Short Story - The Happy Pills

Note - I've noticed an increased number of people finding this story by searching for 'pills to make you happy' or similar. This is a work of fiction, and not what you're looking for. If you are feeling particularly vulnerable, I strongly recommend you speak to The Samaritans (UK) or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (US). I hope this isn't taken as patronising, and I hope that you find whatever works best for you.

I bought my first packet of the Happy Pills two days after they became legal. I'd have bought them on the day itself, but they'd sold out everywhere. And walking down the street, you couldn't really tell. People were still working, were still rushing, but there was a slight change. Barely noticeable at first, but the closer you looked...the more you noticed that there was a bounce in more peoples steps. There were slightly more smiles on faces, slightly more animated conversation. The mood was almost infectious. 

The Happy Pills fired synapses in your brain that, normally, needed stimuli in order to fire up hard enough to push your mood. The kind of stimuli that would be caused by those few hours spent in the park, basking in the good weather with no pressures at all. The kind of stimuli that would be caused by totally unexpected, really good sex. No, you didn't feel like you'd been doing those things - but you got the same kind of good mood that I can only describe by relating it to euphoria.

It wasn't euphoria though. Euphoria tends to lead to you losing some element of control. It doesn't always, but it can do. The Happy Pills didn't. They had absolutely no negative side-effects whatsoever. They just put you in as good a mood as you could possibly be in. That was it.   

At the time, Karen and I were having problems. We'd been married for eight years, and it's fair to say that the passion had long, long since died. Sex had been non-existant for the three years prior, and it hadn't been much present after we became parents anyway. And while Karen and I were best friends as well as lovers, eight years of cabin fever were beginning to cause their problems. There was still love in our marriage, but it had been a long time since we were in love. We'd tried things to get the romance back into our lives, but it just wasn't happening.

And then the Happy Pills came out. We talked about it, about trying them. We thought they might help. And so, two days after the pills came out, we tried them. Both of us. And then we waited.

It wasn't something that happened immediately. It wasn't that noticeable, because it was subtle. We were sat talking, and after a few hours, we realised we were laughing more than we had done in a long time. It didn't seem artificial either. It was just like we'd remembered things that we liked about each other. It didn't sort everything, not immediately, but it was fun.

We took the pills daily. That weekend, we went out and just walked around Hyde Park for a few hours. It was the site of one of our first dates, and we hadn't done something like that for a long time. Just enjoyed each others company for the first time in years. The park was packed, but there was no hassle. Everyone was in a good mood.

The longer you took the pills, the more you noticed the change, and - conversely - the less it mattered. The pills had a way of just clarifying everything. It was like realising that, for the last however many years of your life, you'd been suffering from a constant migraine that finally lifted.

Within two years of the pill being launched in public, they were selling on a similar level as bread. Everybody bought them. And there were new kids turning eighteen every day, so it was an evergreen product too. A product base that was only growing.

It wasn't just Britain either. The Happy Pills were worldwide. And it was making a difference. It took a while for the wars to finish, but they did. Suddenly, religious and cultural differences stopped mattering. It was difficult to find the emotion necessary to kill someone when everyone was in a good mood.

Crime was down too. Not actually zero, but certainly at the lowest it had ever been. Perhaps it was because poverty wasn't as big an issue any more. People were happy, and didn't feel quite as much of a need to prove themselves through money any more. As a result, there were record amounts being given to charity. Although the pills made you happy, the happiness meant that people were more productive. People either found the joy that made them want the jobs they were in in the first place, or they felt more confident bout themselves, and went after the jobs they actually wanted. And rejections were a lot easier to deal with when you felt good.

And the sex. Oh God, the sex. It was amazing. And every time was good. Karen and I were back like we were in our first year of dating, rediscovering everything about each other. It was fun, it was happy.

Last year my mother died. She was in her late sixties, and she had died in surgery, in an attempt to remove a benign tumour. An infection led to her contracting an illness, and the illness killed her. The funeral was a beautiful affair, full of joy and love, as we all remembered everything that had been good about her as a person, and how much she enriched our lives. The only tears that day were tears of laughter. She would have loved it. We grieved. Of course we grieved, but it wasn't as important as remembering how wonderful her life had been.

The world had become a wonderful place. And not artificially either - the mood may have been caused by the pills, and maintained by them, but it wasn't just them. Once you were up and running, the pills just helped you keep to a certain level. The real highs were natural, and the real lows just didn't happen any more.

It was a utopia. A real utopia, right here on earth.

And then it ended.

We didn't realise that the synapses in the brain would wear out. We didn't realise that, one day, they would just stop working. It wasn't one day, all over the world or anything like that, but rather a little over six years after you started taking them.

Nobody realised for a while. The suicides of the original scientists, and the chairman of Abblexcon were puzzling, but nobody understood. They didn't tell us.

