The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  “How are you going to manage this logistically?” I ask. “The last episode premieres a week from Friday.”

  “I want to see you in makeup at oh-eight-hundred on Thursday,” she says.

  “Can you get Jean-Marc back from France?” I ask.

  “I’m renting a jet to bring him back.”

  “Who’s directing?”

  “That’ll have to be Tessa Brettel.”

  I rub my forehead. “Are we moving back into the Lang Towers?”

  “Yes. Nobody’s caught Joey’s killer, you all stay under guard.”

  “Can I have the NoHo instead?”

  “Maybe. Someone will get back to you about the arrangements.”

  There’s a chime from the motion detectors on the front of the house, and then another chime from the doorbell.

  “Richard’s here,” I say.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Dagmar says, speaking very swiftly, and hangs up.

  There’s a security console in the living room, and I check the cameras to make sure it actually is Richard before I open the door. There he is, in his usual cat burglar clothes, with a memory stick in his hand.

  “Come in,” I say. “I need a better idea of what’s going on.”

  For a moment I’m paranoid about whether Richard can smell the bud I was smoking the night before, but the only thing I can scent on the air is the leftover ginger beef. I offer Richard some fresh orange juice and sit him down on the armchair. The India-print throw I usually have on the chair, to disguise the fact that it’s held together with duct tape, vanished in the move, and Richard sits gingerly on the plastic cushion. Because he looks nervous at the way I put the memory stick on the coffee table, I get up and make a point of locking it in the safe.

  “Okay,” I say, as I sit on the couch near him. “Do we know how Joey died?”

  “Overdose,” Richard says. “I don’t know any details, but apparently the police have every reason to believe that Joey didn’t inject himself.”

  “Carter-Ann has access to drugs,” I say. “Did she actually fly to Boston for her convention?”

  “Her tickets were used, she checked into the hotel, and since her presentation wasn’t canceled, I assume she delivered it.”

  “And—” I run a hand over my balding scalp. “There was another loose end I meant to ask you about, but I can’t remember what it was.”

  “Joey’s phone call to Dagmar? On the night when Nataliya died?”

  I blink. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe that was it.”

  “The call originated from a cell tower in Beverly Hills. So he wasn’t down in Malibu killing Nataliya.”

  Which, I think, is both good and bad, at least for me. Bad because the notion that Joey killed three people for reasons of revenge is pretty much dead, and that means that whatever is actually going on is well-nigh incomprehensible.

  Good, because if Joey didn’t kill people over Timmi, then nobody did, and that means that the deaths aren’t about me. Which means I’m not on any hit list that I know about.

  It means that whatever’s happening—call it the Secret—is about Dagmar, or Sri, or maybe even someone I’ve never met. And the only problem now is that somehow Jaydee, Nataliya, and Joey found out enough about the Secret to get themselves killed—and so far as I know they weren’t even looking. Which means they could have stumbled right over it, then got themselves wiped out, without even knowing what it was they’d found, or why they were being killed.

  I look at Richard. “Do you have any fucking idea why any of them died?”

  He shakes his head. “I was starting to agree with you that it was Joey, but—” He slices the air with a hand. “But it wasn’t.”

  I look around the living room, shabby furniture in a fine, polished home.

  “Maybe while you’re here,” I say, “you might want to do a bug sweep, just to keep in practice.”

  INT. GETTY VILLA—EVENING

  So on Thursday I report for the reshoot, and by Friday I’m already beat to hell. I had so wanted to escape all of this, but here I am covered again in fake mud and dust and blood, except that now it’s supposed to be Khabane’s blood instead of mine. At least we’re shooting in the studio instead of on location—there were high winds predicted for the end of the week, and they would have made Parmenter Canyon a living hell, so Dagmar decided to rely on studio work and green screen.

  Tessa is a little nervous and uncertain helming the project, which is unfortunate, because Roger Cedric Johnston III is being a complete asshat. He’d been having a little vacation in California, seeing the sights, taking meetings with his new agent and manager, and waiting for stardom to descend on his head in the shape of a glowing white dove—but now he’s got to work for a living, and he’s making everyone as miserable as he can.

