Stories Beta Academy
A world changed, adapted to the crises it has suffered from. Beta Academy is the tale of a single day in the life of a circle of friends, all living in an institution for the limbless orphans this world calls Betas. Jessica, Amy, Adam, and the rest all struggle with accepting the lives set out for them by the United Nations’ Beta Care and Future Protection Programme.
Chapter 1
Stirring what she could, Jessica awoke to another lovely day as the simulated sunlight in the Senior Beta Sleeping Quarters rose to full brightness and the soft, staccato buzzing of the bulb pressed against her mons alerted her like a quiet alarm. Blinking the sleep out of her eyes, Jessica was greeted by the familiar open-top box that she had slept in all her life as recordings of songbirds tweeted, echoing in the cavernous hall just as they always did, regardless of the season outside.
Waiting patiently for one of the transfer arms to help her out of bed, Jessica could faintly hear Amy in the next box over, shaking and shuffling to get off from the vibrating alarm, but Jessica knew better than to try. As tantalizing as the chance was, as soon as everyone in the room was awake the alarm would cease, and the bulbs would remain inert until bedtime, just like every other morning. She could wait till then. Or until Amatory class, at least. And sure enough, the short buzzing stopped only seconds later and a great sigh came from Amy’s box.
“Sweet dreams last night?” Jessica inquired with a chuckle and a yawn to the panelled drop-ceiling, featureless save for AC vents and the rolling track for the transfer arm. Though it had been said entirely without malice, a few other girls nearby laughed quietly from their own boxes, save for poor Catherine, who probably wanted more than anything to be doing what Amy was right now, futile or not. Dreams of sex were far from uncommon for Betagirls like them; just one more side-effect of the Purpose they were training into themselves.
“Oh Jess, hi, um, good morning, um, yes, I think so.” Amy replied to the open air, stammering. Jessica giggled and left her friend to regain her composure in a modicum of privacy, stretching a bit and looking around her box for the millionth time to keep herself busy.
Craning her neck over the tent her breasts made in her cotton sleeping sack, the close-fitting box was made of a soft white plastic, bright even against the sky blues and spring greens of the large hall, and had little to distinguish it from anyone else’s except for a soft brown teddy bear velcroed to the side wall that she had begged the supervisors to let her keep past her graduation to high school. Printed on the outside rim beyond her line of sight was of course her name, social insurance number, and barcode in black ink, just like on her collarbone. Save for Teddy, the contoured foam pad she laid on, a small protruding straw for cool water, and the vibrating bulb that extended from the bottom wall, her box was largely featureless.
There were also some concentric holes in the plastic above her head. It was actually Amy, who Jessica loved to bits but admittedly wasn’t the brightest light, who had suggested that they looked similar to the intercom speaker screens throughout the Academy hallways, but in all of Jessica’s 18 years, she had never heard the holes emit any sound, so they were still a mystery.
Finally, Jessica was greeted by the two white mechanical arms rolling into view above her. ‘Mister Pick-Me-Up,’ they had called the bright pink one in the Elementary Sleeping Quarters all those years ago. Jessica smiled inwardly: she was only months from graduation, from leaving the Academy she had been raised in, so what once might have been embarrassing memories now made her treasure her time here.
Hello, Mister.
With mechanical efficiency, the arms reached inside and unzipped her sleeping garment, nudging the soft fabric out of the way, and secured her nude, limbless torso around her midsection before picking her up. Jessica shivered in the open air, the only warmth she felt being the residual body heat from the previous Beta the arm had moved. After only a moment, she too was zipping over the dozens of other boxes toward the conveyor line of motorized wash chairs leading to the showers.
Like every morning, Jessica’s path flew her over top of him, and like every morning she had to consciously ignore that he was probably looking up at her exposed bottom, forget the sight of his shy morning smile when she looked downward, forget how just the sight of the only male Beta in the whole Academy sent her body into complete autopilot. Her head wanted to play out all the ways the boy down there could fulfill the Purpose deep inside her, all the ways— Jessica cut herself off, focusing instead on the quotidian tasks ahead of her.
And just as quickly as she was picked up, she was set down on one of the crawling train of plastic chairs, her spine in alignment and her full hips and bottom creating an upright balance just stable enough for her to quickly lean back onto the cool plastic to be safe. Ah ah, too cold! Squirming the little that she could to warm up where the plastic touched her bare skin, Jessica peered forward, and like usual, there was a long line of girls in front of her, heading around the bend toward the showers. It was really a simple operation, Jess thought, but with nearly a hundred and fifty Betas in just these quarters, it was too slow.
First came the bidet, during which the nerve implants in her lower spine released control and allowed her to relieve herself (both ways), before the full body spray, then the soaps, shampoos, facial creams, and mouth cleaner, followed by the exfoliating arms and toothbrush, then a light rinse, followed by a routine depilation spray on undershoulder and pubic areas, a deeper rinse, a warm blow-dryer for the body and short hair, deodorant and fragrance of the girl’s choosing, tampon insertion if she was menstruating or scheduled to be, and then finally off to be given a once-over by a supervisor for simple hair and makeup requests if any, before being fitted with a bra and the standard, state-issued Beta Academy uniform.
At first glance, the uniform appeared to be a crisp white blouse, navy blue jacket and miniskirt, finished off with a cute, short red tie on school days, but in reality it wasn’t unlike the sleeping sack which was probably in a hamper by now, except tighter, more form-fitting. The whole outfit was actually a single elastic body-garment inside, the more traditional and time-consuming elements simply sewn onto the figure-hugging spandex beneath, intersected by a single zipper in the back that went from the collar to the elastic bottom to hug Jessica’s hips and behind. Of course there were no openings at the shoulders or hips, just at the collar. It was functional, one-size-fits-all, and even featured the old national colors from before the war.
Even with Jessica’s generous breasts, which had been continuously growing ever since her enhanced puberty, the uniforms did not sag or tent like the loose sleeping sack; they hugged every curve so as to not impede her body any more than necessary. The pleated miniskirt, just long enough to cover her wide hips, had once been an attempt to hide some of those lower curves from male supervisors, but there had been no male supervisors hired since the earliest days of the Academies due to side-effects, like the ones she felt for Him, for Adam. Even on the rare occasion that an Enforcer left his post and came into the Academy complex itself, the Betas dared not look too closely at the men in those paramilitary groups, for fear of setting off their Purpose, the autonomic desire latent within them.
All finished, a long line still behind, her short dark pixie cut brushed and eyes given a hint of liner as per current Beta protocol, Jessica was picked up by another set of padded arms and deposited in her chair, before being strapped in. The two straps, one near her hips and the other just under her breasts, had once again been fastened too tight by the transfer arm.
“Hey, um, excuse me!” she called out but most of the supervisors along the line were too busy, so she waited until she caught one’s eye. The Alpha woman bent down with a huff. Well don’t get too excited, now. Jess couldn’t tell if she was annoyed by the miscalibrated robot or her, but she had a feeling it was a bit of both. Before Jess had a moment to say it was still too tight, the supervisor was back on the assembly line, adjusting the tie on another Beta.
Looking down over her chest, craning to see the bottom strap still digging into her wide, fleshy hips, just above the flair of her skirt, Jessica was suddenly aware of the fact that she had never fastened or unfastened those buckles herself, even though they were the only barrier to her falling face-first to the floor. This thought faded away quickly, though. The life of a Beta in 2087 was hands-off, by design. She guessed from seeing the supervisors and teachers that Alphas were not pampered to the same level, even for convenience’s sake, so maybe they knew how to unclasp a buckle, or turn a doorknob, or write with a pen, or survive outside these walls, but she wouldn’t ever be expected to. Was that compromise really so bad?
Now, the standard chair for high school girls was a luxury compared to the group strollers of elementary school pushed by the supervisors, or even the automated chairs of middle school that ceaselessly dragged you down the hallway wherever you were scheduled to be next, so Jess thought it better not to complain, put her shoulder against the pressure-sensitive controls, and got on with her day.
Chapter 2
Meanwhile, Amy still lay in her bed waiting for her turn in the showers. Flexing her right hip over and over, fidgeting, she took another sip of water, waiting. She knew the selection was randomized, but Amy had been near the end of the line the last three days in a row. It just wasn’t fair, and neither was that damn alarm! Her hip muscle twitched again and again. Oh, come on, a hall full of senior Betas, how long could it possibly take? She knew how long, but that didn’t help one bit. But all these concerns were distractions, blissful distractions from the pressing matter of the day: the Math test results.
It hadn’t been an important test for anyone else, anyone not on academic probation, but Amy knew that if she failed any more she would be marked as a lower Beta at graduation, and who knew what would happen then? She probably wouldn’t be able to fulfill her Purpose, and then what? She would let her country down! She would be worthless! Fifty-two graduates this year for the entire Cascadian Protectorate, less if you exclude the two girls already marked as Low, unworthy; it wasn’t fair, none of it was!
But being a lower Beta didn’t necessarily mean exclusion from the Purpose. Amy watched Cathy from two beds over get picked up and whisked overhead to the showers, her small body stiff like a doll. The two girls weren’t as close as they had once been, Cathy having driven everyone away well before she lost her voice, but even someone like her might still be fulfilled, she had just been a bad girl, lazy, rebellious; but Amy knew failing academically was far different. She wasn’t choosing to misbehave, she just couldn’t keep up, not bad behaviour but bad genes, and that gnawed at her.
Barely holding back the floodgates, Amy looked upward and blinked fast to quell her feelings, just as her old friend Mister Pick-Me-Up came into view and descended to unpeel her from her sleeping cover, before whisking them both off toward the showers.
After Amy was clean, dressed, short golden hair arranged in tiny pigtails just as she liked, and secured into her chair, she took a moment just like all of her sisters; to shuffle her round hips into the gel seat until comfortable, until she could feel it conform to her butt and press up against what lay between, and ready her right shoulder at the controls. Then she took off down the hall toward the cafeteria, at the fastest speed she could manage without automatically alerting a supervisor, looking for her best friend, Jessica!
From what the Betas’ driving teacher had told them in class before the mobility test way back when she was twelve, their chairs weren’t like the old wheelchairs from before the war, no, those things looked ancient! Amy’s chair was mass-produced and provided by the United Nations for use solely by Betas in their Academies and Future Centers, and it was more like a scooter than one of those antiques.
No arms to push wheels? No manual wheels. No legs left, not even thighs? Give it a slimmer seat. Betas falling and hurting themselves? Lower the seat to the floor and strap them in for good measure. Batteries running out all the time? Power them from the floor. Amy wasn’t quite sure how that last one worked, it just did, and she loved it! Jess had mentioned once that the bottoms were weighted so none of them tipped over, and Amy used that to her advantage as she ripped around a corner, feeling every little bump in the polished floor vibrate up through the seat to her hips, biting her lip.
Though they knew it by heart, the Academy was a giant institution, raising and supporting around fifteen hundred Betas like her at any one time, from babies until they all graduated to the Future Centers or other placements. Still, large as it was, Amy managed to get over to the South Cafeteria fast enough to catch Jessica just about to start breakfast, and luckily there was an open spot beside her at one of the feeding stations, which Jess nodded toward.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say the central computer is picking on you.” Jess said with a grin.
“I know, right?! Fourth day in a row. Luckily you’re such a slowpoke I didn’t have any problems catching up.”
Jess scrunched her face at that, “Hey! I am not! Not everyone here has your touch for the controls, and let me remind you last month when I beat you to Biology.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, you really showed me! Bail that harshly again right in front of a Super and they’ll put you on autopilot like a kid.”
