Stripped: Part 1

A Sapphic dystopian romance in three parts

When I opened my eyes, I was greeted by an unfamiliar mix of colors. Greens and browns and a yellow so vibrant it looked nearly poisonous. The air was crisp and chilly, the wind full of a rich dark smell I couldn’t identify. For a dizzying second, I couldn’t make sense of what I was looking at, the sensations zinging and pinging around the walls of my mind.

The surface beneath me was hard and rough. Something poked against the back of my ribs, unyielding. I was…uncomfortable. I had never been uncomfortable before in my life.

It was this shocking realization that spurred me into action. I leaned up onto my elbows and shook my long dark hair from my eyes. It was loose, another unfamiliar sensation. Usually it was slicked back in a sleek bun or pony, or held from my face by my permagoggles, the VR headsets we all wore at all times in the City. They fed us news and entertainment, a constant stream of distractions from our lives on the occasions we had to leave our projection pods to go out into the world. Keeper forbid we have a moment of boredom or a need to interact with each other face to face.

There was a substance sticking to the sleek fabric of my body suit, the only clothing I’d ever worn. It was made of a nanotech polymer that stretched and flexed as I grew. They were first placed on us when we were taken from our reprochambers by the nannybots who worked the natal wards, already equipped when we were handed to our parents at three days old.

The suit covered me from the base of my neck to my toes and fingertips, only the skin of my face exposed, and that rarely.

I brushed at some of the crumbling substance with my suit-covered hands, confusedly watching the brown shreds fall to the earth. I shifted my hips and realized that I lay on a layer of those crumbling and crunching brown shreds. Picking up a handful, I saw that some of the substance still clung to a branching skeleton, small fingerbones reaching from a thicker spine.

Leaves a voice whispered. I jumped and looked around me only to realize the voice had been in my head. A thought. I was so unused to my own brain supplying me with information rather than the AI housed in the chip embedded in my right forearm at birth that I hadn’t recognized it. Used to the tech I lived all twenty five years of my life surrounded by answering my every question and query before I could form it.

I was laying on a bed of dried brown leaves, surrounded by what I now saw were the trunks of tall trees softly shedding their yellow and orange and red leaves.

A forest that same thought-voice supplied. I was alone in a forest.

This must be one of those fancy hyper realistic holos Keeper Tech had started teasing during their morning City wide broadcast. But hadn’t they said those were still months away from release?

I shifted my body into a crouch, feeling even more unfamiliar sensations, even more of that discomfort. My body, unused to hard surfaces and temperatures that had not been engineered for my peak comfort, to movements that strained my muscles, was awash in aches and minor pains that flared red in my mind’s eye.

I stood to my full height, pushed strands of hair blowing around my face in the breeze, another word my mind supplied from that deep instinctual vault of knowledge I’d had little need to access before.

What the fuck was I doing alone in an actual, real forest?

The only forest I knew existed beyond the bounds of the City’s outer rim, a place I had never even dreamed of venturing. It was cut off from Keeper’s network, unable to connect to the systems that kept life in the City humming. A dark and lawless place full of hardship and strife, where a person had to work for survival.

How had I ended up here, alone and disconnected from Keeper?

I ran my left hand over my right forearm, searching for the familiar bump of my implant through my suit. It should have been just under the skin five inches below my wrist. That bump had been there since I was pulled from my reprochamber. It fed my biometric data into Keeper from that moment, alerting the system to something straining my body before I even noticed, and sending a message to both me and my doctor with exactly what was off.

But as my fingers swept over my forearm, there was nothing. Just smooth flesh uninterrupted.

My heart began to race. I wasn’t simply cut off from Keeper due to proximity. I had been severed completely from the whole fucking network, my literal lifeline. That chip didn’t just monitor my health data, it also acted as a back up for my memories, housed my identity information that connected to my bank account and granted me access to the areas of the City I frequented. It allowed me to browse the memory banks of the whole city, to pull up whatever information I needed simply by thinking it. I scanned it to access my projection pod and to activate my permagoggles. Without that chip, I was essentially locked out of my own life.

It hit me at once what must have happened.

I had been Stripped and dumped here, my assailents assuming I’d die from exposure or inability to fend for myself cut off from Keeper.

With a sinking feeling, I had to admit that they had been right.

