It was closing time at the resort and George was strolling down the quiet streets of Ancient Rome. Alright, maybe Ancient Rome as imagined by Hollywood and video games, as some nitpickers had complained, but it was what the resort guests wanted and what the paying guests wanted, they got.

 Walking under an arched column, George nodded to the Roman soldiers who stood on guard, scutum and pila resting on the cobblestoned streets. Neither of the swarthy men responded to the security guard’s nod and casual salute, nor took any notice of him at all, heads fixed forward, eyes unblinking. At the end of the day they, like all the robots in the resort, had been put into standby mode.

 Through the archway, the road led into the market. George strolled among the stalls, ignoring the unblinking stares of the robot citizens standing behind them, as he shone in flashlight around the inside of the stalls and behind the crates and stacks of amphorae. Even though all the guests knew things shut down at the end of the day, there was always some who tried to hide out and have the run of the place after dark, mostly teens. George would get quite the chewing out if the morning crew arrived to find the Governor’s toga stolen or “Romanes Eunt Domus” painted over the walls of the forum.

 At the far end of the market, he slowed his pace. That side of the market was where the recreated slave market was. All the robots stood in place, ready to start the auction again the next morning. At the front of the raised stage was Gracchus the slave dealer, hand posed outstretched to the small crowd of ‘bots. Beside him was the Nubian, blank expression belying the pose of abject misery. She was stripped bare, aside from the shackles on her hands and feet and the small clay tag hung round her neck, scratched with a few words in Latin George couldn’t read.

A few more slave girls knelt at the back of the stage, equally nude, waiting their turn. George knew, from what some of the programmers had told him, the main event of this current story line was the gorgeous blonde, third from the left, a kidnapped Germanic princess which would, in a future season, lead to an attack and sack on the town. For the moment, though, George was content to ogle the fembots for as long as he thought he could get away with before resuming his rounds.

He was just about to press on when he heard a noise. He started, knowing any noise in the deactivated resort probably meant trouble. Vandalizing teens, most likely, but you never knew. Malfunctioning robots came to mind as well. Sure the programmers insisted they had finally worked out all the bugs in the bots and nothing like that messy business at their rival park couldn’t happen here, but it hardly made George more confident, walking through the crowds of frozen Romans with blank expressions on their faces as he moved in the direction of the sound.

It was coming from the building behind the auction block, where the slave dealers kept their wares. A couple of the old story lines involved looking for and breaking out a friendly bot that had been abducted and enslaved, and of course when there wasn’t an auction going on, it was a popular spot for certain guests to come and get a ‘closer look’ at some of the female wares for sale. Not, strictly speaking, in keeping with the terms and conditions, but there was a tacit understanding that the resort staff looked the other way and flipped a coin to see who got stuck cleaning things up at the end of the day.

The sound was coming strongest from the door on the far right, which led into the dungeon where the slaves were kept. George went slowly, panning his flashlight through each of the cells. Half the cells were empty, their normal occupants out on the auction stage at the moment. In the other half, male and female slaves were chained up in a variety of poses, each frozen…

Except for the last cell. As George got to it, he saw movement in the dark space a moment before the beam of his flashlight turned. It revealed a young woman, tall, slender and pale skinned, standing against one stone wall of the cell. She was completely nude, her wrists and ankles locked in shackles attaching her to the wall. A leather hood covered her face, from which a quiet murmur escaped.

For a moment, George wondered why this particular robot hadn’t deactivated with the rest, but continued to play out the rule of the abject captive so well. Then an idea came into his mind. “Let me see...The Nubian, the German, the Greek twins outside...inside the Gauls, the Egyptian, the Persian…” George silently ticked off each of the regular ‘slave girl’ bots and with this new one came up with one extra. For a second he wondered if the engineers had released a new model early or something, but then another idea came to him.

“She’s not a robot.” He said, quietly. “She’s a guest.” The girl, robotic or real, continued to squirm and tug against her restraints, giving another muffled moan. Now that he had started to suspect, he couldn’t see any of the subtle hints that marked one of the resort’s ‘bots from a flesh and blood guest.

“But how’d she end up here?” He wondered aloud. She didn’t seem to have noticed his arrival, the hood muffling sounds as well as leaving her in the dark. It didn’t make any sense. There were a few scenarios where guests could be ‘captured’ by the bots, but they were, well, restrained, no pun intended, always with the aim maintaining guest safety. Certainly no scenario would have ended with a captured female guest stripped naked and shackled in the dungeon. And it couldn’t have come about through an emergent narrative either. The robots were programmed against taking hostile actions of this sort against guests. Unless…

George lowered the beam of the flashlight, lingering a second longer then he’d have admitted on the young woman’s perky breasts which heaved as she struggled, before settling on her naked crotch. Beneath the thatch of reddish-brown hair, her sex and inner thighs showed a shininess under the flashlight that betrayed the obvious arousal the young woman was deriving from her situation.

“She set this up herself!” George thought with a start. It was the only explanation. She must have come in during a lull sometime in the day and, maybe with the help of a friend, gotten herself chained up like this. With the other slave girls locked in the cells in much the same state, no one would have suspected the slave girl in this particular cell wasn’t just another robot but a flesh and blood woman. George could imagine she found the idea of being seen by every other guest who passed through the slave dealer’s to be very exciting, and in all the excitement lost track of time.

George scratched his chin. “Now I know how she got here...or I think I can guess…” He thought. “Question is, what do I do now?” Now he knew she was enjoying things, her vigorous struggles had more the air of play then any great distress. If she had some way of getting loose, it might be better to let things be and allow her to make her exit.

But on the other hand, if she’d been expecting a friend to come and let her go at the end of the day, something had obviously gone wrong and now she’d be stuck here all night and longer still if no one realized she wasn’t one of the robots. In that case, George should free her, embarrassing as it might be for both of them.

And then, some unworthy part of George’s mind put in, there was the possibility of having some fun and making the most of this opportunity. “I’m sure she’d be all for taking her slave girl fantasy to the next level.” The voice said and George immediately thought of a couple places in the simulated town where he could definitely have some fun with the pretty, struggling thing in front of him.

“What to do…”