If you are armed and are at the Glenmont subway station, please shoot me.



Shoot straight in the head, in the high, a little under the corner down. I need the bullet to go the shortest path through my brain to the hippocampus. If I’m lucky, I’ll feel the bullet breaking my brain for a few decades.



I know it sounds awful, but you will do me a great service. To die from a shot as quickly as possible is the best thing that can happen to me right now.



My trial began about ten thousand years ago, at 10:15 this morning. I work by participating in clinical trials of drugs. I’m the so-called “subject” who takes unchecked drugs so doctors can study side effects. Once it was a medicine for the kidneys, several times – something from pressure or to lower cholesterol. This morning I was told that the medicine I took was a nootropic that improved the brain.



I have never felt any effect from these medications. In other words, none of the drugs that I was tested, did not shake me, did not relax, and did not work at all. Maybe I’ve always been in the placebo group, but I didn’t feel anything anyway.



Today everything was different. This shit worked. I was given a pill at 10:15 and then asked to wait in the reception room until I was called for a few tests. “Only 30 minutes,” the laboratory nurse said to me. I sat down on the couch in the reception room and read a couple of articles from Psychology Today magazine from the coffee table. I was not invited back to the office, so when I finished this magazine, I took US News and read it from cork to cork. Then I read the old issue of Scientific American. What are they doing there for so long?



I looked at the wall clock. It is only 10:23. I read all three magazines in eight minutes. I remember thinking that day would be long. I was right.



There was a small shelf with old books. When I stood up to approach him, it seemed like my legs barely worked, not in the sense that they became weak, but as if they became slow. I stood up from the couch for a minute and walked to the shelf for another two minutes, though it was only two steps before it.



Of all the books on the shelf, I chose Tomic Moby Dick. I had the same problem with my hands as I had with my legs: I had stretched to the book for an eternity and even had time to get bored while waiting for my hand to touch its cover.



I pulled back to the couch and fell on it, as if in slow action. It reminded me of astronauts jumping on the moon under low gravity conditions. There I discovered Moby Dick (slowly) and started reading from the phrase “Call me Ismail.” I was able to get to the point where Ahab threw his trumpet into the sea (this is his mother, chapter thirty) when I was called for the tests.



The laboratory asked me:



How do you feel?



and slowly.



In fact, it is the opposite. You think the world around you is slow because you are fast.



But what about my feet? My own hands? It was like slow action.



You think your body is moving slowly because your brain is working much faster. Now it works 10-20 times faster than usual, so you think and process incoming signals with acceleration. Despite this, the movements of your body are limited by the laws of biomechanics. In fact, you are moving faster than the average person, but your brain is so ahead of action that even your acceleration seems to you very slow.



I thought about my slow fall on the couch. Even if my muscles worked slowly, I would still obey the laws of gravity, but I even fell slowly. The slowed muscles could not explain why gravity seemed weaker. My brain was 10 times more active, so I read 30 chapters of Moby Dick in 15 minutes.



I passed several tests. Physically it was fun to go: I jongled with three balls, then four, and then six. It was easy because all six balls moved very slowly. In fact, it was even boring, having to wait for each ball to fly on its own trajectory to put a hand under it (still slow) and throw it back again. They threw corn rings into the air, and I caught them with sticks for food. They also poured out a handful of coins, and I counted the total before they touched the ground.



The cognitive tests were no longer so fun, but cognitive. Find a word in a text of fifty (three seconds). Pass the intricate labyrinth on the sheet A1 (two seconds). Detailed answers to questions about the presentation, which I was shown at a rate of 10 images per second (95% correct).



I was told I had more than 250 on the Knopf scale. This is beyond any human outcome.



Then I was sent home. I was told that the effect of the medicine will pass in an hour in two. “You will feel like a few days have passed. Try using this to your advantage – respond to work emails while you’re in accelerated mode!”



The trip home was horrible. There were only three metro stations, which now took about 35 minutes, but in my new, accelerated reality, it took a few days. A few days. I only walked from the office and to the elevator for about an hour! Although I ran as hard as I could, the laws of biomechanics were stronger than me. I can’t force my legs to move at the speed of my brain. This gap between body and mind did not allow me to correctly assess the position of the body in space, and accordingly, to react to the surrounding environment. In fact, I have become an impenetrable giant. I miscalculated my speed and crashed into the wall of the elevator with all my strength. Despite the fact that I saw how far away the wall was from me, I could not stop and pull my finger away in time by pressing the lift button, so I ticked into it too hard. too much. It was very painful. If my brain worked normally, I would feel pain for thirty seconds, but in my state, it lasted for 30-40 minutes.



The lift was disgusting. At four o’clock, or five o’clock, I went down to the seven floors, looking over the walls of the elevator.



