Chapter 9 – A Descent into Hell
“Destiny Michelle Hutton,” the lead judge intoned in a thick, Arabic accent, looking right at me with the same fierce, judgmental eyes I'd seen on all of them before. I was cloaked in a burqa, and my face was covered so that only my eyes were visible. The judge continued in Arabic as my solicitor translated. “You have been found guilty of drug trafficking in the Kingdom of Salat. In accordance with Sharia law, we hereby sentence you to seven and a half years’ incarceration in the Control Institution for Delinquent Women.”
When my lawyer finished the translation, I collapsed as my knees went weak, and I dropped to the floor in a heap of flowing black cloth before anyone could catch me. At that point, out cold, I had apparently been taken away and deposited in a holding cell while still unconscious. I was alone – no lawyer, no jailer and no fellow prisoners. A day ago, I’d been on my way to give a paper in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Now I was going to prison for seven and a half years! I HADN’T DONE ANYTHING!
“Prisoner Hutton,” a stern male voice shouted at me, bringing me back to the real world as I lay on a hard shelf in the cell within the local justice center. “Prisoner Hutton, stand and submit!”
I stumbled numbly to my feet. The last thing I’d remembered was collapsing to the floor in the courtroom. They’d found me guilty! I’d been sentenced to years of imprisonment and control!
Right then, I didn’t even know what control meant.
“Strip!” The man commanded. He was a giant, more than a foot taller than my five feet, four inches and easily twice as wide. My head was a fuzzy mass of confusion – a disposition that didn’t sit well with the monster in front of me.
“I want to see the US ambassador,” I told the blurry face above me, in Arabic.
“That is not possible. There is no US ambassador here. Besides, the time for that has passed. You are now under the authority of the Sharia Court of the Kingdom of Salat. You have been convicted and will be remanded to the Control Institution to serve your punishment sentence.”
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“I am going to take you to the Control Institution for Delinquent Women. Get up immediately and remove your clothes. If you fail to follow my instructions, I can beat you into submission. I would prefer not to do that, and I guarantee you that you would not want me to do that. NOW REMOVE YOUR CLOTHES!”
His hand leaped out and slammed across my face. Even through the cloth covering me, it stung like nothing I had ever experienced, almost knocking me unconscious again.
SMACK! Another blow hit me from the opposite side. I collapsed to the bench again. My head began to pound. I shifted uncomfortably on the hard surface; one leg had been knocked off the bench and my foot was resting on the floor.
“GET UP!” SMACK! Again he struck my face. I tried to understand his command through the confusion in my mind and the repeated interruption to my train of thought. I put my other foot on the floor and tried to get my senses back.
SMACK! He hit me again.
“No … no … Please don’t hit me! I … I’ll try to get up … to do what you want. I half stood up, then fell back down.
SMACK! SMACK! He’d hit me across my face and swept back to hit me again. I felt my jaw dislocate, then pop back with agonizing pain.
“Aaarrrggghhh! NO! PLEASE! STOP HITTING ME! I’m getting up … getting up.”
I stood on quivering legs.
“STRIP!” He commanded.
At that point, modesty was a lost, meaningless concept for me. I pulled off the head covering of the burqa, and dropped the robe to the ground. Beneath it, I wore only a simple shift and underwear. I removed that forthwith, and stood naked before the jailer.
“Hands behind you!” I complied groggily, still reeling from the blows to my head. I felt him snap handcuffs onto me. Then he bent to fasten rings to my ankles. The rings were connected by a short hobble chain.
I was hustled, naked, down a long corridor. I passed a few men, each of whom looked away from me, turning to the side so they were almost grasping the wall, their arms and legs spread like spiders. I remember thinking that they were timid sheep, and not men at all. I was taken outside, put in a dirty, dilapidated white van, fastened to a bench seat in the back, and driven to the prison, more than five hours away, totally hidden in a scrubby part of the desert.
Halfway to the prison, I called out to the driver and guard that I needed to relieve myself. They pulled over and took me out, indicating that I was to go on the side of the road where I was standing. Embarrassed, hot and getting dirtier from dust in the air blowing against my sweat-covered, naked body, I squatted down and pissed right there. There was no way to wipe and nothing to use so I got up, still dribbling. They shoved me roughly back into the van and I was locked to the seat again. The van continued on to the Control Institution for Delinquent Women.
**********
I saw little of the remote, unremarkable complex, as we drove up to it. I was checked into the bleak, sandy-colored prison; my cuffs and shackles were removed. Still naked, I was taken to the inbound/outbound processing facility by a woman matron in a drab, olive-colored, army-like uniform and a male guard whose uniform was a bright white. The man held a long rod which, at first, I thought was something like a billy club. Then, seeing the two prongs on one end, I realized it was a cattle prod!
I entered a suite of rooms, bright and white like a doctor’s or dentist’s office. I was the only person there. They took me into a side room and fastened me into a chair that was, itself, fastened to the floor.
“What are you going to do to me?” I asked in a little voice rapidly rising in panic.
