Chapter 4: Voice Training Begins
Sleep, when it finally came after the agony of the bathroom crawl and a silent meal where he’d been forced to eat kneeling by the table, was a flat, dreamless void. It felt less like rest and more like a temporary system shutdown. His body and mind, overwhelmed by the curated sensations of the day and the profound helplessness of the full-body restraint, simply blacked out.
He awoke to a different kind of assault.
Light. Not the soft, diffused glow of his penthouse, but a harsh, jittering sunlight cut into stripes by moving shadows. It flashed against his closed eyelids. A deep, rhythmic vibration trembled up through his seat. A muffled roar, the squeal of brakes, the fragmented murmur of conversations not his own.
Jun-Ho’s eyes snapped open.
Panic, now a familiar cocktail in his bloodstream, flooded him anew. He wasn’t on the floor of the utility room. He wasn’t in his bed. He was sitting upright. In a bus.
The world outside the grimy window blurred past—a bodega, a laundromat, a wall of graffiti-streaked brick. The air inside was thick and warm, smelling of old vinyl seats, diesel fumes, and the sweet, cloying scent of someone’s cheap strawberry candy.
He was still in the silicone suit. The ever-present, hypersensitive layer was there, a base note of unreality. But the sensation on top of it was wrong. Tight, compressive, and… elevated. He looked down.
A tight, ribbed white crop top strained over his chest. The fabric ended a good four inches above his navel, exposing a strip of the suit’s faux skin. Below, black yoga pants clung to his legs like a second sheath. But his chest… it was wrong. The weight, which had already been a constant, awkward pull, was now immense. The silicone breasts were larger, much larger, a heavy, pendulous weight that pressed against the constrictive fabric of the top. He could feel their sheer mass with every slight sway of the bus, a deep, anchoring drag.
A cold, clinical dread, colder than the panic, seeped into his bones. He slowly, stiffly, turned his head toward the bus window. His own reflection, superimposed over the passing city, stared back.
It wasn’t his face.
The sharp, angular features of Jun-Ho Park were gone. In their place was the face of a young Korean woman. Soft, rounded cheeks. A delicate, slightly upturned nose. Fuller lips, now parted in shock. Large, doe-like eyes framed by lashes that hadn’t been there before. The hair was different too—long, with a soft wave, falling around this new, alien face. It was cute. Strikingly, conventionally pretty.
A stranger was wearing his panic.
His hand—slimmer, the fingers seeming more delicate—flew to his cheek. The silicone met his touch, but the underlying bone structure was different. It wasn’t a mask. It felt seamless, solid. He pressed harder. He felt the pressure, but the shape beneath was irrevocably altered.
A soft, choked sound escaped the new mouth.
“You okay, miss?”
He jerked his gaze away from the window. An older woman across the aisle was looking at him with mild concern. Her voice snapped the surreal bubble into a terrifying, public reality.
He couldn’t speak. If he opened this mouth, what would come out? His voice? Something else?
He managed a frantic, tight-lipped nod, quickly turning back to the window, hiding his face. His heart was a trapped bird battering against his ribs. Where was Hana? This was her work. This was a level of violation that made the corset and the rope feel like simple, physical games. She hadn’t just dressed him. She had… replaced him.
The bus lurched to a stop. More people shuffled on, the collective body heat in the vehicle rising. He became hyper-aware of the space he occupied in this new form. A man taking the seat behind him brushed against the back of his hair. The contact, innocent and accidental, shot a bolt of electric awareness through him. He was visible. He was being perceived, in this body, by the world.
He tried to shrink into the seat, but the new proportions worked against him. The weight on his chest made slouching uncomfortable, pulling on his back. He had to sit with a straight, almost arched spine, which thrust the cleavage created by the tight top even more prominently. He felt glances. A construction worker a few rows ahead let his gaze linger for a second too long before looking away. A teenage girl glanced over, her eyes briefly cataloging the crop top and yoga pants.
He was a object in a public space. Hana had thrown him into the deep end, removing even the private context of his humiliation.
A recorded voice announced a cross-street. He didn’t recognize it. Where was he going? He had no wallet, no phone, no money. Just this impossible body and these cheap, revealing clothes. The sensation of the yoga pants, every seam and pull, was magnified by the suit. The waistband dug in. The crop top’s ribbing felt like a cage around his swollen chest.
He focused on the reflection in the window, trying to find some piece of Jun-Ho in those alien features. The eyes. There was a tension in them, a hunted look that felt like his own. But the face surrounding them was a placid, pretty mask.
