Snuffed-Out Candles

An idea had been deposited and was swelling inside her head.  It reproduced among her neurons.  Brenda's eyes defocused as they stared at the terminal screen.

She had just been conversing with the mop wringer.  He was telling a story about a person he met the night before.  He couldn't remember the person's name or gender.  She now spun around in her swivel chair and watched him hand the mop back to the mop pusher, then lean back towards the hallway railing.  His arms shot out as he misjudged and lost his balance, taking a quick step back and steadying himself.

The proper cocktail per person was still a very inexact science, which was why it was still managed by humans such as Brenda.  She was the administrator responsible for West Orange, New Jersey.  Because of its proximity to New York City, West Orange was one of the few jurisdictions with two administrators.  Brenda had never met the other administrator.  Administrators in the National Contentedness Bureau were generally the only humans who weren't actively being contented.  All other jobs were either managed by software or were unimportant enough for contented humans.  Maintaining contentedness was a synonym for maintaining social order, so only fully functioning humans could take that job.

Brenda continued to watch the mop wringer.  He and the mop pusher were laughing about something.  She wondered how it might feel to be like them.

Administrators regarded administration as the loneliest existence imaginable.  Contented people didn't think about it much.  Administrators were few and far between.  In addition to the isolation of being such a sparse group, care was taken so that administrators stayed generally out of contact with one another.  Contact was found to have a negative impact on turnover rate.

Individual administrators managed ethanol cocktails for their assigned region.  Regional dynamics meant that a one-size-fits-all algorithm for ethanol concentration couldn't be counted on to maintain contentedness.  Subtle changes to the violence inhibitors and other cocktail additives were made and closely monitored by administrators in response to ever-evolving socioeconomic differences among regions.

The history of the NCB was intentionally vague.  Once softwarization of jobs hit stride and most human labor was unnecessary, pressure began to build among a population with no place to be and an unclear future for wealth distribution.  Once the food voucher program began to roll out in large cities, alcohol quickly became number one voucher purchase.  Violent crime and organized government protests began to plummet in those areas.  The NCB was born as a pilot program to develop safer and more reliable alternatives to over-the-counter alcoholic drinks and supply those alternatives daily to any citizen who chose to opt in.  Within 10 years, the opt-in rate had climbed to 99.5%.

Contentedness became a science at the NCB.  Supplements to the ethanol blend reduced the violent effects typically associated with alcohol intake.  Short-term societal stability was achieved as every citizen led happy, simple lives in a state of calm, confident, blissful sedation.  The dangerous world which threatens the average drunk was, with much effort, tamed.  Cars and guns were systematically crushed and melted down.  Software now shuttles contenteds around in trains to dance clubs or amusement parks.  Sharp edges are sanded down.  Metal railings are wrapped in foam.  Uneven sidewalks are quickly re-poured.  Loud conversation and laughter perpetually drift into open windows.  Longer-term health risks were not addressed, as there was little public concern.  The average life expectancy dropped to 53.

Brenda closed her eyes but couldn't shut out the laughter.  She felt jealous.  She often wondered what made her feel more alone.  Staring out into the sky at night, completely black, the light from nearby Manhattan drowning all but one or two stars, soaking emptiness, trying to imagine just how much black there was between her feet and that one star.  Or seeing people who weren't alone, effortlessly flaunting their human connection in front of her, just beyond the tips of her fingers no matter how she stretched.  She would imagine posing the question to someone else.  Anyone.  She always thought that she had such interesting thoughts and she just wanted to tell anyone, but there was no one to tell; no one around her who cared to hear.  Certainly no one who could relate.  She would imagine conversations.  She would create elaborate scenarios and play dialogue back and forth in her head.  She was at dinner parties every morning while she showered.

The idea walked up and down her spine and twitched her fingers.

-----

Guy's eyes defocused as they stared at the terminal screen.  He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them wide.  He was obsessively checking his inter-region inbox.  He was grooming several other administrators across the country but he knew that he only really wanted to find a message from one in particular.

Guy was trying to enlist help to put a plan into action across multiple jurisdictions.  He could implement his plan for the entirety of his own, which was Santa Monica.  He had no permission to alter cocktails for any other region though, and it was his firm belief that every human needed to be discontented.  He had committed himself to a date which was fast approaching.  He had investigated and then made contact with administrators who ran jurisdictions within major metropolitan areas across the country.  In his background checks, he had stumbled upon a startling fact about a mid-level administrator in Northern New Jersey:  She was the only female administrator in the NCB.

