Posted by Sawney Beane on August 13, 2007 at 16:18:42:
The Collected Works of Sawney Beane: Volume #135
A COG IN THE MACHINE
by Sawney Beane
17 February, 12 March 2005; 15-17 July 2006
6,278 words
DISTRIBUTION NOTICE and DISCLAIMER: Sawney Beane requests that any distribution of this work of fiction remain within the realm of social responsibility. This story is suitable neither for minors nor for the seeming majority of adults who have difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. It is pure fantasy, which means that, for whatever reason, someone has found it interesting to think about the events depicted herein. It does not in any way mean that the author would like to see this fantasy become reality, so if you are the type of person who might be swayed into doing something irrational by reading a work of fiction, the author respectfully requests that you decline to read further.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sawney Beane, originally a native of Edinburgh, lived for twenty-five years in a cave on the coast of County Galloway, subsisting on the flesh of unfortunate travellers, roughly a thousand of them all told. He and his wife raised a large family of eight sons, six daughters, eighteen grandsons, and fourteen granddaughters. Eventually, the family was captured, and the whole lot was brutally and unjustifiably tortured and executed without trial. Since his death in the early 17th century, Beane has reformed his ways and now confines his atrocities to his literary endeavours.
WARNING: This story contains scenes of institutionally consensual snuff and gynophagia. If you find such things offensive, please steer clear; you have been warned.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: It took a long time to write, and when they get this detailed they can be a bit tiresome. Shows the meat trade in all of its gory details as well as the way it becomes a normal way of life.
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Emily was a vegetarian. At the age of twelve she had become horrified at the idea of eating an animal, let alone the...unspeakable, and at that moment she had decisively and irrevocably denied her carnivorous nature in favour of a path strewn with leafy greens. At university, despite being a good student, she had been much more interested in her environmental action and animal welfare groups than her lessons. Now, a year after graduation, she was still an active member of People for the Ethical Treatment of All Humans, and she faced the biggest challenge of her life.
The members of PETAH had been surprised and a little bit offended at first when the country's largest specialty meat company had approached them. PETAH's executive committee had been suspicious, but the company said they only wanted to show the world that they did everything they could to carry out their business in the most humane possible way. They were seeking an endorsement from PETAH that they could use to counter the activist backlash against their controversial products. Of course, PETAH had no intention of giving such an endorsement, but they could not resist the opportunity to peek inside the largest human slaughterhouse in the country. Thus, a delegation had been formed to tour the plant.
At first, when Emily had been asked to be a member of the inspection committee, she had been terrified, but it was quite an honour for her since the other three women were more experienced activists. She also found that idea had grown on her over time, and when the time finally came, she was actually looking forward to the experience with an eagerness she could not fully understand.
Upon arrival bright and early at the slaughter plant, the four women were led to a cluttered meeting room where the plant leadership briefed them on what to expect, painting images that Emily found her self both dreading and eager to see. After half an hour of lecture, the four women were suited up in overshoes, white clean room coats, and hairnets. They nervously followed the plant superintendent through a heavy door into the centre of the country's largest processing facility for farm raised human meat.
"We have to show you the Fab portion of the plant first," said the plant superintendent. "Unfortunately, we can't show the process from start to finish because of the potential for cross-contamination, so we will begin here."
Emily stared in fascinated horror at what she saw before her. The room was large and refrigerated. In front of her, the room was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of human carcasses. The meat had been skinned and deprived of head, hands, feet, and internal organs, but the carcasses were clearly recognizable as human. And although the breasts and genitals had also been removed, the size and build suggested that these carcasses had once been women. And most horribly, they had each been sawn in half along the spine, leaving two half carcasses.
A long overhead rail snaked back and forth from one wall to the other filling the room in a long parade of hooks, each of which was spiked through a human ankle. The half-carcasses crowded the room as they slowly rode the rails from a shrouded entry to Emily's right ending in the untraceable depths toward the back of the room.
"The carcasses come here to the holding chiller after they've been sterilized," said the superintendent. "We'll show you that bit after we've done Fab, but the carcasses take twenty-four hours to get from one end of this room to the other. This is to allow proper tenderness and to bring the inner temperature down to the chiller temperature before grading."
