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Hypersleep (serial) #1 Prologue.

In the year 2061 human trials began for a technology previously referred to as hypersleep or cryogenic sleep. Although, the real science behind it invented by Swiss scientists in American labs was not quite so fantastic. Indeed, thanks to breakthroughs in this field, a healthy man or woman within some certain, strict parameters could sleep for up to three months at a time; or the equivalent of exactly ninety-two days.

The science relied less on particular hardware, emitting a cool spritz of gas upon the inhabitant of an enclosed, egg-shaped sleeping apparatus; and more on the careful preparation of the Circadian rhythm. While some hardware was necessary for the operation and the sleeping chambers did infact resemble porcelain colored, egg shaped pods; the real breakthrough lied in the modification, and thus the manipulation, the stretching like a piece of a chewing gum into a thin strand of the human sleep cycle.

Preparation for participation in these trials was extensive. A regimen of medications, sleep deprivation, intense physical exertion and a commitment to long periods of meditation and fasting were required for the technology to work in any form. Early renditions saw subjects sleep for no more than 10 days before waking, sometimes in varying degrees of mental and physical duress. Furthermore, to ever become a viable form of travel for a human being to sleep for months or years at a time, specifically for the purpose of interstellar travel; would require the bodily functions of the body to slow down to almost corpse-like degrees while keeping the subject alive and able bodied upon waking.

Theoretically, a body in this slowed state would also be much less susceptible to the effects of radiation on his brain and body; the often unsung yet inevitable obstacle of human space travel is the deadly radiation of outer space and Solar Winds. Foreign trials on chimpanzees as well as mice did see vast improvements in the condition of them after exposure of up to 1000 Rads (well passed the known human redline of around 400 Rads) while these early trials often reduced the animals into coma’s; mostly because they were unable to be awakened by their lack of necessary preparation and meditation as previously mentioned. The bodies themselves remained in fine form.

As the human trials progressed, there was certainly no shortage of ready and willing volunteers, and the 92 day span was determined. A group of students from the University of Texas at Austin had successfully tested in consecutive 92 day spans with twenty eight day periods of deliberate recalibration in between composed of primarily a medically advanced meditation practice. This finding, gradually proved on a repeated basis: that while the human body under the right conditions could not sleep longer than 92 days in one sitting, with a short period of recalibration in between, he/she could sleep for another 92 days and the cycle could be repeated indefinitely. The ramifications of what this could mean for the preservation of Earth’s resources had spiked the worlds interest.

However, in roughly 13% of successful subjects, man or woman and seemingly at random; was observed a new and unpredictable breed of night terrors whilst under the influence of hypersleep. One such case made famous by various Journals of medicine was the case of a New England man, whom upon waking from his very first 92 day sleep claimed he had dreamed of spending 10 years in a high security prison. What was especially striking about this case was the mechanics of the long dream, which had already been observed in less extreme cases. The logic of these dreams was still subject to the subconscious soup of a usual 6-8 hour nightsleep where there is often a certain personal essence of randomness and softness within the dream. However, even extremely lifelike dreams in the average person are usually short lived and tend to flow into other dreams. These dreams or night terrors which can occur during the hypersleep still possess these variables of personal randomness, but due to the span of the dreamer, the subjects mind is given time to essentially fill in the blanks that would not be possible in the standard 6-8 hour night. The man from New England had never been in any legal trouble of any sort in his waking life, and was entirely unable to produce a reason as to how he had landed such a lengthy sentence. He did however, and very specifically note that his estranged father who had passed in his waking life in his teenage years was in his prison unit with him and extremely violent. One particular instance claims the New England man was forced to murder his estranged father with the revolving ceramic plate from inside of the prison microwave, broken into long and deadly shards. This altercation, landed himself in the prison hospital for many weeks with dozens of stitches to his own neck and abdomen, and then subsequently forced to serve the remainder of his sentence in a single room cell. In his initial interviews too, he described many of his fellow inmates as people he had known from grade school, teachers, school children (conveniently grown enough to fit the dream) or even distant family of which he could not with sufficient force pull into his conscious the awareness that his experience was indeed a dream and not real life. His later recovered Neurological data illustrated that his brain could not tell the difference either.

Upon waking at the end of the 92nd day, researchers noted the New England man’s hair had gone completely white in his sleeping chamber and he had happened to leave a majority of it in the chamber itself. While its connection is as yet unconfirmed, the otherwise healthy, physically fit, 34 year old man with no underlying conditions was dead of heart failure within 1 year following his hypersleep.

