SMACK, SMACK, SMACK! She hit me back and forth until my head rang like a church bell!
“Since you cannot be quiet, I will tell you nothing else. You are on your own,” she admonished me. She turned and walked away.
I needed to know what she was going to tell me. I didn’t have a choice. I yelled at her, “I’m very sorry, Matron! I spoke when I should have listened! Please forgive me, Matron! Please tell me everything else.”
She paused, turned, and stared at me. Then she walked up to me and slapped me so hard that I blacked out for a moment. I found out a few days later that all the blows to my head had, somewhere along the way, caused a concussion already. That wasn’t to be my last one either.
When I regained my senses, I was crying and begging her not to hurt me, and to tell me what I needed to know. She stared at me and hit me again, then went on.
“Before you became insolent, I was about to elaborate on what benefits you’ll reap by smoking. You’ll not only have the relaxation most people derive from smoking and the pleasure nicotine provides, but you’ll also experience satisfaction at fulfilling a compulsion, and, perhaps most importantly, you’ll experience something of a tingling, sexual thrill while smoking. The thrill will be mental, not physical, but the inmates tell me it’s one of the few ways they can get a release from the frustration of having no nipple or genital arousal. In other words, you’re fortunate to be in a smoking group.
“The other women in your group also have made a commitment to daily canings, as penance for their past sins against Allah. This had developed into a compulsion for six of the eight of them, and has been added as a compulsion to the other two. It will also be programmed into you through the controller, as an irresistible impulse.”
I realized she was telling me that I would be caned each day, and that I would be given a compulsive need for that to happen because the controller would make it a part of my deeply-rooted desires and daily habits. I’d be essentially addicted to daily flagellation!
She went on. “The other members of your group, like all inmates, keep to a strict, Muslim diet of course, avoiding foods which are ḥarām. This includes food which is not prepared acceptably, but in particular includes all pork. You will be given an inherent aversion to these foods, which will be manifested as a violent, negative reaction to the very idea of eating them. Coupled to that, you will be compelled by your controller to perform the five-times-per-day salat – the Muslim daily prayers of the faithful. This is the Kingdom of Salat, after all. Both of these, the Muslim dietary restrictions and the compulsion to perform salat are control restrictions which are permanently etched into you by means of the controller. They will not, and cannot, be removed when you are released.”
So now I was going to get sick at the thought of certain foods or how they were prepared? This was more than a sentence for the crimes I wasn’t guilty of; it was a change to the very nature of what I could do day-to-day for the rest of my life!
Besides, I love pork! Especially bacon! Does this mean they were going to make me get sick at the thought of eating some of my favorite foods?
Then on top of that, I was to be mentally bound to perform the five-times-a-day Muslim prayers of salat for the rest of my life! And I’m not Muslim! This whole thing was awful, and to make it worse, I’m innocent! I didn’t do anything!
Except refuse to flirt with an Arab guy who might have decided to fuck me over. On the other hand we might have been targets of convenience. He probably thought he could eliminate his risk by getting me or Toni or both of us to carry his stash through customs. If one of us got caught, he’d just walk on, as innocent as he could pretend to be. Which is, of course, what happened.
The matron was talking again. “Finally, you are too thin. All of the women in your home group are well rounded. The prison maintains a range of populations, in order to give our customers a choice should someone decide to buy out a punishment contract and save the Kingdom the cost of incarcerating you. To match you with the group, you will be fed four times per day instead of the normal two, until you stabilize at a compatible weight, comparable to others in your group. You will probably have to increase your body mass by about 50 percent.
“You will be with us for seven and a half years. Unlike in the West, you do not get out early for behaving. If you don’t behave, you’ll serve additional time. You’ll also be punished further. There is much we can do to you with the device that controls you. You’ll see what some of those things are tomorrow, when the tendrils interlacing your brain have all grown into place.”
Something alien was crawling through my head and there wasn’t anything I could do about it! It made me want to scream and tear at my head in horror. But I feared being slapped again. My jaw still hurt and had cracked loudly the last time she hit me.
She continued. “You have three ways to leave this prison: release when you have served your time, your death, or a citizen of this country buys your contract. That can happen any time after you’ve been here for at least 20% of your sentence, one and a half years in your case. Otherwise, you remain here. Learn to get along here and you will have far fewer problems.”
What did she mean, ‘buys my contract?’ I wanted to ask her, but I was afraid to speak. I didn’t want to be hit again. Perhaps there was a possibility that someone could buy my way out of here, and I could leave this God-forsaken, piece-of-shit country.
She apparently saw the wheels turning in my head because she spoke up, answering my unvoiced question.
“No, you cannot persuade someone to buy you and send you home. If your contract is bought, it must be by an approved, Kingdom of Salat citizen, and you must go to the home of the individual who purchased you as that person’s property. You are not allowed to leave the country until your full sentence is completed. After you are programmed tomorrow, your controller will prevent you from leaving. Once per day, starting after activation tomorrow, your controller will receive a continuation code. If that code isn’t sent to it, you will begin to randomly lose capabilities. You may become blind, or your legs will not work or your arms will be paralyzed, or you’ll be unable to swallow, and so on.