And then his mind ran.

He had read very old books.  He knew that love was something that involved two people who didn't simply take what they need from each other.  He knew that falling in love was something that happened somewhere in your chest.  His chest felt tight the moment he read the gender field for Brenda.  He reasoned that he had fallen in love.

He knew that people who were in that state talked about their feelings.  He didn't quite know what his feelings were, but he thought that he had them.  He felt physiological effects because of her.  So he made contact with her and talked about his plan and tried to recruit her, just like he did with all of the others.  He exchanged over one hundred messages with her in the two days since he had made contact.  Several times, he had typed out "what color is the sky there right now" or "do you hear any birds outside your window" only to quickly deleted it.  He no longer even cared whether he would be able to recruit her or not - he anticipated her refusing, based on her vague and brief responses - but he couldn't stop talking to her.

Guy looked at the clock and realized that Brenda had probably left for the day.  He powered off his workstation, grabbed his bag, and walked out of the office.  The morning fog had long since burned off and the sky was an empty, oversaturated blue.  Guy stood under the awning of the single-story office building and counted.  Six people passed out; four in the street and two in lawns.  Typical for this time of year.  He walked quickly towards the train station.  He only had one way of walking, and that was quickly, with his head down.

The train was loud and smelled like urine.  It was a drum agitator jostling and rolling its contents, smashing them against each other to break them into smaller pieces.  People shouted conversation within their group and bounced synchronously.  As the train braked abruptly coming into each stop, dozens of plastic drink containers rolled along the floor towards the front of the car.  When the train accelerated away again, the drink containers all migrated back to the rear of the car.  Guy kept his eyes glued on the floor in an effort to avoid confrontation.  There generally was very little interaction of any kind between administrators and the general population, but administrators were still occasionally targeted in assaults by contenteds whose belligerence was enough to overpower the anti-violence supplements.  

Contenteds continued to bump and stumble into him.  He drew his knees in closer and shrunk himself to be as small as possible in his seat.  Guy could feel time slow down.  The interval between movements of the second hand on his watch began to grow in duration.  He felt himself begin to stagnate along with the rest of the train car.  He began to darken, thicken, and then coagulate like the stain which was gluing his shoe to the floor.  As each moment passed, he lost a little more of his belief that he was different than the rest of them and began to assimilate into all of them as they rotted together.  As he watched, their movement began to appear in slow motion.  They started to blend into one bloating, stinking, piece of food that was out in the sun.  The other people were no longer bumping into Guy, making contact, and then receding.  They were now pressed against him with increasing pressure.  The mass was swallowing him, bit by bit, and their apathy and indifference, climbing up both of his arms through his veins, was paralyzing his ability to fend them off.  Guy became aware that his plan was no longer about helping everyone else.  It had become a grand survival mechanism for himself.  If he didn't act fast to bring everyone out with him, they would soon pull him in with all of them.  The train came to a halt and a speaker announced "Santa Monica Pier".

Guy climbed over the back of his seat and was out.  He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the sun and then looked himself over.  His white button-down shirt clung to his skin, soaked with other peoples' sweat.  He noticed a few dots of what looked like blood on his shoulder.  He wasn't sure if it was old.  He wasn't sure whether it was his.  He began to walk along the sidewalk towards the pier.  His mind began to wander.  He shook his head and blinked his eyes hard, trying to make it stop.  He forced his eyes out towards the ocean, where the sun hung heavy over the water.  He hated to let his mind wander.  He told himself to stare out and absorb what was in front of his face.  He couldn't will his mind out of its playback of events that had just transpired on the train.  From there, it was a short jump to a playback of another recent event.  Four days prior, Guy had stepped over a man passed out on the sidewalk as he had left work.  As he walked over the man, he'd looked down and had seen something.  By the moment his feet reached the ground again, he was very much aware of exactly what he had seen.  He put distance between himself and the man and he told himself that he was mistaken.  When he was further away, he admitted to himself that maybe he wasn't mistaken, but someone else would help.  By the time he boarded the train, he told himself that he was too far away at this point, and it wasn't his problem anyways.  He had seen the man experiencing a seizure.

