Discovery
1718 Words
The Iron Sheep
Bwang!
Bwang!
Bwang!
The sound came again, sharp and metallic, drilling into the skull.
Damian’s eyes snapped open. The dorm was still dim, bathed in pale fluorescent light. Rows of bunks stretched across the concrete hall, each one filled with a tired boy wearing the same white uniform. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and bleach.
“Alright workers, up! Up! Let’s get moving!”
The officer’s voice boomed through the megaphone as he paced between bunks, steel rod clanging against the floor. The same routine. Every day.
Damian rolled out of bed, his body moving on habit. He grabbed his towel, joined the long line toward the showers, and stood under the cold spray with the rest. The water was freezing, the soap was cheap, but nobody complained — complaints were punished.
After bathing, they all stood for roll call.
“Forty-three!”
“Present!”
“Forty-four!”
“Present!”
“Forty-five!”
“Present!”
“Forty-six!”
Damian raised his hand. “Present.”
The officer nodded, tapped something on his tablet, and moved down the line. When the list was done, they were marched through the corridor toward the main work floor.
---
The hall was exactly as it had been yesterday — and every day before that. A vast, white chamber lit by thousands of overhead lights. Each worker sat at a personal terminal, surrounded by tall glass walls.
Usually, Damian felt a spark of satisfaction sitting here. Fulfilling his Due Diligence meant purpose. It meant approval. It meant safety.
But today, that word —diligence— made him sick.
He sat down, fastened the monitoring collar to his neck, and stared at the screen.
The words WHITE WORKER DASHBOARD flashed across it. A biometric scan followed, and then his face appeared in the corner — younger than he felt, eyes dull, the name tag below reading simply:
> SUBJECT 46
> Department: Neural Analysis Unit 03
> Status: ACTIVE
He stared at the photo for a long moment.
“Who the hell am I, really?” he muttered under his breath.
Something was wrong with all of this — wrong in a way he couldn’t ignore anymore.
The faces around him typed quietly. None of them questioned anything. None even looked up. The idea of curiosity didn’t exist here.
But Damian couldn’t help himself.
He wanted to know what was beyond these walls. What waited past the checkpoints, past the fences, past the corporate insignia plastered on every surface.
He looked down at his screen again. Every menu, every function was locked. Even the simplest commands — copy, save, exit — were restricted.
A smirk touched his lips.
“You don’t think they called me the Iron Sheep for no reason, do you?” he whispered.
And then he cracked his knuckles.
He opened a hidden input console and began typing. The others glanced briefly, then looked away. To them, this was just 46 doing what he always did — working hard, typing faster than everyone else.
Only Damian knew the truth.
He wasn’t working.
He was breaking the system.
The screen flickered as lines of code appeared, one after another. He bypassed the first layer of access control easily — it was designed to stop ordinary workers, not someone who had once designed encryption systems for entire governments.
“Still lazy with your firewalls, huh?” he murmured, half amused.
Every few seconds, he paused and typed faster, burying false commands to make it look like he was doing his assigned tasks.
The trick wasn’t finding the weakness. There was barely any. The trick was creating one.
He isolated a dormant port — an unused internal communication line — and injected his own command sequence, forcing it open. Then he tunneled through, fingers moving faster than thought.
If anyone saw his screen now, it looked like standard workflow data. But beneath the surface, Damian was pulling up NeuroDyne’s internal archives.
The system resisted. Warning messages flashed. He suppressed them. A few beads of sweat rolled down his forehead.
And then — access granted.
A new file opened. It was labeled SUBJECT REGISTRY 01-150.
He scrolled through the list until he reached SUBJECT 46.
There it was. His full record.
> Subject Name: Elias Carden
> Date of Birth: September 9, 2119
> Age: 17
> Acquisition Type: Parental Debt Exchange
> Transaction Code: ND-A3-1204-Ω
> Condition: Neural Implant (Left Hemisphere Replacement)
> Status: Active – Compliant
Damian froze.
Elias Carden. That was his name here.
The next section showed a scanned image of two tired-looking adults — his parents — standing beside a man in a NeuroDyne suit. Behind them, he saw himself as a baby wrapped in a blanket. The transaction statement was signed by both parents.
> Debt Amount: 52,000 Kuts
> Payment method: Subject transfer (offspring).
Damian leaned back, his chest tightening.
“What the hell… is this even legal?” he whispered.
He scrolled down. The document had official seals, biometric stamps, everything. Legal in every way that mattered — because NeuroDyne made the laws now.
