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. 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. They have an enlightening discussion on the way.
Then they stop overnight. When the dust (not to mention the sex) settles, Jenny discovers that Beth thinks she’s Jenny’s wife. The settle in, and Jenny discovers her work assignment is with the Taxi Service. The taxi service uses ponygirls, of course. Lots of ponygirls. And she finds time to collar Beth, much to Beth’s pleasure.
Jenny finds out about the fake ponygirls at the Taxi Service, and starts training them. Audry discovers what’s happening to her.
“I didn’t anticipate this,” Jenny told Vicky when she came in for her shift the next morning.
“Oh?”
“Audry.” Jenny nodded to the floor outside the office. “She found out who I am and sent me a message last night. A long message. I guess once she started writing it all began to come out.
“It boils down to being both scared of becoming a real ponygirl and fascinated by it. And she’s afraid the fascination is going to win out. She tried not coming back and wasn’t able to.”
“She has to make up her mind by herself,” Vicky said. “However.” She sat down and pulled up Audry’s dossier.
“If she wanted to come back in from being a wild girl, we could offer her an entry-level position as a collared worker. That’s not a promise, but if you want to talk to her, you can dangle it as a possibility.”
“You’d take her?”
“She’s behaving herself, and she certainly knows her way around. There are a couple of others that we were about ready to ask the police to take them away before you started training them. They’ve settled down since.”
“Well,” Jenny said, “it’s not like I can pretend I don’t know she’s not a real ponygirl any more. Although I doubt if it makes any difference when she’s on shift. I’ve got her to the point that she’s not paying attention to what anyone says around her, and that includes me.”
“There she is,” Jenny told Beth as she looked around the crowded club.
“I see. That mane is interesting.”
Just then Audry stood up and waved at them.
“The die is cast,” Beth said portentously, and then spoiled the moment with a giggle.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Audry began after the server had brought them their drinks.
“I’d say: then don’t, but it would kind of spoil the reason we’re all here,” Jenny responded dryly.
“I’m afraid I’m getting addicted to the ponygirl experience.”
“Quite likely. My old employer said they used to lose a lot of employees that way. One day they’d just crawl into a training cage and say: finish me up.”
Audry took a deep breath. “If I don’t do anything, what’s the next step?”
“Taxi,” Jenny answered. “You’ve really got most of the inhouse jobs except maintenance down quite well, and we don’t want to put you on that until we’re sure you can’t read diagnostic codes.”
“I’d think that would be a plus,” Shelly put in.
“It would, except that the bosses think that it would upset the rest of the ponygirls. They’re used to having one of us doing it if they can’t figure it out themselves.”
“Point,” Beth nodded.
“So the next major piece would be training you for taxi. That’s what the taxi service does, after all.”
“I’d have to have a real tail for that, wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t think so. Your prosthetic seems to be quite workable. So are your prosthetic jaw and throat pieces. What I’d worry about is the muscle bulk and whether the leggings will stand up. We could put a real horsehair coat on your legs easily enough, but that might put a crimp in your social life.”
“So how do I keep working as a ponygirl and not fall in all the way?”
“See, you finally managed to ask it!” Jenny teased. “The idea is to make it less attractive, and we do that by cleaning and brightening your everyday experience. I’d really prefer that you have a competent therapist do it, but I suspect you don’t want to take the chance.”
“I checked,” Shelly said. “There aren’t any therapists that could do it that I’d trust for an off the record transaction.”
“I was afraid of that. That’s why I asked you to have a friend, and I brought my roommate. We need witnesses. I could work on it, but it’s way out of my area of expertise, and you’d have to ask me formally. No sliding around the issue.”
“I’d think you’d know how,” Shelly said.
“Well, almost. It’s not a task I needed to know to work on shift with the ponygirls we were training. It’s a task I would need for training a new worker, and that’s optional. I was looking at some of the material, but I got yanked to go to college before I got very far.
“It’s a design problem: I’ve got to adjust her personality so the real world is more attractive than the ponygirl world, and the adjustment has got to meld smoothly with her current personality. That’s going to take some work, and it’s work that I’m only barely qualified for.”
“Hence the witnesses,” Audry sighed. “What’s likely to happen?”
“Well, if it works you’ll find your attitude much more positive and forward-looking. I suspect that once it settles in you’ll probably want to come in from being a wild girl. You’d probably either forget the ponygirl thing, or keep pieces because they’re darn useful.”
“Parts are useful?”
“Oh, yes. You’ve already found that ponygirls learn certain types of things very rapidly. We can’t train them the way we train normal people, but we don’t need to. As long as we can show them, step by step, how something works, they’ll take it from there. They do it so fast it’s almost scary. It’s one of the reasons I work maintenance: I can keep up with them; the rest of the staff can’t.”
“So, you do it that way?”
“Right. It was part of my training. I can slide into the ponygirl mindset and then right out again. You’re set up so that you’ll stay in the mindset while you’re on shift, but you’ll be able to decide if you want to shift in and out while you’re off shift. And you won’t accidentally slide into it if you’re dressed and don’t have the prosthetics in your mouth.”
