Vigilance

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  His phone vibrates very softly in his pocket, and he freezes—McDean has taken great pains to make sure very, very few people know his contact information, and those who do have it know he doesn’t want to be contacted now, of all times.

  “Something wrong?” asks Hopper.

  “My . . . phone, sir,” says McDean.

  Both men practice the same level of security when it comes to personal electronics—you don’t touch them or tell anyone about them unless it’s critical. “Something about the show?” asks Kruse.

  “I don’t know. I’ll confirm, sir.”

  He takes out his phone, presses his fingertip into the pad, lets the camera read his face, and breathes into the screen. (They need new biometrics every year to make these things more secure.)

  When his phone unlocks, he’s treated to the sight of a nude, twenty-one-year-old girl, sitting cross-legged on a hotel bed with half a cantaloupe positioned very strategically in her lap—its long, narrow seed core facing out, of course—as she carefully eats a half-peeled banana. She smiles impishly and winks for the camera.

  McDean stares as the video loops over and over again. He blinks, feeling stunned, pleased, and a little outraged.

  Goddamn it, Tabitha.

  “John?” says Kruse. “Is everything all right?”

  McDean swallows and puts his phone away. “Just confirmation that we’re going with the mall,” he says. “That’s all, Mr. Kruse.”

  Hopper sits up, looking at something off-screen. “Oh, damn it, O’Donley’s gone off the rails again.”

  “What?” says Kruse. “Who?”

  “He’s hollering like his ass is on fire,” says Hopper. “McDean—when they gonna take that poor boy out back and shoot him?”

  “When his ads peak,” says McDean, relieved the subject has changed. Shawn O’Donley is ONT’s biggest live pundit. His shows tend to get very loud and incoherent, and his viewers love it.

  McDean shifts in his chair. He is painfully aware that he is now sporting a very decent erection. He is also aware that this very decent erection is surely very visible through his pants. And finally, he is also very, very, very aware that he is on a video call with his superiors, and that his superiors have the choice of viewing him from multiple angles.

  “I’m afraid we’ve got to finalize our environment now,” he says. “It looks like the mall’s approaching peak optimization. Gentlemen, if there’s nothing else . . .”

  “Naw,” says Hopper, sighing.

  “No,” says Kruse curtly.

  “Then if you’ll excuse me.” He stands up. “I’ve got a show to start.”

  He turns and walks back out to the pits.

  * * *

  McDean walks out of the conference room and strides through his crew. He has to walk somewhat stiffly, since the tip of his erect penis is now carefully stuffed just below the waist of his pants.

  “Numbers holding steady, chief,” says Darrow as he passes.

  “That’s great,” says McDean. He coughs. “Uh—so, any of those numbers change?”

  There’s a pause.

  “I . . . believe I just told you, boss, that they have not,” says Darrow.

  “Oh. Oh, right. And the peak traffic?”

  “Peak will pass within forty-five minutes,” says Darrow.

  “Then fuck it,” says McDean. “The mall’s a go. Get our security units ready for the lockdown.”

  “Can do,” says Darrow.

  “I’ve got to make a goddamn call,” says McDean.

  “Uh,” says Neal. “Okay, sir?”

  McDean walks away, to a back hallway far removed from the control pits, toward an undistinguished black door. The door reads him—it’s tuned for his biometrics—and it promptly unlocks. He slips inside, shuts it, and the lights flick on.

  Inside is McDean’s private bathroom—a very tasteful sink, stone sculpture, shower, and toilet.

  He sets down his tablet, pulls out his phone, and unlocks it. Again, he’s greeted by the sight of her gorgeous, perfectly symmetrical face, winking puckishly as she eats a banana.

  God, that wink. It’s got to be in the top ten of all-time winks, for sure.

  He shakes his head, takes a breath, and calls her.

  The phone rings once, twice. He finds he hopes she doesn’t answer.

  Then there’s a rustle, and her voice—high and gentle—chirrups, “Hellooooooo?”

