The Malicarn #6
It was better at her place. She had a one-room studio on the twentieth floor of the Citadel.
There was very little furniture—a bed, a small couch, a couple of chairs around a kitchen table.
Even here, though, Glenn came in and just spread out, taking over with his long limbs, his coat or jacket or shirt flung onto any available surface. He was a walking mess.
Lilly never told Glenn this. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
They moved into some sort of semi-romantic relationship so quickly that, in spite of herself, she had already grown fond of his presence.
Glenn made any room he was in more full, even if what he filled it with wasn’t productive.
He seemed to know about a lot of things—movies and music and trivia about semi-famous people from half a century ago.
But none of this minutiae added up to knowledge or insight or even wisdom.
Their conversations were about mundane topics—work, pop culture ephemera, memes Glenn found funny—and if Lilly ever tried to talk about politics or the news Glenn grew quiet and a little bored.
So she usually just let him talk, filling the air with his chatter.
Glenn’s mess, annoying as it was, made the rest of Lilly’s life a little less sterile.
Lilly of course recognized they were mismatched from the start, even if Glenn did not.
When they started sleeping together Glenn was much more invested in the mutual success of their sex life than she was.
He talked constantly while they had sex, asking her what she liked, was she okay, should they move or try something new?
He was very sincere, which annoyed Lilly.
“Just keep going,” she said. “Just don’t stop.”
But he kept asking questions and wondering what else he could be doing to perform better, and she eventually had to snap at him.
“I want you to not stop! That’s what I want you to do!”
She could tell this hurt Glenn’s feelings, but Lilly did not find the biological urge for sex something that needed so much discussion.
Even afterward, as they lay in bed and Lilly desperately wanted to go to sleep, Glenn liked to talk.
Not about their relationship, but about plays he liked or actors he admired or scenes Jules and the writers planned for him to enact on set.
“Do you still talk to your family?” she asked one night. She knew this question would make him quieter, which is why she asked it.
“No.”
“No, because you don’t like them or because they’re, like, dead?”
“Because they’re dead.”
“Ah, sorry. I don’t talk to mine because they’re assholes.”
“That’s interesting.”
Glenn truly did want to spend time with her, though.
Lilly fell backward into their relationship but Glenn jumped in feetfirst. Some days he was the only person in the whole bizarre Malicarn project that actually wanted to see her.
Even if Lilly was sure Glenn had never had a serious relationship before, and was acting the way he thought a serious boyfriend was supposed to act, Lilly appreciated the effort enough to keep seeing him.
The thing about living a life where you make every decision on purely utilitarian grounds is that not very many people make their own utilitarian choice to remain your friend.
The producers constructed a tunnel that ran underground through the set.
They connected the Citadel, with all the labs and offices and apartments and administration, to the Old Village underneath Glenn’s tower.
As the geographic center of the set, the Old Village was a good place for staff to release newly implemented characters or do surveillance.
On nights when Lilly finished early or had to run quality assurance on set, she would hitch a ride on one of the electric golf carts ferrying people and supplies from the Citadel to the Old Village.
Once in the Old Village, Lilly would visit Glenn in his tower.
She had a cheap costume she’d wear for these occasions, so she could walk around the Old Village square and blend in.
When lab implementations increased, Glenn spent more time visiting her at the Citadel instead, using the same tunnel but rarely changing out of costume.
The Citadel held dozens of dorm-sized living spaces for staff.
Lilly was lucky enough to have a window.
Some apartments had been constructed underground.
One of the implementation assistants lived down there and hadn’t seen natural light in weeks.
At the Citadel, Glenn was often called into late-night writing and production meetings.
Glenn’s accounts of these meetings sounded like a lot of time wasted by writers bullshitting one another, but somehow they still organized three or four different story arcs across different parts of the Malicarn at any one time.
Some of these arcs would be spun off into streaming specials or limited series, but everyone knew that they were building toward a major feature film.
