Chapter 1

Lynn Daniels sat silently staring at the message holo hovering above her small desk. The information it conveyed was as damaging as it was expected. The last few months had been so trying she was almost numb to the final coup de gras.

"Final Foreclosure Notice" it read. That and a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo all boiled down to the fact that the bank was going to take possession of their home in less than one month. How nice of them to mention that they would be willing to issue a short term "bridge loan" for the three months plus penalties, that they were in arrears, so long as she was willing to put herself up as collateral for the loan. She sighed and waved her hand making the offensive message disappear.

She sighed again and turned in her chair startled to discover she wasn't alone. Her seventeen-year-old son, Jack, was standing in the den's doorway casually leaning up against the doorframe. It wasn't that he was so imposing; he stood six feet and probably weighed in at around one-hundred-seventy pounds, pretty average for a senior in secondary school. No, what was disturbing about him at times was his habit of moving quietly, almost like a cat stalking its prey. Lynn wasn't even sure he realized he was doing it; it just came naturally to him. How unlike Troy, his bull of a father whose every step could be heard throughout the house when he moved, if his bombastic voice didn't cover it up that is. Lynn missed hearing that rumble. It had been almost four years since the accident had taken him from them and she still missed it.

"Jack!" she exclaimed. "I wish you wouldn't do that! You almost made me pee my pants!"

"Sorry, Mom," he answered in that soft, almost singsong lilt of his. "Maybe I'll start wearing a bell around my neck so you'll know where I am." The grin he was trying to hide under his obviously faked façade of remorse not only made her want to start giggling but again made her wonder if he really did do it on purpose.

"Harrumph," she shorted. "Maybe we'll just do that. Serve you right for sneaking up on a poor old woman."

"Old woman," he snorted himself. "You're barely old enough to vote. Don't give me that 'old woman' routine." Lynn knew that at 38 she wouldn't be considered old by any stretch of the imagination, especially these days when life expectancy, barring accident or terrorist attack, was well above the century mark. Still, there were times, like now, when she felt exceedingly old.

"What was that?" he asked. "It seemed to bother you. Not more collection agencies I hope. It's not like we have anything left for them to take."

"Nothing for you to be concerned with," she said standing up. "And, no, it wasn't a collection agency." Mentally she crossed her fingers. She didn't like lying to him, and it was technically true: the bank wasn't a collection agency ― but it was at best an obfuscation even if it didn't make it to the level of blatant lie. Still, she didn't want him to worry about that which he couldn't control; that was her job. He seemed to think it was his duty now that his father was gone to become the man of the house and take care of their troubles. Lynn freely admitted to herself she let him most of the time. For some reason he seemed to be able to get even the most obstinate and unreasonable people to see things his way.

He did it with reason and unrelenting tenacity. It helped that he was a genius, Tested and Certified, Lynn thought proudly. His father always quipped that if his son's brainpower could be transmuted into muscle he would have been playing for the Chicago Bears at the age of twelve. One of her late husband's few faults was his inability to appreciate intellectual pursuits over purely physical ones.

Not that Jack had grown up to be some wormy little science dweeb. He played a few sports: swimming, tennis and even volleyball. He held his own but couldn't be said to excel in any of them. He was a well-rounded, level-headed kid who just happened to be extremely smart. He even refused to be accelerated out of secondary school and into collage claiming he wanted the school experience with people his own age. Lynn suspected part of the reason was her inability to pay the college tuition, scholarships being a part of the dim past. The schools were little more than businesses and far fewer people could afford to attend. Luckily his school was one of the few that allowed their advanced students to take post-secondary courses for credit. By now he had enough credits to be the equivalent of a late semester sophomore or early semester junior. Hopefully it would help in the future.

"Then what was it?" he asked. Lynn knew she had to get out of there fast and find something else to occupy his interest or his natural relentlessness would eventually drive the truth out of her.

"Nothing at all," she said lightly, waving her hand again to lock the deskcomp. "What is it you wanted, dear?"

"I just wanted to tell you dinner was ready," he said, seeming to ignore the now-locked computer.

"Oh good, I'm starving," she said pleasantly. "I'll set the table and have everything ready in about five minutes. Make sure you're there on time." She patted his arm as she walked past him and continued down the hall towards the kitchen.

"Sure, Mom, no problem," he said to her retreating back. He watched her for a moment to make sure she wasn't coming back, a chore that was pleasant no matter how you looked at it. Jack would be the first to admit his mother was one very hot chick. When he was sure she wasn't coming back he stepped into the den and within a few seconds had the computer unlocked and all recent messages transferred to the perscomp strapped to his wrist. For good measure he reprogrammed the deskcomp to send him a copy of everything she sent or received. That task completed, he relocked the deskcomp, exited the room and made his way to dinner. In all it had taken him about thirty seconds to accomplish.