Guy stopped walking, shut his eyes hard, concentrating, trying to push the memory out of his head.  The playback stubbornly continued.  It looped.  He felt the apathy climbing up from his fingers into his shoulders and being circulated back out and around to every distant part of his body.  He wondered if he still cared enough to save anyone else.  Being around them made him wonder whether he really felt compassion towards these individuals - the one who had put sweat on him, perhaps, or the one who had put blood on him - or if he was just fixated on the idea of being a saver of people.  He wondered if they were the source of his growing apathy, by example, or whether he had always been just like them on the inside.  

-----

The idea needled at Brenda.  It pushed on her eyes from the inside.  It clenched her jaw.

It was 5:05.  Brenda powered down her workstation.  Her eyes scanned over her cubicle.  She studied all of the things which surrounded her daily without ever laying claim to any of her attention.  She stared at a stapler and then felt embarrassed.  She forced her feet to walk out to the hallway.

She walked into the break room and grabbed her coat.  Two contenteds were sitting at a small table.  One picked at the faux wood veneer which was chipping off.  The other appeared to be asleep.  Without moving her eyes off of the floor, she grabbed her crumpled coat off of the counter and quickly darted back out of the room.  Two steps further down the hallway, something made her hesitate.  She took one more step forward, then wheeled around and walked back stiffly into the break room.  She spoke at the room without lifting her eyes from the floor, trying hard to speak slowly and concentrating on each word.

"Hi.  I have a strange question."

She heard nothing.  She slowly drew her gaze upwards and saw that she had the one man's attention.  She didn't look into his face but could feel herself being studied.  She forced herself to continue, staring at his shirt.

"Do you, have you ever, I mean do you think it's more lonely to actually be alone, or to be, or I guess to feel left out when you are right by someone?"

She waited.  Seconds rumbled on.  Then, she heard something from the man.  He began to snicker through his nose.  The snicker slowly grew into a laugh.  The laugh became increasingly loud, and suddenly he was snorting in between his laughs.  She felt sweat beads start to speckle her forehead and her cheeks become hot.  The walls squeezed her inward.  She tried to move her feet but they wouldn't move.  She was frozen, facing the man.

"Have to grab my purse" she mumbled.  Her voice was lost under his laughter.  She wasn't actually sure if she spoke it or only mouthed the words.  "I, my purse" she said again, louder.  She turned around towards the door, her eyes once again fixed on the floor.  She saw orthopedic shoes directly in front of her, blocking her own shoes from making progress towards the exit.  She let out a desperate exhale, realizing that she had been holding her breath.  She felt herself start to quiver.  Her eyes traveled up from the shoes to the pants and then shirt.  The other contented.  He was now awake and standing in front of her; inches in front of her.  Her mind raced, evaluating scenarios.

"Are you lonely, Miss Brenda?"  He said slowly, in a deliberate monotone, reading her security badge.

"Just need to get my things" she stammered.  She heard a chair sliding across tile.  She could feel the other man standing up behind her by his body heat.  Their damp smell made her clothes cling to her skin.  She held her breath again.

"Please.."

"Please what?"

She forced her eyes upwards to his face just in time to see a coy smile with half-closed eyes rapidly change into pursed lips and bulging, panicked eyes.  All at once, she was covered in his vomit.  Black, half-digested blood and food bits clung to her.  Nausea clawed up her neck; she began to cough.  She took a step and slipped in the pile, falling to her knees and palms.  She could hear snorting and laughing but it seemed to be miles away.  She picked herself up and stumbled towards the door.

-----

The sun ambled toward the horizon.  Guy shouldered through the crowds of contenteds milling around on the pier.  Crowds surrounded the carnival booths and spilled into one another to form one large living mass of moaning, sedated attention spans.  The movement of individuals from one stimulus to the next progressed in a surprisingly ordered fashion as people defaulted to the same paths on the same schedule as those immediately around them; there was a slow clockwise swirl of cells within the dull beast.  With the capacity of independent will muted, large groups behaved with docile cohesion.  Thoughts and urges bled out of individuals in every direction and were gobbled up by all those surrounding; decision propagated throughout the medium.  It was the path of least cognitive resistance.

Shouts erupted to Guy's right.  He tensed up reflexively, then unclenched his jaw and looked.  A beat-em-up was in progress.  Crowds of people surrounded a stage where a large man was punching a much smaller man.  The smaller man was crumpled on the ground and the large man was holding his head up by his hair so that he could continue hitting him effectively.  The cheers had erupted when someone from the crowd had scaled up onto the stage to join the assault.  Beat-em-ups were one of the most popular outdoor performances.
 
