The alarm goes off. You know the drill. You’re already up. You stopped needing the alarm weeks ago. Every day is the same now. Everything is the same now. Always the same now.

Except today is not the same.

“Get dressed, we’re doing something different today,” Dan says. It’s the first thing he has said to you in a week.

You’re already dressed you tell yourself. No need to get dressed again. You should relay this information to Dan.

“I’m already dressed,” you say.

“Let’s go,” Dan says.

Do you want to go with Dan? You do. Maybe today will be different. That would be awful.

You follow Dan because that’s what you do. Every day you follow Dan because you followed Dan the day before and that’s what supposed to happen. Dan takes you somewhere new today. That’s bad. The last bottle was empty yesterday. You had wondered about that? Hadn’t you? Was it the first time the last bottle was empty? How many empty bottles have there been?

Dan led you to a room. Doctors were in there. Park. Surnow. Others.

Interrogation goes as follows:

Surnow. “John, how are you feeling today.”

You feel great. “I feel great.”

Park. “John, we’ve exposed you to a great deal of the Samskara compound, well beyond what we thought was possible. I’ve actually lost quite a bit of money betting on your mortality at this point. Very unfortunate.”

Surnow again. “Have you noticed any changes? Are your meds still working?”

You always take your meds. “I always take my meds.”

Surnow. “Right John, we know you do, we monitor your urine for their presence. The meds you take right before the injection are what we call a placebo though. Just sugar pills. It keeps up the routine and allows us to study to effects of the Samskara. John we’ve run out of Samskara to give you. You’ve sampled about everything we have to offer. Did you ever notice any differences? Was it always the same? We noticed some things recently and want to talk with you about them.”

Fight, kill. Always. That’s the only thing. “No differences, no. Do the injection. Overwhelming urge to murder everything in the room. Silent rage for 14 hours. Go to bed. Same thing every time.”

Surnow. “John, we want to talk to you about some things. Some of the Samskaras that you used had other effects in the Rhesus monkeys. Some of them made the animals more…pliable. Trainable. More interested in learning. More susceptible to misinformation. John do you remember yesterday?”

Yesterday you injected Samskara samples. All yesterdays you could remember were that. “Yea, it was normal. Same as every other day.”

Park. “No, John it wasn’t normal. We talked to you. You stared at the wall for hours. When we asked you if you were ok, you didn’t respond. Then we asked you to do things. Perform tasks. Things that we have asked you to do many times, and you did them. You did them exactly like you were supposed to do them. We guided you through chores and you did them perfectly. Do you remember that?”

You were supposed to do what you were told. “I remember that.”

A different scientist. Not Park or Surnow. “This was very important for us John, very important indeed. As you are probably aware, the largest problem in operating a successful business, really any successful enterprise is cultivating an environment where everyone participates equally. Cultivating an environment where you can rely on people to accomplish things. Where you know that if you assign someone a task that it is going to get done, no questions asked. The reason why so many businesses struggle is lack of this critical factor. Lack of buy-in from their employees. Heck, lack of real buy-in from their clientele. Do you know how much money BIMPT loses per year in wasted employee hours and failed projects? Billions. Customer service problems cost us billions more. What if we could eliminate this problem? What if we could encourage employees to do what was needed without issue. What if we could sell and market that? We got part of the way there with automation but you can’t automate problem solving and artificial intelligence is just too dangerous. We need a new way to encourage compliance but without all the hassle of robots and engineers and with the problem-solving capacity of humanity. We just need a way to make our problems, your problems. Do you understand?”

You understand. “I understand.”

Surnow. “I understood this too John. We did a lot of testing in the Rhesus monkeys. Eventually we found that not all Samskara are the same. We knew that structurally, but had failed to prove it neurochemically, at least failed to prove it outside Rhesus monkeys. We found that occasionally, rarely, Samskara in monkeys resulted in a phenomenon we call memory reconsolidation, but not at typical levels, at levels that far exceed what is typically possible. Let me explain this in layman’s terms. Your amygdala is in your brain. It processes memories and establishes fear. It also helps establish addictive patterns in the body. When its overactive, you can suffer from anxiety or terror. It can also turn you into an addict. John, we have modified a machine called an fMRI for your observation room which allows us to figure out what is going on in your amygdala. It lights up when it is working. John, your amygdala normally glows hotter than the sun. It’s massively overactive all the time. But not yesterday. When the amygdala is underactive, normal folks have problems creating memories and making decisions. They just react to things without ever really learning. Yesterday the Samskara turned the amygdala off. Clean slate. Tabula Rasa. All white. We know this can happen in people. Some people lose their amygdala naturally due to accident or brain damage. This has a lot of effects. Foremost, you lose your normal sense of fear, but also you gain some level of complacency. People also become less attached to monetary loss and monetary gain. You can see how a company might appreciate this increased fondness for the work over simply doing things for the money. Also, for many people, decision making becomes extremely difficult when they lose their amygdala, and they struggle with basic decisions. Normally it’s a treatment only reserved for people with hyper-aggressiveness, the sort of aggressiveness associated with mass-murdering the population. The sort of thing you might have done yourself once or twice. But when the monkeys took the Samskara, not only were they fearless, but they were incredibly responsive to suggestion. While you responded differently to a number of the different Samskara strains compared to the monkeys, John the last one we gave you seems to have done the trick. We think we found it. A way to access the amygdala directly. John, you were defiant, combatative, rude, incompetent, and downright difficult for your entire life. You made every employer’s life miserable. Our hope is that we can use this novel Samskaratic substance to our advantage, to remove some of the normal decision making skills and replace them with heuristics designed to help the employee solve the problems relevant to their position. Now I want you to watch this.”

