Stories from the human concentration camp

There were six concentration camps for humans in the world: one per each continent.

European was located at the border of former Czechia and Austria.

African - at the territory of former Nigeria.

Australian - just several miles to south from former Sydney.

South American was located deep into the Amazonian rainforest.

Asian - right between the west border of China and the east border of India.

And North American one was located in the former Middle West of the USA.

Honey Bun was a warden of the NAC (North American Camp). She earned this place by her heroic actions during the last human war, when she single hoofedly destroyed most of the human forces and finally brought them down on their knees.

Now she had another mission, just like the rest of the wardens. A long before human downfall, there were millions of pets they kept in their households. Now they didn’t have anyone who’d feed them and take care of them. So ponies decided that it’d be fair if humans will build sanctuaries for these animals.
After all they took the full responsibility for pets, when they brought them to the households. Somepony had to teach humans what does consistency mean.

Honey Bun was sitting in her chair, going through files and papers about the progress of their work and about experiments they ran on humans. Something that they also did in the meantime, justly thinking that humans should become useful at least sometime.

Mostly these experiments were social, but there were also medical ones. Just for fun, though, unlike social experiments. Ponies liked to run them on humans and see their reaction.

Honey Bun smiled, when she remembered the last experiment, when they used a special, human-made recipe of cooking. Though the latter meant it for fish, ponies optimized it for humans as well. And managed to create a great cuisine masterpiece from a human infant, that was fried alive and - the most important thing - was still alive when they served the dinner for his parents with him as the pièce de résistance.

Oh, the look on their faces! It was worth of every single effort they made during cooking and dinner serving.

The gray earth pony stood up and stretched, letting her long mane fall on her back. She was doing this boring paperwork for a while now, so a little walk wouldn’t hurt her.
Honey Bun took all the papers in her telekinetic grasp and put them in a big blue folder in the paper cabinet, before she left her office. After all, she’ll need them later.

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Honey Bun walked through the disorderly row of crude wooden buildings that served as a residence for humans. A usual room in there was had an area of 100 square feet and held from thirty to forty humans inside. As for facilities there was a single hole in the floor and a pipe with ice-cold water that didn’t work around fifteen hours out of twenty four.

To ponies’ surprise though, humans were able to survive such conditions quite well. Which led to another set of experiments with the goal of finding out how bad conditions need to be to make humans’ survival impossible.
So far, there were no results as humans showed remarkable adaptational abilities, on par with cockroaches and common rats. Which was a good sign: ponies didn’t need to waste too much resources on humans.

She stopped before a large field, fenced with a metal reticulated wall that had barbed wire on top. Ponies inside were watching group of humans digging. Honey Bun approached them, having a curious expression on her face.

“What’s going on in here?” She asked.

One of the ponies turned her head and immediately smiled.

“Oh, hi ma’am. Didn’t see you coming.
Well, we’re just testing an old human method of breaking people’s spirit and will and turning them into obedient husks that don’t care about anything, even about themselves.”

The earth pony raised an eyebrow, visibly surprised.

“Sound interesting. Where did you find that method?”

“It’s from… uh, let’s see… from the old times, developed by some group of humans that are called ‘Nazi’ or whatever. Strange title if you ask me.”

“Hmm… okay, and what are you doing now?”

“We’re in the middle of ‘purposeless labour’ stage. We’re making them dig holes in the ground since morning, without letting to take a break or drink water. When they will dig deep enough, we will make them to fill the holes with the soil they dug out. And then we’ll repeat this cycle multiple times.
In other words, we’re forcing them to do a job that has no purpose or meaning. They do it just because they are ordered to and they see themselves that it is useless and they are themselves destroying something that took so much time and efforts from them. Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but their spirit and will deform remarkably fast. You can see it yourself.”

Honey Bun looked humans in the faces and nodded with satisfaction. They practically didn’t have any expression, not even anger or hatred. Nothing. It was an expression of a dumb animal, at best.

“And how long it takes to break them completely?”

“Several weeks. A month, tops.
The goal is to make them accept and believe that they have nothing to hope for, that they don’t control their lives at all. They should know that everything they do is controlled by us, and only us.
Then they will obey our orders automatically, without even pushing from our side.
After that, when they will start shuffling, not lifting their feet off the ground and look only forward, they are pretty much dead.
The last thing that will turn them into nothing but mindless zombie slaves is when they will lose all their opinions and position about their lives and will just accept whatever happens to them, without thinking.

There are other methods to destroy them as well, such as punishing them for breaking mutually exclusive rules, creating collective responsibility, deprive them from the slightest opportunity to control their lives, create unpredictable life conditions that exclude any planning from their side and force them to live by instruction, destroying even the slightest hint of initiative.”

The pony gestured to the other group of humans that sat on the ground and just started forward, without any expression.

“This is the first result of the breaking methods. They are nothing, but mindless husks with no will or inner fire. I will demonstrate.”

She walked to that group and suddenly hit one of them, breaking his nose and knocking out a few teeth. He fell on the ground with a loud *thump* while the others kept staring at the distance, without even wincing or turning their heads.

“See? No reaction. They accept it and think that they can’t do anything to affect their lives. I can do anything to them and they won’t even resist.”

She was about to punch the human again, but Honey Bun stopped her, smiling widely.

“Wait, let me try this!”

The pony nodded, stepping out of her way. Honey Bun stood in from of the wounded human. She lifted him with her forelegs and threw in front of the broken group. To her joy, they didn’t react at all.
She then proceeded violently beating him up, tearing his skin, muscles and breaking bones in the process. Nobody from the group reacted, even if they were now covered in blood, gore and bone fragments.

“I don’t know how you did it, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen so far! Broken humans, losing all their hypocritical and arrogant attitude and turning into the dumb animals they meant to be -- it sounds magical!” Honey Bun exclaimed, panting heavily. She looked like a filly that found the gift of her life under a Hearth’s Warming Eve tree.

“We’re happy to hear that, ma’am. Would you like to burn him alive in front of them, for even more convincing proof?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I would!”

Some time later both ponies watched in glee how the human was burned alive in front of the group of other broken people. Like they expected, nobody shown any signs of compassion or even interest. They were as good as dead, by now. Even animalistic yells of pain didn’t make them wince or cover their ears.

“You know, now I wonder, if it’d be better to turn all of them into this kind of mindless husks rather than killing them, when they’re done with sanctuaries. After all, they deserve it much more, than death, even slow and painful one.” The earth pony said with a smile on her lips.

The other pony chuckled and nodded.

“They do, ma’am. They deserved it a long time ago.”

They shared a happy laugh, watching how the fire slowly goes out.