text: The operation was finally complete. As the anesthesia gradually started to wear off, I opened my eyes. My body was tired. My mind was slow. I did not much care for the surroundings. It didn't even cross my mind that I’d just spent all the money I’d saved since my fifteenth birthday and that people in long and white coats had just implanted a tiny neurotransmitter inside my brain. There was only one thing that I thought about and longed for at that moment. To fade back into the oblivion of sleep one last time. That night, I sat alone and tired in the library. Even though the library was open 24/7, I was the only student who seemed to take advantage of this. The night before every exam, I preferred to come here and study. I simply had no other choice. It was the only way I could pull an all-nighter for the tests. Back at my room, with the queen size bed next to my study table, I barely ever made it past 2 without dozing off. I would try hard to think and study but no matter what, all my mind would hear was the bed calling out to me. Inviting me to lie in her comfortable and motherly embrace, there was no way I could refuse. In the library, there was no bed to tempt me. I was still haunted by a raging desire to lie down and sleep but there were still times where I could resist. Even with heavy eyes and a fatigued brain, I’d somehow manage to make it through the night without sleeping. I hated being a slave to my biological urge to sleep. There was so much I wanted to achieve in life. But there never seemed to be enough time. The fact that humans spend a third of their life doing nothing but sleep always irked me. It was such an inefficient use of time. And in my case, more than ten hours a day were spent sleeping. Every night, I would hope to get up early in the morning and work towards my grades and hobbies. But every single time, I was an entirely different person in the morning, prioritizing an hour’s worth of sleep over my future. And don’t even get me started on that damn snooze button. People laugh when I say this but I truly believe it is the worst invention mankind ever created. A few extra minutes of sleep almost always turn into an hour which inevitably turns into multiple hours. Remove that stupid button from every alarm clock in the world, and you’ll have doubled the world’s productivity overnight. I sat looking at my watch. As always, my brain was soaked dry and could no longer maintain focus. It wandered off to explore memories and thoughts and when it finally returned, it was well past midnight. I was failing to keep my eyes open. The chemical equations I’d been trying to shove inside my head were unable to get in. The effects of the day’s operation had still not kicked in and before I could realize, sleep found me and I dropped dead onto my books. An hour or so later, I was abruptly pulled back from the dark void. I looked around. The library seemed much brighter. My lips curled into a smile as I realized that the effects of the procedure had finally kicked in. My senses felt razor sharp. My brain was racing, my heart was pumping blood fast to every corner of my body and I felt ecstatic. I opened the app I’d been told to install after my operation. The app was linked to the neurotransmitter inside my head. It let me have full control of my sleep. I tweaked around the settings ensuring that I would not fall asleep for another six hours. By seven in the morning, I’d memorized every chemical equation, gone through the chapter multiple times and solved every possible numerical I could find. When I sat for the test, I easily knocked it out of the park. There honestly was no way I would have screwed it up. When I returned to my room, I was as awake as I’d been the previous six hours. The app dashboard showed me that I’d been awake for sixteen hours and twenty minutes. I lay down on my bed and decided it was finally time to rest even though I wasn't sleepy. I pressed the “Fall asleep” icon in the app. A prompt asked me the number of hours I wanted to sleep for. I adjusted it to nine hours. It was the amount the app recommended after scanning my brain activity. The neurotransmitter inside my head facilitated the release of chemicals which had me fall asleep within moments. I woke up exactly nine hours later, without any of the usual fatigue and tiredness. My father had once told me that Ambition was the true measure of a man and ambition was something I certainly did not lack. Now that I could ensure that no more than six hours of a day were wasted sleeping, my productivity soared. I aced every test the college threw at me that year and even started to pursue hobbies that I’d always leaned towards. Within a semester, I was part of the university orchestra and some of my paintings were even displayed at local art exhibitions. Along with this, I finally had time to have a social life without hurting my grades. I would party for hours and study while everybody else slept. As my ambitions grew, I slowly decreased my amount of sleep to four hours per day. I tried to distribute my sleeping hours across the day, often utilizing ideal time on the bus and train. Sometimes, when I felt that class was getting boring, I would go at the back of the class and go to sleep. I would set the timer to make my sleep last for the duration of the class. The app occasionally sent me warning prompts about the duration of my sleep and eventually, I had to turn off the warnings. In the last semester of college, our professors encouraged us to publish research papers. I saw it as the perfect platform to get the recognization I deserved. Time was less and for the last week, I decided that I could push my sleep to just three hours a day. I’d balance it out later once my paper was complete. As the week progressed, I worked harder than I ever had. Two days before my estimated submission date, as I lay on the bed thinking about certain hiccups in my paper, a major breakthrough dawned on me. As I began to get up, my vision suddenly went blank and I collapsed onto the bed. After many attempts, I finally got up. I heard the voice assistant on the app speak, “User condition critical, deactivating device and contacting nearest hospital” Consumed by my work, I had failed to notice all the signs my body had been screaming towards me. Without understanding, I’d hugely overworked myself and my body could not take it any longer. It had been going on and on for months without catching a break. The moment the neurotransmitter in mind had turned off, all the piled up exhaustion and fatigue came bouncing back to knock me down. A vaguely familiar feeling of tiredness engulfed my body. I couldn't move and every fiber hurt.