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Words: 6931 in 4 pages
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THE HOPLITE
Jord awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness.
His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the day's objectives.
He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living.
He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. The steady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontal lobes and whispered down his silver cheeks.
A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience.
Perseverance.
Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid self-control. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.
It tasted bad, but he'd expected that it would.
He didn't have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.
He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else.
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