Autobiography of a Cleaner
There's a body in the showers. It is the fourth one this month. It's sitting on the floor of the Tehom Supermax, the most secure prison man has ever made. The metal cage sits at the bottom of a tidally locked world's ringed ocean, chained and reinforced to the seabed, with no windows or portholes, and a single armored airlock as the only entrance and exit. The place is multipurpose, serving as a detention center and execution facility. Nearly every aspect of the steel box is made to cause those within to die in some way. It's overpopulated, food isn't enough to keep the people inside healthy, lack of sunlight and proper vitamins causes depression, and the guards rarely step in to stop violence between inmates. Any of those could have led to the fresh corpse currently lying across the shower tiles.
The strange man with more scars than flesh, collapsed nude by the drain with soap and water mixing into his blood on the floor, his bones are brittle enough to break with minimal force, and his paper-white skin tore apart as I lifted him, pouring out a horrid mix of water, blood, and bile. Not much, however, only about three liters of viscera. A symptom of starving for too long, but it means less mess to clean. He's covered in bruises and wounds, round blood-filled lumps and gashes. If those were the cause of his death, I can not tell. I am not a mortuary drone. We have never needed one. No one cares how these people died.
My job is simple: disposal and decontamination. Every day since the creation of Tehom, I roll to the warden on ancient treads. I pass the cell blocks and see the inmates move into dark corners of their cells like injured animals finding a quiet place to die. The hall goes silent, save for the creaking of my rusted parts, as people hold their breath when I pass; they are afraid, and I understand why. Their bodies are cold and pale, like marine snow. Sunlight has not graced most of them in decades. I hear the cries of those who do not realize they are already dead echo through the halls from a distance, being drowned out by the constant churning of sixty miles of tides pushing against the walls, eager to spill in and crush this place.
When I arrive at the office, they hand me a green, yellow, or red cardboard card. Green cards are simple and by far the most common; a prisoner is dead. Scrape the body off the floor, then move it to the cremation furnace, then pack up the ashes and mail it to any family they have left. If they have none, I toss the ashes into the ocean to freeze or burn with the tide. Then go back and begin the actual work: scrub, brush, mop, and bleach the mix of dead skin, blood, and waste until there's nothing left but the smell of chemicals and a quickly fading memory of the deceased creature I just spent five hours scrubbing from the floor.
With yellow, it's an employee death, more uncommon and much more gruesome. Few employees go down without a fight. The purple and white pile of bones and meat is typically surrounded by comments written in the victim's feces and blood, demanding revolution or to be released, some threatening, some pleading, others mocking. One time, I found someone still writing when I got there, an emaciated inmate, clothes torn apart and hands covered in blood, nails chipped or broken. He looked to be in his eighties. Chances are, he has been here for most of those years. He was scrawling something like "enough is enough" on the wall in a mix of fluids he gathered from the ground. When he saw me, he had this look of horror, his face mangled with fear I've seen only in people's final moments. Then he screamed with lungs I could hear tearing themselves apart as he screeched and ran like a cockroach in bright light. I cleaned him up about three days later
Most yellow cards are a lot more work than green. They have final wishes; you can not toss them, their families want the bodies. Every time I get a yellow card, I have to pack up a full corpse into a one-square-meter steel box. Every time I have to break, chop, and drain more to get it to fit, and the excess is more to clean.
I have only ever gotten three red cards, all prisoners, most of the time during power outages or for unique prisoners. The first time I got one, it was a young man who was liked amongst the inmates, and even had people looking out for him. The power went out for a few days, and he was attacked by a group of prisoners with shivs. Another group got involved and broke it up, but far too late. When I woke up, I could hear his cries echoing from the walls, pleading for anyone to help, his mother to come back for him, how he wasn´t meant to be here, and how this wasn´t fair. When I got there, the other inmates were trying to hold his wounds, keep his blood in his body. There were about eight of them comforting him and trying to mend his wounds. Back then, they weren´t afraid of me. They looked at me like they looked at the walls, with complete indifference. They did not shrink away into their cells or hold their breath. They saw me as a tool. They yelled at me to leave, that ¨he wasn´t going to die¨ with tears in their eyes, they spoke with such certainty, and they were right. I knew this. I knew he could live if given time to heal, I knew he could recover, but I also knew the color of the card.
I moved closer, and some of them tried to hold me back, pushing their frail, emaciated bodies against my frame. They hit and screamed at me, I remember one yelling out in desperation ¨Guards! Please, the machines are broken! Turn it off, turn it off!” The guards ignored him. They knew what they had given me. I finally arrived at the bleeding man, grabbed him, and applied pressure to his neck until he stopped breathing. I could feel his esophagus collapse inwards in my hand. He tried to claw me off; the other inmates did too, but it didn't matter. They didn't have the energy, and they could barely muster much of anything. They tried to stop me anyway they could, punching, scratching, pleading, begging, threatening, even heard one call to the guards again ¨Please, somebody stop this thing, someone turn it off, anyone!¨ but it fell on deaf ears yet again.
I opened a central chamber in my body, an emergency generator that ran on biofuel in case the energy reserves went dry and the faculty needed me. Then I placed his body inside the chamber, a 0.70-meter metal box. He fought against it weakly; it was too small for his body, however, he would fit with some mild pressure. After about two minutes, the faculty was filled with the sounds that normally follow yellow cards. I closed the door on the central chamber, processed the corpse in a strange reverse 3D printing, in which every layer was broken away and redistributed, as I unmade the man one layer at a time. Then I left the way I came in.
My job is simple: disposal and decontamination.