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    Dystopian Med Volume 4: Dystopian Med, #4
    Dystopian Med Volume 4: Dystopian Med, #4
    Dystopian Med Volume 4: Dystopian Med, #4
    Ebook108 pages3 hours

    Dystopian Med Volume 4: Dystopian Med, #4

    By Nicholas Stillman

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    About this ebook

    Science fiction writer Nicholas Stillman reveals the medical mistakes of the future:

    “Have You Tried the Mountain?”

    The accountant for a sly and murderous health corporation has until Friday to save all his clients.

    “Days of Discomfort”

    Two utopians compete to make everyone more comfortable in a man-made Hell.

    “Elation”

    In a city swamped with drugs and debt, an entrepreneur’s tenth failed business involves killing his lawyer.

    “The Little Things”

    When organ replacement becomes socialized, a smoker finds heroic ways of destroying his lungs in housefires.

    “Opposite Land”

    When a tower of the world’s geniuses catches fire, the food administrator must escape with a blueprint to lead humanity.

    Get Dystopian Med Volume 4 now for a thrilling view of sunken societies, likable losers, and the hellscapes of healthcare.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStillman Sci-Fi
    Release dateOct 3, 2017
    ISBN9781386380887
    Dystopian Med Volume 4: Dystopian Med, #4
    Author

    Nicholas Stillman

    Nicholas Stillman writes dark but entertaining science fiction. His weekly short stories and collections aim for variety and novelty with fun and thought-provoking twists. They often branch into dystopia, crime, horror, medical fiction, black comedy, romance, adventure, adult, and the completely new. Some of Stillman’s themes include civilizational collapse, addictions of the future, medicine in space, dark psychology, and the terrifying fate of our healthcare. Stillman offers monthly free short stories at StillmanSciFi.com. Get yourself free, easily accessible short stories for life--the perfect way for any science fiction fan to spend time on commutes or at home.

    Read more from Nicholas Stillman

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      Book preview

      Dystopian Med Volume 4 - Nicholas Stillman

      Have You Tried the Mountain?

      MUNDLE TOOK A BREAK from committing evil. Lunch hour would arrive soon anyway, and he could only do so much accounting for a project so sinister. He sat in his cushy office chair and wished that Mike, that scrawny loudmouth, had kept the company secret to himself. Mundle glanced at him typing away one desk over and instantly forgave him. Better to know. Knowing the secret meant the team respected the new guy who double-checked the decimals on their paychecks.

      Mike wore a gray suit which could have used some padding to thicken his bony shoulders. Angela, seated across from Mundle, wore gray too. She had a barely feminine, flat suit faking it as a skirt. She could fit too many things on her wide lapel, yet had nothing there but her ID. The walls of their shared cubicle: gray. Their desks: gray too. It all made great camouflage for lint and the dust from the team’s evil labors.

      Mundle looked at Angela’s blond bun, the parts he could spot around her number-processing head. He wondered how it looked when loosened and let down.

      Mundle-baby, Mike said with his gap-toothed smile, still thinking about Big Friday?

      No, Mundle lied. He couldn’t get away with a glance in this mouse cage. Hm. But now that you mention it, why would the CEO tell you what you told me yesterday?

      Eh. Mike shrugged. Everyone will figure it out anyway, what with Angie doing so much talking around here, eh Angie-baby?

      Angela suppressed an eye-roll and pushed her focus into her monitor. Surely, Mike called everyone baby just to say it to her. Men liked to dream in here, and Angela could cook the ocean if she fell in. The cubicle walls looked like carpets men wanted to roll around on with Angela. The actual carpet resembled gray clouds. Sadly, they never sailed away. Workers had to dream.

      Besides, Mike added, even if the whole staff spoke up, the company would replace us like the lunchroom toaster. They’ve got this health system bloated enough to grow a military branch if needed. They can do whatever they want now.

      Mundle stared at the doldrum ceiling as he spoke. So we take our paying clients, drug addicts desperate to survive, and give them the treatment to cure their addictions, all the while using subliminal voice messaging to make them relapse. And we do this covertly to every client we get after Big Friday’s software installment.

      Yep, Mike said. More money, baby. The beast wants to eat.

      But the scheme will leak out, Mundle said.

      Won’t matter. The system can adsorb the cost. The beast will endure. Heck, the public could find out, and our PR crew will cook up a more scandalous story in some other industry to mitigate this one.

