Constant 3, Chapter 4-5 (Patreon)

This is the nearly-complete draft of Chapter 4-5. It may undergo another revision or two, just to tighten it up a bit, before publishing. If you spot any errors, feel free to let me know, or if anything seems oddly out of characters or inconsistent. Otherwise, enjoy!

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Five: Fake It to Make It

I must be cruel only to be kind: Hamlet’s idiom captured Julia’s intentions well.

            The final week of Julia’s control over my life was brutal.  She wanted to forcibly implant two decades of feminine conditioning into my pretty little head, and she had the means to do it. Oh, sure she insisted it was for my own good. Maybe she even believed it. It was a clever bit of mental trickery, rebranding her guilt as a gift. She humiliated me only to save me. And if she took guilty enjoyment at watching me squirm—well, it was a price worth paying. After all, she only humiliated me to save my life, right?

            Yeah, I didn’t buy it either.

            Two weeks ago, she’d established her dominance by trying to fuck the manhood out of me. And yeah, I complied willing because—because it felt so damned good, and I wanted it, needed it, even. So she said, and she was right. Now, she was training my masculinity into oblivion—again, for my own good. Considering how scarily effective a single week of her training was, it’s a very good thing that everything went so horribly fucking wrong by that weekend.

            It started on Sunday. Her day went as planned, at least at first: shopping, lunch, a constant barrage of corrective warnings and rewarding tingles—far more warnings than rewards, it seemed—followed by a couple hours of maid duty back at hers and then a debrief. With poorly concealed excitement, she walked me through the day’s data: “a fifteen percent improvement,” she said. She pointed at a pink spike on a graph. “Massive progress with vocal femininity. It’s skewing the rest of the data.”

            “I tried going the whole day without swearing,” I said. “Fuck me, it was hard.” Heat flared at my wrist. “Really?”

            Julia laughed. Then she indicated a moment earlier in the day, a blue surge in a rolling sea of mild pink data. “But this—we need to talk about this.”

            This: early afternoon, tummies glowing with a light lunch and glass of wine, head fuzzy with the effort of projecting the Cindy she expected, that the AI wanted. We left the café, click of heels against sidewalk slabs as we cut along a warren of backstreets under October skies. Bright sun and lost in both character and chatter, I felt—happy—a genuine surge of pleasure trotting alongside Julia on a beautiful Sunday, light dress fluttering in a cool wind.

            “Food?” called a voice. “Money?”
            He sat on a flattened bit of cardboard, dirty, menacing, dark-eyed. Successive governments over the past two decades promised homelessness would be a thing of the past but nothing changed. There would always been forgotten people and lost places in which they sheltered. Julia probably hadn’t even noticed the rent-a-cops we’d passed during our walk; I did. Private security forces swept through the city centre and moved the beggars and rough sleepers along, usually towards the periphery. On those seemingly, increasingly rare nights I slept in my own bed, I saw many of these lost souls on my morning run through the suburb.

            Up close, this guy reeked of despair, of piss and sweat. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty—no, not even that. Just a kid, and his eyes betrayed both disbelief and sullen anger at his own loss of dignity. He eyed these two pretty women in their bright clothes and resented them and keenly felt his own grubbiness. He needed their help but would hate them for it. Maybe he remembered women from his past and felt the disdain they’d feel seeing him like this.  

            Before Julia could stop me, I crouched in heels and a dress that cost enough to house him for a week. “Hey,” I said. His clothes were filthy but not yet tattered, his breath rank but his teeth still healthy and white. Homeless, but maybe only recently.

            The man eyed me warily. His eyes flicked to somewhere past me, searching, looking for the catch, the authorities, for something to explain why this beautiful girl might talk to him. When his attention returned to me, he took in my shiny lips and earrings, the meticulous makeup and prissy cleanliness. I felt ashamed.

            “What’s your name?” I asked.

            He shifted uncomfortably, scratched at a spot under his armpit. “Theo.”

            “Well, Theo, if you’ve got a phone, I’ll spot you some cash.”

            I could feel Julia hovering disapprovingly behind me. Well, fuck her.

            Theo reached into an inner pocket of his puffy jacket. There were a few tears and rips in the fabric, taped over. He’d feel those come winter. He pulled out a phone. I tapped it with mine, transferred some money.

