The Rice Painter

Greg opened the door and pointed to the only comfortable chair in the room. Then he turned his back on Traxi and continued his so-called painting. Let her wait; it gave authenticity to his story. He couldn’t see what she was doing behind his back – probably surveying the pod. That was okay, there was nothing incriminating for her to see.

Greg’s pod was pale blue and looked like a soft plastic. Like most pods, there were no sharp edges. The pod consisted of the standard kitchen area, dining table and lounge area. This particular pod’s lounge area had been converted into a studio. There was a long table along one wall with all the art supplies, smaller benches to sit on and only the one chair Traxi was sitting on. The chair was the only piece of furniture made from natural fibres – clearly out of place in the pod.

“This is something new I’m trying.” Greg said putting his paintbrush down. “Once the individual grains of rice are placed next to each other in rows, they should form the outline of a ship. I had the picture in my head and needed to finish painting the pieces before I lost the vision.” 

“How many grains of rice will that take?” asked Traxi.

Greg shrugged; he had no idea. “What did you want to chat about?”  Greg walked over to the kitchen area and scrummaged around to find a second coffee mug. He hadn’t had a guest in so long, he couldn’t remember where he’d kept the spare mugs.

Since Greg’s PPG stopped coming, nobody had been in his pod. Of course, PPG stood for personal prison guide formally, but that was a misnomer. It was the person who had ultimate power over him. Greg had thought of his as a ‘particularly pompous god’.

He didn’t go out much either – only when needed like to take his art to the framers and the seller who refused to collect. Currently, they were the only people Greg interacted with on a regular basis.

Greg’s art was framed in a variety of magnified glass containers. Some of the grains of rice were placed on velvet behind glass, others in small intricate boxes. 

“I’m doing my doctoral thesis on crime and punishment. You seem to be one of the rare success stories.” Traxi displayed her university credentials in a hologram above her device. 

“Rare?” Greg glanced at the credentials – they were unimportant. She had asked to chat to him, and he’d agreed. He wondered what would make a woman go to an ex-convict’s pod on her own. But if she was that stupid, he’d play along.  

“So far, I’ve not seen people completely change careers the way you did,” said Traxi. 

“Ah. Drink instructions?”

Traxi sent instructions to the coffee machine to add only creamer from her device. 

“Good. Is it Arabica?” Traxi asked sipping the coffee. Greg nodded. It was the one luxury he allowed himself now that he could buy his own food. Coffee had become scarce and prohibitively expensive. Most people now drank mock coffee which to Greg tasted like caffeinated mud.

“Tell me Greg, what motivated you to change careers?”

“I wasn’t motivated to change.”

“Oh?”

Before prison, Greg had made money from the latest blockchain gimmick - not currency, which had been banned years ago nor non-fungible tokens which had fizzled out on their own for being the nonsense they’d always been. No, it was blockchain search tokens that could be used to target the right ad at the right person at the right time. This technology had filled the gap after third-party tracking and cookies had become defunct. 

Seeing an opportunity to expand the search-token network, and so increase his wealth, Greg wanted to get more people involved. It wasn’t hard for him to persuade people to invest in his venture – he had a cocky attitude and was very persuasive. Soon Greg was managing thousands of dollars.

Then someone invented a chain-block to block the search-tokens, and the price dropped. Greg tried to explain that blockchain was temperamental and people just had to sit tight, but they were scared and demanded their money right away. With a rush on withdrawals, the price dropped to a few cents from the high of over a hundred dollars. 

That’s when Greg realised his mistake. He’d simply downloaded stock-standard investment contracts from the internet. The contracts hadn’t mentioned the risks inherent in blockchain investments. Greg had also neglected to explain how buying something with no underlying value worked. Consequently, his investors hadn’t expected to lose money, and when they did, they wanted Greg to pay. Greg was charged and found guilty of fraud.

“I was angry,” Greg said. “Financial advisors are not criminally prosecuted if they invest in the stock market and the stock market crashes. But they decided to charge me with fraud anyway.” Actually, I’m still angry, Greg said to himself – What had happened to him was unfair.

Yeah, so he hadn’t been a registered financial advisor either, so what. This was blockchain – nobody dealing in it was registered. 

Greg had been held responsible for the fiasco. All his assets were liquidated to repay the investors and he was expected to make up the shortfall. As punishment, he was only allowed to live in an entry-level pod and placed under house arrest.

Along with house arrest, Greg was forced to complete a realignment program. 

The aim of a realignment program is to change someone’s life in a positive way. It consists of aptitude tests and questionnaires. In theory, a panel of vocational experts and psychologists analyse the results and pinpoint the careers that should fulfil the person. Typically, these careers are as far removed from the even that led to them being punished as possible. In practise, it was data processing and algorithms that made the decisions.

The program showed Greg had an aptitude for art and that it would be a good career choice for him. By good, Greg assumed they meant a career in which he’d stay out of trouble.

“Were you an artist before?” Traxi asked.

“No, I had never been interested in art. And still wasn’t. I thought they’d made a mistake. In the first week I just doodled or scribbled. I ignored the training materials. My PPG told me that I needed to create art not just play around with the paper. Out of frustration I tore the paper into smaller pieces and called it a work of art. Needless to say, my PPG didn’t fall for it. And he refused to give me more paper.” 

Instead, Greg’s PPG instructed him to find something in his home that he could paint on. Until Greg produced something resembling art, he was on limited rations. Only legumes and rice.

