Chapter 2: Population: Controlled

Chapter 2: Population: Controlled

The journey to Ashfield was a masterclass in disorientation. A black sedan with tinted windows picked Chris up before dawn, followed by a two-hour drive into the scrubland of some forgotten corner of the state. There, on a dusty, private airstrip, a featureless white helicopter waited. The pilot offered no name and no conversation. The final leg of the trip was spent staring at a monotonous landscape of brown and grey, until a perfect, unnatural circle of green appeared in the middle of nowhere.

From the air, Ashfield looked like a model train set. Manicured lawns, identical houses painted in muted pastels, a pristine town square with a gazebo. Encircling it all was a high, concrete wall, smooth and grey, with no visible gate from this altitude. It wasn't a town; it was a petri dish.

A man was waiting for him on the helipad, which was cleverly hidden behind the town’s community center. He was built like a cinder block—short, stocky, with a thick neck and a jaw that looked like it could crack walnuts. His uniform was the same as Chris’s: dark grey, functional, with a small, stylized ‘A’ embroidered over the heart.

“Travis Baker,” he grunted, offering a brief, firm handshake. His grip was like a vise. “I’m your second. Glad to have you, sir.” He didn’t look glad. He looked like a man who had long since traded in gladness for efficiency.

“Chris Chambers.”

“I know,” Baker said, already turning to lead the way. “I read your file.”

He led Chris through the back of the community center and into the security hub. It was a cold, windowless room, the only light coming from the bank of monitors that covered an entire wall. Dozens of screens showed silent, high-definition feeds from every conceivable angle of the town. Street corners, living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms.

Chris felt a familiar knot tighten in his gut. This was surveillance on a level he’d only ever seen in counter-terrorism facilities.

“State-of-the-art,” Baker said, gesturing to the wall of eyes. “Full-spectrum cameras, thermal, audio pickups in every residence. We see everything. We hear everything.”

“Everything?” Chris asked, his gaze catching on a feed from inside a bathroom, where a woman was brushing her teeth, oblivious to the unblinking lens hidden in the ventilation fan.

“That’s the directive,” Baker confirmed without a trace of irony. “Total observation. The subjects were informed they’d be monitored for the trial. They just don’t know the extent.”

The feeling of being a zookeeper was immediate and overwhelming. These weren't people; they were specimens. And he was the one holding the key to the enclosure. Baker handed him a thick, black binder with the same stylized ‘A’ on the cover. The Ashfield Security Protocol.

Chris flipped it open. Much of it was standard—patrol schedules, emergency response, lockdown procedures. But then he got to Section C: Subject Monitoring Directives. His eyes snagged on two rules, nestled between paragraphs of dry corporate jargon.

Rule 7: Report any strange occurrences immediately.

He looked up at Baker. “Define ‘strange.’”

Baker shrugged, his expression unchanging. “Management was vague. Said we’d know it when we saw it. Deviations from baseline behavior, I guess. So far, it’s been quiet. People are settling in, getting their free rent and their pharma stipend. They’re behaving.”

Chris’s gaze fell back to the binder, to the rule just below.

Rule 8: Remember their faces.

He read it twice. It was an odd command, phrased with an unsettling intimacy. It wasn't 'Familiarize yourself with subject identities' or 'Maintain visual confirmation.' It was a direct, personal instruction. Remember their faces.

“What’s this about?” Chris asked, tapping the page.

“HR directive,” Baker said dismissively. “Came down from the top. Corporate wants us to ‘build a rapport’ with the subject pool. You know the type. They want us to think of them as people, not numbers. It’s nonsense, but it’s in the book, so we follow it.”

Chris wasn't so sure. It didn't feel like a platitude. It felt like a warning. He thought of Dr. McDonough’s bizarre questions about dreams and spoons, about seeing the pattern by noticing the break. This felt like one of those breaks.

He spent the rest of the day in that cold room, the hum of the servers a constant drone in his ears. Baker walked him through the systems, the access codes, the silent alarms. Chris learned that the town’s food was delivered weekly by an unmanned truck through a subterranean service tunnel. The power was self-contained. Ashfield was a hermetically sealed world. He and Baker were the only two security personnel on site. They were as much a part of the experiment as the forty people they were watching.

As evening fell, Baker left to conduct his perimeter patrol, leaving Chris alone with the wall of silent lives. He watched the forty test subjects go about their fabricated routines. In House 7, a young couple, the Millers, were having a quiet argument about a misplaced TV remote, their whispers perfectly audible through the sensitive microphones. In House 12, an elderly man named Arthur was meticulously polishing a collection of what looked like silver spoons, lining them up on his mantelpiece. Chris felt a cold jolt at the sight, the memory of McDonough’s question surfacing like a bad dream.

He forced himself to look away, his eyes scanning the grid of screens. He began the official evening headcount, a duty outlined in the protocol binder. He zoomed in on each residence, cross-referencing the face on the screen with the digital roster next to his console.

One. Two. The Miller couple. Three. Arthur with his spoons. Four. Five. The Garcias, watching television.

He continued the count, methodically, professionally. The faces began to blur together—a collage of placid, ordinary people living out a profoundly strange existence. They were all here for their own reasons, he assumed. Debt, desperation, the lure of a quick and easy payday. Just like him. The only difference was the side of the camera they were on.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.

He double-checked the count. Population: 40. The number was logged. The baseline was stable.

But as he leaned back in his chair, the glow of the monitors painting his face in stark relief, the rule echoed in his head. Remember their faces. It wasn’t a corporate suggestion. It felt like a matter of survival. His gaze drifted from screen to screen, trying to burn the images into his mind. The faces of the Millers. Arthur. The Garcias. Forty faces. Forty souls.

He had a sudden, chilling sensation that he wasn’t just watching them. From somewhere deep within the sterile perfection of Ashfield, something else was watching him, too. And it was waiting for him to look away.