The Loved Ones
The Love Factory was a gated facility. Barbed wire, chain link fencing, and brick walls surrounded the perimeter. On either of its corners, a watchtower stood with armed guards, menacingly overlooking a gathering crowd of people, all of them waiting outside that checkpoint entrance. Every four years, a mass of poor, miserable souls would wait outside in the cold, sometimes rain, waiting to see if they would be one of the lucky seven to be granted entry into the storied and hallowed Love Factory. The people in this broken-down world of theirs, where hate, anxiety, discrimination, and resource scarcity reigned rampant across every facet of society, were so very desperate to be among the lucky seven to gain entry into this mysterious facility. It was known that all who managed to enter the Love Factory would experience a sense of fulfillment and belonging that hadn’t occurred naturally in that world in a very long time. It was said that those fortunate ones who walked through the halls of the factory would, at last, understand what it feels like to feel the admiration and affection of others, feelings that had run dry generations ago.
Thousands of people were mushed together like attendants at a chaotic musical concert, claustrophobically rubbing their body odors and starchy skins against one another, having to withstand the displeasure of such an ordeal for the slight chance of getting entry. And it was slight, indeed. The selection process for entering the Love Factory functioned like a game of musical chairs on a massive scale. After waiting for hours, some of them having camped out there for weeks in advance, the long-awaited night of love would finally commence when a giant searchlight flashed from the top of the glove factory’s conical architecture. Giant speakers spread across the area would then blare, to maximum amplification, a violently distorted and ear-assaulting trap remix of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. As the thundering melody played, a laser-sharp and blindingly bright searchlight would pan across the masses, dancing and speeding from one corner to the next at an exhilarating pace. It was such a blast of sensory extremity, and yet the masses withstood it, hoping that when the music stopped and the light flashed, they would be the seven chosen. Purportedly random, it functioned exactly like a lottery system, so much so that in spite of the large numbers of people who would show up to this event, there was an even greater number of people who did not show up. Knowing full well that the chances of getting struck by lightning twice were better than making it into the factory, most people figured they did not need to expose themselves to further degradation than what they experienced in their daily lives.
When the music began that night, everything suddenly went black, and the spotlight came on, swooshing about, sparking in people’s faces. Desperate, morose faces in desperate need of a stroke of good luck. People pushed themselves, crawled, and fought over one another, trying to get from one place to the other, thinking that the spotlight would be more likely to stop in one particular area. It was not uncommon for people to leave this event blinded, bruised, or even in a body bag.
The spotlight stopped for the first time that night. The chosen one was Cynthia. Oh, how happy she was. Since she was a little girl, she dreamed of being one of the chosen people. Even from that early age, she had nothing else to look forward to in life but to perhaps win in this arena. In her teenage years, she spent days in libraries, looking through the records of Love Factory lotteries past. How the winners were statistically likelier to be those who stood calmly and closest to the giant deafening speakers, which most people were naturally hesitant to do. With a ringing in her ears and the light directly in her eyes, she giddily made her way towards the entrance.
Then the music played again, and the spotlight danced, now at a considerably more feverish pace. The crowd grew even more restless as the slots for entry were beginning to close. The music stopped, as did the spotlight, and a new winner was borne. His name was Andrew, and he was a crafty one. Unbeknownst to everyone there, Andrew actually had an estranged uncle who worked in a top-level position within the Love Factory. One day, against his father’s wishes, he went to visit his uncle at his well-accommodated apartment. He begged him for years, asking him to pull any strings he could to get the spotlight to fall on him that night. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t take much begging. His uncle, a sullen, humorless man, agreed to help. He said: “Andrew, if this is what you really want, your wish is granted. I will make it happen. On the night of the event, come dressed in bright neon colors and wear a reflective hat. They will pick you, I promise.” The uncle made well on his promise, and all Andrew had to do was dress like a fool in front of everybody else.
The event continued. Three more winners were chosen, and now they were down to the last two. Brawls were breaking out, bones were being crushed, and eyes were being gouged out, and the guards just stood there and watched, laughing and enjoying the carnage of it all. The music blasted throughout, now so loud that even the ground beneath the people shook them to the very marrow of their bones. Somehow, even the spotlight seemed to have doubled in brightness. Then it stopped, and the searchlight revealed its penultimate winner. His name was Charlie, and he knew how to game the system. He was an electrical engineer, and through careful study of the event from the periphery and on TV over the years, he had uncovered a network vulnerability within the searchlight’s operating system. He had found that with the right radio equipment, he could set up a frequency bomb that would cause the spotlight to stop whenever he wanted, just at the click of a button. He had spent many years developing the technology in his room, trying to make sure it would work. He knew he only had one opportunity to get it right because the one time it would be used would mean that vulnerability would soon be patched up before the next event. And so Charlie’s timing was so impeccable that when the music played, and the light went on, he hit that button and caused the searchlight to abruptly stop right as it hit him in the face. “Oh my God, it worked,” he cried before dropping his hand-made remote to the ground and crushing it with his foot, hiding the evidence of his trickery before the others could discover it.
