The Compound

by Aisling Rawle

I’ve always been a passive kind of person; it is both my worst quality and the thing that people like most about me.

Her hair was a bright, artificial red, which she moved about a great deal as she spoke, and she had long, well-maintained acrylic nails.

Artificiality

“Please refrain from revealing personal information unless instructed to do so in a task.”

What can they talk about that isn't superficial?

Even after three days in the desert they were beautiful. But we were beautiful too, and we sat straight and let them look.

“You’ve got a great smile,” he said. “Thanks. You do too.” “Well,” he said, smiling, “I guess we have that in common.”

I felt more conscious of my words when I was speaking to him, perhaps because he seemed to be paying close attention.

Nobody else was paying attention to what she was saying necessarily

Possibly the rule of finding someone to pair up with had been intended as a way to offset the selfishness of pursuing rewards, but as I lay there, looking at the boys around me, the rule only felt like a cruel exaggeration of our ideas of desire and desirability.

Next was Gav, who was good-looking, but not good-looking enough.

Once you received your Personal Reward, you had to thank the brand that had sent it. It was the best advertisement brands could get, and it meant that there would always be a supply of things for us to win.

Late stage capitalism

We weren’t talking about anything important, nothing interesting or noteworthy, but I felt that I had a sense of him just from that discussion, from the way he moved and the way he smiled at me and the way he listened so carefully to everything I said, even if it was nothing interesting.

He was so easy to talk to—he never seemed to think too deeply about anything.

It was the best possible reward she could have gotten at this point, not just because it showed off her body, but because it was small and easy to carry for whenever she had to leave, and because people would associate her with the outfit, making it easier to land a brand deal when she left.

So superficial - all people care about are branding deals

I didn’t want to be confronted with my selfish decisions. I wanted to be absolved through his regard for me.

It was easier now, to talk without revealing personal information. It limited your conversation, but if you just emptied your brain and said whatever came to mind, it was enjoyable in its own way.

For a moment I stopped thinking of Sam solely as a fellow contestant on a television show, in which he was suspended somewhere between reality and social experiment, and thought of him fully, truly, as a man standing before me, impressive, attractive, intelligent—someone I realized I liked a great deal.

I guess I can’t think of a system to replace what we have. Pointing out that something is broken doesn’t count as a solution.”

Seb had been right: if you spoke about something that you wanted, you were often offered it as a reward. This meant that we spent a great amount of time sitting around talking about material things.

Capitalism

You came to crave it again and again, that shock factor, the surge of conflict, the possibility of violence.

I wanted to be free from the daily confrontation with the slow decay of humanity and everything we had built. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted quiet. I wanted to stop pretending that I cared about things.

“I’d been feeling poorly for a while, even before I went on the show. I didn’t know what I was doing with my days. I found it hard to plan for the future. I kept thinking, why bother when we’ll probably be dead in twenty years, maybe fifteen. I think probably all of us must have been very unhappy, otherwise why would we have done that to ourselves? I know we told ourselves that we wanted to live peacefully, but I think we were looking for new ways to make ourselves miserable.

Kind of the thesis? Everything is nihilistic but they needed to find community - like the two friends (Btittany and Donna) who were successful, because they had each other and didn't care about "winning"

I raised my hand, returning the gesture, and stepped forward, the sled dragging heavily behind me.

Off to face the world - she's going into the unknown.