The commercials started, and Cyrus immediately opened Chrome and called up Reddit, Facebook, Fox News, MSNBC.com, and a few other websites. While those were opening, he hit a combo of keys, and Tor opened with a few more obscure sites loaded and ready to go.
His first note was that the traffic at the mainstream places was the lowest he had ever seen. A few scattered posts, all coming during either this or the last commercial break, were all he could find on any of them. What little was there was as worthless as he expected – a few people desperate for any information, with nothing coming. He changed some alert settings and switched away.
The window he switched to was custom, the combined feed of the groups he monitored. Anything interesting that popped up there could be swapped to the focused Tor window in the upper right of the screen. Nothing was worth moving over, yet. He drummed his fingers on the desk a couple of times, deciding what to do, and hit another set of keys.
His custom chat window popped up and sent a ping. He felt confident that if anyone other than himself was on the line, it would be Karnath. He was not disappointed, as an avatar of a middle-aged man with a long beard and a wizard hat popped up on screen. He knew a single C was on the other end to represent him. He hated avatars in general and had once attempted to prevent them from showing on his end, but Karnath’s always came through and he’d stopped fighting it. He and Karnath chatted more than they talked to anyone in person, and by now it was as natural as any other conversation.
“About time you logged in, C-man,” Karnath typed. “Worried I’d lost you like the rest.”
Cyrus quickly checked to confirm that he hadn’t had any pings before he sent out his own and responded. “Sure, K, you were all over it. I see the numerous attempts to reach me.”
“What can I say, I was busy. Had to check into a few things.”
Cyrus scanned over a list of contacts and sent a few more pings before continuing. “I’m going to try to wake up Steph, Rohit, Oskar, and Min-Ji and bring them in.”
Too many seconds later, Cyrus was still staring at the cursor flashing, waiting on a response. This was unlike Karnath – he usually typed fast, short sentences that would hit the screen almost as soon as you stopped responding. If he’d been talking with Oskar, he would have gone and grabbed a drink while waiting for a three-paragraph response with footnotes, but that wasn’t Karnath. He reached back to the keyboard to check on the connection, when Karnath finally responded.
“Shit. Rohit.”
“What?”
Another long pause, and Karnath continued. “It’s what I was checking on. What Anastasia’s reason could be.”
Cyrus responded over the top of Karnath’s follow up, both hitting the screen at the same time. Cyrus typed, “What do you mean her reason? The reason is to drum up publicity for something, probably a movie.” It buried Karnath’s one word response, “Kashmir.”
Before either could add anything else, an icon lit up to indicate that Min-Ji had joined them. “What is going on? Some sort of virus is opening a window live streaming a talk show on all the computers, and everyone is just staring. It’s creepy!”
Cyrus typed, “Yeah, I’ve got it, too. Show is more interesting than I expected, though.”
“You’re wrong.” Cyrus stopped at that – Karnath was rarely that blunt. He’d tell you you were wrong, of course, sometimes even when you were right, but he’d thrown in a pop culture reference as well to make it a joke. “Not a virus. Turn on a TV instead of a monitor.”
Min-Ji and Cyrus responded simultaneously, “Don’t have one.”
“It’s not just computers. It’s everything. All TV stations. Phones and tablets. Screens are currently showing Tonight! no matter where you are. At least on the computers, we can open other things.”
Cyrus considered this, looking at it from all the angles he could see, and applying Occam’s razor. Between how crazy the entirety of the show had been so far and the track record of Karnath, he was leaning towards it being fewer assumptions to get to this entire thing being a practical joke from Karnath, right down to creating a fake show for them to watch. His biggest question was whether Min-Ji or the others were in on it or not.
“MJ”, he typed, “are you in on this with Karnath?”
“?” from Min-Ji, which didn’t answer anything, but Cyrus expected that. The comment was really directed at Karnath, telling him the jig is up.
“Fair, but not this time,” he responded. “From everything I can see, this is real.”
Before anyone else could respond, two more lights hit the screen as Oskar and Steph joined in. Steph started immediately, posting simply, “???”
Cyrus summed things up quickly, “MJ and I have had computers taken over by talk show. K swears not his doing. Says it’s all screens. Thinks A is for real.”
Karnath’s response came almost immediately, “Safe side, let’s type Anastasia out.”
Cyrus rolled his eyes, not believing that Karnath wasn’t responsible for this. “What’s on your end, Steph?”
Steph replied, “Woken up by TV turning on by itself. During monologue.”