With that, the superintendent pushed aside the nearest hanging half femme and stepped between two adjacent half-carcasses which appeared to once have been the right and left halves of the same girl. The four women gasped at the sight of the swinging girlmeat, but they reluctantly dodged in and followed the superintendent down the long aisle with hanging former women eerily sliding along rails on either side of them.
At the other end of the room, a man was making a small cut in each carcass as it came by him. They paused to watch the man as he drove his knife neatly into the flesh along the edge of the lowest rib, cutting almost back to the spine and revealing a uniform slab of loin meat in each half girl.
"This is the grading station. We have special photo-electronic equipment which calculates the ratio of muscle to fat and its characteristics."
They watched as another man placed a small electrode against the recently exposed loin meat and then watched the monitor of his machine. He tapped a few buttons, and stamped a large letter "B" on the carcass's rump in purple ink.
"There is a government meat inspector here, who can overrule the decision of the equipment, but we have perfected the method, so this happens quite rarely." They watched as the government inspector standing next to the plant employee marked the rump with an identical letter "B" in red ink.
"Right this way and we'll see how the meat is separated into the primal cuts, which are then subdivided into steaks and roasts for shipping."
The foursome followed the train of carcasses through a plastic doorway into another large room. This room contained a maze of conveyors and tracks as well as dozens of live humans in bloody white smocks, each wielding a large knife or saw. The room was chaos of noise and slaughter, but the emissaries managed to maintain their composure as the superintendent walked them down the large line in the centre of the room.
"Here we separate the primals, first the foreshank," he said, pointing to a man with a large powered saw lopping off the arm a few inches from the shoulder of each carcass that came by him. They stepped around a conveyor on which the severed arms were being picked up by people at various stations, each making the same cut over and over, leaving each arm in five pieces, one elbow, two forearm pieces, and two upper arm pieces.
"Then we separate off the rib and chuck primals together." The cut in the grading room had taken the base of the ribs almost to the spine, so the man nearest them now had only to saw the spine at this point and lower the large piece containing the rib cage and shoulder.
"This piece immediately goes to the rib saw to be separated into its two primals." A man in chain mail gloves slid each of these large pieces into a band saw just below the shoulder blade separating the shoulder roast from the ribs. Each of the resulting pieces wandered down a separate conveyor and was attacked by the dutiful mob of meat-cutters, coming out in steak and roast sized pieces.
"Next, we take off the loin," remarked the superintendent as they watched a man slice the meat from the carcass along the waistline. "Most of the most tender meat is found in this region." The conveyors took away the meat and a dozen cutters tore their special steaks from each.
"Then, it's just the leg and rump," the superintendent said, pointing to another man with chain mail gloves removing a leg from its hook and placing it on the bed of a band saw. One cut just below the groin, another above the knee, a third below the knee, and the pieces set off down conveyors to be further reduced.
The group of five climbed a set of stairs near the middle of this complicated room and reached an observation platform from which most of the operations could be surveyed. "We have everything tagged by RFID, so if we ever need to have a recall, we can trace each individual steak back to its source." He did not elaborate on how this was possible amidst all of this organized confusion.
A variety of emotions welled up in Emily as she watched this scene. Mainly she experienced the horror that she had expected to feel. But there was something else, something that nagged at her mind and made her even more uncomfortable than just the horror of it all.
She had come with a righteous indignation at the idea of slaughtering fellow humans for meat. One of PETAH's many slogans had always been, "Why is she different from you and me just because her great grandmother donated an ovary to a meat producer a hundred years ago?" Somehow she had always viewed this from a certain direction and, although she had preached it vociferously, it had never really sunk in, not really. Here the uncomfortable truth was dawning on her: she was no different from the carcasses flowing through this building. The depth of this realization made every molecule in her body tingle.
"Through this door we have the packaging area," said the superintendent leading them into the next room. Emily found this area to be an immense relief. The beginning of the room was a series of vacuum packing machines, which very impressively sealed the bits of meat and sorted them into the proper boxes. The rest of the room was a vast rack of boxes and automated conveyors that swept boxes in, out, and across the room, up into racks, down into one of the half dozen waiting lorries, or back across to another shelf.
Emily felt the tingling sensation begin to subside in this room as she could no longer see the meat, and the swirling boxes troubled her a bit less. But she was about to see a sight even more stunning.
