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</div>It wasn't really life, it was more "existence". An orphan in the system, Parents unknown, listed as killed in one or other of the Uprisings, just another statistic. She was a criminal since birth. A free-consumer, not contributing to society and therefore unwanted by society, condemned to life in the lowest strata - quite literally. The city spiralled above the place where she had grown up, cared for by those marginally more fortunate than herself, those who had money and time to spare and lived low enough on the scale to actually give a fuck what happened to people below them.<br/><br/>The Uprisings had been about that: People at the lowest level looking up and seeing what those above them had, wanting it, climbing the ramps and the stairs, being met with armed guards and electrified barriers, arming themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on, violence and death erupting on a number of ramps, spreading quickly, fires starting, and being quenched by the removal of oxygen from the air, the smoke sucked away along with the breath of any caught nearby. Thousands died in the Uprisings, three in total (so far), but that was not even a percentage decimal place. At the last count there were half a billion souls scratching an existence from the lower levels of the city, where light was artificial, green was a colour you avoided eating if you could, and blue sky were a technothrash girl-band who had made good half a century before and had set up a foundation to help girls like Carrie Talbot.<br/><br/>Of course, the money they put in was all syphoned off at various levels. They had started in the Gutter, but they had got lucky, they had talent, their music appealed to people with money, and so now<i>they</i>were up there in the glass and the light and the clouds. Fuck them!<br/><br/>Carrie didn't need their help no more anyrun. She was indi. She had a job! She was, she told herself, on the way UP! Not much of a job, but it paid cash, fifty nuyen per session. And the irony was, if she hadn't been in the system, she would never been able to do it. The system put the bar-code on her face, and the chip in her head, and it was that chip that let her be a doll-girl. She walked through the damp filthy streets, through the half-light that was perpetual here in the Gutter, the drizzle a constant thing too. You didn't drink the water that came down for free. That was death. That water was the spillings and leaks from a thousand pipes up above, the condensation of steam and sweat and breath of a billion people rising up in the foetid air to hit the cool soft clean air in the upper layers and form droplets on cool but unwashed surfaces, to run back down, drip off and fall, down, down. Sometimes to land on a roadway and be contaminated further with the cleaning solutions they used to keep them sparkling clear, to run off again into a drain, that leaked and was filled with rats and rat piss, down through a crack to land on the back of her neck and trickle down inside her shirt, making her shiver.<br/><br/>But she was used to it. She arrived at the Doll Factory Gutter entrance, surrendered her weapons, stripped naked and stepped into the decontamination chamber that was also the lift. All her possessions were now in a locked box half a mile below her, that was keyed to her DNA and her chip. The two-g ride up to the industrial level made her knees and back ache as ever. The hot jets of disinfectant stung, but she knew that she would not be allowed in if she were in any way contaminated, so she made sure to scrub herself all over, even<i>there.</i>The disinfectant encountered the drip of contaminated and lethal water, killing off most of the bacteria and washing the rest, along with several mutated viruses, back into the drainage system, where they would mutate further, breed and again drip down into the Gutter. Not that Carrie knew nor cared. The jolt at the top made her stagger as ever. But she could do three sessions today, that was ぬ¥150. Fifty went towards her rent, the other hundred was for food, water, clothes and... She put whatever she had left at the end of the week aside. She was saving up to buy herself an ejucator program, get some smarts, get a<i>proper </i>job, buy a pass out of the Gutter....<br/><br/>The doors opened and she walked down the bulletproof corridor made of transparent plasteel, under the gaze of the armed troopers on either side.<i>That must be a great job</i>. To be paid however much to just stand there all day and point a weapon through a sealed port at naked boys and girls, and shoot one if they made trouble. The door in front of her slid open and a woman in a white hooded suit made of plastic, wearing goggles and a face mask, as if they didn't trust their own decon process, directed her to her "coffin". She thought of it as a coffin, because that's what it looked like. "My request to change shift?" She asked hopefully.