"Dolcett City Council USDA Choice **** Offline Offline Gende" By robblu (https://pastebin.com/u/robblu) URL: https://pastebin.com/rWbSQgjy Created on: Monday 2nd of April 2018 07:29:25 PM CDT Retrieved on: Saturday 31 of October 2020 03:14:59 AM UTC Dolcett City Council USDA Choice **** Offline Offline Gender: Male Posts: 274 What have I got in where? View Profile Personal Message (Offline) Story: Optimal Throughput « on: July 12, 2011, 06:42:04 AM » ReplyQuote The naked woman took a deep breath, then stepped forward and down into a shallow, rectangular indentation. She leaned forward toward the wall, bending more than ninety degrees at the waist, and put first one, then the other hand on the handles in a pair of matched recesses on the wall. She used them to pull herself forward and put her head through the hole between the handles. Gentle but infinitely strong padded clamps closed over her ankles and wrists with the sigh of air-driven hydraulics; something similar closed around her neck, and she whimpered. Heavy blades passed through her neck, wrists and ankles without any discernible resistance. The clamps around her neck and wrists released, and her body was pulled, nearly instantaneously, down through the a trapdoor recessed into the floor. ?“Wow,” said Marisol, “Did you see that?” Her attention was riveted on the scene, which was playing itself out at twenty-four stations along the imposing wall. She didn’t have to count them, because each station was numbered on the wall above with human-high numbers in bright blue. The woman in front of her in line looked back at her incredulously. Marisol smiled at her, then her attention went back to the wall, where another woman had stepped forward and was leaning forward. “Look,” said Marisol, “When she’s pulled under, I think there’s a blade in the floor between her feet. It would make sense, it’ll bisect her into two sides and at the same time it’ll allow for easy cleaning of the body cavity.” She shook her head admiringly. “This is really good industrial design.” “That’s very comforting,” said the woman in front of her. “I’ll take great satisfaction from having been killed as efficiently as possible.” Marisol laughed a dorky, braying laugh. “Oh, I know!” She looked down at the incredulous woman. “I’m a process engineer,” she said. “Well, I was, until this morning, when the messenger showed up.” She’d really enjoyed her work, too, for the six months between graduation and this morning’s pre-breakfast knock at the door. “I didn’t do this, exactly, I worked in sports equipment manufacturing, but the principles are similar…” She sighed. “And it’s a distraction.” She deflated a little as they stepped forward again. “Listen, you see how fast they’re going?” She pointed at the line snaking back and forth toward the numbered wall. “I timed it against my pulse, they’re averaging one per station per minute, that’s incredibly fast! Twenty four per minute makes one thousand four hundred and forty per hour, that means twenty three thousand and forty in a sixteen hour workday! Imagine that, almost twenty five thousand of us per day in this one plant.” The woman ahead of her snorted. “I do find that somewhat reassuring,” she said. Marisol looked down at her blankly. “I find it reassuring that people who majored in something useful are down here too, and it’s not just us Sociology majors.” She smiled. “I’m Calley, by the way.” She held out her hand. Marisol smiled and shook Calley’s hand. “I’m Marisol,” she said. “I’m sorry, I guess this stuff isn’t interesting to everyone. I promise to keep my nerdiness to myself.” Calley laughed. “No,” she said, “You’re right, it does take my mind off things.” She looked at the line that wound away in front of her toward the wall, then back at Marisol. “Tell me more,” she said, “What makes it go so fast?” “Well,” said Marisol, “First think about the line. There’s one line, back and forth, back and forth, and then at the front…” She pointed to where the single file line which wound through the artificial maze ended. “There’s an open space, then it feeds into one shorter line for each station. That means that one station having a problem of some kind won’t slow the whole line down.” She pointed to the breaks in the line, splitting it into sections. “You can see how, if there’s a problem in the line, you can close off that section and keep the line moving around it.” “It doesn’t look like there’s many problems,” said Calley, looking up and down the line. It was true, the line had been moving them very smoothly forward. “Yeah,” said Marisol, “I think you’re right…” She looked up and down the line. “Do you remember that girl, the Hispanic girl who was with us in the dressing room?” Calley nodded. The dark-haired beauty had been led through a different door. “I think there’s a set of cameras in the changing room, and I think they have some sort of profiling system to divert women who look like they might cause trouble.” She looked back at the long line