48 Hours on Blue Bayou Pt. 16: Albert

Albert was spending more time getting to know this business' distribution lines and, he later admitted, got "a bit detached" from the central problem: training girls. Finally, his friend had enough.

"Look, Albert, we're not in the same business. We were at the start, and you deserve credit for doubling our size and profitability. I can see the kids mob you when you visit the Training Center. But, this other business is just not working. I'm spending too much time on a bunch of young women. It's cutting into time I need to spend on finding kids good families. How about you work on this problem and, just like the other problems, maybe you can find a solution. Otherwise, I don't know that I want to be in that business."

Albert had agreed to look at the problem. He soon realized that the basic difficulty was that the inputs were different. The women wanted different lives from the kids, and were not willing to give up those wants. They had started from a different base from the kids, and there seemed no way to change their minds or refocus their desires, or a whole lot of other psychobabble.

Then he had two women who positively thrived in training. The instructors couldn't praise them enough. Albert took them to his apartment for closer study. He remembered that week as being as harrowing as a couple of weeks in Iraq. But it explained the problem so that, over time, he used the insight to come up with a solution.

If you want slaves, start with submissive women. If you want sex slaves, start with women who want sex. It made the job of the Acquisition Department more difficult, but it made the Training Center a lot more relaxed. Over time, the Acquisitions people began to focus on single women, running from 18 to about 30 years of age, working in small offices or factories, living alone, or possibly with another similar female.

Over the course of a few years, the Acquisitions Department honed its Research and Development Branch protocols. Depending on the country, women were researched at small colleges or small businesses. Big families were an exclusion criterion. Divorcees were not excluded unless there were children involved. Gyn physicians and clinics had their records hacked for sexually active types, at the same time excluding those with difficult diseases. Targets were "interviewed" by making simple contacts at a bar or concert. Drug addicts were screened out. Each Country Team had its own favorite types and venues.

Albert spent time training the Acquisition Teams. The ideal "snatch" was to take the woman from her apartment, make her so helpless in her bindings that she was completely terrorized, and move her quickly to the island Training Center, where her training was immediate and constant.

Another routine, more expensive but often more easily done, was to advertise a "free training course for models." Women who showed up for the "course" alone, or with a single girlfriend, made a good catch: two for one expense. The application of terror, the binding into a helplessness the young women had never known, and the transportation could all be done as if on an assembly line. The R&D folks liked this one because their subjects researched themselves, answering questionnaires and being examined and photographed "from all angles."

The training course was simplified. Some physical discomfort was alternated with sexual stimulation for the first days, along with limitation of food. The tired, hungry, thirsty, scared, stimulated young woman most often accepted her new life. If not, a week's repeat usually gained acceptance as the girl realized that the training could be repeated endlessly, and probably more severely, until she submitted. Then, the "finishing" of a sex slave took another month or two.

Albert understood that his friend had been correct. These were two entirely different businesses. While the new Acquisition and Training Protocols had mostly solved the original problems, his friend was still uncomfortable. So, Albert bought him out. That Separation Day lasted almost a week, and staffers up and down the businesses enjoyed it to the fullest.

New offices were easy to find in Macau and some e-mails from friends in the Corps developed new staffers. The island Training Center proved a more difficult problem. You couldn't really cordon off a bunch of kids from a group of young women, they found. Some training that required trainees losing inhibitions and becoming comfortable wearing only handcuffs while doing everyday tasks like food shopping, were difficult to explain to the kids. Public whippings as punishment for rule infractions had to be moved to small internal spaces, losing much of their emotional impact on other trainees. Another island was obviously the best choice.

The first possibility presented itself almost by accident. As well-established entrepreneurs, the partners were able to move in fairly high levels of civilian and government society. At one event, Albert couldn't remember for exactly what, some Planning woman had complained that the Army types were giving her grief over some construction project. Drawing her out was easy: just listen and commiserate.

