Proposition :)

John was a happy man. He lived in a happy home, which was located inside a happy country, which was on a happy planet. Everything was so very happy because of the Pills, which were small and circular, and yellow, and imprinted with faces smiling earnestly.

Every day after waking up, alongside each meal, and before going to bed, John took a Pill. Except at lunch on the weekdays; at Foundry where John worked the Safety Officer said Pilling, although in all other ways beneficial, reduced Awareness and become more of a Hazard than a Help. So for hours at a time John was not happy and satisfied, which was a horrible feeling indeed. When he went home from work he always made sure to take two pills in the AutoCar, to completely obliterate his not-happiness, and he was like the State ads for Pills said: "Doubly bubbly!"

And one day at work a bit of molten iron got onto John's shin, somehow getting past his protective clothing. It seared violently, with a hissing sound and a nasty smell, and the Pain shot up from his shin and tried to cut through John's mind and strike at his Soul, where --as all State Co. ads said-- the happiness which the Pill retrieves lives. This naturally made John terribly, awfully distraught, so on his way home he Pilled three times. It was especially fateful that he did so, because as soon as he got home, the very first thing he saw as he walked through his front door, was his wife lying very happily under his equally happy friend. Even with three Pills in his bloodstream, stress threatened to topple the plastic walls in his head, but he swiftly strengthened the foundations with another Pill, and soon they all laughed happily about the embarrassment together.

Later that night John walked into the kitchen. His wife had already gone to bed. With a cheerful smile on his face, he drew a long knife from the block, a knife which had a decorative hook on it. He didn't really use it for decoration as he skinned his wife from her big toe up to her head, however. She struggled, giggling, as he did the deed, and he chirruped a bit himself, because they were both still happy. At least until the stress from her body finally overcame the Pill's influence. And she started screaming very, very shrilly as she died, and John had to take another pill because he began to feel morose that she would die unhappy.

And the next day the police came and took him away to a big white prison where big white guards in clean uniforms fed him yellow tablets with imprinted smileys, and he was happy. A smiling judge sentenced him to three hundred years in prison for the crimes of Assault, Murder in the First Degree Fahrenheit and the Negative Seventeen-and-One-Fifth Degree Celsius. Or something equally silly; it was immaterial exactly why, because it had no effect on John.

The big white guards fed him and clothed him and so on for two hundred and fifty years, which would have been an eternity to you and me, but was simply a cavalcade of pleasure to John -- pleasure patented, manufactured, and distributed by State Drugs Co. It was the same routine that John had followed at home, with his wife -- Pill after waking up, Pill after every meal, Pill before going to sleep. Except now, John didn't have to skip the lunch Pill, so he was much better off, even though he sometimes missed the greater fun he'd had when he had triple- and quadruple-Pilled.

He could hardly be very concerned about that, however. One of the big guards, an exceptionally burly and chirpy specimen named Warren C. Childing, often stopped to converse with John and they had very intense and deep conversations about how joyful everything was. Sometimes Warren reached through the bars of John's cell and grabbed a strong hold on his head; then they would play a game. Whoever couldn't see first for the blood flowing into their eyes from pounding the iron bars, won. John loved that game because he always won, and winning gave his happiness an extra edge.

So two-hundred and fifty years passed by. Quite a while, even though the State had abolished mortality.

Outside John's prison -- the Valyeschenko Regenerative Penitence Pen -- people began to go insane, or went sane, or did nothing at all -- which was a new one for any kind of animal.

John never ever saw that. He only saw that, one day, no one came to give him his Pill. And food. He had a hard time deciding which one worried him more (worry being a stranger to him, really); the food or the Pill. With the Pill, he wouldn't worry about food, but without the Pill food seemed rather more worrisome. Deciding which was of the most concern between not being able to not worry and something altogether very worrisome, was, he realized, terrifying.

And he collapsed back onto his cot, breathing heart, hard slamming itself to pieces on his sternum -- even the narrative became confused, suffering from a sort of aphasia while its codpiece--character!--suddenly barreled and garbled across the battle of infusion. Infusion of what, John really had no idea, but whatever it was he couldn't stand it. There was nothing behind his eyes except a huge yellow disc smiling placidly into where his Soul would have been. It was incomprehensibly frightening and reassuring, telling him that all could be well. But it was not well. =)

Then his cell door rattled and shook and screamed in a metallic whine for somebody to come and help this occupant, please, he keeps on shaking me and won't stop crying! Nobody came to see what the door was on about, though. No nice white uniforms came running with TranquiLiters and a full cup of smiles for to put him down. But John -- what else could he do? -- barely took notice and shook his cage some more and more.

