The Talent

I walked downstairs into the basement. Into the room with the plexiglass wall and the high-powered lights, I walked, carrying a plate of mashed potatoes and microwaved chicken nuggets. Back when we first started this room was much dirtier, and there was no plexiglass, only nylon straps. It didn’t make a difference for the product, but I wanted to treat the Talent well. Now there was clean linoleum lining the floor, soft bedsheets that I changed every other week and even a TV I set up on my side of the plexiglass. The TV didn’t get signal down here, but it had a DVD player.

The Talent was awake, sitting against the glass. The Talent had taken to doing that, lately, maybe attempting to affect some sang-froid. I rapped twice on the wall to indicate that I was in the room, and then opened the grille to slide the plate across the glass barrier. The Talent glanced at the plate to the left, but not at me. That was fine — the Talent was off duty, and I didn’t impose on the Talent’s free time. I did have an announcement, however, so I left the grille open.

“You’re going to have a new friend soon,” I said. The Talent didn’t respond, so I continued. “Another actor, doing the same thing you are. We’re expanding our operation. You’ll share a room.”

That made the Talent sit up. “You did it again?”

I grinned in what I hoped was a sheepish manner. “Good help is hard to come by. Besides, this is a better gig than most, and I’m sure you’ll make good friends.”

The Talent didn’t answer right away. When a response finally came, it was clinical, detached. “I feel like I should hate you or pity her, but I almost think you’re right.”

“I am right,” I said. “I’ll bring your new friend in the evening, after work. You can be like a mentor, right? You know what to do and what’s expected of you.”

The Talent laughed. “Poor kid, probably thinks she’s about to be шшшшш.”

The word hit my ears, flew into my brain, went straight for the linguistic processing center, got lost somewhere along the way and slid right back out of consciousness. I felt clammy but also good, like the giddy high you get right after vomiting. I couldn’t even remember what I couldn’t remember. I would never, ever, ever….

That evening I went out to the truck. I had a moment of panic about not leaving the A/C on before I remembered that it was October, and there was already a chilly nip in the air. I put on my jacket, my gloves, my balaclava and my boots. The gloves weren’t really necessary, but I was paranoid about septic bites — I’d heard stories around the net of other guys doing similar things, and getting a nasty wound on the hand for their troubles. I was cautious. That’s why the first thing I did was to prop up a big studio light facing the trailer door. Inside the truck would be dark, so hopefully the bright light would act like a stun gun, just in case anything had gone awry inside. After flipping on the light with a loud mechanical clack, I walked over to the truck and took a couple deep breaths. Now the most dangerous part: in one swift motion I unlocked the trailer and swung the door wide open.

I needn’t have been so cautious — this time. The person inside was still securely strapped down, and flinched away from the light’s glare, or maybe just from the noise. I jumped up inside the truck and double checked the straps before unhitching them from the trailer and pulling the person upright. I pulled the person to the edge of the truck and out to the driveway below, trying to ignore the cute little mewing sounds. We were only out in the open for a few seconds, then we were in the door, me practically carrying the person through the hall, down the stairs, into the basement, and up to the metal door. Now for the second tricky part — but the Talent didn’t say or do anything as I unlocked the door and stepped inside with the person.

I removed the tape first, so the person could see and talk. Then I waited for the person to quiet down. It took several minutes, so I grabbed the chair and settled in to wait. As I did, it occurred to me that I would probably have to get another chair. In fact, I should probably double everything. I had intended them to take shifts, but there was no reason not to have them both working at the same time. We were scaling up the operation, after all.

When the person had finally screamed themselves hoarse, I explained the situation. I said that I wasn’t going to hurt either of them, that I needed business partners, that I was presenting an opportunity. I explained how really I did most of the work, and provided everything they would ever need. I asked the Talent to explain how good behavior was rewarded, how easy the work was, how everything was going to be just fine. I gently told the person that I knew it was hard to accept, but the sooner we all got used to this new normal, the better for all of us. I told them both that they were the Talent now, and that we were sure to be making a lot more money soon, and they’d both reap the profits. Finally, I told the Talent to be ready to start working 24/7 soon, on 12 hour shifts. I walked back upstairs, full of hope and new opportunities.

