Anyway. After reading the resultant story to NoNo she said it reminded her of a sci-fi tale she'd read about a lady in a golden cage that essentially had the same properties as the Gear. Damnit.
The story she described was tragic, mine is pretty much just a mild slice of life. I can't even point out the conflict, really, so it's more like a string of ideas listed out. Fun stuff.
I'd like to thank the internet for keeping an eye on my knowledge of Shakespeare scripts until I needed it.
-Mars
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Fifteen minutes until air. Anna knew she looked "wrapped and ready," as Master Red called it, but she didn't feel right. She wore "the Gear" for the first time, she'd visualized wearing it before but now she felt like an imposter. It was clear to her that the years of training, the constant study and hundreds of student performances were just a sham. She felt like her graduation was a mistake, the Masters gripped by a four year epidemic of mis-marking her transcripts, keeping her in the program undeservedly. And now it would all come to light. As soon as the screens lit up around the nation and she took her first cue everyone would know Anna was a fraud. Laughed at in private, pitied in public, and castigated by every critic who could tap a key pad. Pilloried and humiliated she would live long with her shame, a footnote on how not to do it, an object lesson for every Academy intake class from this point on, for ever and ever…
Anna hung her head, slumped in her chair, letting the whir of the Gear become a wail of despair echoing in her head as she sank into a private blackness of utter failure predestined.
Three breaths. Hold the last one. Count ten.
Letting the air out loudly, buzzing the exhalation around loose lips, Anna sprang up to her feet and started bouncing, shaking her hands and arms wildly. Kevin, leaning over the script in a chair next to hers started at the sudden movement, his arms coming up to protect against Anna's flailing limbs.
"Hey, hey! Damnit!" He rolled the script and whacked her a few times. The paper bludgeon plonking harmlessly off the cables and right elbow cuff of her Gear.
Anna laughed and faked a kick at his knee, causing him to flinch again, the servos on his rig clicking and hissing, which made her laugh harder.
"Oh I see, that's how it is," Kevin grinned and stabbed with his script, tagging her ab plates. "Touch!"
She slapped at his weapon but he disengaged and tapped her again. "Double touch!" He yelled, "you owe me a beer."
"Ok, ok," she held up her hands, the black gloves spidered with thin guys and rods between and surrounding the digits, held them palms out while Kevin relaxed back into his chair, unrolling the pages. When he looked at the lines again - which Anna knew he'd already memorized - she struck, hammering his left bicep with a pair of quick jabs. His Gear absorbed most of the attack, but she had raised her middle knuckle to sneak in a painful poke between the arm cables.
"Hey, ow!" he grabbed his arm, dropping the script.
"Two for flinching."
Kevin rolled his eyes but nodded, unable to argue against hallowed tradition. Anna flopped back into her chair, slouching as much as she could with the Gear cables and sensor cuffs surrounding her. The two of them were alone in the green room, waiting for the earphoned-stage manager to stick her head in and frantically wave them out. It was a known fact that any SM was either vibrating with anxiety so fast they would soon break the light barrier and disappear from this plane or were frustratingly mellow in the face of the chaos that always threatened any theatrical performance.
Anna liked the anxious ones better. Their neurotic energy always made her feel calm by comparison. A stage manager with no evident worries tended to make her feel like she had forgotten something.
Still rubbing his wound, Kevin turned toward her. "In the zone?"
She nodded, "Yup, cleared it away with some self-loathing visualization. The world hates me and I never should have graduated."
"I kept saying that, but did they listen?"
Anna let the Gear servos whine pointedly as she raised a specific finger slowly, not looking at her co-star.
"Meh. That's more impressive in the training rigs." Kevin held his arms out, flexing his hands and twiddling his fingers in complicated patterns. "Man…I knew there'd be a difference but this stuff is awesome."
"The training is rigorous so the practice will be effortless." Anna recited, impersonating Master Red's stentorian delivery. She shoved herself out of the slouch and twisted to face Kevin, "Which is such bullshit, they're just too cheap to upgrade the rigs."
