“A group of women were kept in a room. They were all due to be vaporized in the next session. They were kept together because all of them had almost the same issue. All of them were unpleasant-looking. And they had all dared to stand up against the misbehaviors of their family and the violence of their husbands because of their unpleasantness.”

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fiction, nov 24

That lady was, or is, the deadliest of them all. And she has always been escaping. Now, no one even bothers to catch her. She has become a non-entity, whose continued existence disturbs all. She is very much alive and unchanged, save for her age, but is like a ghost wandering around the town, unwanted, rejected, unloved, and a constant threat to the age-old pious norms that she dared to defy. The norms that banished her from her position among humanity.

She is not the only one who showed this audacity. There were others who collectively caused the doom of humankind, and the DRDs had to take over. Throughout the recent few decades, the world has lost control, and humans have become a mess. And why wouldn’t they? There are more recovery houses filled with women than there are actual houses filled with ladies. Those who were supposed to bring life have spoiled the very idea of life. It is too much of a mercy that they are given a chance to recover at the recovery houses before being shoved into the vaporizing room where their corrupted minds and their entire entities fume into smoke.

And the silent animosity between the humans and the DRDs has only grown. Humans are at risk of being replaced, but they can’t rebel, as they are terribly dependent on the DRDs. Well, the DRDs are a kind of android humanoid robot type of something, they don’t have any simple description. Nobody knows where they came from. There was a rumor that a shock therapy machine in a hospital exploded, and a few hours later, a silver doll-like creature with a weird hairstyle and a stiff face walked in. Everybody freaked out. The creature walked into a chaotic ward and surprisingly handled all the chaos alone. The freaked-out human doctors felt a relief, and let that creature stay. In a few months, out of nowhere, this creature constructed a few replicas of itself, like plastic-wrapped Ken dolls and Barbies. All the hospitals got even more help from them, though they were still freaked out. Eventually, the humans stopped being scared of the increasing population of those creatures, as they were increasingly getting used to their service. Somehow the creatures ended up being called DRD. As they are inhuman, they can’t have emotions. However, they are special; they are allowed to feel loathing shame for the subjects they are to help and fix. It drives them; it is basically their only job and the only thing that holds humanity from falling on the verge of extinction.

The DRDs have built numerous recovery houses—it was their original idea—which is far better than the old-fashioned hospitals that humans cling to. These recovery houses are radical. They either completely fix the faulty subjects, or eradicate them like garbage in the vaporizing room. And about their mystery remedy of fixing the patients, they never let it out. For occasional dramatic effect, the patients or the faulty subjects in the recovery house are called the lost ones, and those whose minds are gone for good, and need to be vaporized, are called the gone cases.   

The previously mentioned ghostly old woman, when she was young and a normal person, once asked an aged male of her family: “Why are wives always so much younger than husbands? That’s so weird.” The man frowned. His gray beards shook, as did his wrinkled, vibrating cheeks. He replied, “That’s common-sense, idiot! The wife must remain young and strong to take care of her lord husband in old age!” She cringed and said, “I don’t know why, but that sounds gross.” A repellant wave of rage flowed through the man’s eyes. He left.

When she was still young and grew a little older, about 16 or so, one day some guests were at her house. Among them was a very special guest, a 25 year-old man, who sat beside her and leaned in. She could feel his warm, stinking breath with all her nerves; it felt like she had dipped into a gigantic can of filth. Then he said, “You must have heard the news. In 2 to 3 years, you will be good enough to bring my lovely children into the world. You must be so happy.” All others laughed and clapped and congratulated. But something inside her chest or her head or somewhere, she couldn’t understand what happened, something snapped, wrenching her soul, and she only screamed “NO!” as loud as a siren. She ran to her room. Everyone was shocked, then they left. But for many days, barely eating or moving, she only shivered and chanted “no” in a feeble voice. There was no other option than sending her to the recovery house. She was called Patient T.

……

Before patient T’s admission, no other patients were fixed. They came as the lost one and then became the gone case soon after. Understandably, her family was pretty sad that the girl they’d lost would be gone too.

There was also patient K, just a tiny bit less problematic than patient T, but even more absurd. Though she didn’t shiver or blabber anything like a possessed lunatic; she looked calm and wise, but undoubtedly worthy of being a gone case. She was 30 years old. Her loving parents had been trying for her marriage for a long time. She even agreed. They were so happy that they started dreaming of grandkids. But soon, she started talking nonsense, in a sensible manner, which was much more disturbing. She said things like, “It’s my body… I don’t want what you want for my body… I’m not okay with that… I don’t want someone breaking into my body… how can you force me into that… I don’t want anything to kill me from inside… I don’t want to hurt to death… you all disgust me… please stop… how can you not understand… it’s simple… just leave me be…” And she went on and on with the irritating repetition of words like “I want,” “I don’t want,” “my body,” “my will,” “your will,” etc. No one understood anything, and they lost all hope, and she was sent to the recovery house. She still survived because she was polite. But her days were evidently limited.

