It wasn't that he wasn't patriotic. Michael was patriotic as could be. He'd had the misfortune to, when he was four years old, be the passenger in a car driven by his parents that got smashed head-on by a drunk blazing home from the bars. Everyone except Michael had been killed. It was okay. He couldn't really remember his parents anymore. He couldn't really remember what it was like to have legs below the mid-thigh. Thank goodness, he couldn't remember the pain.
In some other country, some deep European shithole, that sort of bad toss of the dice would've left Michael doomed forever. A maimed orphan? He'd freeze to death on the streets. But in the good old USA, the government was right there to step in and take care of him. Uncle Sam set him up with a place to live and a top of the line chair and an education. Uncle Sam gave him a purpose, and shielded him from the cruel, misguided wrath of those classmates of his who couldn't understand how anyone could dare to be a little bit different.
When he turned eighteen and graduated, the first thing he'd done was get his first mandatory term of enlistment started. Service was service, legs or no, and Michael had gotten good at a lot of things in class. He knew the rules inside and out, and he knew how to articulate himself and convince people. He'd been so afraid he was going to get some meaningless pity shift, but the powers that be had come through for him again, and he'd landed on this team assigned to turning bad news about foreign campaigns into good news about America's ever-increasing borders and reach. And he'd been good at it, so good that, three years later, he'd been pulled for a team tasked with making a really hard sell go down just a little easier: a deathmatch for the glory of the nation, peopled by high school students drawn by lottery.
It wasn't the arbitrary nature of it that got to Michael. No, he was so familiar with that, with how fate could give you a once-over and mess you up. And it wasn't the death. To put it bluntly, working on The Program was a walk in the park compared to the war beat, in terms of the sheer magnitude and brutality of violence on display. It took a few days, a week to see fifty kids ground up into paste. Michael had watched tapes of artillery barrages pulling four times that much carnage in ninety seconds.
What nibbled at him just a little was the waste of it all. There were a lot of ways to inspire fear and obedience and loyalty. He'd worked on his fair share of them. The Program was vaguely elegant in the simplicity of its design, but time and again Michael watched it turn loyal citizens into traitors, then kill them. And that wasn't the end of the story. Yes, it had certain boosts to morale and loyalty across the country, but the effects on directly-targeted areas could be dire. Many family members of those chosen bore it stoically, but some took to subversive activities themselves. Morale plummeted. There were incidents, which had to be hushed up or spun, and these in turn rippled further, a cascade of entirely preventable resistance.
And the worst of it was, Michael got it. He'd been married about two years after The Program started, and now he had three kids. He wouldn't go on a tear if one of them was picked. He knew fate, and he could accept it. But when he looked at his daughters and his son, sometimes, he felt this pang. He asked himself whether a better way could be found.
Which brought him, in roundabout way, to the current situation.
Michael was smart, and he even got tapped for suggestions from time to time, but never for the high level stuff. And yet, he had faith, and it had been rewarded. A better way had been found. He wasn't sure if it had been the plan all along, or if it was an improvisation due to the colossal wreck that had been the last attempt (and oh boy had that one kept him up overtime; he'd been broken of the sympathy he'd held for those Denver kids pretty quick by the twin facts of their actual survival and the level of unrelenting misery it had meant for him personally), but this new thing, taking prisoners from the enemy and making them fight, that was genius.
More than that, it was working great. The last run had been a real wash, morale plummeting, people sort of but not really convinced about the Brits killing everyone. It was what it was, but it just didn't make sense. Why would they do it? And, more than that, the outrage just wasn't there. "Foreign adversary kills population of death row" just didn't inspire that much anger. But when the other shoe dropped, and it was British kids thrown into the game to finish what their nation had started? The country ate that up. There was none of the fallout, none of the local dissent. When they sent that helicopter in, Michael was told people had cheered so loud you could hear it on the street in some places. Exaggeration? Perhaps. But it was kissing cousins to the truth, and, as he'd learned, that was what mattered most.
