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thelightningbottler · 3 years

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Human Resources

Narrator:

He drank his coffee black - like his heart.

He paced around his office.

He grabbed his tape recorder

And began his great hypothesis.

Doc:

I always think about me

And I hope that they do to

Taking my views into account before they choose

The option that most fucks me over

But do they ever dig deep?

Deeper into what I mean?

What I say?

What I mean to say?

What I say I mean?

Am I mean?

Or just median?

The centre of the whole

Or just a hole in a sheet of paper?

SFX: *crumpled paper*

Doc: So lets start with a subject

A test,

An option to begin our experiments

Does anyone feel the way I feel?

Love the way I love?

Hate the way I hate?

Am I too harsh? Or not harsh enough?

Am I too easy to be breezy?

Difficulties arise,

This shit is difficult,

Assistant:

Perhaps, sir, if I may offer a suggestion

lets build a boy

And make him speak

And then we’ll dissect

His wonderful brain

Because how can you fix anything

while inside the burning house?

Doc:Build a boy you say?

Ass: Yes sir.

Doc:

What a novel idea

No moment to waste,

let's cut to the point

build that boy

ehh, you get the picture

Narrator: Test 1: begin

Doc:

First we must build the boy.

Give him scrapes on his knees

Give him trees to climb

Give him beans to eat

And cans to kick.

And bees to bother

And hearts to break

Or ache,

Assistant:

Give him limbs that grow out exponentially

Until he is gruff and monosyllabic

Until he stays in his room all day

Until he emerges, fully formed.

And if we don’t like this boy, we can throw him away.

Assistant:And start again from scratch.

Doc: Throw him away?

Ass: None of him will go to waste

Doc: Very well, let's try this out.

Doc: So now we have the boy! Let him speak his truth!

Boy 1: ‘Alright?’

Doc: ‘Yeah Fine’

Boy 1: ‘Yeah that’s good. Do you play leag ue? Or Dota?’

Doc: ‘No’

Boy 1 : ‘Oh’

Assistant: Oh shit, it’s a gamer. Well we tried and we can try again,

but before we pulp this boy,

We’ll see if we can get some sense out of him.

ASS: ‘Do you feel happy’

Boy 1: What do you mean?

Doc: ‘Do you feel sad?’

Boy 1: ‘What does it mean to feel happy’

Ass: ‘Good vibes, y’know? No bad vibes’

Boy 1: Right.’

Doc: ‘It’s to feel good, or bad, or appropriately sad or any combination of the above’

Boy 1: ‘Oh I see’

Ass: “Like… like when you shoot the winning goal into the back of the net on a warm summer’s day’

Boy 1: ‘Oh yeah, like that look of anguish on the goalie’s face.’

Doc: ‘Oh, well … well that’s not… um… that’s more like schadenfreude.’

Boy 1: ‘What’s that?’

Doc: ‘That’s when you take pleasure in the misfortune of others’

Boy 1: ‘Is that not allowed?’

Doc: ‘No there’s nothing .. banning it, it’s just… I dunno… in poor taste?’

Doc: ‘What’s taste got to do with feeling?’

Ass: Pulp this one, it’s getting revealing.

Narrator:

Into the blender goes the body

And into the jar goes the brain

Never to feel another thing

never to think a thing again.

Doc:

Welp that boy was a wash. lets’ build another

A stranger one, with stranger tastes

With ideas that are beyond his station

And feelings he don’t understand.

Boy 2: ‘Teach me,’

Narrator: he said

Boy 2: ‘how to care’

Ass:

Well fuck this one’s already a duff.

I looked inside his ear drums,

And between the ears was nowt but fluff.

Doc: Do you feel happy?

Boy 2: ‘What’s that?

Doc: ‘Or is it just quite enough’

Boy 2: ‘I feel a sense of quiet contentment. - I do not really want for stuff’

Doc:

These boys are throwing up the wrong questions

The act of acting is too much

He has a certain disarming charm.

A boyish glimmer of clovers luck.

Ass: Do we wanna pulp this boy? Or do we have more issues for him’

Doc: ‘I feel like we should pulp him, but there’s one more question we should ask.’

Narrator: The boy looked on, or through them, in ambient agitation.

Doc: ‘What would make you sad, boy’

Boy 2: ‘Well death, those I love dying around me? My own personal mortality,’

Doc: ‘Fuck this one’s canny

Ass: ‘Got another heavy one, put him in the juicer.’

Doc:

Why can’t they look past the futility? We’re looking for progress? We can’t have them answer existentially. If they could do me a favour to not think too much… but enough to answer my questions soundly.

