“You’re our agent? Our PR agent? You get us gigs?” Donut asked, voice full of wonder.
“That’s right,” Zev said. “From now on, all interview and panel requests will filter through me. I have opened up a special chat channel so I can send you messages through your interface.” Zev looked about distastefully. “Also, they make me come down here and talk to you directly after interviews for a debriefing.”
“This is absolutely fabulous,” Donut said. “Can we provide advance riders? Like with makeup and green room requirements?”
“How about a more important question,” I asked. “Can we refuse interviews? Last time we didn’t have much of a choice.”
She nodded. “I will always ask you before whisking you away. But,” she leaned in, and her entire outfit creaked ominously, “Odette has already contracted with our office. She gets first right of refusal for each floor opening. You’re already locked into those interviews, and as long as you keep your numbers up, you will go on her show. That means I’ll try to schedule one additional interview for each floor down. You can refuse what show you go on, but I’m afraid you’ll be obligated to pick something. We might move to three interviews for the lower floors depending on how it’s going and whether or not the party keeps insisting on accelerating the game. And if you survive, of course. But whatever happens, I promise I will do my best to get you quality gigs.”
“What about now?” Donut asked. “Do you have something for us now?”
“Yes,” she said. “There are a few options, but for this first one, I went ahead and chose a program for you. It’s a little less serious than Odette’s show, but it will hit a demographic that you aren’t yet trending in. Plus it’s a round-table style discussion, and in this program all crawlers get a parting gift. Sometimes it’s a joke, but it’s usually something useful.”
“A gift?” Donut said. “Carl, we get a gift!”
“Wait, are we doing this now?” I asked.
“No,” Zev said. “I’ll ping you when it’s time. It’ll be at minus six plus one full.”
“Minus what?” I said. I felt a sudden, unexpected wave of rage at the fish woman. It came out of nowhere, and I didn’t know what set it off. She’s just a goddamned pawn like everyone else. It’s not her fault. Still, I couldn’t help it. She was a kua-tin. The enemy. The real enemy. And I couldn’t do anything about it. Take a deep breath. “We don’t understand your time reference.”
She sighed. “Six hours before the next recap episode. Not the one tonight, but the next one. So, in about forty hours. Since you’ll be doing your Odette interviews between floors, I figured it’d be best to schedule your second appearance right in the middle of the floor’s timer. It’ll keep interest up. Also, you should try to line up a major boss battle right as the floor closes like you did last time. That really worked in your favor.”
That rage, which I thought I had successfully held back, bubbled up and out. “Goddamnit. God fucking damnit,” I said. Mordecai raised his hands in alarm, rapidly shaking them, trying to get me to stop. I didn’t care. “We are, quite literally, fighting for our lives here. We are not willing participants, and I am getting sick of pretending we are. We are going on these fucking interviews not because we want to, but because we have to.” The fish looked up at me through her helmet, eyes wide. “Zev, ma’am, whatever the hell I’m supposed to call you so you don’t send a lightning bolt up my ass, I don’t want to get in trouble with you or Borant or the Syndicate or whoever else is running this bullshit. I am doing what you have asked. I am killing monsters, trying to level up, trying to survive. I will smile, and I will joke, and I will put a proper face on when I go on these shows. But, fuck. You have already taken everything from us. Do not ask us to give more than what we have. We are not going to fight or survive on your schedule.”
I sat there, my chest heaving, glaring down at the fish. The world seemed frozen. Mordecai looked terrified. Donut, who remained on my shoulder, butted her head against the side of my own. She purred, a deep, silent rumbling. Her reaction surprised me.
But not as much as Zev’s reaction.
“Look,” she said, after a moment. “I know. Okay? Nobody in this room is an idiot.” She pointed at Mordecai. “The moment I appeared, he was terrified of me. Once he saw I wasn’t wearing a party badge, he relaxed. When I’m done here, I go back down to the production headquarters, and I will have to face my boss who is a member of the party. If I do or say the wrong thing, my entire family will be wiped from the universe. You’re going to go out there and face mobs who know people like you are prowling the halls, trying to find and kill them. They, the sapient ones? They live in constant fear of you guys. We are all parts of the same, inexorable machine. All of us are afraid. Yes, your place in this really sucks. It’s not fair. You know it. I know it. The cat knows it. But believe it or not, I am on your side. The better you do, the longer you survive, the better I do. So when I tell you that you should do something, you best listen because I know what I’m talking about.”
Nobody moved or said anything for several seconds. We just stood there, looking at one another.
“This is just like that scene in season three of Gossip Girl when Chuck and Blair break up over the hotel,” Donut said.
I turned to regard the cat on my shoulder, and I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t funny. I’d never watched that damn show. Yet I laughed, and I had a hard time stopping.
“No it’s not,” Mordecai said a moment later. “How do you even get that from this?”
Zev turned her fish gaze to my cat, then Mordecai. “I can’t believe it. You two have watched Gossip Girl? Nobody on my team has watched anything, except that old show COPS and Judge Judy. We’ve been stuck here for 15 solars with nothing for entertainment but earth-based programs, and I’ve had nobody to talk to about them.”
“Oh, Honey,” Donut said, jumping down from my shoulder to sit next to the fish. “I have seen everything. Season five, the car accident?”
“No, stop, you’re going to make me cry,” Zev said, waving her fish arms. I thought, fish can cry? They started rapidly talking with one another about the show. Bea used to sit up and re-watch the series over and over again. She’d clutch onto Donut and sob every time.
“That was dangerous,” Mordecai whispered to me as Donut and Zev continued to talk. “She’s about as low-level as you can get and still be an Admin, but you need to control your temper. She has the power to end you. All kua-tin are dangerous, party members or not.”
“What the hell is the party?” I asked, also whispering. We both took a few steps back. He was right about my temper. I rarely lost it. But that didn’t matter right now. This was a rare opportunity, the ability to talk to Mordecai with nobody else listening.
“It’s a political party. They’re called the Bloom. Now everyone just calls it the Party. Ultra-nationalism. The closest thing you have in your history is maybe Axis Japan with a good splash of Nazi Germany thrown in, but even that’s not quite right,” he said. “When I signed my indentureship contract, the Bloom represented less than 15% of the votes. Now they control the whole kua-tin system government. They’ve run it into the ground. The whole system is bankrupt. They’ve recently started requiring all kua-tin to wear a badge indicating if they’re members or not.”