Chapter 1

 

That I had been framed, I had no doubt whatsoever. Of course I knew it, for I hadn't committed the offence. But I also knew it had to have been someone in the firm. Someone who had access to my computer and the codes I used to access the corporate files. And someone who knew me well enough to have been able to create that offshore bank account into which he or she had siphoned off hundreds of thousands of the firm's clients' funds in my name.

But the evidence was there and my pleas that I had had nothing to do with any of it fell on deaf ears. The jury convicted me without even leaving the jury-box and the judge sentenced me to slavery for life, the standard penalty these days for serious corporate fraud which had become endemic over the last decade.

I stood there in the box, numb to everyone and everything around me as I contemplated my future. Slave! Slave for Life! I well knew what it could mean. Anything from domestic service to labouring in a chain gang. And of the two, the former was a thousand times more desirable even if, as everyone knew, it was more often than not a euphemism for sex slave - and if you happened to be bought by a gay man and you were straight, then your future, especially if you were handsome and muscular, was utterly horrible.

Oh, my name is Scott Draper. I am just twenty-two years old and without wishing to seem immodest, yes I am good-looking and as I am a dedicated gymnast. I am also decidedly muscular. I am blond with curly, shiny-gold hair and a skin that is as smooth as silk and as gold-coloured as my hair when I have been out in the sun. In short, I knew with a sinking heart that I would be a fag's dreamboat and I shrank from the thought with a fear and loathing that in this fourth decade of the new millennium was rather strange as homosexuality was now perfectly acceptable in Australian society.

Actually, I am a Sydney-sider, being brought up on the North Shore. But both my parents were gone (in a car crash) and I had no near relatives. I had kept their house but as a newly sentenced slave, I knew that it and all of my other assets would be forfeit to the State of New South Wales, for that was the law these days. I was now a penniless thing. A mere object, one that could be used and abused without comeback. Nothing was beyond the pale for a slave. It was intended that way.

Slavery had been seen as a wonderful new punishment. One that wiped out at a stroke the previously enormous costs of running the prison system and in fact returned a profit to the exchequer, for slaves sold for around half a million dollars - and that went straight into consolidated revenue. Oh yes, everyone and his dog thoroughly applauded the now worldwide acceptance of slavery as the most common punishment for serious crime although not always for life. That I had been given a life sentence reflected the seriousness with which corporate crime was viewed and I had no argument with it - except that I hadn't done the deed.

I was stripped there and then. Slaves went naked. Totally and completely. And in all weathers and conditions. No clothes of any kind; not even a rag over their genitals - but even more than simply without clothes we were depilated of all hair on our bodies - all of it, from the top of our heads to the tips of our toes. We were thus marked forever as slaves and even if a person was sentenced to only a few years, then he or she would be bald for the duration. These days the process could be reversed and the head hair could be regrown but for his period as a slave he was absolutely nude.

It was part of his sentencing that a slave be stripped in the court, with everyone from the judge to the court clerk and the spectators watching - usually avidly for who doesn't get off on another's distress?

The bailiff moved up to me and gestured to my clothing. Of course I had worn my best suit to court but off it came, to be taken by the official and given to the poor, as would every other item of my clothing. Soon enough, I was stark naked. Not yet depilated; that would take place at the Slave Pens where all new slaves were sent to be processed and then put up for public auction on the next Saturday.

With slavery now the standard punishment for all middling and certainly major crime, there were always dozens of us at the Sydney Central pens during any given week but I also knew, since I had a friend who had worked there for a few months until his disgust at the way they treated the new slaves led him to resign, that the days I spent there were not going to be pleasant.

They weren't. In fact they were decidedly unpleasant.

First was the way they transported us from the courthouse to the pens which were way out west near Penrith, some fifty or so kilometres from Sydney. These days, STVs, Slave Transport Vehicles that is, are used to move slaves from place to place and in the spirit of the intended shame and humiliation that is a major part of criminal slavery, we are moved about in as shameful and degrading a manner as they could devise.

