Posted by Jamie on February 07, 2000 at 04:00:40:
THE LESSON
Chapter 3
‘Krissie, please take the rest of your clothing off, dear then come over to me.’ I had moved over to the gallows after donning a pair of simple UV glasses which would allow me to see what I was doing as I positioned the girl for her processing.
‘Oh God, do I have to take off my other things Sir?’ she pleaded.
‘Yes, please Krissie It is required that all girls be returned to the Selection School for their post death certification naked, so it is deemed best that they be that way for processing. Apart from that almost all clients prefer to kill their girl naked so while we do not want you to suffer the usual degree required of a girl enduring strangulation by noose, realism for your fellow student’s benefit should be maintained.’
The girl’s fingers trembled and fumbled with her clothing as she rendered herself naked for her death.
‘Thank you dear,’ I said turning back to the audience to make a further observation for their education.
‘Girls,’ I began, ‘you will have noticed how calm our first guest was in the face of her death. Oh she was terrified alright, no girl wants to be killed, but she had the benefit of three months careful training to help her endure what was required of her.
‘What we will do until the moment before we actually hang Krissie is to concentrate a camera on her face which will be displayed on one half of your screen while images of Gail in similar circumstances of stress on the other. Note how much better the training helped Gail endure than will Krissie be able to.’
‘Now, Krissie, we need to have the Matron who has been helping you cut your hair very short, if you don’t mind dear.’
The Matron had placed a red velvet cushion on the ground near the girl and stood ready with her implements.
‘Cut my hair?’ the girl cried as if loosing her lovely hair really could matter to a girl with ten minutes to live.
‘Please, honey,’ I said gently. ‘We need an uninterrupted view of your neck and the effect of the Micro-Pro-Sensor™ rope about it as you hang. Your hair will get in the way. Anyway, almost all girls who are culled by hanging have their hair very short as that is the way clients prefer them and we are after all trying to be faithful to the real thing for the benefit of our students.
‘But, but please, you can put it up.’
I was right, the girl was still concerned about her lovely hair.
‘Krissie, that would not be good enough in this case. We are setting the computer to allow you to drop just far enough to break a single link in your neck and in order to calculate that fall precisely the Micro-Pro-Sensor™ material has to have absolutely unfettered contact with the skin of your neck and throat to scan the structures. One lose hair could alter the analysis such that your neck is not broken and you will then remain conscious throughout your strangulation.’
‘Please girl,’ said the Matron, ‘kneel on the cushion so I can prepare you.’
‘Kneel?’ stammered the terrified teenager.
‘Yes, girl, kneel please. I am too short to reach your head properly and we do want you to look your loveliest don’t we?’
The girl’s legs almost gave way in her terror as she knelt before the Matron to have her hair cut to bare her long slender neck to the noose, a terror seen on one hundred and twenty thousand screens.
And what a tantalising sight it was as her hair fell away from that beautiful smooth column of femininity, each forty centimetre section of it dropping away like panels of a silken curtain to bit by bit reveal the long white slender perfection beneath.
Then the last of the fine light strands were removed with a brush from smooth bare shoulders and the woman shifted her position to the front of the girl to place the tip of her left hand fingers under the pretty chin and tilt her head back on that long slender neck.
‘Just some very light make up dear and you will be perfect,’ she cooed to the girl as she applied a light dry dusting to the lovely face.
She then had the girl stand again and taking a fine mist sprayer, she applied a film of cooling liquid all over the tall slim naked young body.
‘There was a murmur of obvious puzzlement amongst the girls so I thought I should explain why the mist was being applied to the girl’s flesh
‘Girls,’ I began, ‘the film of volatilising moisture you see Matron applying to Krissie’s body is to help keep her skin dry and pleasant to look at and touch. You see when a girl suffers asphyxiation her body temperature can be expected to rise very rapidly, particularly as things get bad for her.
‘In this case Krissie will be unconscious during the greater stages of her strangulation, but her body temperature will still rise very rapidly as that strangulation progresses. The spray cools a strangling girl’s skin and reacts with the moisture as she heats up such as to cause that moisture to vaporise rapidly thus keeping her temperature down.
‘As I said it will make her far nicer to look at as she dies and make her dead body much more pleasant to handle when it comes time to take her down from her noose.’
It was unfortunate that poor Krissie had to listen to these explanations, but there was no other way if the students were to be properly educated on the role of the Federation’s most beautiful girls in modern society.
