Huzzah! The first chapter!
Bust alas! Not a comment?
But the forums say BerserkerSlig answered, yet I see nothing ...
Ah, well! Let the chapter be!
And so it was.
Chapter 1
“Wake up, you f*ing idiots! We have a schedule to keep!”
This magnificently friendly wake-up call from our resident greeter was written into its unique programming, so it was always the first thing we hear in the morning. It wheeled on down the halls, squeaking and creaking, awaking grumpy mudokons at five in the morning. And, of course, after hitting the sack at two the previous night, who wouldn’t be up and ready to go to a long, grueling day of heavy labor? Certainly not me.
On a side note, the glukkons decided at some point that they did, after all, need to do something about their exhausted workers … they weren’t working! So they paid the vykkers (as little as possible) to see how little the mudokons needed to sleep while still being able to operate as they would after a full night of sleep. The vykkers found that the mudokons need at least four hours of sleep to operate. That was too much wasted time, so glukkons gave us three and order Expresso! (at the lowest possible price) to make up for the lost time.
Uh-oh! Alarm! Get out of the rooms fast! If we didn’t, our doors were bolted shut automatically and the room was filled with poison gas—trapdoors would fall and our corpses would fall down chutes to the furnace. We are oh so efficient here at the factory.
So out I went. Step into the hall. Left face, march! Left, right, left, right, one, two, one, two.
We lined up in front of our slig supervisor, Yarnis. In his monotone voice, he repeated the same thing we’d all heard every day for our entire lives. “Okay worms, come pick up your stuff. I’ll cut each of you off at the right spot, so that the right number of people are assigned to each job.”
I, personally, was amazed that the slig could count correctly. There were two hundred and fifty of us all working throughout the whole factory; never more, never less. There are ten Zulags, each separated into five sections, and about five mudokons assigned to each zulag.
Zulag One was the food preparation zulag. All of the food we made here at Tastee Treets is processed here. Mudokons here have it the easiest: follow the cooking directions on the meat charts. In Zulags Two, Three, and Four, we keep all of the stock animals. Sikz and burrs in two, jyggs and meeps in three, slogs and friets in four, where I was assigned. Zulag Five handled sales, Six is mudokon living quarters, Seven is slig quarters. Zulag Eight housed all the rations for the workers (it was a very small Zulag). Zulag Nine held the Boardrooms, where the glukkons met to discuss profits, etc. Zulag Ten, finally, was the “detention” area. Many mudokons went in, few came out.
I picked up my usual ten satchels of flit carcasses to feed to the slogs and friets in Zulag Four. Quickly I chugged my can of Expresso! and took off running to the transport to my workstation.
I met my usual pals near the lift, waiting for me. Adonis, Flex, Nod, and Starch. They whistled the customary hello. Talking was punished by a zap from an always overhead Zippy, which operated like a chant suppressor. Ever since that Abe guy took off, many facilities installed these things. We nodded at each other, looking rather tired. I didn’t blame them—we all had little sleep.
The three red lights over the door flashed green, and the door clanged open. File in, stand up straight. The lift inside wheeled downward … and to the fourth zulag. We scurried out and marched to our sub-zulag.
The day was extraordinarily uneventful. Standing above the pits of slogs and friets, we periodically threw small, birdlike animals—flits—into the pits. We would spend hours in between scrubbing floors. We would take turns going into the pits and cleaning up the filth of the animals. They would not attack—they knew as much as us that they would be shot for trying. For this we knew we were in relative safety. Stuff like this for twenty hours straight. We were allowed to eat bits and pieces of the flits, but not more than one. Each.
But as usual, one mud slipped up. A curse after stepping in slog shit. A funny look at a slig. Relaxing. Then …
Rat-tat-tat! One less mud. Two hundred and fifty became two hundred and forty-nine. Within the hour, a fresh mud, three years old, would be working. And there would be a random reassignment.
After the one a.m. whistle, we marched back to our lifts. Back up to our rooms. “Social time” in the halls of Zulag Six for exactly one hour.
Two o’clock bell. In bed. Fifteen minutes later and lights out. As if we needed fifteen minutes to fall asleep.
Some of us were afflicted with the Winks. That’s what we called it when you couldn’t sleep. But you still see things.
Bad things.
Really bad things.
I have the Winks.
And I see things.
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