The enemy of your enemy is not your friend, as Silas finds out. The Quintessons see only slaves.
Title: Enemy
Warning: Going into this fic, three warnings:
1. It's pure self-indulgence, so I wrote in second person. It's despairing slavefic, not a happy or hopeful fic. It's also not sexual; see #3.
2. Being that it's second person, it will make a lot more sense if you actually know who Silas is. And why he's an awful human being, but just know about Silas in general.
3. There's another big oviposition (egg laying) fad going on in the fandom, so I got to thinking. When I think of oviposition, I think of horror. This fandom veers toward porn, but I find eggs and tentacles horrible, not sexy, and that leaves me a fun niche to fill since everyone else goes for the porn. Transformers have the Quintessons, who are under-utilized evil tentacle monsters in this fandom. Combining oviposition and Quintessons seemed like an obvious thing to do, especially since Quintessons are canonical a terrible species. If my main character's going to be the bad guy, I needed worse people to make a horror story.
Rating: PG-13
Continuity: TFP/G1
Characters: Leland "Silas" Bishop, Quintessons
Disclaimer: The theatre doesn't own the script or actors, nor does it make a profit from the play.
Motivation (Prompt): Pestering Codenamesilas on Tumblr, and a really lousy week.
[* * * * *]
Conquest of Earth happened overnight, the Autobots vanishing under the assault of another race. Of all the things alien robots brought to the planet, and it's Quintessons that doom you.
A slaver race, they have no interest in Earth itself. They care only for its living resources. Trainable semi-sentient pets and workers are one of those resources. Whether by government infiltration or the Autobots' machinations, MECH is one of the few resistant organizations marked for immediate neutralization. In human terms, that would mean execution or disbandment. In Quintesson terms, it apparently means harvesting all viable bodies for use.
MECH disappears in a fireball as the assault comes out of nowhere, every base and agent targeted in one fell swoop. You're captured, along with anyone in your files who ever saw a robot. Not just MECH's files, either. There are Senators in the group you're thrown in with, a general, a bunch of Air Force and Army soldiers, Agent Fowler, those damn kids, and a New York city subway worker, for some reason.
It's the children's presence that hammers home this is bigger than a hidden group of alien robots. The Autobots would never have allowed those kids to be taken.
This is suppression. Crowd control, cutting out the troublemakers from the outside before trouble can be made. This is an actual invasion, planned out and done right. Anyone who's seen or heard of the Autobots or Decepticons has been removed from Earth. Killing you, however, would profit the Quintessons nothing. They prefer to remove all traces of potential rebellion but profit from the removal.
You don't understand that at first, but you become intimately familiar with your captors' way of operating as time passes.
The cells are well-lit from above and made of something no amount of pounding on can break. The barriers are clear, there for herd separation instead of isolation. The groups inside each cell range from 10-50 people in each, of varying ages. You can't figure out the criteria used for sorting each group, although common theory is by amount of alien exposure. It may explain why your cell has the largest group. Your agents and the soldiers are kept in a dense cluster of cells, and further out are those who just happened to watch the wrong YouTube video.
It's cold. Without clothing, the only way to keep warm is other people. Cellmates huddle together. Everyone abandons modesty fairly quickly, between the huddles and the unshielded drain that's each cell's toilet. Although everyone sprains their eyes looking anywhere but the underage girl. MECH agent or Senator, nobody's that depraved.
Activity can be sustained for only so long, and staying active singles people out, something everyone learns is bad. It might keep you warmer and slightly less frustrated, but the first couple days you spent shouting at the automated guards marked you. Attempting to manipulate them is futile, but everyone gives escape a try. You're just one of the most persistent. When the culls start, you're lucky that the Quintessons haven't quite gotten the trick of telling humans apart yet.
You trip and fall in the chaos as the first cull was made, individuals singled out and pulled from the cells for their dissention, and the automated guards don't notice you're not the man they select. The girl - Miko? - isn't so lucky. The programming child - Raf, yes? Rafael? - isn't, either. They're too distinctive. Your build and scars don't stand out in a group of combat veterans all sporting similar military buzzcuts and defiant expressions.
Staying prone on the floor isn't your finest moment, but it keeps you in the cell. Your skin chills as you lie there watching several of your men be shocked unconscious and taken away.
They come back. So do the children. When they do, it's the girl's silence you notice first. She sits and stares blankly at nothing, eyes empty, and in the back of her pupils you swear you see Hell, because she's not in there anymore. The boy is worse, an automaton who obeys the guards without translation or hesitation.
