• Sid knew his facility like the back of his hands. He loved it like a mother loves her child. But he also feared the waste management facility that he had worked at for sixty years. He had risen through the ranks from trash-shifter to senior manager in the first fifteen years. His parents had told him to look for more, for better. Eventually they disowned him. But none of that mattered to Sid. He couldn’t explain it, but the 124th Division Trash and Waste Management and Disposal building, or the ‘D.T.’, was as close to a god that Sid had ever known.
    He would sit in his small rotating chair and watch as trash of all different kinds would be slipped through the shelves at the far end of the room, where it would then be filtered and organized by trash-shifters to expose the most surface area. Finally, the trash would enter the furnace, and the roaring flames would reduce the exotic bits of debris into ash.
    Sid liked to find a particularly colorful or unusual bit of trash and slowly follow it down the conveyor belt. If the shifter who happened to be on that line at the time did a good job placing the particular piece of trash at an appeasing angle, he could expect to be receiving some sort of reward soon. Sid had been known to erratically promote and give his employees raises with little pattern. But only Sid knew the truth.
    Sometimes somebody would put something onto the belt that Sid wanted; a chair, a couch, even an oven was once pushed through one of the larger shelves. Once, Sid had taken an object off the belt. But the 124 D.T. taught him. Just moments after lifting the small T.V. off of the belt his shirt got caught. The shifters had to follow strict guidelines to avoid accidents, and keeping shirts tucked at all time was none of them. Sid was still green at the time though, barely had two years at the D.T. under his belt. He had left half of his button-up poking out. He struggled while the conveyor pulled him closer and closer to the jaws of the furnace. Soon other shifters noticed, and scrambled to help him. Their efforts were useless, though, and the D.T. continued to drag Sid towards his fiery demise. Just moments before he was engulfed somebody in the control room used the emergency brake. But Sid’s right hand was burned beyond recovery.
    When he went home and plugged the T.V. into the wall a week later, the box burst into flames.
    It was these incidents that made Sid realized the magnificent power of the D.T., and how he could never leave her. How he was a part of her, and she was a part of him. He promised himself and the D.T. that he would never steal something from her again. And he kept that promise for sixty years, until one fateful night.
    Sid almost completely lived at the D.T. by now. Most in the 124th District considered the crazy old fool who loved his job. He was sitting in his chair, watching the belts from his office windows. It was the late shift’s turn. Most thought that the D.T. shut down at night; that nobody was throwing things away. But they were wrong. The night was when the companies and other community centers shipped their trash, and there were truckloads of trash that the D.T. incinerated at night.
    Sid was sipping from his mug of coffee when he saw a small brown cardboard box slip in through one of the smaller shelves. The plain box caught his gaze. He didn’t know why, he had seen thousands like it and paid no mind. But this particular box caught his interest. He watched the shifter adjust the box so it would go into the furnace longways, to ensure maximum efficiency. It was three-quarters down the line when Sid saw something that made him spray his coffee onto the window he was peering through.
    An infant’s arm poked out of the closed lid of the box.
    Sid’s instincts took over. He the raced down the stairs, and scrambled across the room; jumping over the wider belts and ducking under the higher ones. He snatched the box from the line ten feet from the flaming maw of the furnace. Then his breath escaped from his chest in a great sigh. But it was then when he remembered why he never dared remove anything that was given to the D.T.
    Sid’s shirt caught the conveyor belt once more. His old arms had no power to struggle against the massive strength of the D.T. He tried to call out to the shifters that were a hundred meters away at the other side of the room, but his breath had been stolen from him by his mad dash. By the time he caught his wind, Sid knew it was too late. The D.T., his god, had chosen to take him. He could feel the unbearable heat of the incinerator on his back by now. Sid knew that in moments he would be swallowed. Finally, one of the shifters turned and saw him. The young boy cried out, calling for him. The boy got the attention of the other shifters, and they also yelled. But their voices were useless. The D.T. wanted Sid, and now, after a long sixty years, the D.T. would have Sid. Seconds before the flames enveloped Sid he saw something incredible.
    Infant in the cardboard box punched a hole in the side of the container. The plump little arm just burst out, the baby punched through the thick cardboard like so much tissue paper.
    But that was last thing that Sid saw, and the shifters watched in horror as their eccentric senior manager was engulfed in flames. Little did they know, the infant child that Sid had sacrificed himself to saved would change the world.