The Avross Coorporation

Warning: This story is not for everybody.

There is no sex and little focus on the female form or nudity, and the tale is fairly graphic in some parts. It is a story of power and manipulation, of torture and pain, and of a complete lack of control for what others, robots or humans, might do to you. Not for the light of heart.

Thanks to Jim1855 for the editing :)

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Everybody thought the Avross Coorporation had mastered the art of replicating the human form. With their advertising and promises of the future, they managed to get the world ready for a new age. Over time though, it became clear that software limitations would prevent artificial intelligence from ever becoming prominent. The company couldn't let the world know though, there was too much at stake for that, so they developed their 'training' program. A series of tests, surgeries and alterations a subject went through that made them seem as if they weren't human. Crisis averted.

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I wake up naked on the floor of a white, nondescript room. My first reaction is shock, then fear, and then finally, dread. I recall what had happened the night before. I was out late, a little too late, perhaps, with some guys I'd met earlier that day. One of them invited me into his house, and we chatted, kindly, gently to one another. The last thing I remember is staring into his dreamy eyes as I lay on his lap, drifting off into a blissful sleep. Looking around with trepidation, I realise the room I'm in is actually a pure white cube made of some sort of hard plastic with me encased in the middle. I shiver, despite the warm, moist air around me. With nothing else to do, and feeling slightly drowsy, I slip back to sleep.

I awaken with a jolt. An alarm of some kind is sounding, somewhere outside my box. The white walls seem to shake a little, and then I get the sense that I'm moving, slowly, inside this prison of a room. Listening carefully, I can hear the sound of machines and people on the other side, and it dawns on me that whoever put me inside went to a lot of effort in doing so. I think back to my friends. They had seemed a little odd and disconnected from the world around them, as if they weren't supposed to be there, but I had dismissed it as simply being shy. I began to think better of that. There is clearly something bigger going on, and I appeared to be an integral part of that process. As I continue my journey through what I can now only assume is some sort of factory, the air around me starts to seem a little stuffy. On closer inspection, it seems that there are no air vents; no way for air to get in, or out, of my micro-prison. Panicking, due to both a slight lack of oxygen and a strong fear of the unknown, I throw myself at the walls of my cell, but all I achieve is a painful arm and an overwhelming sense of being trapped.

Eventually, the hellish trip comes to a stop, and a small opening in the wall, just large enough for a person, opens up. Too weak to stand, I lie on the plastic, crying softly. It doesn't matter though, a robotic claw on a long arm reaches in from outside my shell and grabs hold of me. Completely naked, my bare skin rubs painfully against its rubber grips as it pulls me through the hole and holds me upright as another arm attaches me to a metal hanger affixed to the ceiling. It consists of two cast-iron hand-cuffs connected to a solid steel frame, which itself is attached to a sort of slider system, allowing the whole contraption to be moved with ease along rails embedded within the roof. Immobilised, with my arms dangling above my head, I am swung into absolute darkness, the wheels of my new restrainer gliding silently as they roll above my head.

After what seems like hours of travelling through darkness, wind lightly blowing through my dishevelled hair, I arrive into what appears to be a huge warehouse. Only instead of boxes of goods, there are racks of bodies all strung up like me, in metal hand-cuffs. The room is dimly lit, though from what I can see there are several thousand people, possibly more, simply hanging on their frames. The stench is unbearable, smelling like a putrid mix of sweat and shit, and it is clear from the brown streaks that cover many of their legs that toiletries are not available in this complex. I trundle helplessly over to one of the many racks, and softly bump into who I can only assume will be my neighbour until the robots decide otherwise. After taking it all in, the piles of excrement, complete lack of hygiene, and the filthy bodies next to me, I'm promptly sick, my stomach's contents emptying themselves into the depths below. I hear a splash – what I can only imagine is a river, carrying the waste away. In the wrist-wrenching position I'm in it's hard to sleep, but I drift into a state of semi-wistfulness, weeping throughout.