They both shuddered at the thought of losing that treasured privilege, and the pillar-like machines came to life just as Adam arrived and took his spot at his own station in the far corner. Amy saw Jessica’s bright eyes falter and dash as her and everyone in the room tried to ignore him, but she tried her best to submit to the urge, and kept looking. She absently asked how Jess’s head was doing after that fall… but she wasn’t listening, she was still looking… still looking, still—
“Earth to Amy!? See, don’t make fun of me anymore for not going over to talk, that blank stare is exactly what I end up doing and I just embarrass myself, or worse.”
“But you said you liked him!”
“I said Adam had a nice voice in class, don’t put words in my mouth.”
“Yeah, sure, the first class after the trade with the Californians. That was over six months ago, Jess! What have you done since then? You should go get to know him before we all graduate.”
“You’ve been watching too many pre-war films.” She scoffed but her eyes drifted over to the subject of discussion nonetheless. “I still can’t believe he was worth all of the graduates last year.” Forty-five or forty-six, Jess couldn’t remember, but as a simple Beta who had grown up inside these walls her whole life, it made her head spin to think of all of those girls so far away. Jess couldn’t even fathom how far that might be, wouldn’t it take weeks to travel all the way to the Californian Protectorate? And all for Him?
“Stop changing the subject. You’re into him, and it’s not just the Purpose talking, I can see it.” Amy cooed.
Jess’ face hardened. “Yeah, ok, maybe! But how would I even know if that’s true when it’s talking so loudly? I mean I can’t even think straight when I see him. Is that love or programming?” Jess lowered her voice, “Tell me you aren’t wet after looking at him directly for that long.”
Amy had no retort for that sorry truth.
“He has his Purpose and I have mine, maybe he can fulfill me someday in some Center we cross paths in, but there’s no way we can have a relationship like Alphas do. What are we gonna do, Amy? Flirt? Buy pretty plants for each other? Engage in illegal monogamy? Put shiny metal rings on each other somewhere? Find some suburb that isn’t abandoned and settle down? That’s inefficient, old-world nonsense and you know it. Maybe a real man could make it work, but…”
The girls both looked over at Adam sucking his meal from the feeding spout all alone, and a mix of programmed submissive pleasure and resounding pity took over, before they averted their eyes back to their own feeding spouts to distract themselves from the confusing feelings. Amy knew that Jess, while usually light-hearted and polite, could argue her way out of anything with an airtight defense if pressed too hard. Amy thought she would’ve made a good lawyer if she were an Alpha, but the food was ready and she had made her case.
Amy took a sip of the fruity nutrient slurry from the spout, mixed and portioned individually for her body’s needs based on data from her implants. It tasted really good, as always, and the new machines only fed her as much as she sucked from the thick straw, so there was no need for those embarrassing bibs like back when they were kids. That said, she had to eat it all eventually. The nutrient calibration meant none of them became overweight or malnourished, and Amy hadn’t even had an upset stomach in years, but only because she trusted the system to treat her right, so she ate up. Provided for, Amy was left to think as Jess and her ate quietly, sucking away, left to fantasize in a way Jess’s uptight smarts couldn’t, or wouldn’t, it didn’t matter.
The last thing Jessica had said was insensitive, callous, and both girls were glad Adam hadn’t overheard them. Just because Beta boys were a thousand to one, that didn’t make them more than Beta girls, and no one could get past the law. Boy or girl, no Beta could claim ownership of the clothes they wore nor the box they slept in, never mind a life for themselves outside the Academy system, and that was for the best! How would Amy even survive in the world outside? Rare stories had spread about powerful men using their influence to buy Betas from various protectorates and colonies around the world, but Jess always said those were just ridiculous stories, and that made sense to Amy: Betas were way too valuable, too special. Their lives might be simple, predefined, but they served an important role that was essential; unavoidable.
But still, it was nice to dream. A man all to herself, who picked her, just her, Amy 312, over a real woman with arms and legs and things and stuff. She sighed longingly, chewing on the tiny fruit bites from the spout. Alphas probably didn’t even have to take stupid tests.
Chapter 3
Jessica found herself in a mood after breakfast. She loved Amy, like Alpha families must love each other in the world outside, but the way that girl unchecked herself from the limitations of their reality just annoyed her sometimes. After seeing Cathy uncheck too, and never come back… No, it was Jessica’s responsibility to watch out for her sister. Amy could daydream and lose focus in a way that was really harming her future, and so Jess was nervous for their classes today, hoping for good news for her sister. Still, first period was not yet the class which would decide her fate.
As her chair controls deactivated and the lesson began, Jessica smiled up from the second row at the young History teacher at the front of the classroom. Not as young as her, of course, but Miss Alyssa couldn’t have been older than thirty. The teacher had been a kind of mentor to her, a relationship grown over the last year and a half quite naturally once Jessica asked for after-hours tutoring. She felt a connection with her teacher, more than any other staff member, and one could see why. She was kind, smart, and she was the only staff member in the whole school who actually looked like her students, who knew what it was like for them. Most of the other teachers and supervisors meant well, of course, but to them Jess was still just a Beta with a Purpose, plain and simple.
“Good morning, sisters! Let’s pick up where we left off on Friday. Does anyone remember— yes, precisely: the Independence Day Attack of 2017.”
There was a pause before Miss Alyssa’s digital notes appeared on the desk in front of her, its faux-wood surface dissolving, actually a terminal monitor which had been on standby. A second later the projector above her warmed up and began the video content for today’s lesson. She read off her screen to start but was soon directing her impassioned lecture toward the class, her shoulders unconsciously gesturing where arms instinctually would have.
“…it was a desperate act, backed into a corner, unaware of the consequences, a clear confirmation of how badly the world needed a treaty on biological and genetic weapons, like those on landmines or nuclear weapons before, and how badly we needed a solution for political strife, stagnation, and brinkmanship.”
Another pause while the famous videos of the explosion in San Francisco Bay played above her, where an Alpha Teacher would have stood with a long pointer in their dexterous hands.
“I don’t need to remind the class of the ramifications of that day.”
The teacher shuffled absentmindedly in her seat; her wheelchair. Of course the girls understood the ramifications, as the class was lined, front to rear, with twenty-four short wheelchairs, a young woman aged 17-18 in each one, each wearing the identical state-issued uniform. Or mostly young women, but it was easier to generalize when there was but one gender anomaly for every thousand Beta girls, in a world where any Beta was one to every forty Alphas. Yes, Alyssa would teach half the 11th grade girls after her gap period, and then the other batch of 12s. Every student would be in the same outfit, the same apparatus, strapped into their chairs and their destiny.
“The irresponsibility of the countries before the World Protectorate System is appalling, as you can see. Irresponsible with the environment, with humanity itself. Shortly after the breakout, a large segment of the population were focused solely on how the Independence Attacks would hurt the economy, their money. They had no concern for the reports of strange birth defects along the west coast.”
Jess was eating this up, but she knew it all already, they all did. The reason she liked Miss’ class was that she didn’t just teach what happened, she taught them why it happened. Nothing in History this year was very new or scandalous, they were just learning more detail, motivations, reasons, opinions; interesting only to a secret nerd like herself. Some supervisors openly questioned why the Betas were even taught anything of the sort, but intelligence and aptitude needed to be measured somehow, and besides, Miss Alyssa herself was a testament to the benefits of such an education.
More than 60 years ago, from what they had been told, the world was a much scarier place. Ghastly wars were being fought left and right, and the former USA was actually a huge perpetuator of that world, constantly vying for dominance. National ideologies were constantly in flux, at each others’ necks. Communism had fallen, why not capitalism? Even as far as they had come technologically, there had been conflict, starvation, inequality everywhere, and the Earth was on its last legs.
Jessica wondered to herself: it couldn’t have been as bad as they say, could it? There had been seven billion people before the collapse! But if Miss Alyssa was teaching the same material as all the others, it must have been true to some degree. So yes, famine and strife and inequality and all the rest.
That is, until a loaded missile was sent to San Francisco Bay one autumn morning. Apparently it didn’t do much damage, merely grazing the Golden Gate before hitting the water, so the government hardly looked at it, too busy coordinating a full-scale war with North Korea in retaliation. But they failed to notice the contaminants onboard until it was much too late, until it had spread through the water. Ten years of failed quarantines and martial law later, the world was a very different place, and the first generation of Betagirls were growing up in the fledgling Academies of the North American Protectorates.
Jessica wondered who had come up with the term “Beta” for them. Hints in her memory from a middle school lecture attributed the term to Joseph Eldridge, the UN Secretary-General and and creator of the Academies, but that might equally have been hearsay spread by the other girls, Jess couldn’t remember. It was sometimes hard keeping facts straight living in a closed school where rumours spread like a game of telephone. But anyways, in such a progressive society, it seemed a little harsh, portraying her and her friends as “less-than” or secondary to the rest of society, even when they were so important.
Her Biology teacher had finally told them why they were important only six months ago. Why they were imbibed with the Purpose. Why their home and the few places they traveled to beyond the fences were under such tight security. Of course, Jessica 326 had always known her one role in life, what she was raised for, what the Purpose reinforced ever more strongly as she got older, but her Bio teacher Miss Dierdre had finally enlightened them to the reality outside the walls of the Academy. The girls had all gossiped about for so long that she would have guessed naturally, but it was nice to finally know.
Riiiiing, that’s the end of class!
Miss called out her closing announcements, “Remember to do your readings, up to section 7.2, with the initialization of the UN World Protection and Stabilization Plan by Joseph Eldridge. Hey, Ashley 312! I noticed in the access log that you only skimmed today’s section last night. You have to try harder, dear. And yes, yes, this will all be on the quiz next week. See you on Wednesday.”
A resounding sigh preceded a faint whirring; the mass exodus of twenty-four chairs. Even though Jessica’s chair was now unlocked from her spot on the floor, she didn’t move her shoulder against the controls to roll out of the classroom. No, she fought against her tight waist strap a bit instead, in a bid to let the classroom empty so she could go up and talk to Miss Alyssa. Looking up, she locked eyes with Adam just as he passed on his way out, a quiet smile lighting up his face, lighting up the fireflies in her stomach.
“Hey!” she bursted, cheeks flushing red.
“Hey, Jess.” he said, undoubtedly knowing she would hang back: it was common-enough.
She looked back down quickly as he passed by and left, motors whirring. He did have a nice voice, she thought through the haze.
When Jessica finally rolled herself up to the front of class, the room nearly cleared out, the small teacher across the foot-high mock desk gave her an eye, not without a smirk. “You know you can’t keep skipping PT like this, Jess. You don’t want the supervisors to take away your controls.”
Jessica didn’t need reminding. “I know, Miss, I just wanted to clarify some things.” Alyssa nodded for her to continue on. “So I don’t really understand, did they think the Beta virus would only incapacitate the United States? How didn’t they know it would spread?”
“Well, Jess, that’s a good question. We won’t really ever know, we can’t ask them ourselves, but I’m sure you’ve learned about the scientific method and experimental responsibility in Biology class when you studied the big breakthroughs, right?”
Jessica puzzled to herself, “I… don’t think so, Miss, they must have changed the curriculum since you lived here. All we cover is Alpha and Beta physiology, oh and reproductive science of course. The rest, I’m not sure…”
This seemed to momentarily tick the older woman off, but she caught herself and said cryptically, “Hmmm, so they stopped pretending. Well… you give and take at the Cascadian Academy, always remember that you girls are lucky compared to many others. I was raised here, as you know, and only by the luck of being distributed here after birth was I educated enough to be able to teach all of you.”
