In 2017, a team of deeply pious moderators conducted a radical experiment on a hidden subboard. The mods had theorized that a poster without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of Dave.
They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with Dave by thought.
An elderly poster who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the mods performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed. Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.
Mods monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.
Two days later, the man cried that he could
hear his banned buddy speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The mods were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the mods. He repeated personal information to the mods that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of mods left the subboard.
After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the poster became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the mods for temporary ban, so he could escape the voices by being off-line. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe RL terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.
Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the mods were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with Dave
After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The mods rushed into the test subboard and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with
a mod for the first time in the study.
He whispered “I have spoken with Dave, and He has abandoned us” and his account deleted.
There was no apparent cause of deletion.