            He stared at me. “You’re pretty.”

            “Yeah.” I leaned in a little closer and spoke so only he could hear. “We passed some cops a few streets back. They’ll be here soon. You should move,” I said, and recommended an unofficial shelter near my neighbourhood, a derelict building of squatters, homeless and gang kids living in uneasy harmony.

            Julia and I walked on, until we turned a corner. She grabbed me hard by the arm, yanking me into the doorway of a fancy café. “What the fuck was that?” she hissed.

            I stared back at her, then at her hand. “Let go of me.”

            “You’re a young girl, you idiot. He could’ve hurt you.” An exasperated sigh, and she released me. “What were you thinking?”

            “He needed food.”

            “Food?” She laughed. “He’s a bum. He’s going to—”

            I shoved her up against the wall, hard and ignoring the scorching pain in my wrist jabbed a finger in her face and spoke with barely restrained fury. “Don’t you fucking say it, Jules, you don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about. Yeah, maybe he’ll spend it on—whatever. Drugs. Booze. And who can blame him? His life’s shit.” My finger curled into a fist, and for a moment Julia must’ve thought I was going to throw a punch. But my arm fell impotently at my side. “His name’s Theo. And maybe—just maybe—he’ll take that tiny bit of money and… eat, or get himself a room for the night, shower and for just one day feel like a man again. It might make a difference. It might not.” I glared at her, flushed red and breathing hard. “He deserves the chance.”

            Julia stared at me and let it drop. It took a solid hour before the dark cloud over us lifted and we could enjoy the rest of the day. We finished our shopping; she punished my aggression with an extra hour of maid duty when we got back to hers; and then over wine and a charcuterie board, she pointed at the data that captured the encounter and the computer, in its digital fucking ignorance, determined it was an especially unfeminine—or un-Cindy—thing to do. Compassion and empathy were outweighed by anxiety and revulsion: a girl like Cindy shouldn’t stop and talk to homeless men—too scary, too icky—and if there’s a single time this whole goddam week I wanted to tell Julia and her goddamn AI to fuck off, it was then.

            “You used to do the same thing, too, back then,” Julia said, musing as she pushed the laptop aside. “I’d forgotten, you know. It was one of the things that first attracted me to you, fourteen years ago when we first met. It just seemed so—out of character.”

            I titled my head and smoothed hair over my shoulder and felt a buzz at my left wrist. “How so?”

            “You were so arrogant, especially after the tech buyout, really cocky. The way you splashed cash around, the flash suits, expensive restaurants. You could be such a dick, you know?”

            “You quite liked my dick.”

            She rolled her eyes. “But then, every time we went out and you passed some homeless person on the street, you’d stop. Talk to them, just a quick word and some money. I swear, you were kinder to them than anyone in the office.”

            I shrugged.

            “Why?”

            An itch, raw skin beneath a hardened scab.

            First, I lost Persephone. Then, I lost the only home and family I’d know. After recovering from my injuries, I walked out of the hospital, into the city and disappeared. Yes, there were offers to take me in; I had friends, then and favours owing. Debts I could have collected. In pursuit of oblivion, I chose instead obscurity, I wanted to forget, and to be forgotten.

            Lonely nights. Grey hollowness and fear. A constant hunt for shelter, for sustenance, for some way to obliviate the self. Rules: quickly learned, and the need to push on, the places to stay away from and how to avoid authorities. Not that anyone looked for me.

            A few bright moments that alleviated the emptiness: moments of kindness, grudgingly accepted. Other lost souls, briefly known. One girl—briefly—and then gone, forever. Jesus. I’d nearly forgotten her. Beatrice. That was the first tear, that night, shed in remembrance of the forgotten. I’d promised to find her, someday.

            Most of that year, numb. Hunger; always hungry, often cold. Filth; how deeply the stench can sink, an indelible stain on the soul. And the discovery of what a person might do for an instance of heat, or scrap of food, a drink or even the briefest flash of what passes for intimacy. I’d been raised into violence, precisely applied; that year, I learned the hollow joy of violence, indiscriminate.

