Reeducation
Β«1Β»
Kiara set her bags down inside the door and reached for the light switch. She flipped it and swore, the apartment was still dark and she was going to have to fumble her way back to the laundry room to flip the breakers again. She grumbled as she dug out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight. She was going to have to talk to the condo manager again, there was no excuse for the recent power bumps that had been happening to various units in the building for the last several months. She had filed numerous complaints and still nothing had been done and now the breakers were tripping when she wasn't even home! It was inexcusable, for what she had paid for this unit and the amount she shelled out in fees every month she expected any issues to be dealt with promptly.
She left the door open to provide some extra light as she worked her way through the confines of her tidy living space. She was already angry and when she barked her shin on the coffee table that didn't help matters any. She had been living in this condo for seven years and somehow she
still
hadn't memorized it enough to navigate it in the dark without injuring herself. She found the entrance to her hallway and started working her way down, confident that the way was clear. Her left hand trailed on the wall as her right reached out for the door that led to her little laundry room. She felt the door frame of her bedroom door under her fingers, then the open gap where she had left the door itself open this morning. She was in mid stride when something grabbed her wrist and she barely had time to gasp before she was yanked into her bedroom and something cold and hard pressed against her side. Pain exploded through her body, making her drop her phone and in the flashing spiral of light she saw two figures dressed in dark clothing with some sort of strange device strapped to their heads.
Then she fell down into dreamless darkness and silence.
Β«2Β»
She woke up to a throbbing head and a sore body. She was freezing cold and dizzy, nauseous and hurting. When she tried to rub her face, she found she couldn't move, and she couldn't see... it was so dark she couldn't tell if her eyes were open or closed, if she was blindfolded or it was just dark and panic settled in as she tested the limits of her entire world. Her arms were bound straight out to each side and her ankles were bound tightly. She worked out that she was flat on her back from the cold of whatever she was laying on and there was something in her mouth, something that held her jaw open wide and still let her breathe and move her tongue. As she worked it all out she realized that she was completely nude; restrained and helpless. A sob welled up within her as she fruitlessly fought against the restraints, they were metal and affixed to the table she was laying on and they had no give whatsoever. Rape was one fear that was immediate, she knew enough about human trafficking and abductions to know that she was in that target group but she also knew that there were other reasons for her to be treated this way.
She struggled as much as she could, refusing to simply surrender, knowing that as long as she could still think she could resist and fight whoever it was that had done this to her. But panic was threatening, clawing at her, making her heart race and her breath come faster and there was nothing she could do to stop it. The helplessness of her situation, her nudity and enforced silence, and worst of all the
darkness
that she couldn't even begin to penetrate all compiled to drive her anxiety higher and higher with every passing moment until she was almost lost to it, wordless sounds escaping her throat as she turned, struggling and fighting to get free, her thoughts beginning to scatter and her heart going so fast that it hurt. She was at the cusp of panic and she knew that if she gave in to it that she would be lost; she would beg and plead and break when confronted by her captors and above all she did
not
want that.
A moment before she broke, the lights came on and blinded her. They were painfully bright and she recoiled, her head banging off of the metal table, her eyes closing and she tried to turn her head, but it didn't help. She whimpered and blinked, trying to make her eyes adjust to the light and when she was able to see, she looked up at herself, reflected back in a huge mirrored ceiling. The reality of her predicament was even worse than she could imagine; she was restrained on a medical examination table, the room was stark and bare, with stainless steel walls and all manner of surgical instruments all around her and standing by her feet were two people in medical scrubs. Unable to speak, she made wordless sounds of protest, demanding to be released with her tone and the posture of her body, letting them know what she wanted, attempting to communicate. But the pair didn't pay her any attention, they just moved to either side of the table and adjusted some clamps and swung the stirrups her legs were bound in far out to each side, exposing her defenseless vagina.
'This is where it starts...
' she thought to herself, her panic increasing, the ragged edge of control that she still held fraying.
'This is where they rape me...'
She couldn't even pray because she didn't believe in any gods and she knew that even if she did they wouldn't answer. She sobbed and struggled, shifting her hips and pulling at her restraints, determined to fight rather than just surrender to what was coming. She had been dreading rape most of her life, ever since she had gone to university and seen the way women had been treated in the past. She had held some ideal that it was a different world now, that such things did not happen anymore. But then her eyes had been opened and she had seen the truth; it was still there, all of the rapes and deaths, all of the misogyny and sexism was just as strong as it had been decades before in her grandparent's time, it was just hidden better now.
She had been a part of political activism and peaceful demonstrations ever since, trying to break the back of the patriarchy and gain true equality for women. She was a regular at every cause that she could find and she had made her share of enemies. And she knew that what was happening to her was likely tied to that, this was their way of silencing her. But the pair didn't immediately start ravaging her body. Instead they moved up her sides and started washing her all over and something in the water or in the soap made her skin tingle and then
burn
. They washed across her legs and up to her sex and she watched as the hair on her vagina was rinsed away, leaving smooth skin behind. She pulled at the restraints as she saw it and they ignored her and moved up her body, cleansing her completely, washing away her spray-tan and the hair under her arms and she felt them laving her long, black hair with it and the cold-sensitive feeling as her hair, a point of pride for her, all came loose and washed away.
She was bare and bald and helpless and in a way that was far worse than the rape she had anticipated. The clinical detachment that the pair had as they cleansed her and then dried her with soft cloths was worse than any brutality that they might have shown. They were careful of her face, using sponges to clean her skin and she closed her eyes tightly. She felt raw and cold as they finished and she opened her eyes and looked around. One of the figures grasped the sides of her head and forced her back onto the table while the other slid something into her nostrils. It felt like two pieces of wire and a strap of some sort was against her sensitive scalp, preventing her from moving her head without intense, blinding pain.
She watched in the mirrored ceiling as they moved to her shoulders and placed leather straps around her upper arms and then more straps around the tops of her thighs, restraining her so securely that she could barely move. She sobbed again at the growing feeling of helplessness and humiliation. Rape would have been bad enough, she could have prepared herself for that; this was far worse and she felt tears leaking from her eyes as she tried to see. The table was adjusted again and her legs were spread as wide as they could go. Then she felt the table shift and suddenly she was upright and looking into a bank of lights, watching the two anonymous figures as they retreated. Moments later another figure was silhouetted by the lights and she heard a voice, clinical and unmistakably male.
"This is subject C1-27, formerly Cooper, Kiara. She is a twenty-six year old female in prime health. She is fertile but only minimally sexually active and all blood and tissue screenings have come back with a clean slate.