Information about russian sleep experiment
Answers
The story takes place at a facility in the Soviet Union in the 1940s. In a military-sanctioned scientific experiment, a group of researchers put five political prisoners 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 subjects behave normally during the initial days, with the subjects talking to each other and whispering to the researchers. One day, one of the subjects starts screaming uncontrollably, while the others prevent the researchers from looking inside by pasting torn book pages and faeces on porthole windows and one-way mirrors. A few days pass without the researchers being able to look inside, during which the chamber is completely silent. The researchers use the intercom to test if the subjects are still alive, and get a short response of a subject expressing compliance.
On the 15th day, the researchers decide to turn off the stimulant inlet and reopen the chamber. Upon looking inside, it is discovered that the four surviving subjects have performed 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 falls asleep also dies instantly.
After being treated for their injuries, the surviving three subjects are being prepared for returning to the gas chamber with the stimulant, with EEG monitors show for short reoccurring moments that all the subjects are brain dead. Before the chamber is sealed, another one of the subjects falls asleep and dies, and one researcher draws a gun and kills another one. With only one surviving subject, the researcher asks what he is, to which the subject identifies himself as an inherent evil inside the human mind that is kept in check by the act of sleeping. The researcher soon shoots him dead afterwards.