Destiny Taken (Destiny Lost Book 1)

by Giulia Napoli

  As I was saying, after zuhr, we beat each other. That was an insistent, binding part of our resident group activities. We always did it the same way, and in the same order as our morning ablutions.

  We each held the Middle Eastern version of a rattan cane, most of a meter long, and we formed a circle of sorts with Erij, Altaf behind her, and then me, and then Erij completing the circle behind me. We stood in the tight circle, about a meter apart. To start the beating, Erij would hit me on the rump with such force that, on that first day with my triple, I thought I would fall to the ground and pass out. Then I’d strike Altaf, who would then strike Erij. After five rounds, we’d switch directions – Altaf would hit me, and I’d hit Erij. We’d repeat this cycle until each of us had been beaten 20 times, ten from each triple mate.

  With every stroke of the rattan cane, a searing pain and a sexual thrill would ignite within me like lightening. Unfortunately, the sexual thrill would fade about as quickly as lightening too. Nevertheless, I realized within minutes of the start of the first beating by my triple that I was totally hooked on their infliction of pain and punishment on me.

  Such was the power of the controlling device that had wormed its way into my brain. Was it coupled to my own natural tendencies? I didn’t think so, but I had no way of knowing for sure. That in itself was horrifying. I could no longer tell my own thoughts from those imposed on me. To make matters worse, I was sure that even if they went against my natural tendencies, the impulses I was being forced to follow would, over time, change me into whatever they wanted me to become.

  Normally, the prisoners only ate a late-morning dinner and a somewhat late supper. The meals consisted of prisoner porridge, except on the day after Sabbath, when we got something that slightly resembled actual food. Of course, since that came after a day of fasting, and a single meal of gruel, it tasted wonderful to me and to everyone else.

  It was hard to get to know anyone because we couldn’t speak. I probably found out about the other women as much from the guards as I did from the inmates individually. The guards were surprisingly verbose, considering that they otherwise treated us with disdain at best, and outright cruelty most of the time. It was almost as though they sought to cover their abominable handling of us by being erratic, and unpredictably friendly. As a result, you never knew whether one was going to talk to you in an almost comradely way, or beat you until you bled.

  No one knew American Sign Language, of course, including me – with the exception of a few gestures I’d picked up over the years - but there was a sort of local sign language that had apparently grown up over time. For example, rubbing your thumb along your first 2 fingers – a gesture that usually meant “a lot of money” outside the prison, meant “how long are you in for from now?” To answer, in years, you held up the right numbers of fingers, or flashed them multiple times if it were more than ten.

  There were the usual obscene gestures found mostly in southern Europe and the Middle East. In particular, the forearm jerk for “fuck you.” That would usually result in an instant fight between the sender and the receiver. I observed this my third day there while many of us were standing around in the hot, sandy courtyard at the center of the prison.

  I saw one nondescript, stocky girl give the forearm to a tall, thin, and equally nondescript girl of about the same age. They instantly leapt at each other. They had, of course, no hair for hair-pulling, but there were swings and bites and eye gouging and attempts to use short nails to scratch. The fury of it was pretty impressive – for about twenty seconds. Then, as though we’d all been gassed, every prisoner in the courtyard, myself included, suddenly crumpled to the ground, motionless.

  I’d experienced complete loss of control for a moment during a demonstration and test of my initial programming. This event wasn’t at all planned, nor did it take place in a padded room. I instantly collapsed right in the courtyard, right where I’d been standing a moment earlier.

  I lay there with my face halfway in the sand, unable to move anything. Even breathing was difficult. My eyes were open and I couldn’t close them; my right eye was in the sand and covered by it. It was awful, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

  After about five minutes, they released us and forced us to stand in a circle in the middle of the courtyard, surrounding the two combatants and several matrons. My eye was watering and in agony. I tried my best to clear sand from it, but it felt like there were boulders behind my eyelid. The best I could do at that point was to keep my eyelid pulled out from my eyeball, while my eye watered in an attempt to clear itself.

