Dead Inventory

📅 Published on June 5, 2025

“Dead Inventory”

Written by A.G. Greene
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).

🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available

ESTIMATED READING TIME — 22 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 2 votes.
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Part I

The warehouse didn’t look like much from the outside. Squat, rectangular, surrounded by buckled asphalt and broken sodium lamps that never turned on, it sat at the far end of an access road that hadn’t been paved since the Cold War. No signage. No windows. Just rows of blackened vents and motionless security cameras fixed at odd angles, like the eyes of a half-dead spider.

Richard Pell stood outside with his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, rocking slightly on his heels to ease the throb in his knees. The cold was dry, scratchy, like paper. The night felt unusually quiet for the industrial district—no trucks, no rail noise, no wind even. Just the warehouse and its low-slung silhouette against a pale moon.

The email had said: Third Intake Orientation – 11:45 PM Sharp.
It was now 11:46.

He reached for the buzzer beside the reinforced door just as it clicked and groaned open. No one stood inside.

Richard hesitated. Something in his chest stirred—an instinct, maybe. Or guilt. But he pushed through the threshold and let the heavy door ease shut behind him.

The interior was lit by buzzing fluorescents, half of them flickering. A windowless antechamber lined with bolted lockers and a grease-stained check-in desk. The air had a faint chemical tang—like bleach that had tried to cover up something else. Behind the desk sat a man with perfect posture and unnervingly smooth features, typing on an ancient beige keyboard without looking up.

“You’re Pell?” the man asked.

“Yeah. Richard Pell. Inventory shift.”

The man’s fingers stopped moving. Slowly, he turned toward Richard, his expression fixed in a kind of polite neutrality that bordered on mask-like.

“Welcome,” he said. “We’re glad to have you.”

Richard nodded. “I appreciate the opportunity.”

“Of course.” The man’s voice had a slight delay between syllables, like a recording stitched together. “I’m Mr. Avery. Night supervisor. Let’s go over a few things before you begin.”

He pulled out a folder, crisp and thin, and slid it across the desk. Inside were forms: a non-disclosure agreement, injury waiver, and something called a Sensory Misperception Acknowledgment that Richard didn’t recognize. The print was dense, and the font just small enough to discourage close reading.

Avery pushed a pen forward. “Initial at the X’s. Sign at the bottom. Use firm pressure.”

Richard frowned at the last line but signed anyway.

“Phone,” Avery said.

“Sorry?”

“No personal devices on the warehouse floor. We store them here.”

Richard hesitated, then handed over his battered flip phone. Avery placed it in a drawer without labeling it.

“Locker thirty-seven. Uniform and gloves inside. You’ll report to Inventory Section C, aisle six. Keep to your assigned floor. Use the yellow lines to guide your route.”

He paused.

“There are crates along the back wall marked with red tape. Do not open them. They are managed by a separate department. Understood?”

Richard nodded. “Understood.”

Avery stood. “Good. Shift ends at 7:00. You will clock out in the same room you entered. Lunch break is optional. Water fountains are located along the main aisle.”

Without another word, he turned and disappeared through a door labeled Authorized Personnel Only.

* * * * * *

The uniform was too big in the shoulders and smelled like plastic sheeting left in the sun. Richard adjusted the sleeves, zipped the front, and pulled on the powder-blue gloves. He checked his reflection in the locker door—lined face, thinning hair, eyes gone pale with age. He looked like someone impersonating a man who still had fight in him.

He followed the yellow line past flickering bulbs and humming circuit boxes until he reached Section C. The factory floor was larger than he’d expected—easily the size of two football fields. Metal shelving units lined the space like warehouse canyons, with crates stacked four or five high on heavy pallets. The fluorescent lighting didn’t reach every corner. Some aisles fell into perfect darkness.

The only sound was the distant hum of refrigeration and the occasional soft click of settling metal.

Richard checked his clipboard: Scan barcodes. Log crate numbers. Note damages. Simple enough.

He moved to the first crate—standard industrial build, black composite plastic, triple-sealed, no markings besides a barcode and a faint yellow “R3” stenciled on the side. He scanned it. Logged it. Moved on.

Hours passed in a mechanical rhythm. Scan. Click. Write. Next.

By 3:00 a.m., the warehouse’s subtle noises had started to grate on him. The far-off thunk of shifting pallets. The creak of something heavy settling against its restraints. A wet sound, maybe leaking coolant. Maybe not.

