Printed from https://writing.com/main/interactive-story/item_id/1951708-Strange-New-World-of-Transformation/cid/1886028-You-decide-its-time-for-the-cattle-drive
You've been working almost non-stop at the company for the last few months, eating and sleeping in your office while monitoring the rollout of the new nanites personally. It's been so long away from home that you're fairly sure your wife has filed a divorce in your absence. You've earned a break.
Of course the CEO of a multiplanetary company doesn't just take a month off, even when sales are doing well. Investors don't like it, and shares plummet. You inform the board of directors of your plans. They arrange for a stand-in to cover for you. A professional impersonator modified with your appearance and voice and trained in your mannerisms who will sit in your office and at meetings, and give the occasional press release so as to maintain the image that business is as usual.
With one last satisfied glance at the nightly report, you set off on a much earned break, slipping out of the back entrance while your stand-in arrives. Your chauffeur drives you to the space port, and you catch a private shuttle to Westworld.
Westworld is named not after the archaic movie about a robot-staffed theme park (although such places do exist), but because the entire population is nomadic, constantly moving towards the West. While a fertile planet, it's rotation is extremely slow, such that it takes 7 standard Velusian years to complete a single day-night cycle. The planet is quite the agricultural food bowl of the system and massive cattle drives move ceaselessly from East-to-West, racing ahead of the night.
It was on this planet where the unfortunate misuse of your company's nanites took place. A number of visitors had been converted into cattle and subsequently lost among the other lifestock (an easy thing to happen with herds often numbering in the hundreds of thousands). They had then, unfortunately, been led to slaughter off-world and butchered. The mistake was only noticed once their flesh (still laden with nanites) entered the food chain, with many steakhouses reporting customers suddenly transforming into cows at their tables.
Although every measure has since been taken to ensure such things won't happen again, it is probably inevitable. Many people use Westworld recreationally to get away from their stressful human lives, and the planet still serves thousand of visitors who want nothing more than to be one with the herd, to become a cow or a bull and enjoy the steady plod-plod towards the horizon, to be one of the hard-worked but valued horses ridden by the gauchos, or one of the dogs that barks and nips at the heels of the stragglers. Such a life is simple but can be fulfilling for a time.
Printed from https://writing.com/main/interactive-story/item_id/1951708-Strange-New-World-of-Transformation/cid/1886028-You-decide-its-time-for-the-cattle-drive
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