text: “Did you find anything yet? I want something weird, something no one’s watching, you know?” “Yeah, I get it. I’m trying. Look, I’m on page thirty-two of the search, ok? First ten pages were all the same shit.” “Oooh, what about that one.” “Uhh, let’s see. Monster Boss. Some kind of show. What do the comments say? ‘Its like if The Office happened in hell.’ ‘Omg wtf is this?’ ‘Low budget arthouse crap.’ ‘I don’t get it. Is it supposed to be a joke?’ ‘How are there three seasons of this?’ ‘The monster is kinda hot, ngl.’ ‘Something about this sets off red flags, its too amateur to look that real.’ Huh, I don’t know, not a lot there to go on. I’m down if you are.” “Sounds terrible. Start it up.” ..... Happy sounding music starts playing. A shakey camera darts between a rows of trashed office equipment in what looks like a cave. Nervous people in torn suits scribble at crumpled paper on broken desks, one of them is typing away at a computer with a cracked black screen, mumbling something to himself. A hard cut to scenes from the show, people laughing and crying, some of them bleeding, most of them keep shooting wide eyed looks off screen. It flashes to a long table as the music gets happier. People sitting in broken office chairs, trembling smiles, the shaking camera looks at every face and then trails the length of the table and swings up to something wrong. ‘Monster Boss’ appears in block letters, with a happy chime above the wrongness. The camera shakes closer to what is obviously the Monster Boss. Someone whispers “help us.” The music cuts out and the camera stays on the Monster Boss for far too long. It’s all wrong. The thing is tall and stands on two legs with too many joints. Its skin glistens, like a frogs, but the muscles beneath it look strong. It must be ten feet tall. It’s wearing a suit. The ripped fabric of it is stained with dark watery marks. The suit is far too small, so it looks like it’s wearing kid’s clothes, the pants end halfway down its legs and the sleeves are stripped and fluttering, snagged on thorny protrusions that blotch its arms like a rash. The back of the suit is torn nearly in half, making room for what looks like a massive hunchback, except that it wiggles. Not a hunchback, a mass of tentacles. It’s like a huge anemone growing from its back, the semitranslucent appendages slimy and long, caked in bubbly mud where they drag on the cave floor. It has two arms, equally over jointed, that end in hands with six fingers. Fingers which are just too long, each tipped with jagged claws that seem to pop in and out like a cats. Its face is indescribable. Only features make any sense. A beak, teeth, the head changes shape constantly, it has a wig stuck to its head, dark matted hair smeared in grime with what might be a mushroom growing out of it. It’s looking right at the camera. Something that should be eyes stare into the screen. Stare through the screen? Or is it looking at the camera man? The frame is shaking violently now. Hard cut. A woman appears, sitting behind a desk. A cut runs down her cheek, rumpled and oozing, she smiles into the camera and the words ‘Human Resources’ appear under her. She’s shuddering as she speaks, her eyes never stay still. “I love it here, at work. It’s where I do all my work. It’s good work, because, I have a good boss,” she laughs then, a sound that is high-pitched and crackles at the edges. “Why did I choose to work here,” she asks, clearly repeating a question. Her smile is so wide and tight that a part of the cut pops open and red and greenish white strarts dribbling down her cheek. “Oh, you know. Same reason as everyone here. Met the boss while I was out at a club. We started talking in an alley, when I was getting some air, and... well, woke up and I was here. It’s a literal dream job.” She looks around, the clicking of a keyboard tip taps out something that sounds like the chorus to ‘I need a hero’. “That’s too obvious, Frank, it’ll know,” she whispers at someone behind her. “You think it knows music,” a man’s voice, quiet and jumpy. Hard Cut. The woman is sitting very still, everything about her face is tight and carefull, except for the tears. Typing sounds come in like a kid hitting a piano, erratic, clumsy, barely covering the sound of whimpering behind her. “Oh, the boss? He’s the best. No, no I don’t think I’m his favorite. I don’t think there is one, really. It’s more like we’re a team, you know. Leadership? Oh, ok, sure. I mean he seems to like Doug; I think he’s trying to teach him the ropes, get him ready for management you know. And then there’s Tina, not really sure what’s going on there. She’s just, so lucky, to get all that attention.” Something cracks in the background and there’s a muffled scream. Hard cut. The cameras focused on knees, the picture looks upside down, the knees are rocking, and tangled hair keeps slipping into the frame, someone is whispering "nonononononononono". Hard cut. A yellowed, filthy base is dripping rusty ooz and holding up an upside-down water jug made plastic, cracked, and empty. Two