            That year also taught me how quickly everything once taken for granted could be stripped away. We live dancing at the edge of the precipice, willfully ignoring the chasm and its depths. Basic dignities are fragile. Dreams and hopes, thoughts of the future a luxury. I learned the fundamental truth of our animal nature: we are beasts, and what we call human rights or morality are nothing more than pretty illusions. What value in social construct that fail so utterly?

             Julia watched the passage of silent emotions expressed as a shudder. Throat dry, I gulped my wine and smiled wanly at her. I’d never talked to anyone about this. There’s never been anything to say. That year was in past and could damn well stay there. David’s entire existence had been built on a foundation of forgetting. His life ensured it never happened again.

            “So,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

            From some distant place, I watched my slender hand with its shiny nails careful place the wine glass back on the table. The hand trembled, slightly. The armband tingled approvingly of my weakness. I felt tears form at my eyes and blinked them away. No. This wasn’t something I could talk about. Not while wearing a pretty dress, legs shaved and sleek, a face full of makeup, and sparkling rings at my fingers, earrings dancing against my cheek. The distance between then and now, impossible.

            I shook my head no.

            “Tell me.” This time her voice was hard and cold. “I’m not asking.”

            Her demand and the tone of it raised a strong sense of indignation—I opened my mouth to tell her to fuck off—felt a warning at my wrist—the feelings in my throat lurched and twisted sideways—and then….

            Cindy told my story. She told the story of a lost and tragic boy because it had never been David’s to tell. In her quiet voice, it came pouring out:

            “There was a boy, once, and—a whole year—before you knew… him, when he was only twenty—he was homeless. He’d run away from home long before that, and the people who took him in—the woman who—and I got hurt—I mean, he got hurt and ended up in the hospital, and—” I was babbling, or she was, the story wasn’t coming our right.

            Sad smile flickering through shades of apologetic sadness, Cindy took a deep breath and tried again. “That first night, this boy….”

            Julia listened in silence. At one point she tapped her tablet, and I felt those bracelets go cold and quiet and unlatch themselves, and she removed them from my wrist without a word. I talked; told her about things that happened over the course of that year that I’ve never told anyone. She never interrupted, though a few times she asked me to explain more clearly.

            Meanwhile, a quiet and insistent voice at the back of my head kept telling me to shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up! and stop whining, walk away and never look back. Jules didn’t need to know this; no one did; and I didn’t want to remember. But having started, I found that stopping simply wasn’t possible. Every time I tried, another memory tumbled, half-formed and ugly, from my mouth.

            I spoke until the bottle of wine was empty and it was dark outside, my throat felt raw and my makeup ran in dirty streaks down my face. I felt no shame in these tears. They were the tears of a young girl for a tragic boy she’d only known dimly, as through a dark mirror.

            “And then one morning, I walked into this bar run by this guy I knew and asked for a job. A few years later….” I trailed off, and stopped. I hadn’t told her the worst of it, nor would I. Those memories were fresh once again and would stay with me for a long time. I remembered Bianca, and Deniz, and the Pit. I remembered unpaid debts, a crunch of broken bones, and a scream, a bite, a final breath muffled beneath by palm.

            “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what came over me.” I rubbed at my eyes and the back of my hand came away smeared with mascara and eyeliner. “I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t apologize,” Julia said, voice flecked with the same steel with which she’d instructed me to start.

            “You asked,” I said. “Why I stopped today. That’s why. That kid, Theo? That was me, once.”

            Wordlessly, Julia stood and walked over to the window and stared outside. I remained at my seat, staring into my empty glass. Now, I felt tired, as though I could curl up and sleep for a week. Julia stood in silence, her back turned to me. Several minutes passed, until I glanced at my phone and saw the time.

            “I should get going,” I said.

            “No.” Julia crossed back to me. “You’re staying here tonight.”

            “I’ve got work tomorrow.”
            “Doesn’t matter.” Next thing I knew, she was reattaching the bracelets to my forearms.

            I shuddered at their cold touch and looked up at her pleadingly. “Please.”

            “You need these,” she said. “More than ever.” With a click, the armbands sealed around my wrist. With surprising gentleness, she pulled me to my feet and led me to her bedroom.

