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“...Jesus, you really gorged today, huh?”
No answer. There never was.
The machine didn’t reply. The fact that it had the approximate face of a human made no difference on the code within - when it stepped back into the recharging and repair bay, any hint of it being even remotely alive faded away, replaced with the simple stares of a steel mannequin staring back at her. Jess had gotten used to Unit-889B’s lack of outward emotion, just like most other engineers no doubt had with their own machines, but that didn’t make it any more comfortable to be its sole focus.
The thing before her wore the shape of a humanoid, nothing more. What lay beneath was nothing more than the mechanical equivalent of a near-bottomless pit with only one defined directive. Leave empty, return full. She wasn't even sure that it ever got instructions on who was a valid target - perhaps it didn't matter. She wasn't paid to question it.
Some days, the "mission" would leave little more than a light dent in the machine's middle - a gentle swell of a couple of well-processed rebels, or the slightly-more-visible bulge of a few hostile targets that had been hunted down and disposed of. Nothing more surprising than seeing a normal human looking sated and stuffed after a heavy meal.
This was not one of those days.
The plating along Unit-889B’s midsection bulged outward, the seams of its armored carapace stressed and strained in a way that only metal plating could endure. Beneath the dull armour came- the steady churn of hydraulics compensating for the excess weight, and under that, softer sounds. A mechanical churning, the busy ambience of an artificial digestive system that was overpacked so tightly that it was almost clogged with fresh meat, the electrochemical engine within the unit's chest humming at an elevated pitch as it tried to brute-force the digestive process.
Jess swallowed. She keyed the release on the abdominal shell. The locks popped one by one, and the armour withdrew with a hydraulic hiss, immediately buckling outwards as the reinforced strips lost their connection to the main frame and were fully subjected to the sheer solid weight pressing outward from the machine’s meat-clogged guts. Something creaked from the strain, but the armour held, shifting slightly as the bodies within writhed against the slight amount of extra space they had been afforded.
Supposedly, you got used to it.
She had been working as an engineer for these units for a decade and a half, and she had never gotten over the speed, the precision, the cold efficiency with which her charge could reduce half a dozen captives to a slurry of liquified, pulped biomass within a matter of hours. If anything, she had practically pavlov'ed herself into seeing it as a reward - the sign that her day's pay was coming, the sign that she could go off-duty for the next ten hours and get back to her bunk.
She was stalling. Her hands were hovering over the plating, trying to think of a reason not to open it.
Before she could stop herself, she was leaning forward, the tip of her finger pressed lightly against the lower portion of the plate. The surface was warm, the metal heated up from the constant internal pressure. Her fingertip traced along the seam, the movement drawing the machine's attention. It remained still, as silent and unmoving as the rest of the bay, but it kept its attention on her - and the slightest twitch of its gaze was all she needed to know that her touch had been noticed.
"Sorry. Just, uh... thinking."
Again, no reply. It didn't care.
Her hand pulled away, her eyes quickly returning to the task at hand, nervously unhooking the final pieces keeping the armour strained around the gut behind it. It wasn’t the sight of the machine's insides that worried her - she'd seen them a thousand times. What bothered her was the contents. Jess thumbed the clamps on the chest-plating and gently pulled the entire section away, her breathing slowing as she took in the results of the unit's last sortie.
Beneath, the opaque containment sac glistened with condensation. It bowed outward, swollen tight against the inner frame, packed full of writhing forms. Faces pressed against the membrane, distorted by the slick barrier, mouths opening in muffled screams that never carried beyond the fluid haze - before being dragged to god-knows-where for another loop through the artificial intestines. The weight of them shifted sluggishly, a slow churn as the machine’s internal pumps cycled digestive solvent across the mass.
Every single one was moving. There was a rhythmic pumping, the artificial innards of the unit's gut flexing and contorting around their prey, the walls squeezing tighter to try and force the helpless victims further along the digestive cycle. Even from the outside, Jess could hear the low, wet, rhythmic gurgles and groans as the machine worked its way through the bodies.
In total, there had to be at least three times the normal capacity. Each of the figures were packed so tightly into the chamber that the sac was visibly bulging, the clear surface stretched tight and whitened in spots where the pressure was reaching its limit. The upper half of the monumental stomach still contained all of the most recent captives, fresh bulges punching out across the surface as they fought for freedom - and more importantly, air - that wasn't coming. But as Jess' gaze dropped lower, she could see the slow transition to the lower guts - the gradual shift from solid to stew, the liquid remains of previous meals pooling in what would have been its bowels like a dense weight that audibly sloshed at even the gentlest of disturbances.
