Netcast: Zero

by Ryk Brown

  “It’s a corporate world, Barry,” Arielle said. “You’re going to be doing propaganda pieces.”

  “I’m a videographer, Ari. All I care about is the shot, not the story.”

  “And the money,” Arielle added.

  “Yeah, it is good.” Barry laughed. “Damn good, in fact.”

  “Then you won’t mind giving up your cut of today’s assignment, will you. After all, you are bailing on your contract.”

  “Keep it,” Barry insisted, a big grin on his face. “They paid me a fat signing bonus.”

  “What about the gear?” Arielle asked.

  “Most of it was leased. I returned it to the leasing agent an hour ago. That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “Right.” Arielle looked at Hanna, noticing the surprised look on her face. “Local company,” she explained, “they don’t allow their gear out of state, at least not without paying extra.”

  “Don’t forget, the data cores were mine, so don’t forget to add them to your next lease.”

  “When are you leaving?” Hanna asked.

  “Taking the shuttle to Terra station in about an hour.”

  “I don’t suppose I could convince you to leave from Boston, after the next assignment,” Arielle asked. “At least then we’d have more time to shop around, instead of hiring the first operator that walks in the door.”

  “Sorry, immediate departure was part of the deal.” Barry glanced upward and to his left as he checked the time on his personal visual space. “Listen, ladies, it’s been great working with you, and I really appreciate you taking on a newb and all, but this is pretty much my dream job, you know.”

  “We understand,” Arielle replied in a professional tone. She extended her hand across the table. “Good luck, Barry.”

  Barry smiled as he shook Arielle’s hand. “Thanks.” He turned to Hanna, looking her in the eyes. He leaned in and kissed her cheek, then whispered in her ear. “I’ll never forget that night in Chicago, Hanna.”

  Hanna nodded. “Right. Good luck.” She continued to stare straight ahead at Arielle as Barry rose from the booth, grabbed his bags, and left.

  “So,” Arielle said, “I guess sleeping with him didn’t work as well as you’d hoped.”

  “It was only that one time, and I was drunk,” Hanna defended.

  * * *

  Hanna and Arielle followed the pulsing lights in the decks of the train station. The streaming lights led them to the line for their train car, where the crowd of people became more condensed as they gathered to board the old mag-lev train network that connected most of the major cities in the Americas. Although it was once the fastest and most luxurious way to travel across the continents, it was now simply the cheapest, and thus, it was also the most crowded.

  Hanna hated the mag-lev network. It might be fast, but it stopped at every city along the way, prolonging their transit time.

  “You know, we could have used Barry’s cut to pay for tube tickets to Boston,” Hanna said as they stepped onto the train. “It would’ve gotten us there in less than half the time, which means that we would’ve had more time to find a new videographer.”

  “And would have cost us three times as much,” Arielle replied.

  “His cut would’ve covered it.”

  “But it wouldn’t have covered the money we would have lost on these tickets. Mag-lev tickets aren’t refundable.”

  Hanna didn’t reply. She simply picked up her bag and placed it into the overhead bin above their seats. “You want the window this time?”

  “You can have it,” Arielle replied as she added her bag to the overhead and pressed the button to close the compartment.

  Hanna took her seat next to the window. Their train was on the uppermost tier of the massive San Diego train terminal. There was no platform on her side, and she could see all the way to the ground far below. From this height, the millions of panels that made up the walkways and roads disappeared, becoming only continuous strips of varying shades of grays, greens, and browns, depending on their function. The tiny lights built into the panels worked in unison to convey messages and define spaces and traffic patterns to all those using their surfaces. She wished they had been departing at night, for the patterns were almost magical after sunset. She remembered watching them late into sleepless nights from her bedroom window in her family’s upper-level residence as a child. She still watched them now, on the rare occasions when she had time to visit her parents.

  Arielle took her seat next to Hanna, activating the privacy field that isolated them from the rest of the occupants in the train car. The noise of the other passengers faded away almost instantly, as the invisible barrier between them blocked all sound from them. “You want the visual block on?”

  “No thanks,” Hanna replied. “I kind of like to see what’s going on around me, even if we can’t hear them.”

  At least it will be quiet, Hanna thought. Even the old mag-lev cars had sound isolation fields around every pair of seats. It made for a much nicer journey, to say the least. On a few assignments, they had been forced to ride the free public transit systems. What you didn’t pay in money, you paid for with your sanity, as the lower classes always seemed to generate incredible amounts of noise, leaving her exhausted after only a four hour journey over a relatively short distance.

  After a few minutes, the train pulled away from the station. It moved at a leisurely pace until it was completely clear of the station, after which a tone sounded and the status indicator in the console above them changed to ‘Caution: Accelerating’. Hanna felt herself sinking deeper into the back of her seat as the mag-lev train accelerated sharply, and she allowed her head to fall back against the headrest. She angled her head slightly toward the window to her left watching the landscape slide past her window at a rapidly increasing rate. It was always a bit frightening to watch the nearby buildings flash past them in a blur, so she tried as much as possible to look past them and focus on the landscape in the distance.

