From cloudear@nym.alias.net Tue Aug 04 17:56:27 1998
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Date: 4 Aug 1998 21:56:27 -0000
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From: woodear <cloudear@nym.alias.net>
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Subject: The Asp: Factory Girl
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When Aaron McStaff inherited the Oceanside Can Factory from
his father, he was forty-six years old, and had held the same job
as a night watchman for nineteen years. His father's life had been
spent developing the ideal metal container for preserving food's
flavor and protecting its nutrients from decay. As if this goal
had turned inward, his own life had outlasted expectations by more
than twenty years: he died at the age of ninety-eight.
The old man's ambitious striving for the perfect can had
brought him close to madness on several occasions. On his sixty-
fifth birthday, he assembled all of his employees and ordered them
to begin work on a can that needed no labels: its contents would be
revealed by the sound emitted when the customer tapped the lid of
the can. These lids would be made thicker or thinner depending on
what was stored in the can, and the thickness of the metal would
result in a different pitch, like with guitar strings. Peaches
could be given a relatively thick lid, and the cans, when tapped by
a shopper, would emit a lower pitch. Applesauce cans could be
given thinner lids, yielding a higher pitch. This would save
manufacturers the added cost of purchasing labels, and would
provide shoppers with an opportunity to express themselves
musically while shopping. The workers at the factory found the
plan baffling, however, and the old man realized that his system of
assigning pitches to different fruits was unnatural and arbitrary:
why should peaches be assigned a low pitch, rather than a high one?
Shouldn't the nature of the fruit or vegetable determine the sound
of its can? And didn't some foods express themselves better
through pure rhythm than melody? What did pineapples, pears, or
beets really sound like, anyway? Wasn't there a reason why god
made vegetation quiet? The old man's attempt to grasp the auditory
nature of typically silent produce left him frustrated and
discouraged.
When the old man was sixty-eight, he hatched a plan to develop
a series of cans shaped to resemble their contents. This visionary
scheme proved to be abortive as well, for while string beans
logically demanded a long, cylindrical can, and while whole
tomatoes seemed to deserve a rounded container, what about pureed
fruits? Refried beans? Chopped olives? Couldn't they fit just as
well into convex or concave cans? Again, the attempt to derive
guidance from the nature of the food was futile.
The old man also considered making cans with their fronts
shaped like facial sculptures, bearing the features of famous
people: cans for tomato sauce could be given the plump cheeks and
the wrinkled forehead of Marlon Brando as the Godfather; cans for
peaches could be shaped to form the slender nose, the elegant
cheekbones of Flora Tennison, who was nicknamed the Georgia Peach
by tabloids before her bloody suicide. But the old man's inspired
notion met with resistance: wouldn't strangely shaped cans require
grocers to rearrange their shelves at odd distances from each
other, and perhaps at strange angles? Why would they go to all
that trouble? And wouldn't the celebrities sue?
When the old man was seventy-one, he decided to try making
cans out of metals other than aluminum and tin. He proclaimed that
wealthy shoppers would be quite delighted to purchase cans made of
sterling and gold, if not for the marvellous produce contained in
them, then at least for the sheer thrill of witnessing something so
beautiful as a can fashioned from precious metal. He pointed out
that Andy Warhol had worshipped cans: clearly awed by the graceful
simplicity of the can and its invaluable role in ordinary life, he
had painted countless pictures of tomato soup cans.
The old man also considered using non-metallic substances to
make cans with. One afternoon he flew across the floor of the
factory, grabbing his workers by the shoulders, shrieking for them
all to gather and listen to his latest brilliant invention. In a
dream, he said, a slender, gleaming angel with transparent eyes and
vast, cloudy wings told him to create a can made of something
clear.
"Glass!" He shouted at the mystified faces. "I'll make cans
out of glass!"
The workers look away, embarrassed.
"Sir," One of them said quietly, "People already do that.
They're called `jars.'"
When he was almost eighty, the old man began reading science
fiction novels to stimulate new ideas for modifying cans. On one
occasion he became convinced that a rack could be invented which
would send invisible propulsion beams from various directions upon
masses of produce, clustering segments of peaches together in mid-
air spheres of sweetness, pressing olive pate into hovering globes,
making cans and normal containers entirely superfluous.
