Good Boy
The officer directed us toward the far wall. "Tables, boys. Single file."
Tables. Six of them, arranged in a row, each staffed by a clerk seated behind a terminal. Men and women in administrative gray. Behind them, shelving units held stacked containers, barcoded labels, filing equipment. The setup resembled any government processing office, the kind of place that handled forms, issued receipts, closed files.
The difference was that we carried our files in plastic boxes, and we were naked.
My feet registered cold concrete with each step. Box 17 pressed against my hip, clothes folded neatly inside, phone tucked in the corner, wallet beneath the jeans. Objects that an hour ago had been distributed across pockets and waistband, woven into the shape of a man moving through the world. Now they were contents. Inventory to be surrendered.
The man ahead of me placed his box on the table. The clerk, a woman with cropped hair and a lanyard badge, opened the lid without looking at his face. Her hands separated the contents with practiced efficiency. Shirt. Jeans. Underwear. Phone. Each item went into a larger container behind her. She typed something into her terminal. Two minutes. No conversation. The man stepped aside with empty hands.
I moved forward. My clerk was male. Mid-thirties. Clean-shaven. He looked at the barcode on the box. Typed.
"Place it here."
I set it down. Weight left my fingers with a finality my body registered before I could articulate. Not the weight of objects. Something beneath that.
He opened the lid. Separated the items. Documents, the copies I'd brought, the forms I'd signed, identification, went to his left. Everything else went behind him into the larger container. My clothes, my phone, my wallet, my keys. Items that defined a person who went places and opened doors and paid for things and answered calls. Sorted and removed with the efficiency of a procedure performed hundreds of times before this morning, hundreds of times after.
"Clothing and personal items will be disposed of," he said. No inflection. "Documents and identification are retained in your file. Upon release, a standard set of clothing suitable for a free person will be provided, along with your documents."
The words were complete. Every category addressed. Clothing: destroyed. Documents: held. Release: provisioned. The language closed the subject the way a folder closes, all edges aligned, all contents accounted for. The promise of clothing upon release existed in the same sentence as the destruction of clothing held now, and the distance between those two references was the full length of my contract.
He pulled my registration card from the jeans pocket. My jeans were already sorted into the container behind him with everything else. He scanned it, typed a sequence. Then he held it out.
I took it.
The plastic was warm. Residual body heat from a pocket that no longer existed on jeans that were already disposed inventory. A sudden shiver ran through my legs, and warmth flooded my groin. Heaviness settled there as the box's barrier vanished, leaving nothing but this card as cover, like a tag dangling from cattle. Shame tightened my chest. I stood naked in the middle of the hall, card in hand like an animal branded with a number. My fingers closed around the edges and the nakedness hit. It was not the ambient hum I'd been carrying since the undressing room but something acute, something that broke through the surface all at once. I had taken off my clothes. I had folded them into the box. I had carried the box against my hip, pressed it to my side as I walked. The box had been weight, surface, a barrier between my skin and the room. Now the box was behind the clerk. The clothes inside it were behind the clerk. The phone, the wallet, the keys, behind the clerk. And I stood here. Bare feet on cold concrete. Bare skin under flat fluorescent light. Nothing on me, nothing covering me, nothing between my body and every pair of eyes in this processing hall. In my right hand, this. A rectangle of laminated plastic. The entire material residue of who I had been an hour ago, compressed to something I could cover with my thumb.
The clerk was already looking past me.
"Next."
The corridor beyond the tables narrowed into a series of partitioned stations, single desks each occupied by a staff member. The flow was directed: one participant per station, guided forward by gestures from attendants positioned along the wall.
I was directed to the third station.
The woman behind the desk was perhaps thirty-five. Dark hair pulled back. No jewelry. Her uniform matched the administrative gray of every other staff member in the facility, collar buttoned to the top. She sat with her hands resting on the desk surface, waiting. Her posture carried a composure that came not from effort but from the complete absence of disturbance. In front of her, arranged with precision, was a device I didn't immediately identify, a small tray of hardware.
I stood before her. Naked. The card in my hand, the only object I carried.