They had originally evolved from unsanctioned street fights but had long since become stage spectacles which weren't so much a fight between two combatants as they were a ceaseless assault of a weak, frequently elderly victim by a hulking gladiator, often to the point of death.  A few comparatively healthy victims were bribed with ethanol; far more were simply abducted from the street, often being too incoherent or diseased to put up any struggle.  Guy had heard rumors that some of the more crude carnival operators would open the curtains to their beat-em-ups with a victim who was already deceased, and that few in the audience would catch on.  

Guy judged that this particular victim was long dead, though from the color and amount of blood he had started the match alive.  Guy halfheartedly convinced himself that the man was probably far from conscious when the blows started to land.  He became aware that he had stopped and was watching intently as the two men stomped on the clump of human tissue and wet clothing.  Bits of hair stuck out from the pile but now that the attacker had released the victim's head, it was difficult to make out any human form, much less find a face.  The audience member, who was of average build, was kneeling down and repeatedly punching a clump of clothes which didn't appear to have any body part underneath.  His knuckles began to swell from striking the metal stage through the clothes, but he didn't slow.  The other man, the original performer, was 300 pounds of protruding muscle.  It appeared that his arms were so large that they were heavy and difficult to move, and that he was merely lifting them up to a sufficient height and letting them fall under their own weight to strike the body.  Now, he paused and circled the body, seeming to search for an area which was still receptive to damage, which wasn't yet swollen and shattered, which would still change by his hand.

Maybe he was already dead before the curtain rose, Guy told himself.  It probably was a person who wouldn't be missed, Guy told himself.  He guessed that no one had yet noticed that the victim had gone missing.  If no one missed him, did it matter that he was here on this stage?  He was probably long since lost the ability to sense pain, physical or emotional.  Did he have anything that could pass as consciousness yesterday, before the events were set in motion that brought him here?  No one has ever faced a jury for pulling a weed from the ground.  Was he sufficiently plant-like?  Maybe he had merely been harvested.  There is some threshold between switching off an appliance and murder, Guy thought.  Maybe a little too much sanctity was being felt towards the electrochemical activity inside some of these appliances, Guy thought.

Somewhat to his own surprise, Guy found himself at the end of the pier.  He had lost himself in wandering thought again.  The sun was partially under the horizon now, and the moon was visible high in the sky, pale white like the victim's skin, crisp on one edge and fading into dim blue across its surface.

Who was feeling sanctity, anyways?  Not one of these people care, and there are a lot of them.  Why do I care so much if they don't?  Why care for the careless?  

Guy looked down the edge of the pier at the others who surrounded him.  He scanned faces, looking for anyone who might have noticed the sunset, the water, the clouds assuming strange colors on their undersides.  He already knew the outcome; he had performed this experiment too many times.  He was already aware that he was seeing the sunset less than he used to, instead obsessing with tests which he know would fail.  It used to make him angry, seeing them all so oblivious to the beauty which surrounded them.  Gradually, his feelings changed into sympathy.  His plan began to gain momentum, turning from a vague desire into scrawled details and task lists.  He wanted them so badly to see what he saw, to experience wonder again.  He didn't want to be the only one.

Were they even capable of it, once being freed of cocktails?  Were those abilities still lying latent inside them?  After generations and generations of contentedness, had those parts of consciousness rotted away or been selected against?  Guy wondered if any precedent regarding the ability to be stirred by awe could be assumed from the human tailbone.

Now, he studied himself.  He frantically searched for an emotion; a reaction.  He'd take rage, sympathy, disgust, anything.  He found nothing.  This outcome was becoming more and more common for him.  Indifference towards the masses.  Today, he didn't care that no one was observing.  He knew that he wanted to care but the mere fact of knowing wasn't enough to elicit an emotion.  Last week, he cared.  The week before, he had felt nothing.  He knew his capability to care was atrophying.  He knew that they had found a way inside him, perhaps through a scab, and were infecting him.  His recent acknowledgement of the extent of the decay inside him had prompted him to set a date.

To his relief, Brenda once again took over his thoughts.  Between the hours of 5PM and 9AM, his mind ran wild inventing a storyline for her.  He wondered if she was thinking of him at that same moment or if he was forgotten about during their nightly communication blackout.  He decided that she had also watched the sun set earlier that evening.  Did she still have her sense of awe intact?  All it takes is a pinprick and all of your insides will leak out, given enough time.

