The dressing room had changed a lot. It looked a lot more like a boardroom with a buffet than a dressing room. Grace had found a downgrade that had stripped it of the unnecessary makeup and hairstyling tools and made it into a bare room with plank flooring and block walls. Then they’d used the xp from the sale of that to upgrade it into a modern boardroom.
“Was it funny?” Joe asked, grabbing a cup of cappuccino. They’d linked Tami’s cooking ability into the catering department, which was worth it because a catering department gave them access to a set of marketing skills that Grace could teach them.
“I don’t know,” Tami shook her head, sitting at the long table in the middle of the room. The comfortable executive chairs were a gift from the producer for 250k viewers, was it last week or yesterday? “Maybe?”
“Yeah,” Joe nodded, shoving aside the neat pads of paper that reset after every meeting thanks to Mandy. Grace’s research assistant was also a whiz of an upgrade because little Tempest was tasked with synergist upgrade options. If there was a way to get an upgrade for next to nothing, Tempest could find it. “I figured I’d flubbed it again.”
Viewers – 904,551
“Don’t sweat it,” Jean patted Joe's shoulder as she pointed to one of the monitors on the walls where they got live updates to what the post-production departments (they’d expanded) were doing with the live stream. “It’s already hit the cutting floor of post-production.”
“At least it won’t be in the episode,” Joe made a note on the pad that then transferred straight to Mandy’s feed. That AI needed yet another upgrade, so Joe put it on the list of what Tempest was researching. It was outrageous on Joe's upgrade cost sheets. “Spider?”
“Nope,” Mandy told him, his form appearing on the nearest monitor. He could take a physical AI form, but it upped his hourly xp cost. Without Joe saying anything, she brought the email from the NOOB network up onto the main screen.
“Good,” Joe told her, then highlighted the screen of the email, the summary super-imposed over the top of smaller text. “Bummer to pause the game, but this just came in.”
“What’s the deal?” Tami asked, as departments on the screens dimmed their current tasks and put their supervisor images up on their screens. It was a cool effect, but it made Joe's nerves light up. Joe knew they were all just a bunch of AIs and maybe an extrovert or narcissist would like it, but it just unnerved him. Joe didn’t stop it because he was hoping he could grow out of it. Could one grow out of being an introvert? Joe’d read somewhere that introverts could do all the social things that extroverts liked, but it just took more out of the introverts than it did for others. “I thought NOOB was a contract-free zone.”
“Turns out their bandwidth isn’t big enough for how fast we’re growing,” Joe answered Tami as the summary text behind him highlighted the parts of the email that matched what he was talking about. “If they keep us going on the 14/10 schedule we’ve been doing, they’ll have server crashes and brown outs the moment we hit 100k viewers at a time.”
They’d been filming or streaming for 14 hours with half hour breaks here and there, and then going off air for 10 hours. They’d found that off air time was best during peak hours for cable networks. While people were off watching their favorite cable shows, Joe’s show was dark. At least in the US, where most of their viewers were located. They went dark around when the afternoon toons started playing for afterschool stuff, and back on air at midnight. Their viewers tended to set them to record if they wanted to watch during prime hours. Even with them live during off-prime hours, the NOOB network was crumbling under the pressure mostly because even when Joe’s show was dark, they were running highlight or blooper reels.
Viewers – 999,893
“So far, we’ve been skirting the edge of that, but with the addition of our VR elements, we’ll max out in our next episode,” Grace explained.
“That episode is scheduled for 3 hours from now,” the Post Production AI reported to them from their screen.
“So, this needs to be cleaned up by then,” Joe nodded to them and laid his elbows on the table to lean forward.
“And we have 25 minutes left in our off air time,” Mandy put in, popping a timer up behind Joe. She knew Joe hated the things but as long as it was behind him, he was okay.
“The NOOB network has proposed a contract that would let us continue just as we are right now, but only if we commit to a six-month period so that they can recoup their investment in the new architecture that our show is forcing them to install,” Joe summed it up even briefer than Mandy had done for him. “Seeing as I don’t like the idea of changing networks right now, I’m okay with that part, but they want a chunk of revenue that we’re not even making yet.”
