Elana receives instructions.

After a very long two or three minutes, Elana's phone made a notification sound she'd never heard before and when she read the notification, it was from the delibertization app.

ACCOUNT 11431975 CONFIRMATION OF ACTIVATION
You have been assigned a handler based on your preferences. Your location is being transmitted to your handler. Estimated arrival, 9 minutes.
INSTRUCTIONS
Do not attempt to leave your immediate vicinity.
You must be waiting just inside the front door in an approved kneeling position.
You must be wearing your gene-coded ID collar and nothing else.
Failure to comply will result in automatic enrollment in a three-day obedience training program.

Elana gaped at the notification, feeling heat rise in her face. This was way more than she'd bargained for. Naked? In public? Keeling in wait for a stranger? In retrospect, she didn't really know what she thought would happen, but for some reason she had romanticized all of this a bit in her mind. She certainly hadn't counted on this.

8 minutes.

She swallowed nervously. She remembered something about these obedience training programs. They'd come up in the literature and during her enrollment proceedings. Those things were the **** end of hardcore, not for the faint of heart and definitely more intense than Elana was interested in at that moment. That certainly helped make up her mind. If she wanted to avoid obedience training, she'd have to comply with all instructions. Despite being mildly appalled at the idea of disrobing in the café, Elana recognized that she was getting exactly what she wanted, after a fashion. This choice was being made for her, by threat of reeducation. She couldn't not do as she was told, and that realization thrilled her deeply.

She stood up, feeling like more people should be staring at her due to the enormous weight of her situation, but still no one was. That won't last long, she thought, as she began unbuttoning her blouse.

7 minutes.

Elana hurried, trying to ignore the growing number of people who took notice of her now that she was stripping. The blouse came off, slipping from her shoulders and down her arms. She caught it as it fell into one hand and laid it down on the chair she'd been sitting on. She kicked off her shoes and unzipped her skirt, letting it fall to the floor before stepping out of it. It joined the blouse on the chair.

The heat in her cheeks was intense as Elana stood in nothing but her nude-colored bra and white panties. Pretty much everyone was looking at her by now, but she knew for a fact that she wasn't breaking any laws by stripping in public. If anything, remaining clothed could have been a bigger problem for her. She honestly wasn't sure at this point.

When Elana reached behind herself to unhook her bra, a woman in a nearby booth shrieked at her. "What are you doing? This isn't a strip club!"

Elana felt both humiliated and anxious. She had to hurry, but she couldn't just ignore this woman. "Ah, I, uh... I have to... I'm delibertizing, so..." She gestured to her phone, still unlocked on the table.

5 minutes.

The woman's eyes widened when she realized what Elana was trying to say. "Oh! Oh..." Her expression turned to uncomfortable pity. "Oh, I see. Well you need to wear your collar so everyone knows. You can't go around giving people heart attacks like that."

A collar. That rang a bell somewhere in her memory. They'd given her some kind of collar when she'd enrolled. The instructions also mentioned a collar. Her hands froze. Undressing would be pointless if she didn't have that collar. She'd made the rule old, but as the one who'd written it, her memory was still spotty on some things. She hadn't fully reconciled the previous reality with the new one yet. Her eyes moved to the small bag she always kept with her and prayed she had the good sense to keep that collar handy in the event she ever activated her account.

The alternative was a guaranteed trip to obedience training. Suddenly much less concerned with her partial state of dress, Elana tore open her bag to search for the precious collar.