The Bullpen Ch. 01

"No. He was waiting for me to finish messing with the emitters." He frowned. "Sorry."

Erica ran her hands through her hair again, unnerved by how short it was. It had been since her sophomore year of college that her hair had been this short. "It's okay," she replied. "It's not like I'm going to see him out here anyways."

"Yeah," Colin agreed, unsure of exactly what to say. There were a few more moments of awkward silence, before Colin finally said, "Okay, let's give those emitters a try. The sooner you're in, the sooner you're out."

Erica had been thinking the same thing. But, as she'd expected, covering herself for even such a brief period of time made it that much harder to shed the towel. Swallowing hard, she unwrapped the small towel and tossed it towards the lockers, watching it drop to the floor of the Observation Room. She stepped completely naked back into her prison.

"Oh, wow," Erica offered as she caught sight of her reflection in the Bullpen's mirror glass. The door rolled into place behind her. "Not bad at all."

Would it have been a haircut that Erica picked out for herself? No.

Was it uneven in places? Of course.

Was Colin going to win a hairdressing award? Of course not.

But short as it was, as quickly as it had been done, Erica had to admit that her new look wasn't all that bad. Gone were the long strands of black hair hanging alluringly down past her shoulder blades. But her hair was still longer than she'd expected it to be, falling cutely past her ears and nicely framing her face.

In fact, Erica was still taking in her new haircut when Colin called through the intercom, "Perfect!"

"Yeah?"

"Yup. Absolutely no problem with the emitters."

"Which means I can use the projector, right?" Erica asked. Her first three hours in the Bullpen had been excruciating, not just because of the nudity, but because of the absolute boredom. Having had nothing to do, all Erica had been able to think about was the fact that she was naked, and that people were looking at her through the walls of the Bullpen. All that she'd been able to do was stare at her own naked body in the mirror glass across the room.

She was answered by a flickering on the wall furthest from the ops desk, as the projector came to life. Unfortunately, the image that greeted her was that of the ops desk camera, with Colin leering into the Bullpen. Suddenly, the distance between "here" and "there" seemed infinitely smaller, and the idea that there were people looking at her body from "out there" began to conflict with the presence of Colin's image "in here." Of course, so long as Colin was staring into the camera at the desk, it meant that he wasn't staring out across the Observation Room and into the Bullpen through the wall.

"Well, it's three thirty now," the technician announced. "Anything on TV that you're jonesing to see on a Monday afternoon?"

"Just whatever you have for a DVD out there is fine," Erica replied. She didn't want to do work. She didn't want to think about her situation. She just wanted to sit back and vegetate in front of a movie, getting her mind off of the past three hours and the upcoming five weeks. And so, as Noah returned and helped Colin adjust the measurements that the Humane Hormone Lab needed, Erica sat on the floor of the Bullpen watching "Ocean's 11."

***

It was only a few hours later when Erica felt as if she needed to use the bathroom. Colin was still on duty, though Noah had come and gone by that point. Erica couldn't bring herself to ask the man for the toilet, though, preferring to wait for him to leave and for Wendy Milne to take over. It was silly, and childish - Erica would eventually have to use the bathroom while Colin was on duty. But she excused herself from this embarrassment on her first day. After all, she'd debased herself enough in front of him for the first day.

But by six, after she'd moved onto her second movie, after the emitters had all been adjusted, and after both Colin and Noah had gone home for the night, Erica decided that it was time to bite the bullet. After all, she'd been in the Bullpen for six hours at that point.

"Wendy?" Erica asked as she stood, visibly blushing from head to toe.

Erica had met Wendy countless of times before. They weren't friends, but it wasn't as if they had a bad relationship at all. The black-haired biochemist had her work, and the pierced and tattooed, peroxide-blonde technician had hers. They had little in common, but it never ceased to amaze Erica how open the girl had always been with her. Within hours of their first meeting, back during the primate trials, Wendy had begun talking about her menstrual cycle, her clitoral piercing, and the size of her ex-boyfriend's penis. Erica was completely buttoned-up and tight-lipped, conservative when it came to sex, or talking about sex. Wendy, though, didn't have the same hang-ups, and didn't seem capable of being embarrassed.

The blonde girl was certainly not going to understand the level of humiliation that asking for the toilet was going to bring to Erica.

"Yup?"

"Do you think I could use the bathroom?"