"OK," said the superintendent. "I'll take you over to the Kill floor now, and we'll see the middle third of our process." As they began to walk down a long hallway blissfully outside the chilly Fab area, the superintendent explained, "To prevent contamination of the meat, we maintain a rigorous sanitary separation between the Prep, Kill, and Fab sections of the plant. You can only move from Fab to Kill to Prep and not the other way around...unless you're being processed of course." This last comment he accompanied with a nervous little laugh.
The other women murmured their disapproval as they had almost every step of the way until now, but even they were about to be shocked as they entered the Kill floor. The heavy door led once more into a chilled area of the plant, and the truly horrific sights beyond.
Emily looked up in horror at the upside down women hanging near the doorway. She could not see beyond into the next room, but every minute like clockwork, another unconscious woman appeared through the portal. The women were suspended from an overhead track by manacles clamped around their ankles. They all looked surprisingly similar: all roughly the same height and weight, all with shapely bodies meaty in the right places, all with shaved heads and bodies. And each with her eyes staring wide and tongue lolling out. Most ominously, each had a one-centimetre diameter red spot in the centre of her forehead with a thin trickle of blood seeping from it.
The plant superintendent explained to the visitors as they watched the women ride the rails to their doom. "They're still technically alive at this point. They've been knocked in the next room, which we will show you later, but that involves driving a small shaft into their brains, which you can see. It stuns them instantly, and they don't even know it's coming, so they don't suffer at all. They'll be unconscious for at least twenty minutes, but we make sure they're stuck in less than ten. They come through the door within a few seconds of being knocked, and as you can see, there are about five there between the door and the first station."
A man in a wire facemask holding a vicious-looking knife waited as each incapacitated female rode up to him. With a smooth well-practiced and heartless stroke of the knife, he opened a deep gash in each vulnerable neck close up under the chin. The blood flowed in torrents down the unseeing faces and into a trough below as the slaughtered girls continued to ride the rails around a corner.
"Death is very quick, and they never wake up-very humane."
"What's the facemask for?" asked Emily.
"Well, it's a government requirement for worker safety just in case they do wake up and start thrashing about. It used to happen once in a while years ago, but with all of our new precautions, that just can't happen. We haven't had a thrasher in over three years now. If you would just follow me." The guide led them around the corner where twenty girls in progressively more drained states hung in a moving row, their blood dripping into the trough.
"What happens to the blood?" asked Emily.
"Oh, we collect it and bottle it for sale. It's a fairly popular commodity."
Two men with electric saws were waiting at the end of the row. They skilfully lopped off the hands of each drained woman as she arrived. A small amount of blood drained from the severed wrists, and the hands fell onto a belt and were carried out of sight.
"The hands are packaged together and sold as a pair."
Next, the bodies moved into an area where they were abused both above and below. Emily had difficulty deciding what to watch. A man on the floor below used a small knife to slit the skin around the senseless face, making a thin line connecting the ends of the slit throat behind the jaw and behind the ears and across the forehead just above the eyebrows. Meanwhile, a man on a catwalk inserted a small instrument into each anus.
"Now, that's a fancy tool," announced the plant manager. "Saves a lot of time that tool and increases our safety rating immensely. It slices out the sphincter ring while at the same time severing the end of the rectum and tying off the bowels to avoid contamination and to ensure a clean drop later."
Emily watched as the man withdrew his tool and deposited a tiny flesh doughnut into a tube.
"I know it seems strange to you and me, but the sphincter rings are a delicacy in Mexico. We pickle them on the floor below and sell them into the export market in jars of twenty."
At the next station, a man on the catwalk above was wielding a knife to quickly slice around the dead woman's labia to remove a small handful of flesh cradled in fleshy lips surrounding an extracted gem of womanhood.
"Of course, the pussy plate is one of the most valuable parts of the female," mentioned the plant manager casually. "We put these in very attractive packages, which you might have seen on your grocer's refrigerator rack."
At the same time, a man below was slicing the corpse's lips off, leaving an oval hole in the face through which the shiny teeth grinned eerily
"These lip pieces are sold in packs of ten, and the nose and ears are pickled in jars of ten each. All of these are quite desirable delicacies."
