The Malicarn #3
“No, Gregorian. Please. You must listen to me. When I think back over my life, all the battles I have fought, quests I have gone on … I remember it and I do not remember it. As if they happened to someone else. I cannot explain it, unless there is some sort of secret magic that you know of. I cannot tell Prion this, he would not understand. I fear something nefarious is afoot, and if I go on this quest I will only be an obstacle.”
Glenn looked at the short little man before him, his breathing heavy, and felt sorry for him. “I will think on this. But Sir Kip, do not plan to turn your back on your fellow knights. They will need you, even if you cannot see it.”
“I will only hinder them. Please, Gregorian. Find a way.” Glenn watched Kip sulk away from the square, wandering to nowhere in particular.
Glenn walked toward the inn. Lilly was leaning on a post outside.
“What’s wrong?” she asked as he approached.
“Nothing,” he said. “Are they in there?”
“The Council? Yeah. And they’re getting sloppy already.”
Glenn peered into the pub, where Bariol was standing on a table, glass of ale in hand, leading the rest of the Council in a raucous song. Kreek was among them, smiling broadly and singing along.
“Let grasses grow and waters flow in a free and easy way, but give me enough of the rare old stuff that’s made near Galway Bay!”
Glenn looked at Lilly. “Did you implement memories of Irish folk songs in them?”
Lilly shrugged. “They know a bunch of old songs. Whitman likes it.”
“Well, Kreek missed the writers’ meeting this afternoon.”
“Oh, is he a Real? I didn’t realize. I mean, I didn’t remember implementing him, but I can’t keep them all straight now. He’s very convincing.”
She leaned against him, slipping her arm under his, beneath his cloak so no one would notice.
“Nice to see you, Mister Wizard,” she said.
“You can’t call me ‘Mister,’” Glenn said. “Malicarn characters don’t use that word.”
“I’m not a character.”
“When you’re on set, you’re a character.”
“You sound like Jules,” Lilly said. “Anyway, I did miss you.”
“It’s been so busy.”
Lilly rolled her eyes. “Glad you missed me too.” She pointed over to the corner. “See Prion? I think he has a friend.”
Prion sat with his hands clasped together with a young extra Glenn did not recognize.
She wore a long plain dress, a peasant’s dress, her hair braided into a bun on her head.
She was Black, one of the first diversity extras the producers had pushed to include, but if she worked at the inn or somewhere else in the Old Village, Glenn did not know.
“Who is she?” Glenn asked.
“Her name is Evangeline,” Lilly said. “I implemented her last week. Prion’s been quite taken with her.”
“With an extra?” Glenn asked. “Why would he be interested in her?”
“Why not?”
“He’s supposed to be in love with Heloise, who has a much more interesting personality. I’m just not sure what he sees in an extra.”
Lilly removed her arm. “Evangeline’s not an idiot.”
“No, no, I mean, I’m sure you did a good job. But why her?”
“What does anybody see in anybody, Glenn?” she asked. But by the time Glenn noticed the pique in her voice and became dimly aware that Lilly was not talking about Prion anymore, she walked away. He turned to call out to her but decided not to attract attention, so he let her go.
2.
Whitman put “ANP Briefing” on everybody’s calendar right before lunch, so Lilly figured it was time to finally learn a little bit more about what this new auto-neurological protocol was and how it was going to mess with her job.
The scanning staff crammed into a long conference room on the lab floor. A few people were in chairs but most were standing around the table. Lilly leaned on the wall by the radiator. Whitman talked through a slide presentation one of her assistants had put together.
“What this means,” Whitman said, after discussing new mission priorities from the studio and R & D leadership, “is that implementations will proceed with a reduced QA procedure for all below-the-line characters. This is in order to ensure that we have adequate capacity for the new extraction procedures we plan to introduce next year.”
Lilly knew there would be time for questions at the end, but she shouted one out anyway. “What extraction procedures?” Several other scientists nodded when she asked. Clearly everyone had been wondering.
Whitman glared at Lilly but eventually answered.
“I was getting to that. As some of you know, Project Athena is one of the company’s tier-one objectives.
R & D have been working on it upstairs since the set went live.
It is a new procedure that will allow increase in fidelity and replicability across brain models.