  The punishment for the two offenders was immediate and, I suppose in the view of the matrons, appropriate to the offense. Each girl lost the use of her arms and hands for a month! Right on the spot, a matron used a controller to block their ability to move or control their arms at all. They’d be forced to have a member of their triple or someone else in their resident group attend to shaving, cleaning, and even pushing the feeding button for them – and anything else they were required to do.

  Such was the level of matronly dominance in the Control Institution for Delinquent Women. They had all the control, we suffered a complete loss of control.

  Chapter 11 – Count on Me

  The forced – or, rather, the enforced – feeding started my second day of incarceration and continued without break, even when it was the Sabbath. Everyone fasted, but I got a double dose of extra-caloric gruel after the sundown dinner – just before lights out. I was being pushed to gain 2 and a half kilograms per week, or about five and a half pounds. This wasn’t a matter for debate or anything I could resist. Using the controller they’d inserted the need deep into my mind and I couldn’t neglect it.

  So I ate. Or, rather, I let the machine feed me four times per day. Two regular meals, and two meals designed to pack on the pounds.

  I’ve always been both healthy and slender. I’ve never been gaunt, but you would immediately know by looking at me that I was athletic and trim. When I arrived at the prison, I was more-or-less told that they had enough trim inmates. Totally by random chance, I’d been assigned to a group of chubbies. It appeared to be nothing more than the luck of the draw.

  I found out much later that it hadn’t been random. The warden, whom I never saw nor met when I arrived, for reasons known only to her, hated Americans. In particular, she hated American girls who looked all-American – pretty in a cute, loveable, shapely way, with clear skin, light hair and a winning smile. I was told by a matron who became borderline friendly to me, that the warden was determined to relieve me of all those attributes. Obviously, my light hair was easy and the first to go.

  My cute shape was going to be next. Thus, I was assigned to a specific one of the eighteen openings when I arrived, which my friend told me was the only fleshed-out opening of the lot. Had there been a fat or very obese woman opening then or anywhere in the near future, I would have been sent to that. In fact, I was told that possibility still existed, if an opening occurred and the warden decided I should be further abused by being sent to it.

  My sentence, and that of every other inmate, required that we spend twenty percent of our punishment time in the Control Institution for Delinquent Women itself. After that, the system did, by far, prefer that we be purchased by a Kingdom of Salat citizen, and fulfil the remaining eighty percent of our sentence as an indentured servant to that citizen. In many cases, indentured servant was equivalent to concubine.

  In order to encourage overall sales and placement of inmates, it was in the prison’s best interest to keep a variety of women in all shapes, sizes, colors, body masses, and so forth. That would maximize the overall opportunity for placing inmates with sponsors, thus eliminating the state’s cost, while providing a stable environment for continued control, bondage, and punishment. At the same time the system satisfied a societal need in the patriarchy that was the Kingdom of Salat.

  As a result, women in the prison spanned the spectrum from concentration-camp gaunt (known as
a hazil) to well-over morbidly obese. Coming in, I was considered a nochhadn, or thin inmate, but I was only a few pounds below the average weight for my height. The most commonly-desired form for potential buyers was motowoseik, what Americans would call average build, not slender (me), skinny, or gaunt. Next heaviest were the dontoleh, Arabic for “plump,” which were present in the prison in the second highest percentage. My group was actually referred to as gideen, which essentially translated as “chubby.” We’re heavier than the dontoleh, averaging 40 to 60 pounds over the average group. Fat women, the swomina, were heavier than us at around 200 pounds (90 kg). The heaviest group are the zenay vizhiden, essentially the “very fat.” Those poor souls are maintained at 100 to 150 pounds over the average weight. Apparently there is a significant group of buyers who want concubines of that large, fleshy body type.

