The Special Economic Zone

I. In medias res

The spade met the soft, water-logged mud with an unsatisfyingly slow push. The viscosity of the ground made digging ditches much more difficult than one would experience somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Even in the dead of night, the heat did not relent; everything felt difficult, more gruelling here. The only thing keeping the ‘recruit’ sane as he dug and dug was the steady sound of cicadas radiating from the forest. If he could hear them, he could ground himself in the present and perhaps put off the future from happening at all. Turgid metal piercing the soft ground, then the sound of wet mud slopping into a pile behind him, this would be his last experience of the world. He repeated the motion over and over as the Mistress and her assistant watched. He paused, sweat dripping from his brow into his eyes,

“Please, may I have some water, Mistress?”

Without a word or a glance being exchanged, the lady’s assistant, holding an AK-47, poured a bottle of water over his head.

“Keep digging,” barked the armed woman.

He kept digging; tears began to mingle with the sweat that drenched his face. He knew what was coming. Originally, he had been here in a managerial position, but the company had had to let him go; he was now redundant. The ditch was for his own body to repose in, much like every recruit was forced to dig when they were first brought to the facility in the Special Economic Zone. Once they dug their own grave, they behaved much better. Everything becomes more real to the recruit. He never expected to be let go from his managerial role, he never thought this would become him too. He wanted to plead, to tell the women how valuable he was, how valuable he still could be, but he knew it was pointless. It’s better to die an honourable death than to beg on his knees in the mud. He began to shake slightly as he realised the hole he had dug was now the perfect depth. After all, he had liquidated recruits into plots of land just like this only last week. Recruits were easy to find and easy to dispose of.

“On your knees,” commanded the Mistress.

He paused and tightened his grip on the spade. Water droplets from the leaves above him startled him, making him refocus on the moment. He dropped to his knees in the mud, where he began to pray. The armed woman pressed the gun to the middle of his forehead and smiled. He could not look at her now. Previously, he had had a crush on her, he thought she was his friend, and he thought he was going to get ahead in the Company. But sadly for him, with a slow, steady squeeze of a trigger, his brains were now mingling with the dirt in a wretched corner of the South East Asian jungle abyss. He did not get ahead; he got his head repurposed as fertiliser. He was much more useful in this format. More compatible with Earth’s interface.

The ladies giggled to each other as the blood streamed from his head, the armed one giving him a good, hard kick and arranging his body so it perfectly fit into the hole.

“Finish the job now, Captain,” the Lady commanded with a smile at the armed woman.

Turning to return to the compound, she could hear the rhythmic filling of the ditch that the former manager now occupied. The standard procedure would be to execute the recruit and then take the body to the makeshift operating theatre on the compound grounds, in order to sell the organs to whichever investor had bid the highest on the Company’s dark-web auction website. Not today. Today, a swift turnaround was needed: the Chinese surgeon of choice was spending time with his family, and the gentleman was to be presently relieved of his post.

Meanwhile, the Captain was rather gleeful to be rid of this particular wretch. She had grown to despise the way he tried to flirt with her—he really was fucking clueless and useless, she thought with a laugh. It took her rather longer to fill the hole up than she would have liked, especially whilst armed with an AK-47. She lamented the old weapons assigned to them here at the Company Compound; she would have liked brand-new, shiny weapons, after all, they had the money for them. However, for safety and privacy, her Mistress preferred to buy guns in a more clandestine fashion, so as to be completely untraceable. You see, if you lurk in the dark corners of any third-world shithole, you can buy yourself some nice former USSR surplus. This is much more agreeable than leaving a trail chasing new weaponry. After all, the Company only requires them for enforcement; there is no need for anything too flashy. The Special Economic Zone itself is protected by Chinese paramilitaries; the Company is simply an entity therein. Smaller, older arms were appropriate even if they were not to the Captain’s liking.