Oh, and of course, the Brits were expected to be loud, nasty, treasonous little shits. All kinds of stuff that would've never made it to public consumption could thus be cheerfully waved through, which meant that Michael's job was a whole lot easier than what he was used to. A small thing, but a pleasant one. It let him sit back and, well, not enjoy the broadcast, per se, but appreciate it a bit more.
He could really get used to this.
"Good morning, campers!" David Adams' cheerful voice burst across the airwaves. "You'll be pleased to hear that you good little beefeaters not only hit halfway, you blew right by it! Kids, it is my very great pleasure to announce that if you are alive right now, you have officially reached the final ten of The Program!"
Canned applause.
"Nine between you and life. What's it gonna be, kids?"
There was a long pause, long enough to make one wonder if the broadcast had cut out entirely. Then, Adams resumed speaking.
"That halfway mark was brought up by the death of Ashley Pontecorvo, who got her skull cracked against the ground by Sofia Chiles. Never too late to learn, kids, and here, the lesson is that if you smack somebody against something hard enough, that body is going to break sooner or later.
"A real crowd-pleaser up next. Molly McKenzie went all out Gallagher on Nastya Zharkova—" Adams stopped for a moment, and some indistinct speech drifted across the PA, then the sound of a scraping chair. "Lieutenant Daly here informs me that you philistines probably don't understand that reference, so let me rephrase. Molly smooshed Nastya's head like a watermelon. Unfortunately for Molly, she got herself shot in the process and hop-skip-jumped right into the grave. Close, but no cigar for both of those girls.
"Sadly, our very own Sofia Chiles joined the butcher's bill not too long afterwards. Seems that she sustained too much damage fighting against Ashley back there. Turns out 'any fight you can walk away from' isn't quite the only metric you should be using.
"Victoria Amaro, after such a strong showing last time, was next to die. Not all bad though, she was knocked off by a returning favorite, Oliver Davies, who's been quiet for a while but is right back in contention with that crack shot. Good on you, Ollie."
Adams chuckled.
"And our next death was, oh man, was it everything we hoped for when we first assigned the weapon. Headline for all of you: bee stung to death. That's right, Phoebe Quincy misthrew her wonderful jar of hornets and, well, bees don't do so hot against those. Sorry, honey, turns out your chances weren't antenna-outta-ten.
"Lastly, and one more reminder, taking us to our final ten was the death of Michelle White, who went toe-to-toe with Pippa Andolini and took a bayonet for her trouble. She kept on trucking for a while, but that ain't something you sleep off, folks."
A pause.
"Well. No need for me to overstate things, kids. You all know what you need to do. Nine to go. I'll address whoever's left around this evening. We're in the final stretch.
"Time to step up and be counted."
Weather: 0800 hours, Day Three, Friday, January 23, 2026
The morning is bright and clear, the weather mild and the breeze almost refreshing. As activity has tapered off in the arena, a measure of quiet has fallen over it, and animal life may be seen more frequently. Tidal currents washed up a number of dead, harmless jellyfish upon the beach, which dot it as small puddles of unidentifiable goo. The fifth announcement will occur when only four students remain alive, no later than 2000 hours.
And, as mentioned last time, the next two sets of rolls will be hidden until the deadline for each passes. For this first set, there are three days for cards and a further seven for deaths, but rolls may not be revealed until an additional seven days have passed, to account for potential extensions. Following completion of this set of deaths, any handlers rolled out will be removed from the planning zones, and the final set of rolls prior to Endgame will be conducted, again in secrecy.
Finally, staff would like to take a moment to address the After section of PV3 Prologue. Initially, we gave an uncertain date for After's closing. The section has had a slow but steady rate of activity, and has not caused any problems when it comes to spotlight for PV3 proper, and given handler engagement, resources required (or lack thereof), and a general desire to offer opportunities to handlers, we have decided to keep After open indefinitely at this time, through and likely beyond the completion of PV3 itself. Should we at some stage decide to officially close the After section, handlers will receive at least one month of notice prior to the deadline.
