To find this BBC 500 words story deeply unsettling?

[shockedmama23]

Cellmate by Olive C.

For twelve years, this has been happening. 624 weeks ago, Cellmate was first launched. Today was my call up. Nobody knows what it is, just that everyone who comes out is changed somehow. No one speaks about it. Whether because they can't or won't, I don't know. A two-year military programme. Compulsory. All fifteen-year-old boys.

That was me. Today.

I took the bus to C.O.H.P. Centre of Human Pride. "Where strong journeys begin", they say. 'We'll see about that,' I thought. My heart was flickering fast, palms sweating like the condensation on the bus window. In I went.

There were thousands of us. Lined up in neat rows of hundreds, numbered one to one ten-thousand. And there I stood, in the midst of it all, number 4579. Gradually, guards herded us each into tens of thousands of individual cells, stacked on top of one another. The door locked. I heard a curious chirp from behind me.

I whipped round, waddling over to the cradle in the back of the room. There, a small human-replica robot lay, curled into a tiny ball, making snuffling sounds. There was a little bubble around its mouth, and it opened its big eyes. The robot smiled, it was a child's smile, completely and utterly real. A speaker in the corner of the room announced: "You may now name your child." What?!!
Humans haven't fraternized with robots for decades. They have been at war for years. So, what kind of military programme was this?

I poked the tiny thing and contemplated for a moment what to name it. Hate pooled in my head. It took me only a second. In the floating bar above the robot's cradle, I typed with quick and sharp precision: Laila. My sister's name.
The name was accepted and the hovering bar disappeared.

I stared suspiciously down at "Laila" and settled her back down in her cot cautiously. I didn't want to set off any sort of alarm they might have put on her. Hastily turning away, I paced the small room. There was a twist to this for sure. I just had to find out what. I sat on the edge of the rickety bed in the corner. And she began to cry.

Over the next 24 months, I was kept in tight isolation with Laila, feeding her, raising her. First following orders from the speaker, but then because I began to love to. She started to call me "Dadda" and I marvelled how intricate and compassionate her coding was. She was kind and courageous, never doubted herself. She grew like any human child. She began to remind me of her namesake. The girl who lost her life to the robot army. Laila.

On that final day, the speaker clicked and that rough voice announced, "your order is to kill it." A carboard box was slipped through a crack in the metal door. I rushed over and opened it with frantically shaking fingers. Inside...
Was a knife.

Honestly, it reminds me of the hitler youth caring for and then killing dogs. Just overwhelmingly disturbing, and not physically possible to be written by a 9 yr old.

Kingsman inspired. Definitely not written by a 9 yo. Would they really choose the robot to be a baby- what does a baby mean to a 9yo boy? Would they really understand the impact of being called ‘Dadda’? What 9yo has a concept of National Service?

I am a bit uncomfortable about the ending as I first thought it was about indoctrinating boys about looking after babies, which seemed like a good thing to do.

was devastated at the thought of the dog being shot in Kingsman though

I think it’s most likely child ( or parent) wanted to enter the competition and discussed creepy story vs adventure story vs space story etc.. settled on creepy story, robots Parent wrote the rest.

Yeah, not written by a nine year old. The idea, maybe, the writing skills are too advanced even for a child that reads a lot.

It reminded me of the GOT Unsullied Army where their training starts as young children and one of the last things they have to do is buy a slave child and then kill it. There are also many urban myths from different countries that part of the training to get into elite Armed Forces is to kill one of their pets (or sometimes, in the more extreme version, a member of their family). Also thought it had a Terminator vibe. Plus that of a lot of dystopian fiction where a young person (usually a girl) reaches an age where they undergo a great shift and often discover their society is revealed to be cruel or unjust.

Some of the story sounds like a (bright) 9 yo, mainly the syntax, but some of it sounds unusually dated for a child to use - fraternized and rickety bed. They probably went over and over it with a thesaurus to polish it up to be as good as possible for the competition.