  I try to get Carter-Ann to terrorize him into obedience, and she does her best, but she seems to have lost some of her mojo, and Roger remains, at least intermittently, a brat.

  I get showered and changed in time for the premiere of Part V, which is being held at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades—which, being a replica of some kind of Roman mansion, is I guess a completely ideal place to premiere the first of two episodes taking place in South Africa and Swaziland. They do have an African highlife band playing in the central courtyard, at the end of the long, gorgeous ornamental pool, and there’s dancing amid the shrubbery. I don’t think highlife is South African music, but maybe Ladysmith Black Mambazo was busy.

  This is why I love California, because the Getty alone shows how unnecessary it is to visit places like Africa or Italy. You can get it all here.

  Inside the museum you can wander among ancient statues of Aphrodite and Zeus, eat from a rather uninspired buffet, and watch Escape to Earth on whatever digital device you happen to have carried with you. I go to the statue of Zeus, who sits with curly hair and beard on a throne, and I think a prayer at him. Please, Zeus, let this be a hit.

  From the buffet I get a kebab and some kind of curried meatball. If the buffet is anything to go by, South African cuisine is some kind of Indian-influenced Dutch food, with occasional native elements—though of course the buffet may just be a buffet and not representative at all. I go to an inner courtyard, where there are modern bronze statues pretending to be ancient ones, and I sit down on a bench with my meal and my tablet. The meatball isn’t much, but I like the mealie bread that goes with it, and there’s an interesting drink apparently made from fermented maize—it’s not alcoholic, but it has an interesting flavor, a little like yogurt, and would taste very good on a hot afternoon.

  When the countdown comes, I get out my tablet, unfold the screen, open Dagmar’s proprietary software, and watch. The episode opens with Roheen on a little tin-bucket freighter heading for Cape Town, with Table Mountain looming over everything, and again I marvel at how gorgeous the CGI is. I know that I, Sean, was never on that freighter, but you simply can’t tell the whole thing was rendered on a computer. And my guess is that you wouldn’t be able to tell even if you projected it on a screen sixty feet across.

  This leads me to think about Roheen’s journey, the climax of which I’ll continue to shoot over the weekend. By Episode V Roheen is a lot tougher, but he’s also a lot more sensitive to what’s going on around him. He’s engaged, he’s compassionate. He cares for the people who helped him out. He’s learned a lot more about Earth than he ever would have as an anthropologist, and it’s changed him.

  Yeah, he’s maybe an angel, but he’s a rugged angel. Give him a flaming sword, and he’d know what to do with it.

  The episode ends with Roheen and Khabane on a bus for Swaziland and the climax at Execution Rock. As the image fades and the credits roll, I hear applause from inside the museum, and I hear voices raised in Xhosa. Roger doesn’t just have his auntie with him any more, his whole extended family has flown in for the premiere. There are at least twenty of them, and they all worship him. It’s not making him any easier to deal with.

  I
met his parents when they visited the set. Dad’s a high-powered economist for the Ministry for Home Affairs, and Mom works for some kind of NGO that deals in carbon offsets. They’re very intelligent and well-dressed and speak excellent English, and they’re clearly a part of their nation’s elite, a twenty-first-century power couple.

  And now, I assume, they’ve spent the last twenty-odd minutes sitting or standing in various corners of the museum with handsets and tablets, watching Episode V. They all subscribed to Dagmar’s feed in order to do this, and paid their fee, and provided basic information to be uploaded into the Sri Sphere, for Sri to mine for its monetary value…

  They are, I figure, exactly the sort of demographic that would interest Sri. The parents are in influential positions, and probably a number of the other family members as well. Though the parents are here as Dagmar’s guests, the family has enough money to fly the rest of the clan to California on its own nickel.