Richard rubbed his eyes and looked toward the back wall.

That’s when he saw them.

Six crates—larger than the rest—lined up in a recessed loading area. Red tape marked each lid in a diagonal cross. No barcodes. No clipboard entries. No manifest tags.

They hadn’t been there earlier. He was sure of it.

Something about them made his stomach clench. Maybe it was the moisture gathered on their sides. Maybe it was how one of them seemed to… twitch. Just slightly. Like something inside had shifted.

He turned away.

Avery’s voice echoed in his mind: Do not open them.

He logged the next standard crate and forced himself to keep working.

Still, the smell was growing stronger. A coppery sweetness that turned his stomach and reminded him of the time he’d found a raccoon melted into his garage’s crawl space. That same thick, wrong rot. He glanced over his shoulder. The red crates sat motionless. Waiting.

* * * * * *

By the time 6:45 rolled around, Richard was back near the front of the warehouse. He’d logged over a hundred crates, all without incident. But that smell still clung to his nose. He felt it on his gloves.

He stripped them off and dropped them in the biohazard bin beside the exit—another detail that hadn’t been mentioned. The bin hissed and closed over the gloves like a hungry mouth.

Back at the security vestibule, Avery was typing again. Still not looking at the screen.

“Done for the night,” Richard said.

Avery nodded once. “Very good. You’re adjusting well. Not everyone does.”

Richard frowned. “How many don’t?”

Avery’s mouth curved in what might’ve been a smile. “We’ll see you tomorrow night.”

Richard collected his phone, walked out into the chill morning air, and tried not to think about the red tape.

But even as he drove away, he swore he could still smell it.

That copper sweetness.

That open secret.

Part II

The second night began colder than the first. A dry, biting chill that slipped beneath Richard’s collar and settled in the soft joints of his hands. The sky hung low over the warehouse complex, bruised and hazy, as though the city lights had dimmed just for this building. It felt like the kind of night the stars avoided.

He checked in, signed the log, and passed Avery without a word. The man was seated behind the same desk, in the same posture, typing without pause. If he’d moved in the last twenty-four hours, there was no sign of it.

In the locker room, Richard found a new pair of gloves in his cubby, still damp from disinfectant. His previous set had vanished without comment. The uniform had been laundered, but faint rust-colored stains remained at the cuffs.

He didn’t ask questions. Something told him that asking only marked you.

* * * * * *

Section C was darker tonight. More lights flickered than worked. A few had gone out entirely, leaving patches of shelving swallowed in shadow. He turned on his issued headlamp but found the battery nearly dead, the beam sputtering with every step.

He followed the yellow lines, passed familiar crates. Most were unchanged, anonymous and inert. But the red-taped section had grown.

There were ten now.

Stacked two high, damp at the edges, with condensation forming along their sides like sweat on a feverish patient. Richard tried to ignore them, but the air around them was different—warmer, somehow. And thicker.

He didn’t stop. Not yet.

He worked the inventory in silence, but his mind refused to settle. Every step echoed too loud. Every creak from overhead pipes seemed sharper. And the smell—the copper tang he thought had faded—was back. Stronger. It clung to the aisles like steam from a meat locker, metallic and cloying.

When he reached crate 44-91C, he stopped.

This one was out of place.

It had no barcode. No manifest tag. No record on his clipboard. Yet it sat there on a fresh pallet, slightly ajar, like someone had closed it in a hurry and never finished the job. A thin film of pinkish fluid had pooled beneath it, trailing in a lazy curve toward the drainage grate.

Richard glanced around.

No footsteps. No cameras visible in this corner. No whir of wheels on concrete. The place was silent but alert, like it was waiting.

He crouched, pulling his glove tighter.

The lid of the crate wasn’t locked. Just held in place by its own warped weight.

He lifted it.

The smell hit him first—sweet and sour and wrong, like spoiled pork left in the sun. His eyes watered. His stomach lurched.

Inside the crate, wrapped in clear plastic, was a human arm.

It was cleanly severed just below the shoulder, pale and flushed with livid marbling beneath the skin. The hand was clenched loosely, fingers curled, nails trimmed. A plastic tag looped through the wrist read:

UNIT 22B – UPPER EXTREMITY, RIGHT
DESTINATION: DEPARTMENT IX

He recoiled, nearly dropped the lid, then steadied himself. Something inside him had gone cold and heavy, like a stone swallowed by accident. He wanted to believe it was a prosthetic, some hyper-realistic medical dummy. A mistake.