The asymmetry pressed into my chest before I could name it. She was clothed. Seated. Composed. I was bare, standing, hands empty except for one thin rectangle of plastic. The exposure I had been carrying since the undressing, the ambient hum of skin against air, intensified at once, as though her composure were a lens that focused my nakedness into something sharper. She did not acknowledge my body. That was what made it unbearable. No disgust. No interest. No discomfort. Nothing. I was simply present before her, and she processed my presence the way the clerk had processed my belongings.
Heat spread across my face and down my throat.
"Boy."
The word landed in my body first. Compression in the chest. Tightening below the jaw. A single syllable that took everything I had been, years, training, the decisions that brought me here, and compressed it into something that meant none of it applied.
"Kneel, boy."
My knees hit the floor.
The thought came after. A full second behind the action. Maybe two. The concrete was cold and hard beneath my kneecaps, and I was already there, lowered, positioned, compliant, before the cognitive part of me finished receiving the command. My body had processed the instruction through some channel that bypassed deliberation, bypassed hesitation, bypassed the part of me that should have decided. The channel simply executed.
I was kneeling. Naked. At the level of her desk, her folded hands, the hem of her uniform.
Something pressed against my throat. Not hard, definitive. Her hands moved with the same practiced efficiency I had seen at every station. A band of firm material, synthetic, smooth, body-temperature within seconds of contact, settled around my neck. She fastened a clasp at the back. A small mechanical click. The kind of sound that seals.
The collar rested against my skin. Not tight. Not loose. Precisely fitted. Its weight was negligible, a few ounces, but it registered against my throat with a presence that exceeded its mass. I felt it in my pulse. Each beat pressed outward against the band and returned changed.
She lifted the card from my fingers and attached it to a small metal loop at the front of the collar. The clip engaged. My identification now hung from my neck. The card's edge settled against the hollow between my collarbones, resting on my chest. Identity, filed, processed, and now worn. The last object I had held was no longer in my hand. It was on me. Part of the apparatus.
Then her hand moved to my face.
Palm against my right cheek. Brief. Light enough to be a touch. Firm enough to be a claim. Not a slap, no sting behind it. Not a caress, no warmth in it. Something between. The kind of contact applied to an object to confirm its position. Her skin was dry and cool against the heat of my face.
"Good boy."
A thrust hit my groin. My scrotum squeezed tight in a mix of shame and the praise's pull. Unwanted arousal betrayed me as my body stirred. My body relaxed into those words like a dog hearing "good boy," and the shame made my chest and lower belly burn hotter. Something in my chest shifted. Involuntary. Immediate. A loosening I did not authorize, my body receiving the words through that same channel that had dropped me to my knees, and for a fraction of a second responding. Accepting. The way something that has been waiting to be told it performed correctly opens toward the confirmation. And then, climbing hard behind that shift, shame. Not shame at the kneeling. Not shame at the collar. Shame that something inside me had moved toward those words. That my body had answered approval from a stranger who had touched my face the way you verify the placement of an item.
"Stand up."
I stood. The collar moved with me. The card swung against my chest and settled. I was vertical again, collared, and the woman was already preparing for the next participant. Already finished with me.
I walked. The weight at my throat was constant. The card tapped middle of my chest with each step. My knees held the memory of the floor, the speed, the absence of decision. I had not resisted. But worse: I had not needed to choose not to resist. There had been no moment in which refusal existed as an option my body considered. The compliance had been so complete, so frictionless, that what remained was only the heat in my face and the new weight at my throat and the devastating fact that it had been easy.
Not the order. Not the collar.
The ease.
The next station was a wall. White. Lit from above and both sides by directional lamps that produced flat, shadowless illumination, the kind that eliminates depth, reveals every surface, removes ambiguity. A camera stood on a tripod at center distance. A staff member adjusted settings on its screen.
"Against the wall, boy. Center mark."
I stepped into the light. Heat from the lamps pressed against my forehead, my shoulders, my chest, the tops of my thighs. The light did not observe. It recorded. Every contour, every line of trained muscle, every angle of bone was held in its flat, commercial attention. My body, the body I had built through years of disciplined work, was arranged inside it like an object being indexed.