A group of women were kept in a room. They were all due to be vaporized in the next session. They were kept together because all of them had almost the same issue. All of them were unpleasant-looking. And they had all dared to stand up against the misbehaviors of their family and the violence of their husbands because of their unpleasantness. One woman had a slightly different issue. She wasn’t absolutely intolerable. She used to be very beautiful when she got married to her husband who was two or four years younger. Both of them grew older, he remained good-looking, she didn’t. His behavior worsened, and she retaliated, and was sent here. They just didn’t bend to mend their ways. There were others like them who still had scope for improvement. But these women were just stubborn as hell, and a horrid pride was brimming from their faces, as if they didn’t care about anything.  Beside their room was the room for the abuse victims who refused to marry their abusers. Their vaporizing session was next after the slot of the unpleasant girls.

Everything changed that night. Patient T started messing around the recovery house and sneaked inside the vaporizing room of the unpleasant girls, where the highly sensitive vaporizing materials were kept in big jars. Patient T stumbled upon a jar and spilled all the material all over the room. She got nervous and left the room. In just a few minutes, a mild explosion happened. All the lost ones, soon to be gone cases, and DRDs hurried to know the source of the sound, and there they witnessed the unpleasant girls’ slots being vaporized before their given time, in a much more nightmarish way than they could ever imagine. The group of disagreeable abuse-victims saw that too. The thing is, everyone knew that being a vaporized gone case meant death. But no one had to visualize the blazing horror—and now they did. Everyone was changed, everything was changed. And by the way, patient T escaped and has been on the run forever and ever since.

So, this was the big secret of how the DRDs fix the patients. Inspired by the terrorized faces of witnesses of this accident, they made a change. In the future, if any lost one ever acted too hard to control, the recorded footage of this accident is shown to them. Those who get scared, mend their ways and go back home. There are still some who are stubborn enough to not get scared and give in. They obviously get vaporized. And the ones with fear choose lifelong physical sexual emotional psychological abuse over burning to death. So did patient K. It was her own secret of pretense. She pretended to be ashamed of not wanting to produce a human fetus inside her body while being a woman, she pretended that it was shameful for a woman to not want to let a stranger penetrate her bubble of personal safety, she perfectly pretended to accept how inappropriate it was for a woman to think that she had the right to claim her own body, while she clearly was and always will be someone who never deserved love unless she became a glorified marital property. If she didn’t choose this pretension, her options would be either to live isolated, rejected, and unloved, or to burn to death. So, she slammed a huge fake smile on her face and got married to a princely man promising the family to provide various children for their ongoing legacy. Eventually she died at childbirth, but naturally. It’s a win because she definitely avoided punishment, and so did many other former lost ones along with her, who didn’t become gone cases.

The fireworks of the warm, dazzling night were lighting up the sky as everything below stared in awe, then he blinked, and the needles of colorful sparkles blurred into a blinding white wall slamming him down, like a bright void of nothingness, pressing onto him, like suffocating death… flash…

Perfect human-sized figurines with no faces gathered around him. They weren’t frightening to look at; they were reflecting comfort, in fact. The hazy outlines of the figurines were sprinkling something that felt like happiness, the empty faces were gleaming with laughter, and all this was embracing him like he belonged there; until, a piercing subtle noise penetrated his bubble of comfort, a flashy gaudy white dome, burning bright, captured him like a giant claw and devoured him… glass bursting…

It was a dream. DRD133 has these random visions, what are simply called dreams, when he is shut down. The dreams always start beautifully, then turn disturbing, which he is used to. He is not bothered anymore after he figured out that the visions come to him because of the accidental ability of thinking he survived the accident of his creation that left him malfunctioning all the time. So, what happened was, in a room next to the room where he was being put together, one of the gone cases were being vaporized, one particle of the gone case’s body got so heated that it burst into ashes, and then the ashes flew through a window into DRD133’s making room, and slipped into his unfinished system through his open skull. No one noticed this small but massive blunder, and DRD133 has been malfunctioning every now and again. He was created to identify as a perfect entity, but is now left faulty with the great flaw of a gone case woman’s body-particle’s ashes. Poor DRD133 has been paying the price, with pain and stupidity, the biggest of which was his crush on patient K.

