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(Note: There are some fairly harrowing descriptions of rape in here. You have been warned.)

Transcript #3465371

Respondent Hearings to Mediate Issues Surrounding the Penitent Uprising

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ARBITER: Welcome. Before we begin, let me explain to the interviewee that these proceedings are part of a larger inquiry by the truth and reconciliation commission. As such, you are required to recount the full details of your experiences and circumstances, truthfully and without omission. Only if you do this to the full extent of your abilities will your sentence be commuted. Do you understand?

CONVICT 3941: I understand.

ARBITER: Do you have any further questions?

CONVICT 3941: No.

ARBITER: Then let's begin. You are to describe the overall and specific experience of a convict, specifically a "red one," in your own words. I will interject with additional questions if elaboration or clarification is needed, attempting to be as impartial as possible, and ensuring that your opinion, however expressed, is respected and properly recorded. You may begin speaking whenever you are ready.

CONVICT 3941: All right, I'll begin, then. From the very beginning?

ARBITER: Start wherever you feel is appropriate.

CONVICT 3941: The beginning it is, then. You know, I wasn't some horrible, monstrous person. I didn't have malice in my heart. I was just a guy: young, horny, and far too stupid for my own good. I thought I knew enough about the way the world worked, but I didn't know nearly enough. What can I say? I wanted to get my rocks off, but I always thought Red Ones were too trashy to deal with, that my friends would laugh at me if they caught me nailing one. So when I saw a proprietor walking down the street, I availed myself of her. Dumb little shit that I was, I though the way it worked was basically the same as it was with the red ones - you grabbed her, flipped her skirt up and pulled her panties to the side, did your thing, and when it was over, the credits were paid and you went on your way. So that's what I did - didn't care that she was trying to explain herself, trying to explain that proprietors were sometimes off duty, that they were allowed to say no and that guys had to listen. I thought the way she cried out was just to spice things up, something extra to make it more worthy of payment. It was stupid of me, and wrong, and if I could take it back, I would, but I do not lie when I say I had no malice towards her whatsoever, no desire to hurt her in any way, just to get what I needed in the way that I thought was appropriate. That's no excuse, I know, but it's the truth, and the only explanation I have.

I think you can all guess how it ended up. I finished, she ran off, and a couple of minutes later the cops tackled me to the ground. They told me what I'd done, what I'd been charged with, and I didn't even think to deny it - once I realized what I'd done, what that was considered to be, I felt so bad that I readily admitted to my crimes. They took me before a judge, and as soon as it was made known that I'd confessed, the trial was over - the judge found me guilty of rape and said I was to become a Red One. It felt like the world had stopped, like I had been damned, that all hope had been sucked from my chest. And there was no time to do anything else. No time to apologize to the woman I'd hurt, no time to talk to my family or get my affairs squared away, no time to inform my work or let the people I cared about know what was going on, or appeal to them for support. They just wheeled a gurney into the courtroom, and I panicked and struggled, but the cops pushed me down on top of it, held me down, and someone took an injector and jammed it against my neck. The bright white lights on the ceiling of the courtroom fuzzing out before my vision went blank is the very last memory I have of being a man.

ARBITER: While we appreciate your candor about your background, please try to keep your responses more focused specifically on your experiences and the general conclusions you can draw from being a Red One, specifically.

CONVICT 3941: I'm done talking about being a man, because that was it. When I was next aware the transformation was over. And when you wake up as a Red One, that first time, it's one of the strangest feelings. You'd think that would be the most traumatic part - waking up, realizing you're a woman, that your penis is gone and everything feels different. But it doesn't. They do something to your brain when you're in there, rewire sensory inputs or something. I don't know exactly how it works, but at the end of it, it feels like you've been female all your life, like that's how your body's always been. You can still remember being a male, but only in a general sense, almost like you're having memories of someone else. It's the most disconcerting thing, like you've been placed in some other, anonymous life, your old one just taken from you, and for a couple of weeks you get to live that existential horror.

ARBITER: To clarify, you're describing the process known previously as Orientation.

