I was a famous athlete in my country, but not in a sport you probably care much about. Then I screwed up my life. I was trying to find my way back—had an apartment again after years without a home—when I was snatched off the street by a team of commandos, strapped to a hand cart, and rolled on to a C-5M Super Galaxy military transport plane.
There were many more people aboard, similarly bound, our faces held straight forward by some sort of silver bridle. You could talk around it, but couldn’t be understood. Soldiers in jumpsuits, without patches or identifying insignia, moved efficiently to strap us upright to the floor of the cargo bay, locking us into long rows like cans in a coke machine. I made too much noise, so one of the soldiers sprayed something in my face and I don’t remember much after that.
I was dimly aware of of having pissed myself, of being fed a strange red slop, of wondering at the sliver of a face I could see through the slats in the hand truck ahead of me. I could hear slurring voices all around me. “Urrr wharr,” someone said. It could have been me. There were other sounds, but no one could quite solidify them into words. Then we hit the runway, bounced, and came to a stop.
A separate team of jumpsuited people came aboard and we were fitted with IV needles then rolled off the plane. It was raining on the tarmac, and they loaded us into truckbeds. I was on the bottom of a stack of three hand carts. Their smells dripped down on me. Someone was whimpering. It wasn’t far to a hangar of sorts, with a little terminal beside it, which butted up against a barbed wire fence and a dark forest beyond.
The soldiers signed us over to a woman in a black polo shirt who came outside to inspect us. The others at her back wore a similar uniform of khakis, white hats, and black polos—like they were valets, only with chrome 1911s on their hips.
They lined us up outside a cinderblock building with no windows, which abutted the closed hangar. Then the first kidnapped person, a woman with long black hair, was taken inside. I stared at the flimsy wooden door. A minute passed in silence. There was a piercing scream, abbreviated. Another minute, then a wet squeal, which turned into an inhuman sound before ending. She never came out.
The next person was wheeled in, a man with facial piercings filling in for eyebrows. I stared at the flimsy wooden door. The piercing scream and silence. The wet squeal. The inhuman sound. The next cart, with the next person, went in. Then another disappeared, and another. Soon it was my turn.
Two polo shirts wheeled me in, where I was met with a doctor and a team of nurses. They were masked, anonymous, and wore head-to-toe purple scrubs, with only their surgical gloves glaring white. One of the nurses put a breathing mask over my face. I inhaled, and suddenly felt horribly alert. My body tensed, every muscle in it, and my teeth gritted against each other until I couldn’t unlock my mouth.
The two polo shirts unstrapped me and hefted me, stiff as a board, on to an operating table that looked like something from a field hospital. The room was barebones, but looming over my head was a surgical robot, its limbs draped in neon pink cloth and terminating in specialized appendages.
“Thank you for consenting to the tissue removal procedure provided by the CNS De-Threader,” a disembodied voice said. I realized it was coming from a boombox with a cassette deck. A nurse pressed stop.
“My English is not very good,” the doctor said. “You have consented now.”
I was still fully tensed, my muscles shaking and sore, so they tightened the straps until my quivering was contained. A robot arm—swaddled in velvet, gold knots at each elbow—came across my field of vision, then disappeared under my chin. Something went up my nose, and kept going. I let out a little cough.
“It will feel like getting a tooth pulled,” the doctor said, lowering a splatter shield over his face, “but much longer.”
The doctor pressed a button and I was unplugged from myself. A curl of red nerves stretched out from my nose and zipped up, up and around a little spool, which the robot sealed in a cartridge and set on the surgical tray. Before I could feel every strained muscle in my body, now I felt like my body didn’t exist—even the persistent awareness of air on my skin was gone. I screamed.
The arm came back, this time with a prickly armature that sank effortlessly into my neck.
“Your voice will also be collected,” the doctor said.
There was a strange sizzling, an electric whine, and then I felt tugging deep in my throat. I screamed again, but only a wet squeal came out. I saw two sheathes of muscle stretch out from my neck, pinched between robot fingers, and my squeal got higher and higher until the tissue snapped. I realized they were my vocal cords as the robot twisted them up like spaghetti around a fork.
