Bully Boy

A Bully Boy in hanyo times was a female human surgically altered to resemble a male. They could be Smoothies, or the more elite Punishers who had artificial penises. The Bully Boy technology was created by Lionfist Corporation in the early 2060s to offset its lack of biological males to staff the lower echelons of its corporate security force. The tech was quickly adopted by the other corps.

Who was a Bully Boy?

The Bully Boys started out as normal slags who graduated from Slag School aged fifteen, then went to work in one of the typical slag careers. At some point thereafter they fell foul of the system and got sent to Corrections under Human Resources. The only exit from Corrections was death or the Bully Qualifiers, which was a set of tests determining levels of aggression and willingness to bully people. If you passed the Bully Qualifier you got given the Bully Contract, and were sent to surgery for the alterations. A very small number of slags opted for the Bully Qualifiers voluntarily, and they were often offered instant upgrades to Punisher status. Bullies had to be addressed as 'he' by slags, but hanyos and chicks continued to call them 'she'. Their early memories of slag life made them very efficient enforcers and rooters-out of dissent and troublemaking. As they had 'escaped' from the privations and humiliations of slagland, they often had a secret fear of being sent back there, where their erstwhile victims could get at them, and this kept them under the hanyo thumb, and gave them motivation for severity and paranoia.

The Bully Alteration

The first stage of the change was the removal of all primary and secondary female tissue, and the tattooing of the corporate logo on the fresh breast scars. This whole procedure was done without anaesthesia to 'toughen them up'. Then, an artificial gland called the SOD or Sergeant-on-Duty was implanted in the roof of the mouth and hooked up to the body's systems. The SOD was set to begin by giving out bursts of male hormones at levels only seen in fetal males. This often made people so 'high' that their pain vanished, often making them psychologically dependent on the SOD. In this stage they were bombarded with violent porn and made to play very rough team games to 'build character'. As the male hormones bulked up their muscles, they were whipped into training like maniacs. The weaker ones often died of cardiac arrest in this phase, and this was regarded as unavoidable attrition. Once their bodies had been altered sufficiently, the hormone levels were dialled back.

The Punisher Upgrade

All Bully Boys began as Smoothies, that is neuters without sex organs. The particularly nasty-minded or favoured were offered the Punisher Upgrade, where an artificial penis and scrotum were attached. The penis, which often had tiny barbs along its length, could be erected by a switch on the SOD activated by the tongue. The scrotum could be filled with biohazard or radiohot materials, toxins, or genetic material. Chicken-hunting by a Punisher usually caused severe lifelong morbidity or death.

The Tokyo Rethink

In 2079 The Joking Clown toured Japan, ending with a mega concert in Tokyo. However, after the set ended, nobody left. The fans barricaded all the entrances and remained inside, while the Joking Clown continued to sing, perform and address teh crowd. It was discovered that fans had been stockpiling food and water inside the stadium for days, and this could not have been possible without the complicity of the Bully Boys who were supposed to be guarding it. Furthermore, when an assault was attempted on the stadium, Bullies armed with state-of-the-art weapons were seen repelling it. At first Ramdhun thought it might be an attempt by the defunct Shigenobu Corporationto cause trouble, but later were forced to conclude that the Bullies were acting on their own initiative. This caused a crisis of trust among the hanyos regarding their Bullies, which became known as the Tokyo Rethink. Many Bullies were executed merely on suspicion of having sympathies with the rebels. Paradoxically, this led to a cooling of the Corporate Wars in the late 2080s and 2090s, until Ramdhun's invention of military-grade ai caused it to heat up again.

Bully Boys in hanyo culture

Among a minority of hanyos, Bully Boys were regarded as exotic and desirable sexual partners, performing the functions of gay men in either butch or femme roles while being genetically female. Some Bully Boys were also well known rockstars with their own bands and fan followings. Mostly the genre they performed was Rape Rock, pioneered in the 2030s by Babelion as a protest genre, but quickly taken over by hanyobait artists and performed ironically. In the 2070s, the most famous Bully Boy band in New Singapore was Beaver Junction.