Wednesday

The sun was just coming up over the horizon as Anna and I walked hand in hand together into the DDE employee lobby to begin our mailgirl shift.

Tanisha, the security guard working the Mailgirls desk, gave me an odd look as I approached. "I almost didn't recognize you with your clothes on Nine," she smirked. "Is this a new thing?"

"Yes, ma'am," I replied although I knew it was likely to be a very temporary "thing." I was wearing a simple cotton dress with sandals which was a departure from the many previous months when I'd walk to work naked a step behind Anna as part of the dominant/submissive roleplaying that Barbara demanded of us. She had used Anna as her surrogate to get me accustomed to my role as a submissive until the day came when she would take over the dominant role herself. That day was nearly at hand now and I was about to become her personal mailgirl/slave. The refusal to play Barbara's game for these final few days was our small act of defiance, as futile as that gesture might be.

Yesterday had been miserable for me. I'd shown up to work still feeling the aftereffects of my drinking session at Hooligan's the night before and racked up more demerits in one day than I usually did in a week. At least I wasn't feeling hung over today but I remained an emotional train wreck, still reeling from that fateful meeting in Barbara's office on Monday.

I stripped and handed my clothes and sandals to Tanisha to be locked up and she strapped an MMU to my arm. Anna did the same and also had a metal collar displaying the number "1" locked onto her neck. Our nudity, the electronic leashes in the form of the MMU's, and our metal collars were meant to remind us, and everyone else, of our status as company slaves. Once stripped of any sense of dignity and normalcy the two of us headed up the stairs to the Mailgirls locker room to begin our preparations for the day.

Diana and Kelly were already there when we arrived. We exchanged some small talk but there wasn't much beyond that to say to each other. Nothing had really been resolved on Monday night other than the promise that the four of us would keep our eyes and ears open for anything we might be able to use as ammunition against Barbara.

The remainder of Diana's training had been reassigned to Anna so I'd be working a normal shift today, not that the word "normal" could ever really describe mailgirl duties. I'm not sure why Diana had originally been assigned to me on Monday. Most likely it was just another of the head games that Barbara loved to play with me. Maybe she somehow knew that I'd once been a "Bixby Girls" fan and wanted show me that she even had the power to strip and humiliate one of the icons of my youth. That might even be why she hired Diana for the role in the first place. "Who the fuck knows?" I muttered under my breath. I'd grown tired of trying to unravel the reasons behind Barbara's torturous plots and schemes.

I went through my daily ritual of preparing for my shift in front of the unseen audience on the other side of the mirror, a process that made me feel like a combination of entertainer and zoo animal. My body held no mysteries for anyone employed at DDE but I still felt the inevitable stirrings of arousal knowing I was about to put it on display once again for hundreds of clothed people. I'd never become jaded about my constant public nudity and I was actually grateful for that small gift since it appeared now there would be no end in sight to it.

My morning started out fairly routinely as I made my pickups and deliveries. I was familiar now with every inch of DDE's vast complex just as its inhabitants were familiar with every inch of my body. In my role as a lowly servant girl the best that I could usually hope for these days in an interaction with a norm was that it would be brief and businesslike. More likely, though, it would involve some combination of rudeness, condescension, or undisguised lust as they demonstrated their superiority over me. For my part, I had come to accept this degradation with submissive deference.

At one point during the morning, while kneeling on a Mailgirls mat between runs, I overheard someone say that a team from Hiromoto Industries had arrived this morning to finalize the extension of their Mailgirls deal with DDE. Anger surged through me as I thought about Mr. Hiromoto's betrayal and Mariko's apparent complicity in it. I couldn't help but wonder if they were here, though, or if I would see or talk to Mariko. I wasn't sure I even wanted to anymore or what good could come of it if I did.

If there was one thing the drinking session at Hooligan's had done, though, was help diminish my feelings of being adrift and alone. Kelly, Anna, and I had re-established the bond that had once been so strong when we were the only mailgirls working together in the tower. Diana, even though we'd just met, also felt like a part of my "crew" now, even managing to win Kelly over by the end of the night.

