Steam hissed, gears rumbled, springs and cogs whirred and churned. Caged bulbs, strung along the cracked concrete walls, cast a dim flicker over the capsule-like machines that crowded the room, stained with rust and ancient oil. Thick, clear tubes tendriled along the floor like bubbling, faintly glowing roots, each fastened securely to the undersides of the humming capsules. Somewhere deeper in the corridors, a scream of pain was cut short.

The light, the steam, and the pulse of the tubes all churned to the same mechanical rhythm.

A small, sandy-haired man in a tattered white lab coat shuffled into the capsule room, ticking notes on a clipboard that was soon deposited onto a bent nail on the wall. After an adjustment to his goggles, he pushed open a capsule's cover and, grunting, dragged out of it a lifeless mass of yellowish skin and half-formed bones. He slung the human-ish corpse over his shoulder, tossed it into a wide metal chute and closed the rusty door after it. The furnace below roared agreeably. With a handkerchief he wiped down the inside of the vacated pod, then shut the fogged-glass cover with a satisfying [i]clack[/i].

"Now then!" Doctor Kelodie chirped cheerfully to himself, turning a few knobs on each of the empty pods. He clicked a switch on his goggles. "Let's try again, shall we?"

The glow of the tendriled tubes filled the whirring capsules; the ambient light of the room was quickly overcome by a blinding blue radiance.

When the light had faded and the capsules had calmed to their consistent low hum, Kelodie carefully opened each of the covers in turn and peered in at the healthy, well-formed shapes within.

"Excellent. Excellent." He muttered under his breath with a smile, and pushed open the eyelids of each of the new subjects -- Echoes of once-living people -- to shine a light into each of their freshly recreated eyes. "Sight and consciousness. Brilliant!"

He grabbed the clipboard with a flourish and scribbled his observations.

Around them, the mechanical rhythm churned and hissed.