"Face forward. Arms at your sides. Still."
I stood. The camera registered without sound.
"Turn around."
My back to the lens. Shoulder blades, the line of my spine, the muscle tapering to my waist, my glutes, the backs of my legs. I felt the light on surfaces that should not have been documented this way. Warm. Invasive. Precise.
"Face forward. Hands behind your head."
My arms lifted. Fingers interlaced behind my skull. The position opened everything. Ribs expanded. Chest lifted. The line from collar to groin became unbroken, uninterrupted. Light beat on my exposed groin. Skin itched under the camera's gaze. My cock twitched and heavened from the shame of being photographed like merchandise. I stood in a pose that bared everything I'd once hidden for the camera to fix and sell. Armpits exposed, torso stretched, nothing concealed anywhere. A body arranged for maximum visibility and held in place by its own hands.
"For the auction profile," the staff member said. Not to me. To the process. A field in a database being populated.
Auction.
The word bypassed my mind and landed in my deep in my stomach. A contraction, sudden, involuntary, that I held in check only by keeping my arms exactly where they were. Auction. Profile. The photographs were not documentation. They were listing images. My body, its muscle, its conditioning, the physical capacity I had always understood as my primary asset, was being catalogued for sale. The light was not clinical. It was commercial. And my body stood inside it arranged in the posture of a product being presented.
"Done. Move through."
My arms came down. I stepped out of the light, and the cooler air beyond it felt like a boundary crossed. The word auction sat inside my abdominal wall, dense and unprocessable. I walked forward. My structured thinking, the logic that had carried me through the registration, the undressing, the collar, reached for the word and could not hold it. It remained where it had landed. In the body. Below thought.
We were formed into a line.
"Shoulder width apart, boys. Eyes forward."
Bodies arranged themselves. The line wobbled and roughly held. Feet shuffled on concrete. One man crossed his arms, then uncrossed them. Another kept his hands cupped low, shielding, before letting them drop. Heads turned toward sounds. Weight transferred restlessly. The errors were civilian. I recognized them because my own body was producing some of them, the slight rotation of my shoulders, the impulse to look sideways, the tension in hands that didn't know where to rest.
No correction came.
The officer watched. His gaze moved along the formation with the attention of someone cataloguing rather than instructing. The silence where correction should have been pressed down on us harder than any command. Something was being accumulated. I found myself adjusting without being told, straightening, stilling, pulling my gaze forward through will.
The officer walked to the side of the room and returned with an object that was immediately legible. Black. Approximately two feet long. A handle at one end, two metal prongs at the other.
He held it at his side. Visible. Not raised. His posture unchanged. His voice unchanged.
"This device is used for behavioral correction," he said. "Sometimes young servants and young slaves don't fully appreciate the consequences of non-compliance. That's not a criticism. It's a fact of experience. Some things need to be experienced to be understood."
He let the statement settle into the room.
"We demonstrate this for your benefit. Not as punishment. Not as threat. As education. So your decision at the end of orientation is fully informed."
Benefit. Education. Informed. Each word clean, reasonable, structurally sound. Each word existing in the same room as two metal prongs held at the side of a man who spoke about care.
"Each of you will receive one demonstration shock. Medium level."
The sentence entered every body simultaneously. I felt it in the collective compression, not voices, not faces, but the visible tightening that passed through the line like a wave. Spines locked. Jaws set. My abdomen clenched before I authorized it, bracing against something that had not yet arrived, that still existed only as an arrangement of words in the air between us and the device.
He started at the far end.
I was near the center. Seven men between me and the moment. Seven intervals of time I could not measure except by watching bodies fold.
The first man took the shock without sound, a sharp jolt, a buckling at the knees, a hard exhale. He caught himself partway down and was standing within seconds, hands trembling at his sides.
The second made a noise. Short. Bitten off. Knees hit the floor. A breath. Then vertical again.
Third. The snap of contact. Spasm. Down. Up.