“No vegetables?” Traxi asked.

“I was given supplements – artificial nutrients. If I wanted real food, I had to follow the realignment program.” Real food included meat, fruit, vegetables, bread, and snacks. 

“I decided to use the food – specifically the rice as my canvas.” Greg smiled remembering his first day. He had tried painting the legumes as they were bigger, but they wobbled. The rice was painfully tiny. Then he stumbled onto a brilliant plan. Plugging in his 3D printer, he printed pre-painted 3D grains of rice. It’s not like anyone was going to cook his art and figure out it was plastic. And 3D printing had become so advanced it looked exactly like the real thing. But he couldn’t tell the Traxi woman this – she’d run to the authorities.  

“I was painting the rice black,” Greg said. “At first, I didn’t care how neatly they were painted, I just wanted to get the job done.  But after a few days, I started painting patterns and really got into it.”

Greg watched Traxi hanging onto his every word, recording most of it. She’d make him look good on paper – a real success story. Perhaps he’d wait until she published her research.

“My PPG offered to get me paper again,” Greg continued, “but I had taken to the rice. I wore magnifying glasses so I could see what I was doing. It kept me focused and my thoughts from wandering.”

The PPG had taken Greg’s work to a framer, and then to an art seller. It was a novelty item, but also art. With homes becoming smaller, space was tight. And small works of art was a niche that turned out to be quite popular.

“What made you continue the painting when your sentence ended?” Traxi asked.

“I had nothing else to go back to. I was content spending most of my day painting. And since my communication to the outside world had been curtailed, I had become used to isolation. So, I just continued painting rice.” Greg was sure Traxi would believe this. They all would. Besides it was almost the truth. 

Greg’s PPG had introduced him to the framer and art seller and Greg continued to use them when his sentence ended. It was a short subway ride to the framer and the seller was walking distance from there – which was the only bit of exercise Greg was getting. Other than that, Greg spent all day in his pod on his device.

“I was surprised how much money I could make from something silly as painting rice. I wasn’t even recording the process and uploading it to Vidshow.”

“Once your debt is repaid, will you stop painting?” Traxi asked.

“It’s repaid. I did a series of cute animals that were wildly popular and pushed the prices up. Because of my modest surroundings and low cost of living, I could quickly repay the debt. I could probably live better, but I’m happy with the status quo.” Actually, living better would attract too much attention, and right now that was something Greg wanted to avoid.

“I’ve seen the animal paintings,” Traxi said. “They are very cute. Do you still paint them?”

“Seldom.”

The animals placed in small, magnified boxes had been an instant success.  But the seller cautioned Greg against flooding the market with the same artwork – scarcity always pushed prices up – just look at what happened to coffee. 

Greg watched Traxi browsing her list of questions. She seemed relax. Every time he looked away; she studied him. Probably trying to read his body language. She wouldn’t learn anything.

“How do you feel about the punishment?” Traxi asked accepting a second cup of coffee.

“Look I’ve got a good life now, and I don’t miss all the flash and largesse of my earlier life. But I still think I could’ve gotten those investors their money back if I’d been allowed to wait out the market.”

The market for search-tokens had never recovered, but Greg explained it was because he, and other investors that were keeping the market buoyant, had all been prosecuted and banned from using the platform. They could’ve overcome the obstacle of the chain-block if they’d been given enough time.

He agreed he’d made some mistakes but attributed those to inexperience, not maliciousness. 

“Are you still getting therapy?” Traxi asked.

“Not anymore. The therapy was part of the realignment program and ended when I started being successful with my art.”

Greg had also learnt to play the game: to give the AI therapist the right answer. That way he didn’t raise any flags, and he could end the therapy sooner. Interacting with an AI therapist had annoyed him – there was no real understanding of what he was going through.  But after a while he started looking forward to the game. He could outsmart any AI software – he was sure of that.

“Greg, do you think the realignment programme was successful?” 

“I’m not going to sit here and say my life is amazing now and it’s the best thing that happened to me. But I’m also not going to be a martyr. For now, I’m enjoying my newfound passion.” Greg felt that answer would disarm Traxi – relax her.

“Many years ago, they would’ve just put you in prison or given you house arrest and community service. Do you think it would’ve had the same outcome?” 

“Impossible to tell. Certainly, had I been locked up or not working, I would still have owed the investors a lot of money. Left to my own devices I probably would’ve just watched streams all day.”

“What about your friends and family?” 

Greg’s so-called friends had turned against him – they had all invested money in search-tokens. None of them were willing to back him during the hearing. As for his family, they’d never been close. They could all go to hell. He didn’t need them.

“My sister phones me from time-to-time. I’m not sure why.”  She had offered financial support, and kept in touch, but hadn’t bothered to visit him, even when he had been allowed visitors. Nobody else had visited him either.

“Don’t you have any desire to have a partner again, maybe start a family?”

Greg shook his head. Why? With the latest devices, he really didn’t miss the human touch. And he’d just spent five years with someone telling him what to do, how to do and when to do it. He wasn’t going to get a girlfriend and live through that again. Besides, this way nobody tried to talk to him while he was watching streams. 

Greg studied Traxi and saw her frown. Quickly he added: “Look, I’m still recovering. I’ll start socialising again. I’m just taking it slow. A lot of the people who persecuted me had been friends. It’ll take time to get over the shock.” Greg was enjoying this interview – Traxi seemed easy enough to manipulate – she was nodding now.