Eye fingers? 
Add another one the the “Sticks with you even after thirty-plus years” column.
The line, “It’s longer than you think, Dad!” still sends shivers.
It’s not fun if they just show up on Mars and go about their day and nothing happens.
I had the same thoughts while reading the story: the procedure for doing this was pretty haphazard if a 12yo could just hold his breath and fake being unconscious.
I was originally on team sensory deprivation, now I’m on team “sent to Hell or something like that”, for the following reason: For somebody who has been sense-deprived as long as the kid has, he still came around to the post-jaunt situation pretty quickly - he knew he jaunted, he knew he held his breath, he knew he was on Mars, he still recognized his father, he was even referencing the conversation they had within the previous (hour?) right before the Jaunt. Hell, his psyche was still together enough that he had to prove how smart he was by claiming how he outfoxed the nurses AND one-upped his Dad.
However long you have to be in a sensory deprivation tank to forget what you were doing right before getting into the sensory deprivation tank… however long that length of time was, the kid did not spend it in the Jaunt. Billions of years? No way.
And so I think he was subject to unspeakable horrors. Mental, physical, who knew? But it wasn’t mere sensory deprivation.
No, eye fingers are fingers for eyes–finger eyes are eyes on fingers.
Mmmmm. . . ladyfingers. . …
I thought it was specifically revealed that what happened in The Jaunt was that your perception of time became almost infinitely slowed. Even though your trip was instantaneous, your mind perceived it as being trapped in an endless white void for all eternity.
Black Mirror actually did kind of touch on a similar phenomenon in White Christmas. John Hamm had a copy of some woman’s consciousness trapped in a similar “endless white void” holding area and ran the clock for a thousand years until it complied and Siried the original’s house like it was supposed to.
Most of the Skeleton Crew stories are great. The Myst. Cain Rose Up seems a bit quaint these days, but it was terrifying when I was a kid in the 80s. And I don’t trust that fucking cymbal clapping monkey in my kids room that I don’t remember ever bringing home.
You are slightly conflating two of the sub-stories.
(Also, Star Trek did something similar to Miles O’brian in an episode–a virtual prison sentence.)
The kid in The Gate got an eyeball on the palm of his hand. (Hand-eye coordination?)
For some reason, the short story/novella “The Sun Dog” sticks with me most from King’s shorter works. Just something about the concept the story’s based sets off primal alarm bells for me.
Some people have already hit on this, but FWIW how I interpreted it was that Jaunting while awake causes your consciousness to basically just ‘exist’ in an infinite white void (could also be a black void but the kid’s father specifically elucidates a white void) for what it perceives to be an eternity. I guess the length of perceived time is indeterminate, because existing in such a way without any external stimuli would cause any time to feel longer than normal. The fact that the prisoner specifically uses the term “eternity” makes me think that it’s at least a thousand years long, though.
Real time obviously still passes, though, because at some point the conscious Jaunter is zapped back into his or her body. That’s what makes the story of the endlessly Jaunting wife so disturbing; if even a fraction of a second (!) is perceived as thousands of years - and by the time of the story the wife was Jaunted thirty years prior - then that means she would’ve already by that point experienced a trillion trillion trillion eternities or something like that.
Truly disturbing.
It’s a great horror story, not science fiction. Trying to analyze exactly what happens during the Jaunt runs into problems like ‘how is he forming memories with no neurons changing state’ or ‘what’s fueling his energy to think for this huge amount of time’, but most horror isn’t scientifically rigorous. Also, things like this qualify more as ‘what a horrible way to die’ than a ‘fate worse than death’ to me - at some point in the endless time of jaunting, your brain is going to go insane to the point that you’re not even you anymore, which I’d count as death.
That’s more or less what I thought. We don’t really know the mechanism for how the Jaunt works. Just that somehow a person’s consciousness is decoupled from any external stimuli, including the sensation of time passing. So it literally seems like you have always been there and always will be. Or maybe it’s just a hallucinatory effect. Like you don’t really experience “eternity”. You just think you do.
Maybe there’s just an endless loop of “post rock” music playing during the Jaunt?
Right. The “cookie” lady was only 6 months. Still a long time to be trapped in a white void IMHO.
A TV series? How? A movie, maybe, but a whole series?
In your head, in your head, za-ahm-BEH…
I dunno - I flew on airplanes in the 80s and everything seemed pretty lackadaisical by today’s standards. (Hell, society seemed pretty lackadaisical.) I think it fits the zeitgeist.
Agree with those who prefer King’s short fiction to his novels. I think my fave is the one with the guy on the desert island who eats his own foot.
I will not hold my breath (heh) waiting for The Jaunt: The Series. If I could lay a bet, I would bet it will suck. But hope springs eternal with King fans, I have found, and I wish them all the luck in the world with this one.
I know. That’s longer than you think.
Survivor Type, IIRC.