Winning Mars | Page 2

you that?"

"Nobody. Our inference algorithms--"
"Bullshit!" Jere slammed a hand down on the desk, then turned and
paced. He didn't know he was doing it. He just knew he had to walk.
He felt wound up with nervous energy, like an overcharged battery, hot
and ready to burst.
Because that was the big secret. The big secret. One of the writers must
have talked. Or one of the sponsors. Or maybe even one of the actors.
And if the secret was out... Jere stole a glance at the two
double-breasted sharks, trying to look wide-eyed and innocent.
The dataspook tried again. "Mr. Gutierrez, it's plain as a 1M spike in a
trendline. There are too many impossible correlations, too many
sponsors that match investment and ad revenue records. We can even
map some of your plots to television shows that were popular in the
nineties and aughties. Seems some of your writers reused their tropes.
The new Afghanistan thing was really the most blatant. I mean, every
once in a while a commercial entity gets a unique and heartwarming
story that hasn't hit the user-generated media pool, but that was going a
little too far. And analysis of the shots of the rescue showed far too
much product placement for General Motors and Wal-Mart. I assume
you have them bid on the rescue contracts?"
Jere just looked at the dataspook. He was young, younger than Jere
even, maybe early 20s. He had a wide-eyed sincere look that was
completely convincing.
Perfect for telling me I'm dead, Jere thought. And he was. If the secret
was that far out, he was done. His big epiphany had taken him on a
16-month ride. Now it was over.
He remembered that first great realization. Patrice, his girlfriend at the
time, had actually listened to his dad when he said they should watch
Casablanca. She'd accessed it one night, when Jere was too tired to do
much other than complain through the black and white titles, and make
fun of the cigarette-smoking. But when the movie was over, and Patrice
was crying, and even Jere was feeling something that he hadn't felt

from the morass of user-generated media and found media and
interactives and even professional linears, he thought, Holy crap, if this
eighty-year-old-film with guys in funny uniforms can affect me, maybe
this is the story thing that dad always talked about, the thing he said we
lost back when the age of television got eaten by the internet.
And then he thought, I can use this.
Jere made one stop before he cashed in the small trust fund his dad had
given him for education and found an ailing linear network to buy. "I'm
going to bring back television," he told his dad. "What you couldn't do,
I'm going to."
"Great," dad said, lounging on some foamy thing in his pool.
But the night stars had never looked so bright. The day had never
seemed so perfect. And when Neteno started its stunts, started serving
up those impossible stories, those heart-wrenching exclusives, it
exploded into Neteno the powerhouse, Neteno the savior of linears,
Neteno the spirit of television risen.
But if the secret was out... Forget buying black. I'm already dead. I just
haven't started smelling yet.
"I get it," Jere said. "You know my secrets, so you don't want to lend to
me anymore."
Jerome broke into a smile that looked almost natural. "No. Not at all.
We don't care about your secrets. We're just worried they'll get out in
your audience."
Richard nodded. "We've run some scenarios, and none of them are
pretty. If you continue working the stories to the extent you have,
within 4 months there's a 2-sigma confidence that amateur inferrers will
discover what you have been doing. After that, you have a few weeks
before the evidence base grows so big people can't ignore it. Then,
you're operating with maybe two to five percent of your current
viewership base."

Jere shook his head. "I'm surprised it's that much."
"Televengelist syndrome," Jerome said. "You've been in the public eye
a lot, and you're a charismatic man. You haven't been the network man,
hiding behind the curtain. A certain subpopulation really likes you.
They won't be swayed by facts."
But I can't run on 2% of my audience, Jere thought. And the sponsors
wouldn't touch me, even if I could.
"What do we do?" he asked.
"Be more conservative with your scripting," Richard said. "If you
handled everything like you did the Twelve Days in May, you'd have
20, 24 months before it collapsed."
"But we hardly did anything in Twelve Days!" Jere said. Mainly
because dad had uncles and shit back in DC, and Jere knew he'd have
his nuts on the chopping block if dad thought he was