Nelligan Conqueso sat in his work pen in Fuel Homogenization Center 4. He was naked and alone, and his FENGER was firmly pressed into a dish of shit. It wasn’t an especially large dish—about the size of a small oil lamp—but Nelligan had never been convinced that the specific volume of shit had any proportional correlation to the volume of dignity it cost him to sit like this for twelve hours a day. Every day.

For twenty-one of his twenty-eight years, Nelligan had worked at FHC4 as a FENGER-bearer, so the ratio of shit to dignity heavily favored shit. At this stage, Nelligan barely thought of it.

He didn’t feel much either. He didn’t feel the hard, plain surface of the bench on which he sat nor the table on which his arms rested. He didn’t feel how his elbows had worried glossy contours into the wood over his many years of service. He didn’t feel similar indentations put there by his predecessors in this pen. Nor did he feel the troughs on the bench rubbed by generations of bony, ancestral buttocks. He certainly didn’t feel many emotions, which was for the best.

The absence of sentiment left room for the table and bench, which along with the shackle that secured Nelligan’s left leg to the stone floor, comprised the totality of the pen’s furniture. The shackle was WiFi-connected, though it didn’t give Nelligan access to any of FHC4’s networks—from his perspective, it was just a chain with some blinkies on it.

And then there was the dish, which formed the practical, occupational, and moral center of Nelligan’s world: fashioned of transparent glass, fitted into a recess, and filled with 200 grams of human waste. Nelligan could feel that it was of a middling grade. Nothing special today.

On every level, this day had been uniformly unspecial. It was a normal day in a normal work pen with normal walls just wider than his normal, thin, non-trivially malnourished shoulders. His horizontal field of vision was totally normal minus the limited neck rotation afforded by his rear skull cable (also normal).

Vertically, the view extended into darkness from which hung a long, black wire. That wire terminated in a crud-crusted lightbulb that, depending on the periodic variations in Nelligan’s slouch, dangled at an average distance of 18 cm from the tip of Nelligan’s nose.

The bulb lobbed photons around the pen in the flickering, flaccid rays of confined wires subjected to jittery electrical current. They bounced apathetically off Nelligan’s gaunt face and weary retinas and receding hairline and receding teethline. Whatever the light could be bothered to illuminate took on the desaturated yellow of cat vomit, though it did manage to emphasize the purples where Nelligan had also been subjected to electrical current by the Tentacles of Discipline.

These two circumstances—the bulb and the Tentacles—were the only two under which Nelligan had directly experienced the electricity produced by the fuel he had spent his life testing. And today was just another day as a stationary unit of meat-machinery in the great Po(o)wer® production empire of Locris Blingo.

Nelligan blinked dryly as a co-worker began tapping from the other side of the wall to his right. This, too, was normal. The thin partition separating him from his right-hand neighbor was slightly loose, a nail having worked its way out of the old wood over decades of similar activity, and the panel wobbled in some weird harmonic with each thud. The knocking came purposefully and steadily, drumming a stream of mundane chit-chat into Nelligan’s forebrain.

Nelligan was grateful for it. Speaking was strictly forbidden in FHC4, so other than the sounds of ennui and farts, it was pretty quiet. Code-tapping filled the sensory niche scratched out by the enforced silence. It also helped to induce the inert and insensible state that scrub work required of sentient beings since the first low-status hominin had been set by his betters to digging up tubers or emptying musk ox bladders or cleaning the phallus statuary. The tapping from Nelligan’s neighbor merely abetted a process that had evolved over millions of years and was essential to the development of civilization.

Of course, none of this implied that Nelligan was privy to any of that social condition’s fruits.

From time to time, between bursts of his neighbor’s taps, Nelligan gave the wall a powerful kick or two with his right foot, but mostly, he just listened and worked.

Work at FHC4 was a thoughtless process or, more accurately, work was substantially improved as a thoughtless process. Nelligan didn’t often think while he worked. He’d learned the hard way that thinking was productive only of awareness, and when one’s job was to sit for twelve hours in a tiny pen with a small dish of shit and a bare lightbulb centimeters from one’s face, a staticky obliviousness was desirable.

The main benefit, of course, was that such a generalized numbness made one less likely to flinch or weep or pound one’s fist in despair, all of which would interrupt the FENGER’s data-stream and bring down the Tentacles of Discipline. Avoiding the Tentacles constituted the entire life-goal for most of Locris Blingo’s low-status hominins.

This bit of introspection came unbidden—accidentally, even—which managed to startle Nelligan, and his FENGER threatened a wiggle. His eyes flickered toward the digit, whose tip still occupied its appointed place. Any movement could trigger the Tentacles, but fear had conditioned his motor cortex well. The FENGER had remained still for seven uninterrupted hours, and it would continue its stolid tour of duty for another five.

Nelligan’s arid peepers fixed themselves on the FENGER, on whose steady performance his life and livelihood depended, but mostly life since he didn’t get much livelihood out of this.