Also unconfirmed in their connection but still relevant for the sake of our story, was the apparent spike in the rate of suicides among the subjects of hypersleep within up to 5 years following their individual participation.

The case of the New England man made International Headlines, and did help determine further pre-requisites for successful hypersleep. Researchers had determined that an unsound mind, while more than capable and perhaps even content in the physical world, was highly susceptible to subconscious complications during hypersleep. It has been theorized that deep resentments from the youth of the New England man had managed to be cleverly avoided in his meditation practice which had regardless progressed to the previously mandated level of sitting completely still with legs crossed on a foam pad from regulation dusk until regulation dawn without any breaks or adjustment.

#2. Cassie

Cassie Vasquez dreamed of riding a bicycle through every park and trail she had ever known. She could descend into the thin interior forest trails without any fear of being catapulted over her handlebars by a stray root or stone. Instead, steadily gaining speed, feeling the warm forest air across her face and neck; her father somewhere close behind enjoying the ride just as much as she was, just as they did when Cassie was a young girl and they would ride in the neighborhoods near their childhood home. Forgotten and beloved schoolmates laughed and giggled behind her too, she heard the unmistakable happy trampling of her childhood dog, Kiki somewhere over her shoulder; all gaining more speed all the while and practically flying over impossibly thin trail that was endlessly satisfying. The sun painted golden fractals in the forest all around her, Cassie was perfectly serene.

When another soft voice seemed come from in front of her on the trail, somewhere too far up ahead to see, impossible to see around so many winding curves anyways; a voice that she did not recognize. Or perhaps, did not recognize in the same golden light of those carrying on gleefully behind her. A new feeling of dread became a sudden weight in her stomach and golden light enveloped her vision completely, and the pleasant sounds of her past dwindled lightly and the soft voice from up ahead became louder and louder. Suddenly too, she was aware she had been dreaming, was still dreaming as the white-gold light faded into the flourescents above the pod chamber as she watched her fellow grad student, and bioengineering major, Tyler Krutchens leaning over her open sleeping pod kissing her feverishly on the neck and whispering to her. The words were largely indiscernable to her but the obvious lust in them was perfectly evident. She felt his weight shifting on top of her as he climbed very carefully into the pod with her, as though he was careful not to wake her. The weight in Cassie’s stomach seemed to multiply like a cast iron pot slowly filled with water at the sink to be boiled as she realized her dream was over and what she was witnessing was happening in real time. In reality, Tyler Krutchens had waited 65 days into Cassie’s sleep cycle until he was absolutely sure she would not wake up and he had spent himself a majority of that time convincing himself she would only remember it as her own dirty dream if she was aware of it at all. But Cassie was awake, as he began to nimbly unzip her white jumpsuit from the neckline; she was terrifyingly stuck in some in-between consciousness, where after 65 days in REM sleep, she could not immediately assume command of her faculties.

Tyler thought he saw her nostrils flare, but he was far too invested now, sweat began to glisten on his forehead, Cassie could smell his anxiety was rancid. He had slowly managed to unzip the front of her jumpsuit, exposing the round swell of her breasts in their nylon bra and her bare belly. Tyler could not resist and placed a trembling hand over each of her breasts. Cassie began to fight very hard to wake up. Her eyelids began to flutter, briefly showing the rolled back whites behind them, Tyler did not notice. He sat back in her pod, placing most of his weight in her lap as he began to fumble with his belt buckle.

Sensation began to trickle back into Cassie’s fingers but she found her muscles dull and unresponsive; she began to wonder if the muscle preservation techniques had worked at all, she wondered for a moment if perhaps this was simply a nightmare and she had failed at her emotional conditioning too. But her wisdom told her otherwise, and that she must wake up. She began to fight very hard now.

Cassie gained a vague conception of Tyler’s flacid penis against her stomach as he began to fumble her jumpsuit down and off her shoulders so that he could get to her underwear. She felt her body exposed to cold air. And somewhere in the panic, Cassie found solitude in her foolishness of trying to wake up to full consciousness all at once; all she needed was one single, focused movement from her prison of half-dream state to her physical body. One single, focused movement, she felt a small breath draw into her lungs, one single focused movement. Tyler’s fingers began to tug down her panties when one of Cassie’s knees shot up with the mindless rigidity of rigormortis directly up into his exposed groin.

He screamed out in a rictus of pain, so startled his knees weakened and he fell over Cassie, clamoring his way out of her pod gasping, “Cassie, oh my god can you hear me?” “Cassie?!”

