The factories themselves endlessly churn out tainted fetishes, pattern webs, and just plain crap. They're stark hellholes of corrugated siding, rusting pipes, body-grinding gears, loose wiring, sparks, dim fluorescent tubes, hellishly hot ovens and reeking smoke. It's a rare day in the Scar when an emanation isn't burned to death, electrocuted, or ground up in the gears. The assembly lines run 24/7, and any slacking is punished with whips or shock batons liberally laid into the back. But the factories are paradise compared to the Scar's textile mills: these firetraps work at an even more frenetic pace than the factories, endlessly spinning out pattern webs to bolster the realm's Gauntlet. Sometimes the mills grow so overheated they spontaneously burst into flame, incinerating everyone inside (no-one's allowed out during a fire; the work must go on as long as the workers are able to perform it).
—Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Umbra: The Velvet Shadows
And its go boys go
They'll time your every breath
And every day in this place your two days near to death
But you go...
They'll time your every breath
And every day in this place your two days near to death
But you go...
[Pistons thumping, valve hisses]
Well a process man am I and I'm tellin' you no lie
I work and breathe among the fumes that tread across the sky
There's thunder all around me and there's poison in the air
There's a lousy smell that smacks of hell and dust all in me hair
I work and breathe among the fumes that tread across the sky
There's thunder all around me and there's poison in the air
There's a lousy smell that smacks of hell and dust all in me hair
— Great Big Sea, Process Man
Sweetling, to the dark tower below! Down we go. Down the lighted path. Down the conveyor belts. Down the metal monster menagerie. A sterile, bright nightmare. Metal grafted to fiends. Legended beasts dreaming as machines. Smiling scientists become the nightmares of nightmare things. Is that what the Dreamers see in some of you?
—The Buzzing, The Secret World
"And, near the god-machines, the slaves of the god-machines: the men who were as though crushed between machine companionability and machine solitude. They have no loads to carry: the machine carries the loads. They have not to lift and push: the machine lifts and pushes. They have nothing else to do but eternally one and the same thing, each in this place, each at his machine. Divided into periods of brief seconds, always the same clutch at the same second, at the same second. They have eyes, but they are blind but for one thing, the scale of the manometer. They have ears, but they are deaf but for one thing, the hiss of their machine. They watch and watch, having no thought but for one thing: should their watchfulness waver, then the machine awakens from its feigned sleep and begins to race, racing itself to pieces. And the machine, having neither head nor brain, with the tension of its watchfulness, sucks and sucks out the brain from the paralysed skull of its watchman, and does not stay, and sucks, and does not stay until a being is hanging to the sucked-out skull, no longer a man and not yet a machine, pumped dry, hollowed out, used up. And the machine which has sucked out and gulped down the spinal marrow and brain of the man and has wiped out the hollows in his skull with the soft, long tongue of its soft, long hissing, the machine gleams in its silver-velvet radiance, anointed with oil, beautiful, infallible - Baal and Moloch, Huitzilopochtli and Durgha."
—Freder, Metropolis
A thousand massive furnaces burn within the vastness of Zharr-Naggrund, smelting the metals that are the lifeblood of the city. The city itself is a huge living workshop full of smoke and noise, illuminated by its inner fires and driven by machines of vast size and power. Gigantic steam-driven hammers stamp out sheets of iron and bronze with rhythmic booms like the heartbeats of a cyclopean god. Massive cauldrons of bubbling metal pour out their molten contents into twisted moulds of intricate construction. The roaring of furnaces, groaning of huge wheels and grinding of arcane machines fills the oily air. The noise and the labours never cease. The Dark Lands are shrouded in thick volcanic clouds and smoke from the workshops of Zharrduk, so the Tower of Zharr-Naggrund exists in a timeless twilight, illuminated by the carmine fires of its own forges.
—Warhammer: Chaos Dwarfs Army Book (4th Edition)
A place to both work and live at the same time? Well, of course people wanted in! Never mind the harsh hours, working conditions, sadistic security force, and all the rest. Factory workers were forced to work 16 hour days, work only shutting down on Sundays, between sunrise and sunset. Workers were not given individual rooms, instead sharing rooms with eight other people, sleeping in shifts of three. Medical attention was unheard of. If you were injured in the course of your duties, which most people were, you were expected to just keep working. Anyone too injured to work was dragged off by the security, never to be heard from again.
For forty years, the Anderson Factory cranked out all sorts of things for people. Meat, clothes, weapons. Never mind that the beef might be mixed with human. Don't care that the weapons were forged in blood. No attention need be paid that the clothes were dyed with... well, you get the idea. Rumors leaked out, but the products were so good, why bother?.
A chain of immense volcanoes, constantly smouldering, girdles Khorne's domain. These form the Ring of Doom. Khorne's roars of rage cause the volcanoes to erupt and the ground to shudder. The volcanoes then explode with the wrath of the Blood God, spilling out rivers of lava as hot as Khorne's anger. On the inward slopes of these jagged, fire-tipped peaks sprawl the foundries of Khorne. It is said that within these dire forges labour the souls of warriors who died in their sleep, forever doomed to serve Khorne as slaves. Great stacks billow forth clouds of smoke, which mix with the fumes of the volcanoes to choke the blood-red skies with the industry of war. These grim edifices keep Khorne's armouries filled; his numberless warriors armed and armoured by ceaseless toil.
—Warhammer 40,000: Codex - Chaos Daemons (4th ed)
We crawled onwards through a soundlock. The helmets conveyed the cadavers into a violet-lit vault; as we passed thru the flap, the celsius fell sharply, and the raw of machinery burst our ears.
A slaughterhouse production line opened out below us, manned by figures wearing scissors, swordsaws, tools I don't know the names of... blood-soaked, from head-to-toe, like sadistic visions of hell. The devils down there snipped off collars, stripped clothes, shaved follicles, peeled skin, offcut hands and legs, sliced off meat, spooned organs... Drained hoovered the blood... the noise was colossal.
A slaughterhouse production line opened out below us, manned by figures wearing scissors, swordsaws, tools I don't know the names of... blood-soaked, from head-to-toe, like sadistic visions of hell. The devils down there snipped off collars, stripped clothes, shaved follicles, peeled skin, offcut hands and legs, sliced off meat, spooned organs... Drained hoovered the blood... the noise was colossal.
—Sonmi-451, Cloud Atlas
My soul shudders at what I have seen, but at last I have reached the main part of the factory. Now onwards, downwards, to find those floodwaters and drain them away. Like Moses, I will cleave the waters and lift my little darlings clear of its vile cradle.
—Oswald Mandus, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