The lowest parts were a dark red layer of viscous liquid flooding around the partially-digested slop that had once been well-armed mercenaries. Their guns and armour had long-since melted just like they had, now little more than another ingredient mixed into the thick stew. The entire mass was settled heavy in its belly, the whole thing distended far enough that Jess could have sworn it was going to burst.
She swallowed nervously. Again.
"How many?"
A pause.
"This unit has eliminated [twelve] individuals in the past four hours."
Twelve.
At an average, a million and a half calories.
Jess reached out, her hands pressing against the firm membrane of its overtaxed synthetic stomach. A ripple spread out, the bodies within squirming and kicking and thrashing at the sudden intrusion. The sac itself was firm, filled almost to bursting, and hot to the touch.
"Holy shit. I thought this was overkill, but... goddamn."
Her thoughts trailed off, the engineer's fingers slowly tracing around the perimeter of the artificial bloating. The membrane was stretched to the point where she was fairly certain it was going to rip, the thin wall holding back the entire weight of its prey. She knew from experience that the material could take a lot, but she couldn't remember ever seeing a single body packed in so tightly and without a trace of space.
"You know I have to do the diagnostic, right?"
She didn't even need an answer, not that the machine would give her one. With a sigh, she reached back and unplugged her tablet from its charger, tapping the screen a couple of times until the device booted up.
"Alright, let's, uh..."
With the tap of a button, a new panel opened, and Jess scrolled through the options.
[Internal Stomach Temperature: 80C.]
[Internal Intestine Temperature: 132C.]
[Total Volume: 4m^3.]
"...oh Jesus Christ. That's... that's a lot. That's a fucking lot! How do… I mean, you don’t even look…”
The machine said nothing.
"Yeah, uh... okay, 889. Let's just run a couple of quick checks, yeah? I think we can skip the-"
"Diagnostic checks require complete external inspection."
Jess winced.
"Oh, uh, y'know, that's not necessar-"
"Protocol must be followed."
She let out a small nervous breath, her fingers trailing through her hair as she tried to steady herself a little.
"Fine. Yeah, you're right, protocol and all that." A shaky, nervous chuckle left her throat. "It's fine, this is, uh... fine. So... I just have to..."
She had to touch it. Properly inspect every inch of it. As an engineer. She had done this before. She could do this.
There was no reason to explain herself. Jess' fingers hovered over the edge of the membrane, checking for any tears or signs of damage. In theory, that was all she had to do, but the fire burning below her stomach was telling her otherwise.
Every inch of the machine's guts were filled. Its stomach was so bloated and round that it almost looked fake, packed so tight with prey that the bodies had begun to lose definition as digestion hit the active stages. There were no longer individual features, just a series of struggling bodies desperately fighting to stay above the churning, acid-laden depths. Those who were still conscious wouldn't be for long, not with the sheer mechanical efficiency and brutality with which its artificial stomach had fully swung into digestion.
The lower gut wasn't any better. A dark, soupy mulch of liquid meat and fat sat at the base, dense like wet concrete. At best, there would be a slight bulge forming somewhere as a still-solid piece of the undigested scraps shifted to the front of the machine's guts before quickly vanishing again in the boiling depths. The worst part was the noise - the audible churned bubbling of the machine's own organs, the thick, syrupy slosh of its innards as the whole sac moved and shifted with each clench of its artificial stomach muscles working to compress the hefty sludge inwards.
Her fingertips ran along the outer curve, the surface taut and firm. She could feel the pressure beneath the membrane, the faint warmth radiating through the material. There was absolutely no real give, not in the softness sense - whenever she pressed her hand in, all she got was either the firm tightness of the meat-clogged upper guts or the hefty resistance of the lower half's chyme-slush contents shifting under her touch.
Jess paused for a moment, letting her fingers press in a little harder against the side, feeling the way it flexed beneath her as countless micro-joints worked to accommodate the incessant shifting of a synthetic stomach that had a lot of work to do.
"It's, uh, really packed in there, 889."
Again, the machine didn't reply. It didn't need to, not to such banal observations. Somehow, that only made her even more flustered than if she had been fiddling with a real person’s stomach - the cold lack of response did little to ease how perverted she felt, running her fingers over what was a bare stomach in all the ways that mattered.
She was the engineer, and yet somehow the machine's digestive capabilities had never ceased to impress. No matter how much she worked with them, no matter how many times she watched it happen, the sheer scale of the destruction the mechanical gut was capable of never stopped shocking her whenever it broke another expected limit. This, though, was on a whole other level. This was absolutely past the recommended maximum capacity, far beyond spec, and definitely not something that the unit had ever been actually designed to do.