As a result, it took time for it to spread, and for people to realise what was happening. But all of a sudden, there were two classes in the world. There were those that were happy, and those that weren't. Those who had been poor in the past were still happy, since they were generally the last to start taking the pills. Those that were the first - those internet buyers - were the first large group to be affected.

There were murders. Lots of murders. There's nothing worse than watching other people constantly being happy when you're not. And there were a lot of suicides. The death toll, as it stands, is in the millions.

There are riots on the streets. Unhappiness and depression, and anger towards those that still were happy. Watching it happen was horrible, and we empathised, but we didn't understand what it felt like any more.

Until it happened to us. You remember how I told you that it felt like a migraine had suddenly been lifted? Imagine getting the migraine back, and realising that it was never, ever going to stop again.

Imagine spending the best six years of your life, and realising that the rest of your life is going to be spent living with the memory of all the good feelings, all the happiness, and realising that it's denied to you forever. Because you used a pill to burn out the part of your brain that makes you happy.

You can't understand, David. I don't expect you to understand, and I hope to God that you never understand. I need you to keep the next sentence in mind for the rest of your life. Never take them, no matter how good you're told they are. Because I love you, son, and I never want you to feel like I feel right now.

Your mother killed herself two hours ago. We had an argument and we fought. It's all my fault, and I love her, and I miss her, and I miss feeling like we used to feel, and I miss being who I was when I was with her, and I miss how much I loved her, and I miss how much she loved me. I miss my mother. I miss my wife. I will miss you so much.

My body will be upstairs, David. Don't look. Call the authorities, they have enough practice in dealing with it. Just know that it didn't hurt. And it's the only thing that can stop me feeling like this. From knowing how much I've lost.

You will never fully know how much I love you.

Your father.

Left - Short Story

I fell asleep on the sofa an hour after my wife went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night, which is always disconcerting. I stood up, noting an ache in my lower back from the uncomfortable position, and set about turning lights off and joining her in bed. They were already off, which sleepily confused me.

I quietly opened the bedroom door and crept in. One advantage of my mobile phone is that just switching the screen on gives me enough light to see where I'm walking without making enough light to wake her up. It wasn't until I was around to my side of the bed that I felt a sudden cold wave of fear and confusion flow down over my skin like ice water.

Next to my wife was someone lying in the bed, quietly sleeping.  I froze, trying to make sense of what I was looking at, and also thinking how quietly I could retrieve the cricket bat from inside the cupboard. I looked over at my wife, who was sleeping heavily, but breathing obviously. I then looked more closely at the figure's face.

I saw my own face lying on the pillow, eyes closed.

I recoiled, horrified and confused. I couldn't make sense of it. I just stood and watched the two in the bed sleep for a while. When he turned over, I could see that he was wearing the same t-shirt that I was wearing.

I walked carefully around to the other side of the bed again, and shook my wife softly. I didn't understand what was happening, but she was always my first port of call when I was upset, or when I needed to talk. She continued to sleep.

I shook her harder. She didn't wake up. I was scared about waking him up, but eventually, I couldn't bear it any more. I shouted her name, and I shook and slapped her to try and wake her up.

Nothing.

Had he drugged her or something? I went back around to my side of the bed and shook him this time. He didn't respond either. Neither of them did. I eventually screamed, but to absolutely no avail.

Not knowing what else to do, I went and sat on the sofa again. I cried out of frustration and confusion before falling asleep.

I woke to the sound of voices. She was in the kitchen while he was getting dressed, and they were discussing their day. It took me a few moments to recognise my own voice, with the slightly unusual quality of hearing it at a remove.

I raced through to the kitchen, and shouted, but she ignored me again. When he walked into the room, he didn't walk through me, but he may as well have. I was pushed easily out of the way when he brushed against me. It felt like I'd been hit by a car, and when I fell against my wife, it was like being hit hard in the opposite direction. I scrambled out of both their ways but continued talking. They couldn't hear me.

I stood up and watched him stood next to me, talking to her. He was exactly my height, my weight, wearing my clothes, speaking with my voice.

After a while, he went to work. I tried to follow, able to get onto the bus, but I lost my nerve when I got to the train station.

Instead, I trudged back to the house, and sat all day. I wasn't hungry. I didn't need the toilet. Nothing like that.

I could interact with household objects, I found. That first day, I wrote messages, but when my wife got home from work, she either didn't see them or didn't read them. The letter was treated as rubbish. The message written with her lipstick on the mirror was perfunctarily wiped off, without so much as any sense of comprehension.

I couldn't communicate with her in any way. When he came back, and they ate, I just sat and watched. When they sat on the sofa and watched television, I sat on a chair and just watched with them. Sometimes, he said the exact thing I was thinking. Watching quizzes, we would often answer the same questions.

