Mira Grant - Feed

“You didn’t just shake us because?” I mumbled. A splitting headache was rushing in to fill the void left by my disrupted REM cycle.

“Are you kidding? You two sleep armed. I like having four limbs and a head.” Seeming oblivious to the hostility in the room, Buffy activated the terminal on the wall, pulling down the foldable keyboard. “I’m guessing you guys haven’t seen the daily returns, huh?”

“We haven’t seen anything but the insides of our eyelids,” Shaun said. He wasn’t making any effort to hide his irritation, which was only increasing as Buffy ignored it. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon,” Buffy said. The hotel start-up screen came up and she began typing, shunting the connection to one of our own server relays. The logo of After the End Times filled the screen, replaced a moment later by the black-and-white grid of our secure staff pages. “I let you guys sleep for, like, six hours.”

I groaned and reached for the phone. “I am so calling room service for a gallon of Coke before she can do any more talking.”

“Get some coffee, too,” said Shaun. “A whole pot of coffee.”

“Tea for me,” said Buffy. The screen shifted again as she pulled up the numerical display that represents our feed from the Internet Ratings Board. It measures server traffic, unique hits, number of connected users, and a whole bunch of other numbers and factors, all of them combining to make one final, holy figure: our market share. It’s color-coded, appearing in green if it’s more than fifty, white for forty-nine to ten, yellow for nine to five, and red for four and above.

The number at the top of screen, gleaming a bright, triumphant red, was 2.3.

I dropped the phone.

Shaun recovered his composure first, maybe because he was more awake than I was. “Have we been hacked?”

“Nope.” Buffy shook her head, grinning so broadly that it seemed like the top of her head might fall off. “What you’re seeing is the honest to God, unaltered, uncensored Ratings Board designation for our site traffic over the past twelve hours. We’re running top two, as long as you discount porn, music download, and movie tie-in sites.”

Those three site types make up the majority of the traffic on the Internet—the rest of us are just sort of skimming off the top. Rising unsteadily, I crossed the room and touched the screen. The number didn’t change.

“Shaun…”

“Yeah?”

“You owe me twenty bucks.”

“Yeah.”

Turning to Buffy, I asked, “How?”

“If I attribute it to the graphic design, do I get a raise?”

“No,” said Shaun and I, in unison.

“Didn’t think so, but a girl has to try.” Buffy sat down on the edge of my bed, still beaming. “I got clean footage from half a dozen cameras all the way through both attacks. No voice reports, since someone went and volunteered to help with cleanup—”

“Not that going through decon without helping would have left me able to record,” I said dryly, retreating back toward the phone. Incredible ratings or not, I needed to kill this headache before it got fully established, and that meant I needed something caffeinated to wash down the painkillers. “You know that wipes me out.”

“Details,” said Buffy. “I spliced together three basic narrative tracks—one following the outbreak at the gate as closely as possible, one following the perimeter, and one that followed the two of you.”

I glanced in her direction as I waited for room service to pick up. “How much of our dialogue did you get?”

Buffy beamed. “All of it.”

“That explains some of the jump,” Shaun said dryly. “We always get a point spike when you say you hate me in a published report.”

“Only because it’s true,” I said, quashing the urge to groan. It was my own fault for leaving Buffy alone with the unedited footage. She had to put something up. A news blackout doesn’t heighten suspense; it just loses readers.

Shaun snorted. “Right. So you had three tracks, and…?”

“I tossed them up in their raw form, tapped some beta Newsies to throw down narrative tracks, got straight bio files on the confirmed casualties, and wrote a new poem about how fast everything can fall apart.” Buffy cast an anxious glance my way, smile slipping. “Did I do it right?”

Room service confirmed that the assorted drinks were en route, along with an order of dry wheat toast. I hung up the phone. “Which betas?”

“Um, Mahir for the gate, Alaric for the perimeter, and Becks for the attack on the two of you.”

“Ah.” I adjusted my sunglasses. “I’m going to want to review their reports.” It was a formality, and from the look on her face, Buffy knew it; she’d selected the same betas I would have chosen. Mahir is located in London, England, and he’s great for dry, factual reporting that neither pretties things up nor dumbs them down. If I have a second in command, it’s Mahir. Alaric can build suspense almost as well as an Irwin, fitting his narration and description into the natural blank spots in a recording. And Becks would have been a horror movie director if we weren’t all practically living in a horror movie these days. Her sense of timing is impeccable, and her cut shots are even better. Of the betas we’ve acquired, I count my Newsies as the best of the bunch. They’re good. They’re hoping to ride our success to alpha positions of their own, and that makes them ambitious. Ambition is worth more than practically anything else in this business, even talent.

“Of course you will,” Buffy said, clearly waiting for me to break down and say the words.

I smiled, faintly, and said them: “You did good.”

Buffy punched the air. “She shoots, she scores!”

“Just don’t get cocky,” I said. There was a knock at the door. This hotel must have the fastest room service in the Midwest. “Remember, one successful set of executive decisions does not prepare you to take my—”

I opened the door to reveal Steve and Carlos. They were impeccably dressed, matching black suits so crisply pressed that you’d never have guessed they’d been in the field incinerating the bodies of their fallen comrades less than eight hours previous. I stood there in my slept-in clothes, with my uncombed hair sticking up in all directions, and stared at them.

“Miss Mason,” said Steve. His tone was flat, even more formal than it was on our first encounter. Dipping a hand into his pocket, he produced the familiar shape of a handheld blood testing unit. “If you and your associates would care to come with us, a debriefing has been scheduled in the boardroom.”

“Couldn’t you have called first?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows. “We did.”

Shaun and I really had been sleeping like the unrisen dead. I pressed my lips into a thin line, and said, “My brother and I have only been awake for a few minutes. Can we have time to make ourselves presentable?”

Steve looked past me into the room, where Shaun—still clad only in his boxers—offered a sardonic wave. Steve looked back to me. I smiled. “Unless you’d prefer we came as we are?”

“You have ten minutes,” Steve said, and shut the door.

“Good morning, Georgia,” I muttered. “Right. Buffy, get out. We’ll see you in the boardroom. Shaun, put clothes on.” I raked a hand through my hair. “I’m going to wash up.” One good thing about going to bed straight from a cleanup operation: Even after six hours of sleeping and sweating into my clothes, they were still cleaner than they’d been when I bought them. After you’ve been sterilized seven times for live virus particles, dirt doesn’t stand much of a chance.

“Georgia—” Buffy began.

I pointed to the door. “Out.” Not waiting to see whether she obeyed me—largely because I was pretty certain she wasn’t going to—I grabbed my overnight bag off the floor by the foot of the bed and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind me.