The bus slowed again, his stop approaching. A decision point he hadn’t chosen. Should he stay on? Go out there, into the city, like this? He had no destination. But staying on the bus meant remaining in this mobile aquarium, under public scrutiny.
The doors hissed open. The older woman who had spoken to him got off. The construction worker followed. An impulse, raw and desperate, took over. He couldn’t just sit here until the end of the line. He had to move.
He stood up. The shift in balance was immediate and profound. The new center of gravity was high and forward. He had to take a small, stumbling step to steady himself, grabbing the metal pole. The movement made everything jiggle, a sensation so profoundly foreign and unsettling he nearly gagged.
He shuffled to the front, keeping his eyes down, avoiding the driver’s mirrored gaze. He stepped down onto the sidewalk, the concrete solid and unforgiving under his thin sneakers.
The city sound erupted around him—honking, shouting, the rumble of a subway beneath the grating. He stood there, paralyzed on the curb, people flowing around him like water around a rock. He was adrift in downtown Los Angeles, utterly transformed, with no link to his old life except the memory of it.
Then, his hand, shoved into the pocket of the yoga pants, brushed against a small, stiff piece of paper.
He pulled it out. A single, crisp note card. On it, in Hana’s elegant, familiar handwriting, was a simple message:
"Welcome to the world, Mina. Your first task is to make $20. Be creative. I’ll be watching. Don’t disappoint me. - H"
Mina. She’d even given him a name. The final erasure.
He looked up, his new eyes scanning the towering buildings, the countless windows. She was watching. From where? A cafe? An office? A car idling at the curb? The sense of exposure was total. He wasn’t just visible to strangers. He was on a stage for a specific, cruel audience of one.
Make twenty dollars. The instruction was absurd, degrading, and ominously open-ended. The Jun-Ho who negotiated venture capital deals was gone. In his place was Mina, in a crop top and yoga pants, with a body that drew stares and a face that belonged to someone else.
A man walking by gave him a slow, appraising once-over. “Hey there,” he said, his voice a low, confident rumble.
Jun-Ho—Mina—flinched, the note crumpling in his fist. He turned and started walking, directionless, the heavy, unfamiliar weight on his chest swinging with each step, a perfect, grotesque pendulum counting down to an unknown end. The rules had changed again. The prison was no longer a penthouse. It was the entire city, and his own reflection was the lock.
It was the entire city, and his own reflection was the lock. He walked. The simple, automatic act of moving from point A to point B had become a complex physics problem. Each step sent a wave of motion up through his legs, translating into a pronounced, swinging bounce in his chest. The weight pulled. The silicone shifted. The tight crop top strained. It was a relentless, rhythmic reminder he couldn’t escape, a heartbeat of wrongness.
He kept his head down, the long, unfamiliar hair falling around his new face like a curtain. It didn’t help. The eyes found him anyway. They were glances, flickers, sometimes sustained stares. A group of teenagers snickered as they passed, one mimicking an exaggerated bounce with his shoulders. A man in a suit, talking on his phone, let his conversation trail off as his gaze tracked him from sidewalk to sidewalk. The attention wasn’t loud, but it was constant, a low-grade radiation of appraisal. He felt like a window display, his body curating a narrative he hadn’t written.
An hour bled away in a haze of disorientation. The sharp, ambitious mind that could optimize code and predict market trends was now fully occupied with logistics: how to cross a street without the bounce becoming a jarring sway, how to adjust the crop top subtly, how to breathe without making his chest rise too noticeably. Every external stimulus—a car horn, a shout, a sudden movement—made him flinch inwardly, bracing for a comment, a touch.
He passed a café with mirrored walls. The stranger, Mina, reflected back at him, moving with an awkward, careful gait. The outfit that felt like a costume looked, on her, casual, deliberate. A young woman trying too hard. He saw a man at an outside table nudge his friend, both looking his way. His cheeks, the new cheeks, burned with a heat that had nothing to do with the sun.
“Spare some change?” a voice rasped from a doorway. An older woman with a ragged blanket looked up at him. The request was a surreal mirror. He needed money too. He shook his new head, a quick, nervous jerk, and hurried past, the woman’s muttered “Yeah, okay” hitting his back. The hierarchy of need was a sick joke. He was begging for his entire identity.
His feet ached in the cheap sneakers. The yoga pants, after miles of walking, chafed at the inner thighs. The silicone suit beneath was damp with a nervous, trapped sweat. The weight on his chest was a growing, muscular soreness in his upper back and shoulders. The physical toll was a brutal education. This was the mundane, grinding reality of the form Hana had engineered for him. It was exhaustingly high-maintenance.
