Stella 568B

by Petra Whiteley

If Stella had a mouth, she might have been in the office by now. As it was she sat on the edge of the waiting room chair, in front of the carefully labelled door. There was a smaller one, equal only to the size of a ten year old child, situated two metres away from it, unlabelled and with no handle, only a small hole, a glass eye at half of its height and beneath it a circular hole with a thick mesh.  There was no door through which Stella entered; only an archway, and she had to slightly bend to pass through it – it was the only source of light that came through the large windows of the corridor that lead up to it.

The waiting room was spectacularly clean and painted white, none of the walls bore any marks, any stains, signs of life and its homogeneity was only disturbed by two plants that were positioned opposite one another in left and right corners in black planters. The plants were of the kind that didn’t need special care and yet looked richly green; the beautifully shaped leaves contrasted with the enveloping whiteness of the room but in no way disturbed its sense of a complete and utter stillness, nor did the few elegantly framed reproductions on the walls. Stella’s eyes flickered over them here and there, blindly, without registering. They were soft, classical still lives, far too beautiful – the finesse and virtuosity of the painter was obvious, but its sterile perfection rendered them decorative objects rather than works of art.

The chair was surprisingly comfortable. Many of the more comfortable waiting rooms had wobbly stools only; majority of waiting rooms had none at all. Stella briefly wondered at its exception, it wasn’t the most important office in the bureaucracy after all. Regardless of its cosiness, she wasn’t comfortable sitting in it; she jerkily crossed and re-crossed her legs, over and over. If she wasn’t there alone, she would have no doubt annoyed the others with it. That she was there alone was another exceptionality of the situation, adding to her nervousness. She smoothed her thinned hair behind the ear countless times, violently blushing when she became conscious of what she was doing.  Outside, it was very windy and the cold seemed to reach through the walls. There was no heating in the waiting room and she was cold, but she realised she broke out in sweat and that her anxiety penetrated the carefully applied, permitted deodorant.  She became distressed by it and she had to apply tremendous amount of energy to calm down, she knew it will only get worse if she didn’t eliminate all the traces of apprehension.

The wait was stretching over a long time. However when she pressed the time button on the wall, the display showed that she was there only five minutes. Although she dreaded the meeting that was to take place when its digits moved sufficiently forward, she looked at it angrily before it switched itself off, as if sight alone could speed it up.

When she finally heard her name called through the intercom and when the door swung open mechanically with a loud beeping noise, she begun to shake so violently, sweat pouring down her back in rivulets, trickling down her face, making zigzags through her so carefully applied face barrier, exposing her skin under the white. She spent what felt like eternity trying to calm her mind down, forcing her breathing to come evenly to dispel her reaction. Once it subsided she pulled out a small hand mirror and quickly retouched the paint on her skin. The antique may have got her into trouble, but the disturbed paint would do so too, the choice between the two smaller evils was not a choice at all. Her name was called again with an impatient bark to the voice emerging from the small speakers in the walls. The shaking was recommencing, but several flashes of images behind her eyes forced her to pull herself much faster now.

 As Stella got up from the chair, bracing herself further, she had a brief vision. She saw a winter sea in the morning. The monotonous heavy laden waves were flowing to the shore with mesmerising regularity; the vastness was spreading out into horizon with its iodine smell of antiquity and indifferent witnessing to the whims of the land. The beach was deserted except for her standing on the blunt stones, their hardness imprinted on her soles, her shoes being so very thin and inadequate for hard walks. Her shock at realising that a frantic dot in the distance was herself, her speech-able double, drowning. She was overwhelmed again and was unable to do anything, each pore of her skin filled with an acute sense of inadequacy and self-loathing.

Being reminded of her recurring nightmare right now had made her body frozen stiff. She stood there numb and frightened and statuesque.

The camera above the door slashed the silence with its mechanical movement, it focused on her closer. The voice from the intercom sounded out infuriated and roared her name again with a warning.

There was nothing for it; she had to go through the door...its loud lock clicking behind her back flooded her veins with sub-zero cold, she shivered.

Stella entered a very short featureless corridor and walked to the office as briskly as she could. It was plain, strictly utilitarian room. There were not even lifeless paintings or self-sufficient plants there, only machines and white paint. Behind the long desk that was situated at the centre, cutting the room in half was a window that covered the whole wall.  The wall leaned in angle into the street and she was met with a view of fast cars and trains right underneath her, introducing vertigo. 