  What will Sri do with their data? I wonder. Use it to target advertising, predict consumer or demographic trends, chart political and economics changes, inform public health issues…? No doubt someone as smart as Sri could find a lot more uses than these.

  And then I think of all the deaths that have happened, and I can’t imagine why any of this would be worth killing someone over. So Sri has data on a lot of people—so what? Lots of people have data sets.

  There’s a humming overhead, and I look up to see a drone aircraft flying overhead, mining visual data for one tabloid or another, data that can be sold for money.

  The drone with its cameras passes out of sight, and I look down at my Chandra tablet, at the screen that is still rolling credits over an arid South African landscape, at the control buttons and the miniature QWERTY keyboard, the omnipresent little camera that gazes blandly from the frame. The kind of omnipresent camera that enabled me to capture pictures of Melody Chastain’s humiliation, and that identified me as a witness for the detectives investigating the series of murders.

  I look at the tablet, and I think about the application that Ramona could have installed on my handheld, one that turned it into a bug for Kari Sothern and the Tale.

  I look at the little camera lens, and the camera lens looks back at me, and I realize what kind of data would be worth killing over.

  The kind that comes with audio and video.

  Escape to Earth is pitched to a certain class of people, people who can afford the hardware and have credit cards to pay for subscriptions—people like Roger’s family, local elites with access to the corridors of money and power. The demographic skews young, but that’s all right, because once you’ve got the software on Junior and Missy’s phones, you can listen to the whole family. Because what Junior and Missy are carrying around isn’t just a platform for downloading video, it’s a sophisticated espionage system.

  Talk about child exploitation. Sri and Dagmar are bugging the children and sending them to listen to Mummy and Daddy.

  Of course you can’t listen to every conversation among the four hundred million subscribers, but then you don’t need to. Your data-mining algorithms can extract from the raw data which of your clients are worth bugging, which have information that’s crucial to whatever it is you’re interested in.

  Politics. Economics. Military. Banking. Law enforcement. Crime, for heaven’s sake. Whatever will provide the information necessary for you to make the right moves, and make a killing in the markets—or in the backstreets.

  I remember the way Richard talked about Dagmar’s project, giving it a particular emphasis as if it were so much more than just a movie. I recall what Carter-Ann said when she was admonishing Dagmar after the scene with Joey—this is all too important to lose track of ourselves this way. I remember thinking at the time that she was talking about something more than just Escape to Earth.

  What did Richard say? You talk as if spying is illegal or something.

  How many people would you actually need to pull it off? I wonder. The loudmouthed guy I overheard in the locker room wasn’t one of them—he had no idea what was happening to the data he was processing, or for that matter where the data was physically located.

  Dagmar has her group of loyal samurai, like Richard and Helmuth and Ismet. They’ve overthrown a government and dodged bullets and bombs together, and probably constitute the hard battle-tested core of the project. There is Carter-Ann and the Psy-Ops Division, who have to be involved somehow. And of course on top of the project is Sri, master of the Sri Sphere, boss of his own shadowy collection of Sphere denizens.

  It is like the world’s most enormous private intelligence agency, disguised as a distributed network with server farms in Finland and New Zealand. And what happens when someone threatens to blow the whistle on them?

  People die, that’s what.

  I can—just barely—wrap my brain around this idea. But what I can’t seem to comprehend is how Jaydee and Nataliya and Joey were able to constitute any kind of threat to the Secret Sri Sphere. I suppose Joey might have been smart enough, and sufficiently wired into the production to discover something; but what dangerous information could be gleaned by the costume designer and by a pop star/actress who was on the set for all of three days?

  I ask myself that question, and I draw a blank.

  On the tablet screen, the credits come to an end. I log out, and then I fold up the screen and turn the Chandra off.

  My hands are shaking. I try to put the screen in its carrying case, and manage on the third try.

  I make an attempt to rejoin the party. I eat apricot sponge cake and have more of the fermented mealie drink, and I try to talk to some people; but I keep seeing Dagmar and Sri nodding and chatting in various corners of the museum, and whenever I see them my nerves begin to shriek. My brainstorm has me so rattled that I’m thumping around like a zombie, and eventually I call Simon and have him bring up the car.