"The toilet, yeah," Wendy replied. Within seconds, the toilet had emerged from the wall. There was no toilet seat, just porcelain all the way around.

The room was large and open, making Erica feel uncomfortable about her lack of privacy. Of course, there was no one in the Bullpen with her, and she couldn't see out beyond the glass wall.

But she knew that Wendy was out there, watching her urinate. She knew that she was being recorded as she did so, making her humiliation something that would stand the test of time. Still, she sat, she peed, and she asked Wendy to retract the toilet into the wall.

"I bet that must get old," Erica said aloud. "Opening and closing the toilet all the time."

"Well, I mean, it's different with the men," Wendy replied casually.

Erica wasn't quite sure what Wendy was getting at. Men needed to use the bathroom just as much as women. How was it different? That she wasn't peeing while standing up?

"The men have, in the past, just pissed in the shower drain," the female technician replied. She then added, "But don't worry, that place has been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected like seven or eight times over. Colin's been making us scrub up in there for the better part of two weeks."

Erica wasn't terribly concerned about the sanitation issue. After all, this room had hosted scores of chimps and orangutans over the years, and Erica knew from experience that peeing the shower drain was a lot cleanlier than some of the things she'd seen the apes do.

What concerned her, though, was the fact that she was being treated differently than the men who had come before her. That she, as a subject, required extra work on the part of the technicians who watched over her. The thought made the girl uncomfortable.

So uncomfortable, in fact, that it festered over the next few hours. Erica was watching "Doc Hollywood," but had a hard time concentrating. She'd been stripped naked. She'd been locked inside a box. She'd been given a forced haircut. And she'd urinated in front of another woman, as well as literally hundreds of little recording devices. But yet, she was concerned about the added effort that she, as a woman, required on the part of the Bullpen staff. No, it wasn't much work, but it seemed as if, given the choice between a male test subject and a female test subject, they would go with a male subject every time.

Maybe it had more to do with the fact that the technical staff was more men than women, that sexual harassment concerns were lessened with a naked man instead of a naked woman. But Erica didn't want yet another reason to choose a man for research over a woman.

Could she use the drain? Could she bring herself to squat over the shower and relieve herself that way? Certainly, it was humiliating, but was it really that much more humiliating than sitting on the toilet bowl? Was it more humiliating than asking the technicians for the toilet, and then asking them to flush it when she was done?

It was around ten o'clock that evening that Erica felt the urge to go again.

And, instead of requesting the toilet from Wendy, she simply crouched down over the shower drain. In the reflection across from her, Erica could see that she was blushing badly, embarrassed about what she was doing.

Thankfully, Wendy didn't say a thing, as Erica had feared she would. The embarrassment was excruciating, and she didn't want to talk about it. Maybe Wendy mentioned it to the other technicians, maybe she didn't. But Pete Bowie never brought it up, nor did his intern Tessa Romero during their shift afterwards. Colin never mentioned it once. For the next five weeks, it was just accepted that Erica would be using the drain at the corner of the Bullpen, and no one acknowledged this development. It just was.

That first night, falling asleep was difficult. None of the male subjects who had come before her had been particularly thrilled at the prospects of sleeping on the hard, white floor of the Bullpen, and Erica herself hadn't been looking forward to it. She tried sleeping on her left side, on her right side, and on her back, but she simply couldn't get comfortable. Even a pillow would have been a godsend.

But it wasn't so much the floor that kept Erica awake, no matter how ungiving it was. Rather, it was her own mind. She was still very much aware of her own nudity, as she had been all day, and aware that right at that moment, there was a woman on the other side of the wall watching her. In a few hours, Wendy would be replaced by another male technician and his female intern. Eight hours after that, it would be Tuesday morning, Colin would return, and the staff at Connecticut Pharmaceuticals would begin their day, breezing in and out of the Observation Room.

Each one of them was going to see her bare body. Each one of them was going to watch her shower in the nude, watch her work in the nude, watch her urinate in the nude. She had worked hard to gain the respect of her colleagues, and she couldn't help feeling that she was flushing it all away. Would they see her as Ph.D. that she was? Or would they see her as a sexual object, a naked girl to watch for their own amusement? She had gone from being biochemist Erica Rivers to peep-show girl Erica Rivers in no time at all.

It would be a long night.

It would be a long five weeks.