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Dorley…the Final Frontier…

These are the Voyages of Alan Mallow

His continuing mission?

To expunge his toxic ways.

To seek out a new life and a new identity

To Boldy be Basemented like Many Men have been Basemented Before…

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Stardate -363.5715 – The Basement – Programme Day Two

   “Alright, boys, this is something we’re trying out for the first time. We have a…unique…situation with your intake, and therefore we’re trying something different.”

   Maria stood at the front of the rec room, a portable display sitting next to her displaying the title slide of a PowerPoint. The title simply read “The Programme” in bold white text, with a plain purple background. After we had left the dining room, the girls had made us wait about ten minutes while they set up the monitor and six chairs for us to sit in. Steph had shown up, clearly having finished with her morning classes, and had taken up a position close to me, which I assumed was either to ensure I didn’t try anything, or for some other reason that I couldn’t grok. She didn’t say a word, but she did smile at me, which just confused my reading of her further. Was she a bitch, or was she trying to be my best friend?

   Arthur had been escorted out of his cell during this time, and was currently sitting in his chair looking annoyed, a pair of girls I didn’t recognise watching him closely as he slouched in his seat. The older east Asian lady continued her presentation, her gaze panning around our group as if she was waiting for something.

   “As you’ve all no doubt been made aware of by Mister Martins, he and his brother, Ned, were both candidates for a different intake of candidates to our programme. You are not the first group to pass through our system, although we are trying a new strategy this year with your intake.”

   “You mean to say you’ve kidnapped others?” Katsuro asked, raising an eyebrow. “If that is the case, and Ned Martins was indeed one of your prior victims or patients or whatever, then why has Ted never been contacted by his brother? If you’re telling the truth, and we are not going to be killed or otherwise silenced after this ordeal, then how come one of our…intake…has not seen or heard from his identical twin for nearly four years?”

   “I cannot tell you what I do not know,” said Maria, her face impassive. “Ned Martins did successfully complete our program and has since been released, but I do not presently know his whereabouts. We don’t worry about people who don’t matter to us anymore. Ned is gone, and I can’t tell you anything else.”

   “You’re lying,” Ted said, defiant. “I know my brother, and I know he was here. You did something to him, and you know that you’re not telling me everything. You and your…cabal…destroyed our life. We were legitimate businessmen trading in-”

   “Oh, I know what you were trading, Mister Martins,” Maria said, aiming a remote at the screen. She paged through a couple of slides before arriving at an image of what appeared to be some sort of shipping manifest. “This was, I believe, the manifest for the delivery you and your brother were performing when we took him in. We got the delivery too, and it was certainly anything but “legitimate business”.”

   She moved to the next slide, and I felt my face go pale. I had tried not to imagine what sort of illegal porn Ted would be dealing to get the attention of these girls. But even if I’d done so, I could never have imagined the sort of depraved filth that Maria had just pulled up. The woman cycled through a few more slides, each worse than the last, before she mercifully returned to the title card.

   “Ted…” said Ewan, his face white. “Please tell me that wasn’t what you were handing out. Tell me those images aren’t…real.”

   “Oh, I can assure you, those files were all from one of the six eight-terabyte flash drives we recovered after our partially successful recruitment attempt four years ago. We made sure to track down the source and anonymously report them to the authorities, but we archived the contents in case Mister Martins here was captured successfully and brought into the programme. Now, while Mister Martins was not complicit in the production of these materials, and in many cases was not in direct contact with their creators, he was distributing them to a minimum of sixteen unique parties on campus, and was making quite a significant profit margin too.”

   Ted’s face was bright red, and he his gaze could have burned holes in steel. He glared at Maria; hatred etched into his face.

   “So what? I found images of some controversial stuff on the dark web. And I sold them to some people who had an interest in it. I wasn’t harming nobody. You bitches just don’t like the fact that I was making money from material you consider to be vulgar.”