After two weeks, the Emergency Limited Release kicked in -- Valyeschenko Regenerative Penitence Pen had a failsafe system wherein, should there be a complete lack of activity on the Pen's caretaker's parts, the automated cell doors would unlock and allow the inmates to find sustenance. The Pen's outer- and most of its inner-doors would not open, however. When John finally walked out of his cell, there was nobody else around -- all the other cells were empty, there being few enough serious criminals over the past centuries. Well, one cell did have someone in it -- but she was in a catatonic state for one reason or another, not moving, just staring. John rifled through her cell and clothing, and all the other cells, and LO!

There was one halfway dissolved thing, yellowy, underneath a lonely cot at the end of Prison Block A. John scarfed it greedily. Instantaneously, terror receded, replaced by -- not quite happiness, the potency had certainly diminished from being gummed by whomever -- befuddlement. Still concern of a sort, but the almost inert kind -- deciding whether or not getting a box for your leftovers would be too gauche for this particular establishment, opposed to sacrificing either your mother or your lover.

The second one wouldn't bother John too much, though; the continuity of these metaphors (in the context of this story) is lacking.

Eventually, he found himself some food in the kitchen. And two more Pills, which he decided to ration but accidentally ate wholesale. John then wandered aimlessly, smiling at the abandoned structure, thoughts skittering perpendicular to his intellect before being blasted by chemicals. An awful lot like skeet shooting, he might have said.

This went on for nearly a year, during which time the world outside deteriorated into progress.

If you were wondering; the State had fallen apart. People everywhere stopped reporting for work -- something which had always happened with the Pill. But before State Co. Policing Units had been available to bring them in and Produce. But eventually, the same plague hit the Policing Units, which meant the current Policing Units had to go and recover their own members, which worked for a while until everything started to spiral out of control. At an exponential rate. Soon, there was nobody to do anything -- glassy-eyed bureaucrats never filed paperwork, cashiers did not cash, and so on. A few brave Staters tried to stop the descent by restricting usage of the Pill, or charging for it so that people had to work, but that failed miserably -- instead of being motivated to get what they had lost, people went mad with grief and terror until it was given back to them.

Eventually there was nobody to give it to them, and everything ended.

Except -- this is not a sad story, there will always be an exception -- for a fortunate few. John's compatriots at Foundry, and at Construction, and at Mechanics, and at Medicine, had already been exposed to lack of Pilingl. Its absence did not affect them so totally as it did others -- instead of a psychotic breakdown followed by vegetation, perhaps a quarter of these colossal men and women functioned. They refused to die, and refused to let their husbands, wives and children die -- even force-feeding them to stave the inevitable off.

And these people lived -- stealing from each other, plundering what once was a civilization, starving, and killing one another in anger. More than a few tried to go back to how things were, and just as many said no. Some barricaded themselves into Pill Factories; others besieged those Factories, and still others tried to kill everything in order that it might be saved. No one liked that last group. It was all senseless and grotesque, but there's life for you.

John wasn't really aware -- he wanted another Pill, still, and never bothered looking out of windows or taking advantage of the six Emergency Communication Modules. He had scrounged and scavenged the whole of Valyeschenko Wing 2, and an aggregate mass of three gram's worth of Pill had been found. Not sufficient at all, he had verified.

So he decided to leave his prison. Not decided; forced to.

Through a necessarily ingenious contrivance, John succeeded in separating the twin safety doors of Valyeschenko Wing 2, and stepped out onto a concrete yard which had seen little enough of human activity for some time now. Only a few limpid bits of detritus cluttered here and there.

The bloated sun shone a sickly pink on the earth. But not The Earth. Plato's theory on forms attests that the highest plane achievable on this plane is mere illusion; so this earth is merely a shadow of an idea which constitutes -- which defines -- which creates -- Earth, the ideal. This landscape, imbued pink, was not even a shadow of a shadow, but the tiniest shade colonizers of space could create.

And it was dying, the blindest of the eyeless could see that. John couldn't.

He crossed the yard to the inner security gates of Valyeschenko, pausing only to investigate a forlornly wandering shopping bag. How did a shopping bag find its way into the confines of a prison? What was propelling it, on this windless day? Why did there have to be a shopping bag in what was, until recently, an era of quantum mechanization?

