Chapter 2: New measures
The airport hadn’t changed. The same sterile light, the same hum of concealed machinery, the same smell of recycled air and industrial cleaner. But the poster was different.
Evelyn stopped, her wheeled suitcase bumping against her calf. It was mounted where the old “Travel Pure. Arrive Secure.” image had been. This one was larger, more graphical. It depicted a schematic, cross-section of an aircraft. The passenger cabin was full of men, older women and children. The hold below was meticulously arranged with rows of uniform, rectangular units. Inside each drawn unit was a simplified silhouette of a female human figure in a crouched position. The headline was bold, black, sans-serif: OPTIMIZED SECURE TRANSPORT PROTOCOL.
The text beneath was chilling in its clarity.
In accordance with updated global security mandates (Edict 7-11), all female passengers aged 20-40 will be transported in standardized secure modules within the aircraft cargo hold. This eliminates all in-cabin liabilities and streamlines processing. Your comfort and safety remain our priority.
Key Changes:
- All security and handling personnel are now federally certified.
- Personal item disposal is mandatory at initial checkpoint.
- Identity imprint is applied pre-stowing.
- Secure modules are climate-controlled and equipped with essential hydration.
Evelyn’s mouth went dry. A cold, slick feeling coiled in her gut. Cages. They were calling them modules, but the silhouette was curled in a cage. She glanced around. The flow of passengers—mostly men, some older women, a few children—moved around her, oblivious. A man in a suit glanced at the poster, then at her, his expression unreadable before he hurried on.
Annoyed but knows there’s nothing she can do. The thought was flat, final. Arguing was pointless. Missing her conference was unthinkable. It was a simple, brutal equation. She released a slow breath, her grip tightening on the suitcase handle until her knuckles ached.
The signage led her not to the familiar locker banks, but to a new, cavernous hall marked PROCESSING AVENUE A. The line here was entirely women, and the air was thick with a silence broken only by the rumble of wheels on concrete and the occasional muffled sob. The personnel were different. All men. They wore dark uniforms without insignia, their faces set in expressions of detached focus. No more Zara in a neat tunic. No female agents with gloved hands.
A uniformed man directed her to a disposal chute. “Everything,” he said, his voice neither kind nor cruel. It was a statement of fact. “Clothing, luggage, personal effects. Into the chute.”
Evelyn unzipped her suitcase, the sound loud in the quiet. She lifted out her folded blazers, her sensible trousers, her underwear. She felt a surreal pang for her notebook, for her favorite pen. She dropped them all into the dark, wide maw of the chute. They vanished without a sound. Next, her clothes. Her fingers, cold now, worked the buttons of her shirt. She shrugged it off, the air conditioning immediately puckering her skin. She stepped out of her shoes, peeled off her socks. Then her trousers, finally her plain cotton bra and briefs. She stood for a moment, naked at the edge of a concrete abyss, holding the last shreds of her chosen identity. She let them fall.
She was exposed. Fully. The light here was brighter, more forensic. She was tall, at twenty-four, her body was a lean, articulate map of disciplined living. Her shoulders were straight, her collarbones pronounced above the gentle swell of her breasts, which were high and firm with pale pink nipples drawn tight from the chill. A faint trail of dark hair led from the flat plane of her stomach down to the neat, trimmed triangle at the junction of her thighs. Her legs were long, muscles defined in her calves and thighs from a lifetime of walking, of pacing lecture halls. Her skin was smooth, a shade of ivory that showed a flush of cold and now, a creeping heat of humiliation. She was, objectively, a striking woman. Here, she was a specimen.
“Move to the scan grid.” Another guard pointed.
She walked forward onto a yellow circle etched into the floor. A laser array mounted overhead activated, painting her body in intersecting lines of red light. It moved slowly from her head to her feet, front and back. A console beeped.
“Proceed to manual verification.”
A third guard, older with close-cropped gray hair, approached. He wore thick black gloves. “Arms out. Turn around.”
He was thorough. His gloved hands were impersonal but invasive. He checked her scalp, ran his fingers behind her ears, along her jaw. He lifted her breasts, checking beneath. His hands moved down her ribs, her spine, the cleft of her buttocks. He parted her labia with clinical detachment, then instructed her to squat and cough. He examined the soles of her feet, between her toes. Evelyn stared at a crack in the wall paint, her mind a blank, white static. The search was a violation, but it was the sheer, bureaucratic completeness of it that stunned her. She was naked, had nothing, and yet he still had to check.
