The engines were monstrous things, squat and slick with oil-tainted condensation. All it took was a hand in the wrong place and another engineer would be lost to the brutal pistons, nothing left but remnants of their gear and a red tinge to the oil.
Stopping the engines was a rare event but a necessary one - too many bodies tended to clog up the pipes further down and put a slow, crunching halt to the factory though it felt like the whole world went quiet. Beneath the glistening bulk were always at least three bodies, shredded, wrung dry and barely recognisable as human.
They were never untangled from each other. Every engineer was buried in the same old mine chute with a few kind words from their comrades and as many shovels of dirt tossed down as they could spare. Nobody went there to mourn, too many restless souls all trying to climb out displaced any sense of peace it might have held.
The dead were left to rot and everyone else fought for scraps of their old uniforms as tokens to ward off their soul, should it actually climb out. Most made it about halfway at best before another dragged them down and tried to escape instead. The dead don't pity each other.
As soon as a new engineer joins they are taken to the burial pit to see their predecessors, to understand their mortality and their legacy. They are given their tools, usually the belongings of the recently deceased, and asked to give their blood to the engines in appeasement of the souls still trapped within and beneath it.
They almost never refuse and those that do find themselves dreaming of faces being crushed beneath the pistons,. They dream that their blood is the oil and oil is their blood and the engine is a creature with the face of their father and all it has ever asked for is what it gave them.
Life.
Stopping the engines was a rare event but a necessary one - too many bodies tended to clog up the pipes further down and put a slow, crunching halt to the factory though it felt like the whole world went quiet. Beneath the glistening bulk were always at least three bodies, shredded, wrung dry and barely recognisable as human.
They were never untangled from each other. Every engineer was buried in the same old mine chute with a few kind words from their comrades and as many shovels of dirt tossed down as they could spare. Nobody went there to mourn, too many restless souls all trying to climb out displaced any sense of peace it might have held.
The dead were left to rot and everyone else fought for scraps of their old uniforms as tokens to ward off their soul, should it actually climb out. Most made it about halfway at best before another dragged them down and tried to escape instead. The dead don't pity each other.
As soon as a new engineer joins they are taken to the burial pit to see their predecessors, to understand their mortality and their legacy. They are given their tools, usually the belongings of the recently deceased, and asked to give their blood to the engines in appeasement of the souls still trapped within and beneath it.
They almost never refuse and those that do find themselves dreaming of faces being crushed beneath the pistons,. They dream that their blood is the oil and oil is their blood and the engine is a creature with the face of their father and all it has ever asked for is what it gave them.
Life.
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