Pharmuria (Boy x Boy)

Part Three

Yhprum's Law: The notion that systems that shouldn't work still work regardless.

I never dared to call my apartment, or anywhere in Pharmuria for that matter, comfortable. However, I would be willing to kiss the ground of my living quarters if it meant escaping my new room.

Upon waking up on the ground after being knocked out cold, I was unpleasantly greeted with four, grimy brick walls surrounding me. A dim light hung from the ceiling, shining light to the only three objects in the room: a bed, a toilet, and a sink. Over by one of the corners was a metal door.

I learned about prisons from my adventures with books. It was a place where people paid their debts to society, though I always found it ironic that society was the one that paid for them to have such a place. Though it certainly seemed like a mini-Pharmuria with its corruption and lack of moral values, there were some pleasantries prisoners got that subjects didn't. For example, the food they got had to be before the expiration date passed.

Pharmuria didn't exactly have a prison system, unless one were to consider the city a prison in and of itself. Aggression between authority and subordinates seemed to be a shared theme between the two concepts. If an officer didn't like what a subject was doing, the officer would assault the subject. If two subjects were fighting, an officer would intervene with violence. If a subject killed somebody, violence. What was a city without ethical guidelines if it didn't also come with a lack of human decency?

I leaned up against the bed while remaining on the floor. This was my life now. The figurative cage of Pharmuria had been traded for a literal cage of steel. My identity had been reduced to the point where I was nothing more than an animal.

Confinement seemed necessary at this point, since this was the part of a subject's life where they would become extremely defensive. Even as much as I wanted to be with my family, the actual action of dying still terrified me. I anticipated that I wouldn't be so submissive to the human's commands. Assuming that was the same for others, it was probably a smart idea for the humans to trap us.

Without a clock in the room, I had no sense of time. A mere minute felt like an hour, and an hour felt like a day. Back in my apartment, I at least had a television set and a stack of books. In this confined space, I had nothing. Not only was I truly stripped of my identity, but I was starved of anything meant to occupy my time. It seemed like a psychological method of torture. I supposed the humans believed one would be more willing to accept unethical treatment after being shoved in a small room for twenty-four hours a day.

My eyes were glued to the metal door in front of me. Eventually, a human had to walk through it. That was assuming they needed to keep me alive, after all. The only objective I had at this point was to sit and wait at the door until somebody came through it, making me feel like a dog waiting patiently for his owner to return. I never realized how similar subjects and animals were until I had to go through this type of isolation. Locked up, abused, and abandoned. I really was just an unwanted puppy at that moment.

Thoughts ran rampant through my mind as to what the human interacting with me would be like. All of them were already cruel in public, brandishing their aggression for all of the subjects to see. Being in a private setting such as a cell, I theorized that a human would be worse. The true monster would break through their skin and thrash everything in its sight. Being in fit condition for experimentation didn't mean the humans weren't allowed to give me a few lacerations or fractured bones. The thought was rather unsettling. There was at least some escape out in the city. There was no evasion when it came to being in a box.

I surveyed the area with my ears. There was an absence of screams and shouts. These were rather common noises on a stroll down the sidewalk, yet they didn't exist anywhere in the vicinity. It was eerie. The prevalent silence made things appear empty, and it induced me with the surreal feeling that I was the only being on the entire planet. Such an existential thought made me shudder. Insanity was already digging into my brain and I hadn't even been in the cell for very long. I could tell that the long, sedated days leading up to the experimentation were not going to treat me well.