She could not respond, her knee was still frozen in air where it had struck him, she still lay flat on her back. Her eyes fluttered and her jugular bulged from her neck.

Up until this interval, Tyler Krutchens would sustain a plausible deniability via his attorney in the later recounting of the courtroom at trial. What he would brazenly attempt next is what was most concretely considered by the Jury to solidify his guilty verdict though he would ultimately serve no jailtime.

His mind reeling, sharing subconciosuly with Cassie the mutual certainness of his actions; he felt in these moments reality had become papery and he held the cruel potential to crumple and manipulate it without the guise of his own self-deception- but pure animal force. Surely, Tyler thought although without the tact of conscious language, he had come too far now and with discovery of his actions imminent he felt any apprehension towards his target give way. He was like a frenzied dog with the hair along its spine darkly peaked for battle. He climbed back into the pod with Cassie, pushing away her rigormortis-like postured knee, pulled down her uniform and underwear fully now and promptly began trying desperately to achieve an erection; the nausea still radiating immediately above his groin slowly subsiding, he felt achieving it easier this time as he ran his hands harshly up and down Cassie’s body. Her mind, fluttering in her prison of sleep paralysis, again drawing breath into her lungs the adrenaline in her body nearly batting it away. Her senses had become utterly magnified. One single, focused movement she began to pray someone would barge in and rescue her before he could rape her. She felt his furious rubbing against her, making slow progress towards a usable erection. One single, focused movement. Cassie knew she must swat away her prayers for rescue if she was to stay present, placing the intention instead on the burning of blood in her muscles. One single, focused movement. Tyer grabbed behind her neck now, bracing against her body as he prepared to enter her when with the same unconscious force of her knee in his groin, it was as if she shot all of her strength from her core, both legs and arms into one flat driving palm into Tyler Krutchens’ nose, flattening it to his cheek and in the way of his left eye, two ropes of pearly red blood shot out onto Cassie’s face. And her whole body heaved forward into an upright position, writhing with adrenaline fully awake now, her stiff knee loosened with life, reeling it back one more time and kicking Tyler, stupidly drugged in pain and surprise, in the chest catapulting him to his back on the floor outside of the pod. Cassie, hurriedly dressed herself as Tyler haphazardly gathered himself too and ran for the exit letting the heavy steel door slam behind him. Cassie climbed to her feet, still leaning her weight against the white egg shaped pod with blood on her face and neck, her chest rising and falling like a gladiator. Her very next thought was her gratitude and the very one following was the realization that her tireless preparation for the hypersleep, body preservation and her previous hypotheses, were flawless. She was in this moment like Edison seeing the bulb flicker.

Tyler Krutchens, would soon after be stripped of his academic accolades as a part of his association with the University and kicked from his enrollment with the school altogether. He would however, narrowly avoid jail time in a plea deal which granted him 96 Months of probation as opposed to an equal sentence incarcerated. His role in the early days of hypersleep research would also go down in infamy, himself fading into obscurity.

Cassie on the other hand, would go on to become one of the worlds’ foremost authorities on Hypersleep preparation and her findings would prove invaluable to the medical and scientific communities alike; touring recruit training facilities and universities world wide with her course and steps to a successful sleep. For five years following the incident with Tyler Krutchen in the pod chambers at the University of Texas at Austin, Cassie would also become an advocate for the safety of young people, particularly women during clinical trials and the role of safety in cutting edge research. And after those five years, at the age of 29, in July of 2066, Cassie would be selected as a crew member of the manned mission known colloquially in the canon for the years following along with 4 other highly qualified crewmembers as The Deep Space Disaster of 2066.

3. Phillip

Sitting towards the rear in the upper rows of the packed lecture hall, Phillip Nguyen sat near a handful of other adjuct faculty members with his elbows on the folding desk in front of him and his chin cupped in his hands. The presentation was the Massachusetts chapter for the nationwide tour of Cassie Vasquez and her lecture regarding the vegetation discovered on the moon SK47219 and how Hypersleep would prove to be an integral part of researching it. But of course, Phillip had heard the speech already in D.C. and once more in Pittsburgh and as the rest of the audience leaned in eagerly to listen with baited breath, Phillip began to doze off.