Your men are the same. You and Fowler go from man to man, exchanging increasingly disturbed glances at their lack of reaction. The uneasy peace between the two of you shifts into something closer to an alliance after that, for all the good it does either of you.
When the nurse loses her temper, screaming at the guards alongside her son, you catch Fowler's arm, trying to restrain him. The two idiots scream accusations and abuse, demanding answers, and all they get are empty eyes when the guards initiate a second cull. The nurse and boy are taken away with a scattering of loudmouths, and they come back with nothing left inside.
You tell your men to stand down. Fowler doesn't obey your order. The third cull is smaller yet, but enough.
"Subtle tactics," you breathe to your men. Everyone speaks in whispers now, barely loud enough to be heard even huddled together. "Look for opportunities. Wait. They have to let us out eventually. Then we can strike."
It's the best plan anyone can come up with, but time is wearing away at everyone. Despair, inactivity, and fear are stealing hope. Your agents, naked and vulnerable, cluster together across the cells from the blank-eyed mannequins that were their coworkers. The nurse and Fowler are part of the silent crowd. They blend in disturbingly well. It's difficult to tell the mindwiped people apart. The whole group reacts as one, on command from the guards.
Perhaps the most frightening part is how they no longer group together for warmth. That should be animal instinct. They sit perfectly spaced apart, as if skin contact were no longer necessary, bodily need overridden by whatever these hideous aliens wrote into their minds. Hurt them, and they don't react. Pull them up or push them around, and they placidly respond until released, whereupon they resume their place.
You won't admit that unease has become fear. Fowler's return hit you harder than you expected, perhaps because you knew him. You knew his willpower. Your men, alright, they might have been weaker than expected. The children certainly couldn't be expected to hold up. The nurse was a noncombatant. But Fowler glided into the cells walking like you've never seen him move before, a programmed stride precisely measured by an inhuman brain, and his eyes are empty.
There are no marks, not on any of them. No marks, no signs, no hint of emotion or intelligence left. No hidden circuitry to force it, or time for torture to have broken them. Just empty eyes and a blank slate.
When the Quintessons begin replacing the empty eyes with actual empty eye sockets, you lose control of your agents. They're only men, and you're not employing them anymore. Most of them resent you, loyalty turned to loathing. To their minds, their captivity is your fault. You got them into this, fooling with the robots.
You take their apathy and belligerence well - who else do they have to turn their anger on in here? - but keep trying to rally them. Your time will come. You don't know what's going on, but you have no choice but to be patient, so you wait and watch. The aliens are coming back into the cells to modify the already subdued. The Quintessons who pass by the cells to retrieve their subjects don't answer any of your questions, although you've learned to ask instead of demand. Demanding is too rebellious, too likely to trigger a cull, and you're more cautious, now.
Caution doesn't save you. Subdued compliance doesn't save anyone, in the end.
"Apple pie," someone says.
"Chili," someone else responds. "Extra spicy, with beef."
"Chili con carne," one of your agents sighs in agreement, his voice suddenly full of an accent brought on by nostalgia.
A ripple of similar nostalgia goes through the room, and your own stomach growls. You've already taken your turn at the feeding tube to sip overcooked-pasta textured food/water nutritional combo. It supports the body but fails to satisfy anyone.
"Taco Bell," says one man, and the next guy in line laughs weakly.
"We're not that desperate."
You snort agreement from your place in the huddle.
The gas doesn't give warning. One minute you're shaking your head at how low you've fallen to miss bad fast food, and the next, you wake up with a collar hardwired into your spine. Fiddling with it gets you nowhere. The outside is completely smooth, and the inside is fitted snug to the skin of your throat. You have nothing to pick open a seam with but your fingernails, and nobody's about to let you try ripping a hardwired piece of equipment out of their spinal cords. You're outnumbered and outvoted.
The reprogrammed people don't get collars. They get new eyes in their empty sockets, and they don't resist you investigating them. The cybernetic eyes are marvels. You're amazed by just what you can see studying the surface, and you pry one out of the man who'd been Fowler to get a closer look. You're hoping for something you can turn to your advantage. He does nothing to stop you, but the missing eye summons the guard to the cell, where it seizes you by the arm and pushes you to the floor.
"Property damage: -5 quartects," it drones, and you don't know what that means but it alarms you.
Quartects, as it turns out, are how the Quintessons measure pleasure. They're the slaver race; of course they figured how to quantify physical stimuli. The negative of pleasure is pain, and the appropriate quartect amount is doled out by your new collar.
"You're lucky," one of the other men whispers as he helps you to your feet afterward.
You're shaking and you've shat yourself, but you know what he means. You were terrified the guard was there to take you away to be stripped of will and self, installed with a new personality and mechanical accessories. Pain, however agonizing, is preferable to that.
