Try Try Again Read online

  Conning, when challenged, acknowledged he had no knowledge of any specific additional terrorist invasions of friendly countries, “but he was sure he’d be the first to know.”

  Thomas Conning was now 12.3 percentage points ahead of the other party’s candidate, Barbara Dean Nicholson. His backers slept better than they had a few weeks before.

  Sybille Haskin, pleased with events, sent Conning a basket of flowers with a card reading “from all your many friends at ConDyne.” She met again with her real employers, who expressed satisfaction with her efforts and presented her with another secret Swiss account, this one with a balance of ten million Swiss francs. It is of no matter, they said, that several hundred of their insurgents had to be sacrificed in battle. They implied subtly, however, if Conning were not actually elected President for any reason, then Haskin and all her friends, lovers, partners, associates, assistants, and mere acquaintances would be fed to large dogs bred for that purpose and kept hungry.

  Chapter 21: Two Years After the Assassination

  Jill had been waiting for this moment for months: the first season-two episode of “Try Try Again” was about to begin. But she won nothing that night, or the next. In episode three she won a dollar, was encouraged to try harder next time.

  All she wanted, she thought, was to get enough money to finally rid herself of Roger, even if that meant a little bribery; and to remodel her home, one of the hundreds of original 1950s bungalows in the neighborhood that had been built for WWII veterans and their young families. Most of the houses in Pimmit Hills had been added to, subjected to façad-otomied, or simply torn down to make room for a McMansion. Jill’s had been untouched by the ambitions of time, only its ravages. Already architecture students had been spotted looking around and making notes. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before her home would be designated historical and then she wouldn’t be allowed to do anything with it except to replace her creaky old washing machine. With a sigh, Jill turned her attention to next week’s “Try Try Again.”

  It was in episode four of season two that Jillian M. Hall, of Pimmit Hills, Virginia, became a nationally famous household word for some three days, greatly thrilling her, until an even bigger piece of trivia came along.

  Hub Landon hadn’t watched the episode-four competition that night, because he was at one of those Hollywood parties he hated, but didn’t dare miss. But as soon as word spread that an unknown named Jillian Hall had won some three million dollars, he broke off a conversation in mid-sentence and drove home, taking hill curves like a James Bond wannabe.

  The Big Win, as it was already being called, occurred just after the British Foods commercial, as the local police chief was giving the prosecutor his account of the assassination. The winner had been playing Liv Saunders, even though she was at the defense table, not speaking. But those were the toughest characters to play, he knew: motions and expressions were fleeting, subtle, or their mouths were covered as they whispered to someone else.

  He thought hard about what to do, and if there was some dishonesty behind that win, how to keep it away from himself. Yes, right after the final episode of that season, in one week, he’d do something. He began laying plans.

  The next day, Jill was not yet over her big win. Now she knew, there would be reporters to fend off, ‘human interest’ people with nothing better to do, and organizations wanting a donation of her money – or wanting to invest it, which was worse.

  She called Ellie. “Yeah,” said Ellie, without being prompted, “So you won a lot of money and I’ve got chicken feathers in my mouth or whatever that saying is when you made your point and it all turns out wrong. What I said to you that night, I mean.”

  “It’s ‘crow,’ Ellie, ‘eating crow.’ And I didn’t call you to crow at you. But I wonder if you can come by and handle the media for me today. There’s going to be a crowd and I don’t think I can stand it.”

  “I can’t do that, I’ve never done that. What would I say?”

  “Just ‘Ms. Hall can’t see you now, or probably ever.’”

  “And if that won’t do?”

  “I think the proper escalation would be ‘fuck off’.”

  “Oh, OK; I can do that.”

  “Great, Ellie!” How soon can you come over?”

  By mid-afternoon, Jill was beginning to calm down and Ellie was not only doing an excellent job of fucking off the callers, but enjoying it as well.

  But at three o’clock, Ellie popped her head around the door and said “You wanna take a call? It’s Roger.”