I'm jolted alert some hours later when my restrainer begins to move. Looking around groggily and with great effort, I see about 30 other frames doing the same thing. As we group together, travelling down the passage, I realise that the other people with me are frightened, just as I am. One woman, about 5 back, is screaming constantly, asking for the authorities; to be let down at once. The rest of us know better than to do that as it is clear nobody is listening. Even if they were, I doubt that they would care. We arrive in what looks like an operating room, except with no surgeons in sight, only robotic arms with knives and scalpels. I listen in horror as I hear each of the people in front of me whimper, and then a loud slicing noise is heard, and then an inhuman cry of pain. After what feels like hours of waiting, finally it's my turn. A large arm grabs my head, preventing it from moving in the slightest, while another clamps tightly around my boobs, completely immobilising my upper body. A third arm forces my mouth open, while a scalpel arrives, moving closer and closer to my gaping mouth. In one deft sweep, the robotic arm removes my tongue and I feel it fall decidedly onto the bottom of my mouth. I scream the scream of a tortured animal, an animal with no voice to be heard. Another bot arrives soon after with a scorching-hot metal bar to cauterize the wound, and I scream again, the pain ripping through me, tearing me in half.

It's not over though. As I glide onwards, further into the depths of the robotic arms, I get injected from all sides, the fluids finding an easy way to my body, allowed in by the torturous robots. One goes for my vagina, and I am powerless to stop it as it glides inside of me. As far as I can tell, it appears to be filling me with some sort of foam, and it's only when I see it hardening do I realise what the robot has done. Expertly, the arm had managed to fill both of my ovaries with the foamy substance, while leaving the rest of my sex untouched, the fast-hardening material now forms an impossible barrier for sperm, rendering me infertile but still desirable to men. I feel a sharp pain in the back of my neck as a small electronic device in inserted into me, and I can feel its spikes penetrating deep within my skin. As one of the robots moves over, I see what was just attached to my neck – a short metal plate with 4 sharp legs and an LED on top. I recognise it, but I can't quite place where I've seen such a device before. Lost in a daze of pain and fear, I fall unconscious as my hanger takes me away, back to the warehouse.

When I come to my senses again, I'm hanging in a row amidst the stench of thousands of other helpless people. My tongue still hurts like crazy, and my head is aching too. I remember what I saw, what the machines did to me, what they put inside my neck, and then I realise. The last time I'd seen one of those devices was on my household android, in their head. It was what allowed everyone to tell the robots apart from the humans. If you owned an android and felt like punching, or raping, or maiming them, you could – they weren't human, after all, you were simply damaging your property, like you might accidentally crash your bike or break your microwave. No big deal, just get a new one. There had been a few reported cases of abuse where the suspect had claimed that they had assumed the victim was an android, but the defence never held, because the first thing you did when handling a robot was check the back of their neck, to make sure they weren't human. But now I had one. A piece of metal in my neck that would make everyone assume I was simply another robot to be abused and discarded.

Before I could dwell on my predicament any further though, my frame begins to move again, this time towards a different part of the factory. The journey is uneventful, though I can hear groans and wails in all directions throughout. My speed starts to abate, bringing my trip to a close, and I see a large, open area, filled with people moving in unison, walking forward. A loud voice sounds: "Backwards for 50 seconds." and suddenly every person starts walking back, without looking. My hanger moves closer to the scene, and drops me harshly into the back of the group, alongside the others who had had their tongues cut out the day before. Everybody is still walking with eerie, robotic precision, and I have stumble backwards in order to get out of the way of the oncoming movement.

The next order arrives, "Jump 100 times."

Everybody in the room begins to hop except us, the new arrivals, who are still slumped on the ground, moaning. A pain begins to grow in my neck. I reach back to try to remove the device lodged there, but as my hand gets closer the pain increases dramatically, growing and growing until it feels as if some spiteful person wants nothing more than to see me writhe on the ground in agony. I pull my hand away, and the majority of the pain recedes, but the irritation is still growing fast in the back of my neck. With nothing else to do, nowhere else to turn, I, too, start to jump, in the hope that it would ease the pain. Immediately the torment ceases, so I stop, returning to the floor in a heap. However, to my dismay, the pain starts again, stronger than ever, and I am forced back onto my feet to continue jumping, as if my life depends on it.

