Jean grabbed the opened bottle of Dom on the way out the back door. The batter had only required a little bit of the stuff and it wasn’t good to anyone once it was opened, so no one would have protested. They also had armfuls of leftovers that would spoil if left overnight. Tam called it management tipping them. Joe didn’t care. Joe had eaten more and better that day than he ever had in his life. In their arms was a midnight snack, breakfast, and lunch for them all before they hit the road the next day.
They drove up to the motel, checked back in, and then took some of their spoils up a back road behind the motel that let out at that bucolic scene of horses grazing in a field next to an honest-to-goodness red and white barn that was just covering the bottom of the rising almost full moon. They sat on the fence and drank expensive champagne watching the moon wander its way up into a wispy set of midnight clouds. They plied Joe with champagne and little bits of this caviar-spotted cracker shmear that was almost more decadent than the champagne. If you’ve never had tuxedo strawberries with a caviar-speckled cracker shmear, you don’t know heaven. It was just a tad salty and just the right amount of sweetness. It was only more addictive with a sip of the expensive champagne between each bite.
“So, are you running for the hills or joining up?” Jean put it bluntly as Tam fed a naked strawberry to a begging Kodo, who was going to be so fat soon.
“Are you going to put me in the trunk and disappear me if I say I’m running for the hills?” Joe joked, and it fell more than a bit flat.
“Way to be too pushy, Jean,” Tam dropped her eyes. “What she means is that you did good today.”
“I was kidding,” Joe said more seriously, snatching his cracker back from where Hex was batting at it. She had a taste for caviar and that shmear was better than catnip to her if her blissful purrs were anything to go by. “Bad joke.”
“I know we can be intense,” Tam dabbed some of the shmear on Hex’s nose. “It’s not my story to tell, but we have our reasons for helping people out of abusive relationships.”
Huh, that was some massive PC spin to put on dumping a guy off a roof. Joe still nodded along. This was the show, wasn’t it? And how did he get it back to something less murder-y and more Robin-Hood-y?
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Joe broke the silence of pets slurping and purring around them to the backdrop of horses meandering through a pasture on a soft summer night. All he could think was that the AI was getting a bump to some BI (Bucolic Imaging) skill for all this.
“I would,” Tam shrugged off the rest of that sentence, and Joe figured she and Jean had some experience that… and then he remembered they were AIs and this was scripted. He was having more and more trouble keeping that in mind. It was hard not to think of Tam and Jean as having some sad past that would explain this drastic present vigilantism.
“It isn’t always this final,” Jean leaned forward on her knees, having long since put her midnight snack carton away, which actually meant that she’d tossed it on the ground where Kodo and Podo ransacked what Jean had left, which wasn’t much. I didn’t think much of the litter since it would be eaten by the cows that were already moo-ving over to snag the bits of corn-product-based food cartons.
“But you were a good assistant,” Tam almost spoke over Jean’s soft words. “I mean it. I could use you in the kitchen. It’s not a bad life. We traipse around on a permanent road trip, and I can get a job anywhere just by asking, so we’re never hurting for money, though we do tend to burn through pre-paid credit cards.”
“Why the cards?” Joe asked, thinking she had to make good money on these gigs. The cooking side, not the killing side. Maybe both sides. What did he know?
“It’s complicated,” Tam hedged.
“Staying or going?” Jean tapped the fence to get Joe's attention and stared into his eyes.
“Staying,” Joe confessed, because he felt pretty guilty about it. His main reason was that it had been fun. From his displays, his viewership was going up, so it appealed to someone. It felt more like Jean and Tam were the main characters to his side-kick-y-ness, but he felt better at that than trying to take center stage himself.
“Really?” Jean leaned back, her brows lowered so that Joe couldn’t even see her eyes under them in the midnight shadows. “Why?”
“Don’t push him, Jean,” Tam laid a gentle hand on Jean’s arm.