            The next day, Monday. She didn’t say a word about what happened the night before. Instead, Julia assembled an outfit for me: houndstooth skirt over tan pantyhose and a form-fitting long-sleeved black top paired with a wide red belt and red pumps.  I looked sexy—Cindy always looked sexy—but compared to previous days it felt subdued, almost comfortable. Touching up my nail colour that morning to match belt, shoes and lips, I watched Julia moved efficiently around her apartment. Exhaustion again dogged her footsteps, yet she pushed aside her own needs in favour of mine.

            “Good luck today,” she said, and I saw the tiredness behind her eyes. But she smiled and tapped the bracelets. “I made a few adjustments.”

            We traveled separately, that morning: I rode the bus, and she took a taxi.

            I didn’t see her at work. The night’s previous conversation haunted me at first, but the intensity of my performance distracted me. At 9am, my phone beeped: Julia, to tell me she’d hooked her software into the floor’s security cameras. I felt the armbands come alive. For the rest of the day, they guided me through this new, nuanced version of Cindy. The software seemed to focus on mannerisms, that day, the less obvious expressions of girlhood. The negative reinforcement had changed as well. Gone, the previous warning warmth, the gradual heating. Now, both armbands gave a shock, ranging from a mild prickle to a genuinely painful jolt for persistent and egregious violations.

            When we met later that evening, she walked me through the day as represented by bar charts and line graphs. “Not bad,” she grudgingly admitted. “Though we need a bit more focus on this ‘timid’ metric, you’re still coming across as way too confident.”

            I blew a lock of hair out of my eyes and kept silent.

            “Next time someone compliments your work, try to play it down,” she advised.

            Tuesday played out similarly, but already I could feel her adjustments creeping over me. It’s difficult to precisely define what changed. It’s not like I performed some limp-wristed caricature of femininity. Rather, it was something—subtle—a tilt of the head, or the way I stood; the way I held my hands or gestured with them as I spoke. Holding objects differently—not just because of longer nails, but with a gentler grip, less controlling, less possessively. More eye contact. More hedging in conversation, more listening; and the light touch, subtle affirmation as someone else spoke.

            Even the things I wore came under scrutiny. Before, I’d slip on a necklace or bracelet because—well, because that’s what women wore; but under the AI’s supervision I better incorporated these objects of femininity into the performance—a low-key pantomime of gentle touches, fiddling, confirmatory fidgeting with accessories that confirmed my girliness.

            The tug of an earring, or the roll of fake pearls between forefinger and thumb; absently twirling a bangle during conversation, or the subtle tuck of hair beneath a hairband under watchful male eyes: these were the forgotten gestures that helped complete Cindy.

            And when I got it wrong, the pain of each correction proved remarkably effective. Somehow, I came to both yearn for and dread the sharp sting of each error—at times cringing in anticipation for a shock that never came, other times finding relief in having a recognized and accidental slip up corrected.

            And I wonder, had everything not gone so necessarily, disastrously wrong between Julia and me—what would the long-term effect of this training been? Between the affirmatory pleasant tingles of acting like Cindy, and the warning jolts of David-like actions, even a single short week of her regime changed the way I behaved, even in those all too rare times when I was alone and away from the gaze of judgmental observation. Another month—or two—and would Julia’s vision for Cindy have seeped into my unconscious sense of self? Fake it to make it: how long before the act becomes reality?

            Julia caught up with me during breaks that day, both to check up on me and to explain some of the AIs more baffling corrections. “Here,” she said, picking out an incident from the morning, caught entirely on camera:

Cindy in high-definition video, standing in reprographics, collecting a ream of copies to distribute around the floor. Oh, the irony of a sustainability report printed on paper: dozens of pages thick, in multiple copies, a heavy stack waiting in a box on a shelf for the young girl to haul back to the office. She stood there non-plussed and looked around, twirling a bang around her finger. She looked every centimeter the secretary: black pencil skirt, tall pumps, tight white bloused buttoned low over red push-up bra. For a moment, she seemed to consider the suitability of pretty nails, tall heels and a short skirt for manual labour. Then, just as she shrugged and reached for the reports, sliding her hands beneath the box, a man entered the room.

            “Hey, Cindy,” the man said.

            “John.” She twitched, as though from a static shock. “Um, Sir.” She grimaced and tested the weight of the box of printed report.

