LABOUR FOR THE EMPEROR AND THE CELESTIAL COURT
Imperial Space, Deep Core, Balmorra
Underground elastics processing plant C337
03:04
Deep underneath the surface of the war-torn planet, in an unremarkable underground facility, close to 500 souls were busy maintaining their production quota. Some laboured manually, others acted as overseeing chemists, and the rest were caught up in simpler busy-work, such as standing in view of operating machinery to ensure that the assembly lines operated without error. All of them were those lucky few who had been assigned to the graveyard shift - with all the wonderful privileges that that entailed. Underpowered light fixtures, tectonic tremors caused by other facilities producing much more volatile materials, and of course, water rations. Just to name a few.
Nestled between Synthetic Rubber Refinery room B1 and that particular sector's janitorial wing was a single tiny office, barricaded from the sounds of industry by a tightly sealed safety bulkhead. There was a small console a few inches to the left of the door on the wall, buzzing with incandescent light to indicate that the room was currently occupied - but unlocked. At least to people with clearance higher than the average worker.
4 grey cement walls were behind that bulkhead, coming together to form a spacious room no larger than 200 square feet. Inside, towards the back, there was a solitary office desk facing the doorway and a woman sitting behind it on a featureless plastic office chair. On the wall behind her was a portrait of the Emperor, -a mass produced variant, for the lower classes-, whose visage was stoically set on staring at the bulkhead, as if He were some sort of watchman for the functionary.
She was working, shifting through piles and piles of paperwork, blueprints and time tables, every now and then stopping to wipe the sweat from her face, which seemed to be dripping unendingly from the top of her forehead. The room had no ventilation, and the ambient heat of the facility was high enough that whenever her skin approached a satisfactory degree of dryness, her pores would open up again and repeat the cycle.
She pushed her right gloved hand into the paperwork mass lying in front of her, reaching around for an item which she was failing to produce. Disgruntled, she removed her hand, unbuttoning the leather glove and - she paused, her eyebrows furrowing at the sight of her skin.
Blackened veins underneath an increasingly pale epidermis, coiling around her shivering fingers and disappearing into her wrists. A sight which was familiar to her, and a herald that it was time for her to drop whatever she was doing and reach for her prescription. With the very same hand, she opened a cabinet under the desk and withdrew a plastic bottle full of pills. Little white beads, smooth enough to the point where she could see her own reflection fractalizing on their collective surface.
She shoved the bottle's rim into her mouth, picked out a single pill with her teeth, and swallowed. The bottle was swiftly returned to its nest, and her glove soon rejoined her hand, allowing the search to continue. It was good practise; she had convinced herself - to not cover important physical documents with grease and other various fluids. It extended their lifetime significantly, allowing for easy scanning and archiving later on. Plus, whoever was in archival duty no doubt greatly appreciated her efforts. She hoped.
ALAS! She had found it. She fished out a metallic placard, a very important Imperial communique etched onto unalterable pressed bronze dotscript. It addressed her department in particular, and as was tradition for her, she had left it for later reading only and only under the condition that she had finished today's tasks. Which she had of course achieved successfully, 6 hours early. Lesser workers in her position would normally produce a PDA or a translation device of some sort, but she didn't need to, as she had memorized its grammar so as to be able to translate and write the script fluently.
And it read... it read...
Her grip tightened, bending the small sheet in half. With such infernal rage it filled her, that her mind had to process its contents in segments and excerpts, unable to cope with the insinuation of its full message.
CURRENT PRODUCTION FAILING TO KEEP UP WITH WARTIME COMPETITION, STOP.
GALACTIC ALLIANCE SET TO OVERTAKE RUBBER PRODUCTION IN 5 PRODUCTION CYCLES, STOP.
And the rest were various directions and directives aimed at her superiors. Ordering manpower around, calling for more hands-on deck, altering the allowed percentage between slaves and workers for facilities and so on and so forth.
It angered her to no end. She stood up, and tossed the placard against the bulkhead, the sound echoing inside her little chamber. First of all, it was merely news and not an actual important letter. For people like her away from executive authority, it was as useful as a gossip column on an editorial. Secondly, it was a sign, a sign which she knew would come, but dreaded nonetheless.
Her fingers curled out of her control, and she launched her hands wildly against her stacked papers. The collision sent them flying.
From her perspective, the Empire was martially winning. But on the home front, it had set itself up for failure. In order to fuel its war machine, it relied on its own currency and credit system, the values of which were tied to how many resources it could reap and consequently process. It was a race of consumption, a ravenous black hole whose hunger could only grow exponentially as the war raged on.
