yessleep

### ATTENTION ###

### X35763YTF ###

### THE FOLLOWING DOCUMENT HAS BEEN CENSORED. ###

I used to be like you - reading whatever I wanted to whenever I wanted to on nosleep and now I am in military prison.

I spend the day either moving as quickly as possible or being as completely still as possible and seldom in between. Cleaning duties, drill, inspection, parade, pt, etc are often performed at double quick time.

I have five minutes to shower after pt and then I have to prepare for a surprise inspection.

My first thought in the morning and my last thought at night are to count the days remaining in my prison sentence.

There is only one confirmed exit from military prison, and it is the one and only door to the entire complex. It is guarded at all times.

The only time I ever get to use that door is the day I leave and I want to get the fuck out of here as soon as fucking possible.

I open my eyes one night to see a stranger holding a flashlight to my face and somebody is about to slice my throat in half with a battle axe.

WAKE UP YOU WORTHLESS PILE OF and so on.

I’m not about to die at all. It was only a dream. I only dreamed that I was about to die.

It could be worse.

The next night, the fire alarm wakes me hours prior to reveille.

I am being timed. This time I break my own record.

“Pathetic,” says to me staff. “If that had been a real fire, we would have been dead by now. My parents and your parents would have to be informed that your disastrous fuckery single-handedly killed every single person in this building. You have until reveille to set up your kit for inspection, fuckwad. Dismissed.”

Reveille is in ten minutes.

They start the clock and before I’m allowed to do anything at all, I must perform twenty five pushups as payment for the privilege of inspection.

LAY OUT YOUR FUCKING KIT they yell repeatedly for the next ten minutes.

A-TTEN-TION yells staff and they inspect the condition and quality of my layout.

“What is this?” to me asks staff.

“Staff, that is my left parade boot, staff,” is the reply.

The parade boot shines like a clean glass mirror. I can and have used my parade boots to touch up my shave and staff were none the wiser. If time is money then my parade boots are my most expensive piece of kit.

“Why does it look like shit?” asks staff.

“Staff, I have not polished it enough, staff,” is the reply. You’re fucked no matter what you answer.

“It shows,” says staff. “This is the laziest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t wear this to the enemies funeral.”

Staff scratches up the left parade boot with an exacto knife and my heart plummets. It will take weeks if not months for me to restore my boot to its former glory.

“Redo the other boot as well. It also looks like crap,” staff continues.

It is tempting but unwise to take a swing at the staff. Violence guarantees time added to your sentence.

Any form of insubordination is punishable by restricting you to the bread and water diet for 3 - 7 days depending on how badly you pissed somebody off.

There’s also solitary confinement, where you spend all day standing still either at attention or at ease for hours at a time taking rare breaks only for the bathroom, food and lights out. It has given people psychological breakdowns.

I was once made to do a burpee every single time I wanted to create a single fold in my laundry all day during laundry day. They made me do my laundry twice that day as a part of a health inspection. It was beyond brutal.

Change parade goes worse than expected and as punishment for dust, I must do pushups to bring sally up in my service uniform.

Look it up if you don’t know what that means.

So I’m at the very last sally and the song stops unexpectedly.

“I’ll be right back,” says staff. “Don’t end the song without me. Hold the pushup position until I return.”

“Staff, yes staff,” I reply as mandated.

Military prison has definitely improved my physique. In the past, there’s no way I would have ever routinely made it to the last sally. This extended play though does me in. My arms go numb and I collapse to the ground in agonising defeat. If the song had never stopped and had it reached its natural conclusion, I would have made it to the end.

YOU INSUBORDINATE PISSHEAD, yells another pt staff. YOU WERE GIVEN A DIRECT ORDER TO HOLD THE PUSHUP POSITION UNTIL STAFF RETURNED. WHAT ON EARTH MAKES A SHIT PIECE OF SCUM LIKE YOU …

… and it goes on like that for a while. I just can’t get a break from these guys and yes, they are as loud if not louder than caps lock.

“Tell that prisoner that they must set up a surprise inspection,” one staff says to another, referring to me.

SET UP YOUR FUCKING INSPECTION they yell for the next eleven hours with a lunch break.

While you’re here, you can mop the floor, to me says the kitchen staff during lunch break.

Back in my cell, my bedsheet is measured to precisely 32 centimeters or 16 inches.

My clothing has been freshly ironed.

Ironing is the closest thing I get to a relaxing break around here. Staff have to go easy on you when you’re ironing because a stress environment would be a fire hazard. The timings are narrow though. I have one minute to iron my pants.

After a couple pre inspection inspections, staff let me off the hook.

“It could be a fuckton better but it will have to do,” to me staff says. “Remain in the at ease position until brought to attention,

Three staff are on guard to keep an eye on me. Jackie Chan would get past them and on his way to freedom in ten seconds, I am not Jackie Chan,

A-TTEN-TION,

Both I and staff come to the position of attention,

Very unexpected. I can’t think of a single moment when I have ever seen staff stand at attention for any reason.

The highest ranking staff I have ever encountered during my entire military career enters my humble cell.

“What a shitty place you’ve got here,” the high ranking person ordanes. “Staff, when I dismiss you, you will leave me to speak alone with the prisoner…”

… and staff are dismissed and I remain,

High ranking staff says to me, “would you like to leave military prison and never return?”

I’m speechless. Are they serious?

“You can relax,” the high ranking staff says to me. “Just answer the question.”

“Staff, I would love to leave and never ever return, staff” says me in reply.

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” in return says the high ranking staff.

They continue.