The Captain returned to the compound and hung her coat up next to the door as she entered. This may well be a militarised compound, but she made it homely for herself. She paused, listening to the hum of hundreds of computer servers and the click-clacking of computer keys as the recruits worked, constantly worked, they worked 24/7. Sleeping was done in shifts by group; groups were set up in relation to which enterprise each Captain oversaw. This particular Captain, Captain 2, worked on the cybersecurity team. Soon, the Captain’s group would be sent to bed for six hours, no more and no less. The recruits cannot be too well rested; they cannot have free time; they cannot socialise. If they are caught breaking the rules, they are duly punished. The Captain loved to punish them, and as she loved it so, the rules changed by the minute with sadistic glee.

She threw open the work room door; seven people remained in her work group. Two had been liquidated this week, and tensions were high at the Company for the recruits. ‘Valuable’ people were being ‘let go’; nobody felt secure. Nothing was certain, not how much food they got to eat, not how much sleep they got, not how they were treated. Privacy no longer existed for recruits; they were never alone, not to get changed, not to wash, and not to defecate. They were now property of the Company and nothing more. Livestock that could operate a computer, or who could be put to work in the Company’s labs.

“Stop working, come on now, leave your work station and follow me to bed,” she ordered, stamping her boot down hard on the ground to get their attention.

The recruits rose from their work stations and stood in a line awaiting the command of the Captain to follow. The Captain nodded, and as such, in single file, they followed her to their bedroom. The Company valued ruthless efficiency, and thus they had only two dormitories for the recruits; the other 25 rooms in the compound were used for different purposes. The recruits walked past the lab, which perpetually smelled like blood, past the locked rooms where they could almost constantly hear the sound of screaming or crying, to finally join the other recruits from other groups to rest in Dormitory 1. The room was lined with cheap metal bed frames onto which they unfurled their futons and attempted to get some rest. It was never truly dark in the compound; darkness was used as a reward and a torture. The lights dimmed for sleep but never totally shut off.

“Captain, please, I need to eat,” pleaded a 30-something-year-old man collected from some trafficking operation the Company had conducted against undesirables last year.

“No, no food for you, you animal, shut the fuck up and go to sleep,” she ended her statement with a hard, firm slap to his face.

Dejectedly, he made his bed in silence and lay as still as he could despite the growing, gnawing pain from his stomach. The recruits slipped into total silence. They were not allowed to chat amongst themselves, and any such chattering would result in immediate punishment. The room was guarded overnight by the lowest ranks of the Company. They were to show just how ruthless they were willing to be if they wished to climb the ranks around here. Working here at all was not advisable unless you were of a particular mindset and had a particular set of skills. The cruelty had to be fairly balanced. Excess cruelty meant you may well become a recruit yourself, but a lack thereof would mean your imminent liquidation. Everything was to be balanced perfectly; it is simple economics.

Captain 2 could finally retreat to her bedroom. Summary executions, slavery, torture, it did make one rather tired at the end of the day. By contrast, the Captain had a lovely room, very homely, girly even. Their leader, their Mistress, allowed them to have a personal space in which to feel like a person; however, outside of this space, all identity must be stripped, and the person must become a strict enforcer of the Company. To thrive here, one’s Will must be strong, focused and unrelenting. The Captain gave everything she had to the Company: her life, her money, her energy, her love. It is All or Nothing, and the Nothingness here was all-encompassing.

The Captain stripped herself of her black tactical clothing. The Company had a practical uniform; they did not wish to be easily seen when conducting off-site activities. And even if they were to be observed from the outside, with the faces of employees covered and everyone in the same black outfit, it was hard to work out who was who, which rank, or even whether they were a man or a woman. Nothing identifiable was allowed. Finally breathing freely, the Captain felt herself again. The black veil pressed against her face gave way to another person, another persona, she was not herself when she was in uniform, which allowed her to commit greater acts of cruelty than she could as her everyday self.

