This work is copyright 2000-2006 by Xaltatun of Acheron (A Pseudonym). It may be posted on the Internet to any free forum. It may be reformatted to match the forum's look and feel, and the forum editor may make minor spelling and grammer corrections. Otherwise it must be posted in its entirety, including these notices. It may not be sold, or included in any compilation that is sold, or posted on any forum that requires a fee for access, without my written permission. My permission will require payment, terms to be negotiated. For purposes of this notice, sites guarded by Adult Check or similar packages are considered pay sites. Posting on any site must include this copyright notice.
Adult Content Warning - this story contains adult themes, including non-consensual bondage/slavery and forced sexual acts. If you are under the lawful age for such materials (18 in most jurisdictions) or if you would find such material offensive, please go elsewhere.
Safety Warning. This story may contain descriptions of practices that are decidedly unsafe, either in general, or if performed by someone without adequate training. There are a number of good books available on safety in the BDSM scene. Most large cities, and some not so large ones, have organized BDSM groups that will usually welcome a newcomer. I'm not going to point out which practices are safe, and which aren't. Any practice is unsafe if performed by someone with inadequate training and experience, or if performed when not paying attention. Please think before you act. Don't make yourself a candidate for a Darwin award.
Now on to the story...
Chapter 2. Jenny. Processed by Reliable.
Chapter 4. Jenny: This is your life. Adapt ... or else.
Chapter 5. Jenny. Ponygirls in their cages.
Chapter 6. Jenny: Training Carol.
Chapter 7. Jenny, Carol and the Tentacle Monster.
Chapter 8. Jenny: Ponygirl Ronnie.
Chapter 10. Jenny: As Luck Would Have It.
Chapter 11. Audry: Faux Ponygirl.
Chapter 12. Jenny: On the Road Toward College
Chapter 13. Audry: The Taxi Service Acquires a Wild Ponygirl
Chapter 14. Beth: If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.
Chapter 15. Jenny and Beth: At The Mountain View Motel.
Chapter 18. Jenny and Beth: Settling In.
Chapter 19. Jenny at the Taxi Service
Chapter 20. Jenny collars Beth.
Chapter 21. Jenny Discovers a Wild Girl Infestation
Chapter 24. Jenny: Programming Seminar.
Chapter 25. Audry: Good News, Bad News and News.
Chapter 26. Jenny and Beth: Preparations.
Chapter 27. Audry: A step forward?
Chapter 28. Jenny and Beth: What’s in the box?
Chapter 29. Audry: The light dawns.
Chapter 31. Jenny: Engine Girl.
Chapter 32. Jenny: All is Revealed.
Chapter 33. Jenny: Well, maybe.
Chapter 34. Jenny: Tamed Girls.
Chapter 35. Jenny: Vacation Time.
The date is sometime around 2400, and Jenny Jackson is ready to graduate from high school. She discovers, contrary to every reasonable expectation, that she is not picked as a wife, nor is she going to college. Instead, she’s been routed to a job as a collared worker in Reliable’s ponygirl manufacturing process.
“Am I going to have any trouble with you?” the guard asked.
“Uh, no sir,” Jenny said from where she lay propped up on the hospital bed.
“Good. They tell me you’re healed from the operation, so I’m to take you to your work assignment.” He reached over and unlocked the light chain that attached her collar to the wall.
“Get dressed. There.” He pointed at a cabinet.
She blushed as she got dressed under his watchful eye. Then she looked at herself in the mirror and nodded thoughtfully. The mid-thigh length skirt and neckline that stopped just before it showed cleavage seemed to be the current fashion for collared workers’ uniforms when they would not be doing anything that required protective clothing.
“Do I need this?” He held out a leash.
“No, sir.”
“Good. Follow me. No need to remember where we’re going. You won’t be coming back this way for a long time, if ever.” He walked out of the ward, Jenny hurrying to keep up.
After several twists and turns and one short elevator ride they emerged into the sunlight. She stopped, startled at the sight of wide lawns and flower beds, with ponygirls and what had to be engines taking care of the flowers.
“Surprised?” he asked.
“Uh, yes.”
“It’s a common enough reaction. Ponygirls and engines are all supposed to be able to do yard work, do their own housekeeping and keep their equipment working.”
“Swifty sure did,” Jenny said reflectively.
“Your family’s ponygirl? The best way of making sure they can do it is to have them do it. This place wouldn’t be half the size if we didn’t need all the space to give them a yard to work. It sure makes it pretty, though.”
“It sure does,” she agreed as he led the way to a waiting ponygirl and a two seat chariot.
