Living in a city has it’s benefits. I live here with my husband and baby girl in a 2-bedroom apartment. Being able to walk to most places, rather than having to drive is one of the benefits of city life.

So, I was walking to the nearby supermarket to pick up a few things early on a Saturday morning, probably around 8am. Being the weekend, my husband, Mark, is taking care of little Abby, so I can get some things done. As I’m walking, I see a plain white van pulled over a few car lengths in front of me. I thought nothing of the van at first. It was just a vehicle that was double parked like any other, which was a common sight in the city. Probably there to move some furniture or something. The van had a few patches of silver spray paint, probably covering up old logos or whatnot from the van’s previous owner.

As I continued down the sidewalk towards the van, expecting to simply pass it without a thought, the driver gets out and comes over to the sidewalk, and looks right at me. Now, etiquette in the city, as any city-dweller knows, is that you NEVER look someone in the eye, especially if they’re looking right at you. It means they want something… Whether they’re a beggar or religious fanatic, or whatever else, they want something you’ve got.

So, naturally, by my instinct, I adjusted my stride to walk around him and looked at the numbers on the nearby building. Suddenly, right in my face is a silver shiny piece of metal. I don’t get a good look at it, the suddenness of seeing it a bit bewildering, but I look at the guy as he puts it away. The case it was in looks an awful lot like what a cop might use to hold his badge.

“Wha?” I say, bewildered at what’s going on.

“We need someone like you for a top secret project.”

“I- Um- I’m a very busy woman. Can’t you pick someone else?”

“Participating in this project would make you more efficient. Imagine all you could get done if, for example, you didn’t need to sleep. Also, participating would provide you with a rather large tax break. It will only take a few hours.”

“What sort of project is it?”

“I am not authorized to elaborate unless you agree to participate.”

I stood there for a minute. I thought about all the sleepless nights when little Abby would cry and wake me up. I thought of all the running around I had to do to take care of her. I’ve been drinking more and more coffee just to keep up. Then there were all the expenses: diapers, bottles, toys, little childproof plastic plugs. I had wracked up a nice chunk of debt on my credit cards. The tax break would certainly be welcome. This guy is obviously from the government, since he had a badge, though I didn’t get a good enough look to see what division. He must be telling the truth. I don’t want to leave Mark and Abby waiting, but this will be worth it.

“Alright. Let’s go,” I reply, as I get into the passenger seat of the van and he gets into the driver’s seat.

He passes me the documents I need to sign to agree to participate. I read them a bit. If I sign, I agree not to talk about it to anyone, I agree that they’re not at fault if anything goes wrong, and I can no longer choose not to participate. I sign the documents and hand them back to him.

He drives a few blocks to a construction site. The first few floors of the site are complete. I pass by this building a lot, and haven’t seen anyone working on it in a few months. I assumed they were undergoing some sort of renegotiation with some contract or something. This sort of thing happens a lot with construction sites.

He drives into a garage on the site. We get out of the car and he walks over to the open garage door and pulls it shut. I can’t see anything in the complete darkness. Then he flips a switch, and the lights come on. Cheap fluorescent lights. I squint briefly as he walks over to a door on the side, near me. “This way”, he motions with his head.

He steps into the room, flips the lights on, and holds the door for me as I enter, shutting off the garage lights, and shutting the door to it behind me. With a click, I hear it lock. This room is also bathed in cheap fluorescent light. I see a waste bin next to the door. There’s a plastic mat in the middle of the room with metal cuffs. Across from the door is a row of canisters that look like they might be for medical use. To my right, I see a metal bar held by wooden 2x4s on either side of it leading to the ceiling. To my left is a shelf, covered in a similar plastic as the mat. There’s a spool on one end of the shelf, made of wood, but coated in plastic. On the other is a small metal faucet looking thing. It’s bigger than a faucet though, and has an opening on the top. There’s a big plastic bowl under the spout. On the center of the shelf is a single long knife. It looks like a meat cleaver.

Everything’s very clean and there’s a medical air about the place, which is reassuring, but the knife worries me. Seeing it, I freeze. “Wait… What’s going on?”

“Relax. Some government scientists made some sort of machine that works with a human brain. It’ll work just like your body does now, but much more efficient, with a lot of extra features and easy to replace parts, extending your lifespan to many times what it is. We’ll also be putting your skin over the machine so it still looks like you. No one will know the difference. Only your insides will have changed. “

“Oh… Is this going to be… painful?”