John dug greedily through the bag, finding a few crumpled pieces of paper inside. He tore these open with equal avarice, but no Pills were forthcoming. The bag was tossed aside, and he set himself to the conundrum of passing out of Valyeschenko Regenerative Penitence Pen. There was no wall demarcating the inner-periphery of the prison, merely a single red line circumnavigating the yard and building, its two ends terminating at the security gates. Upon crossing this line at any point (but not when passing through the gates' portal), a prisoner -- which was any body with a special implant -- would receive a huge stimulation on his neocortex, resulting in instant debilitation.

On this line, there were an infinite number of points. John vaguely remembered this fact from school (school was a more serious requirement for workers at Foundry). It probably made no sense to him -- something could hardly be composed of an infinite number of anything, could it? Because, if there were a never-ending amount, the majority of these individual whatevers would have to be no size at all. And how could something be composed primarily of nothing?

John ran his thumb over the piece of the implant which stuck out from the nape of his neck. There was a significant physical presence so that it could be removed at the time of repatriation with a minimum of surgical invasiveness. And this physical presence felt like bone sticking out, which it was very close to -- synthetic bone with synthetic nerve endings, to synthetically short-circuit John's brain. There was no off-switch, which would have been very useful.

The inner gates were the only way through then, he determined, unless he could produce an epiphany to the effect of reprogramming bionic machinery. This problem was obviated quite effortlessly, however, when the security gates detonated ten seconds later. Not detonated, precisely -- they had been rigged with shaped charges who delivered their force in such a way that the heavy metal doors sailed off their hinges in several odd directions, giving the sense that this was a spontaneous explosion. The blast's effulgence blinded John, but he was eminently lucky in that the varied forces of atmospheric resistance and thermite shaped the trajectories of all shrapnel into paths not intersecting with his wobbly pink flesh.

There was no realization of the miracle of life on John's part as he fell back onto his bottom, all the rods and cones and whatnot of his eyes temporarily shut down thanks to overwhelming visual stimulation. And his ears rang. In fact, his whole body felt as if two hands had violently clapped -- and he was in the middle of it, where the palms struck hardest.

This worried him badly -- feelings he could barely handle, we have already seen. The concrete did not score beneath his fingernails as he scrabbled on the ground, feeling to make sure that he still lived. He was an ineffectual thing, unable to change anything around him, unable to take control of himself or anything because of his single-mindedness. He would not see the Pill's loving smile again; two-thirds of the planet's sensory experiences would be denied him. What kind of a happiness was that?

"JOOOOOoooooOOOOooOOHhhnN!"

John threw himself away from the sudden introduction of dialog, shocked as much by the realization he could still hear as by the atonality of that screech.

"John! HahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahHAhahahahahAha! Never did I think our fates, twain in every seeming respect, would be so closely conjoined in this the hour of doom!"

The voice was...strange. A vibratto was held beneath, whilst the surface appeared strong and unyielding; deep and assured, yet at odd moments unstressed syllables were stressed, stressed syllables were unstressed. To John, who had forgone speech for so long, it was quite strenuous to follow and understand. He opened his eyes, hoping to see, but everything was still too much -- streaks and blots and polygons of electric intensity arced hither and thither cross his eyeballs, starkly contrasted somehow to the plain whiteness. A field of snow populated by varied tribes of neon/argon/xenon/krypton/helium lights, perhaps.

"Are you rendered speechless with shock? Or has my entrance robbed you of all sense?"

John swallowed, cleared his throat, and slowly spoke. "I...I can't see. Please, do you have a Pill on you? Only, none have been brought to me for so long."

"Yes, naturally you want a Pill...you can't have heard from a person in over a year, and you want a Pill. Well. If you can't see, no wonder you don't recognize me! Warren C. Childing, your prison guard, your newest ally on this earth, returned from death to preach the words!"

Childing didn't look too good. Acceptably so, if he really had been dead and returned hence, etcetera etcetera, but still not good at all. If John could have seen him he would have espied less than he did while blind. His prison guard uniform was torn, raggedy, and splotched with some unspecified residue. Its hue was no longer white, but more of a brownish-grey. On his back there was a huge leathern sack, bulging gluttonously with an assuredly seedy cargo. Where once a taut, muscular man of hawk-eyes strutted, a huge but emphatically deteriorated personage clutched himself nervously while shuffling forward, eyes still sharp but tinged of fever, hunched over by the weight of what sloshed inside his head. "Of course, you must be wondering all about my story, how I came to be, why I blew up the gate, no?"

"Why," John began, his vision improving so splotches of color clustered around definite objects, "has no one been coming? That is cruel, you know. Was."

"Why indeed," Warren said, sounding none too sure himself. "Let me put it this way for you, John, since you've been out of circulation for so long. You remember the State ads? 'The Pill reaches deep on down, picks up your Soul and reverses its frown!'"