“So what’s likely to happen if I just go on?”
“I’ll finish training you, and we’ll put you to work like any other ponygirl. You’ll spend most of your work time on the street. Most likely you’ll eventually quit taking your nights out. Once you don’t do that for a while, we’ll call the appropriate authority, and you’ll become a permanent ponygirl, tail and all.”
“So it’s either quit cold turkey, ask you to fiddle my brain a bit, or accept the bridle and bit?”
“I’d say that covers it.”
She grimaced. “I don’t have the willpower to quit. That’s what’s got me scared. So go ahead and start work revising my normal personality. Goddess knows it hasn’t done me that much good. Whatever you come up with has got to be better than this.”
“Jenny, would you please introduce yourself around,” Dr. Abrams said when the seminar participants had settled.
She looked around at the rest of the students. Older students. Most of them grad students. Well, it was an opportunity. She hoped.
“I’m Jenny Jackson, and the faculty decided I’d better take this seminar because I’ve been conditioning ponygirls for the taxi service.”
“A ha!” a young man named Miles exclaimed. “I’ve seen the diagram, but they keep how they do it rather close.”
“I’ve got their permission to let Jenny talk about it,” Dr. Abrams said smoothly. “Continue.”
“Well, that’s not too far out of my area of expertise; I was in the unit at Reliable that did the conditioning, and I’ve been conditioned so I can slide in and out of that state at will. I’d gotten to a level 2 certification on what I needed to know to work a shift, which means I can read the diagrams and track the process and yell if anything looks wrong.
“The background is that every once in a while a wild girl decides to fake being a ponygirl and hide at the taxi service. We decided I could finish their conditioning as long as they could still decide to leave for an evening out or permanently.”
“Now that’s something I want to see,” a young woman named Katie said.
“You will,” Dr. Abrams said. “Continue.”
“The big problem with the system is that the ponygirl state is emotionally addictive. So one of the girls figured out that someone was working her over, and had a hacker friend track me down. She asked if I could do something that would let her keep being a ponygirl at the taxi service, but would stop the slide into being full time.
“As you might imagine, that put me in a bit of a bind. Turning her into a full time ponygirl is over the line, so I had an obligation to do something. We couldn’t find anyone else to do it, so I dug in, figured out an approach, and started in on the conditioning sequence.”
“Good going,” another girl, Yilsa, said. “An ethical problem to boot. This is going to be interesting.”
“That’s enough on the background. So who’s the subject?”
Jenny tapped her reader, and Audry sprang to life on the screen that dominated one end of the room.
“This is Audry. She’s around 20. She decided to drop out in the last year of high school, and put in quite a bit of work to get a disguise as a ponygirl. She’s got the brain scanner installed. Here’s what it looked like just before she vanished and took up residence at the taxi service. I had a hacker dig this out of the medic’s files.” She threw up the diagram.
The resulting discussion flew over her head. She shook it ruefully and sat back to pick up what she could.
“I think,” Dr. Abrams said after ten minutes, “we’ve decided she’s in an at risk category so her dropping out shouldn’t be a surprise.” Most of the students nodded.
“Good. Now for the next piece. Jenny?”
“I came on the scene about eight months ago, and spotted her a couple of months after. I did a bit of checking and got authorization to complete her conditioning and put her to use, with the provisos I mentioned earlier. Here’s the brain scan from just before I started.”
The discussion was, if anything, even more intense. However, Jenny understood most of it since it swirled around the changes that two and a half years of pretending to be a ponygirl had made in her brain.
“I think this is enough,” Dr. Abrams eventually pronounced. “It’s fairly obvious that she’s suffered a great deal of deterioration in the areas that are excluded while she’s being a ponygirl, and that aren’t exercised while she’s out enjoying herself.”
“Those aren’t that much, surely,” Katie said.
“It’s the decision areas,” Miles replied. “The girl who could decide to hide in the taxi service and carry the plan through no longer exists. She simply doesn’t have the will power any more.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Good. Jenny, put your plan up for us to critique. Class, we’re going to take it apart and see if we can put it together better.”
Jenny put her plan up on the screen and tensed a bit.
“Enough!” Dr. Abrams said a half hour later. “Jenny?”
“I knew it wasn’t all that good, but I had no idea it was quite that bad.”
“Cheer up,” Miles told her. “The first plan I put up wasn’t half as ambitious, and I left with body parts strewn all over the floor.”
“Ouch!”
Katie giggled. “The first plan always gets torn to shreds. I think you did quite well, considering.”
“I agree,” Dr. Abrams said. “That’s a good part of the reason for this seminar: to rip bad analysis and plans to shreds. The rest is to be able to hold up under the criticism.
“How’d it go?” Beth asked that evening.
“Horrible. Blood and body parts all over the floor. Then when they put the poor thing back together, it looked like Frankenstein’s Monster.”
“That bad?”
“The original was worse,” Jenny giggled as she grabbed her roommate for a coming home kiss.
“You’re looking better,” Shelly said as Audry slid into the seat across from her.
