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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. She finds out that manufacturing only looks simple; it’s anything but.
Meanwhile, a girl named Audry has decided to drop out and become a wild girl; she’s going to hide out at the Taxi Service as a ponygirl.
By now Jenny has spent several months in Stage 2 of Ponygirl Manufacturing, has gotten to criterion on shift work and is learning more of the business. She’s trained three of her former classmates and has been trained as both a ponygirl and an engine.
Then she finds out she’s headed to college. She collects the other three girls who will be traveling with her and gets the engines installed on their mounts in the rental car they will be taking.
“The whole ponygirl and engine thing bothers me,” Beth said once the car had pulled out onto the road, headed toward J-41 and the mountains.
“What about it?” Jenny asked from where she shared the front seat with Fran.
“Why do we do it?”
“We have alternatives?”
“I’d think we’d find something more, human, to do with them.”
“Well,” Jenny said slowly, “I had to study a whole lot of background that’s not in any history course they taught me in school. It starts off, of course, with the DNA bomb.”
“That’s ancient history! It was what, three centuries ago? There’s five of us girls for every boy. Guys like to screw around. Why not give each of them five wives and have done with it?”
“Beth,” Jenny said slowly, shaking her head, “Wives work in the home. A wife’s job is raising kids, keeping the house in good order and keeping her husband happily productive. One man can’t support five wives unless he’s somewhere near the top of the upper crust. Think about it. If one of the guys had asked you to be his wife, would you have accepted?”
“Of course I would...” Beth dribbled off.
“So would any woman who’s wired normally. We don’t need that many wives, and society needs the labor. We’re headed off to be Professionals because no guy wanted us and there are professional jobs that need a woman’s approach, and there are more women in the professions than men anyway.”
“I think what she’s getting at is the ponygirls and engines.”
“I’m not sure I understand it completely. What I read looked like it shaded an awful lot. What I was told is that there are several issues, and the big one is competition for men. Women are wired so that we want children and a man to support us while we raise them. Since the DNA bomb, there simply aren’t enough men to go around. If we left it for free choice, we’d have a morass of backbiting, undercutting, character assassination and other unlovely habits that would totally foul the efficient working of society.
“Not to mention that, given a free choice, women tend to pick a nice, caring and supportive male for a husband, and then promptly go behind his back to get knocked up by the most testosterone-soaked alpha male they can find when they’re fertile. With the enthusiastic cooperation of that testosterone-soaked alpha male.
“That’s why the chastity shields came into use after the Reorganization. If you’re not wearing a collar, you can have sex with any guy you want when you’re not fertile but you can’t take it off when you’re in your fertile period. If you are wearing a collar your owner can keep you from having sex with anyone but him when you’re fertile.”
“Owner?” Beth asked. “Wives don’t have owners.”
“Owner, husband, whatever,” Tracy answered. “You listed the guys you liked, but he’s the one that picked you, he’s the one that riveted the collar around your neck and it stays there until one or the other is cremated. The collar says you’re devoted and obedient. He’s in control, and you do what he says. That spells owner to me, and so what? If I’d have been picked it would have been ‘rivet that collar around my neck and let’s see how fast you can get me pregnant’.”
“Right on,” Fran said enthusiastically.
“It’s also why marriage is permanent,” Jenny continued. “It doesn’t matter if he’s got a dozen admirers that would love to replace his wife or even if he wants to replace her with one of them; it’s not going to happen. Everybody knows it, which still doesn’t entirely stop the trickle of women into the engine ranks who tried to displace a legal wife.
“The marriage courses go into compatibility; they try to make sure he picks a girl whose personality is compatible so they’ll support each other emotionally over the long term.
“Five women for every man would tear the whole thing apart. Three is barely sustainable; we sideline the other two as ponygirls and engines.”
“What if we switched it around?” Beth asked.
“Switch it around how? Women are wired to stay home, raise kids and get their man to bring home the resources. We don’t have to do that, but most of us would have dropped the chance at college and a professional career like a hot potato if we’d have been chosen. That’s why the guys pick their wives first. College and a professional career is second prize.”