He did not dream, but he did remember…

Walking with his mother being led by the hand and only coming up to her pencil skirted hip. He remembered how her perfume captured so much of the sophistication and bitterness of the rose and so little of the sweetness he would learn to love about ladies’ perfume as he aged. He remembered how it mixed with the smell of the city on Thursday afternoons when she would lead him to his daycare center in downtown Dallas, walking through the ghettos that had become inescapable. His tiny strap on shoes following clunkily next to his mothers’ stockinged flats which she always managed to make sound like heels. Very few cars passed by but for small electric wagons and even those were barred from traveling down some roads in areas where the living quarters had poured into the street. “The city within the city” his mother had warily called it, referring to the homeless ghettos where men slept flat on the concrete at all times of the day, and harsh looking children played makeshift, harsh looking games and the old simply stood hunched over in rags and wavered. The walk from his mothers office to the daycare was a brief one and one only made on certain Thursday afternoons when his father was unable to fetch him due to his own professional obligations. His mother afterall was an attorney, his father an Orthopedic Surgeon. He understood it was quite a commodity that his family should have a hybrid electric vehicle that also took gasoline, as by this time the price per gallon was roughly $57. But his mother was afraid to drive it such a short distance, and by herself at that, so on those Thursdays when they did come, she elected to walk.

Phillip and his mother observed many great absurdities together, she would tell him to divert his eyes so as not to stare but to a young boy this task was virtually impossible. He remembered looking up to see stone faced beings dangling their feet from the open windows of once vacant skyscrapers, themselves now occupied to the very top with Ghetto’s. Trash burning in bins from the upper floors too and mothers hanging laundry. He remembered being afraid of one old man in particular who was missing both legs and an arm, the nubs of skin at their ends twisted and sealed crudely and grotesquely. The man sat in what looked to be a rolling desk chair now stationary on the asphalt balanced upright by the counterweight of his bloated belly, his expression one of absolute disgust and his eyes unabashedly meeting young Phillip in his helpless stare. His mother had barred him from taking out any water or snacks from his backpack until he was safely behind locked doors of the daycare and warned him almost everytime they took the walk of pickpockets and snatchings, things Phillip never was able to witness firsthand. As he would learn later, many of the men sleeping flat on the concrete at all times of day had in fact been dead of hunger, dehyrdration or exposure. Stalls without any goods to sell, canopies of wood, nails and tarp lined up and down the block, empty storefronts had people laying shoulder to shoulder on their floors. Every different posture and every different figure in every different skin tone and the many colors and contortions of all their garments existed on top of eachother and together, as much a part of the city as the concrete itself. Like Coral Reefs growing over the city in huge swathes down entire city blocks and composed of living, breathing people. And through it all, as a boy Phillip remembered his mind was often elsewhere.

Her name was Sophia. A beautiful young girl with long brown and very curly hair, and huge mahogony brown eyes to match, exactly Phillip’s age. He only knew her from daycare, and had only spoken to her in the infinitesimal articulation of young children, in which journeying across the room to ask permission to borrow her scissors in particular was akin to a most grandiose profession of love. His boyish heart pounding in his chest. She smiled and offered them to him, at which point young Phillip snatched them up and hurried back across the classroom. Images of a twinkling Sophia haunted him through the day and in his dreams with the strength enough to till the hard soil where the sprouts of adolescence had not yet bloomed. He never mentioned her to his mother, or his father for that matter, and with his child’s attention span he would forget about Sophia soon after his departure from daycare until he was once again left only to his own devices.

Phillip remembered his anticipation swelling inside of him as he walked with his mother, her own eyes often darting back and forth in her characteristic paranoia which followed her regardless of her surroundings. And most of all, Phillip remembered the soul crushing weight of Sophia’s absence when she was not at daycare at all. Sophia, the young daughter of some other affluent family was placed in the daycare at their discretion and in fact had only landed in the classroom at the same time with Phillip only twice. Thursdays came and went, each time Phillip prayed to see her so they could finally share their love. He fantasized running away with her or resucing her from some dream-like scenario, and he would be haunted by the images of her mahogany eyes for what seemed like a very long time. Phillip could not remember exactly when he had let go of her memory but it was somewhere after the time of his daycare tenure and once he was old enough to attend primary school.

From his earliest days of Primary school, Phillip was expected to perform well and for all intents and purposes he did. He was a very bright young boy with a talent for arithmetic and a special hidden love of the stories and poetry from English class. His mother and father taught him to work hard and persevere through the mental obstacles all young students face. And at least partly stemmed from this, Phillip kept a side of himself under lock and key within him, the part of him that fell in love with countless girls over the years often with nothing to spark it but seeing her smile from across the cafeteria. He understood too, it was quite a commodity to attend a private school. His bus ride with the other school children was a much longer journey than the short walk through downtown he would make with his mother, and Phillip remembered the ghettos and shacks, stacked upon eachother like favelas that stretched even far outside of the city and in fact seemed the wide majority. He remembered the wrap around lines and resulting bedlam of days when rations were airdropped from the massive skyships, watching all through his bus window. It was these images which further fueled the competitive nature of private school. The students often felt, as pervaded by their teachers, that success in life was like a podium and upon it were more limited spots than ever before.

