I was glad for the break. We had a 10-hour downtime before I had to be back on set. The viewer levels were still piling in, and while I’d assigned a few old points, I needed to spend some time crunching numbers too. We shuffled off into the dressing room in a hush that broke the moment we felt the off-air light go on and the red door close.
Viewers – 203,194
“But who came through the garage door?” Hex insisted, trotting on air behind Tami and Glenda, who were whispering to one another excitedly.
“Have you seen our stat bumps?” Tami was ranting.
“I never imagined we’d have so many running xp to spend,” Glenda gushed back.
“Hang on!” I announced over the din in the dressing room. When it didn’t calm the excited whispers, I whistled through my teeth. “Hey!”
“What?” Glenda was looking at me, but I’d seen that glitter in her eyes before in a dress shop.
“Grace, please shut down the spending spree!” I called out even louder and that brought silence. “If you all want to maximize those points, we need to spend them together, remember?”
Glenda gave a pretty scowl, but mirror cash registers snapped shut as if they’d had a meeting with soured hors d’oeuvres.
“I’m not saying you can’t spend anything,” I reassured them, knowing I didn’t really have control. The fact that they were willing to pause their spending sprees on my word was just out of respect for my ideas and that nearly made me swallow my tongue. “I’m just saying that we should talk about at least some horse trading before we spend it all. And to answer your question, Hex, Tami and Jean entered through the garage door to save me because they’d gotten Glenda to spill the beans on exactly how Ms. Toovers liked to torture her spouses.”
“Thank you,” Hex gave me a grateful nod while snubbing my costars who had ignored her. Were their attitudes changing that much toward me?
“The next scene is them explaining all that to me over apologies, but we wanted to leave the audience out there on a cliffhanger, so they’d tune back in when we go live again,” I completed the explanation. “For the rest of us, let’s make some wish lists and see what we can do for each other, okay?” Was I in charge? Probably not, but it was better than it used to be because they did seem to trust me to do it this time.
“You should update your stats,” Grace admonished me like I’d had any time to do it before now. I wondered if they forgot that I couldn’t do all that stuff between seconds like they could.
“I feel like I threw a few stat points in at the cookoff,” I protested lightly, sitting at my vanity at the end of the line.
“That was before we had a crazy number of viewers,” Grace rose transparent eyebrows at me, numbers scrolling up.
“Does that say level 50?” I gaped at the numbers and did some of the math in my head just because I was worried that somewhere, someone must have made a mistake.
“Yes,” Grace nodded. “And there are nearly 200,000 running xp to spend and a whopping 195 stats to assign.”
“That’s almost 40 per stat,” I goggled.
“In 700 more xp it will be,” she nodded at me, her own giggle peeking through her normally stern face. “For now, it’s exactly 39 per stat, but remember that you don’t want to go dumping all that much into anything at once.”
I remembered and dribbled a single point into each stat at a time, pausing as it felt too full for me, which was often. Between dribbles, I scanned the shopping list for upgrades. 200,000 seemed like so much to spend, but as I scrolled through the upgrades, I found that it would go fast. Upgrades for all our departments, including the new music department, was going to run me around two-thirds of the points all by themselves. If I added costar updates, a new marketing division, skill bonuses, and automated comment reply AIs, I’d be broke again very quickly.
“I should warn you that if you do that ‘horse-trading’ thing again, your account will get flagged for another meeting with Dr. Phendal,” Grace whispered conspiratorially.
“If I don’t do some horse-trading, I’m going to go broke just getting the basics,” I lamented, my eyes rolling around like they weren’t attached. “Grace, is there any way we can hide our negotiations from the prison’s system? Any upgrade that would give me, I don’t know, privacy to go to the bathroom? Anything?”
“The prices did go up at level 50,” Grace clucked to herself. “I should have pulled you aside before then, but it’s been happening so fast, and you were so busy with the gaslighting thing.”
“What’s done is done,” I muttered, still scrolling for anything I might be able to use.
“I should bring to your attention that you got an email account at level 25, monitored of course by the prison system, as well as more contracts to peruse at your leisure,” Grace brought up a dizzying number of screens as she went through a checklist very fast. “Level 25 gave you access to several upgrades that weren’t available before and your food has been upgraded. At the newest level of 50, you’ve been granted a complimentary Star Trailer with its own bed, minifridge, and shower, all of which are also upgradable.”
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What she meant by upgradable is that the bed would be absurdly hard, the fridge would be stocked with hotel-priced minibar, and the shower would drizzle worse than my old apartment. I knew this because the upgrades were only 100 running xp each, but the upgrades were so incremental as to be worthless until you’d spent at least 1,000 xp. I skipped them. I could still sleep on set, and I’d rather sleep on the white bed surrounded by rippling waves of tarantulas than spend a single xp on one of those upgrades.
“There must be 100 emails in here already,” I scrolled through what was mostly junk.
“I’ve filtered out most of the spam manually, but there is an upgrade for a personal assistant who can do a better job of that,” Grace told me. “I’m not technically allowed to summarize or filter your email without that upgrade, but I figured a simple spam filter could weed out the worst of it. This is your personal email. There is another screen for fan email, which is a much longer list.”