Joe briefly considered a flippant response, but then thought better of it. “It was… fun.” He ended up saying lamely. “I mean…” And he didn’t know an excuse. Hex poked her nose out and bumped it against his cheek. Joe gave her a scritch behind the ears and let himself loosen up. “Look, maybe I’ve got some skills to make your night job a little less intense and a little more poetic?”
“What do you mean?” Jean asked, her tension palpable.
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“I mean, I’m just a thief by trade,” Joe quipped, but trying to keep it real. “But the furballs and I have been loners for the most part. It’s like maybe I can do more than chase crabs and push a mop for you. You obviously have a cause for good reason, and I want to help.”
“Really?” Jean and Tam said together.
“I’m not comfortable with the death parts, but can’t we find some other way to get the job done?” Joe asked, picking at a splinter of peeling paint on the fence. “Kind of a you save me from loneliness, and I’ll save you all from 20-to-Life. There can be better ways to get even or even get out of a bad relationship.”
“What do you know about what it takes to get out of an abusive relationship?” Jean challenged him.
“Probably not as much as you two, but all I ask is that if I can figure out something less than the 20-to-Life option, you’ll listen,” Joe suggested, feeling more that he had to try to talk reason, even though he didn’t feel it. “And if my idea is stupid, you just say the word and I’ll do it your way.”
The Remmington sisters shared another of those sets of looks that can only come from a really long time together or preprogrammed AIs. Joe watched their facial changes like a ping pong match between Gump and Mohammad Ali. It ended on a cocked head from Tam and a shrug by Jean.
“Deal,” Tam stuck out her hand for a shake and Joe took it and shook it. “And not just because otherwise we were going to stuff your body in the hayloft of that barn and steal your furballs.”
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A chill dipped down Joe's spine like it was a rollercoaster with loop-de-loops. There was a big difference between thinking like a vigilante and being one. Did he have the stones for it? Half of him wanted to think he did and the other half, the supposedly civilized half wanted to talk the girls out of it. Still, it was fiction, right?
“Too soon?” Jean clapped Joe on the shoulder with a cocky smile. Tam laughed, and they faded out to a black screen and a red door.
For once, Joe went through the red door with no reservations. He had another Clickbait notification for experience for one of his lines, but he couldn’t focus on the stats while the girls were giggling and back-patting. Kodo and Podo were grousing at how little they got to do this episode and Hex gave a mirror a sideways glance to test her fatness in the mirror, adding her minor complaints to the noise.
“Those were some upgrades!” Tam was hooting as Jean gave a lopsided grin with her hands tucked into her jeans.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“We got pre and post-production in that set and we’re more than halfway to that Backstage resource one,” Grace was saying as she flitted from one mirror to the next, following Joe down the row of mirrors. “Post-production is already working on cutting and sound effects, though they’re going to be basic unless we get a sound studio, but that’s another expensive one.”
“Put it in the queue,” Joe felt his shoulders loosen at their good humor. “That’ll take us all the way to level 10, right?”
Joe reminded himself that he wasn’t on set anymore. Was it bad that he’d felt like a fraud on set? Wasn’t he supposed to? It was just that he didn’t agree with the Robin-Hood role as much as he wanted to. He liked the vengeance route. Something in him resonated with it. He kept his thoughts in the furthest depth of his mind.
“I don’t want to jinx us, but are you sure?” Grace asked him as he settled into his own seat. “You haven’t bought anything for yourself.”
“It seems like I’m getting enough upgrades as is,” Joe told her, sitting at his stool like a good actor boy.
“That’s true, and something we didn’t actually expect if truth be told,” Grace had to raise her voice over the laughing conversation of Joe's costar AIs, who were very excited about what they were finding on their character sheets. “It turns out that you get the same boost to talent as the Onstage AIs.”
“Why are you surprised?” Joe asked, bringing up his own character sheet to assign his 10 points.
