Chapters Beta Academy Chapter 5
From his exercise pod, Adam couldn’t help but eye the gymnasium door with curiosity. How late would Jess be today? Definitely late for hook-up, as almost all the Betas had been shorn of their uniforms and lifted into their pods already by the great handyman in sky, zipping along its track. That would mean either an extra tough workout to make up for lost time, or an after-class session, which would suck for Jessica: their physical therapist Miss Harriet didn’t enjoy missing the city-shuttle one bit, and had on multiple occasions taken her frustrations out on the class.
The pods, airtight eggs of worn-out plexi and aluminum, were designed to monitor the Betas’ exhalation and perspiration and feed that performance data into the systems that ran their lives. Everything was measured, and all actions were monitored, no different than the rest of the Academy. The machines had one control station operated by the burly Miss Harriet, a post she rarely vacated, and they were arranged in a uniform grid, irrespective of the fading multicolor lines that dashed the wooden gymnasium floor, useless markings of games Adam couldn’t play. In between the pods strode a number of supervisors, assistants to Miss Harriet and her whining microphone.
Adam sat erect in the middle of his pod, careful to keep balance on his legless bottom, which was notoriously tricky but of course old hat for the Betas. If he did happen to fall over against the padded sides, there was a collar around his neck leashed to an automatic winch in the ceiling of his pod. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to be lifted up, but it worked. Along with the chairs, the exercise pods were another piece of standardized tech designed and mass-produced by the UN. Any complaints of neck-pain could be handwritten and sent to New York Headquarters, he surmised.
Looking down, Adam was almost naked, wearing only the tight spandex pouch that covered his bottom and held his junk in place, but he was semi-hard, straining against the fabric with that familiar pressure. That had been happening recently; morning wood nearly every sunrise and spontaneous erections interrupting his classes, and it was becoming more frequent and more annoying with every passing day. To offer a guess, since he had never had this problem before coming to Cascadia, Adam was fairly confident that the feeding machines were slipping something more than vitamins into his food: it was a far cry from the freshly-prepared meals back home in the Californian Protectorate. Adam had heard Cascadia wasn’t as well-off, but really anything could be in the pre-mixed slop they ate here. And yet the girls seemed to love it: those perky, model citizens had no idea what they were missing.
Speaking of Betagirls: the door to the gymnasium slid open, revealing the only classmate that had really held Adam’s attention those last six months, unbeknownst to her of course. Jessica rolled in, her chair following a path far too straight and steady to be natural, and her sheepish expression confirmed as much. The chair’s autopilot directed her promptly to the foot of Miss Harriet’s control station, Jess’s slim torso dwarfed even by their slouching teacher, and Adam could see Miss Harriet lay into her with that accusatory finger, poking Jess in the sternum to hammer her point home, no doubt with that tired speech about respect and obedience toward natural Alpha superiority; and as always, directed with such casual, lazy venom that it had Jessica flinching with every syllable. The mic left off, her vitriol came through the pod’s shell so muffled and reverberant he couldn’t make it out, but it pained him to see such a smart, dutiful girl being chastised in such a way. A fingersnap, and one of the assistant supers was hastily lifting the limbless girl from her chair, which automatically scooted off to the corner to go into standby with the others.
Adam rocked his hips forward, shifting his weight carefully, first one side then the other, trying to see what was happening down the row, as did Amy across from him and half the class. The obedient supervisor roughly planted her load face down on one of the changing tables and unzipped the girl’s uniform, revealing Jess’s naked back and ass.
Adam had thirty girls around him wearing nothing but their daily spandex bras and some exercise wear to cover their bottoms, so that wasn’t unusual: his eyes were locked on Jess, who was squirming and looking around, obviously wondering why she wasn’t being lifted to a pod by the arm, why she was being left half-dressed in such an uncomfortable position laying on her chest, but Adam had a feeling he knew what was about to happen.
The static of Miss Harriet’s desk mic came in over the pod speakers, her disaffected voice piping into each. “Students, I am aware you all must feel very high and mighty right now. Very important, yes, off to do what us Alphas can’t in just a few weeks now. Off to save the world!”
She scoffed as if they were too dim to parse her sarcasm.
“Graduation is approaching without a doubt, and soon you’ll be someone else’s problem, but I want to be clear: academic rules do not bend, whether you’re five years old or eighteen, and they won’t bend in the centers either! You are Betas and you will follow the rules. This includes attendance!”
Adam couldn’t help but cringe as she nodded at the unnamed supervisor, who brought her hand down hard on Jess’s round ass, sending the girl into fits, shuffling on the padded table but going nowhere. He could see her looking back, trying to scoot her vulnerable behind away from the super, her smooth shoulders shrugging over and over, her behind shaking, twisting her hips, anything to get some contact with the mat, to worm herself away, but the super had a single hand on the small of her back; she was stuck.
