Gack
(page two)
Once Marshall isolated the chemicals he thought to be Gack’s active ingredient, he mixed the Gack extract with saline, producing a suspension with 100% purity. However, the dosage required to produce whatever effects it would induce was also unknown. The first series of tests were on laboratory rats that were given the drug by injection. After elapsed time the rats did not immediately die, and various tests were run to determine changes in things like blood pressure, heart rate and respiration, but the introduction of Gack into laboratory rats seemed to have zero effect on autonomic systems meaning it was unlikely that Gack was a type of stimulant or a depressant. As far as Gack’s psychoactive features, it was impossible to learn anything about that from studying laboratory rats, and to understand how new drugs affected the human brain, human clinical trials were required. Thus, Marshall’s team placed a request to assemble human test subjects to study and test the new drug.
Within a few days Marshall’s team had a lot of over a 100 volunteers ready to ingest Gack and if they survived they would be paid $500 each. Test subjects were delivered into a controlled environment designed to mimic the average person’s living room, complete with couch and lounge chairs, large flat screen LCD television with digital cable and surround sound system, video game consoles and games, a range of DVDs, and a digital sound system loaded with over a million different songs. There were also books and magazines as well as typical junk food and alcoholic or soft drink beverages. The idea being to reproduce as closely as possible the typical environment, wherein a human being might ingest and enjoy a drug.
For the test Marshall mixed the active ingredient chemical extract from the Gack plants into an inert powder then packed the powder into 1000 milligram capsules for the test subjects to swallow. Then technicians delivered the capsules to the individual test subjects inside their cubicle living quarters housed in a large building on Narcon Pharmaceutical’s campus. All 100 test subjects took the Gack pill. Marshall and others in his team could study individual test subjects by selecting from 100 closed circuit television channels, one for each test subject cubic. Likewise everything that occurred among the 100 test subjects was recorded for future study. There were also talkback microphones installed in all 100 living environments connected to a console in the observation room, where Marshall could select a given cubicle or multiple ones at once to communicate with the test subjects asking them to describe how they felt after taking the new drug.
For the first fifteen minutes after the test subjects ingested the Gack capsule, it did not appear as though Gack had a noticeable effect. All merely sat on their couch or lounge chairs quietly, most seemed to be watching something on the provided television monitors or appeared to listen to music. After a half hour it was still the same. Marshall decided to field some general questions to the group at once:
“Can you describe how you feel?”
Marshall selected a single test subject to hear his answer as the recording devices recorded everything the 99 other test subjects said in response to Marshall’s question. The test subject Marshall selected spoke:
“It’s really weird. The only way I can describe how I feel is that I feel like someone else!”
Marshall was curious:
“Can you elaborate on that please?”
The test subject replied:
“I mean it's exactly like I just said. I feel like a different person. I can’t seem to connect with my previous personality or feelings and I can’t remember any details about myself right now. I also don’t really care about anything. I don’t care about what’s on the television, I don’t care to try and listen to music, I don’t care to read anything or look at a magazine or anything else. All I want to do is sit here and vegetate and enjoy having totally escaped my own ego and my negative personal issues. It’s refreshing, feeling like someone else instead of who I usually feel like, which I can’t remember right now. Whatever this is all about I really like it, so if I could, I would probably do Gack every single day. I wonder how long that pill is going to last?”
Marshall listened to recorded responses to his question, and all the test subjects described the effects of taking Gack the same way and their reactions to the drug were all favorable, something that pleased Marshall because his personal contracts with Narcon Pharmaceuticals stated he would be paid 5% of total sales of any new drug he could bring to market that went over big. Marshall could already tell that Gack was a totally different kind of drug experience and that once the public got wind they could forget all their problems and even their own lives and feel like someone else for a change, Gack was going to dominate the designer drug markets everywhere it was sold. Marshall got his superior on the phone to tell him the good news.
LET’S GET GACKED
By 2023 the United States Food and Drug Administration functioned only as a formality. The FDA no longer required stringent clinical trials in regard to new drugs intended for human consumption and had a more practical arrangement with pharmaceutical companies. All a pharmaceutical company needed to do to get new drugs approved was pass $5 million dollars to the FDA and any sort of chemical, so long as it wasn’t lethal, could be approved. The long term health effect of a new drug was the least of anyone’s concern. Thus Narcon Pharmaceuticals made the required donation to the FDA and got their seal of approval for Gack. Now nothing stood in the way of the full scale marketing and distribution of Gack.
