The Department of Corrections, Book One

Inside of Dissection Cell A-4891.

AlterGrav Off: Atrium in SEG (standard Earth gravity) Mode.

Stella Goring Ruwutska stood inside of cold DissCell A-4891: a Siberian cold that made the air feel too thick for the human body to maneuver through. The cell’s temperature had been lowered to below zero—standard protocol to prevent corpse spoil. Her uniform a bloodied white chef’s hat over a babushka, a Smart Pince-nez clipped to the bridge of her Magyar nose, an earpiece/mouthpiece, camouflage shirt and pants, utility belt, a sidearm (pistol), bloodied jackboots, and a bloodied white butcher’s apron: her MIKGU (military-issue kitchen-grade uniform). She—old, fair skinned, dark-brown haired, blue eyed, scarred right side of neck, bow-legged, barely five feet tall, over 200 pounds, and strong as an ox—swung her bloody, fifteen-inch-long chromium-plated meathook through the icy air while uttering “Aie, aie, aie, aie, aie!” like a wild gypsy—transpiercing CBC058908s (Ivanov’s) giant, intact corpse. Then, with a violent yank! in one smooth motion, she pulled the giant, stiff corpse from atop of the stainless-steel autopsy table down to the hard concrete floor with a loud, rigor-mortis “SMACK!”

Dragging the future serving of Impound Kibble behind her short, stocky, bow-legged body; she heaved giant CBC058908 above her babushka-wrapped/chef-hat-topped head and slammed! him on top of mutilated E112731, on top of a tangled mound of pre-correction and post-correction dissected/harvested impounds, on top of stiff corpses already piled up high on HoverCart 66’s flatbed: all dissected/harvested corpses, except for Ivanov’s, she had already collected this day; all on their way to the kitchen to be processed/extruded into “delicious” ImpKib. She worked the bloody, fifteen-inch-long chromium-plated meathook from Ivanov’s frozen corpse like a fishhook from a fish’s sinewy mouth.

Using her fat, latex-gloved fists and her bloody, size 10 jackboots, she callously compacted the exterminated pile of impounds, callously compacted the frozen pile of snapping corpses. A melting slush of thick bodily fluids embedded with brownish wads of blood-soaked gauze splattered and splashed onto the concrete patch of Corridor A directly underneath HoverCart 66’s flatbed—eventually to be cleaned up by the black-clad, “corrected” LLF (lobotomized labor force), aka the SlavErs (slave workers).

Stella sped away in the overloaded HoverCart transport suspended only inches above Corridor A’s cold concrete floor, sped away in an electric hum trailing human blood. Passing in a blur, passing Corridor A’s many, many stainless-steel CorpseChutes—possibly passing the CorpseChute that had already swallowed E121867—that dropped down down down to the kitchen’s boiling vats (human Crockpots) and Nazi-like impound ovens (human incinerators). The HoverCart’s headlights temporarily erasing slanting shadow. The jiggling mound of harvested impounds (now of zero value to the State, unless converted into ImpKib), of tangled corpses, bounced up and down and left and right and up and down and left and right—looking like the dissected impounds were wrestling with one another to be the first to escape being processed/extruded into tasty ImpKib: tons of ImpKib produced daily. Their bodily fluids dripping, trailing behind them, like mutilated athletes sweating profusely. After picking up Officer Ivanov’s giant corpse (she saved CBC058908 for last) for processing into ImpKib, obese Stella drove deeper into the center of the concrete and steel honeycomb; her Smart Pince-nez directing her with map/blueprint readouts of immense Level 66, directing her to the kitchen’s freight elevator. Stenciled on the freight elevator’s chromium-plated door:

CAUTION - MULTI-HAZARDOUS BIOMEDICAL WASTE - CAUTION

RESTRICTED AREA - AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY - RESTRICTED AREA

“Time to make the ImpKib!” Stella blurted in Hungarian. Her evil, witchlike voice echoing behind her, fading away into distant shadow as black as death. Under her bloodied chef’s hat and too-tight babushka, and behind her Smart Pince-nez, mental images of industrial-sized stainless-steel pots, pans, ladles, forks, knives, and spoons churned inside of her insane mind like portions of dissected/harvested impounds churning inside of a boiling vat of palmetto-bug-infested stew.