Discarded Colony by V.M. Gunn Read Free Book Online

DISCARDED COLONY
     
    The sun was beating down on his head with the ferocity of a midsummer's day in the Mojave Desert. Sweat dripped down his cracked forehead and naked back but did nothing to cool him. His throat was parched. What he would give for some shade and a long glass of cool water to quench his thirst. Yet he knew any respite would be at least an hour or two away. He could not stop his work now. Those from afar monitoring him via his nano implants knew that he could sustain considerable more time in this oppressive heat. His dehydration levels, despite being considered worrisome by any qualified doctor on Earth, would show up on the overseers' HUD's within normal ranges.
    "Those cruel bastards," he thought. They knew exactly how far they could push a human being before extinguishing their life force for good. He was being monitored like cattle in a pen by soulless humans ordered to extract the very last ounce of labor from him. Should they overstep the bounds and accidently kill him, there would be no grave consequences for any of them. He was a prisoner with no tangible value and certainly no hope for redemption.
     
    He plunged his small garden spade into hard the dirt from his kneeling position. The spade was made of a light and soft polymer probably designed so that he was unable to ram it through his stomach and empty his guts onto the ground, quickly putting an end to his misery. As he pulled the spade up out of the soil, a bright orange carrot was brought up amongst the dirt. He grabbed it, dusted it off and for a moment considered taking a bite out of it. He glanced up and saw a group of mosquito-sized patrol drones buzzing past 30 feet overhead. Despite his urges, he knew it was not worth the pain that would be inflicted on him for breaching such a serious rule. Something, somewhere, would certainly see him, or his implants would notify his overseers that he had ingested something that was not authorized or scheduled. They would simply force him to work twice as long in the sweltering heat, to the brink of death. Instead, he tossed it into the clear box sitting next to him, along with the other hundred or so carrots he had already dug up for the day. He tried not to look at them as he knew such fresh food will never touch his lips.
    "You’re going work for us," they had said to him and a group of others the first day they arrived. "We need to eat and you’re going to grow the produce, tend to the animals and make us love coming to this shithole every day! You are dangerous, unwanted… discarded from society... so at least this hard labor will instill a sense of purpose into you while you rot here!"
     
    His confine for the day was a square garden of approximately 10 by 10 feet. "Plot 3483" they had called out at the beginning of the day. He often wondered why they just didn’t call them "cells", because that’s what they really were. But then again, if he was confined in a prison governed by the laws of Earth he would at least have had some form of rights - here he did not. He was surrounded by semi-transparent walls about ten feet high. They were very innocent looking; modern and sleek. But, he knew the slightest touch of them would send a massive electrical pulse through his body, making it feel like all his fingernails and toenails were being peeled back while simultaneously emptying his bowels and ejecting projectile vomit from orifices he once didn’t even know existed. He had made that mistake once and vowed never to do it again. Here, every punishment was designed to inflict as much pain on someone without killing them so that it would leave a permanent mental scar.
    "Here," he laughed to himself, "One of man’s greatest marvels being used as a human cattle death farm." He was not being held in a standard prison on planet Earth. No, this compound was one of the many structures hovering outside of the Earth’s atmosphere on a sliver in space and time. He had not seen this particular one from