Hybrid by Keith Laumer

Author:Keith Laumer [Laumer, Keith]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T17:32:20.750000+00:00

Chapter 24

RYZA

Slavers were something Ethan had grown up fearing, such was the life of a refugee. A slave had his life and freedom taken from him, to live out the rest of his days toiling for someone else. He had always imagined it as a torturous existence, with chains and shock whips and other dark, unbearable conditions, where the unfortunate souls unlucky enough to find themselves sold into slavery would be ground down by their owners and then thrown away like trash when they were no longer useful. Living that slave life for himself now, he was again faced with a reality which did not quite equal that of his imaginings, though the experience was no less terrible for it.

Disgusting as it was, the work he was forced to do wasn’t that difficult. Definitely not the grueling hard labor he had envisioned, though he was still exhausted by the end of the twelve hour work shifts. While the labor was fairly simplistic and repetitive, it also happened to be mind numbingly monotonous, which caused the time to crawl by at a painfully slow rate, an altogether different, though no less agonizing sort of torture in and of itself. His primary function so far had been to trudge through the steaming pools of bio waste that collected in a sort of large spill basin, one of many in the disposal zone, shoveling the muck into holes in the floor that opened into a drainage pipe system. Those pipes led to an incinerator below which disposed of the sludge, which was also the source of heat that made the festering waste swamp bubble and churn like a giant pot of some gruesome soup. He spent the hours unclogging one pipe opening after another with the blunt tool the workers were provided for the task. Thankfully they had all been supplied with face breathers as well, as he could only imagine the noxious fumes the waste pool gave off.

He could almost taste the vile stench that had been absorbed into his waterproof coveralls when he stripped them and the rest of his clothes off at the end of the day for the relief of a well needed shower in the community wash station. He had quickly gotten over both his embarrassment and modesty in having to utilize the mixed sex sanitation area. The hard, but still soothing shower sprays were the only relief to be had in this place and he found himself looking forward to it as each day progressed.

The jobs they all performed could have easily been completed by half the number of mech workers. But mechs were expensive. The slaves were all divided into two separate half day work rotations to keep the zones fully operational at all times. Mechs did not require rest and could run constantly, but that came at a cost as well. They needed regular upkeep, repairs, programming upgrades. Ethan could envision the line of thought Syntax Corporation had taken to come to the conclusion that

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