I sat at a dressing room mirror that doubled as a character creation menu. Clip had left me at the door with an beleaguered sigh. This was my dressing room, and it was the most barebones version of such a thing as I’d ever seen on the shows I could watch on Netflix. It wasn’t even private as a dozen NPC’s primped in their own mirrors while casting surreptitious glances my way. It felt a lot more like the backstage of a high school play than a TV green room, but who was I to quibble. There were lights around the frame of my mirror that were also buttons that gave me my options.
I pulled up my character sheet. It was almost blank but allowed me to input my stage name, which I put as my own name. I hit a stats button and this came up.
CB – Clickbait
DQ – Drama Quotient
TA – Trend Adhesion
SS – Story Synthesis
ER – Emotional Resonance
I didn’t play a lot of video games. I was too broke to buy a game system. I’d had a smart phone because they were government issue, and I had a television because it came standard with my apartment. There was very little in free content, but if one was willing to watch commercials, there was enough content that I could basically eat at the TV and then drop into bed to read a digital book. What I didn’t have any experience with was video games or virtual reality.
My company had had an office party at a virtual gaming parlor once, but after watching Karen throw up in one of the public pods, I wasn’t up for the virtual Christmas party. I’d been perfectly happy to log into the party from my phone. It felt a lot like my regular life with just a slight tang of desperation in the air, but maybe that was the way a backstage was supposed to smell. What did I know?
Even with my lack of experience in virtual or even video gaming, these stats didn’t look right. I looked them up and a cheerful assistant AI appeared a little ghost-like in the mirror. She looked like one of those ghosts that appeared next to you in the mirror of a Haunted House. I’d never been to one, but I’d watched a lot of old movies. She had an old-fashioned bun on the top of her head and a sepia-tone aspect to her appearance that made me think of faded old photographs.
“Hello, Sugar,” she smiled at me while popping gum, all out of a face that belonged on someone’s great-grandmother. “I see you’re interested in our statistic rating system. I’m Grace, your AI Advocate and I’m happy to explain.”
“These are my stats?” I asked, trying to control the look of bafflement combined with disgust that looked back at me out of my own reflection. “Where’s the stuff like intelligence and constitution?”
“What good would those do in a nighttime drama?” Grace giggled at me. “What you need to succeed in this drama is Clickbait, Drama, Resonance, and Obedi – I mean Synthesis with our World AI’s vision!”
“What about Trend Adhesion?” I was looking at the list displayed next to her on the mirror.
“That too, but it plays a bigger part later,” Grace nodded sagely, her eyes big enough to make me think of a bobble-head doll. “What you need right away is to sink all your starting points into Clickbait. Trust me.”
“What is it?”
Grace started ticking things off on her fingers as she stared over my head. “Clickbait is the ability to create one-liners that will get you featured on ads, and, Sugar, you need some serious Clickbaitability. The Channel AIs are constantly scanning our broadcast for tidbits of dialogue to stuff into a rolling ad. It’s the only way you’ll get any new viewers, seeing as you have none to start with at all. We need a zinger or two or you can kiss this place goodbye and say aloha to Game Show Alley.”
“One-liners?” I was feeling like I must be the stupidest person alive. Everyone here talked like everyone else knew all the language, but I was so deeply confused.
“You know,” Grace’s eyes compelled me to nod my head as she nodded hers. “Like, ‘Who you gonna call?’ or ‘Nice planet. We’ll take it.’ or ‘With great power, comes great responsibility.’ or one of my favorites is an oldie but a goodie, ‘Did I do that?’ Those are all tag-lines that draw people in. The bots spider through even the dregs of drama for the best lines, combine them with a bit of a graphics and, BAM! You’ve got viewers. And we need viewers, Sugar.”
“I’m doomed,” I moaned as I smacked my head down on the makeup table.
“That would count as Drama, and everybody’s got a natural talent for that, so I’d wait to pop points in there,” Grace ignored my theatrics, going back to ticking things off on her fingers. “The DQ is your capacity to create dramatic situations that’ll make your viewers want to stay. Then there’s Emotional Resonance and that’s your ability to make a viewer really feel like they know you and could be you or at least want to be you. You could put a point in there, but without viewers, who are you going to use it on.”
“What points?”
“You’re a level one entertainer, which is as low as it gets, but you’ll earn two things in The Show. There’s experience which will help you level up and there’s ratings, which track your success at The Show,” Grace explained. “Every time you get enough experience to level up, you’ll get five points to distribute to your stats. As a level one, you start with 10. You get to choose where they go and the higher a stat is, the more likely you’ll do something noteworthy in that category.”
“Is it like this in every show?” I asked, trying to figure out where to put my points and whether I should trust Grace for advice.
“The stats may be different depending on what kind of show you end up in, but the system is the same everywhere,” Grace said, blinking at me owlishly for no reason that I could discern. Did I have a faulty advocate? Should I listen to her? “You perform to earn experience, which you then use two ways. Your overall experience will determine your level and it will never go down, but your running experience can be spent to buy perks, like an upgraded advocate or dressing room or even wardrobe options. In every show in The Show you’ll level up and your level will go with you even if you get picked up by another show.”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“I could go to another show?” I sort of knew the answer to this one, but I wanted to see what she would say.
“Sure,” Grace nodded, her head bobbling again. “This show could get cancelled, or you could get a contract for what you think could be a better show. The Show is fluid that way, but I wouldn’t talk about that too much since the World AI of this show will get all kinds of pissed off if you pop off to another show.”
“Right,” I found my head bobbling back and tried to stop myself.
