The Three Lives of Subject A (Part 2) - To Suffer In Silence

Background color
Font
Font size
Line height

Trial 1

The goal of Trial 1 was to determine how Subject A's purpose in life formed when confronted with constant adversity. I needed to know what meaning he would attribute to living as he suffered. Meaning, for the first trial, he was in for a tragedy. The first step was to remove the stability of the nuclear family. As I willed it, Subject A's mother faced complications in labor and died while giving birth. His father was devastated, but he chose to raise the child alone. His wife's death weighed on him, and Subject A's father could never grow to love his child as he associated the death of his wife with the birth of his child. Subject A was rarely introduced to playmates during infancy and was largely neglected.

This led to difficulties forming connections with peers and a general mistrust of adults. I considered the option of leaving Subject A with his father for the rest of his childhood, potentially creating an abusive household. Instead, I had his father die in a car crash when Subject A was four years old, watching from the backseat. Subject A was left without severe physical injury but substantial mental trauma. Subject A moved to foster care with no relatives willing or able to take him in.

I withheld giving Subject A any physical disabilities at birth. While it was a viable option, as it would likely draw negative attention to him in the foster system, I posited that by not giving Subject A a specific deformity he would blame for any negative treatment, and thus might find fault with his character. Making the root of his problems internal would make them difficult to overcome with outside encouragement or reinforcement. In the foster care system, he continued to be neglected. On the outside, he appeared numb to any difficulties. He presented as though he was no longer capable of feeling but, in truth, found himself torn between profound grief and loneliness and a fear of connection.

Supposing the experience of an abusive household could be valuable, I arranged for him to stay with a foster family from age six to ten years old that would meet that objective. Subject A stayed with a forty-year-old man and his thirty-two-year-old wife. They had no intention for a child beyond a beer and cigarette transporter, and the government stipend of course. Their mental abuse furthered his withdrawn nature and reinforced his idea that he was the problem.

Their physical abuse was less frequent but left him with constant tension because of its unpredictable nature. Because of the string of misfortunes that Subject A endured during the most formative years of his life, he began to develop the view that living naturally entailed suffering. His treatment at the hands of his foster family only fed into his self-hatred. Instead of feeling rage at others, Subject A directed all negativity inward. At age 10, I intervened with child protective services, who removed him from the home.

I next selected a long-term household made up of a childless older couple. The couple was open to his arrival and planned on accepting him into their family, but Subject A's nature made assimilation difficult. Regardless of his cold and emotionless behavior, the couple supported and encouraged him. The environment I chose for this portion of Subject A's life was an attempt to have him feel love and care before drastically changing the circumstances to take it away. Their attempts to get through to him would be unsuccessful for years but would start to take effect toward the end of his stay.

Subject A displayed some academic talent, which I allowed to mature in this trial. He performed passably at school without ever taking the time to study. At 13, Subject A began to be harassed with more frequency and intensity at school. To further this treatment, I engineered misunderstandings leading to conflict with his peers. Subject A took the abuse without resistance as another testament to his conditioning. Subject A made himself a target with his hollow appearance and demeanor and the happenstance I orchestrated. His behavior suggests that he was long past his breaking point but has no inclination toward acting out violently.

Being harassed by his peers further degraded his self-image, while at the same time, it gave him the hatred needed as a motivator to continue trying. His foster parents remained by his side and made consistent efforts to coax any positive emotions out of him. To this point,  Subject A only displayed emotion privately and in rare cases. During these times, he showed profound sadness and grief over his lost family and childhood. Subject A adopted the idea that he lived only for the sake of being tormented as opposed to meaningless suffering.

After years of gentle efforts and considerate affection aimed at gaining his trust, Subject A and his foster parents found common ground to the point where he felt understood to an extent and believed they were not out to harm him. Even with the ongoing abuse he received from his peers and the trauma from his past. Subject A felt he had a home to go back to. As Subject A had reached some small contentment amidst his suffering, it was time to take away that source of comfort.

I've observed that the suffering of a human without anything to hold on to is eclipsed by those who have something they hold dear ripped from their desperate hands. Mothers who lose their children to a hail of explosives, fathers that fail to protect their families before losing them. Their lifeline is gone, their support is gone, and they suffer, deeply suffer. It escapes me, but it seems to work.

I decided that a home invasion with an unintentionally bloody outcome would be a fitting end for the family unit Subject A had grown fond of. I caused two armed men to target Subject A's house for a robbery late at night. Hearing the commotion, Subject A's father told him to stay in his room and went out to confront the intruders. The intruders panicked and shot the father, along with his wife, when she stepped outside her room and screamed in shock at seeing her husband dead. The intruders fled the scene while Subject A, now 15, sat shivering in his room.