            “You look good today.”

            “Uh.”

            Just as she went to lift the box, John moved closer. He stepped in directly behind her. His hands held her by the hips. “Hey, let me help,” he said, even as he pulled her back into his crotch, grinding into her. “I can get that for you,” he added, and as he reached around her for the box, he took her by the breasts. She went immediately stiff under his touch, even as he groped her tits, briefly.

            John leaned close, burying his face in her hair. He took a deep breath. “Mm, you smell good, too.”

            She dropped her elbows, jabbing his hands off her chest, and twisted within his arms. Trapped between the man and the shelves behind her, she glared up at him. Loathing crawled across her face, and she visibly trembled. For a moment, it looked as though the diminutive girl might throw a punch.

            He didn’t notice, pushing past her to pick up the box. He grunted with the weight and smiled at her. “Where do you need these, little lady?”

            Cindy didn’t answer.

            “What?” John asked, as she stalked out of the room, face contorted with pain as she clutched her wrist.

Frankly, I deserved a medal for not killing that bastard. John was a known pervert; every girl on the floor had a story to tell. These stories ranged from pats to the bum and pinches to the thigh, to being cornered at office parties and mauled—or worse, according to Mel.  Many girls laughed it off; for many, their laugh hid tears. But John was a manager, and well-liked by the other guys. All the girls said they’d raised a complaint with HR, but nothing ever happened. One girl went as far as to threaten legal action but she no longer worked for Volumina International.

            “Jesus, what’d I do wrong?” I asked, munching on a high-protein, low-carb bar that passed for a breaktime snack. Emma had gifted me a box of these things. She was always commenting on how much I ate and drank and seemed genuinely worried I’d start putting on weight. Honestly, I’d rather be fat than live off these things. “These f—” I took a deep breath and tried again. “These things—” I indicated the corrective bracelets, “—were frying me alive. I didn’t kick him in the nuts. He got off lucky.”

            Julia shook her head and sighed. “Listen, Cindy, God knows he deserves it. John’s an asshole. But he’s also a manager, and technically one of your bosses. You’ve got to think like Cindy—what would she do in that situation? How would she react?

            “She might go to HR. But she can’t afford to put her job at risk. She certainly can’t risk losing her job. So, what does she do?” She directed my attention to her software’s recommendations, where sliders running from ‘demure’ to ‘bold’, ‘compliant’ to ‘assertive’ and ‘accommodating’ to ‘confrontational’, in shades running from pink to blue, were highlighted. “We need to push these over to the pink side,” she said.

            I raised an eyebrow. “Is this really the kind of Cindy you want?”

            To her credit, she looked pained even as she answered, “Yes.”

            By Wednesday afternoon, I sat behind my desk at work, idly twirling a pen through my hair, chin resting on the back of my hand, long fingernailed listlessly flick-scrolling through boring rows of numbers on the screen. Legs crossed at the knee beneath a pleated skirt, heel dangling from one foot, I gazed absently into the middle-distance and thought of Mr Connor. He’d just walked by, so intense and strong—stopping to speak to me, deep voice rumble planting a warm glow in my belly—and lower—and I suddenly started—became actively conscious of myself—and saw myself as a pretty young woman in a way I hadn’t since this whole insanity started.

            Jesus. What was happening to me? The transformation was subtle. Only a few short days, but the consolidation of all these tiny, learned behaviours had an incremental impact far beyond any single change. It was—something in the way I tucked hair behind my ear, the trailing of fingertips along the ear, or the touch of an earring. A tilt of the head, incline of body, and a different stance taken when talking to a man, or a woman. How long I held someone’s gaze—modulated my voice, timbre and tone and cadence—all of it, over the period of a single week and constantly reinforced by pleasant tingles and mild shocks—changes to the way I not only presented but felt about myself—as Cindy.

            I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like living death, a constant eating away at the memory of who I’d been.  But grudgingly, I also had to admit Julia hadn’t been wrong. I’d gotten complacent. The prosthetic fooled me into believing the illusion was perfect. That hole between my legs made my feminine cloak impenetrable. More subtly, perhaps, it pushed me unconsciously into old male habits as reassurance that underneath that prosthetic skin and female slit there still lay—me—cock and balls and a thrusting male libido.