You still snap, "None of us are lucky until we break free!"
The two of you freeze in dread when the guard station bleeps and wheels grind down the line of cells to enter again. That's how everyone finds out that even discussing escape is considered rebellion, now. The guard impassively seizes the nearest one of you to make an example, possibly not requiring both people in the prohibited conversation. Discipline is just as effective using only one.
The man helping you yells protest, "It was him, it was him, I didn't do it! Please!" The guard doesn't listen. Frantic hands claw at your arm as he's taken away, and he comes back changed.
You really are lucky.
The headsets with the eyepiece are distributed one day, one per person. They can be taken off. You make enemies of everyone when you smash yours looking for something you can use. The guards activate, and you desperately grab for the closest man's headset right as they target-lock. Your heart hammers relief in your chest as he's hauled from the cell instead of you, but the whole cell glares at you.
You're very lucky anything more than bruises is considered property damage, now. The fight is short and brutally one-sided by numbers, if not experience. Loathing and herd mentality inspires violent hate against you, and the beating is just turning serious when the guards intervene. Two of the stronger ringleaders, formerly your rivals for the loyalty of the cell, are taken away. You wish you could feel vindictive satisfaction for that, but even black-eyed and sore, you feel a wince of pity.
You're beginning to understand the purpose of the cells. The children and Agent Fowler passed on a couple garbled facts about the Quintessons gleaned from the Autobots before capture, but intellectually hearing about a 'slaver race' is far different than realizing you're here to be broken in and trained for slavery.
Training hurts. Your pride more than anything, but it does hurt quite a lot, especially during the adjustment period. The collars are a nasty business. For every two seconds of disobedience to the basic commands you're taught - stand, attention, come here, go there, kneel, prostration, and hardest of all to obey, silence - you earn increasing negative quartects. The headsets translate the orders; the eyepiece displays your cumulative quartects. You earn negative quartect into double digits the first day of training, and it's doesn't take too many days of that kind of punishment before even your ironclad stubbornness falters.
You compromise by balancing your quartect at 0 if you can, and erring in the negative if you can't. Positive reinforcement is as degrading as the actual obedience, but that's your pride, maybe your intelligence speaking. You're beginning to understand the Quintesson training strategy.
The first time someone in the cells can't equalize the display on his eyepiece, he cringes in fear. Everyone is scared. Nobody knows what a positive quartect does at that point, but you all know what the negative numbers do.
The unfortunate man cringes - then sobs as the unexpected wave of pleasure crests over him. +1 quartect lasts two entire minutes, like an orgasm that lasts practically forever.
It absolutely horrifies you, because you know what's happening. You know what's being done. You even know why.
How are slaves trained? The fear of punishment, of course, but that teaches terror and to hide hostility until it festers into underground rebellion and eventual revolution. The key is to counter terror with complacency instead. Eliminate hostility by supplying a reason for the slaves to enjoy service. Subvert anger by breaking the slaves into equating subservience with happiness. Disobedience earns punishment, but obedience is rewarded.
It's anticipation of reward that will break humankind of slavery. You see the enslavement of your whole species in small scale happening all around you, if not in this generation, then the next. Hell, there are people on the minimum wage right now you know would change jobs to this just for +3 quartects at the end of each shift. The Quintessons will tame humankind, and you're helpless to stop them.
You can't even rouse the prisoners around you. Some of them figure out the training like you, but it doesn't matter. Most of them have already given up. This is just the nail on the coffin. They prefer numb obedience if it'll get them the stupor-inducing pleasure at the end of a shift. The first person to earn over +4 quartects sleeps with a smile on his face. He's eager to begin again when the lights overhead brighten for the next shift, and more and more people began to follow that example. Just seeing their doped expressions makes your skin crawl in revulsion - and fear.
Every time the choice is positive or negative quartect, the fear rises. You know what's happening, but knowing only gets you so far. You can feel your will breaking. You bargain with yourself, compromising here and telling yourself it's temporary submission there. Except it's not temporary if you're being molded one forced decision at a time into a slave, never given the chance to backtrack out of that mold for the rest of your life.
"Why don't you just program all of us?" you ask during one of the various inspections done by the Quintessons. God, they're ugly. "Why train us?"
The mind-stripped people in the cells don't need training. They just need their minds wiped clean and some equipment installed. Then again, they don't speak out of turn and earn -8, either. You eye the number clicking down on your headset and swallow hard, but you look past it to keep a steady gaze on the Quint.
