The girl studied at some Visual Arts school in Tokyo, minored in Psychology. She knows the brain space that artists work in, has a knack for translating designs to reality, and Pete Lundahl had picked her out from twenty candidates. Plus, she fills a kink he didn’t know he had until he saw her sitting in the waiting room before her interview, legs crossed.
She makes small talk on the showrunner floor, the elite menagerie of accomplished men and women crowding around her, their wearables dangling over their necks like those enormous headphones with visors. They are Delta’s breadwinners, its vitality and its golden goose. The girl knows who to get in with, and how, knows how to form a lasting impression, and it’s then that Pete realizes he’s a stepping stone to the showrunner enclave, the creative bastion of the company. Their average salary is tenfold of the second highest paid staff at Delta, the CEO. What use are the script engines without input?
Pete waits for her, watches from afar.
The hallway is long, lined with off-white fluorescent strips. Symbols personalize each of the optical locks along the rows of doors. Pete finds the one he’s looking for, waits for the retinal scans to complete and steps through.
Projectors line the ceiling of the stark white room, looking like sprinklers ready to spurt. The floor is tiled black glass with a few feet of carpet at the entrance, a few chairs and a wearable rack holding one headband.
Pete sifts through the interface of his visor and finds the launch protocol. It’s a giant steel lever floating in augmented reality, making him feel like a fighter pilot starting the engines. The white light dims as five fist-sized drones flutter up from their hubs on the opposite side of the room. They gather just a few feet from him, spin and project.
A single figure appears between them, stands at the center of the room. “Hello,” it says.
Delta Reel’s Creative division has made the ACT-1600-DR actomata a pixel-perfect representation of a 30-something East Indian man, purple suit and gelled black hair. The DR in its model’s name means the actomata was built in-house, but the 1600 chipset was released five years ago, making this one of the eldest in Delta’s AI inventory.
A glance to his watch tells Pete that this one has places to go, but whether that’s a subroutine adding character or a thematic mannerism he cannot say. “Sha.” Pete rubs the sweat from his wearable’s visor. “Pleasure to see you.”
Shaheen Badoor Khan pauses too long. “A pleasure to see you too, Pete Lundahl of Delta Reel.”
Way way too formal. Someone must have dialed back the propriety complex when he wasn’t looking. Pete’s lost more time retraining the actomata and fixing other’s mistakes than anything. “Relax, and slow it down a bit.”
The AI breathes as it parses Pete’s words into commands. “A pleasure, Showrunner.”
Better, but not perfect. The title is an outdated term, replaced with Creative Director to give further emphasis to human intervention, though most people still use the old moniker. Plus, he’s technically not a showrunner.
“The season finale is coming,” Pete tells Shaheen, “but for now, we’re somewhere in the middle. Your wife is a rural soul, forced to live with you in urban Delhi. She’s doing her best not to have an affair with your gardener, and you know it, but what else can you do? Be the strong working man she expects you to be. Watch over her. Provide for her but give her the space she doesn’t ask for but desperately needs.”
Shaheen flickers as the projecting bulb on one of the drones is close to burning out. “What are my settings?” it asks.
“Your choice.” Pete thinks this over. “Actually, pull it back to a taxi just outside your house. Your wife lingers in the car longer, looking at the aforementioned gardener. You know what’s going on, but you can’t say or do anything.”
There is no expression on the actomata’s face, but Pete can feel the gears of its mind clinking into place. “Jealousy,” it says. “Envy.”
“Exactly.” So, not all of R&D’s updates were detrimental. Still, that doesn’t stop the same pervasive feeling crawling up Pete’s spine he gets whenever R&D pushes changes to the actomata before informing him. These collections of codes and subroutines are close enough to be his children, given the time he’s spent with them.
“And the rest, Showrunner?” Shaheen asks.
Again, the title. It sounds a lot better than Actomata Calibrator, the one on the job offer Pete accepted three years ago. He’d be lying if he said it didn’t excite him every time he heard it, would be lying further if he said R&D should patch it out right away. “Your choice. Whatever you think is right.”
It’s not too much faith to put into the actomata, and Pete steps back to see the algorithms click into place. The set builder starts by pulling shared environmental assets from 3D model libraries stored in Delta’s open servers, the ones the whole company can access. A mud-brick house pops into existence, then flickers from mansion to condominium to country home as the system delves into the source material to gather the closest approximation.
Then, after constructing the set, Shaheen improvises the dialogue. It’s silent for now, mouth and limbs moving much faster as the scene plays out in 3x and 5x. Shaheen’s wife walks in, her height the perfect generic approximation Pete would come to expect. She’s one of the weaker baseline actomatas, one that Pete discarded long ago but only needed for testing scenes.
When the scene starts to take shape, and the dialogue appears as written text floating beside the projection, Pete runs it over three times, then four, then sighs. The result is abysmal.
