After much debate, which lasted only as long as it took me to ruminate on right, wrong, and the agents bartering for my attention, the AI Director moved the wedding to the beach and parking lot where we shot the scene of Glenda saying a tearful goodbye to Tami. Once again, I was pretty much a cardboard cutout, and I was pretty sure that the AIs were only half in their own game while the other half of their minds were having a myriad of last-minute script changes to cater to the new “horrible hotels” clause that Dr. Pompous Ass had imposed.
“Tami, you must promise to text now and then,” Glenda was saying a line that sounded written in haste or like there had been a writer’s strike. “Especially when you need money or something.”
“I have money,” Tami responded with a good-natured smile. “I choose to live like this.”
We were all standing around the Thunderbird and my bike in the pristine parking lot with the amazing cameras and security which we couldn’t continue to advertise because Dr. Pompous Ass had kicked us out of the program. This was only a simulation, and we could only get the beach and parking lot because those were the only parts of the VR Resort that were not copyrighted. The Set Design AIs were to be lauded though, because I couldn’t tell the difference. The wedding was actually filmed at a generic beach and the production teams had spliced in previous clips of the wing where we’d stayed in the spot over the wedding and the ocean.
All that was how I knew we had an Entertainment Lawyer AI on staff and that she was part of the post-production team, though she floated in to help out the pre-production team too. I did ask her about my incarceration and whether she knew anything about my case, but she firmly told me that she didn’t specialize in criminal law unless it was about a crime on set and therefore could not help me with my case. When asked if she could advise on a scene where someone was incarcerated for social ineptitude and flushed into prison where she was then tortured by a spider, she’d replied by saying, “Would you trust TV to tell you how to stay out of prison?”
“And you could just as easily choose my way someday, so if you change your mind, let me know,” Glenda patted Tami’s hair in a way that didn’t mess it up somehow. “As for you,” and she turned and caught me with a doe-caught-in-the-headlights look because I’d still been trying to figure out how a person could pass the bar, which was the same for every lawyer out there, and not know about most sectors of the law. “You are the second person I’m calling for backup on my next side-job.”
“The first being me,” Jean put in, already behind the wheel of the Thunderbird.
“Of course!” Glenda purred to Jean and then turned back to cup my cheeks in her hands. I’d seen some very realistic blackmail pictures that could convince me that Glenda was a giant spider in another incarnation. “But you are a gem, my dear, and don’t you forget it. My very second pick.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said the only innocuous thing I could think of for a statement like that. When “I’m sorry” isn’t going to work, “Yes, ma’am,” generally covered everything else. “Yes, sir,” wasn’t in my vocabulary anymore, especially not after Dr. Psychobabble.
“Good girl,” Glenda kissed my cheek with what almost felt like real emotion, or at least as real as VR AI was going to get and more real than any “for my own good” crap that Dr. Pissbucket had said to or about me.
“I am thinking of someone we could…” I started, then thought better of it, though the sparkle in Glenda’s eyes made me think she was up for it the next time Dr. Poppycock showed up in actual VR. Then again, his ability to turn off the AIs for a period of time was problematic.
“You mean that handsome young man on the beach who dumped you for the Princess of Political Politeness?” Tami temporized quickly. Now that they could all read my thoughts, they were getting much more adept at keeping me out of trouble, at least when they weren’t paused.
“Yes,” I drawled it out oh so slowly, and I knew that they knew and that would just have to be enough.
“He’s already sorry he left you,” Glenda assured me, and my eyes widened at the way she said it.
“The next time I’m trapped in a room full of chattering agents…” I started.
“Done, darling,” Glenda purred again, and it was the first time ever, well except for my mother, that a woman kissed me. Well, an AI woman. Oh, hell.
I extricated my face and lips away from the barracuda of Palm Beach Florida and the Princess of Persia very carefully by pretending to need to strap in my backpack, which had never needed to be strapped in before and had never threatened to fly out of the sidecar. Podo gave my hand a pat from her spot on top of that backpack. We exchanged a wide-eyed look between us that got us a Clickbait banner with a purred, “Call me,” from Glenda over the top of it.
