Session 2: Above the Line

What happened#

Two of us. Lux Vale couldn't make it, so it was Hunter and Vinnie on a lot with several hundred people working on it.

The job came in through Fontaine from the man who gives you a line on a call sheet instead of a name, and it was one cartridge out of a studio archive on the Melrose lot: day 22, a raw, one shooting day. He paid too much for it, which we noticed at the time and did nothing about.

We skipped the recon day and went in on the Thursday, the exterior, when the main unit takes the picture vehicles and four drivers are called and nobody is counting faces. Hunter went through the front as a vehicle expert on that transport call and joined SAG-AFTRA to make it stick, which is the most legitimate thing any of us has ever done. Vinnie went in as temporary security, standing a shift alongside Tony on the vehicle gate, because Tony turns out to be the kind of man who can find you a badge if the conversation goes the right way. The extras came in through the Universal Brotherhood, because apparently that is who a production calls when it needs forty people who will stand where they are told.

The grab was two people doing two unrelated things. Hunter broke a rig, and then took the broken rig to Denise Okoye at the check-in window and asked to be shown through to the simsense rigs so he could fix it. She walked him back there, because that is her job and he had a reason. While she was doing that, Vinnie got past the astral ward on the racks and took day 22 out of its slot.

Then we swapped two entire trays of raws around, so the rack does not read as a theft. It reads as somebody misfiling a fortnight's work.

It reads as Denise misfiling a fortnight's work. She is the one who walked a stranger into the room, and she is the one whose window everything goes through. We left that where it fell.

Then we watched it, which was not the job. Deadstock at the arena has the gear, so we borrowed rigs off her and played the raw ourselves, hot. She zip-tied us into chairs first, which we thought was funny until it wasn't: thirty minutes of somebody else's nervous system at full bandwidth puts you on the floor, and both of us were fitting by the middle of it. She stood there with a first aid kit and two of the arena's security watching, and neither of them looked surprised.

We enjoyed it, and that is the part worth writing down. A raw master has had nothing mapped off it and no peak controls on it, which is the same thing a dreamchip is: studio simsense with the caps taken out. So what we were wearing was a BTL with a studio's name on the label, and cal-hots are legal here. Makeup was pleasant. Filming was better than pleasant. The garage floor was neither, and by then neither of us was in a position to take the rig off, which is how it goes. We went back to the handover with our hands shaking and told each other it was the stairs.

What is on it is thirty minutes of Honey Brighton in three parts: makeup, then filming, then a hot mic on a garage floor six years ago where W. Lipton talks about a man who died on one of their pictures and the report he signed to bury it.

So now we know. Brighton is blackmailing Lipton with it. And as of tonight, so is Vinnie.

The handover was on the thirty-fourth floor of Oceanwide Plaza, up through the podium market and the water queue at the bottom. He had climbed the stairs too. He took the cartridge, did not ask what we knew, and paid.

They were both up there: Brighton at the far end of the plate in a coat that costs more than the job, bags at her feet, and Lipton beside her putting his bag down twice and losing an argument about it. He is a dwarf, about thirty, and a head shorter than either of us, which is not what you picture when somebody says producer. She was pleasant, she used his first name, she answered for him and she told us nothing. He talked to us: asked whether that was the whole of it, and then whether we knew what we had just done. Six hours earlier we had been inside her worst afternoon and his three sentences, and neither of them knew that. When the cartridge changed hands the two of them went down the stairs.

The parrots up there are Awakened, which everybody seems to know and nobody seems to mind. One of them has been named Tony. Not after the guard.

Timeline#

• Thursday morning. No recon day. Hunter in on the exterior day's transport call as a vehicle expert; Vinnie badged in as temporary security next to Tony on the gate. Extras through the Brotherhood.
• Midday. A rig gets broken on purpose. Hunter takes it to Denise's window and asks to be walked through to the simsense rigs.
• While she walks him. Vinnie past the astral ward, day 22 out of the rack, two trays of raws shuffled behind him.
• After. The arena, Deadstock, two borrowed rigs, chairs and zip ties, and thirty minutes of somebody else's memory in three parts. Both of us seized through it.
• Evening. Twenty-four flights of Oceanwide, the kitchen and the water queue at the bottom, the handover on thirty-four. Brighton and Lipton waiting at the far end of the plate with their bags, four minutes of them, and then the stairs. Paid.

Quotes#

Nothing anybody said got written down this time.