The Program

A group of people stood clustered around a beat-up television, their eyes fixed on the screen like pious communicants awaiting some awful revelation. Their breathing, careful and subdued. Suddenly, a cheer roared through the group. A banner ran across the screen:

“INTRODUCING RICKY, AGE 33 - LOS ANGELES”

On the television, a young man swaggered into a studio waving at the camera, pumping the hands of several of his new housemates; it cut to a montage of Ricky swimming in a pool, now laughing with several handsome women — a drink in his hand, held like a microphone as he deftly delivered a joke.

“It sounds like him, but it’s a bit off - don’t you think?” an old woman said, her eyes were wet. “Like he’s pretending to be someone else.”

“Well, he ain’t swearing for one!” laughed someone at the back.

“I wanna see!”

A young girl was hoisted onto a pair of shoulders — too late, she wailed as the broadcast ended and was replaced with a weather warning:

“FIND SHELTER. EXTREME WEATHER CONDITIONS: FLOODS EXPECTED”

“Don’t worry” said the old woman wiping her eyes, “He’ll be back on again”.

***

“We’re all in agreement, and we don’t think you should go, Ricky”.

They were congregated around him on grimy sofas and upturned buckets. A trickle of rain had found a path through the makeshift roof and onto a lonesome electric bulb hung above their heads. A few iridescent sparks shot out with a sickly pop as the trickle charged forward.

“Get a lamp!”, a voice demanded.

Ricky caught a brief glimpse of their faces before they disappeared: worry, sadness, fear — a legion of discontent had settled itself around their eyes and mouths. A match was struck and a lamp set upon an empty crate bearing the word ‘RATIONS’ in bold black lettering, stamped diagonally across each side. Their faces slowly reappeared as the lamp caught. They all seemed grimmer now, a miserable family photograph, aged in the sepia of the flickering lamp.

He stretched back, slovenly on a moldy sofa, feet kicked out defiantly in front of him towards the others. The heels of his shoes lounged in a growing puddle of rain.

“It's a hella good gig. And, food for you all,” he drew out the next word like a salesman, "guaranteed!"

“You’re coming back though?” asked a voice behind him. Ricky jumped up grinning.

“Where’d you come from, yo!” cried Ricky, plunging his hand behind the sofa. A child giggled with delight as Ricky hauled her up and plonked her down next to him.

“You were told to play outside,” said the old woman scowling from a cocoon of blankets and plastic tarp. The girl truculently murmured something which sounded like ‘rain’.

“That’s all it ever does, child” sighed the old woman. She dug deeper into her blankets; a pair of mended, broad-rimmed spectacles and a cloud of limp grey hair poked out the top.

“In any case,” Ricky resumed, glancing at the child, “we all, never coming back, one day. I mean, right, it ain’t so bad. I get to live like a motherfucking king for a whole year”

“Mind your language, Rick!” shot the old woman from her blankets.

Ricky covered the child’s ears; she looked up at him with a puzzled expression.

“Like I said,” he mouthed the expletive, “a motherfucking king ... food, babes, parties, everything!”

“Yeah, but Rick, they’re going to kill you afterward!”

“Nobody can kill The Slick”, he grinned smoothly.

“Kill, euthanize, it’s all the goddam same,” said the old woman.

The puddle had grown bigger and had begun to ease towards her; she pulled her feet in closer, frowning.

“It’s not right Rick …” she resumed, but Ricky barrelled on peremptorily:

“It's dope! You take a couple of pills, have the trip of your motherfucking life ...” he quickly covered the child’s ears again, but she wasn’t listening, she was fiddling with something attached to one of his many chains.

“A mind-blowing trip, and then I’ll be catching some gnarly swells up in the sky” The joke landed sourly.

“And food for you guys, guaranteed” he added again, hastily.

A stagnant silence descended over the room. Ricky stared at the floor. A votive of silent intercessions glowed before him, offered up in each glance. He didn’t want to look at them. He was doing something good, noble even, he thought. He absentmindedly put a hand on his chest to quieten an unfamiliar and painful feeling in his heart.

“Leave it, grom,” said Ricky gently; he pulled a small heart-shaped locket out of the girl’s fingers.

“What is it?”

“My family … just leave it I said”, he plucked the locket from her again and hid it under his shirt.

“I thought you were an orphan?”, asked the old woman frowning.

“Yeah, well, we’re all orphans at the end of the day, right?” Ricky answered quietly.

“Hm. Well, I won’t touch that food, I swear, as true’s God I won’t”, she declared abruptly.

“Don’t be absurd, Pat,” A tall, thin man had emerged into the light. His trousers were held up with a belt — several holes had been punched into the leather.

“We’re starving”

***

“How many more to go?”

“Just one, and then we’ll start rendering the new cohort.”