  “Well, OK. Unless he’s a reporter now.” Jill answered. She picked up the phone.

  “That divorce was a fraud, Jill,” a desperate-Roger voice rang out. “You misrepresented both me and yourself to the divorce court. That’s perjury. Actually, I don’t want to put you in jail, I just want to come back to you.”

  “And to my money?” Jill said, “Or is it that Suzanne more shop-worn than you thought she was?”

  “Ah – ”

  “She’s standing right beside you, isn’t she? Tell her not to breathe so hard – for a minute I thought you’d bought a horse.”

  Jill hung up and she and Ellie shared a laugh, a horse-laugh.

  “As long as I’m here now,” Ellie said, “I’ll tell you where we are on the calls. You’ve had seventeen marriage proposals, one shakedown, your boss assuming you won’t ever be back and ‘please brief somebody at the office about that damn contract!’, and uncountable reporters wanting to know ‘how you feel?’ and ‘what it’s ‘like?’” the second of those clichés’ calling forth additional horse-laughs from Jill and Ellie.

  Later that week, three happy winery workers in Peshastin, Washington, who’d bought a PowerBall ticket together, won and split eight hundred twenty-two million dollars in a record jackpot. To Jill’s relief, reporters and others fascinated by undeserved money turned to that story and left her alone. The investment floggers, however, stuck around.

  But then Roger’s attorney called. He’d found, he said, a minor clerical error in the divorce agreement, but enough, he said, to invalidate it. “We’ll have to start the divorce process all over from scratch again,” he said redundantly, “this time considering a fair distribution of your winnings. So Roger will consent to a divorce, that is, and not move back in with you.”

  Jill hired her own attorney and told her to fight it out with Roger’s attorney and don’t tell me about it, just do it.

  She reported the newest Roger initiative that evening to Ellie. “I’m glad you’ve got your own lawyer on this one,” said Ellie, “you’d have a tough time fighting Roger in court just looking severe and playing air-lawyer.”

  Jill, believably enough, completely ignored episode five, where the jury finds Charley Dukes guilty of murder in the second degree. In fact, she ignored the webV completely for several days.

  In Hollywood, however, Jill’s win had aroused anxiety in the two men chiefly concerned with the show: the producer and the director. Both were concerned Jill’s big win could have been the result of either cheating, or a previously unknown bug in the show’s computer system. Frankie took it upon himself to call WizWhiz and ream them out.

  AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

  ROUTINE NSA PHONE TAP, LOS ANGELES, CA

  NO CRIMINAL ACTIVITY VERIFIED

  ON PHONE: FRANK DICKSTEIN CALLER (FD) TO UNKNOWN MALE (UM)

  FD: What the fuck happened? You told me no one could ever win that much money. How am I supposed to come up with so much money? I’m not made of fucking money, y’know! Network’s gonna hang me up by the balls for this.

  UM: Wait, Mr. Dickstein. Just calm down. We’re looking into it now. We think we understand. We’ve got our heads together here …

  FD: And they’re sticking up your fucking asses.

  UM: If you’ll just give me a few minutes…

  FD: Why should I?

  UM: You need to know how we score contestants here at the WizWhiz TTA Center. It’s pretty complicated. H
all’s win was a real fluke.

  FD: Why should I care about that technical crap? It’s what happened that counts.

  UM: The network’s going to ask you about that technical crap. Wilson thinks he’s some kind of super-geek, even if his last hands-on was Windows 8 and that didn’t go so well. His office called here ten minutes ago and I put ‘em off. But they’ll be calling you – Wilson himself, probably – tonight. So I need to pump you up so you can say something to Wilson to get him off your back – and save our jobs here too.

  FD: Yours especially, huh? – OK; how does it work?

  UM: OK. Say we have two million contestants signed up to play Liv Saunders or one of the other trial figures in episode four. It was actually a little higher than that, but…

  FD: Get to it.

