Chapter 28: The New Catsuit
The new suit lay on the steel pedestal like a shed serpent skin, a pile of onyx latex so small it looked unreal. Lena stared at it, her breaths shallow puffs that barely fogged the cold air. The XXXS suit she wore now was a second skin, thin as a condom, stretching translucent over the stark architecture of her hips, her ribs a corrugated cage beneath the sheen. It whispered with every micro-movement. The new one promised silence.
“Post-prototocol nutrient,” Clara said, her voice the only solid thing in the room. She didn’t hand Lena the capsules. She placed them, one by one, on the gleaming surface beside the suit—tiny yellow bombs.
Lena’s skeletal fingers, the knuckles pronounced and shiny, picked up the first DNP capsule. It rattled against her teeth before she swallowed it dry. The process was ritual. The second followed. Her throat worked visibly, a fragile pulley system of tendon and bone.
“The body clings to volume. It’s sentimentality,” Clara observed, tapping the new suit with a fingernail. “This will educate it. The process is one of elegant compression. Are you prepared to be educated?”
Lena’s eyes, large and glassy in her gaunt face, fixated on the garment. “Yes, Mistress.” Her voice was a papery rustle.
“Then begin.”
With movements that were painfully deliberate, Lena peeled the current suit down from her neck. It resisted, clinging to the sharp points of her collarbones, the ridges of her sternum. The sound was like tape being pulled from a wound. Inch by pale inch, she revealed herself. The transformation was no longer shocking; it was geological. Her stomach wasn’t just flat; it was concave, sloping inward to the ridge of her spine. Her hip bones jutted like twin knife-handles.
Marcus, standing at his usual observation point, felt his own hunger—a different, vast, emptier kind—grip his guts. He watched as Lena, shivering violently now, stepped toward the new suit. She lifted it. The armholes were cruel, perfect circles the diameter of a champagne flute.
She tried. She guided her right hand, a bundle of sticks sheathed in sallow skin, into the latex. It resisted, gripping her at the wrist. She strained, a soft, desperate sound escaping her lips. She twisted, her shoulder popping audibly. The latex inch over her knuckles, then her hand, with a sudden, sucking rush. Her arm was now encased to the bicep in a sleeve that looked painted on. The process left her panting, her chest heaving in the cold air.
“The other, pet,” Clara said. There was no encouragement, only expectation.
Lena obeyed. This time, she used her teeth, biting the cuff to stretch it, her face a mask of strain. She won the battle, her left arm vanishing into the black sheath. She stood, arms held slightly away from her body, captive in the material. The rest of the suit hung from her waist like a dark, deflated appendage.
“Now the commitment,” Clara said. She didn’t move to help.
Lena bent, a crane-like movement of hinges, and gathered the suit. She stepped in, pulling the latex up over her thighs. This was the real fight. The material fought every centimeter, squeezing her thighs, her buttocks, her hip bones with silent, terrible pressure. She danced a slow, agonized ballet, wrestling herself into a smaller space. She lay back on the pedestal, braced her feet, and began to haul.
A choked cry, quickly bitten back. Her face flushed, then paled. With a final, full-body convulsion, the suit sealed itself to her torso. It was done.
She lay there, stunned. Then, slowly, she pushed herself upright.
The difference was profound. The XXXS had been tight. This was structural. It didn’t clothe her; it redefined her. The latex compressed her waist into a smooth, unbroken cylinder, eliminating the last hint of the hourglass her body had tried to maintain. It pressed her ribcage inward, forcing her breath into quick, birdlike sips. Her collarbones were smooth, submerged ridges. She was a diagram of reduction.
Clara circled her, a sculptor assessing a finished piece. “Good. The silence is preferable.” She stopped behind Lena. “Now the laces. Yourself.”
On the pedestal lay the corset. Eleven inches of black, oiled leather, the laces thin and cruel. Lena’s fingers, clumsy in their new prisons, fumbled with the stiff material. She brought it around her middle, over the suffocating latex. She fed the end of the lace through the first eyelets.
“Tighter,” Clara said, not as a command for more effort, but as a simple statement of the only possible direction.
Lena pulled. The laces creaked. Her breath hitched. She moved to the next set of eyelets. Pulled again. A whimper escaped her, high and involuntary. Each pull was a theft of space, of air, of self. She counted the eyelets in a frantic whisper. “Four. Five. Six.” Her voice grew thinner, strained.
