We got the contract, with the stipulation that we play DnD at least once a week to provide a good enough revenue source for them to afford the upgrade. With the contract, they were able to get the funding for their upgrade. It took offering them a year instead of six months, but that was balanced by the clause that gave them 100% of the click-app revenue as long as I was on the NOOB network with an option to buy out of the deal if I moved to another network. In the meantime, they were buying bandwidth from the Supernatural Channel for the option of picking up our show when all this was through. All that meant was that I was contractually bound to read through their contracts before any other network offers and have a negotiation meeting with them. Thanks to the SNC, NOOB wouldn’t even be going dark for the two days that the upgrade would need. Like all good negotiations, everyone was happy, not as happy as they wanted to be, but happy enough to not have hard feelings. I didn’t want bad feelings with SNC or NOOB. The latter held my life in their mainframes and the other was the most probable of places I’d go when I got released from prison.
Viewers – 1,394,709
That was my biggest issue and why I was now stuck watching prison channels. Tyrone had given me a list of shows and I’d logged in to them. I wouldn’t say that they were totally awful, but their feeds were practically dead. All I could think was that I’d gotten so lucky to not be right there with them. I gave a shudder of dread that I’d be that way if I wasn’t careful about how I dealt with Dr. Psychoshithead.
“Have I hit a nerve?” Tyrone asked, his hands pausing in the deep tissue massage he was giving me.
“No,” I told him. His last upgrade had allowed him corporeal form even on the set and we were using the hell out of that by setting up an episode in a spa setting. Between takes, I could have a massage while I watched shows on my display. “It’s this show I’m watching. It makes me feel lucky, but almost painfully.”
“I don’t believe that your success is purely luck,” Tyrone argued mildly, dribbling oil on my legs before digging in. I didn’t know how this felt so good here when my real muscles in the pod were not affected in the slightest, but I’d take it. “You’ve worked very hard. Don’t you think hard work should be rewarded?”
“That hasn’t been my experience in real life,” I mumbled, but he had a point, so I shifted perspective and went back to trying to find some loophole somewhere that would let me deal with these 0.5 star rating bombs. “Tyrone, can we trade advertising with these shows?”
“What do you mean?” Tyrone asked. “I can bring advertising into our conversation if you’d like.”
“Sure,” I blew out a breath and repeated my question. It wasn’t one of those necessary things since they were always processing all that was going on in the front of my mind and what came out of my mouth. I’d learned that from a late-night confession by a slightly loopy Tami. The reason they had me repeat it was for aesthetics because they were supposed to be mimicking a real-world atmosphere for rehabilitation purposes. They forgot a lot. I liked it better when they forgot.
“Outside of the prison system, many independent shows do what they call ‘shout outs,’ where one show will reference another in their feed,” Advertising AI answered me. “Desperate ones do review swaps, but you’d have to watch a bit of their show to give a real review instead of just a quick rating. The larger cable networks do crossovers to spread their viewers across many shows.”
“And we can’t do those?” I asked around a moan from Tyrone’s magic fingers.
“There are restrictions due to prison rules,” Advertising AI hedged. “It isn’t clear why more of them aren’t done, but we are limited by the way we can interact with other prisoners. They can’t physically come into our live feed, but we can have a PiP with them.”
“PiP stands for a picture in picture,” Tyrone preempted my question. “But why would you want to give them some of your screen time? They are killing your ratings.”
“But would they be doing that if I was helping them?” I posed.
These are criminals, the World AI put in his two cents. They are unlikely to help you out of the kindness of their hearts.
Viewers – 1,495,723
----------------------------------------
“So am I, and I’m not unkind,” I countered, sharing my screen with them. “I mean look at this guy. Sure, he was one of the rate-bombers but he’s in a kid’s show about a skunk that can’t get any friends. Is he really a bad guy or did he just do a favor for Dr. Psychofungus to get some perk? I mean what could the guy offer him? Probably anything, right?”
“You’re going to court fifteen prisoners a day to try to bribe them with advertising swaps to try to get them to reverse their rating bombs?” Tyrone’s tone didn’t sound convinced.
“Supposedly, we can’t meet, but we can highlight their live feed,” Advertising nodded their heads. “It could lose some viewers.”
“We already know they don’t like more advertisements,” Grace was also listening in. Hell, who wasn’t listening in when I started putting out ideas? It upped their creativity to get involved, so I expected all my AIs were tuned in.
“Views aren’t doing any good for me right now without a rating above 4.0,” I complained, wishing I’d picked another venue for this conversation. It was impossible to relax for the massage when I was all tensed up with thinking. I sat up and let Tyrone wrap me in a fluffy bathrobe. “It didn’t even matter when I hit a million views. My ratings are at 2.3. If I can’t fix that, I’m sunk.”