She explained that the Army wanted details on the ocean bottom off China's coast. "I've sent them details about areas that have potential for oil or gas exploration, but they keep sending them back — not up to our standards, they say. But they never tell me what their standards are. If they'd tell me what they're looking for, don't you think, wouldn't I be able to help them more?"

Albert had chuckled at just another Army screw-up. They had an acronym for it, right? SNAFU: Situation Normal; All Fucked Up.

But when she mentioned that she'd found at least one area that met their "standards," Albert became interested. It was a shallow area, miles off the coast, with an occasional rock or two above mean sea level, and off the common ferry routes. He managed to get a colonel's name from the woman and sat back to consider.

Why would the People's Liberation Army want some spitheads out near nowhere? It made no sense until his friend, more as a joke than a serious idea, mentioned that "maybe they won't always be near nowhere?"

Albert routinely watched the government closely, not only because he was paying many of them, but because this "spitheads" project seemed so bizarre. Over the course of months, he cultivated planners and Army types until, at a year-end celebration, as he recalled, he met the colonel named by the woman. As old military types do, they each had "war stories" aplenty. This colonel's stories mostly focussed on engineering battles rather than war zones. Albert was intrigued, and let his interest, and respect, show. The colonel waxed eloquent.

He was experimenting with building a group of spitheads into an island which the Army could shape to its particular likes: no damn civilians or competing industry, no environmental panels, no nothing!

Albert laughed along with the colonel, and then got in a question about how big an island was he talking about? When the answer came back in kilometres, Albert knew he'd struck gold. The only thing that took up kilometres was a runway. China was building "aircraft carriers in place" in the East and South China Seas! Given advances in undersea cables, the Army could furnish power and communications anywhere.

He recalled a stint on Guam, when the island had nothing besides his training squad. The movie house was mobbed each night. The carefully controlled bars were not much fun, especially if you couldn't pick a fight with some Army types. The internet would make these islands almost resorts!

Patiently, Albert had cultivated the colonel. A "date" with one of Albert's "trainees," suitably documented by audio and video recordings, made the colonel see the usefulness of allowing Albert to build a "concession" on one island. The colonel sold it to his superiors as an income-stream to offset the usual budget overruns that accompany any government project.

Albert's business already had a small fleet of ferries, so the comings and goings of his "trainees" and "trainers" raised no eyebrows. The colonel, actually, was "worked into" the graduation exam for each trainee. Albert's girls were now "Inspected and Approved by the People's Liberation Army." Could any slave have a better provenance?

Of course, over these times, markets and conditions had been changing and developing. The market for slaves was not different. With his frequent visits to world capitals, Albert met a wide range of wealthy people. He was friendly, had interesting stories, and listened with a sharp ear. He was a bit surprised that so many of these rich folks had so loose a tongue. Sexual desires of all kinds were mentioned and discussed easily. Albert took these back to his island and updated his Training Center Protocols.

If you provide a service, there will always be people who want hire you.Someone had said that a long time back, and Albert learned it still held true. Placement of a few talented slaves generated word-of-mouth advertising, the best type of ad. Now, the backwaters of South-east Asia didn't supply enough suitable material while the length and intensity of Protocols meant his island Training Center was crowded and rushed. At one vacation back in Macau, his friend had quipped, "Albert, this is no way to run a business."

Spurred by his friend, Albert looked at his slavery enterprise. It still had the same three divisions that he had inherited from the Dragon Lady: Acquisitions, Training, and Distribution. But each Division had expanded into a bureaucracy, with layers of managers, lots of bookkeeping and controls for the accountants, and a core of staffers who did the actual snatches, training, and delivery of the slaves. His revenues were rising consistently, but so were his expenses. Revenue per staffer was surprisingly high, but so were expenses per staffer. Still, even by the financial records and forms that his accountants filed among the various countries where taxes were expected, the enterprise was doing well.