Each one compressed the distance. My breathing came apart somewhere around the fifth, shallow, irregular, hijacked by my diaphragm without my consent. My abdomen, the muscles I had trained for years, the core I had considered reliable, clenched in anticipation so tight they produced their own pain. The shock had not arrived. My body was already in it.
Sixth.
The thought formed: I did nothing wrong.
It was accurate. It was irrelevant. The shock was demonstration. The thought addressed a logic the system had already overwritten, the logic in which pain followed guilt and innocence provided protection. My muscles did not tighten against injustice. They tightened against physics.
The officer stood in front of me. Close enough to see the weave of his uniform. The cattle prod at waist height. His face administrative.
"Hold still, boy."
The prongs touched my abdomen.
Everything collapsed into a single point of electric fire. Every muscle in my torso contracted simultaneously, not a cramp but a total override of voluntary function. Air left my lungs in a sound I did not recognize. My vision compressed. My knees gave, and the concrete met them with an impact I registered only afterward, when the primary event began to recede.
Floor. Palms flat. Chest heaving. My abdominal wall continued to fire in diminishing waves, each one weaker, each one confirming that my body was no longer responding to my commands.
"Stand still, boys!" The officer's voice was already past me, addressed to the line. Then, directed back: "Up. Hold it."
My palms pushed. My legs straightened. The abdomen screamed through the motion, not the electric pain now but its imprint, the muscles still convinced they were being overridden. I stood. I held it. Humiliation burned as I rose naked on trembling knees before them all. A light adrenaline sting hit my groin and blurred pain into arousal. I stood trembling, the shame twisting that everyone had seen me collapse like a weakling. My body swayed once, then locked because the command required it. Because the command existed and the body performed.
The officer finished the line. The last few received their shocks. I stood and felt the aftershocks diminish through my stomach. Each breath tested the damaged muscle. Each breath was compliance, standing and holding because those were the instructions.
When the last man rose and the line held again, ragged, vertical, trembling, the officer returned to center.
"From this point on," he said, "your bodies are no longer private."
The words entered bodies that were still shaking.
"What you felt is information. Your body now contains the knowledge of what correction means. This knowledge protects you. From now on, you will understand what non-compliance produces. Not as a concept. As a fact written into your muscle."
He scanned the line. No one met his eyes.
"Pain in this system is not connected to guilt. You were not punished. You were educated. Remember the difference."
The silence that followed was absolute. The words settled alongside the residual ache, not ideas to evaluate but facts installed into tissue that was still firing. Not punishment. Education. Not guilt. Information. The logic was structurally complete. It was also the first thing I had encountered in this facility that my thinking could not contain without something bending.
"It's late." Same tone. Same cadence. As if the cattle prod were a completed item on a procedural list. "Feeding, sanitation, sleep. Wake-up is at oh-five-hundred."
Three items and a time. What had just happened, the shocks, the declaration, the line of trembling naked men, occupied no space in his language. Administratively behind us.
We walked. Bare feet on institutional flooring. The corridor held the same flat fluorescence as every other space, and the sound of the group moving through it was soft and rhythmic, the padding of naked soles, the absence of conversation. The silence was different now. Before, it had been nervous. This was heavier. Something the body carried but the mind had not yet named.
The Ration Hall was a room with tables and benches bolted to the floor. Clean. Functional. No windows. Trays sat at intervals along a counter, each holding the same thing: a bowl of gray porridge, a cup of colorless liquid.
No line formed. No choice offered. Take a tray. Sit. Eat.
The bench was cold against my bare thighs. The porridge was warm and tasted of almost nothing, a faint grain quality, absent of salt or sugar or intent. The liquid was lukewarm. My stomach still ached beneath it. The body took what was given. Not because of hunger. Because this was next.
I ate. Spoon, mouth, throat. The motion mechanical, repeated, emptied of the meaning that eating usually carried. Around me, others ate in the same silence. Spoons scraped. Throats worked. The Ration Hall absorbed everything and returned nothing.
The Sanitation Hall was large and open. Tiled floor, tiled walls, showerheads in rows along both sides. No partitions. No curtains. The space was engineered for volume, bodies processed simultaneously, without the architecture of privacy.