  I have a lot of new lines to learn for tomorrow, anyway.

  The rest of the cast and crew have been moved back into the Lang Towers, but I’m at the NoHo, back in the Marilyn Suite. I suspect I’m here because Dagmar has realized I’m irreplaceable and she wants me away from any of the cast and crew who might take it into their heads to kill me.

  It isn’t until after I’m alone in the room that I realize that, if my new theory is true, Dagmar is guarding me from herself.

  The guards aren’t working for me, they’re working for Dagmar: she can have them look the other way when she needs a bit of killing done. And that’s what probably happened with Joey, the guards just happened to be in another place when Sri’s super-ninja slipped in and gave Joey the contents of a syringe…

  In a panic I take my spy-tablet and hide it in the closet. I put a jacket on top of it to smother any sound. And then I remember that Richard had my phone for a whole day, after Ramona installed her spyware on it, and that during that time Richard might have installed his own spyware. So now I have two poisoned pieces of electronic equipment.

  Of course the whole hotel suite might be bugged for all I know.

  But then, of course, Dagmar has no reason to suspect me. I decide that I should give her no such reason, and decide to behave normally.

  I try to learn my lines. I’m very distracted.

  It occurs to me that I’m caught up in a dilemma. I could try informing the authorities of what I suspect, which might solve the murders but also get me killed. And if the authorities think I’m crazy, which is all too likely, I’d get killed for nothing.

  Or I could play along with Dagmar, and become a huge star and make a lot of money, and rejoice in my share of profits from the Sri Sphere.

  What’s a boy to do?

  Given the fact that I have no evidence at all, and am unlikely to get any, my course seems clear.

  INT. SOUNDSTAGE—DAY

  On Saturday it’s me blowing my lines, not Roger. He just sits with a smug little smile on his face and watches me sweat underneath all my makeup, dust, and fake gore.

  A
t the end of the eight hours that mark the legal end of his workday as a juvenile actor, Roger skips off and returns to the semi-divine status he enjoys amid his extended family. I deliver dialogue to his stand-in for another couple hours, and then Tessa calls it a day.

  Despite my stumblings, the reshoots are nearly over. A few hours on Sunday should finish the project, and then it’s over to Allison to edit the new footage into the film she already thought she’d finished days ago.

  I thank Tessa for her patience, then drag myself away. When my eyes adjust to the dimmer light away from the set, I see Dagmar and Ismet watching the scene along with Corrie van Houten, Nataliya’s ghostwriter and former assistant. Ismet’s face is under-lit by the open laptop he carries in one hand, and one hand taps out a message on its keyboard. I limp over to say hello.

  “Hi, Corrie,” I say. “Did Dagmar give you a job?”

  She blinks up at me with bright eyes. “Yes! Thank you for everything!” She takes a step toward me, arms wide as if ready to offer a hug, but then she sees my grimy clothes and bloody makeup and hesitates.

  Dagmar looks at Corrie with amusement. “Corrie interviewed, and we connected. Now I’m exploiting her without mercy.”

  “Merciless exploitation is what assistants are for.”

  Dagmar looks over the set. “I’m here to see dailies. I want to see if all this is going to work.”

  “I think it’s working fine. If I can just remember my lines, we can wrap this up by noon tomorrow.”

  Dagmar is wearing bib overalls over her pregnant stomach. Pens, notebooks, and her handheld bulge in the overall pockets. Her swollen feet are stuck in flip-flops. It looks like a comfortable ensemble for this stage of her pregnancy.

  It has to be admitted that she doesn’t look much like a terrorist, or like a cold-blooded mastermind who would have ordered Joey’s assassination. She doesn’t even look like a producer.

  “When do we start on the sequel?” I ask.

  Her mouth quirks. “Well,” she says, “I have to write it first. And somewhere in there, I have to have a kid.”