STVs come in all sizes but they are all basically the same design. They range from small, flat-top utility trucks, able to carry a dozen or so slaves, to massive semi-trailers, capable of holding hundreds.

We, I and the five other criminals convicted and sentenced to slavery that day, were moved early the next morning (after a night in the court cells without being fed and therefore cold and hungry) on one of the smaller utilities. Now naked but still with our natural head and body hair, we were each kept in a separate cell until the court sessions for the day were over. The cells were under the courthouse but they were at ground level at its rear and so the vehicle was able to back into the loading dock in the cell block and then we were brought out one at a time to be loaded onto it.

The other new slaves were four males and a single girl. All were youngish - I think older people are more careful of the law these days - but be that as it may, none of us this day were over our late twenties. Slavery of course only applied to adults, that is people over eighteen years. Until that age they still had reformatories and I imagine a lot of other corrective options open to them to correct minors.

The girl was a real looker with a nice face and a stunning body, the males ranged from a real fatty to a superbly-bodied black. Not that his body interested me sexually, just that I can admire a good male physique. The girl's body certainly interested me in that way, however. She was slim and athletic, just as I like in a girl and her skin was smooth and creamy and her boobs: well, they weren't too big but boy, were they perfect! Perfect half spheres of delightfully firm flesh that wobbled just a bit as she moved and I ached to cup them in the palms of my hands.

They weren't having any of that, though. The utility was, as I said, a flat-top tray design and onto its tray had been erected two horizontal RSJs supported about two and a half metres above the floor by a framework at the front and back of the tray-top. These two beams ran fore-and-aft and were about a metre and a half apart.

An RSJ is formed as an H-beam and when turned sideways, makes a perfect overhead rail for runners. As I was brought out I noted there were six of these runners on each of the two rails, every one with a wheel either side of the vertical piece of the RSJ and dangling from each of the wheel assemblies was a short rod with thumb cuffs at the base. Note I said thumb and not handcuffs! Yes, we were to be hung up on this rail and I now saw the runners could move freely up and down the rails so that our bodies would move back and forth when the vehicle went up hill or down dale, or when it accelerated or braked.

And sure enough, as each of the males was made to stand on a step under the left-hand rail, each had to raise his arms up to have his thumbs locked into the little cuffs (which were neoprene-lined to allow circulation) and then pushed forward off the step. I was placed behind the black and in front of another male, fortunately not the fat man. Once all we males were in place, they made the girl climb up to be affixed to the right handrail and then, once they had slipped on the locking frame at the back of each rail, we were ready to go.

That journey was even worse than being made to strip naked in the courtroom. There, I had had to face the lascivious stares of the court officials and spectators and that had been bad enough. Now, though, I was exposed to the thousands of pedestrians who thronged around the vehicle when it was stopped at the dozens of traffic lights on the long trip out west for they didn't use the Freeway - on purpose. We travelled along the old Western Highway which, at least for the first thirty kilometres or so, had lights every few hundred metres - or so it seemed. And at each and every one of them, men, women and children crowded around, staring up at our totally nude bodies and remarking quite openly, what good or bad physiques we had, discussed our sexual equipment and general appearance; and then how they would like (or not) to purchase us, whip (or otherwise chastise) us into docility and then use us for their pleasure.

This was said quite candidly. No-one pretended that slaves could not be used sexually - again, we had been made into slaves as a punishment and the legislators had wanted that punishment to be so rigorous, so shaming and so humiliating as well as physically hard and painful, that it would send a strong message to criminals. It worked, too for the workload of the courts these days was a mere fraction of what it had been. Still, there were always those who err and whilst I wasn't one of them, I was now facing a most uncertain future as a slave for life.

Of course I had begged my lawyer to appeal and to investigate my colleagues and he had assured me he would do everything in his power to get at the truth - at least here the government allowed my assets to be used for this purpose, but when all appeal had failed, they would take everything that was left and I would indeed be penniless.

