Introduction

 

The principle of sliding... somehow being transported to another world; a parallel world identical in so many respects to our own - but so different in others, has now been well established. The how and, more importantly, the why, is not known. It doesn't work as it does in the TV show (that closely emulated the results) where the star operated a hand-held device to open a worm-hole to the other world; no indeed. A man and sometimes his wife and even his family simply woke up to find themselves in a world that had followed a different course of events.

In this world, Hitler, the emperor Hirohito and Mussolini had won World War II and Britain, Europe, the USA and their allies had lost. Hitler had taken over Western Europe and the British Isles; Mussolini, Africa and Eastern Europe; and Japan now controlled Asia and the Pacific Basin, including the Americas.

It was not a good world in which to be an Australian - and particularly a beautiful one...

Chapter 1

 

My name is Jeanne. I was just nineteen years old when it happened...

I distinctly remember going to bed on 31st January, 2000 - the end of the millennium ... and I was very definitely in an era of freedom and prosperity for Australia. When I woke up on 1st January, 2002, it was to a very different Australia. One in which we Australians, or more correctly the offspring of former Australians, were slaves. Slaves to the victorious Japanese in World War II! Sounds weird? It sure does. But I spent a whole year on that other world for I have since discovered other people have been transported to different 'worlds' (for want of a better word) and each has lasted a year there. Of course at the time, I had no idea where I was, why, or for how long. Even now the knowledge the authorities have of the principle, let alone the fact of 'sliding', is extremely sketchy and those of us who have been through it have been asked to keep our silence. I am only writing this so I don't go mad - for the experiences I went through on that other world were both bizarre and terribly distressing.

 

When I woke up, it was in a mean bed in a tiny room in the tin shed that passed for our house. It was hot but there was no means of cooling. Hell, we didn't even have electricity. I got up and dressed in the garment that had been carefully hung up in the tiny space for my clothes. It was a plain cotton dress. Under it I wore a singlet and cotton briefs. Nothing else. That was it! There were no shoes and stockings. I was to discover we couldn't afford them - no natives could and so I went barefoot. In all, I had on only three items of clothing: briefs, singlet and the form-fitting dress.

I went out of my room, cubicle really, to find my parents - yes, they were the same parents but so different ... They looked the same but now my father, instead of being a successful civil engineer, was a labourer - for that was all the 'native' Australians were permitted to be and my mother was forced to work as a servant to a family of rich Japanese who owned a department store in Broadbeach, a suburb of the Gold Coast, a hundred kilometres south of Brisbane.

Naturally I was wide-eyed at the changes - as wide-eyed as my parents were at my news that on my world we had won the war ... Over a meagre breakfast, we talked for a while over the weird fact of my being there (and presumably that my double was now in my place on my world) but then they got practical. My 'father' said he had to go to work, toiling on the streets as a labourer, my 'mother' had to scurry off to scrub floors and wash a mountain of clothes for her Japanese employers while I had to hurry off to the department store where I worked as a cleaner.

It was lucky I had studied Japanese in school and while I wasn't all that good at it, both my mother and father urged me to learn it quickly for our overlords would not take kindly to my apparent lack of knowledge of their language that was now the lingua franca of the country. Fortunately, I am good at languages and was able to pick it up pretty quickly.

What I wasn't able to accept was the utter contempt in which our conquerors held us. I had learned in school that on my world, the Japanese held themselves in low esteem for losing the war, but here, the boot was very definitely on the other foot. We were the lowest of the low and if we stepped even a tiny centimetre out of line, we were in for it - and how. They both admonished me to kowtow to every Japanese I met on the streets; to get off the pavements to let them pass, etc, etc, etc. I gulped. I wasn't used to kowtowing to anyone and while I had nothing against the Japanese as a people, since I was two generations removed from the atrocities committed by some of them in that war, I didn't even think about it.

Naturally, I fell foul of them very early. I wasn't born a slave and I quickly found out that that was how they thought of us. We were a conquered people, fit only to serve them as menials. We could hold no positions of power and the pay levels for the 'natives' as they referred to us, were ridiculously low, kept there on purpose to keep us on the breadline.

