BODY SNATCHERS

A terrifying world set in tomorrow’s future. Prisoners have been deemed a drain on the public with life sentences costing the state enormous amounts of money. The Death Penalty does little to deter the crime or the costs (with all the appeals), so that is not a viable option.

Instead, it is decided that the prisoners convicted of life sentences can serve society. They can serve in a variety of different ways. They can become experimental guinea pigs on new drugs utilizing the rapidly growing area of gene therapy. They can supply much-needed organs for transplants. They can become an almost endless supply of blood donation, which is always in short supply.

The prisoners can serve a purpose. Everyone wins. Except the prisoners, of course.

Body Snatchers is the tale of one of the first...a woman known only as Prisoner #11719.

The tale is told in different narrations. The present day has her at the end of her usefulness and there is very little left of her. She has already lost one eye in a cornea transplant, one of her kidneys, part of her liver, one of her lungs, and other body parts. Her bone marrow has been tapped numerous times, her skin the subject of many different tests.

She has been put through a number of addictions: cocaine, heroin, nicotine, un-named drugs and subjected through numerous withdrawals. She has had a number of new diseases introduced into her body which were quickly followed by new treatments. She is essentially a perfect testing vehicle...a human laboratory rat.

And it isn’t just her body that has been tested on. She has been impregnated and fetuses have been taken. Sometimes a live birth will occur. She can remember nine of them but isn’t really sure.

But now, she is at the end. She doesn’t know it as she has no sense of time or space, but the doctor going through her charts does. An official mandate. For while she was going through her ordeal, the whole concept of using prisoners was winding its way through the legal system...for some 25 years. She was totally unaware of the quarter century political battle occurring as she underwent her bizarre tests. Now, the final verdict is in. Termination.

The life of Prisoner #11719 is told via flashbacks. We meet her as a beautiful young woman embarking on a life of promise and how one unconscionable act plunged her into this madness. We see as she slowly becomes drawn into the experimentation...from her early days as a blood donor until the first step into her loss of humanity.

She watches herself turn into something less than human and there is nothing she can do about it. And unknown to her, society itself questions what they are doing...but not enough to stop what they are doing to her. She is not just a pawn in the game of politics and morality....

She is also a victim.

Brief Description: Tale of a woman who is a prisoner and subjected to experimentation and taking of her body parts, all in a noble cause for society. Her present situation is dealt with and flashbacks narrate the tale of her descent into this foreboding situation.

Key Elements: Horror and medical drama of a world that may be right around the corner. Balances the many questions of our judicial and penal system and how it inter-relates to our medical goals as a society.

Association: Carries the subtlety of A Handmaiden’s Tale with the horror/medical thrillers of something like Coma. Story structure is similar to The English Patient as we chronicle one life (the English Patient) and how that person becomes an unwilling center in another set of stories.

Format: Body Snatchers was a short story that appeared in the anthology book, Negative Burn.

Additional: Body Snatchers is an uneasy look into the pursuit of medicine and the role of prisoners into the future. It may be fiction but is built upon sound principles being considered especially in this new era of gene therapy and cloning. It may be science fiction in a sense but one wonders for how long?

Body Snatchers Outline
Original Short Story of Body Snatchers