"The can of tomorrow," he said bravely, "does not exist."
Like a dented old can tossed into the dark waters of a
roadside spill, his mind grew rusty. At one point he came to work
believing that he owned a petting zoo, rather than a can factory.
He wandered past his employees, stroking their hair, complimenting
them on not biting him, tossing them bits of the sandwich his live-
in nurse had packed for him.
As a watchman, Aaron himself had grown tired of keeping an eye
on things, and he had little excitement over the prospect of taking
over his father's business. Instead of moving back to Rhode Island
and actively running the factory, he developed the ambitious,
though slightly mystical, plan of letting the Oceanside Can Factory
oversee itself. Within six months the company was reporting
losses. Aaron explained that this was a natural and inevitable
result of the change in corporate direction. Within a year and a
half, the company was bankrupt. Aaron announced enthusiastically
that he had no choice but to sell his father's can factory. He
took as a souvenir from his stint as president and owner a large
aluminum can which he kept under the kitchen sink and threw trash
in.
The can factory was bought by a toy company which made plastic
dolls. One of the employees was named Jenny. Her job was to align
metal tubes over a row of small moulds, and then press a button,
causing the tubes to drip molten plastic into the moulds. When the
moulds were full, she would turn off the drips, wait for two
minutes until the plastic dried, then hit a button opening the
moulds. Little plastic hands would then drop from the moulds onto
the conveyor belt, which would transport the hands to the people
who attached them to the dolls' arms. Jenny would then close the
moulds and start over, re-aligning the tubes of molten plastic over
the moulds, and so on.
After Jenny spent six years making little hands, a computer
was installed that monitored the levels of molten plastic and
opened and closed the moulds automatically. Jenny's new job was to
operate the computers. She hit one button every morning to turn
the computer on, then hit the same button at the end of the day to
turn it off. In between, she swept under the conveyor belts,
cleaned the factory's restrooms, and periodically glanced over to
make sure the computer was functioning correctly.
A year later, a new computer was installed that was self-
regulating, and remotely signalled the computer's maintenance
company when something went wrong. The computer did not need to be
turned on and off -- in fact, it was harmful for its central
processing unit to be turned off and on frequently.
There was no longer any job for Jenny to perform, so the
company fired her. In recognition of her years of devoted service,
they gave her a free doll. Their gift was tainted with a bit of
morbid humor: the doll they gave her was unsuitable for sale: it
had been made immediately after the computer was installed, and the
glitches had not been fully worked out. The hands on Jenny's doll
had not been given adequate cooling time, and they looked more like
flippers than miniature human hands. Jenny's doll could not hold
the miniature cellphone it came with.
For a time Jenny was processed by the city's unemployment
office. She stood in lines, filled out forms, gave interviews in
which she answered repetitive questions about her bleak employment
history. She bickered with women who hated to have their lunch
breaks interrupted; confessed her failures to find work, surely a
sign of laziness, to men who had glasses made of paper clips and
the dry, pink complexion of pencil erasers.
Her efforts at finding new work were fruitless. She paid
nearly half of one of her unemployment checks in a manicure
training course, believing that beautifying real hands couldn't be
entirely different from mass-producing miniature plastic ones. At
the culmination of the course, her teacher allowed her to practise
her skills on a real customer.
After a few moments of having her cuticles fiercely poked, the
customer screeched at Jenny, "I'm not a cat, dammit -- I'm not here
to be declawed!"
The customer was afraid of Jenny, and her hands trembled, her
fingers wriggled like earthworms held over a match. Jenny grew
increasingly frustrated with the woman's fidgetting, and threatened
to handcuff her wrists to the table if she didn't stop writhing.
Outraged, her face rippling with anger, the customer stormed out of
the beauty shop cursing.
Jenny realized that her real talents lay on the conveyor belt;
it was in the factory environment was where she felt most
comfortable, amidst the soothing susurrus of unseen engines, the
hypnotic stroke of rolling plastic rivers. But conveyor belt
assignments seemed equally popular with other workers who were
younger, more energetic, and perhaps more talented. Those precious
jobs were snatched up instantly.