He found himself in a quieter, semi-industrial area, warehouses converted into art galleries and designer shops. The foot traffic was thinner. The relief was momentary. A black sedan with tinted windows crawled along the curb, keeping pace with him for half a block. His breath hitched. Was it her? A random creep? The car accelerated and turned, vanishing. The paranoia was now part of the ecosystem.
A young couple walked hand-in-hand toward him. The woman, bright and pretty in a sundress, looked at him. Her gaze wasn’t predatory. It was a quick, assessing glance—outfit, hair, body—followed by a slight, almost imperceptible tightening of her lips. A dismissal. He was being judged not just by men, but by women, measured against a standard he couldn’t possibly understand. The social landscape was a minefield.
He leaned against a cool brick wall, finally stopping, just to rest his screaming back. He had no plan. He couldn’t ask for help. Who would he ask? What would he say? ‘Excuse me, I’m actually a tech CEO trapped in a silicone woman-suit by my maid?’ He’d be dismissed as insane, or worse, a performance artist. Hana’s trap was psychologically airtight.
The note in his pocket felt like it was burning through the fabric. Make $20. Be creative. The words taunted him. Jun-Ho could have made twenty dollars appear with a thought, a tap on his phone. Mina had nothing but the body she was in. The implication was clear, vulgar, and terrifying. Creativity, here, had a price tag he wasn't ready to see.
He watched a delivery driver unload boxes from a van. The man worked with efficient, muscular grace. For a brief, piercing moment, Jun-Ho missed the simple, unexamined authority of his own original body. The freedom of moving through space without being a event. It was gone, maybe forever, swapped away in a penthouse for a game he’d been too arrogant to understand.
The sun began its descent, casting long, distorted shadows. He was thirsty, tired, and desperately needed to sit somewhere that wasn’t a bus seat or a curb. The twenty dollars was a barrier to everything—a drink, a bus fare, a moment’s respite. He thought of crawling on polished penthouse floors. That had been a private hell. This was a public one, vast and full of indifferent eyes.
He pushed off the wall and started walking again, the bounce settling back into its weary rhythm. He passed a neon-lit bar just opening for the evening. Through the window, he saw a woman in a waitress uniform stacking glasses. A simple, normal job. Could he do that? Walk up and ask for work? The idea of interacting, of using this new voice, of enduring more prolonged stares, made his stomach clench.
He kept moving. The streets grew busier again with evening crowds. The stares became more pronounced in the fading light, more brazen. A man walking a dog whistled, low and long. The sound was a physical slap. Jun-Ho didn’t look back. He just walked faster, the increased pace amplifying the painful, pendulum swing on his chest, a visible price for his attempt to flee.
He was a ghost haunting his own life, dressed in someone else’s skin, carrying twin anchors of silicone. The twenty dollars loomed as an impossible summit. He had nothing to sell but the spectacle of Mina, and the thought of monetizing that specific, horrible awareness Hana had engineered in him was a new depth of surrender he could taste, metallic and sour, at the back of his unfamiliar throat. The game was no longer about confinement or sensation. It was about survival, and the currency was his last shred of dignity.
It was about survival, and the currency was his last shred of dignity. He walked until his new feet throbbed in unison with the deep, muscular ache spreading across his shoulders. The sunset bled orange and purple over the downtown rooftops, the sharp light making his exposed midriff feel strangely cold. As the shops began to flip their signs to ‘Closed’ and the foot traffic dwindled to a few hurried stragglers, the vast public exposure curdled into something worse: a profound, isolating loneliness.
He paused in a pool of dim light from a vintage clothing store, its window mannequins draped in lace and velvet. His reflection—Mina’s reflection—looked back, a portrait of exhausted bewilderment. The cute face was now smudged with the grime of a long day, the eyes hollow. He just stared, his mind a numb blank. The twenty dollars was an impossible sum. The only assets he possessed were the clothes on his body and the body itself, a thought that sent a sick tremor through him.
A bell on the shop door jingled. He flinched, expecting another passing comment.
“Tough day, huh?” The voice was gentle, curious. A woman in her fifties with kind eyes and a tape measure around her neck stood in the doorway, holding a pile of floral fabric. She gave him a sympathetic once-over. “You’ve been pacing out here for a bit. Everything alright?”
He opened his mouth. Nothing emerged but a dry click. He shook his head, the motion causing the heavy weight on his chest to sway visibly beneath the thin crop top.
