2

McDonald was driving home late at night. At this hour, the bustle of the city had subsided and the streets were deserted. The doctor steered his new Subaru along the dark thoroughfares like a stray bacterium. He was faint with fatigue. His eyes were sticky, and his head felt like a stone tied to his neck. He struggled to keep his eyes on the road ahead. He blinked persistently to regain focus, gripping the steering wheel tightly. His numb leg rested on the gas pedal. The car drove through the deserted neighborhoods quietly and slowly—as if it were about to stop at any moment. As if the doctor were just looking for a place to park and sleep—his head resting on the wheel. The Subaru dragged, but it kept moving forward. It rolled down the empty eight-lane highway, driven only by momentum and the road's incline.

McDonald squinted. He winced. The streetlights irritated the cracked, veined whites of his skin. It caused him physical pain. The road ahead was just a blotch of salmon-colored light, and the city around him a uniform black stain, dotted with sporadic specks of light. As the world descended into darkness, silence, one would, willy-nilly, sink into oneself. The hum of chaotic thoughts lulled one to sleep. Strange visions flicker beneath drooping eyelids—like a screening of an alternative film in an empty cinema. Like a day in the life summarized in a short commercial, cut and pasted together by a mad editor. Echoes of past conversations thrummed dully, and the image was bright, distorted, accentuated; unreal and banal. The diffusion of cream in a cup of black coffee. The pale faces of the guards. The white ceiling of the laboratory, dotted with glaring halogen lights. The monotonous hum of working computers.

Only one image—the memory of one brief moment—gave the doctor no peace. It haunted him all day. Only when he hung up his white coat in his locker, packed his suitcase, and closed the institute door behind him did the intrusive thoughts vanish. Or so he thought. But as he drove through the sleeping city, the ghastly vision returned—bright and sharp: a headless creature tensing violently and lifting its neck as he inserted a needle into its arm to draw blood for routine tests. They didn't behave like that. They didn't respond to pain. They sensed only heat and cold. They fell asleep when the computer lowered the temperature in the hall and woke when it raised it. Stimuli were needed only to control them. To put them to sleep. To wake them. To immobilize them momentarily with a short electric shock—to prevent them from fidgeting during routine procedures. They were prone to involuntary, jerky movements—perhaps a defect that needed work, or perhaps just a side effect of having a brain the size of a pea. But they never consciously expressed aggression or nervousness. Meanwhile, No. 147 visibly tensed as the needle pierced his skin—like a man who didn't like injections—then lifted his neck, revealing the gaping hole in it to the doctor. McDonald tried to focus, but he kept glancing at the stump of his neck growing above the creature's sternum—right down into the gaping blackness of its esophagus. He couldn't shake the feeling that 147 was watching him warily. It was patently absurd. The headless creatures had neither eyes nor even a primitive optic nerve to detect changes in light. They had neither ears nor a sense of echolocation to locate objects in space. Therefore, 147 had no right to know the doctor was there. It was unlikely—indeed, doubtful—that he even realized he existed. The headless beings were about as aware of their own existence as a pocket calculator—and no more intelligent. They were controlled by a few buttons, activating or deactivating a few pre-programmed functions. There was no hint of even a rudimentary intelligence or any calculation in their actions. And yet, for those few moments—a very long half-minute—number 147 seemed to stare the doctor straight in the eye. As if something were watching McDonald from the depths of his dark esophagus.

After drawing his blood, the guard tossed 147 back into his cage, and the doctor was free to flee the hall, retreat to his lab, hide behind the monitors—safe at last. To deal with this, away from the white, pale, naked, headless beings who shouldn't exist.

The doctor suddenly snapped out of it and slammed on the brakes. The Subaru screeched to a halt in the middle of a zebra crossing, and a man stood frozen in front of the hood. He leaned against the hood, trying to regain his balance.

"You idiot," he yelled at McDonald, who was behind the wheel. He stepped back onto the seatbelt, where the doctor's Subaru had almost swept him away. He tapped his forehead. "Man, where's your head?

"

It might have been a matter of habit, or perhaps practice, but McDonald had to admit that the guards were definitely handling the situation better than he was. They carried out their duties efficiently and without complaint, even though their duties forced them into much more frequent and close contact with the headless beings. The doctor watched them closely and didn't notice the apprehension he himself couldn't overcome. The sight of their impassive faces calmed him. He couldn't say he liked them—he didn't really know them and, beyond purely professional exchanges of pleasantries and orders, hadn't exchanged a single word with any of them—but he looked more favorably on the few people with heads on their shoulders. He couldn't say he disliked the headless creatures. He had no reason to. He'd had minimal contact with them, too. He didn't know what the guards thought of them—after all, he didn't ask, and they didn't tell—but he wouldn't be surprised if they secretly hated them. After all, you don't have to like someone you clean up after. A farmer doesn't have to be fond of the cattle whose manure he shovels in the barn. Regardless, they treated the headless creatures with indifference, treating work with them like any other. One might wonder if it was moral to maintain such a cool professionalism in such a place—but is a good professional one one who cares about their job, or one who simply gets on with it? Who needs a butcher, for example, who cries and blows his nose into a handkerchief at the sight of gutted carcasses hanging on hooks? Come to think of it, it's a terrible sight, after all—but apparently, one shouldn't dwell on it. You have to do what you have to do—especially when you're getting paid for it. And that's exactly what the guards were doing—pulling headless creatures out of their cages, cleaning up after them, bathing them, feeding them, and even when they administered electroshocks, there was no malice in it. Just preventative care.

That day, the doctor arrived at the institute early. He hadn't been able to sleep the night before, so he finally dragged himself out of bed an hour earlier than usual and, after a leisurely breakfast, arrived at work early. He sat down in a chair and watched Hall 2 on a small monitor. Movement caught his eye—a handful of rapidly shifting pixels. He noticed with surprise that the guard was first tinkering with the computer responsible for the hall's heating, then approaching one of the cages and dragging a numb, headless woman out. It wasn't time for cleaning the cages—the guards did that around nine, after feeding, and it wasn't until after seven. And this guard had finished his shift a good half hour ago - but he was still here, patrolling the hall full of headless women.

Hall number two was occupied exclusively by females. Hall one, however, belonged entirely to headless men. They were kept separate, and used the exercise yard at different times—so they would never meet. This excessive caution, however, was a step in the right direction. After all, there were two hundred robust men and two hundred shapely women—completely naked, to boot. They were headless, true—which not only made them less attractive but also significantly impaired their thinking—but a man and a woman would always find a way to hook up. If snails could find each other with only four horns and provide for themselves, then headless humans could manage somehow. Therefore, this could not be allowed to happen.

The guard pushed the headless woman against the wall. He pinned her down with his forearm, and with his free hand, he unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly, and lowered his pants. Then he grabbed the woman around the waist and plunged his swollen, erect penis into her. The creature didn't react. She stood obediently against the wall, keeping herself upright, her arms dangling limply at her sides. The guard, with vigorous hip thrusts, drove her repeatedly into the wall. He squeezed his eyes shut and, running his thick, rough hands over her body, fucked her fiercely for several minutes. When it was over, he pulled out and tucked the item into his pants as if nothing had happened. Then—as in routine procedure—he led her to the cage and locked it in.

The doctor changed the camera angle and zoomed in on the guard's face. He flinched and looked directly into the lens, startled by the grinding of the mechanism.

***