Jessica could only imagine what an Academy anywhere else must be like, or if they even had Academies like this; she had only rarely ever left these walls or the dense evergreen forests beyond for short class trips to the beach or museums nearby in Seattle, and even then, they were always back in the group strollers in sets of eight, treated like toddlers yet again, guarded heavily by Enforcers to boot. And besides those little glimmers, where all the girls were stunned silent by curiosity as they were led on a leash through the land of the Alphas — the “normals” — it was strictly taboo to ask about other Academies, or the Future Centers, or even the specifics of life for everyday people. Everyone did anyways, but not without great care. It was strange… like her curiosity could not be put into words.
“From what I’ve read, the Beta Virus was supposed to only affect people of European and settler descent, to tip the scales toward the East and fulfill their old vengeance and supremacist agenda we talked about last week, but of course that would be an impossible genetic puzzle to unwind. There’s barely one hundredth of a percent of our DNA that makes each of us unique from each other. No it was a mistake to even try, so everyone but the few microcolonies still in successful quarantine is now a carrier, and once you graduate to one of the Future Centers in Seattle, your Alpha offspring will be distributed to Alpha pairs based on factors that have nothing to do with race or sexual orientation for that matter. They may even end up with Korean parents! So remember, that even though we have to live with the repercussions of that day, they failed, and out of necessity we haven’t had a war since.”
This perplexed Jessica even as she nodded in agreement. The world seemed like a better place, but was such a disaster necessary to bring us to this state? Sure, war was a thing of the past, but at what cost? So spiteful, so careless, so…
“Miss, one last thing, I’ve always wondered, why are you not in a Future Center? I mean you seem like you have so much to give the Protectorate, to the people of Cascadia.”
The older woman shuffled in her seat a bit. The question obviously made her uncomfortable. “And am I not giving what I have to you, Jessica? After all our little chats like this, you must know by now that’s a very inconsiderate question.”
The young woman blushed, “I’m sorry… I didn’t—”
“No no, you should be told, but only because you’ll find out soon for yourself. This does not leave this room, do you understand me, young lady?”
Jessica was all ears, nodding.
“You know why we have our Future Centers, of course? So we can keep the ‘engine of humanity’ alive?”
This was all review for Jessica from that quiet day in Bio class; it turned out that nearly all Alpha women were infertile, it was the Betas’ job to make sure humanity didn’t go extinct. This infertility was the real intended curse of the Beta Virus; Jess and the lot of them were all just a side-effect, an exception.
“Well… not all of your Purposes will be fulfilled.”
“Yes, of course Miss, Low Betas don’t get to—”
“No, not just them. Not all of the graduates will be birthers in the Center.”
This hit Jessica like a brick wall. Every ounce of her training, her entire future, Purpose, and self-worth all revolved around becoming a birther. It was everything! All-encompassing! She suddenly realized how careless her question had been. Miss Alyssa was a Beta too, after all. She had the Purpose hardwired into her brain. She needed this as much as any of them.
“I can’t tell you much more, just know that it’s very important for you all to perform well in the Academy before you graduate. I know you’ll do fine Jess, you’re my best student, but there is much you still don’t know about what comes after… all of this…” She trailed off with a look of deep emptiness in her eyes, and a large part of Jessica regretted ever asking.
“You best be off to PT, now. Miss Harriet isn’t a very forgiving woman.”
Chapter 4
The automatic pocket door slid closed after her last student, and Alyssa 295 was alone in her classroom, her second period today being a break for other work, a gap, and finally she could let the facade drop. That… hurt. Why had such a careless comment pained her so much? Oh, it only invalidated all her struggles to get to this very point, but Jess didn’t know all that. Hadn’t she developed a thicker skin by now? Apparently not.
It was so hard being a teacher to these girls that she still considered sisters, though they were almost a decade younger than her. Truly she felt more alike to them than to her peers here at the Academy, the ones who treated her so… so… professionally? No, not quite, but with much the same remove. Let’s say ‘adequately.’ Being a Beta, she was still part of their job. But she definitely wasn’t a student. She was alone in the middle, a member of neither club.
It was nearly impossible to gain respect as a Beta, Alyssa knew. At worst, all Alphas saw in her was an unused womb, abandoning her Purpose, helping to speed up the decline of civilization. What were they at now? 1.2 billion and falling? At best she was a threat to their job, the vanguard of a potential workforce who couldn’t even legally accept a teacher’s wage. Just being stuck on the floor driving around with her shoulder left her closer to her coworkers’ shoes than their faces, and Alyssa had a sneaking suspicion that the UN Authority didn’t want it any other way.
Still, getting too close to the students was unprofessional, she knew, and this time she had definitely told Jessica too much. Alyssa was fairly confident that her star pupil wouldn’t go spreading it needlessly, but there were rules to how the facts of life were revealed here in the Academy system, rules that Alyssa didn’t necessarily subscribe to, but she had to admit that they were dangerous to mess with. Telling a young disabled girl that her life has been predefined from birth and she will never have a chance of altering that or running away does not breed happiness, or even acceptance. No, some knowledge was a burden.
Alyssa twisted her shoulders, her back, stretching what little she could, the tight nylon straps’ ever-present hold on her making themselves known. Hell, she was starting to sound like one of them now. Like a supervisor, like an alpha, like a…
Looking at the “desk” in front of her, the divider between the old Beta and the new ones, Alyssa wondered which super, or which of the other teachers, had the gall to put a plastic apple there, in the corner, full of pencils that hadn’t been touched or dulled since she started her job here nearly five years ago. A backhanded gift, without a doubt. Of course she had never been taught how to write, even when she had asked way back in third grade if her Teacher could show her how to do it with her mouth. Oh, the look on her face! Alyssa wanted to knock the fucking apple off her desk, but thinking of her smooth shoulders, she was well aware no such thing would happen. If she did manage it, put the effort in, lean as far as her chair would allow and knock it over with her shoulder or mouth, she knew the result would be pitifully anticlimactic, and then there would be pencils and pens all over the floor, blocking her chair’s hard wheels, impossible to clean up without asking for help, making the whole damn thing pointless.
Sometimes it all made her want to scream in frustration.
It had taken everything she had in her tiny limbless body to get to this point, like swimming upstream when all she had been taught to do was lay back and float. But the students were worth it, they really were, and it was better than being a mindless milker, or a bed companion in some state-run brothel, collecting “samples.” She knew that without a doubt.
Alyssa’s thought about her parents, those anonymous genetic donors she had never and would never meet. A Beta and an Alpha, pre-screened but obviously not well enough. One of them, most probably the father, had passed down some unwanted recessive traits into their daughter, traits that wouldn’t matter if she weren’t a Beta but, being the ‘engine of humanity,’ only the purest genes would make the cut. Though the criteria for purity was unclear. Who knows what had disqualified her? Maybe a tendency toward heart disease or Alzheimer’s, maybe they didn’t like freckles, it had been an off-limits, closed-door, classified decision, as so many decisions about their lives were.
So, faced with the alternatives of being milked all her life or collecting semen from pre-screened men to be redeposited in other, worthy Betas, Alyssa had managed to convince the head supervisor at the Future Center to make her mind useful to the nation… even if her womb wasn’t.
But this still left the Purpose in her. That fucking Purpose. They must’ve known she was unfit for motherly duty earlier than graduation but still they planted that ceaseless need in her head, half physical implant, half hypnopaedic suggestion. Probably so her and her kind would keep being the eager sex slaves of the protectorate. Ugh, just the thought of it made her sick; but inevitably it turned her on: to be useful, to be used; such were the suggestions in her head, such was her Purpose; and the cycle was endless… endless…
Alyssa looked down at her uniform-covered breasts ballooning out in front of her, sighed, and leant side to side, twisting the small bit she could to ease the dull ache. If the standard enhanced puberty drugs weren’t enough, she had been in the Lactation Productivity Program for nearly six months before she wore down the top super with her unprecedented proposal, a possible solution to the ever-present labor shortages. Though her breasts had stopped producing shortly after she started studying for her education certificate, they were left unusually large for her slight body type, and still heavy. If only she had arm stumps instead of these useless udders, Alyssa thought, even small ones, then she would be able to knock over that fucking pencil holder, for sure.
Alyssa checked herself. She was frustrated, yes, but disappointed with herself for letting an offhand comment get to her so easily. She had been through much worse. Of course, it didn’t help that she hadn’t been fucked in a month. A whole month. Not the longest she had gone by any means, but the bulb only did so much now that her cherry had been popped and the Purpose really activated. Her students had no understanding of real desire, none. Once she knew what it felt like to be fulfilled by a real cock, making her sore, making her complete, oh there was no substitute.
No. Alyssa didn’t want to go down this road. She had already been a little wet just from having Adam present in her first period class, and now she was flush from letting her mind wander. If she let it go on any further, it would make concentration very difficult for the rest of the day, or until she could get back to her box. She had definitely swung by her room over lunch before for a little relief, but her current situation wasn’t that dire yet.
Alyssa looked around on the desk terminal for some work to do, it’s camera tracking her eyes as she looked through folders for unfinished forms, teaching notes, anything. But she lived for her work, and she was always well ahead of the game, so this didn’t leave her much to distract herself with now, not much at all.
What was a curious woman to do with the hundreds of questions she couldn’t ask, shouldn’t ask? The system was firewalled. Oh yes, even as a Teacher she was still blocked from the internet. After the war, all access was granted by registered fingerprint, for security purposes of course. Access without hands just wasn’t ever built in, or that was the story, so all she could see was the pre-approved content of the local Academy network. Besides, the administration didn’t think she needed to be connected to the world of the Alphas for any work-related reason, her lesson plans had already been laid out for her very clearly: “This is what you will teach them, this is what they’re not ready to know, and these are the sections you don’t have clearance to read.” Alyssa was sure if this job of hers was more than a pilot program she would have never seen nor heard about that third bit.
The thought of even that thick-headed gym teacher Harriet knowing more than her just frustrated her to no end. She flicked her gaze across her desk and all the papers flew back into their folders, her workspace clean again. Bare.
She turned to the window and looked out to see a group of Betagirls in the play-yard, they were maybe twelve or thirteen, it was hard to tell. One of them had bulleted too fast across the paved area (as all young girls did with their first wheels), overshot the edge of the concrete and rolled into the grass field, motors powerless, while her friends sat just feet away on the inducting asphalt, teasing her and calling for a supervisor.
With nothing better to do, Alyssa couldn’t help but let her mind drift to where the Purpose wanted it to go, looking off farther toward the fences, thinking about the last time she had enticed a man to her room here at the Academy. What must he have thought?
She tried to picture it through his eyes, looking down, as unfathomable as it was for her. Her living space was all custom, since she was the only live-in educator here, the first ever. Everyone else on the day-shift drove back into the city in the automated busses to be with their families. But no, Alyssa stayed where all Betas had to: in the system; monitored, protected. Trying to head to the city, she wouldn’t have gotten much farther than that girl on the lawn, less than half her age, losing power on the threshold and being pulled the few feet back by her supervisor along with a stern talking-to.
The Enforcer had knocked at her door, and upon her voice authorization it opened to let him in, quickly, quietly, closing it again. The surveillance officer had been paid off, but the soldier didn’t want to get caught by a passerby. It was very much against the law to touch the merchandise, and though she had invited him personally, and though she wanted him, she was still a Beta after all. Vulnerable by chance, willing by design. No wonder the protections were in place and as inflexible as they were. In the eyes of the UN Authority, once the Purpose implant was in, Alyssa couldn’t responsibly consent anymore. She was “under the influence,” forever… and usually this wasn’t an issue. Take the Future Center as an example, one man would walk into the pairing room, already pre-approved, and the Beta prepared on the bed would instinctively want him, and only him, until he left and another walked in, and another, until one of the little swimmers had met its match inside her. There was very little choice involved and it was entirely a non-issue. It was regulated. It was okay.
