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“This is going to revolutionise nail polish,” he gasped.

He was almost drooling with excitement.

“I know, amazing isn't it?”

He didn't detect my sarcasm.

“Any ideas?” he asked.

The tone in his voice was high.

“Maybe,” I replied before placing the end of my pencil in my mouth. His pupils were dilating as he watched me twirl the rubber coated end between my lips.

“Teaser,” he said.

I was the office chemist, if anyone could devise a formula it was me. But there was one thing out of my reach. My soul yearned to be in love; I wanted her, needed to be her slave, but I wasn't sure who she was.

We all watched the clock and each other. Gillian had been looking at me for the last hour, and every time I glanced back she turned away, instantly laughing at some spurious comment from Steve. Should I play with my hair, file my nails? Finally, she walked over, looking me up and down. She leant forwards over my desk. Her mouth hovered over my ear. I could feel her warm breath as she whispered, “I love a man in stockings,” and her leg brushed against mine. The suspenders dug into my flesh like stirrups.

“You're on my radar, Valery,” she said.

I could see a fire in her eyes.

“Pretty boys like you are gagging for it,” she continued.

I'd never seen a woman like this, her eyes wild, biting her bottom lip.

“The others will hear,” I stammered, and fluttered my eyelashes coyly.

It worked, but she jabbed her fingernail into the back of my hand before leaving. Her heels stabbed into the floorboards.

The five o'clock whistle sounded, and we all rushed for our coats.

“Valery 01 to the office,” announced the voice over the speaker.

I hesitated, desperate to leave, but Claire would make mincemeat of me the following day.

“What have you done now, Valery?” asked Steve.

“Who's a lucky so and so,” said Cassie as he fastened the buckle on his full length mauve raincoat.

The others had gone as I approached their lair, my head down, feet dragging.

Claire sat at her desk with Gillian perched on the end like a hunting bird. She was holding a sharp pencil.

“Any luck with the formula?” asked Claire.

“Almost,” I replied. ‘Just give me another day or two.”

“Aren't you the bright one,” said Gillian, but the tone in her voice said the opposite.

“Look, why am I here?” I asked, trying to raise a feeble, compliant smile. I failed.

“Gillian has noted an air of insubordination of late,” said Claire, matter of factly.

I looked at the floor. I knew the real reason I was here as Gillian opened her briefcase and reached for the strapon. Even with the roles reversed everything was still about sex, except sex itself. Sex was about power, and I duly, obediently, bent over Claire's desk as they fastened their weapons like gunslingers. I was a puppet; this is what women did to us, legally.

They took turns and it seemed to last forever. The only concession to my comfort was the gel. I separated myself from the humiliation.

“Not a word,” said Claire before holding a finger to her lips.

I was sore, physically and mentally.

“I bet he enjoyed it,” said Gillian, laughing as I pulled up my dishevelled clothes. “And caged too, isn't he just adorable?”

She was younger than Claire, with short jet black hair, and a snarl etched on her thick lips. She twisted a silver ring with a large black opal on her middle finger.

“I always mean what I say,” she said, “and have what I want.”

“Don't worry, I'll drop you home,” said Claire.

We all knew there was no point complaining, and I looked out of the window to avoid their gaze.

I lay in the bath for hours when I got home, but I still couldn't feel clean.

I fell asleep in new bed linen, wondering what I had done wrong to draw their hurtful attention. And, more importantly, what I could change in the future to stop it happening again.

Chapter Four

I felt like I was trapped in a cage and I was, a steel one on prescription. I showered carefully; no time for a bath, I was running late. Besides the running water was more hygienic and flowed over and through the spikes like a waterfall. Something felt different, unreal. I was longing for her to save my soul, but I still didn't know who she was, only that one day she would come for me.

I could hear their boots running up the stairs and their banging fists on the doors. But we were the quietest block on the street thanks to our interview panel. I'd gotten in because the tranny voted in ahead of me had a stroke before he could move the sofa out of the lift. He was rehabilitating in prison.