Too grown up for a nine year old for me too.
Not just the story line but also the arrangement of text.

I find it disturbing that this would even be accepted as the work of a 9yr old !

The Hitler youth did not kill dogs, ie ye olde story that they were given puppies for a year and then told to strangle them
Thats propaganda …. It never happened.

Loved the DUN DUN DUN too
And robbing Tesco with toilet paper and a toaster 🤣🤣🤣

my first reaction was a nine year old did not write that one of his parents probably did or pointed the way to write like that

At eight, I wrote a truly gruesome Nativity story. Mary screamed a lot, haemorrhaged and almost died. My poor teacher was somewhat taken aback 😂 My brother had been born the year before and, though it hadn't been a near-death delivery, there were difficulties. I think I must have overheard the midwives chatting about their latest dramas. Dark stories don't come only from the media!

I thought it was really well written

Maybe the writer also read 1984 at age 8. I am a bit surprised that you are shocked by the story if you read that book when you were so young. Have you read it since you were 8? It is pretty disturbing.

Really?

How do you feed a robot?

And can you kill one with a knife?

Also WTF?

The writing is plausible for a 9 year old, given the constraints of the form.

It's the idea that's perhaps unusual, but it's really not too far-fetched.

The 500 word criteria imposes the need for control which is an objective for writing in KS2, and this writer has used fairly standard writing techniques, taught in any KS2 primary classroom, to craft a narrative which, over the course of some simple paragraphs, delivers the story arc quite neatly to a plot-twist conclusion.

OP, you seem invested in this being somehow off-the-scale weird. Do you read much primary age greater depth writing? If not, I find it quite mean-spirited to cast aspersions on the provenance of this piece.

I read 1984 when I was about 11. I'd seen the old black and white film at about 8.

I reread it as an adult and so much had gone over my head.

I could have written that at nine. I was a voracious reader, as were my parents - our house was full of books and by the age of nine I was exclusively reading adult literature. I was more widely read as a young child than most adults. I was also an unusually sensitive child; reading books with upsetting themes made a huge impact on me, and I then brought some of these themes to my own writing. I 100% believe this story was written by a bright and perceptive child.

I thought it was well-written but somewhat predictable. I had guessed the ending as soon as we met the ‘baby’. The Gangsta one was so bad I had to stop reading because I had no idea what they were on about and the complete lack of grammar made it hard to read.

Having read 9yo writing (ex-teacher) many times, a fair few are Gangsta-esque. I have definitely seen writing from a 9yo like the first one from very gifted children. Some of them have great author’s voice.

What universe do you live in? Kids see a lot worse than that!

There are no similar scenes in GTA.

I found it disturbing too, couldn't really be bothered to read the gangsta one though!

I don't think this is the work of a lone child. Acronyms, straplines, programme names? Plus i agree very derivative Good Mothers, Kingsman. Parents do homework all the time, I imagine they also 'help' with competitions

I don't think it's that well written. There's a lot of detail (which I would expect from primary age) but it also finishes very suddenly. A bit of an "and then I woke up and it was all a dream" type ending.

The real skill in writing a 500 word story is to build a plot and have some sort of ending, even if that is a cliffhanger. This just feels unfinished to me.

My nine year old wrote a story about a conker.

It didn't get past the first stage.

I think Scottish gangsta is even less likely to be written by a nine year old. Doesn't know the word drove but has control over things adults would find funny but not kids?

YA fiction has lots of dark themes. This story reminds me of things I read when I was about 13. A precocious nine year old might read similar.

I dont think it is disturbing at all. I find it a little strange that you cried after reading it. It shows a good and adventurous imagination using a lot of the creative writing devices they will be learning at school. I reckon the writer is a Goosebumps fan though, it has that feel to it.

I’ve marked many a piece of child’s writing in my time. This could have been penned by a nine year old, unlikely, but a deeply disturbed one. How on earth did this story win?