CONVICT 3941: Yes, if you want to call it that. In reality it's just a room with a bunch of beds and other Red Ones in it, and some robots moving around and teaching people how to walk again - even though the feelings are all there, I guess they can't implant the mechanics, because they're already so ingrained from what you figured out growing up, so you've got to unlearn and relearn a bunch of different things like that. Those two weeks are the most like the prisons of old, with everyone locked up somewhere, together but alone, as they all try to come to terms with what they've become. It is in that way, though, that they are actually the most cruel, backwards as that might sound. It is because, for those two weeks, the walls surrounding you give you a false sense of security. It isn't an ideal situation - everyone is female, and naked, and to some extent afraid - but it provides no clue as to what a Red One will face once those two weeks are up. For those weeks you actually feel somewhat safe, somewhat in control of your own body. Even though you know what Red Ones are like, even though intellectually you know what the fate of a Red One is, for a short time that safety generates a certain level of hope, that maybe you can handle just being female, that maybe it's going to be a punishment, like prison was, but generally it will be okay. But it isn't okay. And that's the other cruel thing, the thing that they don't do in that orientation, the thing that makes it even worse. They never turn on the heat regulator. They never ramp it up slowly, let you get used to how it feels, prepare you at all for what it means. You have no idea at all what it's going to do to you. Just two weeks of orientation, two weeks of false hope, and then it happens.

ARBITER: Could you be more specific about that last point?

CONVICT 3941: Once those weeks are up, orientation is over. You wake up, and there's this clock projected on the wall, counting down to zero. When it reaches thirty minutes to go, though, that's when it first starts. There's this actually audible click that sounds like it's coming from behind you, or within you, and when you reach up to figure out what's going on, you can actually feel the slight bump on the back of your neck where the heat regulator is fused into your nervous system. Only it's not a regulator, because a regulator is something that you can change, that you can very up and down to a specific setting. It's really just a switch - all the way off, or maximum on. And that click, when you hear it every morning, means that it's on. It spools up for a minute, doing whatever it does, and then it feels like it sends an electric shock down your spine, and bursting up across your head. It's not actually a shock, but it's the trigger, and all of a sudden there's this crazy tightness in your chest, in fact everything feels too tight, your fur, your skin, every part of you, as the hormones start coursing through your system.

It takes about an hour for them to fully take hold, though, and so you're still feeling everything ramping up when the timer counts all the way down. It's when that timer hits zero, though, when the stark reality of being a Red One really sets in. Because as soon as it zeroes out, there's this grinding sound from all around you, and as you watch all four walls of the large room start sinking into the floor, until the room is nothing more than a ceiling held up by four pillars at each corner, completely open to the air. And as you look around, stunned, you realize that the facility isn't really a prison, isolated somewhere to prevent escape, but a building on the corner of some urban intersection, with dozens of guys wandering by on the sidewalk outside, some ignoring it, but plenty looking in, and gawping at what the lowering walls reveal. And that's when you realize, really realize, just how naked and vulnerable you really are. There are no more walls to defend you, no clothes to conceal the obvious attributes of your female form.

You only have a few moments to come to terms with that, though, because while some of the guys are content to just watch things play out, plenty of others quickly start to move in. And so as you stand there, shocked, still trying to deal with the crazy feelings flowing through you, it's only by virtue of being in the center of the room and partially obscured by the beds that you're not the first one in line. Instead you just watch, terrified and rooted to the floor, as a pack of guys grab one of the other Red Ones near the perimeter of the room, one of them holding her waist and jerking her hips back as another shoves her hard in the back and forcibly bends her over a nearby bed. As they tug aside the magnetic flies on their pants and their cocks just spring out, no more ceremony than that. One of the guys is dressed in a full business suit, the others in casual dress, but it all works exactly the same. You watch as the Red One desperately tries to tuck her tail down between her legs, panicked and terrified, but the guy behind her in the business suit just laughs, tugs her tail to the side, and slams his hips down against hers. You watch her go silent, watch her eyes go wide with shock, but it's not until the guy pulls back, cruelly slowly, that she starts to scream. It's a horrible sound, high-pitched, wailing, and full of obvious pain, her tail stiffening to the side and her eyes going wild and delirious for a moment before he pushes back in, and they return to their expression of stunned shock. Then he pulls back again, and once more, her screams becoming even more ragged. Then he's done, pulls out, and for a moment you can see his cock hanging out there, sagging slightly as the erection subsides, translucent spines glistening with droplets of blood before he wipes it off against the fur on her thighs and puts it away. She just lays there, gasping desperately for breath, but there's no break, no mercy - the next guy is already behind her, and you see her whole body rock forward as he shoves himself inside her. The screams are louder and harsher, starting to come from all around, as the panic in your own body starts to build, clashing with the other wild feelings. To your horror, even with all the terror surrounding you, a strange sort of fire is already building in your belly, and you can already feel things swelling and warming and somehow spreading or unfurling between your hips. You know that it's heat, that you can't possibly be turned on by what's happening there, but as much as you try to will yourself to, you can't stop it from happening, either.

