It was a tradition that started in Hollywood and carried throughout the theater from coast to coast for over a century. So when Britney came and changed the world and the face of acting forever, it was only fitting that the thespians would continue the tradition at their home away from home, Carmine's. This day was a huge event as another person was inducted into the prestigious left wall of Carmine's.

Carmine’s caricature wall was well organized and not meant for tourists. It was a living tribute to those who survived hyperprogramming and those who fought against it. The smoking section was filled with autographed pictures of actresses and actors of the day. However, they were candid shots of Britney’s human puppets in their dazed and mindless state, taken by a brave corps of paparazzi and spies from around the world. This fulfilled the establishment’s requirement to the Department of Tourism, and served as a memorial to friends and colleagues lost to greed.

At the back of the smoking section were the VIP tables all the tourists gawked at for celebrity sightings. These served a dual purpose. One was to draw in tourists with the promise of seeing an actor or actress. The other was to allow thespians to smoke their joints without disturbing others. As a deprogramming tradition, many were glad to share.

The stairwell was lined with autographed posters of Channel 1 stars, as a memorial to those who fought for the cause and were hyperprogrammed as a form of execution, or fell prey to Britney’s naked advances after years of turning them away. Each poster was underscored with a heading listing the real name of the actor or actress, dates of birth and hyperprogramming, and an epitaph that explained their real work for the resistance. Many visitors came to leave flowers or other items like in a normal gravesite, and a priest or priestess from the cult of the Lady was always present at the host stand to help with any questions.

At the base of the stairs were the most recent deaths. The bottom step was almost lost in masses of blue and white flowers, studded here and there with tiny Israeli flags. The poster showed a modern game show set with a young woman straddling the rail and planting her high-heeled boot straight into the capital city of an African country. “Now YOU can rule the world! – Spin the Globe with Natalie’s globetrotting sister Kate weeknights at 7:30 pm on Channel 1 the Spirit of America” The grave marker below it read, “Eva Cohen 1988-2020 – Mother of a free Israel, destroyer of Moses and rebel heroine even in death – forever reunited.”

Two steps up, a natural blonde in a minidress with her cleavage very visible through a crisscross v-neck down the middle stared sultrily out at the viewer. “All the sports, all the time – the all sports news ticker with heavenly Sky on www.sportysky.com (a free 24/7 service of Channel 7 sports).” The inscription read “Skylar Glover – 1988-2015 – gave her life to end hyperprogramming – murdered in the line of duty by a mindless zealot – may she torture her for eternity.” To further this point, below the poster was a picture taken by the paparazzi union of Sky shooting a freshly hyperprogrammed Cory a death glare before her introductory interview. This was one of the brief moments of clarity that occasionally happened off camera with even the best made actors and actresses; the transcript for the introductory interview, with Sky's repeated ad-lib of "How does it feel?" highlighted, was in an envelope behind the photo.

Another two steps led to “Carole McDonald – 1990-2010 – protector of Canada in life and death” This was Channel 1's bumbling Captain Canada, tripping over herself in her bright red supermom outfit. But “The REAL Captain Canada #1” was available for anyone who might be losing touch with Britney to read the truth.

At the top of the stairs was a large-scale picture of IDF Communication Corps Female Elite Programming Unit #15, the first to fall under Britney's spell. There it was subtitled “The Ten Commanding Comics, Forever for Israel, Forever for the World.” On a table in front was a donation jar to support rebel activity against hyperprogramming; the jar was always full to overflowing, especially with the checks from the Sons of David. To the left was the emergency toilet and elevator to bring sickened tourists down to the smoking section; most did take that route, preferring to return to the world they knew and understood.

To the right was the private non-smoking room, the exclusive hangout of the Thespians Union and Broadway Equity. The difference between the two unions was simple; while Broadway Equity members were allowed to call themselves thespians in public, so as to avoid the stain of "actor" or the implication of "performer", only union members could refer to themselves as Thespians with a capital T. As well, only union members had pride of place among the hundreds of caricatures on the walls of the private room. A cheerful banner stretched over the doorway, reading “Welcome Brittany! – The supreme ruler is ours at last!”

Brittany stood at the doorway, under the banner, and Lana took her arm. Three years of apprenticeship had served to prepare her for this moment. Brittany wore a sparkling pink top and matching pants with pink platform shoes, while Lana had chosen a long black dress that seemed far too Channel 1 for her.

“Are we ready, Brit?” Lana said with a smile.

“Sure, although I still don’t get why everyone is pretty much in costume,” Brittany replied, looking at her own scant attire. "I'd have liked something a little more decorous."

