Everybody has heard of the Dreadnought Factories deep inside the country from where impossible devices flood the world. Orbital imagery shows to jealous and scared competitors continuous clusters the size of cities, their color the deep black of solar panels, opaque to engineering analysis but reminding people and image recognition software of the hyperefficient architecture of a cancer cell. The engineers who maintain and assist (and perhaps part of) the unknown machines inside them have seen and become too many secrets to leave.
That's not the only reason.
The global rumor is that they are prisoners. That the key to the dreadnoughts' uncanny productivity and creativity is an endless stream of slave labor augmented and mutilated by genetic engineering and invasive neural interfaces. The government refutes these histories while leaking on purpose just enough to keep them alive. The careful butchering of genome and nervous systems (and many more things they have chosen not to remind the world are possible) is true. But nobody who works in the dreadnoughts ever wants to leave. There are clinics ready to undo enough changes that workers could survive without most of their biological support infrastructure. Built primarily as a second line of reputational defense, their services remain unasked for.
Government inspectors on their first survey tour, however familiar with the statistics and technical briefings, are surprised by an unfeigned joy distinct from the productivity drugs most people in the world have access to. Those workers with bodies that could still dance seem to do so as they carry their unexplainable tasks among the small parts of the factories humans and the somewhat-human have access to. They hum something inspectors think is a song until they realize it is also a prayer.
Engineers never leave. Government inspectors seldom come back. It's a prestigious assignment but an unnerving one. After their visit the strange, omnipresent products from the dreadnoughts seem stranger and more ubiquitous than before.
Those who have visited the dreadnoughts don't pray, but not because they are sure they won't be heard.
(Originally posted on my blog.)