Before I could spiral too much further into abject despair, I heard a crunch behind me.

“Who the hell are you and how the fuck did you end up in my corner of the woods?” A voice called out from the trees.

The woman was rangy. Tall and thin with a harsh cast to her long and narrow face. In the dappled yellow light, sunlight I realized when my eyes stung looking directly at it, that filtered through the falling leaves, her medium brown skin seemed to glow.

She stepped closer to where I stood frozen.

“W-who are you?” I asked, my voice emerging scratchy and hoarse.

“Lorella Dunn, Warden of the South Corner of these here woods. Again, who the hell are you?” The woman said, eyeing me warily. Her eyes were a dark brown that blended nearly seamlessly with her irises in the lowlight of the forest.

I swallowed, overwhelmed by her unobstructed eye contact and the strangeness of her appearance. She was dressed in separates that hung baggily on her wiry frame. Dark pants and a light brown jacket with a red and green checked collar. She stood with her booted feet apart, arms resting casually on the long metal object slung across her shoulders and resting against her stomach.

Rifle, the thought-voice supplied.

She tilted her head, clearly waiting for me to reply. Her hair, a few shades darker brown than her skin, was gathered in thin locs and tied at her nap in a long pony tail that shifted with her movements.

“M-Marnie 3J67O45C,” I said, stating my personal name and designation code. I lifted my right arm out of habit, waiting for Lorella Dunn (what kind of identification was that?) to match my movements so our chips could sync and gather each other’s data.

“You one of those City people?” Lorella asked, eyes still flitting over my body, hands firmly gripped on the handle of her rifle.

I let my right arm fall to my side as I nodded.

“You’re not from the City?” I asked, stating the obvious. There was no way this woman came from the same life I’d led.

“I told you, I’m the Warden of the South Corner of these woods, never stepped foot in that fucked up place,” the Warden said.

Fucked up place? I thought in confusion.

The City was a paradise. The people who lived there didn’t have to work unless they chose to. Those who did, the technicians and engineers and doctors and Keeper tenders, were rewarded handsomely and enjoyed an honored place in society.

All of our needs were met at all times with very little effort on our parts to get them. Any food you wanted could be printed in the comfort of your own home. Any place you wanted to visit could be accessed through the holos or sims stored in Keepers network. Since we mainly interacted with the other denizens of the City in VR, you could look like and be whoever you wanted to be.

Even sex could be had on demand. Well, simusex, a process that did not involve any actual skin to skin contact. Although there were bots you could employ if you wanted a bit more of a traditional experience. Some people even opted to have techless sex, although those people were viewed as deviants. Why choose an unenhanced experience when you could have one perfectly calibrated and optimized to bring you peak pleasure?

If you wanted a family, two or three or four parents and up to three children, you could register for one. Babies were distributed monthly to those who had chosen to have kids in their homes. If you didn’t want a human child, you could have a bot one, or a virtual one, or none at all. Nannybots were also provided to all homes with children. I, myself, was primarily raised by my Nannybot, Annette 700, who attended to my needs until I was old enough to enter school in my projection pod.

“The City is Utopia,” I said, parroting Keeper’s tagline without thought.

Lorella snorted and shook her head.

“So how’d you end up here, City girl?” she asked.

She nodded at my right arm, where I was unconsciously rubbing the spot my chip should have been with my left hand.

“Got Stripped?” she said, more a statement than a question.

I nodded and forced myself to stop rubbing the spot. Strippers were thieves who crept into the City from Outside, snatched citizens off the street and removed all of their tech, including their chips. Thankfully, my nanosuit repaired any damage to my body, so I didn’t feel a wound.

“Must have knocked you out and left you for dead when they got what they wanted,” Lorella said, echoing my thoughts.

“You don’t seem that surprised,” I said.

Lorella shrugged, her rifle shifting with the movement.

“You’re not the first Stripped City dweller I’ve found in my woods. Guess this is a favorite dumping ground,” she replied.

I was just wondering if she was going to leave me here when she gestured to the left with her head, grasp relaxing on her gun.

“Come on, City girl, I’ll take you to safety. It’s part of my job, afterall,” she said, and she turned on her heel, heading back the way she’d come.

“Call me Marnie,” I said as I tripped after her through the woods.