They lived in real houses in all the suburbs of the Gold Coast (and I suppose all over the populated areas of Australia); we lived in shanty-towns or in very low-class suburbs. My real parents lived in a very nice area of Broadbeach since my father had done very well as a consultant engineer; now though the Japanese lived in that part of Broadbeach while we now lived in a distinctly seedy part, way back from the coastal strip. They had colonised Australia very quickly it seemed - understandably as this country has one of the best climates in the world. In my own world, Australia was referred to as 'the lucky country'. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese had come here after the war to buy up the expropriated property of the 'natives' who were all dispossessed of everything they owned. Even their bank accounts were frozen and transferred to the interim government. We could work for them as peons, labourers, virtual slaves and take what they gave us - or we could starve. My grandparents elected to work and of course so did my own parents.

Working conditions were terrible. Just as the Japanese who guarded the prisoners who worked on the Burma Railway had been wantonly cruel to our soldiers, so now were all of them who were now our masters and mistresses.

As I said, I fell foul of my boss very early in the piece. I was supposed to clean the ladies' toilets in the department store. Back home, I was a university student studying law; now I was suddenly a cleaner. It wasn't that I was a snob and thought the work beneath me. Not at all. But to be sneered at constantly and smacked across the face and buttocks and even my breasts every few minutes by Japanese matrons and not-so-old women became unbearable. I grabbed the hand of one of these women who was about to slap my face for some unspecified fault and her face turned from astonishment at my temerity - to rage. I was marched out of the toilet and down to the floor supervisor who also looked at me in real incredulity when the story of my impertinence was told to him. No-one challenged their authority, it seemed. I was quickly to find out why ...

He jabbered at me for some minutes and my knowledge of the language was enough to make me understand I was now dismissed and, for my rudeness to the lady, sentenced to one year in a correction camp. I realised, with a rude shock that my parents' warnings had been very real and, for my stupidity, I was facing a horrible time of it.

I wasn't hauled off to a court. We natives did not have the luxury of such democratic judicial procedures. It was enough for a native that a supervisor considered you guilty. Only the authorities at the camps could do anything about a so-called miscarriage of justice and I was also going to find out very quickly that they never did. In any case, according to their laws, I was guilty and I was about to find out how their penal system worked - at least as it applied to us natives.

I was locked in the holding cell that each large firm that employed natives had to await collection by a prisoner transport truck. Nobody came to see me. I was now a pariah and anyone showing any sympathy for me might well suffer the same fate as me. I was transported to the camp on the back of a truck. It was more like a cage actually: a zoo cage in which we prisoners were jam-packed, forced in much like the railway station attendants pushed the commuters into their trains in Japan. There was no room to sit of course and all of us - there must have been a hundred or even more forced into that cage, males and females alike were pressed up hard against each other. I wondered what would happen if any of us needed to go?

Most of the women were dressed like me, in just plain underclothes and a simple dress - three items at most and some clearly didn't even have underwear, the outline of their pubic mound was very obvious as were the nipples of those who didn't even have a singlet. I never saw a native woman with a bra - such luxury was unheard of for us.

The males were just as simply dressed, many without upper body covering of any kind and with only a pair of brief, torn shorts or in some cases trousers, usually tied with a string around their waists. Few of them had underpants on - that much was obvious through the tears in their shorts or trousers. Universally though, whether male or female, we were all lean and hard. Being kept in abject poverty, there was no money for excess food, every morsel being scrabbled for, if not in the gutter, not far from it.

The camp was located on a plain at Beaudesert, a town situated some thirty kilometres inland. It was an enormous complex, one of four that served the whole Gold Coast region and which between them had space for over a hundred thousand inmates at a given time. Since the population of the Gold Coast region in my world was half a million of us 'Australians', I presumed it would be much the same here and therefore a full twenty percent were capable of being held in correction at any one time.

Concentration camps run by the Germans and the Japanese in WWII have been described as pretty horrible. This was vastly worse. First, there were no barracks for us. Not even a roof to keep out the rain. We were allocated pens. Yes, pens, just like pigs, except that on a modern farm, pigs are sheltered from the weather. We had nothing. There was room for about two hundred of us in each of the 125 pens. Each was surrounded by razor wire and had a rough board floor made by nailing unfinished planks onto joists. This kept us out of the mud but the planks were awfully rough. There was a trough to drink out of, fed by an automatic valve and next to that another trough, lower down, over which we could squat to do our business. It was all in full view of everyone, of course. We had no privacy for any of the former so-called 'private' bodily functions.