On the seventh pull, she faltered. Her body swayed. Dark spots danced at the edges of Marcus’s vision in sympathy.
“Please,” Lena whispered, not to Clara, but to the room, to the universe. “Smaller. Less.”
She said it like a prayer. A plea for annihilation.
Clara’s smile was a subtle curve. “Yes. That is the correct aspiration.”
Marcus felt the words etch themselves into his brain. Smaller. Less. They resonated with something deep inside the hollowed-out vault of his own will. Wasn’t that what he was doing? Whittling himself down, design by design, to a point of pure, efficient suffering? His own prototype—the one he’d drafted for his body—was now in fabrication. He knew it. He’d seen the 3D printers humming in a subsidiary chamber, building his custom hell from the digital blueprint he’d provided.
Lena, finished lacing, stood imprisoned in her new silhouette. She was a exhalation given form. She tried to take a step, and her legs, deprived of stability, buckled. She didn’t fall. She simply folded, sinking slowly to her knees on the polished floor, a black obelisk brought low. She stayed there, head bowed, breathing in tiny, whistling increments.
Clara turned her gaze to Marcus. The green eyes pinned him. “Your empathy is noted. It’s also useless. Her journey is her own. Yours is waiting.” She jerked her chin toward the door. “Viktor requires your prototype. It’s time for field testing.”
The words were a bucket of ice water. Marcus moved, his limbs heavy. He followed Clara out, past the kneeling Lena, a monument to reduction. In the corridor, Clara spoke without looking back.
“Your design showed promise. But promise is theoretical. Viktor will provide the data. You will observe, through the tactile recorder. You will feel every flaw, every wasted opportunity. And you will correct them.” She paused at the threshold of a familiar room—the VR observation chamber. “The next iteration will be yours to wear. Consider this your quality assurance.”
Inside, Viktor was already bound to a vertical frame. But it was the old, inefficient frame. Strapped across his chest and arms was the new, sleek, black-lobed harness. Marcus’s harness. It looked alien and beautiful, a piece of brutalist sculpture.
Lena entered, moving with her new, constricted gait. She didn’t look at Marcus. Her eyes were empty vessels. She picked up the bottle of conductive gel.
Clara handed Marcus the VR headset. “Pay attention to the fail points.”
Marcus put it on. The world resolved into Viktor’s nervous system, a constellation of complaint. He saw his design mapped onto the glowing form. He felt Lena’s hands apply the cold gel to the interior pods, then snap the harness closed over Viktor’s torso.
There was a moment of stillness. Then Clara gave a soft command.
The harness activated.
It wasn’t a shock. It was an occupation. The gel turned Viktor’s skin into a hyper-sensitive microphone, broadcasting every nuance of pressure, every minute, unrelenting compression. The silicone nubs sought the nerves and pressed, not in a pulse, but in a constant, grinding presence that blocked the dulling flood of blood.
In the VR, Marcus saw it. The golden nerve filaments didn’t blaze and fade. They lit up and stayed lit, a sustained, screaming note. The heat maps didn’t bloom and diffuse. They hardened into permanent, scarlet continents of distress.
He felt it. A vice, cold and intelligent, squeezing his own ribs. A thousand tiny, focused teeth sinking into the nerves of his arms. It was agony, but it was a clean, clear signal. No static. No numbness. Just perfect, unadulterated strain.
Viktor began to scream. Not a cry of pain, but a raw, continuous tone of existential unraveling. The body had no retreat. No adaptation. It could only stand and broadcast the signal.
Marcus watched the data streams. They plateaued at peak levels and held. Forty-five minutes. An hour. No degradation.
His design worked. Perfectly.
A wild, sickening pride flared in his chest, immediately followed by a void of dread so complete it made him dizzy.
Clara’s voice cut through the virtual and real worlds simultaneously. “Acceptable. A solid beta test. The fabrication of your personal unit is seventy percent complete. We’ll adjust the pod placement based on your unique bio-feedback. You’ll wear it during your next endurance session.”
She removed his headset. The real world crashed back in—Viktor’s hoarse, endless scream, the clinical white light, Lena’s silent, skeletal vigil.
