Joe was glad for the break. They had a ten-hour downtime before he had to be back on set. The viewer levels were still piling in, and while he’d assigned a few old points, he needed to spend some time crunching numbers too. They shuffled off into the dressing room in a hush that broke the moment they 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!” Joe announced over the din in the dressing room. When it didn’t calm the excited whispers, he whistled through his teeth. “Hey!”
“What?” Glenda was looking at him, but he’d seen that glitter in her eyes before in a dress shop.
“Grace, please shut down the spending spree!” Joe 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,” Joe reassured them, knowing he didn’t really have control. The fact that they were willing to pause their spending sprees on his word was just out of respect for his ideas and that nearly made him swallow his 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 Joe a grateful nod while snubbing his costars who had ignored her. Were their attitudes changing that much toward him?
“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’ll tune back in when we go live again,” Joe 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 he in charge? Probably not, but it was better than it used to be because they did seem to trust him to do it this time.
“You should update your stats,” Grace admonished Joe like he’d had any time to do it before now. He wondered if they forgot that he couldn’t do all that stuff between seconds like they could.
“I feel like I threw a few stat points in at the cookoff,” Joe protested lightly, sitting at his vanity at the end of the line.
“That was before we had a crazy number of viewers,” Grace rose transparent eyebrows at him, numbers scrolling up.
“Does that say level 50?” Joe gaped at the numbers and did some of the math in his head just because he was worried that somewhere, someone must have made a mistake.
“Yes,” Grace nodded. “And there are nearly two hundred thousand running xp to spend and a whopping 195 stats to assign.”
“That’s almost 40 per stat,” Joe goggled.
“In seven hundred more xp it will be,” she nodded at him, 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.” Joe remembered and dribbled a single point into each stat at a time, pausing when it felt too full for him, which was often. Between dribbles, he scanned the shopping list for upgrades. Two hundred thousand seemed like so much to spend, but as he scrolled through the upgrades, he found that it would go fast. Upgrades for all their departments, including the new music department, were going to run him around two thirds of the points all by themselves. If he added costar updates, a new marketing division, skill bonuses, and automated comment reply AIs, he’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,” Joe lamented, his 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 fifty,” 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,” Joe muttered, still scrolling for anything he 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.”
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 his old apartment. Joe knew this because the upgrades were only 100 running xp each, but the upgrades were so incremental as to be worthless until he’d spent at least 1000 xp. He skipped them. He could still sleep on set, and he’d rather sleep on the white bed surrounded by rippling waves of tarantulas than spend a single xp on one of those upgrades.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“There must be a hundred emails in here already,” Joe 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 him. “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,” Joe said distractedly as he flipped open an email from his union rep welcoming him to the union with an attachment to his pay scale that referred him to an online legal document that made his 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 he’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 he didn’t even use in VR. He was strapped up with tubes that controlled everything that entered or exited his system. At level 30, he’d received an email stating that expulsion was imminent, but when he opened it, it really meant that it was coming sooner or later and that if he wanted the process to be comfortable, he 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. He skimmed through about four of them before deleting them all.
Exp +10,000 (Quest: Even More Viewers!! Quest Complete!)
Joe snapped closed the email window. He wasn’t paying some assistant to sort his fan mail and fan his ego nor was he paying a lawyer to overcharge him just to tell him that whatever problem he had wasn’t their specialty. He wasn’t shelling out xp on a suit of clothes he would only wear around Dr. Psychobabble. They’d already charged his real money account for the blanket that had been ruined from his last expulsion. Every time there was more than five dollars in his prison account, it was charged a fee for something or another.
Then again, maybe their pre/post-production lawyer was specialized so that he’d buy the upgrades. He glanced at the price of them briefly and snapped that screen closed too. It was extortion. He wasn’t doing it.
While they had hundreds of thousands of viewers, they really did very little advertising on their show, and he’d done that on purpose so that the prison system wouldn’t make a lot of money off of their ownership of him as a human being. The assistant could be paid either from their advertising revenue or his running xp but the lawyer was strictly a revenue drain. He would only make 1% of the overall revenue from any part of his show, including his own salary that the prison paid to him and then paid back to them and then gave him 1% of that in accordance with union rules. These hoops were all stipulated and cross-referenced with State and Federal litigation briefs with so many addendums that Joe gave up trying to understand how they could continue to milk his poverty for every cent he made.
“And I’m the one in prison,” Joe complained under his breath. “They’re legally allowed to gouge me for almost every penny I could ever eek 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 him.
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,” Joe muttered.
“You might want a reminder that your words are being monitored,” Tami told him through their mental link. “The ‘s’ word is a red flag.”
“Thanks,” he sent back to her. He’d forgotten. There was just too much to do, and his mind took one look at it all and just wanted to sleep. He didn’t need a trailer he’d never use; he needed an assistant and a lawyer that was actually on his side and preferably less literally animated than his last one. “That includes these little telepathic things, doesn’t it.”
Tami just gave him a nod from four vanities away. Some of the legal precedents for the loss of civil liberties for prisoners dated all the way back to the turn of the millennium when corporations had brought in efficiency experts to streamline the budgets of the prison systems. The moo-verse heard about how some prisoners were better fed than the hard-working poor people and children, and sure enough they voted for work-programs that could reimburse the prison corporations. Those work-programs were appealed on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause and Supreme Court rulings about debtor’s prison but the moo-verse only saw fake pics of prisoner’s eating filet mignon and playing VR games all day. According to the final Supreme Court battle over the subject, Joe wasn’t a slave. He was an employee of the prison corporation who had to conform to management’s rights to make money. Yeah, that non-sequitur didn’t have a soundbite that could concern the moo-verse enough to do anything about it.
“Did you all get trailers too?” Joe asked down the line.
A complicated set of expressions passed over the faces of his costars as they had meetings about how to answer that. It occurred to him that they didn’t need a “trailer” to escape him. They had meetings between seconds. Joe just ignored them, and they pretended he hadn’t asked the question he’d only asked to change the subject he wasn’t supposed to even be thinking about anyway. He banged his head on the vanity again. It didn’t help that the pressure of adding in a bunch of stat points was pressing against his virtual cranium like he was a hot air balloon that was floating over a volcano.
“Grace,” Joe moaned out loud. “I’m feeling a little nauseous.”
“Joe,” Grace stuttered like an ancient fritzing television. “You might want to read the new incoming email.”
“What’s happening?” he felt the world lurch uncomfortably. He vaguely remembered something like this happening before, but he couldn’t seem to focus his mind on where.
Joe, just let it happen, the World AI’s calm tone was the only one to reach him as he 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?” he was saying, or he was trying to say but something was stuck in his throat.
He coughed and great gushes of liquid came out. He hadn’t felt this sick since he’d broken up with the mechanic gal. That had been one hell of a binge. He’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 he recognized as something that made him want to take up drinking again, and maybe a few harder drugs if he could get his hands on them. “Hose it off and drop him in a real cell until he becomes civil. He hasn’t opted for any transition upgrades, so he’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.”