Later that evening he transferred the downloaded data to his own deskcomp for ease of review and read her correspondence with single-minded attention. Finished, he sat back and idly drummed his fingers on the desktop. Suddenly he froze and after a few completely motionless minutes he grinned and started "digging" into the web.

He had a lot of research to do.

+ + +

"Mom, do you have a minute to talk?" Jack asked after rapping lightly on doorframe to her bedroom. Lynn had been lightly dozing with the holo on after another fruitless evening of trying to think of a way they could get out of the mess they were in.

"Sure honey," she said, wrapping her robe back around her legs and patting the bedspread beside her. He sat down and stared at her intently.

"This looks serious," she said lightly while trying to avoid his direct look. "Who's in trouble? You or me?"

"Both of us I would say," he began. "I know about the problem with the mortgage. Have you thought of any solutions yet?"

"How do you know about that?" she demanded. "That's not something you should be worrying about anyway. No, I haven't thought of anything yet, but I'm sure something will come up. I just need to find a job, that's all. I'm sure I'll find one any day now."

"Let's be realistic, Mom," he replied calmly. "Just about any job you'd be qualified for is being taken by an IS. Almost all of the non-professional labor out there is being done by Indentured Servants; even some of the professional work is going that way now. Face it, Mom, we have a slave society and we have to learn to survive in it."

"It's not nice to call them slaves," Lynn snapped. "IS is bad enough."

"I'm sure the difference means a great deal to them," he again said calmly. Somehow even obviously sarcastic remarks weren't quite as biting when he said them. "However, whether you call them ISs, slaves or labor fairies; the result is the same. There isn't a job out there for you that pays enough to make it worth the fuel to get to it."

"Jack, I'm trying, really trying," Lynn said, coming close to tears. "I just don't know what to do."

"I know, Mom, I know," Jack scooted over and put his arm around her shoulder. She did lean into him and start softly sobbing then. "I've been thinking about it for the past week or so and I have a few ideas that might help us out."

Lynn froze for a moment. The last thing she had wanted was to impose this problem on her son; unfortunately it appeared she wasn't going to have that option. What he said was entirely correct: Just about everything she was qualified to do was already being done by an IS. The fact was the labor market was literally a "buyers market." Most employers would rather buy the body off the repo market, train it for what they want and keep it for as long as they want. The awful fact was so many men had been killed in the past war against the Islamic fanatics and the recycled communists in South America that there was an overabundance of women of all ages. Human life was cheep and females in particular were a resource corporations and the government were quite willing to utilize.

Of course in the United States outright slavery was still against the law. Sort of. The war, with its resulting destruction of almost all natural petroleum resources and the loss of so many lives brought about a global economic depression unseen before. In the U.S. so many banks were going under because of bad debts and personal bankruptcies the government finally felt it had to step in.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

No slavery or involuntary servitude? Not exactly. All it took was being convicted of a crime. What crime? That's was up for interpretation and Congress tended to interpreted it rather liberally. At first it was the standard capital crimes and felonies, but soon it was a crime to fail to pay off any unsecured debt. There had been talk of making any crime eligible for Indentured Servitude (slavery was never officially used; far too much baggage in the U.S. for that word to be condoned), however this set off a number of general strikes and near-riot demonstrations so the idea was quietly pulled and hidden away. The fact was nobody seemed to care if murderers or deadbeats were forced to work without pay, but try that for going a little too fast on the parkway, well, that hit a little too close to home.

The end result was Lynn found it almost impossible to compete against a woman who was forced to work for twelve hours a day for no pay, and then had to sleep with the boss at night! It isn't fair, she protested. She also knew it didn't matter what she thought.

"Okay," she sighed. "I have to admit, I have no idea what to do. What did you come up with? By the way, I'm pretty ticked off you hacked my system. We're going to talk about that later, mister!"

"Sure, Mom," he said. "I'm sure I should feel bad about that." Lynn noticed he didn't say he felt bad, just that he should feel bad about it. In spite of everything the one thing she had never caught him doing was lying to her. He may twist words into pretzel logic, sounding like one thing while actually saying another, but once his words were parsed out you would find he invariable told the truth. Always.

"Anyway," he continued. "The first thing we need to look at is what assets we have. The liabilities we already know."

