Readers welcome, about 2550 words.
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My grandfather would have been astonished to learn how quickly freedoms eroded after the restocking of the Supreme Court. He died not long after that. I was still very young in those days. Looking back at those fifteen years, I find it hard to believe how much things changed.

There is a door in the science building that I've never seen open. Rumor has it that the government pays one of the professors to run experiments in there--a sort of state-supported mad scientist program. I had some guesses. Dr. Randel in chemistry was a strange fellow, and Dr. Price in biology was just plain creepy--the perfect image of the mad scientist. Rumors also said that anyone going in that door never came out.

I often went out of my way to walk past that door. Not many people had reason to go past, but I happened to be taking a class with the new guy, Dr. Fleisher. He was given a make-shift office in the basement not far from that door, and I was waiting outside for my appointment.

Edit: formatting

This is not a satire piece. The first paragraph is necessary to justify how the events can be happening. I did consider that it might not be the right FIRST paragraph, but I need to think on where else to drop the information into the piece. Maybe some suggestions on the feedback loop?

Rahl: He didn't talk me out of it, no. He didn't try. He merely discussed whether it is appropriate. In this case, I'm not trying to get inside the character's head. I want this to sound like something the character is telling after the fact, so first person is the correct choice in my view.

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There is a door in the science building that I've never seen open. Rumor has it that the government pays one of the professors to run experiments in there--a sort of state-supported mad scientist program. Rumor also said that anyone going in that door never came out.

Still, it is a commonplace of SF that our current ideas of Constitutionality won't last forever (considering that most of them were invented out of whole cloth within the past few decades anyway, this isn't unrealistic). I don't think that you need to start with that. Most readers will expect that, in a story set a dozen or more years in the future, social mores and legal codes will have changed pretty dramatically.

Well, people - in general - do not like doors that they are not allowed to open. If it just happens to be closed, thats fine. But if its closed, and, for whatever reason, we are told we cannot open it, then all of a sudden, it becomes of prime importance that, at our earliest opportunity, we must open that door.

So I think you've tapped into something primal in human nature.

However, the entire "mad scientist" angle that surrounds the closed door kind of trivializes it. For some reason, I can't help but imagine the character opening the door, and its like the old, black-and-white Frankenstein movie's lab scene on the other side.

To include a first paragraph like that one marks the narrator as a legal scholar or the author as a politicialist trying to write SF. Everyone that reads a lot of SF already knows that a story set more than a decade in the future is supposed to show more than a decade's worth of change in society. It's just that obvious.

By stating the obvious, you're saying that you don't think the audience is smart enough to know that already. Which marks your story as "political" fiction rather than SF. And political fiction just isn't worth writing. Nobody's going to read it unless they already agree with your point and don't care about anything other than whether they agree with the "point" of a story.