357
The Life
My life for the following three months was the most difficult I’d ever experienced. However, it was all I ever knew so it didn’t seem so bad. I was tested medically. I had blood pumped into my veins; I had a better heart put in, and finally, knowledge. By the time I was two weeks old, I had the IQ of a 16-year-old. I was able to speak of the chemical reaction between Sulfur and Krypton. I could recite the Gettysburg Address from memory and I read two to three books a week. My brain was constantly working, thinking, reeling…I rarely had a spare moment until I was introduced to Polphasic Sleep on my 17th day on earth.
“You will take six naps a day for twenty minutes each. This will induce your regular REM sleep so there are no wasted moments on pointless rest,” another doctor by the name of Dr. Simey explained, giving me a sleep schedule. A scientist I did not know the name of stated that I would be spending every other moment learning, practicing motor skills, and soon I would learn to deal with my emotions and body. Those were the most difficult parts.
I was put through dark rooms where people would pop out at me. Dead would be covered in blood and gore and I would have to stare at them. They scared me and made me sad, but I had to deal with it on my own in a solitary room. I had never heard of human condolence. It was something that I never even knew existed. I became a hard rock, somebody who didn’t care for other life forms, who had no fear, who had no emotion at all.
For hours a day, I would exercise in some of the most brutal ways possible, getting punched and beaten when I did not do well. I would then take five minutes to shower, in which I would study my new body, wondering who it had previously belonged to. I wondered if this person ever used it to do horrible things or if he used it to do good things. My body was a young man’s body, I could tell. He had many tattoos and my favorite one was the one that read ‘HALLOWEEN’ across his knuckles. I died on Halloween.
I wasn’t allowed to ask about the world above me—the worlds #356 spoke of—New Jersey and New York. I wondered, though. I wished to know what was going on above my own little sterile, steel building.
The experiments were forbidden to speak to each other after the first couple of encounters. I believe it had something to do with an ‘escape plan.’ None of us felt the need to escape, though. For all we knew, the world above was worse than where we were.
I met a regular human the day I escaped and explained my situation to him. He asked me how I stayed sane.
What is sanity? Everybody has their share of insanity. Nobody has the perfect mind. Nobody is normal, because normalcy doesn’t have a specific meaning. If anyone were normal, then they would be strange and strangeness is often linked to insanity. So, I must have always been sane.
“You will take six naps a day for twenty minutes each. This will induce your regular REM sleep so there are no wasted moments on pointless rest,” another doctor by the name of Dr. Simey explained, giving me a sleep schedule. A scientist I did not know the name of stated that I would be spending every other moment learning, practicing motor skills, and soon I would learn to deal with my emotions and body. Those were the most difficult parts.
I was put through dark rooms where people would pop out at me. Dead would be covered in blood and gore and I would have to stare at them. They scared me and made me sad, but I had to deal with it on my own in a solitary room. I had never heard of human condolence. It was something that I never even knew existed. I became a hard rock, somebody who didn’t care for other life forms, who had no fear, who had no emotion at all.
For hours a day, I would exercise in some of the most brutal ways possible, getting punched and beaten when I did not do well. I would then take five minutes to shower, in which I would study my new body, wondering who it had previously belonged to. I wondered if this person ever used it to do horrible things or if he used it to do good things. My body was a young man’s body, I could tell. He had many tattoos and my favorite one was the one that read ‘HALLOWEEN’ across his knuckles. I died on Halloween.
I wasn’t allowed to ask about the world above me—the worlds #356 spoke of—New Jersey and New York. I wondered, though. I wished to know what was going on above my own little sterile, steel building.
The experiments were forbidden to speak to each other after the first couple of encounters. I believe it had something to do with an ‘escape plan.’ None of us felt the need to escape, though. For all we knew, the world above was worse than where we were.
I met a regular human the day I escaped and explained my situation to him. He asked me how I stayed sane.
What is sanity? Everybody has their share of insanity. Nobody has the perfect mind. Nobody is normal, because normalcy doesn’t have a specific meaning. If anyone were normal, then they would be strange and strangeness is often linked to insanity. So, I must have always been sane.