It turns its multi-faced head to give you a look in return. Maybe because you asked in a respectful tone instead of a snarl or shout, it deigns to give you its attention. It glides to a stop in front of the cell and answers in a distant, detached voice, "Programming is effective but expensive. Training is cheap."
You haven't been mindwiped because it's cheaper to spare the hardware. You're markers on a ledger. Even speaking directly to you, this creature sees you only by your sale price and training cost.
"Kneel," it orders, and you drop to your knees before it because -8 quartects will reduce you to silent crying for hours in residual pain. You learned the cost of disobedience too well to go through that for the sake of mere humiliation. Obedience is the better option, but you still seethe.
Rage cools rapidly to wariness when the usual obedience check becomes a physical inspection. The Quint enters the cell, and you're too well-trained - or rather, too experienced in futility - to attack. A tentacle stretches out to sweep over you. It's twisted, wiry surface smoothes over your too-long hair, writhes down your back, squirms against the soles of your feet, and creeps back up to pause in front of your face. None of it's a good feeling, but apprehension fills you at the pause. Your eyes flick from the tentacle to the impassive Quint's current face.
"Open," it commands.
That's not an order you're prepared to obey. Your fists clench.
The seconds tick. You can't stop the flinch at the tally on your eyepiece. Remembered pain, learned behavior makes you hastily reconsider the order.
You open your damn mouth.
It does what you expect, and it's just as unpleasant as anticipated. Pretending it's some odd piece of medical equipment doesn't work; it's too organic. Pretending it's…well, to be crude, you try to distract yourself imagining it's someone's dick, because quite frankly it's the only comparison you can make as the tip probes into the back of your throat. You prefer the thought of that to a Quint's tentacle, but no. It's too mechanical to sustain the illusion. You're left gagging wretchedly as it fills your mouth and distends your throat.
There's nothing but nutritional paste and bile in your stomach. It comes up in a disgusting slurry, but you welcome the taste. It's better than the taste of Quintesson. Gagging loudly, you let your mouth fill until it dribbles out around the Quint's tentacle onto your scraggly beard. The tentacle in your throat withdraws as you hoped it would. You fall forward onto your hands, intentionally coughing too hard to stay upright on your knees.
While you're panting over a small puddle of vomit, the Quint moves on to examine one of your cellmates. He fares better than you, or at least has a weaker gag reflex, but the Quint drifts to the next person. It eventually chooses another man, someone more passively accepting of a tentacle shoved down his throat. He still chokes on it, but he doesn't resist, and his reward is a swift +1 quartect applied then and there.
As soon as he recovers, a bulbous, somehow more organic tentacle ventures out from near the base of the energy beam the creature floats on. The man blinks, dazed by unexpected pleasure, but he opens his mouth willingly enough on command, knowing instant reward awaits obedience. The thicker, oddly knobbed tentacle pushes in.
Everyone stares, gaping in fascinated horror. You feel more revolted hate than horror, but you admit the scene is like something out of a surreal horror film. The tentacle pulses in a strange rhythm. The knobbed parts slide. They're dimly lit from within, dull glows like small orbs studded down the length. One squeezes past the poor man's teeth and passes out of sight into his mouth. You can almost see it go down his throat.
You know exactly what it looks like. You know it's probably what you think it is.
The victim just breathes noisily through his nose until it's over. The thick tentacle withdraws, leaving a swamp-green ooze on his lips, but the sheer grossness is blotted out for him by another immediate +1 quartect.
Even afterward, once he's coherent again, he doesn't seem to care. "Don't feel anything," he slurs to the crowd of people that gathers around him.
"Chestburster," someone mutters, and anxiety spreads through the cells. Everything that happened and his description of what it felt like spreads in whispers to the surrounding cells, who crane their necks to watch the man. They're waiting for the alien to emerge in a spray of blood.
Nothing happens. The man becomes more sluggish, prone to falling into long periods of simply sitting in the huddle breathing deeply as if he's asleep with his eyes open, but he claims he feels fine, just tired. You're not allowed in the huddle anymore, but in your opinion, staying near someone who might be a carrier of an unknown alien creature is foolish anyway. For warmth, you sit against the slave that used to be Fowler. For security, you keep your back to him and your eyes on the carrier.
The truly weird part is that it becomes clear the man's marked for special treatment from the guards. He's trained as much as anyone else, but his rewards amp up. As long as he's obedient, the guards keep giving him extra quartects. They also separate him out at feeding time to provide him with a food supplement, something beyond the awful nutritional paste from the feeding tube. It has a crunchy texture and a sharp tang, not that anyone else is given a taste. The supplement is almost as great a reward as a quartect. Everyone in the cells, you included, stare at the man as he enthusiastically chews his good-boy treats.