During her extended period of unemployment, Jenny spent most
of her time sitting in front of her television consuming bowls of
bargain brand nacho cheese flavored microwave popcorn which she
bought with foodstamps. Eventually her cable was cut off,
restricting her to three channels. Two of them were Spanish-
language channels, but she didn't know Spanish, and the miserable
quality of the English channel's reception was well-matched by the
dreariness of its programming. Eventually Jenny's electricity was
cut off, and it was almost with a sense of relief that she
dislodged herself from her chair and from her increasingly gloomy
corner of the televised universe.
Having nothing at all to do with herself, Jenny began making
every imaginable excuse to stand in lines at the unemployment
office. Often she asked the employees for advice, such as: Would
there be any problem with her leaving out her middle initial on an
application? Would there be any advantage in spelling out her
middle name in full, rather than using an initial? Since her phone
service had been terminated, should she use her aunt's phone
number, or her grandmother's? When she was advised to dress semi-
formally for an interview, did this mean pants were prohibited?
Was blue what one would consider a semi-formal color? Jenny spent
so much time at the unemployment office that one of the office
managers mistook her for an employee, and ordered her to re-
organize some files. She dutifully, even happily complied. She
went along with the act as long as she could, but was finally
discovered, and asked to leave until she had a legitimate reason to
be there.
Jenny began taking free tours of factories, pretending that
she was opening a similar one of her own and needed pointers. She
assured the employees at the companies she visited that her product
would be sold in an entirely different market -- usually London or
Vancouver -- so her business would not really compete with theirs.
During a tour of a small paint-brush factory she spent a good half
hour alone in front of a conveyor belt on which locks of synthetic
rabbit hair were suspended in mid air, brought ticklingly close to
tapered black handles, then permanently bound to them by shiny,
brass bands.
For a few minutes the operation was hypnotic, and her body
responded to the rhythm of the machine: she blinked when the hairs
were bunched together; gasped slightly as they edged closer to the
paintbrush handle; paused as the metal bands were bent snugly to
lock the hairs to the handle; then breathed out as the completed
unit was transported to the packaging area.
Then her serene union with the operation broke; she stood
trembling, blinking, and her hand rose up.
"Something wrong?" The machine's operator seemed startled by
her transformation.
"The...the arm that lowers the hairs to the handle...why does
it turn like that?"
"Well," the man pointed toward starting point of the conveyor
belt, where hairs were gathered in clumps by delicate metal
gripping devices, "see? The, uh, the angle. It has to."
"No," she shook her head vigorously, "the bin could be tilted
so that the gear doesn't have to shift."
"Uh...so?"
"Well, that's what slows the whole system down. Look..."
Driven by a purely emotional, almost trans-human grasp of the
machine's structure, Jenny made a demonstration for the man, and
her theory proved correct. Her modification would save them time,
lower production costs, and bring their productivity to another
level -- substantially increasing the likelihood that the next
Picasso, wherever and whoever he was, would use their paintbrushes.

Something inside Jenny was awakened: some elegant mechanism
that placed her passion for conveyor belts on precisely the same
level as a market shortcoming, and brought them swiftly together,
clamping them into a sheer union.
Jenny started a business as a conveyor belt analyst. She went
to factories and made inspections; meditated with the machines,
listened their groans and hums, touching the pulse of ratchets and
acceleration balances, finding their weaknesses and insecurities,
the irregular clacks, idle beats -- then she comforted them with
design improvements.
Once, just experimentally, when no one else was around, she
lay down on a conveyor belt in a bottling factory and hit the on-
switch. Steel rollers bumped against her vertebrae, cushioned by
the rubber beneath her; she smelled the heat of the engine
straining to accomodate her weight. Ahead of her, she saw a wall
of mechanical arms pumping down, reaching up for reloads, then
pumping down again. She had removed the cap tray from its usual
position so that the arms would not jab her with caps, but she had
no idea how much force the arms would strike her with. As she
approached them, she closed her eyes, lay back, and relaxed.
