Shiner Blemming was a poor man. He worked for most of his life at a small crematorium, and on this day, he was privately celebrating his eightieth birthday. Of course, after the catastrophe, all jobs were to be always active and thus there were no breaks, and so Shiner was still burning bodies at this time. Only in his mind was he celebrating. Due to the small size of the crematorium and his extensive experience, he was the only worker there. Today, a large group of twenty corpses arrived, each still donning their clothes. Shiner had to undress each and every person first before placing them in the furnace. If the clothes were bland, they were burnt. If the clothes were unique or interesting or seemed expensive, they were put in a box on the side. Today, only one person had unique wear. A man by the name of “Andre Passt” had a pair of shiny, bright red shoes. Very unique. Shiner placed them in the box. He noticed that on the man’s hand there was a slight blackened circular mark. An “engine mark”. Oh, those horrible things. Engines were essentially what the authorities called “the perfect killing machines”. When a psychological assessor (called by most “Psycho’s) assessed that you were “not needed for the progression of mankind” they would place you in an engine, which would then swiftly kill you by absorbing all of the electricity in your body, killing your brain. The authorities claimed it was an efficient way to kill, since you gained energy from it, but Shiner knew that a singular human wasn’t even enough to light a lightbulb. That was why so many people were turning up as “not needed” during the assessments these days. After all, the authorities had little use for human life, unless it was highly capable human life, otherwise, they could use the excess energy. And to get energy from humans, you needed a lot of dead humans. Luckily, Shiner’s crematorium was small and unassuming, thus he was not a hot spot most of the time and wasn’t under much pressure. But still, one extra body a day was more than none. By now all of today's bodies were in the furnaces, and using the nuclear core, they were already nearly disintegrated completely. Through the small yellowed glass window of the crematorium, Shiner watched as the ashes from the chimney floated lazily through the gray skies. ‘Happy birthday, me.’ He thought, and then turned his eyes back towards the furnaces.

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  ‘Happy birthday.’