I am a Sociologist who Participated in The God Experiment

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play God?

Some questions should stay unanswered.

We selected seven individuals for the study. My colleague found it important to have a radical mixture of gender and sexual orientation. Discrete cameras were set up throughout the participants' home and places of business. We instructed the subjects to proceed with their daily activities, normally, as if nothing had changed.

We then told our people a white lie.

We told them that a team of scientists would be working to alter their lives.

Allegedly, this group analyzed the recordings and applied subtle changes to the subject's real-time routines. Each modification would be would be designed to improve personal productivity and overall contentment. We told subjects that they should not notice any differences, whatsoever. It could be as simple as a passerby saying hi. We also forbid all contact with us during this time.

The reality was that we did nothing.

We just watched.

In the interest of avoiding the ire of recent legal proceedings... I will avoid using last names.

I worked with a respected Sociologist; named Thomas, or Tommy, for short. Tom's prestige in the industry secured our funding in the first place. I considered myself the intern. My job entailed ordering pizza, bringing coffee, and answering phones. Sometimes, Thomas allowed me to watch the cameras while he slept or left the building. Not a bad gig for a twenty-three year old kid with a sociology degree.

That changed soon after it started. My hatred for my job started when our first subject, Michael, began to behave erratically.

The biography listed him as Subject001, a straight white male, age twenty-eight. He stood at six feet three inches. He weighed one hundred and ninety pounds. He had dark brown hair, with a blemish on the upper right corner of his eyebrow. Mike did not have a girlfriend at the time. Thankfully, Tom considered that factor.

It did not take long for things to go haywire. On the second day of record-keeping... I caught Mike talking to himself in the middle of the night.

"I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Are you sure? I don't want to do it."

The noise nearly caused me to fall off my chair. The rest of the day had been silent. I checked the cameras twice, but found no one else there. Thomas had left the building on another one of his errands. I texted him an alert just as Michael jumped out of bed on the infrared and walked to his door.

"Camera three. 001 is losing his marbles."

Tommy walked into our makeshift laboratory a couple minutes later. He wore a look of guarded excitement and and undersized white coat that barely covered his overstuffed belly. Crumbs on his jacket suggested that snacking had caused him to slack off next door. Yet again. Tom looked fascinated when he saw the screen. He watched the monitor over my shoulder like a parrot.

Michael banged his head against the wall. My colleague sounded downright giddy when he exclaimed -

"It's happening. Record this, kid."

I did not know what 'it' meant. But I followed orders. After about twenty head bangs, Michael stopped moving. We waited and watched for ten minutes. We checked his vitals. Somehow, Michael was not injured.

He only fell asleep.

Standing up.

It is an eerie feeling to watch a man on the verge of losing his mind. The curtains in his apartment fluttered nervously in the wind. Every few hours; Michael roused himself from sleep and checked the window nervously, then returned to his perch by the bedroom door. He repeated this trend a few times throughout the night. He didn't get back in bed all evening.

The next day, Michael got a promotion.

We had nothing to do with it.

We watched the whole thing from a hidden cubicle camera. Michael's boss sounded truly grateful. She considered Michael's job performance to be worthy of recognition. To boot - the firm had been particularly successful that quarter. That meant a big bonus. The shit-eating grin on Michael's face told us that he considered the experiment to be responsible.

Our subject got very drunk that night.

We did not capture the bar in our video feed. I did, however, catch his walk of shame home sometime around two in the morning. I adjusted the audio and found the guy talking to himself once again.

"I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Are you sure? I don't want to do it."

Michael walked into the apartment and flicked a light switch. The room remained quiet and empty. He repeated his favorite little phrase over and over again. He futzed around the living room in an apparent panic.

"I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Are you sure? I don't want to do it."

It annoyed me. To be honest - I started to doubt my colleague. Unstable subjects tend to skew results. I had not consider the more dire consequences at the time.

"Who is he talking to?" I asked. Tom didn't answer.

Michael walked towards into the kitchen and grabbed a glass of water from the fridge. His movement seemed extremely erratic. The overall behavior reminded me of an animal with rabies, especially the way one leg dragged behind the other.

Suddenly, as if hearing something, Michael stopped and stared out the kitchen window. Water spilled all over the floor. Michael stayed in that position for five minutes.

Then, he offered one last line in the direction of the kitchen door.

"Are you sure?"

Then he sprinted outside without another word.

"Switch to camera four," Tommy barked over my shoulder.

I did as I was told. I swear... that's it. The memory of this still keeps me up at night.

Michael's drunken shape came back into focus on the green grass of the apartment complex. The receiver taped to his chest captured rapid breathe as his haphazard footsteps traced a path that led in only one direction. Headlights and horns blasted only fifty feet away.

The freeway.

"Tom... this is a problem. This is a big fucking problem."

I must have repeated that phrase a thousand times. But my pleas were ignored by my wide-eyed companion. I grabbed the office phone and quickly tried to find an emergency contact. All the while, Michael teetered in between traffic carelessly like a missing toddler.

"There's nothing we can do," Tom muttered. "What do you want me to say?"

Michael's body exploded the moment it met the tractor trailer.

He died that day.

Our benefactor compensated the family handsomely. Litigation was temporarily avoided. The God Experiment continued with the remaining subjects, uninterrupted, for five weeks.

Author: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9bcw94/i_am_a_sociologist_who_participated_in_the_god/
Image: https://www.wallpaperup.com/228595/Chamber_Experiment_room_ruins_steampunk.html