“At least the real viewers don’t pay any attention to the star rating,” Grace pointed out, but it was no use to me. I wasn’t demoralized by having a low star rating and it wouldn’t have mattered at all if it didn’t tank my release. I’d gotten Grace to post the star rating in my display so I could keep track of it, but it really was making me crazy again.
“Can you guys get me a PiP with this guy?” I asked. “The worst that can happen is that he says no, right?”
My crew didn’t look or sound convinced, but they made it happen. I read through the summary of the rules for prisoner-to-prisoner conversations, and they were seriously censored. If I mentioned any of a dozen things, the communication would be immediately terminated. I stared at my naked toes and wished I’d dressed for it, then again this guy played a talking skunk in a Bambi scenario, so maybe it wasn’t so bad.
“Hey!” came a voice of another human being and I nearly lost my tongue. Luckily, I had my stats to lean on, so I just gulped and plunged.
Viewers – 1,597,380
“Hi, I’m Janet, a fellow prisoner here,” I stated carefully.
“Yeah,” and he had the temerity to look a bit abashed. “I’ve heard of your show.”
“I’ve been watching yours too,” I tried to sound bright. I couldn’t talk about the ratings specifically because it could be interpreted as combative or conspiratorial and I was pretty sure that once Dr. Psychoslime found out I was doing this, he’d be hovering there with his finger on some button. I had some leeway because we were having this conversation at 4am, which was when skunk-boy’s show started running for the early morning kiddos.
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“Really?” and his whiskers twitched oddly, reminding me of Hex’s expressions.
“Yeah, and I was wondering if maybe you wanted to do some advertising swaps?” I plunged into the pitch.
“With me?” his little skunk-nose scrunched up like he’d gotten a whiff of himself.
“It’s an I-scratch-your-back and you-scratch-mine kind of thing,” I offered.
“Is this about – ” he started, but I cut him off quickly. I was ready to cut them off because I was almost sure no one else had spent an hour sifting through the document on what we could and couldn’t talk about with each other.
“We can’t really talk about anything that might be considered combative, so I’m just here to offer a nudge of viewers to fellow performers in a similar situation to mine,” I warned him, hoping he wasn’t an idiot.
He took a moment to think, as his round blue pupils probed the animated clouds above his little forest. “I couldn’t promise anything on my side, but I wouldn’t turn down free advertising.”
“How about some free advice?” I offered, then could have bit my tongue when he frowned. “I mean, free tips? Like, did you know that your World AI can be upgraded?”
“Like I have that kind of xp to throw around,” his nose scrunched up again and I wondered if his animation could get stuck in that lopsided frown. Even his frown was cute.
“But if you upgrade the AIs, they can upgrade you back for cheaper than you might think,” I rushed to say, wondering if I was pushing my luck with a conspiracy angle. “It was cheaper than stats for me.”
He got a thoughtful look on his little skunk face, and I used my Emotional Resonance to the max and left it to simmer for him.
“Think about it and if you want to do a mass cooperative advertising trade, I’ll have my assistant send you some clips you can show on your show,” I dangled, and Tyrone gave me a nod to show he’d already done it. “I’m contacting others to do the same. Maybe be ready to tune in to my channel at say, tomorrow at 1pm?”
Viewers – 1,699,367
I didn’t wait for a reply. We had a strict time limit on how long of a segment we could do with a PiP and I had more fellow prisoners to contact. Supposedly some prison rebellions had been done through these communications and so they were highly supervised by censor AIs. I had one hour to get all my interviews in before I was out of minutes.
“What?” came a grit-filled growl from a guy stuck in a volley of bullets on a Wild West set.
I gave my speech and left it dangling again.
“You want to do a shout out with me?” a mobster guy quirked an eyebrow.
“Why not?” I pressed.
Another speech. Another dangled opportunity.
“I’m a romance,” a drop-dead gorgeous woman protested from a hot tub. “What do our shows have in common?”
“I think my viewers are eclectic enough to like all sorts of things,” I raised an eyebrow at her and pointed my chin down to the fluffy robe and half-naked masseuse behind me pointedly.
She was going to think about it.
“No,” a guy on a raft in the middle of the ocean just closed the window. I had a few like that, but not as many as I thought there would be. I barely resisted rate bombing them for it. That would make me as bad as them, but it was very very very tempting.
I used up my hour’s worth of PiP time and set my AIs looking for some way to upgrade our systems for more. I had done eight. It wasn’t enough to counter Dr. Psychopissant’s efforts, but it was a start. I knew I needed to do more, but I didn’t know what? I’d have to wait 17 hours to contact any more, and I had to save about fifteen minutes for the broadcast part of it. I’d only reversed two bombs so far, and our rating popped up to 3.1 with just two revisions. Tyrone was tracking them for me so I knew exactly who it was, but that would have been totally impossible on my own because I would have had to be watching incoming urls and matching them with rating changes and then narrowing them down and finding the pattern. Yeah, Tyrone was worth the xp and all his upgrades. I was starting to think that if we upgraded him much more he’d be a person… or would that be a downgrade?
