your nightmares, experienced in infrared, stem from your employment which consists of sitting reclined in a pitch black $4,000,000 pod controlling a similarly priced drone flying silently an ocean away. with the click of a rigorously engineered tactile button on your joystick, you immediately reduce an illiterate tribesman, with his broken kalashnikov & 8 bullets, into forty unrecognizable meat chunks across an acre of baking desert. you administered a similar execution to everyone standing around him; you tell yourself they were certainly terrorist accomplices but you know in the back of your head that you just iced some women and children & did so within eyeshot of many more women and children. a pal gives you high five as you hit 1600 kills today after climbing out of the pod at 5:00, no longer resembling anything that could be construed as a human in any conceivable way
on the drive home your thought pattern can be characterized by the couple of seconds of scratchy silence that plays from the last few grooves of a vinyl record after the album is finished. walking through the front doors of your newly purchased mcmansion in the suburbs of virginia, you kiss your wife and tell her you love her in a way that is somehow even less genuine than a bird or dog trained to do the same. you silently eat dinner with your increasingly estranged & bizarre acting children, maintaining the line silence in your head.
shortly thereafter this head will lie against a pillow where it will remain motionless for hours, not deviating from this line silence for even a moment. the stimulus of a dark room, heavy covers, and a warm body wrapped around you has long since failed to provoke a drowsiness response as it does in diurnal mammals. because, you see:
the darkness experienced in your murder capsule at work is no match for any darkness that occurs naturally; it is sealed to a degree rivaling that of the doors in the CDC’s level 4 bioterrorism labs. air kept at exactly 72 degrees fahrenheit & 45% humidity (with similar levels of precision) is pumped in, making your pod indistinguishable from a sensory deprivation tank if it were not for the kill cam and controls that cleverly resemble that which you used as a teenager to play video games developed by people that just so happen to also be involved with the engineering of your pod
most likely the person reading these words right now can emphasize with the distinct feeling one gets after trying to go to sleep after sitting in front of a computer all day. it certainly doesn’t burn many calories and certainly does not help guide our subconscious minds into going to sleep at the correct time. sitting in a reclined, leather bound control chair designed by swedish ergonomists amplifies this problem by orders of magnitude but it is still nothing compared to the unaddressed, festering mental baggage accrued from your time in the pod. the fact your hardened, military-trained body is even capable of sleep more than once a week baffles doctors and maybe even physicists
altogether, the amount of opiates necessary to temporarily alleviate these problems, for a single night, would easily dispatch an adult elephant much less whatever configuration of organic molecules you have become
as you lay, the radio silence in your head slowly breaks as you metaphorically crack the closet door into your mind open. a single beam of conscience thought shines through and reveals the assorted putrefied organs of all your victims, all still shuddering and pulsating and writing like the maggots occupying them. some dismembered vocal cords, divorced from a functioning larynx, resonate to produce an audible scream which still sounds more human than your normal speaking voice
the staggering horror & realization inflicted from this tiny glimpse immediately puts you in some state of shock; you fall unconscious immediately, without retaining any memory of the last few minutes of indescribable hell. this happens every night, this is how you “sleep” now
the nightmares that follow, all perceived through the same infrared filter and overlaid crosshair as seen in your pod, are africanized permutations of what you experience in reality, daily. unbound from the laws of this universe, your experiences of frequent gory murder are free to metastasize into much more horrifying versions of themselves. an account of one of these terrors is omitted as trying to conceptualize what one might entail is a feat admittedly too terrifying for the author of these words
people wonder why, after asking if i would work for lockheed martin, i respond only with a speechless, agitated expression