“You’ll find out soon enough,” Lana reassured her.

The tour began at the Right Wall. These portraits were very dark in nature, though they got somewhat lighter in tone the further towards the left one looked. Peeking out from each of the pictures was a deep purple envelope that contained a written report from the Historians.

“These are the stories of those who survived Britney’s touch but were too enraptured by it to escape normalcy. Most just became regular housewives or working husbands. Some ended up writers. Others did go mad but served Britney in their mania,” Lana explained as Brittany gazed through the paintings. She looked closely at one of a woman leaping from a car that had been pushed off a cliff by what looked like her twin, except for the expressionless face and starry eyes. The woman's leap seemed to be taking her towards a block of buildings that rose high on a hill. The caption read “Faith, HOPE, and love”.

“Zelda Shane, one of the more recent right wall people,” Lana explained. “Vera Brown discovered this through one of the HOPE camp escapees she works with. Turns out that Zelda’s lover in college was none other than Melissa, the mixed up ex-gay of the Quaker Show! She basically fed her unclaimed fire by emulating her lover and sending ambiguous fan mail. Given her male-sounding last name, the idiot in the mailroom gave her the common hugs and kisses reply, making her passion burn deeper. Her reactions to this started showing the telltale signs of self-programming and the producers were called to ship her off to Hollywood where she would become a stunt double.”

“And well...”

“It was one of the government’s best-kept secrets. Her co-workers rebelled against her becoming an actress… they arranged for her to find a new girlfriend among her wards. She stayed on the Hill until the end of the program and then who knows what happened.”

As they moved along the right wall, Brittany stopped at another picture. This one was of a woman in a green dress getting out of a limo with a bottle of whiskey, stars around her head but not in her eyes. The caption read “I'm a big star now”.

“Ahh, Tabloid Tanya, the anti-celebrity. One of the early accidents of hyperprogramming. This one was before prohibition was so accepted. Tanya Marriot was quite the troublemaker in her day, and very popular too. So they were gonna make her into one of Channel 1’s top stars. One problem: an altered mental state on top of an altered mental state doesn’t work too well.”

“Haha, she was drunk!” Brittany replied.

“And high, and she most likely hit her head on the door on the way in. Basically it kicked her permanently off the wagon. So she’s the low rate Hollywood bimbo, the trashy people can read about in the Enquirer and laugh at. After all, being a slave to Jack Daniels is just as bad as being a slave to Britney.”

Right at the edge of the right wall was a picture of a larger-than-life figure roaming the streets near Rockefeller Center. She wore the classic 2018 pre-ban basketball outfit of jersey dress and heel sloped sneakers. In her right hand, dangling from her wedding ring, was a marionette puppet on his knees, his Bible open to the 7th commandment. His mistress was impaled on the woman’s left hand, a hand puppet whose beautiful starry-eyed face belied the raggedness of her blue jersey-dress with the number 50 scrawled on it. The puppet's tiny hands held the handle of a baby carriage that she swung up towards the hard face of the puppeteer. The caption read “Linda Wolfe”, and Brittany gasped with recognition.

“We do not speak of her future atrocities,” Lana said tersely. "Those fall outside our jurisdiction. We record all that we've been able to find out about her career as a writer and a producer, not what she did afterwards."

“What? I’m going to have to read this for myself,” Brittany said.

“Go ahead, you have to read one off of each wall to get to the next wall. Wouldn't have been my choice, though…”

Brittany’s face twisted in horror as she read the story of Linda Wolfe. “My God, she didn’t even know what was done to her, what she did.”

“A Wolfe supporter, I see. There are many in this great city,” Lana said with thinly disguised disgust.

“No, I mean Dale! She didn’t know she was being abused and humiliated by a bitter wife. And was she really transformed into Linda to have her kid?” Brittany asked.

“Some things, like what happened next, are best left unsaid,” Lana replied, leading Brittany toward the right side of the Center Wall.

The center wall contained lighter-hearted, but still dark, sketches. Many were tales of those who survived but could not stay sane enough to function, or were hyperprogrammed in other projects that left them in a confused state but not full N stage.

Brittany looked at the various sketches, which seemed a lot more personal in nature. For one, almost everyone on the center wall looked to be in attendance. Some are being helped by friends, family, and even orderlies from Roosevelt Island. She looks at the pictures. The first one that caught her eye was one of a young woman on her knees, devilish look on her face, but instead of being pornographic, a fist rose up between the legs of a silhouette of a man. The caption read “I’m too good to suck!”.

“Lesbian?” Brittany asks.

