Winning Mars | Page 2

just knew he had to walk. He felt wound up with nervous energy, like an overcharged battery, hot and ready to burst.
Because that was the big secret. The big secret. One of the writers must have talked. Or one of the sponsors. Or maybe even one of the actors. And if the secret was out... Jere stole a glance at the two double-breasted sharks, trying to look wide-eyed and innocent.
The dataspook tried again. "Mr. Gutierrez, it's plain as a 1M spike in a trendline. There are too many impossible correlations, too many sponsors that match investment and ad revenue records. We can even map some of your plots to television shows that were popular in the nineties and aughties. Seems some of your writers reused their tropes. The new Afghanistan thing was really the most blatant. I mean, every once in a while a commercial entity gets a unique and heartwarming story that hasn't hit the user-generated media pool, but that was going a little too far. And analysis of the shots of the rescue showed far too much product placement for General Motors and Wal-Mart. I assume you have them bid on the rescue contracts?"
Jere just looked at the dataspook. He was young, younger than Jere even, maybe early 20s. He had a wide-eyed sincere look that was completely convincing.
Perfect for telling me I'm dead, Jere thought. And he was. If the secret was that far out, he was done. His big epiphany had taken him on a 16-month ride. Now it was over.
He remembered that first great realization. Patrice, his girlfriend at the time, had actually listened to his dad when he said they should watch Casablanca. She'd accessed it one night, when Jere was too tired to do much other than complain through the black and white titles, and make fun of the cigarette-smoking. But when the movie was over, and Patrice was crying, and even Jere was feeling something that he hadn't felt from the morass of user-generated media and found media and interactives and even professional linears, he thought, Holy crap, if this eighty-year-old-film with guys in funny uniforms can affect me, maybe this is the story thing that dad always talked about, the thing he said we lost back when the age of television got eaten by the internet.
And then he thought, I can use this.
Jere made one stop before he cashed in the small trust fund his dad had given him for education and found an ailing linear network to buy. "I'm going to bring back television," he told his dad. "What you couldn't do, I'm going to."
"Great," dad said, lounging on some foamy thing in his pool.
But the night stars had never looked so bright. The day had never seemed so perfect. And when Neteno started its stunts, started serving up those impossible stories, those heart-wrenching exclusives, it exploded into Neteno the powerhouse, Neteno the savior of linears, Neteno the spirit of television risen.
But if the secret was out... Forget buying black. I'm already dead. I just haven't started smelling yet.
"I get it," Jere said. "You know my secrets, so you don't want to lend to me anymore."
Jerome broke into a smile that looked almost natural. "No. Not at all. We don't care about your secrets. We're just worried they'll get out in your audience."
Richard nodded. "We've run some scenarios, and none of them are pretty. If you continue working the stories to the extent you have, within 4 months there's a 2-sigma confidence that amateur inferrers will discover what you have been doing. After that, you have a few weeks before the evidence base grows so big people can't ignore it. Then, you're operating with maybe two to five percent of your current viewership base."
Jere shook his head. "I'm surprised it's that much."
"Televengelist syndrome," Jerome said. "You've been in the public eye a lot, and you're a charismatic man. You haven't been the network man, hiding behind the curtain. A certain subpopulation really likes you. They won't be swayed by facts."
But I can't run on 2% of my audience, Jere thought. And the sponsors wouldn't touch me, even if I could.
"What do we do?" he asked.
"Be more conservative with your scripting," Richard said. "If you handled everything like you did the Twelve Days in May, you'd have 20, 24 months before it collapsed."
"But we hardly did anything in Twelve Days!" Jere said. Mainly because dad had uncles and shit back in DC, and Jere knew he'd have his nuts on the chopping block if dad thought he was tweaking a major national terrorist disaster.
Richard cocked his head. "You have to tone it down."
Jerome nodded. "Work with 411. I believe they have a list of scriptwriters you shouldn't work with. Take their advice, and you could stretch this out."
"How long?"
A shrug. Dancing