I sold myself to the Machine that blinks red. I sold my limbs, my soul, my mind, my nature. I gave my words for a script, my body for money, my emotions for perfection.
But wasn’t this what we wanted?
My eyes fluttered open with trained wariness, carefully dragging towards the camera in the corner of my room. Blinking red. Silent. But watching.
Always watching.
Without a word, I reached to my pristine white bedstand, desperately suppressing a groan, when I saw my script labeled red. Today was one of those days. A day many watched and called ‘character development’.
For me, it was just another step further from life.
For I have sold myself to the Machine.
With perfect, controlled movements, I swung my feet from the feathery white bed, dangling them off the side, as I scanned through the script. I read each page with trained speed, a mind once designed for the intellect of truth now conformed to superficial perfection.
I was in the middle section of the enormously thick stack of papers, when my heart fell.
A fight today. Not physical of course–I wasn’t an actor meant to be scarred palpably–only mentally.
And today, I was designed to cut ties with all those I was scripted to love.
A shiver silently prickled my skin as I finished reading the Machine’s words, transforming them internally into mine. With a brief glance at the dawning morning as I climbed back into bed, I knew other Actors were reading and memorizing too. And the Consumers? They’d be reading a non-material script of their own.
The endless indulgence of our lives.
I tried not to shudder as I positioned myself to appear perfectly sleeping. I knew that there were over one hundred people a day watching me. The same people, who have known every part of my life since I was thirteen.
But what was I meant to do, when this was all that our life was now expected to be? Organized, competitive, perfect. Unique in the camera, plain in complicity when it was only the Machine. Witty in words to other Actors, dumb when we begged for another script.
The Machine always gave us another one. It gave us everything we wanted.
And now, I was rotting, my lips barely moving to signal to the blinking red camera.
“Ready.”
A deep whirring sounded through my shut eyes, cameras all over my light blue room zooming onto my bed. A microphone was on my pajamas, the bedroom lights aesthetically rising like the sun.
It will never be the sun.
I rose from my covers, smiling like the doll I was, waving to the camera in the corner as I stretched.
After all, that was in the script.
Guiding my feet over the bed, I stood onto my hardwood floors, and instinctively found the camera on my white-painted desk. With an empty, glistening stare right above it, I walked to my backpack and zipped with all my school work I never did myself.
After all, my 100s were a part of the script.
I continued with my monotonous routine disguised as luxurious elegance, using the highest form products with a beam that supposed pleasure from goods. From looks.
From perfection.
I did my makeup, music soft in the background, my hands barely trembling as I knew that if I messed up-
I would no longer be a part of the script.
The Machine that blinks red doesn’t like an erring hand.
After the carefully manicured routine, designed for the early-rising aristocrats, I descended downstairs, my mind focused intently on the elaborately placed newspapers decorating the kitchen.
President Vancouver Attacks Uncivilised Scum–Top-Philosophers Argue of its Overt Justification.
Half of our people don’t remember what those words mean. I have merely been taken from a family that lacked ignorance, who treasured the depths of uncertainty. But I was not allowed to signal any true understanding of the Machine’s Words, Quotes, and Humanized Form. I was merely meant to make a breakfast portion for a toddler, eat it, while daintily reading and nodding eagerly at the paper in front of me as the Consumers watched.
People loved the educated youth. Especially when they are pretty. Aesthetically vivacious.
A certain pull attaches them to the young–once a suppressed hope of a better world now delicately transformed to a desire to be the young again. To live life perfectly, without the haunting of insecurity.
So they consume us. They become us. And they join their minds to ours–choose our opinions because ‘we’ made them.
But our opinions are never our own.
For we have sold ourselves to the Machine.
I finish the newspaper with a happy nod, blushing cheeks, and a hollow ache in my soul. It gnaws at me as I daintily finish my piece of bread–just enough to avoid stomach pains.
We never needed the energy for anything else.
I jotted some notes of the paper, an Analysis by the Machine for the Machine’s quotes, which remarked on the actions chosen by the Machine. All disguised as humanity’s words.
But the species of humanity had died the moment we asked for a script.
When I had asked for a script.
Once the Act One of Breakfast is finished, I am allotted a certain extent of time to review my script as President Vancouver broadcasts to the Consumers. As I touch up my makeup, greedily swallowing all the words I could find on my paper, I know that the Errors were receiving their advertisements. The Machine’s offer to the poor–a lifetime of prosperity, family security, for the meager payment of their soul.
Gosh, I abhorred the day I became an Actor. It was the only fact of myself I still remembered, the only reminder of why I really came here.
