The Regime: Urban 'Renewal'

As stated in last night's bonus upload, the More Captions poll ended in a tie. I decided to work on the 'Park Bench' caption first, with the runner-up being Monday's upload. As you can see, Park Bench was simply a placeholder title, based on what was in the image.

Full disclosure, this one is dark, with some body horror. It also got away from me near the end. I blame a bit of that on my job, as I wrote this on my phone during my down time at work...that ended up not being so, well, down.

TEXT

The possible near-future. With skyrocketing housing prices and predatory landlords, the homes population in urban areas had punched through being an epidemic and into a full blown meltdown. There were huge camps in the streets, in the parks, tunnels and even people living in utility corridors and infrastructure access points. The next election cycle took advantage of this chaotic situation and allowed a far more hyper-conservative party to seize power. It did not take them long to dismantle the old government, reversing basic human rights and simple freedoms on those that did not fit in their view of what a 'true society' should be like. This included free elections. What the party had been called eventually fell out of use and was instead placed with a far more fitting title; the Regime. And one of the problems the Regime and its Glorious, Genius Great Leader was determined to fix was the 'blight' of homeless that were 'polluting' the city streets. Nanomachines, extremely small robots that could tear things apart at the smallest level and reconstruct them into any shape and form. Thus, the police were given authority to 'renew' urban areas that had been 'infested' with the homeless. All they needed were nanomachines in their canisters, a tarp, stun-sticsk and those unfortunate enough to be enemies of the horrible new state.

"Please! Just let us go! We'll...we'll go camp in the woods! Please!" Sam, leader and former military veteran cried, his desperate, dirty face reflecting off the visor of the Renewal Cops. His small groups of friends, Kelsey, Heidi, John, Zack, Ian and himself had been jumped at dawn by the cops despite their efforts to remain hidden. A brutal stun stick beating later and they were now bound with zip ties and laid prone on a silvery tarp.

"And pollute our pristine forests with garbage? No, I don't think so. You had your chance to contribute to the new world. This was your choice. Pour it out, guys" The squad captain said with a dark chuckle, and the other Renewal Cops joined in as they began pouring the nanomachines onto the tarp, whose magnetic currents would  keep the tiny little machines contained until the job in front of them was done. From each side of the tarp, a gray metallic looking liquid poured out from each canister, spreading quickly across the equally silver surface of the tarp. 

The group of homeless individuals screamed even louder until the faceless cop activated the sound dampener, muffling the pleas of the damn as the flood of nanomachines crawled over their bodies began pulling their bodies apart. It was a surprisingly bloodless affair as the nanomachines covered the group in a mound of shimmering, shifting grey. There were hundreds of billions of the tiny machines active, digging into dirty akin and breaking it apart, coating bone and nerve endings as the people they belonged to were painfully deconstructed into nothing a pile of formless biomass. The Renewal Cops carefully folded the tarp in on itself, looking almost like heavily armed garbage men as they loaded the heavy bag of nanomachines and biomass into one of six large freezer-shaped boxes known as 'Reclamation Tanks'. And then the oppressors were off to raid new camps as the second phase of the strange technological process began within the Reclamation Tank. The original swarm of nanomachines, the Deconstructors, were neutralized with a blast of radiation and flushed out. New nanomachines were automatically poured in and coated the mass of flesh, swiftly getting to work, following a carefully written program. Within the confines of the tarp, the oozing mass began to be put back together. Piece by piece over the course of the day a new being slowly began to appear.

It was human shaped, of course, but any doubts that it was decidedly female were quickly erased as the nanomachines piled fat tissue after tissue onto the torso of the prone form as two huge breasts rose to prominence beneath the shimmering grey. Long, slender arms with small, dainty nails sprouted into existence, joining two long, toned legs. A trim abdomen sat between the Titanic tilts and the wide, child bearing hips andxrear of the new woman as a momentary bulge in the crotch collapsed inwards as the last of the new woman's organs were built from the shapely biomass. A skull formed, with high cheek bones and a small nose. Soon the nanomachines began costing the voluptuous body with fair skin, releasing charges of electrical energy that hardened the fair, hairless epidermis until the woman was a pale beauty, her lips becoming wide and puffy while her skin developed just the right amount of sensitivity. Hair growth was stimulated, and strand after strand of dark hair began to coat the woman's bald head, as well as appearing in a small patch in her crotch. As the hours rolled by and the boxes within the police tank were filled with similar stories, hers was almost finished. Or perhaps, ready to begin. The biomass that was no longer useful was flushed from the tank, this was the 'worthless' excess biomass, the diseased genetics, discarded bone and brain matter, most of it from the four men of the homeless encampent. They had been converted into the equivalent of waste water, and it, along with the other unfortunates in the other Reclamation Tanks, were drained out of the police vehicle, leaving a wet, red-brown smear on the pavement as it rumbled past. But now the most complicated task the nanomachines faced was bringing intelligence and sapience to the biomass. The almost magical machines had built the woman a new brain, the neural pathways having been carefully pieced together but lacking any sparks beyond autonomic responses. The woman, once six individual beings, was nothing more than a newborn. But this did not stop technology

The nanomachines stimulated the new woman's body as her unblinking eyes were force fed information. Basic knowledge of how to walk, talk, the base functions of a human being was poured into her brain...Along with plenty of propaganda that suited the Regime's political purposes. She would be intelligent enought to function...But only just. Individuals with intelligence were threats, after all. No, the new woman would be better dumb, relying on her good looks to provide a measure of visual and sexual comfort to the Regime's citizens, as she was also being programmed with more than a little knowledge in how to satisfy men and women. Similar tales would play out in the tanks surrounding her as the Regime 'repurposed' what it saw as refuse into 'socially accepted' individuals. Eventually the re-education was complete, and the new woman had a simple yet appealing set of clothing wrapped around her, courtesy of the nanomachines. She was given a new identity, Jessica, a secretary at a nearby office. She lived in authorized government housing. She was given a stipend to assist her in her first few months of life until she was firmly established at her job, or more expectedly, as the trophy of a rich executive and Regime official, such were her good looks.

The police vehicle rolled to a stop at the small park in front of Jessica's assigned work facility. They pulled the dazed, airheaded new woman out of the tank as her brain began to fully engage, and deposited her gently onto a nearby park bench. She blinked dumbly as flashes of the Renewal Cops frightened her for just a moment...but the police were her friends! They were fixing all the horrible problems and making the, um, Reggie thingy strong!

They even gave her a free ice cream while she finished her morning break! It was just a great day to be alive, and Jessica smiled sweetly as they looked her over for a moment before piling in their large car and rolling away. Just another lovely day to be alive and a citizen of the Regime!