Story code: ST-001324
Part 3: Subject Eight
The man in the charcoal suit didn’t blink. He just stared through the clinic’s glass partition, his hand resting heavily on the handle of his silver briefcase.
“Fifteen seconds, Elias,” Miller’s voice buzzed from the phone resting on my lap. “The escrow window is closing. I need your verbal consent right now.”
“He’s here,” I breathed, my voice barely audible over the mechanical hum of the apheresis machine pumping saline into my arm. “The courier. He didn’t wait until midnight. He’s outside the donor room.”
“I cannot speak to the courier’s logistics,” Miller said, his tone clipping with severe bureaucratic urgency. “Ten seconds. If I don’t hear a ‘yes’, the forty-four thousand dollar garnishment executes tonight. You will default.”
I stared at the man in the suit. He adjusted his grip on the briefcase, bringing his wrist up under the harsh fluorescent lights of the lobby. A flash of metal caught my eye. His cufflink. It was a very specific, custom shape. A heavy cross intertwined with a descending dove, cast in polished brass.
My stomach violently dropped. The freezing saline in my chest turned to absolute ice. My lungs seized, refusing to draw air.
I knew that emblem. I had spent eighteen years staring at it plastered across the pulpit of the Grace Tabernacle Fellowship. My parents’ church.
“Stop the timer,” I choked out, gripping the plastic armrest so hard my knuckles went white. “Miller, stop the timer right now.”
“I cannot alter the escrow countdown-”
“Hold the timer!” I shouted, loud enough that the exhausted donor in the recliner next to me flinched. “Read the medical clause again. The proprietary evaluation. Read the exact registered name of the facility!”
“Elias, five seconds-”
“Read it! Or I hang up and default!”
A sharp exhale whistled through the phone speaker. The sound of rapid typing followed. “The medical protocol is registered as… ‘Intensive Pastoral Counseling and Gender Re-alignment Therapy,’ administered at the Shiloh Restorative Campus.”
The peeling walls of the clinic seemed to warp inward.
It wasn’t a faceless corporate conglomerate buying my body for clinical trials. It was them. My parents. The congregation. They had tracked down my defaulted federal student loans. They had pooled their money. Forty-four thousand dollars to buy their prodigal son back.
“And the name clause,” I said, my voice dropping into a dead, hollow rasp. “Clause two. Tell me exactly what it says.”
Miller hesitated. The relentless, scripted drone faltered for a fraction of a second. “It… stipulates the immediate legal surrender of your current legal name, Elias. You are to accept the numerical designation ‘Subject 8’ until such time as you demonstrate… ‘readiness to legally revert to the birth-assigned female nomenclature.'”
*Name reversion.* They wouldn’t even put my deadname in the contract because they didn’t legally recognize the name I had bled to make my own. I was just Subject 8. The eighth person they were dragging out into the woods to break.
“Elias,” Miller said, his voice dropping an octave, losing the script entirely. “The timer is at zero. But the system is… it’s holding. The benefactor is manually keeping the window open. They are waiting for you. Do you accept?”
I looked at the courier through the glass. He checked his gold watch, then looked back at me, his eyes dead and expectant.
“Do you know what pastoral counseling is at Shiloh, Miller?” I asked, my voice eerily calm, cutting through the low vibration of the centrifuge.
“Sir, I am only authorized to-”
“I asked if you know what it is,” I hissed, leaning over my phone, the catheter pulling painfully at the vein in my arm. “Because you’re sitting in a federal cubicle processing a bill of sale for my torture. Let me tell you what ‘Intensive Pastoral Counseling’ means when I climb into that transport van. It means they lock me in a cinderblock room in the Ozarks with no windows. It means sleep deprivation for seventy-two hours while they blast their twisted version of scripture through a PA system until my ears bleed. It means standing on my toes against a wall until my calf muscles tear, and when I finally collapse, they call it the devil leaving my body.”
“Mr… Elias, please, this is a recorded line-”
“Good! Record it!” I barked, a desperate, hysterical laugh bubbling in my throat. “Record that they use ice baths to ‘shock out the sin.’ Record that they hold you down and force you to drink emetics so you vomit every time you assert your own gender. They are paying off my federal loans so they can legally kidnap me, strip me of my identification, and beat my identity out of my skull until I answer to a dead girl’s name!”
Silence hung on the line. It was the heavy, suffocating silence of a man who had just realized he was holding the switch to an electric chair.
“That is… that is not what is written here,” Miller finally stammered. The slick, polished collection agent was gone. He sounded breathless. Horrified. “The rider says it is a therapeutic spiritual retreat. Approved by a private medical board. It… it’s legally coded as debt relief.”
“There is no medical board,” I said, my eyes locked on the courier. “It’s a pastor with a leather belt and a cattle prod. And you’re the one enforcing the contract.”
Through the glass, the courier’s patience finally snapped. He pushed the clinic door open. The automated entry chime rang out, high and cheerful. He stepped onto the linoleum, his polished shoes loud against the floor, walking straight past the front desk supervisor.
“Excuse me, sir, you can’t be back here!” the supervisor yelled, stepping in front of him in her yellow isolation gown.
The courier didn’t even look at her. He reached into his suit jacket, pulling out a heavy, embossed laminated card and shoving it into her chest. She stumbled back, reading it, her mouth falling open.
“Miller,” I whispered, the pure, blinding panic rising back into my throat as I watched the man approach my chair. “Miller, he’s coming. The contract is illegal. It’s extortion. Cancel the escrow.”
“I…” Miller’s breath hitched over the speaker. The mechanical clatter of his keyboard had stopped completely. “I don’t… the system requires your verbal decline to void. But if you decline… Elias, your garnishment. You’ll lose everything.”
“I already have nothing!” I screamed as the courier shoved past a rolling cart of gauze, stepping directly to the foot of my vinyl recliner.
The courier looked down at me, his eyes entirely devoid of empathy. He set the silver briefcase on my lap, right over my vibrating phone, and popped the latches. It opened to reveal a single, thick manila folder and a capped syringe resting in a velvet groove.
“Time is up, Subject 8,” the courier said.
“Miller!” I yelled at the phone beneath the briefcase.
On the other end of the line, the federal agent said nothing at all.