My name is Bruce McCoy. This is my story.

Seventeen years ago when the Darjee announced the coming of the Sa'arm to selected humans, my parents had not even met. They both grew up in California and met in college. They were in the last days of their wedding plans when Average Joe's XV was running. They married several days before the President's announcement.

My dad and mom took the CAP test and scored 8.6 and 8.5 respectively. They initially wanted to wait until they graduated before having children. Once the Sa'arm were announced, they decided to wait until they were extracted.

That plan lasted about four and a half days when everyone was surprised when the stick turned blue. Nine months later I was born. My parents at that time decided I needed siblings so, eighteen months after that my parents had twin girls, Donna and Denise. My mother was a baby factory and produced two more children, a boy and a girl at eighteen month intervals, John and Marsha.

When I was seven my father was on a "business trip" to Las Vegas and was extracted. We still lived in California and the "Confederacy Free Zone" had been voted on. My dad was unable to get his children extracted. My mother on the other hand was absolutely furious about the whole thing. We received letters from my dad, the gist was he tried, but there was nothing he could do. My mother did not believe he tried at all.

About a month later, we packed up and moved to Boston. My mother had managed to get a job there at a defense contractor and permission to move to Boston.

By this time I was shocking everyone with my intelligence. My mother had been working with me since I was about one. She was a fabulous teacher. When we arrived in Boston, a check was forwarded to my mother from the Confederacy awarding my mother $300,000 as compensation for extracting my father. This allowed my mother to quit her new job and stay at home with her five children during the day. During the next few years my mother completed her degrees in the evenings at MIT. She felt, at least for a while, that her extraction was just a matter of time.

As I grew up I had a big hand in raising my siblings. With Dad gone, I was the man of the house, and I took that responsibility seriously, helping with their education and discipline. I learned how to lead during that time and how important integrity and consistency was. I can't say that I didn't get into trouble, but most of it was on the lines of defending my siblings and not too serious.

With the advent of the Confederacy, corporal punishment returned to the mainstream. It was no longer something a family practicing it had to hide. There were abuses and they were dealt with but for the most part if you got spanked you deserved it. When you didn't deserve it was part of growing up and learning things were not always fair.

When I turned ten my mother insisted that I help with the discipline of my siblings. My mother believed in corporal punishment and used it when she felt it was the only way. I had been spanked a few times when I went too far. My eight year old twin sisters, Donna and Denise, however, were a handfull. One day while I was 'in charge' my sisters discovered that my orders did not have any teeth, at least until my mother came home. They wanted to do something and did even though I expressly forbid it. I was furious, but there was nothing I could do until my mother came home. When my mother arrived I discovered that she had a really bad day and had lost one of her boyfriends. I let the issue slide.

The next day my mother saw my sisters do something that my mother had heard me expressly forbid. My mother asked me about it. I told her about the day before, and that I had let it slide. She explained to me that discipline was something you could not let slide, or it snowballs into bigger problems. I could understand what my mother said but I told her that I did not see how I could deal with it. My mother then gave me permission to spank my siblings. She also told me that I had to tell her when I did and that I had better not abuse the privilege. That day I spanked both of my twin sisters. When they complained to my mother, she gave them another spanking. From that day forward my mother never spanked me again. My authority in the house had been established. I always told my mother when I spanked my siblings. My mother never said anything unless a sibling complained. Most of the time my mother sided with me, but she was fair about it.

The only time there was disagreement was when my mother thought I had overreacted. We would discuss it, why I was overreacting and how to prevent it from happening in the future. We always reached an agreement. Sometimes my mother would explain the problem to my sibling and say that sometimes life was unfair. Sometimes, when I was overreacting, the "offender" would be given a special treat. Often I would be the one giving them the treat to "make it up". All in all it worked pretty well. I learned leadership and child rearing skills that most people did not learn until older.

About a year after the first time I spanked my twin sisters, my mother was called in for a parent teacher conference with my sisters' teachers. Suffice it to say my mother was not happy when she returned home. My sisters had fallen in with the wrong group of friends and they were failing in several key subjects. It was time for an attitude adjustment. Both my mother and I had warned the twins about the friendships they were forming. We warned them that there would be consequences for bad grades and getting into trouble.

My mother had found an old strap and had started to blister the butts of the girls and was at five strokes each when my mother received a phone call. The caller was a good friend of my mother and said it was an emergency. She was reporting that the entire MIT campus was being extracted (literally – eventually there would be a big hole in the ground). It turned out it was to late too do anything about it. The parent teacher conference took my mother off the campus and as a result she missed the pickup. She came back after the call, reported to my sisters what they had caused and handed me the strap and said, "I am too PO'd to deal with this. Can you handle it without emotion?"