  Minutes later, the cityscape thinned out and eventually gave way to the less densely populated hills and coast line between the San Diego and Los Angeles basins. It was a beautiful view, with the Pacific Ocean glimmering in the distance, but it still bothered Hanna that, at the moment, they were not exactly headed in the right direction.

  “It’s only one interview,” Ariel said. “Thirty minutes, in and out. I promise.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Hanna replied.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  “Did you get a chance to see Sahmeed?”

  “He spent the night last night,” Arielle replied. “He left early for a meeting.”

  “How’s his new job going?”

  “Well,” Arielle replied. “He expects to make partner within two years.”

  “Good for him,” Hanna congratulated. “Good for both of you.”

  “Don’t start with me, Hanna,” Arielle warned.

  “I’m not starting anything,” Hanna defended, glancing at her friend. “I’m just saying that I’m happy for you. Both of you.” Hanna looked back out the window. “It must be nice to know that you have a good backup plan.”

  “No more stunts,” Arielle warned sternly. “You promised.”

  “I don’t pull stunts,” Hanna objected. “I explore alternate explanations.”

  “Please.”

  “Someone is going to do it, Ari. Why not us?”

  “Because we had an agreement, Hanna,” Arielle reminded her, “and because it’s not worth it for me to sell out my integrity for high numbers.”

  “Easy for you to say. Your fiancé is on his way to being a full partner.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for wanting to settle down and start a family, Hanna. You’ve known I wanted to do so since we met. You might wa
nt to consider it as well. We’re both coming up on our procreation windows, you know.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “You should have accepted that job offer from PCE last year.”

  “Pacific Coast is small time, Ari, and you know it,” Hanna objected.

  “Maybe, but it would’ve been a comfortable living, and you wouldn’t be riding Mag-Lev’s across the country.”

  “No, just up and down the coast,” Hanna mumbled.

  “Do you really want to stand on the sidelines and point at pop-culture icons for the drooling masses for the rest of your life?”

  “And ride in company shuttles? Have high-profile assignments that billions of people stream into their personal visual space each day, instead of interviewing unknown computer geeks and epidemiologists? Uh… Yes?”

  “Well, in ten months, you can,” Arielle retorted. “Until then, we stick to the plan.”

  “But why?” Hanna pleaded. “If we started taking the pop-news stuff now, we could land a good gig within a few months, and you know it.”

  “But I don’t want to work pop-news…”

  “Then don’t,” Hanna interrupted. “We get the gig, you quit a few months later, and they assign me a new producer. You’d rather be with Sahmeed sooner rather than later, wouldn’t you?”

  “Just because I’m turning thirty in ten months doesn’t mean I want to quit and start popping out babies the moment they hand me my first permit, Hanna. I want to keep doing this as much as you do. I just want to do it for a respectable news agency, and operate from a regular base so that I can go home and sleep in my own bed at least a few nights a week. When the time comes to have kids, I can always take maternity leave.”

  “The difference is that you have an out if we don’t get signed,” Hanna reminded her. She looked out the window again and sighed. “Maybe I should have applied to go to Stennis like Barry. It might have been exciting.”

  “I was raised off-Earth, Hanna,” Arielle reminded her. “It’s not as great as some people think. A lot more rules and restrictions on most of the core worlds. Besides, I’m not going to let you sell out now. You made me promise not to ten years ago. If we still haven’t landed our dream job by the time we turn thirty, I promise I’ll help you land whatever job you want.”

  “Even if it’s pointing out pop-culture icons for the drooling masses?” Hanna wondered, a wry smile on her face.

  “Don’t push it.”

  * * *

  “Tell us a bit about yourself,” Arielle told the young man sitting across the table from them, “something not in your resume.”

  The young man’s eyes began to dart about, looking first at Hanna, then the walls and ceiling, the window to the side, and then back to Arielle. “Uh, I was born and raised in Worcester. Umm, my parents were both doctors.”

  Hanna felt bad for the kid. He was obviously fumbling, and had little to no experience at being interviewed for a position.

  “I started making vids when I was a kid,” he said urgently, finally feeling like he latched onto something relevant. “Ten, I think. My parents bought me a video kit. Hover cams, docking station, controller… even a full editing suite. My friend, Russell, he and I used come up with these kid adventure stories, and we’d turn them into videos using our friends as actors, then post them on the kid-nets. That’s where I got the bug. My father blames my mother for me not becoming a doctor like them. The vid-kit was her idea.”

  While the applicant continued rambling about his childhood, Hanna used her neuro-digital implant to search the kid-net using the young man’s name. In seconds, she was scrolling through a few dozen videos, sending ten second clips into all four corners of her personal visual space. One of them caught her attention, and she focused her mind on it, causing it to move from the corner of her visual space to the center and enlarge. The cameras were hovering about, and were often casting shadows that a professional videographer would have kept out of the image. Of course, the video was six years old, so the applicant must have been about thirteen years old when it was made. There was another kid, perhaps his friend, Russell, dressed in a military helmet and combat vest. They weren’t real and neither was the weapon he was carrying. They were obviously toys meant for a much younger child than the pre-teen that was wearing them.