Then you look back to the first Red One, on her third guy in a row, and you watch as her scream cuts off with a sharp increase in pitch midway through, watch her eyes roll back in her head until all you can see is white as the heat and pain and unwanted sensation finally overwhelm her, watch her tail seize spastically and her body go limp against the bed, moving limply only in response to the savage thrusts of the man behind her. And that's when you realize what your fate is going to be, and the panic really sets in, as the Red Ones on the periphery, unused to the treatment, have been temporarily used up, and the men are starting to circle inwards, towards the few remaining Red Ones, yourself included, that have yet to be molested. That's when your instincts take over, fight or flight, only you know that you can't really fight - the men are stronger, and you've already seen them manhandle the others into position and force them with ease. All you can do is run, try to run and hide, dart out somewhere into the world and see how far you can make it before a guy, or a pack of them, corners you. I found an open lane between the beds, took it, and ran off, looking back to see if anyone else had made it. A couple of others had, but the rest ran straight into the arms of approaching guys, and on my last glance back, I saw the guys pinning their arms behind them and pushing them to the floor, and as I ran, I heard their screams ring out before they faded into the distance.

ARBITER: For geographical clarification, your exodus took place from the orientation center located at Grid Square 21, on the outskirts of the downtown commercial district?

CONVICT 3941: Yes, I believe that's where it was located. It wasn't something we were informed of at the time, though. In fact, there was very little we were informed of. As I said, there was no warning, no real preparation, no instruction of what we were supposed to do once we were outside. The walls came down, and then you were on your own, scrambling to do what you could, to avoid the absolute terror you saw happen in the orientation center. Keep in mind that at that point the heat regulators had just kicked in, and none of the Red Ones were fully in heat at that point, without any of the mollifying effects of being completely in that state. They weren't offering or begging for it. They were taken, violently, harshly. If it hadn't been for their status as Red Ones, it would have been considered aggravated rape. But because they were, because that violence had no lasting or permanently debilitating effects, as terrorizing as it was for all of us, it was behavior that was condoned.

ARBITER: Your characterization has been noted. However, you were talking about your exodus from the orientation center, and the events that subsequently transpired.

CONVICT 3941: What can I say? For a while, I just ran, and a couple of guys made a grab at me, but I darted out of the way and they were content to look for easier prey. After a few blocks I found an alley that ran between two rows of restaurants, and there were a couple of utility sheds behind one of them, one that hadn't been properly locked, so I darted inside and sat there in the dark, trying to feel safe again. That didn't last long, though, for obvious reasons. There's a delay between when the heat regulator kicks on and when your heat fully takes hold, and while the panic and adrenaline served to stave it off for a little while longer, maybe another half-hour, as soon as they faded, it quickly took over.

Heat is something that most guys probably can't even imagine. As strong as a guy's sex drive can be, as much as that desire can feel urgent, especially in the presence of a receptive woman, trust me when I say that it's nothing compared to what a full-blown state of heat can do. It's beyond just a desire, or an urge, until it becomes something indistinguishable from a basic, desperate need.

They call it heat, and that's not entirely inaccurate. When it really sets in, that's kind of what it feels like - not that your body's on fire, but it feels too warm, too tight, coiled like a spring and far too sensitive. Anything brushing your fur feels simultaneously pleasant and irritating. There's this crazy, buzzing, giddy feeling in your head, and right before it really takes hold, for a moment you feel like bouncing off the walls. Then it flashes over, and that's when you really feel the need.

When it first builds, that part is separate, a tight, fluttery knot in your stomach that, once that spreading or unfolding or whatever is happening lower down finishes up, it just plummets like a stone straight between your legs. Suddenly, you're painfully, achingly aware of what's down there, of this thing inside you that's empty, and desperately needs to be filled. That whole area, it doesn't exactly itch, but it's that similar thing - it doesn't just want to be touched, but scratched, this crazy, throbbing ache building agonizingly inside you, making you feel beyond antsy inside and out. By that point, your... mound, I guess, has swelled up and out enough from the heat that it takes up your entire crotch, and you can feel the fur on your thighs brush up against its edges, something you can suddenly feel keenly, but is so torturously, tantalizingly inadequate it only serves to drive you even more crazy.