I could see the rage in my mothers face. I said, "I doubt it, but I am in better shape than you. Please Mom, let me handle it." My mother turned and ran from the room.

My sisters watched my mother leave. They were mortified by what they had caused. They looked at each other, communicating between them. Then Donna asked me, "Bruce how do we fix this? No amount of spanking is going to make up for this."

I stood there thinking, 'What do I look like, God?', but I said, "First young ladies, you cannot change the past. Don't try. You can only change the future. Dump your friends. Pick up your grades until you're performing to the best of your ability. You can still fix things there. Take responsibility for your past and future failures and strive to fix them. Mom still loves you, and she always will. She will come around in a few days."

My sisters looked at each other and Denise said, "We are going to need Mom's and your help. Mom's help at home to catch us up and to help us with the teachers. Your help at school to help us deal with our ex-friends and to stay away from them."

I had to laugh a little. They looked again at me as if I had four eyes. "Girls, I will do what I can but I am not even in the same school as you. You are going to have to take responsibility for yourselves and deal with your friends and the consequences of being their friends. Break it off and keep it broken off.

"To help though, from this day forward, until I say differently, you are to be waiting at the school for me before going home. No after school consorting with your friends. Failure to be there when I arrive will have severe consequences.

"Mom will be checking with your teachers regularly now. You will behave in class. You will get good grades. Anything less than what we expect will be punished by the removal of privileges or spanking. Is that clear?"

They both said, "Yes, Sir" simultaneously.

I said, "We've had a hard day. A lot of bad things have happened."

"Yes Sir", Donna said, "It is my turn to go next, for the spanking."

I said, "Girls you've learned a valuable lesson today. You are correct, no spanking is going to improve on that or make that lesson easier to learn. However there are consequences for actions that damage others. That is where this spanking comes in. Both of you, go to the back of the couch, drop your pants and your panties, and drape yourself over it.

They did as ordered. I don't think either one was too embarrassed by dropping their pants but they kept their more private parts turned to the couch. I gave then ten swats with the strap each in two sets of five.

I then said, "Go do your homework and then to go to bed. You are grounded for two months. We have a big day tomorrow."

The girls looked at one another, then turned back to me. Denise said, "Bruce, you are just too nice to us. We deserve a hard and serious spanking. We want to remember the consequences of what we caused, every time we sit down for the next two months. We want you to spank us severely. If Dad were here we would be getting ten times what you and Mom gave us and a whole lot harder. We earned this punishment. We need you to spank us every time we screw up or disappoint you. We don't want this to be hanging over our heads either. We want you to give us fifty with that strap. We want you to give us fifty with the ping pong paddle. Then we want you to give us a hug and a kiss and remind us you still love us.

Donna continued. "Then we want you to evaluate our behavior every week from now on and then spank us every week to remind us. We should get a minimum of twenty-five swats a week. You should ask us which implement we deserve but you get the final decision." They were in complete agreement.

While I realize most guys would just start whaling away, I was a bit confused and told them so. I said that they should kneel in opposite corners of the study, while I discussed this with Mom.

I went and I found my mother in her bedroom and heard her bawling her eyes out. I knocked on the door, and she told me to enter. She was crying and I went over to hug her. We embraced and my mother eventually calmed down. She said, "I am sorry Bruce, we missed another extraction. It is so unfair to John, Marsha and you. You all deserve to be out in the stars, out of the way of the Sa'arm.

"By not being as attentive to the girls as I should have been, I have let all of you down. I've been a poor mother and if your father was around, I'd have him spank me!"

I told her that it was okay, that she was a great mother and that we would eventually make it. I told her there was still time for that to happen for all of us, including Donna and Denise. I said that they were mortified at what they had done. I said that we all needed her love right now. I explained how I had handled it and what they were insisting on. I explained to her that I was confused. I told my mother that I had left my sisters kneeling in the corners of my the study while I went to talk to her.

My mother got an evil looking grin on her face ... and asked me, "You've never been told to kneel in the corner of the study have you?

I said, "No, why?"

"We had better go talk to them now. Your father had some very special tile installed in the corners of his study, in California, just for unruly girls. I copied that when we moved here." I gave her a blank stare. She continued, "Your father and I played some adult games. You will understand in a second. Don't worry, they deserved it."

