THE CAGES
The requisition said civic contribution. It did not say this room.
They arrived from the city quarantine blocks at eighteen, the last clean year on the form. After that the classification changed and the price dropped. Some still had city haircuts. Some still waited for a clerk. There was no clerk. There was a wet yard, a hose, and a man with a tablet who told them to strip down to shorts and walk.
The parlour was a converted lock-up under strip lights. Rusted livestock cages in a single row, bars close enough to print a grid on skin. Each cage had a steel slat bed. They were put in on their backs, heads toward the far wall, bare feet toward the aisle. From the door you saw soles first, then ankles, then the line of cages running away under the fluorescent. Shirtless. Shorts still on. Wrists cuffed where the overseer could reach through the bars.
A stainless drum stood on the wet concrete by the first cage, valves and gauges on the lid, clear tubes already snaking across the floor. One thin tube per cage. Each one disappeared under the leg of the shorts and came back out toward the drum. No fittings above the waist. The machine did the rest from under the cloth.
The overseer did the prep by hand through the bars.
The circumcised boys were quicker. The head was already bare. Cold lubricant, then the sleeve, then a ring tightened behind the glans so the tube locked on the exposed crown. When the vacuum started there was nothing to buffer it. The pull took the head straight into the plastic and held it there. Each pulse was a tight wet tug on skin that had no foreskin left to slide. Not a stroke. A draw. Long suck, short pulse, pause. The first load left them in a thick jet that jumped the line under the shorts. Cum showed white in the tube where it crossed the slats and fell toward the drum.
The others took longer. The overseer peeled the foreskin back until the head was fully out, then rolled the sleeve on and cinched it so the skin could not come forward again. It stayed that way for the whole cycle. Some of them hissed when it locked. After that the suction had the same target: glans trapped, foreskin bunched useless behind the ring, every pull landing on the raw head. They felt it as a deep swallow around the tip, then a harder pulse working the shaft from inside the shorts. The skin wanted to roll forward and could not. Yield came cleaner with the head kept stripped.
From the aisle you would not have seen any of that. You would have seen feet. A row of them, dirty soles, toes curled when the pulse hit. Cages. The faint twitch of a thigh. A clear tube leaving the shorts and joining the drum. The rest was noise: the wet click of suction, the occasional bitten-off sound, the hum of the pump.
Morning was two cycles, the premium cut. First while they were still full, hips lifting against the slats, the tube at the shorts-leg jumping when they came. Second with a second fitting worked through the bars until they shook and spilled thinner. Midday the cages opened long enough for water. The sleeves stayed on. The foreskins stayed back. Then the doors shut again for a third take, paler now, drawn out in long pulls while their feet flexed toward the camera line of the aisle. Evening was quota. Some were almost dry. The machine still found a last weak pulse and took it. Four times a day if they held condition. Five if the tanker was light.
By lights-down the drum was heavy. White still showed in stretches of tubing. They were walked to the stalls with the rings off and air on skin that had been sucked raw for hours. The paperwork said first-press.
What left the room left chilled. Morning spend from the eighteen-year row was sealed as the paying line. Noon and evening were dried, cut, pressed, and relabelled as pharmaceutical feedstock, then as nutritional isolate. By the factory the word cum was gone from every document. The public name was clean: Peak Eighteen. Vitalis. Young-spectrum protein. Restoration complex. State-certified harvest stock.
Scale did the hiding. One lock-up would have been a rumour. A belt of converted dairies and old cattle sheds, an existing milk cold chain, drying rooms, and a white tin in every high-end gym made it ordinary. Brokers signed purity. Overseers signed weight.
THE GYM
In the city the tin sat on the bench between a shaker and a towel.
Two men after work, still sweating. One drank. The other tapped powder into the bottle. They talked batch codes and whether the expensive line was stronger. One said he slept better on it. The other said he felt it in the morning.
They had never been shown a cage.
The packet gave them grade, batch, and cold chain. That was the whole story they were meant to have. No rusted bars. No row of bare feet pointing at an aisle. No tube leaving a shorts-leg for a steel drum. No overseer locking a peeled foreskin. No circumcised head sealed raw in a sleeve. No boy on slats while the pump took him for the fourth time before dark.
The shake was grey and tasteless on purpose. Anything that tasted like what it was would have made someone think. They were not drinking a rumour. They were drinking a branded commodity, and Peak Eighteen read to them like a name, not a classification.
The Farm kept the cages. The label kept the rest. What they swallowed had been pulled out of someone else that morning, cut or peeled, vacuumed until there was nothing left to give, then chilled, powdered, and sold as source.