by Ben Elton
Nathan was quite interested, but only quite. He didn’t want a game, he wanted a job. He guessed that, despite Plastic’s rough treatment of his synopsis, he must still be in some kind of contention or he would not still be in the great man’s company. All he could do was sit and wait. Eventually Plastic returned to the point.
Marketing lesson.
‘Your treatment is good,’ said Plastic. ‘The rat is going to eat the kid, that moves me. It’s a little down, a little sombre, maybe, but it’s good.’
Obviously, Nathan, not being privy to Plastic’s sense of humour, was a little surprised, considering what had been said in the office, but he was happy to take his luck where he found it.
‘But, with respect, I would contend that it has to be down,’ he said, launching into his pitch. ‘You market a product which will protect people from the death of the Earth, surely the best way to do that is to push the total planetary screw-up we’re m. Environmental degradation is the best sales tool you’ve got. You can’t talk it up enough.’
Plastic smiled at Nathan’s naive enthusiasm.
‘Oh, like, and that never occurred to us, right?’ he said, returning to his favourite tone of aggressive sarcasm.
‘Well, I just thought —’
‘Like, there’s all us dummies sitting around here in Hollywood without an idea in our heads, just waiting for some genius Englishman to come and reveal the dazzlingly obvious to us. Thank you, Mr Einstein, thank you for striking the scales from my eyes. I feel so stupid my dick has shrunk.’
Nathan was at a loss.
‘The reason that we have avoided the scare advert for nearly thirty years, you feeble-minded jerk,’ Plastic shouted, ‘is because we market a product that shames us all, that’s why! Jurgen Thor and the Natura guys are right. It’s absolutely disgusting that people are investing in post-Armageddon life insurance. Jesus! We should all be putting every penny we have into saving what we’ve got.’
‘Well, yes, of course but —‘
‘But nothing! Shut up and listen. Claustrospheres are the thing everybody says they wish they didn’t have to have. It’s like private education! People would like to support the state system; on the other hand, they don’t want their kid getting shot for his eraser. Now if we’d been playing the doom card all these years we’d have looked like we were exploiting a terrible situation. Like we were happy the Earth is screwed — which of course we are — but if we say that, we look tacky, right? We’ve had to be positive and up-beat! We’ve had to say “Because we hope you’ll never need it”. If we had said “your kids will die unless you buy our product”, people would have smelt -a rat, and the rat would have been them. Nobody likes getting the mote in their eye shoved in their face.’
‘So you don’t like my treatment, then?’
‘I just said I liked it!’
‘But then you said —‘
‘Listen, Nathan, just let me do the talking here, OK? You shut up and maybe we’ll get somewhere. The situation has changed. Just about everybody in the developed world has a Claustrosphere. You have one, right?’
‘Well, actually it’s part of a property dispute with my ex-wi —‘
‘Like I should care? Nathan, please. We will be here all day. Everyone has a damn Claustrosphere, the market is drying up, right? We’ve been so damned successful we have consumed our consumers. Now this ain’t a new thing, right? Producers have faced the problem before, like everybody has a freezer, a car, a semi-automatic weapon. The point is that with other products you get round the problem with built-in obsolescence. You just make a damn freezer that falls apart after two years, it’s easy. Unfortunately, built-in obsolescence would rather defeat the object of a Claustrosphere. By definition, it’s got to last at least a couple of generations. So what’s the solution?’
Nathan decided not to risk attempting an answer. He knew that whatever he said Plastic would twist it so that he was wrong.
‘We gotta get people to upgrade, that’s what. People have to realise that their present units, Eden Ones, Twos and Threes, are crap. What are you and your wife fighting over?’
‘A Mark Three with a bottled rain forest.’
‘Exactly. Crap. A bolthole, nothing more. Sure, it’ll keep you alive but who wants to live like that? I’ll bet the video library doesn’t even have Virtual Reality.’
Nathan could only nod at this casual exposure of the woeful inadequacy of his arrangements.
‘The point is that all the time people have been sort of presuming that in the end they ain’t actually going to have to use the thing. You know, it’s been like insurance. Nice to have it there but you hope you’ll never have to claim it. What we need to do now is change the emphasis. We have to make people believe that they’re actually going to have to use their Claustrosphere which, let’s face it, they probably are. People have got to realise it’s a pretty good bet that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives inside a geodesic dome, existing off a Biosphere technology. We’ve got to have them asking, “Hey, do we fit new carpets in the house? Or do we stick a rain water simulator in the ‘Sphere?” They’ve got to say, “Well, hell, where are we likely to be five years from now?” That’s what we’ve got to do, Nathan, we’ve got to get people to upgrade their Claustrospheres before they change their cars. It is finally time to play the doom card — the one which you seem to be under the impression you’re the only person who’s thought of!’
Consumer Control.
‘So you’re going to make my ad, then?’
‘Yes, I’m going to make your stupid little dumb advert,’ Plastic replied irritably. ‘But that wasn’t why I asked you up here. You think I ask every pen-pushing little scribbler I commission into my private ‘Sphere to play tennis? Let me tell you, under normal circumstances I shit you kind of people. I actually shit little guys like you and then use another little guy like you to clean my ass. Understand?’
