The One Who Wasn't Chosen

Once upon a time, Mailgirl Number Seventeen had been a fast-rising financial reporting analyst within one of the most well-recognized and well-respected bulge bracket firms on Wall Street.

She'd been Emily Evans then - a Maryland native with a diploma from Cornell, a Masters in Accounting from Stern, and a CPA. She'd spent her first few years in the workforce with Deloitte, but had made the jump to US Financial almost three years earlier. The company she'd joined way back then had disappeared, however, and in it's place now stood a forty-eight story fraternity house. The corporate culture had shifted and changed with the introduction of the mailgirls earlier in the year, and one Emily Evans had found herself caught up in the aftershocks.

Why hadn't she left in April? There'd been a mass exodus when Human Capital's pet project came online - most significantly among female employees, but well-represented by both genders all the same. There were women who feared they'd be on the hook for a nude role down on the 2nd Floor, of course, and still more who were understandably and justifiably outraged at the blatant misogyny USF was promoting. But while Seventeen had witnessed a noticeable uptick in exits within her department, that uptick was never as high as maybe it should have been. In the early days, the original six girls had been announced as "volunteers" - a party line that Human Capital continued to provide in defense of the program straight through the present. Why someone, anyone, would volunteer for such an assignment was mind-boggling, but at least the female employees at the Plaza could assure themselves that they'd never stoop to such a level and raise their own hands for the role. Seventeen had told herself that very thing in the Spring.

Rumors soon began to swirl around Mailgirl Number Six in the subsequent weeks. The fact that she'd badly flubbed a trade that had cost USF almost half a million dollars was well-known within Capital Markets, and people started connecting the dots to explain her new job. Even if it was true, Seventeen had reasoned at the time, Six had still volunteered as a mailgirl. Maybe she was going to get fired, and maybe she'd have a difficult time finding another capital markets job -- but she'd still made the decision to go the mailgirl route on her own.

Once the program got going, it was easy enough for empathy to begin to wane. If one truly believed that these girls were volunteers -- even if the alternatives to volunteering were less than optimal -- one couldn't help but write their suffering off as self-inflicted. Sure, they were under contract. And sure, there were penalties for breaking said contact. But no one had forced them to sign their names. And what sort of penalties could be so severe that these girls would subject themselves to eating out of dog bowls or getting paddled in front of an audience or squatting with legs wide open by the elevators? Maybe Seventeen could understand those first few girls in April not entirely knowing what they were signing on for. But by the time the next six girls volunteered - and then the next six, and then the six after that -- they had to know what the life of a mailgirl entailed.

When the masturbation started, everything began to click into place. Of course. Of course, of course. These girls were exhibitionists and masochists. They were the subs in the sub-dom paradigm, deriving sexual pleasure from their own debasement and degeneracy. They were sluts and whores! They put up with this because they were getting off on it. When the mailgirl terrarium in the elevator lobby devolved into a hedonistic temple of self-love, it was like a car crash that transformed the entire populace of Plaza into rubberneckers. Seventeen wasn't gay, but she'd stood outside the locker room that second or third week with Jessica Cochran and watched the show over coffee. What should have been digusting and repulsive was instead hilarious -- and Seventeen had felt the mockery and derision was earned, for the role that these girls had played in their own abasement.

It was surprising how quickly Seventeen and her coworkers had accepted the new normal. There was a naked girl showering in the elevator lobby as Seventeen arrived at work. There was a naked vagina waggling around in reception when she went to use the ladies' room. There was a pair of naked tits bouncing out of the stairwell with an urgent message for her. Sure, whatever.

But then, it was surprising how quickly the mailgirl phenomenon had exploded worldwide. It had been less than a decade since the first program had come online in Tokyo, and only within that last year or two that a gaming company out in Seattle had dared to first launch one Stateside. It had become a common enough occurrence in Southeast Asia and much of continental Europe, and even now appeared to be gaining momentum in New York. Seventeen had thought for sure that the government would step in and shut the practice down -- but good lawyers, private property, offices full of adults, and a pool of willing and consenting volunteers had stymied such attempts thus far. There was vociferous opposition from women's rights groups, as could be expected. But there had also been vociferous support from other women's rights groups, which was more unexpected. "The right to individual self-determination" and "individual life, individual choice" were not ideals Seventeen had ever thought would turn into rallying calls in defense of the mailgirl concept. But those very ideals had managed to unite a hodge-podge coalition of libertarians, sex-positive feminists, and liberal academics who, even if they didn't agree with the choices these mailgirls were making, were actively and passionately defending their right to make them.