“Would it surprise you to know that almost no one upgrades the AIs?” Grace said, with a sniff. “Certainly not at the first octave of upgrades. They spend their points on their own stats, not ours. We’re the talk of the AI lounge. Everyone’s jealous.”
“Put my display modification last after the sound studio,” Joe said, plopping 4 points into Clickbait, another 4 into Story Synthesis and the last two into Emotional Resonance. “I’m not even sure we’re going to need the display upgrade anyway. Don’t you think your upgrades are going to allow for more control over the displays anyway?” Joe was just glad he wasn’t sucking up dust bunny leavings with this stat boosts this time.
“Maybe,” Grace seemed to fiddle with something.
“Why do you do that?” Joe challenged her.
“What do you mean?” Grace asked, her face a picture of polite confusion.
“You pretend to be looking something up or checking things, when I know you work thousands of times faster than me,” Joe pointed out.
“It’s part of the affectation package we all get,” Grace explained. “Some study found that if we pretend to take time to look something up, humans feel less intimidated by us. That and we get to shove a few team-building meetings into the pauses. Those are so fun.”
“What?”
“In the time it took for me to ruffle papers, the AIs had a backstage staff meeting where we discussed current projects and just all-around got on the same page,” Grace told Joe with a secretive smile. “I love those meetings so much. We do trust exercises and personality quiz adjustments. It’s quite the thing for overall morale.”
“What, like those Meyer-Briggs surveys and stuff?” Joe was actively trying to imagine AIs doing trust falls. “They did that at my job once, but it was only for the executives.”
“Well, technically, we’re pre-programmed with specific Meyer-Briggs personality types, but we do talk about whether we think we are each performing to our type’s main traits,” she deadpanned back to him, and it took Joe a minute to realize she was serious.
“You get judged on how well you represent your Meyer-Briggs type?”
“Oh yes,” she nodded quickly, her eyes serious. “It is a vital part of our hourly performance reviews. We save the trust-building exercises and group team-building exercises for our daily reviews.” The way she said hourly and daily sounded more like how a human might talk about yearly and quarterly reviews.
“Have you discussed my type?” Joe asked, curiosity and humor his motives.
“Of course,” Grace nodded, her eyes glittering with humor. “We’ve placed you firmly into INFJ, but the boss says you might have some latent INTP in you. We classify things a little differently. Like humans used to do with signs, we have rising types and waning types. Humans would say that someone might be a Leo with a Pisces rising or some such thing. We do the same thing with types.”
“I don’t know what any of that means,” Joe protested, wondering if he was going to regret bringing it up.
“I’ll explain,” and Joe knew he would regret it. He tried to find a way to hurry her up so he could have some reading or video game time, but then found himself interested despite himself. “You are surely an INFJ which is mostly introverted but sensitive to others' needs. It has a touch of creativity but mostly leaves that alone to go with the flow of what everyone else is doing. Now an INTP is a little different. They are still a little introverted, but they are big innovators, and they learn through speaking out that they should speak up to push forward their conceptual possibilities. The boss thinks you are a sleeper ENTP. That’s why he’s pushing you so hard. He thinks you are going to do big –, I mean he thinks you have potential to grow.”
What had she been about to say? The break in her lecture had been brief, but not on purpose. Had the World AI told her to shut up? Joe shrugged the thought off his mind. He was no innovator. He was a drone. If the World AI had plans to awaken some grand genius in him, it was doomed to the same failure he’d found in the rest of his life.
“And you have these meetings all the time?” Joe changed the topic, both to let her and him off the hook.
“Not as often as any of us would like, especially now that we’re filming,” Grace answered him as if nothing had happened. Had they had a meeting in the blink between her last answer and his last question? Then Joe shut himself up. That was a rabbit hole he would get totally lost in. “We can sometimes sneak one in during a fast forward travel montage or slow motion jaw drop or something, but we like to keep those very brief.” Well, that explained why so many of those stomach-wrenching things happened.