“I suppose this is more of the same?”
“Right. Municipal taxi services, parks, industrial farms and suchlike are our second biggest market segment, right behind individuals, so we give them lots of practice before sale. Or at least as much as we can squeeze in.”
“I suppose you do the same for engines?”
“Not as much as we’d like. The truck you came in on had trainee engines, but we don’t have enough of that kind of work.”
They arrived at another building in short order. The neatly kept sign on the front lawn proclaimed: “Ponygirl Manufacturing Stage 2, Building 4.” The only way to describe the building, Jenny thought, was huge. Four stories and sprawling.
They went down several corridors and eventually stopped in front of a door marked: Ponygirl Manufacturing. Stage 2. Unit 128.
“In you go, girl.” He stood aside as she looked at the door. She shrugged and went through. There weren’t, she thought, all that many other options. Like, none.
Inside was a small cubicle with another door. She tried the handle and found it wouldn’t budge until the outer door closed behind her. Then it opened and she walked through.
She looked around and saw an older woman standing watching, arms crossed under her breasts. Well, she was a few years older than Jenny herself.
“So you’re my new crew member,” she said. “Female. Check. Breathing. Check. I take it your name is Jenny? I’m Daphne.”
“Uh. Yes, I’m Jenny. Hello, um, Daphne?”
“You got it. I suppose you’ve got all the usual questions, because I know they didn’t tell you anything while you were in the hospital recovering from the operation.”
“I got a lot to study, but it all seemed kind of general.”
“They do that so you’re not totally bewildered when you arrive. Manufacturing is manufacturing; the basics are the same everywhere. The only place you’re going to learn the specifics is on the job.
“Let’s start at the top. We live here and we stay here, possibly until we’re ready to be cremated. The usual way out of this unit is a job transfer to another assignment in the organization. If you don’t work out you’ll find yourself in one of the cages being trained for real.”
“That’s?”
“Not what you expected? Don’t worry about it. We have very few failures, and the comps assign trainees to units where they’ll fit in. Reliable is interested in getting its ponygirls trained properly, not in providing fodder for the 3-V comedies.
“We sleep 8 hours, work an 8 hour shift and have the other 8 hours to study and amuse ourselves. There are two of us on each shift in each cell, for six on shift in the unit. We supposedly get one day a week off, so there are actually seven of us on each of the day shifts. The day off rotates; the seventh worker rotates among the cells. Otherwise we’re assigned to a specific cell and stay there until we’re reassigned.
“There are only four people on the night shift. We don’t need more because all the girls are supposed to be asleep in their cages. They do maintenance and some monitoring and planning.
“Trainees, that’s you, are extra. We work extra shifts while we’ve got a trainee, and then she fills in to make up the time. Once she’s up to speed and can take a full shift without a mentor, one of us will get moved to another assignment.
“You’re not actually going to get a lot of time off for a few months because of training assignments I’m going to talk about later. Once you’re done with those you get most of your off shifts and half of your days off; the other half you’ll spend doing something else I’ll talk about later.”
“Uh. Right.”
“Physically,” she gestured to a chart on the wall, “the unit is a rectangle, and it’s a lot longer than it is wide. The dormitory extends all the way along the wall. Next there’s a row of study cubicles. We each have one. Then we have the long corridor, rows of units stacked lengthwise, and another long corridor by the far wall. The other side of that wall is the rein training area.”
“It looks simple enough,” Jenny said as she looked at the diagram. “I’m, um, here and here?”
“Right. Your area in the dormitory is a bed and a small stand. The walls between are both light and sound absorbent, as is the far wall, so you don’t have to try to sleep with a lot of noise or a lot of light. I’ll give you a quick tour when there’s nobody sleeping.
“We use a standard manufacturing cell organization. This is unit 128, and it has three cells. Each cell has 3 columns of 10 cages, for 30 in the cell. We normally have 60 girls in the unit for 20 in each cell. We get an average of one new girl a day and send an average of one trained girl a day on to stage 3. Most of the fluctuation is smoothed out in stage 1; we’ve sometimes been up to 25 in each cell, and sometimes down to 15, but it usually stays right around 20.
“Each cell has six rows: three rows of cages, one row of Tentacle Monsters, one row of treadmills and storage, and one row that contains a washer and the maintenance area for the servicers. There’s also a row between units that’s got the laundry, closet space and maintenance work areas. As well as the engine mount trainers.”
“The what?” Jenny exclaimed, her attention dragged away from the diagram.
