Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1)

by Giulia Napoli

  Satisfied and pleased, despite a nagging, deep-seated anger at what I’d been forced to do to myself, I returned to the padded room. The nurse immediately felt my head and told me how happy she was with my shaving. I glowed with pride at her words. They had completely recast my self-image. For at least the next seven and a half years, the only paltry sexual tingling I’d experience was going to come from smoking, being caned and shaving myself.

  “It’s time for the final induction control.” She did something else on the device.

  “Prisoner, tell me your name.”

  I started to say “Karimah,” but nothing happened. Then I tried to say my name again, but nothing came out then, either. I opened my mouth slightly and tried to talk. There was something wrong with my voice. Then I realized that my voice didn’t have anything to do with it. I realized that I didn’t know how to talk anymore!

  “Speak up or face the prod!” The nurse was commanding, but not angry. Her voice maintained the same, bored tone. I could understand her without a problem. The guard moved toward me with the cattle prod.

  Desperately, I tried to remember how to talk! I didn’t know what to do! I couldn’t figure it out! It were as though my brain had forgotten how to connect to my vocal chords!

  “Prisoner Karimah! Speak!”

  I wanted to scream, “I can’t! You know I can’t!” But nothing came out of my mouth. I stared dumbly at the nurse with my mouth hanging open. I couldn’t talk anymore, and I knew I couldn’t talk.

  The guard pushed the prod into my abdomen, right into my bellybutton. I couldn’t tell him to stop! And then …

  ZAP! I felt the agony of an electrical discharge radiate from my navel up my chest and to my neck and face. I felt it plunge downward, and then dissipate at my unfeeling groin as I shook uncontrollably. I fell to the floor mat, writhing in silent agony.

  They’d proven to themselves that I couldn’t talk anymore. I couldn’t utter any sounds, even those of anguish. When I’d tried to scream something, instinctively but without expecting anything intelligible coming out of me, nothing had occurred but a subdued whoosh.

  I couldn’t even make a sound as meaningful as a dog could.

  My brain was no longer able to use my voice box. Thanks to the controller, I was mute, exactly as they’d intended me to be.

  I lay there shaking with the horror of my situation. She’d shown me that they now had complete power over my body and much of my mind. I wasn’t my own self anymore; I was a prisoner and something of a robot subject to their power.

  I was in fully-controlled bondage.

  I was about to discover that every other woman here was exactly like me. Or, rather, I was exactly like every other female here – I wasn’t a woman at all – I was merely a female who was being controlled as a part of her punishment. The authorities here were charged with disabling my personality and gradually replacing it with their ideal, submissive inmate. By the time I left this hell-on-Earth, I wouldn’t be anything at all.

  So they were to succeed and fail at the same time.

  Chapter 10 – Loss of Control

  The guard, still armed with the cattle prod, along with the matron from yesterday walked me out of the processing center toward another nearby, colorless building in the dust-laden, blowing, hot, dry air. I could see the high walls of chain-link fence surrounding the prison. They were the only feature visible that wasn’t the same nondescript color as the desert itself. The fence enclosed a barren vista. Nothing broke the monotony of the prison buildings, the infrequent patches of scrub grass and the tan dust which covered the entire, parched compound.

  In the distance beyond the far fence, a forest of royal poinciana attempting to bloom rose up a substantial hillside. To the right or left was merely more of the eternally beige, stale, grimy landscape. I was afraid to look behind me, but I remembered the dry scrub grass along the river that the rattling, rickety bus had followed to bring me to this hellish place.

  We entered a shallow, U-shaped building to the right. There was a mirror-image building to the left. Together, they formed most of a square administrative center and dormitory. We passed through there and into an open courtyard. Naked, hairless women were playing ball, walking, or just sitting in the sun, a sun hazy from the dust in the air – the ever-present dust. A few women were sufficiently motivated to jog around the stiflingly hot courtyard.