  UM: Ah – through their broadband connections, we sample what these contestants are doing. We’ve got five thousand concurrent sessions, so that’s how many people we can sample in the same time-slice.

  FD: What’s a time-slice, and do I care?

  UM: Yeah. Well, tonight say we had about those two million contestants, mostly Saunders wanna-be’s – she’s the most popular character in the show.

  FD: So only five thousand people get looked at – reviewed – whatever you call it.

  UM: Scored. Five thousand at a time, five thousand concurrent computer processes, about a thousand of them allocated to Saunders. So if we want to give each of these people a chance at winning, we have to score each of them at least once – and turn on their gamelight so they’ll know they’re getting a chance. When we do that, that’s a time-slice.

  FD: So how do you do that?

  UM: Turn on their gamelight?

  FD: No. Two million people and five thousand – what? Processes.

  UM: An episode is eighty-eight minutes not including commercials. So we dynamically adjust the length of a time-slice, or “T-slice” as we call it, allocate these five thousand processes to cover all active contestants. The more contestants, the smaller each T-slice is. I won’t bore you with the calculation…

  FD: Oh please bore me. I need the sleep.

  UM: Ah – huh?

  FD: Never mind, go on.

  UM: So given the numbers – those just for-example numbers – if we set a T-slice to half a second, that gives each of the million people playing Saunders one shot at winning that episode. Actually, we calculate the length of a T-slice dynamically, depending on how many agonists are actively online. But for purposes of scoring it usually comes out to about half a second a T-slice.

  FD: So that’s enough time to …

  UM: Capture a static image that our computers can compare with the image on the film that’s shown at that particular T-slice. Static because it’s just too difficult to measure five thousand people at once over a period of time, even just a half-second, given the resources we have. A half-second is enough to capture an image and evaluate it against other images coming in at the same time. Contestants who win a T-slice, or tie for the lead, well, their particular computer process just stays on them until they don’t win a T-slice, once, and then their process goes on to somebody else.

  FD: No action, then. Just a pose.

  UM: Well, yeah, you could say that. But if the contestant isn’t emulating, moving, speaking when their character speaks, then the pose wouldn’t be right. The expression wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t win.

  FD: Set up a dummy – a manikin - with the right pose, maybe captured from the film itself?

  UM: But you wouldn’t know which half-second the pose should be for, since the contestants are sampled at random. At best, you’d win one T-slice, which pays nothing. You’d need thousands of poses…

  FD: Feedback an image from the film itself right onto a second screen in the contestant’s home in real time?

  UM: [LONG PAUSE] Ah – good idea, gee. – But [SIGH OF RELIEF] we use a Kinect-type device to get a 3D image of the contestant – they’re required to have those and they’re built in to all the new webVs anyway – and the film is 2D – there’s never been a 3D release – and so the images wouldn’t match.

  FD: And why did you do that? About the Kinect, I mean.

  UM: So we can ignore the background, y’know, sofas, pictures and so on, and so we don’t have to require contestants to stand exactly so many microinches from their screens.

  FD: So you’re looking – sampling – playing peeping Tom at somebody playing actor in her living room? How could a kid – or an old woman – or a black woman or a man for that matter – ever win being Saunders? She’s about forty, I guess, skinny, female, white.

  UM: We only score facial expressions and hand and arm gestures, frozen in time. And body movements, like what the mouth is doing should match the words the principal, say, Brent Nielsen, is saying. So I’ll admit that a paralyzed person could never win. But we’re fair to ninety-five-plus percent of the American people, we estimate.

  FD: OK, OK. – So why did Hall win so many – T-slices, however many that was. Could she have cheated?

  UM: It’s possible, but right now we don’t see how. We’re still collating, but we haven’t figured out how she could have gamed the system. She’d won before, you know, a thousand dollars, so she’s an accomplished agonist and could have won honestly this time. And she’s an accountant or something like that, so I guess she likes detail. But she’s no computer whiz, that we know.

  FD: You’re saying that your system – my system - allowed someone to win three million dollars honestly?

