Competition & Awards

It was called “True Bliss,” or at least that’s what people believed. 

In the 2020s, South Korea’s suicide rate hovered at 28.3 deaths per 100,000 people. What no one expected was how that number would spill outward, first to neighboring countries, then to distant ones. By 2045 the world found itself drowning in an epidemic no border could contain. 

Birthrates were already falling, and now those few young people kept disappearing. Humanity had no choice but to confront a new and terrible arithmetic: more graves than cradles. 

And then, in 2050, at long last, the drug was released. 

The drug’s principle was simple. It was said to be inspired by the old phrase “Ignorance is bliss.” Ignorance. Not knowing indeed removed pain. In The Great Gatsby, Daisy says she hopes her daughter will be “a fool,” because “that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Perhaps the creator of the drug took Daisy’s word to heart. Whoever invented it had, in the end, turned the entire world into one big, beautiful fool. 

Once the drug entered the bloodstream, people began to forget, selectively forget. All the harrowing, horrendous things in the world slipped away. They forgot that there were humans who sexually exploited and tortured children to death. They forgot that powerful nations erased weaker ones from the map. They forgot that disabled people were denied freedom of movement, that immigrants lived as second-class citizens, that women were forced to live under perpetual double standards, that people were arrested and tortured simply for loving someone of the same sex. They forgot the unjust deaths of workers killed in accidents at companies without unions, the people who fought back and were silenced. They forgot those who disappeared after challenging their government or sovereign. 

Justice was pain. And forgetting justice brought them bliss. 

Those who never needed to forget anything had no use for the drug. For people who valued legality over justice, they never felt the need for the drug, already insulated from suffering. They were true bliss. But those who had too much to remember, those who had to remember, those whose lives were threaded with pain, they needed a knockoff bliss. 

Every house and every apartment was filled with syringes and IV bags. Many would devour this drug through means of oral consumption, while other hardcore addicts would directly inject the viscous white liquid into their bloodstream. Plus, with the advancement of AI, people could rest in their homes with their happy drug while their personal robots fed them, kept them clean, and earned money for all. Even children were exposed to this miracle serum. As teenagers found themselves hooked to the drug, they would slowly begin to succumb to their temptations. 

Janet’s suffering began when she was seventeen. Of course, she’d had the small sorrows in her childhood, the kind of a close friend moving away, crying at Girl Scout camp because she missed her mom, the chick she’d been raising dying after only two days, or being bullied simply because she won first place in a race. Those were sadnesses, yes. But not real pain. Not the kind of sorrow that feels personal yet isn’t personal at all. The kind that no amount of individual effort can ever fix. That kind of pain began when she was seventeen. 

“Seventeen? A bit early, yeah, but…well, obviously you have symptoms, and they’re severe enough. I’ll prescribe it. You don’t look like you’re faking anything.”

The doctor at the clinic, where her mother had dragged her by force, offered True Bliss without a second thought. 

Janet didn’t want to take it. 

“Just take it. Once you do, the whole world looks different. I can’t believe I didn’t take it sooner. It almost made me angry, realizing everyone else had been living like this. All that pain I carried for nothing.”

That’s what her friends said. Janet believed them. That was exactly why she didn’t want to take the drug. She believed that if she eradicated the root causes, she wouldn’t need the drug to stop hurting. What use was putting a lid on something when the problem beneath it remained? The bomb wouldn’t go anywhere. It’d only explode sooner or later. How can no one see that coming?

 *

Hyoji was a 13-year-old with beautiful black eyes and thin black hair running down her side. Her face was dusty, and her hands sullied with a greyish powder as she had been running for hours. The back of her head resembled a porcupine, and a rancid smell filled the alleyway as she sat on the grim concrete floor. She peered to the right only to find a melancholy feeling seeping into her. It was as if a grayscale filter was cast upon the world as she pondered to what purpose she had run in the first place. Memories poured into her mind as she reminisced about the days in which the drug had not yet developed. Her mother and father cradled her as a baby, showing her love and care. Hyoji could feel her eyes swelling as a single tear fell. He had just come home after school to find her house obscured, shrouded in darkness. A fan running alerted her as the sound was flapping like a car engine. As she ran down the narrow hallway, almost tripping on piles of clothing across the ground, she stopped inches from the wall.