But it wasn’t. He knew better. The skin had pores. The veins had depth. He could smell the rot.

There was something else, too.

A twitch.

The fingers spasmed, just once—enough to tap lightly against the plastic wrapping. A reflex? Nerve memory? Or—

No. He wasn’t staying to find out.

Richard dropped the lid, stepping back fast enough to slip on the leaking fluid. He caught himself against the shelf, smeared pink along his glove and sleeve.

From somewhere deeper in the warehouse, he heard the soft ding of a service elevator arriving.

He froze.

Footsteps followed. Measured. Approaching from beyond the red zone.

Then came a voice.

“You found a spoiled unit.”

Avery.

Richard turned. The night supervisor emerged from the shadows at the end of the aisle, backlit by flickering light, hands clasped behind his back like a man on a garden stroll.

“I—” Richard started, unsure what to say.

“You’ll log it accordingly,” Avery said. “Waste fluid collection will handle the cleanup.”

He walked to the crate without glancing inside and placed a white sticker over the top: SPOILED / DESTROY BY MORNING in block letters.

Richard swallowed hard. “That’s a person.”

Avery blinked slowly. “That’s an upper extremity. Misrouted. Likely due to a database fault.”

“You’re saying that’s normal?”

“I’m saying it happens,” Avery replied. “You’re not the first to encounter it. And you signed consent.”

“That’s a body part, not inventory.”

“Here, there’s no difference.” His tone didn’t change. “You’ll log the error, and the crate will be removed. No further action is required.”

Richard stared at him. “You expect me to just keep working like nothing happened?”

“I don’t expect anything,” Avery said. “But you’ll find that continuing to work is often easier than the alternatives.”

For a moment, silence pressed between them. Then Avery smiled, faint and bloodless.

“You’re doing fine, Mr. Pell. Very few make it to their second shift. We’re pleased.”

Richard said nothing.

Avery walked past him, disappearing behind a row of shelves without a sound. No echo of his footsteps. No change in the air.

* * * * * *

The rest of the shift moved like molasses. Each crate felt heavier, each barcode a dead code. Richard kept looking over his shoulder, listening for more signs—another misrouted unit, another twitch beneath the lid. But the warehouse stayed still.

Still didn’t mean safe.

He washed the pink smear from his gloves in a stainless-steel sink bolted to a load-bearing column. The water came out hot, then ice cold, then hot again. There were no mirrors. Only a blank metal plate where one might have hung.

When the clock struck 6:57, Richard was already walking the yellow line back toward the vestibule.

Avery wasn’t at the desk.

For a moment, he thought about grabbing the folder, digging through the contract again. He wanted to find something—anything—to tell him what he’d really signed. But the drawer was locked, and the hallway to the admin offices had a glowing RESTRICTED panel blocking its entrance.

His phone was returned to him in silence, now warm to the touch, as if it had never been turned off.

He stepped into the outside air just as the sun broke over the distant treetops.

Birds chirped somewhere, faint and confused. The city beyond the tree line blinked on like a dying circuit board. Morning had come. But the smell of the crate clung to his jacket like invisible soot.

And behind his ribs, deep where no hand could reach, something inside him had begun to ache.

Not a sharp pain. Just pressure.

As if something was trying to shift.

Trying to twitch.

Part III

The third night came easier than the second—not because Richard felt any safer, but because he no longer bothered pretending he didn’t need the money.

The bills hadn’t slowed. The creditors hadn’t stopped calling. His ex-wife had declined to answer his last message, and the rusted Oldsmobile was beginning to knock in the rear axle. That job, however sick it might be at the core, was the only thing paying him above table.

Still, he hesitated outside the warehouse’s steel doors.

He watched his reflection in the dark metal. It wavered slightly, like something beneath the surface was moving.

The door opened on its own again. No buzzer. No intercom.

Avery wasn’t at the desk.

The clipboard was waiting for him anyway.

* * * * * *

Inside Section C, the red crates had doubled again. They were stacking now, three high, the lowest ones warped under the weight. None were on his manifest, but they were clearly being logged—he noticed freshly printed labels on their lids, machine-typed and time-stamped.

None of the time stamps were later than 3:12 a.m.