“They can’t force us to produce revenue, can they?” Jean asked, shoving half a donut in her mouth after the question. AIs didn’t need to eat, but eating was a reflection of their power consumption, and the Tami-level donuts were enhanced power structures that gave buffs to creativity; creativity that was a skill for them that only interacting with Joe seemed to push up.
“They can and they can’t,” the Production Lawyer AI shrugged from a screen across from Postproduction. “It’s a grey area. Officially they’re politely asking for us to contribute to the increased load by offering more pay-per-click stuff. They can’t force us, but they can terminate our show without cause because it is their network. Obviously, they don’t want to do that, but they can’t have all their other shows crashing.”
“Aren’t they making enough on their banner ads?” Tami protested. NOOB network had a stiff 24% off the top of any revenue created by their show, but since most NOOB shows didn’t make much they supplemented that with banners that advertised anything that gave a kickback.
“It isn’t enough to offset the bandwidth upgrade they’re going to need to buy,” Grace explained. “They’re going to have to go dark for two hours too, so they’re estimating time lost there.”
“It wouldn’t normally be an issue since most shows are trying to get some revenue flow by the time they get as big as us,” Joe delved deeper into the issue.
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“Most shows would have upgraded to another network by now too,” the Production Lawyer AI put in. “The 24% off the top of revenue is the first temptation for changing networks since most of the big boys will offer lower revenue percentages.”
“Can we look at some of the contracts?” Tami suggested hesitantly.
“I have summarized the following network contracts as the best of the current offers,” Mandy passed out a two-page sheet. Joe skimmed the contract summaries, but nothing really felt right to him.
“Our options are to join one of the new networks or start charging for our VR unless we can come up with something more creative,” Joe stated plainly. “I’m up for getting more creative, but we haven’t got much time.”
“We may have another issue too,” Grace interrupted. “I didn’t want to bring it up until I knew for sure, but I’m sure now. We’re getting rating bombed.”
“What?” came the general chatter of everyone as they scrambled for screens that would show ratings. Joe had to look over Tami’s shoulder since Grace still had him locked out of it.
“It isn’t reviews,” Tami pointed to the reviews that were generally good except for a troll here or there. “It’s in the anonymous rating system. It doesn’t take much to tank our star system when real ratings tend to range from 3 stars for folks who really just didn’t like us much to 5 stars from those that love us. That evens itself out and we were up at 4.6 stars for the most part.”
“We were until yesterday,” Grace went on, pointing to their metrics graph of reviews. “But these are the 0.5 star bombs that are crashing it. It only takes 8% of our ratings to tank us.”
“So, we have hundreds of relatively good ratings, but if only 8 for every hundred mark us at 0.5 stars, we lose a whole star rating to it?” Joe tried to follow the math and metrics but that wasn’t how his mind worked at all. “That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It helps that we started with almost a thousand ratings,” Grace tried to point to the bright side. “But we got ten 0.5 ratings yesterday and another ten today.”
Their rating had dropped from that reasonable 4.6 stars to 3.7 because of twenty people. It was hard to swallow. Joe's stomach sank. His release required that his rating be over 4.0. Ms. Slick had warned him, but he’d thought it was just another sales ploy.
“How do we fight that?” Joe leaned back in his chair and saw it all falling through his fingers. He’d known the deck was stacked against him, but they’d been pulling out of the muck.
“Actually,” Mandy poked her visage onto a corner of Grace’s screen. “It’s worse than that. I’ve traced the ratings.”
“You can do that?” Grace goggled at the little Mandy head.
“Is that legal?” Production Lawyer AI seemed to flicker as she flitted off and on to do research between seconds.
“It’s a gray area?” Mandy brushed off the concern as if it wasn’t important. Could AIs do anything illegal? Weren’t they programmed against that? “Anyway,” she cut off the whispering, “the bomb ratings are coming from fellow prisoners in this prison.”
And that was the final piece of the puzzle. Joe hadn’t gone to watch any of the other prisoner’s shows. It hadn’t even crossed his mind as he felt pretty overwhelmed just keeping track of his own. Between that apathy and Ms. Slick’s warning, Joe knew exactly where those rating bombs had originated.
