“Yes sir.”
“Again with the ‘sir’ business. I could get used to that.”
We continued down the corridor toward a set of heavy iron doors. As we neared them, a security camera mounted over the top of the doorway made a soft whirr, a red light clicked on, and a set of locks within the doors disengaged.
“These doors usually require a card-key,” said Daddy Bliss, “but since I have no arms, for me they will open once visual identification has been made.” He looked up at the camera and smiled.
The doors opened, and I was immediately assaulted with the sounds of a factory floor at full production speed. The smells of machine grease, metal, warm plastic, dust, and a hundred other scents put my sense of smell into overdrive, and I remembered how both my parents used to smell when they came home from a hard day on the line.
I followed Daddy Bliss through the doors into a cage-style elevator. When the iron doors closed behind us, the back wall of the elevator dropped into place and the whole contraption began to rise. I reached out and grabbed two of the bars to steady myself. “Afraid of heights, am I correct?” asked Daddy Bliss. “Ever since I fell out of a tree in our backyard when I was five,” I replied. “You needn’t worry, Driver. This elevator is perhaps the safest one in the country.”
It continued to rise like a roller coaster car clack-clack-clacking up the tracks toward that drop that you just knew was going to send your balls up into your throat, and a few moments later the elevator stopped, shuddered, made a clack-clack-clacking of its own, and shifted forward, the top mechanisms connecting with an overhead track and pulling us forward.
“There will be a bit of a lurch in a moment,” said Daddy Bliss. “It’s nothing to be concerned with.”
“Uh-huh.”
The elevator lurched, dropping down about a foot as the whole shebang left the safety of the platform and hung suspended thirty feet above the factory floor. Once my initial panic was over, I realized that both the moving mechanism and the overhead track were solid. The ride was smooth. Daddy Bliss grinned at me. “Better now?” “Yes, thank you.” “Then I’ll ask you to step over here and look down, please.” 0“I’d rather not.” “The heights business again?” “The heights business again.” “I assure that we are perfectly safe. Now, come here.” I moved toward the side, not once lifting my feet. Somehow it felt safer if I slid toward him.
Below us I saw three separate work areas, each one crowded with equipment and machinery that dwarfed those people working the line. I had no idea what I was looking at, what these machines were called or what function they served. I did recognize a lathe press because Dad used to operate one, and an area near one of the walls was used for wiring small circuitry chips—this I knew because Mom used to do the same thing, only she wired chips for all-night banking machines. These two things aside, I couldn’t tell you what was what or what purpose it served.
The only thing that was obvious to me was that each line started with some part of a trashed automobile; a door, a dashboard, steering wheel units, under-hood components, instrument panels, floor pedals, and other parts both external and internal that I couldn’t place because they’d been removed from whatever it was they’d been attached to in the first place.
The cage glided over the factory floor as the workers continued with their labors. I couldn’t see what parts of the workers had been repaired from up here, save for a few people who—like Dash—had large sections of their skulls replaced with metal plates.
Daddy Bliss said, “Now here is where we see whether or not you’ve got half a brain, Driver. Take a good look at what’s going on down there, and see if you can spot the one thing that all this busy bee-like activity has in common.”
“Is this part of whatever test it is you’re giving me?”
He sighed. “You mustn’t think of this as a test, it will add far too much pressure on your nerves. Think of it more as an assessment, an evaluation, a review.”
“In other words, a test.”
“Have it your way, then. Now, take a good look and see if you can answer the question.”
I studied the activity, though from above it was impossible to see any detail work. It wasn’t until I saw one of the workers use a pair of industrial shears to strip the covering off of a control panel that I knew the answer.
“Plastic,” I said. “They’re removing all the plastic from what’s left of the cars.”
Daddy Bliss smiled. “Bravo, dear boy, bravo—though I feel compelled to point out, for the sake of accuracy, that it isn’t precisely plastic. It’s polypropylene, a form of thermoplastic. Did you know that the average car has 245.5 pounds of plastic? The ever-increasing use of plastics in automobiles helps reduce vehicle weight, thus improving gas mileage and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A total of 4.19 billion pounds of plastic will be used in North American autos and light trucks this year, increasing to about 5.63 billion pounds within the next decade.” He laughed. “All that wonderful raw material, recycled over and over again.”
“Is this where you make the parts for people to be repaired?”
“Hm? Oh, goodness gracious me, no. The Repair facility is located about a mile away—in fact, I think Hummer drove by it just so you could see the place.”
I remembered the worker and his tail-light eye and went cold. “Yeah, I saw it.”
“Excellent. Here is where we manufacture our goods. We produce a limited, specialized line of products here.”
The cage was nearing the farthest end of the factory floor. Below us, I could see several rows of molds arranged inside shelves that were built into the walls. There was something like a large oven, and another huge contraption that looked like some kind of cooling unit, and then an area where the melted, molded, and cooled final product was cut into shape. “Jesus…” I whispered. They manufactured custom-made HO-tracks and cars. I looked at Daddy Bliss. “Is this where Miss Driscoll got her track and cars? From you?” “Her name is Road Mama, Driver, and, yes, we make every piece of track and every car to specification.” “And all of it’s made from the polypropylene taken from wrecked automobiles?”
“The track is made from the polypropylene. The cars are made from whatever is left over from the raw materials—the automobiles—once the polypropylene has been taken. Not one piece of raw material goes to waste. It is in this way that the cycle of production and purpose keeps turning, pardon my lapsing into pathetic poeticisms.”
“And alliteration,” I said. “That’s the second time since we’ve met that you’ve done that.”
“Is it, now? I shall have to take care to watch my tongue.”
The cage slowed, then shuddered once again as it moved onto another platform, disengaging from the overhead track as the front-most door rose up automatically and another set of iron doors opened before us.
We entered another brightly-lighted hallway, this one with a highly-polished off-white floor and walls the same color. The iron doors closed behind us and the stink of the factory was replaced by the sharp, antiseptic smells of a hospital. I moved alongside Daddy Bliss. “And this is…?” “The Pre-Repair Unit.” All of the doors were closed, and there were no personnel working the floor. We paused by one of the closed doors. Daddy Bliss jerked his head to the side, gesturing. “Why don’t you take a look through the observation window there?” I did. I wish to hell I hadn’t.
All I can for certain is that the person lying in there was female; she could have been 17, she could have been 52—it was impossible to tell. Her massive facial injuries rendered her features almost unrecognizable as being human. Her lower body was covered by a sheet. From the ceiling there extended down a pencil-thick cable that spread out at the bottom like the wires inside an umbrella, each one attached to one of the spark plugs implanted in her skull. She jerked underneath the sheet as if in the midst of a seizure, arms and legs twitching as the sparkplugs lit up in a precisely-timed sequence. Her eyes were held closed by two heavy strips of medical tape. A clear plastic tube ran from her throat into a large glass jar set on a metal table beside the bed; with each jerk, dark viscous liquid crawled through the tube and oozed into the jar. With each sequence of sparks she bit down hard on her lower lip, breaking the skin and dribbling blood down the side of her face. Finally, one of the convulsions was so violent that she ripped the sheets from over her body, exposing the metal rings that encased her torso from the center of her chest down to her knees. It looked as if she were being tortured.