It's hard not to drool. You catch yourself licking your lips far too often and force yourself to turn away. Envying a dead man his last meal is pathetic.
You're not the only one bitter, but you're on thin ice with your cellmates . You keep your peace aside from a few snide remarks about going tamely to a gruesome death. Someone two cells over spits a comment about docile breeders, and the man snorts.
"It doesn't hurt. Far as I'm concerned, getting hentai-ed by an alien's been worth it so far."
Some of the pop culture-savvy people further out in the cells giggle. They sound a little hysterical. He grins wearily and rubs his belly, but stops as every eye snaps to his hand. "For Christ's sake, it's just nerves! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I'm self-conscious, that's all. I don't feel anything!"
It doesn't sound like he's lying. He insisted from the start that he feels fine, and everyone's certainly watching him close enough to catch him in a lie. He sleeps a lot, now, dozing through training that the guards exempt him from, but he yawns and shrugs off concern at the exhaustion. You study him in the rare times he gets up to walks around, but his body looks the same as before. All of you have lost weight to inactivity and the bland nutritional paste, unable to keep muscle or fat. A bulge can't be hidden, but he doesn't have one.
You want to pound on the cell wall and demand to know what's been done to him. The fear that it'll be done to all of you, to you in particular, burns low in your belly.
Measuring time is a depressing task. By everyone's best estimate, it's roughly at the two week mark when the man starts coughing in a hoarse rasp. Most of the cell scatters, freaked out. Even his friends abandon him when the cough quickly escalates to tearing convulsions, red-faced hacking as he chokes. The guard station lights up, wheels squeal, and two guards swoop in to retrieve him. Nobody says it, but you're all relieved that they took him away.
To your surprise, he survives. He coughs, but he's alive. He's dazed and wide-eyed in astonishment when a guard returns him to the shift half a shift later.
"Egg," he whispers as the cell clusters around him. You hover on the edges of the crowd, unwelcome, but you can hear. The rest of the prison is pressed to the nearest cell walls, waiting for someone to pass word. "I threw up an egg thing. They numbed my throat so I could get it up."
"Did you see it hatch?" someone calls.
"No. No, I just…they stuck a swab down my throat to numb me, I barfed up the egg, they checked my throat, said I'd heal," he shrugs, more baffled than horrified, "and they sent me back here."
You want to ask who 'they' is. You want a report on where he was taken, what kind of equipment is there, how many automated guards there are, and an assessment of escape routes. Some of your questions are answered as the rest of the captives demand details, but your attempts to dig for information are soundly ignored.
The man heals as promised. The only visible result of the ordeal is a glyph printed in yellow lights on his collar. Nobody knows for sure what it means, but it's likely a mark saying he's carried. You memorize it as something to avoid at all costs.
All in all, he rates the experience as bizarre but no worse than what he's already lived through here in the cells. General murmured consensus is that being abducted by aliens for some sort of an egg-laying farm operation actually makes more sense than just being randomly trained as slaves. The man's wistful sigh at the diet of nothing but nutritional paste gets some dark chuckles and catcalls of, "Go seduce another squid!"
It's black humor. You understand it, but you don't approve.
Next time a Quint comes down to the cells for an inspection, you keep to the back and do your best not to draw attention. Best not to risk it. The cell two down is chosen for a physical inspection this time, and you relax slightly. It feels like dodging a bullet.
In the cell, two or three people push to the forefront of the ranks, chins set and obviously determined that since carrying isn't fatal or painful, it's worth grabbing for special treatment. The Quintesson is visibly pleased by its property's cooperation. As soon as it picks a volunteer and tests her for use, more aliens glide down into the cells to inspect the slaves. Two enter your cell, and your stomach sinks.
You get on your knees with the rest when ordered down but stay tense, lips pressed together and a roiling cauldron of emotions twitching the skin under your left eye.
"You. Here." A tentacle beckons. The first victim hesitates a bare second before shuffling forward. The Quint who summoned him pets a possessive tentacle over him and changes faces to address its companion. "A proven incubator. Minimal behavioral notes, and in good health."
"A valuable asset," the other Quint notes and brings its own tentacle up to wait in front of the man's mouth. "Open."
Resigned as he is, being discussed like a prize broodmare turns the man's ears bright red in embarrassed anger. It fights longing on his face, and you can see precisely how this will go.
Those who want the easy quartects and food supplements will dream away their slavery in lethargic, pleasure-drugged carrying, egg after egg after egg. The Quintessons will invest extra in them to encourage carriers to volunteer, to stay on good behavior and be content to incubate their spawn. Those that struggle will be less valuable. This is the creation of another category of human slave, like the mindwiped, augmented mannequins. Docile carriers are presumably more expensive than regular slaves but less expensive than the programmed humans.