But left to make her own means, Alyssa was confident there was something particularly attractive about this one, something that confirmed her belief that she had real choice and will over her own feelings of desire, and oh sure he had been the first one she saw on patrol between the perimeter fences, and sure he was the first one she asked, but it couldn’t all be the Purpose.
Right?
Again she tried to imagine it from his perspective, door closed, turning around, seeing Alyssa alone there in her tiny chair so far below, waiting for him in the center of the room. A transfer arm in the corner with enough ceiling track and reach for the whole 15’x15’ space, a station for her chair at night in one corner, floor-level bidet in the other which had a moulded seat that she could sit in unaided, a low countertop along one wall from the toilet with a feeding machine and water spout built in. And finally a twin bed along the other wall, unmade and mattress bare, with a Beta’s sleeping box on top.
They had provided the twin bed at first, and sure, Alyssa had tried to adjust, but live your entire life sleeping in a plastic box with sidewalls close, protecting you from the openness, the dark, and then go to an Alpha bed that engulfs you in heavy fabrics and has no sides to protect from a fall. Oh, and the bulb. The box had its magic bulb. She was still ashamed of needing the box, as if it alone defined her as a Beta, but he hadn’t cared, or so he had said, clearing the bed and putting it on the floor so easily with his big, strong arms, before unbuckling and picking her up from her chair, sitting on the edge, cheap mattress creaking and sagging under his weight, resting her unsteady torso on his lap, her fleshy, useless hips conforming to his thighs, tensing in anticipation, his large hands around her petite waist, her eyes reaching out where arms couldn’t. To see him, to smell him, to feel him, her Purpose was practically in overdrive, and she was finding it exceedingly difficult to say anything other than, “please…”
Alyssa had wanted to dress up for the occasion, like they did in the old movies, but she had nothing to wear save for her custom teacher uniform, based off the same zippered elastic shell of the student uniforms, provided every morning by the young supervisor who helped her get ready for the workday. Betas didn’t really own things, and you could tell. Two whole years into this job and her room was pretty bare, save for her Teaching Certificate framed on the wall and an origami crane on her countertop that Jessica had folded with her mouth and given to her several months ago.
So he had peeled off her work clothes; unzipping her from behind, unclipping her bra, and laid her bare on that open expanse of mattress to watch as he stripped himself too, his holster and bulletproof vest the first to come off, shortly followed by his uniform. This was the most skin she had ever seen of a man in person, the rest of them had been too nervous of getting caught, wasting only enough time to get their dick out of their pants. And still her eyes had focused like a ravenous animal on that last detail, and on the muscled, thirty-ish Enforcer it was one hell of a detail!
He had left her little time to ogle, though, as he eagerly climbed on top of the torso which lay prone exactly where he left her, and with his warm body he had enveloped her, held her so that she wouldn’t slide around as he began to poke at her smooth, legless hips with the rock-hard shaft mounted to his. Oh, he obviously wasn’t very experienced. That was okay, Amatory classes from years ago had taught her to be understanding of the mistake, to try flexing her hips “outward” in hopes it would pull her pussy open for him, though she didn’t know if that technique worked or not, especially since by now many of those exercises had gone the way of her schooling.
Another stab and he was home, slowly pushing into her needy, dripping hole and relentlessly splitting her in two, filling her, fulfilling her. That first push, oh god! Alyssa had tried not to scream out, wished he would kiss her, gag her with his mouth. The impulse to grab and hold onto something for dear life had been overwhelming, if foreign to someone born without hands. She wondered if Alpha women felt the same way when they were having sex, or if it was just a manifestation of her desire for all that was forever beyond her grasp.
But even as his hips picked up speed, slamming into her and sending her tits into fits across her chest, he hadn’t kissed her, even at one point suckling and biting at her nipple, but his lips never touched hers. The Purpose made it incredibly hard to emit anything more intelligible than moans, or to have much of an opinion at all, really, but Alyssa distinctly remembered wishing he would treat her like a real woman. Like in the movies.
But that hadn’t made it a bad experience, no, and the Enforcer likely agreed, with Alyssa rhythmically flexing her well-trained kegel muscles as he fucked her. Besides, it was her duty to get him off, the Purpose made sure that was her very top priority. No, not just a priority, her only thought, her obsession. And this didn’t necessarily mean as fast as possible, it meant as powerfully as possible, for the more cum that flooded into her, the more would be sensed by her lower implant, and the harder she would get to cum.
Of course her clit wasn’t modified or blocked, the buildup, the fucking itself, that all still felt amazing, but her reward for fulfilling her Purpose was miles beyond such natural sensations. An Alpha woman just wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t understand.
So when he finally ejaculated deep into her, hand gripping onto her empty shoulder, she rolled her vaginal muscles, milking him for every drop like the good little breeding machine they had raised her to be, all to cue her nerve implants to send that golden key to her brain, to release as much of an oxytocin and dopamine cocktail as possible, to flood her body with that high, to cum in sync with him, her man.
Alyssa stopped herself when she realized she was still at her desk by the window, eyes half-closed, subconsciously flexing her kegels along with the vivid memory. If only she had just one hand to… one finger to… Shuffling her hips, wincing as her sensitive clit pressed into the gel seat, she realized just how wet she was. Damn it, she likely stained her seat cover again, and the bottom of her uniform was definitely soaked through. If Alyssa could see over her breasts, though, she knew she wouldn’t have seen a trace. The pleated skirt had its benefits, she had to admit.
The Beta looked at the clock, realized she still had fifty minutes left in her gap period, and started rolling toward the door, hoping that the bulb in her room would be good enough this time.
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.
Chapter 6
This was turning into the worst day in a long time as Jessica bolted out of the gymnasium as fast as she could, closely followed by Amy, “Jess! It’s going to be ok! Here, c’mon, follow me.”
Zipping ahead, Amy led her distraught sister to a side-hall that only led down to the elementary wing, before turning around to face her, butting her chair up as close as she could, clashing front wheels, giving Jess a bump backward reminding her to lift her shoulder and set her brakes.
She finally looked up at Amy, at those caring eyes, who said, “No one will mind us here… look, they still even have the old lockers, and the lights are still those old tubey ones, no one will come down this way, let it out…”
And she did. Jessica cried and cried, leaning forward as much as she could against her belts, reaching out to be held. She would give anything right now to be held by anything other than a nylon strap or a mechanical arm. Amy knew, leaning forward to press her cheek against hers, to kiss and whisper softly, “…it’s not so bad. It will be okay.”
It was just like when they were kids, struggling to roll around on the mats or hop on their bottoms during playtime, inevitably colliding into each other, back when it was easier, before her chest grew so large and sensitive. That’s how her and Amy had met, the hyper, blonde girl with the pigtails who sat two rows back in the stroller, colliding with her suddenly, half-lying on top of her before even introducing herself!
It hadn’t taken long for Jess to ask to be sat next to Amy in the double-wide stroller as the girls were pulled from class to class, so the two could lean over and chat/gossip/whatever anytime they wanted to. That’s how she had met Cathy too, who sat just behind Amy, and the three of them had become the best of friends.
“It could have been any one of us to set her off today…”
Jess faintly remembered one trip into Seattle. They were old enough to have their own self-driving chairs by now, the one they had to ask politely if they wanted to go somewhere — an effective way of teaching manners, Jess had to concede — but being out of the academy meant it was back in the strollers with her best friends and sisters by her side like old times. Oh, the air was so fresh and cool, the sun wasn’t too hot, a smell like it was about to rain, typical. All the Betas were craning their necks, trying to soak it all in, peeking around the Enforcers’ legs and rifles to see the electric trolleys whiz by, the solar panels creak and tilt like mechanical sunflowers, the noise from the shops and restaurants pour out into the quiet streets. It was all so wild and disorderly and lively, nothing like the sterile Academy.
The caravan of eight-seat strollers and armed men all stopped in front of a UNNAP banner proclaiming “Protect our Betas, Protect our Future”, the Enforcers saluting before continuing onwards.
Seattle was pretty big by post-collapse standards, maybe two hundred thousand in the metro area, but she knew they were only seeing the downtown buzzing away. The windows in the bus had been too high up on the drive into town, but the outskirts were probably crumbling, if not already razed or reclaimed for farmland and logging.
Too bad. Jessica had always liked the cows in her picture books and wanted to see a real one.
“Everything is going to be okay, we can head to the bathroom and get your face washed off…”
Downtown, the girls had seen many things. Unhealthy, messy foods they couldn’t dream of, signs and lights striving for attention in a mad frenzy even as no one seemed to pay them a second, but one of the most curious had been an Alpha woman embracing an Alpha man as she let him out of her apartment. Jess remembered her jaw almost dropping as she saw the two wrap their long arms around each other and hold the other’s body to theirs, not to carry the other person, just because! She even pressed her breasts right into him, which went against all the modesty lessons they had been taught. The two were so happy, slipping apart and waving as the man donned his pack and headed on his way, the woman tightening her robe and heading back inside. Jessica hadn’t been the only one to notice, as that night during free time she remembered asking Amy and Cathy about ‘hugs’ as they laid out of their chairs on the mats.
Cathy had guessed that they hadn’t seen one yet because the supers and teachers were only coworkers and those two Alphas had seemed really close, which made some sense. The trio had whispered something about the two normals doing “you-know-what” and left it at that. Of course when they were older and allowed to watch movies they saw much more than hugging, but to young Betas it was a big deal.
Amy had been the one who started brainstorming how them Betas could replicate a hug. “I love you two, I want a way to show it!”
They had tried rolling onto each other, bumping shoulders, a little headbutt, but the only part the limbless girls could replicate was tucking their chins into the crook of each other’s neck, and when they were firmly bound in their chairs as Amy and Jess were now, they could barely do even that, due to their front wheels butting up together.
“Soon we won’t have to see that bitter old lady ever again…”
So the cheek touch had become the way the Betas could feel close with the people around them even as their torsos became less limber and more front-heavy, and they spent more time in their chairs, and it had caught on amongst good friends, and Jess had even seen some younger girls doing it too. ‘Hugging.’ Not as casual as a greeting, it was meant for the hard times, the happy times, the important, lonely, quiet times.
And that’s what Amy did for her sister while Jess couldn’t get the shame of being spanked in front of her whole class out of her head; while she couldn’t wipe the specks of vitriolic spittle off her; while she couldn’t forget the disappointed and hurt expression on Miss Alyssa’s face.
And that’s how Adam found her.
Jess heard the whirr of motors coming around the bend, stop and get closer before he piped up, “That was ridiculous!! Are you okay, Jess?”
Breaking off at the last person she expected, Jess caught Amy’s knowing smirk, before turning to him, trying to blink away the tears. “Not really, but…” Jess sniffled, tried to focus, experiencing a wave of Purpose she didn’t want right now. With an eye toward Amy she continued, “…but I will be.” Her and Adam locked eyes again like in the exercise pods.
Amy interjected, “What do you mean, ‘ridiculous’?”
“I mean it was totally unfair! Miss Harriet should be fired!” The defiance in Adam’s face lit up Jess, before she just started laughing, Amy and her both.
“Yeah, okay, new kid! We’ll go complain to the head super about life being unfair!” Amy was loving this.
“What are you laughing at? I was just about to go there, another supervisor just stepped way over the line with me too! The one that hit you, Jess.”
Now it was her turn. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, seriously. You’ll just get laughed at. Well, maybe with you being… you… they’ll go through the motions, but punishments like that, they suck, and they’re usually reserved for the young ones who need to learn the rules, but they’re not out of the ordinary. I was late, after all.”
