Sleep! It does a body wonders!
Sleep! It’s what your soul requests!
Sleep! It’s owned by purple elephants working in their gardens and I’m right in the middle of helping one plant some bacon
when BANG my alarm goes off right in my ear, in my head, and I’m awake and overdrawn on my account.
Goddamnit. I shouldn’t have hit the extend button. It usually gets weird fast, especially when the commercials start replaying inside my head. The last thing I need when I’m asleep is to dream about Sleep. That’s just recursive.
The day goes by, and it goes by slow. It always does after I overdose. I spent the morning weirdly chipper and hyperactive.
“Hi Julie!”
“hiiiii….”
Halfway through I started getting crabby and twitchy.
“Julie can you take your GODDAMNED MUG OFF MY DESK?”
“….’kay.”
By the evening I’m almost back down to something more slumped and normal, but deeply resentful about it.
“Gbye…”
“…Yep. Fuggoff.”
That’s usually when I go out and buy more. After a full night on Sleep, I’ll do anything to get back to it. Anything.
Except that was the day my wallet ran dry.
I’d known this day would come. One too many nights on one too many Sleep doses. One time too many slamming the extended rest button and going through three extra hours of restless hallucinations that felt like ten minutes.
I’d known it would come. But I’d never stopped moving towards it either.
And, as I grabbed the biggest knife in the kitchen, I realized that I’d also more or less been planning for this. Somehow.
The drug store was manned by a wall-eyed sloth of a creature, half-lidded and sluggish.
“Yeaah?”
“Gimme Ssleep!” I blurted out, brandishing my weaponry in their face. “Gimmeme noww!”
“Jeez,” said the Sleeper, blinking with the speed of a striking glacier. “’Kay. Don’t uh. Don’t….make such a big deal. Sure. Whaddyawannagain?”
I focused.
“Sleep!”
“Diet..?”
“No!”
“Liime?”
“Nuh-uh!”
“…Zero?”
“Fugoff! Sleep! Plain! Now!”
“Sure. Righ’. Righ’ here.”
He opened the drawer, counted out three capsules six times each, gave up, and handed some amount of them to me, who put them in my face.
“Donegonowhere,” I said, waving my arms around with intense intimidation. “I’mmmagetcha.”
“Surrreee,” said the Sleeper.
And bonk, I was out.
I don’t remember precisely how much Sleep I got out of that, but it was enough for me to have no dreams at all. I woke up CRACKLING inside, like a bottle of lightning, and realized three things immediately.
First, I was holding a large spoon, not a knife.
Second, that the Sleeper must have forgotten what I’d done and failed to call the police.
Third, that I would probably rather die than go through another day not feeling like this.
I sat up, rubbed my back, went through three completely unlocked and unguarded doors marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY” and “HIGH SECURITY” and filled up one of my socks with Sleep capsules.
“Where’s the truck come in?” I asked the security guard watching me.
“Uhmmmmm,” he said. It was all he’d said since I’d gently shouldered past him.
“Just point,” I said.
“Uhmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” he deferred.
But he did point. Sort of. And when the truck came in, so did I, and when the truck rolled out, so did I.
Inside it, staring at the ceiling, I batted aside the driver’s slow-moving inquiries. And I thought. I thought about Sleep.
I thought about enough Sleep to fill the oceans and drown the forests.
I thought about enough Sleep to empty my head and drive away the stuffing inside.
I thought about enough Sleep to have some EVERY. DAMNED. DAY.
Maybe every night, too!
And I got so excited that I took some more Sleep and conked out.
The trip was forty miles and took a mere three days. Would’ve been even shorter if I hadn’t gotten impatient and taken over the wheel, breaking every speed record I’d ever heard of and crossing the last twenty miles in a blistering half-hour.
The Sleep plant was long, dark and cold. It was defined mostly by where it wasn’t. This wouldn’t have disturbed me if I wasn’t so tanked up on Sleep that I could tell what was normal and what wasn’t.
The security was tight here. It took me over three minutes to persuade the front desk I was the CEO, and even then they kept getting suspicious and asking me again every time I got them to open a door for me. They’d been well-trained. Sometimes their eyes even focused.
Still, they got me into the boardroom, no questions asked. I had the keys to the kingdom, and there was only one problem: the boardroom was full of people.
Sixteen chairs. Each occupied by an executive as aged as he was devious, as devious as he was cunning, as cunning as he was clever, and as clever as he was poor.
None of them were very poor.
And none of them were very awake. Sleepyheads, the lot of them. Blissfully napping even at work, in their chairs, in their suits. My god, the decadence of it nearly made me gag.
And then the security chief, who’d been unsettlingly attentive since I opened the door, pointed at the head of the table and said “heeeeeey……..THA’S the. C. The see ee. The oh”
I gently pushed him aside and ran like the dickens.
Lost ‘em all at the first intersection, but god, I kept running just for the novelty of it. I could coordinate BOTH limbs at once while pumping my arms! Pure sorcery!
I understood them, those blackhearted bastards in the boardroom. I understood why they would wallow in their own product like this. I’d do it too.
A bland, watery alarm honked out across the facility grounds some time later. Smelled like dead seals and dim caution.
It woke me up. I hadn’t really needed the nap, but the boardroom had eaten at me, and running wore a body out. Besides, nobody had opened the maintenance closet I found in at least a year.
I took a mop and bucket with me, and every time I saw someone point at me I turned to them and said “janitor” in a very authoritative voice until they went away.
This worked until I got to the production floor, at which point I was stopped by the security chief again.
“You’re no’ janit. or.”
“You caught me. I’m the infiltrator.”
“Ahhh!”
“April fools.”
“Huhhh?”
“I’m actually the CEO. You’re fired.”
“Ahhhh!”
“April fools. Let me in.”
While he was figuring that one out I took his keys and locked him out. He was worryingly competent, and what I was about to do here could do without that sort of thing.
The production floor was six football fields long, five baseball fields wide, taller than six basketball courts stacked up on top of each other, and had a little computer terminal the size of a tennis racket sitting in the middle of it and absolutely nothing else.
Was this really what I wanted to do? Surely I could just leave the room, get rid of the executives (push ‘em out a window or something? Sleeping was a dangerous business), and take the place over. Nap sixteen times a day. Seventeen. Rule the world with a furiously clear head. Take their money, give them paltry handfuls of Sleep. Let everyone else shuffle around half dead and bleary.
My god, imagine the size of the bed I could make on that boardroom table.
I opened the computer, tried ‘password,’ tried ‘123’, tried ‘abc’, tried ‘12345’, then picked it up and put it in the bucket and bashed it with the mop handle until everything was crunchy.
At some part an alarm went off and started making drawn-out ‘yorpp’ noises, but nothing seemed to happen.
I walked outside past snoring people, curled in every corner, drooling at every desk. The highways were parking lots; the offices were nurseries, and by the time I’d gotten back home I was exhausted as hell.
Seven AM. A weird time to end my day. Would there be a normal one again?
Oh well. I’d sleep on it.