I'm a Cyborg's Pet (girl X cyborg)

Chapter 10/Being Sold

Video: this is how a geek/scientist thinks about online dating. For some reason, we put this here, we don't know why either. V1.1 of this chapter.

One of the guard-robots had come along and dragged me out of catwalk class and I was in. I was glad, apparently, I walk like a badly shaken monkey.  I wasn't walking in a straight line. A certain spider said I needed to show off my 'bitchen body'. I had to work on pushing my shoulders back,  hips forward and remember heel toe, heel toe. Give me a bazooka and I'll heel toe them.  I was pulled out so I could update my eBay product description. It was in a room called 'the podium' but it was more like a self-service, TV newsroom. Fortunately, Kayla and Joe had heard in time to come along and help.

I got into the video booth to make my sales pitch video. Kayla was coaching us through our profiles. I stood on the podium in the 3D photo booth and read out my lines.

"Hi My name is 5642, I'm blood type A-positive, I'm female, my model number is 127/c. I'm really your silicon-covered girl who's fun to be with. So if you're a machine who likes sunsets and walks on the beach, I'm the slave for you. I'm all original parts, handmade in America and I also come in red," I said. It felt a bit lame; I wasn't used to talking to a 3D camera. Trying to sell yourself in fifteen seconds to a remote machine wasn't easy.

I didn't know what was more degrading, the fact I was being sold like livestock or the shame that at least cattle don't have to write their own profile pages: 'Hi, my name is Daisy, if you don't like bits of bone in your burger then I'm the cow for you'. Trust the machines to take the already degrading process of being sold like meat and turn up the heat by getting us to compete to sell ourselves.

To make matters worse, the slave profile videos were shown throughout the factory. You were constantly bombarded with 15-second displays showing people trying harder and harder to out-sell and out-humiliate themselves to the machines. As soon as someone came up with a new way to debase themselves, it got copied immediately by everyone else's profile. In the first few days, we slaves broke through the 'respectful' barrier, smashed through 'deferential', plummeted past 'meek', fell through 'servile', nosedived past 'obsequious' and our race-to-the-bottom was currently mining its way beneath the 'sycophantic' barrier. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out a level below even that.

People who had proudly told me in the first week that,  "The machines could take our lives but they'll never take our freedom," were now happily acting like they had had their self respect surgically removed. This was partly driven by the bids for us, that trickled through from the owners, from the outside. 88 was currently the queen of self subjection having abandoned all tenuous links to self-respect by having introduced the wider slave population to the phrase, "believe me I'm a total unashamed slut: you can use me in whatever way you can think of and if you can't think of it, I will help you."

"You need to smile and stop opening your mouth like that," said Kayla."Do you have to push your chest out like that? We all have exactly the same cup size, even Joe: you're not fooling anyone."

"I don't understand. I'm doing what it says to do in the user guide," I said coming out of the booth. Not to mention that the 'hang-on-I'm-about-to-sneeze', lips slightly open, pose, was almost the standard slave look." Joe, you still have men's private parts, don't you?" I asked.

"Last time I looked," said Joe.

"Why do Glamour Girls pull that face? Like, do men really find some girl who looks like she can't breathe in through her nose, sexy?" I asked.

"Yeah, I never got that either. No one consulted me about it. I always assumed that they were standing around whistling through their teeth in boredom. Now I have the same equipment you have: I'm still equally bemused," Joe said, looking down at his machine-grafted boobs.