A Slave to Race

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  The entrance to Mineshaft K-947-beta looked like the mouth of a long-dead dragon – rugged dark-gray and black rocks forming jagged teeth of stalactites across the giant roof. We filed into its rocky throat in single file under a black sky pin-pricked with tiny diamonds.

  The mech-orgs didn’t poke, prod or shove us – which somehow made them even more menacing, and made me feel like a lamb going to the slaughter. The beastly guards just stood there with their boxy heads, emotionless faces, and powerful musculature, looking like they had only two settings: docile and kill.

  Right before being swallowed up by the great hole in the mountainside, I felt panic rise in my gut. Was this the last time I would see the outside? I looked up at the stars – the place I’d spent so much time as a slave racer – and almost – almost tried to run.

  But before the message got from the animal-instinct part of my mind to my muscles, a bald-headed woman just three paces ahead of me broke loose and dashed for freedom.

  It was a pitiful sight – as she reached the ten-meter radius from the entrance, her slave cell-coding paralyzed her and she fell on her face in the gravel, skidding to a halt with a grunt.

  Two giant mech-orgs approached her – clearly in no hurry, since she wasn’t going anywhere. As she moaned helplessly, locked in the grasp of the cell-coding constraint, the mech-orgs raised their shoulder cannons in unison, and blasted her at close range without ceremony. The energy beams converged on her mid-section and disintegrated her, rather slowly – one wave of white-hot energy moving toward her head, the other toward her toes. Within a few seconds, she was a small pile of black powder.

  The mech-orgs holstered their shoulder cannons, then turned to the harried slave line as if to say, “Any questions?”

  We all just turned back to toward our fate, and trudged on with our heads hanging down and our arms limp at our sides.

  Defeated.