Which will make the category you belong in the cheapest, and you're fine with that. You will never open your mouth knowing what will happen, not like the man in front of you. He draws a deep breath to brace himself and braces for implantation.
The second set of eggs involves ten people. You think surely someone will snap, go crazy like during the first months of captivity, but the carriers stay quiet in their cells, soaking up their privileges. Most of the others leave them alone. If anyone feels any more trapped than before, it doesn't seem to drive them mad.
A hierarchy starts to form, you notice, and it frustrates you because the carriers are at the top. You, the loner and universally disliked, are at the bottom. You don't have anything anyone wants, and you're well aware some of your former agents would love to murder you if the consequences weren't so dire. On the other hand, the carriers have something everyone wants, even you. They can't share their extra quartect points, but they can sneak bits of their food supplements back into the cells to give out to their friends.
Or to trade. There are still things to trade for in captivity, things as simple as being in the center of the group huddle to stay warm, or a back massage, or even sexual favors. Everyone stopped caring about what anyone else witnessed a long time back. Modesty doesn't hang on long in a clear-walled prison, you've found.
One after another, the living incubators start to cough. They're all taken away and returned, eggs delivered. Another group of Quintessons comes down to inspect the slaves, and this time there's jostling as people rush to volunteer. Disgusted, you try to ignore the competition and implantation process.
After the third round emerges but before the fourth begins, training ends. You don't know it at the time. A Quintesson comes down for an inspection, but it doesn't seem to be looking for a carrier. It selects slaves from each cell, and you're one of the chosen. Your stomach lurches when the tentacle points at you.
"Kneel," the guard commands.
You obey, hating how easy obedience comes to you.
"Prostration."
It's harder on your pride, but you grit your teeth and lower yourself flat on your face on the cold floor, arms stretched on the floor above your head in a defenseless pose. The humiliation adds +1 to your daily tally, and your gut knots in anticipation of shift end. Your body is an animal, and like any animal, it can be trained by pain and pleasure. You've been trained.
The Quint hovers down the line of prostrate people, examining you closely. You shudder at the touch of a tentacle on your back. The collar around your neck is fiddled with for a moment, and the creature moves on to inspect the next person. You watch out of the corner of your eye. Whatever the Quint marks the next slave's collar with is red, but you can't see if it's a glyph or just an identifying light.
At least it's not yellow.
After the alien's done with the lot of you, the guards get you back on your feet. You get a better look at the red glyph now on the collars, but you still can't read it. The line moves obediently, prodded on by the guards. Training has taken you out of the cells before, but this feels different. You glance back once before the doors close. Nobody is watching you leave.
It is different this time. The guards bring you to a holding pen, a small confined area next to what has to be a display platform. A sick feeling grows inside you as the first person is shoved out onto it, out into a glaring spotlight. Camera drones circle the platform, and screens showing changing glyphs move slowly behind the lights and cameras. You squint, unable to read the glyphs but recognizing several from the Autobots and Decepticons. Are they…numbers?
A guard begins giving the singled-out slave standard orders, orders you've been drilled in endlessly. The glyphs change faster. A chill pours like ice water down your back as you realize what's going on. Someone hisses a breath in.
"Auction," the woman beside you says softly.
"Oh my God," someone else moans, and the group draws into a protective clump, staring terrified through the barrier at the sale happening before their eyes.
You don't join the huddle, tempting as the useless gesture is. You stand there and fume, plotting things part of you knows you're too broken to do. You could jump from the platform, but you know it will do you no good. You could attack a camera drone or a screen, but what's the point? Punishment is an ingrained fear, and you'll have to do as you're told after it's done. Knowing you can't resist makes this worse.
But you can't just give up.
Even though you know what defiance costs?
You know you shouldn't.
You can't.
No.
You're shaking when you're directed out onto the platform four sales later. By now, you think you've worked out what part of the screens indicates bids, what section is the bidders, and what your individual glyph is. It looks like a number and the glyph now engraved on your collar.
You haven't made up your mind. You don't think you can.
You're thinking that all the way up until you stop standing tamely in the center of the platform and instead hurl yourself in a sprint at the nearest camera drone. Stupid as it is, a sense of victory fills you as your weight brings it crashing down, bashing your knee in the tumble to the floor and sending the guards' wheels squealing toward you.
That was your great last stand. That was your final moment, going down in a blaze of glory. Ha! See that? You look up and smirk at the screens and cameras focused on you. You're not broken yet, not for all their training.