“I don't know and I'm not adventurous enough to ask. No one does. Jessie Oakley’s as much an actress as anyone else. She still thinks she’s a cowgirl, she just, well, won't do anything or anyone,” Lana explained.

“Ummm, ok, and she’s here why?”

“You thought the Gray Lady liked guns? Jessie was beyond her pace before we locked her up on Roosevelt Island. As far as we could figure out, she was an actress who wouldn’t put out. Her brain was stuck in a western and her body stuck in New York. 200 dead later, she’s earned a spot in the center wall. If she had better aim and took out about 50 more brainwashed than she did New Yorkers, she’d be on the left wall!”

“YIKES! Good thing she’s locked up!” Brittany exclaimed before getting to the next picture, this one of a woman doing nothing, just standing there wearing a flaming red jersey with the number 13 on it; her face was cold and expressionless, but some trick of the artist's craft lent the agony of madness to her icy eyes. There was no description behind it, no descriptive caption, just the name: Danielle Sullivan. “What, there’s nothing to read here. Why is she here?” Brittany asked.

“She escaped Lindseyville. She’s no one's prize and she lives in the South Bronx. That’s all we say about it,” Lana said in a tone she hadn't used with Brittany in years.

“So someone was hyperprogramming lesbians into trophy wi…”

“WE DO NOT SPEAK OF IT!” Lana snapped. Brittany, perhaps remembering her trial by fire, relented and moved on down the wall. Before reaching another picture, a dark-haired woman wearing a dress right off the runways of Milan tapped Brittany on the shoulder. As Brittany turned, she saw the dagger in the woman's garter before she saw the note in the woman's hand and the cool smile on the woman's perfectly made-up face. The woman put the note in Brittany's purse and made eye contact for a moment that chilled Brittany to her soul.

“Who was that Bronx Society chick?” Brittany asked.

“Didn't you recognize her picture? I suggest burning that note if I was you. You don’t know if you read it how much longer she'll let you live,” Lana cautioned. Brittany put the note away without reading it publicly; only later would she even begin to read it.

Brittany then spied a picture of a tall chestnut-haired young woman with her mother, whose features were familiar enough for her to look back towards the right wall. The personalities seemed split: on the left side, the mother was adjusting the fit of a navy blue basketball jersey, her hand seeming to linger somewhere highly inappropriate as the daughter balanced a striped ball on her finger; on the right side, the daughter wore a designer top not unlike Brittany's, and the mother's right hand scattered stars that dulled the daughter's eyes and tinted her hair golden blonde. The caption read “like mother like daughter”.

“She was trying to become an actress?” Brittany asked.

“Well, you might as well pick up where you left off on the right wall,” Lana said with a sigh.

As she read the story of Rosalie Wolfe-Balliard, Brittany’s eyes turned serious; the description of hyperprogramming haunted her, even if it was just a description from Rosalie’s undamaged sister. She read the description again, trying to figure out how she escaped.

“So her mother told someone to rescue her after she already got her…warmed up,” Brittany said with her heart in her throat.

“Linda was going mad. She didn’t know what to think. Rosalie wanted to be an actress from birth. She loved it, so this was always going to be her 18th birthday present. Linda just... moved it up a bit.”

“And herrreee's the fucked up thing, you wanna wanna know, like really wanna know? She KNEW what being an actress was all about, yeah really, she wanted to be brain dead, yeah, yeah, no thoughts, it turned her on, like you, yeah yeah…” A strange voice suddenly interrupted Lana's explanation. Brittany turned around to see a woman wearing a gym jacket over a sequined midnight blue evening gown approaching unsteadily on four-inch heels. Her long hair was frosted platinum blonde, but only lightly, and rich chestnut locks flowed beneath. She stood imposingly tall, well over six foot, in her heels. Her stare was frighteningly intent and direct until the normal-looking young woman next to her- not quite as tall, but still an impressive figure, and clearly kin to her- smiled apologetically and whispered into the woman’s ear.

“So this is our guest of honor. A pleasure. I'm Elizabeth Balliard, and this is Rosalie. Rosalie, say hello,” Elizabeth said with a nod to Lana. Her hazel eyes searched Brittany's face for a moment before she gave Brittany a slim book that Brittany barely had time to tuck into her bag.

Suddenly Rosalie’s face broke into an actress’s smile, and she greeted Brittany with a perfect actresses’ greeting and hug, a pure hint of Channel 2 kidspeak to indicate her intended channel, and a playful giggle before reverting back to her schizoid state.

“Umm, pleased to meet you, Rosalie, I’m- oh, did your sister introduce you to Lana?” Brittany thought twice before mentioning her name, lest Rosalie crash to her knees in worship…or try to kill her.

