Sententia
Chapter 1
Once upon a time, everything ended. In the year 3150, the world reached its final demise. For centuries, humans attempted to create a world where their lifestyles were sustained by machines. These machines did all their work for them and served as the mechanical slaves of the 21st century. Technology grew such that people did not even have to attend school or work anymore. They were free to live each day as they pleased. Some scholars would hoped that humans would indulge themselves in literature and grow intellectually, but this was not the case.
In 2890, Scientists discovered a way to extract all feelings that people experienced and infuse them into a pill. In the beginning, two types of pills were created. The red pill contained all the good feelings of the world. The feelings of happiness, contentment, love, and joy were all combined into a single emotion that sent the user into an unimaginable state of euphoria. This pill came to be known as Valvae. On the other spectrum of emotion, the blue pill, was infused Sadness, Grief, Anger, and Jealousy. This pill was known as Verum.
The general idea behind creating both kinds of pills was so that humans could finally choose the emotions they felt. For centuries, man felt jealousy when his wife spoke to another man. These pills provided him with a choice. He could choose not feel jealous by taking Valvae, or he could take Verum and deal with the reality of his wife’s possible infidelity. When scientists first did these studies, they did not consider the psychological aspects that these tablets implied. A man by the name of Jack Lefroy was one of the few psychologists who still practiced during that time. Lefroy warned against the possible problems that these drugs may cause, but was ignored by the scientific community due to pressures from corporate companies to invest financially in this new drug.
As companies began to mass-produce Verum and Valvae, distribution centers were built and people flocked by the hundreds to take their first doses. At first, people experimented with both kinds. Some days they took Valvae, and other days they took Verum. As time passed, people realized that they did not want to be sad for a day, when they could be happy every day. They began to take more Valvae, and the usage of Verum decreased exponentially. Within a decade, Verum was taken off the market and Sententia, the center for emotion control, became the sole provider of Valvae. Humans had become accustomed to feeling happiness and as decades passed, they became foreign to emotions like anger and sadness. Soon, laws were passed requiring citizens to take a daily dose of Valvae so that they could remain calm and collected on a daily basis. After taking Valvae for years, many became dependent on it. Those who did not take Valvae for more than twenty-four hours began to show symptoms of dementia and often confused anger with happiness, sadness with joy, and could not differentiate from one emotion to the next. Life it seemed was not without a sense of irony. The pill that was meant to give humans control of their emotions ended up causing the loss of all control, in the end.
Chapter Two
On February 15th, 3140, the center for emotion control experienced a devastating fire that burned all the records and machinery involved in producing Valvae. People attempted to recreate the formula for Valvae but did not succeed. Their lack of education, knowledge, and understanding of the world around them had diminished significantly since the creation of the miracle pills. Humans in the 31st century were no longer concerned with discovering and learning, they rejoiced in entertainment and celebrations, instead of intellect and literature. And so it came that Valvae could no longer be produced. Weaker versions of it were concocted from left over samples, but the required dose that people needed in those days was twice as much as the older samples contained. Scarcity grew throughout society, and chaos ensued. Murders in the name of happiness were made. Children stole doses from their parents. Parents stole doses from their children. Many committed suicide from the dementia that they experienced during withdrawal, several others simply took their lives so they did not have to suffer being off the drug. Thousands of people became diagnosed with severe liver conditions and often died within months of going off the required dose. By 3150, all that remained of the human race was a husband and wife by the name of Anacto and Aurora.
Chapter Three
Anacto and his wife Aurora had managed to survive by splitting up their doses into small amounts for many years. They were the only people left in the world after “The Great Shortage”. They had been struggling to stay alive for many weeks. One night, their ration of Valvae ran out. Anacto was forced to leave his wife behind and search the abandoned city for Valvae before his wife ran out of doses completely. Aurora was pregnant with his child and could not survive on small doses anymore.
In that day and age, a woman had to be happy in order to survive giving birth. Anacto, being the brave man that he was, set out into the concrete jungle. He was a very strong, loyal, and ambitious man who was prepared to sacrifice anything for the survival of his wife. Anacto was a rare breed of man that had survived through the generations, he was very close to what humans were like before the release of Valvae. Aurora was also considered unique for her times. She enjoyed reading, painting, and writing poetry. Who they were as people was what made them survive as long as they did. Their souls were intellectually nourished long before they took pills of any kind.
It had been three moons since Anacto had left his wife, to search the streets for doses. Aurora had been having contractions the entire morning, and as the sun set she began to wonder if Anacto would ever return. She managed to survive through the night but as the sunrise began, so did her labor. For hours she screamed in agony and pain, eliminating any good emotions she might have had left in her body. As she held her newborn in her arms, she uttered the infant’s name with her last breath, “Emergo, may time be with you, my son.” Anacto did not end up returning to his family, for he had bravely fought lions in an attempt to break into the abandoned building of Sententia. He too, fought until his last breath and also wished that Emergo would have time as his blessing. And time was Emergo’s blessing. Time flowed over the infant’s body and turned years into minutes for the small child. He flourished into an adult within hours. Time had turned into a mysterious magic over the years.
Chapter Four
As Emergo stood up from his mother’s arms, he pushed aside the skeletal bones that still grasped his torso. Time had flown over her also. He was a perfect combination of his mother’s beauty and his father’s build, yet there was something different about him. He could not control his emotions. Feelings of sadness filled him as he realized that the remains that lay in front of him were likely to be his mother. Directly after that, he felt anger, for he would never be able to meet his mother and had no idea who his father was. He was born without the thirst for Valvae. Aurora had depleted her Valvae supply the night before she gave birth to him. Emergo had been born pure, with no chemicals affecting his mind. As the night sky crept in, Emergo looked at the stars above and wondered where he came from, and what his purpose was. He did not know, but Jack Lefroy knew exactly.
Lefroy had been the man who planted bombs in Sententia, the center for Emotion control. He made sure that Anacto and Aurora had just enough Valvae to surive until the birth of Emergo. He was the one who knew the world could no longer go on as such and took action. As he took his last dose, before passing away, Lefroy knew the world was being left in good hands. Emergo was meant to begin the world once more. He was going to discover the world with a mind free of intellectual oppression and false fantasies. He was going to be the first man of a new generation of humans. He was the creator of the new world.
*Latin Meanings:
Sententia: thought/state of mind.
Valvae: opening door.
Verum: truth.
Anacto: night.
Aurora: dawn.
Emergo: emergence.
Tags:
blue pill,
end of the world,
happiness,
idea,
metaphor,
new world,
philosophy,
recreation,
red pill,
sadness,
story,
value,
Valvae