She lay on her bed, now only in her pink underwear, and opened up her laptop to review the day’s footage. She was the Captain of group number 2. She was to review footage throughout the day and rate performances; she was to make sure the Company was efficient, exacting, and most of all, profitable. She turned to the footage for Room 5, a room they livestreamed from. One of her recruits was sent there for reeducation today, which is always livestreamed to a paying audience on the dark web. They all knew what happened in some of the rooms because they could hear it from the outside, and of course they were briefed on it upon arrival.

The video progressed; the man was now being tortured, fingernails ripped from one hand, as a Captain, who was tasked only with torture, held the camera for the livestream. Captain 2 was extremely aroused by this. In her previous life she had been a rather sweet girl, but the Company had changed her, now she was not quite human any longer. Her hand went down her underwear as she watched the man bleed, tied to a cold steel chair; she orgasmed right as they began to cut off a few fingers. Orgasms are a part of the energy economy and are absolutely encouraged when reviewing footage.

Sleep was a privilege for absolutely everyone on the Compound, and as such, stimulant abuse was the norm for those employed by the Company. The Captain managed to get 6 hours’ sleep that night, masturbating to the torture livestream can help one get some rest, due to the sedating nature of such an activity, but it was only a slight reprieve; the biggest reprieve came from the drugs manufactured on-site.

II. Yield Reports

She popped a little red pill and put on her black uniform. It was time for the torture to begin anew. In Dormitory 1, sleep was abrupt. A low ranking guard patrolled the row of beds, kicking ankles at random. The pain woke the recruit up in an instant, their screams served well as an alarm clock for the others.

The thirty-something man, still hungry from the night before, woke with his gnawing hunger. He filed into the workroom with the others, sat at his terminal and watched the script loading automatically as always. He continued his work on a woman named Diane who lived in Ohio. Diane believed that she was in a relationship with a military man stationed in some country she’d never heard of. He started the days messaging and as he hit enter he heard the screaming start again from across the hall.

Nobody stirred, everyone had learned how much attention was safe to spend on someone’s fate. Looking up could very well cost you yours. Losing your pace, your work flow, ruined your quota; missing your quota moved your name one line up on a list that was constantly updated within the Captains psyche.

Above them Captain 2 attended the morning review. An unarmed and rather vulnerable accountant named Feng attended, despite being a rather cruel man himself felt skittish at the Company’s compound. The morning meeting was called a ‘Yield Review’, it occurred every day at seven am just before everyone felt too oppressed by the compound’s failing AC system to feel comfortable. Feng’s laptop showed numbers on a portable screen, conversion rates on the romance scripts alongside average extraction per target-relationship in the crypto vertical. ‘Asset attrition’ was also shown. Two dead just this week, one from the ditch Captain 2 had filled personally and one from what the spreadsheet called ‘natural causes’. A recruit was flagged amber, underperforming for eleven or more consecutive days. They were now assigned to Room 5’s content division, the footage of which already monetising above projections. Feng noted this last part with an enthusiastic nod, he approved. Nobody used the word tortured, the word in the spreadsheet was engaged.

“Room 5…over-indexing on the livestream vertical again,” Feng said in a flat tone. “Worth asking whether cannibalising labour hours we’d get more value…”, he often mumbled rather than projecting his voice.

This was, as Captain 2 understood it, the real structure, the real utility of the place. Forget the screaming, which you honestly did stop hearing after the second week, the way you stop hearing any environmental noise, that the screaming had a line item was what held meaning. She made that amber flag and she would do it again, happily, in the coming weeks.

Somewhere below her, thirty people were building fictional lives for strangers on another continent, pain, misery and deception were generated by the hour. She thought that the worst thing the Company had built was not Room 5. It was the paperwork. The livestream was finite but the paperwork implied it would go on forever.

III. Order #4471

Many time zones away, in a serviced apartment with a view that looked like nothing, no landmarks, nothing of note, a man who used the handle Halcyon_LP opened the marketplace the way others open their emails in the morning.