We walked into the room, and both of my sisters were kneeling in the corners, squirming from knee to knee. My mother told them to stand. I walked over to one corner. The corners of the room had 4 tiles that were topped with grooved stone in a crosshatched pattern. It was chosen to be the most uncomfortable surface possible to kneel on without drawing blood. Fifteen minutes kneeling on it turned into sheer torture. The more you moved the worse it was. The girls had spent twenty plus minutes in the corners and their knees were red with indentations. They both had tears in their eyes. Apparently this was not the first time they were punished this way. My parents had rarely had reason to punish me and had never used the corners on me.

I said to them, "Sorry, girls I didn't know about the corners."

They both looked at me and then each other, and giggled. Denise said, "Don't worry brother we deserved this and much more. We thought this was part of our punishment. Where do you wish to finish our spankings?"

I looked at my mother. She said, "Sometimes punishments help people move on. They want the punishment to 'atone' for their conduct. This whole issue is due to them not getting enough attention from your father and myself. You are the surrogate father at this point, whether or not they, you or I like it. Both you and I need to pay more attention to them or things will get worse until we do. You need to blister their butts until they cannot sit."

I said, "Very well girls. Go bend over the back of couch next to each other." Side by side I gave them the fifty swats with the strap they had asked for. I laid it on hard, as I intended to do the job right like any job I had. By ten strokes they were promising stellar behavior ... by twenty they were begging me to stop ... by thirty they were begging for mercy ... around forty they stopped and just accepted their punishment. My mother was watching the whole time. She was not enjoying it any more than I was. I saw tears streaming from her eyes, but when I looked at her she just motioned to me to continue. I knew it had to be done but by the time I reached fifty I was very tired and I was more upset than they were.

Well, not really but it sounds good. Their butts were blistered, welted and bleeding from places the strap caught the welts right.

I said to them, "I do not enjoy this. You forced me to do this. I am your big brother. I am supposed to be your protector. Please don't ever make me do this again."

I decided that, if I was going to be the "father" here, I was going to act like I thought my father would. I said, "The fifty swats with the paddle are suspended. If your grades do not improve in the next few weeks, they will be given to you in addition to any other punishment you earn. If you backslide once you've improved those grades, those swats will be given to you in addition to any other punishment you earn, every time you do so.

"You are grounded for the next two months. The other normal household grounding rules all apply. For the entire two months you are required to be in your bedrooms studying if you are not at school or eating with the family. If you break that grounding you will receive at least 10 swats of the paddle. The number will increase by ten for every offense.

"You may go to your bedrooms now and start studying. I expect you to be prompt for dinner and back to your bedrooms to study immediately after.

"Otherwise, your punishment is finished. Your mother and I forgive you for making us miss the extraction. We will not speak of that again."

I went to the study door and motioned them out. They then ran from the room clutching their still bare butts.

When they left, I closed the door and my mother turned to me, hugged me and said, "I am proud of you. You handled this well. I should have handled this myself, but I was afraid I'd go too far. You remind me of your father in so many good ways and my dad in all the other good ways. I wish you had known your grandfather". My mothers parents had been killed in a car crash about a year before I was born. My dad's parents lived in the Midwest. We never got to visit them before the Sa'arm came and we assume ate them. We would never know for sure.

"There is only one problem and I will need your help on this. If I ever remind them of their failure causing us to miss extraction, you need to remind me. It will not do for me to break our agreement with them.

"Let's go try and forget this happened".

After about ten minutes I went up and checked on the girls. They were both on their beds, still holding and rubbing their butts. Something needed to be done about where they were bleeding. I fetched antiseptic ointment for burns that had aloe in it and hoped for the best. I went to Donna, told her I needed to care for the bleeding on her butt and clean it up. This was going to hurt but it had to be done. I did what needed to be done. Initially it hurt, a lot, but as the aloe took over the pain became less. When I was done Donna thanked me and told Denise it was worth the initial pain. I did what had to be done for Denise too.

When I turned to leave, I noticed my mother standing in the doorway smiling. She said, "Good job! I'll be down in a few minutes." She stayed with the girls. I heard the girls apologizing to her and asking forgiveness. I would learn later in addition to assuring the girls that they were forgiven that she told them how to dress so that their clothes would not be damaged during dinner. They were told that dinner was going to be hard to sit through but it would get better with each meal.

When Mom came down from the girls bedroom, we watched the news until supper time. We called the family together when dinner was ready. Donna and Denise came to the table wearing sun dresses. It looked like they had towels wrapped around their butts under the dresses. They both sat very gingerly. When my younger brother John gallantly brought two pillows in from his bedroom for the girls to sit on, we all had a hard time keeping a straight face. Donna and Denise apologized to everyone and we gave them long hugs and kisses.

