The Changeling (Male World Order, part 6)
**This story is a work of fiction and all characters, events, and locations described in it are purely fictional. No resemblance or connection to any living or deceased person or real-world event or location is intended.**
**This story contains a scene of non-consensual intercourse. If this offends you, do not read further.**
...
A handsome and elegant grey-haired gentleman in an exquisitely-tailored grey suit parked his antique Saab in front of a white-columned colonial mansion just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. It was Alpha House 4. Despite what that sounds like, it was not a fraternity.
Well, maybe it sort of was.
61-year-old Fourth Beta Landon Braithwaite strolled around to the back entrance and let himself in. He made his way to a small office off of the gleamingly-clean professional kitchen and prepared for his one-week shift. First things first: he got undressed. Braithwaite removed his fine single-breasted suit and carefully hung it in a garment bag in his large, cedar-lined locker. He then doffed his gleaming white undershirt and black silk boxers and folded them neatly underneath.
He then went to a full-length mirror and admired his uniform: stark nudity. He went over a mental checklist in his head:
Hair: perfectly standard crew cut, hair clean and presentable.
Skin: smooth, exfoliated, moisturized, and clear
Nails: professionally manicured and sparkling clean
Genitals: Testicles tight to the abdomen, penis fully flaccid and hanging meekly
Landon returned to his locker and retrieved a small tube of shea butter. He applied the faintest dab to his silver-dappled dark brown pubic hair, and gave it a good going-over with boar-bristle brush. He returned to the mirror.
Much better. He was ready for the day.
B4 Braithwaite worked nude because he was a servant, and as was the custom in an all-male environment, servants worked in the buff. This was not meant to be sexual in any way, nor was it meant to be a humiliation. It was simply a display of submission and subservience. You see, a man would only be embarrassed or ashamed by it if here were NOT subservient.
In the general way of things, Fourth Betas were not of the serving class. Usually servants were B7s (the most submissive rank), or B8, B9, and B10 (the ranks that did not fit into the true hierarchy that had to take what work they could get). Fourth Betas were usually considered to be of the professional class, and quite a few of them made their way into the upper class.
But Landon Braithwaite was no ordinary servant. He was a professional Alpha's man-in-waiting, and had the education and experience to back it up. Alphas get the best in everything, and Landon was the best.
Another naked older gentleman entered the room. "Good morning Fourth Beta Braithwaite. I trust your week off was refreshing," opening his own locker and picking up a pair of socks.
"Good morning to you! Indeed it was, Fifth Beta Braithwaite. Any news to report?" Landon Braithwaite asked his younger brother, Jerome.
"Breakfast has been cleaned up and all the men are in class. There is a load of wash on with about fifteen minutes to go."
"And how is young Alpha Krause? I trust he's continuing to settle in well?"
"Indeed he is, Sir, indeed."
These men had known each other for 58 years and as such were able to pack a great deal of communication into just a few words. In this case 'indeed he is, Sir, indeed' really conveyed 'we have not an an incident yet, but I have been closely monitoring the precarity of the situation and highly recommend you do the same.'
"Well, then Fifth Beta. If all the daily logs are in order, I wish you a good day and a lovely week off," Landon, said, with the tiniest hint of emphasis on the 'all.' "Give Eliza my best."
"They are, Sir. All of them. I trust you'll have a pleasant week as well, Sir. I've left a fresh pot on the warmer for you."
"Very considerate." B4 Braithwaite left B5 Braithwaite to finish dressing and went into the
butler's pantry to review ALL the logs.
...
Three quarters of a century prior, when Dr. Indira Chaudhary was conducting her multi-decade studies into instinctive power dynamics of human boys and men, she discovered that most men have a baseline "dominance factor" communicated toward other males with very subtle body language, and (all other factors being controlled for) he will naturally take a dominant role over men with a lower factor and a submissive role toward men with a higher factor.
She eventually came to find that this factor rose rapidly in puberty and leveled out starting when a boy was about 16 to 19. After that, trauma or prolonged stresses later in life could permanently or temporarily lower a man's dominance factor, but once he was an adult, it rarely climbed more than a few points higher than his late teenage level.
Dr. Chaudhary found that about 10% of men did not seem to have a dominance factor at all. Nor do they seem to respond to dominance and submission signals from other men. These hierarchically-non-reactive males, neither dominant nor submissive, had significant difficulty navigating power dynamics at all.
Other scientists would come to replicate and corroborate Chaudhary's work. They assigned formalized values to these factors. Perfect D0, in theory, would be a man who was totally submissive toward other males. Perfect D100 would be a man who was totally dominant over the rest of his gender. Though 60% of men were between D38 and D63, there was a fairly continuous spectrum from almost totally submissive to almost totally dominant.
Around the same time Dr. Chaudhary was conducting her research, on the other side of the world, Dr. Javier Villareal was doing some work of his own, on what he called "Spontaneous Hierarchy Formation." His experiments were thousands of different variations of this: put a group of people together, and get them to organize themselves by social rank. Sometimes offer prizes to the ones who end up on top. Sometimes punishments to those on the bottom. Sometimes neither. Or both, along with many other things he tried.
