Another Deadhouse Report... page 2
{ My partner must be taking some kind of experimental drug. Maybe this one’s supposed to do his thinking for him, only it’s not working too well.
Swallowing my revulsion, I touched the boy’s flaccid wrist...and found life. He was barely conscious at the time--we were lucky he was conscious at all. If I had suspected at the time that the child was responsible for his father’s death, was responsible, in fact, for all the deaths in that house, would I have had the courage to touch him, the forgiveness to save his life? I don’t know, and I suspect that I don’t want to know.
Now keep in mind that we wore freshair masks, but that child had been breathing death for who knows how long. I wondered how he found the will to eat enough to stay alive, how he managed to keep it down in that environment, when I noticed a bottle of Appetiter on his bed with a string tied around it. It seems he had dislodged a string from his blanket and tied a kind of hangman’s noose, a knot that tightens around any weight it’s forced to support.
Apparently, his father kept the bottle next to his bed. The child caught the bottle within the noose and somehow found the strength to pull it all the way up to his own bed. The Appetiter gave the boy the will to eat, and the strength to keep it down.
Just as my partner suspected, this household had a Boatswain Gourmet foodsystem, but it was functioning more than perfectly. It continued bringing food to anyone who was capable of requesting it, even though the rest of the house systems were down.
Yet, he was the thinnest body there, and he lost consciousness even as I measured his pulse. My partner and I carried his bed out of doors }
{*{ Hey, that was my idea! My partner said we shouldn’t, he said the shock of being outside for the first time in his life would break the child. He said that after the tragedy of living in a deadhouse, (his melodramatic words, not mine), the shock of discovering that his living room wasn’t the whole world would kill him. We didn’t want to stand there arguing all day, so we flipped a coin, I won, and we carried the kid’s bed outside }*}
{*{ My partner says "Hurry up, the computer says we have another deadhouse".
After describing every irrelevant detail himself, he tells me to hurry up.}*}
{*{ The dead could wait! }*}
{*{ We won’t find a living one. I bet this was the first and last time we find a living person in a deadhouse. }*}
{*{ Don’t ask me how much I wanna bet. How much are you willing to bet, Mr. I-never-take-risks? }*}
{*{ Fine, done.
This thing just records everything, doesn’t it?
We carried the child outside, and he immediately regained consciousness. He was too busy breathing the sweetest air he’s ever breathed to be afraid. Wait, my partner wants to describe the boy’s breathing in writer-speak.
Remember, make it quick, we got another deadhouse to do. }*}
{ Lungs that had never needed to take a deep breath tried to gasp for air, and failed. His chest hardly rose and fell. His short, uneven breaths made wheezing noises that sounded as if his air passages were clogged drinking straws. }
{*{ Wow. You did make it quick. I like your first sentence, but that part about the drinking straws was just dumb. }*}
{*{ I don’t care, you got my opinion on it anyway. What do you think our captive audience thinks of you? }*}
{*{ Well, now, I doubt they think that. }*}
{*{ Well, maybe hoping is all any of us can do.
The kid’s alright now.
He has some psychological problem that prevents him from eating. No one dared to put him on Appetiter after what he’s been through, so he has to be fed intravenously. There are many people who choose to be fed intravenously all their lives, and I’m sure the kid will get used to it soon enough.
Analysis showed that his parents had been drugging him with sedatives all his life. }*}
{ God will punish }
{*{ }*}
{ }
{*{ Although sedating children to make them more manageable is illegal, we couldn’t really catch everyone who does it. Well, his parents couldn’t be punished now }*}
{ only God can punish }
{*{ Stop that! It’s not such a big deal. You got to see it from the parents point of view: it’s easier to put a sedated child in front of a T.V. than it is to have him underfoot, wrecking everything. It’s safer for both the kid and the machinery. }*}
{ I doubt that it’s safer for the machinery: look what this child did to the machinery.
I’d like to emphasize my partner’s word: "easier". That’s the ultimate goal of their lives: to make things easier. They use the most modern advances in science to make a drug that suppresses a child’s natural boisterousness. They turned this boy into a useless, immobile parasite on society. }
{*{ They’re not parasites! They don’t live off other beings, they live off machinery. They benefit from the technological age they live in, and they give us something to do. }*}
{ I wouldn’t use the word "benefit" to describe addictions to Appetiter, nor did the child benefit by loosing his free will to technology as soon as he found it. If he had not been drugged, he could have simply walked out of the room. }
{*{ Wait a minute. The sedative just sedated him: it didn’t remove his free will. Wouldn’t you call his computer tampering an exercise of free will? }*}
{ On a purely academic level, you’re right. And you just won my argument for me. Without the drug, he would not have had to become a T.V. watching drone. He would not have needed to murderer his own father to gain peace. His murder couldn’t even gain him freedom: he’d have to regain use of his body first. }
{*{ If he had free will, he’d probably lie right down in from of the T.V. anyway }*}
{ He should have the chance to decide.
Although, it seems that he did decide. Would parents sedate a child who calmly lay in front of his T.V.? Or would they sedate something that insisted on walking around the house, asking question, examining objects? It seems the child had made his decision, and it wasn’t T.V.
If a woman isn’t ready to give a child life, a real--human--life, she shouldn’t put her eggs in an incubator. }
{*{ She couldn’t have known she’d get a troublemaker. Hell, she got a murderer! She can’t be blamed for that. }*}
{ Between his mother and his father, it’s no wonder the child grew up to be a murderer. And who knows what else the monster will become?
As we carried him out, he regained consciousness for the briefest of moments, and he used that moment to look back at his father’s bed. Since the time he was put in bed to the time he was carried out, he could not have seen his father, and he’ll never see him again. What he saw this time was a hideous bloated corpse. Of all the things that have been done to the child’s genius mind, how will the first and last impression on his father affect it? }
{*{ My partner is incapable of happy endings. Here we have a story of survival, a story about a genius child who did the impossible and survived a deadhouse. And what does my partner do? He puts the most twisted and sinister thoughts in the boy’s mind, he says the child is responsible for killing his whole family, when there is no proof that he did. Hell, it could be he turned the safety’s off on his father’s request, just as he said he did.
And as usual, my partner ends the story by putting a character in what he calls "a self-created personal hell scenario"
No wonder he never gets published. }*}
{ I refuse to let this report end with that last sentence. }
{*{ O.K. case closed. }*}
{ He always gets the last word. }
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