Emily watched as men at the next two stations sliced off the women's ears and noses, leaving grotesque faces, which did not survive long as further down the line, men were ripping other parts unceremoniously from the bodies. One sliced the cheeks off to be sold in refrigerator packs of four cheek cutlets. Another took an odd roughly circular bit of flesh from around the eyes encompassing eyelids and eyebrows but leaving the eyeballs hanging exposed with a surprised look on the denuded faces. A woman with a small vacuum tube sucked the eyeballs from the heads leaving an inhuman vacancy in their places.
The plant manager explained. "The eyeballs are also quite a delicacy. They are pickled in jars of twelve, sorted by colour, of course." Emily imagined the terrifying product she had seen on the grocery shelf, a jar of a dozen disembodied eyeballs floating in liquid, all arranged so that they faced out staring through the glass disgustingly at unsettled shoppers who passed the aisle with either poorly disguised revulsion or with unholy delight, depending upon personal tastes. You either loved or hated eyeballs. Very few people fell in between extremes on that point.
The final indignity in this section was a worker who sliced through and ripped off the lower jaws of each corpse. The tongues were then removed for sale in packs of five, and the jaws were sold as chin cutlets.
Of course, while all of this was happening down below, the catwalks were alive with activity as well. A man on a raised platform pressed an odd tool against the navel of each corpse. When he removed it, the navel was gone, sucked into the vacuum tube connected to his tool, and only a small red circle remained. "The navels are also sold in packs of ten," explained the plant superintendent.
Next, two women on the catwalk above were making precision cuts around the ankles. They used small scalpels to slice the skin around the ankle just below the cuffs, which the dead women hung from.
Meanwhile, down below, a woman with another suction cutting tool, removed the nipples. "We used to slice off the breasts and sell them as breast cutlets, but the meat really isn't that good despite its reputation, and removing them really damages the hide. So nowadays, we mainly remove the nipples, which we sell in pairs. We also later remove the breast tissue, which is pureed and sold as a very popular spread.
Above, more cutters with scalpels were creating incisions down the front of the women's legs ending at the navel. Another connected the vacancies left by the removed anus and genitals with a slice across the perineum and continuing on to the vacant navel. Another worker made an incision down the girls' fronts from navel to throat where the jaw was eerily missing. Still other scalpel-wielding workers made incisions along the dangling arms from the centreline incision on the chest down to the wrist.
At this point, men on the catwalks above peeled the skin down around the ankles so that several inches of skin hung down to reveal the muscle beneath. Another man clipped something onto these skin bits, as the carcasses arrived at an impressive piece of machinery.
"This part of the plant was a real hassle before we got these babies, but this machine makes it go so much easier." The plant superintendent looked really pleased as he watched the machine fondly. The action certainly was impressive. As the four horrified activists gazed on incredulously, the machine gave a loud jerk downwards, and the skin of the dead woman attached to it was jerked off in one neat tug. The removed hide was sucked through a slot in the machine and disappeared. "We process the hides in the basement," remarked the superintendent with pride. Before the activists could fully process the shock of the grimly effective skinning machine, another corpse was stripped of its skin. Emily felt her skin crawl and imagined how easily she could be deprived of her skin by a machine like that.
"The value of the hide varies widely. A really high quality hide can be worth more than half the value of the total animal, maybe more if the meat is lower quality. On the other hand, a poor quality hide would be worth only 10% or so. One thing many people don't realize is that an animal can have Grade A meat and a Grade C hide and vice versa. The two are really not as well correlated as people like to think."
The superintendent took this opportunity to explain a bit more while they watched a woman scraping the exposed breast tissue off the chest of the stripped woman before them. "Our products fall into four categories, Carcass is all of the steaks and chops you saw being prepared in the Fab area. Hide and Hair is fairly obvious. The internal organs, which you will see shortly we call the Drop. And finally, the bits that are being removed in this area such as the facial parts, hands, feet, genitals, and nipples are called Specialty Meats. The amount each part contributes to the value of the total animal varies depending on quality."
The next stage along the line saw a man sliding meat hooks into the ankles of the skinned corpses, and further along, the cuffs were removed from the ankles. The skin of the feet remained like white socks on red legs. At the next station, a man sliced the feet off just at the skin line. "We sell the feet in pairs as well," remarked the superintendent.
At the next station, the head was finally sliced off, its jawless, eyeless horribleness being hung on a separate hook through the palate and carried along on its own journey. "The brain will be extracted and sold as a unit. There is some pending legislation that would force us to discard the brain tissue for safety reasons, but there are those who enjoy the delicacy, so we supply the market that exists now."
The line of skinned bodies moved higher along its track and through to another room. The superintendent led the four women through the door parallel to it. "This is the Drop room, he explained. The Drop makes up 5 - 15% of the value of the whole, but it's also the area most subject to intense regulatory scrutiny."
A tall man in a rubber suit walked on a conveyor belt until another skinned woman arrived at the end. He immediately inserted a gutting knife and split the body open from waist to collarbone, ripping out the sternum in the process. The former woman's entrails spilled unceremoniously onto the plastic conveyor belt below. Several women, some of them government meat inspectors sorted the various organs, and at the end of the conveyor, others thoroughly cleaned the digestive tract.
Emily thought she might retch, but she held back. She could almost feel herself sliding apart like those women. The very thought horrified her. She was not disappointed when the other women insisted that they leave this room forthwith.
Just outside in the next room, the gutted carcasses were sprayed down with anti-bacterial solutions and thoroughly washed with hot water by men in rubber suits. Having done so, the sanitized carcasses slid on over to a place where they rested on their backs, and a man with chain mail gloves operated a band saw that cleaved them in two from vacant pubis to severed neck, neatly bisecting the spine. The resulting two half woman carcasses were carried along on their track. "And now we're back to where we started," remarked the superintendent.
All of the women expressed their relief to escape from the physical and mentally chilling abattoir. The third and final portion of their journey awaited them. Emily was feeling turmoil in the pit of her stomach as they approached the unloading bay where the buses drove up and disgorged batch after batch of fifty nude farm-raised meat girls.
"We process approximately one thousand head a day in this plant. Normally, we do the females on Mondays through Wednesdays and the males on Thursdays through Saturdays. The plant is cleaned thoroughly on Sundays and every night," said the superintendent, resuming his narrative.
The group walked along a glass-enclosed observation hallway overlooking the Prep floor below. They could see the room where the women were unloaded from their buses and lined up in order of the numbers marked on the back of their necks. "All of our stock are 8,000 days old when they're processed," remarked the superintendent. "We've found that to be optimal, and we have further optimised the diet so that it costs about $0.50 a day to feed them. The hatchery gets roughly $500 per head on average, and with veterinary bills, housing, and other miscellaneous costs, the average investment in each of these meatgirls when they get here is $12,000. A girl that is Grade A in both hide and meat when parted out will bring in as much as $30,000, but the profits that we make on those are balanced out by the Grade C stock which can be worth as little as $7,000."
Emily was ignoring this accountancy talk. She was mesmerized and dazed as she gazed down upon the women walking through the process of being thoroughly showered and scrubbed before having their heads and bodies shaved. Then these oddly similar-looking human livestock patiently waiting their turn to be flushed by various tubes inserted in their orifices. Emily was fascinated.
"Why do they cooperate with all of this?" she asked.
"Oh, that's part of their training," replied the superintendent. "They're trained from birth to follow instructions to the letter."
"Do they know they're going to die?"
"Well, not exactly," replied the superintendent a bit uneasily. "They know that when they arrive here and go through all of the Prep, they will be given their reward. They look forward all their lives for their reward. It's what they aspire to."
"And this reward is a steel spike through the forehead?" said one of the other women gruffly.
"Yes, but they don't know, and after they get it, they don't feel a thing. It's all very humane."
Emily thought all of this was nonsense, but still, the feelings welling up in her were not the ones she expected to feel. Yes, the horror was there. Yes, the disgust was there. But there was something else that was taking over. Perhaps the revulsion was becoming so strong it was flipping back into a compulsion. Suddenly, she had to irresistible urge to be down on the Prep floor, in the middle of the line, just one of the nameless meatgirls waiting in line for her reward.