            Well, that armband jolting me awake every five minutes quicky had me realising how far I’d slipped back into old patterns.

            Admittedly, what the AI considered “feminine” was too over-the-top for my liking, too stereotyped, too demure and compliant and soft. Mel popped over at break to lovingly swear at me for skipping out on Daiquiri Tuesday with the girls, before telling me in graphic detail about the man she’d gone home with and how he’d fucked her so hard she could barely walk this morning—and I blushed and nodded until she looked at me oddly and left disappointed, and I envied her. Even Julia—for all her self-destructive insanity, I’d have rather copied her mature confidence, her passion and anger and futile railing against the patriarchy.

            But that was not Cindy’s way. Increasingly, I resented the brand of femininity she forced into me. Julia argued that, based off my earlier failure, it’d do me good to push some of the software evaluative metrics to the extremes: submissive over dominant, considering how I’d reacted outside the restaurant a few nights ago; or accommodating rather than confrontational, after the encounter in the photocopy room. She threw the sliders over to one end, smiled and told me to enjoy the ride.

            Even if I hated it, seething behind a glossy shy smile, there was no denying that after a couple of days of intense training I found myself relaxing into a feminine posture far more easily. By that Wednesday, Cindy came easily—too easily—so much easier than ever before—and handing the reins over to her was almost a blessed relief. In fact, it felt as though it took a conscious effort to turn off the tiny girly flourishes that made the performance of Cindy complete. There was precious little time to myself that week, and even in those rare times I discovered myself still caught in the act.

            Jesus. And all this, after only half a week? How could I change this much in so short a time?

            I had a theory. During my stay at the Clinic, Crystal let slip during one of our sessions that the same process that saved my life might be messing with my mind, too. That’s not how she put it, of course. No, she couched it as “helping me adapt” and “easing the transition”, but her point was that the same chemicals that regenerated flesh in response to change or damage might also affect the brain. So long as those chemicals were churning away in my bloodstream, I wouldn’t just heal faster, but also learn faster. The overnight healing of the navel piercing was pretty good evidence that the regenerative compound remained active. My near D-cup tits were another heavy reminder.

            It’s not as if I understood any of it.  But it felt possible that the constant negative reinforcement of those bracelets—first the mild burns, now the sharp electric jolts—kept kicking the regenerative compound into some low-level active state. Nothing so serious as to trigger any of the monstrous effects I’d seen deep below the Clinic. Thank God for that. But still enough to stimulate the swift growth of new neural connections every time I complied with the software’s instructions.

            There was no way of knowing, of course. I’d have to ask during my next checkup appointment. But if acting like Julia’s version of Cindy meant becoming that version of Cindy, at some deep, biological level—then this couldn’t continue. This version of Cindy wasn’t somebody I wanted to be.  Yet I could feel her creeping over me, in action if not quite in thought. How long could I pretend to be docile, or compliant, or submissive, or whatever other bull—other nonsense Julia thought was appropriate, before it stopped being an act and started being me?

            Meanwhile, between pain and pleasure, I completed the working day in a detached haze. Often, I felt disconnected from my actions. Oh, I completed my work easily enough. Sitting at the reception desk, my lips curved into the same smile as before: bright and shiny; but accompanied now by those tiny little touches that converted a welcome to subtle flirtation. I saw myself, as Cindy poked a stray bang behind her ear, touched her earring and then smiled shyly at the young man standing in front of her, and marvelled at my own transformation.

            “I’ve got the 3:30 interview,” the boy said, ill at ease in a cheap suit that didn’t quite fit.

            “Name?” I asked, smoothing down my hair and batting long eyelashes.

            “Keiran,” the boy said with an Irish lilt.

            “Black-haired.” I smiled and winked. “It suits you.”

            We chatted as he waited to be called. He blushed and at first spoke too quickly. I giggled, and listened, and he gave me his number, of course. He called me a pretty girl and said he’d like to take out sometime. After he left, I sat behind my desk, slowly stroking my hair.

            A pretty girl, he said. The kind a boy likes to take out.

            What, exactly, is a girl?

