The babies of Borad weren’t sleeping. They lay in their cribs blinking.
Then the crying started.
At first, the parents of Borad thought it was a fluke. One bad night. But when they arrived, bleary-eyed, to their posts at the water factory the next day, and saw that all of the other parents were equally bleary-eyed, they scratched their heads. “Wait, what?” they asked, dumbfounded. “Your baby too?” The parents all skipped their allotted sun lamp breaks and opted for naps instead.
It didn’t take long for the citizens of Borad to realize the full extent of the problem. None of the babies were sleeping. Not one. And it wasn’t just that night either.
“Call in the robot doctors!” the people said.
And so the robot doctors came, with their hypodermic needle fingers, and scanner beam eyes. They collected extensive data. They poked and prodded the babies, taking blood and urine samples, CT and MRI scans. They compared this month’s numbers to last month’s, looking for trends. Up until now, their babies had always scored in the top percentile across every metric. Borad babies had always scored in the “exceeds expectations”category, never in the “partially meets,” or “does not meet.” Whatever could be the problem? Things were color coded. Graphs and charts were involved.
“Time to analyze the data!” The academics shouted, rising up on their toes.
The data was normed with all of the data collected from all of the other babies in all of the other neighboring galaxies. Rich babies. Poor babies. Babies of varying heights and weights. Normed data equals good data, the academics said, so they normed that data good.
What they found was this: The babies were not sleeping.
They reported their findings in all of the leading academic journals. They gave the problem a name. They called it PSD- persistent sleep deprivation. The academics loved acronyms. But what could be causing it? everyone asked. That was more of a gray area.
At first the environment was considered. Was it something in the factory water? The lack of natural sunlight? Some cursory questions were asked, but eventually fingers pointed at the mothers. Their breast milk must be tainted, their rocking deficient. Breast milk was tested in test tubes and then re-tested again. Rocking consultants were brought in, intervals timed. More data was collected, sorted, graphed.
“Time to analyze the data!” the academics shouted. Nothing conclusive was ever discovered, though suspicions surrounding the mothers lingered.
Still the babies blinked and stared. They stared and blinked. And they fussed. Oh, how those poor babies fussed. They scrunched their eyes tight and balled their little fists. Their little foreheads became permanently creased.
It was a serious situation and they all knew it. The baby’s cognitive functions were noticeably impaired. Their baby talk became unusually garbled and they seemed to be hallucinating, swatting at things that weren’t there. Startling for no reason.
“If these babies don’t rest soon, their future will be grim,” the people said.
The academics tested every oddball theory they could think of. New results were posted with new color-coded graphs.
The babies never rested.
A century later, people still talk about the irony of it. Those poor babies from Borad who died from OTS.
Over testing syndrome is no joke.
Alison Bullock‘s short fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, The Coachella Review, Sledgehammer Literary Journal, The Writing Disorder, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bright Flash Literary Review, Every Day Fiction, and Boston Literary Magazine. She lives in Massachusetts.
