After much debate, which lasted only as long as it took Joe to ruminate on right, wrong, and the agents bartering for his attention, the AI Director moved the wedding to the beach and parking lot where they shot the scene of Glenda saying a tearful goodbye to Tami. Once again, Joe was pretty much a cardboard cutout, and he 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.
Joe failed the next part of the quest for the jewel thief thing, but that wasn’t his fault. It was impossible to get from the dingy motel room to the hotel without triggering security in a way that made it impossible to complete the task. The doctor from hell had ruined that for him too. Joe shrugged it off, letting Jean do the quest without him. She took the ferrets, but not Hex. They could only film 10% of their material without him in it due to the contracts the prison owned, so they filmed that around other scenes.
Joe was just glad they hadn’t had to redo the Ball for the actual Reception. They’d just mashed a bunch of the scenes from the rehearsal together, pasting Joe’s face on an Actor AI for distance shots while Joe was busy going over contracts. He’d almost rather have done the ball all over again than look through the agent offers. They’d all ended up in the trash, with Joe even more certain that not only didn’t he want them, but he didn’t need them either. Not a single one of them could protect him in any way from Dr. Psychojerk.
“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 Joe's Hoverhog 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 Joe 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 they’d stayed in the spot over the wedding and the ocean. Jean’s cat burglar quest had been shot with generic stock and tidbits of the jewel store from days ago. It was actually amazing how little of the actual resort they needed to complete the whole arc.
All that was how Joe knew they 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. Joe did ask her about his incarceration and whether she knew anything about his case, but she firmly told him that she didn’t specialize in criminal law unless it was about a crime on set and therefore could not help him with his case. When asked if she could advise on a scene where someone was incarcerated for social ineptitude and flushed into prison where he 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 Joe with a doe-caught-in-the-headlights look because he’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 Joe's cheeks in her hands. Joe had seen some very realistic blackmail pictures that could convince him 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,” Joe said the only innocuous thing he 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 his vocabulary anymore, especially not after Dr. Psychobabble.
“Good man,” Glenda kissed his 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 him.
“I am thinking of someone we could…” Joe started, then thought better of it, though the sparkle in Glenda’s eyes made him 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 woman on the beach who dumped you for the Princess of Political Politeness?” Tami temporized quickly. Now that they could all read Joe's thoughts, they were getting much more adept at keeping him out of trouble, at least when they weren’t paused.
“Yes,” Joe drawled it out oh so slowly, and he knew that they knew and that would just have to be enough. For the time being, Joe would have to content himself with fantasies and whatever cosplay the crew was willing to play with in the dressing room.
“She’s already sorry she left you,” Glenda assured him, and his eyes widened at the way she said it.
“The next time I’m trapped in a room full of chattering agents…” Joe started.
“Done, darling,” Glenda purred again, and it was the first time ever, that a dominatrix of death had kissed him. At least that he knew of. Well, an AI dominatrix of death.
“Oh, hell,” he thought at them all.
Joe extricated his face and lips very carefully away from the barracuda of Palm Beach Florida and the Princess of Persia by pretending to need to strap his backpack into the Hoverhog, which had never needed such a thing before as it had never threatened to fly out of the sidecar. Podo gave his hand a pat from her spot on top of that backpack. They exchanged a wide-eyed look between them that got a Clickbait banner with a purred, “Call me,” from Glenda over the top of it.
The girls and Joe were on the road again. They had montages, and they had enough footage for Joe to finally have an uninterrupted full nine hours of sleep in a very dingy-looking, but incredibly comfortable motel bed. He spent two of those hours reading a horror novel where he imagined Dr. Psychobabble at the whims of a dastardly demon of House Forggy. While he was sleeping, the viewers doubled, and whichever production did whatever it needed to do to put out two pretty good episodes. They were running on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule of episode releases and they were on par for rising stars at this rate.
Viewers – 8091
As for Joe's agents? There were more agents than offers, but the agents were easier to get rid of with Grace locking them out and the trashcan filled with their contracts. Joe chose none of them. If that made his own counsel his only counsel, then Joe was pretty sure that he could do better than that pack of leeches. Then Joe got a good look at the contracts for possible networks that were interested in picking up their little show, something else that the Entertainment Lawyer AI could not advise him on due to it being a specialized version of entertainment law that wasn’t her specialty. Joe began to think that lawyers specialized in finding ways to not help anyone.