Nelligan’s FENGER was, like all FENGERs, a diligent worker, a faultless gatherer and analyzer of data, and a reliable judge of character. The Field Effect Nano-Gate Exoreceptor! It was an inspired tool whose nanotech and organic components were melded into a sensory instrument like no other; it was a technological wonder with molecular-level accuracy in sulfur censusing; it was a visionary masterwork of precision engineering, capable of sensing the Z-boson turbulence that caused supra-crypticity in the reactor’s neutron baths, allegedly. And it did many, many, many other things that Nelligan understood even less than he understood sulfur, which he thought was a flavor.

The FENGER extended from the place on Nelligan’s right hand where a normal serf’s index finger would originate. It mimicked the general geometry and structural continuity of a biological digit, though its grey surface lacked the hairs, wrinkles, moles, parasites, and grime of the hand’s other members.

Beneath the translucent outer layer of the FENGER, a delicate net of blue kagome circuitry enveloped the instrument, and when actively sensing, it emitted a soft glow. It gave the impression of a wire-frame image still awaiting the application of computer-generated texture and lighting to complete the illusion of a natural finger. Nelligan had no point of reference for such a comparison, though, so he thought it looked like a moldy sausage.

 He could see the blue lines fade rapidly where the FENGER met the rest of his hand, where the exotic filaments dove deeper into his flesh. Somewhere under his palm, the lines met to form a single data link, the fine strand coursing its way through Nelligan’s arm, where it found a nerve pathway to his brain. He couldn’t feel it at all, except for some itching inside his medulla. The mechanism terminated in the port in the rear of Nelligan’s skull, where it could send critical information about sulfur densities, etc. to Quality Assurance.

Nelligan, encouraged by a sense of vocational pride and savage negative conditioning, was determined to assure that quality by keeping his FENGER motionless. He knew the consequences of a sudden tremor, an unconscious circle traced, contact lost in a moment of reckless stupidity. No, Nelligan’s FENGER would remain immersed and immobile as it completed its survey of precious fuel. Nelligan didn’t understand how it worked, and it didn’t matter. What did matter was a constant and consistent sampling stream, a value hammered home by his supervisor[1].

So as the FENGER sampled, the tapping in Nelligan’s right ear continued unabated, and his thoughts safely receded once more into the communiques of his neighbor.  

It was good to have a neighbor like Boloonya. Or Bauloinja. Pleuwinia, maybe. She’d tapped her name once, early on in their relationship, but Nelligan hadn’t had a complete handle on her code yet. So he’d kind of blown that. Anyway, he thought of her as ’Loney now, whether or not it was accurate.

It didn’t really matter in the end because the conversation was really more of a monologue. Nelligan’s right hand was rendered useless for tapping by the necessity of keeping his FENGER in the proper posture, so he was limited to using his right foot to kick the wall as his sole contribution to their intercourse. Nelligan used the conventional one kick for “yes” and two for “no,” except when he felt like doing it the other way. In any case, ’Loney wasn’t much of a question-asker, so Nelligan rarely had use for even that.

Consequently, Nelligan could not ask ’Loney for the correct spelling of her name. Nor could he express his own. Nor could he perform any of those linguistic tasks with any of his previous neighbors, all of whom had been swept off to Calorie Reclamation after a longer or shorter period of time. ’Loney had certainly been one of the most durable, having been his primary interlocutor at work for over two years.

Nelligan hadn’t the slightest idea what ’Loney looked like or sounded like (other than sounding like knuckles on wood). Whether she was young or old. Whether she had hair. Distinguishing scars? Cool mutations? Cyborg or Brid or Baseline?

Nelligan had tried to glean such basic information from ’Loney’s taps, but her primary topics of conversation were remarkably bereft of clues. She talked mostly about rocks and garbage, which, to be fair, made up two-thirds of the landscape of Locris Blingo, so it was relevant at least.[2]

The neighbor to Nelligan’s left, however, was hardly worth tapping at. This man—speculation, he admitted—was worthy only of Nelligan’s contempt. He seemed sullen and stupid: his affirmative kick was half-hearted and dull, and his negative kicks had a slight pause, barely detectable but revealing a profound streak of dishonesty. Nelligan had bestowed the name “Fuckface” upon this odious co-worker. Of course, Fuckface could no more communicate his real name to Nelligan than Nelligan could to ‘Loney. But Fuckface was a liar anyway, so who cared what he had to say?

Nelligan’s left hand swiveled up from his elbow, whose calloused point rested on the wooden table in front of him. He flicked the first knuckle of his index finger rapidly against the wall, sending out a stream of scornful taps toward his disgusting, left-hand neighbor. There was no replying kick from Fuckface, so after an uncomfortable minute, Nelligan tapped out a terse “I hate you” before easing his hand back to the table.

Nelligan released a long, slow breath and closed his parched eyes as ‘Loney tapped on. His hatred of Fuckface often necessitated a session of calming meditation. Meditation was a critical part of Nelligan’s mental health regimen—he’d sit motionless for hours at a time, his breathing regulated and his mind clear of all thoughts. Some may have dismissed this as a common nap, but Nelligan knew better. Without the escape of deep meditation, he wasn’t sure how he could tolerate sitting still, hour after hour, doing nothing, imagining nothing, creating nothing. It would be a dreary life without those precious spans of consciuousness-nothing.

