by Mark Andrews
But of course that was speculation. I didn’t even know if the company could come up with a penile item. But in the meantime, I was well pleased with what we had already.
We duly programmed them (you could do it for each of them individually; or for all or some of them as a global command) for our destination and then herded them along to the generator room. Here was set up a giant capstan which had six spokes and space for five prisoners on each.
It was a marvel of technical wizardry. It was of course connected by gears and drive shafts to the generator over yonder and this was designed to feed current back into the grid when we generated more than we were using, thus allowing us to be credited with our feedback.
But more than that, each place on the six shafts had hand-grips and these included sensors which measured the force being applied to them. The computer attached to the capstan sensed which places were active, automatically tied in that prisoner’s implant to that sensor, and then, every time he slacked in his efforts, zapped his testicle with a short but painful reminder to buck up his efforts. By now, such technical marvels were commonplace and didn’t cost much at all.
But the prisoners had no idea of it at all - until one of them goofed off, allowing the others to carry his share of the load. And then he reacted. Yes, we had tested the units on each of them so they knew what to expect, but they weren’t aware they were now connected to the capstan.
It only took one of them to scream, leap into the air and to suffer a massive blood loss to his head (his face went a deathly white) and then he, and all the rest of them, attacked those poles with a new vigour.
I grinned as I turned to Carl to remark how efficient it was.
“Too right, Will. It will mean we can use just a token guard in here. If we keep them on this unit for a fair time each day, it will mean a savings on salaries...”
“That’s exactly what I had in mind,” I said. “Indeed each of our punishments will need only a single officer, adding to the savings.”
“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you,” he said, grinning widely at me. He really was a nice young man as well as being one of the most handsome and physically magnificent I could ever have imagined and I wondered...
Here, I should say that my own sexual predilections were mixed. That is, I liked both males and females as sexual partners. I had explained this to each officer I had interviewed so he knew where I was at; but I also underlined to them that raping these prisoners was going to be mandatory and if they weren’t able to perform with a male, then opt out straight away. Some did of course, but those who remained each stated they were either gay or bi, Carl included. What I was wondering, was whether he and I might try it on some time.
I knew he had a good body - no, a great body and I had kept my own in good nick, too with at least an hour a day at the gym, but I was quite a bit older than him and... Anyway, I would wait and see. If he was, good and well, if not, well you couldn’t win every time.
He and I left the prisoners in Pete’s care and went off to inspect the waste digester unit. This comprised two tanks, into the first of which all of our and the prisoners’ body wastes would be deposited, as well, in the future, those of the pigs we were going to acquire for meat for the prisoners and ourselves. We would add some hay for this doubled the production of methane which would power our generator. This tank was what is called anaerobic: that is the bacteria which powered it works without oxygen and the methane is produced very quickly. It would be siphoned off into our small gasometer, a special tank designed to hold the gas under pressure. The second tank is aerobic and finishes off the process, producing a little more methane but converting what is left to a highly efficient fertiliser which is totally inert; that is, it has no nasties left in it and can safely be used on gardens used for growing food for human consumption. This would be used on our vegetable gardens for we were going to produce as much of the prisoners’ food as we could.
Carl and I and those of the other officers who were going to live in, had been in residence for a few weeks by this time and thus our wastes were already working in the primary and secondary digester tanks. We checked this and also the level of methane in the gasometer.
“It’s building nicely, Carl,” I said, “let’s give the generator a whirl.”
The unit’s engine had been designed to run on methane exclusively so there was no need for petrol or diesel start-ups. I opened the supply valve, watched the flow meter and then pressed the start button.
It fired first off and then settled down to a low growl. We went over to the main switchboard and I positively glowed. “Look at that, Carl! We’re already feeding back current into the grid. The generator and the capstan together are creating four times as much as we’re using! If we can keep this up for a major part of the day, we might cut most of our power costs.”
“And why not? Working them on the capstan is going to really debilitate them, which is what you want and it needs only one officer - and him a token only, really, to supervise them. If he wasn’t there, the sensors would keep them on their toes - literally!”
He grinned at me and then paused. “Will, I don’t know whether you are interested or not, but I really get off on your body. If you were ever interested, I’d love to come to your room some time...?”
I smiled back at him. “You won’t believe this, Carl, but I was trying to work out how to ask you myself... Let’s make it tonight, eh?”
I left then to attend to some paperwork, specifically the selection of the next batch of prisoners and to go over, once more, the profiles of the rapists’ victims. Another of the planks in my thesis, the one area I was qualified to speculate on, was the recovery of those victims. I knew very well that while rape victims usually healed physically within a few weeks of the attack, their mental state was another question entirely. I believe that if a girl (or a male victim too, for that matter) was to see their attacker punished in the way we were going to be doing it, the mental scars might heal all that more quickly.