“Believe it,” Tracy said.
“Although,” Jenny added thoughtfully, “a lot of wives get both.”
“Oh?” Fran asked.
“About half of the guys go to college, and they take their new wives with them. She can take classes, and most of them do. It’s encouraged. A college trained mother gives her daughters a much better chance of being in the professional or senior worker categories, besides being a better fit for a college trained husband. It also means that she’s got a natural entry into the professional or senior worker ranks after her brood is grown and has left.
“Anyway, for most of us the wife and mother slot is the prize, and if there is more than one woman officially in the household, they’re going to fight over it unless the roles are set in concrete. At least most of them will. I’m told the symbol for trouble in one of the picture languages is two women under one roof.”
Tracy laughed. “I’ve heard stories. It isn’t pretty.”
“But still,” Beth persisted, “how can anyone do that to someone else?”
“Maybe some background would help?” Fran said. “I worked with engines, and the one thing I can tell you is that they’re not suffering. Jenny?”
“Their brains have been programmed into a different functional pattern. It doesn’t include the language areas or higher centers, but otherwise it’s fairly complete. My family’s ponygirl, Swifty, was quite capable of taking care of herself. She did the yard work, did most of the light maintenance and kept a very pretty flower garden. The one thing she wasn’t doing was suffering.
“The engines back there have two functional patterns. One is the same as the ponygirls; most of the large companies use their engines to maintain their own quarters and a lot of the rest of the equipment.
“The other is the mounted pattern. That’s cut down to exactly what they need when they’re mounted. They don’t remember anything. The memories simply aren’t recorded. They don’t even have a sense of time.”
“I’ll second that,” Fran said. “It certainly seems like there isn’t a middle. You unmount an engine and the first thing she’ll do is explore. Unless she’s taken straight to a cage.”
“That’s how it works. Part of engine training is to get them used to the notion that when they’re unmounted they could be someplace different, and if it’s the same it could still be different.”
“You’ve said a functional brain pattern several times. What is it?” Beth asked.
“Maybe,” Fran said, “it could be this?” Her hands flashed over the controls, and then the display steadied to a very complex diagram.
“That’s it,” Jenny said. “This is for, um, our right front engine?”
“That’s her. They told me it was some kind of engine diagnostic that needed a specialist to read.”
“This one’s simple enough. That pulsing down here is the motor areas controlling her legs. So this has got to be the pacemaker.”
“It should be in the vagina.”
“It is. Then this is the visual area. She’s just scanning. There, see that? She just noticed something, categorized it, and decided that it wasn’t important.”
“Oh. She’s the one monitoring the road in front.”
“And this last thing is the auditory area. She’s listening to music, and it’s influencing her emotional state over here slightly.”
“And the rest of it’s gray?”
“Those are parts of the brain she isn’t using. A lot of them are parts she’s been conditioned against using, and the rest she shouldn’t be using while she’s installed.”
“I see. It’s got three sections that aren’t mixing.” Tracy said from where she was leaning over the seat. “That’s what makes her an engine. So what do the back engines look like?”
Fran pressed another button, and the same diagram popped up but with less activity.
“I see. She’s pumping away and listening to music, but there’s less activity in the visual area?”
“I think she’s generating visuals from the music,” Jenny said a bit hesitantly. “There’s nothing coming in from outside. That would be this here.”
“Interesting,” Tracy said. “I’m beginning to see why you two are so calm about treating them like pieces of equipment.”
“When they’re mounted, that’s what they are. It’s still a fairly complicated functional pattern, but it doesn’t add up to a viable organism.”
“What would a ponygirl look like?” Beth asked, fascinated by the display.
“We haven’t got one,” Fran answered.
“I could probably show you, but there’s no connection,” Jenny said at the same time.
“Huh?”
Jenny laughed. “Reliable trains all of their manufacturing workers as both ponygirls and engines. I can shift in and out of both patterns, and I’ve got a fourth pattern as well. However, we don’t have any way of hooking my brain monitor to the display here.”