He didn't know anything about her.  Their interactions had been limited to him grooming her for his plan and her responding in single sentences or one-word answers.  He had told her that more than half of administrators turn over by their 10th year of work; a fact which the NCB actively concealed.  He told her of the accidental death trends and the life expectancy changes since the program had been ramped up, and of the massive number of elderly persons who were flagged missing each day by population tracker software.  He told her of the NCB's suppression of intra-administrator contact.  She still hadn't given him an answer on her involvement.  He wondered if she looked anything like the face his mind had invented for her.

-----

Brenda sat in her rocking chair.  She wasn't rocking.  The TV was off.  She chewed on her fingernail and stared at a nail hole on her wall.  The stillness of her body was outward evidence of the immense load that her mind was currently demanding.  Her chest had been fluttering for hours on end and she thought it might give out before she had a chance to take any action.

The idea had not been her own but its fast-moving roots now reached into every fold of her brain.  Her mind ran over it continuously, as though she was still trying to evaluate it, but she knew that the outcome had already been chosen.  The moment that the idea had been introduced, it was inevitable.  She was letting herself entertain the notion that she still had free will to go any way she chose, but she didn't know why.  The idea couldn't be unthought, therefore it was going to be acted on.

She was scared to take action, but was terrified of enduring many more days feeling as alone as she did.  She had endured a lifetime of days.  Her first 14 years in Junior Academy in the Solo Schooling program, segregated from the main student body and their full-time athletics curriculum, interacting only with the teaching machine.  Now, approaching her tenth anniversary with the NCB.  Year after year of days.  Each day a countdown to the moment when she can go to sleep.  Each morning, another lifetime counting down.

She instantly transitioned from a still-life to a blur of motion.  She jumped up, grabbed her car keys and was out the front door in one continuous advance.  She hadn't changed out of her vomit-stained work shirt.  The rocking chair rocked itself in the empty room, an equal and opposite reaction to her violent exit.  Dust particles swirled in the beam of fluorescent light that was still humming.

-----

Guy was in the office again.  it was dark out.  At the pier, he had decided to start the plan immediately and had taken the next available train straight to the office.  He had sent the placebo cocktail recipes via email to all of the other administrators who he had made contact with, whether they had confirmed their involvement or not, knowing, hoping, that they would mirror his actions the next morning when they arrived at work.  Because he was altering recipes during the night, his district would receive the placebo in their morning shipment while other parts of the nation would receive their standard cocktail in the morning and the placebo in the afternoon.  The timing was far less than ideal, but the alternative was waiting until morning himself for a coordinated switch and giving himself the opportunity to lose his nerve and delay again.

There was one administrator who he'd paged directly.

He knew Brenda's bureau-issued pager was required to be within earshot at all times.  He was anxious because of her lack of response thus far and immediately regretted his decision to communicate over a medium on which he couldn't cover his tracks.  He felt as though he needed to make some kind of contact with her, and now he felt silly.  He felt rejected.  This was his first experience of rejection of any kind in his life and it caused him to sweat profusely.  He checked his own pager.  It had been four minutes since he had sent the message.  He told himself that she probably just hadn't heard the device yet, and forced himself back on task.

His next move was to commit the placebo recipe to his own production plants.  There were six 24-hour production factories in his district which he had commit privileges to.  They were completely automated and produced ahead of cocktail delivery by 4 to 5 hours.  The placebo cocktails would start to be mixed immediately and would be delivered to homes and businesses at 6:30 AM the next day.

The commit was finished in seconds and there was nothing more to do.  It agitated Guy that his tremendous gift to society was so soundless and invisible and did not relieve any of his internal turbulence.  He wanted to see immediate evidence.  He had planned on feeling immense gratification.  He wondered if he had forgotten a step.  

He powered down his workstation, checked his pager again, then abruptly turned it off.  He pulled a small rectangle of paper out of his back pocket and dangled it over the paper shredder.  A one-way ticket to Newark Liberty International Airport which departed the following afternoon.  He shut his eyes and focused on steadying his shaking hand.  Seconds ticked by without movement, and he put the ticket slowly back into his pocket.  He exited the building carrying more instability in his head than when he had entered.

