An Experiment (539 words)
The question before us, ladies and gentlemen, is: how much can the subject take?
Red and pink. The colour of valentines, love-hearts, babies’ skin and little girls’ bedrooms. The colour of blood and peeled nerves, sizzling in the raw air.
Earlier experiment has shown that this amount of trauma applied at once tends to result in massive shock and almost immediate termination. As you will notice, gradually increasing the amount of trauma over a period of time permits the system to adjust. Some nerves are destroyed. Scar tissue is formed. Note that the scarred areas lose their sensitivity not only to pain-stimuli, but to pleasure. Note the lighter, rose-pink colouration of these areas.
Increase the nutrients, please. We do want to keep this going as long as possible.
Love hearts, lace, valentines. You can’t love scar tissue, and scar tissue can’t love. Yet who would want to go on feeling? Surely, in the end, you must become numb.
But what if that isn’t true? Sometimes you can’t stop feeling, even if you long to. Even if that’s your greatest desire. Instead, sometimes, perhaps what you feel…changes. It mutates like a virus. If you can’t find love in a laboratory, an end, a cessation, seems all that’s left to aim for. But after enough of the essential nerves have been severed, enough scar tissue has formed, the desire for oblivion can transmute into - something else.
Please note that the pattern in which the stimuli are applied is almost as significant as the intensity. If this is done correctly, the survival period can be extended far beyond what was originally considered possible. The subject’s system continues to adapt. What one might term ‘the survivable level of trauma’ becomes greater than was originally considered possible.
We have experimented on a great many subjects in order to gather this information, but there is still more information to be gathered. The question remains, ladies and gentlemen. How much can the subject take? At what point does survival become pointless? At what point does the system simply give up?
Old habits die hard and almost invisibly, draining away, leaving a hollow place. What fills it? The last fragments of the old self are seared away. Heat cauterises. Once you’ve learnt to take enough pain, perhaps you can learn to take…everything.
The subject’s responses have altered. This is interesting. Note the increase in adrenalin levels, the bunched muscles. I do believe our subject would be baring its teeth, if it still had lips. We have of course seen this before, if you look at your notes. There is sometimes this last-minute surge of physiological activity before the inevitable end. Gather round a little closer, please....
It’s been a long time since I had vocal chords. Now…I scream, not with the throat but with the entire body. To feel stripped muscles snap their chains is like exploding into a new universe, like becoming another order of being. I am transmuted, translated.
There is nothing left of what I was.
It doesn’t matter if the figure on the table was one of those that originally strapped me down. All hands are shaped for scalpels, including mine. The question remains, ladies and gentlemen...how much can the subject take?
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