Fifteen Million Merits

Black Mirror 1×2

& ’Hey, what else were you planning to do with that hand?’

& Bing: ....... Drying my hands.
    Abi: Impressive.

& Bing: Bing Manson. Short for Bingham.
    Abi: Abi Carner. Short for Abi Carner.

& Abi: Can’t you just use that CPT app?
    Bing: What’s that?
    Abi: This cognitive behavioural thing. It realigns your thinking to pick healthy food. Whispers you into it while you sleep.
    Bing: Yeah, I should try that, yeah.

& Abi: It’s just noises, though. Noises in the right order.

& Bing: It’s all just stuff. It’s... It’s stuff, it’s confetti, it’s... You’ve got something real. What better to spend it on?
    Abi: You heard me singing in a toilet. Is that real?
    Bing: More than anything that’s happened all year.

& Bing: I... I look around here, I just... I just want something real to happen. Just once.

& — Would you like to be as big as Salma one day?
    Abi: Yeah, I mean...
    — Could you say that as a self-contained sentence into that screen?
    Abi: ... I guess I’d like to be as big as Salma one day.
    — OK. Proceed to stage area.

---

& Judge Hope: Listen. We said, right from the start. We’ll go with something different this season. That’s why he’s on the panel!
    Judge Wraith: She would be a star on our stream. A star. On his... You’re furniture, at best. Forget about all the shame, and all that ppht-ppht-tew. We medicate against that. You will have pleasure forever.
    Judge Charity: Realistically, sweetheart, it is that, or the bike.

& Judge Hope: Who do you think is powering that spotlight? Millions of people! That’s who. All of them, out there, right now.

& Judge Hope: You know what? Maybe you do belong on the bike. Because you don’t seem to be very willing to step off it.

& ’Resume viewing!
    Bing: No! No!
    ’Resume viewing! Resume viewing! Resume viewing! Resume viewing! Resume viewing! Resume viewing! Resume viewing! Resume viewing!
    — ’Look at you. All clean and shiny.’
    ’Portal disabled during commercial.

& — A what-nic one? An eth-nic one!

& — So what are you, a magician?
    Bing: An entertainer.
    — Could you say that down the screen as a self-contained sentence?
    Bing: I’m an entertainer.

& Bing: I had to get here, to stand here, and I wanted you to listen. To really listen, not just pull a face like you’re listening, like you do the rest of the time. A face that you’re feeling instead of processing. You pull a face, and poke it towards the stage, and we lah-di-dah, we sing and dance and tumble around. And all you see up here, it’s not people, you don’t see people up here, it’s all fodder. And the faker the fodder, the more you love it, because fake fodder’s the only thing that works any more.
        It’s all that we can stomach. Actually, not quite all. Real pain, real viciousness, that, we can take. Yeah, stick a fat man up a pole. We laugh ourselves feral, because we’ve earned the right, we’ve done cell time and he’s slacking, the scum, so ha-ha-ha at him! Because we’re so out of our minds with desperation, we don’t know any better.
        All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That’s how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit.
        What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, and it doesn’t exist! It’s not even there! We buy shit that’s not even there.
        Show us something real and free and beautiful... You couldn’t. Yeah? It’d break us. We’re too numb for it. I might as well choke. It’s only so much wonder we can bear. When you find any wonder whatsoever, you dole it out in meagre portions. Only then until it’s augmented, packaged, and pumped through 10,000 preassigned filters till it’s nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day in day out, going where? Powering what? All tiny cells and tiny screens and bigger cells and bigger screens and fuck you!
        Fuck you, that’s what it boils down to. Fuck you for sitting there and slowly making things worse. Fuck you and your spotlight and your sanctimonious faces. Fuck you all for thinking the one thing I came close to never meant anything. For oozing around it and crushing it into a bone, into a joke. One more ugly joke in a kingdom of millions.
        Fuck you for happening. Fuck you for me, for us, for everyone. Fuck you!
    Judge Hope: .............. That was, without a doubt, the most heartfelt thing I’ve seen on this stage since Hotshot began!
    Brilliant!

& Judge Hope: I like your stuff.
    Bing: It’s not stuff.
    Judge Hope: It’s truth. Am I right? Your truth, admittedly, but truth nonetheless. And you’re right. Authenticity is in woefully short supply. I’d like to hear you talk again.
    Bing: How so?
    Judge Hope: The slot on one of my streams where you can talk just like that...
    Judge Charity: I’d watch it. It was such great passion.
    Judge Hope: What do you say? 30 minutes twice a week?

& Bing: ’We’re all in this together they say. Yeah, right. Farewell for ever..... ’Till the same time next week.’
    'Stream off-line.'

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On the IMDb

Σ Episode 2 extends the line started in the Episode 1 in the future. "Who do you think is powering that spotlight? Millions of people! That's who. All of them, out there, right now." It's just scary.