Joe sat at a dressing room mirror that doubled as a character creation menu. Clip had left him at the door with a beleaguered sigh. This was his dressing room, and it was the most barebones version of such a thing as he’d ever seen on the shows he could watch on Netflix. It wasn’t even private, as a dozen NPCs primped in their own mirrors while casting surreptitious glances his way. It felt a lot more like the backstage of a high school play than a TV green room, but who was he to quibble? There were lights around the frame of his mirror that were also buttons that gave him his options.

He pulled up his character sheet. It was almost blank but allowed him to input a stage name, which he put as his own name. He hit a stats button, and this came up:

CB – Clickbait

DQ – Drama Quotient

TA – Trend Adhesion

SS – Story Synthesis

ER – Emotional Resonance

Joe wasn’t a stranger to video games, though he didn’t own a system himself. His friend, Hunch (a self-imposed nickname that the guy thought enhanced his intuition reputation), occasionally invited him over to play, mainly because Hunch enjoyed a guaranteed win. Joe wasn’t great at video games, more out of a lack of practice than a lack of interest. It wasn’t that he disliked the games; it was more about disliking the feeling of begging to be insta-killed in them. Hunch’s favorite phrase when Joe lost was, “Suck less.”

His limited experiences were confined to those weekend sessions which were fun but humbling, as Hunch's competitive streak often left Joe in the dust. His company had once organized an office party at a virtual gaming parlor, but Joe didn’t see the point of getting bodyjacked just to go to a social event. Now, if he’d been allowed to hunt his coworkers with a sniper rifle, that would have been a different story. Joe was more than content to log into the virtual Christmas party from his phone. The backstage area had the feel of his regular life, just with a slight tang of desperation in the air, but maybe that was how backstage was supposed to smell. What did he know?

Even with his limited exposure to virtual or even video gaming, these stats didn’t look right. He 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. He’d never been to the Disney one this image was based on, but he’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 him think of faded old photographs or westerns.

“Hello, Sugar,” she smiled at him 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?” Joe asked, watching his own eyebrow quirk in a distracting way as it looked back at him out of his own reflection through Grace and a character sheet, somehow leaving them all perfectly visible. “Where’s the stuff like intelligence and constitution?”

“What good would those do in a nighttime drama?” Grace asked. “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?” Joe was looking at the list displayed next to her in the mirror.

“That too, but it plays a bigger part later,” Grace nodded sagely, her eyes big enough to make him think of a bobblehead 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 his 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?” Joe was feeling like he must be the stupidest person alive. Everyone here talked like everyone else knew all the language. He knew what a one-liner was, but how was that going to affect killing VR monsters? Was he going to get a chance to kill something? Maybe he shouldn’t have dismissed horror so quickly.

“You know,” Grace’s eyes compelled him to nod his 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 taglines that draw people in. The bots spider through even the dregs of drama for the best lines, combining them with a bit of graphics and, BAM! You’ve got viewers. And we need viewers, Sugar.”

“I’m doomed,” Joe smacked his head down on the makeup table. He’d been dumped in chick-flick-ville. He’d thought he was getting something funny like the old Young Sherman where he could be a quirky genius, but instead, he was neck deep in chick-drama.

“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 his 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?” Joe grasped at something he could control.

“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 are ratings, which track your success at The Show,” Grace explained. “Every time you get enough experience to level up, you’ll get 5 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?” Joe asked, trying to figure out where to put his points and whether he should trust Grace for advice. He was feeling a bit steamrolled and was determined to put the brakes on somewhere so he could resume control of his life.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“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 him owlishly for no reason that he could discern. Did he have a faulty advocate? Should he 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.”

“I could go to another show?” Joe sort of knew the answer to this one, but he 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,” Joe drawled out.

“You can look up perks under this menu,” Grace pointed at one of his makeup mirror button/lights, so he poked it just to see what she meant.

His eyes nearly bugged out of his 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 him he hadn’t eaten breakfast, and a long list of cast and entourage options. It was enough to make his mind spin. Every time he 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, research, and visual presentations.

“How do I get experience?” Joe asked, ignoring Grace’s not-so-subtle hints toward advocate upgrading.