“That bastard,” Joe swore. Well, now that made sense, Joe thought, and his mind quickened with fury. Obsessing over the cause wouldn’t help him, so he switched gears to figure out how to combat these new hurdles to his freedom.
Viewers – 1,194,458
“It’s easy and legal enough to trace users to their referral URL, even with the anonymous rating system,” Mandy explained her method of detection patiently to the Production Lawyer AI. “They all have their own shows and if they’ve bought the user interaction upgrade for a mere pittance of running xp, they can watch and comment on their fellow prisoners’ shows. They haven’t been our target audience, so I ignored the influx until they coincided with the rating bombs. Exactly ten logged into your show yesterday and within two minutes of them watching, we’d get a bump of another 0.5 star rating. The same thing happened today. It’s just metrics tracking. I do that for our Trend Adhesion and Spider Tracking statistics anyway.”
“Is it happening on a schedule?” Joe asked. He thought about a daily schedule of a prison psychologist dickhead, with his thirty-five minute appointments over a seven hour workday and realized that he could keep this up every day until Joe was trapped here forever.
“About every 45 minutes,” Mandy bobbled her mini-head. “From about 10am until 6pm.”
“He takes a half hour lunch, but yeah, that’d do it,” Joe muttered. “Do I have access to communication with these prisoners?”
“You could watch their shows and put in some comments,” Grace answered. “But everything said would be public and if you talked about the prison system, the Prison Communications AI would filter out your comments as derogatory or inflammatory or some excuse.”
“There are rules against speaking out against the prison,” Production Lawyer AI agreed.
“But not rules against rate-bombing,” Joe said through his teeth.
“No,” Production Lawyer AI admitted.
Joe wanted to go rate bomb each and every one of those prisoners. He wanted to thrash them with derogatory comments on their shows. In essence, Joe wanted to troll them like they’d done to him, but it wouldn’t do anything to get rid of this set of problems and he had a scant 10 minutes of talking with the crew to come up with something, anything, that could save them. Joe wanted to be out on air killing gnolls while floating on a pool noodle and here he was stuck dealing with show marketing that had nothing to do with the quality of his show. And he had three hours for one problem and no clue how to solve the other one.
“First things first,” Joe reined in his temper. “I want some legal options on this contract stuff. Let’s brainstorm. I’ll start. Can I work something into the contract with NOOB that would give them revenue before it got to the prison system or am I going to have to just swallow my pride and let the prison make some money off of us.”
“We could easily be making a buck an hour on the VR simulation of our DnD campaign,” Tempest popped into another corner of Grace’s screen. “We’ve been losing money on that since it went live. Most games charge more.”
“Can we funnel that money to NOOB before it trickles through the prison system?” Joe asked.
“I might be able to structure something like that,” Production Lawyer AI said, nodding.
“I’d want to keep the copyright to the game itself, so no bartering that away and I’d only contract that to them for six months,” Joe hoped the math in his head was keeping up. “Would that be enough for them to leave off most if not all of that new contract?”
“So that even if you jump to another network, they get the game proceeds?” Production Lawyer AI mused almost to herself.
“Don’t give it all away if you can help it,” Joe sighed with reluctance. “Maybe put something in the fine print that says if I move to another channel, we split the profits of the game instead of giving it all to them.”
“That might get us some marketing kickbacks for more viewers, if we pitch this right,” Marketing AI piped in with excitement. They’d been so underused with Joe's decree to not make money until he was free from the prison system.
The Producer AI and I would like to have final approval of that contract, so send it to us first, the World AI inserted into the conversation, quieting the room.
“I can’t read it on set,” Joe waved his hands around. “It would make me useless as a character for too long. Can I trust you to finish this up so we can get back out there?”
When had that happened? When had Joe learned to trust them? He questioned himself, hiding his frown by getting up to snatch up a pastry that was a flaky puff pastry layered with chocolate and shaped into a cat with cherry eyes and perky icing-drizzled ears. They’d become a team, and Joe turned to look them over as they flitted in and out for their meetings.
Viewers – 1,294,136