  Almost no one came to the prison as a zenay vizhiden. There simply weren’t that many obese women who got into trouble there. I think that’s because there wasn’t as high a percentage of people in this or nearby countries who are that much overweight as there are in the US. Remember the Kingdom of Salat was a semi-autonomous region within the country of Eritrea, which is more than half surrounded by Ethiopia where people have been starving for generations.

  Where an inmate fell along this body type spectrum when she arrived in the prison was irrelevant. She was assigned to either the oldest available opening or one specifically picked by the warden when the warden decided to get involved, which was infrequent. The inmate's controller was programmed to get her to the desired body shape. That might mean gaining a little weight to a lot of weight, or losing a little or a lot. We had no say in it. Once inside, we were programmed to do what the system decided.

  As I said, for me, that was to abandon my buff, athletic form, and join the gideen. Could I have resisted this enforced change to a body image I’d had all my life? Not a chance. Between the environment that forced me to do whatever it was decided that I’d do, and the imposition of needs and compulsions by the controller, I didn’t have a prayer of doing anything other than what they’d decided I’d do.

  So I got chubby, at the rate of about five pounds per week. I think the exercises I was compelled to do insured the weight would be distributed in the way they wanted. Or maybe they somehow used my controller to make it happen a certain way. Regardless, I didn’t gain it all in my stomach or end up with a giant ass as I’d feared would happen, and I didn’t suddenly become brutish-looking. The new forty-five pounds seemed to go everywhere.

  By the time I reached 70.5 kilos or 155 pounds, my legs were significantly plumper from my toes to my calves and all along my thighs. My butt was bigger in about the same proportion. I could see it in the mirror and feel it when I walked – I wiggled or swayed more – and I could especially feel it when I sat down. The one blessing was that my tummy stayed mostly flat. My modest-sized, pert boobies were gone, replaced by what I considered substantial, somewhat drooping breasts, with natural cleavage, even in the nude, which I was all the time. My shoulders became rounded, and were no longer the broad, sleek, somewhat muscular shoulders of a lifelong gymnast. My arms and face filled out. I think my fuller face somehow makes me look younger. I’m a pretty but evenly-chubby young woman. It’s not a look I would have chosen for myself, but it isn’t ugly or the end of the world, either. Certainly though, no one would call me trim and athletic anymore.

  I stared at myself one morning after shaving and showering, for as long as I could get away with it. Until I shaved, I was so tormented and uneasy with need that I couldn’t think of anything else. Afterward, though, I could think straight again – at least until the irresistible impulse to be beaten started to build a few hours later.

  I stood there, examining my body. I thought: gosh, Karimah, you’re definitely an extra plump denizen of the Control Institution. You’re soft and curvy. Your supple, yielding body reinforces the picture of you as the submissive you’ve denied being for most of your adult life.

  In the mirror, I thought I saw Tia hovering above my right shoulder, young, self-assured, and beautiful as always. She said nothing. She didn’t condemn, praise or judge what I’d been forced to become in any way. Her expression was an unsettling combination of disquieting surprise tainted with desire. I couldn’t tell if that were a reflection of my own feelings, my imparting of feelings to the apparition of a dead girl, or some truly real emotion that was unique to a sprit which somehow still had a part of herself fastened in the real world, and wanted to communicate with me.

  The way Tia was looking at me bothered me. I was impatient with her popping up, saying nothing half the time, and then being totally – perhaps intentionally – vague when she did tell me something.

  “What is it, Tia?” I said in my mind, in Arabic I realized. I’d become so used to hearing it that I was preferentially thinking in Arabic by that time. The tone of my thoughts reflected both my impatience with her, and irritation at what this place had done to my body. I was alone in the bathroom by this time. Erij and Altaf had gone off to their morning jobs. No one was around to hear me talking to myself, though someone could have been eavesdropping remotely.

  To my astonishment, Tia responded to me in Arabic. At least I thought it was Arabic at the time. Looking back, I’m not sure it was any language at all. Perhaps it was only a string of conceptualizations; thoughts passed from one person to another.