Nathan nodded.
‘I brought you here because I think you can write and I want to make a movie. A real movie, a centrepiece to the new campaign. I want a real old-fashioned advertainment and I want you to work on the words, OK?’
Nathan was stunned. A proper movie! So few were made these days. To be asked to be involved in one was to join an echelon so upper it gave Nathan vertigo.
Only a few years previously it had seemed as if nobody would ever make a real movie ever again. Not one with actors and a proper fixed plot, that people had to go to a cinema to see. A series of technical innovations seemed to have made the genre obsolete. The feeling was that technology was more interesting than art, and that if you didn’t need a million dollar helmet to watch a show then it wasn’t worth seeing.
Interactive entertainment became the miracle ingredient that was going to revitalise a depressed industry. The consumer was going to be put in control.
‘Like the consumer knows anything!’ Plastic and a few like-minded visionaries had complained at the time. ‘Remind me because I forget, did the consumer write Oliver Twist? Or Beethoven’s ‘Fifth’? No, I don’t think so. As I recall it was artists who did those things, people with special talents. And what did the consumer do? The consumer consumed it, didn’t he? Sucked it right up and went away with his life enriched.’
But for a while the revolution was unstoppable. It was presumed that since the technology existed by which an audience could be presented with an infinite number of possible solutions to a drama, then that must be what they would want. Likewise, since it was now possible for a viewer to don a helmet and a suit which would enable them to enter the action along with their favourite heroes, then it was presumed that the public would jump at the chance.
Plastic still felt bitterly about the way art had been hijacked by technology. He ranted at Nathan as if it had been Nathan who was responsible for the development of interactive entertainment.
‘The public always had the technology to get involved with the action if it wanted to. Right back to the Greeks. All they had to
do was get up on stage and join in. But they didn’t do it, did they? Weird, huh? Maybe, just maybe, they kind of guessed that it would completely screw up the show. The public could always choose their own endings when they read books. All they had to do was get a damn pen and write in that Scrooge never got nice and Moby Dick was a chipmunk. But they didn’t, and why? Because the public don’t pay for entertainment in order to have to provide it themselves. The whole damn nightmare was a conspiracy by scientists and computer brains to make everyone in the world as boring as them.’
But now the tide was turning. The public were returning to more traditional forms of entertainment; movies, in particular, and it seemed that Nathan was being commissioned to write one. What is more, Max Maximus, who was just driving up to the house with Rosalie fidgeting nervously at his side, was going to star in it.
Stormy meeting.
‘Here’s what I want,’ said Plastic. ‘I want a straight mega-buck advertainment to sell new generation Claustrospheres. It’s got to be the biggest hit of the year. I want everybody to go and see it and I want it to star Max Maximus, OK?’
The BioLock entry-screen leapt into life. An electronic voice announced that Max and a friend were outside. Max and Rosalie appeared on the screen.
‘Come on up, Max. We’re in the Claustrosphere,’ Plastic said. The screen went dark and he turned to Nathan. ‘Can you believe this guy, brings a chick to a meeting? I’ve got a good mind not to put him in the picture. Chicks always distract things. Am I right?’
Plastic was about to find out how right he was.
Max and Rosalie emerged through the BioLock.
‘Hi, Plastic. Great ‘Sphere, cool,’ said Max, like an over-eager schoolboy visiting a much respected master at his home. ‘Wow, you have a mini-mountain,’ he said, referring to a hundred-metre-high rock structure complete with snow on its upper reaches. ‘I’ve been thinking of putting one of those into mine, but I’d have to extend. I don’t have the height for a split-level climate.’
If Rosalie had been having trouble making her decision, that was behind her now. The sheer obscenity of what she was looking at confirmed her resolve. She did not consider herself Plastic’s judge and jury. That task lay with all the dead animals and sick dying people she had encountered in her years of struggle. The devastated areas where peasant populations skulked in the shade, nursing their tumours, waiting for night to fall so they could harvest their mutated crops. They had tried and convicted Plastic Tolstoy. It was merely Rosalie’s job to carry out the sentence. Of course, she knew it wasn’t all his fault, but there he was, inside a private paradise that he had built for himself in a doomed world, and Rosalie was in no mood to make excuses for him.
‘So, who’s your little pal?’ Plastic said, turning to Rosalie only to find himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
‘Plastic Tolstoy!’ Rosalie announced, her hand trembling on the trigger. ‘I am a Mother Earth activist. Dedicated to the principle that the ultimate human responsibility is to the planet which supports us. The idea that we can exist separate from the planet is treason. You are the principal perpetrator of this fiction and therefore, on behalf of the planet Earth and all the people, animals and plants that live on it, I am now going to execute you
Rosalie had never been so lucid in her life. Conviction lent her eloquence. Plastic Tolstoy was dead. She knew it, and he knew it. Rosalie’s finger tightened on the trigger.
It was pure ambition and naked careerism which saved Plastic.