of women behind her, winding toward their appointment with the wall. “I wonder what happens to the troublemakers,” she said. Her forehead wrinkled with genuine concern at the thought that she might never know. She looked up and down the line, then up at the ceiling. There were guards on a catwalk high above them. Calley smiled. “You could always cause a scene,” she said. “They’d have to take you away and deal with you.” Marisol brightened. “You know, that’s a great idea,” she said. “What should I do?” Calley laughed. “I don’t think you’re the troublemaker type.” She placed her hand on Marisol’s arm. “Listen, why don’t you just… keep me company, until we get to…” She looked up at the wall, watching twenty four women go through various stages of the process. “How much longer do you think it’s going to be?” She asked, quietly. “Twelve minutes, give or take,” said Marisol. “Really.” Marisol nodded. “Each of the sections holds about two hundred forty women, which is about ten minutes woth. There are a total of six sections, so it takes about an hour to get through the line; I’m guessing that that’s more or less on purpose, so that they’re never more than an hour from clearing the line.” The stood in silence for a while, shuffling forward a step at a time at regular intervals, then crossed the last gap together, into the last section of the line. Marisol looked up at Calley. “I don’t really want to be here, I wish…” Her lips pursed, and she looked like she was suddenly on the verge of tears. Calley reached out and took her hand. “Oh, honey, none of us does, it’s just… it’s just the way things are,” she said. Marisol wiped her eyes roughly with the back of her hand, then crossed her arms over her breasts, hugging herself. “But I don’t understand,” she said. “The numbers… I mean, this plant.. if you run it for sixteen hours a day, for five days a week, it’s going to process six million women per year! How can that many of us every year be surplus? And this isn’t the only plant, I know. Plus,” she took a deep breath, “For god’s sake, why keep putting is through college if we’re just going to be meat animals? It doesn’t make any sense.” Calley reached out and took both of Marisol’s hands, then pulled her into a reassuring hug. “Oh, honey, I know, it’s hard, isn’t it? To not be here to find out how it ends.” She pulled back a bit and looked into Marisol’s eyes. “Take it from a Sociologist, it works, and it’s necessary, even if it’s unpleasant for those of us it happens to.” Marisol made a wide, two-armed shrugging gesture. “But… why?” She sounded like she was on the verge of wailing it. “Why? For God’s sake, why?” Calley blinked. “You really don’t know?” Marisol shook her head, looking frustrated and frightened. Calley sighed. “Well, listen, it started with the financial crisis in 2008, when…” There was a Bing behind her. She turned to find herself at the front of the line. A screen on a post said “12.” She looked up, and sure enough, the line in front of station twelve was shorter than the others. She turned back to Marisol. “I don’t have time to tell you, honey, I’m sorry.” Marisol nodded, her mouth open, as her new friend went and joined line twelve. Bing, went the sign, and it said “13.” She went and stood beside Calley, in the next line over. There were three women ahead of her in this abbreviated line, the line with only one end, at station 13, where she would be transformed into a pair of sides of meat, efficiently and quickly. She was suddenly horrified that she’d been excited by the process, and she wished she’d made a scene, started screaming or something. Calley reached out across the rope boundary between the lines and took her hand. Together, they moved forward, then forward again, not saying anything, just occasionally looking at each other for comfort, and then looking back at their stations. Calley reached the front of her line first, and stepped forward exactly like she was supposed to, into the recess in the floor. She looked back at Marisol, eyes trying to pass her soul into the other woman’s consciousness in a brief second, and then she leaned forward, grasped the handles, and with a little grunt of effort she pulled her head through the hole. Marisol gasped as the clamps tightened around Calley’s wrists, ankles and neck, and flinched, her whole body wincing away, as the blade severed the young Sociologist’s head, hands and feet. Calley’s whole body sagged in that instant, clearly and visibly suddenly without motive force. Then, almost as fast as Marisol could blink, the bottom of the square recess dropped out and Calley’s headless, handless corpse was pulled down through it by the ankles, a blade in the center of the recess slicing her body in half. Marisol’s mouth hung open as her new friend was just gone in an instant. Her station had been standing empty for almost fifteen seconds. She looked back down the line, took a deep breath, and stepped forward, down into the shallow, rectangular indentation.