“Unfortunately yes. They don’t want me to puncture your skin any more than I have to before bringing you to their main facility, so there will be no anesthetic. Here, you’ll just be separated. Also, your old internal parts will help many people. So you’re doing a great service by being here.”

“There’s no way to get out of this?”

“You signed the contract. That’s legally binding. Because this is a federal government contract, breaking it would be a felony.”

“O- Ok… What do you want me to do?”

“Well, first we’ll be removing your skin. So if you could remove your clothing, put it to the side near the door there, and come over to the mat on your hands and knees, we can get started.”

I felt the icy chill of fear as I slowly stripped down. I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t want to create problems for Mark and Abby. To make matters worse, this man was definitely leering at my body. I removed all my clothing and placed it in a neat pile next to the door. As I stepped towards the mat, the man interrupted, “Jewelry too. Don’t worry, you’ll get them back when we’re done.” I stopped and took out my earrings and slid my wedding ring off my finger, placing them on top of the neat pile of clothes.

I stepped onto the mat, covering the front of myself with my hands as best I could, kneeling down, facing the canisters. I felt the weight of my breasts tug at me as I let them go. I was already scared to death, when the man tells me “Now, this is all a very delicate procedure. If you move at all, you could cause me to miss and hit something vital. This would cause the project to fail, as you’d be dead.” As he speaks, he locks the metal cuffs around my wrists and ankles.

“k… kay”, I choke out. Trying to relax myself, I thought about when I gave birth to my baby girl. I’ve been through the pain of childbirth. How much worse could this be? Right?

I feel the knife puncture my skin right at the base of my neck, moving down along my spine, right to the crack of my ass in one smooth stroke of surgical precision. I want to scream and leap at the pain, but I follow the man’s orders not to move, instead tensing my body and letting out a self-muffled scream, which comes out as a high pitched squeal.

That wasn’t too bad, I think to myself, breathing heavily. It was quick, and childbirth was certainly worse. Then I feel him insert the knife through the opening, under my skin, to cut the skin on the left side of my back away from the muscle. This is much worse. I scream and throw my head back, with my eyes widened. My eyes fill with tears. The pain is immense as the skin on my back is separated from the muscle.

My voice quickly goes hoarse from screaming, as I usually never need to yell. My ability to react just starts to completely shut down as he moves the knife, slowly and carefully down the right side of my back, repeating what he did to the left. It’s like, it’s not me. I’m not here. I feel the pain, but it’s not my pain. I can’t move. I can’t react.

The rest of the operation goes by almost like I’m in some sort of a painful trance. He continues cutting my skin away from my muscles, never puncturing the skin except for that first line he cut along my back. Next he frees the skin on my left ass cheek, then my right. Then he starts to peel my skin down like a pair of tight pants as he works off the skin between my ass cheeks. Separating my anus from my large intestine seems to require a more forceful cut. Then he moves to my shoulders, peeling back my skin over to my upper arms. Continuing to work downwards, with my back now fully exposed, he slips the knife along my sides, my peeled skin hanging tightly from my front torso.

Going under my body, like a mechanic working under a car, he works his way across my abs and up to my chest. He separates the skin around my tits from every angle before finally working the knife carefully between my right tit and it’s skin. Once he’s separated the skin from my left tit as well, the skin that was once on my torso begins to hang down, completely separated from my body and in one piece.

He moves down to my cunt, which has gotten quite moist in my body’s complete confusion of how to react to such extreme pain. He takes great care to keep my clit and labia on my separated hide. Now that he has more slack to work with, he continues down my thighs, one at a time.

When he finally reached my ankles, he presses the blade under each of my toenails, popping them off one by one. I’m already in so much pain though, that nothing he could do would make me feel worse than I already do. He then uncuffs my right foot and I find myself lifting my leg to help him, just to get this over with. Once my right foot is free, I turn my head and look down. All my toes are still there, just skinless. and there are no holes in the hide removed from them. This man is very good at what he does. I turn my head back to the position it was in. He recuffs my foot, with the metal now against my muscle rather than my skin. He repeats the process on my left foot. He pulls my lower hide under my torso. All the skin I have left is covering my arms and head. He continues on each arm like he did on my legs, ripping my fingernails off along the way.

Finally, he puts the blade to my skin where he made his initial incision at the base of my neck. This time, cutting away skin up on the back of my head, holding my hair up as he does so. He stops in the middle of the back of my head and works to peel the skin off my face. Even my eyelids are attached to the pelt when he hangs it over the metal bar to my right.