  UM: Ah, yeah. Possibility, anyway. If not her it could have been somebody else, sometime. We should have figured that, but we didn’t.

  FD: On your advice, buster, we’re insured for one million dollars a payout, max. We eat two million dollars here. I eat two million dollars.

  UM: [ASSORTED SOUNDS]

  FD: Fix it so it won’t happen again. I mean it. And when you fix it you’ll tell me how you fixed it, and if you can’t convince me you’ve fixed it, you’re dog food, or somewhere down the food chain from that.

  UM: Ah –

  [CALL DISCONNECTED]

  [END OF TRANSMISSION]

  Concurrently with Frankie’s tapped phone call, Hub Landon was considering what to do. He’d promised himself he’d look into the situation, even if his own money hadn’t been on the line. A woman named Jillian Hall had won three million dollars on his show. Not that he’d had much to do with the show after season one – basically a rerun after that. But his name was still on it as Director, and if there were some kind of scandal – well, he could be hurt.

  He had to make sure Hall was who she said she was, not a ringer, and she hadn’t made some secret deal with one of the tech people to rig the competition. Just what we don’t need, he thought: another contest-cheating mess. There were already too many rumors the show was fixed in some way. He phoned Frankie Dickstein, but was shuffled off to the Producer’s voicemail. He didn’t bother to leave a message.

  But first, his daily ritual. He ran a webscript which gave him the temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, ground-dryness at eight strategically located nearby spots, with projections for the next several days. Only a slight chance of wildfire and no chance of a drenching rain, he concluded. His beloved mansion just downhill from Mulholland Drive would be – almost – safe from the ever-present danger of fire, or the chance the entire mountain would rain-slide downhill in the direction of Sunset Boulevard. Safe for the next several days, anyway.

  Turning back to the show, it occurred to him to wonder exactly what Jillian Hall had keyed off of – exactly where she had won that first, crucial, T-slice, and how many other contestants had tied her score for that slice. If Hall was the clear winner – no ties – that would be so unusual as to be suspect. If Hall had been an undistinguished agonist before winning big, that would also be suspect.

  How should he proceed? Carefully. A rumor in the showbiz press that he was concerned about a potential fraud, would be almost as harmful as the exp
osure of a fraud itself. Not just anonymous whispers, but the Director himself was suspicious. He shuddered at the thought.

  Hub had a light lunch and soaked in his enormous bathtub – his friends actually referred to it as “The Enormous Bathtub,” or “Lake Mulholland,” or, less kindly as “Hub’s Tub” – often followed by “glub glub.” They could laugh, but Hub’s best thinking took place there. It was his refuge, his den, his study, occasionally shared but normally only with very close friends of either sex with whom he wanted to get even closer. It was actually a heated indoor pool, but he had had it built in the shape of an old-fashioned lion-paw-cornered bathtub, complete with fake hot and cold taps and a shower nozzle.

  He waved a hand at his webV screens and ordered them to re-run season two, episode four. He fast-forwarded to near the end of the British Foods commercial. In just a few seconds he’d be watching the point in the show where Jillian Hall had done what no contestant had ever done before.

  His customized datascreen next to the webV displayed, in real-show time graphics, how many logons there were, now many contestants were doing Poorly, Average, Well, or Very Well. It was part of WizWhiz’s job to tweak the show so that most people scored Well or better most of the time, thus creating enthusiasm and higher viewership. The resulting numbers were sold, in confidence, to potential advertisers after being slightly “edited.” This tweaking, of course, was performed by WizWhiz to Hub’s and Frankie’s specifications.

  Hub’s datascreen also showed how many T-slices - fractions of a second - the current “best” agonist had been “best.” Of course at any one time, hundreds of contestants could be tied for “best,” owing to the granularity of the scoring subsystem, but most dropped back after a second or two. Fifteen consecutive seconds as “best” was rare, and fifty-six point five seconds, scored in season one, episode two had been the record until the previous evening.