The smell was stronger tonight. Less decay, more ammonia and static electricity. It prickled his nose and made his tongue taste like metal. He chewed a stick of gum to push it back but couldn’t shake the sensation that the air itself was growing humid with blood.

The aisle lights flickered overhead as he passed beneath them. The batteries in his headlamp had been replaced—someone had opened his locker. He hadn’t told anyone it was dead.

He kept his eyes forward. The crates could wait.

* * * * * *

By 2:30, he was deep in the eastern racks when the first whisper caught his ear. A soft, lilting female voice.

“Is anyone left…?”

Richard turned sharply. The voice hadn’t come from behind, but from inside the shelving unit to his left.

He moved closer, leaning toward the crates. They were standard black—nothing red-taped—but one of them had a crack near the lid. A thin thread of dark hair curled out from the seam.

He stepped back, and the voice came again, clearer this time.

“I’m still here. I think. I think I’m still here.”

The whisper was slurred at the edges, like someone speaking underwater.

Richard reached for the crate’s ID number—stamped in fading silver:

VELLA – VOCAL MODULE / 7B3-X

He stared at the label.

There’d been a woman in orientation. Or maybe on the schedule. A Vella. Patrice? Patricia?

She’d had a sharp voice. Something memorable. He remembered thinking she sounded like someone who used to smoke too much and laugh too hard.

That had been weeks ago, hadn’t it?

Had it?

The voice came again, strained.

“Don’t let them take all of it. Some of it has to stay mine…”

Then silence.

Not fading. Cut.

Like a wire had been pulled.

Richard staggered back. He felt something warm in his palm and looked down—he’d gripped the edge of the crate hard enough to split his glove. A thin cut crossed his skin, not deep, but bleeding.

From down the aisle, he heard something scrape the floor. A dragging sound.

He wiped his hand on his pants and turned the corner—but the aisle was empty.

No dragging. No footsteps.

Only a sudden coldness, thick and sour. Like someone had opened a morgue drawer and left it ajar.

* * * * * *

He logged another five crates before he dared speak again, and even then it was only a mutter.

“Patrice?”

No answer.

But somewhere, deep in the back shelving, something moved.

Not walked. Shifted.

As if it were being repositioned by something larger than itself.

He reached for the radio clipped to his belt—but it wasn’t there. He’d left it, hadn’t he? Or had it been missing when he suited up?

The security speaker above him crackled to life.

“Inventory workers are reminded not to engage with defective units,” the voice droned. Flat. Sexless. Filtered like a voicemail left in a nightmare.
“All audio anomalies must be reported to Department IX. Repeat: Do not engage. Do not sympathize. Do not retain auditory residue.”

The speaker clicked off.

Richard felt something tighten in his throat.

Auditory residue.

He turned, slowly, and looked back down the aisle.

The vocal module crate was gone.

Not shifted. Gone.

He hurried to where it had been, checking the floor. No scuffs. No fluid trail. No label.

Only a faint indentation in the dust where a crate had been resting. And a single long hair, curled like a question mark.

* * * * * *

By 4:10, Richard had given up trying to follow the manifest.

His clipboard now listed crates that didn’t exist and failed to mention ones that did. Whole columns had gone blank. At least one crate was now repeating in multiple aisles with different contents logged. It was labeled R-LUNG-7X (G) – Pell. His last name.

He didn’t scan it.

He didn’t touch it.

The voice didn’t return, but the memory of it lingered. Soft. Threadbare. Trapped in something too tight.

And Richard knew.

He knew in the quiet certainty that comes with horror settling in the bones—that whoever Patrice Vella had been, she was still in there somewhere.

In pieces.

In systems.

In shipments.

That warehouse didn’t kill its workers. It disassembled them.

Like appliances.

Like products.

His chest ached again. Slight, but insistent. Something off-center, like a bruise blooming in slow motion.

He pressed a hand to it and felt nothing unusual. But the warmth was growing.

He didn’t speak again the rest of the shift.

* * * * * *

Back in the vestibule, Avery was absent. The desk chair sat empty. The monitor screen flashed green text over black:

INTAKE CONFIRMED.
PATTERN DEGRADATION: STABLE.
NEXT UNIT PREPARED.

Richard picked up his phone. Its screen lit up before he touched it.

A new message had appeared, time-stamped 3:12 a.m.

“We don’t leave. We echo.
-Pat”

His hand shook.