The one marker that didn't look as good, at least in Albert's eyes, was net income per slave. If he hadn't been doing such "turnover," Albert would not have been able to live as he wanted. He would have had to think about each purchase, each vacation, each hotel accommodation. When he talked about it with his friend, the friend smiled and pointed out, "Albert, it's like the old marketing strategy:We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in the volume."

They laughed, but Albert thought it was a bit brittle and hollow. So, he started thinking about his strategy. By now, he'd picked up enough jargon from the businessmen to know what he needed was to "Update the Business Plan." Conveniently, the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School was advertising a week-long Conference on Business Plans in Philadelphia. Albert checked into the program topics, was satisfied they might help solve his problem, and registered.

It was the first time in many years that Albert spent much time in his home country. It felt good, but he was surprised by some of the things the younger generation was up to. The coeds on campus seemed already halfway through his Training Program in Sexual Arts, but none of them seemed interested in a career of service. His casual contacts at local bars or campus events reminded him that his Training Center Protocols would also need updating to properly prepare this type of recruit. He did take a few names and numbers of women he thought attractive enough to be worth the training effort.

That part of his week, he reflected, was at least as helpful as the classroom time with the philosopher-kings of the faculty. The faculty, he was surprised to discover, was actually fairly reality-based. Remarking on this to one lecturer, he was told that Wharton had been known as "a hotbed of misfits in the financial world" since Joseph Wharton founded the school in 1881.

The day after the conference, Albert spent several hours on the phone and using e-mail to contact several other slaver organizations around the world. He'd come in contact with most of them, of course, just by talking with his customers. The "proper procedure," he'd learned, was to call early in a contact and explain his agenda before anybody got worried about some scheme or "aggressive business tactics." There were enough government officials on somebody's payroll that "the industry" ran quietly and efficiently.

It took him almost two weeks to get back to Macau, still his operational hub. Most slaver organizations were smaller than his own and he picked up only a few tips on this or that point, usually about training the new slave. A few were larger and he learned that they, too, were concerned about burgeoning bureaucracy and efforts to stay "lean and mean." There weren't any panaceas, as far as he could tell. His last contact had summed it all up rather concisely, he had thought. "You pick up the units you think you can train. You try to train them, at least to the point of saleability. You try to get them sold to a good customer, one who pays quickly, treats his or her slaves well, and comes back for another unit when you've got more inventory."

He invited his friend to a few dinners and, afterwards, they discussed Albert's entire universe. Albert was a bit embarrassed by the praise his friend lavished on the attendants serving the two men, but managed to take it calmly enough. Some parts of his Training Protocol, after all, seemed to be holding up quite well.

They agreed on one point almost from the start. The most important statistic had to be Income per Slave. Some seasons were busier than others, but the enterprise had to make a profit on each unit. The primary expenses items remained Acquisition, Training, and Distribution, and any expense not directly contributing to these activities was suspect. It quickly became evident that there were a lot of those expenses.

So, Albert began reviewing the processes that were generating those expenses. Each process had evolved over time, sometimes years, with each layer added seemingly for a good reason and with expenses justifiable. Now, however, the increased use of various electronic devices, some unbelievably multifunctional, really allowed for a pruning of many steps and levels.

There was another facet of this pruning that appealed to Albert. The trainees could be made to concentrate on fewer aspects of their environment. The dangers — consequences of failing to perform up to standards — in their environment could be spread among fewer elements and people. There would not be as many possible chinks in the control systems. The trainees would learn to respond to signals from these fewer devices with greater sensitivity. A more sensitive and responsive slave would grade higher on the Sheldon scale and sell for a better price. He had thought that it was a win-win situation.

Albert had put these changes into practice without announcing any revolution. Each worked about as well as predicted, which amazed Albert and his friend. Some of the computer programs they had specified worked well even in Version 1! Unheard of! Albert found himself with more information, and useful information, as the new processes took hold. His accountants also told him of increasing Income per Slave.

