Hogs Get Slaughtered potential chapter 2

The corner of my mouth curls up into a grin. Looks like they aren't going to make this easy for me.

I firm up my grip on the fireman's axe and checked my corners. Nobody - but there should be. In a better world, I should have at least two men here to help with my assignment. In a sane world, I'd have three. But enough bitching. I swung the heavy axe in a slow, deliberate arc, cracking it against the door. The thing was a cheap hollow-core - I only needed a few more swings to bust it down completely.

The scene beyond was a horror beyond comprehension - just another day at the office. Piles of laminated plastic tubing covered the floor, climbing the walls like vines, hanging from the ceiling in places. The stench was familiar, yet unmistakable: vomit mixed with feces mixed with bile. Death. A naked, bloated corpse hung in the middle of the room, suspended by an elaborate beaver dam of rubber bands, bungee cables, and miscellaneous elastic odds and ends. The plastic tubes attached to its mouth, stomach, and privates... A network of skinnier tubes fed fed into injection points in the subject's arms and legs. Adrenaline, Blood, Monster NRG, all readily available at a thought.

This entire room was just one big digestive system. Incoming delivery fast food would be placed on a tray, dropped into a concentrator, and fed to the subject as a nutritious paste. Waste products would be sent directly to the sewer line, without the subject having to de-harness.

As I crossed the room, I tripped over a tube, and the cheap thing just split open, spewing an acrid, dark brown sludge. Probably the "output" tubing, but the kind of food these things run on is so terrible that I couldn't be sure. The effluent fit right in with the thin pool of mucus that seemed to coat every surface in the apartment.

Technically, my job here was done. Whenever a user goes flat, a call gets automatically sent to the fire department to check on the individual. So I go. If there's a fire, I put it out. If there isn't... I call the undertakers. There is no protocol for what to do if the user is alive and well and just decided to stop playing video games for a day. Would that even be possible?

As if on cue, a searing bolt ripped through my skull, almost knocking me down. Withdrawl symptoms, unusually severe. I'd been offline for too long -

I had to get back home. Back to the warm embrace of my tender, loving headset.

But before I could go... I owed this former human being a final farewell. I walked up to the body, and gently pulled the visor from it's face. From the hard facial features and alopecia, I was 70 percent sure that it had been a man. What always struck me about these kinds of corpses was the eyes. The eyeballs had long since shriveled up into blood-red prunes, each tipped with a chocolate chip that used to be a pupil. I reached out with one hand and pushed the eyelids down. Unfortunately, they hadn't been used in so long that they sprang back open immediately. I tried a couple more times, but eventually gave up.

Based on the user activitiy logs, this individual had been deceased for about two hours.

Allegedly.

The people who come up with time-of-death have never looked a dead man in the eyes. But I had. A terrible feeling crawled up my spine, like a foot-long spider on my back. It whispered to me. It told me that the corpse in front of me had died far earlier than any brain-scan, vital sign, or activity log would suggest.

The Purgatory 2.0 system had dropped three weeks ago, and it was already claiming its first victims.