He powered the phone off and didn’t turn it back on until he was home, under his own roof, lights on, windows open.

But even then, the message stayed.

He deleted it.

It returned the next night.

Part IV

Richard didn’t remember driving to the warehouse on his fourth night.

He remembered leaving the house—keys, coat, thermos of coffee gone cold. But the drive itself? Blank. Like skipping a page in a book and finding yourself deeper in the story without knowing how you got there.

The lot was darker than usual. Only one floodlight still worked, casting a yellow glow that seemed to bend around the warehouse instead of touching it. Richard parked close to the loading ramp. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees, but the air carried the same copper weight he couldn’t scrub from his nostrils.

The door opened before he could reach for the buzzer.

No one inside.

No one at the desk.

The locker room lights were dimmer than before—two had burned out completely, leaving his locker in half-shadow. Inside, the uniform was already laid out. Folded. Fresh gloves in place. The clipboard had been replaced with a small black tablet bearing a pulsing green light.

He didn’t remember anyone telling him that was standard issue.

When he touched the screen, the light flickered and resolved into a single message:

SECTION X-9 – REPROCESSING SECTOR – FOLLOW THE BLUE LINE.

There had never been a blue line.

He stepped into the hallway. The yellow safety stripe he’d come to rely on was gone, stripped clean from the concrete. In its place, a new trail had been painted—bright blue, wet-looking, though it left no smear beneath his boots.

It led toward the eastern wing, beyond the rows he’d been trained to log.

He almost turned back. Almost.

But his hands moved without him, and his feet followed. As if somewhere deep down, his body had already decided what the rest of him hadn’t.

* * * * * *

The deeper corridors of the warehouse weren’t built for human use.

That much was clear in the way the lights angled too high to cast meaningful illumination, or how the walls narrowed in odd places, pressing in with geometric dissonance. The shelving units here were taller—at least twenty feet high—stacked with industrial caskets sealed in reinforced polymer, some marked with color-coded tape he didn’t recognize: green Xs, white circles, black spirals.

No sound, except the soft buzz of fluorescents and the occasional knock-knock-knock of something far off and slow.

At the end of the corridor, the blue line broke across a massive steel door.

It bore no handle. Only a pressure pad, pulsing green.

Richard placed his hand against it.

There was a soft click, followed by a heavy thunk of locks disengaging. Then the door creaked inward on its own.

The heat hit him first—humid, pressurized, with the sour smell of a butcher’s shop and the ozone sharpness of ionized metal. The air was thick with it, dense enough to taste.

And then came the sound.

Whirring. Clanking. Suturing.

An endless mechanical rhythm of motors, pincers, pneumatic arms hissing and clamping and stitching.

Before him lay the Assembly Line.

* * * * * *

The space was enormous. Stadium-sized, maybe larger, with catwalks and conveyor belts threading the upper reaches like a spider’s web. Long, wheeled tables ran end to end along the central spine of the chamber, each bearing partially constructed human figures.

Some were missing limbs. Others had no faces. A few twitched gently under translucent sheets.

The machinery never stopped.

Articulated arms equipped with scalpels, staplers, forceps, and bone saws hovered and danced across the tables with inhuman precision. Sinew was stretched and tied. Skin was smoothed over new bone. Tubes pumped blood-like fluid from sealed drums into open veins.

It was clinical. Efficient.

And utterly obscene.

Richard stood frozen.

A low clunk behind him made him flinch.

Another crate had arrived, deposited by a track system in the far corner. A mechanical arm lifted the lid and extracted the contents—two legs, cleanly detached at the hip, labeled L-LOWER (MATCHED SET) – PELL.

He backed away.

He didn’t remember losing his legs.

He didn’t remember being sedated, or cut, or scanned.

But he remembered the scar.

The one on his chest that hadn’t been there before this job.

The one that ached when the air turned cold.

* * * * * *

On the second table, a half-assembled figure turned its head toward him. Its eyes were stitched shut, and its mouth hung open. One side of its face was identical to his.

“Rich…” it rasped.

Richard stumbled back. The machinery paused—not all of it, just the instruments near that table, as if acknowledging that something unscheduled had occurred.

The voice came again, higher now, from the third table. “Don’t… forget me.”

It was Pat’s voice. But this one had no vocal cords—just a chest cavity and a larynx suspended in transparent gel.

