"In the copper mines of Geber, the living are dead."
Joshua woke with a start. In his dream, giant cockroach beings in the thousands preyed upon human flesh. For years the humans had tried to stamp out the cockroaches but now the roaches had grown strong and they wanted their revenge. Humans were taken, dragged among them and eaten alive. But waking from this nightmare wasn't much better - for the mines were a place that ate men's souls.
The tyranny of the morning whistle sounded dread in every miner's heart. But this planet was a mining colony. Don't want to mine? Get off the planet. The workers were considered free men, for you see, if you didn't like your job in one mine, you could simply mine in another. A slave by any other name.
Work was God. It was holy and unquestionable. God help the man who spoke against work. To even speak out against the conditions of work was heresy. Of all things known and unknown, it could be assured work was good. They clung to that precept, built their worth and their lives around it and were fanatical in its defense - most especially the ones who did no work. 
The walk to the mine was as walking through an ancient battlefield. The land was stripped of all vegetation, shards of stumps the only reminders of life once existing. Corpses, some still dying, could be seen strewn in the distance. The worst were the Cripples, the great lepers of the Geber world. Men too deformed to work - some only in the mind. They probably got hurt on purpose it was supposed. There is no good reason to defy the Work God. A few sympathetic miners threw them scraps of food.
Sadist Guards ran the mines. They watched the faces of the miners coming in, enjoying the hollowed out looks, the expressions of terror, or those too defeated to even see. These faces were the Sadist Guards' dreams. They fed off the horror in the miner's lives knowing that to rebuke the Guards was the same as rebuking the Work God. With glee they handed out their punishment. If the Sadist Guards could bring a worker to tears, they high-fived one another in victory.
Every day was the same and every tomorrow. No one cared who you were, they already knew. Dreams turned to screams. Your mind remained locked into the work by the ever present fear of becoming a Cripple. No thoughts of having a life. Some men were so broken they got off on their own death. If you chose to actually look up, you could see the Sadist Guards honored as keepers of the Great Society. And above them were the Fat Rats, beings that only took from others, calling themselves Men of God.
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