Status Updates From O Coração É o Último a Morrer

Her face barely moves: she’s had work done and they went too far[...]

Aurora can’t smile like a normal person, but it wasn’t just the weird smile, it was the tone. Overly mollifying. How you’d talk to a child about to have a painful vaccination or a cow on the way to the abattoir. They had special ramps for those cows, to lull them into walking placidly to their doom.

Incidents of violence are way down, they’re told today – a graph pops onto the screen – and egg production is up. A new process will soon be introduced at Poultry: headless chickens nourished through tubes, which has been shown to decrease anxiety and increase meat growth efficiencies; in addition to which it eliminates cruelty to animals, which is the sort of multiple win that Positron has come to stand for!

She’s wondered about organ harvesting[...] But whatever happens, it’s bound to be useful, and that’s all she needs to know[...]
Tonight she’ll join the knitting circle, as usual. Some of them are doing
little cotton hats for infants, some of them are working on a new thing –
blue knitted teddy bears, so cute. “Had a nice day?” the knitting circle
women will say to her. “Oh, a perfect day,” she’ll reply.

Granted, it’s only the worst criminals, the incorrigibles, the ones they
haven’t been able to turn around, who are brought in for the Procedure.
The troublemakers, the ones who’d ruin Consilience if they had the
chance. It’s a last resort. They’d reassured her a lot about that.
Most of the Procedures are men[...] Though none of the ones
she’s done have been women, yet. Women are not so incorrigible: that
must be it.

"What they wanted was a short time alone with a chicken. They were
willing to trade for it. In return, Stan would be offered protection from the
furtive gang thuggery that was then running like an undercurrent beneath
the orderly routines of Positron Prison.
“You want to what?” he asked the first time. The guy had spelled it out:
he wanted to have sex with a chicken."[...]
What did that make him? A chicken pimp[...]

“There you go,” says Clint. He holds up a mirror so Stan can see the back of his own head. There’s a bristly roll of fat taking shape at the nape of his neck, but only if he leans his head back. When he finds Jasmine he must remember to keep his head upright. Or forward a little. She might
put her hand there [...]"

Consilience was founded in the late nineteenth century by a group of Quakers. [...] its crest was a beehive, meaning cooperative labour. The first industry was a beet-sugar mill; next came a furniture factory, then a corset company. Then there was an automobile plant [...] a camera film corporation, and finally, a state correctional institution. [...]But now, thinks Charmaine, it’s all different. Such an improvement!

"And if every citizen were either a guard or a prisoner, the result would be full employment: half would be prisoners, the other half would be engaged in the business of tending the prisoners [...] the fair thing would be for everyone to take turns: one month in, one month out. Think of the savings, with every dwelling serving two sets of residents! It was time-share taken to its logical conclusion."

"Stan rolls an olive around in his mouth before chewing: it’s a long time since he’s had an olive. The taste is distracting. He should be more alert, because naturally they’re being scrutinised, though it’s hard to figure out who’s doing it. Everyone is so fucking nice! The niceness is like the olive: it’s a long time since Stan has encountered that muffling layer of smiling and nodding."