Secure administration chambers, Fenghuang Level

The Facility

Approaching in a North-Easterly direction, keep to above thirty-six thousand feet until you see Kanjut Sar I, from where you’ll orient yourself against the approaching Gateway Peak (P6880) and Yukshin Gardar Sar, between where a flat patch of landing space is discretely maintained by the Facility’s mysteriously generous program, flexibly available to the day’s steady arrivals. Tail numbers and paint coats never to re-appear, the filth-speckled prop and jet planes were as often as not scuttled midair over one of the nearby impenetrable mountain depths, so brief were the careers of familiar pilots and anyone deemed a market risk.

Crew and ferried ambulatory would see upon landing a harmoniously range-blended ripple whose ellipsoid construction disguised from all aerial or orbital view the presence of several large elevators that creaked and screeched their way down hundreds of meters, most showcasing the tectonic warpings of geology, strange ringed and sparkly formations, but suddenly also the cuboid glass enclosures of many of the residing ambulatory awaiting their next extraction, most docile, seemingly serene, seated in cross-legged poise symmetric about phantom limbs. A tragic few were so deep into their extractions with barely any segments remaining and they noiselessly spun and writhed in pinkish whitish smearings upon their enclosures transparent surfaces. Some pressed themselves against their enclosures and looked directly at us, a few even seemed to be praying, thumbing invisible beads, instruments, pages, and then they were gone, swallowed back up into the rock as the elevator continued its descent. 

The Foam 2

It is light and frothy and although you certainly never want to “smell” the stuff, through the cozy safety or your layers of protective shielding and compliant safe distance you still feel it would be gently floral, perhaps a tinge of an herb, the  suds of an Alpine bather frothing snow melt during patridge sunrise songs. 

It tends bluish in sufficient white light, in flourescent interiors, or even sunlight when there is nothing nearby burning casting its citrus flickers upon the surfactant spheroids burbling from the business ends of the sprayers’ prodigiously bulbous ring of ejection jets. 

Training simulations with much more benign commercial soap suds prescribed a subtle wavey motion to undulate the jettisoned foam so as to almost coil it as one might a lasso trick and so better coat the uncontaminated targets with the foam.  Slang for these systems have included “low pressure plasma,” “bose-einstein disolvant” “white goo” “cooties” and “extinguishers.” 

Born from a family of clandestinely developed chemicals coined “sapientphagic” or “anthropoid erosive,” the idea was to create chemically what was embodied in flesh-incinerated, skeleton-crumbling zapper guns of science fiction boarding parties and inter-planetary expeditionary teams, achieving with exotic materials and nanomachines what those storied ethnically harmonious fire teams would blurt from their smooth ceramic carbines until an abrupt beeping signaled a pause in the globular neon furries flashing the flesh from ethereal charred Grey or Pleidian forms, cadences of heavy helmets and chiming cinders pulled into the ground by unfathomable gravity buckling all but the best maintained exoskeleta required for the grueling fusillade slinging fight. 

Loops

The facility program that installs the titanium filament loops into each resident’s skull does not prescribe a standardized, consistent location on the resident’s head, specifying only the “top” or “upper skull,” where busy but unhurried blue-smocked technicians are tasked to surgically drill and thread through the bored cranium the fanning fastener and silvery curl of titanium. When the resident’s ordeal is finally over, the cranial loop is slung over the sturdy prongs of an overhead conveyor network and they join their place with the facility’s circulating queues of bodily materials. 

Because of this haphazard placement of skull loops, these queues parade hideous crooks, cants and snaps upon the unsightly angles of drooping bodies yanked to animation by shuddering up inclines and shuffling about the conveyor’s whirling corners. Those odd twists and jerks reflected as idioms the often times incredible volumes faced by the intake processors. On days when more than one always filthy plane landed within an hour upon the facility’s designated runway, the intake processing teams faced challenging volumes who nonetheless must be successfully and efficiently processed into the facility. Non-compliant staff are often sent into the processing program, so there is high motivation and spirit to accomplish all assigned duties and responsibilities as they pertain to newly arrived resident resources. 

Under such challenges, residents begin their processing immediately on the runway as soon as they disembark upon the rickety metal stairs marched to the plane’s chilly sides by the clippy cadences of military personnel who oversaw the facility’s exotic extractions, guarded our perimeter, sorted our arrivals and departures, but never stepped past the parting metal gates that rung the entire facility’s complex, avoiding sight, even unnecessary respiration, should they find themselves near any of our macabre logistics.  Before long, similar chipper cadences deliver rows of chairs upon which each resident is briefly bolted, the most time-consuming of these restraint procedures being affixing the resident’s head into the cephalic cage that permits more successful installations of the titanium filaments so important to later processing. Afterwards, residents are permitted walking entrance into the facility. 

Intake processing can take anywhere from a few minutes of shrewd medical assessments or a couple hours of studious measurement. 

The Foam

A minute flask of swishing circles is inverted and swiftly poured into an open ceramic clamshell, reacting immediately with the piled translucent slurry awaiting the flask’s clear contents. A thundrous oxidation hisses, a jet batters the ear drum. Technicians in eggshell and daisy and beige toned coveralls stand back, trained hands at their sides poised in restraint, purged of all fidgeting impulses that might undermine the protective equipment’s fastidiously taped patches and imperceptible gaps.  Having retrieved a pike sized glass stirrer, a technician returns and swirls the hissing clamshell’s mouth.  In muted pink protection covering all that wasn’t masked by greenish blueish goggles, another technician produces an elongated plastic white dipper on which dangles a four-inch diameter cup and submerging it fully into the now quietly burbling clamshell, harvests from it a precious bubbly reaction product that is carefully sent down a stainless metal flume where it is imbibed by inconspicuous silicone-valved drain ports, piped from there into pairs of high-pressure chemical tanks lining the wall of the equipment room, emptied from the previous day’s vigorous application of foam agent on prescribed targets.