Chapter 5
Showdown
Chapter Description: Austin confronts the director of the Panda Group program
(Thanks to Areat for some great suggestions that helped with this chapter)
Back home the day after the sleepover, Austin started to put things together. Something had come over him at the sleepover, an overwhelming sense of acceptance, a desire to just go along with what was happening instead of thinking too hard or resisting.
Now that he’d noticed it, though, he was aware that he felt it all the time, just less strongly. That was why he’d given up on his investigation. He’d squandered weeks, and now Brett was being switched to the special class and he might have lost his chance to help his friend. Even now, he could feel that pressure in his head, a strong sense that whatever was happening couldn’t be that bad, so he should just let it happen. All of Sunday, Austin fought it, holding on to his determination. He wrote down everything, in detail, on his computer. He considered sending it out, to the whole school, or the media, or someone, but it was so wild he feared it wouldn’t be believed.
Instead on Monday, instead of going to his first class, he hurried to the wing with the special class - the room both Brett and Zach were in - and looked around, avoiding the classroom itself, but trying to find some other point of access. Sure enough, on the opposite side of the hallway was an office of some kind. Gathering his courage, Austin barged in. A secretary looked up from her desk.
“Is this the office for the special ed class?” he demanded
She nodded. “This is the office for the Panda Group, yes.”
“I know what you’re doing, and you need to stop it. And fix my friends. I’ve seen everything, I have evidence, and I’ll tell the media if you don’t."
“Would you like to speak to the director?” the secretary offered. When Austin agreed, she gestured to a door. Inside was a nice office, a desk covered in paper, and a woman in her fifties.
“Hello, Austin,” she said. “Ever since we I your IP show up visiting our honeypot website, I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to come see me.”
Austin repeated his threat. “You need to fix my friends, or I’m going to tell everyone what you’re doing.”
The director laughed, not the least bit intimidated. “Austin, have you always been such a big fan of Pokemon?” she asked, gesturing at his shirt. Austin looked down, and sure enough, inexplicably, he was wearing a bright red shirt with a big yellow Pikachu on it.
While he was staring at it, trying to remember why he’d worn it, she stood up and crossed the room to him. “I don’t appreciate being threatened, so I think it’s time we’re clear who’s in charge here,” she told him, firmly gripping his shoulder. “Pants off, and sit cross-legged on the floor.”
“I’m not…” Austin started.
“Now,” she told him, firmly. The feeling that she was the adult in charge, and he was just a kid, was overwhelming, a nd Austin found him doing as she said, pulling off his jeans revealing white briefs beneath, and sitting cross-legged on the floor like she’d said. She sat in the chair he’d been in, near him and towering over him. “Very good,” she said. “I think it’s clear that you’re in no position to be making threats. We’ll get you across to hall to play with your friends very soon, but I think we have some things to discuss first.”
“How did you get me in these clothes?” Austin asked, indicating the shirt and underwear.
She raised an eyebrow. “You put them on yourself this morning,” she said. “Did you think how you acted at Brett’s little party was an anomaly? Everyone’s been treating you differently for weeks,” she told him, "and you’ve been accepting it, just like you’re supposed to.”
Austin thought back through the couple weeks since that first visit to Brett’s, combing his memories carefully. He’d been thinking of himself as chatting with Brett because no one else would, but now that he looked back on it, he remembered everyone else giving them space, the two little mascots sitting together being ignored.
There had been changes at home, too, that he hadn’t thought much about. He’d been struggling to keep up with his chores on top of everything else, so it had seemed perfectly normal when his parents had called a family meeting - all four of them, Austin, his parents, and his little brother, Clay. When they’d taken his chores and given them to his twelve year old little brother, and given him some simpler ones that needed supervision, he’d just been relieved and hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
When his mother had taken over doing his laundry for him, that had been a relief too. Now that he thought back carefully, he hadn’t even noticed that, when she’d done his laundry, she’d replaced all his boxer shorts with tighty whities and started putting shirts like the one he was wearing into his drawers, and he’d worn them without noticing and hadn’t even made the connection with what had happened to Brett. He hadn’t even minded walking around the house wearing just those briefs, unconcerned about whether his parents, his little brother, or someone passing by outside saw him.
Just a couple days earlier, he’d been watching TV - a kid’s cartoon, he remembered, though it had seemed so enthralling at the time - when Clay came in, kicked him off the couch, and insisted on his own show. Austin remembered sitting cross-legged on the floor in just his briefs, watching the show, not fully understanding it, but feeling like he had to do what Clay told him - much the way he felt right now.
“It wasn’t our plan,” she said, “but you stole Brett’s transponder, and after that it was inevitable.”
“Transponder?” he asked.
“The panda pins we give all our participants. It broadcasts the subliminal field to change how you act, and to make other people treat you accordingly.”
Austin frowned. “Then how come I noticed Brett was acting different?”
She grinned, a real, warm smile this time. “Oh, good question. We were puzzled too. It was a mystery until Cynthia remembered that you told her you were friends with Zach before his change. You have lots of memories of time with him, but they’ve all been changed so that you remember him always acting like a little kid, right?” Austin thought back to his memories of Zach before he’d joined Panda Group, and it was true that a lot of them would have made more sense if Zach had been a regular teen, but all Austin could remember was Zach acting like he did now. “That’s a lot of changes, and it put some stress on your brain. And then, on top of that, you missed the first month of Brett’s exposure. Together, that was enough that you resisted the suppression effect. It’s a useful lesson, and we’re glad you found it, so we can fix it in the next batch of transponders."
