Jason Callahan had been an athletic star in the NCAA, and it had showed in his physique. As a member of the Yale swimming team, he had led the Bulldogs to a national title. He had broken Ivy League records. He had broken NCAA records. He had broken Olympic records.
And, for a period of four days last year, he'd resided in the Bullpen.
It was an honest enough exchange. ConnPharm provided him with the funding that he needed to pursue his swimming, and Jason, in turn, provided himself as a subject for medical research. Dr. Robert Van Guilder had been extremely interested in just how Jason's body worked. What was his lung capacity? How quickly did his pulse rise as he exercised? What was his metabolism like?
Jason had allowed himself to be poked and prodded for ninety-six hours, residing naked in the Bullpen.
Erica could still see his naked body, chiseled and well defined. His pectorals. His abdomen. His back. His arms. His penis.
She hadn't meant to walk in on him, she hadn't meant to see his penis, but she had needed to discuss technical specifications of her upcoming experiment with Colin. Emily DiStasio was still months away from finishing her Category F requirements, and months away from receiving her fateful tattoo. But Erica wanted to know that the Bullpen would be fit for long-term human inhabitation.
Erica had expected Jason to be in the Bullpen, on the far side of the one-way mirror. She had expected to go unnoticed in the Observation Room, the swimmer unaware that a woman was standing only a few yards away from his naked body. But as she walked into the Observation Room, she was greeted by the sight of Jason Callahan on the Stairmaster in the corner of the room. He was clad only in the black corset, which stretched from below his massive pectorals down to his hips. His long, loose penis flopped down in front of him, and for a minute, Erica couldn't take her eyes of it.
Not that she was thinking about it sexually. She had simply been shocked, to walk in and find it there, in front of her. In her entire life, she'd seen three penises in person - her boyfriend's in college, her boyfriend's in graduate school, and her boyfriend Tom's. But there, in the Observation Room, at work, she could add a fourth to that short list.
She remembered having blushed. She remembered stuttering as she spoke. And she remembered the grin on the man's face, the casual disregard for his own nudity that he'd shown. The confidence. Erica had been fully dressed, while Jason had been wearing nothing but a piece of technical equipment around the midsection. But it had been Erica who was ashamed, and it had been Jason who had the upper hand.
Erica struggled to remember that confidence as she herself continued the simulated climb on the Stairmaster. Her breasts, still small, bounced with each step. She could feel sweat dripping down her back, dripping down past the small of her back and towards her buttocks. With Pete and Tessa watching from the ops desk just a few feet away, Erica did her best to remember the confidence that Jason had shown. But it was still Erica who was the one ashamed. It still wasn't her who held the upper hand.
If anything, she felt as if the corset wrapped around her abdomen called more attention to breasts and pussy, still exposed above and below the black material. She had asked Colin why it couldn't have been stretched just a bit larger, why she had to remain nude if the corset was wrapped around her body in the Observation Room. He'd explained to her something about short-range tactile waves, something about the corset taking readings more from the areas around it than the areas beneath it. Erica hadn't followed it, but she hated the slutty way it made her look and feel. She had covering, but she wasn't covering the right parts.
She wanted to show the same confidence and power that Jason had shown her. But even after a week without clothes, Erica hadn't gotten over her nudity. She wanted her clothes back. She wanted the experiment to be over.
***
Soon after first entering the Bullpen, Erica found herself in a routine. She woke up each morning around seven, said hello to Pete and Tessa, and scanned the latest headlines on the projector from electronic copies of the various newspapers. In the Bullpen, the girl would do push-ups, sit-ups, and her stretching routine, uncomfortably aware of just how sexual this last practice came off. As Noah had assured her, though, Pete was too old to be very threatening, and, at any rate, his time in the Observation Room was quickly drawing to a close. By that Monday night, Tessa would be on her own for the late night and early morning shift.
After stretching herself out, Erica met Tessa by the open door to the Bullpen. After a week of putting on and taking off the corset, Erica felt as if she could have done it on her own. But every morning, Tessa would wrap the black fabric around the biochemist's naked stomach, fastening each of the six adjustable hooks, and running a quick diagnostic on the corset's built-in sensors. Before Erica was allowed to step too far beyond the open Bullpen, however, Tessa had to run another series of tests and checks from the ops desk, and anything abnormal had to be logged and reported. But, usually after five minutes or so of standing around and making idle chitchat with Pete as Tessa worked, Erica would finally be allowed to work out.
She exercised for well over an hour out in the Observation Room each day - using the exercise bicycle, the Stairmaster, the treadmill, and a few of the Nautilus machines. At first, she had looked forward to escaping her clinically white prison cell. But, as the week went by, Erica began dreading the time she spent out of the Bullpen. While inside, she could feign ignorance of the people just beyond the mirror glass. While outside, she was constantly aware of their presence across the Observation Room, constantly aware of her own nudity, constantly aware of how ridiculous she looked exercising in the futuristic corset.
