Chapter 1

 

The moment I woke up I knew something was wrong. I looked first at Jane, beside me in the bed. She was still asleep but was showing signs of waking. No, it wasn't her. I looked around the still dim bedroom. Everything seemed to be in order. But then I knew what it was.

It was in myself. I was no just longer the senior sergeant in charge of the police station at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast of Queensland. And although Jane was still my number two and I still had the rank of Senior Sergeant, it was in a different role. I was now the District Commissioner for the Burleigh Heads area-the same jurisdiction as I had had last night when I went to bed, but in a vastly different character.

I knew I was now responsible for the manners of men in society rather than simply policing the laws of the land. I knew of my past experiences; but I also knew I now had a vastly more responsible job and, as I cast my mind over, it I began to sweat. Surely this couldn't be so, I thought, as the penalties for public defiance of the moral code came to the forefront of my mind.

I let it wander over these and as I did, I felt a strange stiffening in my loins. I say strange for the penalties were not only draconian, they were also extremely salacious. And yet I also knew that in this weird new society I now found myself, the moral code was distinctly Victorian in viewpoint.

Jane woke up and as her mind got into gear, stared at me in confusion. "You too?" I asked.

"What the hell has happened, Peter? I have the weirdest thoughts coursing through my mind?"

"I have no idea, my darling wife, but I suggest we rise, eat our breakfast and get to work. I think we're going to find a lot of changes have occurred overnight."

"But what...? How...? And most of all, why?"

I shrugged. "I have no idea. But we're not going to find out by lying here, are we?"

She grinned. I love my wife dearly and with the special dispensation that allowed her to work with me in the same station, we were together all the time. Her infectious grin was one of the things I loved about her the most; that and her svelte, athletic body and her beautiful face-and most of all her wonderful nature ...

She was out of bed in a flash and although we had been married ten years, I still stared at her beautiful, naked body in awe-and lust. Ten years hadn't blunted in any degree my adoration for her body. She caught me staring at her (as I did every morning when she got out of bed) and grinned again, doing a little pirouette with her hand up high above her head, a motion that showed off her body to a tee.

"Now it's your turn, lover," She said. I smiled. We both worked hard to keep our bodies in top form and mine was still as athletic and muscular as it had been when I had been a gymnastics champ back in our police college days. And so I doubled up my arms and flexed my belly muscles for her-both actions she loved.

But then she frowned. "You know if you had done this outside, even with swimming togs on, I'd have had to arrest you ...?"

I gaped at her for a moment but then when the new ideas came to the forefront of my mind, I knew she was right. "All right, let's skip breakfast and get straight down to the station. I want to find out what's going on.

I wasn't surprised to find my uniform was no longer that of the Queensland Police Service and neither was Jane's. In fact the shoulder patches now proclaimed us to be members of the Australian Police. I was still a senior sergeant but now the District Commissioner for the area and Jane my deputy. The style of the uniforms was rather more old-fashioned than we had been used to and when we stepped out of the house alongside the old station, I saw why.

Everyone was now dressed in a style of clothing more reminiscent of the middle Twentieth Century that the Twenty-first although the architecture and gadgetry was all of the present time. There were no jeans or clod-hopper boots. People were much more sedately attired and their attitude towards Jane and myself was one almost of subservience-without exception. Of course, as my mind explored these strange new experiences, it filled in the blanks. We were to be feared. We had almost a power of life and death over these people, especially when they stepped out of line, even to a small degree.

In the station, my former colleagues were all there, but now all dressed in the new uniforms. What immediately became apparent however, was that none of them knew anything of any other lives. Jane and I did, but we were to discover that no-one else seemed to. Civilians and our members of lower ranks had only their experiences of this new life to draw upon.

Jane and I quickly learned not to speak of such things to them as they looked at us most oddly when we did. We also learned that crime as we had known it yesterday was virtually non-existent now. There was no stealing, no traffic violations, no crimes of violence... The penalties were so severe and our methods of interrogation so terrible that no-one dared to even think of committing a crime in the old sense.

No, nowadays, our jobs involved the morals of society. And boy, were they strict! As in the Victorian era, at least on the surface, sex was a no-no. Girls were virginal until they married-and look out if they weren't! Boys were not only forbidden sex, they weren't even allowed to masturbate. Schools were now segregated and boys and girls only allowed to go out together when chaperoned.

Girls wore skirts and blouses buttoned up to the throat and flat-heeled shoes; boys, proper shirts and trousers. There were no t-shirts out in public and limbs were kept modestly covered in both sexes. Adults echoed the youngsters' dress.

People still had much the same jobs but there was a lot more walking or bicycling to work and only in the case of long distances was public transport used. Cars, almost never, except by the upper echelons. This isn't to say they didn't have cars; they did, but they were used much more sparingly and mostly only for long distance travel.