   “Mister Martins,” Maria said, looking mildly disgusted. “First I’d like to point out that the images on display were more than just ‘vulgar’. The people in them? I doubt they consented to be treated that way, nor do I have any reason to believe they were willingly performing those acts. Secondly? Some of those images are of children. I don’t care how few qualms you have about certain types of banned pornography, but there are some lines that can never be crossed. Finally, we had other reasons for pulling you in, and I know you’ve avoided mentioning those reasons to your intake.”

   “Fuck you,” Ted hissed, trying to rise from his seat. Nessa pushed him back down, coming up behind him and pushing down on his shoulders. “Get off me! I didn’t do that shit; it was a frame job!”

   “So you deny sexually assaulting your fourteen year old cousin when you were eighteen?” Maria asked casually, her tone conveying more than a little bit of anger. “We’ve already heard your brother confess to his part in that assault, at least when he was still here. Both of you got drunk on your birthday, and assaulted your cousin who was staying with your family while she went to school in your area, no? Your parents were out, and you very thoroughly ensured that her story was never corroborated with any evidence, didn’t you? I believe you took turns holding her down and muffling her cries for help as you each had your way with her. She committed suicide a year later after the court case against you two was dismissed because of your wilful and meticulous disposal of any evidence. Of course, your parents didn’t want to pay for your college fees after the entire ordeal made them pariahs with the rest of your family, so you ended up performing that vile business to fund your degrees.”

   “Jesus Christ, Ted,” I said, looking at him in disgust. He looked…beaten. Like he had just been violated. “She’s not telling the truth, right? You…you cannot possibly have done something like-”

   Ted hugged his arms around his head and doubled over, his face touching his knees. He began to sob, while me, Ewan, and Katsuro stared at him in shock. Danny was also looking at Ted with a weird expression that I couldn’t quite read, and Arthur…Arthur looked amused.

   “Hah! So the conspiracy loon is also a goddamn rapist who enjoys a little bit of incest, huh?” barked the arsonist, giggling slightly. “I wouldn’t have seen that coming. Come on now, you can’t possibly be upset about a bit of sexual experimentation? I mean, no offence to your cousin, but she probably had the time of her-”

   “SHUT! UP!”

   Ted’s angered shout rang through the room, and Arthur mercifully stopped before anyone could work up the courage to try and throttle him to death. Ted glared at the older boy, who gazed back with a mix of shock and amusement. I became consciously aware that several of our minders had put their hands onto their taser grips and were focusing intently on Ted and Arthur. The tension in the room was palpable.

   “Mister Martins, I’m not going to try and explain why what you did was wrong,” Maria said cautiously. “But I will ask one thing. Do you regret what you did? Do you feel any shame over your appalling action?”

   “You have no idea how much I regret what happened,” Ted said, his voice shaking. “Ellie was like a sister to me. I don’t even remember what happened that night, not clearly. I was drunk, more drunk that I’ve ever been. I don’t know what prompted me and Ted to do what we did. I only remember bits and pieces. Fuck, we were drunk when we cleaned up the evidence too, I don’t even remember doing that clearly. But we hurt her, and we were both too scared of the consequences to admit we had any recollection of that night. She wouldn’t…she wouldn’t speak to us, not even at the trial. And when we were ultimately favoured by the law, when our cowardice sent her off that cliff…we tried to forget. To move on. But we could never forgive ourselves.”

   “Mister Martins...we’re not here to punish you for what you did. The same goes for all of you. The things you boys have done span a spectrum of toxic masculinity. Mister Scott used his skills with computers to invade the privacy of many women when they were in places they thought they were safe. Mister Malloy behaved in a distinctly rude and abusive way towards women who were trying to find a community they could find happiness within, simply because he felt threatened by their presence in a space he considered to be male-dominated. Mister Ishihara caused severe physical harm to a woman who was close to him, and while he certainly does not have a history of similar actions or unacceptable behaviour in quite the same way as the rest of you, he does have his own traumas linked to the incident that qualify him under our intake requirements. Gibson and Clifford have committed crimes against vulnerable minorities that they were motivated to do through their indoctrination by the toxic culture of the alt-right.”

