A Cowellian Future - The X Factor in the Year 2053
The year is 2053AD. The X Factor is now in its 50th series and has taken control of most of Western Europe under the stewardship of Simon Cowell, its High Lord Protector. But the State is facing danger abroad and The Great Simon must find a way to uphold the crumbling morale of his army and citizenry. Then, one day, a child appears...
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Susie’s lower lip quivered, just a fraction, just one shuddering jot. Instantly, metallic screams blared briefly around the gargantuan studio, as hot lights and cameras high up in the rafters turned themselves into vigilance, robot arms wrenched back into joint. They sought, found, focused on little Susie, alone in her wheelchair on the big empty stage. The audience craned their necks in their seats, waiting for what they knew must come, for what happens to every Contestant. They were waiting for her to break.
Susie’s lower lip quivered, just a fraction, just one shuddering jot. Instantly, metallic screams blared briefly around the gargantuan studio, as hot lights and cameras high up in the rafters turned themselves into vigilance, robot arms wrenched back into joint. They sought, found, focused on little Susie, alone in her wheelchair on the big empty stage. The audience craned their necks in their seats, waiting for what they knew must come, for what happens to every Contestant. They were waiting for her to break.
Susie had been automatically
selected for the programme under The Regime’s Reallocation and Entertainment
Initiative. A soulless computer had spat out her name onto the desk of a
faceless bureaucrat, the wheels had been set in motion, and, like a fat man
rolling down a hill, the process could not be stopped. Following Disinfection
and Interrogation, Susie had been ushered through the preliminary checks,
rushed from grey room to grey room, clutching her regulation issue Child
Comforter Bear Toy #6681427, called ‘Simon’ (All the toys were called Simon now,
as well as all the first-born males.) Throughout the screening process the
producers had slowly begun to realise the magnitude of the computer’s chance
discovery. Whispers began, gathered pace, evolved into rumours and then broke
into galloping hysteria. She had been found, people gabbled to each other; She
was no longer theoretical. The Child was at hand. All of them knew and recited
by heart the sacred words of the Prophet Tulisa: ‘And lo, there shall, like,
come at a time, like, a little kid, who is, like, well cute, and who will, on
account of her being totes gorgeous and smushable, be the saviour for us all.
Right, fuck off now, LOL’. Now at last those beautiful words were ready to be
fulfilled.
For it was clear, judged the producers, that Susie was the perfect
contestant, the pinnacle of pathos, the very embodiment of everything the X
Factor strived to exploit. Susie was young. She was blonde. She had blue eyes.
She had no facial disfigurement. She was an orphan (her parents had been loyal X-Factotums killed in the defence of The Show, protecting the gates of The City
from Kate Thornton’s roving dissident hordes.) Best of all, crowed
the producers, she was in a wheelchair! The Great Simon could not believe it
when word ascended through the levels of his massive bureaucracy. A photogenic,
wheelchair-bound, orphan child? Oh happy days! Of course, by this point, The
Great Simon was simply a consciousness transplanted into The City’s mainframe
computer in order to free him from his decaying prison of a body, but God
dammit, his incorporeal existence still knew a target of exploitation when it heard it. Maybe now they had finally found something so cute, so adorable, so
sympathy-inspiring that it would bolster and sustain his demoralised and
starving armies in the fight against Louis Walsh’s Visigoths and bring an end
to the brutal energy wars which had been raging across New Eurasia for nearly
forty years.
Under the scrutiny of
the lights, she held her bear Simon close to her breast, as if trying to deaden
the loud thumping of her heart, which she was sure the JudgeBots could hear.
Fear, they had told her on the indoctrination course, was undesirable; fear
makes you weak. The JudgeBots are programmed to smell fear. But she couldn’t
help it. She was afraid. She was confused. The lights blinded her and she was
still bewildered from her encounter with the two elderly gentlemen off-stage;
their tone was kindly, but they spoke in some strange, long-past language that
her minder had told her was ‘Geordie’. As she glanced into the wings of the
stage for reassurance, she saw these two ancient men, their wrinkled faces
creased in smiles. ‘Way-aye!’ shouted the one who still had his own teeth.
‘That must be some kind of war cry!’ Susie panicked. Suddenly the fear
overwhelmed her and the lip quivered again. The lights doubled their intensity,
the audience leant forward in their seats, expectant. Slowly, like a State electric
punishment chamber building its charge, Susie began to cry. Big oval tears
pooled in the corners of her eye and coursed like rivulets down her cheeks,
tears that would gradually carve out the lines on Susie’s face, like streams
that have eroded their way down an ancient mountain.
JudgeBot Cheryl
immediately engaged its automatic sympathy programme, and walked on its giant
iron legs to the child, efficiently engaging and reassuring Susie in a cold
simulation of maternal affection. The State took a collectivised breath before
releasing it in a collectivised sigh. Women cooed as their ovaries throbbed.
Deep in the machine, The Great Simon smiled insubstantially; that should
increase the conception rate tonight, he thought. More soldiers for the war!
‘Now go on,’ intoned another JudgeBot in
the hearty Yorkshire brogue of the long dead Gary Barlow; ‘Why don’t you have
another go, sweetheart?’ Calmed by the sedatives released during the embrace
with JudgeBot Cheryl, Susie composed herself. She moistened her lips, she
inhaled deeply, she drew herself up. In the ravaged cities of The State,
citizens stared with hungry eyes and strained their ears, ready for angelic
tones crooning forth from the cherub’s lips which would lift their souls away
from the scorched earth, away from their bodies. But the sound that came forth
was of no such kind. Little Susie (her last name had been lost in the massive
bureaucracy) opened her mouth, and out poured a confused stream of atonal horror,
as if torments streaming from the jaws of Hell. Note after note, each so
inexpertly pitched, stabbed at the very hearts of the citizenry, shredding
the last vestiges of the belief that anything could ever be beautiful again.
In the space between mind and machine, The Great Simon raged: ‘BUT SHE’S A
BLONDE EIGHT YEAR OLD ORPHAN IN A WHEELCHAIR! WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE CAN’T SING?
SHE MUST BE ABLE TO. PERSONAL TRAGEDY EQUALS SINGING ABILITY, WE ALL KNOW THAT!
THAT IS THE VERY CORNERSTONE ON WHICH THIS STATE IS FOUNDED!’
Cowell’s mind could not compute the
fundamental logical contradiction. Sparks flew as the mainframe began
short-circuiting and breaking down, wires bursting into flames, cars exploding inexplicably, like what happens in the movies, yeah? Around
the studio screams erupted throughout the audience as the JudgeBots exploded
and caught fire. The elderly Ant and Dec wailed and clutched each other,
finally confessing their mutual love in an incomprehensible frenzy of Geordie.
In the midst of all this chaos stood Susie, a figure of angelic peace and calm.
Blocking out the noise around her as flaming beams fell from the ceiling and
the roof buckled and caved, Susie sat in her wheelchair singing her little
heart out, her voice drowned out. Then the ends of her mouth twitched upwards in what might have been a smile.
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