"Oh, I dunno," Kevin stood, talking as he went through a quick kata, legs kicking, arms blocking and punching the air in the ritualized movements, "I think there's something to that. This is so much easier to move in."
"I guess."
Anna watched him complete the form and then did her own. It was clear from the first move that he was right. The Gear was less restricting than the Academy's training rigs, more elegant. The cables were thinner, more supple, moving fluidly with her muscles. The sensor cuffs were nearly flat, almost as flexible as cloth, unlike the bulky metal bands she'd been tortured with since she'd opted (and been judged worthy) for performing arts.
It'd been…what? Ten years since she'd auditioned? Her hands did a series of edge strikes as she reflected on that day. Fresh out of elementary and the administrators had them trotted out in front of one panel after another. Timed math, dramatic reading, obstacle course, animal handling, service agility, sentence parsing imaginary languages, crisis response, tool use, etc., etc.
Officially it was called Future Occupation Assessment and Assignment. Everyone who'd ever gone through it, which by law was in fact everyone, knew it as the Thresher. Three weeks of tests Anna didn't even understand and then half a year before she got her choices.
Military (Operations), Performing Arts (Stage Performance), Military (Piloting), Sports (Team), Restaurant Service (Server), Judicial (Court Actions), or Retail (Corporate Sales).
Like a large percentage of girls at that age Anna had been hoping for Animal Handling (Horse) but even she realized that crying and running to the edge of the stall when confronted with a full grown equine during the Thresher wasn't going to convince anyone she should be around them for the rest of her life.
Her mother - Education (Primary) - was ecstatic that Anna had qualified for Judical (all their friends and neighbors had known about it within a week of the results) but the idea of law didn't appeal to the frenetic child. Too many desks and boring clothes. Her father - Residential Maintenance (Plumbing) plus a respected and rare double specialization in Residential Maintenance (Electrical) - was tickled by the idea of Sports for his daughter and joked with her about being a heavy tackle for his beloved Steelers.
"They'll call you Buck Twenty, the little tackler with the big numbers." He'd tease and Anna would rush him, giggling, crashing into his legs. He'd always go down with an exaggerated "woof!", wrapping her up so they fell in a pile. "Sack! The quarter back goes down!" he'd cry in the announcer-voice.
"Sack! Sack! Sack!" Anna would chant, bouncing on his stomach.
In the green room, Anna sped up her movements, feeling the Gear respond smoothly. There was no hitch or grind as she varied the speed or stopped suddenly. Kevin cocked an eyebrow at her, palms up in front of him.
"See? Top quality. Not bad for a 'Cavalcade of Culture' gig."
She did a pirouette, shuffle stepped and leapt into a four foot high prat-fall that rattled her head cage, then flipped back to standing with an arcing flex of her back and legs.
"I don't think that's in the script…" Kevin said mildly, pretending to search for the stage directions amongst the pages.
In the end it was Anna's guidance counselor who pointed out how rare the Performing Arts (Stage Performance) classification really was.
He showed the family a bar graph, indicating a row of tiny stacks at one end. "That there is your highest research section, all the Research and Development categories and Theoretical science positions. Those are rare for the simple fact that not many brains can handle them. Percentages are low and we have to retest the candidates after four years of intensives. And here," he tapped a bar a bit further to the left. The section it was in had a half dozen stacks with career labels on them, each one only slightly taller than the R&Ds. "That is the Performing Arts (Stage Performance) slot. Few qualify. With pup-tech we just don't need that many actors and actresses to fill all the roles."
"So what you're saying," Anna's father said, canted to one side in his chair and pointing two fingers at the counselor so that his daughter thought he was about to lunge and stab the man with his hand, "is that it's rare because we don't need a lot of them, not because it's hard? My daughter's not a RoC." He brought the fingers straight down on the desk with a thud. It was a gesture of finality that Anna was familiar with.