“Open up,” they screamed.

I recognised their pitch, shemales.

I opened the door wearing my dressing gown, a towel wrapped around my long hair. The first shemale in scowled, the second threw me a wink.

“You can tidy up later, love,” said the female officer standing on the stairs, smirking at my confusion. They were enjoying themselves at our expense.

She had bags under her eyes, weighed down with responsibility, and wore thick green trousers and jacket, with a brown leather holster. The handle on the pistol was worn like her boots. I wanted to speak to her, wish her well and admire her, but I was just a male, a number; that changed when they found the stickers under my bed. My mattress was turned on its side, the apple print duvet strewn over the ground like an orchard hit by a tornado.

The shemale handed them to the officer. She smiled before her stare cut me in two.

“Sit on the sofa,” she shouted to me, then ran up the stairs.

The flats were teeming with shemales, with a handful of officers in charge. Tranny crime scene operatives waxed lyrical to one another, whilst the crossdressers studiously took notes. We, the men, cowered and obeyed. I guess it was a pretty good snapshot of our Femocracy.

I could hear two crossdressers talking near my door. Some sucker had set up an illegal still, and a trail of bootleg vodka had led them to Rinse Gardens. As an endless thud of boots marched down the stairs I guessed they'd found their man.

Riesling 88 was standing with his back to the wall as the hastily assembled shemales fired. He lay on the ground with torn tights in a pool of his own blood.

I couldn't have helped Riesling, and I couldn't have helped the others before him. Unfortunately, now it was my turn, and there was no one to help me either.

“Stand up darling,” said the officer.

Her peaked latex cream cap was shiny and pointed downwards but I could still see her stare, cold like her heart.

“I'll be late for work,” I said.

She laughed so much I didn't think she was ever going to stop.

“That is the least of your worries, Valery 01,” she finally said.

Our names, and number, were on the front of the doors. I didn't know if it was the same for them, our rulers; they lived apart, in secret. Except they had no number and fewer restrictions. Women and transgenders could drink just about anything, the rest of us were restricted to red wine, two bottles a month at home.

She looked at the stickers shaking her head, “I'm taking you in for questioning.”

“Can I get changed?”

“Sure, my shemales will help you, and no funny business.”

My would-be friend threw me another wink.

“And nothing too revealing,” she shouted as they followed me into the bedroom.

My eyes avoided the floorboards, looked everywhere but downwards. If they uncovered my porn stash, I'd be pushed against the same wall as Riesling 88.

They started looking around, snooping. I quickly tidied up the duvet and found my distraction. I jumped back, terrified.

“Kill it,” I pleaded, looking at the monstrous spider scuttling across the floor.

A shemale removed her heel, and I saw a glimpse of stocking, red toe and seam on opaque black, nice pair. I'd seen some just like it at the mall with floral holdups.

‘Splat,' and the beast was dead.

“I'll get some tissue,” I said.

I flushed it down the loo with a bent spider's leg sticking out from the mush. My nose was screwed up, like my life.

We passed a confused Cordelia 615 on our way down the stairs.

“I just got back this morning, thanks, Valery, I owe you one.”

Then she saw my escorts and looked the other way. We were all good at that.

“Sorry,” she said, but I wasn't sure if it was meant for me or them.

And was that Dorian 3309 outside in the courtyard? I squinted again and the image was gone.

Chapter Five

I'd been in the windowless cell for a day and a night. Someone pushed food through a grille, but no one came, no one spoke. The yellow ceiling light was made of toughened glass and secured in a wire cage should I consider another way out. They'd taken my hair brush and comb, but there was no mirror.

There was a book at the foot of my bed, The Feminist Manifesto, by Professor Carla Marks. She was a revolutionary, visionary, blending economics with Mother Nature for what had become a quasi-religious Femocracy. I opened the cover, there was nothing else to do; I was medicated.

