The Malicarn
Lilly Kaminsky hated mess. It piled up and overwhelmed, it distracted, it forced her to think about things she didn’t want and didn’t need to think about. When everything was clean, there was less to worry about. Less to fuss over. There was nothing except what was right in front of her.
In the implementations lab Lilly kept everything in order, lined up, neat, straight.
The lab was quiet, two floors underground in the large, black, cube-shaped administration building that the writers liked to call “the Citadel,” on the western end of Madeira in what used to be Ponta do Pargo.
Unlike the production offices upstairs—messy and busy, full of half-filled whiteboards and pens and constantly streaming monitors—the lab was a model of order and precision.
It wasn’t fancy: a fairly nondescript space of gray walls and white worktables, a few viewing rooms, and a lot of servers, terminals, and hard drives.
But it was tidy, it was clean. There was too much critical work going on—too much to prepare and monitor and deploy—to leave it any other way.
Lilly was an implementations specialist, which meant she did much of the grunt work while her boss, a semi-renowned MD/PhD from Stanford named Sue Whitman, took credit.
Lilly, after all, merely had a PhD, and it was from Northwestern.
They were responsible for the many characters placed onto the live Malicarn set.
The lab processed twenty to thirty characters a day, with the goal of ten thousand characters living and acting on set by the end of the next year.
The implementers were well on their way to hitting that target, and had been working on mass implementation for over six months already.
With some more staff, the lab could even hit fifteen thousand with a little bit of effort.
The process of implementing a character, streamlined as it had become, was still complicated.
First the writers’ room sent down requirements.
Characters fell into three tiers: A-levels, B-levels, and extras.
A-levels were characters with major story arcs, whose bodies were sourced from established actors in Hollywood or London, some who had appeared in previous Malicarn films and some whom the writers planned to establish as new characters going forward.
A-levels had the most involved instructions.
B-levels might have lines or a need to fulfill some story function, and depending on how their arcs went could always be promoted to A-levels.
Typically they were sourced from actors with some theater training and saw Malicarn character implementation as a big break, though in truth one’s thespian background was entirely immaterial to the procedure.
Their characters had slightly more simplified personality requirements.
Extras were just that: background actors who were not expected to partake in much, if any, story.
Some might never appear in a Malicarn film at all but were needed to fulfill the basic duties of running a rural, medieval-like society.
They were implemented as farmers, craftsmen, horsemasters, millers, mothers, and wives.
There were a standard set of about thirty different personalities used over and over again for the extras.
As for their memories, the implementers would mix and match from a prearranged collection: childhoods on a farm, apprenticeships, time served during one of the old films’ wars.
But compared to the A-levels, who were given elaborate, sometimes novel-length, backstories, the extras ended up with fairly simple, interchangeable little lives.
Extras were selected from a pool of volunteers, almost all people who loved the Malicarn and just wanted to live in it for real.
They signed long-term contracts and, to Lilly’s surprise, were always the most enthusiastic for the procedure.
Lilly herself didn’t care much about the personalities.
That job belonged to a subdepartment of the lab whose staff were affectionately known as the Brain Coders.
They fed each character’s stories into an AI language model, which then drew on a vast database of sounds, images, and video—culled from the Web and a number of proprietary archives, along with memories devised by Malicarn writers, producers, staff, and several thousand hours of B-roll from past Malicarn productions—to create a file known as the PersMat: a Personality Matrix.
A QA debugger would run the PersMat through another AI, meant to replicate human behavior, to make sure they weren’t accidentally building sociopaths or otherwise unstable personalities.
Once the PersMat was approved, it moved to Lilly’s team.
The biggest hurdle for the implementations team—and what Lilly spent a good chunk of her time dealing with—was that the technology was not only fickle but nearly impossible to fix.
If one ran a processing machine too many hours a day it might start to overheat and melt the internal circuits.
Everything had to be managed carefully to ensure characters could be implemented on time and the scanners kept running.
(The staff had taken to referring to the processing machines as “neuroscanners,” even though Lilly found the term unscientific and imprecise.)
There were twelve machines, and only one technician on staff who had any facility with repairing them.
But even he could only do minor fixes. If a machine really broke, that was it.
There were no more to order, since the patents were sealed under several overlapping cases of litigation in the United States.
In fact, the actual specs and documentation for the neuroscanners were held in only one place: a vault in Whitman’s office.
This was almost certainly illegal, as the US Department of Justice had subpoenaed the studio to get these documents back, arguing that they rightly belonged to the United States government.
But that didn’t matter if the studio kept all the tech off US soil.
The studio had been involved in this legal game of chicken for several years now, and the Portuguese, by authorizing the Special Madeiran-Malicarn Jurisdictional District, had inadvertently created a sort of legal no-man’s-land for themselves, too.
With all of the neuroscanner technology in Madeira, the studio didn’t have to worry about either government.
It was a sort of scientific and technological détente: The United States had the capacity to build more neuroscanners but didn’t know how, the studio knew how but didn’t have any manufacturing capabilities, and the Portuguese tried their best to appease both parties.
Lilly herself was responsible for tracking the machines’ usage and not letting any of them get overworked.
There was a complicated spreadsheet and series of workflows she had developed for this purpose, and it took up a lot of her time.
But she was also responsible for about one implementation an hour, and since these implementations were the studio’s priority they became her priority.
It took a lot of organizing to keep her daily tasks ordered and neat, but that’s how Lilly liked it.
She usually worked twelve or more hours a day, and if anything that wasn’t enough.
Lilly would have preferred more. It’s not like there was much else for her to do, anyway.
The vast majority of implementations were extras—only a few A-levels came through a year, and B-levels maybe once a week.
The extras blended together, though a few stood out in her mind: the mother who was very concerned about where her children were, the old man who wanted a drink, the priest who lost his faith moments after implementation.
A few months into the project, Whitman got a directive from the writers’ room that the extras needed a bit more spice.
They were milling about too much, too passive in crowd shots.
Some didn’t even try to run away when a few A-levels, as part of an ongoing TV show subplot, fought an animatronic troll at a spring market festival.
Each member of the implementations team was asked to contribute a few memories of their own to enliven the extras’ personalities.
Lilly, who had grown up in Los Angeles, did not personally have a plethora of rural or agricultural stories she could draw from.
There was no need to give a carpenter’s wife a memory of a nightclub in Santa Monica or a summer study abroad in Madrid.
Instead, she wrote down one of her father’s stories about Iraq, one he used to talk about after drinking a little too much.