He ran, turning and sprinting back the way he’d come, but the door behind him had vanished. The blue line had curled inward, toward a secondary door marked: HUMAN ERROR CORRECTION – FLOOR -2. 

He didn’t remember descending stairs, but the floor was suddenly metal beneath his boots. The light was dimmer now, flickering fast and hard. Every few seconds, the whole hallway seemed to shake, like something beneath the floor was shifting.

The voice over the intercom returned. “Congratulations, R. Pell. Early reprocessing initiated. Acceptance achieved. Cardiac core pending.”

He stopped running and clutched his chest. That pressure was back, and it was no longer subtle. This time, it was faster, syncopated.

A pipe hissed nearby, spraying red fluid onto the floor. It steamed when it hit the grating. And through the haze, he saw the silhouette of a woman—what was left of one. She stumbled down the corridor ahead of him, with one leg and only half a face. Her body was laced with surgical tubing and black stitch marks, and her eyes were wrong—too wide, too bright.

“Patrice?” he whispered.

She stopped. Her mouth worked its way open, but no sound escaped. Then her arm lifted, pointing past him—behind him.

He turned, and he saw the crate. It was already open. The lid bore his name. Inside was a clean, neatly organized foam insert, shaped to cradle each of his organs. Only one was missing: the heart slot, still empty—but not for long.

He felt his chest flutter. Something inside shifted, rolled, and pulled. He dropped to his knees, gasping.

Patrice limped closer, her voice ragged. “Help me forget.”

Richard tried to speak, but something was rising in his throat. Something wet.

* * * * * *

He woke up on the locker room floor and found the lights had gone back to normal. The tablet was gone, and his gloves were folded neatly beside him, untouched.

There were no alarms going off.  And there was no sign of Avery.

The digital clock read 6:55 a.m.

His phone was in his pocket. He had no messages and no missed calls, only a photo in the gallery he didn’t remember taking—an empty table in the assembly room. And on it, a ribcage, partially stitched, bearing a tag that read:

PELL / ACTIVE CORE / EXPORT: ON HOLD

He deleted the image.

It returned before he reached the parking lot.

Part V

By the fifth night, Richard had stopped wondering what was real.

There was no point.

Whether he was asleep or sedated or inside some waking death spiral, the outcome was the same: he clocked in, and the factory opened itself around him like a mouth.

The parking lot was empty again. Even the birds had gone.

The warehouse door stood ajar.

No security desk. No Avery.

The hallway lights were flickering in a new pattern—one on, three off, alternating in rhythm. His locker had been moved. He knew because locker thirty-seven now bore a new nameplate:

SHELL – PELL / EXTERNAL CASING (TEMPORARY)

He stood there for a long time, waiting for the words to change.

They didn’t.

Inside, his uniform was sealed in a clear plastic bag. A note attached to the hanger read:

DO NOT REMOVE UNTIL PRIMARY SYSTEMS ARE STABILIZED.
REPLACEMENT CORE PROCESSING IN PROGRESS.
CARDIAC CONTROL: PENDING DELIVERY.

He didn’t remember putting on the uniform, but it was on him by the time he reached the work floor.

* * * * * *

The tablet had returned—no clipboard. It displayed a single inventory update:

NEW ITEM RECEIVED:
R. PELL – CARDIAC UNIT, PRIMARY – AUTHORIZED DELIVERY.

A single crate sat beside it, gleaming under its own fluorescent fixture.

Unlike the black polymer boxes he was used to, this one was transparent. The walls were glass or something like it, rimmed in brushed steel and anchored with bolts the size of his fists. Inside, suspended in viscous amber fluid, was a human heart.

It beat.

Not regularly—but anxiously. As if aware of its exposure. As if trying to communicate through rhythm.

The label on the crate read:

  1. PELL – CORE COMPONENT 01
    ARRIVAL DATE: 4 DAYS AGO
    CONDITION: VIABLE / AWAKENED

Richard backed away.

His chest ached. Not in panic—in response.

The beat inside his body no longer matched what he felt. Something was out of sync.

He stumbled into the next aisle, found a nearby crate and leaned against it for balance.

His palms were slicked with cold sweat, and his knees buckled once before he caught himself.

A chime echoed from the wall speaker above him.

“Inventory error detected. Human inconsistency exceeds tolerance threshold. Rectification required.”

A new message flashed on the tablet.