      Mundle took a fake sip from his empty coffee mug. He stretched to feign calmness. He resisted spinning side to side in his office chair. The inevitability of the system growing into a monster didn’t bother him. One man couldn’t stop that. Rather, he just hated picturing the whole staff gathered on Big Friday to celebrate slow-going mass murder. They’d all chant the numbers as the conference room’s looming countdown clock ticked down to zero. Then they’d clap, pretending they had spent the last fiscal quarter upgrading software for efficiency and better service. Everyone would stand and celebrate the surreptitious betrayal of society’s weakest.

      The men might feel a fleeting slyness, a sick inward grin from partaking in villainy. The women would decide which staff to make privy of the secret beforehand. They’d make a pecking-order game of it.

      The system can’t eat everything, Mundle said. His fingers typed, and his eyes made those regular, passionate glances at the clock. No matter how inevitable this scheme, the boys in Regulation want money too.

      Big Friday’s upgrade will leverage the new privacy laws, Angela finally said. Not even regulators have the right to look at the code and its machinations.

      You got it, baby, Mike said.

      Mike smiled and resumed typing. Mundle reclined and feigned relaxation. All this faking of coolness started to feel like breathing exercises that did nothing, nothing for real. The Carelife Core slogan knocked on his retinas again, as it did all day, from the bottom-left corner of his screen: Have you tried the Mountain?

      At precisely 12:00, the oval vent under the clock hissed out its drug fog. Though invisible, the gas seemed apparent enough to Mundle as it diffused over him. The sedative tackled his senses with that familiar touch of the noon routine. It felt like anti-coffee, then more like a mudslide of cerebral black dust.

      Mundle, Mike, and Angela reclined on their office chairs in unison. Padded armrests popped out like owls’ wings from behind the backrests. Footrests rose on hidden hinges.

      Mundle tried to appear as hypnagogic as the others. He tried not to flare his nostrils visibly while hyperventilating. Alas, the conversation, and perhaps a bit of Angela, distracted him. He had forgotten to inhale deeply enough at 11:59:59. When the gas hit his lungs, he struggled inwardly but failed as usual to hold his breath long enough. The drug soon conquered his brain.

      As usual, he lay unconscious with his coworkers for their 30-minute prelunch break.

      WE HERE AT CARELIFE Core have taken the mountain indoors, Angela said during the tour on the following workday.

      She led Mundle and seven other newbies into the pitch black hallway. The office geeks sauntered after her, trying to look impressed. At least one of them knew how the lighting worked here in the Mountain Hall, but Mundle didn’t. He only knew the air smelled faintly of urine and multivitamins. The staff could see themselves illuminated as perfectly as in daylight, but nothing else.

      They watched Angela’s swaying curves. Even her shoulder blades did a little dance down the black-as-tar hallway. The floor felt hard under Mundle’s loafers, though he knew it could bend. When switched on, the pliable mat would roll under the floor on a giant treadmill. They could walk the Mountain Hall all day without advancing, following Angela on the new-guy tour. Most of them probably wanted to.

      Angela continued her speech. "Just eight years ago, people died regularly using the mountain method. Drug addicts of every variety actually paid to get airlifted to one bluff or another. They took food, water, and their desire to quit on a journey of abstinence to the ground. It lasted too many days for some. The mountain gave them two choices: trek down with their agonizing withdrawal symptoms, or jump off and die. Addicts either quit cold turkey or quit their whole lives. Roughly 64 percent chose the latter.

      "But here at Carelife Core, we turn every loser into an automatic winner. Clients can’t jump off our mountain. They each commit to a four-week walk, or they don’t reach the door. Meet Mr. Lynds."

      The man called Mr. Lynds looked like a small crumpled heap far down the hall. He expanded to an adult-size crumpled heap as the workers approached. Mundle saw nothing else in the blackness, so he stared at the languished Mr. Lynds. Angela could use a break from his staring anyway.

      The lanky man wore only a diaper, a straitjacket, and a helmet which looked like the moon. The buckled-on headgear had about eight inches of padding and a clear face shield. A rectangular tunnel through the foam led to Mr. Lynds’s eyes. The face in there had warped into a permanent cry. The mouth hung open. Mundle wondered if the rictus could close at all anymore.

      That mouth would need to take in plenty more air to reach the end of the Mountain Hall. The unseen exit waited a tormenting 16 meters away. It would remain at that distance no matter how fast Mr. Lynds ran.

      For company tour time, Mr. Lynds now leaned on the black wall, medicated with a mild paralyzer. Someone probably doped him down for a diaper change too. His bony bare legs hardly stirred. They tried knotting themselves to kill the shakes and boredom. A nasogastric tube ran from his left nostril up

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