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This time, when Joe woke in his motel room, he was surrounded by piles of contracts as he sat with his chin in his hand in the middle of his very comfortable bed. The Car-Tune Network, CTN, was interested in picking up his show and would give Joe a 2 am time slot for live airing. That didn’t sound so bad until Joe got to the fine print where he was 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 a person put that one side-by-side with the Fast-Food Channel, FFC, where Tami did 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 his 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 Joe got to the fine print on that one, he realized that PHT was sponsored by a costume company that specialized in furries and then it all made sense.
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 Joe almost couldn’t refuse, in an “if you know what I mean” kind of way. Widow’s Peak was the more popular of the two and almost mainstream, but they only wanted Joe's show if he 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 Joe's and combined with another prison star who would become the Prince of Persia. Joe thought 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 was Joe’s story, and he was 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 channel. They even promised future favors if Joe and company did a really good job.
The Charming Charms Channel, CCC, would take them if they hit 10,000 viewers, but CCC sent over a contract early just to see if they would be open to making Joe 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 no one could kill clones, and no one could stop them from procreating, but their kids didn’t stop being clones, of them). When Grace checked them out, she found that they were heavily sponsored by a plastic surgeon who worked only while in VR that just gave Joe the willies. Joe wasn’t judging it. It was a lifestyle, but it was not one he wanted to 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 Joe and Hex to sign up for a Pets and Me subchannel of a subchannel of their overall brand for a 26-day contract that may or may not have been aired depending on whether it got enough ratings. Joe just didn’t see the point. Wasn’t that what he was doing on the NOOB channel? At least on the NOOB channel, Joe got to eat.
Joe really got excited about the Supernatural Network, SNN, sending them an offer. He’d always loved it, but it had been bought out by a subchannel 1%er wannabe who had turned Bloody Mary into something G-Rated. SNC had declined since then, as in plunged so far in the ratings that 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 Joe and company immediately, if they would exclusively hunt demonic husbands. There didn’t seem to be any drawbacks to it until Joe got to a final line of fine print which stated that he’d forfeit his soul if he signed. That couldn’t be right. It was probably a joke, but Joe 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 Joe being there) to hash out the pros and cons. About halfway through the meeting, Joe realized that he was talking to AIs who were programmed to do whatever he wanted and make him feel good about the decision he’d made as long as it was a moral one on the road to his recovery as a socially inept prisoner.
“Do we have to leave the NOOB network?” Joe asked into the din of overlapping AI opinions that were specifically structured to allow for any choice he 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?” Joe 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. Joe had learned that these silences came when he said something particularly astute that they weren’t sure he really understood yet. They couldn’t outright tell him any answers about what was best because that would break the illusion of choice that he had about all of this, and illusion of choice was essential for prisoner morale. That was in the rule book. They couldn’t show him that either, but he’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,” Joe 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. Joe imagined all his “betters” sitting around and discussing whether he’d “sat up” as instructed and was therefore worthy of praise or if his “sitting up” was accidental and therefore should be ignored until he did it on purpose.
“Then I choose neither,” Joe 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 Joe barely resisted rolling his 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 new viewers,” Joe explained, like he knew what he was doing. Joe thought he did know what he 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. To Joe, it was nauseatingly condescending. Joe liked his costars, and he even liked his AI oppressors. They kept him in comfortable beds and delicious food. It was just that he never forgot that he was a prisoner, and his goal was still to attain freedom. When he attained freedom, something he finally thought was possible, he 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 Joe. He was a prisoner. They had monetary value to a free person or the prison system that owned him.
Dr. Poopypants had done Joe a favor this time by reminding him that he was still under the thumb of the prison system and everything he did was at the whim of their generosity. He hadn’t done the prison system any favors by rubbing Joe's nose in it. All those endorsements that the AIs had set up would have paid out to the prison system and not to Joe. Oh, Joe would get some of it, but only 1%. Even his viewer count was credited to the almighty prison of social ineptitude. It was until he got 1 million viewers at a 4.0 out of 5.0 rating. Joe was mad enough at Psychobabble Poopypants that he had decided to make as little money as possible while he did that and then sell out enough to afford to buy his AI crew and continue on his own, or at least start out with a new one.