“If you go missing, the control system will be told not to send you a continuation code. Then, as the controller executes its incapacitating program, you will gradually become more and more disabled, until eventually you will be nothing more than a broken mind in a useless body. Now that the controller grows within you, there is no escape from the justice of the Kingdom of Salat.”
They were going to have more control over my body than I did! They’d have enough control over my mind to make me into someone else, into any kind of woman they wanted! I could become a slavishly obedient woman, if that’s what they decided to do to me!
I already felt barbarically violated, despondent, and more afraid than ever before in my life. I was to be stuck like this for seven and a half years! Then, even after I was released, I’d never be the carefree, happy, whole, independent young woman I was before! I wanted to crawl into a hole at that point, and pull my life in after me. As far as I could see, my freedom and my life were essentially over.
She still wasn’t finished. “We are going to break you, Prisoner Karimah. In a few months, you won’t even recognize yourself or your own thoughts. You have committed a serious crime against the nation, and we intend to punish you for that for many years to come.
**********
Shortly after her lecture the guard returned and they tied me to a post, facing it, with my hands cuffed above my head, and my feet cuffed to rings in the floor. Then they beat my back and bottom with a cane – I think about twenty times. I screamed and cried until the Matron told me to be quiet or she would double the beating. About fifteen strokes into the beating, I lost control of my bladder and made a mess down my legs and onto the floor. The matron continued to beat me without stopping. I was hurting too badly to be embarrassed. I tried my best to reduce my cries to quiet sobs. That apparently satisfied her because she
stopped after a few more vicious swipes with the cane.
They left me more-or-less hanging there while they did some other things in the clinic-like room. Then I was taken down and told to relieve myself in a small washroom. Little happened as I’d already emptied my bladder onto the floor. I did manage to clean up a bit. When I returned to the larger room, they handed me a small plate with a piece of crusty bread some olives, and some salty, dried fish. That and a cup of water was my dinner. In fact, it was the first food I’d had since the small meal I’d eaten in their jail, shortly after being arrested.
After I ate everything, they spread me out naked on the bed and fastened me down to it again. Then the lights were turned out when they left the room.
Struggling against the handcuffs that held my wrists and ankles was useless. I was bound; I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d never been more terrified. I lay there staring up into blackness, unable to move enough to relieve the pain on my butt and back from the caning. I’m convinced that I could feel something crawling along under my skull, on the surface of my brain and deep within it, as the controller’s tendrils wove their way into me. I could picture my brain being pierced and perforated with tiny, growing wires as they invaded my mind and connected themselves to everything that my brain could do.
I was losing myself, even as I lay there. How could a government be allowed to put something in the heads of the people who lived under it? Even if they supposedly had committed a crime? Where were the rights of the individual in all this? Where was my right to not have my body or mind violated against my will?
Even when I was arrested, I thought they would only send me back to the US. Two days ago I was my own person, even if I did face trial in a fanatical country.
They had decided to punish the person I was, by saying that I was someone else. That I was a criminal. At that point, I wasn’t a person in their eyes; I was a felon deserving not mercy nor rehabilitation, but only entitled to punishment. The first thing they were doing to me was taking away my ability to have control over my own body.
More terrifying yet, they were taking away my ability to freely, fully control my own mind.
I wasn’t in River’s Edge anymore. I was under the control of fanatics; a stranger in a strange, horribly troubled land.
I didn’t completely appreciate it yet, but I was in hell.
**********
SLAP!
I’d fallen asleep, what seemed like an eternity later. Now I was being beaten awake.
SLAP! “Wake up you lazy infidel!” It was a man’s voice. I opened my eyes to see a tall, thin, 30-something man with dark hair and a thick mustache, fire in his eyes, glaring down at me.
CRACK! He hit me again so hard I saw stars and almost passed out. I was pretty sure he’d dislocated my jaw because I couldn’t move my mouth! Then he hit me again from the other side, and I felt a “pop,” as my jaw was painfully knocked back into place. The pain was like a knife in my face! This was at least the second time it had happened.
“P … P … P … Please, Master!” I said, begging. “Don’t hit me. I’m awake now.”
CRACK! He hit me one more time, but not as hard, and stepped back. A woman in a white lab coat, her hair covered with an equally white veil, stepped up to me and looked me over. She appeared to be a nurse. I didn’t see hate or evil in her eyes, just bored acceptance of whatever it was that she had to do. The man left the room.
“You must get up now and use the toilet. Then you will take your breakfast and afterwards we will test your controller.”
She stepped aside and I got out of bed, standing naked beside it on wobbly legs. My head was ringing and an ache was spreading throughout it. She pointed to the bathroom door and I went in, did the necessary things, and cleaned up a little. My head looked awful without my hair. I started to cry, but tried to bring it under control. There was only the barest of stubble where my pretty, delightfully short hair had been, after Dyana had cut it. It had been demolished by the buzzing the matron had given me yesterday. I felt it and it felt like whiskers all over my head. I hated it and once again struggled not to cry.
