Chapter 4: The Reunion
Pon gave a final, satisfied look at the kneeling men. “Perfect form. Hold that clarity. Now, let’s rejoin the collective.”
He led them out of the glass sanctum and down the stone path, back toward the main lodge. The transition from isolated practice to public exposure should have been a cliff’s edge. Ken braced for it, his senses hyper-alert. He felt the cool mountain air moving freely over his skin, the peculiar, slick embrace of the transparent shorts, the hard memory of the floor in his knees. He walked in the middle of the group, a formation of exposed skin and crystalline vinyl under the pine-filtered sun.
They entered the cavernous main hall. The fire’s orange glow licked over polished mahogany tables, over half-empty glasses of whiskey and mineral water. The low murmur of a hundred conversations filled the space, the scent of woodsmoke and ambition thick in the warm air. This was where the other departments had gathered.
Ken’s eyes scanned the room, waiting for the impact. The stares, the whispers, the confused or mocking glances he’d felt on the bus.
They didn’t come.
A few men glanced their way, but the looks were brief, acknowledging, then sliding away. No double-takes. No nudged elbows. It was as if a shirtless man in clear shorts was as ordinary as a suit jacket. The normalization was more jarring than hostility would have been. Ken felt a peculiar disconnect—his body screamed its vulnerability, but the world had been instructed not to notice. The humiliations of the trip up the mountain, the palpable weirdness, had been bureaucratically erased.
At the front of the hall, a projection screen was lit. Boom and Kla stood beside it, flanking the glowing data. Boom caught Ken’s eye. His smirk was there, but it was casual, integrated. He gave a slight, familiar nod as if to say, See? All part of the plan. Kla’s gaze was colder, scanning the S&F team like a quality control check, his severe features impassive.
On the screen was a streamlined organizational chart. Department names linked by clean arrows. Beside each department name was a small, stylized icon. Marketing showed a silhouette with a briefcase. Operations had a cog. And there, beside ‘Strategy & Foresight,’ was an icon of a bare torso and, distinctly, clear shorts. It was right there on the official flowchart. Their state wasn’t an anomaly; it was their designated box in the corporate schema. The other groups had seen this. They’d been briefed. That was why no one stared. Ken’s almost-nakedness was just another uniform, another line item in the corporate visual identity. The relief was so profound it felt like vertigo.
Boom leaned into the microphone, his voice smooth and amplified. “As you can see, clarity of structure breeds clarity of purpose. Everyone has a role. Everyone has an identity.” He gestured vaguely toward the chart. “Transparency isn’t a suggestion. It’s an operational framework.” He then stepped back, yielding the floor with a theatrical sweep of his hand. “Pon will guide the next integration.”
Pon took the microphone, his serene smile in place. “Thank you. For our next segment, we’ll move into a break period. Everyone, please collect your luggage from the drop-off and proceed to your assigned cabins. The room assignments are on the tablets by the entrance.” A general rustle moved through the clothed crowd, a shifting toward the doors.
Then Pon turned his attention to the kneeling team on the floor near the front. His voice remained warm, conversational, but it carried through the mic. “For Strategy and Foresight, this break period presents a continued opportunity. You may use this time to dress and proceed to your cabins conventionally.” He paused, letting the option hang. “Or, you may continue practicing our transparency policy, carrying the embodied principle into the transitional space. The choice is yours, as always. It’s about your commitment to the standard you represent.”
The choice. Ken felt the eyes of the hall on them again, but this time it was a watching silence. The other employees had paused in their slow drift toward the exit, curious. This was a live demonstration of the culture.
There was no hesitation. Not from Todd, who let out a low, firm, “Practice.” Not from Marcus, who simply nodded, his eyes closed. Not from Leo, whose voice was thin but clear: “We’ll practice.”
Ken’s own voice joined them, prompt and certain. “We’re ready for transparency practice.” The words left his mouth before he could think, but they felt true. Dressing now would feel like regression, like admitting the posture was an act. It wasn’t. It was their function. Putting clothes back on would be putting a barrier back up, reintroducing noise. It would be a failure to solve the problem of opacity. The clear shorts, the kneeling spread, the exposed skin—it was the solution. His choice was no choice at all. It was necessity.
It was necessity. The hall emptied around them, the fire crackling as the last of the other department employees filed out with their luggage. Only the kneeling team and the two managers remained in the vast space. Boom walked over, his shoes clicking on the hardwood, coming to a stop just in front of Ken’s lowered sightline.
“Posture’s good,” Boom said, his voice conversational. “But let’s get you back to the practice room. The open hall is for display. Refinement happens in private.” He said ‘private’ with a subtle, knowing irony that made Ken’s skin prickle. Kla simply gestured toward the corridor, a silent command.