“We might,” Fran said thoughtfully as she examined the instrument panel. “Right. Here’s the data socket. Now if they have it in the toolbox,” she ducked under the dash and rummaged around for a minute. “Got it!” she said, holding up her prize.
“What’s that?”
“It’s the transducer for a brain scanner. I have no idea why they pack it, but it’s one of the standard tools. Probably a backup if the one in an engine’s collar is malfunctioning.”
Jenny eyed the strap and cable cautiously. “OK. Put it on me. If it blows up...”
Fran laughed. “Hold your hair out.” She deftly wrapped the strap around Jenny’s neck and plugged the end of the cable into the dash. Her hands flashed over the controls.
“Wow! That’s lit up like a fireworks display!”
“That’s the normal state,” Jenny said, as the display shifted to show what parts of her brain were active moment by moment.
“Now let’s see if I can do this. Normally I have to install the throat and jaw prosthetics first.” She leaned back and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them she looked different.
“Yipe!” Beth said. “Half of it’s gone gray”.
“Not quite half,” Fran demurred. “There’s more active than I remember seeing. Jenny?”
Jenny didn’t react.
“She’s in ponygirl mode,” Tracy reminded them. “She can’t understand you.”
“Oh, right.”
Jenny suddenly took a deep breath and closed her eyes. A moment later she said: “I’m back. Did you see the difference?”
“There was a bit more active than I remember from the engines?”
“There should be. I was in interface, not in ponygirl mode. It’s got additional pieces that ponygirls and engines don’t have.”
“Interface?”
“That’s what lets me switch back and forth.”
“So you’ve been in ponygirl mode?” Beth asked, fascinated.
“Oh, yes. Mostly for three to six hours a day although for a day and a half several times. Part of my training was to go through the same training as the ponygirls.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s hard to say. Language is missing and so is a lot of other stuff. The interesting thing is that you can’t really tell from inside that something’s missing, at least without specific training. I was beginning to see some of the things I could do in one state and not the other, but it was real slow going. Then I got sent off to college.”
“Oh.”
Tracy laughed. “I can imagine. I had an uncle who had a stroke that damaged part of his brain. Talk about frustrated!”
“Really.” Jenny giggled.
Beth thought a moment as Fran removed the interface cable and dove under the dash to put it away. “Why both ponygirls and engines?”
“You can train one person for both roles but they fill a different niche. Ponygirls are for short trips, engines provide power for long trips. They’re both useful for a lot more than their niche, but different people and companies own ponygirls and engines, and they have different needs and usage profiles.
“The full system expense for an engine is a lot higher than for a ponygirl. Individuals who buy a ponygirl usually have a couple of carriages for her to pull, a real small apartment for her to live in and some equipment for yard maintenance and other stuff she does. Large organizations like a taxi service or a commercial farm have light vehicles as well; they use battery electrics for anything heavy because they don’t need to go far.
“My family has a small cart, a racing sulky and a trap for Swifty. Mom uses the cart for shopping and to run around, and they use the trap for church and occasions where both of them have to attend. The carriages are good quality, but all three of them together cost about a tenth of what this vehicle does. All told, Swifty more than pays for herself.”
She nodded. “Engines go with vehicles that you’re going to drive a long way. There’s no point to using an engine if you’re going to go back to your home base in less than fifty miles or so; your battery will take you that far and you can recharge overnight. So engines are for trips like this, or that freight that passed us a few miles ago, or for rich kids that have more money than good sense.”
“So they do a lot more than just pull carriages or pedal generators?”
“Most of them do. Most people and companies are going to put them to whatever work they can find rather than keep them in a cage. It’s more efficient and keeps them happy. The big trucking companies sometimes keep part of their inventory in cages, but that’s because they’ve got more engines than housekeeping and maintenance work, not because they like to see them sitting in cages. If they could find work for them, they would.”
“They were training me for something that involved engines,” Fran added. “I suppose I’d have found out in a few more weeks what it was.” She giggled. “They were still making sure I knew how to install them and service them without getting all upset about what we were doing to the poor dears.” She paused a moment.