Dr. Villareal discovered that with a group of women, or a mixed-gender group, this was chaos. But a group of men alone? They could do it. It would take some hours and some posturing and some squabbling, but men would eventually organize into a pecking order and stick to it. He also found than men from one group usually ended up in the same part of the hierarchy when placed in a different group.
And then there were the men Villareal called "hierarchy catalysts." They seemed to comprise about half of a percent of the male population. The presence of just one of these men in a group (even a group with women) seemed to cause the process of hierarchy formation to be much smoother and faster. Just one of these men could quietly, calmly, and firmly negotiate any unruly mob of any size into an organized and orderly ranking, with himself at the top, usually in less than an hour.
Dominance Factor and Spontaneous Hierarchy Formation would come to form the basis of the Alpha/Beta ranking system used in the US, and similar systems in other nations. Dr. Villareal's "hierarchy catalysts" would eventually be called "Alphas." Dr. Chaudhary's work in Dominance Factor would mutate and evolve to become a large part of a man's Masculinity Assessment.
Of course, many other considerations went into a Masculinity Assessment, to name just a few: psychological gender alignment, intelligence, personality, law abidingness, character and values, education history, athletic history, health history, substance use history, physical fitness, and the all-important "CWAFB" or "Classical Western Andromorphicism of the Face and Body."
Still, a D100 would likely be a First Beta and a D0 would almost certainly be a Seventh Beta, because many of those other components of the score showed a strong positive correlation with Dominance Factor.
And those 10% of men who had no factor at all? The men who failed to grasp the unspoken language of dominance and submission? They usually ended up as B8, B9, or B10. More than a few were given a higher ranking, based on those other factors. Most though, ended up on the discard pile.
...
Landon Braithwaite had never read the works of Indira Chaudhary or Javier Villareal. His degree in Hospitality Management from the Sorbonne only had some relatively basic science courses for prerequisites.
That didn't mean he didn't know some things. Landon knew that if you took a group of 100 men composed of Second and Third Betas and lined them up in order from most to least masculine, you would have a smooth gradation of men. No one would be able to make more than a blind guess as to where the Thirds stopped and the Seconds began. It would be the same with a group of Sixths and Sevenths, or Fifths and Sixths, or Fourths and Fifths and so on.
But if your group of men was First Betas and Alphas, there would missing piece of the gradient. A gap. Maybe most people could not consciously find that gap in our hypothetical row of men, but if they knew how to turn their brains off and listen with their gut, they'd know exactly where it was. There was a definite difference between the most masculine First Beta and the least masculine Alpha.
A gap. And of the 161 freshman currently enrolled in the College of Alpha Leadership at the University of Virginia, one was on the wrong side of that gap.
...
"I'd like an iced tea, unsweet," Alpha Michael Rosen said, his eyes never lifting from his laptop screen. It was precisely how an Alpha was supposed to issue an order to a Fourth Beta. A simple, succinct statement of fact. No fuss, no urgency. Braithwaite went to fetch it, expediently, but in no rush. It wasn't dignified to rush. If the young Alpha wanted to be interrupted with a 'Yes, Sir,' or other such groveling, he would have looked up at the B4. He simply wanted iced tea, no more, no less. An Alpha gets what he wants. Braithwaite fetched it silently and efficiently.
They were long hard days minding the needs of the sixteen men in his house, but Landon would not trade it for the world. There was no greater joy for a Beta of any rank than serving an Alpha. Let alone 16 of them. And Alphas were generally very low-fuss. Upper Betas could be much more demanding and finicky.
Braithwaite was walking through he upper floors, making sure everything was ship-shape as the daily cleaning crew was about to depart. He counted at least four men masturbating with their doors wide open. Alphas in general had no sense of modesty, and at this age Alphas needed to ejaculate at least four or five times a day.
A young nude man exited his room and headed toward the bathroom. His extraordinary Alpha physique passing by even Braithwaite's healthy and fit body made the two look like different species. The Fourth Beta made his way up to the third floor.
"Excuse me, Braithwaite?," he heard passing by 302. It was Paul Krause.
"Yes, Sir?"
"I saw that tonight's dinner is steak au poivre, I just wanted make sure they make mine a plain steak, no sauce," Paul's asked, lounging in bed with a book across his lap scribbling something on a tablet computer.
It was the most upper-Beta thing Braithwaite had heard in a long time. Alphas usually ate whatever you put in front of them, but young Krause hadn't seemed to figure out in his short time here that he was the only one of his "peers" with these special meal requests, and Braithwaite was worried eventually it would be noticed.
"Of course, Sir. May I speak freely for a moment?" The question seemed to form in Braithwaite's mouth without permission of his brain. His arm reached and closed the door, also without permission.
"Sure thing."
