Breve história sobre um menino e uma menina envolvidos em um experimento e que receberam injeções para envelhecer rapidamente

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A história é contada do ponto de vista de um dos cientistas. Ele encontra os sujeitos no experimento enquanto eles jogam no laboratório antes de serem colocados no recinto que se tornará seu mundo / casa. Eles recebem injeções que os fazem envelhecer rapidamente, mas em seu falso "mundo" eles vão para a escola, namorar, casar, ter uma família e envelhecer sem saber que tudo é fabricado e não real. Seus corpos envelhecem além dos 100 anos, 120, 140 + ... O experimento é para ver o que acontecerá com os seres humanos quando eles viverem do que são capazes atualmente (105 ou 110). É uma espécie de busca pela fonte da juventude, conhecimento divino e / ou imortalidade.

As crianças crescem a pelo menos 160 ou 180 anos de idade ... suas cabeças e corpos mudam drasticamente à medida que continuam o processo de envelhecimento. A última cena é dos dois acoplamentos, então a garota parece olhar diretamente para o cientista enquanto ela olha para a câmera e morre. O horror do que os cientistas fizeram para arruinar duas vidas perfeitamente boas os choca e eles silenciosamente dissolvem o experimento.

    
por Canadian Girl Scout 23.02.2013 / 23:06

1 resposta

Isso soa como "The Time Beyond Age" da coleção de contos The Bone Forest , de Robert Holdstock.

The day before the experiment was scheduled to commence, Martin and Yvonne, our two MAA-grown subjects, were allowed into the observation laboratory for the last time.

[...]

The first stages, of course, were the familiarization procedures, and our two subjects were introduced to the closed environment that was to be their home for the rest of their natural and unnatural lives. There was something almost depressing in watching the children, conceived, grown and matured to the age of six in a Morris Artificial Amnion, now facing an incarceration in a second womb, this time for good.*

[...]

A breakthrough into what was difficult to say. The kudos for the original discovery of Chronon was not ours. The chemical of age, the simple protein that accumulates in body cells at a steady rate and dictates the phenomenon of aging, was the discovery of a Swedish biochemist seven years before. The acceleration of development, and of aging, under the influence of artificially high concentrations of synthetic Chronon, was the contribution of a Scottish behaviorist at the University of Edinburgh, four years later.

[...]

The excitement of year one hundred passed into our distant past, and over the course of weeks, then months, the enormous ages reached by the subjects failed to arouse even the slightest whimper of joy. We worked virtually full-time countering the efforts of each of their bodies to shift into a disease condition.

[...]

One corner of the laboratory was filled with neatly stacked printouts representing the last fifty years of the subjects' lives, and staring at that pile of information I realized that nowhere in its bulk could I put my finger on a single statement of feeling, of awareness. Even the sheets on which were recorded the last living moments of Martin and Yvonne were bare, sterile accounts of failing physiology and murmurings and alpha waves; there would be no account of what they thought, what they felt as death unfurled its protective wings about them.

De acordo com o artigo da Wikipedia, foi publicado originalmente em " Supernova " em 1976.

Do artigo da Wikipédia:

This is a science fiction short story describing a scientific experiment in which two subjects’ rate of aging is increased in an environment that is devoid of all disease. The subjects live for the equivalent of centuries and evolve into exaggerated archetypes of male and female. Eventually they die, but not before the perpetrator of the experiment self-administers the life-altering treatment.

    
14.12.2014 / 17:26