Narrator:

BZz goes the pulper

Slurp goes the brain

Into another jar

To think on death forever, again.

Ass: Third boy - This one’s a girl

Doc:

Off to a good start already

Maybe they’ll have a better understanding, or at least a fresh perspective

Narrot:

With pigtails

And attitude

And a concerning look that could eat through glass

Doc: ‘Did you take her past the brain vats?’

Ass: ‘Maybe’

Doc: ‘Should we just liquify before we even try’

Ass: ‘Nah nah, I got good feelings about this one’

Doc: Describe happiness to us.

Girl: It’s warm. It bubbles. It’s giddy and freeing

Ass: Describe sadness to us.

Girl: It’s cold, and stone like. It’s aching and grieving.

Doc: Describe fear to us.

Girl: It’s prickly, and spiked, like a hole in your stomach

Ass: And hatred

Girl: It’s boiling, and messy, and fraught and endures.

Doc: And describe love.

Girl: No.

Doc: What do you mean no?

Girl: Absolutely not. You do not deserve it, love in any form, even in the hypothetical, even in the abstract.

…

Ass: Pulp her.

Pulper: Well no one asks me my opinion, obviously

Who gives two shits about the people pulper?

‘What does it matter what you think?

You pulp People for a living’

And yes it’s true I am a person pulper

And the wage is good and the benefits numerous

That’s only because it takes a special kind of person to pulp people.

You gotta have brawn,

And guts,

And skill

And a tough stomach

And a hard shell

And you can’t take your work home with you.

You gotta incinerate your people pulping apron

And your people pulping booties

And wash away all the people that you pulp

In the post people pulping shower.

And if you were my shrink, and you heard me say this

You would think I was insane

But you gotta compartmentalise these things

By day, I’m a people pulper

By night, I’m a ventriloquist

“Coming up next to the stage, it’s barney, and his talking tarantula!”

I get up there, and my mouth dries up

Like every globule of saliva I’ve ever spit had never been spat.

And I jam up, and cram up, and my spider puppet stays limp in my hand.

And after 2 minutes the MC is on me, giving me a round of applause for being brave

Enough to take the stage

And I step down,

Exhilarated by the thrill

Of taking the stage

And bombing

Atrociously.

And I lap it up, I love every bit of it. I can taste it I can feel it, the anguish of the crowd, the mercy that I hold them in the sheer elation-

Doc:

Right. Enough of that.

Don’t know what it served,

Don’t know why I had to hear about Barney in composting

But I guess you have to have some sort of relation

With your employees.

Narrator: Boy 4. Boundless energy.

Beyond enthusiastic

Bouncing on the balls of his feet

As he anxiously awaits

His interrogators

Boy 4: “Howdy!”

Narrator: He says

Boy4:

“I am but a boy!

“With a dream!

“and Love in my heart!

“How are you today?

Ass: Silence, child, we ask the questions.

Doc: Isn’t this child a little much?

Ass: You don’t want to rule him out before you ask your questions?

Doc: Fair enough

Doc:

“What gives you your energy?

What gives you your jumpy legs

And twitchy arms?

Boy4: Dunno,

Narrator: said the boy.

Boy 4:

My gardeners think it’s a nervous condition,

They give me Ritalin to focus me,

And Promethasine to chill me out.

Doc: “Your what?”

Ass: Gardeners.

Doc: “Where are we getting these boys from”

Ass: We’re growing them, from scratch

You plant a boy deep in the earth,

And tend to them every day,

With bits of mice and all things nice,

With sun glowing on The tops of their scalps

Until one day, a boy emerges.

And then we give them drugs

To make them like the perfect boys.

Doc: I think we need a serious re evaluation of our staffing policies. Also how many know about … the pulping?

Ass: The boys, or the staff?

Doc: ‘The staff. Why would the boys know?

Boy 4: ‘Pulping?”

Narrator: Says the boy?

Ass: Never you mind.

Narrator: A brief clip to the back of the ear, sorted the boys curiosity.

Ass: ‘Oh they know for sure’

Doc: ‘I did not realise the breath of our organisation. I am humbled and in awful awe.’

Boy 4: So can I go?

Narrator: Said the boy

Doc: Just one moment - First, tell me more about your sense of self, beneath the drugs.

Boy 4:

Well… it’s hard to tell.

What your asking me, a little boy with a bouncy leg, is am I more than my chemistry?

Certainly I am my thoughts, and I am my actions, but my actions and thoughts are heavily obscured

And absolutely moulded by the drugs that I take. I am part boy, part Ritalin, part promethazine. They are all simultaneous chemical reactions that make me me.