I got to the subway — honestly, it was even fun. Even though I was moving super slowly for myself, I could still choose where to put my legs, how to move my hands, and how to turn. Two quarters later, I adjusted to this imbalance between mind and body, and then I was like dancing all the way to the subway, lavishing between people on the sidewalk and avoiding passing cars with a gap of just a few inches (read: minutes).



I went down the ladder for an hour, ran on the platform, and then incredibly missed all six minutes while waiting for my train. Of course, unlike the elevator, there was something to see here, but I had time to get bored. I should have taken that Tommy Moby Dick with me.



My rainbow train arrived at the station. The usual metro brake screw, high enough, in my speed perception turned into a long low sound, something like a monotonous solo on a tube. Three octaves below began to sound not only the sound of the brakes of the subway train, but also all the other sounds, almost on the brink of the unheard. I could not hear the voices, they became much below the perceived frequency range. I was able to hear a baby crying in the subway car — her cries slowed so slowly that they reminded me of whale singing. Other sharp sounds, such as car cranks or the drizzling of trucks passing through the crabs, became deaf scatterings of a distant thunderstorm.



Even at the research center, I could talk to staff and hear them clearly, but now it has become impossible. The effect of the medication only increased.



I spent a few days on that fucking train. A few. of days. Listening to the whale songs of a screaming baby and solo on the brake tube. Even though the voices went out of the range of frequencies I perceived, the smells I felt were the same as before: I felt the smell of bodies, the smell of train brakes, the smells of curtains and other wonderful smells of the subway wagon.



I finally got to my apartment. Running from the threshold to a large room at full speed felt like a slow descent on the waters of a lazy river.



I was so happy to finally be home. At least there was something to do. I grabbed the “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which I recently started, and read it. I scrolled pages so fast that I broke some of them, but despite this speed, I still scrolled more than I actually read. Three minutes have passed since I came back.



Then I stuck on the internet (lords, modern computers are on just eternity), but the internet was annoyingly slow. The new page loaded for about an hour — and I took a fraction of a second to read it. Hundreds of read articles from the tape - and three more minutes. All of.



I started reading books from my must-read list, and I read two. Four more minutes passed.



Maybe if I fall asleep, the effect of the medicine will pass? But unfortunately, the part of the brain responsible for the perception accelerated by the drug was not responsible for sleep. Despite the fact that I didn’t sleep for a few days (as it felt), my body still thought it was 1:25 days, and it didn’t want to sleep.



Despite this, I tried to get myself to fall asleep: I went to the bedroom (a relentless 45-minute walk through the entire apartment) and rushed to bed (like a peanut descended on the mattress), closed my eyes and lay down for hours (10 minutes in real time) until I gave up. The dream did not go. It all went to the fact that for a few days, or even weeks, I would be locked in this slow prison.



So I took Zolpidem. From the feeling that the pill and the water I drank the pill moved inside my throat, I got sick. Stopping to breathe, like a snail crawling down the esophagus.



I read the book. 10 minutes have passed. I read the second. Eighteen minutes after taking Zolpidene. In anger, I threw the book through the whole room — it flew slowly and gracefully through the air, like a leaf in the wind, and crashed into the wall with a barely audible long hole — it was the first sound I seemed to have heard in hours — and then slipped to the floor, drowning like a hammer in the water. Gravity has obviously not changed since the morning, the laws of physics remained the same. Only my perception of time went crazy, which means that I can measure the effect of medicine by relying on the speed of things falling. Given how long the book slipped to the floor, I realized: the effect of the drug was still increasing.



I read the magazine. Turn on the TV. Disappointedly looked at each frame of the video, like a slide show. Shut off the TV.



Read a little more. I read the first two volumes of Churchill’s “History of the English-speaking peoples” – not an easy read. It was actually disgusting to read, but given that taking another book from the shelf would take a few intolerably boring hours, just sitting down and reading Churchill was better. Or at least not much worse.



It has been 35 minutes since the reception of Zolpidene. I lay on the couch, closing my eyes. The time went. Breathing is a long process. The time went. Exit – a few more hours.



I do not. could. to sleep.



A new plan was needed. I decided to go back to the research center where I was given this medicine. Suddenly, they have something that can overcome such a side effect. Well, or some sleeping pill, so that I just sleep all the time until the action passes.



I left the apartment as quickly as I could — a few hours to my senses, and didn’t even close the door. It would take too much time.



Down the stairs (much faster than in the elevator if you run), through the hallway and finally out. A long day in the office.



Down the street, lavishing between passers. Probably they thought I was moving with inhuman dexterity. The first step that leads down to the subway. The staircase. to the second flight. And then Zolpidem acted.



I did not want to sleep. Absolutely. On the contrary, probably, the action of Zolpidene was mixed with the effect of the experimental drug that I took in the morning. I ran down the stairs, moving slowly, but still feeling the movement, and then – the bat! Everything stopped.



