by Tarah Benner
I dash off to the nearest bathroom to change. I’m ten minutes late, my hair is a wreck, and my stomach is eating itself. Feeling frantic, I pull my hair into a messy bun and sprint to the newsroom to catch the briefing.
By the time I get there, I’m twenty minutes late. The desktop with all of my story notes is dead, and I look as though I’ve been out drinking all night.
The newsroom is a modern-looking office with red walls, charcoal carpeting, and desks arranged in clusters. Everyone is already gathered in the conference room — a big glass box in the very center of the open floor plan.
I slink through the door wearing an apologetic expression, and a dozen pairs of eyes snap on to me. I can practically feel the waves of judgment rolling off the other reporters, and I feel as if my face might catch fire.
Not only am I late, but I’m also the least put together. There’s a bored-looking Asian woman dressed in short black overalls and emerald-green heels. The tech asshole from Topfold is here, wearing designer jeans, a chocolate blazer, and a bright-orange tie.
I grab a seat next to an elegant blond woman who looks Swedish. She’s model thin, six feet tall, and dressed in a smart little pantsuit.
That’s when I realize what I’ve just walked into. This isn’t a galactic press corps. This is a five-year convention for the hottest content creators in the world. The people in this room aren’t journalists — they’re digital celebrities.
The woman presenting can’t be more than five foot four. She’s built like a pixie and drowning in a black sleeveless shift and the fiercest studded leather boots I’ve ever seen. Her jet-black hair is piled into a knot at the top of her head and secured with red chopsticks.
She’s speaking very fast, pausing only to take the occasional puff from the glowing pink e-cigarette perched between her fingers. She wants ten story ideas from each of us by the end of the day. That I can handle.
Suddenly the briefing ends, and I make a mental note to go through her entire presentation the first chance I get. I don’t know what her position is here in the press corps, but she seems to be important.
The crowd parts, and the speaker doesn’t wait around to take questions. She struts out of the conference room and heads straight for her desk. I watch nervously from across the room as she fields two Optix calls in quick succession and fires up her desktop to review pitches.
The Topfold tech asshole accosts her before I can make my move, and so I sidle over like a lost puppy and hover in the wings.
Finally, the woman shoos him off, and her eyes snap on to me. She’s wearing black reading glasses with a slice of red along the rims, and when her gaze latches on to me, I feel myself shrink a good two inches.
“Yes?”
“Hi,” I say nervously. “I’m Maggie Barnes.”
“Oh!” she says, as if this explains everything. “I was wondering where you’d got to.”
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” I say. “There was a mix-up with my cargo delivery. I swear this is not typical.”
She doesn’t say a word. She seems to be waiting for me to cut to the chase, so I clear my throat and take another step toward her.
“I’m looking for Alex Brennan.”
“You’ve found her.” She quirks an eyebrow and sticks a hand over the desk for me to shake. “Alexandra Brennan.”
My mouth falls open. “Oh,” I say, feeling my face heat up. I am such an idiot. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’re not the only one who expected me to be a balding middle-aged man with food stains on his clothes. Jim’s the only one here who fits that description . . .” She nods across the room. “He’s just here to upgrade our security software, but he’s already had half the staff pitch him stories.”
Relief floods through me. Finally an editor with a sense of humor.
“Wow,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief. “It is such an honor to meet you. I just read that piece you wrote on AI in healthcare, and I think you really nailed the intangible benefits of human-on-human interactions.”
“Thanks. Believe it or not, that story was the last piece of my writing to be published at The Times. That was right before we made the transition to immersive, and god was that depressing. I was laying off writers left and right, popping half a Xanax with my coffee every morning and pumping my body full of beta blockers.” She takes a deep breath. “Anyway, Maverick approached me, and I thought, why not?”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “Maverick owns the paper I was working for. Last month my editor told me they wanted bots writing all the stories.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
Alex frowns and consults her Optix. “I thought you were a Topfold girl.”
“I am,” I say quickly. “I do immersive stories for them under my pen name, Layla Jones. I was writing for the New York Daily Journal as Maggie Barnes.”
“Gotcha.” Alex takes one last quick puff from her e-cig and sticks it down in its little crystal docking station. “I told the doc who did my medical evaluation that I’d quit,” she explains, yanking down the neck of her top to show me the nicotine patch below her clavicle. “No smoking in space. Go figure.” She shakes her head. “Must be all the oxygen tanks or something.”
I raise my eyebrows, not sure that this statement requires any sort of response.
“So . . .” She jostles the glowing ball in front of her to wake her desktop. A digital bulletin board materializes between us, and she swipes to a new blank screen with my name at the top. “What’ve you got for me?”
“A question.”
“Shoot.”
“Who would I talk to if I wanted to get my hands on the budget for Elderon?”
Alex scrunches her eyebrows. “Why?”
“Just background,” I say smoothly, trying not to make a big deal out of it. I need to confirm my suspicions before I come in and try to pitch such a crazy story.
Alex tilts her chin forward, glaring at me over her glasses as though she knows I’m up to no good. “Maggie . . . I’m your editor. You don’t need to worry about me scooping you. What’s going on?”