He’d heard that one of the experimental FHCs had instituted something called a 15-minute “break,” which he assumed was a period of the workday reserved for inflicting injuries upon one another to relieve stress. He’d long hoped that the feeding stockade in Fuel Homogenization Center 4 would be cleared of its hundreds of individual gruel stalls and repurposed as an Octagon of Pain (though any polygon of pain would do, in Nelligan’s opinion). Just something to resolve workplace conflicts in a constructive manner. He figured that smashing office sundries into the faces of some of his fellow drudges could be cathartic. Cathartically smashing sundries into Fuckface’s face sounded especially attractive even though he had no idea what Fuckface’s face looked like.

As Nelligan engaged in speculative, salutary worker-on-worker violence, his brain activity gradually crossed the threshold from torpid to vegetal. He lost contact with the outside world for a time, wandering in dreams of gargantuan buildings cast in the swirling shadows of a raging sandstorm.

The sand crashed in waves against the massive, windowless walls of these fortresses within fortresses, filled with faceless, voiceless, nameless shadows, laboring for unseen and unknown masters. Above it all stood a massive tower in which those very masters wrung their avaricious hands in vile glee.

Nelligan sometimes wondered why he only dreamed of work; he wouldn’t have minded an occasional dream that included not being confined.

Suddenly, the shift whistle screeched, and his eyes reopened to their wonted view. Wow, he thought groggily, must have been meditating pretty hard there—he hadn’t noticed the passage of five hours at all!

He smeared the back of his left hand across his mouth to rid it of mindfulness-drool. He’d have to hurry if he was going to beat the shift-change crowds to his favorite pub, the venerable Stone and Bone.  

Habit kept the FENGER planted in its dish as Nelligan kicked his leg forward to clear the unlocked cuff of his ankle chain, expecting the familiar, liberating clank as it hit the ancient stones. Instead, he heard only the dead sounds of iron on flesh as his leg was jerked to a stop. His body shook as the force of his efforts reverberated.

His shackle was still on.

Nelligan froze. His eyes, drying quickly in the light of his bulb, danced reflexively to the FENGER, which remained safely entrenched despite the unexpected shock. He let out a wheezy breath that was half relief and half chronic brown lung. But Nelligan also saw that the sensor was still giving off its gentle, blue glow.

This was very strange. Once he was confident that the Tentacles of Discipline were not going to descend from the ceiling, Nelligan finally asked himself what was happening. This question took the outward form of a few sputtering profanities that broke the silence, which he was also starting to notice.

Normally, the FHC was an auditory desert, which was consistent with the actual desert around Locris Blingo. But shift changes were different. That’s when the tapping stopped, and the sounds of human despair took over. Where was the despondent shuffling of thousands of fellow drudges, flung back toward the dusty, timeworn, windblown, sun-bleached, urine-stained streets of Locris Blingo? Where were the muttered curses? The low groans of bodies moving after twelve hours of stasis? The sharp cracks of batons and their attendant yelps? The dry rasp of parched throats and defeated souls as they wound their ways through the maze of tunnels and cramped corridors toward the city?

Anyway, the silence was odd. And if he didn’t get out of this pen quickly, he was going to get caught at the back of the search line. The Inspectors were always grumpy by then and usually out of lubricant. He needed to see what was going on with his shackle.

He steadied the top half of his body and, watching the fuel dish closely, he gingerly extended his left leg until it reached the limits imposed by the chain. First, Nelligan pushed his leg harder against the cuff, hoping to force the hinge open. A few seconds of effort told him that it wasn’t going to budge that way. And until the FENGER cycled out of shift mode, he couldn’t move it, so more violent attempts were out.

He also couldn’t move the dish—it was seated into a circular cavity that had been carved into the table’s surface. Any attempt to free it would certainly trigger the Tentacles. Nelligan tried to reach down and around with his free hand toward his not-free ankle, but the combination of geometry, chains, and early osteoarthritis quickly repulsed him.

What if it weren’t just the hinge, he thought? Maybe the cuff had never unlocked at all! Nelligan tried to get the ankle into view while keeping his FENGER in place. He drew his shoulder blades together and pinched his chin downward, twisting his head as far as the data cable would allow. With some inventive squinting, Nelligan managed to see enough of his leg to make a determination.

The LEDs glowed red. Totally locked.

Shit, thought Nelligan, not thinking at all about the subject of his life’s work but swearing generically.

Permitting himself some righteous pique, Nelligan thought that maybe a facility at the core of his rulers’ shit-fuel-power-empire cycle should have some sort of reliable maintenance schedule. Apparently that was too much to ask of these oligarchs, who were just so busy counting their unused cheese or whatever rich people used for money. Anyway, everything was just falling to pieces: he grimly recalled Burrito Week.