  Hanna tagged the video and forwarded it to Arielle. A few seconds later she replied, her message again flashing across Hanna’s visual space.

  From; Arielle: Cute, but I’m thinking no at this point.

  Reply: Agreed. Or ‘We’ll get back to you’, at least.

  “Well, I think we’ve taken enough of your time, Mister Nielan,” Arielle said.

  “Please, call me Alex.”

  “However, we still have a lot of interviews to complete before we make our decision. We’ll let you know by the end of the day.”

  “Of course, of course,” Alex replied. “Thank you for the interview.”

  “Thank you for applying,” Arielle replied. “Good day.”

  Hanna smiled and nodded at Alex as both his image, and the image of the small office in which they sat faded away, and she found herself back in her seat next to Arielle on the mag-lev train. “How many more do we have scheduled?” she asked her friend.

  “Just one,” Arielle replied. “Graham Barnett.”

  “Just one? There were only four applicants?”

  “Like I said, there’s a lot happening right now on the east coast. I’m guessing either everyone is booked, or they just don’t want to hook up with a team as old as us.”

  Hanna frowned. “Well, at least we’ve only got one more interview. These VM sessions are tiring.”

  “I told you to set the opacity level to full, so you don’t have any bleed-through of the real world into the virtual space.”

  “I can’t,” Hanna replied. “I get nervous not being able to see what’s going on around me when I’m in a public place. I don’t know how those people that practically live in V-space can do it.”

  “Like all things, it takes practice,” Arielle said. “To be honest, I’ve never understood the attraction of V-space. I mean, it has its uses, sure, but it’s just not the same as really being there.”

  “Come on, Ari. Don’t try and tell me that you don’t occasionally slip into V-space when you’re lying in a dingy hotel room. Put yourself back home in your own bed.”

  “Oh, I use it to spend time with Sahmeed almost daily,” Arielle admitted. “But it’s still not as good as being there.”

  “Graham Barnett,” Hanna mumbled, drifting off topic as she often did. “The name sounds familiar for some reason.”

  “I’m not surprised. He’s been in the business for twenty-five years now. Most of it was for the major networks, like NCN World, and Global News Exchange. He even spent some time out in the fringe for NCN Galactic.”

  “Then why the hell is he looking to work with us?” Hanna wondered.

  “I was wondering that myself,” Arielle agreed. “From his resume, it looks like he hasn’t worked much in the last year.” Arielle looked at Hanna. “He’s ready to start when we are,” she said as she looked at her time display in the upper left corner of her own visual space. “We can probably finish up this last interview before we arrive, if you’re up for it?”

  “I’m good,” Hanna insisted.

  “You want to take a minute to look over his resume, maybe check out some of his clips?”

  “I’ll do it during the interview,” Hanna replied. “You’re the one doing all the talking anyway.”

  “Very well,” Arielle said. “I’ll initiate the next VM then.”

  “Let’s get it over with,” Hanna groaned as she settled her head back against the headrest to prepare herself. She closed her eyes and remained motionless, in order to appear to be restin
g to the other passengers on the mag-lev train. It was better not to advertise to those around you that you were off in V-space, and would be an easy mark for thieves and assailants, although both were relatively uncommon on mag-lev transport networks.

  Again, the view of the virtual interview office appeared in her mind as real as if she were sitting in the room itself. The experience was far better than it had been when she was old enough to receive her first implant. V-space, once a venue for gamers and training simulations, had matured into very realistic virtual experience. The higher levels even included the senses of touch, smell, and taste, assuming of course that you had the funds to pay for the experience, which they did not. However, as the final applicant’s presence joined the virtual meeting space in the seat across the table from them, Hanna couldn’t help but wonder if the lack of a sense of smell in this particular V-space wasn’t an advantage this time around.

  Graham Barnett wasn’t the most unattractive man Hanna had ever seen, but he might have been in the top ten. His resume indicated he was in his mid forties, but she would have guessed a decade older by his appearance. Like most seasoned field videographers, his sense of fashion seemed to revolve around comfort and lots of pockets. In fact, he looked as if he might pick his control box up at any moment and dispatch a dozen orbs to start recording.

  Hanna took curious notice of his hair, most of which sported various shades of gray, and stuck out in so many different directions that she couldn’t determine if it was styled that way or if he had just awakened and he hadn’t bother to run a comb through it.

  “Good day, Mister Barnett,” Arielle greeted. “Thank you for meeting with us today.”

  Graham Barnett said nothing, only nodding his head respectfully to acknowledge her greeting.

  Message; Arielle: A man of few words. Hanna tried not to smile as her mind sent the message. There was no response. Message; Arielle: Of few combs as well. This time, she smiled slightly, although she kept her eyes on the applicant.