“Down at one of the labs, they think they’ve found a way to let somebody become living through dying but they need another test subject. So far, none of the subjects have survived beyond death. The likelihood of your death is near certain but it would become a valuable contribution to necromantic science. They say at the lab that this time, they’ve got it right. They said that last time too, though…”

They pause.

“You ought to know,” they continue, “that you risk a terrifying and prolonged death if there is failure …”

… and the high rank staff asks me if I would like to volunteer myself to the scientific cause. They add that answering in the negative will not negatively affect my stay in military prison.

I reply to the high ranking staff “staff, no thank you staff,”

I have hated every second of every day since I got here but not badly enough to die horribly for it. On my worst day, I have sleep and my eventual release to look forward to.

“I’ll just tell everybody that you said yes,” says the high ranking staff.

*** time passes ***

I’m dressed in very dignified clothing, chaperoned by high ranking officers and sitting in a limousine destined for the cemetery. Some other well dressed vehicle passengers are pointing guns at me, ready to shoot me if they believe me to cause a threat.

The penalty for attempted escaping is to return me to military prison for double my previous sentence with shorter sleep periods. Oh what a nightmare that would be.

There is a checkpoint in the guise of construction blockage and then we reach the cemetery grounds. A team of scientists has been awaiting my arrival, some of whom look as though they weight train by playing kettlebell baseball.

We step out of the limo and are escorted to a lab kept beneath the funeral parlour.

It is a very fancy lab. What it’s doing beneath a funeral parlour is a little unnerving but it all makes sense now.

One of the scientists holds a large syringe.

“This will hurt a lot,” says to me the scientist and my arm is restrained by one of the muscle staff as my vein becomes injected with the contents of the syringe.

My vision blurs and I become unable to move. My skin feels everywhere like it’s getting nibbled by something that has small sharp teeth. I’m vaguely aware of being stuffed into a dark coffin and then I pass out screaming.

I again become aware of being aware.

It is pitch black. There is no light,

I must be in a coffin. Where else could I be?

There’s no room to stretch or to get comfortable. I guess this is how I will die. If I am to die buried alive, how long before I succumb to suffocation or thirst, or a terrifying third thing? Perhaps I will live. Gotta stay positive.

The vein that took the syringe begins to spasm. I place my hand over it to find that it is expanding like a balloon and then it explodes a mysterious liquid that gets in my eye.

At least a thousand bugs or something are crawling all over me and biting me. It is a lifelong terrifying fear turned into reality. My whole life, bugs creeped me out and I pretended they didn’t. I would pick up bugs just to prove I was brave but they still creep me out. They just do.

I have a recurring nightmare that I’m studying an ancient religious text that describes hell as being a place where every bug you ever killed would come to eat you in a hellish afterlife only now they would have each fornicated and each raised a trillion generations of offspring take turns at devouring you.

The sensation is unbearable. I writhe, kick and scream, bashing myself along the entire interior as I lack the movement to fight off most of the critters in the pitch black dark.

I feel them eating my body, I feel them eating my face, I feel them eat my… you don’t know what else they eat…

My screams go ignored.

Seconds feel like minutes. Minutes feel like hours. Hours feel like months.

It is always pitch black. There is no light,

The pain eventually becomes a dull numbing sensation and I pass out completely possibly to die I wonder.

*** time passes, I think ***

There is noise. Have I gone crazy? I haven’t heard noise in a very very very long time except for in my dreams, and sometimes I can’t tell when I’m dreaming.

There is a noise again and more noise after that. There is clinking and scraping and whirring machine noises. Could it be true? Could it really be happening? Am I about to get out of this coffin never to return?

There are minutes or hours of noise and then the coffin lid opens.

I hope this isn’t a dream. The light is blinding but it doesn’t hurt, inconvenient as it is to look at. There is noise like a banshee opera being blasted right into my ears and it doesn’t hurt, inconvenient as it is to listen to.

More than a hundred well dressed people dressed in mess dress apparel are present to applaud my exit from the coffin and they offer me a dignified slice of pizza served with an equally classy and exotic beverage.

Everybody is chatting enthusiastically and saying to themselves “they said it couldn’t be done and we fucking did it.”

There is a buffet and a drinks bar.

Two years less a day has passed since when they shoved me in the coffin.

Two years of not eating, drinking or once ever having to use the bathroom. They show me a mirror. My hair has not grown. My face in spite of having been eaten is whole again. I look exactly as I remember myself having last looked when last I looked in a mirror though in far more wrinkled clothing.

I must be dreaming.

They explain it to me again. The stuff they injected into my vein was a maggot aphrodisiac that encourages maggots to lay eggs in the skin, pinching the nerve endings in a specific manner that initiates the body’s built-in mummification process while leaving the brain and muscles in a state of perpetual working order because of the way in which the organs are conserving their energy.

I am apparently the only test subject so far to survive.

“You can only imagine our disappointment every time we’d dig up the coffin only to find the other ones had died,” says one of the scientists.

Out of nowhere, somebody stabs me through the chest with a javelin while another person bashes my skull with a hammer. I can feel the weight of the hammer crushing through my incapable skull and I can feel the brain go squishy but there is no pain. The javelin has pierced my lung and I feel the air escape but there is no pain.

There is no blood. There is no pain.

They applaud a deafening round of applause.

“After we perform a few more rounds of testing to verify probable side effects, we can actually send soldiers into battle who can’t die,” all around me are saying the scientists.

They ask me, is the champagne and dignified greasy pizza an acceptable flavour?

I reply that I taste nothing.

“Fascinating,” they are saying to another, absolutely fascinating.