The officer who sat by the desk must have been used to the staggering force of the view on most of his clients and applicants.  Knowing that for the few minutes she would stand there flabbergasted he did not even turn to welcome her and busied himself looking through the endless details fed into the floating computer screen in front of him.

She shook herself from the shock earlier than he predicted which afforded her a moment to examine him. Although she was prepared for the sight that was to meet her, which species exactly she was going to encounter was still the element of surprise. The few years she had to deal with the authorities didn’t erase this somewhat childish curiosity in her. The perfectly tailored suit, dark grey with the white shirt with purple vertical stripes, betrayed a Doberman in a prime of age, in great health. He oozed determination and ambition.  He sat in the desk straight and relaxed although his muscles were taut to their maximum. Stella braced herself again; this was not going to be an easy meeting at all.

Finally the dog-headed official turned his head to acknowledge her. His stern look was somewhat spoiled by the string of saliva falling from his mouth, a mechanical hand shot up from the desk and wiped him as soon as he growled. More than her presence, it brought tenseness, irritability in the room. As he spoke, in the back of her mind, Stella prepared herself for being humiliated; it would have been expected after his embarrassing beginning of their encounter.

“Stella 568B, ZD-Block, Assembly of Endless Joy.” He started with reiterating her data. “Stella 568B; ready yourself to answer or receive coupon for Judgement!” He barked at her as she failed to respond.

She corrected her posture to its stiffest stiffness and saluted him, his office and to the Kingdom itself and affirmed with a jerky nod her given identity. Given as if she had anything of her own! She muttered to herself in her startled mind. The dog-man bared his teeth but restrained his further aggression and with a tinge of embarrassment rushed to pick up a tissue to wipe away stray foam of saliva.  Since Stella’s lips couldn’t form a smile, she smiled within herself, ‘ha! So he wishes to be fully human!’

He pointed to her to sit down opposite him and then indicated for her to watch the screen that doubled and spread itself in front of her. Soon she realised that the clip was a portion of her working day. Only she couldn’t work out what she had done wrong and what she was being reproached for. All her conduct was static, obedient, and scrupulously observant of all requirements laid upon her and countless others in her position. She sneaked a look at the dogman. He was sniffing her emotions and beating into his keyboard furiously. Reporting. If she could, she would have bit his head off, literary. There was nothing in the room and the whole building that she could smash and use as a knife to drive it deep through the tailored clothes into the musky flesh, his report written with his own blood. Sent to his superiors, to the Head of the Heads, and fed to them as an omen. But since even revolution would be mechanised in the slimmest chance of it ever happening, it’d only spoil their digestion for one night and that’d be all, and for her there would be ‘compulsory self-liquidation’. Tick herself off the stock whilst they were laughing at her with their shrieking, owlish skull piercing blades of sounds! No, no, no!

Though she knew he’d have registered her flitter of anger, she hoped that it’d be written off for the bigger crime of whatever she committed already and was being shown here. To her, it just looked like her every day, same mechanical movements from machine to machine, from feeding her requests into them and taking commands and pressing buttons.

He spoke, she didn’t hear him at first, but he snarled now from the depth of his slimy throat. “Well, answer for your terrible behaviour!”

She took a deep nasal breath; a liquid cold heat enveloped her at once. Though she knew it could be a mortal mistake the minute she put her fingers to the keyboard in front of her, it was too late – her fingers were moving faster than her will to control it. During the mid-sentence she was already disassociating herself from the scene, as she saw herself writing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everything I’ve done is adhering perfectly to the protocol.” The silence in the room that followed cracked like a fast forming ice and then became deadly between their stares. Strangely Stella’s mind was so perfectly emptied and peaceful, even her trembling stopped, though it wasn’t to last very long, soon he cut the thick atmosphere with a loud snort.

“I will forget this and will play you this again, if you will not answer for yourself this time, you will be deported to territory D with immediate effect. Do you understand?”

She nodded her head that weighed a ton, and hated him even more. There he was thinking himself charitable, no doubt about that he has felt more brave making such a mistake in his protocol and less a dog than a human.  When the completion of his mutation process will be final, he’ll prove his new-found identity with accentuated cruelty. She was only lucky not to have sat in that chair at that point. On the other hand he wouldn’t be here when that happened – with the cunning ambition that steamed out from his skin invisibly but palpably, he will be promoted in no time at all.

There was the scene with its decipherable crime; all she could see was the drudgery. She felt his eyes burrowing into her flesh, digging for her reactions, their slightest murmur of their change. Then she realised what the bastards caught her for. There, right in front of her the frame showed her looking into the machine for one moment, her face betraying forbidden emotions and thoughts. It was no more than five seconds. It was enough to send her here and on the way to be corrected. She scraped the defences, real or even made up; she knew they’d only make it worse.

