George has had a dream last night. A nightmare, to be more precise. He hates mechanized factories for many reasons involving smog, stench, and growing numbers of unemployed citizens who knock on his door every day, asking for a plate of yesterday's soup. They sometimes even go so far to ask for a fresh sandwich with ham. Unfortunately for him, George had a dream exactly about factories.
At first, he was in a dark, metal, cold, empty chamber. Everything was quiet. It smelled like sewers. Suddenly, there was a metallic bang, which was followed by the sound of iron gears turning. Or were those chains clanking , as they were dragged over something also made of steel? Maybe both. The sound of water flowing could now also be heard. The smell intensified. The chamber got lit up a bit, enough to see the objects around. They were made of iron, almost black of oxidation. There were a few spiderwebs scattered around the corners and below the objects, or machines, what they resembled of most. It did smell like sewers, but it wasn't sewers, or at least not as George imagined it. It looked much more like an abandoned part of the spaceship factory George had visited a few days ago. He is having slightly different versions of this dream from back then, repeatedly. The stinky water flowed into something resembling a tank, but covered with all sorts of measurers and little, multicoloured bulbs, occasionally flashing a weak light. Excluding the water, something else was poured into it by another tube. It reminded George of dark coffee. There was a production line after the tank. Some mechanism was extracting plate-sized, flat, jelly pieces of something from the tank, which were probably gotten by mixing the water and the liquid which looked like coffee. It was placing them on the production line, which lead to another machine. It was compressing the pieces of something. The next part of the line was empty. Or it at least seemed so, at the beginning. Suddenly, a huge load of cockroaches just fell from an opening on the ceiling on the products. They didn't seem to eat them. The firstly ran around on their surface, and then turned their bellies and stopped moving. Another press fused the insects and the somethings together. All that went to another clumsy stack of screechy plates, tanks, gears, and chains. There was another production line leading to it, forming a corner around George with the previous one. It carried nothing unidentifiable, nor even unusual. As George determined, it was carrying baguettes into the last machine, and fusing them with the something. After the machine, there was a tall, thin stand, supporting a tea cup. A white, thin, modestly ornate tea cup. Some yellow light lit it well, uncovering the cup's frail, gentle transparency. A thin, iron tube led from the machine to the cup. The machine stopped gurgling and started quietly buzzing. The product was ready and it was about to be uncovered. Something started pouring from the tube. George approached to take a look.
It was tea.
He woke up with a scream. It was Devonshire cream tea, his favourite.
Another workday has started. That was a few hours before, but its effect has all but diminished. Maybe just slightly.
His face gets the look of every banker after you pay off the original price.
His starts looking less interested. Or more uninterested, to be correct.
He said "good bye" like he had quite limited time to do it.
He turns his head somewhere away and waves McCall like he's repelling mosquitoes.