“Hey viewers!” I broke the fourth wall like a pro, thanks to my stats. We were televising out of the living room of the white apartment. I sat on the white couch like Shermon and his flag podcast. I felt just as stiff. “I’m here for a shout out for my fellow NOOBers!”
AIs scrambled to pop all eight of the prisoner live feeds up in PiPs around my head. I was a little surprised that the spiders picked up that last line as a one-liner until I took a glance at where it was going. At least one of those 20k current viewers was Dr. Poopypants. There were other spiders, but they went to Podcasts, and surprisingly, my DnD viewer boards that were really trending now.
Viewers – 1,801,708
“I’ve got some buddies here across a great span of genres for everyone’s taste,” I announced, my acting skill making my obvious plug sound less fake-smiled and more genuine newscaster. Wait. Was there a difference? “Friendless Skunk is one of my favorite kid’s shows and it’ll help your kids learn how to make friends when maybe that’s super hard, right Flower?” Skunk-man’s PiP grew to take over the left-hand side of my feed.
“That’s right!” my prison-buddy’s skunk gave a perfect arm and fist move for the let’s-do-this-together emote. “Sometimes it’s hard to know what we’re doing wrong that make friends run away!”
“I can so understand that, Flower,” I nodded emphatically. “I’m such an introvert myself that I’m often the one running!”
That got a one-liner? Seriously, my stats were ridiculous.
“Click on Flower’s feed on my screen here to go see Flower deal with his own friend-repellant issues!” And another one-liner flew off the shelf.
“Thanks Janet!” Flower smiled with a stream of scent wafting off his tail.
“And that brings us to my next friend, Cowboy Magnum,” I gave a quick laugh and then ducked at the sound of gunshots. “Are you in a place you can talk?”
“Not without getting shot, ma’am,” Magnum shook his head.
“You don’t want to miss this gunfight,” I urged my audience with a laugh. “Go click on it! I won’t mind. Just be sure to come back to me someday…”
This was a great way to get some spiders. I’d just gotten a new genre on my list of spiders, so all this promotion stuff wasn’t as one-way as it looked.
“Thanks to you on that, ma’am,” and he tipped his hat to me with a winning smile I knew he must have upgraded to get.
I minimized his screen just as his hat got shot off his head. I was thinking there wasn’t a time to tune into his show that there wasn’t a gunfight going on. These shout-outs were actually increasing my audience even more. It wasn’t helping with the troll-bombs as much as I wanted it to, but spiders I’d never seen before were suddenly all over my live feed.
Viewers – 1,904,326
“So, I’d tune you into my friend Gargo’s feed, but it looks like he just lost that round of trivia and is set to lose another arm!” I squeaked and flinched away from that visage. “Luckily, he’s a regenerating octopus, so he’ll be back soon. Eww!” Blood and ink rushed over his screen, and we minimized it so it was back next to Flower’s feed.
“I’ll be back,” echoed out of that feed in a way that gave me the creeps.
“If you like the bloody stuff, don’t miss Carmen’s Ghost,” I motioned as another screen got big on the other side of me. “Every episode is a haunting combination of bleeding houses and something that lives under the stairs.”
That screen pulled a classic ghost stretching the fabric over the wall scene with some lightning and trees scratching at windows. It was not going to make it. That bit was way overdone, in my opinion. Still, I smiled and let the ghost do a final jump scare before the screen minimized again.
“Then there’s my friend Shelby, the super bunny in another universe,” I called out, bringing up one of my favorites that was highly undersold for her content. “She’s got so many alts, she doesn’t know what to do in that caught-in-the-video-game you’ve been missing in your life kind of way.”
Shelby gave me a bunny thumbs up and rushed to go fight another Nudibranchia (sea bunnies). I let her fight scene play out before going on to my next favorite. They were both my favorites. They were just too cute.
“And if you’re interested in romance that isn’t romance because it’s from the side-kick’s point of view, you should tune into ‘More to Love’ with Ahoge! You’ll never be so glad to set up your best friend with one of the top five magic-users at the magic school of your dreams!”
“Hey all you NOOBies out there,” Annie, the main character who wasn’t the main character waved shyly at the audience and canned applause almost made me want to smack the sound studio until I realized it was coming from her feed and not mine.
“How are those magic matches going?” I asked her, actually interested in seeing her next episode.
“I’m working my way up that ladder, Janet,” she sounded so plucky and optimistic. “I just need to grind a few more stat points and I’ll be able to take on Levi and his snarky smile.”
“I’m rooting for you and so are my viewers, right viewers? Click away!”
I got through all the rest of my introductions before I started to feel the familiar burble of choking.
Viewers – 2,007,260