“Your architectural mind has finally found its true purpose,” Clara said, her hand resting for a second on his shoulder. The touch was like a brand. “You’re not just enduring the experiment anymore, Marcus. You’re perfecting it.”
She left him there, standing between the broken result of his old life and the living blueprint of his new one, while the proof of his collaboration screamed itself raw against the steel.
The scream from the observation chamber faded into the hum of the White Room, a distant problem Clara had already solved. Her attention narrowed to the black shape kneeling on the floor. Lena hadn’t moved. Her breathing was barely a tremor.
“Up,” Clara said, the word cracking the air like a whip.
Lena unfolded, a slow and painful origami. The new suit whined in protest. She stood, a sliver of shadow, her eyes glassy and fixed on some middle distance. Clara approached, her heels ticking a measured rhythm on the tile. From a pocket in her own leather apron, she withdrew a flat, black velvet box.
“A milestone requires a marker,” Clara stated, clicking the box open.
Inside, on a bed of satin, lay a collar. It wasn’t the heavy, theatrical latex kind. This was sleek, medical-grade titanium, brushed to a dull finish. Its lock was a miniature biometric scanner. At the center, hanging from a slender ring, was a polished steel tag. Engraved in a clean, minimalist font were five words: CLARA’S ANOREXIC DRUG SLAVE.
Lena’s gaze dropped to the tag. Her dry lips parted. A faint, reedy sound escaped her, not quite a word.
“Proof of concept,” Clara said, her voice almost conversational. She lifted the collar. It was shockingly light. “Your commitment has moved from the participatory to the institutional. This acknowledges that shift.”
Lena lifted her chin. The movement exposed the fragile bird-bones of her throat, the tendons standing in stark relief under sallow skin. She didn’t flinch as the cold metal encircled her neck. It fitted perfectly, snug against the prominent vertebrae of her cervical spine. Clara secured the lock with a soft, definitive click. The biometric seal hummed, bonding it to her unique epidermal signature. It wouldn’t come off without Clara’s palmprint and a chemical key.
The tag settled against Lena’s sternum, a cold, heavy truth over her silent heart.
“Now, the morning protocol,” Clara continued, turning to a stainless steel trolley. On it stood a carafe of water, a small digital scale, and two pillboxes. One was familiar, holding the yellow DNP capsules. The other was new, containing oblong tablets the color of old bone. “The DNP continues. But the body’s adaptive nausea is an inefficiency. We’re adding Zyprexa. It will suppress the gastric rebellion and stabilize the mood. Compliance requires calm.”
She held out her hand. Two DNP. One of the new tablets.
Lena’s hand, a collection of delicate bones in a latex sheath, trembled as she took them. She placed the pills on her tongue, one after another, and chased them with a single, measured ounce of water from the cup Clara provided. Her swallow was a difficult, bobbling motion.
“Good.” Clara made a note on a tablet. “The smaller suit is already an archive. Your new dimensions are being scanned as we speak. The next iteration is in design.”
Lena just nodded, her eyes hollow. The tag on the collar gleamed under the lights.
Days dissolved into a strict, silent liturgy. Weigh-in. Pills. The suit, always the suit, each one a battle against her own skeletal frame. The drugs worked in sinister concert. The DNP burned her from the inside, a furnace with no fuel, making the White Room’s chill a blessing. The Zyprexa smoothed everything into a thick, cottony haze. The hunger pangs were still there, sharp and desperate, but they now echoed down a long, padded hallway. She observed them with a detached interest.
Clara tracked everything. The numbers on the scale. The millimeters lost from waist and thigh. The increasing dryness of her skin, the fine lanugo hair that appeared on her cheeks like a ghostly bloom. She documented the way Lena’s hips now balanced precariously on the crests of her pelvis, how her knees looked swollen and foreign below withered thighs.
One afternoon, Lena was polishing the mirrors. Her reflection was a shock she no longer fully recognized—a stark, black exclamation mark in a field of white. She paused, her rag hovering. She leaned closer, her breath fogging the glass. She traced the outline of her own skull with a finger, following the pronounced curve of her temple, the sharp dip of her orbit beneath the eye.
“I can see it,” Lena whispered, her voice raspy from disuse.
“See what?” Clara asked from her desk, not looking up from her screens.
“The shape. The true shape underneath.” Lena’s touch was almost tender on the cold glass. “It’s almost clean.”
