Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Most of the clientele at Eclipse are men. I’d say a good seventy percent. Most of the girls here are working in one capacity or other, either for the club itself, or as freelancers. Women are in short supply in this corner of the world. Many are kept at home by their families, and others are living their very best lives off-world.
We lost a lot of women when the aliens first came, so I’ve learned. Overnight, millions of women were scooped up and taken away in what was called the first rapture. We don’t know what happened to them. Maybe there’s a planet out there populated entirely with Earth women. Maybe they got spread across the stars. Maybe they were served with nibbles and dips. Everyone’s got an opinion, and nobody really knows for sure.
Then we got more advanced, and found ways to stop the aliens just stealing us, theoretically. The Earth has an ionized barrier of some kind that stops people from just being snatched. Don’t really know how much or how well it works, but you have to trust it because otherwise you’ll spend your days wearing a tin foil broad-brimmed hat. There’re also rumors that some of the corporates got where they are now, all the tech and stuff that makes the cities fly, by trading with alien civilizations, and that they paid for that tech with women.
The official law is that women cannot be sold. Humans aren’t allowed to be commodified. It’s very strictly enforced, allegedly, but that doesn’t stop women going ‘missing’ from time to time. I think it’s probably human males doing the disappearing given the ratio of women to men is like 80:20 at this point.
From what I’ve been told, mostly by men who are high out of their fucking gourds, the demand for human females in various planets and colonies cannot be overstated. Every woman in here is worth a million at least on the alien black market.
For all those reasons and a couple more, the dancing girls at Club Eclipse are locked down. Literally. There are chains wrapped around some of their ankles. They look very pretty. They’re elegant little things inexorably connected to the platforms they’re dancing on. There are barcodes on the anklets. A man can swipe his chip on them and rent them for thirty minutes, an hour, half a day, or a week. The club owners keep girls up there no matter what. As soon as one is checked out, the platform descends for a minute or two, then slides back up through the floor with a new smiling dancing girl.
It seems inhumane, and that’s because it is, because these girls aren’t human and never will be. One is swaying in front of me right now. You can barely see the seams where her plastic form has been sealed shut. This is a Real Woman TM. She’s waterproof, she’s structurally robust in ways a real woman would not be, and far more flexible. A lot of men say these robots are better than real women. Real women are real happy these bots take the abuse the average frustrated man doles out.
It all comes down to profit in the end. A real female is expensive to keep. She has to be fed and she has to be guarded, and she has to be kept in a situation that is clean and suitable enough to keep her looking appealing. Female robots can dance twenty-four/seven in a club and only need to be hosed out semi-regularly from the use they receive from the clients. Any damage can be covered by insurance, and when they wear out, or a new model is released, they can be sold to the private market.
I don’t mind the Real Women TM. I prefer that to looking into the hollow eyes of a real human female who has to have a good time because she’s dosed to the follicles with mental conditioners that ensure she has a pleasant and willing disposition. I’ve seen some of them too, from time to time, out on the streets with men who use them like… I don’t even have a good comparison.
As bright and sparkling and fun as we’re all desperately trying to make this Zeal night be, the world is a dark place and there’s no getting away from it.
I slide through this mass of heaving hidden desperation, helping people zone out from the horrors one sweet little pill at a time. It’s never been particularly easy to be a human, but they tell me it gets harder day after day, year after year. Sometimes I’m quite grateful for not being able to remember anything. It means I’m free of whatever terrible things probably happened to me in the past.
Anyway, I’m bringing my own mood down by thinking too much. That’s always a mistake. I should be focusing on what matters: profit.