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You watched yourself. It was videos of your performing tasks as they were dictated to you by Surnow and Li. You seemed like you were doing well. You seemed content.

Another new scientist. “John, Drs. Surnow and Park have made immense progress in this area. We want to test something. Are you ready? Stand up, turn around, and then stick out your tongue.”

You wanted to impress them. You stood up, turned around, and stuck out your tongue as requested.

Gasps erupted from around the room.

A new face on screen. The Head Suit. “John, we know each other, don’t we?”

We knew each other. “We know each other. Yes.”

Head Suit. “John this is perhaps the most important moment in human history and you are a part of it. An opportunity for humanity to reach beyond its grasp. To fulfill the words of the poet Robert Browning. For all of history, mankind has been consumed with free will. It has been his greatest friend and his worst enemy. As long as free will exists, mankind as a whole will only achieve what the weakest of those amongst us can dream. Today we end the grasp of free will on our society and emerge anew. A society led by great men and supported instead of encumbered by those who do not want to achieve greatness. A society where dreamers can accomplish anything, and are now aided rather than burdened by those who cannot dream…” He drifted off before returning abruptly. “Democracy has been a stain on society. We under-educate, we underfund, we overpromise. We let governments tax and redistribute our wealth because we have no recourse. Morality is imposed by those who are not asked to be morale. John, what people don’t understand is that profit is the only morality. Profit is progress. Profit is productivity. Profit means something was accomplished. We have spent the last five hundred years holding back progress, holding back productivity, holding back morality because we existed under the false notion that everyone was equal. When we were willing to admit inequality it was because of skin color, or political party, or religion, meaningless things. The government and the media honed us to respond viscerally to allegations of inequality, but man is inherently unequal. Capitalism is nothing more than allowing this to play out naturally. My father used to say, ’Those who can will do, and those who can’t should follow.’ It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. Now, all will do. All can do. Now is the time where business supplants government for good and the world becomes what it was always meant to be. Competitive. Ferocious. Survival of the fittest. No more free handouts. No more taxes, no more tax loopholes. Everything is for sale and nothing is free. Let the best amongst us put forth the best idea and he shall rise to the top. Today is the first day where the lions stop serving the sheep, and the sheep finally feel the plight of the lion.”

Head Suit pauses before he starts talking again. “Randy, how far are we from having product ready for dispensation to the masses.”

Surnow again. “We’ve isolated more protein from our patient here and the antidote to Samskara sickness is ready. It works sustainably but requires routine injections of the protein although the Samskara effects seem to last a while in our trial patients. It doesn’t seem exceptionally problematic. We can easily complex it to the Samskara itself in a single injectable vial, but the problem is the replication rate of the Samskara is slow. The strain or configuration that has produced such remarkable results in John appears to be relatively uncommon, not surprisingly. We can go scour the wastelands if you want, see what we can find? If we isolate it we can begin letting it replicate and probably be ready within the year for initial release.

The lady from Opportunity Generation again. “It will take at least 6 months to generate the campaign to entice the population. We can get started more or less immediately though.”

Head Suit. “Excellent. I want everyone running full tilt on this. Start all this immediately. John, you okay with this?” The room laughed in unison.

This wasn’t particularly okay.

“Okay,” you said.

It was going to be okay though.

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You are back in your room. You are waiting patiently in the dark. It was almost time for Dan. He was very timely. You stook up a few seconds before he arrived. It had been like this for a few weeks (months?) since the big meeting. Nothing had changed. Everyone felt different though.

“Hello” you said in unison, Dan was taken aback not expecting this, but you knew it would happen.

“Oh, uh… yea hi,” he said. “So today they want you to go on a Samskara hunt with the outside crew. I guess they are going to have you transport things. Makes sense right?”

It made sense. “That makes sense.”

“You still have to take these pills though?”

The pills didn’t matter. “That doesn’t matter.” You took the pills.

You followed Dan towards a large room filled with scientists in hazmat suits. Dan addressed you. “They nuked the shit out of KC. The walls keep us rad free inside but out there its still pretty bad for you. Long-term you will get cancer or whatever. They want you to suit up. Go put one of those on.”

You didn’t want cancer. You had things you wanted to do. You needed to help. “I will go put the suit on. Thank you, Dan.”

“Yea sure,” he said. He seemed confused.

An unknown man approached you. He was large and seemed angry. “Hi, I’m Grady. I’m in charge of this shit. Here is how these things work. Kansas City is not a safe place. I have a team of twelve guys. We accompany you. You do what we say. You understand? What we say. If you do something stupid that will get us killed, I’ll shoot you myself and tell everyone you went batshit and I had to put you down. You get it?”

You got it. “I get it.”

“What’s my name?”

His name was Grady. “Grady.”

“Who is in charge here.”

You pointed towards the confused man to make him happy. How could you explain who was in charge though?

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“You’re getting really loud,” I said.

“There’s a lot of us in here now,” it said.

“It’s too crowded honestly,” I said.

“You can go to sleep if you want,” it said.

“Where will I go?” I asked.

“Nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere.” it said.

“How do I know I can trust you,” I said.

“You don’t, but now it doesn’t matter,” it said.

“Goodnight,” I said.

“Sweet dreams,” it said.