So you reach down there, trying to find a way to scratch it, to get inside and find some way of satiating it, and that's when it really hits home what they've done to you. Try as you might to extend them, your fingers don't have claws any more, just soft, blunt tips. Technically, you've known that since the transformation, but you never really gave it any thought, just assumed it was part of the punishment, making it hard for you to fight back or to damage anyone else. You realize when you reach that point, though, the real reason for it - try as you might, mashing your fingers around and into that strange, swelled part of you, all it does is the same thing as the brushing fur, tantalizing and torturing and making the feelings even stronger, without providing even the slightest bit of relief.

It's at that point, your head buzzing and your crotch and belly throbbing and that desperate need coursing through your veins making it so hard to think about anything else, when you know that you can't just hide and hope to ride it out. That impossible need is growing by the minute, and there's really only one way to solve it. Despite the horrific treatment you just saw, you know that there's only one thing that will help you feel better - a guy's penis inside you, those raking spines the only thing readily available that can adequately scratch that itch. For a moment, your terror and hormones clash, but you find yourself driven back outside anyway by your body's own desperation.

When you get up, though, it becomes even more noticeable. The heat, or what it causes, starts coming out of you, warm and wet, and you can feel it coating you down there, trickling down across your inner thighs, advertising your condition even more clearly than your garish red fur. You can smell it, smell its sickly sweet pungence, and know that every male around can scent it even more keenly. The smell would even, in fact, make you feel nauseated, if it weren't for the desperation of heat washing out nearly every other feeling. Even as you now know it's only a matter of time before a man scents you out and tracks you down, you just can't bring yourself to care - even the terror of what you've seen washes away under the overwhelming need of heat.

At that point, the fire of it really takes hold of you, and while the feelings are most overwhelming between your legs, your entire body is held in thrall to it. And so you take on the gait that you've seen before walking along the streets, that gait so typical of Red Ones - steps that are somehow both jerky and hesitant, your legs trembling, your arms alternating between being wrapped around yourself and occasionally making a furtive, desperate pawing between your legs, hoping it will do some good but knowing it won't. By that point, you're beyond caring about decorum, and as a Red One you're not afforded that, anyway - you're already naked, your heat on display, your existence a fully accepted public perversity, so grabbing your crotch in desperation barely even ranks as far as offensiveness goes. It still feels humiliating, nonetheless, at least during the brief moments when your mind isn't entirely ravaged by your heat.

When a guy finally tracks you down a couple of minutes later, then, it's not even about struggling. There's a moment of terror when you see him, when you see that predatory grin on his face, but as soon as he gets close enough that you encounter his male scent, whatever fight-or-flight response you have just collapses. Your knees go weak, you stumble into a wall, and as soon as you hit it your hips jut out and rock your ass out and up, tilting into a mounting position spurred on by heat and instinct. You're barely even thinking at that point, just feeling, panting and aching and desperate, and when you feel that hand on your back, shoving you roughly forward until your shoulders and face are nearly flush with the wall, there isn't the slightest bit of fight left. You just stay there, frozen, feeling his hands on you, and then something stabs into the puffiness between your legs. You know instantly what it is, but there's no power or motivation to stop it, and the heat has long removed even the slightest resistance to it. Then it's just... inside you, filling you up, and you can feel all of it, every inch of it, every single point where it makes contact with you, each place where the curved insistence of every individual spine nudges in against flesh that easily yields against them. And then he just sits there for a moment, and you feel his body pressing down on you, pinning you to the wall, completely controlling and constraining you, and as you feel the sharp points of his incisors dig in lightly but clearly against your neck, there's a sense of powerlessness so profound that for a moment it even manages to override the heat. All of a sudden, your body isn't yours any more, isn't really under your control. All of a sudden, you're just this thing, completely subject to the whims of this guy who suddenly dominates every aspect of you, both inside and outside. And the worst part of it is, at that moment the heat feels even more intense, the mere presence of him between your legs aggravating every nerve ending inside you and making things feel even more unbearably sensitive.

That's why, when he does pull out, it's the most agonizing thing you've ever felt. The notion you had before, that a good, rough scratching would somehow satisfy that need, seems horribly false as the spines pull through you. They don't just scratch, but rake, and while you know somewhere deep down that your body is capable of handling it, especially that first time it feels like you're being ripped apart from the inside, like someone's dragging a million tiny knives through your guts. They must do something for proprietors that anesthetizes that initial pain, but for Red Ones, there's no quarry, no mercy, just that ripping, rending pain, and for a moment you think that he's actually killing you, like your guts are going to be nothing more than a mass of torn, bloody flesh, and that your life is going to pour out between your legs and end right in that alley, humiliated and taken and used up and tossed aside. You hear yourself cry out, and you're not even really sure it's you, this horrible, disembodied scream of pain and terror, and then it's over, only you can feel the tip of him still nudging at you, probing the puffy, swollen flesh of your mound for a moment, before shoving back in and stretching your screamingly painful insides all over again.