And yet there it stood, its huge, swollen, packed, stuffed middle straining and distending before her eyes - a garbage disposal system working overtime to process a few dozen extra pieces of human trash.
"I... I mean, this is amazing. I've never seen one of you go this far, you..." Jess chuckled out of pure nervousness, a hint of fear shooting up her spine. "It's... this is ridiculous. You're fit to burst."
The machine didn't respond. Instead, it merely waited, watching as she nervously ran her fingertips over the taut, slightly stress-reddened and tension-whitened surface with no real direction for what she was supposed to be doing in a situation like this.
"This is way beyond maximum capacity, 889. I think you're, uh... fuck, how did you even fit this many people inside you? This is insane!"
She'd seen it handle five or six people at once, on very rare occasions. Never anything more. Normally, that was considered excessive - these units were meant to act in squads, after all. Capture and disposal was limited to maybe three combatants at a time at most, with members rotating in and out to ensure that one never had to take on the brunt of the burden. She had never really understood the reasoning, but that wasn’t why they paid her, and that was good enough for her.
But here the machine stood, the massive, heavy-looking, bloated-beyond-belief swell of its middle pushing its plating outward to the point that the bolts between different pieces of metal had started to whiten from the overbearing stress. It wasn't quite at the point of popping them free, but with how taut its midsection was, Jess couldn't exactly put it past the possibility that one wrong poke could cause some horrendous chain reaction. Either this unit had just been forced to swallow down far too many hostiles at once, or the rest of the squad hadn’t-
Wait, that was a point. The squad. They hadn't come back.
"Wait. You came back alone."
No reply.
"...899. Where are they?” Her voice instinctually slipped from a flustered nervousness to one laced more with panic than anything else. "...889?"
"Combat Squad 451 consists of one unit available for combat, 7 missing in action." The machine paused for just a moment, one of its hands suddenly moving on top of Jess' own - closing around her wrist. "Continue with inspection.”
Jess swallowed. Hard.
"I, uh... 889, I can't-"
"Protocol demands an internal inspection following external checks." Its firm voice gave absolutely no hint of what it was about to do until Jess was already being hoisted off the ground, her brain failing to react in time as she was effortlessly pulled upward by the machine. By the point her body realised it should probably be struggling, it had already gotten its hands on her by the waist, holding her in place with enough strength to stop a charging bull. "Your assistance is required. Please evaluate the performance of my internal systems."
"889, wait! This isn't what they mean by-"
Its maw opened wide, the metallic teeth splitting apart and the inner layer shifting to make space. The tongue lifted itself and unfurled, stretching out to the point where the tip could easily wrap itself around the woman's ankles and tug them in.
Jess' feet kicked futilely at the air, her body squirming and twisting and writhing as she did her best to fight her way free - only for the machine's grip to hold firm, the steel fingers digging in tight enough that she could feel her skin threatening to bruise.
There was no human sadism, no cruel waiting. A mere half-second after its mouth craned open, Jess was stuffed headfirst into the warm, wet, dark chamber, her limbs caught and pulled towards the opening in an attempt to force her further. A powerful pulse from its artificial throat muscles immediately bucked everything down to her chest into its mouth, its head tilting backwards as the tongue curled around her middle and dragged her deeper into the synthetic gullet.
Another pulse. And another. The mechanical peristalsis did its work with such violent efficiency that it took mere seconds to get down to her waist, then her thighs, then her feet. Jess was pinned from all sides - not just her arms, but her shoulders, her neck, even her lower legs. The wet, warm, not-yet-cleaned insides of the machine were primed for her body in a way that made it almost impossible for her to find a scrap of leverage to fight her way out.
"Wait-!"
Its throat pulsed again, dragging every inch of her past the threshold - and then its mouth snapped shut.
For a second, there was darkness. Silence.
Then the machine swallowed.
Even through the thickness of its gullet and the lack of lighting, the movement was visible - a powerful ripple travelling all the way down the muscular passage, the tight flesh pulling her deeper into its innards. Jess couldn't help but whimper a little, her own breathing the only sound inside the cramped, clammy confines, her brain overcome with panic. The pressure increased, the walls closing in as the artificial esophagus compressed itself around her form, forcing her head and arms downward with a series of perfectly-aimed contractions and releases.
"Please! Please, you can't-!"
There was no reply, not a verbal one, not a physical one. Jess' pleading and begging and screaming went entirely ignored, the machine's attention solely focused on its primary function: moving its captive deeper into its synthetic digestive system. Each swallow was stronger and tighter than the last, the powerful muscles of its throat flexing and releasing with just the right amount of direction to ensure that the job would be done quickly.