“But enough about that,” the director continued. “Let’s talk about what to do with you. If you hadn’t come here, you would have been ready to join them in a couple more weeks. But, in light of your threat, we’re going to have to step things up.” She leaned forward, knitting her fingers together. “Between forcing yourself into this by stealing that pin and then barging in here, you’ve caused some problems, so you’re going to make it up to me by helping us make some progress on our research.”
She stood up, walked back to the desk, and opened a drawer. “I’d like your cooperation, so I’m going to offer you a choice. The transponders always work better with people who cooperate."
Austin frowned skeptically. “Why would anyone cooperate?”
“Your friend Brett did,” she told him. “Not consciously, of course. But he always wanted to let other people take charge of his life, so it was easy to give him a little nudge further in that direction. We do, however, have an extra strength transponder, for people who need more of a shove.”
“What, you want to know if your extra strength thing is strong enough?” Austin growled.
She laughed. “Oh, I think we’ve already seen how well it works for you.” She pulled a stuffed panda bear, an exact replica of Zach’s beloved stuffed animal, out of the drawer and put it on the ground in front of Austin. “Based on your sleepover the other night, I doubt it’ll take ten minutes after I turn this on before you’re telling me how cool your new crocodile undies are.” She pulled a pair of grey underwear with crocodiles out of the drawer and showed it to him, then tossed it on the ground near him. Austin instinctively flinched away from them.
“Besides, the extra strength transponder has already been tested. Your friend Zach was much more resistant than you’ve been, but ever since he got Mr. Panda, he’s been a very happy little boy.” She walked back to the chair and sat down again. “No, the interesting question is how living in the house with it will affect your brother. Being around a transponder that strong, he’ll join you in Panda Group pretty quickly, but I’m curious to know what your relationship would be. Personally, I think you’ve already accepted being the little brother, and that won’t change. You’ll both be in Panda Group, but he’ll always be the dominant one. He’ll get the top bunk, he’ll beat you up even though he’s smaller. But that’s just a theory, and I’d love to test it.”
“Leave. Clay. Out of this,” Austin growled.
“The difficulty, you see, is that if we send you home with Mr Panda, we can’t leave him out of it, not when he’s that close to such a strong transponder day in and day out.” She shook her head. “But I thought you might not like that option, which is why I’m prepared to offer you another choice. We have a new program, the Koala Group. We weren’t going to start it just yet, but we can move up the timeline. You’re not like Brett, you don’t just want someone to take charge. Koala Group takes a different approach that I think you’ll find more appealing."
Austin shifted uncomfortably, but he knew what he was going to choose. He knew from the sleepover that the threat if she turned on that panda was real, and he couldn’t let them get his brother as well.
“Koala,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“I thought you’d say that,” she said. She stood up again, grabbed something out of the drawer, and tossed it to him. It was a little koala pin, much like the panda one he’d taken off Brett’s backpack. Then she took a rubber mat out of the drawer, unfolded it with one smooth motion, and spread it on the floor. “Stand here, please.” Reluctantly, holding the koala pin, Austin stood up and stepped over to the rubber mat. “Now,” she told him, “I’m going to need you to wet yourself.”
“What!” he shouted.
“This option depends on your cooperation. I need you to show me you’ll actually cooperate. If you can’t do that, we can just fall back on Mr Panda here,” she said, patting the stuffed bear. “Once we turn him on, you’ll be perfectly happy to cooperate.”
Austin shook his head.
“Well, then I need you to willingly take the first step. Don’t focus on what’s happening to you. Think about how you’re doing it to protect Clay.
That perspective did help, actually. Austin thought about that, about how he needed to wet his pants to save his little brother. Really, he thought, wetting his pants was doing a good thing.
That idea was compelling. He wanted to do a good thing. He wanted to be good. And wetting his pants was protecting Clay, so that was good.
He kept thinking about that, about how good it would be to wet himself, and as he finally felt his bladder release and felt the liquid soaking his underwear and dripping down his leg and onto the mat, he just kept thinking about how good he was being.
He continued thinking about how good he was being as he followed the director’s instructions. He lifted his arms so she could take his shirt off, then let her pull down his soaked briefs and stepped out of them when she told him to. He beamed when she told him how good he was being, and happily stood there naked while she got a towel and a new outfit out of the desk. She wiped him clean, then helped him into new clothes one at a time - blue and white striped briefs with a dinosaur on the front, fluffy and cozy and thick enough to give him some protection if he dribbled a little pee into them, then a bright red shirt with a truck on the front, then overalls, and then he sat down so she could replace his socks with fuzzy yellow ones, and finally put on and tie his shoes.
By the time he took her hand and let her lead him across the hall to the classroom, he’d forgotten entirely what was so good about what he was just doing. But as she introduced him to the class as the first member of Koala Group, he clung shyly to her, and all he knew was that he was being good, and he was going to be good for her, and for his mommy and daddy, and that was what mattered.