I had discussed this with a number of my colleagues and all of them, except one, was in agreement with me. I had then approached the victim’s own mental health professionals and discussed her case with him (or her) and three of them had been very positive.
Accordingly, we were going to bring them one at a time and in his company of course, to our new facility, first to watch them at work and then caned and finally raped by one of my men and/or by a machine I had bought for the purpose.
These would be private visits. No-one else would be allowed into the room while they were there, but I had another plank to my treatment as well and this one was dual-edged. The victims would not of course be charged for their visits. I genuinely wanted to help in their mental healing. But when I researched and wrote my thesis, I came to the conclusion that shame and humiliation were every bit as efficacious a punishment as their physical rape and the diabolically hard work to which they were going to be put.
I had proposed that the public be let in, for a fee, to watch as they were subjected to these two major aspects of their treatment. We would charge a high fee and we would admit hundreds of them to each session each day. There would be two sessions: the one to observe the prisoners at hard labour; the other to watch them raped by my men or by the machines as a reminder to them how horrible the crime of rape really was.
An eye for an eye...? Yes it was; but I have a strong feeling that punishments ought to match the crime and what better way to punish a rapist than by raping him right back.
Oh, just for the record, I had no such theory for the victims of paedophiles. I didn’t believe that observing retributive justice would work with them. They needed a huge amount of careful and sensitive treatment and an even greater amount of loving nurture to heal the dreadful hurt their attackers had visited upon them. However, those criminals would be subjected to just as much rape, human or mech
anical, and hard labour as the rapists. And they too would be punished in front of the paying public.
Over the top? Yes, but considering the appalling state to which the do-gooders had brought us, I believed such methods were very necessary to correct the imbalance our lenience had created. In my opinion, those criminals who physically attacked others should always have been treated more harshly than those who stole. Sadly, English law has always treated crimes against property more severely than those against the person but my thesis argued the other way and now I was being permitted to demonstrate whether I was right or wrong.
And so my idea to show off these prisoners to a paying public, naked, nude and brought down to the level of an animal (or worse) was a nail in this plank. I was aiming to make their time with us about as bad as it could be and when they were finally released, their continued nudity (under their clothes) would ever remind them of what they had gone through. So would the implant, of course, for with it they would be monitored for the rest of their lives. And if my idea for a penile sensor was feasible and was adopted, that too would help to keep them on the straight and narrow until the day they died.
We had needed federal approval for this last idea - that is, the display of the prisoners to a paying public. Australia was a signatory to the international agreement on the minimum treatment of prisoners and this included not allowing them to be seen working in the public domain. So chain-gangs, for example, were no longer permitted. Neither would their punishments within the facility by the public at large.
It had needed a great deal of negotiation and international parleying before the federal government had agreed to abrogate the treaty but I am pleased to report that after a few years during which the world watched our experiment very closely, the United Nations actually rewrote the agreement and my methods were now included as a legitimate method of punishment - for it worked!
Anyway, having gone over my files on the rape victims and decided which one was going to be invited first, I went back to the capstan room. It was now three hours since Carl and I had left Pete in charge in there and I wanted to see how the twelve prisoners were faring.
If you know anything about the work capacity of the human body, you will be aware that it is capable of a great deal of effort, or it can be once it is trained for it. Sportsmen and women are an example of this. But you will also know that while a muscular sprinter can run very fast for a few seconds, it needs a marathon runner’s rangy body and incredible stamina or staying power to run for the hours involved in that race. Few men or women have the stamina of a marathon runner. We all need rests, even short ones between stints of effort. They weren’t going to get them on this machine!
Our prisoners ranged from the less-than-fit forty-three year old Joe Connors to the very lean and athletic twenty-one year old Sandy Blake. I had already trained my men how to deal with this range of subject prisoners. They were to be worked until they dropped! The machine would zap them to keep going but when they were finally exhausted - and I mean that literally - Pete could drag him out of the path and allow him to recover.
I was pleased to find them all still standing - or more properly - staggering around the path. Joe Connors was just about all in but the zaps to his balls had kept him moving - just - although he collapsed for good just after I walked into the room.
Pete suspended the machine’s sensor functions while he dragged the almost scrawny prisoner out of the path and over to the wall but then he reactivated it (after warning them to get moving again) and I grinned as I thought they had all taken advantage of the brief respite to catch their breaths once more.
I stayed and watched as their naked bodies strained against those bars, muscles flexing and relaxing but for the most part quivering in a manner that told me they were all, even Sandy Blake, just about exhausted.
And so it proved. Within the next half hour, one after the other, they dropped and were removed from the path, but now we loaded their unconscious bodies onto a cart and moved them to the cleaning room. This was no bathroom. Indeed, most of the rooms in that old munitions factory were still in the roughcast state, having never been ‘finished’. That suited me down to the ground.