Almost worse than my bald head was the appearance of my face without any eyebrows at all. It made me look completely vacuous, devoid of personality, as though there wasn’t anyone home behind the blank façade that my face had become. I looked strangely alien, unearthly.
According to what I’d been told, this was how I was going to look for the next seven and a half years. What if I became so used to this that even when I could, I wouldn’t grow my hair again?
My depressing self-examination was disrupted by the nurse throwing the door open and telling me to get out of the bathroom. I was instructed to sit on a stool over by one wall. There was a tube protruding from the wall.
“Place the tube in your mouth and swallow the porridge as it comes out. Do not miss any of it. If you do, you will be punished. This is how you will be fed four times per day, until you reach the desired weight, and then twice per day after that for as long as you are here. It is all that you will get. Each week on the Sabbath, you will fast all day and receive only one feeding, after sundown. On the following day, you will receive small portions of regular food at the prisoners’ dinner, unless you are in punishment. That is the only time you will have anything other than the porridge. You may take water whenever you are free to do so. That means whenever you aren’t involved in some required activity.
“Now set the dial to the blue position, place the tube in your mouth, and push the black button to begin dispensing your breakfast.”
I did as I was ordered. I didn’t want to be beaten again. A moment after I pushed the button, a white, granular paste entered the tube, pushing the water that had filled the tube into my mouth, which I hastily swallowed. As the paste came through the tube, I began to suck it up. It was room temperature and tasted like almost nothing, perhaps with a tiny amount of salt. It had the consistency of overcooked oatmeal. In other words, it was a disgusting gruel.
I continued to suck it up until I had ingested it all, probably about two cereal bowls full. Then water came through the same tube again, flushing the remaining gruel out and giving me something to wash down the mess. The water kept coming, clearing the tube and filling me up. Then it stopped and the nurse told me to get up and follow her. I noted that the guard had returned, a cattle prod in his hand. We walked into a side room, which turned out to be more like a padded cell. There were thick, springy, light gray pads completely covering the walls and floor. A small shelf was fastened at about waist-height in one of the corners.
“Your controller signaled its complete invasion of your brain just before you awakened this morning. That means that it is entirely situated in place. I will now test the installation, to determine that everything functions as it should. If there is a problem, you will be sent to another clinic where they will attempt repairs. That is very rare.
“We will test all of the functions of the controller. If I ask you a question, you must respond truthfully. If you lie, it is quite likely that the controller will pick up on the falsehood, and indicate that to me. If that happens, you will be severely punished, both physically and mentally. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Matron.”
“I am a nurse, you idiot! Not a matron!”
“Yes, Nurse. I’m sorry, Nurse.”
“Stupid girl.” She held up a device that looked a whole lot like a full-function, TV remote control. I was very, very frightened. I wasn’t at the edge of panic. I was definitely already panicked. They had done something awful and permanent to my brain, and now they were going to prove that they’d been successful in changing me – in changing me from a free, happy, young woman with a bright future, into a woman who was controlled by others to be what they decided I would be - forever!
I saw her fiddling with something on the remote-control-like object, and then she pushed a button on it. The next thing I knew, I totally lost control of my body. I crumpled to the floor mat like a r
ag doll, unable to move or talk. Breathing was a struggle. I couldn’t swallow at all, and drool quickly started to run out of the corner of my mouth. I couldn’t move my eyes or my tongue. I couldn’t speak. As I lay there, I realized my bladder had let go and I had no control over it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the nurse making some notes on a chart that sat on the shelf. A minute later, I could move again and was told to stand.
“As you just experienced, the controller can instantly render you incapable of controlling your own body. We do not hesitate to use this function to prevent problems. If you are ever disruptive, or even if you’re near a person or group which becomes disruptive, you can be rendered essentially inert in an instant.”
What she had done to me with the controller she held had instantly brought home to me that I was no longer in charge of my own body. I was at their whim. If I didn’t do as they asked, I would become some sort of an automaton, which would be controlled by someone else, not me.
The matron manipulated the controller again, and suddenly I was blind. Totally and completely. There was only a black-like nothingness.
“I can’t see!” I shouted. Then suddenly, I could. I staggered as she made other notes. I was shocked that they could do that to me.
A few moments later my hearing was gone. I told them. At least, I think I did. I couldn’t even hear myself talk. I saw the nurse say something to me. I pointed at my ears and shook my head “no.” The guard walked up to me with the cattle prod. I yelled, “No! I can’t hear you!” I was thinking that she’d ordered me to do something, and when I didn’t, she told the guard to shock me. I backed deafly into the corner as he came at me. The prod touched my stomach and I felt an incredible jolt of electric pain radiate out from there along all the lines of my body.
She wrote something else down. Apparently, she was convinced that I really couldn’t hear, once I’d been shocked.
Then, my hearing came back.
“I am going to disable your sensitive areas and then test them. There should be no pain. If you move when you’re being tested, you could permanently damage yourself. So spread your legs and do not move.
Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1) Page 16