“What you said is about what I learned. Engines are, well, engines. They live in the engine room when they’re not mounted, and they’re always bound and hobbled when you take them out to mount them or put them back.”
“I know I’ve seen ponygirls do some really strange things,” Tracy added thoughtfully.
“Most ponygirls have some interesting capabilities that people don’t have with normal brain functional patterns. Swifty certainly did. You couldn’t explain what to do, you had to show her step by step. But once you did, she learned it almost instantly and then played around with it to find how it worked and if she could improve it.
“They’re fantastic at decorative gardens, but they’re worthless at agriculture. That seems to be because they can see what’s happening in a decorative garden, but they can’t connect food plants with anything real. If they can’t puree it for nutrients right then and there, it might as well not exist. They can’t make the connections through the social organization pieces.
“I can do some of the same things, but that’s because I’ve had my normal state reorganized. The girls I knew from before that went through my unit couldn’t have done any of them before they became ponygirls.”
“You knew some of the girls you trained?” Beth sounded incredulous.
“Of course. Two were in our graduating class, and one had gone wild a couple of months before. I got to the unit as a raw trainee a couple of days before they started trickling in, and I got to take them from when they came from Stage 1 to when we delivered them to Stage 3.”
“I couldn’t stand it,” a shaken Beth said, looking at Jenny as if she’d just arrived from Mars.
“Of course not,” Tracy patted her knee to reassure her. “How those two can I haven’t any idea.” She pulled Beth over to hold her for a while.
“Could you show me how to do it?” Fran asked after the pair in the back seat had dozed off.
“I doubt it. It takes us two months to stabilize the functional states, and we need to use the brain monitor. I don’t think you’ve got it installed.”
“I don’t. I didn’t even know what it was until you showed us. All they told me was it was a diagnostic, and connect it.”
“That’s how we can program them; we can see what’s going on and use stimulus and response feedback intelligently. It’s horribly complicated. I was qualified at level two for shift work, and learning level two for interpretation and adjustment.”
“Level two?”
“We had about two dozen tasks, and each one had four levels, zero through three.”
“Level zero is...”
“Keep your f-ing hands off without a trainer standing over you,” a sleepy voice said from the back.
“Huh?” Fran turned around to look.
“My dad was in manufacturing,” Tracy said, struggling to sit upright without disturbing a sleeping Beth.
“Level one is sufficiently qualified to do it if nothing goes wrong.”
“Right.” Tracy put in. “Level two requires you to know where it comes from, where it’s going, where it fits into the total picture, what can go wrong, how to spot typical supplier screwups so you don’t lose time on defective supplies, what problems defects will cause elsewhere, and how to set up all the machines that are involved. As well as fix the more common problems.”
“And three is for trainers. Our unit had three task groups. I had qualified at two for all the tasks in the first group, which let me take a shift without having to have a mentor. I was working on the second group, which would let me train a new worker, when I got pulled to go to college.”
“So installing the functional patterns in a new worker is in the second task group?”
“Right. Reading the diagram and knowing what it means is in the first group. Diagnosing discrepancies and working out corrections is in the second. The big boss thought I was well ahead of schedule. So did my mentor.”
“That’s still awful,” another sleepy voice proclaimed from the back.
“Awful or not, my daddy didn’t bring up his daughters to fight something they couldn’t change.” Tracy took a deep breath “Society has decided that they’re best used as ponygirls and engines. I’m not going to waste my time fighting it or ruin my disposition worrying about it.”
She took a deep breath. “So you mentioned the taxi system. How does it work? One of you has to know.”
Fran shrugged. “Not me.”
“It depends on what piece you’re looking at. The ponygirls do most of the housekeeping and maintenance. The traffic computer does the scheduling, and there’s a relatively small staff that handles anything the ponygirls or the computers can’t handle on their own.”
Background. If you understood it, you’re doing better than Xaltatun! He only writes this stuff. The next exciting episode of Ponygirl Minder picks up the action with some hot lesbian sex. Well, at least the suggestion – you don’t think Xaltatun has suddenly learned how to write stroke scenes, do you?
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.