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The Skin Machines Stopped Running

Wed 01 Sep 2021

The skin machines stopped running this morning. I hadn't realized exactly how accustomed I had become to their racket in the background. There's the rattling of the rollers feeding out the finished product, of course, that's definitely the loudest part, but it's surprisingly consistent and therefore easy to tune out. The hissing and humming of the tissue extruders is less regular, but much quieter, of course. You still get used to it and only notice when they're running off something very irregular.

I turned to look, of course, how could I not? The skin machines never stop running — there's a tremendous demand for products made out of human skin, and the machines make it almost ethical, building up sheets of skin from a mix of cloned skin cells, collagen, and other feedstocks. Clothes, book bindings, anything you'd use leather for, but with a special frisson of the taboo that you don't get from regular leather unless you're vegan. The extruders print the tissue onto the substrate, cell by cell precisely positioned, and the rollers both move it along and make it uniform. Like making paper, if you had to 3D print the trees with occult nanotechnology beforehand.

Mostly, the skin machines run off solid sheets, pre-tanned to the specifications of various wholesale customers, but sometimes they do special jobs; something needs made in one unbroken piece with no stitching or cut edges, or it needs a very particular color or texture. It was something like that today. The last full sheet had already been carted off, and there was just one small piece on the conveyor rollers that came after the last set of presser rollers. Small-ish, ovoid, flat, and with a symmetrical set of holes printed into it. The rollers were stopped, and it sat there instead of falling into the output hopper.

I called out, "Chief?", looking for some direction from the team lead, but my voice just echoed on the suddenly silent factory floor. I pulled up the team chat on my process monitoring workstation, but didn't get any response there, either. Surgical mask, gloves, and cap on, I walked over to the line to get a closer look at the workpiece.

It was remarkably pale. Not porcelain white, but paler than me, and I'm a cracker who doesn't get a lot of sunlight. It looked unhealthy, and skin fresh from the printer never looks unhealthy. Unwholesome, yes, but unhealthy, never. My first impressions of its shape turned out to be accurate, and not merely pareidolia. It was definitely a face. But a strangely faceless face, if that makes sense. The mouth was a lipless slit, though clearly grown that way rather than cut. The lidless eyes, similarly. There was no hair on the outer surface; not just no eyebrows or facial hair, but no down, though the texture of the skin was otherwise detailed and normal. The nose was a cypher; there was extra material above the nostrils, as if it were meant to be stretched over a nose form, but not any particular nose shape.

It was, to put it plainly, a mask. Looking around again for any of my co-workers, I gave in to the intrusive thought I'd been having since I saw the thing, took off my glasses and surgical mask, and pressed the skin mask to my face, molding it over my nose and brows. The screaming started then, from everywhere, but the effect was somehow beautiful and harmonious — a Classical composition for the most extreme manifestation of the human voice.