   “So, what?” Danny said, softly. “We’re damned because of our politics? Because of our democratically permitted opinions? Because we’re men who see the gays and transsexuals perverting our children and our society?”

   “You’re not damned, Danny,” said Monica softly. “But you have been led astray. The groups you have been taught by the group you were part of to fear and hate? The same people you regret hurting? They have just as much right to believe in their freedom of expression as you have to disagree with them. It’s not your politics that concern us. It’s that you used your politics as a weapon to hurt and kill.”

   “So what?” I said, looking directly into Maria’s eyes. She looked back, steady and calmly. “You girls find people like us- toxic men or whatever you want to call us- and you make us better? What gives you the right to do this? And what makes you think whatever you plan to do will work on us?”

   “We can’t promise that all of you will end up better people. While most years we have only one or two washouts- those who do not respond to even our most intense therapy- we sometimes end up with as many as three or four who we cannot reform. You’re not the first people to pass through here, and all of our graduates have left our supervision alive and fully reformed. They might as well be new people, and our methods have a near-guaranteed success rate.”

   “And what methods are those?” Ewan asked, strangely flat. He seemed to have lost his stomach for further joking or snarking. “You put something in our bellies. Is that part of our treatment?”

   “We have placed a dissolving implant in your bellies that is meant to partially inhibit your natural aggressive tendencies that are inherent in men at a biological level,” responded Maria, switching to a slide that showed a graphic of a small pellet dissolving beneath the skin and releasing some sort of drug into the blood vessel laden muscle layer beneath. “It’s called Goserelin, and it’s usually used to inhibit luteinising hormone production in the pituitary gland to treat prostate cancer. The effects on your bodies should be minor. At best, you may feel a little weaker, and you will have a harder time getting an erection. Other than that, the drug will harmlessly pass out of your bodies via your urine.”

   “So, what?” asked Ted bitterly. “You stick your magic drug under our skin, and give us therapy? This is what you did to my brother that made him avoid me for at least four years?”

   “You’ll be down here for at least a year. At the end of that period, if you have managed to change, and this is something we’ll be able to monitor accurately, then we will take you out of the basement. Right now, you are all very far away from being at that point. You’re all very lucky to have this level of knowledge this early. Due to Mister Martins having a unique link to a former graduate of the programme, we have had to switch up our timetable somewhat. The next week will be spent performing a series of initial evaluations. Some of you haven’t had a chance to talk in private with your sponsors, who are here to both ensure your continued obedience and to also serve as a mentor to you as you work your way towards betterment. You will also be undergoing a routine medical examination where we will be taking a sample of sperm for analysis. In addition, we’re also going to be regularly giving you vitamin shots to make up for the lack of sunlight in the basement.”

   “And if we refuse?” scoffed Arthur, crossing his arms and smirking. “If we like the way we are? If we think that you’re all a load of fucking dykes who’re too scared of us to be in the same room without a wimpy stun gun?”

   “Then you’ll wash out of the programme,” Maria responded, frowning. “And while that doesn’t mean death, there are some fates worse than death. Trust me, you’ll want to do things our way, and avoid that consequence at all costs. You’re already on your first strike, Arthur. You get to three, you have one chance to claw your way back onto thin ice. But then you’re gone.”

   She turned to our sponsors. “I think we’ll give all of them a chance to mull this over in their rooms. If you need to, talk with them privately. But we’re done with today’s festivities. As for all of you “men”, I’d like to officially welcome you all to The Basement Under Dorley Hall.”

   And with that, she left, taking Arthur with her. Steph nudged me in the back, and said something about moving, but I was still trying to process the last thing she had said. Dorley Hall. The weird selective admission dorm on the very edge of campus. The dorm that was part of the Royal College of Saint Almsworth campus.

