Every time mankind gets around to outlawing slavery, some other kind of thing springs up to take its place, or maybe they just change the words for it. I learned that in a history class back when I was in school, the same government mandated school where I got hooked on Fizz. Actually, it's a miracle I remember anything I learned at all, considering what a number Fizz did on my brain. Nowadays no one used the word "master" anymore--it's "body rights holder"--but it means the same thing.

I was in a state med center when I made the choice to become a slave. I have to believe that. Because if I believe that the moment I tried my first Fizz I lost all choices, then I might as well be dead.

I was lying there pretty close to dead when he came in, which might explain why I thought he was an angel at first. I know now that his perfect features, his white skin, blue eyes and blond hair, might all be gifts he gave himself through gene manipulation, but at the time he leaned over the makeshift cot I was lying on, pushing back the hood that had hidden his fairness from a rough, brown world, and backlit by a fluorescent bulb on the ceiling ... C'mon. You would have thought he was an angel, too. Especially if you'd burned so hard on Fizz like I had that you weren't sure where reality started and ended.

I could barely move at that point. My organs were going to give out. I think the techs were hoping my heart would go first, so they could sell off the parts that still worked and get back some of what the government had spent to keep me alive so far.

"This one?" he asked, and someone I couldn't see answered. Doctor Summers, they called him.

Then he spoke to me. "What's your name?"

I was trying to move my mouth to answer, but hallucinations kept sprouting around me. The word that came out was "Jimson."

"All right, Jimson. I have a proposal for you." He lay his hand on my chest, and the physical contact seemed to ground me, the unruly bleeding colors receding from his face. "You can stay here, in care of the state, or you can sign over your body rights to me for ten years. I have a technological solution for Fizz burnout. I can cure you at great expense. But you'll be mine for the next ten years. The choice is yours."

Those were the words he said--I think. But what it felt like to me was that he was choosing me. Out of all the Fizzheads lying burned out in that ward, waiting to die, he had come to me. That had to mean something.

The pen was like a live fish in my hand, and I have no idea what I actually wrote, but the moment they took the piece of paper away, he put something into my mouth that turned all the colors black. Or maybe I passed out.