The listing went up at 3 a.m. his time. Blood type O, middle-aged, no conditions. Harvested by the Company via what was called ‘verified cold-chain logistics’. Meaning that someone had meticulously kept the organ at the right temperature between a jungle, an airstrip and everything in-between. Halcyon reflected that this was the actual value-add of the Company. Anyone could extract as extraction was easy. What the Company had built that nobody else in the sector had dreamed of was a perfect supply chain. Sublime in its efficiency. Divine. Paramilitary-secured transport, a private strip close to the compound, a broker network that is never detected by border officials. It was the most beautiful thing he could imagine.

He didn’t perceive himself as an immoral man, he thought of himself as early. A man in his position, and more of them exist than is publicly imagined, understood a simple truth about reality. Every atrocity viewed from twenty years out eventually resolves into either a war crimes tribunal or an industry. The safest thing to do with capital was bet on which one and hedge without hesitation.

He messaged his usual broker, a woman he had never seen and knew only as Reference 9. Interested in the O-neg pipeline. Also whatever’s coming off the cyber floor…I hear attrition’s up this quarter, might be good entry pricing.

Reference 9 replied nearly instantly, this business rests on being faster than the buyer’s conscience. Pricing firm on the O-neg product. Movement waiting if you want the standing order.

He did just that. Doing it felt exactly like every quarterly allocation he’d ever made. It’s just a number. A small satisfaction at having found value that the rest of the market had not yet priced. He closed the laptop before the coffee went cold and, for a moment, felt nothing and after all that was the part of himself he had worked hardest to build.

III. Prospectus

The Company did not begin as the Company, it began as her slide deck.

Internally she was only ever the Mistress, a title choice similar to one using ‘visionary’ rather than ‘owner’. Previously she was the head of a logistics startup that raised nineteen million dollars and returned none of it. What she took from that failure instead of humility was an epiphany about the rot inside modern business praxis; the problem was operating inside a jurisdiction that insisted on laws and consequences.

The Special Economic Zone was her Holy Land. On paper it exists for ‘legitimate purposes’, a casino resort, a place of special commerce. Language used by supra-officials to justify the normalisation of the black market. It functioned as what the Mistress, in the deck she still occasionally showed to a very small circle of backers, called ‘a sovereign labour environment’. A zone where the paramilitary provided the perimeter and the Company provided continuous horrors in the name of economical advancement.

The deck itself was a masterpiece of the form. It never used words such as ‘trafficking’, ‘torture’, ‘experimentation’ or ‘organ transplant’. It used throughput, vertical integration, and human capital acquisition. Staffing was to be sourced using fake recruitment agencies in surrounding countries via the advertising of ‘legitimate’ IT and lab-tech positions. The pay is nearly implausibly generous for such impoverished places and the interview suspiciously brief but to a struggling student or someone really in need then the ease was rather promising. Too good to miss out on. By the time a recruit got a clue, they were already on the wrong side of a border, in a zone no neighbouring government especially wanted to look inside.

Revenue was measured across four verticals which were presented in the deck as a pie chart in the Company’s signature colour teal. Romance and investment scams were on the ‘phone floor’, they generated the largest and the most steady share and continual growth, it had been an extremely lucrative emerging market. Beneath that, a smaller but more technically demanding and higher-margin line on the deck called ‘biological asset realisation’, which backers understood without being told twice. A third, described as ‘content’, footage from Room 5 and its sister rooms to a subscriber base whose payments were laundered through shell entities before touching the Company’s accounts. The fourth vertical, smallest but growing, was licensing itself: the Mistress had begun quietly advising other zones, in two other countries. She was counting on replicating the model. Sovereignty, she said, was another product category waiting for the right operator. The compound is proof of concept.

Investors were few, never named. Usually introduced through intermediaries whose expertise were silence and sinister conspiracy. They wired funds to companies registered in jurisdictions with the same moral integrity of the SEZ itself.

What wasn’t modelled was Room 5’s guard schedule, sounds that come from Dormitory 1 at four in the morning when a recruit was abruptly liquidated, the weight of an AK47 in the hands of a woman at the end of a very long night. The Mistress never considered these costs, she thought of them as evidence that the model was working.