The Duty (Play to Live: Book # 3) by D. Rus Page B

from a fancy glass vessel. He'd soon start getting the munchies, nutritional as well as carnal. Despite the abundance of choice—three out of the remaining four group members were female—Oksana stood zero chance of avoiding the bastard's attentions.
    One of the remaining two, a Polish girl called Bianca, had long been broken. She was now their local rat who grassed up the others for a few perks. She also warmed the bed of Yi, the gang boss—which meant that Wong would never come anywhere near her if his ass was still dear to him.
    The other female in the group was Boo, an African girl from some arcane tribe. The idiot FIVR capsule operators responsible for redirecting the generous flow of new digital slaves to the Asian cluster had botched the complicated remote administration settings, digitizing the girl without enhancing her appearance. As a result, even Oksana's bosses—who weren't generally too squeamish—screwed their faces up at the sight of her cut and stretched lower lip fitted with a clay ring, her face covered in ritual scars and crude tattoos, her breasts dangling around her belly.
    Wasn't she the lucky one! Also, she spoke some weird African dialect unknown even to the AlterWorld auto translate.
    Oksana's appearance hadn't been altered either: something she'd already regretted 94 times. Today could be the 95th. Her slim and curvaceous body drew her bosses to her like a magnet. How stupid had she been! But then again, she'd been only seventeen at the time, after all.
    Oksana bit her lip, hating herself. Stupid cow! She should have known better when this swarthy, handsome Italian guy sat at her café table, lavishing her with compliments. She let herself be duped... and doped. An ice-cream and a coffee with "just a taste of brandy"—followed by the cellar of an abandoned cottage after he'd spiked her drink with a knock-out dose of some date rape drug.
    She'd seen enough while waiting for her turn to be digitized—enough not to need to have her hair highlighted ever again as the blond streaks in it were in fact gray. The Gypsies—which was the fake Italian macho's true identity—ran their business on a grand scale. She'd seen flocks of screaming babies who'd calmed down soon after meticulously regular shots of vodka. Then a Gypsy woman would sit in the street with an outstretched hand, rocking a constantly sleeping child while making herself a thousand rubles a day. A couple of weeks later she'd be rocking another baby as the old one had already outlived its usefulness. And somewhere a tearful mother was running around sticking posters on lampposts, cursing herself for the wretched moment when she'd taken her eyes off her baby.
    They also took care of the thin flow of unlucky ones the area had to offer for digitizing. Even before the perma phenomenon, over a hundred thousand people had gone missing in Russia each year. Now their quantities had predictably grown. It had become so easy to have your own server with your own virtual sex slave—or a group of prisoners busy eighteen hours a day farming loot in one of the more popular virtual worlds. Easy and, most importantly, safe.
    The slave drivers, too, found it an easy way of making money. You threw a person into a hacked FIVR capsule and kept them there for five days to digitize them. Then you pumped their comatose body with vodka or drugs and dumped it somewhere in a dark alley. The police hated such cold cases and tried to close them whenever possible, announcing another missing person found with no signs of foul play: and the fact that he or she was apparently a seasoned junkie in a coma couldn't have suited them more.
    Oksana sighed. Her own body had to be lying in one of the private medical centers now, withering and degrading. That's if her organs hadn't already been harvested: a business far more lucrative than even arms trafficking. One person contained enough "spare parts" to buy someone a brand new luxury apartment. All they needed to do was sign