Honey Brighton

The face of simsense in this city, and the only person in it whose nervous system is a commercial product.

The lead. Free Fall made her four years ago and she has been the face on the billboards ever since: The Experience Of A Lifetime, Be There As It Happens, Feel The Surge, all of it her. The sequence everybody remembers is the fall, four thousand meters, the ripcord pulled and nothing happening, and the spike the audience feels when it does not. People believe that spike is hers. It is, and it also cost three million nuyen of signal processor to deliver.

She works for Amalgamated Studios, on the Melrose lot, under its Halftone Pictures label, and she is on a picture right now that has most of a post-production floor and sixty million of somebody's money three-quarters spent.

She is rumored to be leaving for Brilliant Genesis, and the rumor is old enough to be furniture. Nobody has confirmed it and everybody repeats it.

The other version of her, which almost nobody sees: two in the morning on a post-production floor, cutting her own performance with her hand on the glass.

What the crew knows#

• A raw records the performer, not the scene. What Amalgamated holds is not footage of her work; it is her nervous system at full bandwidth, hours of it, one cartridge per shooting day, and every one of those is proof of what she recorded and when. That is ordinary leverage a studio has over anybody under contract. See Simsense.
• She is taking her producer with her, per the same rumor. A star who moves alone gets handed whoever the new place assigns.
• The crew have an understanding with her producer, and she is not part of it. See Witt Lipton.
• Two of them have met her, for four minutes on a bare floor plate above Figueroa, with her bags at her feet and her producer beside her. She was warm, she answered for him, and she told them nothing.

Contact#

Canon reference: Free Fall, in Into the Shadows, p. 138