John nodded, then shook his head. What did it have to do with him?

"So, they were saying that the Pill uses what's already there to make you happy," continued Warren, "and they were right. The Pill reaches on down into you and pulls off a bit of your soul. The essence of what's you -- that'll make you happy, better believe it. But the Pill doesn't replenish what it takes. Just pulls and pulls until you're no longer you, just someone who looks like. Then you stop being. And that's what happened!"

John nodded again.

Stopped nodding.

Squinted at Warren. His vision was clearing up quite nicely, and he began to see how ragged Childing was. How the man shivered periodically. "Our Souls? The Pill ruins our Souls?"

C. Childing shook his head emphatically. "If you believe in Souls, at least! Whatever it does, people stop caring about themselves, about the Pill, about anything, when it's taken from them. And if that doesn't happen, they only go one of two ways." He smiled broadly at John. "Which way do you go, John?"

"Wait, don't answer!" His left arm extended, a long snub-nosed cylinder held in his fist. "Remember when me and you used to play our game? You tortured and murdered your wife, and you didn't care because of that smiling tablet. So I stopped taking mine, when I realized. Then I got angry, and beat the hell out of you saying it was a game. And now I've got you, to kill you!"

He even cackled afterward. The cylinder made a sizzling noise -- it was a Repolarizer. Wherever its beam struck on your body, your constituent atoms' polarizations were immediately reversed. It created a sort of free-for-all on the atomic level. Chaos and anarchy; the enemies of life. The woman who came up with the weapon had been reviled as a Seriously Uncool Individual when people still cared about anything beyond happiness.

Rigorous narrative structure aside, John did not get splattered. For a variety of reasons! Mostly, distempered individuals such as Warren C. Childing are prone to maddened outbursts, jabbed to ludicrous ravings by the wreckage of what were once strong, able minds. Childing once been a strong, able mind, mind you, at one point -- he had been one of the few to willingly forgo Pilling, just as he said.

His downfall came as the result of being too strong. He was the only one, and it drove him insane. We can blame John for that; John who is not a human being, and who went for the jugular when he caught a scent.

Childing heaved against him, but he was weak from a long, long sickness that scoured his body entire; the huge sack on his back hissed and crinkled as thousands of Pills rubbed and slid against each other. The RePolarizer lay useless on the ground, the mystical energy cores galvanizing its deadly rays long since spent (if ever they worked), and John who had been eating very healthy prison food just to keep alive now had the advantage. His assault was entirely bestial; tooth, nail, jabs, whatever he could to harm Warren. The self-proclaimed reanimated prophet screamed shrilly, shielding his eyes from John's stabbing fingers, then was thrown to the ground into a heap. The straps of the sack burst under the infinite pressures of a desperate thing's lust, and the golden avalanche -- more delicious than all the bounty of the land of milk and honey -- poured out into John's mouth.

C. screamed again, reached to his belt and his blocks of thermite -- to destroy the things, as he had meant to. To spare people that fate. John was not a stupid animal, however, and he kicked Warren in the face until there was blood pudding. Then he ate the crimson-coated Pills.

It had been a long journey for him, although he never left Valyeschenko Regenerative Penitentiary Pen. He had come dangerously close to not completing it. One of the scraps of paper, from earlier, in the shopping bag, blew by, carried on the weakening wind. John grabbed hold of it, able to afford curiosity now that the Pills had obliterated him. It was in a primitive typeface; the kind found in garage printing presses. The words, microscopic when not in the observer's direct focus, only enlarged to fourteen points when put into focus. Sheer barbarism, really, and quite difficult to read at that. He quickly scanned the last few lines, wondering if maybe there were instructions on how to locate additional Pill dispensaries after the Apocalypse.

"...in sum, this Pill is the most ingenious invention of at least modern biochemistry, if not all fields taken collectively. Making the user totally blissful without regard to his true condition , with no recorded ill effects. The long-sought drug without consequence has been found, and State Drug Co. is going to retail it at ten-penny per pill! Now, when it comes down to it, there are two types of governments; the government which will expressly condone and aid in the dispersal of this sort of drug, and the kind of government which will outlaw it. You may thank your lucky stars that the government of the United States, imperfect as it is, still remains the latter type, for it is the pursuit of happiness which gives happiness its worth; all else is slavery by another name. And with that admonition, Lucky's Gazette strongly urges voters to check the "NO" box on their ballots this August ninth for Proposition ColonEndParentheses. Lorem ipsum! Luctor et emergo! "

John shrugged and threw the paper down. It was not meant to make him happy, so he discarded it from mind and body.