Even though I’m still in incredible pain, I breathe a sigh of relief that that’s over. That was most of what needed to be done, right? Then I feel the knife in my left leg, cutting off pieces. The slabs of me he places on the shelf look almost like uncooked steaks. Occasionally he’ll put certain pieces into the top of the faucet-shaped thing, which I quickly realize is a meat grinder, as I see it pour chopped me into the large plastic bowl. Great, I’m being butchered like a cow. I guess I won’t need my meat in my new metal body I’ll be getting, but the idea of being butchered like a cow feels almost insulting.

As he frees bones from my legs, he puts them in the trash bin by the door. Figuring by now that everything in this room must be for processing me, I look at the spool and wonder what it could possibly be for. Then I look forward at the bins and read some of the labels. One is for transporting a live heart. Two are for lungs. Two for kidneys. One for a liver. Each organ in my body that could be useful in someone else’s body has a container for it’s transport. Each one of these containers represents a life that I’ll save through my pain. That does make me feel better. I’m going to save a bunch of people’s lives!

I manage a smile as I’m flipped over onto my back. My limbs are all gone by this point. The man has started working to remove my vagina. This is placed on the table with the meat. Then he pulls out the tip of my large intestine, which was already separated when he detached my anus from it, and brings it over to the spool. He wraps my large and small intestines in one piece around the spool. I watch this all happen, just in complete shock. There’s not a single thing that could ever surprise me ever again. I’ve had my intestines wrapped around a fucking spool.

He continues taking cuts of meat, including my milk-filled tits. Then he takes a few of my lower organs, like my kidneys, getting them very quickly from what’s left of my body into the appropriate transport units. Soon, I realize I no longer have a lower torso. After removing my rib cage, leaving a lot of meat attached to it and placing it with the meat, he finally speaks. I hadn’t realized how long it’s been since either of us have said a word.

“Oh, right.”, he says, looking at my face. He puts his hand in my mouth and pulls my jaw down. I don’t resist at all as he slices my jaw off. Then he slices out my tongue, cutting it out similar to how he cut my skin off, going deep down my throat with the knife. He also cuts it from underneath where my stomach used to be. He rolls my tongue up as he pulls it out and puts it with the meat.

Then I see the blade up really close. I’m unable to close my eyes, having no eyelids, as he pops one of them out of it’s socket. This is very disorienting. The eye goes blind as he cuts the optic nerve. Then I see the knife come over for the second eye. I’m blind.

“Take a deep breath. This one will need to last a while.”, I hear him say. I take as deep a breath as I can, right before he slices off the muscle used for breathing. I can’t breathe anymore. I can’t see, I can’t speak… Then he removes my lungs. One way or another, this is all going to be over very soon. I start to feel like I’m drowning, as I can’t get any more air. I feel him pick me up, and then, finally, feel my heart removed. I hear the thud as it lands in the container for transport.

He has eight seconds before my brain dies. He doesn’t get to it in time. “Damn. Lost another one. Heh, not that I mind…” He grabs one of the choice cuts of my body and brings it into the garage. He pulls out an old charcoal grill, pours lighter fluid on the coals and tosses in a match before putting the steak on to cook. As it cooks, he looks at the calendar. The picture this month is of a supermodel posing with a car. Drawn over her in marker are dotted lines separating out cuts, with written in labels for them. Each day, even weekends, has two lines drawn on it. He draws one line on today’s date, July 28th. Looking at the day, he says “I’ve been doing two a day for nearly two months now. I’ve only got about another month to get it right before the feds look for another freelancer to get their brain for their bionic woman project, or whatever they’re calling it.”

After his meal, he cleans my intestines thoroughly, and stuffs them with the ground up meat, being made into sausage links. My bones are tossed into a grinder in the corner of the garage. He cleans up the place, putting all my parts into his van. He sells my hide to a taxidermist, who makes it into a sex toy for the son of a rich businessman. He sells the cuts of meat to the supermarket, claiming them to be beef and pork. It’s the same supermarket I was originally on my way to. I guess I made it there after all, even if dead. My clothes and jewelry are put in a FedEx box and anonymously mailed to my husband, who’s address he found in my purse. Then he sells the organs to the local hospital. On his way out of the hospital, he sees a woman who is also on her way out, having just visited a family member. Putting his badge too close to her face for her to read, he says:

“We need someone like you for a top secret project.”

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