They rose, their movements stiff from kneeling, and followed the managers back to the glass conference room. The forest outside was deepening into twilight, a blue gloom swallowing the pines. Inside, the lights were low. Pon was waiting, standing by the now-blank projection screen.
“Let’s resume the kneeling posture,” Pon instructed softly. “We must drill the form until it’s unconscious.” They assumed their positions on the hard floor, the familiar strain immediately settling into Ken’s thighs and knees. The clear shorts felt even more present now, a second skin that highlighted everything. He focused on his breathing, on the clean logic of the posture, trying to ignore the persistent, low-grade thrum of vulnerability.
A long silence stretched, broken only by the faint hum of the climate control. Ken kept his eyes on the grain of the concrete floor. Then he heard a quiet, sharp intake of breath from his left—Leo. He heard Todd shift his weight slightly, a rustle of vinyl.
Pon began to walk a slow circle around them. His footsteps were quiet. “I notice a physiological development,” he said, his tone observational, almost clinical. “For some of you, the sustained posture and focused environment is causing an involuntary excitation. It’s visible.”
Ken’s stomach dropped. He didn’t want to look. He kept his gaze down, but in his periphery, he saw what Pon meant. Against the taut, clear vinyl of Todd’s shorts, the shape beneath was no longer soft. It was defined, angled. Marcus, too. Leo was trembling slightly.
“This presents a safety issue,” Pon continued, stopping to address them all. His voice was concerned, responsible. “The briefs, when worn beneath the protocol shorts, can constrict during such a response. That restriction poses a genuine risk of injury. We can’t continue the session with that liability.” He sounded genuinely troubled, a manager problem-solving. “The integrity of the practice is compromised by a wardrobe malfunction.”
Leo’s voice was a thin, desperate whisper in the quiet room. “Could… could we take them off? The briefs?” The sentence hung in the air, immense and shocking. “Just the shorts. Would that… solve the restriction?”
Pon’s eyebrows lifted in a perfect pantomime of surprise. He looked thoughtfully at Leo, then scanned the others. “That is a proposed solution. Radical, but perhaps logically consistent with our principle of removing barriers.” He placed a hand on his chin, feigning deep consideration. “Team? What is your assessment? Leo has proposed forfeiting the final cloth layer for safety and protocol fidelity. Do we consider it?”
Another beat of silence, heavier than the first. Todd let out a grunt. “Hell, yeah. If it’s a safety thing. Makes sense.” His voice was strained but decisive.
“It is the logical endpoint,” Marcus murmured, his eyes still closed. “The brief is the last obscuring layer. It was always an inconsistency.”
David gave a single, tight nod. All eyes eventually fell on Ken. His face was burning. He felt the expected pressure, the need to fix the problem, to align with the team’s solution. To be the good one. The compliant one. The essential one. His reluctance was a physical ache, a last, dying spasm of a former self.
“I… agree,” Ken said, the words tasting of ash. “For safety. And consistency.”
“Unanimous,” Pon said, his satisfaction evident though his tone remained professionally neutral. “A team decision for team safety. Please, one at a time, use the annex to remove the briefs. Return to posture when finished.”
They stood, awkwardly, and filed into the small side room. There were no jokes this time. No murmured comments. Just the soft, slick sound of vinyl, the rustle of cotton being stepped out of. Ken removed his briefs, his hands cold and clumsy. The air of the room felt foreign, direct, against parts of himself that had never known it. He stepped back into the transparent shorts, and now nothing existed between the vinyl and his skin. The material felt different—cooler, more alien, more absolutely defining.
When they returned and knelt again, the change was total. Pon’s eyes swept over them, and the satisfied glint in them was no longer hidden. They were practically naked. The clear vinyl was now a mere sheen, a glossy film over the complete, unmediated truth of their bodies. Everything was visible, delineated, exposed.
Ken kept his gaze fixed on a distant pine tree outside the window. He could not look down. He could not look at the others. He felt the heat in his cheeks, a scorching embarrassment. Yet his body, traitorously, responded to the sheer, shocking novelty of it all, to the overwhelming vulnerability. He felt a rush of blood, a tightening, a betrayed elevation he could not control. He saw, from the corner of his eye, that Todd was fully, unabashedly erect. Leo was too, a faint shudder running through him.
Ken’s own face flamed redder. The instinct to curl in, to cover himself with his hands, was a screaming impulse in his nerves. But he thought of the trust. He thought of the Code. He thought of being the representative, the essential backbone. Covering himself would be a lie. It would be a failure of the transparency they had all just voted to perfect.
He forced his hands to remain on his thighs, his knees to stay spread, his posture open and precise. He accepted the exposure, the warmth, the unbearable visibility. He held the posture, breathing through the shame until it began to metamorphose into something else, something hollow and powerful and clean. This was the solution. This was the function. There was nothing left to hide.
Pon smiled. “Now,” he said softly. “Now the practice can truly begin.”