“It’s perfect!” Sometime during the construction Jay Ferway had waltzed in. Pete’s manager steps carelessly through a projection of Shaheen’s living room wall as the scene loops, the words in the dialogue bubble reappearing as the actomata adjust. “Just the way I envisioned it.”
You would envision two sunrises the same color, shape, location and cadence, Mr. Ferway. You could not hear the difference between a dying breath and that of a newborn child. Your sensations are numb and dull, which is why you eat the same food, wear the same drab clothes, clomp with the same too-heavy gait. “It needs work.”
“It needs to be submitted an hour ago.” Jay checks his wrist where an antique timepiece rests, an LED screen practically jammed where ancient dials should be. Pete thinks it’s disgusting. “But I’m not here to dress you down,” says Jay.
That’s a relief. “Then what?”
Behind Jay, the girl from before steps wide of the looping production, saunters towards them wearing black sneakers that ride up those slender legs to a plaid skirt. Pete takes her in and immediately suppresses a hard on.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
“Akemi,” Jay says to the girl, ushering her forward, “the illustrious Pete Lundahl. Last, and certainly the least in your lineup today.” He looks over to Pete as if asking the man not to make anything more of the jest. “He’ll be teaching you the… fundamentals. Akemi Suzuki is our new Calibration intern.”
This isn’t a surprise to Pete at all. He’s suspected for a long time that Delta has been seeking young blood to replace him, even worked to hire them. That she’s here in front of him with the complexion of warm milk only makes his groins tingle. “A pleasure.” He reaches out for a handshake, then turns it into a wave when she only nods. “River of Gods is our newest piece. The 1600 is processing the dialogue now.”
Jay smiles, not reminding Pete that he’s late, thus making Pete think the man’s insistence was only a quip to show his superiority in front of Akemi. “Right, then,” says Jay. “I’ll leave you to it.” He steps carelessly through a gesturing Shaheen Badoor Khan.
Pete’s attention returns from the floating dialogue bubbles when he realizes he’s been silent for a quarter minute. “Feel free to have a seat.”
Akemi almost pirouettes as she spins and takes in the room. “Not like the labs back at school at all.” She grunts. “They were twice as large. What channel are you on?” She pulls a device down from her head which Pete had thought was a headband. It’s one of the trendy models of wearables he’s seen on the vactrain holo-ads, the kind the tech giants lure students into. Pete hopes Akemi wasn’t that stupid.
He flicks Akemi the details. She nods as she catches them. “I’m sorry to admit,” Pete says, “but I’m a little unprepared. No one mentioned you were working with me today. I don’t even have a lesson planned.”
The intern finds the projection in her own vision, forgetting what Pete said or not hearing it at all. Shaheen’s actomata begins a loop by stepping out of the taxi, holding his wife at the crook of her back with one hand while waving at the gardener with the other.
“That’s his dominant hand,” Pete says. “It’s symbolic. He’s always thinking with his hands, despite most people just leaving that to habit. He studied in Italy, you see. They always talk with their hands.”
Still, Akemi doesn’t respond. Pete thinks about double checking they’re on the same voice channel, but it becomes clear after a few awkward seconds that the intern is watching the scene’s construction. She folds her arms, leans forward, squints to read the speech bubbles. Then, without warning, she says, “You may not like me very much, Mr. Lundahl.”
Pete swallows. Did she catch him looking? “Call me Pete. And what makes you say that?”
This time Akemi does recognize his existence, black deep eyes like tapioca pearls. “You’re on the way out.”
On the way out. Well, he’s heard Jay say worse things about him, but all in his presence. Maybe the girl is lying. “Did Mr. Ferway tell you that in confidence?”
Pete becomes acutely aware how bad Akemi is at answering questions when she doesn’t respond, instead stepping close to Shaheen Badoor Khan and inspecting him. “It is all about how you speak to the AI, Mr. Lundahl. They are children and they absorb everything. Every word, every mannerism that you inflict it also picks up. The 1600s are notorious for this.”
“Pretty advanced children, if you ask me.”
“You’re not getting the point.”
“I know what your point is, Ms. Suzuki.” He finds the curve of Akemi’s back and remembers to sit up straight. “Sounds like you already have the skills to take my position, though I don’t know how you made it through the interview without answering questions.”
An annoyed glance flicks across Akemi’s face, then disappears. “Mr. Ferway told me nothing about you, but he didn’t need to.” She looks him up and down. “I will have your position in a few months, Mr. Lundahl, or at least its place in the hierarchy. Whatever I put there will be of my choosing.”
A bold claim. A drone beeps with its low charge signal. “You think so?”
Akemi watches in fascination as Shaheen’s looping scene begins to take shape. She crooks her head and pushes her wearable’s earbud closer. “The dialogue is awful. So generic.”