One day, I followed him all the way to work. I wandered around the office while he worked at times, but at other times, something was nagging at me that took a long time for me to fully realise.

He was better at it than I was. He was working hard throughout the day, and seeming less distracted than I sometimes felt.

But then he was better at everything than I was. Not by much, but it was enough for me to notice. Better at exercising, better at working, better at listening and taking note of what my wife said. He was a bit neater than I was. A bit fitter. Better at making love.

Or was I just jealous of him, and looking down at myself?

I don't know, but eventually I got used to it. I became his shadow, more or less. I could spy on anyone, and find out information by myself, but I had nobody to share it with. It was so much less effort to allow him to make the decisions.

Sometimes, I sat around her while she went around her day. It felt like I was spending time with her.

Sometimes, it felt real.

One time, when I was stood in the bathroom behind him while he got ready for work, he looked in the mirror, and his eyes shifted from himself to my reflection behind me. He had never done this before. His eyes locked with mine.

And he smiled.

The Warning (Short Story)

'On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.'

I didn't take it seriously at first. In this job, you don't take things like that seriously. I had one patient tell me, every night, that the sun wouldn't come up the next morning unless a black child was killed. You don't take things like that seriously. You'd go crazy if you did. So, I thought nothing of it, gave him his medication. An hour later, he was asleep in his room.

The next day, at eleven minutes past three in the afternoon, he said it again. Word for word.

'On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.'

I would say that I thought nothing of it this time, but there was something unusual about the way he was saying it. He wasn't anguished about it. He wasn't shouting it, screaming it, or in any way frantic. He was stating it calmly, as absolute fact. The same way he would state what was on the lunch menu on a Tuesday.

Most times, when the patients come up with 'prophecies' - a word that I use very, very lightly - it's a form of transference. It comes from a fixation on something else, which they have begun to loosen their grip on. Then, with the mental energy that they were using to fixate on this thing, they obsess over something. It usually involves celebrities. Ten years ago, we were being told that Michael Jackson would die three days before he hit forty. Now, we're told that Justin Bieber will die the day after his wedding. Other times, it involves politicians, or whatever environmental threat is inthe papers. Natural disasters aren't unheard of either, but usually, whatever they fixate on, they obsess on. This wasn't the way this patient was.

I asked him why he thought this would happen. He didn't know. I asked him if he read it somewhere. He didn't know. I asked him where he got the idea from. He didn't know. He said he knew it in the same way that he knew that fire was hot. He just knew it. So, while I thought nothing of the specific points he was making, I was intrigued by the way he was saying it. It was almost like he was saying 'why wouldn't this happen?'

It quickly became part of the routine for the day. Ten a.m. - hit work. Eleven - start one-on-one sessions, one o’clock – lunch. Eleven minutes past three - earthquakes and Prague.

He didn't just say it to me - he just said it, regardless of who was around. Other patients, other doctors. He said it in exactly the same tone. And in exactly the same way it happens with everything else, once it becomes part of the routine, it stops being something important.

Until I spoke to an old colleague in London at a party. I'm embarrassed to admit that the party was a 'Friends Reunited' one. A group of twenty year old students meeting again as forty year olds. Long hair and sexually transmitted diseases replaced by two cars, two mortgages, and worrying about your own child's long hair and sexually transmitted diseases. There was flowing alcohol, and stilted conversation, until I caught up with Neil, an old classmate of mine.

Neil and I had been close friends throughout most of university, but hadn't kept in touch.  It happens. You swear you'll be lifelong friends, then promptly move to opposite sides of the country without leaving forwarding addresses. We talked for a while, and compared notes on our lives, and eventually just got drunk together. We talked about alcohol, we talked about what our hopes and goals had been, we talked about the women in our lives, and we talked about work. And then he mentioned something strange about a patient he knew.

This patient had been catatonic for three years, since she had been raped by three men. She had been in denial first, and then became withdrawn. As the court case came closer, her withdrawal became so intense that, one day, she stopped talking or moving. She was able to be moved, and she could be prompted to basic moves, but was otherwise totally catatonic. Until two weeks ago, that is. She didn't break the catatonic state for long, but she broke it for a few seconds. The few seconds it took for her to speak two sentences, her voice barely audible.

'On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake will hit Prague. It will kill two hundred and fifty thousand people.'

She said it at eleven minutes past three. For the first time, three weeks ago, and then daily, at the same time every day. It was now the nineteenth of October.

I sobered immediately. And once I told the story of my patient, so did Neil. We compared stories in more detail, and we compared notes. We couldn't find any common ground between the patients, other than the basic fact that they were dealing with mental issues - and even those mental issues had no common ground.

