The Conversion Bureau

Shattered Worlds

        The metro was relatively quiet at 3 a.m. in the morning, something that Dave was thankful for. He grinned shyly at his girlfriend, and she pressed herself closer with an answering smile. As one of the only truly mass-transit systems still in use, it was a treat to ride the London Metro to somewhere other than to or from the workplace. During the day, free-ride ticket prices were too high for recreational travel, at least for the likes of Dave and his girlfriend, but the night-time runs were affordable.

        Dave Cooper held onto his girlfriend Gwen's hand tightly, it was truly exciting. The lights buzzed noisily in the red sector workers' section of the platform, but they were lit. Real, electric lighting! The doors were electric, too, whooshing open as the trains stopped, letting on and off the few travellers there were at the almost-deserted station.

        London had been hit hard by the fuel crisis in Europe, when the world's economy went not only belly up, but for all intents and purposes was left dead and buried for well over a decade. The wheels of industry did what they always do, however, and turned anew. Old coal reserves and gas pockets that had been abandoned in better days as uneconomical to mine were eventually reopened, and with the renewed availability of not only biofuels but honest-to-god hydrocarbons, London and therefore Britain slowly began to claw herself out of the hole. Power returned for good as the country once again discovered the magic of nuclear fission. Fusion was so much cleaner, but the infrastructure to mine and transport the required helium-3 isotopes were beyond what had become of the British Empire. It wasn't, however, beyond its ability to accept - for a hefty payment - materiel which certain countries were laughably calling 'nuclear waste'. Britain had invested, long ago, in a very limited number of Fast Bed Reactors. They could burn any sort of nuclear fuel, and so accepting 'nuclear waste' just meant being paid twice: once by those donating something they were unable to deal with, and once again by the public with an appetite for electricity which, so far, outstripped demand.

        Mothballed test-bed reactors could only take things so far, but that 'so far' was fifty years or more in the future. The elite had time to come up with replacements. In the meanwhile, electricity was flowing again - if in measured amounts. One of the things which a relative abundance of electricity could resurrect was the London metro system. It was this metro which Dave Cooper and his girlfriend Gwen Samson were about to take a trip on.

        Red Sector workers would cram into the cars every morning and every evening as they spent a good proportion of their meagre pay to attend the workplace and then trudge home again. Dave and Gwen, however, were looking for something a bit more romantic. Dave had planned this for months, and had eventually cobbled together enough funds to make it happen; he now had tickets to the metro and an honest-to-god reservation at a restaurant. One that sold, if the rumours were true, real food rather than nano-reconstructed facsimiles.

        With his love by his side and a spring in his step, Dave boarded the metro. Idly, he fingered the small, velvet-covered box in his pocket. Nothing could go wrong.

        It took barely twenty minutes to prove him wrong, to prove him very, very wrong.

***

        "Alright, ladies and gents! Listen up: things is gonna be simple, a'ight?"

        There hadn't been much screaming, yet. The trip had been everything they'd hoped for, at first, but then the lights in the metro had flickered, and then the train had stopped. This was nothing entirely unusual, and most of the passengers had thought nothing of it, especially at three in the morning. After a few moments of silence - punctuated only by flatulence, suffulence and the occasional angry murmur - the train had started moving again, only backwards. When it became clear that the train had been shunted off the main line, that's when people started worrying.

        The trip after that was short, and the train came to rest at a deserted - and in fact abandoned - station. The doors remained closed, and the lights went out again. Before anyone could act, however, the gang had struck. Doors had been first forced open, and then blocked with oversized thugs. Multiple carriages' worth of passengers had been herded into one under the threat of bodily harm, and then a relatively small, feral-looking bloke had noisily cleared his throat until silence had reigned. Then he had started speaking.

        "It's gonna be simple. Everybody listen up, and nobody gets hurt. This here train requires a donation, to our good selves, if you want to continue your journey. You will empty your pockets and deliver any cash and or valuables you have upon your person to our volunteers who will very shortly be mingling amongst you fine people."

        "What if we don't got nuffin'?" came the inevitable objection.

        Mouth tut-tutted. "That would be unfortunate, it just means you have to work off the debt. Don't worry, my associates here will be pleased to assist you in this."

        The man's 'associates' grinned. They weren't kind gestures.

        Dave didn't like the sound of that. "Stick by me, honey, we'll be okay."

        "But, love... I don't..." Gwen started crying.

Dave gulped, and put his arm around her. "It's okay, hon, it'll be okay," he whispered. He reached into his pocket and took out the wad of bills. They were dirty, and torn, but they were legal tender. He pressed them into his girlfriend's hand, closing her fingers around them. She looked at him, shocked. He just smiled, softly, and shook his head. "I told you, 'til death do us part, hon. It'll work out, you'll see."

        Big, hefty bruisers with plastic bags stomped through the crowd. Those who could pay were, one at a time, shuttled through to the other carriages. Those who could not were herded out onto the filthy, debris-laden platform. When it came her time, Gwen fearfully held out the money. The man leered, snatching at it.

        "T'ain't enough fer both of ya. Girly wanna pay some other way?"

        "Anything, please... j-just let us go?"

        Dave squared his shoulders, "Fuck off, she's paid."

        "Yeah, but you ain't, boy."

        "You want everyone else to see you being a bad sport? Let her go." Dave glared.

