Winning Mars | Page 8

when you were what? A kid? Playing with dinosaurs? Jere wondered.
Evan saw his disbelief. "It'll earn out. The sponsors will line up."
"Why?"
"Your logo. On Mars. Maybe a featurette on how you helped build one of the transpos, or fund the food and bev, or just just how you're a visionary, opening the new frontier. This is the biggest thing that's ever happened to entertainment. In the history of entertainment. Come on!"
"Sponsors don't like one-shots."
"So tell them this is the first of many. Tell them we're going to mine the asteroids. Tell them we're going to storm the Chinese on the moon!"
"That's not funny."
"You know what I mean. The spin. You got it. I've seen you on the screen. You're the one who could make this work."
It was crazy. It was stupid. And it was, more than likely, impossible. But it was an idea. It was a big idea. And it just might be enough to get the attention of people jaded by the 'Actives. It might be enough to spike Neteno's growth, once again.
Wouldn't that be a surprise, to the risk management assholes?
"Reality shows are dead," Jere said.
"It's been over a decade since the last one. It's coal. Time to mine it."
Which was probably true, Jere thought. The way things retroed round and round, it was probably comfortably new again. And there were probably millions of people like himself who had caught a glimpse of the last reality shows and remembered them in a fond way. The data seemed to say so. And his intuition agreed.
You've taken big chances, he thought. Which is why Neteno was a rising star amongst dying embers. It's time to take one more.
"Do you think we could get some money from NASA?" Jere said, finally.
"You're in?"
"How long's the flight?"
"To Mars? Six months there, six months back. As best we can figure." Evan's eyes darted with manic glee. "We're going to do it?"
"We could run it like a year of programming. A year exclusive. We can definitely get food and bev sponsors. Start it around Christmas next year, wrap it up next Christmas."
"Start in June," Evan said. "Remember, six months out. The big show will be on Mars. You want it to run for Nielsen in December, when everybody is snug and warm at home."
"Got it," Jere said. "So, what are they supposed to do? The actors?"
"Contestants," Evan said. "So, we're doing it?"
Jere nodded.
Evan did a little jump and victory dance. "Yeah!"
Jere cleared his calendar with a few quick touches and stood up. "Let's go to lunch. You can give me details. Like just how we're supposed to pull this off on the cheap."
Evan grinned. "It's Russian tech. The new stuff. You know, the stuff they do the $250k packages to orbit for a week."
Jere paused at the door. "Now, I'm sure people are gonna die."
As they left, Jere thought, A whole year. An exclusive for a year. Some of the brands of the first and second great internet booms were made on less than that.
A new foundation, to build Neteno even higher.

Getaway
Patrice Klein thought the thing with Jere was over. Thought it, but didn't feel it. That little tickle in the back of her mind, that little facial overlay when she was out to dinner with a boring date, or even in bed with another man. That niggling doubt, Is he the one?
Not that, as a modern woman, she thought The One was anything more than some subtle and inexplicable shifting of brain chemistry, or that The One was The One forever, or even for longer than a few years. But Jere was that shift of brain chemistry. He was the one who ran away, when everyone else flocked.
Of course, that didn't mean he shouldn't be made to jump through a few hoops. He wanted dinner, which meant dinner and breakfast, interrupted by whatever calls were too important to be routed around his eyepod, or eyeblaster, or whatever it was they called them those days. Patrice stuck to earbuds and a palmtop with a little laser-projector, a neat little cultured-wood thing with real synthetic diamonds crusting the edges, and neat gold trim, like an elegant old cigarette-case from a movie.
So, no dinner. She made him take her out for a weekend on one of those new Yamaha speedboats, to the little chain of private floating islands that had grown up beyond Catalina. More beautiful than Catalina, and gyro-stabilized, you could imagine yourself stranded on a perfect desert island. Disney'd done the hills and mountains and impassible bits of forest well, so you could never get to a point on the island that you could see any other. Some people called them, disparagingly, Gilligans, but she thought that was dumb. She'd watched the show, and you couldn't see the ocean at all. Like they did it