elimination

My nerves give a sudden jolt that throws me to the ground. Electricity starts at my wrist port and seers through my veins. My vision goes white. Please don’t let me wake up back in the methylation room. Please don’t let me wake up back in the methylation room. Please don’t let me wake up back in the methylation room. Please Bump Nose, don’t do it. Please just don’t. Just disassemble me, but not that room. No not that room. Please not that room. I’m being polite, please listen. Please. Something, someone please. God? Please don’t let me end up back there. Tears flow from my eyes for a moment before angry fists scrape them away. Wait?!?? I can move my arms!

I open my eyes to find myself curled up in fetal position under my desk. The smell of burnt hair lingers around me. Everyone is gone, everyone but Bump Nose who stands five feet away from me, arms crossed and stoic. He notices the flutter of my eyelids and meets my gaze with a sharp, icy glare. Anger bubbles through my veins with increasing pressure. How dare he do this to me? Foam threatens to form, but somehow I remain calm. He regards me with impatient disgust. “Come on Seven, get up, I would like to speak with you.” I do nothing. “Seven, I’m not going to ask you again.” I scarcely breathe, let alone humor him by moving a single millimeter. This pattern continues 13 more times, until finally, exasperated Bump Nose walks up to the desk I am under and kneels down. I shake as foam finally begins to pool in my mouth. His right hand heads for my shoulder, but as soon as his thumb nears my mouth my teeth snap down.

He lets out a high pitched yelp extracting his finger from the point of danger just in time. I vaguely wonder what the severed appendage would have tasted like, the sweet burning taste of revenge or the heavy metallic taste of blood. He stumbles back in an attempt to regain his footing and falls down, landing on his butt. He makes a noise that is somewhere between a groan and a scream before grabbing on to his desk and pulling himself upward. His left ankle is bent at an unnatural angle. How fitting! Now he can suffer for the rest of his life from the same injury that plagues me! I wonder if they disassemble the teachers who injure themselves like this?! I finally get up and sit on my desk, legs crossed elegantly. I want to bite.

I let out a single laugh which blossoms into a chain of giggles and then an uncontrollable wave of laughter. “I hope they stick you in a room full of a million monsters who look just like you, I hope your limbs shrivel and swerve at odd angles and your skin turns translucent purple and your eyes become so ugly, so incredibly and impossibly hideous that never again will anyone ever doubt the saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul.” For one beautiful moment I am deaf and blind to everything but my own laughter, my own beautiful psychosis. I want to bite.

“Are you quite alright Seven?” His words are as soft and as gentle as the first tiny wisps of falling snow. I stare at him blankly, my rage fading as a final glob of foam dribbles down my chin and onto the table. I just lost control again. I tried to bite off his finger. I was wondering how it would taste. In an instant I recoil from myself. Get me out, just get me out, out of this skin, out of this flesh, just get me out please get me out. I start to breathe fast, I can’t take it any longer. My fingers start to desperately scratch at my own skin. Get me out, just get me out “GET ME OUT!!!”

Bump Nose grabs my arms and shoves them down by my sides. “No Seven.” he speaks calmly, but deliberately. “There is no way out, I am sorry it has to be this way, I am really and truly sorry. Breathe, calm yourself and we can have a conversation about this.” For a moment I just look up into his dark grey eyes. I am full of fear and something else, hope? trust? It sickens me. Finally I purse my lips, nodding slowly. “You shocked me, through my wrist port to get me to stop talking, was it because I was right?”

He sighs and rubs his eyes. “My apologies Seven, I had no choice. I feared I was losing control of my little group; I had to do something to reassert my authority, especially over you. You know about the books, about the ideologies I have been preaching, you are absolutely right to assume their harm. However I believe the value of this experiment as a whole is greater than the value of a few human lives. You see Seven, Titles are becoming more and more complacent with every generation. They are undoubtedly intelligent, but their minds have simply become computers to be programmed. They will believe anything we tell them, no questions asked.” I remain straight faced thinking back to my conversation with Eight.

“If all goes well with you Seven, this will be the final generation of Titles. I had to do this experiment while I still could. I invited the most inquisitive—which coincided naturally with those being given minor mutations—to come at their own risk and ask questions. The plan went brilliantly—the Titles responded better than I could have ever dreamed. So then I decided to take things a step forward. Could I take these individuals and make them defy everything they have ever known, or been bred to do, simply by exposing them to archaic ideologies? So far the answer appears as though it will be yes. I do believe that they will put these concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ over their very lives.” I stare at Bump Nose slowly absorbing his every word. His eyes are round with excitement and shine with a certain indescribable madness.

He eagerly anticipates my response, yet for once in my life I have nothing to say. Or perhaps I do, I am just terrified of the answer. “So this whole right and wrong thing is fake, you just made it up for this experiment, to see if you could brainwash the Titles into believing in ideals that would jeopardize their survival, going contrary to the natural inclination of humans to protect themselves at all costs.” Bump Nose stares at me with a bemused, somewhat judgmental expression on his face. “Why Seven, I thought that you would recognize that. Once right and wrong were very real cultural concepts, however they were always and will always be too subjective to actually mean anything.”

