Ingrid: Very few of our jobs are reserved for hired professionals. Even a management position can be filled by a slave who shows enough promise —
Leif: Um — you shouldn’t say that word, ma’am.
Ingrid: Don’t tell me what I can’t say.
Leif: But it’s a slu–
[zap!]
Leif: Ah!
Ingrid: Asking can work. But telling your owner what to do will always get you zapped. It’s still on the mild setting for now. That gives new . . . pets a chance to learn to manage themselves.
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14 Comments
little more up front about it back home, huh
I bet she used that word specifically to get THAT response out of Leif. Part of her job is training him, after all.
Awfully nice of her to show him the ropes like this. She could’ve just thrown him to the metaphorical wolves and called it a day.
Not sure if sarcasm, but yeah. Even looking at it as ‘Everything Leif’s managers do must be in the evilest way possible’, her job with Leif is to produce a functional service unit, and because these service units have
that pesky free willthe ability to divine what their owner WANTS instead of what they SAID, they need to do so in a manner that produces units that are “happy to help!”.Leif doesn’t get zapped until she TELLS him “Don’t tell me what I can’t say.” That’s not ‘general good advice’. That’s a WARNING.
Contrast with the first time we heard of the Slavska people: I know you don’t know this, but you shouldn’t use that word because it’s now considered a slur against the Slavska people.
Not sarcasm! Just a genuine observation. Although now I’m wondering if “the Slavska people” is slang for “slaves” that said slaves use to get around the compulsion.
I mean, it’s not just out of the goodness of her heart, training newbies is part of her job.
(And one could argue there isn’t any “nice” way to put humans in the magic equivalent of shock collars…)
…there are so many things messed up here I don’t know where to start.
Oh, this is FUCKED UP. I am seriously squicked out…
I’m almost wondering if calling them “slaves” is her way of lowkey pushing back against the sanitized term “indentured servants”? She seems to have respected him/treated him like a human during the intake, so I don’t think it was personal? Also, she changed the term when he objected. Like, his situation is pretty indistinguishable from slavery, considering.
Also she said even management positions can be filled by “slaves” so… I wonder if she was one?
Or she could even be one currently. The back of her neck is conveniently covered by a high collar.
I’ll give away that the servant clothes all have low collars, like Leif’s, so they don’t hide the tattoo. (There’s an exception for winter coats, because in Sønheim they’re deadly serious about cold-weather safety.)
So we start with targeting the low-level functionaries; police detectives, company-level officers, local and regional government bureaucrats. Once those people are gone Sonheim’s economy and government will become increasingly paralyzed as these posts remain unfilled and those remaining either desert or begin to do their jobs poorly. Once their government starts to falter we can begin using local agitators to stir up even more trouble.
Since you’re wanting to end this evil, I would assume by ‘targeting’ these people, you mean offering them foreign employment with salaries too high for them to turn them down?
It would probably be cheaper to just hire them in place and tell them to let your local agitators do their thing.
No, I mean tactics straight out of the IRA’s playbook.
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