“Engine mount trainers. We’re all trained as both ponygirls and engines, and we spend time as ponygirls and engines regularly.”
“You’re ... you aren’t joking, are you?”
“Nope,” Daphne giggled. “One of the things I love about raw trainees is their expression when I tell them. I’ll tell you more later.”
“You know the way manufacturing operations structure tasks, right?”
“Uh, yes. That got covered.”
“Good. In this unit there are a couple of dozen tasks, but practically there are really three; we don’t have much use for a shift worker who can only do some of the tasks.”
“So I need to make level 2 on most of the tasks?”
“Right. Then the second group would be?”
“Um. What I’d need to train a new worker. That would be level 3 on all the shift tasks and 2 on the rest?”
“Right. Then you’d need 3 on the rest to be able to train a new trainer. That’s a supervisory position. You’ve got a reasonable length of time to make shift worker, and you don’t have to go beyond that. We don’t expect genius here, just people that can get it before they’re ready to be cremated.”
“Long before, I presume.”
“Right. We almost never have anyone fail to get there. Reliable’s selection process is supposed to reject anyone that’s even close to marginal.”
“Uh. Right.”
“Which brings up why you’re here at Reliable rather than somewhere else. You’re a heartless bitch.”
“I’m what!”
“You’re a heartless bitch. So am I, and so are the other crew members. The technical term is borderline sociopath. In plain English, it means you don’t give a shit what happens to anyone except yourself, and you won’t have any qualms about what we do to our ponygirls. Even though some of them are going to be girls you went to school with who were your friends.”
“Well, you gotta look out for yourself. Nobody else is going to.”
“Oh, I agree. Here.” She touched her chest. “Most people wouldn’t, or at least wouldn’t take it to the extreme we do.
“The only way you can work in the stage 1 or stage 2 units is to not be concerned about what you’re doing to them. Most people couldn’t work here. If they had to turn a friend into a ponygirl it would rip them apart. It’s possible to work farther down the line without the same problems, but it’s still not easy if you see someone you knew and liked coming through.”
Jenny looked at Daphne narrowly. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Since you asked. We’re going to get one, possibly two girls from your graduating class, and they’re going to be your responsibility.”
“You’re going to what?”
“You’re going to be responsible for one or two girls from your graduating class. It’s a test to see if they were right about you. If you genuinely can’t handle it, they’ll put you somewhere else. If you try to fake not being able to handle it, you’ll join them in the next cage.”
Jenny swallowed. “Got it.”
“Now for what we actually do. We’re the second stage of ponygirl manufacturing. Our job is to take ponygirls from stage 1 manufacturing and bring them along to where we can pass them to stage 3 manufacturing.
“You just spent a few days in Stage 1 so you know that they do the surgery to install the modifications. Input comes in waves as schools do their graduations; some days they’ve got over a thousand new girls, some days they’ve got almost none. The average for this plant is a bit less than 500 a day. They can handle 800, but if they get hit with a big wave the girls may sit in a cage for several days before getting to surgery. That’s not totally wasted; they use a portable scanner so the computers can start installing the ponygirl functional pattern.
“Once they finish surgery they keep the girls in their cages for about four days to make sure the jaw block heals properly; that’s the biggest piece of surgery. You went to the head of the line and they kept you for two days and let you recover in a bed while you studied because you’re a worker; they don’t install the throat unit or jaw block in workers. They install the tail socket instead, which is a much simpler operation.”
“Tail socket? Oh, you did say I was going to be trained as a ponygirl.”
“Hold that thought. You undoubtedly noticed that this was a big building? Stage 2 occupies 16 buildings, 16 stage 2 units in each building. We’re one of about 500 stage two units. We get an average of one girl a day from stage one, which means that each cell gets one every three days. If they’re processing a backlog we might get two every three days; if they don’t have enough we might not get any on some days. We keep them for about two months, which means we send an average of one a day to stage 3.
“We start them on three major pieces. The first is what we call the ponygirl functional brain pattern. When they leave here they’ve got that pattern installed and it’s been locked so they can’t stray outside of it. What that means is that they can only use part of their brains. Anything having to do with language or so-called higher functions has effectively been turned off. They’ve also been conditioned to be cheerful, friendly and obedient. The conditioning will stay because it’s continuously monitored by a brain scanner installed in their skulls and reinforced by their collars.”
“I never realized!”
“We don’t put it on the 3-V,” Daphne responded dryly.
“Um,” she continued, “I didn’t think you could change personality that much.”