The writers hadn’t quite figured out the shape of it yet.
“All anyone can agree on,” Glenn said, “is that it’s about the Council reuniting and Prion coming forward as king.”
Lilly nodded and only half listened. All the story arcs sounded the same to her.
“The A-level characters are doing what we expect,” Glenn told her one night, as they ate Chinese food and watched the small TV hanging above Lilly’s bed.
“Prion is recruiting the Council characters, who are all agreeing to join up. Slowly, but it’s happening.
The extras keep interfering in odd ways, though.
Like the other day, Prion was trying to ride down to the castle and he got robbed.
Actually robbed! The extra knew who he was but didn’t care. ”
“What happened?”
“Well, Prion fought back. Beat him up pretty good.”
“Jesus. He fought another character?”
“I mean, it was self-defense. He’ll be fine, though. Only a few broken ribs. They might retire him early. Turns out his character had just had a baby, and he needed money to feed her.”
Lilly and the other implementers were aware that a baby boom had begun among the scanned population of the Malicarn.
They had expected it, even anticipated it.
The characters, after all, had the same desires and hopes as anyone else.
There was nothing preventing them from having children if they chose to.
But the number of newborns was larger than the producers had anticipated, and the unintended consequences, including a food shortage, were mounting.
Despite how busy Lilly was, Glenn made efforts to see her as often as possible.
When she was in the field, they could rendezvous for a few hours in Glenn’s apartment.
They liked board games, and they had several in progress at various locations: Monopoly at Lilly’s apartment, a game of Risk at Glenn’s, and several chessboards in the writers’ room that, to their eternal dismay, were never left alone between visits.
Glenn would also cook for the two of them, usually seafood with a lot of spice, and he’d rattle through conversations at a fast clip, knowing how each time they only had a few hours before one or the other had to rush off to another assignment.
On the nights Glenn stayed over they watched old movies together.
Lilly used to think she liked old movies—musicals and screwball comedies and gag-filled silents—but Glenn liked exactly two types of old movies, those directed by horny men and those directed by racist ones.
So that was what they watched. There was a lot of Hitchcock, whose grasp of the human psyche Lilly could appreciate as it was considerably fucked up, though Lilly eventually had to tell Glenn to shut up when he babbled on too long about the lighting in Vertigo.
There were also a lot of westerns, endless westerns with sad men looking off at distant desert horizons.
“Well, they’re saved from the blessings of civilization,” Thomas Mitchell said at the end of Stagecoach, as John Wayne and Claire Trevor rode away, and Lilly was relieved the heroes wouldn’t have to stick around with the rest of the characters and act depressed about manifest destiny.
Glenn liked the ending of The Searchers better because John Wayne wanders off alone, but Lilly thought being cast out of society was pretty hopeless even if you had Claire Trevor with you.
In any case, at the end of both movies the Indians were dead.
Jules stopped by the apartment some nights.
Lilly suspected his visits were partially to see his friend Glenn and partially to gauge the status of Glenn and Lilly’s relationship.
Jules talked even more than Glenn, chatting incessantly and only ever about work, laying out his theories of things like “benign interventionism.”
“The only things we should worry about are the stories,” Jules said.
“The rest of Malicarn society can do what it wants, apart from them leaving set and discovering the real world. The island helps naturally with that, and the new perimeter guard system should keep them away from the civilian sector of Madeira. But if these people have babies, great. If those babies starve, well, that happens. People live and die all the time, but that’s not our concern. Our concern is storytelling.”
“But we created these people,” Lilly said. “Don’t we owe them some support?”
“No,” said Jules. “The characters are not machines. They are not AI. We changed their memories but they are autonomous moral actors. We set them up in a working society protected by legal treaties that continues to function well with minimal intervention on our part. Their individual decisions, poor or otherwise, are not our concern. We shouldn’t interfere, unless the story dictates it. ”
“And if the story says to kill them?”