The Malicarn #4
“The inn is constructed, and the stables. Not enough livestock yet. When we started building the set we imported pigs from Britain. They have different pigs over there, did you know? And we’d always used British animals in the films. But you only need, what?
Five pigs for a movie? They might be in a shot or two, maybe in the background.
You gotta have a lot more if it’s a working farm.
So now we need to import all these pigs. ”
“Can’t you just use a different pig?”
“No, the fanboys will notice. We may write a scene with a gift from a foreign king who gives us some new breed of pig, just to make the problem go away. There’s actually a subreddit about agricultural practices in The Malicarn. I mean, Souard does spend a lot of time on it in the books.”
“I never read the books.”
“Oh, you should. They’re quite good. Of course, those storylines are way in the future now. Nice thing about prequels is how much story world there is to explore.”
“I read one of his son’s books, I think, one of the sequels. On an airplane. Or maybe I just started it.”
“Yeah, those aren’t as good. But we can do whatever we want now. Have you read the worldbuilding notes my writers gave you? You need to study that, Glenn. Really get to know the Malicarn and its history inside and out.”
They climbed out of the car and walked down toward a small river, where a medieval town was emerging out of the ground with the help of a hundred or so men and women in very modern-looking hard hats.
Cranes and scaffolding and dump trucks were spread across the half mile or so where the brand-new Old Village would soon be.
The production company had been busy erecting set after set, trying to get them built before Prion or another character showed up.
Most of Jules’s writing was spent devising scenarios to keep characters on the move, giving the crews more time to prepare.
“Local labor!” Jules said, pointing to the construction workers. “Oh, mostly anyway. We flew in some guys from Morocco, but most of these workers are right here, from Madeira.”
“Wasn’t Ronaldo from Madeira?”
“What? I don’t know, who cares?” They walked toward the village.
“Way I see it,” Jules said, “we have about a month to finish up here. Then we bring in all the background characters. When Prion shows up with the rest of the Council, you’ll be ready to train them.
We’re only about ten miles from the castle, which we plan to renovate into the king’s palace eventually, so on foot it might be a half-day walk. Far but not terrible.”
As they got closer, Glenn realized that the center of town was already finished, and the work that remained was only on the outer buildings.
The village was not very large. A smithy, an inn, a few homes.
Only a few hundred people could live here comfortably.
The central square was set up with a number of market carts and stalls, all currently empty of any produce or goods.
Jules led Glenn to a stone tower at the north end.
“Welcome home!” Jules said.
The tower was built out of large black stone, like a looming overseer watching the rest of the village.
Glenn had spent the last month sleeping in a company RV while staff residences were prepared, so even a gloomy castle was an improvement.
The tower was about fifty feet wide, with a single, large metal door at its base.
Jules opened it and they walked inside. The first floor was a library with a couple of uncomfortable chairs and tables piled with books.
“This is where scenes in your house will take place,” Jules said. “There’s a small kitchen in the back. You’ll have a scanned actor as a caretaker, so don’t worry about actually making a fire or cleaning up.”
There was a winding staircase at the rear of the room. They climbed up to a small loft, filled with more books, two chairs next to another fireplace, and a hay-filled mattress on the floor.
“I have to sleep here?” Glenn asked.
“Oh, no!” said Jules. “This is just for show.” On the side wall, he pressed a pattern against a series of stones, and the wall swung open on a hinge.
A hidden room lay behind it. This second room was larger, with modern furniture and lighting, painted drywall, a drop ceiling, and a kitchenette with refrigerator and coffee machine.
On the far side was a couch, a television, a desk, and a bed.
It was nicer than Glenn’s Philly apartment. A pile of boxes rested in the corner.
“Is this my stuff?” Glenn asked. He looked at the boxes—hastily assembled and already starting to sag.
Glenn had asked his landlord to mail his things to him, as he wasn’t sure when he would be getting back to Philadelphia.
He opened the top box, and his clothes were clumsily thrown in with random appliances from his kitchen.
“There’re more boxes in my office,” Jules said. “I’ll have them shipped down.”
“I don’t have to share this?” asked Glenn.