The matron looked at me strangely, and I thought for a moment that she didn’t understand my Arabic. Then she responded, in only slightly accented English, “I am going to prep you for your control insert, and then inject the control device. After that self-installs, everything will be easy for us, and more-or-less automatic for you.
“What is your name, girl?”
“Destiny Michelle Hutton.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“I don’t know … American, I guess. Michelle is sort of French.”
“Here you will be known as … ah …,” she looked at the clipboard she held. “Your name is now Karimah.” She pronounced it KaREEmah, like Carina with an ‘m.’ “That is a reasonable Arabic name, which others will recognize.” She jotted something down on the clipboard.
She handed the clipboard to the male guard and picked up a pair of nail clippers. I normally wear my fingernails fairly short because of the digs, and my toenails are medium length because they look nice on my pretty little feet. I’ve always been proud of my feet in general and my toes in particular. They're well-formed and delicate, without being prissy. I’d been too busy over the past week to trim my fingernails, so they had actually grown out to about medium length, and I’d kept the length and carefully polished them before we left for the conference.
In a few moments, my nicely-manicured, medium-length nails were history, as she removed the polish and cut them off completely, all the way down. Then she did the same to my toes.
“Long nails are potential weapons and aren’t allowed. You will keep them this short as a part of your daily ritual.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about. I did know that, because of how I was fastened, I couldn’t move anything but my head. As I was thinking about why I was constrained, she pulled on an overhead armature and extended the end of it toward my face. On the end was what looked like a rubber-coated, steel mouthguard.
“Open your mouth, Karimah,” she told me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
SMACK! Her hand shot out at once and slapped my left cheek, then my right on the return blow. My head was taking another pounding! I opened my mouth without saying another word. She pushed the rubber-coated guard into it. She must have used a foot pedal or something to trigger th
e contraption because it immediately expanded, holding my mouth painfully open and my head immobile, except for the small motion the armature permitted. Then she flicked a bar on the side of the armature and even that slight motion was impossible as the entire assembly was now held rigidly in place.
I couldn’t move my head at all because it was held by the immovable arm and the clamp tightly holding my teeth and expanding my mouth past the normal limit.
I heard a buzzing and my eyes immediately shot from side to side to see what they were doing behind me. I saw the matron walk around my right side, holding what was obviously an electric trimmer. She came up next to the armature and moved the trimmer up to my hairline in front.
“UHAAAH! UHAAAH! I screamed, which was as close as I could get to saying. “NO!” She was going to take my hair! She was about to shave me!
I started to shout again, and she hit me again. With my mouth held rigidly in the mouthguard, my teeth took the force of the blow. I feared another slap would knock them loose.
“SHUT UP! No inmates here are permitted hair at any time, and you are no exception.”
I felt the cold steel of the clippers on my forehead and then the buzzing pitch got higher as the clippers tore into my short, funky hair that Dyana had so loved to cut. The clippers ripped across my head from front to back.
The prison matron made short work of my pixie-cut, crowning glory. In a few minutes, it was all laying on the floor. My head felt much cooler, even though it was still very warm in the processing center. Tears were running down my cheeks. I’d just lost my short, remaining hair in the few minutes it had taken her to buzz it. The difference between having an edgy, short style and no hair at all is pronounced and it's enormously important in your mind, when it happens to you. I was in shock.
The matron had said none of the inmates were permitted hair. I wouldn’t have hair again until I was released – in seven and a half years! I didn’t think I’d even remember what hair was like by then. That thought made me cry all the harder.
The matron was putting some kind of tape over my eyebrows, pressing it firmly against them. She let it set for a minute or two and then ripped it off with a quick, painful pull, taking my well-groomed, slightly-arched eyebrows with it. She repeated that twice more, I assume to make sure they were completely gone.
The matron released the overhead arm and, keeping my head fastened through the clamp on my teeth and jaws, they tipped me forward, refastening me with my head pushed painfully down so that I stared at my legs. The armature was locked again, holding me in that position. I felt the matron wiping the back of my nearly-bald head with something containing a cold liquid. Then I caught the smell of alcohol and wondered why she was swabbing me with it. Out of the corner of my eye, I could just barely see her pick up something that looked like a gun with a flattened barrel. She came up behind me and I felt the end of the gun press against the back of my head, right where my neck met my skull.
“Hold perfectly still,” she commanded me. I couldn’t move anyway. “If you move at all and I mess this up, it’ll be your brain that’s damaged.”
“What are you going to do to me?” I tried to scream. All that came out of my clamped mouth was a string of “Uh aaahh – ahs” and other gibberish.
“I’m going to count to three and then inject the control device.”
I didn’t have time to think about what she meant when she quickly counted and then there was a loud snap and a horrible pain in the back of my head as she fired something into me! Then, a brief moment later, I passed out.
I awoke fastened to a bed with the matron standing over me. The guard was nowhere to be seen. My head hurt terribly, not just in the back but everywhere.
“Karimah! Are you awake enough to understand me?” The matron asked.
“Yeah … y … yes,” I answered shakily. I was Karimah now, right? In my foggy mind, I thought she’d told me that.