The girls and I were on the road again. We had montages and they had enough footage for me to finally have an uninterrupted full nine hours of sleep in a very dingy-looking, but incredible comfortable motel bed. While I was sleeping, we doubled our viewers, and whichever production did whatever it needed to do to put out two pretty good episodes.
Viewers – 8091
As for my agents? There were more agents than offers, but the agents were easier to get rid of. There’s this old joke that asks, “Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste dumps, while California got all the agents?” and the answer is that New Jersey had first pick. I didn’t know what a toxic waste dump was, but New Jersey had gotten first pick of the agents and I’d been left the bottom of the barrel. I followed New Jersey’s example and chose none of them. If that made my own counsel my only counsel, then I was pretty sure that I could do better than that pack of leeches. Then I got a good look at the contracts for possible networks that were interested in picking up our little show, something else that our Entertainment Lawyer AI could not advise me on due to it being a specialized version of entertainment law that wasn’t her specialty. I began to think that lawyers specialized in finding ways to not help anyone.
This time, when I woke in my motel room, I was surrounded by piles of contracts as I sat with my chin in my hand in the middle of my very comfortable bed. The Car-Tune Network, CTN, was interested in picking up our show and would give me a 2am time slot for live airing. That didn’t sound so bad until I got to fine print where we were required to break down once every episode while Jean described to the viewers exactly how to repair something like Tami negligently frying a grilled cheese sandwich on the radiator. If you put that one side-by-side with the Fast-Food Channel, FFC, where Tami does the millionth remake of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives where the Dives were literally underwater and the Drive-Ins were car-toon wrestling matches sponsored by their sister network Cars, CRS, it won, but when you put it next to the offer from Pets Have Talent, PHT, they couldn’t compare. The PHT network channels wanted to give all our pets special powers, which was great, but only if they agreed to inhabit pet costumes of themselves at RW conventions, but the convention-goers were all going to be VR-ed into the convention for security reasons. When I got to the fine print on that one, I realized that PHT was sponsored by a costume company that specialized in furries and then it all made sense.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
On the other corner of the bed were the two warring offers from Widow’s Peak Channel and the Mob Wives Channel. WPC and MWC had interesting offers that I almost couldn’t refuse, if you know what I mean. Widow’s Peak was the more popular of the two and almost mainstream, but they only wanted my show if I signed away the rights to all spin-offs, which wouldn’t have been so bad, except Glenda’s AI would have to be forcibly removed from mine and combined with another prison star who would become the Prince of Persia. I think Glenda might have gone for it, but the prison system was not going to allow a prisoner some fancy gig and Glenda wasn’t going to compromise hers. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. The Mob Wives wanted to be able to put the faces of their cheating husbands on Glenda’s and Jean’s victims and watch hours’ worth of torture which could be aired on a separate pay-per-view channels. They even promised future favors if we did a really good job.
The Charming Charms Channel, CCC, would take us if we hit 10,000 viewers, but they sent over a contract early just to see if we’d be open to making me a secret love-child of Tami and Jean’s divorced parents twice removed (which is genetic talk for clones, which have been outlawed for centuries, but are still one of those don’t ask, don’t tell things since we couldn’t kill clones, and we couldn’t stop them from procreating, but their kids didn’t stop being clones, of them). When Grace checked them out, we found that they were heavily sponsored by a plastic surgeon who worked only while in VR that just gave me the willies. I’m not judging it. It's a lifestyle, but it’s not one I wanted to go get embroiled in. There were rumors that the governments would sometimes purge the clone colonies in election years to get more votes. It was just overall a scary thing to even think about.
The Survivor Channel, SVC, an ancient series that had grown so much that it had forty-two live streams of people stranded on islands, was interested in having me and Hex to sign up for a Pets and Me subchannel of a subchannel of their overall brand for a 39-day contract that may or may not get aired depending on whether we got enough ratings. I just didn’t see the point. Wasn’t that what I was doing here? At least here, I got to eat.
