The Utopia Project: Dawn of the Phantoms

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===[Chapter 30: The Prison-Industrial-Complex]===

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“ROLL CALL!”

The voice of a guard boomed from outside the dormitories. The iron doors holding the prisoners inside of their barracks slid open automatically, and one-by-one the different penal squads filed outside of their barracks. Eli groggily woke up, being driven from the warm comforting embrace of slumber. He could hardly rise from his bed – as uncomfortable as it was. It was his best night’s sleep since he had arrived in the new world.

The guards barked commands, yelling at the prisoners who hesitated. Even going so far as to drag them out, push them around, and shove them into their proper place. Eli himself was pushed by a guard out of the dormitory, where he took his position at the head of the squad. All of the prisoners lined up, shoulder to shoulder. Tired. Exhausted. Spent.

“Tombstone!” A guard barked.

“Here!” Tombstone's squad leader called out, her voice strained under the wear of morning wake.

“Tally?”

“Seven!”

The guard held a checklist in his hands, silently scribbling a number onto the paper and nodding to himself in approval, “Unity!”

One by one, each squad leader stated their presence and the number of prisoners that they had. There were plenty of new faces among the prisoners, not like Eli was keeping track. But he saw people he’d never seen before fill the vacancies of those who had escaped. Unlike Misfit, a majority of the deserters never came back. Probably dead. Or worse. Eli shuddered to think that Misfit was one of the lucky few, if any at all. Perhaps an exception.

Yet the new security measures were tight. The guards had been moved around, new personnel. It seemed the blind spots that allowed Misfit to make it out previously had been fixed. Armed guards patrolled up and down the road between the dormitory bunkers, steely-eyed as they stared down the prisoners. Hands firmly clasped on the trigger. Cameras watched every inch of ground. Towers cast lights on the dark spots of the campus. Escape had been rendered impossible.

“Misfit!”

Eli at first didn’t respond. Still caught in his own mind. Deep in thought.

“Misfit! Sound off!”

“Here!” Eli shouted. He looked over at his squad. Badger, Rafael, Matteo, Dutch, Omar, and of course himself. His heart ached when he realized that they were still one short. Cato would never come back again.

“Tally?”

“Six!”

The guard again returned back to his checklist to jot the numbers down, his eyes again rose up from his paper, “Daredevil!”

It was a dreadful morning. The skies rumbled with the sound of thunder. The air was hot and damp. Palm trees gently swayed in the tropical wind that was only blowing harder as the minutes passed. Most of the dirt had already turned to mud from the storm that passed overnight. The angry black clouds behind them signaled that the worst of it wasn’t done.

Days like these were the ones where the hum of the caterpillar engines went silent, and where the engines of progress fell dead in the rain.

For days the Coalition had been hacking away at the forest surrounding the Nexus, building, planning, constructing. Like a virus that spread over the land. Transforming it into their vision. Prisoners labored away in the woods, chopping down the rainforest, building mines and power plants outside of the walls of the Nexus. But on days like these, the growth slowed.

The prisoners were directed into the manufactory inside of the base. Their Monitors were chipped with a new program, and they were sent into the sterile room where white fluorescents blared over their heads. Lined up as guards circled them, “Prisoners! You’re being assigned today for factory shift duty. Inside of the factory are tables, belts, and machines. Each squad will be assigned to a station, and it will be the job of each squad to ensure that their daily production quota is met. Preferably exceeded.” A guard spoke as he patrolled up and down the ranks of prisoners, as if he were inspecting goods.

“You’ll be given brief instructions on how to run your station for today and today only. Afterwards, we expect that you’ll understand what to do in order to work autonomously. Each squad leader will be expected to ensure that their station meets the quota, and collectively you will all be graded on whether or not your productivity proved satisfactory. This is a twelve hour shift with a lunch break on the sixth hour. If you work efficiently and meet the quota, you’ll be dismissed at the end of the day. If not, you will be held here until you come up to standards. Understood?”

“Yes sir!” The prisoners chanted.