  “You . . . You can’t do that,” he says, pacing in the bathroom.

  “Can’t do what? Say hello?”

  “No. Send me stuff during the show.”

  “I can’t send you stuff during the show?” she says coyly. “Or I can’t send you that stuff during the show?”

  “You can’t send me stuff,” he says, “and especially that stuff.”

  “I just wanted to give you something nice while you worked,” she says, her voice dripping with faux offense. “And it was nice—wasn’t it?”

  McDean stops pacing. Then he says quietly, “Yes. Where are you?”

  “I’m in my apartment, dumbass. Someone told me there’s going to be a Vigilance. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to go outside when a Vigilance is going on?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I fucking heard.”

  “Did you. Do you miss me?”

  He swallows. “Yes.”

  “It’s been, what, two weeks? God, it takes a long time to do your show.”

  “It’s all top secret. Nothing can get leaked out.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah . . . I was there during the intern training, you know. Hey—listen. A friend of mine from Princeton sent me this cool new app. Get this—it uses your phone’s projector to send you a live 3-D video. Not a static one. Live. The person on the other end can show or do whatever you want.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds, uh, real cool.”

  A pause.

  “I don’t think you’re getting what I’m saying,” she says. “The person on the other end can show or do whatever you want.”

  He thinks about it, confused. “Oh. Oh!”

  “Nowwww you get it. What if later, I show you all the things it can do?”

  “Later during the show?”

  “Like in a couple of hours or something, I guess.”

  “Tabitha . . .”

  “What?”

  “That’s a bad idea.”

  “Why?” she asks. Again, the faux outrage.

  “I can’t download shit to my company phone.”

  “You’ve done it before.”

  “Yeah, but not while I was in here, during a Vigilance. All kinds of sensitive shit is going on.”

  “Suit yourself. But I just want to let you know, I finally figured out this one stretch in yoga that I’ve been working on for forever, and I did want to show it to you. It’s this thing where I can put my whole neck against the floor, and flip my hips up and over . . .”

  He swallows. “Oh, God.”

  She laughs—a high, tinkly, champagne sound. “I take it that’s a yes?”

  “Ohhh . . . Fine,” he says. “Yes, goddamn it, that’s . . . that’s a yes.”

  “Good. Call you later?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Okay. You take care of yourself, okay, John?”

  “I will.”

  She laughs, and the phone goes dead.

  McDean stands there in his bathroom, staring at his darkened phone.

  What a fucking moron he is. What a fool he is—he, John McDean, Director of Entertainment and Marketing, Master of the Universe—to get so tied in knots over a girl. A girl.

  But he can’t help himself. He unlocks his phone again and watches the looped video of her on the bed, his eyes fixed on her face.

  Tabitha is McDean’s latest acquisition, bagged at the start of intern season when the colleges started rotating in new flesh. Intern season is a prized ONT tradition, because interns are the only females you ever really see on the production side: when you have software that can generate an
y image of any woman, employing actual female news anchors isn’t necessary.

  Tabitha, though . . . She wasn’t just some intern. That girl was a thoroughbred, belonging to that special breed of human being whose sheer attractiveness would give anyone pause. She was, as Perry put it, “the shiniest goddamn penny in the piggy bank”—and when she walked in, she seemed to just know that such interns were reserved for John McDean, Master of the Fucking Universe.

  It’s only been going on for a couple of months. Yet McDean’s desire for her has been insatiable: he wants to take her, to hold her, to feel every part of her, to consume her. His obsession almost borders on the vampiric.

  Of course, all the interns get booted out during the windup to Vigilance. Vigilance is way too confidential to allow a bunch of college girls wandering through the halls, including Tabitha.

  But he . . . does miss her. He thinks. Maybe that’s what this feeling is. Since he studies biological reaction to stimuli for a living, he is keenly aware of his raised heart rate, the horripilation of his skin, the prickling of sweat on his temples, and, last but not least, the continuing turgidity in his pants.

