Brave New World

(based on Aldous Huxley's book "Brave New World") Human hatchery Clink clink clink clink... Test tubes prattling past along the chrome plated production line. Glistening under fake fluorescence humming in harmony with the magnetic motors of conveyors, centrifuges and camshafts. Biological blobs of gamete goo, vials of vile biology, a tempest of sperm and ova, neatly confined to a pyrex womb. Organised, sanitised, harmonised. Fordist fertilisation. All equal under Ford. Or at least until your fate and fortune are forced and fixed at forty metres. Not nature (abhorrent), not nurture (disgusting), not what you know, not who you know, but the viability of your cell. Destiny by DNA. What will you be? An Alpha Aryan? A Gamma gopher? A mass produced Epsilon? Will you be genetically enhanced? Or poisoned and asphyxiated? Perhaps you'll be discarded as excess bio-matter by the second trimester at ninety metres? Or survive to be hatched at one fifty metres? Neatly sown along furrows of sterile steel cots. Rows and columns, ranks and files, levels and floors of battery babies. Chemically conditioned, weaned on sleep whispering, embracing their place in a perfect society. United by soma! (a gram is better than a damn) Disease designed away! All praise Ford! Everyone is happy! But nothing is perfect. Bernard is cursed. Excess embryonic alcohol injected at one twenty metres. Someone wasn't paying attention. Industrial accident. Disruptive misfit. Unhappiness. Beta's hypnopedic haikus Alphas lead the way Grey matter, grey uniform Alphas rule wisely Betas work less hard Mulberry clad skilled workers Glad I'm a Beta Gammas are stupid Wearing green! Ugly as trees! Ignore the Gammas Deltas are dummies Khaki clones, oxygen starved Bokanovsky batch Epsilon primates Brutish, black robed underclass Disposable drones John's suicide soliloquy To be or not to be? I cannot be. So I decide not to be. How can I be noble and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when the arrows have been broken and the slings put aside by this ugly utopia? Should I shuffle off this mortal coil and enter the eternal sleep perchance to dream without soma? Will I enter paradise paid for many fold with barb wire and thorns, with torments and trials, with utter utter heartbreaking longing? What sense does this make when paradise lies at my feet that I've not suffered enough to deserve? How can I earn the love of the woman I love when she gives her love so freely to myself and others who scantly earn the meerest slither of her golden fruit? Love so sweet to the lips but diluted by banality and promiscuity to the tasteless sterility of boiled water. Yet I still yearn. And when I attain my unimagined dream I reject her with anger and sow the seeds of confusion in her innocent eyes and watch the weeds of fear choke her very essence. What demons have hatched from my soul? What has this world manufactured in my heart? And so I seek solace in solitude. A lonely lighthouse keeper in a stormless sea of soma civilisation. Absolution with abject poverty, the stings of self flagellation barely noticed against my rented heart. The madness of mixed up mantras. Yet retribution comes from a hornet's nest of helicopters carrying the inane. Spectators of the spectacle. Curious about the curiosity. Fascination with the forbidden. Cultures sparking across electrodes. Moths drawn to taboo's acetylene flame. I curse them! I curse them all! I was born savage, then made savage. Marooned on Prospero's isle by insanity's tempest. I can brew and boil and billow and burn and cast down purifying bolts against the outside world. One asylum to another. Never knowing peace. O brave new world, that has such people in it. But this world is not for me. Notes: BNW society is divided into five major classes. From highest to lowest: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon Original BNW quote - sleep conditioning for Betas - "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta." Bokanovsky is a fictional process of human cloning - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokanovsky%27s_Process Hypnopedia is the process of sleep learning - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep-learning Gametes are cells used in reproduction (sperm and ova) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamete Soma is a drug mass produced by the BNW government - citizens are sleep conditioned to become addicted "a gram is better than a damn" is a BNW mantra used by its citizens to encourage non-conformists (i.e. are unhappy) to take soma John was a savage rescued from a reservation by Bernard Marx for his own political agenda. Bernard Marx was a physically and mentally imperfect Alpha misfit reportedly caused by excess alcohol injected into his embryo during his hatching. John's soliloquy is a parody of Shakespeare's "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet. Since John learnt to read from an old copy of Shakespeare's works, this seemed appropriate. In BNW, Henry Ford is revered as a god - the Christian cross is replaced with a T (as in the model T Ford, an early affordable mass produced car). Written 10th April 2017 Entry to "brave new world" contest