"That's easy," she said. "I have about three thousand ND (New Dollars) in the bank and I suppose you have a few from the jobs you've been doing. Other than that we don't have squat. Probably everything left here in the house is worth less than a couple of thousand, even if you could get someone to buy it."

"That's about what I figure," Jack replied. "With one big exception, we have ourselves. Well, you do anyway. Since I'm not eighteen I can't contract my body, but you can."

"So you also want me to sell myself, do you?" Lynn had pretty much come to the same conclusion but was disappointed that Jack would so readily sell out his own mother. "But I guess you're right. The bank made me an offer; I guess I'll have to take it."

"Bullshit!" he exclaimed. Lynn was stunned for a second, Jack almost never swore. "Those fucking parasites? They'd be getting you for almost nothing! What, a couple months of house payments? Nothing doing!"

"Hey! Watch that language! Well anyway, just how much do you think this old carcass is worth? " Lynn chuckled. "Think of putting me on the block or something?"

"Oh," Jack blushed. "I guess that did sound bad. But actually you're right in a manner of speaking."

"What?" Lynn was getting confused. "What do you mean?"

"Well, let's start out with the obvious," Jack said. "To begin with you are a beautiful woman. I know it sounds bad but you are worth a hell of a lot more than a couple of month's house payments."

"Thanks, I guess," Lynn replied with a wrinkled brow. "Do you really think I'm pretty?"

"No, I said you are beautiful, not pretty," Jack shook his head in wonder. Here they were talking about selling her into slavery and she wanted to know if he thought she was pretty! "Let's be honest: there would be plenty out there who would just love to have you as their own personal sex slave, and pay top dollar to do it!"

"So you want to pimp me out?" she snorted. "Make your mother a whore? How nice. I think if that's going to happen I'd rather have a stranger do it to me."

"Sorry, Mom, that's not what I meant." Jack quickly held up his hands. "All I was trying to say is that you are worth one hell of a lot more than what the bank was offering. Now hear me out: I think I've figured out a way that wouldn't involve you having to sleep with anybody you didn't want to."

"So I get to pick who I whore myself to?" Lynn was starting to get a little angry.

"Forget the whoring," Jack waved his hand. "That isn't what this is about at all. Believe me: I have no desire for you to have to sleep with strangers. What I'm proposing would save you from that. If this works out like I think it will you would never have to worry about that again."

"Huh?" Lynn's anger vanished and was replaced by puzzlement. "Okay, you have my attention."

"Thank you," Jack said with a grin. "Now there are basically two different ways you can use your, well, your body, as collateral for a loan. The first is pretty straightforward. You sign an agreement saying if you don't make the payment the lenders can take possession of you and you become an IS at that time. Follow me so far?"

Lynn rolled her eyes at him but nodded anyway.

"I know: pretty simple stuff. This is what the bank is offering you. The problem with these loans right now is the interest rates are outrageous. It would be hard enough to make the interest payments alone, never mind the principal. It is definitely a sucker bet and I don't want you to take it."

"But..." Lynn started but she stopped quickly when Jack again held up his hand.

"Please, let me finish," he said. "Like I said I don't want you to take that route. Now, I have found there is another way to get a loan. It's through private investors and doesn't go through the normal institutions. The advantage is they offer larger amounts and better interest rates."

"If those are the advantages what are the disadvantages?" Lynn asked. "If they're such a good deal everybody would do this and not go to the banks."

"True," Jack admitted. "There is a big disadvantage. These guys won't lend on the possibility of the collateral becoming IS, they demand it happens before they lend the money."

"So I would have to become an IS before we get the money? Then what's the point? I'd become an IS either way; this way it would just be sooner," Lynn quipped.

"The difference is by becoming a Voluntary Indentured Servant you have the choice of who or what owns your contract," Jack said with a grin. "You see, we set up a corporation, you can do that before you go VIS, and name me chairman and president. You own the one share of stock and proxy the vote to me while you are VIS. As you know ISs can't own or vote anything, and normally being underage I can't either. However, if we set it up like this, the corporation owns your contract and I control the corporation. Nothing can happen to you so long as we make the payments."

"Are you sure this is even legal?" she asked. "Sounds kind of fishy to me."

"Yep, it's legal," Jack said with a nod. "I had three different law firms review it and give their opinion. Yeah, it's using loopholes, but so what? What else is the practice of law but knowing which loopholes to use?"

"Where did you get the money to hire lawyers?" Lynn started to ask. She stopped when she realized she knew exactly where he got the money. Jack often hired himself out to local firms who were having problems with their computers. He could practically make them roll over and beg for him so he always had fairly steady work whenever he wanted it.