This was ridiculous, they never used physical punishment back home, it was cruel! She couldn’t even protect herself! Another spank rang out in the gymnasium, the echo and a small yelp heard over the teacher’s live mic.
The most aggravating part of this whole charade was that the class hadn’t even been behind schedule until Miss Harriet decided to teach them a lesson. What had made their teacher so damn insufferable? Sure he had heard this kind of rhetoric before, but Miss Harriet was on another level. Adam just knew this Teacher would’ve been fired so fast back home…
He stopped himself, letting his eyes wander over the faces of his classmates, most with a pallor of worry and sympathy, but a large minority were simply keeping their heads down, ignoring the show of force on display as if it would save their own asses (literally, in this case), and nobody seemed to feel an ounce of the disgust he felt toward this Beta-hater. He had to stop fooling himself. He wasn’t in the Sacramento Academy anymore, he wasn’t even a Californian citizen as far as he knew; they traded him away like property and he would likely never see home again, and there was nothing he could do about it. He had to focus on the here and now.
“Enough.” Miss Harriet acquiesced after the third strike, leaned back into her chair, the one they had all joked about collapsing under her so many times. No one was joking now. “It’s about time we began.”
Jessica was picked up off the wrinkled shell of her uniform and walked down the row of pods to the empty one diagonal from his, which she was installed inside quite unceremoniously, collar secured around her neck with a click he couldn’t hear, but knew too well. As if the pod was aware of what had just transpired, it tightened the slack on the leash so she wouldn’t fall off of her sore seat, and seconds later so did his and all the others’, the light choking feeling a small price to pay for not hitting his head on the ovoid walls, but dominating nonetheless. Leash mounted as it was on the back of their collars, the subtle pull upward forced Adam to tilt his head down, and his eyes gravitated toward the package at the other end of his useless body, which was by now well beyond semi-hard and tenting the tight fabric painfully.
Why? Why now?
As Miss Harriet came on the tinny speakers again with the same old lines about proper exercise and keeping their bodies in good condition for the good of the country, she added a new line: “And if any of you think you deserve special treatment, don’t fool yourselves: you’re all just a stopgap measure…”
Adam didn’t initially catch it, especially since he was caught locking eyes with Jessica in her pod across the divide. Those deep, serious, stained, sorrowful eyes; the eyes he rarely met for fear of setting off her Purpose, even though he knew she looked more than the others. You’re here now, he thought to himself, be here. Talk to her. Did she see the vindictive anger or the empathy? He didn’t know which was painted across his face more clearly, he was far too focused on hers. Until the prerecorded routines began and they both had to look away.
“Shoulders up, down, twist left, twist right, scrunch down, stretch up, again, now five hops…”
Stopgapmeasure.
“Walk forward, back, forward, back, forward, roll onto your back, ten crunches. Reach for your hips, girls!”
What did ‘stopgapmeasure’ mean? He had heard many derogatory terms for Betas in his life, he knew what they sounded like on the tongues of women who hated the biological shortcomings Betas represented, but this didn’t make any sense. Adam would have to ask his desk during his study period.
In the meantime, even as his persistent erection distracted him, or Jessica’s embarrassed blush hung in his memory, he tried to focus on his exercises. Slacking in PT was not allowed. Any other class, a student could fall behind, get a bad grade, maybe a private chat to get them back on track if their metrics weren’t incentive enough, but not PT. And that was for the best, as scoliosis was a severe risk for anyone who lived their life without arms or legs, sitting all day. Let it get worse over time and organs would get squeezed, breathing would get tough, even sitting upright and driving themselves could become impossible.
Adam glanced back at Jess who was exercising earnestly, trying not to fall behind again, or fall over, before noticing Amy smiling wryly at him from her pod. Agh!! Caught in the act, he avoided her precocious gaze, stretching his neck and shoulders as the recording looped, waddling a bit on his butt to center himself in the pod. It was tough for him.
There were plenty of girls back in California who had sections of their spine injected with fusion material to correct for scoliosis, reducing their mobility, little by little, so they had all learned how important it was to keep fit. Here, Adam wasn’t sure. He felt the leash on his neck tighten just a bit as he almost lost his balance. The routine continued for a bit before he slouched his whole torso forward, making his spine into a curve, and carefully rolled backward, his only way of lying down semi-gracefully without hitting his head. Maybe Miss Harriet’s no-nonsense approach had saved his classmates from the painful, sleepless nights bound in tight braces while the fusion shot solidified, calcified the bones together. It was undoubtedly better than the old metal rods he had heard about, but after getting his L5 and L4 vertebrae ‘filled’, lying awake in the infirmary for days on end, finally being released from his tight plastic body-brace only to realize how inflexible his hips were, his butt, his only way of getting around outside of a chair, Adam needed no reminder ever again to keep his small body strong and his posture correct.