Steam rose from water already running. The floor was warm under my feet, the first warmth since processing began that did not come from my own shame.
A staff member stood near the entrance. Middle-aged. Unhurried. He held a container of disposable safety razors.
"Wash first," he said. "Then hair removal. You will wash each other. Not yourselves. Each other. Pair up, boys. Start with the chest. Work down. The supervisor will call the sequence."
The instruction settled into the steam. The only sound was water on tile. Then comprehension moved through the group, visible not in words but in sudden stillness, the slight turns of heads, the way hands holding razors dropped and lifted without purpose.
Each other. Not my own chest, another man's. Not my own legs, his. And his hands on me. Everywhere.
I turned to the man nearest me. He was the youngest in the room, I thought, maybe eighteen, skinny, wiry, pale skin already flushed under the spray. His collar card had a red stripe across the bottom. His eyes met mine for a fraction of a second, then dropped to the floor. Cheeks burned crimson.
I reached out and patted his shoulder, once, twice, the way you might steady a spooked animal. I wanted to protect him. The impulse felt absurd and necessary at the same time.
"Easy," I said under the noise of water. "We'll just do what they say."
He nodded without looking up.
The supervisor’s voice cut through: "Chest. Both hands. Thorough."
I took the soap and began on his chest. My palms slid over smooth, almost hairless skin, over the sharp line between his ribs, the small flat nipples that tightened under my touch. His breathing hitched once, then steadied. Around us the other pairs moved with the same awkward care, some laughing too loud, some muttering jokes that died when the supervisor barked a single word. "Quiet."
"Back now."
I turned him. My hands moved down the long shallow groove of his spine, over the small knobs of his vertebrae. When I reached the top of his ass he flinched hard.
"Shh," I said close to his ear. "I’m not going to do anything bad. Just washing."
He trembled anyway.
I glanced at the red stripe on his collar card. "What's that stripe mean?" I asked quietly.
"Lifetime slave. Sex track," he whispered.
"Sorry, boy," I said without thinking.
I did not know why those words had come out. Lifetime slavery seemed manageable compared to a sex track, where the body would be used on demand by men and women. My own card indicated physical track, honest work, construction sites, lifting and labor. This was a reasonable distinction. Physical track required strength I possessed. It was preferable to his path.
Physical track was honest work. Construction. Lifting. Sweating for someone else’s profit. Better than whatever they would do to him.
I told myself that.
I almost believed it.
"Between the cheeks. Spread and clean."
I spread him. The motion was clinical and obscene at once. My fingers slid over wet skin, the hole clenching tight under them, and shame flooded me as my cock hardened involuntarily from his humiliation. His own slight erection stirred too. Both of us flushed deeper, eyes avoiding each other. Pale skin, tight little pucker, completely exposed under the spray. I washed quickly, efficiently, trying not to think about how small he looked, how helpless. The supervisor watched. Everyone watched.
Shame burned through me first, heat surging up my neck, tightening my chest, as the supervisor called "Cock." I took his soft shaft in my hand, pulled back the foreskin, and washed the head thoroughly, fingers sliding over slick skin, the intimate contact teasing it clean despite my intent. My gut clenched harder, exposure flooding every nerve.
"Arms. Pits. Ass again if needed."
I did as ordered. When I finished the supervisor called the next phase.
"Shaving. You will shave each other. Start from the top, move down. Pubic hair and genitals last. Thorough. No nicks."
I crouched behind him first. His ass was almost hairless already, just a faint down. I spread his cheeks again, razor gliding over skin I had just cleaned. The little hole twitched when the blade came close. I was careful. Quick. Done.
Then I turned him to face me. His cock was soft, small, retracted from nerves. His balls hung tight. I had never touched another man’s balls before. They felt strange in my palm, warm, delicate, heavier than I expected, skin thin and movable. I cupped them gently, pulled them down and away so I could shave the base clean. The first time another man’s testicles rested in my hand. The first time I felt them shift and tighten under my fingers. He was breathing through his mouth, eyes fixed on the wall above my head.
