The Agony

Prelude: act 1

I struggled against the binds as two stern faced guards lifted me into the ejection bay.
They knew as well as me that my crime was so serious that I wasn't even warranted a fighting chance of survival, but that wasn't what was unsettling them; what was is the fact that they had to leave The Vessel, the gigantic moving city that trundled adjacent to The Source, in its outer ring so that we could move slower.
They knew that The Vessel couldn't slow or stop to drop me off, so they had to take a dunecar, but they knew that if they couldn't catch up with the vessel, they would have to try to outrun The Agony, and dunecars where notorious for running out of petrol.
The klaxon sounded, dragging me out of my thoughts, and the massive door started screeching open.
As soon as the ramps wheels touched down, they yanked me into the dunecar, and buzzed its engine on.
I could see the arid lands that where desecrated by endless sweeps of The Agony, with a few spindly trees.
The guards revved the engine to the nearest of them, which looked like drift wood on a sea of sand.
I knew I had maybe twenty minutes before The Agony reached me as it spun on its 3,093,052nd rotation, and then I knew what would happen; my toes would explode into pain first, as if they had been coated in red hot tar and then cut off slice by slice, before the sensation traveled up my body.
The agony was fairly slow, it would take maybe two minutes for it to reach my head, and I wondered morbidly if I would be one of the lucky ones that reached their threshold and passed out before my internal organs drowned me in blood.
A final tug, and the guards had finished tying me, so they finished by putting the placard around my neck, then snapping a picture, not as a sick memento or a sadistic laugh, but to prove that they did their job.
They climbed back into the buggy and left me alone. With no water, waiting for The Agony to come end me.
With a placard that read "condemned to death."...
"For treason against The Vessel."