“It’s your own private residence,” Jules said. “Free room and board! Perks of the job. You gotta keep it hidden from the characters, of course, but other staff can come up here. You get internet service, too. A little spotty but it works.”
Jules showed him the amenities, how to work the television and order food.
“The cafeteria at headquarters is real good,” he said, “unless you’d rather cook yourself.
” Glenn didn’t. His computer was networked to a database of production information: character locations, ongoing plot arcs, camera feeds.
He also had access to most major streaming services and the rest of the Web.
“Scripts and notes will be emailed to you each morning before our daily story meetings. We’ll run most of those virtually.
I usually won’t be able to meet with you directly, unless you come to the offices at headquarters.
We can always engineer excuses for your character to leave on some mysterious errand, so you can make it to HQ or you can travel for press and such.
The headquarters offices are nice. From the outside, they look like a spooky, magical lair.
We’re calling it ‘the Citadel.’ So we may build that into the story. ”
When they reemerged into the market, Glenn was surprised to see at least a dozen people dressed in medieval garb wandering the square and looking at the empty carts, all seemingly oblivious to the sounds of clanking machinery on the edge of the village.
“Are these all scanned characters?” Glenn asked.
Jules smiled and raised a finger to his mouth to tell Glenn to keep quiet. “Yes, yes. New characters. Mostly bit players here, and extras. We’re testing their motor facilities.”
“They don’t care about the construction?”
“Not currently.”
Jules gestured to the side of the square, where one of the villagers was sitting behind an empty cart. She was wearing a plain skirt, and had her brown hair held up in a bun. Her focus was on something in her lap, a gray box with knobs that she turned and pressed.
“How’re they performing today?” Jules asked her.
The woman looked up at him. “The basic task functions are working well. If we reimplement and it fails again, they’ll have to be retired.” She looked at Glenn. “Who’s this?”
“Ah, one of our Reals. Glenn, this is Lilly, Lilly Kaminsky from R & D. Implementations. Lilly, this is Glenn Mackey. An old friend of mine.”
“Nice to meet you,” Glenn said.
“You could screw up the sample by bringing him here,” Lilly said to Jules. “Are they going to meet him in narrative or will he be backstory?”
“For this group?” Jules looked around at the scanned actors wandering around the square. “He’s backstory for them. This town is going to be where he lives.”
“Oh, so you’re the wizard?”
Glenn peered down at the box Lilly was holding. It was metal, shaped like an old computer hard drive. Not a medieval prop. “What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s a Cerebral Cortex Implementation Processor,” Lilly said.
“The producers just call them ‘neuroscanners,’” said Jules.
“They are not technically scanners,” Lilly said.
“They don’t copy, they implement. We implemented everyone here last week but they had various problems. Forgetfulness, old personalities peeking through sequestration.
So we de-implemented, put them into stasis, made sure there’s not some underlying neurological issue.
We’ll reimplement soon, and if there are still problems, restore their base personalities and send them home.
Happens to about one percent of all implementations, unfortunately. ”
“How does it work?” asked Glenn.
“Show him, Lilly,” said Jules.
“It’s not a goddamn toy, Jules. I only brought it to the field—”
“The set,” Jules interrupted.
“I only brought it to the set in case we have any severe misappropriations on this sample and I have to do an emergency de-implementation.”
“So a character’s whole memory is in there?” Glenn asked.
“Yes, well, a model of one. You can map their synapses with it but it’s never perfect.”
“Come on,” Jules said. “Show Glenn how it works.”
“I’m not doing a field implementation for kicks. You want Larry calling you tomorrow when you have to rewrite half the village because they’re comatose? No, you don’t.”
Jules shrugged and turned to Glenn. “We’ll show you later. It’s amazing.”
“Where do the memories come from?” Glenn asked.
“Visual databases,” Lilly said, “narrative code, whatever ideas the writers come up with.”
Jules laughed. “I wrote a good one for one of the new monk characters. When he was a child, he fell into a snake pit and was stuck for a week and now has an unhealthy fear of nature. That actually happened to one of our line producers. Kind of.”
“Is it safe?” Glenn asked.
“Everyone we’ve ever restored has been fine,” Jules said.
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Lilly said.
“No, that’s true.”