11/07/2010the-alexander-project/in-the-end

In the end

“In the end – if you meet a madman, who tells you where you are – do you believe him?”

Your feet drag you along to nowhere in particular, plastic eyes are staring forward, unfocused. A diagnosis so liberating in its fatalism; you hear the guards coming at you from both sides, yet your head is too tired to crane left and right to look.

You are running on autopilot, with no aim, no mission, not even primal drive to go on. You are a robot who is free of his master to survive until he runs out of electricity, for his work contract is done. But oh, a robot means a slave. Fear not, you are for once free of an owner, and your manager is looking away. Welcome to the final phase. It is nearing the end of Autumn on Earth.

No shuttles have been sent here, since Alexander II.

11/07/2020

Chapter 2

narrated by Peanut I climbed into bed and strapped the belt across my waist. Anything can happen at night, especially if another electrical brainstorm happens. I stared unfocused into the bottom of the bunk above me, and eventually my leg jerked. Suddenly, we were at the dig, and Kevin was talking.

10/07/2020

Kevin

He is frail because he is young, because he not only has the capacity, but routine duty to change. No hard exoskeleton can set and form, little adaptation can occur in his environment. In an unpredictable environment, he was born into his doom. He is a ticking timebomb. But it was merely by Earth standard that we were misconfigured. Whether by our experience on earth or experimental conditioning, power we were carved this way by our own plasticity, to adapt to an absurd situation. Only in the madhouse, do they train you to says please and thank you. In the mad house your ultimate goal as an individual is self destruction, because it is the one thing they most wish to prevent, yet one that can be prevented the least. In the madhouse the nurse bends over for you to glare at her cleavage when you piss yourself and she lovingly changes your pants. In the madhouse you are prevented from reading books from Outside, for it may then make you bring in unpredictable ideas and make management difficult. It fragments and dilutes our disorders and uncalibrates us from our clean and compartmentalised diagnoses, giving the doctors more names to make up for types like you. In the madhouse sit all the failed calibrations, whether they ended up there by lab design or by evolution trying something new for once. We were being told it wasn’t our fault – but in a way it is our fault, as I do not know who else may have done something wrong. I didn’t even know what the word fault meant anyway.