Jess was being forced lower, the thick, slick walls of the unit's artificial throat contracting around her with much more intentional force as she felt herself bucking down past the unit's chest. A deep groaning sound forced itself up from the depths below as the already-well-underway digestive process prepared itself for another fresh addition, the ambient churning of its slop-filled guts only growing louder as she felt her head finally poke through the threshold.
There was absolutely no room to spare.
The exact moment she was pushed into the unit's stomach proper, she was hit with such a sensory overload that her body had no way to respond other than freezing up and letting itself be dumped into the trash compactor of a gut. Every muscle was working in perfect coordination, the synthetic sac stretching the bare minimum amount needed to force her in alongside the various half-mulched bodies as the fetid meat-scented air overcame her. In an instant, her brain was flooded with a mix of signals that it had no way to push aside - the heat, the pressure, the clamminess, the humidity, the scent, and the sheer disgusting tightness of being squeezed to sightly into a tight gut filled with a thick slurry of partially-digested remains.
One more swallow bucked her entire body out of her throat and fully into the machine's groaning gut, the cacophony of effortful churning and constant bubbling drowning out her own heartbeat in her ears. There was barely any oxygen to breathe, the entire space filled with the stench of digestive death, and her clothes were already starting to burn as she felt the tingling sting of artificial acids beginning to flood over her.
Jess' brain couldn't process any thoughts, couldn't come up with a plan. All it could do was kick and thrash against a space that offered zero give or freedom of movement. The mulched-up human stew pooling in the base of its stomach threatened to drown her if she couldn’t keep her head above the surface, her body pinned so tightly in place that she didn’t really have a choice but to fight for the headroom to actually try and breathe. Her lungs were burning, pain rippling along her body as her natural skin barrier failed and the digestive juices started to do their work.
A gagged plea for help attempted to leave her throat. She didn't stay conscious - or alive - long enough to know if the words made it out.
—
[Combat Squad 451 requisition request.]
[Replenishment - combat model x6.]
[Replenishment - officer class combat model x1.]
[Replenishment - engineer x1.]
[Submitted…]
The digital requisition form took Unit 889 less than a second to draft and send to the logistical network, its mind already moving onto the next task of logging its combat statistics with the command network. Its stomach, on the other hand, was having a far less efficient time at processing the excess of human slurry currently clogging its digestive system tight.
A low groan rumbled from the depths as its systems struggled to handle the sheer quantity of material it had crammed within its mechanical gut, its latest addition still squirming slightly in the upper stomach as the internal walls began to pump inwards with brutal efficiency, the contents of the lower stomach desperately trying to pump into intestines that were fully backed up with gallon after gallon of liquefied meat-slop.
Even its internal cooling system was having difficulty. Beads of artificial sweat worked their way down the machine’s vaguely-humanoid chassis and trailed awkward paths down the side of its expansive gut, the in-progress digestion cousin another temperature spike as yet more meat was added to the boiling cauldron. The occasional hiss of an overstrained cooling vent was all the relief that the machine could get - at least if it had the capacity to feel things like relief.
It didn't feel a thing. It couldn't.
Unit 889B simply moved its fingers across the engineering tablet and began to work through the list of other inspection procedures it would have to carry out, the mechanical digits moving with a speed and accuracy that was so utterly removed from the mess churning and bubbling away within its synthetic innards. Its thoughts remained focused, its body not a hindrance - even as the contents of its gut slowly continued to settle, the dense soup-like liquid at the bottom starting to once again drain into its intestines as more of the slurry was siphoned off for fuel storage. The engineer’s struggles weakened, the clenching of the unit’s stomach too strong for the human to make any meaningful movements.
One more squeeze was all it took. A final clench, and a series of audible snaps and cracks sounded off from the bulges across the upper shelf of its expansive gut - another human skeleton broken to paste and pulped into a fine, viscous gravy ready to be added to the stew bubbling in its innards.
[Replenishment Request Approved. Reinforcements ETA (1) day, engineer ETA (2) hours.]
A heavy groan of digestive effort escaped its innards, the machine's midsection flexing outward slightly as one of the not-quite-mulched bodies in its upper guts was dragged lower for further digestion. According to its internal diagnostics, it would take approximately twenty-seven hours before the majority of its current contents had been fully digested and the resulting biomass processed and filtered. That meant it would be combat-ready at roughly the right time to participate in whatever sortie instructions came in with its newly-reinforced squad.
It also meant that the poor engineer assigned to it would have plenty of time to assist with further inspection procedures. After all, the internal checks had never formally been completed.
Protocol must be followed.