I swallow. I hate showing my hand before I have an idea fully worked out, but I need her to know where I’m headed with this. “I just want to know what portion of Maverick personnel would be classified as military.”
Alex frowns, and I can tell that I should’ve waited until I had something concrete. “Not the sort of pitch I wanted to hear from you this week.”
I cringe. I knew it wouldn’t be. In truth, I have about two dozen Layla Jones–worthy story ideas sitting on my desktop. The problem is that it’s completely dead, and Alex has the uncanny ability to make my mind go blank.
“Wow,” she says, still staring at me as though she has x-ray vision. “Not what I was expecting from you at all. The letter of rec from your editor at Topfold was glowing — verging on creepy.” She tilts her head to the side. “Your assessment from Cliff was less glowing but still impressive, considering it was coming from that crusty old dirtbag.”
I’m not sure if I want to laugh or cry. On the one hand, this is turning out to be my first-day-of-work worst nightmare. On the other, hearing Alex call Cliff a crusty old dirtbag just made my year.
“Maggie, look. If you’re not ready to play with the big girls . . .”
“No!” I say quickly. “I am ready. I am so ready. I have a million and one ideas for Layla stories on my desktop right now. The other thing was more of a long-term investigative piece that I wanted to work on.”
Alex’s eyebrows continue to inch up, and she shakes her head.
“What?”
“I’m sorry . . . Are you on crack?”
“Excuse me?”
“Maggie, you’re a smart girl. That is not why Natalie Dubois sent you here. You were sent here to create fluff content to make Maverick Enterprises look good — nothing more. You want my advice? Keep it light. Keep it palatable. Did you take a shit in microgravity? What’s it like to s
hower in space? How’s the food? Take our followers on a space walk this week. Use your imagination.”
I shake my head. I definitely want to cry, but I cannot afford to humiliate myself any further. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if you want to keep your job, you’re going to have to give me Topfold-worthy content. Fun. Nice. Light.”
I feel my shoulders droop as my body deflates.
“I know, I know,” she says. “We all want a chance to play journalist once in a while.”
She glances around the newsroom and lowers her voice. “Look, Maggie . . . I get it. And what I’m about to say isn’t coming from me . . .”
I perk up. This sounds interesting.
Alex takes a deep breath. “If anybody asks, I told you to kill the piece and bury it out back. But between you and me . . . if you want to work on something like that, I won’t stop you. It’s just gonna have to be on your own time.”
“Yes,” I say, nearly collapsing with relief. “Yes! That’s no problem. Thank you!”
“Don’t thank me,” she says, her face utterly devoid of emotion. “Get cracking. I want a Layla story on my desktop by one and another story before you leave today. It’ll go out on the feeds first thing in the morning. Hopefully you got plenty of good footage on the way here.”
“You got it, boss,” I say, practically bubbling over with excitement that she gave me the unofficial go-ahead.
“Maggie,” she says, her voice full of warning. “I meant what I said. Officially, all I want is Layla Jones for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
12
Maggie
After I cut together some first-person footage of my voyage to space and my impromptu interview with Tripp Van de Graaf, I overlay my own commentary and send it over to Alex. I close my desktop and head to lunch, following my stomach’s desperate hunger gymnastics.
My bot disaster kept me from getting anything for breakfast, and that supergreens granola bar from my gift bag is starting to look marginally edible.
I head to the dining hall in a bleary hunger-induced fugue. I gave up on trying to keep my hair in a bun, and it’s back in its usual frizzy blond cloud.
I stumble blindly into the coach line and earn a few strange looks from the polished Space Force operatives around me. I can tell I’ve got this glazed “give me food” look on my face, and they’re probably wondering what the hell I’m doing on Elderon.
When I reach the sneeze guard, I have the briefest thought that I might be hallucinating. The serving line isn’t being manned by people, but rather six human-ish abominations.
They’re bots, but they aren’t like any bots I’ve seen before. They have skin and eyes and lips, and their faces seem to move into expressions resembling human emotions. Their movements and voices are stilted and jerky, but they’ve been programmed to blink in an almost human way.
As I draw closer, I see that none of them have hair. Their silicone skin caps stop halfway up their skulls, revealing a grotesque jumble of wires and pistons moving beneath the plastic.
The bots are dressed in plain blue smocks, but subtle curves and peaks beneath the material hint at features verging on feminine. They swivel at the hips to face each person in line, spooning food into plastic trays.
Lunch is some next-level-disgusting beef stroganoff, shriveled green beans, and runny fruit cocktail. I flip on my Optix to capture the weird, disgusting display just as the first bot swivels toward me.
“Would you like — some — stro — ganoff?” it asks in a stilted monotone voice.
“Yes,” I say, watching the bot warily.
The bot turns back to its vat of noodles, scoops out a glob, and slaps it onto my tray. Next it fishes a ladle into the congealed brown goo, dumps it over my noodles, and splashes some juice into the other compartments of my tray. The bot doesn’t seem to notice the little puddle it created. It just passes my tray to the next bot, which asks if I want fruit cocktail.