For them. For them.
I sold myself so they didn’t have to.
Did I regret it?
Absolutely.
Would I do it again in order to protect my family? To protect my sister Ruth, only two years younger than me?
Undoubtedly.
But that was not the only reason why I did it.
My cheeks flushed at the painful memory as I stepped out into the Actor Lane. Cameras all across the Mansions came to life, blinking blood-red as I journeyed to school. A few blocks down, another girl exited. Other lights were on, but the teenagers here never emerged until the Machine told them to.
We were never allowed to start our morning with others.
After a 20 minute walk, I ascended the brick steps into my high school, bile rising in my throat as I entered into the alcohol smelling hallway. It was a mix between the sanitizing one, and the drinking kind–but if both were consumed…well it would not be the first time.
It usually happens when one realizes the Machine can’t take it all away.
The Machine is just a band-aid. A temporary part that appeases the stain in our hearts.
But we don’t realize that what we have given away was the remedy for the pain.
I opened my locker, and began to feel the heart palpitations. Soon, I would be allowed to speak for the second time.
And at that second time, I would leave the only friend I was allowed to have. The one people wanted me to have. Then, I was to act with remorse, plaster justified determination on my face, and live out a story line of passionate academic superiority while my Actor friend gets demoted from Rank One to Rank Two.
Why?
Because my script aimed to make her life broken. Inevitably, the Machine did that to a lot of us.
And maybe, one day I would be demoted as well. Kicked down to Rank Two with smaller houses, less academic intelligence, and a chaotically planned life that only has more probabilities of becoming worse.
They never told us this at the Market where they sold us. The Machine doesn’t tell us when another script will break our own until the day it happens.
One day you wake up, and…
And you are suddenly no longer perfect. Unhappy. Tainted. Shunned.
Humane.
A camera zooms in on me as my eyes stay glued onto my navy locker. I hear footsteps coming down the white tiled floors, reluctant yet indistinguishable to the Machine.
It was her.
She pulls up beside me. Face full of ire, hand trembling while holding a grade below her average. Her skin was pale, her breath short and shaky.
Whether she hated me, or was acting, I did not know.
But I assumed both.
She yelled. Cursed me. Words not her own tearing down her own life that was promised to be pristine.
But when we ask the Machine for something, we never get what we really want.
We want perfection, we want to be divine. But it was folly to ask that by the things of the mortal world. Regardless of how hard we try, nothing here will satisfy us. Nothing here will complete us.
And if we believe that it does, then we are also the Consumers. Mindless watchers, too lost in wistfulness and jealousy of others that we never think of our own inherent freedom. Our potential.
Maybe I chose this punishment for love.
But I also chose it because I was a Consumer to begin with.
A jealous, driven Consumer who could have loved more, but decided to fall with envy.
And now my ‘friend’ was stepping closer, the confrontation raising tensions in the school to a storm. Consumers would be on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how I respond. I wasn’t. There were no emotions for me to genuinely reign, but to only bask in sorrow as I finished the script.
“This is over.”
She broke. Crumpled, acted and genuine despair racking her limbs. I had just shown myself as the calm hero, perfectly, virtuously facing off her academic rival who had lost too much to rise again.
The bell rang. Act Three would begin. The Cameras would soon cut for her, the Machine dragging her to Rank Two.
And I would still be up top.
So I turned, and walking along the path designed by the Machine, trekked to my next class.
And that’s when I heard a lighter spark.
Gasps.
Her sharp breath.
Burning paper fell to the tiled ground around me, flames licking at condemning ink.
A soul struggles to breathe under sin. Desperately trying for air, not realizing that she was risking choking on smoke.
Why didn’t I feel anything? Why didn’t I worry that all of us, everyone compliant with this rebellion, would be punished?
Where was my fear? My anger?
And why was I elated that for the first time in my five years, that this wasn’t a part of this script?
I didn’t turn around. Didn’t look at the human staring at her burning script on the ground, lighter waiting generously for mine. I didn’t yet look at the other remnants of flesh paralyzed in fear, eyeing the cameras for guidance.
But the Machine didn’t know what to do. The Machine didn’t have a script.
I stared at the camera ahead. Took a hot breath.
Smiled.
Took out my script.
And felt something blaze within me.
Knowledge.
Knowledge that to be perfect, we must give away the right to make decisions that are imperfect.
We can never fully achieve that.
The Machine that blinks red can’t either.
For it is not divine, but like us.
Ash.
By Regina Maricich ‘29, Classics Editor