The Guard turned to the other security units, pointing at a solid door behind them that led to the factory floor, “Hands behind your heads where we can see them. You’ll be assigned one by one.”

With that the doors opened. Eli placed his hands on the back of his head, as did the rest of Misfit. They followed close behind him.

The factory floor was massive. At least thirty stations had been placed in the room, around the size of a warehouse. Robotic arms, benches, drills, tools, engines, and parts lie scattered around the room. All of them connected with a conveyor belt that transitioned from one station to another.

Misfit’s station was simple. All they had to do was put together the chassis for engines. Bolts, metal parts, and components were given to them by dispensers. Using a variety of electric drills and wrenches, the squad was tasked with putting it all together. At the blow of a whistle, the assembly line came alive, and the prisoners were buried in work. They hustled to put together the engines, Misfit fumbled at first but by the time the second hour approached, they got the hang of it. There were always more things to make, always more resources coming in. The engines of Utopia churned alive here, and it used the labor of prisoners as fuel.

For hours Misfit slaved away inside of the engine. They worked, operating the machinery until the hours bled into each other and the sweat of fatigue faded away into a distant background hum. One break was given for thirty minutes total, their daily ration.

“It beats the slop they gave us in solitary,” Dutch muttered, poking his fork into a mush of something that vaguely resembled lasagna.

For thirty minutes they ate and conversed with one another, but the second that half-hour was up, it was back to work. The guards cleared their tables and forced the prisoners back into their positions behind the machines. It might have been tolerable work now that the pangs of hunger had been quenched, but the omnipresent drone of Kovic’s voice infuriated Eli as he worked away at the machines. It was soulless, draining. Each word faker than the last. Insincere. Kovic talked on about dreams of what would happen when the prisoners were deemed “Reformed”, but only the blind or the idiotic would believe that. Reformed prisoners only ended up in a grave, their last rite of relief from the engine of Kovic’s progress. From the system of his Utopia.

Eli looked over to Misfit, glancing briefly as they worked along. He smiled, sighing to himself. At least he had them with him.

They continued this work for days. Days turned into weeks. By that time, it had become almost second-nature. The prisoners worked hard, day-in and day-out until they were nothing more than exhausted shells of themselves at the end of the day. Fueling the engines of Utopia until their muscles ached, their joints stiffened, and their souls dried.

There were strange men that had visited the factory floor on the second week. Men and women dressed in business suits, shiny shoes, and expensive garments. They wore an air of superiority with every step they took. Their shoes click-clacking on the floors of the Nexus. Kovic and an escort of regulars led the businesspeople through. Showing off the progress that they had made. The buildings, the machines, the money, the goods… the prisoners. Kovic gestured toward the prisoners as if they were objects. Even through the thick glass, he could hear them laughing.

They had been reduced to nothing more than just a prop in the wall. A object. A machine to be bought and sold. To be mocked, robbed of their dignity and self-worth. Drained of their value in labor, shackled to strip them of their freedom.

He felt a nudge on his shoulder. Rafael gave him a lowkey smile, “Now you know how I feel, eh Soldier Boy?” He whispered.

“You don’t know how I feel,” Eli told him.

“I have an idea. You’ve been reduced to an object. Cattle. They want to process you, make you work until you don’t have any work left in you. And when they’re done with you, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill us all.”

Eli looked over to him, working still – yet listening, “Kovic and the Coalition. They’re so powerful and far above us that they can’t even think that somebody like you or me would be a threat to them. They couldn’t imagine it. They look down at us from their towers, their office windows, and they build skyscrapers on our graves. Cities. Nations. And they laugh, at us. Because we give the fascists the power to do it.”

Rafael looked closer into Eli’s face. His brows contorted; he was reading a message Eli couldn’t decipher. That was until he opened his mouth, “You aren’t a believer. At least not in what I’m saying.”

“I believe in living,” Eli muttered, “Seeing another day. With Misfit, all of you, alive. That’s what I believe in.”

“So that’s it? Just submit? Submit and be thankful to our enslavers for the fuck-all they’ve given us-“

“Do I look thankful to you?” Eli demanded from him. His voice husk, a lash of anger boiling up in it, “They have us here, they bleed us dry, they laugh in our faces, and you think I’m thankful?”

“Then why not fight?”

“Because that’s not an option. Tell me, what’s your plan? What’s the alternative? Hm? Since you’re the guy with revolution on his mind, tell me,” Eli interrogated, leaning closer to him – trying his hardest to ensure that the guards on patrol couldn’t hear him, “Being alive beats being dead.”

“We are all going to die here. Sooner or later. Just like Cato said. But we can die fighting. Us… Misfit, we can make a change. Right here. Right now.”

“If we die, then what’s the point?”

“It sends a message. It shows that our dignity as human beings aren’t something we’ll just let them take from us! The point of the revolutionary is to guide others to a dream he will never see. I’m an Anarchist. Systems of order and control will always continue to rule over us if we allow them to. If we accept, keep our heads low, go along to get along, we’ll die wasting our lives to feed this parasite-“

“Guard coming,” Eli warned. Quickly, the two returned back to their original postures. The guard strolled by, stun baton in hand. His every footstep heavy as his jackboot smacked against the tiled floors. They fell silent, Eli was even scared to breathe. Scared to think. What if they could see into his mind? Not a ridiculous assumption given that this world was full of magic in the literal sense. His fear put him back in line…

When the guard passed by, Eli slowly turned to Rafael, “If we make a decision, we do it as a squad. That’s it. It isn’t my call.”

Rafael smiled, “At least you’re thinking about it. That’s all I wanted from you, Soldier Boy.”

He could hear Kovic laughing again with the other businessmen as they filed out of the factory floor. Leaving the prisoners alone. The backs of their clean and expensive suits were easy to see make out in their commanding stage above the floor, at least In contrast to the bleak uniforms worn by the Security Units and the monotonous blue and oranges of the prisoners.

Eli held his gaze up at Kovic, who remained to watch over the factory floor while his friends peeled away. His pink face, nearly combed grey hair, executive smile, everything about Kovic felt so hate able to Eli. The man was showing them off like expensive luxury toys to his equally rich friends. Trying to win over their money and support, to which Eli and his kin were all their investment. It was nothing short of enraging.

He must’ve been burning a hole through the glass the way he stopped to stare solely on Kovic. For Kovic stopped his scan of the factory floor to lock eyes with him.

Kovic’s icy blue eyes locked with Eli’s warm brown. The two couldn’t have been more different. And yet they both commanded each other’s full attention. He should’ve been fearful to have been singled out by what was ultimately the top dog of Overwatch Command, but there was some other emotion deep inside his gut that drove him to feel otherwise. An intense burning sensation, one that refused to dissipate and only grew stronger the more he locked eyes with Kovic. It was an emotion stronger than anger, more powerful than hatred. He could hate Kovic all he'd like, but it wouldn't matter. This was different though.

This was rebellion.

Kovic raised his chin above the collar on his suit. Eli held his gaze. Until his eyes broke away from the lock to his work as a guard soon approached. Yet, he didn’t feel defeated in his inability to stare Kovic down. Quite the opposite really.

For any sign of resistance no matter how small was enough for Eli. Any sign to show Kovic that he was, after all, still human. That all of the phantoms were.

In the corner of his vision, he could see Kovic hailing a security unit. He pointed directly at Eli through the glass. Some words were said between the two.

Eli couldn’t hear them of course, but Kovic’s expression said it all. He mouthed out the word, “Misfit", in realization.

And with that, the security unit was dismissed. Kovic returned to look down at Eli once more, but by then he’d already gotten back to work. And soon, he too left the factory floor, leaving them all alone.

It wasn’t until later in the day when the prisoners were dismissed and sent back to the dormitories. Eli’s clothes reeked of the smell of industry, metal and fumes. But at least it was over. The guards walked the prisoners back to their cells, and although it was night – one couldn’t hardly tell. The bright searchlights illuminated the ground like another sun. One that remained hovering over the prisoners even when daylight had long since disappeared underneath the horizon.

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