Paul Abernathy flipped a cigarette into his mouth. He peered over the shoulder of a young man at a set of screens. A host of faces superimposed with brightly colored vectors smiled, laughed, frowned, and cried back at them. With each movement, the vectors scaled in response like little restless spiders. A list of numbers rolled on the right of the screen in synchrony. Abernathy had no idea how any of this digital juju — as he called it — worked and he didn’t particularly care either; he was simply a whip, exercised for cold, heartless, efficiency.

“Well get to it ricky-tick...” he grimaced at the unintended pun, “he and his cohort are due for retirement in less than 24 hours.”

***

An officious woman in combat fatigues showed Ricky to a cramped room. A small untidy cot stood in the corner, a wooden table and washbasin occupied the remaining space.

“We just have to check a couple of details first”, the woman gestured for Ricky to take a seat on the bed.

“When can I join the others?” Ricky asked, looking nervously around him, his usual swagger gone.

“You’ll need to go through mandatory quarantine, first,” she replied casually, “blood tests, routine stuff like that. Now just confirm for me that these details are correct”, she handed him a card and looked back at her clipboard.

“Yeah, but when?” he pressed, taking the card.

Barely looking at it, he thrust the card back into her hand, “It’s all good”.

She moved to open the door.

“When?”

The woman turned around with an odd expression on her face as if she had been daydreaming.

“Oh,” her eyebrows raised — she didn’t look directly at him, just a little over his shoulder. “Soon,” she said and closed the door.

***

“Now, to the right.” the technician requested gently. “Now, turn to the left — good” he struck a key on his computer.

“Alright Ricky, now we’re going need you to walk for a bit on that treadmill”

“What’s this for? I thought they were gonna be taking my blood or something” said Ricky irritably. “And who’s ‘we’?” he demanded, jumping up on the treadmill.

The technician ignored him and moved the arm of a camera positioning the lens to the right-hand side of the treadmill.

“You’ll need to strip, please”

“What?”

“To your underwear only, that is” called the technician over the top of his glasses. Ricky swore.

“If you need underwear, there are a couple of disposables in that”, the technician winced, pointing to a box on the table.

Ricky changed quickly, glancing over his shoulder, relieved to see the technician wasn’t watching but at his computer speaking into a microphone.

“Almost done, Paul, we’re going to do some gait and posture capture and then I’ll send him over to Peter for voice.”

A response came over the computer speaker but it was too faint for Ricky to hear.

“Yes, of course. And, Paul?” The technician waited for an acknowledgment. “We need an easier way of doing this, preferably with clothes on, can you speak to your people, please?”

***

Ricky sat hunched over, on the edge of his cot with his palms upwards like an offering. He counted five days on his fingers. He had seen few others despite the sheer volume of similar rooms. Two individuals had arrived earlier that day: exhausted and weary, they stared right through him when he had grinned and greeted them from afar with a neat flick of his chin. He stretched out over the bed and kicked off his shoes. He wondered who they had left behind, or if they had anyone to leave behind. This train of reverie suddenly sent him in a direction he’d purposely tried to avoid: images of his friends at the Walter Commune flashed across his mind, he suddenly remembered the grudging joy of belonging, of being accepted, and indeed, if he did not realize it already, loved. Pat’s crabby voice scratched at his heart: he remembered how it broke when she said goodbye, turning away to walk inside without looking back. The giggle of the child who adored him rang out like a grace note in his elegy of emotions.

He turned over on his back and opened the small heart-shaped locket. A young family smiled in the photograph, squeezed inside. All of them were strangers to him; the three smiling faces adopted in place of his own family he never knew. A stolen locket: worn as a talisman against the relentless waves of loneliness he fought off with fabricated memories of family intimacy, inside jokes, and even occasional heart-to-hearts with ‘his old man’.

Until Walter Commune, he realized, snapping the locket closed. Ricky pulled off the chain and threw it across the room, once more turning over on his side. A little paint had loosened on the wall in front of him, over what appeared to initials or a name etched into it. He started peeling bits off, mindlessly. There was no option to leave, he realized. The agreement he signed had spelled this out very clearly. Once someone joined the program, they could not back out. How this was enforced, Ricky did not know and the document did not elucidate.

Pieces of paint fell like great flakes of dandruff onto his blanket. Ricky discerned the letter R and the start of another. What a coincidence it would be if there were two Rickys, he thought. A larger piece of paint cracked and tumbled down the wall. He ran his fingers over the letters for a moment and then suddenly scrambled off the bed. He threw on his shoes, frantically searching for something. He tugged at the bed frame, but it was bolted to the floor. He flung the table on its side and wrenched off one of the legs.

He moved to the door. It was locked. Ricky began bashing the handle until it gave and clattered onto the floor. He looked quickly back at the word ‘RUN’ scratched into the wall, and gripping the table leg tightly, flew from the room.