But, at the same time, she was getting herself into better shape than she'd been in months, working out in a set schedule instead of trying to squeeze an hour into the gym on her way home from work each day, as she did with occasional success in the weeks and months before signing on to become her own guinea pig.
During her exercise routine, Erica's breakfast was brought down to the Observation Room from the cafeteria by one of a few technicians. It seemed to be a different technician each day, but Erica hadn't yet guessed that the they were taking turns with the duty, casting lascivious glances at the test subject while they delivered her coffee, orange juice, and food.
After finishing her workout routine, Erica ate her breakfast at a small table on the far side of the ops desk. The silverware, the plates, the cups, and the food itself would all aggravate the emitters if it were brought inside, and, therefore, the girl was forced to come out into the Observation Room three times a day for her meals, each time wearing the corset. She sat in a swivel chair that had been brought down from someone's office upstairs, her bare skin against the fabric, the sweat from her body seeping into the material, usually scarfing down the food so she could return to the Bullpen as quickly as possible.
Around this point in the morning, as Erica sat in the corner of the Observation Room, Colin typically showed up for his shift, secretly delighted by the girl's glistening body. Whenever he talked to her, he sounded casual and aloof. Whenever he looked at her, he was sure to come off as clinical as possible. But wife or no wife, professional or not, Colin couldn't deny the raging hard-on that he got just glancing at the gorgeous, naked, raven-haired girl in front of him.
As the last act of her shift, Tessa unfastened the sweat-soaked corset and exposed Erica's stomach once again, allowing the girl to step back into the Bullpen to take her shower. The emitters in the corset were durable enough to withstand a quick rinse in one of the washing machines elsewhere in the building, and the equipment would be ready for Erica again at lunchtime. In the Bullpen, however, the biochemist had to ask Colin to turn the shower on, and then turn it off again when she was done. All the controls were at the ops desk, and Colin quickly discovered that Erica's choice of water temperature fluctuated from day to day. When she had finished, and Colin had turned the water off, warm fans from above blew her body and hair dry. Her hair was always wild and untamed, but as she told herself most mornings, whom was she really trying to impress?
At ten o'clock each morning, Noah (through the ops desk's camera) briefed her on what was going on in the Human Hormones Lab without her. Typically, she talked with one of the lab assistants in the afternoon, at four, as well. Until the experiment truly began, however, there wasn't all that much to talk about. Still, Erica liked to have a schedule, she like having something - anything - to break up the long, boring monotony of life inside the Bullpen. Most of the day, Erica spent scanning documents and data on the projector, some of it her own, some of it extra work that Natalie and Hannah had tasked her with to keep her busy.
As the day wound down, Erica usually said goodbye to Colin for the afternoon and greeted the arrival of Wendy. She settled down and watched the news, some television, and a movie or two before bed. It wasn't a terribly exciting life, but it had become her life nonetheless.
Throughout it all, Erica was unable to dismiss her undress. She was aware of her exposed pussy every time she sat down. She was aware of her tits being on display every time she had a conversation with Noah, or Aaron, or Colin. She couldn't ignore her own naked reflection staring back at her, every time she glanced at the front wall. She couldn't stop thinking that, just beyond those walls were people looking in at her, taking in her bare body.
***
Natalie had originally volunteered to give Erica her three deuterotone injections herself, but in the end, she had tasked the responsibility to Dr. Cho. Hannah and Erica were good friends, and Natalie thought that Erica might be more comfortable with her friend than with her boss. Hannah's project had also slowed down in the weeks between Phase One and Phase Two, and Natalie felt the Asian-American doctor had more time to spare than the Director of the Human Hormone Lab herself, as Natalie was busy dealing with the a difficult Phase One trial over in Dr. Slattery's laboratory. And, when it came right down to it, the older woman didn't want to be forced to jump through the hoops that would have been required of her.
It had been decided that the injections were to be given in the Bullpen itself, and not outside in the Observation Room. Erica and Noah had both been extremely interested in the body's immediate reaction to the injection of deuterotone, and while the corset was functional enough, it didn't provide all the sensitivity and accuracy that the Bullpen did.
The room itself was often home to multiple primates at similar stages of testing, but configuring the emitters to read more that one entity – and in this case, human beings – was hours of work. In any case, a second person inside the Bullpen would be subject to the same stringent rules that governed the first, and it had been Erica who had originally insisted that she wouldn't strip down to her skin to inject Emily DiStasio with the deuterotone.