“I’m feeling better, even though I’m frustrated as all get out!”
“About what?”
“Being a ponygirl isn’t anywhere near as attractive as it was, but I’m still not able to pull myself away.”
“Didn’t you get Jenny’s message?”
“I did, but I haven’t been able to set up a meeting.”
“She sent me the outline in case you couldn’t get together. I gather her class schedule has turned horrible.”
“Oh?”
“Well, the good news is that you’re not in any trouble with the police.”
“I thought going wild was trouble!”
“Technically it’s a status violation, but nobody cares. The only time they’ll bring it up is if they’re after you for other reasons and they want to pad the charge list, or if there are too many wild girls and they want to thin them out with a sweep. The trouble with the police comes because of what you have to do to support yourself. Right now you’ve got a steady job record at the Taxi Service, and it’s paying you more than enough to cover your staying there, plus spending money.”
“It’s paying me?”
“Check your account balance.”
“I’ve got an account?” Audry pulled her reader out of her purse.
“I’ve got an account,” she echoed herself. “How’s that work?”
“I wondered so I dug in a bit. Their bean counters keep track of how much using ponygirls for labor instead of keeping them in cages when they weren’t on the street was saving them. It’s lots. So they decided to classify you as casual labor and award you a chunk of it. That keeps them strictly legal. You’re getting paid below minimum, and they’re taking room and board off the top, but it’s still credit.”
“It certainly is. I can buy some decent clothes and do some clubbing without hustling.”
“Well, that leads into the bad news. She strongly suggested that you sign up for a sim. Specifically one of the strategy dungeon crawls. She included a list.”
“Why?”
“She said you need to strengthen your planning and persistence, and the sims on that list were recommended by the health service for teens and twenty-somethings that had problems in that area.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t say, but I can guess. It took a lot of planning and persistence to set up to hide at the taxi service, right?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it now? I’d bet that the girl who planned that wouldn’t have had a bit of trouble pulling out when it turned sour.”
“Some.” She sagged briefly in her chair. “You’re right. It’s going to take a chunk out of that balance.”
“So?” Shelly shrugged. “It’s not like you really need to splurge. There are cheap clubs with decent entertainment, and there are used and overstock clothing stores. They’re just not the latest fashions.”
Audry sighed. “So there are. It’s just...” she paused. “Damn. I recognize the feeling. She’s got the conditioning set up.”
“She does?”
“Yeah. I just realized that spending money I might need later wasn’t good planning. Damn!”
Shelly laughed. “So she’s really on your case.”
“I asked for it, I shouldn’t complain.”
“Complain all you want, it’s good for you.” They both giggled.
“She said something else that really got me thinking,” Shelly added after they came down.
“Oh?”
“It was that you could come back from being wild.”
“I can?”
“I didn’t think so until I started digging. You’d have to have a job offer, and I’d have to set it up, but you’d go back as a collared worker. And the taxi service is willing to take you on.”
“Collared worker.” Audry wrinkled her nose.
“That’s what you’re doing now.”
“So it is. It’s better than being a ponygirl, which is where I was headed if I’d stayed for graduation.”
“Nope.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dug into your school records. Learned a lot, too, and most of it I suspect that they don’t want me talking about. Let’s just say that when you dropped out, the odds were two to one in favor of your becoming a collared worker, and less than one in 15 of your becoming either an engine or ponygirl, with engine being somewhat in the lead.”
“I never knew that! So there was even a chance of becoming a senior worker?”
“About 1 in 5. There was also a very small chance of a college slot. They don’t tell you. Odds aren’t certainties, and they could have changed in any direction before graduation.”
“It still rankles.”
“So? Look around you. Four women out of five are wearing collars, and one of those is a wife. The only way you avoid a collar is by being a professional or a senior worker. You could work your way up. It’s not all that common, but it’s possible and it does happen.”
“Fat chance.”
“For you, it’s possible. I’m not going to tell you the detail, but your school records indicated that your problem was mostly personality. You’re intelligent and you used to have a good deal of persistence and planning ability. What Jenny’s doing should take care of the personality issues.”
Audry started to say something and paused, startled.
“Damn. She did it again. You did say I’m back in the system?”
“Don’t push it, but as long as your credit balance holds out, nobody’s going to ask questions. You won’t have any problem signing up for the sim. I’ll still have to make one more record change if, or rather when, you decide to come back in for real.”
“Gee, thanks. What do I owe you for tonight?”
“Forget it. Jenny’s message pointed me to more than enough interesting stuff to pay for it.”
“Well, see you around,” Audry said as she slid out of the booth.
“Be well,” Shelly replied. She looked after the wild girl thoughtfully as she walked off. This one might make it. Then she looked up as another young woman came out of the crowd and slid into the seat.
“I need a hacker badly,” she started.
The Powers That Be (not very well specified) have decided that since Jenny is mucking about with her little herd of ponygirls minds, she’d better take the appropriate seminar. Audry is beginning to pull out of the mess she’s gotten herself into. Does she make it? You’re going to have to wait for the next exciting episode of Ponygirl Minder to find out.
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.