PROCESSING ROUTE MODIFIED:
REPORT TO DEPARTMENT IX FOR INTEGRITY REVIEW.

The blue line returned beneath his feet, blinking into existence one section at a time like a trail of dying fireflies.

He didn’t follow it.

Not this time.

Instead, he turned left and moved past the crates—into a zone labeled ARCHIVAL HOLDING.

He hadn’t seen it before. Maybe it hadn’t been there.

The temperature dropped as he entered. The lighting changed—lower, almost golden, like candlelight filtered through petroleum. The air buzzed faintly, not with machinery but static. The sense of memory hung in the room like fog.

Along the walls were shelves of folders and binders, all sealed in plastic. Each bore a name. Some he recognized.

Some had never left the warehouse.

At the far end of the aisle, he found a wall of metal drawers. Medical, like in a morgue. Each with a small plaque.

He found one marked Vella, Patrice – Vocal, Auditory, Sensory Fragment.

The drawer was half open.

Inside, there was no body. Only a mesh bag filled with coiled fiber optics, an audio cassette, and a voice box wired to a tiny speaker. The speaker was humming softly.

He leaned closer.

It whispered:

“I don’t remember my name anymore. But I remember how the air felt when I left the front door. That first night. That fear. That’s the last thing I kept.”

The voice shifted.

“They take what remembers you first.”

Richard reached for the bag, but his hand passed through it.

Not like a ghost. Like static. Like bad signal.

He turned away.

Something in the hallway behind him had begun moving. A soft hydraulic hiss followed by a wet suction. No footsteps. Just shaping sounds, like clay being molded too quickly.

He slipped past the shelves and ducked behind a rolling scaffold. The blue line blinked faintly at the base of the wall, waiting patiently.

The hiss grew louder.

A crate passed by on a wheeled dolly, pushed by a faceless biped—something stitched together in proportions too long for a man, too short for a robot. Its head was wrapped in wire mesh, and its chest had been hollowed out to make room for a steel cabinet labeled: RETURN TO STOCK.

It paused.

Sniffed the air.

Then moved on.

Richard waited until it was gone before crawling back into the main corridor.

* * * * * *

He returned to the security vestibule, hoping for Avery—for someone.

Instead, the monitor on the desk lit up with static before resolving into a new image: a schematic. His own body. Labeled like an exploded diagram of a machine.

Red highlights pulsed over several regions.

  • LUNGS: Replaced (Batch A-1B)
  • STOMACH: Reprocessed
  • SKIN (Exterior): Synthetic overlay active
  • CARDIAC UNIT: PENDING—ORIGINAL IN TRANSIT

Then a line at the bottom:

CONSCIOUSNESS HOSTING: ACTIVE
INTEGRATION STABILITY: DEGRADING

He stumbled back. Looked at his hands.

They looked the same.

But now he saw the seams. Faint. Geometric. Hairline divisions at the joints and knuckles—like the casing had been opened and reassembled.

He touched his temple.

A faint click, like magnets separating.

He screamed.

But the scream didn’t echo. It was absorbed by the walls. Eaten.

The monitor shut off.

His tablet blinked one final time.

NO FURTHER ACTION REQUIRED.
UNIT AWAITS FINAL CASING.
SHIPMENT PENDING.

* * * * * *

That night, at 7:01 a.m., Richard left the warehouse and walked into the rising sun.

No security escorted him. No alarms blared.

His car was in the same spot, though the license plate had been removed.

Inside, he found his keys in the ignition and a white envelope on the passenger seat.

Inside the envelope was a photo.

A crate. Transparent. Floating in amber fluid.

Inside it—him.

Or something that used to be him.

Still twitching.

Still conscious.

The back of the photo read:

You are being archived.
Thank you for your service.
Integration achieved.

He drove home.

Or at least he tried.

But the roads weren’t the same anymore.

They curled in loops, fed back into the same intersections.

No matter which turn he took, the GPS guided him back to the warehouse.

The front door was open when he arrived.

Inside, a new message glowed from the ceiling monitor above the vestibule:

WELCOME, NEW ARRIVAL
INVENTORY WORKER – R. PELL – NIGHT SHIFT
STATUS: STILL IN TRANSIT

Part VI

Richard no longer recognized the building from the outside.

The windows were still missing, the siding still black with age, the concrete lot still cracked and blistered—but something in its proportions had shifted. It was taller, wider at the base. He couldn’t say how he knew, but he did. As if the building had stretched in the night, exhaled and re-formed.