The next day, I drove to Neil's work, having called in sick to my own, and we spent hours discussing how to proceed. Did we believe what they were saying? Not yet. We were more interested in trying to find out why the two patients were sharing a prophetical experience. Over the next few days, we exhausted every possibility we could work out about the two people's histories. The chances of them having crossed paths were minute. And so we wasted three days. Three days closer to the twenty second of November.

We had decided to quietly begin to spread some information out. Colleagues speaking to colleagues - and two days later, we heard back from a doctor in Scotland. She, too, had a patient who was repeating the same thing, day in, day out.

With anything like this, it starts off small, and begins to pick up speed very quickly. It starts off with three, but quickly grows. Two weeks later, we knew of no less than fourteen patients around the UK that were repeating the same two sentences at the same time each day. And no matter what we tried, we couldn't find any links between any of the patients, other than the fact that they were all in institutions.

We didn't go to the papers with it, or alert the authorities. Not yet. To be honest, I couldn't really tell you why. I could come up with a list of excuses, but the truth is, we just didn't think we'd be taken seriously. We kept it within the medical community, more or less - we were also fairly sure that if somebody was to keep doing it every day, chances were that it would either break in the newspapers, or somebody would make a path straight to their nearest psychiatrist.

A Doctor in Cornwall came up with the idea of mass hypnosis, which seemed to ring true for a while. We worked on it for about a week, actually. As a hypothesis, it made a lot of sense - a TV hypnotist plants some subliminal idea while they are on their shows, which would only work on somebody who happened to be extremely suggestible. It wasn't totally outside of the realm of possibility - not that all of these people were fully hypnotised, but that they'd picked up the same thing. Until we found out that one of the institutions made a policy of having no televisions in the building, and there was no way that specific patient could have seen one any time recently. We were frustrated. That one had beenworking so well.

The next day, we found out about a case in Ireland.

Then two in Africa.

Seventeen in Germany.

Over forty in the United States.

Eventually we had exactly a hundred in total. All around the world. Different corners of the globe. All of them saying it at exactly eleven minutes past three in the afternoon, UK time. Some were even saying it in their sleep.

We couldn't work it out. There was no link. None whatsoever. There was no medium that could have reached all of these people at the same time, in the same way. Every path we went down came to a dead end.

And so we spent hours, and days trying to work it out, when instead, we could have been trying to do something about it. It was the fifteenth of November when we actually began to stop thinking about why they were saying what they were saying, and actually think about the implications of what they were saying. We'd been approaching all of this so clinically and logically, we had never stopped to think that it might actually be true. All of that time wasted, when we could have been trying to convince people to listen to us. To take us seriously.

We started contacting people. Not newspapers, not quite yet; but we got in touch with the Czech Academy of Sciences, the closest thing to an authority in the situation. They took us about as seriously as you would expect. It didn't help our case that the Czech Republic is a seismically quiet area.

So we took it to the newspapers. Days to go and we finally took it public. A lot of us knew that we would be effectively ending our careers by doing so, but we could no longer take the risk that we were wrong. We knew that the best way to do this was to present ourselves as a group. One that was geographically disparate, and one with few obvious other links. A group of Doctors may just be taken seriously.

Let me pose you a question. You're reading a newspaper, and on page thirteen, there is a story about how one hundred crazy people are predicting Prague will take substantial damage, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and a bunch of Doctors are taking it seriously. Would it make you leave the city?

I thought not.

On the twenty second of November, at twelve forty five, an earthquake hit Prague. There was no way of knowing exactly how many people were killed, but eventual reports estimated the number to be close to three hundred thousand people.

I eventually took my theory public. My belief is that some people are more sensitive to the planet itself. If your body feels pain, it sends messages to your brain. When we damage the planet, it sends messages to us, but it sends it to that portion of ourbrain that we've either left behind through evolution, or that we haven't evolved enough to use properly. Except for a tiny, tiny amount of people. But being so sensitive makes these people vulnerable to breakdowns, and to psychotic episodes. They all break down in different ways, or they become more vulnerable to mental trauma. And when the brain is wiring itself differently in order to cope, it listens to what the world is telling it.

The world was sending us a very clear message, but we couldn't hear it. It wants us to stop damaging it. And it doesn't want us to kill ourselves.

They didn't take me seriously. I pressed the subject, I wrote papers, I wrote letters, I made websites, I withdrew from my family, my job, my life, and I desperately tried to put the message out. Eventually, I was arrested for attacking a member of parliament, and causing serious bodily harm. I was deemed to have a lack of control over my own actions, and I was placed in an institution. They say I don't know what I am doing, or why I do things.

But I do know one thing.

I know that on the Seventeenth of August in this year, at twenty eight minutes past six in the evening, the President of The United States of America will push the Nuclear Button. Fourteen million people will be killed.