The foolish sense of accomplishing something lasts until -10 quartects are administered right there. You don't even have time to climb to your feet and take off running. Your nervous system ignites into utter agony, and it's all over.
This is you telling yourself in cursing, sobbing whimpers that you should have just done as your told, done your tricks like a good slave for your masters, and hoped for a lax owner. Idiot, idiot, you should have waited. You shouldn't have done that! You knew better, and if you had the coordination during punishment, this is the only time you'd gladly off yourself to escape slavery. You're not the type to give up or break easily, but oh fuck, it hurts.
You're a mess when the punishment finally runs through to completion. The Quintessons aren't merciful slavers. They don't spare the rod. -10 takes a long, long time to finish.
Above you, the auction's continued. You're the last one for sale, if anyone even bids on you. Honestly, you can't tell. You're beyond observing your surroundings. A guard drags your limp form up onto the platform and waits for you to recover enough to obey orders. You do. It takes a while, but you're ready to obey when the orders are given.
Tears silently streaming down your face, knee throbbing, shivering in violent spasms, you obey and obey and obey. Then you obey some more. You have no idea how long the torment lasts. To you, the auction draws out an unbearably long time. The guard cycles you through commands as if intentionally causing your bruised, wrenched knee as much pain as physically possible. Maybe it's meant to humble you further. You wearily wish the Quints could see you're already defeated.
You're still too shaky to walk a straight line when the auction closes at last. Not that it matters, since you either black out or are knocked out a moment later.
You'll never know how much you sold for, but you suspect you were bargain basement cheap after the stunt you pulled. You hate that you regret rebelling.
There's nothing to foster a sense of hope anymore, however. When you wake up, you're in a square box of a room. There's no door. A feeding tube is positioned above a toilet drain. They're barely within reach, since your collar's chained to a machine. It's some kind of printing device. A simple set of instructions scrolls down your eyepiece, the words narrated by the headpiece. It doesn't take extensive training to do this job. Take the stamped sheet of plastic…plexiglass…metal? Take the stamped thing out of the slot on the machine. Compare it to the images on the eyepiece. If it looks like one of the pictures, fit it into the corresponding hole on one wall. If it looks wrong, walk around the machine and slide it into a chute to be recycled. You think. You don't know what the material you're working with is, much less what the designs embedded into it are supposed to mean.
You're given plenty of time to worry at the puzzle. There's nothing else to break the monotony. You don't see another living creature for months. You count the days by shifts, but after a couple months pass, time blurs badly. Stubborn as you are, you have your listless days, and you're pretty sure you lost count during a stretch of depression.
You're trained enough to work, knowing there will be consequences, and there are. The new system is in line with the old one. Yanking on your collar chain or prying at the machine's cover, trying to open it up, is swiftly punished by negative quartects. Every correctly sorted stamped thing earns you a fraction of a quartect, stacking up in a vertical bar on your eyepiece until you're above the 0 quartect line. Then you can stop for the shift. If you stop before you reach the line or earned enough negative quartects that you can't work them off before the lights dim, you suffer.
You try to stop at zero every day. Boredom and depression tempt you into extra work sometimes, too often for your rational mind, but the pleasure feels so, so good. Your willpower crumbles to powder in your hands as you sit against the wall, head in your hands. As much as you try to hold onto the resolution not to give in, there's nothing else to do. It feels amazing every time.
The day you earn +5 quartects, you know humanity is doomed. You can't escape. You can't resist. The Quintessons will break your species into slaves as they've broken you.
You refuse to consider killing yourself. You just won't.
The next day, you stay down and close your eyes, grimly waiting for the hours to pass. You last most of the shift before you stand up and rush to the machine, heart thumping in your ears as you frantically try to make up for lost time.
The punishment at shift end isn't as bad as it almost was. You wish you held out. You're spineless enough to be glad you came to your senses. Bitter self-hatred floods your mouth. Fear has you by the throat.
You don't try again.
One day, an immeasurable number of months into slavery, the machine turns off. Confused, you stand beside it waiting. After a while, you tap on it cautiously, watching your eyepiece in wary dread. The quartect work bar blanks out, however. The familiar +/- number reappears, blinking at 0. Does that mean no work today? With nothing else to do, you sit and stare at the machine, waiting for it to turn back on.
The second shift goes much the same. You poke at little at the machine, testing. Maybe one of the things is stuck inside. You look in the chute, rattle it, but don't risk sticking your hand into it. You peer through the slots in the wall but don't see anything. Someone might be coming to repair the machine, then. That's vaguely exciting.