I can’t get into the details yet, but suffice to say everyone in leadership is very excited and thinks it’s really going to enhance the work being done here. ”
Lilly, annoyed though she was by it, also admired the skill with which Whitman and the other senior scientists never directly mentioned that “the work” they were doing was making fantasy films.
Several other staffers had questions, some quite heated, about the safety implications of cutting back even further on quality control, and quite a few questions about what this meant for the neuroscanning program’s already tenuous legal status, but Whitman talked them down with more corporatespeak and assurances that none of this meant anything negative for anyone’s employment prospects, which was the real locus of concern anyway.
Lilly went back to her apartment for lunch.
Glenn had been at a production meeting upstairs and decided to stop by, eating a reheated burrito and slumped back on the chair opposite her.
He barely said hello before he started talking and chewing simultaneously.
This was the usual point—after he blew through whatever nonsense was initially on his mind—when Lilly would ask him what plans they had for storylines that week.
She knew the answer, of course: The training of the Council was continuing, delayed due to the slow progress of the characters to get into fighting shape and the equally slow progress of the special effects department in constructing the animatronic monsters the Council was supposed to fight.
The delay was costing the studio enormous amounts of money.
They had expected a finished film in theaters by now.
Spin-offs, series, and other forms of content in production were on hold until the film came out. Et cetera, et cetera.
Lilly could have asked about this, and Glenn might have talked about it, at length and in tremendously tedious detail.
But for whatever reason he had been avoiding discussions of the story recently and seemed genuinely anguished when Lilly brought it up.
So she didn’t ask, and Glenn kept on praising her for things she didn’t like or care about while she read her emails.
“You always have the best potato chips. Sour cream and onion, yum. And you got those good napkins that don’t fall apart so fast.”
Lilly’s inbox held unread requests about spreadsheets to fill and reports to review and benefits to enroll in.
After Lilly browsed through and marked them she flipped to the internal company chat page, the aptly-named-by-HR portal The Informer, because people liked to post important messages there instead of sending emails, and if you didn’t check it regularly you would miss out on mandatory trainings and documentation and invitations to birthday parties.
There were messages about a new CFO and other staffing changes, updated guidelines on archiving and disposal of confidential documentation, and a brand-new alert that finally forced Lilly to ask Glenn about his job.
“The Council is going out on its mission next week? Why didn’t you mention that?”
“Oh, well, you know. It’s been a lot.”
“Is this what’s been bothering you?”
Glenn’s smile faded. “What? No? Yes, I mean—” He shrugged.
“You usually tell me everything,” Lilly said.
She tried to sound sincere, even though this was a lie.
Glenn told her everything about work but very little about anything else.
But she wanted to be sympathetic. How did a supportive girlfriend sound?
What did her mother sound like when she comforted her father?
Lilly remembered that her mother never had.
“Yeah, it’s just some minor stuff. No big deal.” He stood up and went rummaging through the refrigerator, even though he had said he wasn’t hungry.
Lilly didn’t really care to press on. She was still thinking about Whitman’s presentation, about the endless drudgery she was expected to immerse herself in and then spit back out and be happy about.
Everything The Company Does Is Good. That should be their motto.
What was an extraction procedure, anyway?
All right, she would try. “You have to tell me what’s been bothering you,” she said. “I can’t stand having anyone else talk around me in euphemism and metaphor today.”
Glenn nodded. “Sure, okay. I mean, it might be nothing. But it’s been nagging me, and he’s come to me about it a few times now.
Kip, the Council hero. He doesn’t think he’s a warrior.
Like, he’s convinced of it. He doesn’t want to fight or be part of the Council or do any of the things he’s doing.
I don’t know what he wants, but he keeps coming up to me and begging me to let him leave.
I’ve tried to talk him down best I can, but he thinks I’m a wizard with some real authority.
I don’t know, it’s just weird. It’s like he’s not implemented right. ”
“Well, he’s not wrong, is he?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s not a warrior. He’s an actor. A comedian, right?”
“Yeah, Gerry Alderbiest. He’s played Kip for years, used to be on SNL. But he doesn’t remember that. He doesn’t know he’s a comedian, he just knows he’s not a warrior.”