The next two months there were some small slips in the house with regard to the grounding, but the girls grades improved immensely. There were some slight glitches in their scores up and down as could be expected. There was no doubt they were trying. Their old friends were history. By the next semester, their ex-friends were all expelled.

While my mother or I occasionally had to spank them, it was rare. They never strayed from the course.

The more interesting thing was the way some of their older previous friends and new friends treated me. There was always respect shown me and never any back talk at all. I had the feeling that my sisters spilled the beans but I really never knew for sure.

Fifteen years after the president announced the existence of the Sa'arm, I turned fourteen and received my first CAP test. It had been a scary two and a half years with many changes since the Sa'arm invaded North America. Please note that the following is what I, Bruce McCoy, believed to be true. In all honestly, with what little was verifiable because of the war, some of it might just have been propaganda.

School in the US had changed quite a bit. Almost the entire male population of the US was conscripted into the EDF (Earth Defense Force). Female citizens were allowed into the military, but it was still volunteer only for them. The only males not serving were those under 18 and over 55. While the Confederacy thought that it was okay for a fourteen year old to enter the military, the EDF did not see it that way. Perhaps they were right, as some of the guys my age were REALLY stupid. As a result most high schools, where a high percentage of the teachers were men, had lost a majority of their teachers. Attending high school was now optional and home schooling was the preferred method of learning by many parents.

Another big change was food. With the central US having been invaded by the Sa'arm, almost all food was produced by replicators. The EDF military, to drive the Sa'arm out, had carpet bombed most of the Midwest US's food producing farms. There were few cattle ranches any more, all the cattle being destroyed to prevent the Sa'arm from eating them.

The government of the USA was now in the hands of its military leaders. They were elected with the one promise being that the Sa'arm would pay for their incursion into the US. The military of the US, Canada and Mexico merged into the EDF. In Central America, governments just collapsed and their military aligned themselves with the EDF. They would work political things out later.

In North America the Sa'arm were being pushed back and were starving to death. There was a small concentration in Saskatchewan, Canada. The area between the Rockies and the Mississippi down to Arkansas was a no man's land packed with sensors that could sense a prairie dog digging a tunnel, let alone a Sa'arm. Pockets of Sa'arm were still popping out of nowhere and causing panics. No one knew where they were coming from but it was thought that they might be remnants of the Sa'arm invasion that had gone into hibernation. They were now coming out of hibernation and looking for food ... which they were not finding. Once found the Sa'arm would be relentlessly attacked by the EDF and Confederacy orbital weapons platforms.

In South America, the drug lords who were running those countries were Sa'arm food too. There was little left in human hands, mostly near the Pacific coast.

Africa and Australia were completely in the hands of the Sa'arm.

The Russian political government was gone, all Sa'arm food. In Russia their military was beginning to drive the Sa'arm back in some areas but was still losing ground in others.

In eastern Asia the military of groups that had been fighting each other for millennium, Korea, China and Japan, had managed to work together to drive the Sa'arm out of Manchuria.

India had been overrun, as had been the Middle East and most of Europe. England had an invasion but now had driven the Sa'arm off its island.

The UN as a body ceased to exist when it was clear that they provided no help in fighting the Sa'arm.

Economies throughout the world simply ceased to exist. Corporations that controlled them were almost all either nationalized or there was no longer a need for them.

In the US, the US Federal Reserve shut down. The President of the United States declared a permanent bank holiday. If you could not get it with a replicator you didn't need it. Money as such was useless. All debts were canceled. Services, electricity, homes, food, were provided at no charge. As a citizen you were expected to contribute to the war effort, PERIOD. You were given an assigned job and expected to carry it out. If you didn't you often found yourself on the front lines doing your best to not become Sa'arm food, sometimes without a weapon.

Try to mess with the system? You found that the replicators were a very efficient method of correcting problems via recycling and nobody seemed to mind it.

Oh yes, lawyers? Politicians? They had a choice join the military, or make excellent recycling material, too. Criminals? This was war time, there was no time for prisons, courts or the like, recycle them. Corrupt law enforcement, not a problem, drafted into the military. Most people hoped it stayed that way. Mistakes? I am sure there were many, but since the military was always an option those mistakes were allowed to occur.

Meanwhile, I was growing up and ended up skipping three grades between 3rd and 10th grades. My mother believed in school and continued to send me. I was an athlete in my spare time. In my junior year at high school I had managed to make the High School football team as a 13 year old and ended up starting quarterback after the first and second string quarterbacks both broke their legs, one in a preseason scrimmage freak accident and the other in the first drive of the 1st quarter of the opening game. I knew the play book, and for a thirteen year old, I was king size (6 ft. 2 in. and growing). We went undefeated that season. No one even questioned my age. I just looked like a High School Junior. I played basketball and baseball too. I had a wicked curve ball. If there had been pro teams any more I would have eventually been a prospect, assuming I decided to go that way.