            Damned if I knew, but the first and simplest definition that came to mind was: not a boy.  A girl is defined in relation to a boy: she doesn’t have a cock, she has breasts, long hair, lacks physical strength; her softness a lack of male hardness, an echo of the mental frivolity contrasting male reason. A girl wasn’t just different: she was deficient, a deviation from the male norm. A girl is a boy, incomplete.

            This was nonsense. I’d hated so much of these past months, but I’d never been an absence of anything—I was my own, I was a person; and for now that person was a girl. My tits weren’t a deformed male chest, though once it felt that way. My pussy wasn’t a void, an absence, a no-thing rather than something.

            Did it even matter what I thought? I couldn’t define myself in isolation. After all, I wasn’t a girl in the abstract but a girl, a specific girl, not ‘just’ a girl but rather Cindy, and Cindy from the very beginning was defined as not-David. Agent K wanted her to be everything David wasn’t, and so did Julia—my current self was my previous self’s antithesis.

            Meanwhile, Julia’s software wanted to mold me into a girl according to binaries steeped in stereotypes, docile versus assertive, or weakness versus strength. Yet everything in my lived experience these past few days and months resisted these easy definitions. Could there not be a strength of sorts in weakness, an expression of will in submitting to the control of others? Could compliance to one be defiance to another? Passivity an assertion, and humility pride.

            I smiled and watched myself smile: the object defining itself and the object of constant scrutiny; the thing that sees itself being seen.

            A girl: coy smile, tilted chin, and backward glance over bared shoulder. Tap of an earring, whisper of silk, and slender fingers. Wet lips, demure look, tip of tongue between bright teeth. Smooth thighs, soft skin. Long hair and bright colours. Being a girl was being young, and slim, and pretty and fun and petulant and frustrated and cute and wonderful and sullen and sad and confused—yes, confused, more than anything.

            Though maybe a girl didn’t have to be any of these things: what if she wasn’t pretty, or young or slim or shy or… whatever. Did she give up her girlhood, then? What if she could be something other, their own—his own—manifestation of ‘being a girl’?

            If not in action at least in thought, in soul—always.

            I kept Keiran’s number, and smiled absently through the rest of the day.

            Thursday evening. Julia has plans for us. Another exhausting day, but she ended it strangely jubilant. She wanted to celebrate my achievements this week but her own as well. She took us out for late night drinks.

            The place she chose was expensive and pretentious and boring, but she said it was connected to the shopping center and therefore its security feed covered by the contract with her department. Icarus sat atop the luxury hotel that towered over the mall, forty-something floors of conference halls, chain restaurants and carpeted hallways lined with keycard coded mid-range rooms.

            “Something different for tonight,” she said, and smiled wickedly as we got ready at her place that evening. In the palm of her hand, she held a long and slender rod, one end curving inwards and ending with a flat rubber tip—a bit like a suction cup. “A more encouraging reward for good behaviour.”

            “What the f—” I sighed, smiled and tried again. “What’s that?”

            “A gift.” Julia’s smile grew. “An improvement over these,” she said, and tapped at the ugly metal bracelets. “These ruin your look.” She detached them from my arms. “But this’ll really incentivise you to act like Cindy.”

            I held the object to the light and belatedly realised what it was. “You’re joking. You can’t expect me to—”

            She tapped me on the nose. “You’ll love it.”

            With the help of a little lubricant, the vibrator slid easily into the prosthetic and nestled between my pussy lips, the curved end lying gently over the clitoris. With my panties pulled up tightly, Julia’s toy stayed secure. “I don’t like this,” I said. I could feel it, inside of me, this foreign object. I wanted to clamp down and expel it from my body.

            “You will,” she said.

            A taxi ride later and we sat at a booth in the hotel bar. She set up her laptop, and clipped a choker around my neck, similar to the armbands but wrapped in purple velvet. A test run—the choker warmed, then delivered a mild shock that raced up and down my spine. “And the other one.” With a silent buzz, the vibrator kicked briefly into life—Jesus, was that thing sucking on my clit?—and I gasped softly and felt weak in the knees.

            “Fun,” she said.

            Glaring moodily into my brightly coloured cocktail, I pursed my lips in displeasure. “Why exactly are we here?”