And the arms began beating her: first they hit her shins,
causing her to jump forward slightly, then her upper legs, then her
tummy, her breasts, and finally her shoulders. They beating metal
arms just missed her head. It all happened so suddenly, it took
her a moment to gather her senses and realize how it felt: how
delightful the blows were, how aggressive, and yet seemingly
affectionate. Jenny's hands stroked her breasts where she had been
delicately bludgeoned, not by a man, but by something man-made, and
entirely under her control. When Jenny reached the end of the
conveyor belt where capped bottles were sorted into cardboard
boxes, she was still in a daze, and the conveyor belt dropped her
to the floor in a dizzy, exhilirated mass. She lay there for
several minutes, cleared of thought, relishing what had just
happened to her.
The plant manager walked up to her.
"Are you all right, Jenny?"
"Oh, I'm...yes, I'm fine."
"What happened?"
She was at a loss to explain it.
"I...I think I found a way to improve your machine."
"Oh? What's that?"
"Could you...could you find me the manufacturer's prints?"
As the manager went into his boss's office to search for the
machine's documents, Jenny leapt to her feet, flew to the conveyor
belt's programming box, and adjusted the gears.
This time the arms pumped faster, poking her body in twice as
many places. She rode it four times before the manager returned;
four times her body was pummelled to jelly by the rods, then
dropped to the factory floor.
"What...what happened to you?" The manager asked when he
returned.
"What?" She was flustered, breathless. "Whaddaya mean?"
"You have a bloody nose."
"It's nothing."
He looked over at the machine. Its gears whisteled, the
capping arms thrust down with maniacal fervor.
She explained to him that she had "whipped it up a little."
Her modification would save them time, lower production costs, and
bring their productivity to another level -- substantially
increasing the likelihood that the next Michael Jordan, wherever
and whoever he was, would drink their sodas.
For three months Jenny rode conveyor belts like a rodeo star,
subjecting herself to machines that stroked, slapped, wiped, and
yanked her to a form of ecstasy she could barely contain. She
revelled at how close humans really are to machines, and how
comfortably they clatter and buzz their way into every aspect of
our lives. She pitied people who were somehow threatened by
machines, but realized that their real insecurity lay in the fact
that as machines became more sophisticated and sensitive, the
differences between humans and machines diminished. Machines were
the next super-race, she realized, and she wished there was some
way she could reproduce with them, bringing them to the next
glorious stage of their evolution.
Jenny's advice to the companies was always the same: make it
faster, more vigorous. Invariably she said that this would save
them time, lower production costs, and bring their productivity to
another level. After weeks of following her advice, though, the
machines began to wear themselves out and break down. Jenny was no
machinist at all, but rather a hedonist whose pleasure was
increasingly rooted in things un-alive.
Her consistently simple-minded advice would have destroyed her
fledgling career as a conveyor belt analyst had it not been for the
Asp. He found a flier advertising her service, and invited her to
his plant.
"What I make is nothing. I un-make. My machines take used
pet cages, discarded tennis rackets, old stereo systems, and tear
them apart. Every connection is fractured: glue melted, circuits
dashed, rivets and nails pulled out. I gather the pieces, you see,
which individually have no value at all."
While the purpose of the operation eluded her -- she figured
it was some sort of recycling plant -- she asserted that she could
most certainly find some possible improvements.
"I'm trying to expand the scope of my enterprise. I'd like to
adapt the machinery to old encyclopedias, outdated TV guides, junk
mail, that sort of thing. Refine the hardware to deal with
concepts."
The Asp's goals confused her further, but the sight of the
conveyor belts entranced her: things whacked, chopped, poked and
prodded, widening her dazed eyes with flashing blurs and streaking
loops of motion. Never had she heard such noises coming from a
conveyor belt system: metallic groans that made her skull shake;
hisses and screams that sounded almost human as they echoed in the
vast concrete factory.
The Asp excused himself, saying that he had office work to do.
