eternalfarnham:

automatic-ally:

itsbenedict:

thinkin’ bout a dystopian world where all people are conscripted into construction work from the day they’re born, and you’re only allowed to escape such servitude if you get ripped enough to prove yourself as strong enough to command your lessers

which is to say, “in this world, it’s build or be built”

Imagine a bullshit prestige tv space station dystopia in which everyone has to stay calm to avoid using up unnecessary oxygen. If you act up, you get shoved out an airlock. In this world…it’s chill or be chilled.

What about: dystopian horror fiction that depicts enormous for-profit prisons, de facto labor camps turned food processing plants as run by amoral and pettily sadistic food-output-maximizing AIs, all in the ostensibly humanitarian name of combatting world hunger. 

The prisoners know that if they fail to keep their balance on the narrow walkways while they process cuts of meat (a task made harder by the intentionally sweltering temperatures maintained on site), they’ll tumble into the rendering vats, or else spend a white-hot, cramped eternity in the space between the overheated electrical systems, easy to enter but impossible to leave. Claustrophobic, yes, but what’s worse is the deliberate cooking of one’s skin, a gradual, almost tender process as pipes sear strips of exposed skin and begin to slowly heat even that concealed by thin prison clothing. 

No real chance to recognize the scent, of course, even with the crypt-close space – by the time you’ve been charred enough to smell of cooking pork, you’ll have grown accustomed to it, to the pockets of fried corpse that opened up beneath you while you worked the walkways, over and over – little treasures down in the darkness – until it didn’t register hunger or disgust in you and became how air tasted. How everything tasted, honestly: your hands pan-fried and covered in the juices of beef and lean chicken and pork, how your hair began to feel like gristle, how the walls pumped at the leisure of the machine like some ludicrous, poisonous stomach or heart, blood already stoppered by cholesterol and acid so drained and so savory-anodyne that every meal eaten began to reside in the body permanently, not dissolving but melting and burning black the nutrients provided to it.

There they’ll remain until their corpses, covered in awful strips of discoloration from the white-hot pipes against which they were forced to lie in their final moments, are collected and dumped unceremoniously in plywood coffins, not even worth being processed into Soylent. There’s meat enough for the world. These bodies thrown into the processing plants are detritus: charcoal which ignites and stokes the fire, existing only to produce the next meal.

In this world, it’s grill or be grilled.