  “You’re soft and rounded and quite full of figure, My Love,” Tia said, somehow.

  “Yeah, I’m fat. They wanted me fat so I’m fat. I can’t do anything about it.” The irritation in my thoughts would have been evident to even the most ephemeral ghost.

  “I would call you plump or chubby, but not fat as we always understood that to mean.”

  “Well they’d agree with you. They call my new body type gideen, which means chubby.”

  She looked at me with big, sad eyes. “Don’t be unhappy, Lover. I find I quite like you this way.”

  That was so unexpected that I was speechless – meaning thoughtless. I just stared at her and finally thought, “I’m a fucking cow!”

  “You look like a renaissance painting of a beautiful woman.”

  “For God’s sake, Tia, I’m bald and eyebrowless!”

  “I’m sorry, Love. But as for your hair, you have a beautifully-shaped head and a pretty face that I adore.”

  “I have no eyebrows, Tia! I look like some kind of alien! Or a honeydew melon with eyes, nose and a mouth!”

  “When you leave this this place, you can have hair again, or even wear a wig. You can pencil on brows. You will be as beautiful as you were, just different. Many people on Earth appreciate a woman with soft curves. At many times in the past, your current shape was the ideal.”

  “But it isn’t now! I was a slender, blonde American beauty, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, but you still are a beauty. You are different, more exotic, but still desirable to me, as you will be to others.” I saw her look off beyond me and I sensed that she’d said all she intended. She had wanted me to understand that I was still a beautiful woman. I wasn’t completely convinced.

  Ignoring the persistent vision of her, I resumed my train of thought about my future as a fat girl. Could I ever go back to being thin? If I lost weight sometime in the future, would I have all this excess skin which would make me sag and look terrible – possibly worse than I did being chubby? I suppose there’s nothing I could do about this in the next seven-plus years anyway. If someone bought out my punishment contract, would that person keep me this way? I assumed so. Otherwise, why buy me when he or she could have a trim, athletic girl from another prison weight group?

  I assumed that if anyone bought my contract, they would keep me extra-plump. So I’ll be a gideen for at least a total of more than seven years. After that, I would be so used to this configuration of my body that it would simply become how I was, and how I was supposed to be, right? Not how I was destined to be, but how I was. To change I’d have to
really work at getting back to average again, assuming I wanted to, or could convince myself that I wanted to.

  Insidiously, they had altered me so that I couldn’t control my more distant future, even though it would lie beyond the control of this horrible institution.

  Why were my body and mind soft and pliable? They’d done something to my brain and body, I thought. But they’d done something to my self-image too. I looked like a woman who wanted to surround her man or woman with the thick, warm, soft, luxuriant, yielding flesh of my body. The idea of pressing my voluptuous curves onto another person was surprisingly luscious to me. As you know, I was bisexual from at least my late high school times. I mostly thought I had a preference for men, but I could contentedly go either way. If I thought about Tia and Dyana, I had to admit that, perhaps, I was more lesbian than bi.

  Looking at myself in the mirror, I didn’t really care, I just knew I needed another human to share me physically. I couldn’t respond to him or her sexually, but I could share my warmth with theirs, and gain some sense of togetherness.

  Was I curvy? Oh yes, without a doubt, even though I didn’t like that form. But it was reflected in the mirror before me, and though I detested it, I had this deep, undeniable desire to be that way. I was positive in that instance that it was the controller influencing my thoughts, my wants and my needs.

  Was I submissive? I’d always considered myself more of a dom than a sub. Now, as I thought about it – and I did – I came to the realization that I didn’t care. I could be whatever some future companion wanted of me. I’d certainly been sub to Dyana, and that was before all the rest of these things happened.

  I’d been forced to submit. Every inmate here had to submit; that was the very nature of the place. I was of the opinion that submissive was likely what I’d prefer at this point. Maybe they were forcing those thoughts on me with my controller. After all, they’d already made what they wanted of me.