As I said, that journey was terrible but I wasn't looking forward to arriving at the Pens, either. That complex had a dreadful reputation, again, quite intentionally. The old International Rules for the Minimum Treatment of Prisoners which most civilised countries had signed way back in the middle of the Twentieth Century were now long gone and everywhere in the world, criminal slaves (which were the only type that were internationally accepted as legal) were treated as harshly as could be imagined.

And it was all done quite publicly and openly. Some bright spark in the Department of Slave Management had suggested that even more revenue could be derived from exhibiting us through every stage of our induction into state slavery and our subsequent sale. And of course there was the added benefit of the public nature of that initiation being an added plank in our so total humiliation and shame.

Our transfer into the records of the pen had already been done electronically so once they had checked us off against the manifest on their computer screen, we were taken straight to the depilation unit.

Depilation is now a relatively simple and painless operation, when performed as a beauty parlour service on a customer. The new electronic machines could do it quickly and very efficiently, but that process was permanent. A state slave might have only a few years to serve, but in any case, he could also be appealing against his sentence. In the pens, they therefore used a reversible method. It was permanent until actually reversed but until that took place the slave remained totally nude from head to toe. They therefore used a chemical method and this was most decidedly not painless.

It involved being dipped into a far-too-hot fluid, over and over again, once every five minutes, for four hours and of course the paying public was on hand to watch every dreadful minute of it.

And in order to add further to our shame, they dipped us down into the long tank upside down. Displaying human bodies in this position has been a favourite ploy of dominators for centuries and they knew it well. We were herded into a room that had tiered bench seats for the spectators along one of the long walls of the room. There must have been two or three hundred of them sitting staring avidly at the six of us as we were led into the room to stand facing them at the edge of the steaming tank. Behind the tank a huge mirror covered the whole wall so that we would be able to see the slow removal of every last hair on each of our bodies as we were dipped continuously into and out of the tank.

It was let into the floor and was almost the length of the room and about a metre and a half wide. I stared down into the murky reddish liquid in more fear. I already knew this process was painful but had little idea of the details.

We had to stand in what was termed the standard slave pose, which every slave had to adopt when not doing anything else: feet exactly half a metre apart and hands clasped up behind our heads with the elbows pulled right back behind our necks. Our muscles had all then to be tensioned to present as pleasing a picture as possible to the free men and women inspecting us.

The man in charge made us hold this pose for about ten minutes so the audience could enjoy our naked bodies to the fullest, but then he ordered us to lie down on our bellies.

As we did so, a long steel pole descended from a gantry high up near the roof above us. From this pole dangled a series of short chains at the bottom of each of which was affixed a thumb cuff. It took him and his men less than a minute to fix each of our big toes into these, stretching our legs and thighs impossibly (and very painfully) wide in the process. Then the pole began to move up towards the gantry, dragging us back over the floor until we dangled free of it. The gantry then moved backward on its rails until we were hanging right over the smelly, steaming liquid.

The head guard then addressed us: "Slaves will not attempt to prevent their descent into the depilatory. Any movement to do so will result in ten strokes of the cane to his or her buttocks. Now, take a deep breath!"

As we did, the pole dropped, rapidly lowering us right down, head-first into the far-too-hot, foul-smelling liquid until our toes had been immersed, but then it immediately reversed, drawing us up and out of it just as rapidly to hang upside down, dripping, and now very subdued. From then on, every five minutes, a bell would ring, it being the signal to take the next deep breath, and then the gantry would drop us down once more, pause and then bring us back up out of it - for four long hours. Hours during which I despaired of my future and that I might ever escape this terrible place or my so uncertain prospects as a slave for life.

Gradually, as the minutes and then the hours passed, I noticed the hairs on my and the other new slaves' bodies disappearing. Each time, as we were drawn up and out of the hot liquid, I saw in the mirror that we all had less and less of the natural hairs remaining on our flesh until, about halfway through the process, we were all now totally nude - stark naked from tip to toe and my emotions descended into near misery as, once more I thought of the alternatives.

