"With a twenty-seven per cent deployment, your harvester delivers less than half of the average processed Material other harvesters do, Captain. How do you account for the discrepancy?
Even with substandard Material, we only deliver quality, not quantity, Sir."
-- Excerpt from disciplinary review #DR51 for Captain Johan Deboer #HC332697.
***
The smell of something burning woke me up.
Hair?
My head felt like my brain was using itself as a battering ram to beat itself out of my skull, and it was focused on forcing my eyes out before doing anything else. I squeezed them shut, trying to remember what kind of bender I had been on the night before. Everything hurt. Like I'd completed a triathlon and a pub crawl back-to-back.
Never again.
The familiar mantra of everyone ever on the day after was my first actual coherent thought. Followed quickly by how much I hurt and how uncomfortable I was.
It was a while before I noticed a grating noise forcing its way into the forefront of my consciousness with the persistence of a door-to-door salesman.
I tried to move and pull the covers over my head to block it out. However, when I attempted to move, the slight itch on my forearms that I had been intently ignoring exploded into the feeling of burning oil pouring over them. I screamed and tried to sit up, which only caused the burning sensations to spread to my legs, back, and chest.
I thrashed -or at least tried to-, and the pain ramped up. It was as if someone was slowly pouring molten lava onto me. I howled and kept trying to get loose from what was holding me immobile.
Any form of coherent thought left me.
I couldn't stop trying to escape, and the pain kept increasing in leaps and bounds. A primal flight reflex had taken hold: I had to get out of there!
Something then clamped onto the sides of my head. I'm sure I felt it drawing blood, and the pain stopped instantly. The memory of the agony I'd just been through lingered and pulsed with its own strength, but the actual pain was simply cut off. Gone as if it had never been.
I stopped screaming, my throat raw. I didn't stop because I was regaining my faculties or because I was shocked that the pain had stopped, but because I threw up.
My lunch spewed across my chin, and I struggled to breathe while emptying everything from my stomach, crying and blubbering with every breath I tried to suck in.
It took a while for my senses to return and to get my hiccups under control.
When I wanted to move my head to spit out the foul taste in my mouth, I realized I couldn't move. So I froze, then blinked furiously, trying to get the tears from my eyes so I could see.
The grinding sound had stopped somewhere during my episode, but I could now hear muffled screams. The smell of an open sewer and scorched metal assaulted my nose through the reak of my own puke. I was sure I had emptied my bowels and completely soiled myself.
The rest of my aches and pains were present but muted, and I felt awake. An unnatural focus settled in me in a way I'd never experienced before.
Had I been drugged?!?
I slowly gathered that I was face down on something slick, wet, and solid. My limbs were restrained in spread-eagle style, and my head was locked in place, facing slightly up and forward.
Flicking my eyes around, I saw what looked like a train track and chains extending from the thing I was lying on to a dull iron-grey wall about five meters in front of me. I flicked my eyes left and right and guessed I was in some kind of hallway.
What the hell was happening?! How did I get here?!
Something moved around my field of vision, and I heard metallic clicks... I then realized that the minute space around my right hand that had permitted tiny movements had disappeared. Something was locking me down even further!
I tried to pull myself loose again and then felt what could only be a hard slap on my backside.
"Stil blijven liggen, wijfie. Anders maakt dat ding je kapot."
The man, for that's what he had to be with the gruff voice, spoke... German? Something like that. In any case, he was a person, so he could let me go. More clicks happened while I was processing; now, even my toes were tightly secured.
"Ple..." My voice cracked. I knew I'd hurt my throat screaming and throwing up, but it didn't actually hurt. It was just a muted throb. I spat, swallowed, and tried again.
"Please. Let me go. I... I promise that I won't tell anybody. Just… please."
He laughed, and it wasn't a nice laugh. It was a hateful mocking sound and was worse than how the Purists had made me feel during lunch yesterday.
Was it yesterday? What the hell had happened?!
"Je hebt nergens om heen te gaan wijfie."
Whatever he said, his condescending tone dragged me back into the present. It was like he was talking to a particularly disgusting animal or something. I shuddered with revulsion as I felt him squeeze my backside and linger there for a while. I opened my mouth but blanked on what to say.
"Je bent best lekker, maar je stinkt een uur in de wind. Je bent ook waarschijnlijk binnen het uur kapot en ik neuk geen dooie."
He finished restraining me and slapped my backside again, hard enough to hurt through the haze that had muted my body, and I yelped.
He laughed his vile laugh again, pulling on my ear until I heard a metallic clank. Then he pulled on something around my neck before the clang sounded again, and he moved to stand before me.
I was expecting a disgusting fat man with a massive moustache in Lederhosen, don't ask me why but that's where my head goes every time I think about Germany. In this case, he was a lean bald man in a grimy greyish hazmat suit. He started methodically using a pair of small bolt-cutters to snip off all my rings, letting them fall to the floor like worthless trash. He then reached out and pulled the necklace Jo had given me until it snapped and then dropped it as well.