The suffering and despair he faced in his life shaped him into a shell of a person. While he shut out emotion as a defense mechanism, he reached a new low by having an experience of a loving family taken away from him. For the first time, Subject A reacted violently to grief. Subject A destroyed most of his property and resisted being removed from the home he had grown accustomed to by lashing out and thrashing about when the officers and state care workers attempted to relocate him.

Now in state custody, he did the bare minimum to earn his high school diploma. From 15 to 18, Subject A spent time in a mental care facility and scarcely spoke. His self-hatred became partially directed toward hatred for the world. He was released from the state institution as an adult and began to work at menial jobs. His instance of providing for himself came out of spite for the world and himself, as well as the belief that giving in and dying would be the ultimate dishonor to the family he lost. At this point, I'll admit that I was starting to have fun with the experiment.

    Believing Trial 1 had more potential to provide valuable data, I decided to introduce another major obstacle to his life. Subject A, then 22 and working at an industrial production plant, had ample opportunity for a workplace accident. I directed a piece of fabric from his uniform to become caught in the lathe he was operating. The lathe pulled in his arm and tore it off at the shoulder. Subject A was rushed to the emergency room and stabilized. Missing an arm and dealing with unresolved issues from his past, Subject A spent the next year living on disability, isolated from the world and long past his breaking point. Subject A was tormented by nightmares of his biological parents' deaths and his foster family's murders when he wasn't kept awake by the phantom pain where his arm was once attached.

Throughout this experiment, Subject A had frequently contemplated suicide but had yet to make any attempts. His purpose to persevere against the world's cruelties kept him alive, but that purpose began to fail him. But now he began to consider going through with it. Going into the experiment, I estimated the length of Subject A's life between 15 and 40 years and that he would end it, but could not predict the deciding factor.

With many conventional suicide methods cut off to him due to his lost limb, Subject A climbed to the top of his twenty-story apartment complex with the intent to jump. As he stood on the edge of the rooftop, I prepared to listen in on his final thoughts, which I considered to be the most valuable piece of information that Trial 1 had to offer. With dry, dead eyes, he tilted his head towards the sky, took a step forward, and spoke as he prepared to plummet to his death.

"Mom and Dad, Please forgive me. I love you both, but I can't do this anymore. I've been in pain since I killed my mom when I was born. Every time I had a chance at some kind of happiness, I was crushed. This world fucking hates me! God hates me. Fuck this world and fuck God. I'm done. Was this all my fault? I know I was selfish, I know I was cold, I know I was weak, but was this really fair?! What did I do to deserve all this? Why does the world hate me? Why does God hate me? Life has been begging me to give up since the beginning. Fine! You win! Fuck it! I fucking give up. I don't even have anyone to say goodbye to. I've got no friends or family around to miss me. I failed.  Goodbye to nobody. There's nobody left. At least I can get some rest." Subject A finished his inner monologue while approaching the ground that quickly came to meet him and take his second life.

Analyzing the results from the first trial led to valuable insight. For Subject A, the purpose of his existence was to resist. He lived with the notion that the only reason he would see him the next day was to demonstrate strength and never give in to weakness. Subject A attributed the idea of weakness to succumbing to whatever misfortune befell him.

After losing his foster family in the home invasion, the objective of demonstrating strength split into the original notion that giving in was weakness and the idea that staying strong was an act that honored his dead loved ones. Subject A believed that living inherently entailed suffering. Subject A affirmed my belief that all humans have a breaking point. In a life of hardship, the ability to choose became a curse. When a human makes a choice that ultimately leads to further pain, they only have themselves to blame. This condition of responsibility brings on even more guilt and sadness.

On a larger scale, Subject A referred to "the world" and "life" as the causal force that dictated the event in his life. These forces were analogous to my existence, seeing as my whims acted out his fate. I looked at Subject A's views on these forces as his views on me. He believed that I had a vendetta against him. He believed he was being punished by a higher power and looked for justification on why he deserved this punishment. This led to his belief that the purpose of the word god is to judge and punish. He believed God to be a malicious force and that God existed to torment for reasons beyond the understanding of human comprehension.

In Subject A's first trial life case, there was indeed literal divine intervention controlling his circumstances, but arguably his life would be entirely plausible without my influence presence as many humans have lived similarly tragic existences without my intervention.

The conclusion I took from this is that when a human person suffers without reason or respite, they come to believe that God's (or the very universe itself's) purpose is to punish them. Some find God's actions are arbitrarily malicious, or they have done something to deserve the life they were given. Humans have a natural urge to lay blame on a force outside themselves, which makes God an easy target. Instead of taking the chaos of life and working to manage it, humans need to reject the blame, be God, nature, or their fellow man. Armed with this information, I readied a new life with a revised scenario.

What else do have for me, little mouse?

Subject A began Trial 2


You are reading the story above: TeenFic.Net