This floored Adam, who leaned too far back directing his chair to reverse an inch before catching it, making Jess laugh again, lighter this time. Even if she probably looked like a mess, even if she was a little bit distracted by him being there, she was happy he had broken the ice, finally, though she would never let Amy hear that!
The foreigner looked at both of them, as if he had never heard anything more outlandish, “You’re serious?”
“I mean, yeah? I don’t know what your old academy was like, but Miss Harriet has always had her limbs in a knot about not being able to have her own kids, a lot of the supers do, and they’re way less subtle about it since we found out.”
Adam pressed on. “But shouldn’t she be reprimanded for taking it out on you? We have to stand up for ourselves!”
Amy shushed him to keep his voice down, no doubt seeing flashbacks of their third friend.
“And who would take her place?” Jess laid it out, gently but logically, “Just play it out, you know Cascadia is suffering, the population is still sliding, so they can’t afford to fire her. You talk to the head super, Miss Harriet gets a complaint, sees it on her file, and then takes it out on you for every PT class until we graduate…”
He grew quiet, deflated a bit. “I don’t care. I must have some sway… I want to stand up for you, Jess.”
This made her smile, made her feel warm inside, and for once she was sure that this warmth wasn’t the Purpose. Jess engaged her wheels and drove forward to him, leaning forward, and kissed him on the cheek before he even knew what was happening, the both of them close as Betas could be… and beet red. “Thank you, Adam, that’s really sweet, but don’t stand up, please. Just learn to enjoy sitting. I don’t want to see you end up like Cathy.”
Adam looked stunned for a second, before coming back to reality. “Wait, what happened to—”
But they were cut short by a bell throughout the halls, and short vibration in their seats, the warning to get to class before the interperiod gap ended.
Amy was almost giddy, but had to be the voice of reason for once. “Hold that thought, Adam. Meet us after lunch… uhm… where’s good… ah! By the fountain in the courtyard! We have to go to the bathroom and get Jess cleaned up before the autopilot kicks in again, that will give us a hall pass for a while. See you in Biology!”
Jess pulled back and looked into the clueless Betaboy’s eyes, “See you soon,” before reversing and heading off.
Going their separate ways, finally able to think clearly, Jess was overcome with self-consciousness yet again, and her and Amy could barely keep their mouths shut on the way to the washroom. Only once they were inside, Jessica’s stinging butt firmly planted on a cold bidet seat and her implant letting her pee freely while she hit the attendant button by her shoulder, did she look over at Amy going too and pretty much squeal, “That was so forward, oh my god! How could you let me do that?!”
Amy was leaning back, trying to keep the bottom of her uniform bunched up around her waist away from the spray. “I don’t think you needed any guidance from me, you had it handled, smoothie!”
“Yeah but I’m not even—”
Amy cut her off, “Don’t you dare! You’re into him, and he is obviously into you too! Don’t overthink it!” But Jessica knew she would.
An elderly supervisor came around the corner and only had to take one look at Jessica’s teary raccoon eyes to turn back around and get a warm washcloth. “I keep telling you girls, mascara’s not the most practical choice in your situation!” but Jess just mhmm’d while she felt her sadness wash away under the caring touch of the old woman, holding her steady on the bucket seat, cleaning her off while her shoulders twitched, imagining she was doing it all by herself.
“Better?” the super leaned down, to which Jess nodded and lilted a thank you.
Jess leaned her shoulder into the button on the opposite side, feeling her muscles down below tighten slightly in that familiar ‘safety feature’. Honestly, she had no idea how Alphas didn’t leak moving their hips all day, she was happy to be sealed up. A warm dryer blew across her privates before the Mister picked her up, zipped her spandex bottom closed and strapped her back into her chair.
Watching Amy’s torso get set down next to her and cinched in, Jess just muttered, half to herself, “Lunch… by the fountain… what am I going to do??”
Meanwhile Amy just giggled and told her simply, “Just roll with it!”
Chapter 7
Amy cruised into the classroom, followed by Jessica, eyeing Adam already in place like a good boy as they braced for another reprimanding. Their chairs switched to autopilot and guided each past the myriad anatomy diagrams, models, charts, and portraits of happy birthers as they rolled through the rows to their assigned squares on the floor. The brakes quietly engaged, their shoulder controls clicked off and flipped out of reach — which wasn’t far — and they were locked in place.
“Good morning, Miss Dierdre!” they announced in sloppy unison, having missed the class greeting.
“Ah good morning, girls, thank you for joining us!” their teacher remarked with that resting smile she could never quite hide, even while trying to be stern. The bookish alpha adjusted her large glasses and rose from her desk, while every one of her students looked up just a little bit more.
“Since today is a special presentation I thought I would wait for everyone to join, but don’t push it, young ladies! Central is still marking your tardiness.”
Amy swallowed nervously. Every demerit added up, just like Jess always reminded her. But knowing what lay on her schedule this afternoon, a meeting with Miss Olive after class, one-on-one, did it even matter anymore? Her nervous twitching picked up tempo.
Amy leaned forward and shrugged her shoulders, feeling the straps dig into her, glancing down past her chest at a ruffle in her skirt, pulled up under the lower strap, exposing the curve of her bottom pressing into the seat. What could she do but sigh? Amy didn’t know why she always struggled against her chair, twisting or leaning, hoping a certain combination of squirms could fix her uniform, or readjust her pigtails from tickling her ears, or adjust her bra. Oh imagine! It seemed like a dream, but if she could just—
A pair of pretty shoes stepped into view and Amy slowly looked up, following the teacher’s pants and then her blouse, standard all-white uniform just like the normal Supervisors, with a burgundy sweater pulled overtop that looked soft and warm, hardly standard, a leniency allowed by her position and her many years teaching Betas like them. Craning her neck back, feeling the edge of her seat dig into her shoulder blades, squinting against the panel lights above, Amy balked as Miss Dierdre’s hands found themselves on her hips. Oops.
The class was silent.
“I said are you with us, Amy? Don’t make me start calling out numbers now.”
“S-sorry, Miss. I was just—” she looked back down but Miss Deirdre was already kneeling to her level, reaching with her deft fingers to pull the errant fabric from under the tight strap and pat it into place, just so. Amy hoped she didn’t feel her useless hip twitching again underneath, nervous.
“Not to worry, and stay with us today, hun,” she said with a hush. “It’s important, you know.”
Amy could only nod as her teacher rose so high up and returned to the front of the class. She knew she was a bit spacy, and everyone else knew it too, but Amy was a little taken aback. Miss Dierdre didn’t have to help her, to encourage her. Most teachers wouldn’t do such a thing, their PT instructor being a perfect example. Ask any passing super in the hall and they would only raise their eyebrow at such a tiny issue as an unkempt uniform. Amy glowed a bit and tried her best to focus. Her hip stopped twitching.
Miss Dierdre waved away the issue and continued. “Anyways, a special presentation, yes… Seeing as you girls — sorry, Adam — seeing as you all have been very diligent pupils as we near your graduation — just shy of a month now! — I find the UN-mandated curriculum is running a little dry. Whatever I tell you in theory will soon come to pass as you fill your proper motherly roles as birthers. We’ve been through the reproductive cycle, the changes to the body as the miracle of pregnancy progresses, the virus’ mechanisms within the cell, all about sexual dimorphism between men and alphas and betas and so on, we’ve been through all of that. Everything that comes after the exciting bits you cover in Amatory, that is.”
A wave of giggles and blushes coursed through the room, and Miss Dierdre put her pointer down. She wasn’t going to need the screen today.
“As you all know, the child-bearing process will be very hands-off for you.” The mousy Teacher paused, glanced at all the slim, armless shoulders in front of her, and smiled, acknowledging the slip of her tongue. “Well… you know what I mean. Your education is for your well-being not your responsibility, for measuring your aptitude as well, and all we have left is finals. Now I could give you study time at the terminals… or tell you about the Centers.”
The whole class perked up immediately at the possibility of learning about the mysterious Centers. Amy knew she would get to live her life in one, everyone did, but what that life looked like there was still mostly unknown. There had always been tall tales whispered after dark, coming from a few boxes over, one of the meaner girls, about being locked away in a tube or a box with just a slow drip of water and food, waiting nine months to make a baby before starting the process over, and over, and over, but Amy was almost sure that wasn’t a thing.
Almost.
Amy thought it was more probably a really nice place like the Academy but with no classes or metrics or dumb tests, where Amy’s only responsibility would be to create a warm, temporary home for a new child. It would be fun to just lay about all day, talk with Jess and eat good food, she thought, daydreaming away. Maybe more of the mango pellets!
“…well I could stand up here and tell you all about the Future Centers, their ins and outs, what I’ve read and seen on sanctioned visits, but I haven’t lived there, not like you will… so I’d like to welcome one of our alumni here today!”
With each student looking left and right to their sisters to see if they heard correctly, their teacher strode over to the entryway and punched the open button, leaning out the door on one long, graceful leg to wave the guests in, the other out for balance. Amy thought it all seemed so complicated, but the Alphas made it look just effortless.
In walked an Enforcer, making nearly everyone blush and squirm just a bit, Amy herself finding it hard not to study the man’s square jaw, the light-blue UN Peacekeeper’s cap and his black uniform, the way his pants outlined his butt. Her breasts seemed to get sore when her Purpose noticed a real man, kinda like during the first few days of her period, it was weird. With so few men in the building, she had forgotten since Adam arrived but here it was yet again, that subtle throb. She must be more desensitized to their new friend than she thought, able to sort-of tune him out. That was an interesting thought to share with Jess later, but Amy was still eyeing the guard. She twisted her hips into her seat in frustration.
Eyeing the class as if assessing possible threats from the twenty or so limbless girls locked securely in place, the Enforcer nodded out the door and a Beta rolled in, and the whole class immediately forgot all about him.
Miss Dierdre spoke up again, “Ok class, this is Alexandra 2-5-0, she graduated just two years ago, and has since gone and made herself a perfect little incubator, haven’t you?! Oh how time flies! I remember you were in my front row, always attentive, and look how it shows!”
The Beta on display was parked by her chair in front of them all and beamed a shy “Thank you,” with bashful eyes looking up, shifting the golden hair which flowed to her shoulders, a fashionable luxury no student could ask for, not even the seniors who sat there in shock, jaws hanging.
But hair wasn’t what the class was most jealous of.
Alexandra had been dressed in a stretchy white body-garment kinda like the elastic layer keeping their uniforms hugged close, joined at the neck with a firm white collar and red bow flaring to the side, but with a wide and low teardrop cut exposing the fair, untouched skin of her swollen breasts, and stitched here and there to be more form-fitting to the limbless body of a Betawoman as late into pregnancy as she was, leaving little room to doubt where each swelling curve began and ended. This was in stark contrast to the formal uniforms of the slim underage girls, and left her fertile figure practically naked save for the thin material and her bright-white bra underneath. Or maybe it was all one piece, Amy couldn’t tell, she didn’t care.
Even as the visitor glowed in pride, Amy stared at her big belly.
None of them had ever seen a real pregnancy in-person, which Amy now thought was very odd, since that was soon to be a near-constant in their lives. It was bigger than the diagrams and pictures and videos and simulations, massive against the Beta’s limbless body, gently cradled by an add-on to the front of her chair, curved and padded, shielding her child from any tip-over or crash into a wall or another Beta. It must have also helped to support her significant weight, three blue dots stuck near where her belly button poked at the fabric. Amy wondered what those could mean.
The room hung in silence before Fatima in the front row gave a shy, “Congratulations,” and the room was suddenly full of fervid praise for the young mother in front of the class. She did her best to nod and thank each compliment, including Amy’s, before looking up and behind herself at Miss Dierdre for the go ahead.