But this shackle thing was indicative of larger issues, thought Nelligan as he continued to tug lightly at the chain.

Last week, it was the ventilation. The whole place was full of tapping that the methane system had been blocked from the outside by an enormous steel plate welded to the pressure vent. While many of his fellow drudges suspected this was sabotage or even an attack from an external enemy, management had assured the workers that it was probably just a natural occurrence, like a bird or orphans or something. Employees were advised to immediately kill any birds they detected skulking around the facility. Orphans could be stunned.

And now, here he was, still locked up after his shift on a Flurzzday.

Nelligan had a pressing appointment with a bottle of cabbage rum at the Stone and Bone. Ok, sure: not a bottle, given the state of his finances. If he got there for Happy Hour, he could foot a small bowl of rum. Or a rum-soaked rag.

This was a terrible situation. Not only would he be missing on out on sweet, sweet alcohol, but there was also a 3-on-3 scheduled at the Arena tonight. If he missed that, he was going to be disappointed, which was normal, but it still managed to have an impact on Nelligan’s tightly circumscribed emotional world. Nelligan had never actually seen a battle at the Arena, of course: his caste was forbidden to witness the dread majesty of the Locris Blingo Murder League (LBML™️). But the Stone and Bone was his ticket to the fights. Metaphorically, of course, as he would be summarily executed if found in possession of an actual ticket.

The Stone and Bone was an intimate little watering hole nestled beneath the Arena itself. It wasn’t fancy, and it wasn’t clean. It also wasn’t so much a “pub” as it was a lightless, cramped cave accessible only by dangerous, bat-infested tunnel. But most importantly, the benighted patrons of the Stone and Bone were able hear the glorious sounds of strife coming from the Arena above, even if they couldn’t see it or each other.

Some of Nelligan’s favorite memories were of the muffled thumps and screams of martial competition. He recalled the mighty FWWWWAAABOOOOOM that might have been Drakon the Volcanic incinerating the Atomic Trio in the Blood Division championship. And he still savored the CHK-CHK-CHK-CHK-SSSSSSSSCCCCCCCCCRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEE that was plausibly the sound of Impaler Mindy’s gatling-ballista unleashing spiky hell upon her adversaries, though it might have been the margarita blender.

 Anyway, Nelligan was looking forward to feeling his way to the bar tonight and settling down next to his favorite stalagmite with a damp rag and the cacophony of presumptive mortal contests raging above.

The volume of rum susceptible to Nelligan’s meager nest egg was moot for the immediate time, though, as he was still chained to his workbench. Not only that, but his skull cable was still locked, and his FENGER was knuckle deep in its dish of shit. Nelligan focused on the fuel sample before him. Now that he wasn’t fantasizing about ethanol and violence, he noticed that something was odd about the sample.

He inventoried his senses. Not smell, though, which was useless obviously: his pen, the FHC, every other person he encountered in Locris Blingo, all smelled like crap. Auditory data was incidental at best—Nelligan dared not swish his FENGER around in the sample lest he violate his most basic job parameters. Taste was right out. His sixth sense was useless: this wasn’t coal, and the eternal, psychic screaming of fossil fuels didn’t tell one much anyway.

Which left touch, so Nelligan touched.

The FENGER did not move under Nelligan’s conscious control, but the exquisite sensitivity of the instrument provided access to a wealth of tactile information about shit, which also happened to be the only wealth Nelligan was permitted to possess. Nelligan was, however, a drudge of remarkably long tenure and deep experience with the subtleties of fuel palpation. He was intimately attuned to the rich array of data transmitted by the FENGER to its host.

Nelligan turned over the tatty remains of his brain’s executive functions to the FENGER, and it filled him with knowledge: this particular sample was optimally mushy, with a slightly biased moisture band that could be attributed to recent humidification. Viscosity and pH were comfortably within tolerances. Consistent texture with a playful resistance to the downward pull of gravity on the FENGER’s tip. Dense in a sophisticated but weary manner that indicated an older section of the Lode as the source. In short, a very fine grade of fuel shit indeed.

This was a new dish of shit! Nelligan’s blood pressure shot up in agitation, which wasn’t all bad considering his general electrolyte imbalances.

Slowly, Nelligan’s education on the mean streets of Locris Blingo came to bear. As a child-member of the nameless and shiftless rabble living in this desert fortress, Nelligan had no formal schooling, which was obvious when you realized that he thought that “dog” was spelled “tap-tap-tappity-tic-tap-taTAP-tap.”[3] Instead, he learned to survive the dark alleys, cutthroats, swindlers, burglars, rusty nails, open latrines, drug dens, buffets, purge nights, purge weekends, and generalized, brutal oppression by the thugs serving the Great Electri-Czars.

Eventually, though, it was too much for a child to bear, and Nelligan applied for a job at Fuel Homogenization Center 4 by allowing the press gangs to loop a noose around his neck with a pole.

