed at a premium rate. Even the free news service that the rest of the mooks got in the dining hall. What he saw gave him some mild concerns.
He saw something like forty guys like him, and maybe as many as five women, all of them were ushered off under heavy guard. Bo had learned that it cost extra to ask questions, even when there were no answers given. Therefore, he held his tongue until he was returned to the Mooks under Light Duties to work out the rest of his convalescence.
They were all in the same sinking ship, so other mooks like him helped him out when he clearly needed it.
"Did you get to see stars, Bo?" asked his current helper, Mitch. "Ain't a lot of windows in the Habitats. Did they let you see the stars?"
How the little things were treasured in this shitty world. Bo did his best to tell them what he'd seen. Windows were premium, and looking out of them was not working, and therefore gained a fine. The mooks all knew this by now. The new meat taught by the old. Therefore any chatter about unauthorised non-activity was said in a murmur at best, and well out of sight of the security cams if they could manage it.
As long as you were working, or participating in the Corporate-authorised activity of the hour, Corporate didn't much care.
When he was done causing wistful sighs about the stars, Bo said, "I also saw a transport come in."
"Yeah we know. Forty newbies added to the mill," said Dave.
"Yeah. Forty new guys and five women. They were rushed off under heavy guard. Lie SWAT Team ordinance. Head to toe heavy armor."
"None of those guys are on us," said Mitch.
"They don't need to be. Think about it. Forty dudes to five ladies. That's like... eight guys to a girl. How's that going to work out for her?"
Every single guy at the table looked at each other. They knew how it worked in the prisons back on Earth. Some of them had been on the receiving end of the worst of it. They knew what Corporate did to them on the daily. They could guess, from the unstoppable litany of talking points on the communal free news feed, what they were expected to do with a woman if they got near one.
The women had likely been the sort who were less strong at reading. Anyone with a modicum of sense wouldn't have signed a contract like that. Women's prisons were always fewer on the ground than the mens' to begin with. Either they were less likely to make crime or they were less likely to get caught.
Each and every one of them already knew how the Corporation who more or less owned them now had treated them. Each and every one of them silently agreed to not perpetuate that pain on any woman who entered their visual field. Word spread, and some consequences resulted. Anyone who even tried to joke about forcing themselves on a woman found himself with two options: die in the wilderness, or have an "accident" and die anyway.
Whatever management was planning, Bo knew, it would not be good. He and all the other mooks agreed to fight it however they could.
Hell, they might even get together and fight the Management if they could figure out how, where, and when. After all, the fine print was only as good as the people who enforced it.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / berean]
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