Turn 10 of 26

March into physical standards intake and let the officers measure, drill and correct your body as they yell one by one, answering only yes ma'am. All your bodies start to match the officers who’s bodies are the same. you 20 are now 5’5, 170 pounds, 10% body fat, everyone who’s not white skin color changed to white when on walks out of the room. After that all 20 of your bodies are the same.

The corridor takes you in single file, number order, boots in step with the hundred voices, and delivers the twenty of you into a long white room with no windows and a line of measuring stations down its center. 'PHYSICAL STANDARDS!' the Lead Instructor bellows. 'The body is the last thing you own. It stops being yours today. NUMBER ONE, FORWARD!' One steps to the first station and the officers work her with calipers, tape, a machine that hums. They call out numbers as they measure her, and the numbers are not hers. 'FIVE FOOT FIVE. ONE SEVENTY. TEN PERCENT. CORRECT.' The officers yell, and One's body answers — you watch it happen, her frame drawing in, settling, hardening, and when she steps off the mark she is a different shape than she walked in as. The officers' shape.

The line works through it. Two. Three. Four. Each woman measured and then corrected — yelled at, held at the stations while the officers adjust, adjust, adjust — and each one comes out the other end with the same squared shoulders, the same set, the same dense strong build. Six goes through at Eighteen. Her slight frame is taken apart and rebuilt in front of you, and she steps off the mark heavy and hard and 5'5, her pale face unchanged above a body that belongs to the program now.

'NINETEEN. FORWARD.' You step to the mark. 'STAND.' Arms out. Turn. The calipers touch you and the officer reads you wrong on purpose — 'SIX PERCENT OVER. CORRECT.' The yell lands and your body does what the others' did: something underneath the skin shifts and doesn't stop shifting, warmth spreading out from the injection sites through every limb, your frame drawing down and settling into a new architecture, your weight arriving where it's told to arrive. You feel your own bones accept new dimensions. It doesn't hurt. It's worse than hurting — it's administrative.

'SKIN STANDARDS.' The officer yells it at your back as you're marched through the last booth, a narrow white tunnel with light in it that finds you everywhere your sleeves don't cover. Your skin warms, evens, and changes — whatever color you walked in with, you walk out with theirs, pale and uniform, the last pigment of you filed the way your clothes were filed. You answer 'YES MA'AM' to the booth, to the whole process, because it is asked and it is the only answer.

'TWENTY. FORWARD.' The last one finishes. The Lead Instructor walks the line of you, slowly, and the twenty bodies it passes are one body repeated — 5'5, 170, ten percent, white, squared, hard. She stops in front of you. 'You are built correct,' she says. 'You are dressed correct. You speak correct. Your faces are fixed.' Behind her the officers stand in their rows, and there is nothing left between them and you but height of experience. 'Hair is next,' she says. 'The last of it. STANDARDS STATION — FALL IN.'