“That’s half right. Their personality after we get done isn’t going to be the same as it was before, but they’ll still have distinct personalities. Stage 1 shuttles girls that are likely to have problem personalities over to engine training; they’ll wind up sitting in cages when they’re not installed on an engine mount.”
“We also do initial rein, strength and stamina training. When they leave here they’re complete on the ponygirl functional pattern, pretty decent on rein training, and frequently but not always past the first checkpoint on flexibility, strength and stamina. Most of the real training happens downstream, in stages 3, 4 and 5.”
“That makes sense.”
“Enough talk. Time to show you what it looks like.”
They turned down a corridor and stopped immediately. “This is a walk-through shower,” she explained. “This thing,” she grasped a rod that came out of the wall on a track, “is a shower rod. When you put a ponygirl through it, you clip the chain on the end to her collar and it leads her through the whole process. When you go through it to take a shower you do the same thing; it won’t activate unless the chain is clipped to a collar ring.”
Jenny looked at the thing. “This is getting strange,” she said.
Daphne laughed. “It’ll get stranger. Now let’s look at ponygirls.
“We load the cells in order, so you can walk the cage rows and see how they look as they progress through their conditioning. That means the unused cells are in a block in the middle. So let’s start out with an unused cell so I can show you how it operates without disturbing one of the girls.”
“Before we do, I’ve got a question,” Jenny said. “Didn’t I just see a loose ponygirl?”
Daphne laughed. “That was Melissa; she’s one of the workers on this shift. She likes her tail enough to wear it all the time. Of course it means she has to wear a uniform shirt and shorts instead of a tunic, but that’s acceptable.”
“Uniform shorts?”
“Tails don’t go well with skirts. Your uniforms include shorts for when you’re wearing your tail and overalls for when you’re working on equipment maintenance. Now for the cage. You had a glimpse of it when you arrived, right?”
The sides and back of the cage seemed to be some kind of two inch thick white plastic. It was about three feet wide and three deep. The sides came up about six feet, with shelves of the same white plastic at about the four foot mark. They left enough space in the center so the two workers could see into the cage itself.
The knobs and switches of a control panel sat in the right wall above the shelves where they would be out of the ponygirl’s line of sight. The back had two 3-V panels: one showed the inside of the cage from the back, and the other showed it from the top.
The front and a second top were metal meshes with thick bars. The bottom was more of the white plastic, shaped with a lot of ridges and depressions.
“Here’s the cute part,” Daphne said. “Stand away.” She touched a button on the column between the cages. The front slid up and the bottom slid out into the corridor.
“Strip and sit on it,” Daphne commanded.
“Huh?”
“I said strip and sit on it.”
“But...”
“Either you strip and sit on it right now, or you’re going to back to stage 1 where they’ll put the throat and jaw units in, and then you’ll sit on it.”
“Oh.” Jenny slid out of her clothes, stacking them neatly on the shelf, and then sat on the platform. After a bit of wiggling she discovered that there was only one place she could sit comfortably, and that required her to have her legs spread wide and her feet straight back against the sides. As soon as she discovered this, a pair of shackles snapped shut around her ankles, pinning her into place.
Daphne touched a button, and the platter slid smoothly back. The front came down, closing it off.
“Explore,” she told Jenny. “There are a couple of buttons here you can use to slide the top open and shut.” She reached in and pressed them, demonstrating what they did. “I’ll be back in a while.”
Jenny listened to the almost inaudible sound of Daphne’s shoes as she walked away.
Now what? she thought to herself. Explore? She spent a little time running her hands over the confines of the cage. The sides seemed to be smooth but not quite slippery. She found that all she could see was a section of corridor and a wall. Well, that wasn’t quite right. The center cutout of the shelves let her see a patch of ceiling and the top of the wall in front of her.
Now that she’d calmed down, it seemed to be quiet. Really quiet. The whole place must be made of sound absorbent material.
What else? She might try lying down. She bent forward and discovered that her breasts fell into a cavity, and that there was something that stuck up where her mouth should be. She got back up and looked at it. It seemed to be some kind of a hook. Maybe it would latch onto a ponygirl’s jaw unit and keep her from rising until someone unlatched it? Seemed likely.
Now what were those buttons about? She pressed one and part of the top slid back. Maybe she could poke her head out? She managed to get onto her knees, ankles still shackled, and get her head out the top. “Eep!” The top had slid back into place, imprisoning her neck. She noticed she was pressed against the front bars, with her breasts stuck out of convenient openings.
The other button slid the top back again so she could sit down. She noticed that her hands rested, quite naturally, on her thighs. She took a couple of deep breaths and looked around. Try as she might, she couldn’t figure out anything else to do, so she relaxed, took a couple more deep breaths and let herself start daydreaming.
