Russian sleep experiment

  The story takes place at a test facility in the Soviet Union in the 1940s during the World War II era. In a military-sanctioned scientific experiment, a group of researchers puts five political prisoners (Most likely high-ranking generals) in a sealed gas chamber, where an airborne stimulant is continually administered, with the intent of keeping the five subjects awake for 30 days. The prisoners are promised freedom if they complete this experiment.

The subjects behave normally during the initial days, talking to each other and whispering to the researchers through the one-way glass. At the four-day mark, their conversations take a darker side. But after five days, they start to complain about circumstances and start to demonstrate severe paranoia. After nine days, one of the subjects starts screaming uncontrollably, tearing his vocal cords, and instead produces little squeaks. The others prevent the researchers from looking inside by pasting torn book pages and feces on the porthole windows and one-way mirrors. A few days pass without the researchers being able to look inside, during which the chamber is completely and utterly silent. The researchers use the intercom to test if the subjects are still alive, and get a short response of a subject expressing compliance. After twelve days, the researchers come and instruct the subjects to do as they say and that they will either go free or get shot. To the researchers' surprise, one subject states, "We no longer want to be freed."

On the 15th day, the researchers decide to turn off the stimulating gas and reopen the chamber. Upon looking inside, they discover that the four surviving subjects have performed lethal and severe mutilation and disembowelment on themselves during the past days, including tearing off flesh and muscles, removing multiple abdominal internal organs, practicing self-cannibalism, and allowing four inches of blood and water to accumulate on the floor. The subjects also violently refuse to leave the chamber and beg the scientists to continue administering the stimulant, murdering one soldier and severely injuring another one attempting to remove them. After eventually being removed from the chamber, all subjects are shown to exhibit extreme strength, unprecedented resistance to drugs and sedatives, super-human abilities to remain alive despite lethal injuries, and a desperate desire to remain awake and being given the stimulant. It is also found that any one of the subjects who fall asleep also dies instantly.

After being treated for their injuries, the surviving three subjects are being prepared to return to the gas chamber with the stimulant, with EEG monitors showing short recurring moments of brain death. Before the chamber is sealed, one of the subjects falls asleep and dies, and one researcher draws a gun and kills another subject. With only one surviving subject, the researcher asks what he is, to which the subject identifies himself as an inherent evil, as a wild animal inside the human mind that is kept in check by the act of sleeping. The researcher soon shoots him dead. The last subject says this as his last words, "So..nearly...free.."