I look down at my hands unsure of what to do or say. Finally my mouth begins to move out of rash impulse. “In terms of taking the other continent, why and how?” Bump Nose looks uneasy, yet to my surprise begins to answer my question. “The society you have lived in your entire life, you must know it isn’t a real society. It’s something between an experiment for the purpose of creating a perfect human and a training facility for the militants needed to take the other continent.”

“This isn’t the end product, we aspire to so much more, a true society. Yet such a goal is impossible here with these ice age conditions and the darkness. To use solar power to supply energy for entire cities with this much ash and dust in the air from WWIII is impossible. Granted the entire planet is in fairly bad shape, but this is by far the worst place. The other continent is cold, but no where near how it is here, there is less ash and dust in the air. There is no snow or ice, yet at the same time there is very little drinking water and the climate is quite dry. Most of the non-salt water on Earth is held here on the northern continent in the ice that covers the ground. However the climate there is hospitable enough to permit the creation of a true society, a true utopia devoid of the weakness that brought about the apocalypse.” There is so much excitement, so much hope in his eyes, then it falls. His eyes become sad and lost.

“Or so I used to believe, I do not know anymore.” His words hold a certain sense of melancholy as he stares off into the distance. “With age comes both wisdom and insanity. It is no longer entirely clear where I stand between these two outcomes—where any of us stands.” His words trail off; he is somewhere far, far away. One thing is for certain, ‘any of us’ doesn’t include me and I have a faint theory as to who he may be referring to. “Any of us? Who are these colleagues you speak of?” I press onward for information holding my breath. I can see out the window that the sun is slowly beginning to rise. I must have been passed out for hours. Bump Nose follows my gaze to the window. “There will be time for answers Seven, go now before I get myself into even more trouble. I’m sorry I electrically shocked you.”

“Wait,” I exclaim perhaps a bit too strongly. He looks up slightly startled. “Yes?” “How do you know that I won’t go and tell the rest of the group of your little experiment. How do you know I won’t protect them.” Bump Nose props up his sly smile on his right forearm, leaning against his desk. “Go ahead and tell them, they won’t believe you.” I open my mouth to object, but the words die on my lips. He is likely right. Still I press onward. “These are extremely intelligent individuals you are deceiving. What makes you think they won’t figure it out on their own?”

Bump Nose seems to ponder this for a moment. “Some could, but I believe it’s unlikely. There are several different types of intelligence Seven. You have all been given an aptitude for memorizing information far superior to past humans. Yet the other types of intelligence: creativeness, curiosity—we have yet to acquire the power to fully determine which zygotes will have those qualities, and usually they are few and far between. It is one of the few things that falls to chance, that and willpower. Ahh, yes willpower, how I have always dreamed of quantifying that arbitrary force.”

He looks off into the distance; he’s lost again, in another place, another time. I can almost see his dreams projecting from his eyes against the back wall as he imagines himself discovering the exact equations for willpower, the secret to cultivating it, picking it up with lab gloves and a pipet and sticking it under a microscope. Then he looks up, abandoning his dreams of grandeur . “Perhaps you are right Seven, perhaps they will figure it out. It’s just when you have lived through what I have, you begin to develop certain unmovable opinions, views about the world and how it works. Tampering with nature has only ever brought pain and suffering to this world. It started with the industrial revolution in the mid 1700s, and from then until about the year 3000 humans collectively destroyed the planet to satisfy their demands for energy and supply an unchecked population with technology capable of so much that it created a new kind of person. Weakness, laziness, and selfishness became the distinguishing traits of a new generation.”

“People became lazy, complacent, hedonistic and entitled. They destroyed the planet to satisfy their own insatiable desire for a nonexistent ideal of comfort. You must know by now that I do not agree with all of the descriptions in your textbooks of human weakness. But this I do know: in the 21st century, the human race destroyed their planet and themselves. If you don’t believe me Seven look in the mirror. Your disease is living testament to this destruction.”

Bump Nose looks as though he’d like to rip everything in the entire universe to shreds with his own two hands, including himself. I do believe this is my cue to go. I sigh,“Well thank you for chatting with me it was....pleasant, I shall be going now. Goodnight....umm morning.” On the heels of perhaps the least eloquent speech I have ever given, I exit the room and begin running down the hallway until I finally reach the frigid air outside. I reflect on what Bump Nose has said about our atmosphere as I inhale deeply through my mouth. Brain murdering pollutants. Delicious. For a moment I wonder about this great society Bump Nose speaks of. He said that I—the methylation project—was vital to everything. What is my role in the creation of this “great society.” I continue to ponder this until WHAM I run nose first into a tree. I wrap my arms around it for support and let a single frozen tear drip down my nose. I don’t understand anything anymore. I don’t understand anything Bump Nose says. I don’t understand why I was created this way. I don’t understand why the world is like this. I give up. I hug my tree and cry.