Chapter 24
Four Months Ago
(age twenty-four)
Kelli sat nervously as Baz scrolled through her latest script.
She knew she’d done the best job she could.
But she was new at this. Baz’s white, swooping, managerial workstation wasn’t only showing him the script itself, but a whole marked-up document, showing with highlights and comments and different-colored text what ScriptGen had generated; what Kelli had written herself; what had been generated by ScriptGen and revised by Kelli; what had been the reverse.
“This is good, Kelli,” said Baz at last, in a jovial tone that she wasn’t sure she could trust. “Great stuff, fun to read, ticks all the boxes, and you handed it in so fast. Phenomenal, all-round. I just have one tiny little concern, okay?”
“Okay,” said Kelli, heart in her throat.
“These stats here—the number of revisions, and the total numbers of human-authored and human-revised words—these are right up at the top of the allowable range. Your last two were like this, too. Seems to be a consistent pattern.”
“Is that a problem?” said Kelli.
She’d thought that the allowable range was literally just that—the range that was allowable.
She’d kept herself scrupulously inside that range; it wasn’t like she had another choice.
In her first week on the job, when she’d accidentally gone over, the screen had grayed out and she’d had to start all over again.
Everyone had always told Kelli that this was about turn-taking, and she’d tried very scrupulously to keep her turns the right size.
But she couldn’t help but notice that the right size—the very top of Baz’s allowable range for how big Kelli’s turns could be—was a lot less than half of the final words.
Baz smiled at her. “Not a problem, just a little thing to keep an eye on. When the stats are this high, ScriptGen flags it so I can double check. I’m not seeing any actual problems here—no big, long, contiguous sections of human-authored text.
Nothing where it feels you have an axe to grind.
If it was that kind of thing, we’d be having a different talk.
Yours is all small stuff, line-level edits, attention to detail in logic and continuity and how the characters talk.
So that’s fine, and I’m going to let this script go through without a further revision, but just be careful, okay?
We don’t want anyone thinking you’ve gotten any funny ideas. ”
“Okay,” said Kelli. She knew sometimes neurotypicals talked like this.
Insisting there wasn’t a problem, while also emphasizing over and over again that there was, and that she’d better shape up before they got mad enough to actually say so.
“I mean—I just want Ship of Fools to be a good show, with good characters. The kind of thing viewers will like.”
“Of course,” Baz said blithely.
Attending to the details was why script supervision had become her favorite thing.
Shutting her eyes, breathing deep, visualizing exactly how it felt to be Orlando.
Reading every little generated line so carefully, coaxing the bland and vague parts into lines that really felt like him.
It felt like making him real, and wasn’t that why viewers loved Orlando?
Wasn’t that why Ship of Fools’ viewership numbers were so high?
But even Kelli could pick and choose more carefully, save her efforts for the lines that really needed them. It would still be her favorite thing. She would still have most of what she needed, which was more than she deserved.