  He is not sure why he’s so magnetically drawn to her. Perhaps this is all just a hoary cliché, and he’s trying to recapture lost youth. Like most moderately wealthy Americans, McDean never really had one. Going to school in America in the ’20s started to feel like going to school in an airport, all checkpoints and X-rays and bullet-proof backpacks and armed guards. And it’s pretty fucking hard to get laid in an airport.

  He knows he had it good, though. The country had become an unforgiving place to be a child by then. His schools had guards. Others hadn’t.

  But he sometimes imagines—what would that have been like, to just . . . be? To be a kid and not think about the increasingly high odds of being murdered, or dying in some ecological catastrophe? To play, and grow, and learn, and love? Unblemished and whole.

  He likes to imagine he beholds such a phenomenon in Tabitha. A bright, springy, contented creature, unburdened by the world. To see her smile, to clutch her soft shoulders . . . God. He knows he won’t ever have a child of his own—only a fucking moron or someone preposterously wealthy would bring a kid into this dying, smoking world—but he still has a raw, teeming hunger to know youth, to see innocence, to hold his palms out to it like it’s a glimmering fire and witness it before it sputters out, probably forever.

  John McDean looks at her face for a minute longer. Then his tablet blinks on—an alert.

  He glances at it—peak traffic is approaching.

  “Fuck,” he says. He grabs his tablet and storms out of the bathroom.

  * * *

  The tenor of chatter in the pits has grown considerably now. It’s like delivering a baby—everyone knows it’s close.

  McDean looks at his tablet and runs his own models, integrating the environment and traffic-flow data with his own marketing algorithms, trying to time everything perfectly.

  He runs the analysis, reviews the numbers. He walks to the center of the pits and holds up his hand.

  The production room falls silent. They all watch him, like he’s returned from some foreign battle with grave news.

  He looks up. “Nine twenty-three,” he says loudly. “Our drop time is nine twenty-three. What is our fucking drop time, gentlemen?”

  “Nine twenty-three!” they shout back in unison.

  “Nine twenty-three. Perry!”

  “Yessir,” says Perry from the sitter pit.

  “Enviro crossover with our actives?”

  “Three candidates,” says Perry. “All with solid relation scores.”

  “Bonnan included?”

  Perry stuffs another wad of chaw in his mouth and shakes his head. “No records of him visiting the environment.”

  “Boot the weakest and throw Bonnan in. I’ve got a liking for that kid. In twenty minutes, have the shuttles converge on the environment and let the actives pick their gear.”

  “You got it, hoss,” says Perry.

  “Ives?” calls McDean.

  “Yes, sir,” says Ives, blinking sleepily.

  “Spin ’em up,” says McDean. “Get your brand influencers started on putting out the word. I want rumors that a Vigilance is about to drop at any moment with extra focus on the mid-Atlantic seaboard.”

  “Starting up the chorus,” says Ives.

  “Calibrate your bots for aggression,” says McDean. “I want fights. I want people bitching and clawing at people about when the next Vigilance starts, about who’d survive and who’d turn puss. I want people talking about nothing but Vigilance.”

  “I’ve made sure to stuff a lot of the main trends,” says Ives. “We’ll suck all the blood out of them ASAP, draw the convos away.”

  “Good,” says McDean. “Darrow, Neal—do we have an external array?”

  “Got about forty hacked security cameras on the outside of the mall,” says Darrow. “Good angles. I’ve woken the drones, they’ll be filtering throughout the mall shortly.”

  “Excellent.” They’d once had a whole pit just for drone pilots, but the AIs have gotten smart enough by now that they do almost everything for you. “Throw up the main feed on the big screen.”

  The room hears him, and a huge, gleaming, razor-thin black surface slowly drops from the far wall. There’s a click, and it turns into a giant, glowing video screen.

  On the screen is a big, beefy man in a tight suit with slicked-back, graying hair. He’s seated at a news desk, holding a cooked, glistening rib-eye steak in each hand, and he appears to be screaming at the top of his lungs. At the bottom of this is the chyron: TAKING OUR MEAT AWAY??

