One year on an island in the South Pacific there was a terrible epidemic of Stasis. This disease causes its victim to stop aging at whatever age he or she is when afflicted. The epidemic was particularly devastating for children and the elderly, one of which whose entire purpose is to wait to grow up, the other whose purpose is to wait to die. Mothers whose babies were taken ill with this disease often killed them rather than let them live in eternal infancy, a fate terrible as it is unconscious. A quarantine was set up to stop the disease from spreading to nearby regions, and today, except for a few hundred-year-old people, everyone who caught that illness during the epidemic has committed suicide.

I can only enjoy sex

if I lose myself in my animal nature; and I can only enjoy meat

if I lose myself in my animal nature; and I can only kill insects

if I lose myself in my animal nature; and I can only strike another man with my fist

if I lose myself in my animal nature; and I love doing all these things

when I lose myself in my animal nature.

For I am a beast, I am a beast . . . I run naked through the forest . . . I kill game with my hands . . . I see my fellow human as a simple beast like any other . . . I eat my meat raw, and drink my water from the river . . . I am as blind to my image in the mirror as a cat or dog.

I cannot laugh; I cannot cry . . . I cannot laugh; I cannot speak. I howl . . . I howl . . . I howl.

I scream.

The sight of blood excites my senses . . . the sight of blood . . . the sight of blood.

I saw a vision of the entire planet. It was made of metal torture-machines. All through the Earth to the core: a system of pipes, wires, needles, chains, metal, metal, metal. And all throughout the Earth to her center were people splayed out in the torture devices. There were metal pipes to take the blood, and recycle it back to the people, such that no one would die. Fingernails were slowly ripped from fingers; eyeballs were slowly pressed till they broke; ear-drums were popped inward from fast metal spikes; limbs were ripped from their sockets and reattached with robotic machines, and ripped again; knees were hit with hammers; faces were skinned free of flesh. And no one would die, no one would die; had mountains or anything but metal and flesh existed, people would wish the mountains to cover them and blot out their lives. And no one ever died; no one could ever die. And people wished that the world had never existed, and would have cursed their births could they remember how they came to be in the first place. No one knew anything but torture and more torture. No one knew from whence this great suffering mass had come, and all was senseless violence, sickness and death, living death.