Viewers – 212,895
“I thought you were my assistant,” I said distractedly as I flipped open an email from my union rep welcoming me to the union with an attachment to my pay scale that referred me to an online legal document that made my eyes bleed. “Do I need a lawyer too?”
“Technically,” she drawled out the word. “I’m your advocate. We only changed the name to assistant because you seemed to misunderstand the title as descriptive of my duties instead of a euphemism. You’d need to hire an assistant separately and they get paid xp out of your running xp on a per diem basis.”
Half the spam that wasn’t filtered out by a basic spam filter was the prison system’s advertisements for specific upgrades that they’d released for each level I’d attained over 25. They each started with something that sounded like it should be important, like bathroom privileges that turned into bathroom upgrades for a function that I didn’t even use in VR. I was strapped up with tubes that controlled everything that entered or exited my system. At level 30, I’d received an email stating that expulsion was imminent, but when I opened it, it really meant that it was coming sooner or later and that if I wanted the process to be comfortable, I should buy the expulsion upgrades that were itemized with options like “twilight” transitions that could be bundled with a “street clothes” additional upgrade for only 500 more xp. I skimmed through about four of them before deleting them all.
Exp +10,000 (Quest: Even More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)
I snapped closed the email window. I wasn’t paying some assistant to sort my fan mail and fan my ego nor was I paying a lawyer to overcharge me just to tell me that whatever problem I had wasn’t their specialty. I wasn’t shelling out xp on a suit of clothes I would only wear around Dr. Psychobabble. They’d already charged my real money account for the blanket that had been ruined from my last expulsion. Every time there was more than five dollars in my prison account, it was charged a fee for something or another.
Then again, maybe our pre/post-production lawyer was specialized so that I’d buy the upgrades. I glanced at the price of them briefly and snapped that screen closed too. It was extortion. I wasn’t doing it.
While we had hundreds of thousands of viewers, we really did very little advertising on our show, and I’d done that on purpose so that the prison system wouldn’t make a lot of money off of their ownership of me as a human being. The assistant could be paid either from our advertising revenue or my running xp but the lawyer was strictly a revenue drain. I would only make one percent of the overall revenue from any part of my show, including my own salary that the prison paid to me and then paid back to them and then gave me one percent of that in accordance with union rules.
“And I’m the one in prison,” I complained under my breath. “They’re legally allowed to gouge me for almost every penny I could ever eke out of this system and I’m the criminal because I don’t want to socialize with them?”
“Your skills are improving,” Grace changed the subject and brought up a screen to distract me.
Skills: Acrobatic Stealth (7), Acting (61), Brand Insertion (11), Contract Negotiations (4), Hiding (11), Flavor Analysis (16), Lockpicking (2), Misbehaving (4), Misdirection (18), Safe Cracking (2), Stealing (6)
“I wish I could spend a few hours increasing my acting skill since I bought that upgrade for you, but I have a billion emails to sort through and enough legal garbage to make me suicidal,” I muttered.
“You might want a reminder that your words are being monitored,” Tami told me through our mental link.
“Thanks,” I sent back to her. I’d forgotten. There was just too much to do, and my mind took one look at it all and just wanted to sleep. I didn’t need a trailer I’d never use; I needed an assistant and a lawyer that was actually on my side and preferably less literally animated than my last one. “That includes these little telepathic things, doesn’t it.”
Tami just gave me a nod from four vanities away.
“Did you all get trailers too?” I asked down the line.
A complicated set of expressions passed over the faces of my costars as they had meetings about how to answer that. It occurred to me that they didn’t need a “trailer” to escape me. They had meetings between seconds. I just ignored them, and they pretended I hadn’t asked the question I’d only asked to change the subject I wasn’t supposed to even be thinking about anyway. I banged my head on the vanity again. It didn’t help that the pressure of adding in a bunch of stat points was pressing against my virtual cranium like I was a hot air balloon that was floating over a volcano.
“Grace,” I moaned out loud. “I’m feeling a little nauseous.”
“Janet,” Grace stuttered like an ancient fritzing television. “You might want to read the new incoming email.”
“What’s happening?” I felt the world lurch uncomfortably. I vaguely remembered something like this happening before, but I couldn’t seem to focus my mind on where.
Janet, just let it happen, the World AI’s calm tone was the only one to reach me as I slid sideways. The harder you fight the expulsion, the worse it will feel.
“Can’t you just shoot a bit of that nausea medication at me, big guy?” I was saying, or I was trying to say but something was stuck in my throat.
I coughed and great gushes of liquid came out. I hadn’t felt this sick since I’d broken up with the mechanic guy. That had been one hell of a binge. I’d been off liquor for the most part in the years since. It was odd to feel cold.
“This is what comes from coddling these people,” came a voice that I recognized as something that made me want to take up drinking again, and maybe a few harder drugs if I could get my hands on them. “Hose it off and drop her in a real cell until she becomes civil. She hasn’t opted for any transition upgrades, so she’s stuck with the bin. You would think that if they wanted to get back out into society, they would put in some effort to appear more presentable.”