The street was boring, the metro noise disappeared. I was surrounded by a perfect silence like I had never heard before. Before the action of Zolpidem, my sense of time slowed down, probably once in a hundred. And then a thousand times. Each second lasted days. Even the movement of the eyes, any attempt to turn the gaze, felt like a slow slide through the field of sight.



I was learning to walk, run, and jump all day, with my brain working hundreds of times faster than my body, but after the slowdown that Zolpiden gave me, control over my body became almost impossible. I fell from the stairs. Even though I was stuck in the middle of the step, I could absolutely not control my muscles. Mindfully, I commanded my leg to move forward — it took hours, and then back, if I thought I would miss the next step. The clock was used to adjust how bent my ankle was, and the clock was used to bend it differently if it didn’t work out the first time.



Despite all my attempts, I turned my ankle to the next step. Slowing a drop did not ease the pain. Several hours of uninterrupted pain in the leg. Therefore, the nerve signals of pain that come to the brain do not work like the nerves in the ears. The sounds stretched over time, dropping to the point of being unable to perceive them, and the pain did not change over time. It took many hours of increasing pressure on my leg as I carried the weight on it. hours of increasing pain.



I fell forward, unable to control my slow body. Days went by before I slipped down, trying to spread the body so as not to hit the ground with my head. I succeeded – I hit my shoulder. At first I didn’t even feel the blow, but the pressure grew as the pain grew – hour after hour. The shoulder could not withstand and flew out of the joint with one endless rush. A few days later I stopped, rolling down on the ground and looking into the towel. My shoulder hurt as hard as it did at the time of the attack. I had enough time to think about everything in the world during this fall. If every second lasted like a day, every minute of real time took years. Even if the effect of the drug ends in two or three hours, for me this nightmare will last for several centuries.



By the time I fell on the floor, I had a plan. You have to get to the platform and get under the train.



I tried to get up on the four but overestimated the strength with which I had to turn and moved on my back. His shoulder had been sick for a few days and was just begging for mercy. The second attempt – I fell face down trying to understand how to control a body that moves slower than grass grows. A few weeks of fruitless attempts — and I finally got up on my knees. If I managed to get up on the four with such difficulty, I won’t be able to go or run. So I slipped — I slipped down the metro station, watching the disturbing people around me for weeks, slipped down under the turniket and onto the escalator.



At the peak hour, the escalator moved at the speed of a glacier slipping into the sea. As I went down on it, I looked at a crowded platform. On the sign that tracks the trains, it was written that the next train would arrive in 20 minutes. Twenty minutes is a whole year for me. I will have to sit in the subway station for a whole year, waiting for death. I slipped off the escalator for a few days, looking at the worried faces of office workers. I managed to add up to the bench and bend next to it, trying to find such a position not to disturb the painful shoulder.



But the situation worsened as much as possible.



The slowdown on the stairs was only the beginning of the interaction between the experimental drug and Zolpidene. And now they began to interact in full force. I blinked, and years of darkness followed. I had no hearing anymore, but whispering, I lost sight. Years of absolute darkness and silence, filled only with pain in the damaged shoulder.



My accelerated brain filled the emptiness from sensory deprivation as much as I could. They were speaking with me, they were singing in non-existent languages. Patterns, faces, colors flashed before my closed eyes. I remembered my whole life and invented another. I forgot English. I fell into despair. Praying to God. became God. I created a new universe in my imagination and brought it to life. And so again, and again, and again.



The eyes opened with the slowness of the tectonic plates. Weeks were light flashes, weeks were flashes of light, weeks were narrow spots through which I could look at the subway platform: the ankles of the passengers near me and the ad on the other wall.



I got my phone out of my pocket — an action that took decades. How can I describe this unbearable boredom? Even the pain in the shoulder is not comparable to her. I thought of every thought that could come to my mind, not once. The advertisement on the opposite wall did not change and the ankle of people did not move. Absolutely. The boredom was so saturated that it seemed to be touched, as if stone and metal rings were compressing my brain. It was impossible to escape from it.



What could I do? If I jump off the platform without waiting for the train to crash, I will not die. I will experience endless pain, stronger than falling from the stairs, but most likely someone kind will save me before the train arrives, and I will not be able to do anything when the train actually appears.



My suffering will be endless.



So you have to wait for the train to get under it. When he strikes me, I’ll feel like I’m being torn apart for centuries before I die and it all ends. I have lived hundreds of lives on this bench. My soul is much older than any human being who has ever lived on Earth. Most of my life is outbreaks of pain in a twisted shoulder, lying on a subway platform and watching the same thing: ads and someone’s legs.



This post is my plan B. My last prayer. My own adventure. I spent several lives printing this post hoping that someone would read it and make sure that my suffering had to end. Someone who is now on this platform. Someone who finds a man lying next to a bench who has recently slipped down the ladder. Someone who will kill this man as soon as possible. Shot in high.



If you are armed and are at the Glenmont subway station, shoot me.