For a moment, both Max and Nathan had simply watched in horror whilst Rosalie announced her sentence of execution. Then, separately and simultaneously, it dawned on them that this mad bitch was about to murder the biggest break either of them had ever had. For Nathan in particular it would be an unbearable fate… to be commissioned to write a screenplay by the top producer in the world, only to have that producer murdered, minutes later. People spent their whole lives looking for a break like this. Nathan couldn’t let it go now. The planet was all very well, but this was a movie, for God’s sake!
Max was in a similar position. He needed Tolstoy badly. Yes, he already had a huge career but, as his agent Geraldine never tired of pointing out, it was trend-based. He was the current big thing, a teen idol. He had to move on from that; he had to mature and become a genuine star. A Tolstoy project was his chance at real longevity.
For both Nathan and Max, saving Plastic Tolstoy was a career move, pure and simple. Hence, just as Rosalie’s finger began to tighten on the trigger, the two of them launched themselves at her, and as the gun fired, all three collapsed together on to the ground. As she fired, the gun flew out of Rosalie’s hand. The bullet went wild, missed Plastic, bounced off the geodesic wall and rebounded, killing a rare breed of domestic pig which was feeding on supa-grass concentrate by the pond. The noise of the shot rang round the dome, causing a cloud of airborne wildlife to rise in fear above the canopy of the rain forest and an androgynous self-breeding bullcow to emerge from its stable and tread on all the chickens.
Around the world in eight minutes.
Rosalie was up in a moment but Plastic, who had to defend himself before, already had the gun.
‘OK, stay where you are, young lady,’ he said as two armed servants appeared at the mouth of the BioLock.
But Rosalie had no intention of staying where she was. Instead, she dived into the dense vegetation of the rain forest. In a moment she had disappeared within its generous foliage. The two muscular servants plunged in after her, trampling down millions of dollars-worth of Tuf-Plant. Tuf-Plant was greenery genetically engineered to withstand pretty much anything, although not, as it happened, a couple of fifteen-stone armed thugs jumping all over it.
‘Watch out for the fucking rain forest!’ Plastic shouted, ‘And don’t kill her. Dead babes look bad!’
Rosalie plunged on through the jungle which covered about a third of an acre of the whole Claustrosphere. Plastic tried to run around it to cut her off on the other side, but was prevented from doing so by the babbling stream.
‘Nathan,’ Plastic yelled over his shoulder. ‘You’re a writer, make a note. I have to have a bridge built.’
Rosalie emerged from under the dark canopy of the rain forest and jumped into a small field containing various giant Hi-Yield cereal crops. Pushing through that, she leapt over a small mangrove swamp and started to skirt around the rocky outcrops at the bottom of the mountain.
‘Where is she?’ shouted Plastic, as the two servants thrashed their way out of the forest.
‘I think she headed for the hills,’ one of them replied.
Rosalie continued skirting the mountain, the foothills of which lay at the very edge of the Claustrosphere, right up against the walls of the geodesic dome. As she crouched behind a large rock she could hear her pursuers circumnavigating the foot of the mountain from both sides. Her only option was to head upwards. As she broke cover to scramble up the scree which lay all about on the lower slopes, one of the servants spotted her. He fired a couple of warning shots, hitting a small herd of geep.
‘Mind my geep! You asshole!’ Plastic shouted.
Geep were one of the most successful products of a genetic engineering revolution which had been going on in deadly secrecy for years. The original genetic project had been started by a group of very rich men who had been hoping to breed a camel that would fit through the eye of a needle. They spent years on it, until one day it occurred to them that it would be easier and cheaper to simply build an enormous needle. They got out of genetics immediately, selling their research to the Claustrosphere company.
Geep were a cross between a sheep and a goat. They were incredibly hardy, living for over a hundred years, and all the while provided wool, milk and, quite astonishingly, meat. So resilient were these creatures that you could cut glamb chops out of their hind quarters for supper and the animal would have healed up by the next morning. This Kwik-Heal flesh was developed out of DNA isolated from those insects that grow another
leg if you pull one off. Therefore Plastic Tolstoy need not have worried about his geep. The bullets scarcely made them flinch. They had been the result of such brutal grafting and cloning experiments, that being shot at was just like the old days in the lab to them.
Rosalie reached the snowline and looked back. Seventy-five metres below, in near tropical conditions, she could see one of her pursuers beginning to climb up after her, whilst Plastic and the other guard doubled back round the base of the mountain, clearly planning to cut off her descent. She had no choice but to press on. She breasted the summit and began to run back down the opposite slope, hoping to arrive at the bottom before Plastic came around through the foothills. It was a tough descent, with alpine conditions for the first twenty feet. Almost inevitably, she slipped on a glacier and fell into a mini-gully. Fortunately, nothing was broken, but she was pretty winded and it slowed her down. So much so that, by the time she had completed her descent, the first of her muscular pursuers was emerging round the mountain with Plastic Tolstoy puffing behind.
‘OK,’ said the pursuer, by way of a warning, ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘Whereas I do want to hurt you,’ replied Rosalie.
She had taken the precaution of picking up a fist-sized boulder on the lower slopes of the scree and she smashed this into the face of her assailant, causing him to offer no further opinions. Plastic arrived next, just in time for Rosalie to deal him a mighty kick in the balls before running for the BioLock.