No, wait, it's really exciting. You watch the walls eagerly, hoping a door will open. You like your privacy, but there's a vast difference between privacy and isolation. You crave company by now. Desperately need it, if you're honest with yourself. You've been talking to yourself for months. You've had an obnoxious pop song stuck in your head for longer than that. You've caught yourself singing it under your breath as you work.
There's nothing to do but wait, so you restlessly pace the featureless room you're trapped in, limping at a circle at the end of your chain. Your knee never quite healed right. It aches when you sit down and hurts with every step.
On the third day, the feeding tube dries up. It's been dripping less and less over the past two shifts, but this time nothing comes out. You worm two fingers up into it to schlorch out the last of the water/food paste you live on. Once you've licked it off your fingers, that's the last of it. You're stuck in a room, by yourself, with nothing to eat or drink. And here you thought slavery couldn't get any worse.
The only good news is that the toilet drain hasn't clogged.
Not so good news is that the collar still works. You cringe as you test it, but you have to know. An attempt to break open the machine earns you -3 quartects, and with the machine offline, you have no way to earn positive points. Theoretically, you might find something inside the machine you could use to disable your collar and aid in an escape, but not soon and not with your bare hands. You're self-aware enough to know a lifetime of arrogant self-assurance isn't enough to stand up to another -10 quartect. Anticipation of that kind of agony is enough to stop you. You can't make yourself go against your training, knowing what's coming. -3 is going to be bad enough. You squeeze your eyes closed and wait for it to hit.
It's strange to find you can actually be more bored. Bored, yet oddly panicked at the same time. There's nothing to do, and nobody's come to fix to the machine. You're beginning to believe you'll die here, ignorant of why. Did you do something wrong? Did the whole production line of stamped things close down? Did you not earn enough profit to pay off your pricetag, and now the machine will be shut down until newer, cheaper labor is bought? Are slaves like you just used up and left to rot like this?
You don't know. Nobody's there to tell you. You want to at least know what happened. In the midst of all the unfairness of slavery, it still stings that you won't know the reason you've been abandoned to die.
The fourth day, dehydrated and hungry, you yell for attention. It doesn't do you any more good than it did any other time. You don't expect anyone to hear you. It's kind of just something to do.
The fifth day, you're swallowing against the dryness of your mouth when the headset comes online already spitting orders. You freeze, shocked.
You're almost glad to be remembered.
Okay, so you're glad.
You're achy, a bit dizzy, and beyond thirsty, but beaten down doesn't mean you prefer death to obedience. Not yet. Definitely not with actual death looming over you.
You climb to your feet and into attention, the pose of a listening slave, and shame barely twinges behind your sternum. A portion of the wall in front of you flickers like a hologram, and you have the sudden, stomach-sinking realization that two of the walls in this room could be precisely that. The chain doesn't reach far enough to let you touch those two walls.
If you'd broken the chain, you could have walked out of the room. Which is a big if, considering the chain, your collar, and your lack of means to break either, but it's still immensely disheartening.
A camera drone whirrs into sight through the disappeared section of the wall, and a flat screen hovers after it. You heart jolts. This looks terribly familiar. That looks like the column for bidders, that's the amount they're bidding, and that's the number-category combination that means you.
You're being auctioned again.
A shudder wracks you. You don't know if it's disgust, relief, or fear. Your headset gives you a command, and what you feel is irrelevant. All that's important is the choice: obey or disobey?
Your pride gives a feeble flop, the dying throes of who you were. You were the leader of MECH. Now the camera points at you, an audience watches, and you're going to be bid on as a slave.
Two seconds of disobedience clicks negative quartects onto the eyepiece, and a pained grimace creases your face. The number glyphs bid slow. You're not being a desirable slave. The longer you resist, the higher the price you'll pay for delaying. It's only a delay. You know full well you'll do as you're told once your powerlessness is reiterated.
Pain or pleasure, violation now or later? Endless following of instructions in brainless manual labor, never allowed to make a choice but obey now or obey later.
You should have opted to be a carrier.
You can't believe you thought it even as it crosses your mind. You swallow dryly, eyes wide, and make an instant decision.
When the auction finally ends, the camera drone moves on and the wall reappears. You're already on your knees, or you'd have slumped to the floor. As it is, you hunch over to bury your face in your hands and hate yourself. You don't know how long the auction lasted. Too long. It was an excruciating sale.
But not in terms of physical endurance. That was your choice. You had to choose what was best for yourself, now as ever, but you have to live with yourself afterward. The feeding tube schlorps, abruptly splatting nutritional paste down into the toilet drain, and what else can you do but get up and eat? Slaves have no options, not really, and you don't want to die.
[* * * * *]