She knew that now was the moment to denounce herself. If she didn’t, going beyond that frame and not giving herself up would be stacked against her with punishment accumulating. She did it quietly but with a strange calm. Funny how she was scared all this time of this, this very moment but the moment it came the fear was transmuted into a completely different emotion. Was it so strange to find it now, in this very situation?

He read her some official garbage, the barren words fell on her, pricked her as icicles. She understood herself to be under voluntary detention, soon to be self-reporting at the administration of the Courts.

She watched him walking around the table and only braced herself for the retina imprint. When he pushed the laser pen with the provisional number of her crime she didn’t give him the satisfaction of flinching with pain as his ink gun stung her terribly as her eye fought to close against the intrusion.

“I’m sorry.” He startled her so much saying it that she jerked only to make him growl-shout at her. She realised that he wasn’t sorry for hurting her but for his saliva landing on the dark cloth she was wearing. Annoyed at revealing his weakness to her, his nearly insane wish to be fully transformed and fulfilling his destiny and embarrassed by his clumsy gesture, he has grabbed her arm again, pushed her to hold her eye open for him again and imprinted one more digit, his hand-paw shook so bad one number stung more than the rest altogether.

 If he lessened her punishment to stall her using it against him or brutalised the conditions so to make sure her time was cut before she would be able to inform anyone about the incident was impossible to say, she was not going to find out till she was processed. It wasn’t her blackmail he was avoiding, for what she could do to him was harmless, but the threat of those whom she’d tell it to, was enough for him to safeguard himself. He fastened a metal bracelet around her wrist and gave her the marching orders out of the office.

A step followed a step; her eyes registered the changing walls, the doors she walked through, the elevator’s marble finish, the cold gold light reflecting of its black, the entrance, but her mind was elsewhere, catapulted somewhere within her, grown so small and unreachable.

There she was in the underground shuttle, squeezed by the other bodies, pushed by them as if they were waves. ‘If only they were’ she thought. She had to fight a strange sleepiness that was seeping into her every pore. She tried to concentrate on the faces around her, on the muffled words. The smell of the masks on people’s faces was wafting off strongly; it returned her to the memories of her childhood, of the way some houses used to smell after the rain, at the same time she fought this memory as the nostalgia was unbearable, as a knife turning around in her and carving the uneven shapes of pain into her inner flesh. When the hole in the ground spat her out into the street, she found her mind pushed into the white mist of weird amnesia, she didn’t fight it, and she lay in it as if in a cushion.

Mechanically she found the long queue which snaked far from the door and stood where she was located. Utterly still in the cold or in the stale air in the entrance where each code was being read by the bleeping machine and searched by the towering men-animals clad in all-resistant clothing and sowed in hard armour. Even their faces had metallic protection – who knew what they really looked like, their faces forged with the thin but impenetrable lead. Here and there they grabbed someone and dragged them away, out of sight. What happened to them was unknown even if the punishment territories had their names in their lists. Nobody moved a muscle, everyone acted as if nothing was happening. No one spoke up for them. The minute they were marked they became even more invisible than they were one to another already. The rest of the queue was handed out tokens that they’ve pressed into the small machine’s holes in the walls by the various doors they were shown to go to through the long shiny corridors, the steel elevators that dispersed them around the building to the hands of their processing officials. At the end they were marched to the shuttle, the long and enforced buses that took them to various destinations in the territories at the edge. It never stopped, not even during the night, twenty four hours the tokens clicked into the slots, doors opened with a soft quiet swishing noise, efficient murmur of lift mechanisms, wafting voices, rising high and low, coming and going like waves. Whispers, buzzing, ringing, screaming, muffled mouth-escaping cries.

She waited for hours on end. When she saw her officer was fully transformed human, she swallowed hard. This was no good. The extra digit meant her crime’s weight tipped to the heavy duty punishment. Everything that was said passed by her, she was deaf to it all and mechanically written long confession to all suggested there, wishing to be done with it. Who cared whether what she confessed to was lie or a truth. The only time she became roused was when she was asked to give names. A useless question she thought to herself. Those close to her, only by a manner of being colleagues, were already driven out of their cubicles, hauled into the street, marching to the building, answering its endless call.

Fifty days later her skeletal body was collecting worms from the muddy ground with countless other bodies, the rich bounty of Earth’s soil. They no longer bothered to cover them with chemicals to expunge the dead from all attention of the (still) living.