Weekly Prompt Story: The Line

http://oneadayuntilthedayidie.com/?p=28242

My New Program

By Christopher Munroe

Here’s my pitch:

Our contestants, wild, sexy twentysomethings all, arrive at the house on the first day and are told to wait for the host to come and let them in.

The host, obviously, never comes, and the series is filmed in front of the house as, over the course of several days, without provisions beyond whatever they might have brought with them, they give up on ever being on TV and walk away...

The last, half starved, exhausted contestant still waiting, once the others have left, will be declared the winner.

“The Line” will premier this autumn, on NBC.

The Future

We’ve put a robot the size of an SUV on the surface of Mars.

I know this, because I’ve been in communication with said robot.

I subscribe to it, you see, and it sends me messages via a computer the size of a planet that we built by combining every computer on earth and allowing them to communicate with one another.

I access this planetary supercomputer via a phone that itself has more computational power than the shuttle we used to travel to the Moon nine years before my birth.

Oh, yes, and we travelled to the Moon. Nearly a decade before my birth.

While we were walking on the Moon, Mars was the stuff of stories, defined to us only by that which we imagined it might be. Now we have a presence there, learning what it can that we might one day go there in person and sending the information back to Earth, back to me, back to anyone interested enough to pay attention.

We have a robot the size of an SUV on the fucking surface of fucking Mars, and it is my friend on Twitter, and we made that happen. Humanity did that. We reached up into the heavens and put that robot there and it shows us what it sees and any and every one of us has the ability to watch it, it is the future that we are living in and it is a glorious fucking future indeed.

But I digress…

You were saying something about how you think we as a culture have gotten dumber due to our choices in popular media?

My Career in Television was not a Long One...

It was, all things considered, surprisingly easy.

Convincing anti-vaxxers that, in reality, ALL science caused autism, and that therefore the only way they could keep their children completely safe from the ravages of the modern world was to move them to a commune and live lives free of technology of any sort, medical or otherwise, took less time and WAY less effort than we’d budgeted. We were, after all, telling them what they already sort of believed and, by virtue of who they were, they weren’t terribly interested in testing the scientific validity of what they were told.

Once on the commune, struggling to set up a viable farming community with basically zero knowledge about the raising of crops, our hidden cameras gave us a look at their day to day lives that we then cut together and brought to our viewers, who ate it up, as we had predicted they would.

After all, these were the sort of people who would argue AGAINST medical science for hours at a stretch, the conflicts started early, came fast and furious and were frequently hilariously insane. Even if you didn’t like the premise of the show, it was hard not to watch.

And watch people did, by the millions. It debuted at number one in its time slot and by it’s fourth episode it was the third biggest show on TV.

“Wake Up, Sheeple!” was a huge hit, and we were rightly celebrated for producing it.

And yet, in spite of this, we never got a second season.

In hindsight, introducing Smallpox in the season finale was a misstep…