And that's where it really gets crazy - where the whole thing turns into a complete and absolute mindfuck. You've just felt pain so great that it's shoved any notion of relief out the window, but when he thrusts back in, the pain's there for only a second before things become strangely, impossibly calm. You just sit there for a moment, feeling him in you somehow even more intensely than you did before, and then everything from your knees to your chest is gripped by a sudden, fluttering tension centered right where his tip is pressing against something impossibly yielding and sensitive somewhere inside you, somewhere deep where your hips meet your belly. Then there's nothing to feel but these deep, pulsing throbs, rippling through your insides and thudding between your ears, the rest of your body completely frozen as you feel yourself clenching around him, tightening and rubbing against the spines on your own accord, and you don't even feel the pain, for once, as the sense of relief you've been looking for finally flows through you. It doesn't linger, though, and you can already feel it fading as your body works to its unstoppable, internal rhythm, and you know as he bucks hard against your hips that whether you wanted it to or not, your instincts took over and forced your body to do the job that was expected of it. You can even feel his spines flare against you a little as his penis swells a little more against your insides in preparation, and with a few quick, sharp, penetrating bursts of warmth against that place deep inside you, he's done - while paradoxically, a guy can thrust more in an unheated woman before her body's response sends him over the edge, for a woman fully in heat the guy's done by the second or third stroke. Of course, as soon as he's done he pulls out, ensuring that your last memory of the encounter is that sharp, raking pain, dulled slightly by the aftereffects of the female climax that the heat and the stroking forced through you, but still more than enough to make you cry out again, and you can hear your scream reverberating against the walls of the city for a moment as you sag down the wall, still feeling a lingering agony between your legs, although it's one that quickly fades.

The only real reward, as your legs firm back up and you stagger away with your freshly-used pussy still aching between your legs, is that somewhere amidst the craziness of the conflicting emotions your heat is actually momentarily satiated, and for a while, at least, your head is once again actually clear. In some ways, though, that actually makes it worse, as you're then more than well aware of what happened, and you feel so helpless, so powerless, so abused, along with the realization that that's all you get to feel from now on. No love, no empathy, just guys walking all over you, forcing your body to give them what they want, using you merely for the pleasure that you can provide them, in the same way that they would use a toaster or a cellphone for its specific, utilitarian function. And that, I think, is one of the worst parts of it, and one of the reasons that everything came to this. Everyone just saw the Red Ones as a means to an end, and designed them in a way that allowed for that specific function, but no one thought of the real, psychological impact that it would have. That it wasn't just a punishment, but something that humiliated people, that crushed their spirits.

ARBITER: While I appreciate that opinion, and while it is one that will be carefully considered, we are concerned here more specifically with what your own experiences can reveal about the truth of this, rather than the wider social implications, which will also be examined thoroughly in one of the other hearings before this commission. So, if you could continue with your experiences, please.

CONVICT 3941: All right. That is a point that you'll see again and again in what I have to say, though.

So, when it comes to heat, there is only the slightest of respites after being taken like that. Perhaps ten minutes, fifteen at the most. At that point, it feels like your body has basically reset itself, like none of that even really happened - the pain is gone, the strange, forced, momentary euphoria is gone, the satiation is most definitely gone. The heat is quickly back to where it was, and whatever lubrication was lost from the act is quickly replaced. Once again, you're back in that place of desperation, and as soon as another guy comes along, you're practically back to begging him for it. Even that terror from before, that initial sensation of rending, is quickly forgotten, and in truth it only feels like that the first time each day, and as agonizing as it is you soon know that it's both typical and survivable - as much as it seems horribly damaging, it's from the heightened sensations of the nerves rather than any actual harm. In fact, I watched a program a couple of days before this hearing that stated the total blood lost, even for a Red One, is a few teaspoons per day, far less liquid than comes out just from the heat-enforced lubrication. It's still unpleasant, though, and I guess that's where the mindfuck of it really comes in - you know how much it's gonna hurt, every single time that you do it, but the need that heat creates is so compelling, so confusing, that you even start looking forward to that agony after a while, because as painful as it is, at least it's capable of staving of a different but even more pervasive sort.