But all of this we only came to see later. As the truck rolled into the administration complex at the front edge of the camp, all we saw was the masses of razor wire (much of it electrified) and in the distance the beginnings of the rows and rows of the pens. What was actually inside was hard to see clearly.

The truck stopped in a small yard formed of the dozens of strands of tight razor wire that delineated each of the pens and other areas of the camp. Once the entry gate was closed, the back gate of the truck's cage was opened and the guards screamed at us to jump down. Everything was in Japanese of course. I never heard any of them use any English at all.

We were lined up in four rows of about twenty-five and then the sergeant of the guard strode up and down, staring at us in what looked like hate. Then he screamed at us to strip. Yes. We were ordered to strip down to the buff, right there in front of them all and of each other, males and females all mixed up together.

Right here, I should say I have been blessed with good genes. I was naturally slender and had good bones, thanks to my parents. I was always keen on sport - all sports and that had helped give me a nice athletic physique. I am a natural blond with fine silky hair that came down to my shoulders and I have blue eyes. I was also blessed with a good skin ... I'm not boasting. Most of this came from inherited characteristics. I wasn't vain of my good looks, though. I enjoyed boys and I had experimented with sex. I preferred good-looking, athletic boys and I sort of gravitated to them.

On this world, there were no fats amongst us natives and if some of them were on the scrawny side, most were just lean and hard, their skins tanned and their physiques toned by hard work. This applied to us females as much as to the men.

But cruel in the extreme as most of our masters were, they had never forced us to strip naked in public before, that my new parents had told me ... We stood there and stared at them in horror and fear and bewilderment. Strip? Naked? Here, out in the open? No, surely not.

The sergeant just smiled, cast his eyes up and down the line and then hit on me. "You!" he screamed. "Out here!"

I stared at him in consternation but I moved out to stand before him. He smiled sourly at me then raised his hand, grabbed at the neckline of my thin cotton dress and simply ripped it off me. Just like that. The material parted easily and he kept pulling and tearing at it until the last remnants, rags, dropped off, leaving me standing up in just the brief panties and short singlet.

He didn't hesitate. He tore off the singlet with as little ceremony as he had employed with the dress and then, grinning horribly at me, extracted his huge knife from its scabbard on the left side of his belt and, while I stood there shaking I'm sure in utter fear of what he was going to do with that evil-looking blade, he inserted it into the waistline of the panties, sharp side out and gently sawed up and down until they too wafted down as rags off my body. A quick slice at each leg band and I stood stark naked, trying to hide my breasts and my sex with my hands and arms and by crossing my knees over one another while around me the other guards grinned at my discomfort. My fellow prisoners were behind me so I couldn't see them but I knew every single one of their eyes were on my naked back and buttocks and I cringed even further as I felt them boring into my flesh

But things were to get worse. The sergeant now screamed at me to get my hands up behind my head and to spread my legs wide open. He had replaced his knife in its scabbard but now he held his cane and was tapping it into the open palm of his other hand. The implication was very clear. I slowly, and very reluctantly, raised my hands up and clasped them behind my head and then opened my legs while the sergeant looked me up and down lecherously.

But then he raised his cane and lashed it down, very hard, over my swelling breasts. I collapsed in a heap on the ground and screamed horribly.

"Get up," he said, "or do you want another?" He was standing over me, his horrible cane held high, ready to come down hard on my back or shoulders. I scrambled to my feet instantly and resumed the pose, eyeing him fearfully as his eyes again roved up and down my now naked flesh. He raised the cane again and I cringed - but held my pose, not daring to do anything else. He smiled and dropped the cane to his side and then he turned away from me to the four rows of prisoners behind me. "Strip!" he screamed again ...

This time, there was no hesitation. Every one of them quickly stripped off his or her few items of clothing to stand up stark naked before our guards, all of whom were soldiers in a special unit of the Imperial Army, as I was soon to find out, selected for their sadism and brutality - and their delight in using and abusing us prisoners.

Now, as the guards stood ready, their guns trained on us, the sergeant strolled up the line, cupping a comely girl's breasts or delving into her vagina while she cried out and squirmed in shame; or punched a male's belly or grabbed his testicles, dragging them down hard until he too screamed in agony.