Which brought him to this point many, many years later, though admittedly those years and the days that comprised them were virtually identical. But this was something that was not normal: every day, Nelligan’s cuff had unlocked from his ankle, his cable had decoupled from the socket in his occipital bone, and his godsdamned FENGER had turned off at the end of EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SHIFT HE’D EVER WORKED.

Until now.

Nelligan felt something happen in his brain. Great, indolent masses of neurons seemed to shudder awake like Nelligan’s uncle after a hard night of toad-licking. Uncle Speedo’s eyes would spasm back and forth wildly as the last hallucinations faded into a rapid, irregular heartbeat and uncontrollable dry heaves. The dry heaves gradually subsided, at which point the screaming began, never stopping until Uncle Speedo got hold of his toad or died, which he eventually did. Nelligan sold the toad afterwards for a depleted lint roller, earning a tidy profit. Anyway, Nelligan’s brain was just like that, right up until the part with the screaming.

Now though, instead of flailing about in search of a psychotropic amphibian, Nelligan’s atrophied reasoning powers took halting steps toward basic functionality. His frontal lobe was lightly tickled by the available data, which was different from Uncle Speedo, whom one would never tickle. Slowly, that tickling became a steady drumming of information-processing, not unlike ‘Loney’s code tapping but not as much about rocks.

Shift whistle.

Silence.

Shackle still locked.

Cable still attached.

Silence.

FENGER on.

New dish o’ shit.

Silence.

Silence. Silence.

Suddenly, the truth hit him like a ton of shit-bricks: he had been scheduled for a double!

Those bastards! Those bastards had let Nelligan meditate right through the shift change, and the whistle that had interrupted his intense, single-minded focus on non-awareness had actually signaled the beginning of the second shift!

Nelligan didn’t have the foggiest idea who “those bastards” were, but that didn’t deter him from cursing them or their offspring or their (presumably) incestuous connections to powers that sat on Nelligan like a toddler spinning in the frictionless slop of its own feculence. Nelligan shook in rage at the vast network of middle-management forces that would cause him not only to delay his drinking/rag chewing but also to miss the highly anticipated noises of the Three Not-Your-Amigos vs. Grork and his Unspeakably Violent Assistants.

Of all the Flurzzdays this could happen! Nelligan raised his left fist toward the ceiling, his wild eyes staring to some place far, far above him where decisions were made. His mouth stretched in a silent howl that he hoped would reach the Supervisor Pods and make them quake with his unhearable fury. This didn’t happen because the Supervisor Pods were currently filling with smoke and blood, and no living ears remained to be oblivious to Nelligan’s mute wrath, but he couldn’t know that, of course.

Instead, it was Nelligan who began to tremble as truths crept from their hidden burrows in Nelligan’s mind. He had also been sitting naked for more than twelve hours, and deserts get pretty cold at night. But even that only served to amplify Nelligan’s growing consciousness of the injustices perpetrated against him, specifically the denial of cabbage rum and noises suggestive of exciting violence.

Of course, Nelligan was not oblivious to greater evils plaguing him and the rest of the two million laborers, serfs, drudges, and slaves that inhabited Locris Blingo. The physical environment was all but unendurable. The moral environment was debased and perverted. The social environment was violent, impoverished, and despotic, and the aesthetic environment was derivative and had a restricted color palette.

Consequently, the cursed individuals languishing in this city were emaciated, depraved, stupid, brutish, selfish, incurious, isolated, and slothful. When Locris Blingans had clothes, it wasn’t clear that they were placed on the body intentionally or just got stuck there. Otherwise, they were protected from the elements and absolute nudity only by a hearty coating of filth. Their bodies were mutilated to accommodate technologies of labor that they neither owned nor understood. Each and every one of them were thralls to a tiny of class of lords, who ruled with arbitrary and bloody cruelty as their sole governmental instrument. Locris Blingo and its suffering dregs were the disposable property of the Electri-Czars and their cabal of lackeys.

Nelligan was totally cool with this in the abstract. I mean, somebody had to do sulfur density surveys, right? That was the whole point of religion, as far as Nelligan was concerned. He was pretty sure that the Thrice Gods of Locris Blingo—Pinnpor the Compliant, Rath’k Zai, High Lord of Submission, and Akrahq, the Divine Mother of Surrender—had destined him for his position as a FENGERling in the Great Undertaking to Create Value for Shareholders and Other Plans for the Universe, i.e., the employee handbook. That was a comfort, he guessed.

In his placeholder formulation for the way the universe worked, it didn’t matter that Nelligan had seen neither the Thrice Gods nor even the Electri-Czars. And he never would. He was a nobody, and the Electri-Czars were being perfectly reasonable by ignoring nobodies like Nelligan: to spend even precious seconds of their available time in view of the assorted dipshits of Locris Blingo would have been sickeningly irresponsible. As far as Nelligan knew, the rulers of this city had never left the Tower of Power, which he understood completely because that was a lot of stairs. And this lack of direct evidence for the Electri-Czars’ existence gave Nelligan total confidence in the Electri-Czars’ judgment re: who did all the work. Clearly, they knew how to delegate.