The woman’s gaze dipped for a fraction of a second, not leering, but assessing. It was a professional look. “That top looks like it’s working overtime,” she said with a light chuckle. “Not the most supportive fit for… your shape.”
He hugged his arms across himself, a futile attempt to hide. The posture pulled the fabric even tighter.
“Listen,” she said, leaning against the doorframe. “I’m about to close up. But I’ve got a new line of lingerie and loungewear coming in. The website photos are terrible. My usual model flaked.” She shrugged. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in making twenty bucks? Just a few quick pictures in some of the pieces. You’ve got the… look it needs. Very contemporary.”
Twenty dollars. The number hung in the cooling air, a perfect, mocking echo of Hana’s note. His stomach twisted. He felt like 20 dollars wasn't enough, wasn’t nearly enough for what she was asking. It was spare change, insulting. It was the price of a cheap lunch, not this.
But with no other option to make that money, he agreed.
A short, sharp nod was all he could manage.
“Great!” The woman, who introduced herself as Elena, beckoned him inside. The shop smelled of sandalwood and old roses. Racks of colorful garments lined the walls, a far cry from the minimalist severity of his penthouse. “We’ll keep it simple. Just a few shots in the back room. It’s got good light.”
She led him past velvet curtains into a small, cluttered space with a vintage patterned sofa and a tall floor lamp. A tripod stood in the corner. “You can change behind that screen,” she said, pointing. “Start with this.” She handed him a bundle of sapphire blue silk. “It’s a chemise. Should be more comfortable than whatever that is.”
He took the silk. It felt cool and impossibly light. Behind the painted oriental screen, his hands trembled. The process of removing the tight crop top was a relief and a new exposure. The silicone breasts, freed, felt even larger, their weight pronounced and unnatural. He slipped the blue chemise over his head. It whispered against the suit, the smooth straps settling on his padded shoulders. The hem barely brushed the tops of his thighs.
“Ready?” Elena called.
He stepped out. The woman smiled, not unkindly. “Lovely. The color works. Now, just… try to look natural. Relaxed. Maybe sit on the edge of the sofa.”
Natural. Relaxed. The words were meaningless. He perched on the sofa’s edge, his back erect from the remembered discipline of the corset, his hands clenched in his lap. The silk felt alien against the suit, a cool slide over the persistent, buzzing sensitivity.
The camera clicked. The sound was shockingly loud.
“A little less like you’re waiting for a dental appointment,” Elena said warmly, peering from behind the lens. “Think of it as… lounging. You’re comfortable in your own skin.”
A bitter, metallic taste filled his mouth. His own skin was two feet away, in a penthouse he might never see again. The camera clicked again, capturing the strained emptiness in Mina’s eyes.
“Let’s try a different piece.” Elena handed him a black lace teddy with intricate straps. “This one’s more daring.”
Each change behind the screen was a descent. The black lace was scratchy, its gaps revealing the matte sheen of the silicone beneath. He had to pose arching his back, a hand in his new hair, following her soft directives. “Chin down, eyes up. Good. Now look over your shoulder.” The clicks documented his degradation in high resolution. The twenty-dollar bill on the cluttered desk glowed like a cruel altar.
“One last set,” Elena said, holding up the final garment. It was a baby pink, ruffled babydoll set, childish and sheer. “The contrast with your look will be perfect.”
As he put it on, the ruffles itching his neck, he understood Hana’s lesson completely. This wasn’t just about humiliation. It was about market value. This body, this face, this curated vulnerability—it had a price. And right now, that price was exactly twenty dollars. The camera captured him in the frilly pink, his expression a complex map of shame, exhaustion, and a terrifying, dawning comprehension.
Elena lowered her camera. “That’s a wrap. You did great.” She walked to the desk, picked up the crisp bill, and handed it to him. “Here you go. Get yourself a proper dinner.”
He took the money. The paper felt insubstantial. He was freezing in the thin lace and silk.
“You can change back,” she said, already turning to pack her camera away.
Behind the screen, he pulled the suffocating crop top and yoga pants back on, the fabric now feeling like a coarse uniform. He emerged, the twenty dollars crumpled in his fist.
“Thanks again,” Elena said, already distracted. “Take care of yourself.”
He stumbled back out into the night. The street was dark and quiet. He had completed the task. He had the money. He looked down at the bill, then up at the endless, unseeing windows of the city. Somewhere behind one of them, Hana was watching. She would know. The game wasn’t over. It had just entered a new, more expensive phase.