  “Shit,” says Perry. “The hell is O’Donley up to now?”

  “Give me some volume,” says McDean.

  The monitor hears him, and turns it up.

  “. . . going to say what we can eat, what we can do?” he bellows. “We are LOSING the fight, people! We are under SIEGE! Our way of life is being LOST to these discontented agitators! And I, for one, WILL. NOT. HAVE IT!” The man takes a giant bite out of one rib eye, then the other, his face glistening with hot grease.

  “Jesus Christ,” says Neal quietly.

  “This is what a real man looks like!” screams Shawn O’Donley. Still clutching the steaks, he points at his full mouth with both index fingers. “This is a tough boy you’re gonna have to get some dyno-mite—some TEE-IN-TEE—to dislodge from this chair! Ka-POW!” He throws the steaks at the camera, then stoops under his desk. He resurfaces with an armful of pristine leather footballs. “Bam! Bam! Bam!” he screams, hurling the footballs at someone just off-screen.

  McDean has to give the man some credit—the spirals are tight, and the passes are near perfect. But they would be. O’Donley was a tight end at Michigan, and he even played in the Senior Bowl, though he didn’t get drafted. McDean is fairly sure that O’Donley’s thick, square, Irish-ass head has taken so many blows that his brain must be riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, just a loose gob of pudding swirling around in his skull. None of this has impacted the view ratings on The O’Donley Effect, however: though the man’s behavior has steadily degraded to the point where every show has a lot of screaming, stomping around, and, more and more frequently, taking his shirt off, the audience—and especially McDean’s Ideal Person—absolutely loves him.

  They don’t know that after the show, O’Donley wanders the halls of ONT like a lost, confused child, struggling with door handles. They don’t know how he stares around, bewildered, his tiny eyes glistening with tears, the brittle, blinking gaze of a sentimental drunk.

  McDean gives him a year until he’s rotting in the ground. But ONT’s captured a lot of video of him, and he’s got a pretty standard shtick. It shouldn’t be too hard to generate new episodes. Besides, this is great for numbers.

  “We’ll be coasting off of O’Donley, right into Vigilance,” McDean says. “Perfect.” He looks at Andrews. “We’ve got our faces and pipes together?”


  “Compiling now,” says Andrews. “I’ll have our on-air talent generated shortly.”

  “And we’ve all got our on-air scripts filled, yes?” shouts McDean to the control room.

  “Yes,” they all say back.

  “You better,” says McDean. “I don’t want our anchor saying some dumbass word salad tonight.”

  He looks at his tablet, checks the numbers. It’s just been minutes, but Ives has already goosed all his social media resources—traffic on the feeds has quintupled.

  Everyone knows there’s a Vigilance coming. They’ve been waiting for it. Everyone needs to see a Vigilance.

  He watches the numbers build and build. The control room thrums with chatter as people race from pit to pit, comparing numbers, data, info. The main feed’s muted itself again. O’Donley is gripping an American flag in one hand, his fingers shiny with beef fat, and is pointing at a projected image of Lady Bird Johnson with the other and screaming.

  McDean keeps watching the metrics: the page views, the mentions, how many cumulative viewers they’re building, which advertisements are getting the most traffic on the disparate ONT platforms.

  “Security’s in place,” says Darrow.

  “And our actives are two minutes out,” drawls Perry.

  “Drones ready to filter in,” says Neal.

  McDean checks the time. Nine ten. Time to pull it.

  He looks at Andrews and nods. “Launch.”

  Andrew runs the script, and O’Donley fades out, and the show begins.

  “It’s happening!” cries a man from a booth. “It’s happening!”

  Delyna looks up from her meditations. She’d intentionally put her phone away—she hadn’t wanted to actually see it coming, to feel its approach—yet now it seems to be here.

  The man from the booth—the guy in the Oklahoma hat—charges over to the bar. “Change the channel!” he says excitedly. He points a finger at one of the screens, which are currently showing a basketball game. “Change the channel!”