Model Spotlight Series: Caldwell
Trigger Warning:
There’s a lot of, well, sex talk, coming up due to the nature of Caldwells. There’s also some disturbing stuff farther down as I get into parallels of how models and slaves are treated.
Caldwell Name Origin
Models with the name Caldwell originated in a modeling factory in Caldwell, Texas. You’ll be forgiven for never having heard of the town. When I was growing up there, it basically had one traffic light and a population of about three-thousand. But I thought I’d put it on the map if I can, so in the future, I made it a hub of economic activity, spurred on by the presence of a modeling factory that produces a line of models known for their sexual prowess and capabilities. That’s right: my old hometown produces models that supplant sex workers in the future.
The Sex Industry of the Future
For an aside, I should probably talk about the sex industry a bit in the year 2200 and beyond. Just like in all new technology, enterprising and ambitious entrepreneurs saw the potential for sex work in modeling. The modeling industry therefore spent millions of dollars in lobbying in the years 2150, just after the Madison Rule passed (the law which keeps models subjugated and denies them their humanity). This lobbying effort was to make sex work legal, and was wildly successful, prompting the need to create the factory somewhere. Caldwell was chosen for two reasons: it was still relatively unknown, so the company could do literally whatever they wanted to the town, and Texas, specifically near League City, had become the “silicon valley” of model development.
In a nutshell, sex work becomes completely legal, and there are models who work in brothels scattered across the United States, as well as those who are purchased by clients and are “kept” by their owners for “romantic” purposes. Keep in mind that if models don’t meet their owners’ expectations, models can be “reclaimed,” a sanitized word that really means murdered—legally. This is a massive power imbalance, which matters in what I’m about to say next.
Models were often sought out for their subservience and pliability as sexual partners. When life hangs in the balance, how often will a model say no? So many owners bought models to be low-maintanence romantic partners, and others purchased models in serial as targets of their sadistic rage and they were often targets of sexual violence, having no voice or recourse.
Meet the Caldwells
There are several Caldwells who feature prominently in our stories. All of them were impacted by their experiences working in the sex industry in different ways. Without further ado, here are the Caldwells you get to meet.
Monica Caldwell
Appearances: Ordell (you can only get by joining my Patreon community), Bodhi Rising, Libera, Goddess of Worlds (currently being re-edited)
Personality:
Monica is as alluring as she is practical. She lost her eyesight when she was in the process of being reclaimed (killed for parts, essentially), and has mood-affected ocular implants. Her eyes change color depending on her mood. Fiercely loyal to the cause, she fights for model freedom every day of her life. Co-founder of the Humanity in Crisis Council, the non-violent organization founded after Ordell and she left a different, more violence-centric, group of models, Monica will never give up on the cause of model freedom and acceptance.
Background:
From a tragic backstory that I’ve never fully disclosed, but I guess now that I’m typing this I probably should, Monica has two significant physical abnormalities from her time as a sex worker. She has a scar that runs down her chest from her throat to her belly where a sadistic former owner cut her, nearly ending her life. Once healed, the scar so dramatically impacted her ability to attract other clients that she was slated for reclamation, or in other words, to be killed and her body be dissolved to re-use her constituent proteins.
When she was being reclaimed, the Siblings of the Natural Order, a group who claim that genetically-altered clones (models) are superior to natural-born humans (polli), spring her just in time to save her life, but not her eyes. She has ocular implants which cause her eye color to change depending on her mood.
She was instrumental in recruiting Ordell to the Siblings of the Natural Order (SNO), and is a Lieutenant in her own right, taking the cause of model freedom and agency to the streets.
Samantha Caldwell
Appearances: Evasion and Defiance (a.k.a. Brighton Academy, if you want the pre-revamp version-same book), Solitude and Retaliation (not out yet, but you can pick up Human Pride if you want the pre-revamp version, same book), Inertia and Momentum (also not out yet, in any form)
Personality:
Abrasive. If I could only use one word, that would be it. She doesn’t like non-models (at first) and sees the world as a cruel place, hardly worth investing in. She joins SNO mainly because she likes to fight (even though she’s not a Briggs). There are reasons she is the way she is though, so keep reading!
Background:
Samantha was in a particularly abusive owner-model relationship (think serial-killer bad). She escaped and ran away to join SNO, living on the streets as she fled. Her situation was orders of magnitude worse than Monica’s, and her personality was largely hardened in the struggle, often life and death, against her tormentor. Smart, sarcastic, and tough, she fits in well with SNO until she meets Larken and her crew. After that, she softens and decides to leave the organization, falling in among Larken’s scrappy group.
Jennifer Caldwell
Appearances: Inertia and Momentum (exclusively, being edited as I write this)
Personality:
Jennifer values her profession. She’s had no such problems as what Samantha and Monica have experienced. Although, aside from training, her experience is somewhat limited. The brothel she was part of closed down within months of her being assigned, so although she likes to pretend to be knowledgeable about the sex trade, those who know her closely know that a lot of what she knows is only from training. She believes in love, even between polli and models, which leads her to be taken advantage of quite a bit due to the power imbalance between the two classes.
Background:
Jennifer plays a pivotal role in both my Reality Gradient series and my Virtual Wars series, though she only appears in the latter, in a novel yet to be released (I know, weird, right?). Because the novel isn’t yet out, I can’t go much into her story.
Other Facts about Caldwells
If you’ve read Models and Citizens, the first novel in my Reality Gradient series, then you know that models have a First Birth, where they are collectively trained through pre-teen years. After First Birth, they go back into stasis until a job is identified. They have a Second Birth for when that time comes, and from there, they go to Convocation (kind of like high-school) and Didactics (kind of like trade-school).
Caldwells admittedly do learn a lot about sex and technique, and the mechanics of how that works in multiple scenarios. But models who are Caldwells are also taught sophistication, discretion, and charm. Think of them kind of like the Companions in Firefly, only without the prestige. So maybe you could consider them along the lines of the end goal of the protagonist (for a while anyway) in Memoirs of a Geisha.
Other models generally turn to Caldwells for things like relationship advice as often as advice on the physical side of romance.