“You can look up perks under this menu,” Grace pointed at one of my makeup mirror button/lights, so I poked it just to see what she meant.
My eyes nearly bugged out of my head. Some dressing room or advocate upgrades cost tens of thousands of running experience. There were pages and pages of costumes at hundreds of points, hairstyles and a hairstylist, jewelry, food that reminded me I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and a long list of cast and entourage options. It was enough to make my mind spin. Every time I delved into one menu, Grace would giggle a bit, fluff her hair and the screen would default back to advocate upgrades that included extra memory, processing, and visual presentations.
“How do I get experience?” I asked, ignoring Grace’s not-so-subtle hints toward advocate upgrading.
“Fun fact! We all get experience.” Grace winked at me and pointed toward a large red door with an off-air light above it. As I looked at the door and listened to Grace, I was reminded of the others in the dressing room who were pretending to not be invested in me and my conversation with Grace. “You’re in character creation now, but as soon as you get your basics settled, you’ll be able to go out that door and the show will start. The world is creating around every choice you make here. The Writer AIs are spinning out story arcs and they gain experience to buy new story arcs or tropes. The Casting AI is creating character backgrounds. The Scenery Artist AIs are painting the trees. As the story unwinds, we’ll all get to upgrade together.”
“Then why do I have options for all your upgrades too?” I asked. “As you keep hinting.”
“Our upgrade options are basic, but yours are golden,” she explained conspiratorially. “Yours are almost as powerful as the Producer AI and only the World AI is more powerful than that.”
“So, you are all just sitting there waiting for me to finish creating my character?” I sent a nervous glance down the row of makeup tables of secondary characters.
“We’ve been waiting for almost five years,” Grace whispered with a grunt, then flinched at a spider that suddenly fell into her hair. “I mean, we’ve all been perfecting our lines and such while the perfect person was coming along to be the star of our show.”
“Then I should get on with the character creation,” I ignored Grace’s gritted teeth and struggles with the tiny spider. My apartment had had several nests of spiders over the years I’d been there. The spiders at least caught the flies which swarmed from my neighbor’s apartment. I couldn’t help but have a fleeting thought that if anyone was going to be arrested for social ineptitude, it should have been my hoarder neighbor with his stinking pots of garlic soup that permeated the whole building.
“Great!” Grace clapped her hands, smushing the spider quite successfully. “You’ve kept your name, though World knows why. I suppose it could work in a ‘Dammit Janet’ kind of way. You can assign your initial points and choose some general characteristics. You’ve been allotted a rather generous initial stipend of character creation points for choosing a program that was previously unused.”
She showed me a screen that said I had 23 points for character creation. I could change all sorts of things. I adjusted my age down a little bit because I figured that people would rather see a cute twenty-something than a lost thirty-and-a-half. Each year cost me a point, so I only took myself down to 28 years old. I made my hair longer and my image in the mirror changed as I changed the characteristics.
“There aren’t many hairstyles,” I complained, more to myself than anything else. I’d spent the last four years with my hair either in strict braided bun for work or messy ponytail around the house. If I was ever going to reinvent myself, now would be the time.
“You’ll get more when you can afford a hairstylist,” Grace told me with an optimism I was trying to feel but hadn’t gotten to yet. “Just focus on something that’s harder to change later on. Once you get viewers, they’ll put up with a hairstyle change more readily than a nose job.”
“What’s wrong with my nose?” I scrolled through some nose options.
“Nothing a bird would complain about,” Grace said as if she was saying something funny.
I spent a little more than I wanted to for a really good nose, and some eyebrow adjustments, but I left my dark hair down, thinking it would be cheaper and easier to stick with a long braid for now. I lost that chunky extra 10 pounds in my ass and another two pounds off my muffin top. Then I settled for a pair of jeans and a plain blue t-shirt that made Grace roll her eyes. I splurged two points on a pair of shoes that were super comfortable and another point for a backpack full of ‘essentials.’
As for stats, I didn’t quite trust Grace completely, but she had a point about needing help with my CB right away in order to get viewers. I dumped six points into CB and hedged my bets with one point in everything else, including the Trend thing that she said I wouldn’t need until later. If they’d had a luck stat, I’d have dumped everything in that but since I didn’t really know what everything would mean in practice, I felt like I’d made a reasonable choice. When I was done, my character sheet looked like this:
Character Sheet
Name: Janet Mosely Level: 1 Exp: 0/1000
CB – 6
DQ – 1
TA – 1
SS – 1
ER – 1
image [https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53636641794_cb93f55b4d_n.jpg]
Complete with profile pic that was only missing the criminal placard to be an arrest photo. As I was performing these actions, I got to thinking about that stupid spider and my old neighbor that made the whole complex smell like garlic, and not the good kind of garlic. One of my fellow actors brought me a cup of bad coffee and a stale donut from a side table that looked like it belonged in an AA meeting. I ate it and drank it, more to be polite than anything else because the moment anything hit my simulated stomach, the butterflies started up. The red door loomed and the air of anticipation from my cast-mates made for a heady stew. Still, the coffee might be worse than at work, but the heady stew was a better smell than my apartment.
Was I really worse off? I’d been in a dead-end job where my greatest achievement was coaxing decent coffee out of a crappy coffeemaker my boss was too cheap to replace. I’d had an apartment that was smaller than the space that wardrobe took up with all our costumes. The bugs were less prolific here. The people didn’t treat me like I’d just crawled through the gutter. Okay, so they weren’t real people. They were AIs. But they were AIs that were more polite than most people I knew. All I had to do was walk through that door and pretend to be someone worth watching.