At any moment, a stalemate could arise, or a roadblock could manifest in the campaign to impede Imperial conquest, alternating or even pausing the stream of incoming plundered material. The rigid Imperial command economy, micromanaged down to the planetary level would struggle to correct itself in order to fulfil its wartime purposes without direct intervention, and, in all likelihood-
Her spine painfully extended upward, sending her chair flying against the wall behind her. Mumbling incoherently to herself, her hands climbed over her neck to meet her face, tugging away at her skin as her worries continued to unfurl.
-the workers would go without materials to process. The factories would be tasked with producing weapons out of thin air. Wages, issued ceaselessly to motivate people to work would lose their value as there would be nothing to buy, and eventually even the army would be forced to confront soldiers demanding real pay.
She flipped the desk, literally foaming at the mouth and wailing as if she was being lashed. Constantly twitching, she collapsed over the wooden construct, punching and kicking it while she was down, wobblily getting up from the pile of crushed planks only to fall down again and continue the assault.
Her own imagination haunted her with visions of enemy men switching professions guided by supply and demand instead of decree. She heard coffers filling to the brim with foreign currency, coins swiftly circulating from one hand to the other lubricated by trust and the call of cold, mathematical need.
And she couldn't stand it.
She flipped over, crawling away from the gored remains of her desk and stopped a few feet away from the wall. Her ankles and elbows gave in, and she fell flat under the Emperor's portrait, eyes helplessly fixated on the white-haired figure. It was the only thing which was not trembling, according to her fluttering eyes. The last anchor which tied her mind to reality, keeping her from questioning if she was in some sort of unending dream.
A faint and ethereal apparition of a mysterious upper class, whose customs she had always dismissed as nothing but hogwash. A lie for the dumb, propped up by stories to convince the stupid. And for those brief moments on the cement floor, she found herself begging nothingness to make them all true and that those wise elders would descend from their Olympian heights to handwave all of the Empire's problems away.
Frozen in place inside her own office, it was the only thing that her body allowed her to do, while a portion of her mind continued trying to rationalise a solution out of thin air.
Grumble, grumble. She didn't like being in that vulnerable position, but for now it would have to do. It helped her think.
Underground elastics processing plant C337
03:04
Deep underneath the surface of the war-torn planet, in an unremarkable underground facility, close to 500 souls were busy maintaining their production quota. Some laboured manually, others acted as overseeing chemists, and the rest were caught up in simpler busy-work, such as standing in view of operating machinery to ensure that the assembly lines operated without error. All of them were those lucky few who had been assigned to the graveyard shift - with all the wonderful privileges that that entailed. Underpowered light fixtures, tectonic tremors caused by other facilities producing much more volatile materials, and of course, water rations. Just to name a few.
Nestled between Synthetic Rubber Refinery room B1 and that particular sector's janitorial wing was a single tiny office, barricaded from the sounds of industry by a tightly sealed safety bulkhead. There was a small console a few inches to the left of the door on the wall, buzzing with incandescent light to indicate that the room was currently occupied - but unlocked. At least to people with clearance higher than the average worker.
4 grey cement walls were behind that bulkhead, coming together to form a spacious room no larger than 200 square feet. Inside, towards the back, there was a solitary office desk facing the doorway and a woman sitting behind it on a featureless plastic office chair. On the wall behind her was a portrait of the Emperor, -a mass produced variant, for the lower classes-, whose visage was stoically set on staring at the bulkhead, as if He were some sort of watchman for the functionary.
She was working, shifting through piles and piles of paperwork, blueprints and time tables, every now and then stopping to wipe the sweat from her face, which seemed to be dripping unendingly from the top of her forehead. The room had no ventilation, and the ambient heat of the facility was high enough that whenever her skin approached a satisfactory degree of dryness, her pores would open up again and repeat the cycle.
She pushed her right gloved hand into the paperwork mass lying in front of her, reaching around for an item which she was failing to produce. Disgruntled, she removed her hand, unbuttoning the leather glove and - she paused, her eyebrows furrowing at the sight of her skin.
Blackened veins underneath an increasingly pale epidermis, coiling around her shivering fingers and disappearing into her wrists. A sight which was familiar to her, and a herald that it was time for her to drop whatever she was doing and reach for her prescription. With the very same hand, she opened a cabinet under the desk and withdrew a plastic bottle full of pills. Little white beads, smooth enough to the point where she could see her own reflection fractalizing on their collective surface.