And so Seventeen had stayed with USF; this was just the world she was living in now. She'd never opt to become a mailgirl, of course, but she was relieved all the same when the May class was launched and no one had come knocking at her cubicle. Same for June, even though word had leaked out about the "trophies" hanging in Human Capital, and Seventeen -- like Jessica, like Jen, like Ashley, like the other girls in Finance & Accounting -- had worn the sexiest pair of panties she owned...just in case she'd be called upon to undress in front of an audience. And then relief again in July, when USF reached a full roster of twenty-four mailgirls and announced future opportunities to volunteer would be limited to backfills.

The mailgirl was the lowliest of the low at USF. She was stripped and collared. She was spanked and paddled and whipped. She was humiliated and debased over and over again. But the mailgirl, despite all that, could make the case that she was the most popular girl in the company. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew her inside and out. Everyone lusted after her and wanted to get a glimpse of her. Everyone knew that she was the cream-of-the-crop - one of prettiest, hottest, most attractive girls that USF Plaza had to offer.

And so it had stung a little when Seventeen hadn't been approached.

She would have said no, flat-out. But it would have been an honor -- Honor? Really? -- to get asked. Seventeen wasn't vain, by any measure, but she knew that she was attractive. Like any girl anywhere, she had her body issues and self-doubts. She was pretty, though maybe she wouldn't have described herself "hot" or "cute." She felt self-conscious about her height. She worried that she had chicken legs. And she didn't have much of an ass. But she'd been blessed with good skin, large-but-not-cumbersome breasts, and big brown eyes, and had gained a good amount of confidence in herself since high school. Confidence that was shaken when USF more-or-less told her, "No, thank you. We'd prefer that you stay in your dimly lit cubicle on the 13th Floor."

Jessica Cochran would have signed on in an instant. She wasn't so bold as to go knocking on Will Barrow's door up on the 18th, but she was the only one of Seventeen's colleagues in Finance & Accounting who admitted out loud that she fantasized about becoming a mailgirl. It wasn't a realistic fantasy for her, though -- she was too short, too little girl-ish, too...bespectacled...to fit in among the other mailgirls. So she continued on planning her wedding, but made the flimsiest of excuses to summon a mailgirl, just to soak a little of their lives in vicariously. She even befriended a few of them, as much as USF employees were allowed to befriend a mailgirl.

In fact, there'd been that evening at the tail-end of August, when Jessica had played lookout for two of the mailgirls in the conference room. Whether it was bisexuality or full-blown lesbianism, sex among the mailgirls was rumored to be rampant. Seventeen had brushed the rumors off as nothing more than the fantasies of her male coworkers, the product of overactive imaginations and undersexed accountants. But on that particular Friday, with the rest of the floor half-empty for the weekend, Seventeen had watched Jessica lead one mailgirl, and then another, into the conference room. Within minutes, one of them was singing out "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oooooh!!!" loud enough that Seventeen couldn't ignore it, apparently courtesy of the other. Jessica had returned to her cubicle blushing, wide-eyed and smiling wickedly.

She hadn't participated; sleeping with a mailgirl was cause for termination whether it happened at the Plaza or not, and Jessica never would have been so bold as to cheat on her fiancée regardless. But she'd stood guard and watched as one of them had gone down on the other, and then promptly recounted the whole thing to Seventeen and Jen Eckersley in the aftermath. Seventeen hadn't needed all the details, but she got them anyway, and found herself wondering how anyone could get off on getting off like that -- in a public place, in front of an audience.

Yes, Jessica Cochran would have inked her signature at the bottom of a Human Capital contract without hesitation. Seventeen, for her part, had just wanted to have been asked.

Mailgirl Number Twenty-Three had quit on a Monday morning in August and had been replaced later that afternoon. The blonde Mailgirl Number Thirteen had been shipped to USF's back office in Jersey City at the start of September, only for a new, dark-haired Mailgirl Number Thirteen to take her place immediately thereafter. By mid-November, Human Capital's roster of naked mailgirls had stabilized, with no new exits or arrivals since the changing of the Thirteens. And so there was no reason for Seventeen to have been suspicious that Wednesday night when she received a calendar invite from her boss, for 9 o'clock the following morning.