After half an hour of this, we were ordered to pick up what was left of our clothing and march over to a large shed. In this we were processed in readiness for our term in that terrible camp. We were formed into a long line, each of us with his or her hands clasped up behind their head and in this shameful pose, stepped out through the gate of the arrival yard and into the one surrounding the huge building then into it, to begin what was going to make us over - into inmates of the camp.

First they depilated us - removed all the hair from our bodies. This was done by forcing us to walk through a tunnel in which an extremely hot - painfully hot, near scalding liquid sprayed down onto us. They protected the hair on our heads, our eyebrows and lashes by issuing us with a helmet which we placed on our heads before we walked into and through the long tunnel. The helmet didn't allow us to see and we had to place our hands on the shoulders of the prisoner in front, in my case a good-looking male with very nice muscles and gripping his shoulders was the one nice thing about that day.

As we entered the race, the scalding liquid sprayed down onto us from overhead, from the sides and up between our legs. The jets were powerful; even cold they would have been painful as they battered our flesh; but scalding hot as they were, our skins were soon lobster red, which apparently aided in loosening the hair follicles enabling the ingredient in the liquid that killed the hair root to get in and do its horrible work. The jets down between my legs spouted up and got right between my buttocks and into my vagina and I jumped in pain - which was intended as this opened my legs and buttocks even wider, assisting in removing hairs from those normally hidden areas.

All this happened without us being able to see or hear anything. It was quite dark inside the helmet and it also blocked out most sound, only the deafening noise of the sprays and the pumps that blasted them onto us could be heard. It seemed to take hours but I suppose it was no more than half an hour or so and then we emerged from the other end of the tunnel and could remove the helmets.

We now stared at each other in astonishment. I suppose most of us had seen others of his or her own sex naked before and some, those of the opposite sex, I certainly had but I had never ever seen a human being quite like we now were. Every last hair on our bodies, at least from our noses down, was gone. Underarms, legs and sex were all naked for us females and in the case of the males, their chest and belly hair and their beards were also gone, those areas now quite smooth. It made our nakedness doubly obscene - which was what was intended of course. We looked like store dummies except that we had very real sexual organs, which they certainly didn't. And those sex organs were now very much more apparent than they had been a few minutes ago.

With us girls, the gash between our legs was quite open and exposed and I wondered that they were all so different. In my own case, the slit is just that: a mere vertical line and even when I walk, you couldn't see anything of what was inside unless you physically parted the lips. But some of them were very different. In my case, the lips were almost non-existent but some of them had very prominent labia, some of which were naturally wide-open and you could see the clitoris very clearly as well as the pink membranes of the inner lips of the vagina.

With the males, the differences were just as great. As I've said they ranged from lean and hard to downright scrawny but it seemed their sexual equipment didn't depend on their muscles or their general build. You could be the scrawniest specimen alive - and be blessed with a huge set of cock and balls, it seemed, but all were now as fully exposed as were ours.

We didn't have time to think much over this for the line didn't stop moving. As we emerged from the tunnel and handed in our helmets, we passed through a doorway into the next section, from whence we could smell the odour of roasting pig meat - except it wasn't pigs that were roasting ...

It was us! Can you guess? I'll bet you can't.

They were actually branding us on the left buttock with a Japanese character that marked us as troublemakers. The line moved forward and the guard administering the brand, which was on an electric implement like a huge soldering iron, waited until his two partners grabbed the prisoner, male or female, and held him tight - then pushed the glowing iron onto the crown of his flesh while he screamed in agony and then had to walk on.

When it came my turn, I was near vomiting from the smell of the roasting human flesh and from the notion that my skin could actually be branded! The very idea of branding a human being was so far from my consciousness - my perceptions of what was done to prisoners on my own world, as not to be capable of being conceptualised. And yet here it was, happening right before my eyes. Each prisoner, male or female, stark naked and now bereft of every last hair on their bodies (well, their legs, torsos and faces, anyway), was moving up to that terrible spot where the guard was matter-of-factly pressing his instrument of shame and humiliation and yes, of torture, into our flesh, to permanently brand our left buttock cheek with the mark of infamy.