Pete stifles a laugh. “Well, that much we can agree on.”
Akemi bobs her head up and down to the cadence of Shaheen’s speech. “You must have been too vague, too uninspiring. Specific commands need specific direction. Metamatics is using actomata that can reconstruct a whole book series in a matter of minutes, and then have prequels and sequels dreamed up in a few weeks. You know that Stormsingers took six days from start to finish?”
“Before the author even finished the second book, Meta had the ten part series planned out, yes I know. Sets an awful precedence.” Is this a test of Pete’s knowledge? What is Akemi getting at? “I also heard it tanked.”
“Not so hard as you think,” Akemi says. “It’s ten ten times as engaging as this crap, anyways. It will never aire.”
Pete clenches his teeth, waits for the silence to pass. “Ms. Suzuki,” he says, looking the woman over. “I appreciate the creative feedback, but you don’t get to enter my lab and tell me you’ll be taking my job while making a half-baked analysis of my work.” The lab doesn’t belong to anyone, but Pete doesn’t care. “I don’t give any heed what the others are doing. You are not taking all the variables into consideration.” Akemi opens her mouth to speak but Pete raises a finger. “Processing takes time. I suspect the actomata you were fed in your classes were already well calibrated, but here at Delta we re-use a lot of our programs that have to be re-trained and configured to different shows. Metamatics can dedicate one actomata per show, but we need to reconfigure ours, and not all palettes can be swept clean in that time. What you’re seeing is a 1600’s attempt at recalibrating considering the variables.” He nods his head to Shaheen. “Also consider the strain on resources. We’re not a university with perfect labs and training facilities. We are Delta Reel, and we have a time and budget to adhere to. This submission is already late. What would you do in my position?”
Akemi Suzuki mayget the point or may not. She pauses for a moment, her gaze drifting from the scene and to Pete, then quickly away. “I am sorry, Mr. Lundahl. Practical constraints, I imagine.”
This change in character startles Pete for a moment. It’s respectful, but probably won’t last long. “Always practical constraints.” Pete frowns, looks over to the generic desk on the other side of the room. He thinks of stopping the conversation there, but something about Akemi’s demeanor makes him want to open up. “And the largest variable of all, Ms. Suzuki.”
“That is?”
“The source material.”
This, to Pete’s surprise, seems to pull Akemi in more than any point he had brought up today. “The craftsman blaming his tools?”
“When the tools are recycled garbage; half fan-fiction inspired and half Hollywood pandering, then yes, I am a craftsman blaming the tools. Or, rather, the material. Shaheen’s doing the best he can.” He thinks about repeating the last point louder, if Akemi is right about actomata learning through osmosis.
Akemi nods along with her bottom lip puffed out. “May I?”
Pete doesn’t know what she’s getting at, but nods her along. “Be my guest.”
Shaheen stares as his improvisation matrix kicks in, processes his wife’s words, sorts them into sensible permutations, finds the most emotional and meaningful response, the one that will convey those three words in the script best and says “Oh.”
Oh? “What the hell is that?” Pete asks. “Did you do that?”
Akemi flips through her pages, consults her wearable. “No, it’s a memory leak,” she says. “General exception. Might need a minute.”
Pete wants to throw off the thing. Not even through the opening scene, and already Shaheen is shitting the bed. He calms down. “Not your fault, sorry. It’s Development.”
Design, Creative, Development, Training, Filming. The five steps of bringing content from drama to reality. A tried and true design in the streaming industry, yet frustrating nonetheless.
“I’ll call them,” says Akemi, then frowns. “How long do you think it will take them to fix it?”
“Too long, even if it’s a problem in the emotional algorithms. If it’s not…” he doesn’t want to think how long that will be. Pete sighs. “It’s going to be a long night. Are you willing to stay late?” With me?
Akemi sits down. She checks her watch, lets out a sigh. “Yeah, I got nothing,” in a tone which says she has something, and would rather not spend her Thursday night with this boomer.
“Shaheen,” Pete says, in that soft voice of the AI’s wife. “I’m cheating on you. I’m not sorry.”
“A shame.” Shaheen’s voice is too level. “A dam shame, my dear.”
“My dear?” Pete frowns. “My god, this is goes deeper than Development. Who the hell allowed that into his vernacular? Dear? No one would say that.”
Akemi looks away, shuffles her feet as she sits.
“Oh.” Well, Pete has to learn to expect mistakes from the interns, even if he wants to fuck them. But fucking her won’t prep Shaheen for filming. Once the AI reaches that point, it needs to be perfect. After all, resorting to human actors would surely sack Akemi, if not Pete as well.
A pang of anxiety crosses Akemi’s face. He risks putting a hand on her shoulder and she lets him. “Let’s fix it,” he says.
She smiles and blinks back.