When it was my turn he was gentler than I expected. His hands moved over my chest, my stomach, my back. But when he reached my groin the shame hit like a wave. I felt every stroke as exposure, as being stripped all over again. The razor scraping away the last of what had made me feel like a man who owned his own body. Then he took my balls, cupped them, pulled them downward firmly so the skin stretched tight, and shaved the underside with slow, careful passes. The sensation was unbearable: vulnerability, helplessness, the knowledge that a stranger was handling the most private part of me with the same detachment he would use on any object that needed maintenance.
I thanked whatever was left of the universe that I had never been very hairy. The process was over faster for me.
We finished before most of the others. The supervisor glanced our way, gave a short nod.
"You did well," I told the boy quietly. "Thank you."
He looked up at me for the first time. Eyes wide, still flushed.
"Stick close to me," I said. "I won’t let anyone hurt you."
He gave one small, silent nod. Shame twisted deeper as I realized my protection was empty words here. An applicant like me held no power over a lifetime slave's track in this hierarchy, leaving me feeling just as helpless.
When the last pairs finished, the supervisor pointed to the far wall.
"Those who are done, line up. Straight backs. Feet shoulder-width. Eyes down. Wait to air-dry."
We moved. I took position beside the boy. Shoulders back, chest out, cock and balls hanging soft and exposed, water still running down my shaved skin in slow rivulets. No towels. Just the air and the eyes of the staff and the knowledge that this was now normal.
I stood there, dripping, body clean and bare in every possible way, and tried to process what had just happened. Not the touching. I had expected touching. Not even the shaving. It was the ease of it. The way my hands had moved over another man’s most private places without hesitation because the system had ordered it. The way his hands had moved over mine. The way we had both accepted it as procedure.
The sleeping quarters were military in structure. Two rows of bunk beds running the length of a rectangular room, each made with a single sheet and a single gray blanket folded at the foot. Thin mattresses. Metal frames. The regularity, even spacing, identical provisions, institutional precision, was immediately familiar.
"Find a bunk. Stand in front of it."
I chose a lower bunk near the center. The mattress was thin enough that the metal frame's contour pressed through. The sheet was clean. The blanket was coarse and functional.
The group lined up along the row, each man at the foot of his bed. The posture was becoming automatic, feet planted, hands at sides, eyes forward. The day had been teaching this to the body one station at a time, through repetition so consistent it no longer required thought.
In the army it would be similar.
The thought arrived with the shape of comfort. Bunks. Formation. Commands. Communal sleeping. Scheduled wake-up. All of it was recognizable. This was structure. This was the architecture of discipline, and I understood how to exist inside discipline.
Except they would be dressed.
The exception arrived not as argument but as arithmetic, a single digit corrected that changed the entire sum. In the army they would have uniforms. Boots. Rank on the sleeve. The shared stripping would have been temporary and bounded by the return of clothing, the fabric that said you are protected, you have a role, you will be covered again. Here the nakedness continued. The collar continued. The card against my chest continued. The shaved skin against air continued. The comparison held at every point except the one that emptied it of meaning.
"Eyes to the floor."
My gaze dropped before the command ended. The floor was gray. Boots appeared in peripheral vision, two officers entering from the far end. They had come without announcement.
One of the officers positioned himself at the head of the row. The other stood three paces behind, arms folded, observing. Then the officer began to walk the line. Slowly. Hands clasped behind his back.
"The purpose of this training," he said, "is to teach your body to serve commands. Not your mind. Your body. Your mind will follow eventually, or it won't. That's secondary. What matters is that when an instruction is given, your body executes it. Without delay. Without negotiation. Without error."
He stopped beside a man four places to my left. Without interrupting his speech, his hands moved, one to the man's shoulder pressing it back, the other flat between the shoulder blades. The man's spine straightened under the pressure. The officer's hands withdrew. He resumed walking.
"There are two obstacles to this." His voice carried the same flat authority as every officer I had encountered today, not raised, not lowered, pitched to the room with the efficiency of someone who had delivered these words before and would deliver them again. "The first is your conviction that you are free men. That you possess something called free will. That your decisions belong to you and your body answers to you alone."
He stopped at the next man. Took his jaw and adjusted the angle of his head, chin higher, neck longer. Released. Moved on.