   That was where this illegal torture dungeon was? Under a fucking girls dorm???

   Christ, if I suddenly got a second chance at life, I was going somewhere as far away from Almsworth as possible. Somewhere nice, like the University of Bedfordshire. I might get a shit education there, but at least I wouldn’t get fucking kidnapped.

…

…oh god, did they have one of these places there too? Was every university in the UK like this? Dear god, was anywhere safe from these people?

   I swallowed my sudden paranoia, finally started listening to Steph’s increasingly annoyed requests for me to get off my ass, and filed out of the rec room and towards my bunk. Steph apparently wanted to have a chat with me, and I was hardly in a position to refuse.

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   “So, what’s next? The university is behind this whole operation as part of some sort of government funded social experiment? Or maybe it’s the work of a cabal of influential government higher-ups and rich businessmen, some of whom have an alien snake in their head?”

   “Christ, Alan,” Steph said, closing the door of my room behind us. “You sound worse than Ted right now. Also, that last one was really specific. I assume it was some sort of reference?”

   I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Well look at that! Finally, I make a reference today to a sci-fi property without getting corrected by someone who thinks they know better!”

   “Huh. I’m assuming Christine contacted you then?” Steph asked, walking over to my desk, and sitting down on the edge. I collapsed back on my bunk, and squeezed my eyes shut. “She’s only trying to help you, Alan. You have to realise that gender isn’t a barrier that stops you from liking only a certain list of things.”

   “Not now,” I groaned, putting my arm over my eyes. “Look, I just found out that the dorm that sits on the edge of campus and which I’ve been walking past on my way to and from the bar every week for the last two years is secretly hiding a feminist torture dungeon under it, and that nobody on campus knows about it other than perhaps the people in charge of the university.”

   “I can assure you that we’re not sanctioned by the uni,” Steph commented, amused. “The amount of red tape it takes for the uni to so much as issue a student concessions card would be minuscule compared to the amount of paperwork we’d need to file to run this operation with the approval of the faculty. Besides, they couldn’t afford the bills, not without pissing off their researchers by slashing their grants.”

   “Steph, why are you here?”

   She snorted. “Allegedly? To help you process what Maria told all of you.”

   I sat up, and frowned. “No. I didn’t mean in this room right now. Why do you do this. Sponsoring or whatever you call it. You don’t strike me as prison guard material, and you look a little young to be a registered psychologist.”

   She smiled, the expression surprisingly genuine. “Because I see the person you could be. You’re a smart kid, Alan. Your grades are in the dumps, but I’ve seen your grades from your A-levels. You did well enough to get into Almsworth. Hell, you got the highest maths and computer science scores of your graduating class. But then you had one bad lecture, and you began acting out against your best interests. If you could put aside your issues with nerdy women in science fiction social settings for once, and let your smarts prevail, you could be so much better.”

   I tried to come up with a response, but I could see she was being genuine. I thought about what she said. I knew girls only used my hobbies to get close to me so they could hurt me. Steph hadn’t shown any sort of interest in sci-fi, so at the very least she wasn’t like Christine, even if they were clearly in collusion. But she clearly thought that it was wrong for me to try and protect my community, even if they had made it clear my protection was considered unnecessary. Was it possible that she was right, and I did have a problem? I remained lost in thought for some time, barely registering Steph closing the door behind her as she left the room.

   Was I the problem?

   Had I been wrong the whole time?

   …was resistance to Dorley’s insidious mind games…futile?

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   The rest of the first week passed by without any more of my world being ripped out from under my feet. The day after Maria’s presentation, our sponsors escorted us into some sort of examination room, sterile and white, where a nurse who was surprisingly careful to not do anything without proper consent- I was half expecting her to be some sort of black market med school reject with a tray of rusty scalpels and an exaggerated German accent the way things had been going so far- did a cursory examination of my genitals, and asked me to go behind a screen and produce a sperm sample. They even had…uh…material to assist me, although thankfully it was all very tame, and nowhere near like what Maria had shown of the stuff Ted used to sell. Ewan described it as “the sort of shit he watched when he was seventeen and new to the world of internet porn”. I didn’t want to hear any more details after that, and quickly made a retreat out of the showers and back to the rec room.