And although Lin's current duties and responsibilities had kept the two of us from talking much lately I knew she was another person I could trust. She once told me that she'd kept working naked even after being promoted to lead programmer of the upcoming "Mailgirl 9" game out of solidarity with me, although I was pretty sure it was mostly because she got off on it. Her job didn't require the same rules and restrictions as being a mailgirl so she was still the same filterless chatterbox as always, never shy about letting her bosses and co-workers know her opinions even as they stared at her bare tits. I resolved to try to find a way to talk to her by the end of the week. After that I'd be totally under Barbara's thumb and it would become much more difficult.

Although I was friendly with other mailgirls, I now considered Anna, Kelly, Lin, and Diana to be my inner circle, people I could trust in the days to come. The meeting with Barbara had snapped me out of whatever spell I'd been under and I'd finally come to understand that the life that she had planned for me was a path of self destruction. But did this realization happen too late to matter? If there was a way out I just couldn't see it.

My morning runs continued, up stairs and down, through corridors, past cubicles and offices. DDE's Mailgirls program, after two full years, had become a well-oiled machine and I was just one of its cogs.

The program had taken over the actual mailroom now so every package or piece of mail coming into or leaving the complex was handled by a mailgirl. There were currently thirty mailgirls serving more than three thousand employees working in the vast complex, not to mention a growing number of tangos who would be auctioned off to other licensees at the end of their six weeks of training.

Information now flowed far more swiftly and efficiently throughout the complex than it ever had before while the company's productivity, morale, profits, and stock price had never been higher. Employee turnover, among both men and women, was at an all-time low. The presence of beautiful nude women in an otherwise normal business environment now seemed so natural and organic to most DDE employees that they couldn't imagine working somewhere without that. The surprising success of the Mailgirls program at DDE had caught the eye of corporate America and resistance to a concept that had once seemed so outlandish was slowly fading.

The gap between the "norms" and the mailgirls had also never been greater. As Barbara had predicted, both groups had, for the most part, internalized their roles as masters and slaves. While inappropriate touching and sexual contact was still strictly forbidden - and there had been incidents that had cost employees their jobs - there was a growing debate at the highest levels about what the company might be able to legally get away with. Could mailgirls be forced to assume even more sexually provocative positions than they already were? Could a mailgirl be requested to "voluntarily" masturbate in front of employees since no contact would take place? Could "light" corporal punishment and bondage (spankings, paddlings, handcuffs, leashes) as punishment for disobedience and excessive demerits be written into future contracts? Just how far could they go in debasing and humiliating mailgirls and get away with it? Company lawyers had already begun researching these and other thorny legal questions.

There was also the question of what to do about mailgirls when they were away from work. While they were on the job virtually every step they took and everything they did - from bathroom breaks to the amount and type of food they were allowed to eat - was carefully monitored and controlled by the company. Away from work, however, mailgirls reverted back to being "real people." They could dress as they pleased, eat and drink too much, say whatever they wanted, and otherwise act as equals to anyone else. More and more executives at the top of DDE were finding this "problematic" since it undermined the company's emerging caste system with mailgirls at the bottom as its servant class.

Although fraternization between norms and mailgirls away from work was strictly prohibited, in reality it was something that was nearly impossible for DDE to enforce. Most of the company's youthful workforce lived in Wildwood near the DDE complex so it was inevitable that norms and mailgirls would run into each other out there in the real world and interact and converse as normal human beings. There was a growing thought in upper management that being a mailgirl needed to be a 24/7 commitment. They obviously couldn't be forced to work all day every day but their "dress code" and manner of addressing their superiors (everyone else) must be strictly enforced at all times. In other words, mailgirls must be required to remain naked and subservient even when off duty. Barbara, of course, fully encouraged this idea. Although there was still quite a bit of debate about how the logistics of this would work, the consensus was moving toward making that happen.

At 12:15 my MMU vibrated alerting me to my thirty minute lunch break. I took a quick shower to wash the morning sweat and grime off and then went to the employee cafeteria to eat my meal alone on the floor surrounded by norms. This was something that Barbara had ordered long ago because of my disobedience and I wondered if it would continue after becoming her full time pet. I actually hoped that it would if for no other reason than to have some time alone away from her.

After lunch I went back to work and was just finishing my third delivery of the afternoon when my MMU buzzed with another summons. I glanced at it to check the location and then glanced again to make sure I had read it right.

I was being summoned to that little room in the east wing. Hiromoto's room.