The March of the Proles (Part One)

By the year 2150 the forces of greed and ignorance had, for all intents and purposes, bested humanity. Through commerce alone the company divided the world, creating power vacuums which they themselves filled; all culminating when they reunited the world which they had split just years prior under one entity. In just a few decades a single corporation had managed to strip bare the illusions of societies past and establish a state in which those who controlled the flow of capital, controlled existence as whole. By and large they had attained omnipotence, socially, economically, and politically...

One cold Monday (though Mondays were no longer anything special, as to be a prole was to work 7 days a week) A certain prole, by the tag of 187-B was walking down his assigned path to his work, a shipping warehouse. He was a male, though the concepts of gender and sex had long since been eradicated by the company in favor of uniformity. He was, by all perceptible measures, identical to every other prole on that street. He had the same haircut, wore the same gray jumpsuit, and of course had the same totally blank expression as everyone else. 

That day he was thinking, the first thing that set him apart, proles did not think, they worked. He was thinking about his time in school. He, like the rest of the proles, was born in a lab. He had no family besides whatever genetic donors had given way to his wretched existence. For the first years of his life, he was simply kept alive. His days consisted of waking, eating, staring at the wall and going back to sleep again. Then, at the ripe age of five, he was taken away by some scientist. They put a chip in his brain, along with everyone else his age. That chip was the axis of the company's control over a person. It allowed them to dig around in your brain, deleting memories, reading your thoughts... 

The thing is that 187-B's chip didn't work that way. His operation was botched, the chip was still in his brain, but it was entirely defective. Although the company had refined the operation near to perfection, it still went wrong occasionally. The chance of it happening was about 1 in 563,116,052. After briefly recovering from the surgery in the hospital he and the other children were loaded onto trains and into the backs of trucks. Most of the children in the hospital would never see each other again. Something like this should have been horrifying to them, but having experienced nothing beside it seemed almost mundane. 

187-B, as it turns out, arrived at a school in what was once Nebraska. On his first day he was lined up with the other "students". There they were given tags, 186-A, 186-B, 187-A, and so on. After standing there for some odd 3 hours, the children were led to their barracks. 187-B's "room" amounted to a sleeping pod, it consisted of a thin mattress with coarse bedding, all crammed into a coffin sized space. His pod was just below the bathroom for the sector, and the cheaply built pipes above him constantly leaked water onto him. His first day at the school would end up being one of less than 10 days that he did not attend classes.

The next morning, he was woken up at 6:00 by six shrill beeps just six inches from his ear. Immediately he was yanked out of his room and lined up along the wall with the other children in his sector. He was stripped down, made to stand bare before the stone-faced guards as they hosed them all down. Some of them cried and screamed but most of them simply stood there as stone faced as the guards. 187-B wondered if the other children were as emotionless as they looked or if they, like him, were just acting. One boy, however, tried to run. Perhaps he was simply bewildered by whole situation or maybe he saw some chance at escape. Either way, he bolted down the hallway as fast as he could. Of course, it was futile, he was caught by the guards some 15 feet away from where he had been standing. They dragged him away kicking and screaming. 187-B never saw him again, though he thought about him frequently. He wondered if the boy even knew where he was running. 

When the guards finished bathing them, they were all given a single gray jumpsuit. That was the only thing he wore at that school. After they'd all received their jumpsuits, they were promptly marched through the equally gray building towards their classroom. There were no windows in the facility, but 187-B thought to himself that the sky outside must've been the same washed-out shade as everything else. The classroom, if you could call it that, only had one chair. It was for the educator, the children were made to stand in rows, all in their assigned position, never looking away from the educator. 

That day mostly consisted of introductory exposition. The educator explained the strict schedule and rules. Beyond that they learned nothing. When the "class" was over they were marched back to their barracks and forced into their sleeping quarters. At exactly 6:30 PM their rations were inserted through the slots in the doors. All the children sat alone in their quarters and ate in silence. It certainly would have been easier to have some kind of mess hall, but 187-B would eventually come to realize that this was to prevent conversation among the proles. 

The next morning at 6:00 AM 187-B was woken up by the same 6 beeps as yesterday. There were no hoses this morning, no runaways, no cries for help. All the proles simply marched to the same classroom as yesterday. Then they all marched back through those dull, unending hallways to their barracks. And just like yesterday they silently put down that flavorless paste from a gray plastic bag. To no-one's surprise 187-B woke up to those increasingly familiar 6 beeps.

For the next 4,745 days of his life 187-B lived by that schedule. Eventually he learned not to exist. He wasn't a person, just another speck in the colorless hoard endlessly marching towards... towards what? He didn't know. Still, he kept marching, as long as he put one foot in front of the other, he wouldn't be hurt. 

The first thing he learned in school was the immutable truth of his existence. He was a prole. Proles performed all of the manual, repetitive, unfulfilling, or otherwise nasty jobs in life. They weren't taught to read or write, they weren't taught math, history, science, they weren't taught to love or hate. What use would they have for those skills anyways? Those callings were for people. All a prole needed to know was how to do their assigned job, and of course, how to obey. His teacher was a person. He was not. 

  As far as 187-B knew, the company was omnipotent. They'd always had dominion over the world and they always would. The company had decided, in their infinite wisdom, that Proles were to be the machine and the people the engineer. The proles were taught that they could achieve two fates. Retirement and termination. If you stayed in line, marched in time, and did your work well you could retire. Otherwise, you were terminated. 

There was one time, 187-B remembered... One time that he had disobeyed the company. When he was around 14, he'd managed to get his hands on a piece of charcoal. He'd pocketed it during a shift in the boiler room. He didn't know why, but when he saw the thing lying there on the ground something just possessed him to pick it up. Even now he couldn't explain it. Miraculously he managed to smuggle it back to his quarters. While he was sitting there inspecting the thing it slipped out of his hand and hit the ground. When he reached down to pick it up, he realized that it had left a mark on the ground. 

Curiously, he tapped it against the wall. It left another mark. Then, against all better judgement, he started drawing. At first it was just shapes and lines but eventually he started drawing with purpose. He drew himself, smiling... When the charcoal had finally been worn down to nothing he leaned against the opposite wall and admired his work. He knew... he knew that he should erase it, but he couldn't. It was too beautiful; he couldn't bring himself to destroy it. So, he just laid down and drifted into sleep.  

The next morning, he wasn't woken up by those six familiar beeps. Instead, he was forced back into the waking world when he found himself being dragged away with a bag over his head. He knew for certain that this would be his last day on earth. They'd surely terminate him for what he'd done. As he listened to a heavy door slam shut behind him, he couldn't help but think about that boy from his first day at the school. He didn't understand then, but now he knew. He knew what he was running towards. 

Suddenly he heard a voice. It was harsh and robotic. The voice scolded him for what he'd done, for his insolence. He thought they were about to terminate him when the voice suddenly changed. It was still robotic, rehearsed, but now it sounded softer. "You can still be an asset to the company...  But not without correction." In that moment he felt the icy grip of pain shooting through his body. He felt his bones breaking in a thousand spots. He felt is skin melting and his muscles tearing. It felt like it stretched on forever, hours and hours of stretching and breaking and burning. Then, he felt nothing. Just as soon as it came the pain subsided. "The company has been very kind to you today..." the voice uttered. 

He had never experienced such physical pain. All of the torture he had endured, the marches, the alarms, the endless work, the loneliness; they all paled in comparison. There was nothing, he thought as he lay in his bed afterwards, there was nothing so terrible, so dreadful, so hideous as that room. The next morning, he expected to awake in that awful place again, but he didn't. To his relief, he awoke to those familiar 6 beeps.