“Okay… uhm… my name is Alexandra 2-50… like Miss said. I know, us tenners really are lucky, I guess! Just call me Lexi, though. I’m 20 years old and have lived in the Future Centers for almost two years now. Central Seattle for the time being. You know, I recognize some of you from the halls here, I think… but yeah… it’s really good to be back, I didn’t think I’d get to see my academy again, but I’m super lucky the Head Super picked me to do this visit.”
“Ahem,” their teacher cleared her throat to prod the girl, “And why did they pick you, dear?”
“Be… because I’ve been a good, useful girl and my womb is the home of the first recorded set of natural triplets in Cascadia — or the entire west coast, I think — since the outbreak.”
Amy couldn’t believe her ears. This was wonderful! Spectacular! The room was full of more congratulations, as all the girls were not only astounded to meet a real celebrity, but also couldn’t help imagining being filled with enough… substance… to make not one, not two, but three babies! Three more citizens for the quota!! Amy knew Jess would have told her that’s not how it worked, but she was across the room, smiling as eagerly at the joyous news as Amy was.
Miss Dierdre leaned against her desk and grinned with pride, “You know, I read about your conception in the Times! I told my partner, ‘Hey, that’s my student doing her part!’ Get a few more of you and we all have a fighting chance!”
“You’re too sweet,” the Betagirl blushed, looking down at the source of her goodwill, then she winced and the room went quiet. Lexi shrugged her empty shoulders and tried to squirm in her chair, though that did very little. “Oooh, excuse me. One of them is kicking.”
Miss Dierdre got up, reached out with the same hand that had helped Amy, and asked, “Can I feel?” but she was cut off by the Enforcer, who put himself in the way, quickly and resolutely.
“That’s entirely inappropriate, ma’am. Maintain a safe perimeter from the assets, we already discussed this.” He hadn’t raised his weapon, but why did Amy feel like he had?
Lexi could only smile sadly at the deflated Miss Dierdre for the rebuff made by her guard, but Amy was sure their teacher must have understood. She herself had taught them all that every pregnancy was precious, sacred, and twins or triplets came with complications. No risks could be taken, especially with how far along they looked to be. Their teacher leant back against her desk, fingers clasped together in poorly-hidden disappointment, but the Enforcer didn’t return to the door, standing right behind the tiny Beta with her massive, prized belly.
Faced with an awkward silence, Lexi continued, “Sorry, that… that happens a lot around me, I’m only really allowed to be looked after by specially-trained supervisors, because of the value of the triplets and how close we are to their due date. You all saw my chair on autopilot too… has been since the first ultrasound.” Lexi explained with a frown. “I mean, usually we keep our shoulder, just get given a really low speed-limit, like a real one, the wheels only turn so fast… and this brace in the front, obviously. That’s normal for the fulfilled, as a bumper in case I get knocked into by any of the empties or the others.”
The girl in front of Amy, Tegan, interjected. “Others?” Amy wondered what she was on about, to interrupt their special guest, but waited for the answer like everyone else.
“Can I tel— uhm, can I take questions?” Lexi looked up at Miss Deirdre, who nodded eagerly. The Enforcer looked a bit like he was going to disagree but his radio crackled loudly.
“Sergeant Ellis, we have a… a teacher? We have a teacher, Alyssa 2-9-5, the one you requested to see. You didn’t say she… worked here. Over.”
The Enforcer looked pissed, and confirmed into his mic that he was on his way before uttering to Miss Dierdre, “You know the lesson plan,” and taking the few wilful steps required of him to leave the classroom.
With that overbearing presence gone, Lexi shuffled a bit in her chair, wincing again. Amy noticed the growth on her front was so heavy that the usual hops and shuffles Betas did with their torsos to shift weight from hip to hip, butt sore from sitting all day, were totally ineffectual. “Well, uhm, yeah, the others. There are the low Betas, who get to come to the Future Centers too, but they all have different Purposes for serving Cascadia.”
Amy was delighted to hear this. Maybe if she failed it wouldn’t be so bad!
Lexi continued, “There’s the Lactation Productivity Program, which is where most of the other Betas go. You see, I’m lactating now,” she looked down at the swollen breasts she couldn’t touch, nodding her chin at a discolored wet patch in the white fabric around her left nipple, obviously leaking through her soft bra too, and she winced again, “If only the implant could stop me making a mess there too, right girls? Yeah… we aren’t really used for the central milk supply, though. To express this little bit with a pump would just encourage my body to produce more and — actually, Miss, could you let my supervisor Kyra know I need a pad after this? — and to produce more would decrease our efficiency at our true Purpose…”
She stared down at the wet stain, slowly growing, yet unable to do a thing about it.
“I’m not sure if I knew this when I was sitting in your place, but I don’t nurse my own offspring, not even a little bit. Our cycle takes more time to come back if we feed them ourselves, and besides, it’s really important that they separate from their incubator quickly to not cause either of us undue stress. I mean, I love ‘em already, but nine months is enough, am I right? And it’s not like I can take care of them like they deserve… so… yeah…” Lexi kinda drifted off.
“You were saying?” Miss Dierdre prodded after a moment, adjusting her glasses.
“Oh right, sorry. And then… uhm… and then I head to postpartum recovery and monitoring for a few weeks. They have special boxes for that, I think. I haven’t done this part yet, I’m on my first go ‘round… I know, all this buzz and it’s just my first time, but anyways, yeah, I hear at the very end you get to have a party, it’s kind of a little celebration for a job well done, then I’ll rejoin the empties, take it easy until my super says I’m fully recovered and ready to head to the pairing room again, before starting the process all over about a year or so post-fulfillment! Honestly, girls, it’s so wonderfully efficient!”
The room was quiet as all the students processed this info. A lot was just review, like the importance of separation so the newborn alphas could go to their assigned families, and so newborn Betas (if they were so lucky) could be nursed for a while and then delivered to the Academies they would be raised in. Amy thought it was a bit sad to be separated, especially if she happened to give birth to a Betagirl like her. She could tell the little one so much… but surely nine months is enough, isn’t it? And it’s not like she could take care of the tyke like she deserved…
Amy blinked. She hadn’t meant to repeat what Lexi said, though it was true, so whatever.
But the Lactation Something Something was news to her, and while Amy just hated raising her voice, this might be her only chance to see what her future might look like — the mere admission of which sucked to think about — so she spoke up, “Excuse me… Lexi? We kind of got on a tan–… a tan–… uhm… we got sidetracked. What’s different between you and the milkers?”
“Oh gosh, sorry! These boys here kind of occupy most of my thoughts these days! I’m so scatterbrained!” she shrugged with her tiny shoulders. “Well… it might seem dumb to say, but what distinguishes us is breast size. Like, not when you all graduate, obviously, but the low Betas are given something called— Miss Dierdre, I’m sorry I totally forgot what it’s—”
“It’s called rBGH,” their teacher added, “’Recombinant Beta Growth Hormone.’ It’s a wonderful invention, a cocktail of traditional hormones like prolactin and oxytocin — we’ve talked about the importance and downsides of the latter — and some… more complex gene therapy dilutions that the good doctors in New York and Geneva have made specially for you girls to be the best you can be!”
“Oh gosh, don’t get me started on your lesson on the pituitary gland, it really stuck with me, how everything I feel toward these little guys is totally fake, totally chemical, like totally old-world thinking! I mean seriously!”
Miss Dierdre smiled warmly, “Well good to hear it doesn’t all evaporate the moment you girls leave for the big city, I do hope my job makes your Purpose a little easier.”
“It does, it does.” Lexi said with a smile. “What was it? Oh! ‘You’re all just side-effects, and so are your feelings about it all.’ Ugh, like, girls, didn’t that just put everything in perspective when you heard it??”
Amy thought so, but she also remembered arguing with Jess about it, but that was a while back now, and it felt like a nice idea to her.
“Well, those side-effects are unavoidable, and it’s still nice to revel in the good parts, obviously, and rGBH comes with a load of good side-effects. Not like fulfillment-good, I really can’t put that kinda feeling into words… but anyways, they get a lot of it, for the rest of their lives, so their chests become really big and sensitive. Honestly there’s probably way better people to ask about that, I mean mine are tender just like this, my whole body has been since the second trimester. Maybe earlier, actually. It’s hard to pin it down, these things come and go.”
Lexi pondered a bit but just shrugged it off.
“But yeah… the human milk system in Cascadia is really huge from what I hear, so it’s good we have low Betas, even if they’re not worthy of fulfilling their true Purpose. There’s the kids at homes across the protectorate with Alpha mothers whose bodies haven’t gone through all the proper steps to make milk, and there’s all the little Betas in the Academies who need to be nursed too. You wouldn’t think about it but it makes sense, right? Hmm, what else…”
Miss Dierdre piped up, “Formula works too but our precious few little ones deserve only the best. The stores sell it beside the cow’s milk, but they’re both quite expensive.”
The class kind of blinked at their teacher, as none of the Betas had a point of reference for what was expensive or cheap, the girls having only seen pictures of money. But that complex Alpha stuff didn’t matter much to Amy.
Lexi kept up in her chipper tone as she remembered more to say, “Oh! Also! Instead of our chairs, Betas in the LPP drive these special carts that they lay on top of. It’s kind of weird, hard to explain. I wish they let me bring pictures or a presentation to explain all this better, but it has a cavity inside for their breasts. The inside is like a soft pouch or something that massages their chest all day and night. Annoying, from what I hear, but it increases their yields while keeping them mobile, and… uh… what else? Oh yeah. While I would need to ask for the pump, theirs are just built into the cart, with tanks for storage. That’s why it’s so big.
“Actually my best friend Wendy is a milker, and back when we could still hang out at the Center in Olympia, we would be rolling and chatting and then the pump would start and interrupt us. I mean Wendy tries to keep up the conversation when she is being milked, but it’s just too distracting. You get used to it eventually, like I’ve gotten used to having these kiddos here.”
Lexi got quiet for a second, looking down at her belly and smiling, making all the women in the room melt a little in envy, “Actually I’m excited to give birth so I can see her again… maybe…”
It took a second but she visibly forced herself to perk up, “…and so I don’t have to pee all the time, it’s the worst!”
As Lexi went on about morning sickness, Amy and Jess glanced at each other across the room, hopefully thinking the same thing. Aside from the relief of not being just thrown away for unworthiness like they had feared, this was all a little unsettling. The idea of being so close to the action and not fulfilling her Purpose was pretty much unthinkable, but the bright side was that even if Amy failed today, they might not be separated! Still, Amy was hoping they would be birthers together. After all the proper injections when she was growing up, Amy had the hips for it too, she knew from the marks and measurements in her file, she was as ripe as a Beta could be! It just made sense!
Janelle spoke up across the room, “You said some low Betas have other Purposes too?”
“Oh yeah! Actually I see one here. Hello in the back! Miss, Miss, what’s her name?”
It took a moment for the class to clue in that Lexi was talking about Cathy, the one they all ignored even more than Adam, and Miss Dierdre took a second too before telling her.
“Hello Catherine, uhm… it’s, like, good to meet you!”
The class was confused, Adam eyeing Jess for the answers he had been promised, until Shya, who sat at the back next to Cathy, spoke up. “She can’t hear you, or move or speak, she’s been like that since our freshman year.”
Sure enough, Cathy did absolutely nothing to indicate she had been spoken to, her eyes blinked at a precise rate, and she stared blankly toward the front of the class.
“Oh I know, it’s just polite. It may not seem like it, but you should all know that Betas like her are really important, too. Some have, like, really good genes so they still become birthers, but most are part of the UN Cure Programme. Have you… yeah. It’s a worldwide effort to reverse the virus’ effects. I mean… the Cure Programme is more the scientists who run it, but girls like her are essential too!”