I found, when I delved into my mind, the reason for this was a requirement to be fit and healthy. Jane and I had always worked hard on our bodies but this was by no means the norm in our old life. There were many men and women and, for that matter, boys and girls whose bodies were a disgrace. Now it was one of my responsibilities to ensure all citizens, no matter what age, kept their bodies lean and hard throughout their lives.

My powers and those of my officers, were just about omnipotent. There were no courts as such. We enforced the laws with an almost mediaeval power. We had right of entry anywhere, any time. We could not be denied. And our authority was just about total.

I wondered yet again what had happened. It was almost as if there had been a ripple of some sort in the space/time continuum or that we had somehow been transported to another dimension, a little like in the TV show called Sliders ... Of course we had not stepped into any wormhole and we certainly had not felt any physical change to our beings during the fateful night. But although I searched my mind from top to bottom, there were no answers there.

I found I had very little paperwork to do, unlike in my old job as station sergeant. Now I merely allocated areas for my men and women to patrol and then let them get on with it. I also went out and did my share. I discovered that although we had universal jurisdiction, it was usual for the male officers to investigate females and vice versa. To this end, I noted the balance between male and female officers was now about equal. Although I hadn't known them in my previous life (as I call it), I did know them in this one. Weird? You bet!

Jane and I went together this first day. Of course our officers didn't know it was our 'first' day. To them, we had been there for years, just as we had in the former position and don't ask me about the female officers I didn't know previously. I just can't answer the obvious conundrum!

We were to patrol the Burleigh shopping centre and strolled down the street noting with amusement that everyone glanced nervously at us, pulled in their bellies and then walked hurriedly by.

But it wasn't just fatsos that we were looking for. In fact there were very few of them anywhere. If a man or woman got overweight, he or she took immediate steps to correct the situation as our regime of correction was quite diabolical. No, we were looking for moral decadence or arrogance, a lack of dedication, perhaps a certain lack of humility.

We apparently knew exactly what to look for and as we patrolled the street, we fixed first on a young man and then, a little later, on a woman. We didn't arrest them. It wasn't necessary. We merely scanned them with the instruments in our belts-yes, there were some technological differences here - and ordered them to report to the station at noon.

Their faces were aghast. Both however looked quite guilty and I knew our training (yes, I know, what training?) and our instincts had been right. The other people in the streets had seen it all of course but all hurried by, anxious not to be caught in our web. I didn't see a single look of sympathy for the young man or the woman.

When we returned to the station, there were dozens of 'offenders', all standing in neat rows, waiting to be processed. The officers who had charged them let them stew, however. They stood in the charge area perfectly docile. There were no armed guards to watch over them while we had a conference and the officers detailed who they had brought in-and why. I state quite categorically that the officers all believed genuinely their 'arrests' had erred. There was no whimsy or grudge or persecution about it.

We sorted them into an order based on the severity of the crime, starting with the lowest and then went about investigating their crimes. There were always at least two officers on a team and sometimes more. The arresting officer was one. They were called in singly and now began what I (who had knowledge of how things had been 'yesterday') thought was the most bizarre police actions I had ever heard of. Not even the dreaded Gestapo in Nazi Germany, or the Kempei-Tai in Imperial Japan carried out their investigations and later punishments as we did.

The first girl was brought in to the room where I sat with Jimmy Jones, a constable in the old terms but called an Agent here. Jane and another female agent were in the next room investigating some of the men and along the corridor were more officers, the males interrogating female offenders and vice-versa.

The first girl had shown all the signs of impure thoughts. Jimmy had suspected her of ogling a handsome young man walking along the street. Admiration was permitted, ogling was not.

As soon as she entered, Jimmy ordered her to stand on the white-painted feet on the floor in front of our chairs. "Very well, Miss Parsons," he said, "you may now strip naked. First your skirt."

She sobbed a bit. Remember, chastity, demureness and a hiding of one's body was hammered into all children and enforced in all adults. Everything she had been taught about modesty was now being reversed. But obedience to the police was an over-riding factor and while she looked absolutely devastated that she was going to have to strip naked in front of men (you see now why the sex reversal), she also knew she had to do it.

Off came the skirt, to be neatly folded and placed on a chair set beside her for the purpose. She now stood up in blouse, undies, stockings and shoes. Jimmy and I sat back in our chairs, insolently looking up and down her body, but focusing on her now bared thighs-and very shapely they were, too. Not a gramme of fat on them. Just as well, or she would have been ordered to undergo a fitness course and as you will see in a while, these were things to be feared, not just because of the exercises the trainees had to undergo, but for the shame and humiliation they suffered while undertaking them.