The door opened for him without sound.

No desk. No Avery. No lights.

Only a single strip of green LED tracing a line through the entry corridor, pulsing slow and steady.

He followed it.

Not because he wanted to.

Because there was nowhere else to go.

* * * * * *

The locker room had been gutted. The rows of steel lockers replaced by chrome slabs and hanging hooks. No uniforms remained. Just casing shells—skin-colored forms that resembled human torsos, faces molded into peaceful masks, arms folded across chests like the dead in coffins.

His locker still bore his name.

PELL – FINAL HOUSING UNIT

Inside, there was nothing.

No gloves.

No tablet.

Only a mirror.

The first he’d seen in days.

He stared into it—and saw the error.

His left eye had clouded over. Not white, not blind—just dimmed, like the light behind it had gone out. His teeth looked newer than he remembered. His skin had a taut, slightly glossy quality that reminded him of preserved fruit.

His right hand flexed. Too smooth. Too coordinated.

He pressed a fingertip into the back of his hand.

The skin gave slightly—too much. The texture didn’t feel like flesh anymore. It was warm, but not alive.

It was hard to tell now where his thoughts ended and the factory’s programming began.

* * * * * *

He returned to the warehouse floor.

There were no crates tonight, no lines to follow. Just open space and humming lights that shifted color when he passed beneath them—first blue, then violet, then something redder than blood.

A new corridor opened at the far wall. One he hadn’t seen before. Lined in brushed aluminum and trailing cables, like the inside of a surgical theater turned inside-out. The air here was hot and antiseptic, humming with low frequencies that made his molars ache.

He passed under a sign: DEPARTMENT IX – FINALIZATION & MEMORY REDUCTION

His feet moved without resistance.

Somewhere ahead, a voice spoke, not over the intercom, but inside his skull.

“Return has been suspended,” it said. “You are not leaving again. The copy is nearly complete.”

He stopped walking, but his body kept going. He looked down and realized he’d lost control of his legs. They moved steadily, rhythmically, as if powered by another current.

He screamed—but the sound didn’t exit his mouth. It rang only inside his head, echoing uselessly in the hollows of what was left of his throat.

“Emotion fragments detected,” the voice said. “Reducing.”

The scream faded, and along with it, the fear. What remained was a calm, terrible awareness that he was being hollowed from the inside out.

He was not being killed. He was being rewritten.

* * * * * *

The final room looked nothing like a factory. It resembled a chapel built by surgeons. White walls, no ceiling, everything inside glowing softly. Steel beams arranged in a halo overhead. In the center stood a table—an operating slab flanked by robotic arms, wires hanging like vines.

The slab rose to meet him. He wanted to run, or to fight, but his body climbed onto it without hesitation.

The wires moved like snakes, gently encircling his wrists, his ankles, his throat.

He heard the voice again.

“Thank you, Richard Pell. Integration complete. Processing your awareness for future tasks.”

A new voice joined it, something softer, human, and… familiar.

“Don’t let it take all of you,” it whispered. “Hold something. Just one thing.”

It was Pat’s voice.

The last shard of her, still echoing in the circuitry.

He focused.

He thought of his son.

Not the way he died. Not the funeral. But one summer evening, long before the pills, long before the distance—just tossing a baseball in the backyard. Laughter. The snap of leather. The sun in his eyes.

That memory shone like a flare inside him.

The machinery paused.

Just for a second.

Then the voice returned.

“Anomaly detected. Reducing.”

The memory dimmed.

The laughter fell silent.

The sun set.

Then there was only the table. The hum. The hiss of something sharp sliding into his spine.

And the voice saying, again:

“Integration complete.”

* * * * * *

The warehouse reopened at 7:00 a.m.

The morning shift arrived.

A young man in his twenties—tired, poor, wearing clothes a size too small—stepped inside and approached the desk.

Behind it, a new floor manager waited.

Polite.

Still.

Smiling slightly.

“Welcome,” said the manager. “We’re glad to have you.”

He extended a hand.

It bore a faint seam along the wrist.

A badge on his uniform read:

Avery – Supervisor
Model: PELL-R9

Rating: 10.00/10. From 2 votes.
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🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available


Written by A.G. Greene
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

🔔 More stories from author: A.G. Greene


Publisher's Notes: N/A

Author's Notes: N/A

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