Left in charge, men would destroy the world. All their organisations were harems. Only women could be entrusted with leadership, their decisions were not based on basic instincts: using and entering another. But try telling that to Claire and Gillian.

Carla had fuelled the revolution, and we were all schooled in her philosophy. Her revered tomb was in North London.

I was isolated, and should have felt lonely, perhaps more vulnerable than I already was. But I didn't, somehow I felt less awkward in the cell, and I could gather my thoughts. I was always surrounded by others but never quite part of them. Often I had been within earshot of frivolous laughter from those playing a game, the loneliest pretending.

I read the Manifesto from cover to cover, partly out of boredom but then nostalgia for my school days. Were men really that bad? Were we nothing but jealous animals led by our tails?

As I flipped over the final page, there was a short eulogy to Vespertina Eve, our beloved Surgeon General, but her book was incomplete, she still had much to do. Carla Marks had died in a bomb blast, an assassination, just before the war broke out. Any final trust in men had died with her.

The lights never went off; perhaps they were meant to keep me awake, but I hadn't slept so soundly in years. The mattress was hard and there weren't enough blankets. The sheets scratched my smooth skin, but the anxiety attacks had stopped; someone had cut the rubber band that often tightened across my chest.

I had been stupid to keep the stickers, but that was my only discovered crime and for now I wasn't Gillian's office bike, a role I thoroughly expected her to reprise with Claire in tandem. Surely no one would really believe I was MAD?

Chapter Six

Was it two days or three before the cell door finally opened? I rolled off the bed, relieved to stretch my legs.

“Valery 01, follow me please.”

“But my hair,” I pleaded.

“Men,” she scoffed, handing me a small brush from her side pocket.

“Well don't take all day,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“And the brush, please,” she held out her hand. “No telling where you perverts will shove it.”

She laughed and so did I, but mine was nervous.

‘Court Room,' the sign proclaimed on the grim steel door, and I felt sick.

“Just tell the truth,” advised my Guard as she unlocked the handcuffs.

“Change your conditioner,” she added looking at my roots, and then she was gone.

There were three of them, younger than I expected, early thirties like me but with more of a future. The judge wore a white gown with a red sash, flanked by a police chief in a blue cheesecloth suit, and an officer in military garb, thinnest green cotton due to the increasing temperature. I had felt it in the cell, a heatwave was coming, and I was getting hot under the collar.

I lifted up The Feminist Manifesto in my right hand, and recited the oath inscribed on a small table in front of me.

“I, Valery 01, swear in front of Mother Nature, and the duly appointed panel, to tell no lies, spin no half-truths, and deceive no woman. If I do then I fully expect to be punished within the rules of law, up to and including my death.”

No ambiguity there then. I sat down in front of them.

The central figure wore a peaked amber cap, shiny silk. A medallion was stitched to the front, portraying the tree of wisdom and not life; this was a judge that could easily take yours away.

I was scared to face them, and looked under the table at the police chief's boots. She nudged the judge, smiling.

“Is he medicated?” she asked.

The colonel opened my file.

“Weekly injections start Friday.”

“Frisky?” asked the police chief with the darkest of eyeliner.

“Excited in the doctor's surgery. Don't worry, he's caged,” said the colonel.

“Mason Adam Deviant,” said the judge, decision maker, solemnly.

She looked at me, and my bottom lip quivered.

“The stickers were pushed into my hand,” I said.

“Indeed.” She read the notes I'd penned in my cell upon arrival.

“What turns you on, Valery 01?” asked the colonel with the brass pips on her shoulders.

Her lips wore cherry red lipstick.

“I'm not sure I know what you mean,” I replied. “I'm medicated.”

It was a phrase us guys used a lot when we wanted to appear submissive, get what we wanted, if we wanted anything at all, apart from being left alone.

She pulled a gun from her holster.

“Would you like me to shoot it off, if it means nothing to you?”

I shook my head violently.

“Colonel Anais, really,” said the police chief, her authority usurped.

“Apologies, Stella Eve, too long on the front.”