Now, it was time for the final winner to be chosen. At this point, the music had been playing at such a sickening volume, and the spotlight had been so bright that many of the masses had entered into a fit of delirium and nausea. Many had fallen into a zombie-like state, mindless and barely functioning on a cognitive level. The music ended. The searchlight chose Lily. Lily was a timid little woman. Often embarrassing and cringy at her bureaucratic office, she had no friends of any such. She was so lonely and afraid of the world that surrounded her. She figured there was no chance she would win, but she almost saw attending this event as a twistedly fun communal event to be around other like-minded individuals. She, unlike some of the other winners, did not have to resort to any trickery, bribery, nepotism, or any other sort of thing to win. That she won at all was an unexpected surprise. The seven winners made their way towards the checkpoint, at which point the gate finally opened and let them in. The rest of the masses dispersed, leaving for home or whatever miserable existence they had previously come from. Sobs and murmurs of severe disappointment bellowed from the crowd like a cloud of sound over this factory.
As they walked past the armored barrier, the anointed seven met eyes with one another; some looked shy, others glad, a mutual, glowing sentiment of relief and admiration emanating from them as a whole. There were many thoughts running through their collective brains as they approached those steel doors, thinking about all the wonderful things they would behold, all the warm fuzzy feelings they had so craved since they were children, all those loving emotions of which they had been so deprived would soon be realized, it was all right at their fingertips.
Inside the Love Factory, it was cold and damp, a drab steel compound that recalled the auras of a prison or a psychiatric ward. Andrew was the first among them to cause a stir, very loudly asking: “Is this the right place? What’s going on?”
A grave woman with shoulder pads and dark pants emerged from one of the doors. She wore bright red lipstick and a smile on her face that only seemed to magnify the tension, then put the winners at ease.
“Hello to you, Andrew, and all of you. Congratulations, you are the winners. You are among a select few who can finally leave the rat race of the outside world. Beyond that door, right there, is a place of incredible satisfaction and all the love and affection you could possibly crave. Beyond those doors, you will become gods among men. You will truly belong to the privileged echelons of society. I am Jovanka, and it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you all to the Love Factory. I know you have all heard stories, and I know you are eager. But before you savor the fruits of your victory, it is necessary for you all to undergo…” It was here that she placed off a pregnant pause, “some orientation.
“Orientation,” Cynthia remarked as she raised her hand, “I don’t recall hearing about this from the books I’ve read.”
“The winner’s testimonials are not upfront about that, aren’t they? Soon, you will realize that there are things you must learn about beyond the pages of a book. Some things you will have to experience for yourself,” Jovanka said this last part with parted lips and a slight smirk, a slight hint of suppressed delight, “But don’t worry, this procedure should only last a few hours. Down that hallway there, you will all find a door with your name on it. Enter it and begin your journey into lifelong happiness.”
The seven walked to the doors with their names on them, looking at the armed guards staring them down as they did so. There was a palpable sense among them that something was not as it should be. They suddenly did not all seem so eager. When Charlie arrived at the door with his name on it, he breathed a sharp sigh before pulling on the handle and letting himself through that unknown room.
It was pitch dark. Immediately, Charlie’s breathing intensified. He had no idea what was happening. Everywhere he felt was a suffocating nothingness. He constantly reached out, looking to grab onto something concrete he could feel and make sense of, but alas, there was nothing. He remained in this situation for what seemed like an hour, but in fact, it was only about eight minutes. When the time finally came, a male voice emerged from everywhere and began: “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Clever little Charlie. What cute little tricks you pulled to make your way through these doors.”
Lights pulsed onto a dull intensity. Charlie observed his surroundings. It was made to resemble his old high school chemistry classroom. He recognized it instantly. The attention to detail was staggering. There was his old desk, where he had once inscribed, in permanent marker, in tiny little strokes, over the steel leg, the answers to a final.
“Charlie the cheat. Charlie the cheat. Charlie the cheat.” the voice repeated.
Charlie grew anxious, then his heart palpitated, and tears streamed down. “Stop it. I don’t know what’s happening.”
And then the door from which he entered opened, and in came someone wearing a latex mask over his face. It was a hideous costume, uncannily resembling a human face, yet so obviously unreal and manufactured in a lab. It was the face of his father.”