The soles of my suit had grips, but they were soft and flexible, suited for the little walking I did through the floating hallways of the City’s interwoven buildings. Every few steps, something would jam into the tender flesh of my feet, causing me to curse and grimace.

“People call me Rela,” The Warden threw over her shoulder.

“Rela,” I said, testing the strange syllables in my mouth. She grunted in acknowledgement.

I stared at the back of Rela’s head as if I could see through her skull to the thoughts beneath. It was disorienting not to have her basic information– occupation, if there was one, family unit, likes and interests and dislikes– immediately uploaded into my chip to facilitate conversation. I knew nothing about this woman leading me through these strange walls of trees that scraped at my flesh and tore holes in my suit, forcing the nanobots to constantly reform and repair the small stings.

I was too overstimulated by the sights and sounds and smells that surrounded me. The animals chirping and calling and singing and scurrying in the undergrowth. The warmth of the unfiltered and altered sunlight against my skin. The trickle of sweat down my back and between my breasts my suit was not built to absorb. No one in the City sweated. There was no need to exert yourself.

“I need to stop,” I gasped after maybe twenty minutes of walking over roots and up an incline. My thighs were burning and my feet throbbed from the rough treatment.

Rela turned to me with an exasperated huff.

“You City people are all the same. Soft. Weak,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Something flared in my gut at her dismissal. An emotion I had never had cause to experience before.

Was it anger? Frustration? It felt hot and twisty and made my insides feel like they were about to erupt.

“Listen, in the last few hours, or what I assume were hours, I was assaulted and Stripped, cast out from the only life I’ve ever known and left to fend for myself or die in these woods. I could be curled up in a ball crying my eyes out and waiting for death to take me right instead of following you to Keeper knows where. I think I’m doing pretty fucking fantastic all things considered,” I said, hurling my words at Rela with a ferocity I had never felt before.

I had never so much as raised my voice with any sort of emotion at another human being before. The City was about peace and safety for all inhabitants above all. Emotions were meant to be stirred internally, not expressed outwardly to another.

Rela’s eyes seemed to soften and she nodded.

“You certainly could be doing that,” she said, “I’ve seen it.”

She took the rifle from her shoulders and rested it against the trunk of a nearby tree, swinging the small pack from her back and rummaging in it before pulling out a metal canister and holding it out to me.

“What is that?” I asked, eyeing the canister skeptically.

Rela looked like she really wanted to roll her eyes at me again, but took a deep breath to restrain herself.

“It’s just water, Marnie,” she said, shaking the canister.

Something about hearing my name in her mouth sent a shiver down my spine. But I was too thirsty to investigate that sensation. Usually, my chip would alert me when my hydration dropped below optimal levels so I could replenish my fluids before I dipped into dehydration. Never before had I experienced the dry mouth and pounding headache of too little water.

I opened the canister and gulped the water down gratefully. It was lukewarm and tasted like metal, but it felt like euphoria as it went down my throat. I wiped my mouth with the back of my left hand and handed the bottle back to her.

“Thanks,” I said, voice less raspy after the drink.

Rela just nodded and put the canister back in her pack.

“Ready?” she asked. “It’s not much further, maybe another mile or so.”

I had never walked more than maybe a hundred yards unassisted before, so a mile might as well have been a marathon for me. Usually it was a few steps from my door to the conveyor belt walk ways that linked the lifts that took us throughout the City.

I tripped and scrapped my way along behind Rela, but I noticed her pace was slower than it had been. After what felt like an eternity, we reached a break in the woods and a shelter appeared.

It was a…cabin I think they’re called. A simple freestanding structure of four walls made from wood with a short tower on top. Two glass windows were fitted on either side of a wooden door that looked like it had once been painted red. The color had flaked off in chunks. The small porch held only a rocking chair and a pile of logs, and creaked under the weight of Rela’s boot when she stepped on it.

“You’ll stay here tonight while I can get word to the Mayor that another one of you was dropped here. They’ll be able to sort out a new home for you,” Rela said as she pushed open the door to her home.

A new home, because I couldn’t return to the City. No one without a chip was allowed through the gateways. Even if I told them I’d been Stripped, there would be no way for them to verify my identity without one.

I was stuck out here in this world full of uncomfortable sensations and crabby Wardens with strangely beautiful eyes.