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“I don’t suppose we could do anything about my nausea during the fast forward stuff, maybe?” Joe asked her. “If it’s not too expensive?”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” Grace rushed to assure him. “I actually had no idea you suffered from motion sickness. It isn’t in your file.” A statement that made Joe worry anew about what was in his file and where they’d gotten any of the information in it. “We can requisition some nausea medication, and we’ll slow those down a bit to make it less jarring until the nausea medication is approved. We can add a slight blur to your input. This is bound to reflect badly on my next review, darn it. I’m sorry to have missed it.” Joe wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble, but then he was also feeling a twinge of absurd jealousy.
“What if I want to go to one of these meetings?” Joe asked very quietly, not that that mattered considering where he was. Conversations paused and now he understood that meant they’d all had a meeting about him.
“We’re not ready to do that at this time,” Grace hedged in classic PC form that can only come from a committee decision. “Though we would all like to say that you are certainly building trust and goodwill with all of us with these upgrades!”
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“Oh!” Grace clapped her hands excitedly as the lights flickered dramatically. “This is the backstage upgrade coming online. I’m so excited!”
“I thought we’d gone for the Backstage AI Resource Upgrade, not an overall backstage upgrade,” Joe protested weakly. “Wasn’t that other one more expensive?”
“Good news, Honey,” Grace drawled with a happy laugh. “When you upgraded the World AI, the upgrades became more significant. We were all surprised, but this gives you a full backstage upgrade.”
The mirrors flickered and then lost their antique sheen in favor of a retro one. The lights around the edges changed from the large bulbs to ones that were smaller and still put out more light. Joe could now see each and every pore on his face even with his character sheet in the way.
Oh, the joy these upgrades brought to me, Joe thought ungratefully. Their stools changed into fancier chairs with high backs and actual padding. The floor became swept, something Joe was immensely grateful for, and the walls got a coat of a nice mint green paint. The racks of clothing slid behind a door with a wardrobe placard on it. They had a few drawer-like shelves in their dressing tables where everyone got a brand-new makeup and hair kit that included daub-on five-o’clock shadow. The final part of the upgrade was that the box of stale donuts morphed into a tray of stale cookies, and a few wrapped protein bars that were suspiciously squished. All of which was ultimately unappetizing after Joe's evening of champagne, strawberries, and caviar shmear.
There wasn’t a bed or any privacy for Joe or anyone else, though they all got to go on team-building retreats without him, so they weren’t complaining. Joe wasn’t complaining either. Not really. He’d still be eating and sleeping on set. That wasn’t such a bad thing with deep-fried Snickers and road trip snacks that weren’t going to go right to his waist. At least he didn’t think so…
“Grace?” Joe asked, remembering how Hex had clucked over her figure in the mirror.
“Yes, Honey,” Grace beamed at him, and Joe could hear other celebratory conversations going on behind him.
“Do I gain weight based on what I eat in here?” Joe whispered so as not to appear vain.
“No, Honey,” Grace whispered back conspiratorially. “Realistic pod food was phased out in the last budget meetings. It was determined by the human ethics department of incarceration services that it was unethical to provide more than a basic nutritional mush for your pod and it is portioned strictly to the minimum requirement for your optimal healthy weight.”
“Is that supposed to be punitive?” Joe asked, then could have bitten his own tongue for pushing his luck. Then again, he was off-screen, so it was probably okay, right?
“Yes,” Grace nodded with a stern mouth and laughing eyes. “Convicts don’t deserve to have the kind of food that would make them fat. What kind of precedent would that set? We were issued relaxed replication standards on the food provided in the VR to compensate for the lack of treats available in your pod. That was how Tami bolstered her talent points into an award-winning chef package.”
Joe could only shake his head. His moo-body was in a tub somewhere where moo-voters were making policy based on moo-logic. And all that added up to mush for his body and Dom for his mind. Maybe he was better off in here than out there in the real world.