“Verified. To imprinting.”
She was directed to a station where a machine, like a large tattoo arm, hung suspended. A female technician—one of the few women she’d seen, likely a civilian contractor—operated it. “Left thigh, please. Same place as before.”
Evelyn offered her thigh. The machine whirred, the needles injecting the familiar black barcode with a series of sharp, precise stings. It felt darker, larger this time.
“This way.”
The next room was the holding area. And here they were. The modules.
They were metal, rectangular, just like the schematic. Approximately four feet high, three feet wide, and deep enough to slide into. The front was a hinged gate of welded bars. Inside, on the bare metal floor, was a shallow recess and a single, sealed water pouch. There was no padding, no blanket.
Women were being processed ahead of her. Some moved like sleepwalkers, their faces blank. One, a blonde with a curvier figure, her cheeks flushed, had a strange, glazed smile on her face as a guard gestured her into a cage. She crawled in eagerly, the movement making her full breasts sway, and when the gate clanged shut, she let out a soft, sighing sound, almost of relief, her eyes closing. Another, younger girl with red-rimmed eyes, shook violently as she was locked in, her knees pulled to her chest.
It’s clear a minority of the women are enjoying the degradation and dehumanisation. The observation clicked in Evelyn’s mind, clinical and cold. For them, the absolute removal of choice, the total reduction to an object, was somehow a perverse release. It was the most unsettling thing she’d seen yet.
“You. Here.”
A guard pointed to an open cage. Evelyn walked towards it, the concrete floor gritty under her feet. She paused, looking at the confined space. “Why the barcode on us,” she asked, her voice surprisingly steady, “if we’re going into these? Why not just label the cages?”
The guard looked at her, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if the question was marginally interesting. “Logistics,” he said, his tone that of a warehouse manager. “The module gets scanned onto the pallet, the pallet onto the aircraft. But if a pallet gets misrouted—wrong plane, wrong destination—the scanner on the tarmac can read your imprint. Makes it slightly more likely we can ID you and send you home instead of you just… ending up somewhere. Efficiency.”
The explanation was so sane, so practical, and so utterly horrifying that Evelyn had no response. It wasn’t about cruelty. It was about inventory management. She turned back to the cage.
She had to get on her hands and knees to enter. The metal was bitterly cold against her skin. She crawled in, the space forcing her immediately into a hunched crouch. Her back pressed against the top. Her knees were jammed near her chest. She could turn her head, but little else. She faced the barred gate.
The guard swung it shut. The sound was a heavy, metallic clang that vibrated through the entire structure. A key turned in a lock with a solid thunk. She was in.
Through the bars, she watched as her cage, along with a line of others, was aligned onto a low, wheeled platform. A hydraulic lift engaged, and with a lurch, her world tilted slightly as the platform was raised. She was part of a stack, three high. She was in the middle tier. The cage above her blocked most of the light, leaving her in a dim, barred twilight. She could hear breathing, quick and panicked, from the woman next to her. From somewhere below, a low moaning.
An engine coughed to life. The platform began to move, wheels rumbling on concrete. They were being wheeled out of the processing hall, through a large set of hangar doors, into the vast, shadowy expanse of the cargo area. The air grew colder, smelling of diesel and cold metal. The towering shapes of aircraft hulls loomed in the half-dark.
The movement stopped. The roar of an active aircraft engine was deafening now, a physical pressure in her ears. She could see men in high-visibility vests moving, attaching cables, shouting soundlessly. Her cage jolted, then lifted. She was being hoisted into the air, into the belly of the plane.
The final, resonant thud as her pallet was secured in the hold was the loudest sound of all. The light from the hangar doors narrowed to a slit, then vanished as the heavy cargo door ascended and sealed with a final, definitive boom.
Absolute darkness. A deep, mechanical hum permeated everything. The air was cool, sterile, and thin.
Somewhere in the black, the moaning continued. And beneath the fear, the anger, the numb acceptance, Evelyn felt it: a warmth in her stomach. She was a barcode in a box in the dark and she was suprisingly conflicted.