Clara glanced over. A flicker of profound approval crossed her face. “That is the goal. To remove the obscuring material. The sentiment.”
That night, the ritual changed. After the pills, Clara did not dismiss her. Instead, she produced a small, professional camera on a tripod. “The documentation needs an update,” she said simply. “The collar. The context.”
She positioned Lena against the pure white wall, a stark black slash against the void. “Look at the lens.”
Lena obeyed. The camera’s shutter clicked, a sound as cold and surgical as the clip of the biometric lock. Clara reviewed the image on the screen, zooming in on Lena’s face, the deep shadows under her eyes, the profound hollows of her cheeks, the collar a brutal, elegant anchor.
“Perfect,” Clara murmured. She then gestured to the pedestal. “Now, the next step.”
Lying on the steel was not a full suit. It was a garment comprised only of restraints—a harness of thin, black latex straps designed to cradle and display a ribcage, to bracket hip bones, to frame the concave emptiness of a stomach. It was attire as a framing device, for a body that was becoming pure anatomy.
Lena approached it. She understood. The suits were for compression, for the active act of becoming smaller. This was for exhibition. This was for the ‘after’.
Her fingers, clumsy, began to unbuckle the one thing that still offered the illusion of containment. As she peeled the XXXS suit down, the air of the room felt abrasive against her new, raw geography. She stepped into the harness, the cool straps settling into the grooves between her ribs, tightening around the narrow shelf of her hips. It made her look flayed. It made her look finished.
Clara took another photograph. The click of the shutter was the only sound in the world.
“The project is approaching its zenith,” Clara said, putting the camera down. She approached and adjusted a strap near Lena’s collarbone, her touch clinical. “We will need to introduce a stimulant soon. The metabolic rate is becoming sluggish. The work requires energy.”
Lena nodded slowly. The tag on her collar swung gently. CLARA’S ANOREXIC DRUG SLAVE. It wasn’t an insult anymore. It was a job title. It was what she was for.
She looked past Clara, toward her own reflection in the endless mirrors. The creature staring back was a composition of stark lines and profound voids, held together by black straps and a titanium band. She felt the Zyprexa haze soften the edges of the image, and the DNP heat burn quietly in her core. There was no fear. Only a deep, chemical calm, and a single, crystalline point of focus.
Smaller. Less.
She was almost there.
She was almost there.
The stimulant arrived three days later, a small vial of clear liquid alongside a new, insulin-sized syringe. “This will correct the lethargy,” Clara explained, drawing the dose with precise efficiency. “Phentermine. It’s a fine tool. It sharpens focus and incinerates the last pathetic clingings of appetite.” Lena offered her bird-like arm, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The needle’s bite was a familiar punctuation in her skin. The effect wasn’t immediate. It crept in, a wire brushing the inside of her skeleton, tightening every joint.
Her heart, a sluggish thing she’d forgotten, began to tap against her ribs like a trapped beetle. A cold, electric clarity washed the Zyprexa fog from the corners of her perception. The room sharpened. The hum of the lights became a drill. She could feel the individual straps of the harness, each one a distinct line of pressure, and the collar’s weight was a sobering anchor. The gnawing void in her stomach, once a dull ache, woke up screaming.
“Better?” Clara asked, watching her pupils dilate.
Lena nodded, a quick, twitching motion. Her hands trembled. Energy buzzed in her teeth. “It’s very quiet,” she whispered, “and then very loud.”
“That’s the efficiency,” Clara said, turning back to her tablet. “The body’s complaints are just noise. This tunes them out. Now, your afternoon task.”
Clara led her not to the polishing cart, but to the doorway of the subsidiary chamber. Inside, Marcus’s personal harness, adapted from his own designs, was suspended in a clear polymer case. It was a beautiful, terrible thing. The silicone nubs were a different arrangement, configured to his personal nerve map. His beta test on Viktor had been a success. A week from now, it would be his skin.
“You will clean it,” Clara instructed. “Every surface. Every connector. Use the antistatic cloth and the solution in the blue bottle. He must not sense a single particulate of dust when he is sealed inside it. His focus must be pure.”
Lena entered the chamber. The harness seemed to watch her. She uncapped the blue bottle—the smell of isopropyl alcohol spiked the air, clean and brutal. She sprayed the cloth. Her trembling fingers began to wipe down a curved pod, polishing the medical-grade silicone to a matte finish. The phentermine made the task vibrate. Each swipe was monumental. She could see the microscopic topography of the material.