Her mind reeled through all that she had seen earlier in the day, but now she imagined her own body being processed. She saw her throat slit, her hands, face, and other special parts removed one after another. She saw with a powerful tremor of terrible arousal the feeling of her skin ripped off her like an overly passionate lover tearing off a dress. She saw her belly sliced open and her insides allowed to flow squishily into a pile and mixed in with the insides of other girls just like her. She saw her body sawn in half and thus divorced riding the rails side by separated side for more than a day. She saw her meat graded and then roughly torn one way and another by the various meat cutters who would give no thought to who she had been or why she had died as they cut off meal-sized bits of her. She saw herself spread out amongst several dozen different boxes, sharing space with the meat from the never-ending stream of farm-fresh girls eager to receive their unfortunate reward. And somehow, as awful as it was, the desire to experience this overwhelmed her; she had to do it.
"I want to go down there!" she gasped.
The superintendent was interrupted in his explanation of something the other emissaries did not care about anyway, and said gently to her desperate face. "I'm sorry; we're not allowed to disrupt the proceedings down there, so we have to stay here where they can't see or hear us."
"No, you don't understand; I have to be in that line. I need to be one of them!"
"What?" the superintendent was puzzled.
"I want to be butchered in this plant today, please!"
"You can't be serious," said the superintendent, annoyed at her joke.
But the other emissaries did not see it as a joke. "Emily, you're representing PETAH here today; you'd better behave."
"Is this some sort of PETAH stunt?" asked the outraged superintendent. "We invited you here in good faith to show you the extremely humane methods we employ, and you have the nerve to act this way. I told our president that it was a bad idea to bring you here!"
The leader of the group replied haughtily, "There is no such thing as humane killing, sir, and Emily's outburst is not our plan. Obviously, it is the result of her own deluded mind, and I think you have placed the idea in her head with all of your talk."
"They did not," moaned Emily. "Joan, shut your pompous mouth and listen to me. I need to go down there. Today!"
"There is absolutely no way you are butchering a member of our delegation," replied PETAH leader Joan, "Can you imagine how that would look?"
"We have no intention of butchering anyone you bring to us," replied the plant superintendent.
But Emily was adamant, and an hour later, the plant management was in an urgent and very private meeting.
"Jack, you've got to be kidding; there's no way we can do this," said the superintendent to the president.
"Well, why not? She's about the right age, right size and so on. She's got a clear Grade A hide, and I wouldn't be surprised if her meat is high grade as well."
The superintendent sighed. "I tried to explain to her that free-range meat was worth about ten times as much as farm raised and if she wants to be slaughtered, she should go to one of the boutique butchers that specialize in that sort of thing so she can get a high price for her meat. She wouldn't have anything to do with that. She wants to go in the factory, and she wants to do it today."
"Well," said the president, "if she wants to donate a body like that, why don't we let her?"
"Buy why?" asked the superintendent.
The president was already getting stars in his eyes. "Can you imagine the publicity?" he asked to no one in particular. "We invite PETAH here and one of their members is so impressed by our humane methods that she wants to try it herself! Let them say we don't treat our meat humanely after that!"
"Well, sure, but this isn't going to be another San Jose?" asked the superintendent, referring to the worst of several incidents over the last five years in which activists had dosed themselves with potent slow-acting poisons and donated their bodies to boutique butchers or restaurants. The San Jose incident had killed seven diners in a local restaurant, including three small children and had resulted in a public backlash against the radical activist groups. Suspicions were that the woman who poisoned San Jose had been connected with PETAH, but they had immediately disassociated themselves once the extent of the carnage had made itself apparent.
"No, Don," said the plant medical officer. "I don't see how it could be. I've tested her for every poison we know, and she's completely clean. She seems sincere."
"We're really going to do this?" mumbled the plant superintendent incredulously.
"Yes, we are," smiled the president. "Go for it."
Meanwhile, Emily was being abused by her colleagues who could not fathom her betrayal and could not stomach her complete rejection of all that PETAH stood for. She tried to explain that she was embracing PETAH's principles, pointing out that she was seeking only to be the same as all of the farm raised meatgirls. It was exactly what the PETAH slogan had popularised, in a manner of speaking anyway.