The cleaning room was a place where some items in manufacture had been cleaned and boasted high-pressure 100 millimetre water pipes to it. There was also a heater for when very hot water had been required. It, too, suited me well.
The cleaning area was in a corner, was four metres square and sunk 150 millimetres below the surrounding floor level. We dumped the twelve bodies into this, then Carl unwound the black rubber fire hose from its drum and turned it on.
The blast was powerful but not enough to damage their bodies and he now played it over the pile of naked and nude prisoners until, one by one, they came to life, shook their heads, crawled out from the heap and then climbed to their feet and left the sunken area, to stand shivering and most forlorn until the last one had joined them. Only then did Carl turn off the water.
We didn’t give them towels or even a rag, to dry themselves but I affected sympathy with their cold, wet state and said we had better do something to warm them up. Carl and the other officers present grinned but the prisoners didn’t. I think they sensed they were in for yet another trial and they were right!
Chapter 2
Carl Jordan
I liked Will from the moment he first interviewed me. And I think I saw more than a glimmer of interest in his eyes, too. Not that I let on, of course. He was my superior and hopefully, my new boss. Any overt moves towards his body, especially if they were ill-founded, would be disastrous to my joining his team.
And that, once I had read the circular outlining what he was proposing, was now my dearest wish. For too long we had been treating prisoners with kid gloves. A return to real punishment was in my view, the only way to teach them the error of their ways and to restore public confidence in the safety of the streets.
But then, as we settled in to the new premises and he began to train us in our new roles, I really gloried in what we were going to be doing - and more than that, in his company. He made me his deputy straight away and that too, gave me another real boost. And so, once we were actually up and running, I bit the bullet and gave it to him straight.
To my delight he accepted it and tonight we were going to make it.
First though, the prisoners, the first twelve of them anyway, were going to discover what hard work really was! You think what they had just suffered, the hours pushing the capstan, was hard? Think again. What we had for them now was worse, much worse.
We took them out to the back of the lot. The site actually backed onto the Brisbane River and there had been a quite extensive open area behind the building itself, some five acres of it. In its manufacturing days, this had been used to store raw materials and the like but it was now cleared and the bitumen ripped up and removed to reveal good quality river loam, ideal for our purpose.
Will had put together a disc plough. By that, I mean he had purchased one and then had our maintenance man, Bob Drover, build a frame so that the prisoners, any number of them, could pull it. If they thought pushing the bars on the capstan had been hard, now they were going to find out what the word ‘work’ really meant.
They were led out and while two of the other officers lifted up the first row of yokes and held them against the backs of the necks of the four prisoners we had selected for the front row, Will and I locked the front parts of them around the front of their necks. The yokes were provided with places for their hands which they now brought up to rest there.
This yoke was connected to the next one behind it by three chains and we then harnessed the other two lots of four to rows two and three. In the future, when we had more prisoners, more rows could be added, thus allowing the plough operator (it would be one of us officers) to lower the blades further into the soil. There was no electronic control of the prisoners
here. Will had decided that in this case, long bullwhips, applied by two officers on either side of the gang would be more effective - and would provided a salutary lesson to the paying public who would be visiting us in the future.
There was going to be no hiding what we were doing. Everything would be open to the public and the media and we hoped it would all be given a lot of coverage, at least at first. Will believes that a proper punishment, well advertised, will go a long way to redressing the dreadful state the do-gooders have brought us down to.
Once they were all harnessed and had taken up the strain against the connecting chains, I cracked my whip in the air above their heads and then screamed at them to get moving. To underline the point Pete and I selected two of them and then laid our whips against their straining backs. We had agreed to lash the two front outside prisoners, just to show the others, who could of course see them quite easily, what awaited them when they slacked.
Yes, this duty now required three officers but unlike the capstan duty, it would only be used occasionally, when the gardens needed ploughing. And this would normally only be once a year. We also had a harrow which would fine down the soil once it had been broken up by the plough but again, it would only be used occasionally.
Still, as this team of twelve now applied their muscles to the work, they realised I think that their days with us were not going to resemble what they had been used to in their former prisons. There, work, if they had any at all, had been easy and minimal; their food had been good if plain and they had been provided with clothing and bedding. Here they would have none of those amenities.
They were naked and nude (as Will called their now hairless state) and would remain so every moment of their time with us. They would be eating a pureed and rather tasteless mush of vegetables with a little meat added at night and fruit or raw vegetables in the morning. There would be no midday meal. They would be sleeping on wooden table-like benches, lying on their backs with their wrists and necks encased in a form of pillory which would prevent them touching each other, without any covering over their cold bodies at all. The neck section of each pillory included a zapper (based on canine anti-barking collars) which would give them a nasty shock to the sides of their necks if they as much as uttered a peep.