I really used to enjoy watching pro sports as a youngster.

Pro sports had quickly ended in the US when the Swarm invasion of the Central USA occurred. Almost all athletes were called into the Earth Defense Force to defend us. The only players left were some hockey neanderthals and some truly insane baseball pitchers. The pro sports leagues suspended operations until the crisis was over.

On Earth the only real problem for the Confederacy, that had not been completely eradicated, was the Earth First movement. Somehow it managed to find new followers and new methods of harassing the Confederacy constantly. Testing was still ongoing, mostly for people no longer in the EDF due to injury, people who wanted to retest, or new 14-year-old children/adults. CAP testing centers were constantly a target for Earth First, in fact they were almost the only target they had left on Earth.

In the past year the Confederacy had changed its extraction tactics. The CAP testing facilities were now mobile. You were told where to go for testing. You arrived at your assigned time and they teleported you from there to a "secure location" for testing. Earth First had a hard time with the mobile centers. They set up the morning that the testing was to occur. Earth First found that it was impossible to target them because it was next to impossible to set up a strike in the amount of time between the centers being set up at 8 am and the center being torn down around 9 am. You could not follow them around because when they moved they were monitored. Anything following them was detected and dealt with in the time honored method of immediate execution.

The "secure locations" were randomly rotated on a daily basis, again for security. They were used five or six times and then relocated. I was not aware of it, but in the last few weeks extractions started to be done directly from the testing super centers. If you passed you volunteered and were immediately extracted. If you failed your test, you were asked if you were interested in being a concubine. The AIs by now knew what made a good concubine and if you wanted to be one they told you your chances of success. Most men were told they had no shot at all as a concubine. The women on the other hand almost always had a almost a 95% chance of being successful as a concubine and were extracted if they wanted to go. About 75% of the women went to the stars. If you were not extracted you were sent home, usually directly outside your own home. This was another safety tactic. Followup extractions of dependents were not a real problem because they were too random for Earth First to get to in time. Killing children was not good for publicity either.

Mistakes happen though and I was about to be front and center at one of them. The Confederacy had used one of their secure testing locations outside Springfield, Massachusetts one time too many. Someone in for a retest had recognized the inside of the building of the Springfield testing center. He failed the test and was overheard when he mentioned knowing the location. That person and the person he was talking to were executed by Earth First to make sure the information was not spread any further and to prevent Confederacy from catching on that there was a problem. Earth First then directed twenty three person cells to set up to attack the center the next time it was used.

Back to the story ... I was FINALLY eligible for CAP testing. Being nervous, I mentally went through in my mind why I was a good candidate to be a sponsor. I was blessed with both high intelligence and excellent physical abilities. I was first board of the chess team at my High School. I was starting quarterback on the football team, a sport I loved and my mother hated. I was the starting pitcher on the baseball team, with a 90 mile an hour fastball (trust me in HS that is good), a wicked curve ball no one wanted me to throw (including the catcher who had more passed balls than he wanted), a batting average over .500, and was leading the team in home runs and RBI. The basketball coach was lusting after me, as were the wrestling couch, the track coach and the swimming team coach. Somehow I was talked into getting on the the debate team. The teachers and the coaches were all good people and somehow managed to allow me to work with all of them. I was busy, I knew, but I did not know any better. My mother was very supportive of all my athletic efforts while making sure I kept up my studies and got good grades.

I had just started going through puberty and I had recently had a growth spurt and was 6 foot 2 inches, towering over my contemporaries. I was noticing girls but other than planning my pre-pack, I was so busy I really did not have a lot of time for them. I seemed to get along with everyone at school, but that was not that surprising. The jocks at school, while initially a problem, backed off once they saw my athletic abilities and the geeks liked the me because I really was one of them too. It did not hurt that the jocks knew I took a dim view of anyone harassing the geeks, so the geeks were not harassed, at least on the male side of things.

It was the law again that all people over the age of 14 had to get a CAP test now within one year of their birthday. My mother insisted that I be tested on my birthday and I had an appointment at 9 am, that day. When my mother called to set up an appointment the person who she talked to asked if she wanted to schedule an appointment for a retest at the same time. We had no idea at the time that this was a ruse to get her into the CAP testing center. The Confederacy wanted my mom but through some pretty bad luck had missed her several times. They were not even aware she was in the Boston area.