Nelligan supposed that some others might not accept the Electri-Czars’ dictates with the same aplomb as he did. But this supposition—along with all of Nelligan’s opinions that were not about food or masturbation—was pushed far out of cognitive reach by the survival-level demand for apathy. And since Nelligan couldn’t actively imagine an alternative social organization, he also could not actively imagine a person taking intentional steps to change the present condition.

He could imagine, however, punching someone in the face for failing to unlock him and free him for drinking and noises that one could reasonably associate with action in the Arena. And that was a social condition he could get behind.

But he was still locked up, and his fist had been waggling silently ceiling-ward for some time now. At last, Nelligan’s rage and perfunctory social consciousness retracted like the gums of a scurvy sufferer, which is a simile that Nelligan would have appreciated. His withered adrenal glands halted their attempts to rouse a fight or flight response, which over the years had devolved into more of a spiritual fetal position. His gaping jaws and bulging eyes deflated, and the muscles in his left arm decided that they’d had about enough quivering for the day. Nelligan’s hand flopped carelessly to the tabletop.

He watched it fall, distantly, as if he were detached from his body, but in a neutral kind of way and not like that time he had kissed (totally accidentally) Uncle Speedo’s toad. But this was hardly less agonizing because Nelligan knew what the consequences for his negligence would be.

Even before Nelligan’s palm slapped the ancient table as if it were a pair of wooden buttocks—certainly before the impact had time to fart a dull report—Nelligan gasped an astringent “No!”

The falling hand struck the table with a sudden shock. The FENGER twitched.

Nelligan’s heart nearly stopped—it was a skill that he had developed during his career. He could do it pretty much at will, and it had come in handy over the years during performance reviews. One hundred percent effective in avoiding feedback; just restart that sucker before Calorie Reclamation shows up, and they assume you’re the temp.

In the wan glow of the lightbulb, Nelligan awaited the clatter of the Tentacles’ clamps opening, the hisses and clacking of the arms as they stretched downward, and the inorganic voice of its warnings.

He waited for pain.

But it never came, and Nelligan was spared the business end of several quintillion electrons.

He was tempted to feel relief but was saved from such foolishness by a new and terrible thought. What if, Nelligan speculated, he was the subject of some novel form of torture? His nascent cognitive powers advanced the hypothesis that Nelligan was not being spared at all. In fact, the withholding of the Tentacles of Discipline, whose voltage was right and good SO SAITH THE THRICE GODS AND THE ELECTRI-CZAR, MELGATHARON (the tall one), appeared to be itself a punitive denial of righteous correction!

The realization turned Nelligan’s blood colder than it usually was, and his habitual dread of physical and mental and emotional abuse added a shiny new element of spiritual peril.

It was intolerable! To think that his masters would strip away Nelligan’s hard-won eternal reward felt like a real rip-off! That they would attempt to pluck his soul from the Glorious Calorie Baths of H’oopza Brqthqa, the Palace of the Thrice Gods! Nelligan was enraged at this final cruelty of the Electri-Czars, and he was also very impressed with his unexpected knowledge of the mysteries of his religion. He felt like he might be ready to find out which side of the fence “sin” was on, which he hoped was the side with the Calorie Baths.

Nelligan gritted several of his remaining teeth in a fury born of Dawning Enlightenment and its cooler, conjoined twin, Cynicism, who smoked and hated Libertarians.

Girded thus, as well as with a possibly premature confidence in the repose of the Tentacles, Nelligan lifted the FENGER from its dish of shit. He held it before him, its grey surface disgusting and smeared in oily filth. It was a trivial act, but he knew its implications were profound.

The unseated FENGER continued to emit its soft, blue glow, giving no sign that it would respond to Nelligan’s crime. He sensed freedom instinctively. He had no notion of this thing from experience, of course. Or from a historico-social perspective. Certainly not through the lens of the fundamental autonomy of the will as asserted by Kant, who didn’t exist in this world, though if he had, he would have been pretty good at assessing sulfur densities. Rather, it was an impression not unlike that which Nelligan felt after successfully driving off a pack of coyotes—a sensation of dissipating menace, but also one in which the menace never truly vanished because the coyotes would come back someday. Coyotes always come back.

But what if that feeling of liberation could be cultivated in others? Others like Nelligan? Could there be something in that—a cooperative effort to make that sensation more widespread? Socially, he meant. Not to other parts of his body.

Nelligan’s knees nearly buckled under the weight of the epiphany, helped by a couple of missed gruel portions. He tapped these ideas quickly and insultingly at Fuckface before realizing that Fuckface had already completed his shift and gone to whatever horrible home he deserved.

It didn’t matter, Nelligan knew. There was a neighbor, whoever replaced ol’ Fuckface after the whistle, and they must hear and understand his news! He sent out a tap to his unknown, second-shift neighbor, whom he dubbed Buttdribble: “Arise! Arise! The Tentacles have retreated, and we are free to throw off our shackles! So once you throw yours off, will you come over here and help because my shackle is still locked!”