I felt no pain as they wheeled me into the hangar, where the insensate assembled. I was fed by nurse with a long-neck funnel, who massaged paste down my throat before rolling me into line. We faced the aluminum wall of the hangar, in rows so tight my face was pressed against the metal of the handcart in front of me. I could see one side of their face through the frame and their jaw was working in silent circles. It was hours before the hangar was full with us, then the polo-shirted mercenaries turned out the lights, and locked us in, so that the only sound was our clotted breathing. It was cold in there, but I slept until I was woken up by a sound.
There was a voice behind me, coming from the far side of the hangar. The voice said my name. I heard it clearly, but there was nothing I could do.
“Shake your head,” the voice said, addressing me by name. But I found that I couldn’t turn my head, and was barely able to muster a quiver. After a few minutes she found me. With a heave, she pulled my cart out from the row, into the narrow aisle, so she could face me directly.
She was soap-pale, with hair that greased straight down around her shoulders so that she looked like a projectile. She moved with an inhuman, jerky assurance and wore a black pocket-T over what looked like French pantaloons, like from a movie with powdered wigs.
“I’m an archaeologist,” she said, and told me her name. “You are here because the most powerful men in the world plan to sacrifice you to a subterranean mole monarch known as the Queen of Earth and Under. I am here because if we work together we can kill them all instead.”
I’m not a conspiracy theorist exactly, but if you don’t believe the world is run by a self-interested class of people who play board seats like penny antes then I would call you naive, even before I was kidnapped and un-patriated. And anyone against overthrowing all that nonsense is probably my enemy.
What do I need to do?, I thought, but could only wiggle my head up and down in its foam bracket.
“I had a good feeling about you,” she said. She bent down and smacked the hanger’s concrete floor with an open palm.
There was a rumble that I could only feel in my ears, then the concrete burst apart next to her. I could see a plume of chalky dust, but was unable to bend my neck down to look. I could only see her nonchalant reaction, as the floor fell in on itself.
“Yeah, he’s in,” she said. “Pass me up the re-threader.”
“You recognize this?” she asked, holding up a clear cylinder with what looked like a licorice whip wrapped around its inner spool. There was a metal stamp affixed to it, with my name in raised lettering.
“Medical technology is 50 years more advanced than you know, but they hoard it all for themselves,” she said, inserting the spool cylinder into the armature. “That de-threader they strapped you in was probably from the 80s. It targets specific nerves or muscle strands for removal. For prisoners it’s easy: rip out most of your C and T nerves. Renders you harmless. Perfect for compliance.”
She wedged the open barrel of the re-threader under my chin. “But this re-threader is top of the line. I stole it from the private hospital inside the club compound. It can reinsert your nerves into your spinal column, but it’s going to hurt.”
De-threading was like getting a tooth pulled; this was like attaching a long row of molars down my spine with a sewing machine. But once it was done, and I could open and close my hands, I felt much better. After she undid the straps, the first thing I did was point at my throat.
“I have your vocal cord cartridge as well,” she said. “You’ll get your voice back on the other side of this. Right now we can’t risk you making a noise.”
Before strapping me back on the handcart and disappearing back into the earth she told me everything that would happen to me. She said we were a short drive from the club house, where we would be lined up against one wall of the palatial bathroom, facing the Edwardian trough urinal so we could hear the farts of the club members.
The butlers would sneer when the owners of prominent banks and oil companies walked by—in this club, they were riffraff. The only real club members were the men who didn’t own corporations, or even conglomerates, but instead held portfolios of sectors, fields, markets, extra-Earth land, and nations.
If I was caught moving they would call in valets who would call in nurses and the nurses would kill me with carbon monoxide.
Once the club members are asleep, we will be lined up in a hallway until the freight elevator operator gets to work loading us six at a time and taking us rumbling down into the dark. The ride down will take 40 minutes. We will be stored in total darkness until the procession of tribute, when all hell would break loose.
“It’s up to you from here,” she said. “Follow the plan and we’ll bring an end to this terrible era.”