Time for some bad stories!
Twenty years ago, global warming reached a new stage where, for the first time in modern human history, the threat of our civilization being wiped out became all too real.
Before, the dangers of our ever-warming planet were confined to wild speculation and fantasy; no one had thought that day would come so quickly, but it did.
I remember it so clearly. Reports flooded in from all over the world of a drastic rise in skin-related diseases, of massive chunks of ice breaking off of the Antarctic mainland, of freak storms and mud slides that engulfed whole villages.
On that day, we faced the fury of a world we nearly destroyed with pollution, mindless slaughtering of wildlife and desecration of forests.
It was on that day that Nature made its first and greatest stand against us, and we were helpless to do anything about it but cower in fear from her wrath.
Then, the worst news came Once-harmless viruses had begun to mutate and infect a large portion of the world’s animal livestock. Poultry, cattle, and even plants were not spared. Many new diseases appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
All while this happened, we continued to receive more reports of thousands dead each hour as coastal towns vanished forever beneath the water’s surface. Airports, harbors, schools and businesses were closed.
The world came to a screeching halt. And yet, the effects of global warming only grew worse with each passing day. Great deserts formed where once there were lush forests and beautiful, sparkling lakes.
Over the next few weeks, millions of animals that we had relied on for food began to die. The world’s food supply reached dangerously low levels. Vaccines could not be made fast enough. New viruses emerged every few days.
The world entered into another World War. Nations formed fragile alliances and fought amongst each other for control of whatever little resources still remained.
At the height of this war, a conference was held by a shattered United Nations. The outcome of that conference would erode the very last strand of morality we still possessed. It was a necessary evil for our civilization to continue to survive.
A new nation, New Eurasia, situated at the heart of Central Asia, was formed. It consisted of once-powerful nations that had crumbled under worldwide conflict and civil war. New Eurasia was to become our salvation, our last hope for our lessening food supply. There, humans were bred and kept as livestock, in massive factories and slaughtered for food. We had turned into cannibals.
I was a journalist for the New International, a news agency, and I was sent to that hellish land to bring news to the world. It was an assignment I had not wanted, and refused many times, but the agency had sent me anyway.
Until today, the images that I had seen in my two-hour tour of one of the hundreds of factories there still haunt my dreams.
I had visited animal slaughterhouses before, but the conditions in those factories were far worse, and completely inhumane. It also occurred to me how low a level we could bring ourselves to in order to survive.
My tour in that horrible place started at noon on a Saturday. My guide was a frail-looking, middle-aged man clad in a dark-gray overall, his pockets filled with all sorts of tools, from hammers to scalpels to screwdrivers. He told me he was a Warden. His jobs included patrolling the factory, overseeing the meat processing, supervising the other workers, among many others.
I think what frightened me most about that man was how he didn’t seem at all guilty. Throughout the tour, a wide grin remained spread across his dirty face.
As I stepped past the main entrance into the visitors’ hall, I was given a green tag to wear around my neck. The Warden, Billy, told me that very few visitors were allowed there. I don’t think I considered myself one of the lucky ones. If anything, I wished I had never gone into that damned place.
I had to change into a simple, plastic overall before I was allowed to continue into the factory. The visitors’ hall was fairly clean and well decorated, but as Billy took me down a seemingly endless corridor, my surroundings grew darker and dirtier. The portraits on the walls gave way to tiles covered in algae.
The worst was yet to come, and when it did, it hit me with the force of a speeding train. Billy had not warned me of what to expect. I was shocked. This was the first time a camera was allowed into the factory, and I took mine out of my sling bag.
The first thing I heard was the ceaseless cries and moans of utter agony coming from ahead. I choked on my own saliva; the stench of spilt blood and raw meat assaulted my senses. But still, I hadn’t seen anything yet.
Then, Billy opened a metal door at the end of the corridor, and shoved me gently forward.
An uncontrollable wave of nausea washed over my body. As my eyes rose from the damp, bloodstained floor to the ceiling dozens of meters above, I saw a vision of Hell. It was the Hell that the religious had so often spoken of. There were the screams, writhing bodies and flames from fire pits that charred flesh and bone. There were steel rods like devils’ tridents that impaled soft flesh. There was only one exception; this Hell was on Earth, and I had unsuspectingly stepped into it.
For as far as I could see, the same horrible scenes played themselves out over and over again. Billy said that 35,000 people were slaughtered here every day. Then, he added that more would always be available and there would not be a shortage. I could not bear to look any longer, but I had to. I had a job to do.
Billy explained that this room was the slaughter room, the biggest one in the factory. He walked me through an aisle as he continued to explain. I began taking pictures and scribbling down notes, but I could never fully focus on the task at hand.
On my left, thousands of people were hung upside down, limbs bound together. They were moved slowly by a conveyer that brought them towards a row of blades that would slit their throats as they passed by. There were some who missed the blades as they struggled and squirmed, so workers like Billy had to personally do the job with an assortment of tools.
The most commonly used one was the sickle. Billy offered to demonstrate for me, but I declined. He still did it anyway. I looked away, but I could not avoid hearing the terrible scream that followed. Blood splattered onto me.
Tears formed at the corners of my eyes. They trickled down my face in little streams. Billy noticed I was crying and offered me his handkerchief, but I brushed him off.
We continued to walk, and came to the incinerator. This was where human livestock that were diseased were sent. They were tied up and thrown into the pit, at the bottom of which there was a great fire that incinerated the bodies.
We moved on, to another room, after passing through a checkpoint where I had to show my tag. Billy took something resembling a manual out of his pocket and looked at it for a while.