-----

Brenda put her car into park and climbed out.  The lights remained on and the key kept its place in the ignition.  She left the door hanging open behind her as she walked away, taking small steps while her eyes adjusted.  The car dinged politely somewhere behind her, asking to be properly sealed up and powered down.  The car's soft calling faded; all noise faded.  Her immediate surroundings were pure black, thick enough to swallow her hand if she were to hold it out in front of her.  Across the Hudson, the lights of Manhattan burned bright enough to illuminate the perforated cloud cover and turn the entire sky a dim shade of orange.  Brenda had no shoes on and her feet felt cool dew as she transitioned from parking lot to grass and she thought to herself that it felt peaceful.  This all feels peaceful so far, she told herself as she slowly moved between the dark shapes which she assumed were picnic benches.  A few feet around her in every direction, lightning bugs occasionally glowed and then became dim.  In the distance, flecks of fluorescent yellow against buildings darker than the sky around them would appear or disappear as humans came and went.  Further yet, stars twinkled as their light, millions of years old, finally knocked through the atmosphere and silently pierced her eyes.

She wondered if there were any bits of light which her mind was imagining rather than observing.  Light would appear in her periphery and would be gone by the time she tried to focus on it.  In the car before she had left her house, she had emptied a bottle of Tylenol into her stomach.  Now, her eyelids dropped slightly and she had the faintest sensation that she was gliding more than taking discrete steps towards the water, which she was surprised to find not making any noise.  All she could hear were crickets chirping.  A funny thought ran through her head, though her facial expression did not change.  This IS very peaceful.  I feel content!  How absurd.

She reached the pier and began to walk out onto it, towards the burning light across the water.  The buildings reflected long fingers of light across the Hudson towards her.  The water had hands, and those hands were reaching for her.  In the reflected light, she could see that the water was pushing quickly from her left to her right.  With each step, the sound of the water began to emerge more and more from the silence.  The rushing water became deafening.  She didn't pay much attention.  In the car, she had worried whether there was enough Tylenol there.  Now, her capacity to worry was disappearing.  She felt warm in the cold November air.  Yes, she thought, there was just the right amount of Tylenol.  Just the right dosage for my night.  She felt good.  Fine.  Her toes were now gripping the last plank of the pier.  She'd just float away and fall asleep.  She'd take a ride out to the ocean.  It would be fine.  

She'd just take a little step off.  She wouldn't jump.  She stood, staring down at the water a moment longer.  Not hesitating, just taking her time.  Observing.  She felt very warm now, and a little bit drowsy, and it reminded her of being in a warm bed when she was young.  Should she plug her nose?  Now, a smile crept over her face.  She shut her eyes, still smiling, and plugged her nose shut.  She felt silly at the thought but not embarrassed, like a bashful child who was aware that they were being cute.  She took her step.

She perceived the weightless feeling for longer than the brief moment that it actually lasted, and then she struck the bedrock surface of the water.  She instantly felt like she was being stabbed.  She was so cold that she thought that she was being burned.  Her skin throbbed and pulsed and she instantly began flailing.  She was being pulled along and away from shore violently by the current and her head was being repeatedly thrown under the surface and then released.

Brenda was now unable to move any part of her body, which was being spun and bent and compressed and pulled taut like a dish rag being wrung out.  She did not feel drowsy.  She felt wide awake, though she could see nothing in the pitch black and hear nothing over the sound of rushing water.  She had no idea how far she had traveled.  She sputtered and screamed but couldn't hear herself.  

"I don't want to!"  She wasn't sure if she was shouting or thoughts were just shooting through her head.  She was confused.

"I changed my mind!"

Her head shot above water momentarily and she saw a flash of light.  The current had brought her near an outdoor gambling pier and it was alive with light and noise and people.  There was a mass of people at the slot machines at the end of the pier.  She screamed for help just before her head plunged under once again.  She came back up and saw faces.  She was making noise!  They had heard her!  As she was brought closer to the pier, she saw that she was attracting more and more attention from the small crowd.  More faces fixed on her and more people pulled themselves from their games to move closer to the edge of the pier.

"Please!" and she was pulled under again.  She was empty of all energy but the current threw her to the surface again.  She saw fewer faces.  She observed people turning their gaze away from her to return to their games.  The lights quickly faded as the underside of the pier moved above her head.  The river smashed her into the pilings.

-----

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.  He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."
Albert Einstein

Guy sat and sipped.  The natural order of society had been restored, and Guy was now fully integrated into that natural order.  He had a place among all others who had places themselves.  His place at this exact moment was a stool in a bar, somewhere.  He had a job.  He unplugged appliances at the local NCB office every evening at 5:30 PM and then plugged the same appliances back in the next morning at 8:30 AM.

