Corn Field 2 By D. I. Jolly

When Morgen woke up to find himself in the middle of a cornfield, he was almost more surprised to discover that he wasn’t hungover or naked. What he was, however, was completely lost. When he got to his feet, he realised that he couldn’t see above the corn, nor could he see any references to point towards some kind of civilisation. He even noticed that although he was in a small clearing, there wasn’t an obvious path for how he got there. As he turned in circles trying to get a handle on his situation, he found that while he could recall what things were, corn, hangovers, the sky, he couldn’t find memories of events. He knew he must have had some kind of life; he was wearing clothes, he had a wallet with some cash and some cards in it, but while he knew what a school was, he couldn’t remember attending one. He knew what a car was and apparently had a licence to drive, but couldn’t remember ever having done it. In fact, the deeper he looked inside the more he found he could only remember being exactly where he was, doing exactly what he was doing and nothing else.

A few miles below the cornfield where his body actually lay, the doctors noted that the realisation that he had no memory of events only caused a small spike in his heart rate and ultimately caused him to be calmer than when he’d first woken up. They let the simulation run for a few more minutes before sending his mind back to sleep and seeing if they could reproduce the results with the other 252 test subjects. In what was deemed a resounding success, only 2.5% of the subjects didn’t produce the same or similar results, and of those 2.5% only 3 died.

As the first person to successfully pass the simulation, Morgen was selected to be the first to have his memory wiped and to be placed in an actual cornfield, to see if the results of the simulation could be reproduced in an actual real-world environment. This time when he woke up the first thing he became aware of was how dry his mouth was, and the warmth of the sun on his face. As he looked around and realised he had no idea where he was or how he got there, an ice-cold panic set in and it took the medical team 4 hours to find him. He had sprinted through the field desperately trying to find a way out. When they did eventually catch up with him, he was curled up in a ball on the floor screaming.

Disappointingly this result or similar was reproduced in 90% of the other test subjects, with 5% collapsing where they’d woken and the other 5% suffering fatal heart failure within the first 35 minutes.

Ultimately the experiment was scrapped and the remaining 236 subjects woke up in a mental hospital with no memory of what had happened and only partial memory of their lives beforehand. An expected side effect of the experiment which they’d all signed up for. While they might never recover, their families were all well compensated for damages and politely reminded that they always needed more test subjects, should any details from the experiment find its way into the hands of the press.

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