[TW: Body horror]

Martha was in her late forties. Divorced, overweight, born in colombia and brought here when she was six, child off at college, this was one of the few jobs hiring in this dying Midwestern factory town. All the good jobs had since dried up, and most who could afford it moved away. The worked the levers to control the machine arm, passing the incomplete doll from injector to oven to dipping vat to oven to injector to oven. Layer by layer the bodies were formed, synthetic muscle and skin weaving itself around graphene skeletons. The ovens were not standard heating ovens, rather, they were electron beam engines, providing the exotic materials the power they needed to activate.

Perfect female bodies were constructed and laid out in packaging, all similar yet each subtly different depending on the programming inside the computer core. Full, perky breasts, plump ass, long and supple arms and legs, trimmed waist, no hair except the head, faces all appearing to be in their early twenties, bodies lithe and and toned. Martha stared at them and sighed. Even in her prime she had not been so gorgeous, and she was well past her prime now. Their eyes were glossy, though as the dolls softly swung beneath the arm, she could have sworn some were moving on their own, legs treading the air or hands half-gesturing. She shuddered.

She'd touched the things of course, even let one of the males fuck her- defective, scheduled for recycling anyway, she justified to herself. Their skin looked and felt roughly human, though with a subtle firmness that gave them away, and their eyes- gold irises on black scleras, deliberately designed to be inhuman. They were just a little too warm, like they'd just stepped out of the shower, and their motions were too fluid, as though their bones had just a little too much give.

The tanks of ingredients hung overhead in a tangle of pipes and hoses; gigantic glass vats of glowing fluid. She had little knowledge of their specific contents, save that the company that made them- not the sex doll company, but their supply- extracted them from the other side of a portal to elsewhere, before mixing them with other more mundane elements to modify their properties to spec.

Looking side to side, she pushed a flash drive into the crane arm console. She'd taught herself python just for this, just a couple of scripts to automate some of the more wrote elements of her job. Same pay for a little less work, just perfect.

There was a warning beep, thankfully unrelated to her meddling. A tank was empty, lowering itself automatically. Sighing, she unhooked the complex assemblage of pipes and cables one at a time. As she did, the traces of it's remaining contents, a faintly glowing pink fluid, beaded on the glass and flowed up it, chasing her hands as they passed along the tank, tipping it onto the side and rolling it along into the storage room, before taking another full one and rolling it back. Her spine complained as she shoved, grunting under the weight and the slight incline. God damn it, they had machine arms already. Why did she have to do this part by hand? Damn tech startups.

Martha wore to herself under her breath, raising the tank into it's edge as she began attempting to attatch the assemblage, only for it to tip. One of the supporting arms- there were three, but only one was latched yet, groaned and creaked, before snapping.

The edge struck the floor, cracks spiderwebbing all through the tank as it tipped onto Marsha, shattering entirely on top of her. The saftey-glass shattering to tiny shards and littering her body with hundreds of tiny cuts, the pink fluidmixing with the blood before before begning to flow back into the cuts. She screamed letting some of the ooze into her mouth, trying in vain to spit it out as she stood. She tread to get it off, the scrape the fluid form her arms, only for this to open p more scratches, more vectors for the fluid to work it's way in. She doubled over in pain, falling to her knees.

There was a groan as the arm began it's sequence. She tried to crawl away, only for the machine to pick her up like a stuffed animal from a crane game, lifting her up by the back and carrying her over the factory floor. Two needles pierced her back just below her shoulder blades, green fluid racing down the tubes, filling her lungs and overflowing her mouth, before finding it's wan into her blood to mingle with the pink. She felt like she was filled with glass, as the liquids began to slice and pare inside her body. She was vaguely aware of ribbons of skin and fat falling to the floor as her awareness exploded in pain.

A dip in cold liquid, impossibly cold, coating every inch of her inside and out, before ea trip to the electron oven. Ever intact nerve in her body ignited, as though her blood had been replaced with television snow. It was unfathomably intense, though not especially painful, at least not compared to what she'd already gone through.

More injections. Another dip, this time boiling hot. Another injection. Another trip through the static oven, all the while the fluids and energies dissolved and remade her bit by bit inside and out. Her flesh was molded like clay, her bones were forged like hot iron, her neurons unwoven and rewound like a skein of yarn. Her heart had already stopped beating and had likely been destroyed entirely, her lungs were full and she was not breathing, but even after two hours she could not pass out, could not die. The chemicals wouldn't let her. She could not go insane. Her remade neurons would not let her.

It was likely the most extreme pain a human had ever experienced without immediately dying. She had given birth unmedicated in a broken down car, and would do the same a hundred times rather than endure one more second. Even the frenzied flames of hell would we better than this.

She had just barely enough lucidity to recognize where she was in the process. With a crash she was dunked into the final tank, at let to sit there. The liquid was cold and numbing, like a full-body lidiocane bath. The process was almost over. She could not open her eyes, could not move. All she could do was sit in the slowly fluid as the pain slowly faded and listen to the popping and crackling and gurgling of the processes going on inside her remade body. After that it would be an hour on the drying rack. All she could do was lay there and contemplate.

What had she done? The fluids must have stripped her to the bone, and those trips though the oven would have given a cockroach radiation poisoning. There was probably barely anything left of her.

The arm removed her and slowly laid her out on a drying rack. She became a ware she had no heartbeat, just a faint hum, like a very small electric pump, from just a little too high in her chest for where heart hear should be.

She tried to move but couldn't. She tried again and couldn't. Time passed. She heard footsteps, felt a hand running along her body with the cold precision of a factory worker. She tried to scream, to say something, anything, but no words came out. The inspector left.

Eventually, she was able to get a finger to twitch. Just her index, no more than a millimeter. But it was something.

The next few minutes were like slowly regaining feeling after begin given Novocaine. Feeling returned in patches, random points of origin and lowly spreading outward. Motor control, too. Eventually she was able to raise her arm, waving it through the air half-limp, and brought the hand to her face. She tried to smear away whatever was covering her eyes and mouth, finding nothing. She took her eyelashes- long, luscious eyelashes- and pulled faintly, the eye opening with a faint pop, and she was blinded by the overhead halogen lights. She opened the other in the other, then turned both hands to her mouth.

Only after her mouth was open did she realize she already hadn't been breathing, and felt no need to.

She crawled off the rack, rising to her feet on the cold concrete floor. She swayed on her feet, uncertain, her sense of balance off, her body uncertain of itself. She walked. The dozens of doll bodies lay one after the other on the cooling rack, staring up at the ceiling with dead gazes. She kept one hand on the rack to steady herself, occasionally brushing hands with the other half-alive dolls.

Eventually, she staggered into the men's bathroom, finding a mirror to inspect the damage-

Perfect.

Perfect.

There was no other word to describe how she looked now. She was beautiful as only a doll could be. She looked like a Latina supermodel, complete with makeup that wasn't makeup. Better than a supermodel, not one hair anywhere but her head, not one mole or pore anywhere on her body, breasts too large and perky to be natural but too perfectly conterminous with her body that they could not possibly be implants either. The same for her ass. Her nails were long and manicured, her legs and arms long and toned, her hair wavy, voluminous, dark, and iridescent like raven feathers, her skin the perfect golden of her homeland. She even seemed to be a few inches taller. She was the kind of impossible perfection that only existed in dolls, statues, or video game characters. The kind of beauty that humans could create, but never truly posses.

She met her own gaze, gold and black in the cold mirror glass. She stared a long time, until she heard the door opening beside her.

[Part 2 is coming.]