And, as if the girl did not have enough visual stimulants to her terror, some attendant chose that moment to bring up from the pit below the stage the hospital gourney upon which I had earlier strangled Gail and in placing it next to the gallows, left no doubt in the screaming mind of the girl that it was there solely for the purpose of receiving her dead body.
I beckoned then to the girl to join me at the foot of the gallows platform which was visible to me alone, of course and when she at last arrived on shaking week knees I asked her to turn around and place her hands, wrists crossed, behind her back for binding.
‘Oh, God no, please, not that!’ she whispered, near to utter panic now.
‘Krissie, it is the law that a girl be bound for hanging,’ I said in a voice which could be transmitted throughout the auditorium. This demonstration was for the education of the girls in the audience after all. ‘The rule is really to cover those cases where the girl is to die only of strangulation and is to stop her injuring herself as that is happening to her or where, as in your case, her neck is only partly broken with the spinal cord still in tact. Now your hands please, dear.’
The girl placed her hands behind her back then, wrists crossed and long slim fingers shaking in terror as I rendered her helpless with a red silk cord handed my be the Selection Chairman.
I then assisted the girl up the five steps careful she did not stumble and hurt herself in both her weak limbed state and inability to see the steps anyway.
At the top, I paused for a moment to let her catch her breath and then turning her to me, placed the noose over her head leaving it loose about her neck and, ordering her to stand still, head nicely up, stood back.
‘Now girls,’ I said again addressing the students, ‘I want you to watch the image of Krissie’s neck and throat which is now full screen on your monitors.
‘The noose is entirely self activating and self adjusting. Krissie will initially feel it moving up and down the length of her neck, very lightly, a gentle pleasant caress actually, as it begins its analysis of her neck structures. It will then begin to tighten a little as it begins to feel her neck for the best place to settle along its length for her hanging. You will be able to see the movement of the sensor noose as it travels along her neck pressing slightly into her flesh, particularly at her soft throat.
‘This stage will not hurt her at all, and indeed will be pleasant or would be if our beautiful young guest was not facing her death from it. By the way, Krissie is now within a zonal force field and so I can leave her without her being otherwise restrained beyond her hand ties.’
A murmur went around the huge space as the girls pointed excitedly to their screens as the skin of Krissie’s soft smooth neck and throat showed the passing of the noose, a sort of shallow wave caressing the white skin.
Then the movement stopped, shifted up very slightly and finally pressed gently into her neck at the spot it had determined best to kill her according to the program file I had entered earlier that day.
Krissie would have felt it press into her neck, just enough to feel the pressure, enough to hear her blood pounding. Enough to hear the excitement in the auditorium increase.
Enough to know she was now going to be killed.
‘Girls.’ I interrupted their chatter, ‘girls, you will have noticed that the noose has now determined the best place on Krissie’s neck to carry out its task. It will have decided that the vertebrae lying just below where you see the flesh of her neck depressed is the best one to use to cause a minor fracture and produce reasonably early loss of awareness.
‘As I have said, when Krissie is hung, she will remain conscious fro about half a minute although all girls are so different in make up even the sensors and computer cannot be precise in these things. It is possible she may have to suffer a bit linger than we want her to, but that cannot be helped.
‘What is important is that she does have a period of consciousness so you can observe her as she hangs in pain for that brings on quite different reaction from a girl than when she is strangling whilst unconscious.
‘You should observe her face and body signals closely during both these stages of her progress towards her death if you are to fully understand this method of processing, highly desirable knowledge should you be called upon to give yourselves up to it over the next couple of years.’
With that I turned back to the trembling pale girl and placed my hands on her lovely smooth waist.
“Krissie,’ I said smiling at her, ‘it is going to be done now, so just be brave for a while longer and it will be all over.
‘I am holding your legs to steady you as the platform you are standing on rises to the hight the computer has determined as being best for you. I will keep in touch with your legs as you rise. The platform will stop at the point it has calculated and you will be kept there for a moment or two until it determines the best time to release you.
‘Now it is important for you to try to breath in and out normally while you are waiting to fall for the computer will be analysing the amount of oxygen in your blood through the noose about your neck. It wants to release you at a point where you will just start to fight for air before you fall unconscious so that the girls can see what it looks like when a girl actually strangles in a noose while still aware and in pain. We do not want you to suffer too long but some seconds will be necessary, I am afraid.’