Anna blanched at her father's use of the Robotics (Custodian) acronym in front of her. Despite the school's best efforts to give dignity to the idea (someone would be suited for and assigned to the task) it was clear that sitting in a manufacturing plant watching mechanized assembly lines for malfunction was not a desirable job. RoC, RoC head, RoC and RoLL - Robotics (Line Lookout) - were dire playground insults. And, though Anna was too young to know it at the time, cause for more than one barroom fight.
The guidance counselor gave a quick glance at the young girl and a disapproving glare at her father, obviously unimpressed by his fingers on his desk. Which made Anna pay close attention. "Sir, some are very much suited to Robotics (Custodian) and the work they do is vital," he glanced down at his hands, clasped in front of him on top of the bar graph he had recently held up for their inspection, the heat leaving his voice, "even if it is not always the most fulfilling." When Anna was at the Academy she had learned of the suicide rates, controversy over the Thresher's ability to accurately place everyone, and wondered how many times the counselor had to inform a student they were a RoC.
The man looked up again, spreading his hands, palm out, toward the family. "That said, no, your daughter is most certainly meant for a different form of employment. My point is that with the pup-tech applications in entertainment a handful of people can take on a greater breadth of roles than previously possible. And so," he tapped the graph on his desk, "fewer are needed."
Spinning his chair around he pulled open a drawer in the bank of filing cabinets behind him. As he spoke his fingers danced along folders, "But each PA (SP) must therefore have the ability to play that greater breadth of roles. An ability beyond what even the greatest performers of the past must have had. From leading lady to extra, Ophelia to handmaiden. Sometimes all in the…ah, here we go," he pulled out a pamphlet and brandished it aloft before sliding the drawer closed and spinning back to face Anna and her parents. "Sometimes all in the same day, the same performance even."
He placed the glossy paper rectangle on the desk in front of them, it's narrow cover showing the twin masks below an illuminated script that Anna could barely make out for all the curves and curls. Squinting and tilting her head she finally made out two words: The Academy.
"What's the count?" Kevin asked.
Sighing, Anna looked at the enormous digital clock above the door. It had two displays showing both the time past in the performance (in bright green numbers) and the time remaining (red). It was common knowledge that Kevin never looked at the count. A superstition he held for no other reason than to have one. He had confided to Anna in second year, one alcohol and Molliere fueled bull-session, that he affected the performance ritual because it seemed expected of an actor.
"Twenty four ten pass, one thirty
"Thirty seven? I bet Dashiell's pregnant pauses are about to have twins."
"He was…what? Three intakes ahead of us?"
Kevin nodded, "Yeah, Master Hammet's house. You remember him, right?" He hooked his thumbs under imaginary lapels, willing his face to droop so far that the Gear's head cage rods had to extend full length to keep contact with his jowls. Anna wondered again at her friend's rubber-faced mimicry. His transformations were so complete he could probably play a mob scene with a single body.
His voice took on the airy quality of Hammet's accented tones, "Words can be…poor substitutes…for…silence!" Kevin punctuated each pause with Hammet's trademarked look of artistic intensity. Anna applauded.
"Fabulous, fabulous! I could hear your torment in every moment of dead air." Her grin widened, the cage rods following the movements of her features.
The stage manager poked her head into the green room. Strands of hair had escaped a once severe ponytail and floated at all angles from beneath her headphones. The ubiquitous clipboard - creased and haphazardly folded pages attached to it front and back by the metal clip and several rubber bands - was consulted with a glance far too fast to actually impart information and she waved furiously at the two performers to follow her.
"Five minutes, let's go!"
In comparison, Anna felt herself sink into a deeper state of calm in the woman's presence. She ambled along behind Kevin the short distance to the wings of the relay stage. They stepped onto their blocks and a swarm of technicians descended.
Prop guys - Performing Arts (Property) - handed each of them a rapier and made sure they knew which way to point them, scabbard loops were magnetically attached to their waist cuffs, Kevin getting a main gauche for his off hand. A steel-haired woman from FX - Performing Arts (Effects) - clambered around, attaching squib sensors to Kevin's midsection. The swarm parted after mere seconds of frenetic activity, giving way to the man and woman who strode purposely toward the actors. These new arrivals sported bandoliers and tool belts bristling with small instruments, handles sprayed across their jumpsuits like cactus spines. The tools were badges, denotation of nobility amongst the techs and markers of respect amongst actors. If a performer perpetrated an arrogance against one of this class things tended to go wrong.