Another order arrives, "Sprint for four hours," and I look, dumbfounded, as everyone in the room simply started sprinting, in a circle, around the warehouse.

"You've got to be joking," I thought, "There's no way I can do that, I'll die! I've never run more than a mile in my life!" yet the pain begins to grow again, and so I am forced onto my feet, and I start to run. Over the course of the next four hours I stumble my way around the torture-chamber, naked and bare-footed, occasionally falling out of pure exhaustion, only for the pain in my neck to become so extreme as to force me back at it again. Once the session is over, troughs of what look like pig-swill descend from the ceiling, and I start to feed ravenously on them, before receiving a sharp shock to my neck. I give it another shot, but again, the same thing happens. Looking around, I realize no-one is eating the food, they are simply staring at it, wistfully and blank-eyed.

Eventually, after what seems like an eternity, the order arrives, "Eat," and we all bury our heads into the slime, slurping up all that we can, as fast as we can. Then, suddenly, when I'm as little as 5 seconds into my meal, the voice sounds again: "Freeze."

Now knowing better than to disobey, I stop moving, standing as still as I can. The food looks so filling, right in front of me, and yet, every time I move to eat it the pain is unbearable, and I have to resort back to my former position. After about half an hour of cramp-inducing, agonizing, bent-over waiting, again, "Eat." sounds, and the room is filled with sighs and slurps as the troughs are quickly emptied.

"Sleep." is called about 15 minutes later, and everyone lies onto the floor, and, with groans and mumbles, drifts away.

"Sprint."

The voice isn't any louder than usual, but having spent the previous day completely under its control, I wake up and know what to do, almost without question. Those who don't hear, or don't want to hear, are quickly forced to anyway by the pain in their necks. And so this process continues, day on day, week on week.

"Jump."

"Hold your arms in the air."

"Stand on one leg."

"Do push-ups."

"Do squats."

The rigorous training program is so absolute, and so harsh that eventually I just find myself drifting off whilst doing the actions, subconsciously registering the commands without actively thinking about them. Then, one command shocks me, "Brand yourself. Hold it there for 20 seconds. Do not show any signs of pain or discomfort."

A furnace is lit and a crate of branding irons is placed in one corner of the room by the robotic arms. We all move warily over to take an iron and hold it in the blaze. Coming out of my trance, I panic, "I can't do this, I won't do this. I will not let this happen to me. Not me, not now, not ever." but I don't let anything show; on the surface my face is completely passive, just like everyone else's. I knew they would be panicking inside, just like me, but we know better than to disobey the voice. After the iron is heated sufficiently, and glowing white-hot, I place the branding iron, embezzled with the shape of an "A", onto the flawless skin of my upper thigh. The pain is unbearable, a searing, melting, torturous, unending agony, a heart-wrenching anguish coming from deep within my broken body. I don't let it out though, and my face remains passive and unmoving. Similarly, throughout the room, every other captive is doing the same, and the room is filled not with the sound of screaming, but with the sound of bubbling, burning flesh.

Peeling the metal from my burnt skin, I place it back as the restrainers roll into the hall, the first time I've seen them for weeks. Filled both with relief that the torture is over and fear of where the hangers might take me, I wait for a command. We all do. By this point, all of us fear doing anything at all, in case the pain returns to our necks.

"Place yourselves into the hangers," the voice commands, and, eerily, robotically, we all move over to the wrist-cuffs and clamp ourselves to our moving, private cells. As they start to move, I begin to realise what I've become. Through pain, surgery, fear and manipulation, the facility has managed to turn all of us, good, honest people, into robots who will do anything, including branding themselves for life, if they are commanded to. With a shock, it dawns on me that if I am commanded by anyone to do anything I will do it, because no matter what that action is, how disgusting, immoral or painful it is, the alternative is always worse. Much worse. The very thought of even disobeying the voice, any voice, for a second sends shivers down my spine as I imagine the searing pain that would inevitably follow soon after.