Soon all forms of media were inundated with advertising for Gack:
Gack was also given high priority on pharmacy shelves and was always stocked right at eye level in flashy yellow and black boxes. For the impoverished who couldn’t afford a two week supply, individual doses were sold for $10 in tiny plastic baggies with the same yellow and black label. Mothers and fathers brought home family sized bottles to share with their teenaged children, as Gack was not recommended for persons under age 12.
Due to its totally unique properties and because the effects of Gack were so different and new and because Gack did exactly as it was advertised it would, sales of Gack skyrocketed in just a matter of days as practically everyone old enough to consume Gack gave it a try. Everyone was immediately impressed with the experience of being someone else for up to 12-hours. International markets went over the same resulting in global sales reaching the 100 billion mark merely a month after Gack went to market, and doubled, then tripled within the next two months. Gack was here and here to stay.
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Melvin tried every conceivable combination of drugs even taking a dozen different drugs all at the same time, but none of them could remove his feelings of betrayal on the part of his five ex-wives, all of whom cheated on him repeatedly. Nor would the drugs allow him to forget what a loser he and his children were. All the available drugs hardly even took the edge off having to live in a totally messed up world full of equally messed up people he was forced to be polite to while selling his hotdogs, something his life depended on since he was unfit to do anything else for a living.
But then one day, a miracle of science and chemistry arrived in Melvin’s life, when he got his first bottle of Gack and took a 1000 milligram capsule. Within 15 minutes he totally forget all about his ex-wives, failed children, grotesque appearance, and miserable station in life, because Gack allowed him to escape all that and feel like a different person, and one that never had any of those nagging problems. Gack relieved Melvin so much that as soon as it wore off he took another 1000 milligram capsule so he could be someone else in his dreams, and so he could even wake up feeling like someone else. Then as the Gack wore off and his old self started creeping back into his reality, Melvin dropped yet another 1000 milligram pill and went back to being someone else again. Melvin continued taking Gack continuously for the next four months.
Melvin T. Rickets was manning his hotdog stand when his oldest son, who just got out of Joliette Prison outside Chicago, stepped off a city bus to see his father for the first time in seventeen years:
“Pop! Hey Poppy! It’s me your son, Marcus! I just got out of Joliette an hour ago! Aren’t you glad to see me, Pop? What’s the matter? Don’t you recognize me? I can’t believe that because I haven’t changed all that much while I was in the joint. C’mon, Pop, say something!”
Melvin took a good long look at the man standing in front of him, but failed to recognize him as his son or anyone else he ever knew:
“I’m sorry, pal, but I don’t know you, and probably don’t want to. You gonna buy a hotdog from me or what? There are people waiting in line behind you already!”
Marcus Rickets pleaded with the old man:
“What? C’mon Poppy, don’t be that way, I’m your own flesh and blood after all! Besides I was kinda counting on staying at your place in my old room on account I ain’t got nowhere else to go and all my old friends got thrown in the can with me and they’re still there. What do you say Pop?”
Melvin wasn’t having it:
“Listen, pal, I already told you, I don’t know youz and I don’t wanna know youz. Either you can buy a hotdog or stop bothering me and the other customers ‘cause you’re holding up the line!”
Marcus felt defeated and could only shrug and walk away perplexed. Somehow his own father refused to acknowledge him. Either that or the old man was senile and really didn’t recognize him. But Marcus couldn’t decide which. He felt like crap about it but then he saw a sign on a bus stop bench advertising a new drug called Gack. It said Gack would make him feel like a different person and he would forget all his troubles. Marcus bought a $10.00 capsule from a convenience store with his last 10 bucks and swallowed the pill. Fifteen minutes later he forgot all about the fact his father failed to recognize him and everything else that was bothering him.
Meanwhile, it was 10 P.M. and business hours for selling hotdogs were over, so Melvin T. Rickets rolled his hotdog cart to the parking lot where he left his truck and hooked the cart to the trailer hitch and drove half-an-hour to Carbondale to the house his parents left him in their will. They both died in a bizarre jump rope accident when Melvin was still a kid. He backed the hotdog stand into his garage, unhooked it then locked the garage tight. Once inside the house, he went into his bathroom, opened up the medicine cabinet and got his trusty bottle of Gack and took his second pill of the day. By then he had been someone else for so long not even the smallest shred of his previous life emerged to bother him.