  Except for the footfalls and swooshing of movement, the eerie scene was disturbingly quiet. It was then I realized the impact of having the entire prison population mute, as I was.

  The world around me was going to be as silent as I.

  We finally entered yet another facility and they led me to a wing of the building housing, I was told, the eight other women of my home group, my triple of triples. By this time, it was late morning, but not yet lunch time. We walked along a corridor, past a dozen or more barred doors, until we came to one labeled 17. The door opened, apparently under remote control, and the matron led me inside. The guard stood outside the cell door as it closed behind us.

  There was a more-or-less circular area within, which contained tables and chairs, a few games like backgammon, and some things that looked like puzzles, along with several stacks of books. All of the books turned out to be Qurans, the Muslim holy book. Most were in Arabic, but I later found one in English. There was no television in the recreation room, nor did I ever see one while I was imprisoned.

  There were women milling around. Another, smaller number sat in the cells that apparently surrounded the recreation room. About half looked up to take note of me, the others didn’t seem to care anything about me being there. The matron motioned me to a seat.

  “Altaf!” The matron called out loudly, startling me and a few of the other inmates. A bald, plump, characterless young woman – characterless because she had no more eyebrows than I did - perhaps one or two years older than I, came out of one of the unlocked rooms beyond. She carried a pack of cigarettes in one hand, and sat down on a chair at the table where the matron and I both sat.

  Altaf lit up as soon as she sat. I could feel my hunger rise up at the sight of the cigarettes. She offered me one, looking into my eyes as she did it. I smiled and took one; she nodded at me and lit my cigarette, but she didn’t smile back.

  “Altaf, this is the new member of your triple, Karimah. She’ll be with us for the next seven and a half years. Show her to her bed and help her along as best you can for the next few days.” The matron had said this in Arabic, which I had managed to understand, and then repeated it in English for me.

  Altaf nodded understanding, reached out, took my hand and we both stood. I was to find that this was a common gesture in the prison, because none of the inmates was able to say, “come on, go with me.” The completely neutral expression on Altaf’s face never changed. There was no smile nor frown. She seemed to be a woman totally bereft of emotion. I tried a weak smile on her again and her expression still didn’t change. I looked back at the matron who was getting ready to leave, but who had been watching us.

  I must have had a questioning look on my face without realizing it – despite having no eyebrows to raise questioningly - because the matron assumed an evil grin and said, “Don’t waste your smiles on Altaf. She can’t smile back. In fact, she can’t make any expressions at all. Her face is frozen, you see.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Altaf reach up and touch her own face tenderly. Still, her expression remained nondescript.

  “Altaf was quite a jokester when she first arrived here, what, six months ago, Altaf?”

  Altaf looked at the matron blankly and held up her index finger.

  “Oh, so it’s been a year, eh? Well, we got tired of Altaf constantly laughing and always being upbeat, as you Americans would say. She’d smile at everyone, even the most brutal of guards and matrons. She was friendly all the time. A regular, good-natured, outgoing, kind girl who always had a sincere smile and waved a greeting to just about anyone at all, even some of the abs
olute master bitches in this place. It was downright creepy. No one deserves to be that happy. After all, this is a punishment facility. In the opinion of the matrons – which is the only one that counts as far as you inmates are concerned - she wasn’t taking her situation seriously enough. So we tried an experiment on her and it worked!”

  The matron started to chuckle, obviously enjoying the story. “Using the controller, another matron and I managed to shut off her ability to make any facial expressions at all! It took us three days to figure out how to do that. What you see is all she’s got. That was about four months ago, if I remember correctly. Come on, Altaf, give us a big grin!”

  Using her fingers, the somber inmate pushed up on the corners of her mouth. Her dispassionate expression didn’t waver.

  “Ha, ha! Altaf is with us for six years so she has five to go. She apparently became an unlicensed prostitute to support her family, which was a very stupid thing to do. Did she really think the Kingdom would sanction that sort of behavior without getting its cut? Prostitution is legal in the Kingdom, if you have a license to operate, pay your taxes, get regular health screens and so on. Keeps the men happy.