“Fun fact! We all get experience.” Grace winked at him and pointed toward a large red door with an off-air light above it. As he looked at the door and listened to Grace, he was reminded of the others in the dressing room who were pretending to not be invested in him and his 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 being created 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?” Joe 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. Well, and just mathematically, what might cost 100xp for you would cost us ten times that amount.”

“Does that hold true for the reverse on that math?” Not that he thought any AI would be buying him presents.

“Yes,” Grace dragged the word out like it was some luscious tidbit of gossip. “And how very adept of you to notice that the system is rigged toward reciprocity. It’s a part of the rehabilitation programming.”

“So, you are all just sitting there waiting for me to finish creating my character?” Joe sent a wave of his hand 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,” Joe ignored Grace’s gritted teeth and struggles with the tiny spider. His apartment had had several nests of spiders over the years he’d been there. The spiders at least caught the flies which swarmed from his neighbor’s apartment. He couldn’t help but have a fleeting thought that if anyone was going to be arrested for social ineptitude, it should have been his hoarder neighbor with his stinking pots of garlic soup that permeated the whole building. He wondered who had turned him in, but that thought was interrupted by Grace, who suddenly had hands to clap.

“Great!” Grace clapped her hands again, smushing the spider quite successfully. “You’ve kept your name, though World knows why. I suppose it could work in a ‘Meet Joe Black’ 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 him a screen that said he had 23 points for character creation. These weren’t really points that he could spend on stats or skills. He could change all sorts of things, but this area wasn’t really his thing. Joe adjusted his weight down enough to get rid of the muffin top and splurged for some blonde highlights in his hair that made him look a bit more cowboy than nerd. There was a whole subsection that was locked behind a PG rating that even had penis-size adjustments that Joe wished he hadn’t seen.

“Purple eyes?” Joe scoffed at the choices. There were even eyes big enough to be anime girls and he wondered if women had boob choices. Then he focused back on what was important. He got to the section on gender swap that looked like it did indeed offer boob choices that could boggle the mind. Even though he had another 17 points to spend on his physical characteristics, he snapped the window closed.

“You’ll get more choices when you can afford a stylist,” Grace told him with an optimism he 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.”

“Is there something wrong with my nose?” he found himself asking, resisting the urge to open it back up to scroll through noses.

“Nothing a bird would complain about,” Grace said as if she was saying something funny.

That pit in his stomach was shame as he did pop back into the nose options to spend a few points to shave it down some. Then he splurged for a deeper blue for his eyes instead of the ice gray. While he was in there anyway, he spent some more to pump up his shoulder width. Then he settled for a pair of jeans and a plain blue T-shirt that made Grace roll her eyes. He was glad he’d gone back in when he found the miscellaneous section where he splurged two points on a pair of shoes that were super comfortable and another point for a backpack full of ‘essentials.’

As for stats, Joe didn’t quite trust Grace completely, but she had a point about needing help with his CB right away in order to get viewers. He dumped six points into CB and hedged his bets with one point in everything else, including the Trend thing that she said he wouldn’t need until later. If they’d had a luck stat, he’d have dumped everything in that but since he didn’t really know what everything would mean in practice, he felt like he’d made reasonable choices. When he was done, his character sheet looked like this:

Character Sheet

Name: Joe Cockran Denphry

Level: 1 Exp: 0/1000

CB – 6

DQ – 1

TA – 1

SS – 1

ER – 1

Complete with profile pic that was only missing the criminal placard to be an arrest photo. As he was performing these actions, he got to thinking about that stupid spider and his old neighbor that made the whole complex smell like garlic, and not the good kind of garlic. One of his fellow actors brought him a cup of bad coffee and a stale donut from a side table that looked like it belonged in an AA meeting. He ate it and drank it, more to be polite than anything else because the moment anything hit his simulated stomach, it lurched uncomfortably. The red door loomed and the air of anticipation from his 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 his apartment.

Was he really worse off? He’d been in a dead-end job where his greatest achievement was having the fastest time in chair races after hours. He’d had an apartment that was smaller than the space that wardrobe took up with all the costumes. The bugs were less prolific here even with the spider that had flustered Grace. The people didn’t treat him like he’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 he knew. All he had to do was walk through that door and pretend to be someone worth watching. Thus, the pit in his stomach that he was blaming on a very stale donut.