I really got excited about the Supernatural Channel, SNC, sending us an offer. I’d always loved it, but it had been bought out by a subchannel one percent wannabe who had turned Bloody Mary into something G-Rated. SNC had declined since then, really declined. It had been sold and bought and split and sold and bought so many times that even with its original reruns of the original Supernatural series remade in both VR experience and choose-your-own-adventure modes, it was floundering. They’d have taken us right now, if we would exclusively hunt demonic husbands. There didn’t seem to be any drawbacks to it until I got to a final line of fine print which stated that we’d forfeit our souls if we signed. That couldn’t be right. It was probably a joke? I didn’t sign it.
And that finished the contracts, with absolutely none of them appealing in the slightest. Grace did some number-crunching and fine-print scanning for the best and worst. We all sat around during an off-air slow-motion meeting (thanks to me being there) to hash out the pros and cons. About halfway through the meeting, I’d realized that I was talking to AIs who were programmed to do whatever I wanted and make me feel good about the decision I’d made as long as it was a moral one on the road to my recovery as a socially inept human being.
“Do we have to leave the NOOB network?” I asked into the din of overlapping AI opinions that were specifically structured to allow for any choice I made to be lauded as valuable.
“No,” Grace shook her head from the mirror over the dresser in the motel room, which was loads more comfortable than the backstage area.
“It’s like the agent thing, huh?” I put forth, scooping the pet treats off of the SCV contracts. “I don’t have to have an agent either. It just would have been easier to hand control of my life off to another person than to try to figure it out myself.”
Silence dropped into the room as they all had a meeting about how to answer that. I’d learned that these silences came when I said something particularly astute that they weren’t sure I really understood yet. They couldn’t outright tell me any answers about what was best because that would break the illusion of choice that I had about all of this, and illusion of choice was essential for prisoner morale. That was in the rule book. They couldn’t show me that either, but I’d gotten some pieces of it by guessing and waiting for one of these second-long meetings of theirs.
“And I don’t have to choose another channel,” I continued when the pause lasted longer than expected. “But if I choose another channel, they’ll start to dictate what I can and can’t do and limit my choices down to something manageable by my little pea brain?”
It was like being surrounded by a bunch of professors who had written the test for the poor little imbecilic student and were all waiting for the student to give any sign of intelligence before celebrating their massive accomplishment of finding something worthy of praise in the imbecile. I imagined all my “betters” sitting around and discussing whether I’d “sat up” as instructed and was therefore worthy of praise or if my “sitting up” was accidental and therefore should be ignored until I did it on purpose.
“Then I choose neither,” I announced, full of the bravado worthy of a performing dog. “I don’t want an agent and I’m not choosing any of these channels.”
Are you sure? The World AI asked, and I barely resisted rolling my eyes. What was it, an ancient computer prompt?
“I don’t see my viewers getting higher by choosing another channel since all of those channels want to place my program in the wee hours of the morning and they’ll keep us from running reruns which is where we’re getting a lot of our new viewers,” I explained, like I knew what I was doing. I think I thought I did know what I was doing. “And for that grand placement in a paid channel, we aren’t getting paid, but rather we’re banking on an idea that just by being on that channel that we’ll get some of their loyal viewers to watch us.”
Exp +100 (Quest: More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)
Cue the applause. It was nauseating. Don’t get me wrong. I liked my costars, and I even liked my AI oppressors. They kept me in comfortable beds and delicious food. It was just that I never forgot that I was a prisoner, and my goal was still to attain freedom. When I attained freedom, something I finally thought was possible, I could demand to be treated better at the very least. And here was the other thing that came with all this paperwork. These contracts had monetary value. Not to me. I was a prisoner. They had monetary value to a free person or the prison system that owned me.
Dr. Poopypants had done me a favor this time by reminding me that I was still under the thumb of the prison system and everything I did was at the whim of their generosity. He hadn’t done the prison system any favors by rubbing my nose in it. All those endorsements that the AIs had set up would have paid out to the prison system and not to me. Oh, I’d get some of it, but only one percent. Even my viewer count was credited to the almighty prison of social ineptitude. It was until I got 1,000,000 viewers at a 4.0 out of 5.0 rating. I was mad enough at Psychobabble Poopypants that I had decided to make as little money as possible while I did that and then sell out enough to afford to buy my AI crew and continue on my own, or at least start out with a new one.