“I see you’re done exploring,” Daphne’s amused voice jerked her out of her reverie. “Let’s get you out of there.” She touched a button on the controls. It seemed for a moment that nothing happened.
“Puzzled?” Daphne still seemed to be amused. “Look at the buttons you can get to.”
“Oh!” A third button had appeared. Jenny put her finger on it. The front came up and the bottom slid out. The shackles unlocked and she scrambled to her feet, grabbing her clothes to get dressed.
“So what were your impressions?”
“It’s really confining. There’s nothing to do except play with yourself.”
“She can’t trigger the stimulation routines in her chastity shield. That’s one of the things that being collared does: your owner gets control of whether you can stimulate yourself sexually, and we turn it off until later in the sequence.
“Not having anything to do is the point. All she can do is let her mind drift, and that lets us get in and do the conditioning.”
“That’s wicked,” Jenny said in admiration.
“It’s efficient,” Daphne said. “The sooner she relaxes and lets the conditioning routines work, the sooner she’ll settle into being a ponygirl and forget any idea of ever being anything else. She won’t be happy until she does.
“That’s your ponygirl training session for today,” she said, again with a tinge of malicious amusement in her tone.
“Huh?”
“Remember I told you we were going to train you as a ponygirl and as an engine? It starts by sitting in a training cage with nothing to do except let your mind drift. They installed a brain monitor and some stimulus-response units during your surgery. There’s an AI program that does the actual conditioning. It’s not fast, but it’s insidious. Once it’s done, the equipment in the collar will keep things on track.
“By the time a girl gets here she’s already had at least four days of it while she’s recovering, and possibly a few more if they had to hold her for a while before surgery.”
Jenny shook her head. “I’ve got one question. Why?”
“We do it so that you’ve got the experience of being trained, and also the experience of what being a ponygirl is like. There are some other benefits as well.
“We have prosthetics for the throat and jaw units as well as a prosthetic tail and a wig that lets us put your hair up into a fairly decent mane. You’ll learn to put the prosthetics in and take them out, and you’ll spend three of your supposed off shifts a week in a cage with them installed. You’ll be fully trained in less than three months.
“I think I understand being trained as a ponygirl, but why an engine?”
“This is one manufacturing operation that does both ponygirls and engines. This unit is stage 2 of the ponygirl process; stage 2 of the engine process is exactly the same except that they do engine mount training instead of rein training. All of our manufacturing workers are trained as both ponygirls and engines.”
“Uh, right. I hope.”
Daphne giggled. “I love the way new trainees react. While you’re being trained you’ll spend three of your off shifts a week in a cage going through the same process one of our ponygirls experiences. Well, almost the same. You’ll start with rein and flexibility training, and then shift to engine mount and strength and stamina training. You’ll do a flexibility session the rest of the days as well, but it won’t be combined with cage training. Toward the end of your training you’ll begin spending a day and a half as either a ponygirl in one of the cages or mounted as an engine. That takes up your supposed day off, so you get a real day off once every two weeks. When you’re done training you get your off shifts back, but you’ll keep the day and a half every two weeks schedule.”
Jenny looked at her. “Are you sure I haven’t gone insane and I’m hallucinating?”
Daphne laughed.
“This is all highly automated. We give them two rein training sessions, a flexibility and a strength and stamina session each day, and service them four times. That comes out to 320 touches a day when the unit has 20 ponygirls in the cages.”
“Touches?”
“That’s manufacturing-speak for the number of times someone has to touch the product on the way from raw material to the customer.
“With two shift workers and 16 hours a day, that’s about 10 touches an hour per worker, or about 6 minutes per touch. You don’t have to hurry so much you make mistakes, but you do have to keep at it.”
“Oh!”
“One reason it’s set up that way is that you don’t have the time to get to know the girls when they arrive. By the time you’ve worked with one enough times for her to stand out of the herd as a real individual, she’s well on the way to being a ponygirl.”
“Well, that’s the talk. Now let’s go look at some ponygirls.”
Jenny’s head is spinning with the orientation, but she’s finally going to what’s in the cages. Or maybe who. Continue on to the next exciting episode of Ponygirl Minder.
If you enjoyed this story, please e-mail the author and let him know. He likes to hear from his loyal fans, and it gives him some motivation to keep writing this stuff. Of course, if you're a publisher and you'd like to buy some of these stories, please let him know. The starving author in the garret makes a great story, but it sucks in real life.