In Nevada, it's mostly quiet. The way it's supposed to be. Sand and rocks and glorious, glorious space.
Teaming with life, but not to the naked eye. Billions of micro-organisms. Millions of insects. The small ones get eaten by larger ones, who in turn get eaten by larger ones. The cacti have adapted to the slow pace. They wait patiently for the rainy season. Sometimes you see a reptile scurry by.
Unspoiled, as long as you're outside city limits. But The Great Neon Sin has metastasized. A factory sits like a tumor, out of place, on the beautiful desert. Big as a fleet of Naval destroyers. Blocks of buildings connected by ducts, walkways, and cables. Forklifts, conveyor belts, trucks, and hard hats, transport crates, and palettes. Teams in space suits moving drums labeled, "WARNING BIOHAZARD."
The amount of logistics strains the brain. Someone had to design this plant. Someone had to build it. Someone has to run it. Someone has to decide how many supplies to buy every month, or week. Someone has to hire personnel. Someone has to calculate paychecks and taxes. It's amazing people are smart enough to figure all this out. Just stocking toilet paper in the bathrooms is a full time position.
They do it using the ancient geometry of the pyramid. People at the top organize. People in the middle supervise. And the rest do the work. Everything is broken down into a hierarchy. The power of organizing. It would be beautiful, if it wasn't so ugly. The facilities are so big that have their own police force and hospital. And this monstrosity, this mechanical snake squirming in the sun has a name: Capsulsgrave Confections Plant #90210.
Inside, the machines produce, package, box, and crate thousands of cookies and candies per second: Biskit Buddies, Ga-Ga-Roos, Hexachocolators, Lezmends, Skuzzles, Yummer-Gummers, Mommy Munchers, GreesBalz, Gooey-Gummies.
The facility also has extensive research labs, full of glass tubes, and digital analyzers, chemicals, and scientists. One building is called The Zoo. Rows upon rows of animal cages, like a penitentiary, like a low-income high rise--monkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits, cats, dogs, and rats.
Facing one long assembly line, a motivational poster of The Pretty Pie Girl is on the wall. She has her sleeve rolled up and she's making a fist. She's saying, "HARD WORK EARNS YOU VACATION DAYS." Depressed face workers toss baby chicks into the grinder, without end. The long screw turns at a rate that never slows. You wouldn't want to get your hand caught in that thing. They have it a safe distance away, but it's scary looking. Those poor chicks. They don't suffer much. It grinds them so fast, they're dead in less than a second. In this life, if you die quick, you're ahead of the game. The workers wear gloves, not for protection, but to keep the blood off. There's no meat in the candy; they sell the chum to Chicken King, which is also owned by F.U.C.T., and makes chicken balls out of it. Capsulsgrave only uses the beaks, which give certain products the proper crunch, which people like.