“We don't have time- sorry, ladies, but we've got to get our guest of honor to the left wall. We’re all here, Louiza, Ash, me. All the Thespians Union are here,” Lana said with a smile.

“Then WHY are so many people here who aren’t on Broadway?” Brittany asked.

“Because being a Thespian has nothing to do with acting,” Lana replied softly.

“It has to do with surviving, doesn't it? Escaping the computer.”

“Yeah, you’re getting it. This is the last part. Don’t stop now.”

“Right, why would I?” Brittany said nervously.

Brittany stopped at the first picture that interested her. A black woman in full gangsta ho outfit was showing off her cleavage without a thought, starry-eyed- except on the right, where a screaming baby's tiny fist had knocked the stars out and off to the side. The caption read “how did THAT get there?!” The woman in front of the picture, a few years older, wearing the same outfit- albeit too tight at the bottom and too loose at the top- smiled and looked at her now 10-year-old daughter to tell her story.

“Mommy was under a spell by an evil witch and I woke her up! Otherwise she would have been turned into a doll!” the young girl piped up right on cue, smiling smugly at her mother as her savior.

“That was very nice of you, would you like a lollipop?” Brittany offered.

The girl turned up her nose, then broke into a dazzling smile. “But if you had matches, that would be AWESOME 'cause I'm all out and I have so many things to do with them!” she replied cheerfully.

Brittany laughed a nervous “only in New York” laugh, shook her head, and moved on. “Kid already there and saw what happened?”

“Not exactly, no. In those days they didn’t keep their subjects locked up at night and well…” Lana trailed off.

“Yeesh, she’s lucky it wasn’t triplets,” Brittany said, fanning herself, her memories reminding her of the seductive pleasure of the process.

Brittany then came to a painting of a young woman parting the sea even as her other foot searched for water to walk on. The Star of David distorted her cross beyond recognition, and she was apparently being led by a clear-eyed Natalie- but away from the stars, not towards them. The caption read “More Bible than the Bible”.

“Before she was Kate, Eva Cohen saved many lives. Roni was on the plane to Hollywood when Eva and her men raided the airfield,” Lana explained.

“It took me 2 years to recover. I still don’t think straight, I still wear these skimpy skirts, even if it is now to honor Eva. I’m the only person not named Todd Carter who could carry the 666 necklace,” Roni explained, settling in at one of the dining tables. Brittany turned away, stopping at Ash’s painting, which was simply a long, high-heeled, leg sticking out of the closet right in Ash’s face. The caption read “You can seduce me better when you aren’t hiding yourself.”

Brittany grabbed the envelope and read about how Ash was beckoned to lead gays and lesbians into deep secrecy and self-hatred, that she would be rewarded by being openly gay on screen while she beckoned others to reform. She read how her mind caved in, just like Brittany’s did. But beyond all the feelings of pleasure she couldn’t give up her pride. Brittany used to never like Ash- Ash was always too wild and over the top for her tastes- but she smiled the smile of a woman who had looked deep into the darkness and spat in its face, sat down at the head of the center table, and began to write on the pad provided for her.

All my life I was told I was someone beyond the norm, and I never got it. I was always a normal girl who just happened to be Brittany. Because of that I was always told to do more. I never got it but I worked hard to meet the expectations. I wrote my own music, I wrote my own stories, I drew pictures and art, I set fashion trends at school and then the producers came for me. I was airlifted by my friends but I didn’t know what was happening. So they gave up, let me go, and boy did I went. I fell in love with that image. But he just wanted me. I wanted to love him back and all he wanted me to do was lay down for him. Typical guy, I guess, but I knew why. They wanted me to be this thing, this image, named Britney. They wanted me to be less than I was. I wrote a whole play about her, because she is me, except I rule more than a world. I rule myself.

Brittany looked at the letter then handed it to Lana, her face spent with emotion. Everyone on the stage smiled at her and patted her on the back. The artist read through the letter and began to sketch quickly, soon producing a pencil drawing that would provide the basis for a painting on the wall: a young girl staring glassy eyed into the television, blank and mindless smile on her face while she stared at the beauty staring back at her. The caption simply read "WHAT? It’s a mirror!"

He showed this to Brittany, and she laughed, recognizing the essential truth behind the wry humor. They placed the picture next to Lana’s on the wall, to huge applause. Brittany laughed as she smoked the complimentary blunt, the only time smoking was allowed in that room. She finally realized what she had gone through, the nightmares, the writing, even the odd sensations she’d get from some men, and who she was for all of that. She knew it all now, and she was more at peace, yet more determined than ever – the way of a true Thespian.