From the main room, she heard Clara’s voice, lowered, speaking to Marcus. “Your design validated Viktor’s suffering. Now it will define your own. Do you understand the poetry? You architected your central restraint.”
Marcus’s reply was a low, shaken thing. “Yes, Mistress.”
“The final fabrication is tomorrow. You will be present for the sealing of the neural interface gel. You will watch it become your second skin.”
Lena polished, her world narrowed to the black shape in the case. Her heart hammered against the strap over her sternum. The hunger was a sharp, bright blade now, a surgical instrument. She could count her ribs not by sight but by the distinct, individual pulses of pain that throbbed between each one. She felt clean. She felt like a knife herself.
She finished, her breath coming in quick sips that the harness allowed. Clara inspected her work, gloved fingertips skimming the surface. “Adequate.” She then picked up a small, soft brush. “Now the interior channels. Where the gel flows. Any obstruction here would create a dead zone. A moment of numbness. That would be a kindness. We cannot have that.”
Lena took the brush. She leaned into the harness, her face close to the unyielding structure. She guided the bristles into the tiny, gutta-percha channels. It was intimate, invasive work. She was preparing the instrument of a man’s perfect agony. The stimulant made the connection blaze in her mind. She was the acolyte, preparing the altar.
That night, the weigh-in was a ceremony. The number was so low it seemed abstract. Clara didn’t state it aloud. She simply showed Lena the digital readout. Lena looked at it, then at her reflection in the dark screen of the tablet. The collar’s tag glinted. The number felt like an accomplishment. A high score.
“The body is learning its irrelevance,” Clara said. “We will move to liquid-only nutrients tomorrow. The digestive system is an archaic distraction. We’ll bypass it.”
“Okay,” Lena breathed. The word felt thin, used up.
In the stillness that followed, Clara studied her. The clinical approval was still there, but underneath it, something else flickered—the quiet thrill of a hypothesis being proven. “Does it frighten you?” she asked, not with concern, but with a researcher’s curiosity. “The idea of vanishing?”
Lena considered. The drugs spun their cocktail: the phentermine’s electric alertness, the Zyprexa’s dampening blanket, the DNP’s deep furnace burn. Fear was a shape she couldn’t quite fit into this new, compressed space inside her skull. “I just want to see the lines,” she said finally. “The pure lines. Without the… the mess in between.”
Clara smiled. It was a real smile, thin and satisfied. “That is the aesthetic.”
The next morning, there was no suit, no harness. Just the collar and the stark, blinding white of the room. Clara had a new machine, a mobile unit with an IV stand and a bag of clear, opalescent fluid. “Total parenteral nutrition,” she said, connecting the tubing. “Everything you require, straight into your blood. The stomach is now retired.”
The needle for the IV was thicker. It went into the hollow of Lena’s collarbone, a port taped securely over the site. The cold fluid hit her bloodstream, a foreign invasion that made her shiver. It felt like being fed by a ghost.
“Walk,” Clara commanded.
Lena stood. She was untethered from everything but the slowly dripping bag on the rolling stand. She took a step, then another. The IV pole rattled beside her. She was a ghost attached to a ghost. She walked the perimeter of the White Room, past the mirrors. Her reflection was a continuous shock—a pale, strafed landscape connected to a medical apparatus. She was a patient and a specimen, and the line between was gone.
Marcus watched from his designated corner, his own fate hanging in the polymer case nearby. His eyes were pits. He saw Lena and saw the future—not his, but a parallel track of eradication. She met his gaze in the mirror as she passed. There was no solidarity in it. Only a faint, drug-hazed recognition of another object in the experiment.
Clara’s voice cut through, cheerful and casual. “Marcus, stop staring and get over here. Your harness is ready for the final integration. It’s time to pour your gel.”
Lena kept walking, the wheels of the IV stand whirring softly. The liquid in the bag was colder than her blood. It made her feel like she was being filled with moonlight. She counted her steps. She counted the tiles. She traced the true shape underneath it all, the beautiful, clean architecture of bone, and for a moment, everything else was just noise.
The sound of Marcus’s first, choked scream as the warm gel filled the channels of his own design was just another piece of data in the pure, white room.