I arrive in a hallway, and am dropped by my hanger as it once again glides away into the darkness. I feel a sense of loss, as I know that while I'm with it, nothing will harm me, at least, not too much.

The voice speaks: "This is your final test. When you enter the test chamber, your neck will begin to hurt. To help you visualise what is happening, there will be a display on the wall, showing you how much pain you are currently experiencing. You are to give no sign you are in pain; your face must remain calm, your movements must not falter. Over time the pain will grow as you are tasked with mundane instructions, and you must endure this pain up until the green line indicated on the display, without distress. Fail to achieve this and I will give you as much agony as those devices can deliver, which is a lot for as long as you live, likely driving you insane. Please enter the chamber in front of you when the light turns green."

I am dumbfounded, "No matter what they do to me, they always seem to find a way to step it up a notch, don't they?" I think to myself, as the first person in the long line steps through the door, sealing itself behind them so no sound can be heard. I am pretty near the back of the queue, so I'm in for a long wait. The line grows steadily shorter, with every person taking about an hour to finish inside. When the light turns green again, and the next person enters the room, the last person is nowhere to be seen, presumably having exited through another door. The wait is torturous as I try to imagine the new levels of pain and horror I will experience in that chamber.

Finally, after what seems like years, I am standing in front of the door, waiting for the light to turn green. Every muscle in my body is screaming at me to turn and run, but I know that would be no use; I would immediately succumb to the overriding pain and be forced to return to the line. The lights turns green, the door opens, and I walk in, virtually helpless. The chamber is empty except for a display at the far end, showing what looks like a thermometer, and a table in the centre.

"Your test starts now, please follow all instructions. Failure to do so will result in even more pain." Several minutes pass, and nothing happens, except the pain in my neck slowly increasing. It's easily bearable at first, sort of like cramp or a headache, but soon it becomes much more than that, reaching punched-in-the-face levels of pain within the first minute. I take a glance over at the display, and it's barely moved. A slight slither of red is visible right at the bottom. I begin to panic but, of course, I don't let it show. After about 5 minutes the pain has shot through bone-breaking levels, but the thermometer is still less than half way to that golden green-lined safe-haven. I can feel my face wincing, subconsciously, and I hope that is cannot be seen. I am standing very still, pushing my entire inner soul into surviving this ordeal, to not giving in, to not giving up, knowing it will be over soon.

Without warning, at about 60%, the voice sounds again: "Sort these items from largest to smallest."

My thoughts and inner me had receded at this point deep inside the safety of my brain, but the voice, that torturous voice, brings me straight back to the absolute agony of the present. It feels like a million needles are piercing into every area of my fragile body, over and over again, relentlessly. However, without much choice, I attempt to process the objects now place in front of me. Eyes blurry, brain half-dead from the torture, I begin to move the items around. Every one of them seems to be designed to inflict the maximum pain it can on the wielder. Barbed wire, electrically charged metal plates, glowing-hot iron spheres. And yet I don't feel it, because the other pain, the real pain, is so much worse. I glance again at the display, taking care to appear normal, as if I am simply standing in a room, waiting. Though most of my thought-processes by this point have completely stopped functioning, and all I can think about or reason with is the unending agony, I see it is almost complete, and a wave of both dread and relief attempt to rush through me, before being quickly stamped out by the infinitely stronger emotion of pain.

As the last portion of the thermometer slowly fills, I start to shake, ever so slightly, completely out of my control. Internally screaming at the pain and yet standing completely passive has taken it's toll and finally I am losing all control of what my brain informs my body to do.

"Now now, not long left. I'm sure you can make it." the voice chimes in, and, despite my loathing, I begin to make an even stronger effort, although I didn't even know I could, to stop my body from moving. Now in the final moments of the test, the pain is completely, totally unbearable; it feels as though my entire body is being ripped limb-from-limb, one atom at a time, over and over again, without end, without beginning, without anything else. It is simply me and the pain alone in the world, it consuming me from the inside out while I suffer, drown and wither, all at once.