The Sunday Morning Transport, March 2025
Thomas Ha’s “The Patron” presents a haunting exploration of commodified human connection through a gig economy service called “the program,” where people hire others to fulfill interpersonal roles they cannot or will not fill themselves.
The narrator works as a contractor in this program, having previously been hired as a postal worker, church gossip, and substitute teacher—but never as a father until today. He’s assigned to pick up a child named Paph from elementary school and perform the role of “Dad” for the day. The program provides prompts on his phone, marked with blue stars when objectives are completed, while mysterious patrons monitor and update his instructions in real time.
The assignment grows increasingly complex. During a walk through the city park, the narrator encounters a teenager who signals that he’s also part of the program, hired as a “brother” to another boy. The teenager demands Paph submit to a beating as settlement of some agreement. When the narrator receives only the prompt “NEGOTIATE” rather than “PREVENT HARM,” he brokers a compromise: one punch to the stomach, no face shots. Disturbingly, both the teenager and the young boy flash program signals, blurring the line between patron and player.
At Paph’s elegant brownstone, the narrator meets the child’s “mother”—a woman he recognizes from years earlier when he’d hired her through the program to be his friend for an evening. She doesn’t acknowledge their previous encounter, maintaining professional distance. Yet the narrator finds himself slipping deeper into his role, imagining this could be his real family, his actual home.
The evening’s domesticity—homework, dinner, pleasant conversation—feels simultaneously artificial and dangerously real. The woman subtly signals “be careful” before retiring to her locked bedroom. When Paph speaks about loneliness and the transactional nature of all his relationships, the narrator attempts to comfort him, believing he understands the child’s need for connection through the program.
Then comes the story’s chilling revelation: a strange, pale figure with violet eyes and white hair appears in the hallway, watching silently. The narrator’s final prompt reads: “I THOUGHT YOU UNDERSTOOD.” He flees at dawn, realizing he fundamentally misunderstood his role in this performance.
Weeks later, the narrator returns to the school and sees Paph waiting with another hired father. The child gives him the program’s gesture—thank you, well done, good luck—before looking through him “like I was no longer there.”
The story’s genius lies in its ambiguity. Was Paph himself the patron, hiring people to populate his lonely existence? Was the strange figure the real father, observing this elaborate reenactment? Ha leaves these questions unanswered, focusing instead on the profound isolation created when human connection becomes another service to purchase. The program promises to address loneliness while ultimately deepening it, trapping both workers and patrons in performances that can never quite become real, no matter how desperately everyone involved might wish otherwise.
Thomas Ha is a Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated writer of speculative short fiction. You can find his work in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, and Weird Horror Magazine, among other publications. His work has also appeared in The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. His debut short story collection, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, is available for preorder and will be released by Undertow Publications in September 2025.