The BY-PRODUCT sometime 11-12

Here's one of the earliest pieces of literature of mine that i could find. It has squint inducing dialogue and lack of character development so... enjoy.  


By-Product
By Micah A. Gleckler
He stared at the featureless corner of his cube-shaped cell. He sat on the same small cot he had slept on for years; he couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t in that box. His world consisted of nothing but stainless steel, but he knew there was more the world in which he lived: and he planned to see it. So his eyes unwaveringly focused where every day a drone suspended from the ceiling entered, dropped a can of beans, and exited. 'Today will be different, today I go with' He thought in his rudimentary knowledge of English. The drone came in, a spherical robot whose dominant feature was an eye. In fact, the drone was a robotic eye. Alex grabbed it, it yelled and dropped the can on his head. He held on though, and yanked drown as hard as he could. Its connection to the ceiling broke and both Alex and the drone fell to the ground. “Aaaaaaah! It’s got me! It’s going to eat me! Help! Help!” the drone yammered with a British accent. “Make it quick! Please no suffering! Just rip me from life like a Band-Aid!” Alex watched as it yelled itself out “you won’t get anything from me, I swear! Not even nutrients!”
Alex looked around the room then back to the drone. “OUT!” he proclaimed.
“Out? Oh out! Of course you want out! I’m sorry but I cannot allow you to escape. Can’t help you there.” Alex’s gaze turned into a glare, made even more terrifying by his unshapely facial features, “Though, if you want out that badly sure I’ll help you. Of course.”
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As he walked along long, abandoned hallways lined with the aftermath of the Black Mesa incident, the drone babbled along, as if completely unaware of the ungodly horrors that decorated the interior of the massive underground complex. “… but of course how could I know that the banana was in trouble if it didn’t speak up? (turn left) So of course it was my fault that the gorilla got him…”
Alex decided it was easier to just ignore his tangents of irrelevant information. They had been walking for a while and Alex hadn’t seen anything that he didn’t expect. He had anticipated the death and carnage that he was witnessing. He imagined nothing more from the prison that held him all his life. Hundreds of once human things laid everywhere- deformed heads being the only consistent feature. What did this to them? Alex wondered, until he rounded a corner and saw, about fifteen feet down the hall, a reddish blob with four legs and several sharp teeth-like fingers coming from its supposed “front” end. The drone saw it and screamed at Alex to duck. Alex glanced down at the drone and then back up in time to see the blob now flying toward his head in a massive leap! He ducked just in time to avoid the gruesome maw that adorned the creature’s underside “Headcrab! Headcrab! Don’t let it get on you! It will eat your brains, and tap into your neural system to reanimate your corpse! Run and don’t let it get on you!” Alex ran in a serpentine pattern as fast as his under exercised-legs could go. He realized that the once human bodies that rested everywhere were victims of Headcrabs! He never felt fear before only sadness, but he now knew to act on it. At the thought of being one of those corpses he began to run even faster, pushing his limits to the brink. He glanced back to see that the zombies were now rising to pursue him as well as even more Headcrabs. “The end of this hallway has a door! The door, get to it before they get you!” The drone screamed from the armpit where Alex held him. As the door neared he heard the awful groans of the freaks from behind them. He reached the door and pried, it open squeezed through the gap and closed it, cranking the wheel so it couldn’t be opened from the outside.
Alex tried to catch his breath as screaming zombies smashed on the door to get in. He eventually turned around to see the interior of a large warehouse. He began to walk between the hundreds of high stacked crates. “We need to look for another door, most likely in the opposite corner of where we entered.” As they walked, he realized these looked exactly like what he had been held in is that all I was he wondered a number? He saw that one of the larger crates had been emptied out, he stepped inside to see that it had a small fire pit, a pile of canned beans in the corner, and many hieroglyphic-like drawings adorning the interior of it, depicting past events of the lab’s near ancient history. Depicting tales such as that of the test subject that overthrew the evil glaDOS, companion cubes, portal guns, and a… cake.
After eating some of the beans, they found the other door and the drone yet again told him the way. They were no longer in hallways but on railed walkways that were suspended over a chasm so massive that you couldn’t see the bottom or sides. Though, he felt no fear of these heights, since he was unaware of the dangers that heights presented. They then entered a small elevator that resembled a cage suspended from cables. As they ascended to the top of the vast hole the drone reassured him “We’re almost to the surface. You will see the sky in all its beauty.” This made Alex happy and he began to day dream of paradise.
When the elevator stopped he stepped into an airlock. The door behind him closed and after a second or two the one in from of him opened. He saw a long stair case and he eagerly began his ascent.
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When he reached the top he had to force the door open, blocked by something on the other side, when he squeezed out he was in another large warehouse, except everything was covered with ash, and a chilling breeze was all that he heard.
They now made their way to the door. Alex was ecstatic. To see grass, people, the sky! Finally he thought it was all he could think. He opened the door and saw shades of grey. The grass was sparse weeds, there were no people, and sky wasn’t blue, but an unhealthy greenish grey. His knowledge of the world consisted of what he had read in two magazines, a fantasy is all the real world was to him, a mirage, a dream. Now the real world is what he knew, a world ravaged by scientific disaster, The Black Mesa Disaster. A tear fell down Alex’s ugly face, because he knew this is what he was: he was the By-Product.



The End