        Bruiser leered, but stood back and gestured to the door. Gwen ran through it, in tears. Then the brute turned back to Dave. "Come on, then."

        Dave grit his teeth and reached deep into his pockets, pulling out the ring he'd been planning to give Gwen. He opened the small, velvet-covered box, showing it off. It was silver-plated, and it had what could pass for zirconium, in a good light, set into a pretty inlay. It had cost less than the metro tickets, but it had been all he'd had left.

        "That ain't enough for a ticket out, sport."

        Dave glared. "Then it's yours if you make sure she's safe. Otherwise I'll throw it out. Or swallow it. It isn't much, but it'll get you something."

        Bruiser sneered and pocketed it. "Get over there with the rest of the meat."

        Dave watched, relieved, as the train vanished into the tunnels. His reverie was broken by the loud tapping of a solid lead pipe on the walls, as the thug he had nick-named 'Mouth' spoke up.

        "This way, ladies and gents, it ain't far. No dawdling."

        Still there wasn't any screaming, just sniffles and moans. They were all too down-trodden to scream perhaps, mused Dave. It wasn't as if they all didn't get mugged for spare change relatively regularly. This couldn't be much worse. Just as long as they weren't organ leggers, and he highly doubted anybody would want him as a sex-slave. Perversely, the thought almost made him laugh. He bit his tongue to stop the manic grin, and kept his head down.

        The trip through the abandoned platform complex was over relatively quickly, and the group was ushered out into a brightly-lit, secluded and warm space. The air was fetid but breathable, and a good deal cleaner than Dave had expected it to be. They were made to line up, men on one side and women on the other. they do want us for sex-slaves. At least there's no children. thought Dave to himself. He watched bemusedly as a bearded younger man with blue eyes and a dirty white labcoat made cursory inspections of all the prisoners. He roughly turned their heads this way and that, forced their mouths open and peered down their throats and pried at anything that looked out of place.

        He's checking for implants, realized Dave. They weren't sex-traffickers, or even organ-leggers. It was far worse than that. Dave's worst fears were confirmed when a keg was dragged out, and measured doses of purplish fluid was tipped into small cups.

        "Right, my lovelies, here's how it's going to be. My mate Ron up there," said Mouth as he gestured to a man on a gantry, "has a gun. He's got more than enough bullets for all of you. First sign of trouble, you all die. You'll all take a cup and take a drink and have a little bit of a lie down. And then, when you wake up, we'll discuss paying off your debt, alright?"

        Precisely one woman screamed. Ron's gun barked, and she went down in a spray of red.

        Mouth, who still hadn't introduced himself, tut-tutted loudly. "You want to know how useful that was?" He motioned to one of his heavies, who picked up a cup with tongs. Another slit the dead woman's belly open, whilst the first poured the mixture in. Seconds later, the still-twitching form turned waxen and white as it began to lose definition.

        "See, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. Hard way just means I'll have even less use for your mind, and we'll have to... take it out of your body. Vices are cheap these days, folks."

        Dave felt sick as more than a few of the heavies made lewd thrusting motions with their hips. More than a couple high-fived. He could guess who'd be doing the 'breaking in'. He couldn't even feel sad, barely angry. He didn't want to be some fuck-toy, pony or not, so when it came his time, he downed the potion without a second thought.

The ground came up to meet him.

***

        Dave opened his eyes. The dream had been... confusing. Confusing and confused both. A deserted wasteland, a broken-down castle, the distant sound of hooves... and sadness. So much sadness. And yet joy.

        The real world wasn't making much sense either, it was full of odd smells and strange sounds, and a good deal of pain which felt oddly distant and detached. It took a good thirty seconds for his addled brain to put two and two together, before he realized that the pain in the area he'd prevoiously called his crotch and the insistent whirring of a powerdrill were linked. Jerking his head around, a motion which just caused more pain as his hind legs were gripped tighter and forced back apart, he realized that the man in the white coat had a wrench of some sort fixed to the drill, and the chords of a very personal part of his reproductive anatomy clenched in the grip of the wrench. The wrench was rotating, slowly but surely, until with a slight tug the man pulled something roughly spherical away.

        "That's the second one," the man said as he deposited it in a bucket. He took a swig from a bottle filled with a clear liquid, and then poured a goodly amount through two surprisingly small holes just south of a strange pouch-like protrusion on the pony he was operating on, out of which was poking Dave's... well, stallionhood. Dave had often joked about being hung like a horse. Now he was, for all the good it would do him. He whimpered, it hurt and he was being held uncomfortably and he felt sick and hungry, and most of all he wanted to go home, so Gwen could hold him and tell him it would be all better.

        "Let him down, the sooner he's up and about the better." The man straightened his labcoat and clapped his hands together. "Now they're all gelded, the pigs won't bother you. Just keep 'em out of sight for a while. Now, about my payment, you got it? And the stuff?"

        "Sure do, Charlie-boy." Mouth handed over a thick wad of bills and a few bottles of a tan-coloured liquid to the wannabe-doctor, who secreted the latter into his pockets before counting the bills.

        "Where's the rest, you bastard?"

        Mouth grinned, "Oh come now, Charlie, you want us to pay top whack for a few minutes with a powerdrill?"

        "You want them to bleed out, next time? Fucking go ahead, I won't be cleaning it up." Charlie glared. Mouth snorted and pulled out another wad of bills. "Pleasure doing business with you."

***

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