Day One #2
These outlines were generated using Inspiration’s story development algorithm, which paired the language model with an elaborate decision support tree.
It took into account the plot beats of previous episodes, their position in the season, their viewership numbers, sentiment analyses from the fan feeds, the desires expressed by fans in their democratic polls, and the underlying company mission statement, among other things; then spat out the best possible idea for the next episode.
This resulted in a purely fair and objective means of planning a story, without a human’s ego getting in the way.
Upper management reviewed them, as did Baz, but only for major continuity problems and the like.
Most of the time, they didn’t change a thing.
Kelli committed the outline to memory, then shut her eyes, breathing deep.
Some script supervisors liked to dive right in; Kelli preferred a moment to focus.
She imagined as vividly as she could, not the dialogue, but the episode’s feel.
The creaking of the ship as wear and tear caught up with it; Orlando’s frustration and apprehension as he pulled in to the harbor.
The way the crew might weigh the options of paying fairly for the repairs, versus trying to steal them—especially as the delays dragged on.
The ominous ambience of the trap-filled temple.
The snapping, frustrated tension between Kendrick and Narine.
Orlando was Kelli’s creation, her secret alter ego—in a way, her best friend.
She’d written the draft of his character kernel herself.
He was a brilliant, dashing, good-hearted pirate captain who stole from the rich and shared his booty with the poor.
If she’d liked men, she’d have fallen parasocially in love with him.
As it was, she just wanted to be him. Orlando wouldn’t have to hide in a private office with noise-cancelling headphones on because other people set him off so easily.
Orlando was quick to offer a friendly smile or a helping hand.
It was soothing to imagine being a person like that.
Eventually Kelli opened her eyes. Twenty entire minutes had gone by. She felt ready.
Going deeper into ScriptGen’s interface, she started to load the kernels.
The central AdventureVerse kernel, a distillation of many gigabytes of plain text defining the base background knowledge of how that world worked.
Then, loaded into the protagonist slot, the kernel for Orlando.
Her own first draft had grown now, added to by human executives and by the semiautomated process that kept track of how each major character evolved with the events of each episode.
By now, even Kelli didn’t have the clearance to read the whole thing.
There were more kernels from there. Into the major secondary character fields she dutifully loaded Narine and Kendrick, along with a link to the whole current roster of the crew, and an original-character placeholder for the priestess, with an offscreen antagonist link to Malinverni.
She picked her way through similar menus for setting, matching individual locations and characters to the scenes they’d need to appear in—the harbor, the temple, the ship—
Then, all of a sudden, her office phone rang.
Kelli startled at the sound. The office phone was a separate machine from her workstation, hardwired like everything else in the office; it had a simple screen displaying only basic information, like call IDs.
Every private office had one of these, so that workers could get in touch quickly; unlike on Earth, the air of the Jovian system was full of interference, and people couldn’t just carry around wireless devices all the time.
But everyone in the office, especially Baz, knew that Kelli hated phone calls and wouldn’t take them.
And the phones were supposed to be screened so that outside calls didn’t come in without permission.
Nobody was supposed to spend their work time having personal phone conversations.
Nobody ever sent personal messages to Kelli.
She didn’t have friends. She didn’t go on the fan feeds—she had when she was younger, but script supervisors weren’t supposed to.
And Inspiration’s screening blocked random marketing calls the same way it blocked personal ones.
So who from outside Inspiration would even know this number to call her, and have some way of bypassing the filters, and who would be rude enough to call in the middle of her favorite thing?
Reflexively, she pressed the button to decline the call, before she’d even read the sender ID. The phone stopped ringing.
Call declined, it said, Rowan di Pietro.
Kelli startled so hard that she literally jumped back a step.
She took a long breath. In for four. Hold for four.
This had to be a joke.
She knew that name. But she hadn’t been on speaking terms with Rowan for a decade—and most people hadn’t called him that. Why in the whole solar system would he suddenly call now? Or—if this was some deepfake scammer borrowing his name, why in the whole solar system would they use that one?
Come to think of it, if this was someone who’d bypassed Inspiration’s phone screening somehow—well, back in the day, Rowan had fancied himself a kind of hacker, hadn’t he?
A light blinked on the phone screen, indicating that there was now a recorded message.
Kelli had done all her mandatory cyberscurity training. She knew not to open suspicious attachments, or enter her password into suspicious forms, or send money anywhere, not even if the spitting image of a close friend begged her to. If this was a deepfake scam, she’d find out soon enough.
But if it was Rowan . . .
Taking a deep breath, she pressed View.
The image swam into view, projected into the air above the phone’s physical body, and immediately, irrationally, she knew it was really him.
She knew it on a gut level, even though he looked completely different now.
Time, or black market hormones, had broadened his jaw and his brows.
He’d styled his black hair into a careless, boyish wave.
She did recognize his eyes—big and expressive, with irises so dark that she couldn’t tell where they ended and the pupils began.
She recognized the sardonic quirk at the corner of his mouth.
Kelli was bad at recognizing most people’s faces, but she’d never have mistaken Rowan for anyone else.
He looked like one of the devilishly charming fictional men that the girls in their class had swooned over, once. He looked . . . happy.
Kelli wasn’t sure why that was the word that came to mind, because his actual facial expression—which she processed, slow as always, a full second later—was harried and worried, the lips tense, the brows drawn up.
“Hey, Kelli. Hope you get this,” he said.
His voice was androgynous now, deeper than she remembered, but not as deep as she’d briefly expected when she looked at his face.
“Listen, I know this is awkward as fuck. I know we haven’t talked in years.
You would be fully within your rights to hang up and pretend you never saw this.
” He bit his lip. “But, Kelli, I need your help right now. Something only you can do. Meet me at the Good Dog at four, okay? I’ll be there, just in case, even if you don’t reply. ”
Kelli never replied to her messages. She hated speaking into empty air and knowing something she couldn’t quite see was recording her face. Rowan knew this about her.
He also knew she’d be wracked with guilt if she didn’t go.
Not just because he’d said he needed her help: Kelli understood what a lie was.
But even if she knew it might be a lie, she’d keep picturing him, waiting for her at the café with that look on his face, the one he got when there was a problem too big for his glib charm to solve on its own.
Rowan had used to say that was Kelli’s biggest weakness, feeling guilty when people told her to, even when she knew better.
Kelli scowled at the now-empty space above the phone screen.
She should refuse. She should ghost him like she’d never viewed the message.
She’d broken up with him, all those years ago, for a good reason.
Terrible things happened when Rowan and Kelli were together, and she’d long harbored a suspicion that, in these years without her, his side of the terrible things would only get worse.
What terrible things was he getting up to these days? With that face, that voice, those clearly illegal hormones? What in the whole solar system was there that only Kelli could do for a man like him?
She shouldn’t bother to find out. She shouldn’t go.
But she was going to.
The Good Dog sat nestled in a corner of a neighborhood not quite as good as the one Kelli lived in.
The streets had been built wide, to accommodate clumps of pedestrians on their way to one shop or another, but low, with arched concrete ceilings only eight feet high.
No trees, only leafy vines that climbed the walls on hydroponic trellises to help keep enough oxygen in the air.
The light from the panels in the ceiling, at least, was bright and warm. It had to be, to keep the vines going.