Making an Example
Inside the dim editing room, dozens of illusion screens hung in the air, flickering rapidly at the flick of my fingers.
"Kill the BGM right there, then cut. Switch it to black and white. Swap in a different track."
"Here?"
"Yeah. They'll be dying to know what comes next, right? Oh, and I'm slapping an ad on as a caption. The sponsor's going to love it."
"That's incredible."
"Obviously. You drop a production-sponsor ad on the one scene everyone is desperate to see — you have no idea how well that performs."
At my direction, the editing mage seated beside me worked the mana circuits, sweat pouring off him. In this this world, broadcast editing demanded high-caliber talent — a mage, at the very least.
"I-I'm done!!"
A sharp click, and the grand symphony that had been swelling cut out. The image froze, then punched in to a close-up.
"That's perfect!! You've got a gift for this, you know that?"
"Th-thank you!"
You couldn't teach a sense like that. Editing was talent, pure and simple. Anyone could learn the technique. What you couldn't teach was the instinct for pulling a picture that actually satisfied an audience.
In a dating reality show, the trailer mattered every bit as much as the broadcast itself. In a little over a minute, you had to wring the viewers' curiosity and attention to the absolute limit. That didn't require showing them the truth. You locked the spoilers in a vault and built a narrative out of nothing but the contestants' charm and atmosphere.
The so-called Devil's Editing that Earth's TV stations pulled as routinely as eating lunch had, in this moment, descended upon this world for the very first time.
"Good. Paste in Male #6's cut."
Male #6, Julius, appeared on screen. That signature languid, honeyed smile in his eyes. The shot punched in as he tipped his head toward someone and tossed off a line, casual as anything.
Who he was talking to had been thoroughly obscured. For all anyone knew, it had been a throwaway joke tossed off in passing — but with the right cut and a little slow motion, the line transformed into a perfect beat of romance.
In reality, it was Julius asking if it was normal for his hands to shake like this, because it was his first time on camera.
Close enough.
The mood flipped. A hard drumbeat exploded through the track.
Male #1's cut — Aaron, Margrave of the Northern Frontier. Arm muscles a shirt couldn't begin to hide. I layered a heartbeat over it, loud, and shook the frame while I laid in ragged breathing that practically reeked of raw male heat. Then I stamped a red caption across the bottom of the shot.
He opens his eyes to the opposite sex.
Aaron hadn't done a thing. He'd just been sitting there, breathing. And I'd edited him into a feral beast-idol anyway.
"Heh. This is insane. I made it, and I still can't stop watching."
I crowed to myself and flicked my fingers toward the next cut.
The screen shifted again. This time it was Female #1, Rosalind — leaning at a slant against a window, looking down, that flash of despair in her eyes in the instant after she'd received zero roses. I caught that fleeting second of her, and under that sad, aching expression, the caption unfurled.
Was it a noble talking down to a commoner, or a commoner telling a noble they had no idea how the world looked from below? You couldn't tell. She came off like a tragic heroine who had failed to cross the gap between stations. I loved that too. Packaging Rosalind like this was a novel kind of fun all by itself.
And then, the final highlight — the one that would close the trailer.
At the symphony's highest swell, the carriage door opened, and Female #6, Marie, stepped down in slow motion. Black hair. Black eyes. An overwhelming face. The instant she turned a clear, bright smile on someone, the image froze, and the main copy swallowed the screen whole.
As a final cookie, Rosalind's face in the kitchen — frowning, thrown — flashed across the screen for a single second, and then it went to black. Her lips were saying this:
"CUT!!!!!!"
"Does it meet your approval?"
The editor looked at me.
"Yes! It's the best! There is no better trailer than this!"
It was perfect. Not a single spoiler about how anything actually turned out — and yet, with nothing but faces, atmosphere, and captions, we had built an overwhelming narrative. I would have staked my name on it: after watching this trailer, not a single citizen of the Empire would fail to wait for the broadcast.
"Good work. Send it out as-is — the second the evening news ends, prime time, simultaneous nationwide."
The moment the trailer hit Mana Displays across the entire continent, I pulled up the concurrent-user count on the anonymous community I had just opened on the mana network, linked into the station's systems — the Forest of the Empire.
Live comments along the bottom of the screen were never going to contain an explosion of public opinion like this. So I had given them a vast public square where anyone, through a terminal, could write and argue anonymously.
And my prediction had landed dead-on. Or rather — of course it had. These were methods Earth had already proven.
"Director! The server mana circuits are about to overload! Users are flooding in at hundreds of thousands per second!"
"What's money for if you don't spend it? Buy mana stones and expand the servers. Slap some frost magic on it as a stopgap!"
I hung the community's live board in the air and read down through the posts as they stacked up at speed. The Empire's citizens, still reeling from the trailer, had already taken leave of their senses and were pouring text onto the page. They were judging the contestants on looks and vibe alone, with no knowledge of rank — reactions of a hundred percent pure, unfiltered rawness.
The board had already split along lines of taste, and massive fandoms were forming in real time. They were going to be up all night, each camp singing the praises of whichever contestant they had decided to stan.
I snickered as I scrolled.
The miraculous logic by which Marie, who had been slicing potatoes at a countryside tavern, had overnight been recast as the dead imperial princess. That was the true charm of an anonymous community — and the chaos of information itself. The Empire's citizens were already addicted to this colossal dopamine party, the likes of which they had never experienced in their lives.
I was still enjoying the public mood when a post with a curious title appeared at the very top of the refreshed board.
The smile hanging at the corner of my mouth went cold.
Information control was the lifeblood of broadcasting. Sensitive internal settings leaking this early was a cardinal crime I would not, as an entertainment producer, tolerate.
I tapped the monitor with a finger and called to Sylvia, standing behind me.
"Sylvia."
"Yes, Director."
"That bastard who posted the spoiler. Bring him in. Now."
"I thought you said they couldn't be traced?"
I confessed, honestly.
"It actually works. Search the unique address from my terminal and the location will come up."
Unique-address tracing was only possible from my terminal. Not that it made any sense for a communications network that worked like the internet to not have unique addresses in the first place. It had been a secret only I knew. Well. Sylvia knew it now too.
"How underhanded of you..."
"You don't breathe a word of this. It's far too early to go public with that feature. Understood?"
"Understood, for now. And what should we do with this one?"
"Execute him."
"Are you serious...?"
"I'm kidding. Could be a station employee — if it is, fire them. If it's an outsider, find out who they heard it from and fire that person too. If we let this slide, we'll pay for it later."
"Understood."
Sylvia nodded as if none of this were remarkable, searched the unique address on my terminal, and started placing a call. Order was only maintained by making an example — by showing everyone just how ugly the end could be for anyone who leaked a spoiler.
The next morning, the door to the director's office on the top floor of the station slammed open.
"Director!!!"
Sylvia staggered in with enormous document bags in both hands, a hollow wreck of a woman whose dark circles, after night upon night of overtime, had crawled all the way down to her jaw. She looked ready to collapse from exhaustion at any second — but the eyes behind her glasses were flashing with something like madness.
Thud.
"What? What is it? What's the panic?"