Amy looked back at her old friend Cathy. She was essential? Of course they had all wondered what would become of her after the Academy, or what would become of her body, but—
The classroom door slid open and the guard returned, his boots firmly planted by the door yet again.
Tense as his presence was, Miss Dierdre cleared her throat to keep things moving, “So I read your donor has been put in protective custody, so they can study him and repeat the successes you two had in the pairing room. Can you tell us anything about that experience? The pairing?”
“Well, yeah. So you all know the main Center as this big complex in the city, under the Needle? I think the building used to be a science museum…”
Amy had seen pictures, yes, the white arches, though their few trips to the city had never strayed there. She nodded with the class.
“Well that’s just what they call Gestation. You go there first for registration and settling in and stuff. That’s where I live now. But if you’re empty—”
“Can we go up the Space Needle?”
The hawk-like Enforcer glared at Shya at the back for speaking up, as if it hadn’t been just fine for her to do two minutes ago, when he wasn’t there to ruin the best presentation of their whole year! His intensity made Shya look like she would’ve sunken into her seat if she wasn’t strapped in so tightly, and he barked, “Sending one of our few viable incubators up a century-old, decrepit monument to the excesses of the past wouldn’t exactly be the best use of anybody’s time, would it, girl?”
Miss Dierdre stood up without hesitation. “Sergeant, can I have a word with you?”
The grim man had barely opened his mouth before their gentle teacher gave him a look and he obliged her, the two Alphas leaving the room to the Betas, who couldn’t move an inch if they tried. He must have finally clued in that this was probably the safest place to leave her in all of Cascadia, what with the patrols and gates and security outside.
The door slid closed with a thud, followed by an almost immediate sigh from Lexi up front, who shook her hair a bit… and unavoidably her chest.
“He’s a lot, I’m sorry everyone. It feels like we’ve stopped by every school in Cascadia together, and you think he is on edge with us harmless little ladies, well how about a class of five or ten rowdy Alpha kids! Just imagine boys and girls running everywhere, pushing each other, grabbing things, I mean, you know how Alphas can be! And they push their chairs, not vice versa! No straps or strollers, they can even turn doorknobs on their own!! So young! I don’t know what I imagined but… just wild. Yeah, anyways… so this is him calm…”
With memories of her childhood filling her head, days blurring into each other, the hours of rolling around on soft mats inside of net fences, with nothing more important to worry about than how to get this or that toy in her mouth or pinched just right between her shoulder and cheek, the idea of Alpha children running by — what was it? three years old? — seemed like utter chaos to Amy.
Lexi tried again to get a stray lock of hair out of her face, blowing at it this time. Maybe the birther needed some hair ties or a cut, Amy thought, realizing longer hair might be more trouble than it’s worth.
“But no, sorry, the elevators up the Space Needle don’t work anymore. Some damage from the war… or that’s what they tell us.”
And there, Amy heard it, a slip of suspicion. Lexi was more than just a smiling poster-girl for model fertility, she had doubts like Jessica or Adam or any of them. She had words that no one had said weren’t allowed, yet everyone knew would not be appreciated if they slipped in the wrong ears. And others must have noticed too, because now that the Betas had the room to themselves, the questions really began to flow…
“Do you get to explore the city?”
“No, no. We are even more locked down than out here. More people, more danger. To be honest, I miss the courtyard and the fieldpaths out toward the fences like so much.”
“Why is your uniform different?”
“Well, as graduates we get a little more choice, like you did when you were moved to the high school quarters, which is really nice! I always thought the Academy uniforms were a bit stiff, and with my body changing so much I needed the elasticity. Most fulfilled girls choose this outfit but there are two others.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I mean, I’ve been on tour for a month now, this is my reward for traveling across Cascadia, to visit you all, help my sisters, see the academy one last time…”
Lexi seemed to take it all in, even by smell, but she refocused quickly. “…But I know you’re asking about the Center. My super, Kyra, has activities and exercises for me, it stays busy. These boys here have made me pretty high-maintenance, so care takes up most of my day. If you’re empty you live and wait with the other empties and whichever milkers or samplers are at that UNNAP facility. Life as an empty is…” She looked at the door, listening to the muffled arguing. “A little boring, to be honest. You live in anticipation of your next appointment in the pairing rooms, but once you’re in there…” Lexi shuddered a bit and smiled with a blush, before catching herself. “Let’s just say, the UN authority has made our Purpose very rewarding, they’re the absolute best at side-effects.”
Amy bit her lip and rocked her hips a bit, tensing herself down below, as did many of the others. They understood anticipation.
“Where are the pairing rooms?”
“Oh that’s what I was saying before, I totally forgot! They’re at Central and also smaller centers throughout the major cities like Olympia, Vancouver, Portland, you know. So the donors don’t have to travel far once they receive word they’ve been selected. We go where we are most needed, or where a good pairing has been lined up. Mine was in Olympia.” Lexi slipped a smile, before collecting herself, “I mean sometimes you try over and over with the same donor, but other times it’s just random. You know how Central can be.”
Amy frowned a bit at the memory of waiting in her box for so long that morning, twitching her thigh over and over and—
“What is it really like? I mean… pairing?”
This question came from across the room, Jessica, blushing hard and steeling herself to ask the question everyone wanted to. Amy smirked, thinking of course that’s what was on her sister’s mind today! Funnily enough, Adam was just as glued to Lexi for a possible answer, but then again so was everyone else.
Lexi sighed with a smile, before looking at the door again and frowning. The muffled voice of a third person was clashing with the other two now. She tried her best to focus on her presentation, even as Amy could see her wince at more kicks or false contractions, she wasn’t sure. The milk stain was growing.
“Well, it’s—”
The door slid open yet again and the unmistakable iron voice of the Enforcer flooded into the room even before he did, “…talk to ‘your girls’ however I damn please, it’s your fault for getting attached! We agreed to all stick to the script provided when we took the oath!”
As Sergeant Ellis marched in again, prompting a fresh blush across most of the girls in the room, he seemed to collect himself. “Lesson’s over, 2-5-0. We’re hitting the road. C’mon now, let’s go.”
Lexi’s jaw dropped even as her chair activated, ready to follow him out the door that instant. “No, no! I told them I would talk if I could come home again, please! Please!!”
It made no difference, strapped and weighed down with only her shoulders shrugging weakly in defiance, reaching for controls that weren’t even installed for her, the pregnant girl limbless in her seat could barely even shuffle or twist, let alone escape the simple command to leave the room, leave her sisters soon to follow in her well-worn path, their unavoidable Purpose.
Amy’s last view of their guest presenter was first her rotund belly leaving the room before the rest of her, as her head whipped back and called out “Goodbye, good luck!” and the sliding door closed behind her with a thud.
It only took a few moments for Miss Dierdre to return, clearly flustered, but putting on the airs that not a moment of that class period had gone awry. Clasping her hands together, she smiled thinly. “Well girls— uhm, class, I hope that was as educational for you as it was for me!”
Chapter 8
With a subtle vibration in her seat joining the bell chime to bring the class period to a close, the passenger felt her chair unlock and reverse away from her place among her sisters, slowly, steadily, as the din of gossip rose around her. All her classmates’ heads were whipping around, shoulders shrugging, wondering what they had just seen and heard, what it meant for their future.
For their Purpose.
The passenger’s head remained fixed and steady, her lazy stare scanned the room as her chair turned toward the door. She found no pleasure in the curtain pulling back, in the other Betas finally realizing how cruel Alphas like the Sergeant could be.
Out of the corner of her eye, the passenger could see Jessica, Amy, and the new boy Adam were already thick as thieves, and every ounce of her wanted to stay and discuss what had just been put on full display. Like old times. Just to listen would be enough, maybe get a good look up close at a real Betaboy, but with the charade they had just witnessed, there were so many questions to ask! Indeed that’s what she would have done, before.
Yet asking questions is exactly what had gotten her into this… life… but the passenger had long since given up on trying to warn her old friends away from the questions.
Another girl zipped in front of her and out the door, making the passenger’s autopilot brake awkwardly, feeling her tiny body recoil against the straps keeping her tightly in her chair.
Yet her eyes didn’t flinch, her neck didn’t bow forward, she couldn’t tell her sister off; no, the chair just started back up again, calmly at that same steady speed which had just removed their guest speaker from the room too. That same inevitable procession which had dragged the pregnant heroine of Cascadia onward now pulled the passenger toward the next entry in her schedule: Lunch.
Sticking to the slowest ‘lane’ of the hall on the far left, the passenger followed a stream of younger girls, each placed in their own chair, still a bit large for them, not yet entrusted to drive it themselves — perhaps ten or twelve. As usual, she was stuck following a procession of children, and with even fewer privileges. Some days this left her quite embarrassed, unable to join sisters her own age whizzing by, heading wherever they wanted to go. Not that she could show it, she couldn’t even mimic the younger girls gawking at the magnificent idea of moving themselves, anywhere! Or gawking at her, a slack-jawed passenger following along behind them, by all appearances half-asleep — or braindead.
Some days she would worry about that, or the drool dripping down her chin and making a mess of her uniform, sure, and some days she would find herself consumed in the unquenchable fire of fury and rage at how a life with a Purpose and friends had been shown to her and then placed so close, yet forever out of reach. And then of course some other days that fire would settle to background hum, and the passenger would numb herself to the world passing by.
Today had started out numb, but it was revealing itself to be something different.
Someone had talked to her. They had called her ‘Catherine’ again…
It was a sobering moment in what had felt like complete invisibility for weeks— no, months — since the last time someone had even tried and failed to strike up a conversation with the locked-in girl, or even made idle smalltalk to fill the stagnant air.
That last time, Jessica — maybe her oldest friend, since preschool, a self-serious goodie the passenger couldn’t help but adore — had come to sit with her by the fountain, and it hardly mattered that the passenger’s bestest friend was mid-sentence recounting how she remembered Cathy’s sardonic and twisted sense of humor. Five minutes before the bell, her chair had simply received its next destination and driven her away. Jess hadn’t followed, or tried again.
Even the rotation of supervisors who picked Cathy up for dressing, PT, and Amatory; they usually manipulated her limbless body without a word. It’s not like any great font of conversation had ever come from a super changing a tampon, but since no one but her and a few medical staff even knew Cathy was awake inside what used to be the flexible, expressive little body of a promising young Betagirl, these days the passenger might sometimes hear a muttered curse while being lifted, and even that was rare.
No, when she wasn’t a burden she was completely ignored, like all young girls learned to accept in the group strollers; inevitably sat down next to your bully, or your sister-crush who didn’t feel quite the same.
What differed here was the silent chasm of indifference.
Shay had said aloud what her classmates all thought: the passenger was oblivious, gone.
She hadn’t played a real role in her friends’ lives for almost three years now.
They had forgotten about her.
Cathy was just a passenger.
Her half-lidded eyes blinked on cue with every sixth heartbeat.
It was enough to detach someone from reality, to make her think the supervisors had her head in some magic machine, or she was really dead, or any millions of other fears which occupied her idle time, all her time — except in class. The only thing anchoring her to reality were the lessons she was still allowed to sit in on from the back row, a trickle of stimulus to her isolated mind.
And now this: this guest speaker Lexi had talked directly to her! The plump, triply-fulfilled woman had addressed ‘Catherine’ directly, prompting the whole class to glance her way, to disprove the passenger’s latest suspicion; no, she wasn’t a ghost. Not only that, but the graduate had spoke to her with some odd, patronizing admiration which finally — after almost three years — left some sliver of an answer to the millions of questions her slack jaw could no longer ask:
She might still have her Purpose fulfilled… or she might be part of a global effort to cure the Beta Virus. Either way she was still bound inside this unresponsive body. Lacking limbs, well — she had never known different — but maybe this frozen fate wasn’t as pointless or arbitrary as she had been left to believe?