He was surrounded by other bodies and loud speech.  No one else had any idea of who he was; his role in the sobriety incident.  There was no elaborate cover-up needed.  People simply didn't care once they were back on their cocktail.

Guy's utopia had lasted three days and three nights.  The public reacted poorly.  Having been sedated since birth, their brains could not handle waking up to loneliness, anxiety, and the immense amount of suffering which surrounded them for the first time.

The youngest generation had made it through the incident relatively unscathed, experiencing only the physiological effects of ethanol withdrawal and a relatively modest rate of kidney failure.  Those who were older than 16 bore the brunt of the neurological effects.  Left completely alone, with nowhere to be, with no seeming purpose and for the first time with the self awareness to perceive this state, it was thought that many had committed suicide in their homes.  Accurate counts weren't yet available but estimates based on unconsumed overstock of cocktail post-incident placed the missing persons count in the tens of thousands in the greater Santa Monica area.  No one was actually reported missing, of course.

Survival rate among the geriatric population, those who were 40 and older, was under 15% due to medical complications.

Guy had been the only administrator who had participated.  The incident had not reached further than his jurisdiction.  The rest of the nation wasn't aware that anything had occurred.  In fact, citizens in Santa Monica were no longer aware that anything had occurred.  The collective act of forgetting was just the absence of individual will to write a memory.  Once the antidote was administered, it only took one night of sleep.  Sequences of short-term sensory tracks, as not being transferred into long-term memory storage, simply expired.  Upon waking, the unfiltered terror of the human condition and recognition of individual insignificance was no more familiar to them than the trauma of their own birth.

If Guy were still able to let his mind wander, he might think to himself that perhaps this is the reason why humans become self-aware and conscious of their surroundings at such a slow rate during early development.  It's a little hard to swallow all at once.  Guy wasn't currently wondering about that.  He couldn't.  He had been put on a particularly memory-numbing cocktail once software had detected his crimes and overridden his house locks to imprison him inside until compliance personnel had arrived.  If he tried, he wouldn't be able to recount anything about his life older than 60 hours ago.  There was no particular reason to try though.

The bar's TV wall blared loudly, competing with ambient conversation.  Guy faced away from the wall, working on one drink and holding a second in his left hand.  He was paying attention to nothing.  His mind did not move in any direction on its own.  It only served to dim the white noise being absorbed by his ears.  If one could see inside Guy's mind at that moment, it might look like a bedroom which had just been moved out of.  A small length of cable still wandering out from the wall, connecting to nothing.  Some clumps of dust.  Useless evidence of former activity.

On the TV, a popular daily segment called "Crazy Real Life Deaths".  It held the attention of half of the bar patrons with its description, and often depiction, of recent unusual deaths across the nation paired with witty epitaphs for the deceased.  The segment was playing back surveillance camera footage which had happened to capture a man falling between the cars of a light rail train in Philadelphia.  As the main fell and was pulled under the carriage of the next car, a chorus of shouts and clapping went up in the bar.  The train quickly came to a halt and people poured out of the doors and surrounded the remains with surprising urgency.  The crowd descended on the corpse and began to loot the pockets and tear off articles of clothing, seemingly as souvenirs.  Scuffling began to break out among the crowd.  The moment of impact was replayed in slow motion.  Covering the screen, in bold red, text blinked in and out: "JOSEPH MACEY.  WELL HE WON'T BE NEEDING IT".  A loud voice narrated the text with the tone of a used car dealership commercial.

Next, still photos of a teenager who had fallen into a wood chipper.  The voice boomed.  "HE'S MULCHED".

Now, grainy footage of a woman's body floating face down under a pier, among the clumps of algae, plastic cups, and tree branches bobbing between the pilings.  "BRENDA CHAPLAIN.  STICK BROKERED".

Guy's chest suddenly tightened.  Suddenly, the full volume of the bar was being allowed to reach his brain.  Confusion washed over him.  He turned his head towards the TV but couldn't quite see it.  He unsteadily spun his body on the stool so that he was facing the TV wall.  The screen was fading to black.  A beat-em-up was now starting.  Inexplicable familiarity faded to comfortable familiarity.  The drum sound of skin being packed tight by slow, repeated hammering was all that Guy could hear.  He absently smiled, then became aware of the smile.  He laughed, not knowing why.