The Winchester Whaling Company (Part 1)

This is a story about monsters.

Every morning, I climb into the Whale’s mouth.
The air is always a little too warm, a little too wet. The women all have limp dresses and frizzy hair. The men have red, prickly rashes where our collars rub. The smell is raw and salty and oily; it will stick to us for the rest of our lives.
The Whale is lit with florescent lights, and there are no windows. The long tubes flicker and buzz like they are filled with trapped fireflies. No matter what hue you wear on the outside, no matter how rich or vivid or bright, those lights leech the pigment from everything.
There are only four colors inside the whale: a murky bog-black; a dish-water white; a hollow brown that sounds slow, like a bed-ridden death; and a gray that slides over then away from the eyes. In the stuttering light, people move in slow jerks, like old-fashioned films. Sometimes, I try in the eye of my mind to warm up the colors, overlay quaint, Olden Days clothes, and play the monkey-grinder music, so their movements aren’t so sad. But in the heavy air, the image never lasts.
The Whale does not like sounds unassociated with itself. It will take the music right out of your head, if it catches you listening.
The machines in the Whale’s belly do not whir or click or whump with any sort of satisfying rhythm. They grind and groan and sputter like a monster with a tummy-ache; which is, after all, what the Whale is, exactly.

I work in the Whale’s head, four floors up. The elevator carries me there, moaning and shuddering under the weight of the workers. I am one of forty workers inside the head who begin the day at 7:30. The second shift begins at 4:00, and the third at 11:00, with a 2 hour overlap for each shift to smooth the transitions.
In the head of the Whale, we collect information. There are two divisions, the Concrete and the Theoretical. The Concrete Division has five departments: Auditory, Visual, Olfactory, Gustatory, and Tactile. Each department gathers the Whale’s sensory perception of its surroundings, keeping strict notation of changes. The Theoretical Division is considered more complex, as it deals with the Whale’s thoughts and ideas. The departments in the Theoretical division are currently: Communication, Emotion, Identity, Reflection, and Numbers.
I work in the Numbers department. The main function of the Numbers department is to track and process what the Whale counts. I work in a specialty division of the department that is responsible for what the Whale should count, but doesn’t; things like breaths, heartbeats, fish consumed, bowl movements, emissions, and days.
All of the information from the departments and divisions is collected, codified, analyzed for patterns and relevance, processed and commented upon in a lengthy report of annotated spreadsheets. The reports are then passed on to the Brain for synergized analysis; which is to say combined and reflected against all the other reports from all the other divisions. Synergized analysis is performed quarterly, whereupon the findings are presented to the Brain’s Internal Review Board. From this presentation, decisions are made for the Good of the Whale.
The Good of the Whale is the ultimate objective of all work done in the Whale, and the reason for our continued existence. We are the Company. The Company serves the Whale.