Sebastian Pearce – Flash Fiction and Sports Betting. What can go wrong?

A story by Sebastian Pearce based on the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt:

I’ve been in the Programme for three months when Director Chen shows me the red room.

“You’re ready,” she says, her smile precise as a scalpel. “Your scores have been exceptional.”

The compliment should please me. Instead, something cold walks down my spine. I’ve noticed things about the Institute that don’t align with what they told us during intake. The way certain corridors fall silent when I approach. How Programme graduates never visit, never call, despite their promised success in the corporate world. The locked doors on the third floor where the screaming sometimes filters through the ventilation at night.

But I need this. Thirty thousand in debt, no degree, no prospects. The Institute’s hundred-thousand-dollar placement guarantee made my decision easy.

The red room isn’t actually red. It’s white, clinical, empty except for a chair facing a wall of monitors. Chen gestures for me to sit.

“Leadership,” she begins, “is about understanding human nature. What drives people. What they’ll sacrifice. What they’ll become.”

On the screens, footage begins to play. A woman in a grey jumpsuit, sitting in a featureless cell. She looks familiar—something about her eyes—but I can’t place her.

“Subject 47,” Chen says. “She’s been with us for six weeks. Standard parameters. You’ll be her leader now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.” Chen hands me a tablet. “You have three objectives. Make her trust you. Make her obey you. Make her grateful for your authority. You have unlimited tools at your disposal. The scenario runs for twenty-eight days.”

I stare at the woman on the screen. She’s rocking slightly, arms wrapped around herself.

“This is… a simulation?”

“Does it matter?” Chen’s smile hasn’t changed. “Good leaders don’t hesitate when given clear objectives. They act.”

The tablet displays a menu. I can control Subject 47’s environment—temperature, light, food allocation, entertainment access. I can communicate with her through speakers. I can introduce rewards or punishments.

My throat feels tight. “What happens if I refuse?”

“You’re forty-seven thousand dollars in debt to us now, after room and board. That’s not including the non-compete clause you signed. Three years of unemployment in your field if you breach contract.” Chen’s voice is pleasant, conversational. “But why would you refuse? This is what leadership is. Influence. Control. Understanding that humans are variables to be optimized.”

I look at the woman again. Subject 47. She’s young—my age, maybe younger. There’s a small tattoo visible on her wrist. A bird.

“Begin whenever you’re ready,” Chen says, leaving me alone in the white room.

I don’t press anything for twenty minutes. I just watch Subject 47. She tries the door occasionally. Sits. Stands. Paces. I recognize the movements. I did the same thing my first night here, locked in my dormitory, wondering what I’d signed up for.

Finally, curiosity—or something darker—makes me tap the communication button.

“Hello,” I say. My voice echoes through her cell, and she jumps. “Can you hear me?”

She looks around wildly. “Who’s there? Where am I?”

“I’m…” I hesitate. What am I? “I’m going to help you. But I need you to trust me.”

Over the following days, I learn how frighteningly easy it is. Deprive her of food for twelve hours, then provide a hot meal when she follows a simple instruction. Keep her in darkness, then flood her cell with light when she responds to my voice. Introduce white noise at random intervals, then reward silence with music when she demonstrates compliance.

I tell myself I’m being kind. Compared to what Chen could do, what the Institute could do, I’m merciful. Subject 47 begins to wait for my voice. She thanks me for the small comforts I provide. She asks questions—who am I, where is she, why is this happening—and I deflect with reassurances. Trust me. Obey me. I’m here to help you.

By week three, she does everything I ask without hesitation. She’s grateful when I speak to her. She apologizes when she disappoints me. I’ve created something that horrifies me—a perfect, dependent, broken trust.

And my scores are phenomenal.

“Excellent work,” Chen tells me during review. “You’ve demonstrated the core principle. Leadership isn’t about inspiration or vision. It’s about dependency. Make them need you, and they’ll do anything.”

“The corporate world doesn’t work like this,” I say, though I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

“Doesn’t it?” Chen pulls up data on her screen. “Every management technique, every HR strategy, every workplace structure—all designed to create dependency. Economic dependency. Social dependency. Identity dependency. You’re just learning the mechanism in its purest form.”