I removed my IR glasses and the apparatus disappeared.
‘Oh, God!’ the girl murmured.
It was to be the last words that this exquisitely beautiful girl ever uttered although not the last sounds.
The platform slowly rose, or that is what the girl would have felt and I saw, but to thousands of awe struck girls, Krissie would have seemed to rise as if levitated to a hight of just over one and a half metres an there stop in mid air.
The noose was applying light increasing to moderate upward pressure on her neck to keep her head up and slightly to the left, the position it had determined as being the best neck angle when she was jerked to a stop at the bottom of her short fall.
The effect was rather breathtaking, if I may use that expression, for the result to all in the giant room was the image of a beautiful girl rising into the air, her neck slowly lengthening as she seemed to tilt her head up and to the side on its beautiful slender length, as if she was proudly displaying its fabulous, long white curving sweep to her audience.
Then the platform with a whoosh! and at a speed way in excess of a mere 32’/sec/sec drooped away to stop level with the platform again while Krissie, a gasp through her narrowed throat the only visible sign anything had changed, seemed to remain stationery before Newton’s Law took her in charge and she fell the noose still holding her neck and head where it wanted them.
Her body fell through my hands, her smooth dry skin hissing briefly under my touch and then she came to a jerking trembling stop, the wet sound of a neck vertebrae letting go inside the column, a strangled cry of pure white pain forcing its way through the noose closing out her life and releasing an agony to consume her whole being.
I steadied the sway of her lovely hanging form then stepped back from the girl so that all could see her suffering and death in its entirety.
Her body’s immediate reaction to the horror which was being inflicted on it was to react to the pain of its broken neck, a long rapid shiver travelling from her parted lips to the extremities of her fingers and toes, the reaction of a girl in so much pain that she would not have been able to cry out after her first gasp even if she was not hanging strangling on the end of a rope.
Then, exactly at the moment the computer had calculated the amount of blood oxygen left to her, she began to fight for air, the pain from her terrible injury melding with that of the bruising of her long fragile neck and delicate throat, all being overwhelmed by the desperate need for air, for life a pain born in her breast and welling to dominate her universe.
Her body during this stage was perfectly still, did not move a muscle from where I had steadied her, as if utter stillness would hide her from the pain, would tell her body it did not need air to stay alive.
The great gathering of watchers was utterly silent as the drama of a young life being taken developed.
Then there was the slightest trembling, most noticeable on her lips if one was watching her face, lips which had now started to take on a darker hue, especially, as I had so often noticed on a strangling girl, the demarcation line between where the pink meets the white of her face.
This trembling was immediately followed by her body stilling again as she blessedly drifted into darkness although, of course still very much alive.
As she hung quietly strangling for the next two minutes the only movement, apart from the pulse throbbing in her neck, was the slow opening of her lips to reveal her dainty little tongue as it appeared dark pink behind her lovely even white teeth.
Then those classic pre death convulsions of an asphyxiating girl began, convulsions which gently shook her long limp body causing the arms to sway a little and her long shapely legs to take on a gentle oscillation finally slowing to the rhythmic swing as would a pendulum.
Then a further period of stillness, the unmistakable pause in a girl’s body movement as she awaits death to claim her, as if her brain has decide it is hopeless and her body is yet to give life just one more tragic, futile try.
Death came then to Kristen Helen Burke, one day into her eighteenth year of life.
Her body stiffened as if some frightful news had just been given her, her fingers stretched out long and slim, just as her lovely smooth legs seemed to try to reach the invisible floor, toes pointed down below the curve of her feet, sweeping fine bones delicately bridging up to slim ankles, her calves moulded into the classic shape of classically beautiful feminine legs by the muscle tension controlling them.
Her huge blue eyes, speckled now with the tiny red spots of her agony, looked out unseeing in the last moments of life then dulled in the first moments of death.
And finally the ultimate heralds of feminine death from strangulation, her death throes body reactions always different from her earlier convulsions born of advanced asphyxia for now the girl’s body is lifeless and there is nothing so limp as the hot body of a girl recently strangled to death.
That Krissie was dead there was no doubt for soon all body trembles and shudders slowed and stopped to leave her long limp form utterly still save for a residual sway from the unseen rope still caressing her neck.
And for the next fifty years in which I worked for the Bureau Of Female Population control I wondered whether any of the girls who clapped as Krissie's dead body was taken down were themselves ever called upon to die in the interests of the State.
I expect many were.