“Reach shoulder to hip, left right left right…”
It seemed there was only one Beta in his class who had any serious mobility issues — well, beyond the obvious — and that was Catherine 441, lying in the corner of the gymnasium on a mat, who was always tended to by a supervisor when out of her chair due to just how high-maintenance her condition was. Catherine had been dressed in an elastic stim suit which was tensing her muscles one by one as her body remained stock still, so even she didn’t get a pass on PT. Adam couldn’t imagine having his whole body locked up like that, it was hard enough just without limbs. He had heard rumours of a few Betas in the lower grades here with the same affliction, but Adam thought it weird that before coming to Cascadia he had never heard of this. Was it a treatment, or…
The recording clicked after the third repeat, their exercise was complete, and one by one each pod was unlocked, a super reaching in with a stim-wand to probe their round hips and other unexercised muscles before moving on. Using this prod tightened each vestigial bundle, once meant to lift a foot to the next stair step, or meant to wrap an arm around someone tightly; the prod made them cramp and then release until he was properly sore.
Class now finished, Adam looked over toward Jessica’s pod again but she had already been removed, Amy was just being carried away too, before another super unlatched his collar and lifted him up by the waist to get dressed.
Holding his near-naked body to her chest while she strutted to the nearest changing table, Adam’s face grew burning red when he felt how hard his uncooperative spear was pressing into the middle-aged woman. It didn’t help that this was the one who had doled out Miss Harriet’s punishment to Jess’s bottom. He looked up just to be sure and averted his eyes when she noticed. Yup. It was her.
Plopped down on his back while she looked for his uniform, he closed his eyes trying to think of anything else than the sight of Jess’s ass shaking as she struggled helplessly on this table.
Damn it.
Laid on the mat, Adam tried to avoid her gaze as she applied some antiperspirant to his shoulders, hoping the woman would remain professionally detached like the others, but that wish was torn to shreds when she asked casually, “Hmm. Why are you… here?”
“Excuse me?” What kind of question was that?! Supers weren’t supposed to talk to their charges more than necessary. If it wasn’t a formal rule it was a well-followed tradition, and even so, Adam wasn’t in the mood. Not from her.
“Well, I was chatting with my regular one night and I mentioned how Cascadia bought a Betaboy…”
Adam glared at her as she mulled about. “No one bought me! California already had two, I was uhm… redistributed here.” He had meant it to sound more indignant.
“Yeah, but, like… he said he jacked off for the first time when he was twelve. I’m not saying you did… I mean, obviously…” she looked at his smooth shoulders with not a hint of subtlety, “but you’re what? Seventeen? Eighteen?”
Adam was livid. He knew what she was getting at. But she was also in the middle of dressing him, and pointed at the subject of discussion tenting below, and after he told her how to arrange it, he looked back up at her and added, “What’s your point?” He wondered if she was bold enough to just outright say it.
The super readjusted his elastic underwear that covered his hips, grabbing his penis and rearranging it in the tight elastic band so his hardness would hide against his waistline, and slip back in whenever he got soft again. She held it for just a moment too long, a bit too firmly, and Adam failed to contain a gasp. “I’m saying… if your sperm is as priceless as they say… why aren’t you in a Future Center already?”
She said it so casually, all the while slipping his uniform on, turning him over, and zipping up the back, turning him over again before he had the chance to glare right at her.
“Because I’m a fucking person, not a jizz dispenser, and I deserve to finish my schooling in peace! My classmates might not know the security directives but I do, and so do the Enforcers outside. I was practically mag-lev’d in a damn crate like luggage so the anarchists wouldn’t know which inter-protectorate train to hijack, and now you casually tell whoever you last sucked off? Get your hands off me, I want another supervisor.”
Her shocked face, one that had never had to deal with such a response from those she considered so low, turned sour. “No need. I’m tired of your attitude, Betaboy.” And with the press of a button the handyman had descended from the ceiling and was lifting Adam into his chair, fastening his waist belt, and he was bulleting out the door as fast as he could to the head office to file a complaint.
That is, until he found Jessica and Amy in a side-hall, chairs face to face, heads bowed forward with cheeks pressing together in the only embrace Betas could muster. Jess was obviously crying again, and Adam didn’t want to intrude, he wanted to fight for fair treatment like back in— he glanced at the two of them, at Jess, and that voice permeated his thoughts again.
Be here, talk to her.