By the time I get to the end of the line, the beef juice runoff has fully merged with the sugary fruit syrup, and my hunger has magically disappeared. The last bot tops off my disgusting lunch with a fluffy white roll, and I snatch another one from under the sneeze guard when it’s not looking.
I take a detour around a chatty group of engineers and feel a sudden surge of fury. They’re chowing down on what looks like fresh chicken parmesan and a crisp green salad that didn’t come from a can. They must be in business class.
I slam my tray down at an empty corner table and take a bite of the disgusting stroganoff. It’s like chewing on the strap of my bag, and the noodles are some mushy gluten-free rice concoction. I want to cry.
Shoving my tray across the table, I tear off an enormous hunk of my roll and start piecing together my second story for the day. After my blundering show of incompetency earlier, I need to work overtime to salvage Alex’s opinion of me.
I crack open the very-berry fruit drink to wash down the bread and hear footsteps coming up behind me.
“Wow,” says a familiar voice. “That bad?”
I look up and nearly expel a very-berry snot rocket. Tripp Van de Graaf is standing over my shoulder wearing a pair of perfectly distressed jeans and a long-sleeve cotton shirt rolled up over his beautiful forearms. A slight smirk is playing at the corners of his mouth, which only serves to stoke my ire.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I growl, nodding at my tray of barely touched food. “I’m pretty sure that feeding this to prisoners of war would violate several articles of the Geneva Convention.”
An apologetic grin twitches at the corner of his perfect mouth, and he slides uninvited into the chair across from me. “I’m sorry. We’re still working out the kinks.”
I frown. “There’s a sushi bar over in first class.”
He cringes. “If it makes you feel any better, it’s all imitation crab and cultured tuna.”
“It doesn’t.”
Tripp squirms for a moment in his seat, and when he grins, those damn dimples make an appearance. “Am I going to be watching a scathing review of the food in Topfold this evening?”
I switch off my Optix and cross my arms over my chest. “If you subscribe to Layla Jones.”
“Oh, I do,” he says with gusto. “I read and watch everything you do.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. Some small desperate part of me wants to feel flattered, but he’s just trying to butter me up.
“Tell you what,” he says, pulling up his Optix and scanning my face. “I’m going to change your meal-ticket status to first class.” He cocks his head to the side and waggles both eyebrows. “I can’t have the prettiest girl in space starving on my watch.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he holds up a hand to cut me off. “Just until we get the food-science lab fully up and running. Right now our fresh produce yields are only high enough to serve our first-class and business-class residents, but in a month or two . . .”
“We’ll all be eating shrimp cocktail and Niçoise salad?”
“Exactly,” he says. “Not to mention all the fresh fruit your little heart desires.”
“Really?” I say, suddenly interested. “That’s on the record, you know. I’m gonna hold you to that.”
He laughs. “I just sort of assumed that all parts of our conversation were on the record.” His eyes flash devilishly. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you wanted to come by my suite later for some fun that would be strictly off the record?”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say coolly. I refuse to be charmed into submission by the heir apparent to a tech dynasty.
“Suit yourself,” he says, folding his arms behind his head and leaning back in his chair so that it balances on two legs.
“But . . . I could use your help with something,” I say, throwing caution to the wind.
He laughs and runs a hand through his long perfect curls. “Is this a quid pro quo situation?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. ‘Quid pro quo’ always sounds so hot.”
I shake this off, wondering when he’s going to realize that I’m not interested and give it a rest. “It would be really helpful if I could get my hands on some colony specs.”
“Specs?” he repeats.
“You know . . . How much money went into building it. How much Maverick is spending to fund programs like the galactic press corps, the Space Force . . . How much the company has budgeted for very-berry fruit blast.”
Tripp quirks one eyebrow, studying me for a moment. “I’ve gotta say, Mags . . . I’ve watched every piece you’ve published on Topfold over the last month, and private military spending doesn’t strike me as very Layla Jones.”
I open my mouth to respond, but no words come out. He’s watched every Layla Jones story for the past month?
“That’s the thing about immersive journalism,” I stammer. “The good stuff always looks effortless, but I’ll have you know that a lot of work went into that donut piece.” I feel my face heat up. “And don’t call me Mags.”
He laughs. “My apologies. I loved the donut piece. But honestly, I’m more of a big-picture sort of a guy. I leave the very-berry budget to the bean counters.”
I let out a huff of disappointment. “But you must have access to that sort of information.”
He leans forward, and a tantalizing curly tendril falls into his eyes. “Of course I do . . . I’m an all-access kind of guy. But it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as an in-depth interview with the man who made it all possible.”
I roll my eyes and sit back in my seat. “The guy who made it all possible?” I look up as if I’m wracking my brain to figure out whom he’s talking about. “Would that be Miles Lapain the engineer, Cassius Blain the venture capitalist, or your father the space architect?”
“Ouch!” He grins in a way that tells me that his ego is not at all damaged by the slight. “I’ll have you know that the honeycomb design of the suites was my idea.”