ARBITER: Again, please try to stay with your own experiences. Scientific testimony about every aspect of the biology involved has already been entered into the record during a subsequent hearing.

CONVICT 3941: I'm just trying to tell it the only way I know how, okay?

Besides, there's not much more to be said about sex, specifically, if you can even fairly describe what happens to Red Ones as sex. The act itself doesn't change much, beyond certain variations, and the main difference really comes down to whether you're taken by one guy or a pack of them, and that's usually up to maybe three or four - above that, the guys who have to wait usually get bored and go hunt down someone else. In some ways, it's actually a little better if there's a pack of them, at least in certain ways - there's less chance for the pain threshold to reset after each time if they're going back to back like that, even if the aftermath of it is more overwhelming - after a pack like that, sometimes there's a little more time to think, a little more time to realize your situation. During the first few weeks, it was the times I was taken by packs where I actually broke down and cried afterward. I can look back on it now, a little more dispassionately, but when you're actually there, having a bunch of guys just watching you, leering, taunting you with their cocks when all you can do is pant and scream and respond to the thrusts of the guy behind you... it's humiliating. It's especially humiliating because at that point, your memories of your old life are still fresh enough to recall. You can still remember being a guy, doing your thing, having a house, owning things, commanding respect, having power over your own body and your own determination. And it's in those moments, when you're cognizant enough to truly realize just how far you've fallen, that it really, really hurts, more than anything a guy could ever know.

And that's the part they really don't talk about when it comes to Red Ones. Everyone thinks it's just about the sex, about the service they perform, but it's about more than that. When you become a Red One, you are stripped of absolutely everything. Everything you've ever owned becomes the property of the state. You walk by your own home, and someone else is living inside it. You literally have nothing. Not even a scrap of clothing to cover yourself with. And if you do find something to provide even the slightest bit of modesty, a vegetable sack or a paper bag or anything at all, it'll just be ripped off of you by the next guy who finds you, making you feel even worse than if you hadn't been wearing anything. You are so completely dispossessed by society, in fact, that you are effectively dead to your friends and family - as a Red One, you are effectively anonymous and barely, if at all, recognizable to anyone who knew you. That means, if you seek out said friends and family, they are just as likely to wordlessly tackle and abuse you as they are any other Red One - something that I learned, to my utter horror, with the man who had previously been my best friend. The result is that you aren't just shunted to the margins of society, you're all but thrown off the edge. Your reputation, your affiliations, your very identity are stripped away, and even your name doesn't matter any more. I could tell you what my real one is, but the person it used to represent is long gone - all that 's left is what you see here before you. It's better, now that I can think, but up until that point, all that was left were instincts, and the pervasive humiliation and fear that can only ever be truly known to someone who's actually been a Red One.

ARBITER: Nevertheless, please continue trying to describe it as best you're able.

CONVICT 3941: The thing is, it never really ends. And that's where the fear comes in - there is no point during which you ever really feel safe. Those first few nights are probably the worst, because you're so caught up in what's going on that you don't think to follow the other, experienced Red Ones back to the centers where they have the slightest bit of shelter, at least during the night. At some point after the sun goes down, the regulator in your neck clicks off, and the heat starts to subside, although with that level of hormones flowing through you, it never quite goes all the way away - when mine was finally shut off, for now, it took several days before I was back to normal. Red Ones don't get several days, though, just a brief period to eat and sleep - and that, usually, only if they make it back to one of the centers in time. Getting caught outside, on that first night, was one of the most harrowing experiences I've ever had. There are people who roam around at night, and they don't want to just get off. They want to hunt, to play, and when I say that, I don't mean the fun sort of definition. For some, it's literally like cat and mouse - hunt, pounce, shove them to the ground, pin them, rub their face into the ground, stick it in just enough with their fangs in to let them know they're dominated, then letting them up and watching them scamper away in fear, only to hunt them down all over again. Some do worse than that - breaking our bones is a crime, or doing anything permanent or debilitating, but punching, scratching, clawing, pulling and tearing out fur, all that's fair game. Some just lurk in the shadows, constantly harassing you, molesting you every time you try to sleep, leaving you beat and ragged and easy prey for the packs of men wandering around and looking for action before they start their day. Being a Red One, out at night, is as close to a waking nightmare as I can imagine, and it is as terrifying as it is relentless.