As we know, K played it all very smart, and she never let anyone know. So, she is definitely not a gone case, but for poor DRD133, she is a case who has gone far away from him, despite never being close, and DRD133 would either desire her to remain a lost one forever in the recovery house, and hence in front of his eyes, or he would desire himself to be one of those for whom K is pretending not to be a gone case: the mighty humans.

It was an embarrassing matter. Him being not only a totally different entity from her, but being in a totally different position. While she was saving herself by ruining herself, to him, she was simply slipping away from him that much further. Though he was never supposed to be with her, according to him, she made him feel more unwanted than he already was. She continued socializing with the others of her kind, acting all cool and awesome with them, and he could only gaze in a stoic way, like mindlessly stargazing, while the inside of his head was in disarray. Well, his system already knew he never had a chance whatsoever, but as K played her pretend game, DRD133’s wires snapped in way they never had before, and he became as bad as the lost ones, despite being on the team of the savors, and he would rather want to be a gone case himself.

DRD133 goes through the oxymorons really close. The world around him is building up perfectly, and he is stuck. Or, the world is still, as he is falling apart, managing to stay absolutely still. All the others are making actual development in their projects, they are self-progressing in a wholesome way, acquiring and creating experiences, glorious moments. But he is stuck in his own dome of mechanical disparity. His condition wouldn’t matter anyway. The high frequencies bother everyone painfully. He doesn’t intend for it to happen. But it keeps happening uncontrollably. He would just be sitting in his room and his suppressed bundle of disparity would hit his system creating some intense vibration causing a nauseating high-pitched sound, like the humans’ whiny cry, but even uglier. The vibrating waves of that specific sound is so sickening that none could stand being near him. No one would care about him that much earlier, but the occurrence of the sounds forces others to be aware of him and loathe him. Instead of being an invisible stoic statue, now he has become an annoying spectacle. A single strike of those strange sounds creates an obscene situation and all others have to leave the place with utter disappointment. DRD133 is getting conscious of his situation more and more sensitively. He couldn’t understand what it was, how to stop it. For a moment he thought it would be nice if any of the others could tolerate his high frequency and would come to him and tell him that it is no problem. But none does so, and he knows it is indeed a problem, and he feels even more ashamed than he already was for creating problems, for bothering others, for seeking attention in such a repulsive way. The good thing is that the sounds automatically stop, and others forget about it, though he doesn’t.

There’s more. He gets worse. When the sounds are not latching on to him, nothing holds on to him inside or out. Once he was standing in the middle of the road in that state of nothing, and a truck almost hit him. When he realized, he jumped like a weak little baby goat, and all the others saw it. There, DRD133 becomes a spectacle even when there’s nothing in him anymore.

Others now seclude him more than he had already been secluded his whole life. He is not allowed in the tours and research expeditions anymore. He is not allowed in the celebratory vacations anymore, not allowed to explore the world along with others—all of which had been the only things DRD133 was genuinely excited about—while they are only interested in collecting solid data. No one wants a ragged, melting piece of metal he has made out of himself. It’s bound to happen to him like that.

Before knowing them, just by looking at some people for the first time, one can feel very strongly that one is going to be severely bullied by them. Being embarrassingly attracted to someone, not being too close to falling in love, never talking to that person, knowing nothing about that person, and knowing very well that they do not have any good or bad possibility of being with that person: one can already strongly realize the repulsive discomfort of watching that person of attraction continuing their life with someone as perfect and better, before any of this could ever happen. Before the particular time comes or the plans are made, one can right away feel being abruptly rejected, canceled out; one can visualize others enjoying, exploring, laughing and loving and making friends, making memories and achieving success, thriving and growing, while something is hammering one down into a pit of cancellation, while one is shrinking, left out, desperate for the validation that doesn’t exist, inside one’s obligatory walls of incapability. One feels all this, while nothing of this has been actualized. It’s not difficult for one to feel like this. Any entity with the prominent function of insecurity can go through such feelings, both human or nonhuman. It’s a superpower. None of this actually happened to DRD133. But he has experienced the feeling of each circumstance more closely than someone who might have been in such a situation. This superpower of insecurity explodes his waves of disparity each time, crushing his system intensely.

……

So, many years have passed, and DRD133's disparity has consumed his system wholly. No one thought it necessary to dismantle him. Now for real, he is kept in a tiny black pit squishing him every moment.  And former patient T is more withered and weaker now, still on the run. And that’s it. The faint candle of patient T is blown off. DRD133 is shut down, no restart possible anymore.

AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO