The Fuck is a Rototiller?

Trace swept away a thin film of grease and sweat off his forehead. A few cuts and bruises remained, but his organs and sanity were mostly intact. Mostly.

Nothing was as he remembered it. Faint memories of a homeless man who’d tried to sell him bullet-proof rocks glanced his mind, and his face had been so faded. Then he thought of the lady who’d injected miniature robots into his bloodstream. What was her name? She’d claimed to be an artist. The robots had been cubical silver boxes gleaming fiercely under a surgical lamplight. Memories after that point were a blur, a corruption, like a sector of bad data on a scratched bootdisk. He failed to recall how he got here, but he knew that he had been somehow captured and dropped into a testing facility. The first things he saw were a series of segmented rooms that stretched out like the caverns of a salt mine. The place felt gutted, ancient, and the surrounding décor reminded him of the rusted innards of dead cruise-ship. It felt like a prison. Trace could see the shadows of others moving behind opaque glass windows in the rafters high above him, watching him. They belonged to faceless people conducting experiments and testing the results of his progress. He was not alone.

‘Oh my goodness!’  the Salesman’s faceless voice boomed. Trace could not tell where it was coming from. ‘What a show, kiddo, and you made it out unscathed. Kudos for you, my friend. Phase 2 is in the bag!’ The condescending creep of his tone sunk into Trace’s mind and stuck there like stale paint. ‘Boys, can we get a replay on that?’ he said. The sound of mechanical background noises could be heard over the intercom. An old rotary projector kicked in, like the ones they use in drive-ins. A silver screen blanketed an entire wall. When the picture kicked in, he could see himself huddled in a corner with blood on his face. He rested his strained body against the wet concrete and watched.

The room was stagnant, stuffy, and it looked like a cell. The walls were closing in on all sides. Trace was sitting in a corner of the room next to a fallen nightstand of stained red-oak and the remains of a shattered porcelain vase.  The floor was an uneven grid of sun-bleached cedar planks that squealed as the dead-white walls scraped across it. ‘This can’t be hell.’ he said to himself, keeping his gaze fixed on the swaying spotlamp in the middle of the room. The polished silver lamp was not suspended by a cable or mounted to a fixture. No mechanism in sight seemed to be holding it up. Floating in mid-air? Trace shielded his eyes from its violent glare as the room grew even smaller. A wretched stab of frozen panic hit his gut. He flailed at the walls and beat them with his fists until he could hear the snapping of bone amidst the squealing walls. He looked down, and his hands were a mangled mess. Fragments of bone had torn through his flesh and blood leaked all over, but he felt nothing. He said nothing. The room threatened to crush his body like a carton in a trash compactor. Struggling was useless. He could not escape. In one swift motion he closed his eyes and looked up towards the swaying light. His retinas burned from the strain, but he continued to stare. ‘Just one light,’ he whispered, his voice barely audible against the sound of the screaming walls. Then the light went dead, the bulb shattered, and the glass fell into his eyes, shredding them apart. He could feel the edges of the jagged pieces behind his eye-sockets and against the base of his brain, but still he felt nothing. The blood from his hands was pouring out onto the small square of remaining floor beneath his feet. The wood turned into sawdust, mounds of it. A fine-powder sand-castle beneath his feet. Suddenly, the wretched wood buckled beneath his feet like rotten tree-trunk being split by a chainsaw. With all four walls pressing against him, his head threatening to pop from the stress, he slipped through the busted floor and entered a pitch-black chamber of zero-gravity. The room imploded into a small cube of pure black. Cruel barbed chains sprung from the stygian void, snaking around the cube, crushing it some more, and sealing it forever, never to be seen again. Trace had no control over his weightless body. The adrenaline in his bloodstream reached a final peak, causing him to black out.

The robots… his blood… now he knew.