Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

“Don’t you care?”

An inarticulate growl. Then a sigh. They were, after all, all camera, all the time. “Of course I care. But I want to win.”

Glenn shook his head. He bounced over to her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “Not now!” she said. Her normally full lips were compressed into a thin line, the soft arcs of her face pulled into something harder and more brutal. The face he used to love. The face he still loved.

She bounded away and he hurried to catch up. She’d made it clear that they were only back together for this one ultimate challenge, bigger than Everest, bigger than freeclimbing Half-Dome, bigger than marathoning the Utah desert, bigger than swimming the English Channel, bigger than their four-year marriage, bigger than anything he could give.

He caught up and tried to give her a smile. She looked ahead grimly. The terrain was getting more rugged. Ahead of them rose part of Ius Chasma, a two-thousand-foot near-vertical wall they would have to freeclimb to reach their transpo pod.

The low gravity was both a blessing and a curse. Glenn was still getting used to what he could do. The squeezesuit and header made him top-heavy, throwing off his balance, but his total weight here was still less than half of what he was used to.

“More human interest, Glenn,” the Can blatted at him from his private channel.

He shook his head. They’d been ordering them around since before they left Earth.

“Glenn, we need to see Alena.”

He plodded ahead.

“Glenn, we’re close to contract breach.”

He turned to focus on Alena. The squeezesuit clung to her curves, and the transparent header was designed to show as much of her pretty face as possible. Less attractive now, perhaps, with her hair hanging damp and her mouth set in a hard line.

“More,” they said.

Glenn tried running in front of her and feeding the view from one of his rear cameras, but it was too hard to concentrate on the terrain ahead and keep her in frame. Eventually he dropped back to focus on the exaggerated hourglass shape of her suit.

“Good,” they said. “Stay there for a while.”

“Okay,” he said. Idiots .

“Of course someone is going to die. Probably lots of some-ones.”

Jere Gutierrez nodded solemnly. So maybe the old fuck wasn’t just another crank with a stupid dream trying to suck his nuts.

“Death is a legal problem,” he said.

“For Neteno?”

Jere didn’t answer. He pressed a discreet button and the datanet whispered in his ear. His guest was Evan McMaster, producer of Endurance , one of the last reality shows.

So he was real. He was part of the Golden Age .

Jere never prescreened CVs because everyone claimed some kind of connection, whether it was the last great years of Reality, or the almost-mythical Hegemony of the 70s and 80s, when the world was run by television, when audiences sat rapt on their cheap cloth sofas and scarfed microwave dinners in front of the tube, long before the coming of the internet and the rise of Interactives, long before television had been cast into the “Linear, Free-Access” ghetto. Every diapered octogenarian who tottered into his office smelling of piss and death claimed to be part of that great time. They all claimed to know that one compelling idea that would trounce all and return Neteno to some crowning glory, like television of old.

So maybe taking this meeting was not just a complete padre-suckup. Maybe Dad was right, just this once.

“Neteno doesn’t do snuff,” Jere said.

“What about the new Afghanistan thing? Or the Philippines?”

“That was news.”

“What about the Twelve Days in May?”

Jere just looked at him. He waited for the old guy to drop his eyes. And kept waiting.

“Make your pitch,” Jere said. “And make it good.”

Evan stood up and paced in front of Jere’s obsidian desk, backlit by the dim light coming in from the tinted window that overlooked Los Angeles.

“First, let’s dispense with the death thing,” he said.

“Sponsors don’t like it.”

“Don’t lie. Sponsors love it. They just look properly horrified and give some insignificant percentage of their profits to the survivors and everyone’s happy. Your big problem is legal.”

“Tell me why we should take the chance.”

Evan went back to his pocket projector and remapped the far wall with demographics, charts, multicolored peaks spiking like some impossible landscape. Stuff he had seen before, but this was far out of proportion. And yet it still bore the stamp of 411, Inc. It was good data.

“Three reasons. First, the Chinese.”

“The Chinese stopped at the moon.”

“Yeah. They said they’d go to Mars, but they’re bogged down at the Moon.”

“Cost.”

“Yeah. Another is NASA. They’re dead. Gutted. After the Twelve Days in May, all the money is going to Homeland Security. Everything’s being folded into the new Oversight thing. And the polls show people being OK with the Kevorking of the Mars flights. But underneath it all is a pent-up need to see some great endeavor. It’s the Frontier Factor.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Henry Kase. New pundit. Blames the lack of a Frontier Factor for most of the world’s problems. Complete crap, maybe, but it maps well on the audience we’re looking at.”

“Go on.”

“Third, the Rabid Fan. That’s real. You know it.”

Jere nodded. Everyone dreamed of creating a new Star Trek, still in syndication after all these years, or a new Simpsons. A show that made people dress up, go to conventions, meet in real life, found languages, change dictionaries.

“They’ll think this is too game-show,” Jere said.

“Yeah. But they’ll watch. All the trekkies and scifi nuts and people who dream about getting out, getting away, people who hate their lives for whatever reason, they’ll all watch. Look at the numbers.”

Jere looked at the projection, peaky and perfect and tantalizing. If they could create something like that… he sat silent for a long time, imagining himself at the forefront of a movement.

“There are problems,” Jere said finally.

“Of course.”

“Death is still one. I can borrow a platoon of lawyers to armor-plate our ass, but the shitstorm that follows may still take us down. Especially if they all kick it. As in Neteno is a goner. Done. Stick a fork in it.”

Evan nodded. “I know.”

“You’re asking me to risk my network? While you sit there, almighty, living off interest from a previous life?”

“I’m prepared to throw in,” Evan said.

“How much?”

“Everything.”

“It’s never everything.”

Evan sighed. “I’ll sign a personal guarantee.”

Jere had the bottom line whispered back to him and whistled. “You need funding like a first-run ‘Active for a Free-Access ’Near.’ ”

“The sponsors will line up.”

“Why?”

“Their logo. On Mars. Maybe a featurette. Come on!”

“Sponsors don’t like one-shots.”

“So tell them this is a series. Tell them we’re going to storm the Chinese on the moon!”

It was crazy. It was stupid. And it was, more than likely, impossible. But it was an idea. It was a big idea. And it just might be enough.

“Reality shows are dead,” Jere said.

“It’s coal. Time to mine it.”

Jere nodded. The way things retroed round and round so fast, it was probably comfortably new again. And there were probably millions of people like himself who had caught a glimpse of the last reality shows and remembered them in a fond way.

You’ve taken big chances, he thought. Which is why Neteno is a rising star amongst dying losers.