He assumed that Buttdribble would pass on this manifesto immediately and with the same contempt that Nelligan held for him. It would travel around the central ring of work pens on this level of FHC4. Then it would travel to the level above and to the level below and to other levels still, making its way around each ring in the fortress, leaving Nelligan’s ideas in its wake! The message would spread like sand during a winter sand-nami, getting all in sensitive places and causing some wicked chafing.

That chafing was freedom.

Nelligan swiveled to his right and lifted his foot to kick at the partition to get the attention of his right-hand neighbor, but he paused as he realized that his right hand was…free.

He curled it into a loose fist, only the first knuckle of his index finger extended.

The FENGER.

He tapped his mighty theory of individual self-determination at his right-hand neighbor using the instrument of their oppression to call for its destruction! It was ironic, which was something that Nelligan had no notion of. Irony was pointless in a world dependent on vast armies of individuals chained in remote fortresses for the purpose of maintaining shit at a specific level of quality. So no one bothered with it, and Nelligan wouldn’t waste a moment of his new feelings on it if he’d had even the slightest awareness of it.

No taps returned to Nelligan from his right. Nor should they, he thought. Freed from the left-hand bias of obligatory right-hand immobility, his neighbor and his neighbor’s neighbor were surely speeding off the taps of liberation to their own astonished, right-hand neighbors.

Freedom was beautiful, thought Nelligan.

And not very quiet.

Nelligan could hear taps coming from everywhere. Sporadic and faint in the beginning, like the first clacks of gravel in a landslide. Gradually, they grew in number and intensity. Many, many explosive taps popping, popping from all directions. The explosions spread, some of them quite loud, as if this symphony of emancipation were actually a marching band, coming closer and closer, but less organized. Everywhere, really.

It was terribly exciting, and having rarely been excited in a positive fashion, Nelligan felt the urge to react physically. Nelligan stood in the narrow confines of his work pen and raised his hands above his head, waving them, as if conducting this chaotic orchestra while being held at gunpoint. It was exhilarating and would have been weird if he hadn’t been shut away from all view (other than the extensive surveillance of the Electri-Czars’ devices, whose algorithms determined that Nelligan’s actions were, in fact, super weird).

He sniffed the air distractedly, his eyes closed and hands still fluttering rhythmically, as the odor of smoke penetrated his consciousness. Smoke was not unusual in FHC4—the electrical current carried by the Tentacles was sufficient to ignite flesh if the victim were especially dry. But this was not the Virtuous Smoke of Corporeal Regulation, which was kind of bacon-y.

No, this was a smoke of destruction, an acrid miasma of burning circuitry and wood and chemicals, though there was a bit of a bacon aftertaste, now that he thought about it.

There were shouts coming from outside now, growing closer with the tapping, which had swelled into something that Nelligan had heard before, though never here in FHC4. His weird hand-flapping ceased, and he opened his eyes.

He tried to turn himself toward the door to his pen, no easy task since it was only just wider than his narrow shoulders. Add to this his shackled ankle and data-cabled skull, and it became a dance of unlikely angles, cramped squirming, and robust streams of profanity. After several false starts, Nelligan finally succeeded in twisting most of his body to face the door.

He tensed with anticipation. The walls of the pen vibrated with the power of the sounds—taps and shouts becoming startling cracks and screams of pain and the urgent movement of many bodies. Nelligan, though, was not alarmed by this. Rather, it soothed him; he knew these sounds. How many times had Nelligan lain in the dark of the Stone and Bone, immobilized by alcohol and rocked into a stupor by the bloody racket of human beings tearing one another to bits in the Arena?

There was violence being perpetrated nearby! All around him! And Nelligan was really impressed by the clarity of the sound when blocked only by rickety panels of ancient wood rather than by several meters of limestone. The realism was stunning, and Nelligan was sure he could hear the wet thump of flesh being penetrated and the whizz of projectiles cleaving the smoky air, which was exhibiting a little more of that bacon character now.

He realized that all this had been his doing. He was the cause of something great and terrible!

The thought stunned him. Nelligan Conqueso, Sulfur Demarcation Drudge 88402A20 of Fuel Homogenization Center 4, had begun a revolution.

His idea, modulated into the power of tapping, had inspired his fellow slaves to rise up! To free themselves! Hundreds, maybe thousands, had instantly thrown off both centuries of cultural conditioning and their shackles, the second of which was a pretty neat trick that Nelligan hoped that one of them would show him soon. These self-liberated heroes had then, apparently, gotten hold of or possibly built very quickly several powerful guns. Maybe a couple of plasma cutters, if Nelligan was interpreting the shrieks of tearing metal accurately. Philosophy was fast, he admitted.

Once the revolution was completed, Nelligan hoped that they’d build a better society, based on Nelligan being king of everything, as was obviously the just result of inventing revolutions, which King Nelligan would immediately outlaw.

He was just settling on whom he’d purge first—Fuckface and Buttdribble—when five holes sputtered into a neat, diagonal line across the door of Nelligan’s pen. Whoa, that was weird, Nelligan thought, as he slumped backward onto the work surface behind him. His legs had gone limp, like when the Tentacles applied their Sanctified Amperes but without so much of the convulsions.