"OK, we've got you on the line in ten minutes," the superintendent explained to Emily. "We can just slip you in between two of them, but there are two very important things you need to know." He paused for effect. "First, we are a plant designed for efficiency, and not for specialized treatment, so you'll be processed in exactly the same way as all the other ones, and you will have to be shipped out with them; I won't be able to sell your flesh at a premium as you would receive if you took advantage of your qualifications and sold yourself to a restaurant."
"Yes, I don't care about the money; this is exactly how it is supposed to be."
"OK, second, you are not to breathe a word about their fate to any of the other meat girls. They barely speak anyway, but if you do anything to disillusion them about their reward, you will accomplish nothing. They will still die; the only difference is they'll be unhappy about it, and you will make their last few minutes of life miserable."
"I understand," whispered Emily. "I'll not tell a soul."
Emily stripped off her clothes in the main offices, much to the delight of the appreciative president and his staff. Then she was led down the hallway to the beginning of the Prep area. The superintendent slipped her in at the end of one busload and before the beginning of the next. The other PETAH representatives left the abattoir in a fury and vowing revenge. Sadly for them, the person they were most furious with was Emily, and soon she would be beyond any revenge they had in store.
The meatgirls talked almost constantly. Emily remained comparatively quiet, listening to their simple-minded chatter. The shower felt like a baptism, washing away her sins along with her hopes and dreams. A pleasant surreal lightness began to overtake her, and she watched as girl after girl in front of her was deprived of her long hair, which was saved for sale. Emily's own brown tresses evoked remarkably little sentimentality when it came time for her to give them up. The remainder of the shaving regime, while not sentimental, was not exactly pleasant.
On the line flowed. The next few stages involved flushing her intestines and so forth. It was all part of the price she had to pay and well worth it. She knew the Reward was not far ahead. So close.
She admired herself in one of the long mirrors on one side of the wall. She looked at the line of women in the mirror and couldn't with any certainty pick out which one was her. That was the feeling she had imagined and longed for. And suddenly, the Reward room loomed up ahead.
The girls were admitted to the Reward room one at a time. When the door opened, Emily entered with every nerve ending in her body standing on end. Behind the door was a man and three more doors. The man guided her to the rightmost door, which revealed the actual Reward room. In fact, there were three Reward rooms operating in parallel in order to maintain the requisite one head per minute flow into the Kill floor proper.
The man behind the door smiled reassuringly. He was young and good-looking. Just the type of man Emily would like to receive a Reward from. He didn't look like the man who would have one of the most cold-blooded jobs in the world. He gestured for her to walk forward and sit in the chair facing him. She did so, and waited for him to speak.
Her dedication did not waver. The images of her imminent slaughter and butchery flowed in and out of her doomed brain with their perverse allure. She wanted to be nothing, to be insignificant. She wanted to be lost in a pile of steaks just like her. And she knew it would happen. How many minutes left to live? Not many.
The man squinted at her, "You're the human aren't you?"
Emily was puzzled. "What?"
"I mean the real human; not the farm bred ones. They said you'd be coming about now."
"Er, yes I suppose I am." She felt a bit annoyed at this special treatment.
"Yeah, I can tell," he said, "You walk different."
"Mmmm," said Emily.
"You sure you want to do this?" the man asked. "Just say the word, I can get you out."
"No, I'm doing it."
"OK, suit yourself," said the knocker with a shrug. "I put this on your head," he said. "Sorry it looks like a corny cartoon crown, but the drones like that. The knocking bolt comes out of there when I push this button. Then I loop the cuffs around your ankles and you get pulled upside down through a door that will open in the ceiling and you'll be on the path to the Kill floor."
"OK, good," said Emily with a trembling voice. This was it. She was going to become a small part of this massive operation. One of the thousand women slaughtered that day. One of six thousand head slaughtered that week. One of three hundred thousand head slaughtered that year. And she would be one of them. One tiny part of her mind still screamed at her, "What the hell are you doing here!" But the majority of her consciousness imagined herself in the very satisfying role of a tiny cog in a great machine.
"Right," said the knocker brandishing the button, "Last chance to back out."
Emily didn't say anything, but she closed her eyes slowly and bowed her head slightly. Seconds later, a steel bolt poked a neat painless hole in her skull and buried itself in her brain. Unconsciousness was immediate, very humane indeed. And then she was upside down flying toward the Kill floor to become a commodity.