Gear techs - Performing Arts (Technical, Relay Gear) - supervisors of the final pup-tech check. Almost in unison they had Anna and Kevin jog in place, windmill each arm slowly, drum their fingers, and run through HASS (happy, angry, sad, surprised). All the while alternating their bug-eyed view between the Gear wrapped performers and a screen at their hip.
"Eh, loose rod," Anna's tech murmured and had her bend over so he could reach into her head cage. He used a thin applicator to reapply adhesive to her upper lip (she clenched her jaw to keep from squinching her nose at the cold sensation). Anna stared at him as he held the rod in place while the glue set. He had a deft touch, the pressure enough for a solid seal but not jabbing her like some ham handed two-back intake slug. His face, smooth and long with deep set eyes behind digital loupe cylinders, was familiar but it took a moment to place it.
"Are you Gerard Yousef?" she struggled not to move her upper lip while asking. It helped that she'd taken a semester of Historical Techniques: Schtick and Burlesque as an elective.
The tech looked up at her, surprised. His pupils were unsettling, enormous black amoebas in the loupes before he flipped them up with a shake of his head. "Yeah. Academy Technical eight intakes ago. Have we met? Were you in my class?"
"Nope, I just got out. But the techs still touch your picture in the wings of main-stage before a show."
Gerard looked away, color rising in his cheeks that Anna judged was embarrassment. "Yeah, well…I wouldn't know about that."
Liar, Anna thought with a mental smile. Aloud she said, "You think that glue's dry yet? I'm on in a few."
The flustered tech took his hand away from her face, eyes unable to meet hers. Careful not to jar the cage even in his discomfiture. "Yeah, um…yeah."
Anna poked at his nose, stopping short but causing him to jerk his head back. Keeping her finger extended she said quietly, "Hey Gerard…" He looked up at her lopsided grin. "Two for flinching." Her fist tapped him on the arm twice.
"I should of put the glue just a bit lower, skeez," he said with a relaxed smile. "Throw a rod, snap a cable." Gerard made the good luck phrase sound like a ritual intonation instead of a throw-away pleasantry. Anna nodded her thanks and stepped from the block to stand beside Kevin.
"We beat them," Anna whispered as a trio of Geared forms appeared in the opposite wings.
"Indra always lags, it's her thing. Especially when she does Romeo." The two of them waved and mouthed obscenities to their co-stars in the opposite wings.
"Get fucked," Kevin breathed, putting appropriate gestures to the almost silent words.
Anna pointed to them and then to her crotch, getting a kiss face and butt shake in return from Indra and a deuce-deuce from Gilbert. Peter wove a complicated sentence in sign language that besmirched several generations of their families and attendant domesticated animals. The five of them grinned wildly, suppressing laughter before forcing the joviality away.
The announcer stepped onto the live stage, visible through the cloudy screen of the relay stage's fourth wall. Anna could just see his back as he addressed the audience. She imagined the scenery holo the bums-on-seaters could see from their point of view. A piazza, narrow buildings crowded around the perimeter. Summer sun beating down with intensity through a blue and cloudless sky.
Bowing, the announcer ran up into his intro, the words piped back to the relay stage. "The cavalcade continues! A scene from times past…"
Anna stopped listening, she'd heard it all in rehearsal, didn't need the details just the cue and knew that she'd pick it up even without paying attention.
Kevin nudged her and tilted his chin to the live stage wings. They were just a few steps away but separated by the fourth wall, perfectly clear in the wings. Costumers were fiddling with the outfits one last time, fluffing a ruff, jaunting the angle of a cap. They fluttered away just as the SM pointed at the actors, making sure to catch their gaze before pointing to Gerard and his cohort.