Or maybe it was still cruel and twisted and demented and AAAAGGGGGHHHHH!
The passenger imagined screaming out, but in reality made no sound or movement, her heart rate elevating slightly as the chair continued rolling forward unabated, her slight breasts rising and falling as they always did. Even her breath was beyond her control, the rhythmic in and out of her diaphragm a now-familiar sensation.
The long line of pre-teens in front of her turned at the next hall toward the North Cafeteria, one after the other, but the passenger’s chair stayed true, heading to the medical wing, past the helpdesk, through an automatic door to join another line, this time of girls much like her; each body rigid and still, with no shoulder controls and no voice of their own; each chair precisely spaced in single file to the left side so Alphas could still stroll by easily. No girlish chatter filled this clinic hall, no, that was shut out by the automatic doors closing behind her. This line was hidden from the others, which made some sick sort of sense. It would have disturbed Cathy’s sisters to see how she was fed, as it had her the first time…
Here she waited, the story of her life. Cathy followed her locked gaze to the Beta seated in front of her, and the next, and the next. Back when she had asked the question, she had been the only one in this line, but now there were at least five or six of them. Everyday she found herself wondering what their last words had been, what hidden sliver of forbidden thought had forced the supervisors to abandon all pretense of ‘caring’ and just reduce each of these girls to a body and their Purpose.
Cathy tensed her pelvic floor reflexively at the thought of her Purpose, the last bundle of nerves she had any conscious control over, a sick joke in comparison to the question that had landed her here, years ago, a simple question.
The door behind her slid open again, and instead of just the faint whirr of wheels ferrying another girl like her in line, Cathy heard… their guest presenter! Lexi!
“I didn’t mean to, Kyra, I swear! I just got to talking and— They’re just like I was, they deserve to know things!”
“Yes but there’s a method to how Betas learn what comes next, it’s all been well-studied by Central. They’re free to ask Miss Dierdre or any other teacher, just like you can talk to me.”
That old instinct to turn her head to the source of her curiosity plagued Cathy yet again as her neck muscle twitched and her gaze drifted not even a sliver. Parked as she was in the medical wing’s hallway, a pair of supervisor’s legs strutted by before cutting in front of her to enter the adjacent checkup room, closely followed by Lexi rolling along at her level. Cathy seemed to catch the pregnant Beta’s eye, who gave her a double-take and an, “Oh, hello again!” as her chair passed by on its ordered course.
Today was turning out to be like a Unification Day feast, albeit for the professional eavesdropper. Cathy tried her best to listen even as she moved up in her line, and the open door slipped behind her.
“I just think, like—”
“You’re not supposed to think, Alexandra! It’s your Purpose to reproduce! I know it’s misleading, with all this time in school, and now this tour. I get why you think you have other abilities or responsibilities…
“I could!” Lexi attempted to interject.
“No. You saw the same video of the Eastern Bloc as every other graduate, you know why we educate you in Cascadia instead of keeping you in—”
“Don’t say it! I don’t want to even think about that video again! Like I’m grateful, okay, but if you keep Betas in lecture rooms instead of boxes, but like just as much in the dark, we are going to be curious!”
“With talk like that, triplets or not, you’re going to end up like those sample collectors out there.”
There was a heavy silence for a moment, before the super spoke again, “Here, let’s get your mid-day checks out of the way. We can skip the dilation check, my treat, and then some relief for your poor butt and maybe a different kind of relief, yeah? I’ll turn the massager up just how you like it.”
A meek “yes please” preceded the door sliding closed with a click, and Cathy’s chair moved forward in line, one step closer to understanding her place in all this, and one step closer to lunch…
When the passenger was second in line, a passing nurse bent down to put a bib on her just before she felt some spittle drip from her mouth.
Putting aside the significance of seeing a real Betawoman, graduated and fulfilling her Purpose three times over — and how that actually stoked the cold embers of her heart more than she could admit to herself — Cathy’s thoughts swirled around Lexi’s seeming respect for her and what she claimed the passenger had been assigned to do.
What the heck was a “sample collector?” Lexi’s admiration had seemed so real, as if this punishment for asking questions was worthy of respect.
Of course, Cathy couldn’t help but think she might not look so admirable if everyone knew about the many “Company Benefits Nights” with the Enforcers in Barrack B in her first year in this changed body, when some of the men had discovered there was a new type of Beta inside the Academy walls who couldn’t report ungentlemanly conduct, when they had programmed Mr. Pick-Me-Up to fetch her from the room full of snoozing Betas, shaken her from her dreams of before, made her eyes blink open as a passenger again, made her chair follow them back outside to the smelly men’s quarter’s by the fences, a dozen men ready to push their bedtimes and set her Purpose ablaze.
Cathy tensed her pelvic floor again, trying to shut out the terrible memory and the aching desire for it to happen again.
No, instead she tried to recall the red-haired nurse who had comforted her when she found the evidence leaking out of her, that and the bruising. The Alpha had gone against orders almost every night for a week, refusing to send Cathy back to the sleeping quarters until the men of Barracks B had been reassigned. Not discharged, but apparently there weren’t enough Alphas around to get rid of the bad ones.
Cathy loved that nurse, probably the only Super or Alpha who had ever held her and made her feel like more than her Purpose. Not that the passenger could ask her name. It had never been mentioned within eavesdropping distance.
The girl ahead finished up and Cathy’s private ponderings were interrupted as her chair rolled her toward one of the two special feeding machines. While her sisters Jess and Amy were undoubtedly sipping from something similar to this towering column in the cafeteria, the straw attachment here had been replaced with a curved nozzle not unlike the shape of a banana, a fruit she had seen in her childhood lessons which apparently didn’t exist anymore, except in the flavored meals she was about to have fed to her. The attending nurse hooked a finger in her mouth to nudge her slack jaw ajar, grabbed the plastic banana, and unceremoniously filled the passenger’s open mouth. Like always, the Super pushed it deep, past the tubes connecting her nostrils to her lungs — ensuring her access to air yet endlessly tickling her throat — before pressing a button to deposit a meal down her throat in three precise, vitamin-enriched spurts.
All this was necessary thanks to the punishment taking away her ability to swallow.
All this was necessary to sustain this simple life of passivity.
Even if, most days, she didn’t want it sustained anymore.
Everything moved in reverse after that: her jaw was released letting her mouth close somewhat, her bib was pulled off, and Cathy soon found herself rolling to another part of the medical wing, past women in lab coats rather of the normal white super uniform, almost past the recovery room where she had woken up like this so long ago. Cathy tried to shut her eyes to block out the memory: the panic of waking up covered in braces, the terrible ache of full immobilization as her body had slowly solidified, but it was no use. It wasn’t just her bones that refused to respond.
Of course knowing her luck, she was driven right into that specific recovery room, where a Pick-Me-Up descended from the ceiling track to release her straps and lift her tiny, rigid body to one of the three medical beds, massive things high off the ground that only served to frighten the tiny Beta, who missed her box.
A faint roar flared up in the back of Cathy’s head, the same disgust and hatred at her situation returning as she was left to stare lazily up at the same speckled ceiling tiles her blank gaze had first woken up to, as the robot arm covered in smiley face stickers released her and whizzed away to attend another room.
But that roar quieted when she heard the Nurse come in. The redhead with freckles and a friendly voice who had discovered her, protected her, began doing weekly checkups on Cathy and the other Betas just like her, to ensure what happened in Barrack B would never happen to anyone ever again.
No matter how good it felt. No matter how Cathy’s Purpose had ensured she would enjoy it over the many weeks and months before the Enforcers were caught and stopped…
“Good morning! How’s your day going, sweetie?”
She placed her fingers on Cathy’s mound, right between her fleshy hips, above her slit, and Cathy tensed her pelvic muscles once for “Yes”, or “Good” in this case. Cathy got the impression that no one knew she and the nurse did this, as some of the other medical staff looked at her oddly for “talking to the vegetables.”
“Were you in the Giving Life class that got a guest presenter today? I’ve read about that girl, she’s an inspiration!”
Cathy tensed once for “Yes”, the rest of her body immobile and unresponsive.
“Oh you were! I don’t know what happened, but everyone is sure worked up! The Head Supervisor is down the hall yelling at some sergeant. Hard not to overhear. I wish you could tell me everything that happened sweetie. I bet you hear everything. I’m such a sucker for gossip, you don’t even know.” The Nurse laughed and let her other hand massage Cathy’s immobilized shoulder and neck, kneading some of the tension out. The yelling of a man and woman echoed down the hall, and she just rolled her eyes. “Honestly. The girl’s a little hero, I would’ve let her say her piece, but I guess that’s why I’m not a Teacher.” She let out a sour little chuckle.
Cathy pulsed herself below in agreement and blinked blankly, unable to tell her what revelations today had brought, unable to ask what being a “sample collector for the UN Cure Programme” might entail, unable to ask why the medical staff hadn’t explained anything when she was given the Punishment Without A Name — made a passenger within her own body.
Laid down too soon after eating, a bit of her puree lunch slipped up her throat and Cathy’s body spit it up reflexively, to which the Nurse tsked, grabbed a sanitary wipe, and lifted the Betagirl up into her lap, holding her rigid body tightly. There was no reaction from Cathy except for a compulsive retching as the Nurse soothed, “It’s alright, it’s okay. Let it out. I’m sorry, sweetie.”
The passenger’s thoughts skipped a beat. No one had ever apologized to her, not even the sweet red-haired Nurse before now. No one.
The arms around her limbless body tightened once Cathy’s slack mouth was wiped clean and her stomach had settled.
“I’m sorry that Betagirl gets three little ones and you won’t get any. I know what it means to me, being unable to conceive, but I’ve known since my parents told me where I came from as a girl. I mean, outside these walls it’s simply a fact of life. I can only imagine what it means to a sweet girl like you, Cathy, being raised for this and all.”
The passenger’s stomach turned and it wasn’t her lunch.
She wouldn’t be fulfilling her Purpose?
The nurse soothed her, felt what few twitches escaped the little prison in her arms, the girl inside secretly screaming and howling as her worst fears were confirmed. She wiped the tears which welled and fell from Cathy’s heavy-lidded eyes, staring at nothing.
So that explained it. Why Cathy had never gotten pregnant after a whole company of Enforcers passed her body around, thrust her slack face into their crusty sheets from dusk till dawn, and came back to repeat the moonlight serenade over and over again. Cathy had thought she was born defective, but no.
Sample collecting.
The Cure Programme.
Infertility.
Her only remaining muscle control.
Cathy knew then for certain: she was going to be a sperm collector at the Future Centers. She was going to collect men’s deposited “samples” ad infinitum, and her tubes must have been tied to allow her to “collect” without complications.
The Nurse hugged her and slipped a finger down, under her skirt but over the spandex bottom of her uniform, against her vulva. “I know you must hate this question by now, but do I need to check you down below, sweetie?”
“No.” Cathy tensed her lower holes twice quickly. She did so carefully, sincerely, ensuring her voice was heard in this one meager way. If Cathy were to tense only once for Yes, then she knew her uniform would be off in a heartbeat, and the Nurse would be checking every square centimeter for any signs of use or abuse.
She didn’t want the one boy from Barrack C who treated her well to get in trouble.
She loved that her Nurse cared, but now Cathy knew for certain she wasn’t meant for anything greater. The way the young Enforcer — the way his cock made her feel — was how she would be used for the rest of her life.
Cathy was picked up and placed back in her chair, a passenger strapped in securely with a pat on the head, and sent off to enjoy the rest of the lunch period.