“The Breeding and Monitoring Chamber is up ahead. I have a sort of…connection with that place.”
“Connection?” I stammered, puzzled.
“That’s right. Most of the employees, myself included, have donated our sperm or eggs to the breeding program,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised.
Billy didn’t say a thing until we stepped into the breeding chamber. It was considerably smaller than the previous room, but nonetheless shocking.
Endless rows of what looked like enormous, enclosed vats faced me. Inside, a red, liquid-like substance filled half of each vat.
“What’s inside them?” I gestured at the vats, although I already suspected.
“Eggs, sperm, embryos. Thousands of them. You see those tubes?” he pointed at the half dozen or so tubes attached to each vat. The red substance flowed through each and every one of them.
“That’s a blood and nutrient solution, and each vat perfectly mimics the conditions inside a human womb. With a few exceptions, of course. A synthetic drug is used to artificially enhance and improve the growth and development rate of the embryos. Ageing becomes two times faster than normal.”
“Go on,” I urged, disgusted and yet fascinated.
“When the embryos have grown into fetuses, they are automatically transferred by our machines to other vats,” Billy added, walking me through the chamber.
There, in front of me, were even larger vats, packed with human fetuses. Organic material hugged the inside walls of the transparent containers.
“A perfect, artificial womb,” Billy boasted.
“Gestation period is now four months at most, then they are taken to the storage at the back of this chamber.”
Billy pulled me along as he hurried forward.
“Look, there,” he pointed.
I saw. There were people enclosed in pods. They all looked no older than thirteen years old, yet, their bodies were fully developed like an adult’s. They were also extremely pale and hairless.
“What is this madness?” I blurted.
“Artificially enhanced ageing, remember?” Billy reminded me.
I nodded, shuddering, unable to take my eyes away from the sinful combination child-like faces and voluptuous bodies.
“In the pods, they are fed intravenously by a synthetic solution of nutrients and vitamins. It gives them what they need to grow into…proper and healthy food for consumption,” he added.
I stared at the children. Their eyes were shut, bodies covered with tubes.
“Do they dream?” I wondered aloud.
Billy must have heard me, because he replied.
“Of course. Everyone dreams, but I honestly don’t know what they dream about though. Their eyes do not open until they are sent for slaughter or to the other chambers, where the first and last thing most of them will see is the blade coming towards them, and their own blood flowing.”
“A cruel waste of life,” I muttered.
“A necessity,” he countered. “Life is made up of an individual’s memories and experiences. But, these people will never experience anything that life has to offer. They will never be alive in the conventional sense. They will never know they are alive.”
I checked my watch. An hour had passed.
“Has our tour ended?”
“No, there is still more of the facility you have yet to visit,” Billy replied.
Then, he took me through a maze of dark corridors, until we arrived at another checkpoint, where I again had to show the guard my tag.
I noticed the sign above the next exit.
“Milking Chamber.”
“Where are we going now?” I asked. “Milking Chamber?”
“Yes, sir. Now, please move along,” the guard said.
Another long walk through a corridor, then Billy said, “Here we are.”
Like the slaughter room, the first thing I heard were the tormented cries.
The metal door automatically slid open to the side as we approached, and a strange new world greeted me.
Girls, thousands of them, who looked no older than thirteen years of age, lay across the floor of the entire chamber.
Shackled by their limbs to the damp ground, they moaned and strained their bruised bodies towards us. Dog tags hung on tight chokers around their necks.
Other Wardens patrolled the room, whips in their hands, lashing out at the girls once in a while.
The girls were freaks, spawned by the manipulation of Nature with Science and Technology.
Their breasts had grown to massive proportions, and pumps were attached to each monstrously swollen nipple to extract milk.
“I cannot believe what I am seeing,” I gasped.
“Shocking, isn’t it?”
I glared at Billy as he walked towards one of the girls. The pitiful child had her mouth open, tongue hanging out. She seemed to be in great hunger. Billy raised a boot over the frail girl as she stared at him, frightened and helpless.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, perhaps a little too loudly.
Without a word, he brought the foot down hard on the girl’s left breast. She writhed in pain as the pump detached from her nipple with a sick, wet sound.
Her breast milk sprayed onto the ground, forming a white puddle. Without hesitation, the girl craned her neck, reaching for the milk with her tongue.
“Go on, taste it,” Billy persuaded me. “We produce top-quality milk in this factory.”
At that instant, I lost whatever little respect I had for the man. He was crazed, sadistic.
“No,” I said firmly, but Billy bent forward and scooped some milk off the ground with his hand, then licked it off.
“Please, let’s just go,” I begged. My heart ached at the sight before me. I could not remain here to watch this any longer.
“Fine,” he said, attaching the pump back onto the girl’s nipple. By then, my notepad was more than half filled with my scribbling.
Reluctantly, I took a few pictures.
“We’ll be heading to the Packing Chamber next. Be sure to get your camera ready,” Billy snickered.
The next chamber was much, much more horrible than the slaughter room.
There, alive, conscious, and without being given any anesthetic, people were bound to metal tables to have their limbs sawed off by mechanical tools. Then, they were decapitated and their individual body parts transferred onto a conveyer.
I had become a cannibal too, but the only parts of a human body I ate were the limbs.
After my visit to that factory, I fasted for more than week. I had even attempted to kill myself a few times. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
I couldn’t live with those horrifying images trapped in my mind. But, I lived. Everyday since then has been the same. I quitted my job as a journalist and spent my days at home, too frightened to go out and face the world.
Eventually, I became mad, and was sent to a mental hospital, where I currently am residing. I do not know how long this would go on, but the world is getting better.
I only hope to live long enough to taste the flesh of a potato again.