another Huxleyesque take on society

 Insomnia

I had this idea of a society that never slept, and was kept alive by various hormones. i don’t have much in the way of a plot yet, but this excerpts is about one of the earliest incarnations of the idea, and therefore, has to do with one of the fatal flaws; namely the human bodies inability to run indefinitely without sleep. 

 

The Harlem Conclusion

 

The needle pierced his sternum, sending an electronic impulse through his spine and into his nerve endings, flooding his cranium with endorphin. His flesh tightened and the dark, purple-black bags disappeared from beneath his eyes. The wrinkles betwixt his brow stretched and his muscles contracted, revealing sickly, black veins throbbing beneath milky white skin and causing vile blood to emanate through unhealed wounds at mid-arms length; you know, the point in the arm from which many a being has explored in hopes of discovering peace, only to find restless solemnity. The sound of metal on brittle cartilage rang through his ears as they slowly, meticulously, tortuously, slid the needle from his chest. His heart palpitated double-time and he began to sweat profusely. Drip after drip landed on the cot, and soaked the leather straps that held him down. He was a representation of the experimental laboratory subjects of the 1950’s horror era: he was a monster; a rag doll man; homosapien artificialis. He screamed and fought against the bindings until his wrists ran crimson with pain and anguish. The shadowed strangers around him held up dark, maniacal hands laden with sterile gloves. They prodded and shocked him to stimulate more, and more, and more, and increasingly stronger impulses. The destitute soul’s heart beat louder, with a telltale undertone. The larger and more masculine figure raised a club above his head and reigned fury down upon the patients knees and shins. And to no one’s surprise, the rag doll hollered in ecstacy and cried for more! They beat him and stabbed him and pleasured him and prodded him until finally, and with insufferable certainty, his chest rose, and fell, in one final display of life in the midst of iniquity, and his eyes ran red with the blood that had once given him life.

The large, shadowed figure – tossing aside his club – decreed to his peers, “It is neither a viable nor an ethical practice to attempt to revitalize the tempests of an irrevocable society. Let them pass from iniquity into the garrulous noise of the unknown hereafter. Waste no more on these derelict souls.”

And the lights came on in the expansive white washed ward. The blinds raised from the mirrors that lined the ceiling, revealing the landmark dark clouds of a society that prefers the shadows of night, in order to hide from themselves. Row upon row of cots lined the floor, like so many bread rolls, neatly lined in an oven, each with a body incapacitated in one way or another ranging from ailments of arthritis to heart failure; brain hemorrhages down to swollen ankles. Hundreds of creatures, perhaps thousands, perhaps none from a biblical perspective; just shells once inhabited by souls lost in lust, unable to be stimulated by the bare necessities of life. Their visages sagged, and their eyes were shot and stared blankly at things that didn’t exist, if anything at all. Appendiges and aesthetics drooped, and limbs cracked. Bones could be heard rubbing against cartilage counterpoints. The sorrow is in the irony. The symptoms of the elderly, being exhibited on creatures no older than twenty, and having no subsequent hope of revitalization.

The metal door shut with an unsympathetic clang, and an ominous hiss permeated the room, marking the judgement of the ward’s damned inhabitants.

“Goodbye ye fair youth who hath sacrificed age for beauty; and conviction for that which is not passion, but the outer shell from which passion attempts to emerge, only to stain the fragile casing with an image of burlesque; the antiquated, archaic substitute for beauty.”