Turning left, she grasped the doorknob, giving it a slight twist. The stale air was present as she saw both of her parents resting, wasted on the couch. She yelled, screamed, and bawled. However, the two grown adults sat there unresponsive, casting broad smiles on their faces as they let the whitish goo seep into their veins. Subtle but rhythmic sounds of IV drop felt like a ticking clock counting down to catastrophe. Such a feeling would make Hyoji occasionally try to unplug the tube connecting the liquid to her parents, only to be berated and chastised by her parents. Her feet grew cold as her slippers became worn from all the running. The wind rustled as she flowed through the empty street. A sudden distinct sound of footsteps brings her to reality. A man dressed in black came before her; he had jet-black hair and a scared face with swift and practiced movements. Before Hyoji could muster up any words, she felt her body lifted just as her parents once cared for her. For a moment, she wanted the feeling to last, but the desire washed away as she could feel her throat grasping from a gloved hand clamped over her neck. She gagged and trashed, but she could feel herself losing grip as she drifted away into a peaceful slumber.

Hyoji opened her eyes, feeling a thousand needles poke into her arms. She saw a man in a white coat shining a broad grin. He spoke to her in a gentle voice, and it was so gentle that for a second, she had been rescued, only to be met with excruciating pain to her side. The man’s voice filled the sterile room while she was strapped to a cold metal chair. Sitting in a facility responsible for making who-knows-what, she swallowed hard but could not unveil her curiosity. Hyoji peered out the large paned window to find a basement filled with children like hers. Children were groaning and wincing, having the life slowly drawn out of their bodies as long tubes connected their arms to a large machine. There was a sense of melancholy, and what she saw made her stomach drop. Countless children were lost as if their bodies were empty without souls. The thousands of tubes connected to each child strapped in a metal chair such as hers showed a blood red as she discovered the web of red tubes connected into an industrial amalgamation that pumped out a familiar liquid. She pondered where she had seen the whitish liquid only before she recognized it as the same drug that took her parents away from her, “True Bliss”. A feeling of a rush of anxiety as a conjunction of liquids was being poured into her veins, almost popping the skin of her hands.

Hyoji shook violently, trying to free her hand from the shackles. There was a loud yell from the doctor to stay still. After a simple shout, he left the room for his break. A sense of hope drained from her body as she was close to accepting her fate. Suddenly, she saw a faint glisten from the ground beside her. She could almost make out a key. Reinvigorated, she tried to free her one hand. He pulled and pulled, she could feel a tight burning as she saw a red liquid ooze from her fingers. He held her breath as she pulled and pulled beyond the agonizing pain. Pop-! Her hand had been set free, mangled, her bone sticking out of her finger. She reached for the key and grasped the shining object as she felt the metal object fall into her hand. Holding the key, she endured the pain, barely fitting it with her shaking hands into the remaining three holes. 

Free at last! 

Pulling the needle-poking machine to the side, the greatest exodus had begun. As she picked up her pace, huddling over to the red exit door, the doctor's footsteps arose. 

When Hyoji saw the large spiral staircase that led upwards, she began to climb. Step by step, she slowly made her way up the infinitely long staircase with her blood dripping down her arm. Her footsteps crashed on the ground. It had felt as if hours had gone by. However, nothing could stop her from running. She missed her cold and indifferent parents, whom Hyoji still loved. The love as the motivation, she continued, and after days and days of relentless stairs, she finally saw the light. She opened the door with her two hands and ran. She continued to run, and she recognized the factory she had come out of. It was a small abandoned factory that had been left useless for years. She realized she was near her home. She could finally taste the freedom for which she had worked so hard. She raced barefoot down the empty alleyways as she had ditched her ragged slippers, through the rancid hall, the empty streets, and finally into her apartment. She entered the four-digit code as fast as she could. She felt her right hand numb as her broken hand had turned into a rotten fletch. Using her left hand, which had been sullied with the dust of the harsh outside world, she opened it to find her mother standing before her. Hyoji's mother looked right into her face and smiled. 

The hope in love vanished as her mother picked up her phone and said, "We found her. She's right here." 

She was then met with the same man in all black who had taken her to the wretched facility in the first place. She felt her happiness drain into despair as she once again felt her neck grasped by a gloved hand.