  “Anyway, about two months before she’s released, we’ll turn her face back on, assuming either the other matron or I are still here and remember what we did so we can undo it. We’ve got a lottery going to predict which, if any, of her facial muscles will work anymore by then. My money is on none. I think they’ll all be atrophied. So I’m betting that she’s going to look like that forever.

  “What’s so great is the delicious contrast with how she was! You’d appreciate it, I’m sure, if you’d seen her overly-gregarious self before we fixed her.

  “Interestingly, we think her disposition changed along with the loss of her ability to non-verbally express her unbearable, unending happiness. It’s kind of hard to tell, since she’s such a blank slate now, but I’ve observed her body language and she slumps in despondency all the time. So by taking away her ability to smile or express anything else, we appear to have taken away her infuriating, irrepressible capacity to be happy!

  “Frankly, I don’t think she can get sad, angry or frustrated either. She’s completely unemotional and totally bland. My guess is she’ll be like this for the rest of her miserable life. On the positive side, her face will probably age more slowly, since we’ve essentially given her permanent Botox!”

  The matron actually cackled at that point. It was one of the cruelest sounds I’d ever heard. I was appalled at the barbarity of what they’d done to this young woman – merely because they decided that she laughed and smiled too much!

  I felt terrible for poor Altaf. Instinctively, I reached out to touch her cheek in sympathy. I felt her press her face against my hand, the only way she could express her appreciation to me. I’m sure she could see the horror and sympathy on my own face.

  The matron left the room, but not without one last comment.

  “Karimah, it’s probably best not to get too friendly with Altaf. You don’t want her old habits to wear off on you. In my experience, Americans tend to laugh and joke around too much anyway, pretty much like Altaf used to. You wouldn’t want your face to end up like hers. On the other hand,” she smiled an unmistakably evil grin, ”it might be interesting to have one full triple of completely blank women to laugh at!”

  **********

  Besides the morose Altaf, my other triple sister was a dark, moody, chubby, slightly older woman named Erij. Erij was from Tunisia. It took more than a little while to elicit the story in some non-verbal way, but I came to understand that she’d been imprisoned for lesbianism a couple months earlier. She was sentenced to ten years. In her case, the total disabling and numbing of her genitals and nipples were permanent.

  They’d done to her what the Egyptians had done to Dyana, but without the surgery.

  Erij would never have physical sexual responses again. They’d rendered her brain incapable of receiving erotic signals from any part of her body. The Kingdom of Salat had set out to break her of her sexual orientation, and they had purposely broken her for any enjoyment of sexual relations at all.

  Erij had the ring of a scar around her neck, as though someone had sliced her repeatedly with a small but sharp knife in an encircling pattern. I found out that she had tried to hang herself with something that cut her like that, after she was sentenced, but before she had been brought to this prison. Someone had cut or pulled her down in time, before she expired, but the rope or whatever it was had badly ripped into her.

  Now, of course, her suicide or murder by any of us was out of the question. The compulsion against that kind of violence was far too strong and profoundly infused into us by the controllers in our brains. I found that every few days, Erij would undergo a sexual tension that would almost incapacitate her. The only thing that brought her out of it was an extra beating by one of us. I did this for her often; it was a mercy at the same time it was appalling to observe or to do to another person.

  That was barely below the surface of the depth to which we would sink while in this hole

  Among the three of us, we were a sorry triplet, indeed, but we were no more broken than the other six women in our resident group, or most anyone else in this God-awful prison. I expected my life for the next 90 months would be a never-ending hell.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t quite that, though sometimes it was far worse than I ever imagined hell to be. Most of the time, it was mind-numbingly dull and monotonous. Once in a while, however, it was actually funny.