He clenched his fists, but then forced himself to breathe.
If this was true, there had to be more. Something bigger.
He dug deeper.
Just as he was opening another file, a red light blinked on the corner of his screen — a system sweep.
Someone was running a random security check on the worker terminals.
Damian’s heart jumped. He minimized everything, flooding his screen with fake reports — rows of fake neural data.
A guard walked by, glancing at his monitor.
“Still at it, 46?”
“Yes, sir,” Damian said calmly. “Just trying to finish the daily quota.”
The guard smiled faintly. “Good. The company values loyalty.”
He walked on. The light on the screen faded.
Damian waited ten long seconds before exhaling.
“That was close,” he muttered.
Then he reopened his console. He wasn’t stopping now.
His search led him deeper — into something called the Global Corporate Concord Archive.
There he found dozens of historical records and press files. Most were old, from over eighty years ago. He scrolled through them, eyes scanning fast.
> 2054 — Economic Crisis deepens. Nations impose emergency trade freezes.
> 2056 — Major corporations begin issuing private currencies.
> 2058 — Governments default on debts to private entities.
> 2060 — Economic warfare erupts. Cyberattacks between conglomerates destroy infrastructure.
> 2071 — The “Magnificent Five” emerge victorious.
Damian clicked one of the names.
There they were, the five giants that ruled the planet now:
1. NeuroDyne Industries — Bioengineering, AI, cybernetics.
2. Helios Energy Group — Global energy monopoly.
3. Vantage Systems — Weapons, defense, orbital platforms.
4. EverPharm Global — Medicine, gene editing, population control.
5. Ascend Astra — Space colonization and communications.
The governments still existed — but only in name. Real power had shifted.
As one article put it bluntly:
> “The Five decide who eats, who works, and who disappears.”
Damian scrolled faster, anger mixing with disbelief. He remembered something from his previous life — the same kind of greed that built empires, except now it had finished the job.
“Humanity didn’t evolve,” he muttered. “It just rebranded slavery.”
He was about to close the file when a new heading caught his attention.
> A New Beginning with the Qzhl’zhathl
The article was dated twenty-five years ago. Curious, he clicked it open.
A corporate broadcast transcript filled the screen.
> “NeuroDyne Industries and Ascend Astra are proud to announce a historic partnership with the Qzhl’zhathl Collective. Following six years of negotiation, a trade agreement has been reached to expand human potential beyond the stars.”
Beneath the text were images — not of humans.
They were tall, insect-like beings with translucent skin, long limbs, and eyes like mirrors. The captions described them as an extraterrestrial civilization that had “arrived through spatial convergence.”
The document went on:
> “Under the Accord, 20% of Earth’s real estate — 10% land, 10% ocean — will be allocated to the Qzhl’zhathl Collective in exchange for advanced biofabrication technology and access to non-terrestrial energy sources.”
Damian sat frozen, staring at the screen.
Twenty percent. Sold.
He scrolled further.
> “The partnership ensures a new dawn of prosperity and coexistence. Human advancement will be guided by the combined knowledge of NeuroDyne and the Qzhl’zhathl Collective.”
He felt his pulse race. “Coexistence?” he whispered. “You mean ownership.”
There were attached images of massive towers rising from the sea, strange glowing glyphs etched into their bases.
He didn’t understand everything he was seeing — but one thing was clear.
The world he’d known before he “died” was gone. The future wasn’t built by nations anymore. It was built by companies and aliens.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes wide, heart hammering.
His parents had sold him.
His freedom was a corporate asset.
And the company he worked for wasn’t even fully human anymore.
A quiet laugh escaped him — sharp, humorless.
He whispered to himself, “So this is what we built, huh, Damian? The perfect machine. No nations, no conscience, just profit.”
His reflection flickered faintly in the black screen. For a moment, he saw both faces — Elias Carden, the white worker, and Damian Veyron, the engineer who had helped design the kind of systems that now enslaved him.
It was poetic in the worst way.
Damian saved everything he could to a hidden memory cache buried under system logs — disguised as meaningless performance data. He had no clear plan yet, but he knew he needed one.
The truth couldn’t stay buried here.
And for the first time, the word “escape” wasn’t just fantasy.
He shut down the terminal and stood up slowly. Around him, the others kept typing, eyes empty. The sound of a thousand keyboards filled the air like rain.
Damian looked around at the sea of white uniforms.
He wasn’t sure how many could be saved. Maybe none. But he wasn’t going to die in this place.
He was done being a worker.
He was done being 46.
- Writer