"You entered this facility as free citizens. That status has not changed yet. But free will, the sense that your body moves because you, specifically, decide it should, is the single greatest obstacle to functional service. It will be addressed. Not through argument. Through repetition. Through your body learning, before your mind accepts it, that commands originate elsewhere."
His boots passed closer. I felt him stop near me, not directly in front, but close enough that the space between us compressed. A hand pressed against the small of my back, pushing my pelvis forward, correcting the arch I hadn't known I was holding. My spine straightened. The hand lifted. He moved on.
"The second obstacle is shame."
He said the word without emphasis. Flat. As though naming a mechanical fault.
"You are naked. You will remain naked for the majority of your time in this program. This is not a perversion. This is not entertainment. Nobody here has any interest in staring at your bare asses and your shriveled dicks. Sex track servants and slaves are plentiful and cheap enough. If anyone wanted a show, they would not need your intake group."
The words landed across the row. No one moved. No one breathed differently. The crudeness sat inside the silence with the precision of something deliberately placed.
"The purpose of your nudity, eating naked, sleeping naked, training naked, standing before each other with nothing on, is the systematic elimination of shame. And shame is a function of ownership. You feel shame because you believe your body is yours to conceal, yours to control, yours to reveal on your terms. That belief is incorrect. Once it is removed, shame becomes irrelevant. What remains is a body that is available for inspection, correction, and use at any time, without the friction of a mind that thinks it has a say."
He had reached the far end of the row. He turned and walked back. As he passed a man whose hands had drifted slightly forward of his thighs, he pressed them flat against the legs without breaking stride. The man stiffened. The officer continued without comment.
"You experienced the correction device earlier today. That device is not about pain. Pain is incidental, a byproduct. The purpose of physical correction is to install a single fact into your muscle: you do not control your body. Not anymore. The state controls it. Or whoever purchases your contract at auction will control it. Your body is the primary resource you bring into this system. It is the reason you are here. It is the reason resources have been allocated to your intake, your training, your maintenance. And a resource answers to the hand that directs it, not to the mind that once believed it owned it."
He returned to center. Stopped. Scanned the row once.
"You will learn this. How long it takes depends entirely on how quickly you release what no longer applies to you."
The silence held. The words settled into the room alongside the residual ache in my abdomen, alongside the collar's weight at my throat, alongside the cold air on skin that had been stripped and shaved and photographed and stood at attention in a row of identical naked men. The officer had not raised his voice. He had explained. The way someone explains a mechanical process to someone who will undergo it regardless of understanding.
Then, without transition, the inspection began.
The officers walked the row with deliberate pace. I tracked their progress by sound, boots on concrete, the occasional stop, the brush of hands across skin. Eyes down. The inspection was close and physical. Bodies examined.
A set of boots stopped in front of me. A hand took my chin, tilted it up, left, right, and released. Fingers ran across my chest, then down my stomach. Checking the shave. The touch was diagnostic. My skin passed beneath it the way a surface is verified against specification.
The hand moved lower. Fingers traced along the crease of my hip, then cupped beneath my testicles, lifting slightly, checking the shave underneath. The other hand pressed flat against my inner thigh, pushing my stance fractionally wider. A thumb ran across the skin at the base of my shaft, testing smoothness, nothing more. Clinical. Complete. The way you would check any surface for compliance with a standard.
Heat flooded my face, my neck, the tops of my ears. The shame was not in the touch, the touch was nothing, brief, procedural. The shame was in its ease. The absolute absence of hesitation. The way his fingers handled the most private part of my body with the same neutral pressure he had given my chin and my chest. No pause. No acknowledgment. No recognition that this was intimate, that these were surfaces no stranger had ever touched with such casual authority. As though there were no hierarchy of areas. As though all of me, jaw, breastbone, groin, was equally exterior. Equally accessible. Equally not mine.
"Good boy."