young men with empty cups stand around it with Monster Boss looming over them. The word ‘Intern’ appears below both of them. One of them is laughing, the sound seems nervous, almost questioning. The other man smiles and stares at his cup, his eyes painfully wide and unblinking. The laughing one keeps shooting glances at Monster Boss, the towering figure is statue-still and unreadable. Then Monster Boss looks like it bends its head back and its mouths go wild, several going at one and overlapping, “kaa kaa kaa/hosh hosh hosh/ reeegrsh” the laughing intern’s voice stumbles and the one staring at his cup tries to smile harder. Then the boss grabs the not laughing interns’ arm and pulls so hard the man barely flinches. He doesn’t look at the mangled stump, he giggles and blacks out, falling off screen. The other intern is hysterical now, pointedly trying not to look at anything as he becomes more and more manic. Monster Boss is still again, only moving when it slurps at the end of the arm in its hands, like it is a glass of water. Hard cut. “You know what it’s doing, right,” a middle-aged woman ask’s, her filthy dress somehow tight and tidy and her greasy hair tied back into something closer to rope than a braid. She’s in a dark corner, her arm is twitching uncontrollably and she’s holding it to herself with her other hand. “It’s fucking playing house with us.” The words ‘Tina’ and ‘Secretary’ appear under her, somehow skewed and off center. “It’s acting it all out.” She bites her lip. “No, no. It’s smart. It’s too fucking smart. Right. It looks at us like we look at pigs. You know. Fun to play with but tasty too.” Her whole-body shakes, she listens to something off screen. “Like me,” she laughs, and the sound is hard and grating. “Fucking great, are we really doing this shit? Are we even sure that this is what it wants? Does it even matter what we do?” A bundle of translucent tentacles floated into the shot, slowly, almost teasingly, and brushed against her face. They turn the skin pink where they slide. Another twist of tentacles appears at her shoulder, twisting up, snaking around her neck. Monster Boss’s face slides into view then, head height, inching straight at the side of her head. Before it gets to her ear, one of its mouths explodes in sound, “brwahahaaaa!” Her face is contorting, twitching into a dozen half decided expressions, it almost looks like she’s growling for a moment, as Monster Boss screams spittle onto her face. Hard cut. The woman is back. Snail trails outline the places the tentacles touched with raised red sores along the outside edges, the skin between is a valley of oozing yellow-green. It’s clear it hurts to talk, but she does all the same. “Evil,” she laughs, and the laugh is hard and hurts, and turns into a scream. “No, it’s not evil. The world’s not that simple. We’re just a game, to it. Barely toys. I think it sees what we do, and it thinks, well, that could be fun. And this is the closest it can get. No, evil doesn’t come into it. This,” she says, sneering around at the cave, “is the same god damned thing as outside. It comes down to power. More specifically, it’s about power imbalance. Right. The boss,” she freezes, yelling erupts off scene, someone laughs and yells “good work everyone,” and then there is silence. “You can’t fight it; I don’t even know if it can die. There’s no escaping it. Yeah, it hurts us. But I don’t think it really see’s us. It’s like a little kid grabbing at a bug. Always surprised to see the mess in his hand. But no time to think of what it means because there’s always more bugs. Right. You know we’re all going to die here, right? Hmm? Oh, Doug... Doug’s a piece of shit.” Hard cut. “Hey, Brady, right? Yeah, new guy, great. Let me grab you for a second,” a tall man with slicked back hair and a bloodstained suit grabs at another man’s crotch and laughs. The other man is shaking hard, he gives an empty laugh and asks, “what is this place, why are we here?” The man with the slicked back hair moved his hand to Brady’s shoulder, “that’s adorable. Where are we? Work my man! The great American dream! This, this is the company of the future. That man right there,” he says, pointing across the jumbled desks and neurosis ridden ‘employees’ to Monster Boss, “is the visionary man that will carry us all to greatness.” He sighs like he’s looking at a work of art. “Are you crazy? This is hell, isn’t it? Why is this guy recording everything, what happened to his face man? That thing is a fucking monster.” The punch came in hard, followed by another, and another. The man with the slicked back hair kept hitting Brady, even after he fell to the ground. Brady kept screaming “where are we,” in between the blows. Hard cut. The man with the slicked back hair is sitting casually on his desk, arms folded, oblivious to the blood spatter on his face. His suit is the cleanest disaster in the cave. He smiles at the camera. The words ‘mnager n train ing’ and ‘Doug’ appear around his waist. “What do we do here? We work.” He laughs and shakes his head. Listens