"Don't worry. Everything will be alright," says the doctor, draping a blanket around my shoulders before going to fiddle with a needle on a tray beside the bed. How the doctor has managed to perform this gesture, which is supposed to be caring and to comfort you, in such a mechanical, ineffectual way is beyond me. I guess you have to turn into a machine when your job is sending people to their death. You have to brainwash yourself into thinking that that is not what this is, that "the minds of the people will be in a better place." Brainwashing is the only way such an affront to the Hippocratic oath would be tolerated.
I can see the bags under her eyes as the doctor pushes the needle into the patch of my skin she had sprayed with antiseptic on my thigh, bared by shorts. Then she lays my shoulders back, forcing me into a sleeping position. I am just one of countless, forgotten faces she has performed on this past month amidst the third wave of people going into a VR. The limited workforce of doctors has been stressed with the seemingly unlimited rush of people who need the procedure to go into a VR 24/7 and their burden has perhaps been added to by thinking about the fact that soon, it is their families who will be under their blade. Living in the cities is no longer a viable option.
My toes suddenly curl up and I see red. My hands clutch at the blanket, wishing to tear it to shreds, wishing to pounce upon the doctor and scratch out her eyes.
It hits me now that this blanket was my burial shroud, laid upon me by the doctor with the mechanical precision of a funeral director. My fingers dig into the blanket until the last minute, my fists clenched and trembling, before my consciousness fades.