Therefore a love of beauty and poetry and love itself was like a sanctuary for Phillip which he protected as he got older, and watered in the form of the occasional dates and extracurricular interests he once more never mentioned to his mother and father. He remembered the academic downfall for many of his fellow students, so steadfastly committed to hiding their emotional and sexual natures that they outright refused their existence. A young woman he had dated once, a beautiful emerald eyed, almond skinned Minerva Twain had been the defining scandal of his sophomore year in University-prep highschool when it was discovered the final essay she had turned in had in fact been her suicide note, citing how the shadow of her parents and the pressure of a strained world was simply too much for her to bare. She had been found dead of an overdose in the small wooded area behind the school. Phillip remembered drugs and scandal had run rampant in private school among the academic elite, and he also remembered how through it all he had managed. He would go on to graduate near the top of his class, and his commitment to balance in life, allowed him to hide what interests he needed to from his own overbearing family without shame. This soundness of mind would help Phillip in his successful hypersleep conditioning as well, being one of the first of his immediate peers to achieve the full 92 day sleep span and awake in full bodily condition just as the stories now made famous of Cassie Vasquez waking up to defend herself from immeninent assault at the University of Texas at Austin. By this time Phillip was a P.H.D. physicist, he also had an extensive bookshelf at home comprised of almost exclusively fiction and poetry. He would also be the only crew member of the Deep Space Mission 2066 to leave behind a wife and children, both of which would already be of college age.

4. Douglas

Douglas Michael Katz attended public school. Which by this time had largely consolidated onto single mega-campuses rather than the traditional Western systems of multiple schools within a district. He stayed his first year in the dorm at age ten after commuting with the younger children at George S. Patton Technical School with an estimated 8500 other students up to eighteen years old. Douglas did of course come home each summer to his father, Hector Katz and his older sister, Angela. Stepping through the door of his childhood home after the long school year in his school uniform and fraternized independence felt very foreign to Douglas. His father was in his recliner where he had left him after visiting over the Christmas break and his sister was in the kitchen alone with her own fussy newborn, frustratedly reasoning with her to eat now or cry later. Douglas would hug his sister and wave hello to baby Isabel as he poured himself a glass of water at the sink, quickly realizing this was not the same clear stuff running through the pipes at school and was instead an immediately rust colored liquid swirling with tiny brown flakes.

“Dougie, Get a bottle of water from the pantry” said Angela over Douglas’s shoulder as he was already three quarters of the way there. His father entered the doorway soon after, giving his own wave to baby Isabel as if he too was only visiting and leaned against the counter, eagerly crossing one ankle over the other.

In all of his years, there never seemed too much to say. The face of baby Isabel served as the most accurate meter; a look of consternation painted across her soft, unmolded brow. It was a face that characterized the feeling in that kitchen better than any words or singular adjective could. Before long, that look of consternation continued only in the direction of Angela; and Hector, the old man would return to his chair and continue collecting cobwebs to his physical form and to his psyche. By the time summer vacation rolled over to its finish, Douglas was struck with the realization that he too collected cobwebs of his own sort in the droll of his home, enough to feel the swell in the bottom of his throat of anxiety a feeling as opaque yet constant as a cedar fever upon returning to school for the semester.

The smell of unsunned mold over dusty carpet, urine and excrement sat unstirred but for the trampling of mostly bare feet through it, red haze settled near the ceiling even out in the hallway from the synthetic leafy stuff they called Yage. Doors that had been slammed so many times most of them hung open. Boys could be seen masturbating naked in their beds, some of them passed out from the Yage, some still naked, a few of them in pairs and small groups. The hallways stretched forever and behind every door lay some new horror, putrid sight or smell. Douglas’s dorm was a standard enough room with proprietary bunkbeds, two of them sleeping a total of 4 boys in the small cell. The bathroom however had been destroyed in years passed and never fixed. The toilet had been dragged as far into the corner as it could go and the sink still sat coated in a hard orange rust somewhere out in the hallway. Younger boys smashed the porcelain to make small, un-reliable knives and shrapnel. All four of the boys made their business directly into exposed pipes and drank and showered from another, unable to do so without dousing the floor and walls of the bathroom and leaking onto the dorm carpet. While the water admittedly ran perfectly clear by the school’s infrastructure, hands were seldom washed and bacteria ran rampant, sickness seemed to ravage everybody on the floor periodically.