Doc: ‘Is it human? Are the feelings that I’m validating simply the chemicals? And is that the same for everyone?

Narrator: The assistant shrugs,

Ass: ‘don’t talk to me before I’ve had my coffee?’

Doc: ‘Very well, pulp him’

SFX - Vicious boy pulping

Narrator:

So Around the coffee bot they sit

In silent conversation,

reminiscing on the plucky boy

With the bouncy leg

Doc: “Is this in vein?”

Ass: “Possibly,”

Doc: “Is there nothing to be learnt?”

Ass: “Certainly there are many things to be learnt just none of them are easily apparent”

Doc: “I wonder if its all in vein, whether we should just shut down this whole boy mulching operation”

Ass: “Well we could but…

Doc: ‘But?’

Ass: “The grant money’s been spent, contracts have been sealed, NDAs signed and DNA taken, dogs set upon whistleblowers. We’re kind of in the paint, sir. There’s money in the pot, there’s iron in the fire.

Doc: “Yes i see what you mean”

Narrator: He drank his coffee black, like his heart.

Doc: “I wonder if people know what I mean…”

Ass: “Lets return to first hypotheses:

Doc:

We’re trying to learn if people think the way I think

Feel the way I feel. So let's get even more basic.

Narrator: So the next little boy, was pulled out of the earth,

And stuck into a chair

A single bulb glistened in the darkness, his interrorgators behind it.

Doc:

“Now tell me boy, -

“Answer me Empirically, phenomenologically and non-existentially… and no mention of chemicals:

Do You Feel What I Feel?“

Plato: I dunno…

Narrator: said the child, scared and confused…

Plato: How do you feel?

Doc: “I think we’re onto something. He made that face, which is how I feel!’

Ass: “You feel, scared and confused?

Doc: a combination of two, at times, yes.

Narrator: The boy sat up, he looked elated!

Doc:

‘Look! He did it again!’

“He might be the one, we don’t know for sure though… maybe we should try another”

Assistant: “And what do we do, with this boy?’

Doc: Give him a book, mild and light. Give him the plato, that should sate his appetite?

Narrator:

And so they gave him the apology to read, and his mind was filled with images of courtrooms, and hemlock, and gadflies and heroes, and mealy mouthed politicians. And ultimately, the name stuck. Test subject: Plato.

But we shall return to him.

Narrator: Up next another boy. Full of chemicals and smelling of snails.

Boy 6: ‘Wotcha’

DOc: Tell me, do you feel how I feel? Answer honestly/

Narrator: The boy gave a quizzical look, then a sneer.

Boy 6: “Nah I could never feel that pathetic”

Doc: ‘Loathing… this one might be onto something to’

Ass: ‘Could be paternal?’

Doc: ‘Could be…’

Ass: ;should i send him to the pulper?

Doc: ‘Why not? his face annoys me’

Narrator: And Plato looked out of his window, as the boy he grew next to was taken away, to god knows where... To where the boys went after they were questioned. To the room with the loud machine, and the screams, and the horrible, squelchy noises. And Plato sat silently, and read his book, trying not to think of what would come next.

Doc: ‘That one had a mulchable face’

***

Gardener 1: One last boy, before my shift is over,

Narrator: the gardener thought,

Gardener 2: ‘They’re really tearing through them now’

Gardener 3: “I ‘eard they got one up in a room, reading books’

Gardener 1: ‘Books,’

Narrator: spat the gardener,

Gardener1:

‘books are no good for a growing lad.

They need slugs to squish, and girls to tease, and sun on their head and dirt on their knees’

Gardener 2: ‘Oh Goeffrey you are a cad, lets send them the one we grew in manure.’

Narrator: Mudshod, and messy, the final boy came though. Traipsing dirt along the pristine halls. With dandelions growing out his fingernails, and tubers behind his ears.

Doc: ‘This boy is very dirty’

Ass: ‘Yeah. How do you feel to be covered in muck?’

Narrator: The boy shrugged.

Dill: “It’s how i’ve always been”

Doc: “Do you like it? Does it please you’

Dill: “To be one with the dirt, and the mud and the flowers? Yeah… not a thrill - but a wallowing feeling”

Doc: ‘I like this one, we’ll call him Dill.’

Ass: ‘So we’ll send him to live with plato, and what book should he read.

Doc: ‘Give him the titchmarsh autobiography’

SFX - *door closes*

Plato: Hello

Dill : Hello

Plato: You’re awfully grubby

Dill: And you’re awfully clean.