   When we weren’t having our genitals inspected, or jacking off into a small sample container, we were basically left to our own devices. I spent most of my time on the couch either watching the bizarrely calming brain-rot that passed for television in this hellhole, or reading one of the books from the cabinet full of books. Ewan usually joined me, remarking that Danny and Arthur- who had staked out the tables in the middle of the room- were genuinely scarier than the girls.

   “I’m telling you, even if Danny is more receptive to change, he and Arthur are just looking for a chance to get the drop on our watchers,” Ewan confided one afternoon on the fourth day of our confinement. “And since they can’t easily do that, they’re going to get frustrated, and eventually come to target us for a beatdown. The other two aren’t going to get it as bad as us. Katsuro spends most of his time in his room talking with Indira, and Ted hasn’t come out of his room since Maria spilled the beans. I can hear him sobbing through the wall at night. He’s a wreck right now.”

   “So what?” I asked, turning to the next page of my book, and trying not to be annoyed at the interruption. “You and me- the wimpy guys with the computer skills- band together against a guy who looks like he could slam-dunk a basketball into the hoop without the prerequisite leap, and a psychopath with an anger management problem?”

   “I mean…I don’t know much about Star Trek, but don’t ships fight better as a fleet or something?”

   “Ewan, first off, two ships does not count as a fleet,” I said, putting my book down and frowning. “Secondly, last I checked, neither of us was an interstellar vessel with an antimatter reactor, tritanium hull plating, energy shields, particle beam weaponry, and photon torpedoes.”

   “OK, maybe that was the wrong analogy,” Ewan said, bemused. “But my point is that it’s better for us to be a pair of wimps who stand together than a pair of lone wimps who’ll get twice as much of a beating than if we split it between the two of us.”

   “I hate to say it, Ewan,” I said, shaking my head. “But your perverted mind may be right. Yeah, let’s split the bruises between us. Less pain, more gain, huh?”

   “Ah, see, I knew you’d…wait, hey! You stop the pervert shit, or I’ll give you some bruises of my own making, you hear?”

   On the fifth day, Katsuro made a reappearance from wherever he’d been hiding (what was I talking about? He was clearly in his room, there wasn’t anywhere else you could get privacy around here besides the cells), and joined us for breakfast. Bizarrely, he seemed to be genuinely cheerful as he ate the thin oat porridge that was the meal of the day that morning. When Arthur made remarks about him “acting like some sort of overly cheerful cross-eyed fag” he didn’t even lose his smile as he told Arthur where he could stick his colourful language.

   That day, we also got our vitamin shots, as promised. Steph administered mine, the needle stinging as it went into my rear end. Steph was extremely professional about it, and when it was done, she asked if I needed anything to make my time down here slightly less monotonous. I didn’t need to think about it very long.

   “If you can put some decent sci-fi in my entertainment library, I’ll be OK with the injections. Just, please, don’t put dystopian television in the folder marked sci-fi unless it’s actually sci-fi?”

   She said she’d do what she could, and I could definitely live with that.

   On day six, right after breakfast, and while me and Ewan were having a shower, Arthur tried to accost the two of us, Danny seemingly uninterested in causing a problem for us. Apparently he was of the opinion that we were clearly a pair of “stinking pansy faggots” and that this meant he needed to remind us of what a true man was capable of. Fortunately for us, he forgot about the cameras. Unfortunately for us, he managed to get Ewan in a chokehold before Monica and Pippa burst into the showers to stop him. Fortunately for him, they couldn’t use the tasers in the sopping wet room. Fortunately for us, they had batons, and he got another couple of days in a cell once they dragged him out of the room. Pippa told me to head back to my room while she made sure Ewan was OK. I complied, and was soon back in my room.

