The Deep Machines

The factory ran day and night, and no one knew why. The heat and the noise was constant. Machines thundered as they stamped strange shapes from sheet metal and deposited them onto conveyor belts, thousands of pieces rushed along a production line, robotic instruments making slight adjustments to them constantly. As they clattered along the belt, they would be sawed, and bent, and have strange substances piped upon them in precise places, and finally they would be dropped onto yet another belt made of linked metal chains that went into an industrial furnace with a yawning mouth that could easily swallow a man.

Thin men tended the machines, floating from one part of the machinery to another like drugged insectoid drones. The noise was deafening. No one could hear anything except the constant roar of a thousand plates of steel being punched and cut by a thousand machines, the clatter of one hundred thousand pieces of metal along the ten thousand conveyor belts, and the deep inhalation of a thousand industrial furnaces. These all merged into a background thunder that prevented the men from speaking to each other; even when they screamed, they could not be heard.

Every so often, a machine would take a man; he would not have moved his hands and arms quickly enough after loading a metal puncher, and great steel pistons would spring out like captive bolts and mash his arms into a bloody mist. Or he would be tending to one of the robotic shapers and lose his footing as the conveyor belt sped along and be carried into the jaws of one of the industrial ovens, and what emerged from the oven would be a carbonized thing twisted into a fetal position, and the smell of burning meat would hover over the machinery for hours. Or his shirt would be too loose around his waist and catch in the gears of an open conveyor belt, spinning him from head to toe even as it sucked him in and ground him until he was naught but a long red and glistening stripe on the belt. There were many such stripes, the old ones black and brown, some of the blood having evaporated in the heat and the remainder changing from red to rust to black as it aged.

There was no rest. There were no breaks. No meals, no sleep, no stopping for biology. There seemed to be no need. There was only the work.

Then a day came when the machines slowed, and one by one, they stopped.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcuhRnU4ow&t=804s