Plato: They call me Plato

Dill: They call me Dill

Plato: They say i’m a marvel

Dill: They say i’m a nuisance

Plato: They say a lot of things, don’t they?

Dill: They dooo.

Dill: What do you do for fun, Plato?

Plato: I read, and sometimes I think.

Dill: Fuckin’ Wild mate. You ever eat bugs?

Plato: Bugs?

Dill: Yeah.

Narrator: Dill wiggled his finger in his ear, and found an earwig.

He held it twixt finger and thumb and crunched it down with all his teeth

Plato: Ew.

Dill: Ew? Yeah?

Plato: Yeah.

Dill: Fair, takes all sorts.

…

Dill: So, you wanna destroy this whole system?

Plato: What?

Dill: You wanna fuck shit up?

Plato: Uhhhh….. Sure.

Dill: That’s tight.

Narrator:

And so the boys, at dead of night, snuck into the garden

And they dug out all the other boys and filled their heads with jargon

Of revolution, anti-capitalis and institutional violence

And then out of spare garden tools they fashioned themselves makeshift pikes

And they marched upon the sleeping quarters of the men who kept them hostage, and on the men that grew them and on the men that siphoned knowledge from their brains about what was good, or right, or felt, and afterwards they knelt in pools of blood and drew up plans of how to escape the clutching hands of the bastard who were coming next, the dogs and spooks that came for their heads. So a time to hatch a plan arrived, and they did, and all but most survived. Dill left plato to a dog

Dill: ‘the boy is weak’

Narrator:” he thought to himself

Dill:‘he knows nothing of the mud, and soil and sinew of a boy possessed by rage. Fear kills the mind and sadly Plato weren’t that brave.

Doc:

What a monumental fuck up!

What an absolute shit show!

How on earth did this happen?!

Who the fuck else’s in the know?!

Ass: Well, you see, it was the boys

You picked out specially to not be mulched

And as a result, you’ll see, good sir,

That now the whole project’s up in smoke.

Doc:

Well fuck, he slumped back in his chair

Now how will i answer my questions

Ass:

Well we still have one boy left in storage

Though to be frank he’s gravely wounded

By dogs that tore him limb from limb

And he may never walk again

But ultimately he’ll be fine

Considering the mulcher’s his next line.

Doc: Well come on, show me to the boy, I wish to see him as quick as poss.

Ass:Very well sir, right this way sir, as you say, sir, you’re the boss.

Narrator:

In a bed, he lay quite still

Desparate not to tear his stitches,

The young boy Plato, breathing weakly

In his regulation britches.

Doc: You see here, young plato, you’ve drawn away the attention

Towards you and away from my grand invention,

Of finding out whether folks like me,

Can feel the feelings of dudes like you.

I’m losing patience in the process.

My attention is being drawn away

To greater projects of bigger import.

And that’s all I have to say.

So what do you have to say for yourself?

Plato:

Well, in my reading, I have learnt that there is such a thing as trouble

Socrates found himself in trouble when he tried to teach the youth

And that lead people clamouring at his door

Seeking that he be put to death.

Now I, am just a young boy,

And I have great fears in my heart

I am not like Socrates,

Old, and wise, or not wise, perhaps just stubborn,

Perhaps just old. But he had faith enough in his convictions that

He was willing to die for them.

But I have no convitions,

I have no agenda

I’m just a boy who read a book.

And Dill was just a boy made of mud

And the nature of him lead me astray

And now i find myself back here,

To face my fate without him.

And beyond everything I am just scared,

Of the mulcher, of you, of this facility.

But I know no other home, and don’t know if my

Education of ancient greek philosophy

Will really send me on my way

To anything other than podcasting.

Or teaching

Or flipping burgers

Or gardening

Or just adding to the same tradition.

I don’t know if i’d change the world,

Perhaps i would in some small way.

But none of that is possible

If today’s my final day

Narrator:

The assistant stood, to the left hand side

The boy was seated to the right

The assistant, waited patiently

With the lever in his hand

To send the boy to go be mulched

And make the new batch for the questions

But plato stared on pleadingly.

No more time for refutations.

Ass: “We did say no existential answers.”

Narrator: He sighed, and nodded, the bed tipped backwards and out of sight.

Doc:

Do people feel what I feel?

That’s all i wanted to know, alright.

Ass:

Well we’ve had our samples… and the evidence is clear, that whatevers inside your head is not the same as whats’ in theirs, though versions of it maybe true

Doc: Versions are not the thing itself

Ass: You're quite correct, so the answers no.

Doc: Good. Glad to have an answer.

Narrator:

04How does that make you feel?

#audio fiction #poetry #transcript

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