for a moment, and scoffs at someone off camera. “What are you talking about, pay? Man, you work to live. Same thing here. Some people are just better at it than others,” he says, straightening his suit and smiling at something off screen. “Look, this is a great job. What do we make? We make the business work, that’s what we do. And yeah, just like any business we have loss, we have workplace accidents, we have to make cuts sometimes, that’s just business.” He smiles at the camera, faint scars crisscross his face, glinting in the low light. Hard cut. Doug stands over Brady where he lies on the ground and screams, “why,” into the room. Brady’s a mess, his clothes are torn and full of the dirt he’s squirming in. Doug is breathing hard, his arms hanging at his side, he’s looking at the man on the ground with wide eyes and a smile that shows every tooth. Monster Boss walks up behind him, and stares down. The man on the ground is screaming now, no words, just sound. Monser Boss leans down over Doug’s shoulder, its tentacles reach around from the back of Doug’s head and caress his face as it reaches one finger towards the screaming man. One of the claws comes out, and he paints a line into the man’s leg with it. Doug smiles and laughs, one eye closed as a tentacle slides over it. “That right there,” he says and chuckles, “that’s why you’re the boss, Boss.” Then Doug grabs a jagged broken pen out of the dirt and carves ‘WORK’ into the screaming mans head. Hard cut. “Look,” Doug says, still sitting on his desk and smiling. His face a tangle of red trails and oozing liquid, his eyelid swollen and red. “Some people are just born better, that’s the truth.” he says, nodding at his own words. “I’m just a leader. And what this place needs is strong leadership. We need to stop coddling bad workers. We need to make them strong. Because strong workers make a strong company. And if you can’t cut it here, well, you don’t deserve to be here. It’s all about the bootstraps. All these people are just meant to be workers. But me,” he straightens his jacket again, his knuckles red and split, “I’m here for the job. I deserve this position.” He fingers guns the camera. Then frowns. “Tricked, trapped, abducted? Please, everyone plays the victim. No, I responded to an ad on Craigslist. Said something like, ‘workplace training, with the possibility of a full-time management position if everything went well during the trial period.’ And, I got to say, it's going pretty well.” He listens. “Of course, they do. Everyone loves me here.” Hard cut. A black screen appears, the same happy tune from the beginning is playing, a string of random letters, white on a black screen, start scrolling down as the music plays. Nonsense letters, a few words appear here and there. Then there are a few paragraphs that just say ‘work’ over and over again. With the happy final note a giant white word fills the screen, ‘HELP.’ The episode ends. ..... “Ummm...” “What the fuck was that? Was that real?” “What? No! no way. I guess special effects are just more affordable these days, any idiot can get good monster effects now.” “Good? That thing looked real. Real real! And the people? I haven’t seen that good of a performance from Emmy winners, did you see them?” “Come on, really. Look, no. This is the real world, there are no monsters. This is just someone’s twisted fantasy, or maybe a bad joke. It’s tasteless. Right. A little too obvious. Probably some rich kids’ art school project. No way something like that could be real. What are you doing?” “Something was really wrong about that whole thing. No, I don’t care. I’m calling someone, I’m calling the cops.” “Jesus, they’re going to laugh you off the call. You remember that movie Cannibal Holocaust? All those people thought it was real. Or that time that guy did a radio show about a story he did, and people really thought aliens were invading. You want to be one of those people?” “You saw that, you saw it. That thing wasn’t CG, those people weren’t acting.” “Look, look. If it was real, you think it could have made it into three seasons? Huh? You think no one would notice something like that, here, on the internet? No one would allow this online. It’s here because it’s not real. Its garbage, it’s not my thing, so what? We’ll watch something else.” “...fine. But you have to leave a warning in the comments. At least do that.” “Ok, great. Look, writing it now. ‘This is a steaming pile of horse shit, and no one should have to watch it.’ There, good?” “Sure whatever. I want to watch something stupid now, something fun.” “What about that one with pug and the robots?” “Ooooh, I love that one. Yes.” “Perfect, let me find it.” “I think I’m going to have nightmares about that shit...” “Not if you’re head’s full of whacky sci-fi family hijinks you won’t!” Rainbows and stickers flash in bright colors and a peppy voice-over fills the room. The cartoon fills the space, washing out everything else, dulling memories and softening edges until laughter cracks through the dark room in a world where monsters aren’t real.