The words triggered the same reflex as before, that conditioned pull toward approval, but the context twisted it. His fingers withdrawing from between my legs, the heat still burning through my throat, bent the words into something I could not resolve. Praise for what? For standing still while someone examined my testicles? For keeping my legs apart on command? The approval and the act it rewarded belonged to different categories of my understanding, and forcing them together produced not pride but a low, formless dissonance that settled behind my breastbone and would not clarify.
The hand moved on. The boots continued.
Three men down, the boots stopped longer.
The snap of the cattle prod was a sound my abdomen recognized before my ears did. The man's torso jerked, a contained spasm, and the gasp that followed was more surprise than pain. He caught himself.
"Sir—" His voice was controlled. Reaching for reason. "Sir, I was under-shaved. The person who—"
"Don't argue, boy."
Flat. Not angry. Procedural.
"You do not argue with a free man. Ever. You accept correction in silence and you follow orders. That is the full extent of what is required from you."
A pause. The room absorbed it.
"Your body is your primary asset. The single resource this system has invested in. Keeping it in the condition required for your kind is your responsibility, not the responsibility of whoever held the razor, not the responsibility of whoever gave the instruction. Yours. Failure to maintain your body to standard is a serious offense. A punishable offense. Because your body is not your possession. It is property, state property, and soon the property of whoever purchases your contract at auction. Allowing that property to fall below standard is not carelessness. It is damage to another's asset. You should have ensured it was properly handled."
"Got it, boy?"
"Yes, sir." The man's voice was immediate. Tight. Shaped by something faster than thought. "Thank you for the correction, sir."
"Your status will be adjusted."
The exchange settled into the room like temperature. The man had been shaved by another participant, under a command that required mutual shaving, in a context where neither partner had experience or choice. The insufficient result on his body was his failure. His obligation. His property to maintain, except it was not his property. It was property he was responsible for but did not own. The logic closed in on itself without resolution: you do not possess your body, but you are accountable for its condition. You cannot argue. You cannot explain. You accept the correction and deliver the gratitude. And the gratitude had come, immediate, formatted, ritualized, as though it were the only possible response to being told your skin belongs to someone else.
The boots moved on. The inspection finished. The officers exited without additional comment.
I stood with my eyes on the floor and the lesson inside my chest. Whatever was done to my body, by anyone, under any instruction, in any circumstance, was my responsibility. Not the hands that held the razor. Not the system that issued the command. The chain of accountability terminated at my skin. My body. My fault. And I was to thank them for explaining this.
"On my signal, get under your blanket. You do not leave your bunk until the morning command."
The signal came.
The blanket rasped against shaved skin, rough weave scraping bare flesh. My nipples hardened from the day's memories, the washing, the inspection, the "good boy." Shame flooded as my body stirred with arousal at the humiliations. A texture I would not have noticed that morning now scraped across surfaces stripped of every buffer. Chest. Legs. Groin. Each newly bare area recorded the fabric's weave with a sensitivity that felt like intrusion. The collar pressed against the base of my throat as my head settled on the thin pillow. The card rested against my breastbone. My abdomen ached dully beneath the blanket, carrying the day's central lesson in its bruised fibers.
The light dimmed. Not to darkness, to a low institutional glow that left the ceiling visible and the walls in shadow. The kind of light that permits neither full rest nor full observation but holds the space between.
Around me, sounds of settling. Weight shifting on thin mattresses. Breath deepening. Someone swallowing in the dark. The collar pressed against my throat. The blanket lay across skin I no longer fully recognized. The ache in my abdomen pulsed faintly with each exhale, already fading, already becoming part of the body I would carry forward.
I lay still.
The understanding did not arrive. It settled, the way temperature changes in a room. Not an event. A condition that had always been approaching and was now here.
Today was not an initiation. Not a test. Not the difficult beginning that would give way to something more manageable. Today was the structure. The box. The collar. The camera. The shock. The food. The razor. The inspection. This sequence, or one shaped like it, would repeat. Not because it served a purpose that would be fulfilled and end. Because it was the mechanism. The regime was not what happened today. The regime was that today would happen again.
My body already knew this. It was already adjusting, muscles releasing not into comfort but into the specific kind of rest that prepares for repetition.
The blanket settled. The collar stayed. The light held its indifferent glow.
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