<br/><br/>"Denied. You can reduce your sessions to two a day if you wish. We have plenty of candidates willing to take one off you." The voice was flat and emotionless, and not just from the mask.<br/><br/>They knew she couldn't afford to drop a session. And even if she did, that was no guarantee... The Bitch was not always on at the same time, but for some reason was always on when Carrie was locked in her coffin. She sometimes did the second session, sometimes the third, but there was one session every day that Carrie had to suffer the sick and perverted imaginings of this woman. At least, she assumed it was a woman. The avatar was female, and when human was always the same - short black hair and glowing amber eyes, usually in a blank white face, that only had a mouth when that mouth was needed to cause Carrie pain or discomfort. The woman didn't need a face apart from that, and from Carrie's perspective the abstinence of features made her that much more creepy. And that was when she chose a human avatar. But always female.<br/><br/>Carrie sighed. "No, I'll keep what I have, thanks." She climbed into the cold white bath-tub-like chamber and lay back.<br/><br/>"Good. Don't ask again or we will reduce your sessions to zero. Have fun!" The woman tapped at the control panel above the coffin and the lid slid shut, plunging Carrie into momentary blackness.<br/><br/>The Doll Factory was someone's idea to make a lot of money off the rich and redistribute most of it into their own pocket while allowing a pittance to trickle down to the Gutter. Offer the very rich and jaded a sexual playground; a virtual reality environment where they could live out their every sexual fantasy, everything from the mundane to the illegal, every fantasy, no matter how gross, with no consequences because it was a virtual reality. None of it was real. Except, when they tried it with Artificial Intelligence, customers complained that the reactions of the 'dolls' weren't realistic enough. Apparently the Turing Test as applied to sexual encounters was far tougher than on other applications! And then someone in Doll Factory's R&D department suggested using real people. Just as the customers could create an avatar and a virtual environment and control that avatar, so why not provide the same interface for the doll? Obviously on a far more limited basis. Pay a small amount, in NuYen rather than credits, and get unemployed people from the Gutter to control the doll avatars. Use the same interface as the customers used, to pass the full pleasure and pain experience to the volunteer, allow the volunteer's reactions to control the doll's reactions in real time, but remove (obviously) the ability to change anything. Someone had asked, what if the doll is killed? The obvious answer was, so what? But sanity prevailed. Murder was still murder, even if it was a Gutter-body that was killed, and the whole point was that the customer could do whatever they wanted to the doll with no consequences. The second most obvious answer, then, was to disconnect the human element from the doll at the moment of death.<br/><br/>Carrie wriggled on the cold, hard surface that had moulded itself to her body, pressing all around her, holding her immobile. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to get her heart rate down. If it went too high, the coffin would detect it and end the session prematurely, and she wouldn't get paid - more, she would have to work for free, for the next billion years to pay off the refund to the customer. She knew someone that had happened to. The boy had eventually killed himself rather than continue. Carrie was stronger than that, but she didn't want to be in that sort of debt.<br/><br/><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ff0000"><b><i>BANG</i></b></span><br/><br/>The shock of the transfer from her own body to the virtual one made her want to scream, but in that instant she had no control over anything. She was a brain with no input and no output, in total sensory deprivation. People had gone mad in under thirty seconds in that situation, but the transition lasted less than a second - that felt like an eternity, and there she was, face down on a flat white surface, a hard object pressed deep into her cheek, hurting hurting hurting! The collar too tight around her neck. The customer ID flashed into her head and she suppressed a groan. The Bitch, again. She wriggled away from the sharp heel that would puncture her cheek and crack her teeth if the customer turned on the damage side of the program. "Mistress..." She said softly, lifting her eyes briefly to the blank face with it's burning eyes. She was back in the same avatar as last time, and the woman was in a human avatar again. For now. That could all change. She lowered her eyes and instead placed a dry kiss on the boot that had been about to destroy her cheek. The taste and smell of leather filled her mouth and nostrils. The simulation was that detailed.