            Julia grinned at my discomfort. For all the training this week, there’d been little tangible reward. In other words, she hadn’t fucked me with the dildo all week. I was already terribly horny and sat with thighs squeezed tightly together against the burst of pleasure emanating from Julia’s toy. At work, I’d started to find it hard to concentrate again and too often caught myself gazing dreamily at Mr Connor or one of the other young men—or women—in the office.

            The girls commented. Others noticed as well. At least, there sure seemed more guys finding reasons to hang around my desk by the end of the week. Giving license to John’s harassment seemed to have trickled downwards to other male colleagues, an uptick in pats to the bum, unwanted comments, and touches.

            But maybe worst of all, my own performance was somehow a turn on for me on, too. There was a uniquely, exquisite eroticism in so fully embodying Cindy and by the end of the week, I nearly vibrated with barely-restrained need.

            “We’re celebrating,” Julia said.

            Twirling a strand of hair around a finger, I checked my reflection in the window by our table. The view was stunning: the city sprawled below, a late-night carpet embroidered with glittering lights rolled out across the landscape. Towards the edges the carpet went dark, cut by dark concrete slashes raised against the sky. Caught in the glass I saw myself, and that view was stunning, too: shiny lips slightly parted, vivid makeup and eyes glowing with both fear and excitement. “What’re we celebrating, anyway?”

            “You, obviously,” Julia answered. “And—me.”

            “You?”

            “I guess I never told you. I had a job interview today. Promotion.”

            I glanced askance at her. “How’d it go?”

            Julia shrugged, eyes bright with confident pleasure. “Well,” she said. “Very well. I won’t know until later but—yes.” She took a sip of wine, and grinned. “I nailed it. Besides, there wasn’t much competition. Just Malik, and he’s an incompetent sack of shit.”

            I smiled warmly at her. “I hope you get it.” Turning back to the window, I took a moment to touch up my lips with a dab of gloss. Behind me, I could see the shadowed reflection of movement; dim and indeterminate figures sliding and stalking the dim light of the hotel bar. Icarus was busy: corporate men in suits staying for a few nights, unwinding after a day of workshops, conference speeches or hard work in the city.

            My stomach twisted and I felt warm, hot despite bare legs and arms, despite barely wearing anything at all. Pursing plump lips around my straw, I found my drink empty—fruity booze already churning in a mostly empty belly—and sucked on melted ice. We’d been here an hour already, whilst Julia setup in the corner. White tipped nails clicked out an anxious rhythm against the table surface.

            “You need another drink. Time to head to the bar, Cindy.”

            I moaned. “I don’t want to do this, Julia.”

            “Yes,” she said, her voice an iron fist wrapped in silk, “you do.”

            “It’s not fair.” I swept my hands down my front and past that smooth place between my legs. “I’m already, like super horny.”

            “There’s an easy solution to that that.”

            I chewed on my lower lip. Shook my head in denial. My hands twisted within each other. “I don’t—” I took a deep breath. “I’ve already….” Forcefully, I unclenched my hands and hugged myself. “I can’t do this.”

            “You can.” Julia eyed me cooly. “It’s time, Cindy. Well past time, actually. You’re—”

            “A guy!” I hissed hoarsely, desperately, leaning in close. The collar jolted me, and I winced. “I don’t want to get fucked by another man.”

            “… a twenty-year-old girl,” Julia continued, as though she hadn’t heard. “You’re pretty and horny and this is precisely what you need to get it through your thick, stubborn skull.”

            “I won’t do it.” My voice was embarrassingly petulant but kept another warning shock at bay.

            “And I won’t force you,” Julia said. She indicated the doors at the far end of the bar. “Exit’s over there. Same deal as before. And to be clear: I’m done getting you off, too. Thirsty, girl? Desperate to get your rocks off?” She waved her hand towards the bar. Her thin smile seemed as cruel as it was amused. “You’ll find what you need down there.”

            I stared at her sullenly, chewing on my lower lips with indecision. My hands fluttered at my side. “Julia—please….” I whined, reluctantly standing; and suddenly the vibrator kicked into life. I whimpered and sagged against the table and felt so very hot.

            “Go get ‘em, tiger,” Julia said. With a sharp slap to the bum, she sent me on my way.