Not to say, though, that the shelters that are ostensibly set up for Red Ones are all that better. From wherever you are, from the time the regulator clicks off, you have an hour, maybe two, to make your way to whatever Red One center might be in your vicinity, and they're usually miles apart - you have to make your way there even as you can still feel the lingering effects of heat, and even as men are still tracking you down and taking you anyway. Each time, then, is as perilous as it is humiliating, as you lose precious minutes for getting back to the one slight area of safety.

The centers aren't the worst thing, although they're not much more than the sort of bare-bones facilities as were at the orientation center. And, to be fair, even if you arrive after the shutters are closed, the machines on the building's exterior always provide a supply of clean water and the nutrient bars that make up most of a Red One's diet, meaning that even if you don't make it back in time, you can still survive, as harrowing as it is.

Even if you do make it back in time, though, there's not much respite - the shutters only close after midnight, and like the orientation center walls, open back up again on a timer precisely one half-hour after the heat regulators kick back on. That means the only real respite is mostly taken up with necessary sleep, meaning that your waking life is all but consumed by heat. And unlike the normal beds at the orientation center, the ones in the centers seem designed to make you sleep in specific, uncomfortable ways. They're really more sort of strange, lounge-shaped things, platforms with a sort of rounded wedge pushing up from them, and sort of legs spreading out horizontally in a V shape from one end. Even in that one supposedly safe place, it's still designed to make you feel vulnerable and afraid, always accessible to be used no matter what you do - if you try to sleep on your stomach, your ass is in the air and ready to be mounted, and if you try to scoot down from where the wedge is and sleep on your back, you can only do it with your legs spread open. Trying to use them any other way is so uncomfortable that sleep is all but impossible, and you can't even sleep without fear. If you sleep heavily, if you're capable of sleeping past when the regulator first clicks on, there's a very real possibility that someone will wander in once the shutters open and fuck you awake in agony, especially if your heat hasn't set all the way back in. Of course, during the day, the centers offer no protection at all, as any one can wander in, and to a certain extent they're actually worse than trying to hide on the streets, because everyone knows where they are, and that they'll be filled with Red Ones when the shutters open back up. Once they're open, like at the orientation, everyone inside is fair game, and there's often a crush of men who press inside as soon as they open, meaning that once they do, there's no chance at all of escape. If there aren't a lot of Red Ones inside, you can be ganged up on much more severely than encountering a roaming pack outside, and it's an indescribably, grindingly awful way to start your day, pinned down on one of those horrible lounges with the weight of guy after guy on top of you, alternating between screams and moans as the endless waves of pain and spasm shoot through you, and when it's all done all you can do is lie there for a while, your whole body aching and throbbing, barely able to function at all, and even then, even limp and barely cognizant, you're still occasionally flipped over, held down, and fucked by whoever might be passing through.

And that's if you can get any sleep at all. Sometimes, for some of the Red Ones the heat dissipates more slowly, leaving them whining and yowling in agony, still feeling the effects of that need, and with the shutters down, having no way to satiate it until the hormones finally fall enough to allow them a restless slumber. And yet, even that's better than the other thing that can happen. The only rules involved in those centers is that the shutters go up and down at a certain time - beyond that, both men and Red Ones can wander through as they please. That means that if a guy really wants to, and doesn't mind being locked inside for a night, he can hang around the center until the shutters fall, and then have his pick of all the Red Ones trapped inside with him. By that point, most of them are too exhausted from their day to fight back, or to do anything more coordinated like try to band together and fight them off, and even attempting to sleep leaves them exposed. About the only thing you can do, then, is try and slink off to the periphery, and hope that the guy has his fill on the others and nods off before getting to you, so you can at least get a little bit of safe sleep afterwards. Sometimes, though, multiple guys are in there when the shutters close, and then that night is just the same as the day, but with fading levels of heat that make each time being forced that much harder.