Douglas had taken a strong liking to the Yage, as did most of the others on his floor which consisted of a looping hallway over a quarter mile long. It seemed entirely necessary to smoke it in order to survive the dormitories, as if one could not exist without the other. There were pills around, sure, but Yage was the most prevalent and the cheapest. A synthetic potpourri to be smoked and left its signature red haze in the air following exhalation. Douglas began using it daily almost as soon as he became acclimated to the dorms. It had made him seize only once, and luckily he carried no recollection of it. Yet every time he inhaled the red smoke, his vision would twist in front of him and he commonly emptied the contents of his stomach as the world began to turn more and more violently until the vision was blotted out completely and he was faced only with the solid blackness that composed the door to his soul, sealed as shut as a steel prison door. He had been molested once by a couple of tenth graders in one of his Yage induced blackouts, and he had returned the favor to one of his roommates some time later. The boys exhaled the red smoke and experimented on eachother with wild abandon, fighting and fucking like sick dogs…

Classes did carry on, three days a week from 9am-9pm. Most of the teachers were either fiends or perverts too. And most of the classes involved some form of physical labor. In English class, when Douglas was 14 in what would be his fourth and final year in the dorms, they spent 8 weeks on a project for the 120 year old novel Animal Farm by George Orwell consisting entirely of constructing a massive Windmill for the school’s power supply… His young body racked with torn and strained muscles, with nothing to fuel them but filtered water and cheese crackers, he remembered hyperventilating at the feet of his professor who wore bloody purple and black tracks up and down his arms.

There was one redeeming factor to school time, which seemed to form the straining twine which bore the weight of society from entire collapse; was that classes were coed. The girls and those whose identified as such laid the caulk on the foundation while the boys and those who Identified as such, poured the cement. This was when Douglas met Brianna, a pale skinned girl with a demure, bony face and long dark hair and dark eyes. Brianna took an immediate liking to Douglas for reasons he did not quite understand, but it was this fact alone which made him love her. They met along the grand electric fence outside of the Mega dorm and sat in the grass venting about their families and their peers. The girls floor was inaccessible from Douglas’s floor when the staircase doors were sealed, an architectural design only mandated after the invention of what was considered entirely fire retardant insulation. However, like everything in the public school system the lock was bound to break and never be fixed. When it did, girls began to appear with increasing regular on the floor. When Brianna finally visited, Douglas insisted on turning off the lights and waiting for the roommates to disappear or pass out. Brianna did not understand why this was important. The couple smoked yage and made love, they both were blinded by a kaleidoscope of color as they orgasmed, Douglas came inside of her and laid with her afterward breathing in the dark amongst a cloud of stale red smoke, burning ashes landed on the mattress with its single sheet, their bodies snuffed them out. They made love a few more times following, eventually both of them complained of sores on the genitals, sores Douglas had recognized for the penis’s of some older boys he had seen in the dormitories. And the couple was divorced because of it, he soon saw Brianna entering and exiting the rooms of other boys on his floor. The couple would never speak again, and soon Douglas would do the same as he increased his forays with other girls.

To make some extra cash, Douglas began selling yage, and cutting it with regular spice and rose petals to stretch it farther. He had been beaten badly as a result of it more than once, one time even being stomped into a coma by an especially large and strung out eighth grader called Logan. When he returned from the mega dorm infirmary, Douglas resolved to kill Logan with a crude blunderbuss he had acquired in his trade. He did so, shooting the boy then 13 in the chest with a mixture of porcelain shards and nails propelled by gunpowder. There were witnesses, as it occurred in the doorway to Logan’s dorm and the young boy spent several minutes bleeding out from his neck and chest but nobody came investigating. The body was simply removed within the week. After this Douglas got especially high on yage and heroin as he lay against the smutty carpet and this time when faced with the black door of his soul, it’s hinges seemed to swing open. After this experience his addiction would spiral for many more years but once he returned home for the summer of his 15th year, he would never return to the dorms. He would join the military when he was 18 and would largely credit his tenure in the Marines to cleaning him up off the drugs and beginning his fitness and spiritual journey to rehabilitation which would ultimately earn him the respect of his peers as a champion of reform and his own spot on Deep Space Mission 2066.

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