  **********

  All the sleeping rooms were monitored by camera, but, since there were 300 triples arranged into 100 triples of triples, no room would be viewed often during the day or night. Thus, if someone or some triple were intent in causing a quick disturbance, they might try it, with little chance of being caught in the act, so to speak. Sometimes, a prisoner or two might pull some dumb stunt simply to break up the monotony of the place.

  All of us who smoked could pick up cigarettes whenever we wanted. Given our well-established addiction, along with the minuscule-but-very-real, teasing arousal that smoking provided, we picked up a lot of cigarettes. Most of us did a couple packs a day. We were also issued rechargeable lighters. If you lost your lighter, you’d get a new one, accompanied by a punishment – perhaps a controller-induced headache or pain somewhere that would last a day, or loss of your arms or legs for a day or two, or loss of bladder control, which would embarrass you into never doing that again. If your lighter simply ran dry, you could refill it from a lighter-fluid station. No, there were no butane lighters in the Control Institution. We all used that aromatic, oily fluid for our lighters. This is a third-world country, after all. More like a fifth-world country, truth be told.

  Shortly after arriving there, one of the women in my triple of triples, motioned for Erij and me to follow her to the lighter refilling machine. It was well past lights out and all the corridors were darkened. Using gestures, since none of us could speak at all, she indicated that she wanted one of us to hold down the emission nozzle, while she filled a small bottle with lighter fluid, and while the other watched for matrons, or any indication that the room camera was focused on the events happening there, by the filling point.

  I was sort of trapped and didn’t know what to do, so I went along with the plan. I was scared. I thought we might be discovered and they would lengthen my sentence. But I also felt that I needed to support the inmates, of whom I was one.

  We got the bottle filled and snuck away, apparently without being seen. Our conspiratorial leader had Erij and me follow her to another triple room a few hundred feet from our own. While we watched, she silently crept into the room with three sleeping inmates, and poured a large pool of the lighter fluid in the middle of the concrete floor, a few feet from the three sleeping women. She poured a line of fluid from the pool out of the room and into the main corridor. From the main corridor, she lit the thin stream. The flames shot along the stream and into the poo
l which burst into a bright, hot conflagration! The three women shot up out of their bed and you could see the horrified look on their faces and their attempts to scream their lungs out, which failed because they were, of course, mute.

  At that moment we turned away before being seen, and ran back to our own rooms as quickly and quietly as we could. We were silently laughing our guts out at the joke we’d just pulled, and the momentary excitement we’d caused. For a few minutes, I felt more alive than I had since I’d arrived at the Control Institution.

  Unable to make any noise, I still laughed myself to sleep as I remembered the looks on the faces of our victims. It had been well-worth the risk!

  We were never caught. The event was the topic of conversation for days afterwards. You could see the mute inmates acting out the entire scenario in pantomime, over and over again. Even the matrons got into it and I heard many a matron belly-laugh as she told the story to matrons and inmates alike.

  A few days later, as I was drifting off to sleep, replaying the lighter fluid joke in my mind, an idea struck me. It was a crazy long-shot, but it had at least some potential to let me get a message out of the Control Institution. I decided to build a hot air balloon to carry a message over the walls and as far as it could be blown, in the hopes someone might find it in the wilderness around the prison, or perhaps even see it passing overhead. Neither I nor anyone else was capable of planning or executing an escape, but there was nothing in my controls that prevented me from trying to get a message out. Luckily for me, that was a major oversight on the part of the administration!

  Getting the hot air would be simple; after all, I had an unlimited supply of lighter fluid. Since the thin tubing that our gruel passed through on its way to our gullet was always clogging and being replaced, I could make a burner out of a piece of it, sealed at the bottom, stuffed with a rag, and filled up with lighter fluid. My problem was making the balloon.

  My first thought was to use a plastic trash bag, until I remembered that I was in a third world country and we didn’t have trash bags in our wastebaskets – which was probably why they smelled all the time. However, while I was sitting in the courtyard a few days later, I saw an inmate emptying one of the large garbage cans in an enclosed area, by pulling a big, dark green plastic bag full of trash out of it.