Chick

A chick was someone who had passed the Charm Test at age five, and made it to Charm School in the corporate enclave of their employer.

The chick ethos

Chicks held V-jobs, or jobs where they would be visible to hanyos at all times, assisting, serving, protecting and pleasing them. All chicks spent the first five years of their lives in the Baby Barracks in the service territory of their corporation. They then took the Charm Test along with all the other kids, but they were among the three percent who passed. This meant they got to live in a Charm School, which was inside the corporate enclave but walled off from it. Once selected, a chick would leave slagland forever, unless she messed up, which could happen at any level after age ten in Charm School.

Many chicks were also hanyobait, that is people who apologised for and did the dirty work of hanyos willingly. As Zigsa says in Puzzle Two,

Hanyos don’t work hard: a few of them have brains filled with schemes, but the rest just eat and play video games in between scamming each other or beating on victims. The chicks know this: they are given their fancy education so they can do the hanyos’ dirty work for them. From slagland, it looks like the hanyos are doing it all and the chicks are just following their orders. This is only partially true. Without the diligence and brainwork and allegiance of chicks in V-jobs, hanyo town would collapse tomorrow.

Many ex-chicks agreed with this assessment. Gia, a former Financial Assistant who became a prominent Survivor at Zigsa's Nest, understood that the vicious competitiveness of chick life was designed to prevent them ever using their skills and insights to turn on the hanyos, or to ally with the slags in doing so. Instead, chicks were taught to become both food, served as temptingly as possible, and chef to the hanyos. The more innocent were simply eaten; the smarter ones cheated and laid traps. Gia had this to say about her education in her make-sense talk in Puzzle Two:

Like Zigsa, I was cursed with the insatiable desire to ask questions, but unlike her, I could get away with it to some extent in Charm School. I paid attention in my Contracts and Dealmaking class, because the professor was a famously acid old bitch who knew her stuff like a dragon. This is what she told us. She said, ‘Do you know what the slags call you out in slagland? They call you hanyobait.’ (People giggled and she glared at them.) ‘You should never take offense at this, because it’s true. You are hanyobait.’ (Murmurs this time, and a whimper.) ‘Now get this. Bait is food, right, but a special kind of food. It’s food with a hook in it, food inside a trap, luring an animal in. Hanyobait without a trap is just dinner. So you better build yourself a trap. Figure out who owns the hook: you, or your boss, or the corporation. Choose wisely because your loyalties are all you’ll have to rely on.’ She glared at us, then began teaching us the fine points of negotiation. After a few lessons I figured out what she was actually teaching us: the secret to taking down the hanyos in their entirety.

Chicks were gaslighted into worshipping and serving the hanyos by the romance literature and movies they were forced to watch. They were expected to compete with each other for the privilege of being close to hanyos, and to envy those chicks who were better at this than they, while despising those who were less capable. The hanyos and their hanyobait teachers trained the chicks by starving them of love and shutting down all possible routes of happiness except the ones available in hanyo town and sacntioned by the bosses.

The overall ideology of [winning]] which rules hanyo town meant that chicks had to compete with each other in all metrics of value, such as bodyweight, expensive presents given to them, or number, profile and duration of attention from hanyos. It did not matter whether this attention was negative or positive: a chick who had been beaten and chicken-hunted was just as likely to be congratulated for catching a hanyo's eye as one who had been praised or treated well. The objective of chicks was to form a protective cordon around their boss or owner, absorbing his anger, shielding his secrets, and doing his dirty work almost before he knows it needs doing. The smart ones quickly learned to disguise their intelligence and never to show that they might be smarter than their boss: this opened up a space where they had a little freedom and immunity from harassment.

Charm School

At Charm School they got intensive training in the 'soft' subjects of people-handling, slag-oppression and hanyo-pleasing. They were put through gruelling beauty regimes and taught to obsess about their appearance when not actively working. There were five streams of employment for them, celebrity wives, Corporate Assistants, Legal Assistants, Medical Assistants, and Models. The first four careers involved the use of high intelligence, while those who couldn't make the grade intellectually were turned into party-fodder for the hanyos to consume. Celebrity Wives were only required to be intelligent in order that their genes would pass on to their Dynast children: they were not encouraged to use their brains for anything useful.

Importance to hanyo town

Without chicks, hanyo town would not have been able to function. They, along with the Bully Boys, did all the grunt work of slag-disciplining and corporate politicking. Most chicks were thus also hanyobait, but the more intelligent, or less morally defective of them, quickly became disillusioned after entering employment with their corporation, and a significant number of them became rootkittens. Some of their Survivor Stories are to be found in the Karma Sutra.