"Please," I begged, but he ignored me and removed the rest of my jewellery. Then I heard him move something when he was behind me. The effect was immediate; the chain between the tracks went taught, and I was pulled towards the wall. But, before I ran into it, it opened up.
Door. Not wall.
The sounds and smells muted by the thick door now assaulted me unimpededly.
It smelled like a mix of scorched metal, burnt hair, charred meat, rancid oil, the coppery smell of blood, and an open sewer pipe. The screams of what could only be hundreds of men and women being tortured bashed into me.
They were joined by a cacophony of what sounded like whining saws, screeching drills, and chugging machinery. And I was being pulled towards it all on what I quickly noticed was a conveyor belt type of construction.
I strained to break free again, even if it was self-evident to even my panicked brain that it was futile. There wasn't a millimetre of give for any part of my body except for very shallow breathing.
If I'd not been on the verge of becoming a gibbering wreck, I would have probably been surprised that they could immobilize a person so entirely without cutting off their breathing and circulation.
But as it was, I was panicking and again slowly checking out of anything resembling conscious thought. But even though I wanted to just check out, it felt like I had washed down a dozen Ritalin with a few litres of coffee.
The tracks of whatever I was secured to led to a procession of what I assumed were conveyor platforms similar to mine, all moving in an orderly queue in the direction of the sounds of drills, saws, and hysterical screaming. My own hoarse panicked screams joined theirs. There wasn't much more I could do.
The conveyor platform ahead of me held a man with a shaved head and broad shoulders. From what I could see, he'd been bound in the same position I had been, with dull metal bands covering his lower arms and legs completely.
His head was secured in a clamp which held the sides, back, and, I assumed, front of his head so tight that blood had dribbled down. I figured it was similar to the way my head had been immobilized.
His hips and shoulders were secured with spiked clamps. I couldn't see it, but I was probably restrained in precisely the same way.
My platform ground to a halt.
The man's prison kept moving forward before locking into position between a mass of rust-red robotic arms with a loud metal-on-metal bang.
I have no idea where the thought came from, but it reminded me of a documentary I saw about car factories. Except this one didn't have a piece of metal but a living human being between them.
The machine arms all came to life simultaneously only a few moments after the platform locked into position, and I redoubled my efforts of screaming in terror.
The metal appendages moved en masse and began cutting clothes, muscle, and bone away from the man's back with mechanical precision. Then, what looked like a high pressured hose started spewing water and washed away the remnants of flesh, clothes, bone, blood, and gore.
I could hear his screams over the machines' screeching. I joined in with my own and didn't stop until long after his cries cut off suddenly.
It was an eternity of cutting before half the machines retracted, their attached tools dripping dark red. Then, another set smoothly moved in, placing a metallic… thing in the middle of his back.
It was an elongated oval-ish shape, and from my vantage, I saw it extended from the base of his skull down his back, fitting into his body where his spine had been before the cutting started.
The machines continued their work and looked like they were doing things around the implanted metal spine. They worked for what felt like hours; all I could do was keep watching in horror. Until all the machines stopped at precisely the same time and pulled away.
As if a switch had been flipped.
Was it over?
The clamps around the man popped open, and the conveyer turned on its side, dropping him off to the side and down a hole.
As he fell, I saw the metallic spine thing partially disconnected and clatter against the side of the hole before following the man down. There had been dozens of bloody wires connecting the metal to the man.
Tendons? Veins?
I sobbed quietly but started screaming again when my conveyor moved forward, replacing the man's now-empty one, which moved off down the belt.
I pulled and thrashed with panicked-fueled strength, but of course, I didn't move a fraction.
The first saw spun up, and I felt the summer dress I'd put on for work part like silk to a sword, followed by my bra releasing its hold on me.
The water spray hit me; it was lukewarm and smelled vaguely of disinfectant.
Nothing happened for a few moments.
I felt pathetically grateful that they only seemed to be cleaning me up. I knew that whatever the bastards had planned for me, I'd do it without question. The man had grabbed my ass. Maybe he wanted me for himself. I shuddered, but after seeing the machines cut up the man, I knew I'd do anything to ensure that what happened to him wouldn't happen to me.
Anything. No matter how degrading.
I babbled as much to anybody listening, still begging and pleading.
A red mist blossomed into the damp air around me.
The pain hit me just a few seconds later, like a thousand paper cuts. My nerves sang even with whatever they had given me to make me feel less pain.
The machines sliced into me. I cried, screeched and screamed until I suddenly lost all feeling in my body. Except for a numb painful throbbing, it was all gone.
I couldn't draw in a breath.
Some part of my panicked mind was aware enough to realize that my spine had been cut and that I was about to suffocate.
I was going to die.
I cried silently, begging for unconsciousness, but it would not come. Somehow, I was being kept alert while I slowly suffocated because there was no way I wouldn't have checked out yet if I had the choice.
The urge to breathe was overwhelming, but I could only flap my mouth ineffectively.
Every fibre of my being called out for oxygen. It was right there around me, but no matter how close it was, my body did nothing.
The machines continued their work, but I'd already resigned to dying in this slaughterhouse long before the darkness encroached on me.
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