He had not yet solved the problem of acquiring sufficient and suitable trainees, although the new cash flow was making that problem less pressing. Distribution was satisfactory, although there had been a temporary dip in sales after the dot-com bust. He decided to focus on the island problem.

It was "just in time."

The colonel had been promoted to Brigadier, or Senior Colonel. He was proud of the four small stars, flanked by a pair of red lines, on his collar and jacket shoulder boards. He had begun thinking of promotion to Major General, with one large star and no lines as his insignia. He needed some maneuver that would reflect enough credit to make him stand out. Merely pouring sand, rubble, and concrete in the middle of the East and South China Seas didn't seem important enough. That such a huge project was going off on time and within budget, without any pushback from the rest of the world, seemed a small spark in his world. He didn't even realize that the lack of crumbling sea walls, falling docks, or even potholes in the runways was so unusual that Headquarters was holding their collective breath about him.

Albert sensed that there was a new dynamic about the second time he got a call from the Brigadier. He arranged to meet at lunch and, after a glass of wine, the Brigadier explained the new world order. Albert understood his situation and explained how the officer should present this project to Headquarters.

He should claim that, for the island under consideration, Army requirements were increasing and the Army needed the facilities under lease to the concession. He had negotiated with the holders of the concession and made them see the logic of abandoning their facility. It would take them almost a year to construct suitable facilities elsewhere, but they would leave serviceable buildings for the Army to occupy without any further formalities than an official Termination of Concession. He understood that he was not to mention the Army's loss of rental income. Adding the value of the facilities without any construction costs would be a major improvement in the financial picture of the island. Another win-win result.

With a date now hanging over him, Albert had been forced to ramp up the search for a new island. He knew he wouldn't find another completely barren island with infrastructure in place. He wondered what his real requirements were.

As usual, he found his friend a good sounding board. They added and subtracted ideas over a couple of dinners. Albert spent time with the officers of the Training Center to collect their views, some of which surprised him. For instance, he discovered that some trainers wanted access to beaches. The idea was that new slaves would respond positively to time in the sun as well as negatively to the idea of being towed out to sea and left for the sharks.

His experience with the PLA suggested that a stable national government would be a positive attribute. Power being exercised at the local level would be a stronger positive attribute. Everyone wanted an island with a balmy climate. The idea that tourists would frequent the island was a negative, at first. Then, it became clear that tourists would bring incoming and outgoing traffic, a useful cover for the movement of the merchandise, either by air or ship. He already had a small fleet of ferries; he detailed someone to look into small aircraft.

Albert had organized his Island Search Project teams by oceans, starting with the China Seas and swinging around to the Celebes Sea (for islands between Indonesia and Australia), the Bay of Bengal (Myanmar around to India), the Arabian Sea (India around to Somalia), and the Gulf of Guinea (off Western Africa). He briefly considered the Coral Sea; there were thousands of islands, but they seemed to be pretty far away from either his sources or his customers.

Finally, he had a team for the Mediterranean Sea. He wasn't too hopeful there; the Med was such a busy place he wasn't sure he could find a nice, quiet island to settle down on.

In the end, he was surprised by the Balearic Islands, a group of small islands off Spain's Mediterranean coast. Spain was a constitutional monarchy, but government had devolved to local parliaments. The island of Minorca was sparsely populated, with large areas of forest. There were a few towns, but almost the entire coast presented fine beaches.

He had visited the island as a tourist. He found the hotels in reasonable shape, but not suitable for stays of a week or more. Every beach he visited was comfortable, although some were only accessible by climbing down from the Camí de Cavalls, an ancient path that circled the island. It was constructed, probably, in the Fourteenth Century for defense. Patrols had used the small Menorquin horses, giving the path its name:cavallsmeans "horses". The government had recently taken control of the path and was spending perhaps two million euros to restore it. He had enjoyed the long-distance walk and thought it might go into the slaves' physical exercise program. Perhaps a complete trek around the island could be part of their "graduation" exercises?