   That evening, I got a message request from Steph via the consensus instance that Dorley seemed to have set up independently of the official distribution. I accepted the chat request, and began typing.

Alan: Steph, haven’t seen you for a few days! I was beginning to think that it was part of the mind games. You know, make me feel some sort of Stockholm Syndrome and worry about where my oh so wonderful captor had disappeared to.

Stephanie: Good evening to you as well. I see your time down there in the basement hasn’t gotten rid of that oh so wonderful comedy routine you have going.

Alan: I mean, at this stage? Not much else I can do. Can’t escape, can’t fight back, might as well make light of my situation while I still have all my organs.

Stephanie: Cute. Anyway, I just thought you should know I got approval to give you some additional entertainment options. Couldn’t quite get the higher-ups to approve any Star Trek- it didn’t quite meet the guidelines for what media we provide to you- but I did get four or five sci-fi shows and a couple of movies. Orphan Black, The Expanse- that was a hard sell, but I managed it-, Foundation, and some other stuff from the last decade or so. Probably nothing you haven’t already watched, but it’s surprisingly hard to find sci-fi which doesn’t have some sort of caveat that irks the bosses.

Alan: I…uh…thanks. I wasn’t expecting you to actually do something like that for me.

Stephanie: Alan, you’re the second intake I’ve sponsored. Compared to the last one, you’re a breath of fresh air. I’m grateful you’ve been as cooperative as you have been, given that you’ve been here for one week. To be honest, you’re doing way better than anyone could expect of you. Still, you are one of the less serious offenders in your intake, and your intake is nowhere near on the same level as some of our prior groups.

Alan: How long exactly has Dorley been doing this? It can’t have possibly been doing it for that long. Someone would have come along and exposed you by now for sure. You’ve probably been going for, what, three, four years?

Stephanie: I’m sorry Alan. I may think you’re a lot easier to deal with than the last intake I was assigned to, but we’re not at the stage where I can give you that kind of information. Like Maria said on day two, we usually take a lot longer to give you as much info as your intake has right now. Your very late arrival, and Ted’s presence has screwed up our usual timeline to a very large degree. All I can say is that I got here four years ago, and Dorley had a pretty good track record of reforming men like you at that point in time.

Alan: Damn. There goes my cunning plan to talk you into shutting down the cameras and unlocking all the doors between me and the exit.

Stephanie: Unfortunately, I’m not entranced by your manly wiles. My girlfriend would kill me if I was seduced into compliance by an intake.

Alan: Huh. I did not see you swinging that way. Guess my gaydar is defective.

Stephanie: And that’s where I end this conversation before it goes south for the winter. Talk to you soon, Alan. I’ll be down there tomorrow. Maria’s got some educational material for you boys, and I’m on babysitting duty to make sure none of you have a tantrum.

Alan: Ouch. I’m almost offended. See you then, I guess.

Stephanie disconnected from the chat

   I spent the next hour before lights out watching The Expanse and wondering if Steph had put some sort of subliminal encoding in the footage. If she had, there was no sign of it as I finally felt the pangs of my sci-fi craving going away for now. If this was Steph’s idea of a reward for good behaviour, I think I could deal with Dorley’s bullshit for a year. Hell, I could probably take three years if they’d throw in some TNG or DS9 and stop being so fascist about what met their standards for television.

   The next morning, I woke to someone pounding on my door. Groggily, I climbed out of bed and rubbed my eyes.

   “Alright, alright, I’m up!” I said, walking over to the door and unlocking the fingerprint lock. I swung the door open, ready to give Steph an earful for the rude awakening. “Jesus, Steph, you don’t have to hammer-”

   It wasn’t Steph.

   It was Ted. And he looked troubled.

   “Alan…can we talk?” he asked, sombrely. “I have something I want to talk about with you. In private.”

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