Three weeks later, it simply was not working out. the Talent was putting out only 19 hours of content a day, but even that was too much for me to edit down and map. The job was really ridiculously easy for them. I pulled video game footage from one of the thousands of defunct Youtube accounts made by some kid years ago with a dream of becoming internet famous, hours of free content that only a few hundred bots had ever seen before. I played the video game footage on a screen outside the plexiglass, and the Talent reacted at the appropriate moments, pretending to be playing the game. That was it: talk into a microphone for a few hours, laugh appropriately at the jokes, scream at the scary bits. My job was the hard part. I was able to get about 6 hours of usable material out of a day, usually, but I had to watch it all on double speed first to make sure The Talent hadn’t said anything inappropriate. After screening the content, I used the green dots I drew on the Talent to map all their movements to an animation skeleton, and from there I layered on one of several skins, each with a unique visual style, background, and voice modulator. Thanks to a fancy WaveNet tool a buddy whipped up for me, I could even shift the Talent’s accent somewhat to match the skin. Each skin had its own persona, and its own social media account, which I managed. Every time I got a nice contiguous chunk of usable footage I ran a script to blast all the socials with notifications that it was going live, and then streamed the footage — several times at once, to several different streams, each one with a different skin. If you liked Japanese girls, I had a Japanese skin with a thick East Asian rhotacism. If you liked blonde girls I had a blonde skin. If you liked hyperreal girls I had a Hatsune Miku knock-off, and so on. One of the virtual streamers was supposed to be deaf. She still reacted to the sound cues exactly like the others, of course, but people didn’t seem to notice.

That was the system: The Talent watches footage, and pretends to be playing the game. I take the footage of The Talent and overlay it with a CGI avatar in several different flavors, each with their own distinct fanbase. The online world knew they were all the same Talent underneath, but didn’t know I was involved, and the fans all seemed willing to pretend they were unique characters anyway. Their collective willing delusion made it easier for me to occupy the space in the middle, managing all the separate socials, misdirecting superfans who got a little too inquisitive into who the person behind this multi-faceted project was. They didn’t want to see any more than their own favorite virtual streamer, and by looking away from all the others they looked away from me, too.

But it was too much work now, and there was interpersonal drama among the Talent. I didn’t want to get involved, and ideally I wouldn’t have to, but there was more than just that. The new Talent didn’t want to work, which was the primary reason we weren’t operating at full 24/7 capacity. I didn’t know how to discipline one and not the other — previously I had just removed certain amenities until discipline issues were resolved, but I couldn’t very well punish them both for the attitude of one.

Or couldn’t I? I decided to give it a try — maybe it would make them keep each other in line. I went downstairs with a trash bag instead of a tray of dinner. I unlocked the room, went to the bed and stripped off the sheets. The Talent jumped up to watch me.

“What are you doing?” asked the Talent. “It’s not laundry day yet, is it?”

“I’ve decided you have too many distractions in here,” I said, “so I’m removing some of them. When we get production back on track to 24 hours a day then we’ll put things back to how they were.”

I tied up the laundry bag and took it out of the room. The Talent didn’t even ask about dinner. I had to go downstairs one more time to remind them to start filming again, but that was all. I thought things were going better.

They were not. A few days later I took away the TV. It hadn’t been turned on for a while anyway, since I had video game footage playing constantly, but the next night I took the mattress. Then I took the lights. I left a couple spotlights on the space where they sat to record, so the mocap dots would still be clearly visible, but the rest of the room was dark. A few days after that I stopped bringing them any food but bread and water. I took away the chair, the table, the bedframe, the poster of Ashton Kutcher (my idea) and the throw rug. I took away the pillows. I debated tearing up the linoleum and just leaving bare concrete like in the beginning, but decided that would be too much work.

Then one day the new Talent stopped filming completely. Refused to work. Went on strike. I gave it 12 hours with no food, then stormed down into the basement, furious. I threw open the metal door in the plexiglass partition, stomped into the room and undid my belt.

The Talents’ faces bleached. “Oh, God,” said the old Talent, “you’re going to шшшш her. You’re actually going to-”

The new Talent started screaming. I pulled my belt out of the belt loops and raised it above my head. Then I swung it down, buckle-first. Up and down. I kept going until I saw red, but it was so little that I felt disappointed, as if even here the Talent wasn’t giving me as much as I wanted. I dropped the belt and used my hands. I went a bit overboard, and by the time I stopped to catch my breath things had changed.

I stood up, and threaded my belt back through the loops. I looked at the Talent and gestured at the video game screen. “You’d better start recording,” I said. “We have a schedule to keep up with.” I was already thinking ahead in my mind: more Talent, another editor, someone I could trust, ten hours or more of streaming content a day multiplied by as many personalities as I could generate. Could I hire someone to run socials for me?

The Talent seemed to be fishing for an excuse, trying to get out of work. “There’s blood all over me,” the Talent said lamely, finally, “they’ll see it on the camera.”

I lost my patience. “It doesn’t make a difference for the product,” I snarled through clenched teeth. “Just start filming. Do it now.” The Talent turned to obey, and I walked out of the room.

The next day I went downstairs with a hacksaw and several contractor bags to clean up the mess.