12

  The dormitory turned out to be a cottage that had had all its internal walls taken down to make a single large room. It had mattresses on the floor, with the mattress count far exceeding the body count, indicating that the project was intended to be expanded considerably in the future.

  A number of straight-backed chairs with headrests were lined up against the walls. These were upholstered in waterproof material, and had armrests and belts to prevent bodies slipping out or toppling forward.

  The very first thing the handlers did was to seat each body in a chair, securing it in position with the restraints.

  It took a few minutes for all ten bodies to be brought in and securely seated, each one’s head carefully tilted and held in place, face up, with a band attached to the headrest.

  A person from the kitchen cottage arrived with containers of food, arranged on a trolley. It looked like mashed up disgusting glop, though, as I would later learn, it was extremely carefully formulated, and had everything the body needed in terms of proteins, carbs, minerals, vitamins, and all that.

  The handlers were in a hurry to be done, and immediately proceeded to open the mouths of the unconscious men, locking each one open with a brace for the jaw.

  Now, working fast, they hung the food containers on hooks above each chair, and proceeded to insert feeding tubes through the open mouths, gently pushing them the right distances down the throats.

  Glop delivery commenced as soon as the inserted tubes were connected to the food containers, the handlers regulating the flow by adjusting valves on the feeding tubes. There was nothing tender or caring in the feeding process, and the entire container of food was left connected until emptied out.

  The handlers hung around, some sitting inside and some going out to smoke. Feeding was completed in about fifteen minutes, after which the tubes were taken out of the mouths, and placed, along with the empty food containers, back on the trolley. This was rolled out of the cottage door, and left to be collected by the kitchen staff.

  The maintenance manual mandated half an hour of upright body position after feeding, and the handlers kept the bodies sitting in the feeding chairs, until the time was up.

  There was no possibility for the handlers to avoid doing the work properly, or to cut corners and get out fast, because the interior had cameras looking into it, continually recording. These were dual-purpose cameras that also gave the bots vision, necessary to look at the bodies they would be working in at night.

  A kitchen worker walked into the cottage. “Here are diapers in all three sizes,” he said, and thumped down the plastic bags in his hands.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Now, the body-management program progressed to where it became shower time. This was done in groups of three, with two handlers taking on a body each. The young men were dragged and carried to the bathroom, to be laid flat on their backs on the floor, which had a gradient that ensured water and filth slid naturally to the drainage channel along the wall.

  The handlers immediately got down to their job, starting with unfastening the diapers on the men, and throwing those into a couple of garbage bags they had readied.

  Regulations stipulated that the bodies had to be cleaned in a certain way, and clothing changed, regardless of nappy condition, so they got their gloves on and took large sponges into their hands to begin soaping and scrubbing.

  It was nasty work but not too bad, as the muck flowed easily down the gradient to the drain, and they were done in under five minutes per group of three. Thereafter, they towelled the bodies dry and brought them back into the dormitory, where they laid them down naked on the mattresses, immediately taking the next batch of three into the bathroom.

  In a total of a little over 10 minutes, all the bodies had been cleaned, and now they dressed them in new nappies and freshly washed T-shirts, leaving them lying on their backs on the mattresses.

  I found their training manual in the internal computer network, and read that the bots had instructions to keep trying to move the bodies, any part or the whole thing, and one of the recommended exercises was to roll side to side in bed.

  That was undoubtedly the reason the bodies were placed on ground-level mattresses - to prevent injury through rolling off a higher bed, in the extremely unlikely event of success.

  Before exiting the dormitory, a handler checked that the dormitory temperature was set to exactly 24° C, which, I later learned, is the perfect temperature to place most human bodies in sufficient comfort, while preventing illnesses that might be acquired as a result of low-temperature.

  None of the bots could pull a sheet over the body, if it became too cold. And, of course, no one, in all ten bodies in the dormitory, was in any condition to feel anything to make the call about hot and cold, comfortable or not comfortable.

  The internal network, necessary to make the bots functional, was connected to the Internet, but through only a single interface, protected with incredibly long passwords. The bots being trained within the system were rigidly controlled by their algorithms, and never stepped out to wander in the wider world, but, paradoxically, they were also programmed, as part of the security setup, to seek out and destroy any computer used in a hacking attempt.

  Such revenge attacks would usually be commenced while the attempt was on. It being child’s play for a bot to track back and find the source computer of an ongoing hack. The resident bots were loaded with the foulest viruses, to deposit into those computers. However, beyond placing viruses, they were also trained to attack and destroy all core programs within offending computers.

  As hacking never stops, I got the chance to accompany the resident bots on a punitive mission, and was pleased to see the havoc they caused, leaving the hacker with absolutely no data or functional programs in his computer.

  It would always be the hacker ending up as the loser, because whether a bot is a chatbot writing a letter, or a modified bot destroying the insides of a computer, it is basically merely a bot being a bot, doing bot things.

  These newfangled bots are absolutely monstrous programs, algorithmically controlled by their creators, and capable of very much more than talking and writing letters, able to be easily tweaked and converted into hostile forces.

  It is really very dangerous to interact with them, but I’ve said it all in the earlier book.