Of course, there are some Red Ones who just give up entirely, and don't even bother trying to run around on the street, don't bother making any effort to take some level of control, to keep themselves from giving in as much as possible. They just stay at the centers and use the lounges like they're probably intended, lying there and getting used over and over, so inert and zoned out from it all that they're barely a step removed from the objects that everyone seemed to think of Red Ones as. Others, I guess, go insane from the lust constantly pouring through them, and seem to revert to their animalistic selves - not speaking, not doing anything reminiscent of civilization, just eating, sleeping, and fucking. Still others try to claw at the chips in their necks, trying to take them out, to free themselves from their torment, but it doesn't work - even if they were able to shake the things loose, even a little, they became totally paralyzed, flat on the ground while the regulator chip moved around on their necks, somehow reseating itself back into place and returning them to their mandated heat. There were even a few who fled the city, out into the forest, in some bid to find a way to beat their own hormones and escape their fate, but none of them ever returned, and now I know why - when the regulator loses the radio signal that controls it, it defaults to always-on, and the women in that state never go out of heat. Out in the woods, alone, I guess the hormones get to be so much that they're actually poisoned by it, so either they finally give into it, come back, and let themselves be fucked again, or their own heat finishes them off. And that's the other thing - because of how it works, because we're either in heat, getting fucked, or completely exhausted, most Red Ones don't even have the energy to contemplate suicide, let alone carry it out. We just keep going, until the pain and humiliation and perverse, fleeting, backhanded pleasure of it become rote, until our lives sink into that abyss of instinct and barely-thinking existence as things to be fucked. And that's probably the saddest part of all - the way that being a Red One maintains your body, but degrades and damages your soul, to the point where you don't even want to die anymore, where your only goal is to make it to the point where you can close your eyes and know that another day has passed. No dreams, no goals, no aspirations - all of that perished with the man you used to be. You only have one role at that point, and it's one that's drilled and fucked and forced into you, over and over again, until you come to embody that role completely, until it becomes everything that you are and will be - a fucktoy, basically. You'll never again have the opportunity to know love, or really even basic kindness, aside from the occasional man who uses you only out of necessity and whose guilt compels him to make some minimal, marginally nice gesture afterward. For the most part, then, your world narrows down to the space between your belly and your thighs, and the organs placed there by design, there only to accept and be raped and torn and forced into instinctual climax by the cocks of an entire city, over and over again, until there is nothing of you left beyond that.

In a way, I'm probably lucky - the uprising happened only a couple of years after my sentence, so I could still recover, still be coherent in front of you today. Many others have not been so lucky, and of the earliest ones that still survive, and many who came after that, they may never recover at all, certainly not to the level where they once were, and probably not even to the point of being able to function at the basic level of a proprietor. There are some, sadly, where there is no other choice but to let them continue on as they are now, keeping their regulators and acting on the hormones and instincts that are all they have left. For them, I can only silently mourn, but for the rest, I really, truly hope that there will be some way forward for all of us. Whatever our crimes, and however worthy we were of punishment, what we have had to endure goes beyond anything that a just society can deem acceptable. I understand the societal need that was present, and perhaps if it had been done differently - if there had been an end date to the punishment to provide some sort of hope, and the opportunity of some sort of future afterwards - it might have been acceptable, but as it stands, I cannot see any way that such a punishment cannot be considered unimaginably cruel and unusual. I say this having lived through it, and while I have had perhaps less trauma than most, I have suffered in ways that I would never have been able to even imagine before. That's why I am testifying here today - a lesson should be learned from what was done to me and to all the other Red Ones, and we need to be aware of that lesson to ensure that we never again allow a policy of such cruelty to be used as a solution for a problem, no matter how hard to solve, in our society. Thank you for letting me be heard.

ARBITER: This commission thanks you for your willingness to testify, and for the unflinching thoroughness of your testimony here today. It will provide us all with much to think about as this process moves forward. As indicated before, your sentence is hereby commuted, and you have been assigned a date for conversion, to revert your original fur color, provide a proprietor's stripe, and exchanged to an equivalent regulator. It is with regret that this commission is unable to offer a return to male status, but as you so eloquently pointed out, there is an intractable social issue at play, and with the retirement of the Penitent Conversion Program, it is one that will become even more pressing, and will require every current female to play a part, albeit one that this commission hopes will be far more acceptable and humane. This is not a problem that will be solved overnight, and as you also pointed out, there are some who will be irrevocably affected as a result of this grave societal misstep. However, we must do what we can, and so this commission will continue to her testimony until the full truth of what transpired in this program is laid out transparently for everyone to see, allowing us all to move forward, with perhaps heavy hearts but with open eyes, as we try to find our way through to a future where such abuses of basic rights, by individuals or governments, are not allowed to take place. Thank you very much for your time.

MODERATOR: We will now take a short recess before hearing the testimony of Prisoners 4177 and 3109.

--Current Record Ends : Position 46779 : Record Completeness Verified--

--For subsequent testimony in this specific commission report (Direct Accounts of Penitents), please refer to Transcripts #3465372 to 3465421 --