A few paragraphs from Oskar interrupted the conversation, and everyone paused to read it. “Are you all seeing the same thing I’m seeing? We were woken up by the TV, sound blaring loud enough to get past my snoring and Anya’s ear plugs. I barely know who the man is, and have tried to turn the TV off, but it won’t go. Unplugging the TV didn’t help – our phones immediately started streaming it.
“Anya’s scared. When it moved to the phones, she started to worry that this was something directed at me – at us – and has been on the edge of panic. I’ve been telling her it can’t be, but some confirmation from you would help out. Does anyone know what’s going on here?”
Steph was the quickest to answer, although her “N” was less than useful. Min-Ji took longer to get the same information out, typing out “I don’t know.” Cyrus didn’t, either, but he didn’t think he needed to type it out – no answer would give just as much information.
Karnath had an answer, of course, although Cyrus still wasn’t completely sold on it not being a prank from Karnath. “I think the answer is staring us in the face,” Karnath wrote. “What do we know at this point – not what anyone is saying, but verifiable facts?
“First – we know that we have all been watching something we don’t normally watch, after it somehow started up on whatever device we were using or near. That ought to be enough right there, compadres.”
Cyrus knew the others would go along with Karnath, so he felt he had to be the voice of reason, or at least opposition. “Easier explanations are that someone is pranking us, or someone one of us has pissed off is targeting us for something.”
“I could figure out a way, given time, to force anyone I want to end up watching a given TV show, true. I could also take it a step farther, hire some people to play the roles, and deep fake the celebrities – wouldn’t even need to be that accurate to fool you guys, since you seem to stay out of general pop culture.”
“Sounds like you’re admitting something, K,” Cyrus typed.
“What I couldn’t do, however,” Karnath went on, ignoring Cyrus, “would be to make any TV or device you could happen to pick up show the same thing. I couldn’t take an unconnected device and have it start to air anything.”
Cyrus paused, acknowledging this. If he had a TV, would it show the same? Is this a ploy by Karnath, knowing that we don’t?
Min-Ji jumped in. “You started with first, K. What else you got?”
“Second – we know that a person unknown to the majority of people has upended the standard format of Tonight.”
Cyrus typed back, “True, but that doesn’t mean much. Shaking up formats for a publicity stunt is far from unheard of.”
“That’s why I said we know that an unknown person is on the show. You are right, we can’t eliminate this being planned by the show’s producers. But it is another data point of something strange going on. That said, let’s move on to third – we know that the commercials being aired are not normal.”
Cyrus looked at the window with the streaming show, and saw that it was currently on a commercial. Are those orcs? he thought as he saw a group of grey skinned bikers entering a bar. OK, that is weird.
Min-Ji typed, “What is this?” just as the orcs started to surround some patrons of the bar. Cyrus watched as a patron drained their glass and ordered more from the bartender. He laughed out loud at the name of the beer, which was clearly the point, while rolling his eyes at the commercial itself.
Cyrus typed, “This is why I don’t watch TV.”
“I don’t know if you watched during the first commercial break or not, but if you had you’d have seen a Red Bull commercial that broke away from their standard fare, and a trailer for a horror movie I imagine was very disturbing to anyone living in Redwood City.” Cyrus had not paid much attention, and now that he thought about it, he hadn’t been paying much attention ever since the show started. He was grateful that Karnath had been, even if he wasn’t yet swayed to believing.
Steph typed, “Oh my. Watch.”
Cyrus looked back to the screen, just in time to see a massive creature, all claws and teeth and horns, crashing through a forest. Arrows were bouncing off it, and it practically obliterated a tree that was in its way. Something in it called to him – he didn’t know what, but he felt something stir, something that hadn’t in a long time.
His breath caught when the trap was sprung, and forest warriors mounted on elk burst from hiding. The sight of the two circling the creature, evading its attacks as they hit home with their own was mesmerizing to him, and he wanted to know more. A small part of his brain processed that this was an effective ad, putting the beer commercial to shame. He didn’t even know what was being advertised yet – it could be a movie, TV series, game, or even a book – but he knew that he needed to know and become a part of it.
When the moss-covered magi finished his spell and engulfed the beast, Cyrus nearly jumped up and cheered. When the warrior held his trophy high, he couldn’t stop himself and he did cheer. He sat back down, and as “Evermorn” came and went on the screen, he slumped down and breathed a heavy sigh. Whatever it was, he needed it.
The chat was forgotten as the show started back up. No one responded to Karnath’s last message asking if anyone knew what was going on with Rohit.