“You always address me as ‘Matron.’ Do you understand?”
She’d spoken in Arabic, but I’d understood her. “Yes, Matron,” I said, using the Arabic phrase for Matron.
“Then listen carefully, Karimah, because I’m going to tell you what’s been done to you and what happens next, but I’m only going to tell you this one time.
“As you know, you’ve been sentenced to seven and a half years of incarceration and control for drug trafficking. The device I injected into your brain is the control part of that. It’s an excellent example of what our allies, the Chinese, can do, now that their bio-circuit design and fabrication technology is mature.
“The device will work so well at controlling you that it will sometimes seem like magic. As an American, though, I’m sure you can appreciate that it’s simply the application of some reliable old and remarkable new technologies. It consists of a receiver that is powered in the same way your body powers its own cells, so there is never a need for batteries or battery replacement. The receiver is a part of you now, and will become even more a part of you over the next 24 hours. It is sending out tendrils into your brain which will allow you to be controlled by a small, hand-held device …”
“NO!” I shouted.
SMACK! She slapped me again yelling at me to be quiet.
“If you speak again, I will not give you the rest of the information you need and you will have to suffer through this unknowing. Understand?”
“Yes, Matron.” They were doing something to my brain as I lay there bound to the bed, and I couldn’t stop them!
“The tendrils will grow within your head, into your brain, over the next day, until all parts of your body and a significant part of your mind are controllable. The process, once started, cannot be stopped so it is already irreversible. In addition, the control device will remain a part of you always. Attempts to remove it would turn you into a vegetable or even kill you, so it will always be with you. Furthermore, a coded control device will remain in the hands of the Kingdom of Salat. It could always be used on you in the future, even after you’re released, should you be suspected of violating the Sharia again, and be found within our reach.
“Once the controller has extended its tendrils throughout your brain, the process is completed. The device will then be tested and your induction controls will be put in place. Those controls are the same for all inmates; all but two are removed when you leave here. You will be subjected to five groups of controls:
“The first group is behavioral. You will be compelled to obey all orders from all authority figures in the prison, be rendered unable to harm yourself in any way, and be incapable of planning or taking part in any escape attempt.
“We don’t compel you to not hurt others, because there could be times when self-defense may be necessary. However, there are serious penalties for injuring others, if you’re judged at fault. We usually follow the eye-for-an-eye precept. That is, if you injure another prisoner, you get the same injury in return, and possibly additional penalties. If you injure a member of the staff, you receive the same injury, and you will be, additionally, severely damaged. For example, you could lose the use of your arms or legs - for long periods of time or permanently. Permanently means they will not be restored when you leave.
“Secondly, you will be rendered mute, that is, unable to speak, though you will be able to understand others and read and write. All inmates are mute.
“Thirdly, your intimacies, including your clitoris, labia, inside your vagina, the entire vulva area, and your nipples will be rendered incapable of feeling sensation. In other words, they will be numb. Sexual arousal for inmates is forbidden.
“Next, you will be given a compulsion to shave your head and body and remove any eyebrows that may appear every morning after you first relieve yourself. Additionally, you will be compelled to keep your fingernails and toenails as short as I’ve cut them. This will keep you pure and clean. Should you try to fight the compulsion, you will find resistance increasingly difficult as the minutes pass, until the sensation of withdrawal and its
concomitant anxiety become so painful and disruptive that you will have to perform the daily grooming. There is no avoiding it. Ever. This control will also be locked into the control device in your brain when it is programmed. In other words, you will have the compulsion to shave and remove all body hair, save your eyelashes, and wear your nails short, for as long as you are imprisoned here. That identifies you immediately as a convict.”
That was horrifying to me. What she was telling me was that I’d never have hair, eyebrows, or any nails except short, stubby ones for many years! I’d never allow myself to! To make it worse, if my eyebrows were plucked for only a fraction of my sentence, I knew for a fact that they’d never regrow. I started to cry, but was afraid to cry out.
“Finally, by means of the controller, you will be matched to your resident group. That means that certain habits of the group of eight inmates for which you’ll be the ninth, will be your habits as well. That insures harmony within the group, and encourages acceptance of new group members, since you will all share a number of practices or compulsions in common. For your group, the obvious one is smoking. The group you’re to join smokes, so you will also. It is in the interest of the Kingdom that inmates smoke, as it offers another method of control.
“You will come to regard smoking as an important pleasure which you will greatly relish while you are resident here. It will make you feel good and provide a modest outlet for the sexual frustration resulting from the numbing of your intimacies.
“In any event, you will have no choice. You will be compelled to smoke. This will be removed when you’re released, though you’ll be a committed smoker by then and will probably find it difficult or impossible to quit.”
“Are you crazy?” I shouted. I didn’t like smoking. I mean I REALLY didn’t like smoking. Whenever I was anywhere near a smoker, I either went into another room, or left. I didn’t castigate the smoker; I just went away. Now they were going to make me one? “NO!” I shouted at the matron.
Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1) Page 15