Then, before making an even cursory examination of the mechanisms,
Jenny lay full-length on the conveyor belt, stretching her arms out
behind her head, and nudged the power switch with her big toe. She
felt steam moisten the tips of her fingers as she proceeded slowly
into a steel-encased section of the dis-assembly line. The rubber
of the belt was extremely rough, and she felt the skin on her arms
and neck tingle and grow taut. Vibrantly alive with excitement,
she impulsively ripped off her blouse, then nestled back into the
conveyor belt, closed her eyes, and slowly disappeared into the
encased chamber.
Once, when Jenny was eight, her father gave her a magnifying
glass and taught her how to focus the rage of the sun into a tiny,
charring beam. Jenny sat in the backyard with newspapers, first
burning her name over the front page in script perhaps suitable for
an arson story. Then she burned the main crease in the paper and
refolded it, so that if anyone picked up the paper it would
unexpectedly fall apart. Bored with burning newspapers, Jenny
swiped a colorful fashion magazine from her parents' bathroom, and
burned out the eyes and faces of gorgeously sexy, mysterious women.
Looking at her work, she thought the torched features actually
enhanced the forcefulness of the ads. She turned a page, and saw
an photo-ad for mentholated cigarettes in which a man wearing beach
trunks was holding his girlfriend high in the air while cool waves
sloshed at their ankles. The male model's tight trunks bulged
enormously, and Jenny held the mgnifying glass over his crotch. As
she incinerated him there Jenny found herself inhaling the smoke
with relish. When the burn had spread to his bellybutton she
dropped the magazine, and then -- in a daze, not thinking about it
at all -- she lay back on the ground, lifted her T-shirt, and held
magnifying glass over the smooth skin above her right nipple. When
the light was focused to a fierce, slender beam, she closed her
eyes. Before before she felt the sudden, sharp pain, she smelled
the smoke of her epidermis sizzling.
She smelled it again in the Asp's factory as gleaming, dark
instruments flickered and slashed around her. But her smell was
different now, stronger, and more complex: beneath the odor of her
own burning flesh she detected something minty, along with traces
of alcohol. Jenny became confused; her head swam in the powerful
odors, and she could no longer concentrate. Her body jerked as her
bones were shot through with electricity. The fumes of her body
choked her, but when she reached up to cover her mouth and nose,
she saw her hands severed off at the wrists.
These can't be my arms, she thought instantaneously. The arms
sprayed her face with blood, as if trying to capture her with the
sticky liquid.
The machine is having me, she thought before losing
consciousness: It's taking me with it.
A few minutes later the Asp strolled from his office down
toward the end of the converoy belt, where ten large glass jugs now
contained segments of Jenny's being. Three were filled with
mixtures of blood and water; one powdered bone; one hair; two were
filled with skin, much of it charred and black; two contained her
varicolored guts; and the last contained a dense, azure mist
condensing in silver beads on the inside of the glass. Although it
resembled a tiny, thick cloud, the mist did not rise from the jug
or dissipate into the air in the room.
"Her mind," the Asp whispered to himself, then chuckled. "I
have her mind..."
He strenuously battled the temptation to inhale the mist and
gather the droplets with his tongue. Instead, he whisked the vapor
and shook the drops into the machine's control system. Now that it
was equipped with a living blueprint of the human mind, he was
convinced that his machine would now be capable of de-structuring,
compartmentalizing, and segregating the human psyche: re-ordering
it, refining the interconnections, laying down an even more
efficient and powerful capacity for producing evil in the world.
Breathing deeply to calm himself, he lay down on the conveyor belt.
As he slid toward the gate of the potentially lethal machine, his
eyes blinked uncontrollably; his hands shook.
And after the psychic conveyor had sifted, grated, broken
apart, scattered, then reassembled his mind; after every idea in
his head had been crystalized into complex geometrical bits and
then shattered; after every motive and scheme in his heart had been
jotted down schematically in the heavens then reduced to a soothing
liquid that rained back down into the dark, churning pools of his
subsconcious; after his sense of identity had been stripped into
ribbons and then spliced back together, the Asp was, in every
respect, absolutely the same as before.

The author's Asp archive is at
http://members.aol.com/Siskur/asp.htm

Another Asp page is at
http://www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/1662/asp.htm

An e-zine of recent Asp stories is at
http://www.swagazine.com/asp/