Melvin received a telephone call around midnight:
“Daddy? It’s Melissa, your oldest daughter! Listen, I’m kinda in a jam right now. See, these mean city cops decided for themselves that I was a hooker and they accused me of trying to turn tricks in front of an elementary school, which means a triple fine if ya want to know, but, of course, I don’t actually know nothing about things like that; only the cops already told me about the triple fine, so anyway, this is my one phone call and I thought I would call you on account of you’re my daddy and you wouldn’t let your little girl rot in jail until her arraignment, would ya? They set my bail at 500 bucks. I know that’s a lot of money but I’ll promise to pay you back, but you gotta let me make payments. So, what do you say, you coming down to the city jail to bail me out or what?”
Melvin thought hard but didn’t recall ever having a daughter named Melissa or one by any other name. He also didn’t recall ever having been married for that matter:
“Listen, lady, whoever you think you are, or whoever’s daughter you is, it ain’t my concern. I’m sure you’re really a nice person and a good little girl, but those cops can tell the difference between normal people and whores, so if they pegged you for a whore that’s your problem not mine and I ain’t interested in coming downtown to bail someone I don’t even know out of jail. My advice to you is call someone whose gonna give a crap, because I don’t give a crap at all!”
Melvin slammed the phone down on its receiver thinking to himself how odd it was that twice in the same day two different people came up or called posing as one of his children. Melvin knew he never had no stinking kids or at least that’s what he thought because his failure to recognize or care about two of his own children was a simple matter of having been under the influence of Gack 24-hours-a-day for the past four months. The Gack erased all memory of his previous life, but what Melvin T. Rickets and billions of other people, who were doing exactly the same thing he was doing by staying on Gack on a daily basis for weeks and months at a time, didn’t know was they were not going to regain all those memories of a previous life, not even after the Gack wore off or even if they stopped taking Gack. What he and all the others didn’t know also was that chronic overuse of Gack would obliterate the user’s memories of their own lives permanently. All of these people, including Melvin were so involved in feeling like someone else and staying under the influence of Gack, that most of them failed to realize what was actually happening in their own brains and they couldn’t tell the difference even if they wanted to.
The Gack-heads forgot about their families, wives, husbands, children and all other relationships be they romantic or platonic; many of them forgot about their jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, good habits, bad habits, etc. and one and all they ignored previous responsibilities until they became men and women without a connection to the world. They began to wander around aimlessly eventually collecting in groups of people all sharing the same disconnected reality, some still popping Gack capsules, while others, who ran out of money to purchase more Gack discovered they no longer actually required Gack because they felt like someone else permanently because of all the Gack they already ingested biochemically altered their brain.
Even though Gack casualties were everywhere to be seen in all major cities and all over the world, people continued to do Gack until they too joined the Gacked-out people now numbering in the billions. Society on the whole was starting to break down because half the global population was Gacked-out and non-functioning. The people who still functioned attempted to care for the Gacked-out until they themselves became so horrified at the human wreckage, they needed some Gack to escape reality. The cycle of destruction was complete by 2025 when every single man, woman, and child escaped into Gack and became one of the eight billion ghosts. Due to a solar minimum, harsh winters set in and billions froze to death, and those that survived exhausted the remaining food supply since global food production ceased totally because there was no one left to man the farming equipment or to sow the seeds. Death was everywhere, but the Gacked-out survivors hardly noticed or cared until one-by-one the last of them starved to death, or succumbed to thirst or disease. Now a planet that once thrived with life was merely an enormous wasteland littered with billions of decomposed corpses.
THE DISCOVERY
Ten thousand years later, flying saucers occupied by small, gray, aliens arrived on Earth only to discover what appeared to be remnants of a large possibly intelligent civilization that was now extinct. The aliens were scavengers. A totally dead world full of objects they could pillage was ideal, so the aliens rejoiced over their good fortune.
X-Phap, an insignificant crew member, was the one who made the discovery. It had stumbled into the crumbling Narcon Pharmaceutical plant and found a variety of organic and synthetic based substances, which its scanner determined were compatible with the alien’s physiology. X-Phap shared its discovery among the others and they sampled the wares, but most of the substances disagreed with them, that was, until they tried some Gack. It was a fantastic major discovery for their kind. The aliens departed taking a million doses of Gack and samples of the Gack plant with them back to their home world.
enough