Labouring in a chain gang would be horrible: diabolically hard, non-stop labour all day; but with my looks, life as a domestic could be even worse - if I was bought by one of those dreadful queer blokes and forced to pleasure his disgusting body. But I knew he would have the means to make me comply. If he wasn't able to do so himself, he could take me to a slave-corrector and these fearsome men could make a slave do anything - and very quickly.

I knew they could even condition and train a true heterosexual like me to perform all those disgusting acts queers do with each other. I also knew they used pain: extreme, continuous and agonising pain to achieve their ends and they had a reputation of being eminently successful at their profession.

Eventually it was over and the gantry moved sideways again then dropped us down onto the floor of the room. In seconds, the cuffs were undone and we were ordered to our feet, to march in strict precision out of the room.

 

Our next ordeal followed on immediately after the depilation which, incidentally, had been as successful with us as it was with every new slave who endured that horrible tank.

We were now, all six of us, totally bare of all hair, our skulls naked and shiny and the rest of our bodies, even our eyebrows and eyelashes gone, as was our pubic hair of course. Our sex; we males' cocks and balls and the girl's vulva were now totally nude, making them very much more apparent and therefore their exposure even more shameful for us - as of course, was the government's main intention. That it identified us very clearly as slaves was, I think, more of a side-benefit than a primary reason for the process, although as it was illegal for any slave to wear even the smallest covering over any part of their bodies, it certainly did mark us very plainly for what we were.

Now we were to be caned. Yes, on our still very sore buttocks for every part of our flesh still burned from the near-scalding liquid in the tank and was extremely tender still. We were taken to another of the almost ceremonial rooms where stood an instrument of pain I was to come to fear in that awful place.

They called it the Cross, but it wasn't an upright object. It was shaped as an 'X' laid on its side and suspended on sturdy uprights about seventy-five centimetres up off the floor but bolted securely to it. It had been constructed of five-centimetre diameter galvanised pipe and was perfect for the purpose they put it to.

We were lined up on the far wall (again covered in a mirror so the customers could see every part of our bodies as we were caned), opposite the usual stand where more paying customers sat, waiting to watch us caned while the Cross sat in the middle, between them and us.

They caned the girl first. She was ordered out to stand in the narrower of the angles formed by the pipes and then made to bend forward over the junction. The two guards then unhooked the chains that dangled from the hooks at the corners at the ends of the two pipes in front of her and snapped the cuff at its end over her thumbs then drew the chains back and, pulling them tight, fitted a link back over its hook.

Then, moving to her feet, they did the same there, but this time really pulling on the two chains so she was stretched out as tightly as they could get her, her arms and legs now forming the same St Andrew's cross as the frame beneath her delectable body.

One of the guards then stripped off his shirt to reveal a very muscular body and, taking up a cane from the array dangling on hooks beside where we were standing, he proceeded to whale into her buttocks with a ferocity that had me quaking in fear.

She screamed and yowled as the cane slammed down, again and again across her delightful nates. He strung it out, aware that the pain would be much worse if he allowed a minute between each stroke. It also made it vastly more horrible for us others, each waiting in turn to suffer the same 'welcome' as they called it - and very much more entertaining for the awful men and women who sat up there on the stands, watching our punishment with salacious leers on each of their faces.

Ten strokes each - and that on the bare and still very tender skin of our bottoms. The girl screamed at each one and so did the fat boy who was next. In fact, he blubbered uncontrollably even before the guard took up the cane for a second time but as the strokes mounted, his yowls got even more strident.

The black was after him but he bore it all without a murmur. This only made the guard redouble his efforts but still the boy held his peace. Indeed, I admired his courage so much I decided to try to do the same. I did, too, but it was the hardest thing I have ever tried to achieve in my life.

The pain was excruciating on our naked flesh, tenderised so much by the ultra-hot liquid. I had to bite my lip but I managed it, somehow.