The Hunt

It is different

You lucky people are about to have the chance to influence my next publication.

I am known (mainly) for writing light, fluffy, naturist stories. This one is very different. More akin to the stories published in my collection, The Dark Side of the Bun, only much darker.

My Editor thinks it is too different for my readership, I reckon you are all well up for it.

So here is part one, let me know if you want it published as a short story for Kindles and other e-readers … or not.

Over the next few weeks, I will serialise it, so that you can read it for free here.

The Hunt, by Ted Bun part 1

image NoteGPT

“Senior Tech, Enriched Food Imports, I-377-B-940-P-101,” Stefi announced her arrival at the transit station for transportation to the processing hub. The gate slid open, allowing her onto the platform where she joined the throng of Senior Techs, Junior Techs and Labourers of various levels, waiting for the shuttle to work.

Stefi knew at a conscious level that she wasn’t the only Senior Tech on the platform, nor even the only Senior Tech, Enriched Food Imports. Somewhere in the crowds were her four co-workers, who were due to start their shifts alongside her. From time to time, Stefi tried to remember her name prior to adopting, or rather being forced to adopt, the black and green uniform of the Enriched Food Directorate. She was certain that she had had one, but her memory was so vague that it had disappeared, along with the designation of her many sexual partners.

She had been raised in a creche with hundreds of other babies, educated in solitude before being assigned to the Enriched Food Directorate for assessment and specialist training. She was placed in Building 940, Dormitory P, along with several hundred other workers of both sexes and every gender. On shift, they worked in the processing plants. Off shift, they ate, slept and had sex. The Directorate was very keen on stirring the limited gene pool.

At any one time, roughly a quarter of Stefi’s colleagues were with child. Given that some forty per cent of her co-workers were anatomically male, it meant that hundreds of children were being born every day. Except none of them was Stefi’s, despite having had congress with various of the fertile males, maybe two hundred times a year for the past ten years. Her Director ordered her to see the Nurse Specialist, Fertility. Something she did by appointment every six months.

It didn’t help. The baby she longed for didn’t happen. It would one day, her Director promised. “One day, P-101, you will partner with the correct male, and you will have a perfect baby.”

Not today, though. The shuttle arrived; the workers boarded and took up their regular places. A quick glance around revealed an empty seat.

“I didn’t know P-416 was due to deliver,” Stefi observed. The shift was going to be one short today.

“She isn’t.” A male voice from out of Stefi’s line of sight informed her. “P-416 was caught breaching hygiene rules. She has been reassigned to Waste Food Imports pending a disciplinary hearing.”

“What a shitty job!” Someone shouted.

“Yeah, a big job!” Another joker joined in.

Then violence interrupted the banter.

*****

The production units where Stefi worked were huge machines that crawled across the land. The ultimate development of the combine harvester. They trundled forward, cutting the crop, swallowing it and depositing it on conveyor belts inside the beast. Stefi and her colleagues picked over, measured and examined the passing crop before sorting it into edible and inedible streams. The edible was directed to the kitchen processors to be blended, cooked, and then preserved. The inedible stream was minced and blended with the product of the Waste Food Directorate, then sprayed back onto the denuded land to prepare it for replanting. The eternal cycle of agriculture.

The shuttles were designed to carry the workers between the Building and the Production Units. On the return journey, they were laden with the processed food. They also carried the tanks of raw fertiliser, output from the Waste Food Directorate, to the mobile harvesting plants, for spraying. The shuttles completed the perpetual cycle many times a day.

The personnel shuttles and the tanker trains ran on moveable tracks directly to the moving plants. Some days the journey would take significantly longer than others. The tracks were continually realigned to cope with the movement of the mobile factories. The entire transit system was coordinated by immensely complex computer programmes, similar to those that had been called artificial intelligence (AI) in another era.

Once again, AI was to come unstuck when it came up against Natural Stupidity.

The system knew that the ‘up’ line and the ‘down’ line were on different pieces of real estate. It even knew they were close. The shuttles and tankers had been passing up and down all day without problem, until...

There was about a twenty-metre section where the tracks were so close that the transits nearly touched. Then, the chance of a shuttle and a tanker passing through that stretch at the same time was vanishingly small until you applied Sod’s Law.

They passed so close at a closing speed approaching one thousand kilometres an hour, the slipstream forced the derailment of both. Unable to get metrics to reveal what had just befallen the system, the computers failed to stop the outbound tankers. The heavily laden tankers ploughed destructively into the wreckage, adding to the mayhem.

The Legal Bit

Published by Edward Yeoman

11160 Caunes Minervois, France

www.tvhost.co.uk

Copyright © 2026 Ted Bun

All rights reserved. No portion of this story may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by British copyright law. For permissions contact: ted.bun@sunnybuns.me.uk