He woke up early all the time. He worked a lot and it was hard work, loading forty 
pound steel slugs into a slot all day. Going home nights the clothes on his body slapped 
and stuck to him, pierced through with gallons of sweat. He did not talk as he worked, 
and he had no friends. Everybody gets talked at and not necessarily to them, but issued 
like any other order to an autonomously agreeable machine at the plant, and the other 
men there had to call him something, so they called him Frank. This was not his name; he 
didn’t remember his real name. It had been a long time since he had wanted to remember 
anything, but to only experience the present, knowing where his place was. His name was 
Frank and he worked at the plant, which was a sterile and dreary steel machinations 
factory remotely outside any sphere of civilization or influence, surrounded for a 
hundred miles in any direction by intermingled layers of swamps festering with 
disease-ridden sewage. Many men worked at ET10021, and Frank suspected that many of them
were in the same position that he had found himself in, lost inside a fast decaying maze 
of nothingness, all previous connections, all of his relationships abruptly ended when 
he was shipped here. Now there was no other place, there was no other person with Frank. 
There was no other place but the plant, his home, and the Driver, which provided the 
link between them. He hated the Driver, a hollow metal pipe half the height of a man 
that jutted off in an unerringly straight line into the distance, vanishing here and 
there through the waste. If there was anything that he dreaded the most, that was it. 


     Except there was something worse than the effects of the railgun. The treatments 
all of the workers were subjected brought a cold river of squirming terror through him 
at periodic moments throughout the day. Every week they were forced to drink liquid 
quinine by Dr. Schneider, who monitored the health of the men closely as they worked. 
The quinine ate through the stomach lining and throughout the intestines and bowels, but 
kept them from dying of Tryne disease, which infected everything in the swamps, even 
inside the factory although it’s a tightly regulated and decontaminated creation. It is 
forbidden, lethal, and physically impossible to access the exterior surface of the 
factory or beyond, except by the Driver, itself a sterile and carefully maintained 
mechanism. There are some questions in Frank’s mind regarding this, and he turned these
over as he worked the long hours. There were three people that belonged to Management, 
images on screens from somewhere else. These three were never present on the work floor, 
or anywhere the workers were allowed for that matter, and so a lot of the men talked 
that maybe there was a secret second section of the factory where things weren’t 
crawling with the hundreds of airborne menaces and the problems that went with all of
it, the disinfections and quinine, the dozens of pills taken every day, the shots, and 
still men died every day. These three were beyond the common worker. They were not 
expendable.


     The metal slugs were forty pounds each and it took him only a minute to load one 
into the slot, close the cover, bring down the manual release, then pull the switch for 
the automatic release, a safety precaution instituted only after an internal combustion 
blew off four of the covers, killing ten men and injuring just about everybody else, 
including Frank. A foot long piece of metal covering had gone through his calf. 


     Dr. Schneider was one of the Management, and still he had no physical contact with
 the workers. He was never seen, instead injecting and prodding and scoping through a 
robot that looked like a killing machine, bristling with hooks and points. The voice of 
Dr. Schneider echoed out of the walls of the Testing Center and carried a faint American 
accent as he asked blunt questions. “Are the movement of the bowels painful?” “Has your 
urine or semen turned blue?” All the while poking and sticking sensitive points. They 
took skin samples, nail samples, hair samples, saliva swabbed out by a steel prosthetic 
limb quickly enough to be disturbing, a small twinge of pain in the nasal cavity as a 
mucous sample is taken. It takes less than twenty minutes because there are many more 
waiting for their turn, nine hundred and fifty-seven more besides Frank who are waiting 
for their badges to be returned, a brilliant green flash of a card that dimmed in 
potency as the days passed, until it was as gray as the walls on the cutting floor. 
Frank left to return to his post, arms and fingers twitching involuntarily from the 
anticipation, when the 1st E bell rang, loud enough to extinguish everything else, a 
deep buzzing and clicking drone that seemed to scythe through his head. That was a high 
priority evacuation bell. Frank stood there with a half dozen other men as the rest ran 
from their work towards the Driver, but still he stood stunned, wondering if an assault 
were taking place at last or if the seals had been compromised, or what. And then he saw 
the golden bloom penetrating the dense shielding of the dome, a rising furnace of heat 
and hanging potentiality of doom that could only be an oncoming nuclear blast. Scant 
seconds had passed, yet he thought it might have been an eternal moment, a hundred 
outcomes playing out behind his eyes until the dome trembled and bowed as if in the 
presence of a great wind and then shattered in a massive explosion of melting ionized 
fragments that seemed to hang in the air for an instant before being sucked out like a 
vacuum, which actually it was. The flash blinded him just as this happened, so that as 
his body tumbled he could still see printed in the dark a drifting cloud of shards.


incomplete...