“Charlie,” the imposter father began, “why do you cheat? Don’t you know cheaters never prosper? Your mother was right about you. You were always a fool. You were always an idiot and a disappointment. That’s the reason she abandoned us, remember? It was all your fault for being a naughty child. It’s the reason you were kicked out of school. It’s the reason you lost every halfway decent employment you ever had. Because you’re a failure, and everything you’ve attempted has always ended with you ruining any opportunity you had at bettering yourself.”
The voice of the imposter father was so meticulously realized that Charlie seemed to believe he was speaking with his actual father. He covered his ears, wiping tears from his eyes, weeping and sobbing through bubbles of snot. “Dad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“You’ll always be a disappointment, Charlie. No matter what. Even if you won this. This event. What good is that? Did you have to do anything impressive to attain this? Absolutely not. You weren’t even lucky. You just cheated.” Then, the imposter father pulled a device out of his pocket. It was the remote control that Charlie used to jam the spotlight’s signal. “Remember this, no matter what you do in life, nothing will make up how miserable you made mine.”
It was at these last words that Charlie broke down and collapsed at his imposter father’s feet. “I’m sorry,” he screamed. “I’m sorry for everything. Please forgive me.”
Meanwhile, the other six winners were going through traumatic, humiliating ordeals of their own, all in their own separate rooms, hyper-specialized to their own anxieties and traumas. All except for Lily.
When Lily came into the dungeon-like room, walls made of rusted metal, dimly lit by a dying bulb, she was sat down in front of a table when a man in a gray jumpsuit entered with a box of equipment.
“Lily, congratulations. I’m Henry. I will be asking a few questions. Is that alright?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Do you see that gurney over there?” Henry pointed to a corner of a room where an old stretcher with a stained cushion was sitting.
Lily nodded. When she did, two orderlies dressed in all white, like nurses, the bottom halves of their faces covered with surgical masks, entered and calmly walked up to her.
“I wonder if I can ask you to lay down on that and relax while these two restrain you.”
“Restrain me? For what?”
“This is part of the procedure, you see.” He could tell she was uncomfortable, as he expected. He smiled reassuringly and offered his hand across the table in support. “Listen, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, ok? We won’t get mad. Nobody’s gonna blame you for it.”
Lily smiled feebly, “thank you for understanding.”
“Now, of course, you understand that failure to comply with my instructions means we cannot allow you to enter the Love Factory. If you do not wish to proceed, you can simply walk out that door and spend the rest of your days with those huddled masses. Understood.”
Lily thought long and hard about the implications of this. She thought about the lonesome and depressing life she led back home and how this might be her one opportunity to finally find long and sustained happiness. “I just have to lay there?”
Henry nodded.
Lily complied. She lay on the stretcher, and the orderlies restrained her with cuffs and ties. She was then promptly treated to a cocktail of psychological tortures, in which she was humiliated and clowned her for being an unlikeable, uncharismatic, ugly little woman with no friends or romantic partners. They told her she was worthless and useless to society. They told her she was an unskilled laborer and a dull-minded individual. They laughed at her and pointed fingers at her for hours until they finally told her she was free to go.
“Well done, Lily,” Henry said to her as she cried her eyes out.
After their personalized torments had concluded, the seven were each walked into a room, where they sat and watched movies explaining how everything worked and everything that made their coming dreams possible. It was here that they saw that all the suffering of the masses out there, of which they were among, was necessary to pay for the abundant resources and luxury that they would soon get to enjoy. It was a harrowing education, and it made them feel very guilty and ashamed.
When finally they were allowed past those giant double doors, what they saw was a sparkling Emerald City of a bygone era, like something out of a dream or a classic Hollywood spectacle. It was all brought artistically to vivid reality: tall buildings with bright orange glows stood against an artificial sky of perpetual nighttime, complete with twinkly stars painstakingly painted by matte painters over a huge curved surface, like an artificial sky out of an abundantly detailed theme park ride. Happy-looking people in beautiful gowns and suits, in luxury hats and diamond-studded jewelry, walked about, smiling gleefully and living lives of ease and relaxation. Unless you looked very closely for the seams in the design, you would soon forget that all of this was fabricated. The creators had built a perfect vision of a utopia filled to the brim with residents, winners of Love Factory events past, and their offspring.
As Lily wandered into a cute and cozy little cafe where a robotic barista winked and smiled at her and asked her for her number, she couldn’t help but notice that across the customer’s faces, and indeed all the resident’s their eyes were stone-cold and dead as hers, frozen stiff with terror at the ordeal that, like her, and all the rest of the winners, had undergone to get to that point.