He was on his back, sprawled across the table. He could see the Tentacles through the glare of the lightbulb; they were frozen in their clamps far above him, curled into a giant silver claw, steadfastly refusing holy retribution to Nelligan even though his elbow was sitting in a smashed dish of shit.

Light shone through each of the holes in the door, and Nelligan craned his neck toward his chest. Three other holes, very much like those on the door, had appeared there. But there was no light. Only three rings of blackening flesh around meaty wounds.

He sagged, his head flopping back onto the table with a thud. His head wobbled uncertainly upon the junction of data cable and skull before the muscles of Nelligan’s neck surrendered with a tremor, and his head lolled away.

The door to the pen shook from a hammering blow. A second flung it inward, letting the full howl of battle into the small room. Had Nelligan’s face been pointed at the open door, and had Nelligan’s brain not entered eternal meditation only seconds ago, he would have seen a soldier: a battered helmet and sighting reticle framing a young man’s face, whose determined scowl cut across smears of soot and dust. His armor looked like it had been cobbled from the remains of derelict vehicles and ancient plumbing, and on the chest plate, there was a crude symbol dashed across the metal in red paint, like a bird made of flames, or maybe just flames. It was kind of ambiguous, maybe on purpose. But his rifle was modern and sleek, and its muzzle still smoked.

His eyes flicked to the corpse, and he shouldered the weapon as he took a short step into the pen. His right hand reached back to his belt, returning with a long-bladed knife. The soldier’s head crooked to the left and right, as if surveying the contorted landscape of Nelligan’s naked form.

The young soldier’s eyes found their target in a moment: the FENGER, with its pale aura. He leaned forward to grasp it with his left hand, while the right one extended the knife to meet it. As the soldier bent, a bullet cut the air where his head had just been, shattering the lone lightbulb in the cramped pen.

The soldier jerked and flung himself around, trying to get his weapon off his shoulder, but the pen was too crowded, what with bench and the dead body and all, and he lost his balance.

Nearby, gunfire roared, followed by silence. In the sudden darkness, he wrestled his weapon into something like a useful position, and he pointed it at the opening into the access ring that connected the labor pens. The packing of the slaves into these tight quarters had made the raid a simple matter, but now he was as trapped as their quarry had been.

“Arugus,” a gruff voice barked as a familiar shape filled the doorway, and the soldier dropped the muzzle of his weapon. It was Chongrulongrulus, his commanding officer. “Leave it. We’ve got all we need. Time to get out of this hellhole.” The shape turned and disappeared into the smoke.

Arugus planted his forearm against the thin corpse and pushed himself upright. His left hand wandered down to the pouch at his side. It was still secured, and he could feel the FENGERs within—about two dozen of the fleshy cylinders that would liberate them all. Chongrulongrulus was right: they had enough. He stowed his knife. This pathetic thing the FENGER was attached to probably deserved some dignity, Arugus thought, just before his strap got caught around the Nelligan’s head. Arugus yanked and shook it violently until his rifle came free.

Arugus knew that the Rebellion was within a hair’s breadth of victory. Decades of struggle, bloodshed, and loss, and now they had what they needed to take down the hated Electri-Czars and Locris Blingo: the FENGERs.

It was just another sign of their enemies’ corruption that they used a technological wonder like the FENGER for such base and unholy tasks as shit calibration, which the FENGER was admittedly very good at. But the FENGER’s capacity for Z-boson modulation was miraculous. It was a technology with unlimited capacity: it would alleviate hunger in the world! It would banish all disease and infirmity! It would provide everyone with a nice stipend and up to five personal days per year, which was even better than the Necklaces of Ultimate Dynamism. Arugus spat at the thought of such foolishness; they had caves full of those stupid necklaces, and they weren’t even attractive.

But their determined alliance had the FENGER now. That which made the Electri-Czars’ empire of shit possible would be harnessed by the best scientists in the Rebellion. I mean, they weren’t really the best scientists anymore because all the really good ones had been assassinated by Locris Blingan agents, but they were still scientists. Just not as charismatic as the dead ones and probably slightly dumber overall. Anyway, thanks to the FENGER(s), the Weapon would be ready soon, and the Rebellion would turn Locris Blingo to ash. Arugus supposed that was ironic.

A few shots, farther away, brought his attention back to the present. Time to go. The young soldier stepped out of the pen and ran after Chongrulongrulus. There was freedom to be won and no time to dick around with dead nobodies and easy irony! And by the Totally True Gods of Prongus, it stunk in here.

The sounds of battle were more distant now as the rebels fought their way out of FHC4 with their precious cargo. In the darkness of the labor pen, Nelligan’s FENGER glowed blue.

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[1] Merely an expression: the supervisors in Fuel Homogenization Center 4 use standard truncheons for discipline as hammers don’t have the necessary reach

[2] The other third is skeletons.

[3] “God”

© 2025 Derek T. Leuenberger