"Link 'em," she said quietly and the techs tapped a quick sequence on the hip screens. The actors watched as the puppets slowly spun up. The brightly costumed figures tensed, came out of their slouches, the muscles answering the Gear signals as they moved into synchro with Kevin and Anna.
Kevin tapped a rhythm sequence at the neck cuff of the cage, switching the head signals to mirror. The upstage puppet's face turned toward them, the olive skin showing faint wrinkles against long features. The Roman nose was a hawkish beak that dominated the features. From the audience it would look distinctive, from up close it looked cartoonish.
"You're ugly," Anna whispered to Kevin. He smirked, the expression mirrored along the lines of his puppet's mouth. He reached up and tapped out of mirror, the simulacrum's hand moving to it's own neck, and the Italian noble's face turned back upstage.
Anna ran the same sequence and saw a darker, younger face staring back at hers. Kevin snorted at the huge forehead the puppet sported. It gave a complicated impression of dumb, innocent, and loyal that, Anna had to admit, was perfect for the part. Even if it did inspire her cohort to make severe-overbite, monogloid faces at her, aped perfectly by the magnificently nosed puppet linked to his Gear.
"…And so the scene is set…" the announcer exclaimed. Just a few more seconds until their cue.
"They grew that one especially for you," Kevin jibed, "it's a startling likeness."
"I hope you get stabbed in the gut and die slowly while spouting overwrought oaths and curses." Anna replied.
"You peeked!" he said with mock-horror.
"…To fair
That was their cue. Kevin stepped first, striding with an upright swagger, hand on the hilt of his rapier as he made for the mock fountain in the center of the relay stage.
The tall, wiry puppet made the same motions, leaned over the fountain on the live stage, bubbling water splashing over the ringed fingers he extended under the lowest fall in perfect time with Kevin's actions.
Anna came after, steps less sure, lethargic and slow. She dropped to her knees next to Kevin and dunked her caged head into the dry well of the ersatz fountain.
Her puppet, sweating and red-faced, did the same. He came up soaked, hair flinging droplets as far as the second row as his large head shook away the cool water.
"Bwwwaaaah!" Anna gasped as though coming up for air, the cage mics altering her voice into that of a baritone male. "I pray thee, good Mercutio, let's retire…"
It satisfied Anna to have the first and last lines. Indra was the lead of the play, but not the scene. Peter got to spill the "king of cats'" rage and hatred over the stage in crashing waves. Gilbert was a nameless flunky but he had a lead in a song and dance later in the program.
Kevin had the meat of the matter, dancing up and down emotional ladders and dying fabulously. His puppet's blood and simple organs spread in gory brushstrokes across the live stage's plastic cobbles.
She'd have liked to do either death, to be sure. Peter underplayed his, clicking off the relays almost as soon as Indra's collapsible rapier withdrew. Leaving his puppet to dead-weight fall and leak silently and motionless.
But for all that Anna was content to have the last words. She grabbed Indra - who did a very good standing amazed - and pushed once, shouting her penultimate lines.
Indra dropped her rapier and the metal hilt got caught in the field of the magnetic scabbard loop. The telescoping blade flipped wildly and crashed to the floor seconds after her puppet's bloodied weapon clanked to the cobbles.
The two women stared at each other for a long moment, the bubbling giggles visible in their eyes. Peter and Kevin, relays inactive but still in place (propped on their elbows) for blocking, pulled faces and waved their hands to try and break Anna and Indra's concentration.
There was a lengthy dramatic pause before the Romeo puppet's lips, perhaps curled in a slight smile but his face otherwise despairing, cried out, "O, I am fortune's fool!"
Recovered, Anna stepped forward, spun Indra around and pushed her staggering into the wings, calling out, "Why dost thou stay?!" before turning back to the bodies littering the
"Shit," Anna thought to herself, feeling the weight of the situation close around her and inform the expression that the cage rods picked up with their subtle sensors, "the prince is going to be pissed."
Responding to her corresponding gesture, Benvolio's hand rubbed at the sickly worry and frustration etched across his broad forehead as the lights went down and then out.
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