She shoved the bottle's rim into her mouth, picked out a single pill with her teeth, and swallowed. The bottle was swiftly returned to its nest, and her glove soon rejoined her hand, allowing the search to continue. It was good practise; she had convinced herself - to not cover important physical documents with grease and other various fluids. It extended their lifetime significantly, allowing for easy scanning and archiving later on. Plus, whoever was in archival duty no doubt greatly appreciated her efforts. She hoped.
ALAS! She had found it. She fished out a metallic placard, a very important Imperial communique etched onto unalterable pressed bronze dotscript. It addressed her department in particular, and as was tradition for her, she had left it for later reading only and only under the condition that she had finished today's tasks. Which she had of course achieved successfully, 6 hours early. Lesser workers in her position would normally produce a PDA or a translation device of some sort, but she didn't need to, as she had memorized its grammar so as to be able to translate and write the script fluently.
And it read... it read...
Her grip tightened, bending the small sheet in half. With such infernal rage it filled her, that her mind had to process its contents in segments and excerpts, unable to cope with the insinuation of its full message.
CURRENT PRODUCTION FAILING TO KEEP UP WITH WARTIME COMPETITION, STOP.
GALACTIC ALLIANCE SET TO OVERTAKE RUBBER PRODUCTION IN 5 PRODUCTION CYCLES, STOP.
And the rest were various directions and directives aimed at her superiors. Ordering manpower around, calling for more hands-on deck, altering the allowed percentage between slaves and workers for facilities and so on and so forth.
It angered her to no end. She stood up, and tossed the placard against the bulkhead, the sound echoing inside her little chamber. First of all, it was merely news and not an actual important letter. For people like her away from executive authority, it was as useful as a gossip column on an editorial. Secondly, it was a sign, a sign which she knew would come, but dreaded nonetheless.
Her fingers curled out of her control, and she launched her hands wildly against her stacked papers. The collision sent them flying.
From her perspective, the Empire was martially winning. But on the home front, it had set itself up for failure. In order to fuel its war machine, it relied on its own currency and credit system, the values of which were tied to how many resources it could reap and consequently process. It was a race of consumption, a ravenous black hole whose hunger could only grow exponentially as the war raged on.
At any moment, a stalemate could arise, or a roadblock could manifest in the campaign to impede Imperial conquest, alternating or even pausing the stream of incoming plundered material. The rigid Imperial command economy, micromanaged down to the planetary level would struggle to correct itself in order to fulfil its wartime purposes without direct intervention, and, in all likelihood-
Her spine painfully extended upward, sending her chair flying against the wall behind her. Mumbling incoherently to herself, her hands climbed over her neck to meet her face, tugging away at her skin as her worries continued to unfurl.
-the workers would go without materials to process. The factories would be tasked with producing weapons out of thin air. Wages, issued ceaselessly to motivate people to work would lose their value as there would be nothing to buy, and eventually even the army would be forced to confront soldiers demanding real pay.
She flipped the desk, literally foaming at the mouth and wailing as if she was being lashed. Constantly twitching, she collapsed over the wooden construct, punching and kicking it while she was down, wobblily getting up from the pile of crushed planks only to fall down again and continue the assault.
Her own imagination haunted her with visions of enemy men switching professions guided by supply and demand instead of decree. She heard coffers filling to the brim with foreign currency, coins swiftly circulating from one hand to the other lubricated by trust and the call of cold, mathematical need.
And she couldn't stand it.
She flipped over, crawling away from the gored remains of her desk and stopped a few feet away from the wall. Her ankles and elbows gave in, and she fell flat under the Emperor's portrait, eyes helplessly fixated on the white-haired figure. It was the only thing which was not trembling, according to her fluttering eyes. The last anchor which tied her mind to reality, keeping her from questioning if she was in some sort of unending dream.
A faint and ethereal apparition of a mysterious upper class, whose customs she had always dismissed as nothing but hogwash. A lie for the dumb, propped up by stories to convince the stupid. And for those brief moments on the cement floor, she found herself begging nothingness to make them all true and that those wise elders would descend from their Olympian heights to handwave all of the Empire's problems away.
Frozen in place inside her own office, it was the only thing that her body allowed her to do, while a portion of her mind continued trying to rationalise a solution out of thin air.
Grumble, grumble. She didn't like being in that vulnerable position, but for now it would have to do. It helped her think.
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