She shows me photographs of Programme graduates. CEOs. Politicians. University presidents. Military commanders.

“The ones who excel here,” she says, “excel everywhere.”

On day twenty-eight, Chen returns to the red room. “Final task,” she says. “Tell Subject 47 she’s free. Unlock her door. Let’s see what you’ve built.”

I do. The door unlocks with a click that echoes through the monitors.

Subject 47 doesn’t move. She stares at the open doorway for five full minutes. Then she closes it. Locks it from the inside.

“Please,” her voice comes through the speakers, small and desperate. “Please don’t leave me. I need instructions. I don’t know what to do without you.”

I feel sick.

“Perfect,” Chen says. She extends her hand. “Congratulations. You’ve graduated.”

The celebration is brief. She leads me down new corridors, to parts of the Institute I’ve never accessed. My placement, she explains, is ready. Six-figure salary. A corner office. My own team to develop and lead.

We pass a door marked “Subject Processing.” Through the window, I glimpse familiar grey jumpsuits. Thirty, maybe forty people. Some I recognize from my intake group. The ones who dropped out. The ones who couldn’t make the payments.

“Wait,” I say, stopping. “Subject 47. She was—”

“From your cohort, yes. Failed out in week six. We offered her a choice: lawsuit and financial ruin, or participation in our practical training programme.” Chen keeps walking. “Don’t worry. She completed her service. She’s been released.”

“Released where?”

“Does it matter? She learned valuable lessons about authority. You learned valuable lessons about leadership. The system works.”

We reach an elevator I’ve never seen before. Chen presses the button for the third floor—the locked floor, where the screaming comes from.

“One final component,” she says. “Every graduate completes it. Nothing too demanding. You’ll do fine.”

The doors open onto a corridor lined with red rooms. Dozens of them. In each one, a chair. A wall of monitors. And behind those monitors—

I see myself. A hundred versions of myself, from a hundred different angles, across a hundred different days. Every moment in the white room. Every decision. Every instruction I gave to Subject 47.

“Leadership,” Chen says, “requires self-awareness. You need to see yourself as your subjects see you. To understand what you’ve become.”

She hands me a new tablet. On the screen: Subject 1. Me. In my dormitory on day one, trying the locked door. Pacing. Sitting. Standing.

“Your scores have been exceptional,” she says. “But everyone thinks they’re special. Everyone thinks they’re the leader, not the subject. This is how we select our true graduates—the ones who can learn they were test subjects all along and still choose to become leaders.”

My hands are shaking. “The placement. The corporate job. That’s real?”

“Very real. Contingent on your completion of this final assessment.” She gestures at the screen. At myself, trapped and confused and afraid. “You have a choice. You can refuse, breach your contract, face financial and legal destruction. Or you can accept that what we did to you, what you did to Subject 47—that’s just how the world works. And you can take your place in it.”

I look at the screen. At the person I was three months ago.

“What do I have to do?”

Chen’s smile is warm, approving, perfectly calibrated.

“Just watch,” she says. “And learn what good leadership really means.”

The door closes behind her. I’m alone in the red room, watching myself learn to obey, watching the precise application of deprivation and reward that made me grateful for Chen’s authority, made me trust her, made me need this programme so desperately that I’d break another person to keep it.

I understand now. We’re all Subject 47. We’re all in the chair. The only question is whether we realize it—and what we do when we finally see the screens.

My hand hovers over the tablet. On the screen, day-one me tries the door again, hope still visible in my movements.

I could refuse. I could choose financial ruin over complicity.

But I’ve learned what leadership is. I’ve learned what I’m capable of. I’ve learned that humans are variables to be optimized, that dependency is power, that the system works because people like me make it work.

I press play.

The footage continues. Behind me, through the door, I hear other Programme participants in other red rooms, making the same choice I’m making. Choosing to be leaders instead of subjects, even knowing there’s no difference. Even knowing we’re all still in the cells, just with better views.

What makes a good leader?

Someone who’s learned to be grateful for their own conditioning.

Someone who’ll do it to others because it was done to them.

Someone who understands that every leader is still a subject, and chooses to lead anyway.

I watch myself on the screen, and I begin to take notes.