In spite of the noise and the flashing lights, no one spoke or moved for a very long time.
19
Fallen Icon
THE NEXT MORNING, I avoided the news: no Twitter, no Facebook, no TV… nothing. I didn’t even switch on my phone. If Project Icon had made the morning headlines for any other reason than an unprecedented jump in the ratings (Breaking: “Every Man, Woman, and Child in America Watches Season Premiere of Singing Competition!”), I didn’t want to know. I mean, what good would it do? The number of people who’d tuned in the previous night was now beyond anyone’s control.
In reality, of course, the curiosity was just about killing me. After all, my future life with Brock—not to mention my writing career—depended on the show’s success.
A new season of Icon wouldn’t make the news all by itself, of course. (Other than on Rabbit News, which had been running shameless puff pieces since early December.) But if the daily network rankings published overnight by the Jefferson Metrics Organization moved in any way that could support ShowBiz magazine’s predictions about the show’s imminent death, no TV anchor in the country would be able to resist the opportunity to run a clip of Bibi Vasquez and Joey Lovecraft instead of reading aloud the latest minutes from the Federal Reserve.
I suppose it was the unreasonable pressure from Sir Harold—a.k.a. Mr. “Modest Ten Percent Gain”—that made me want to pretend the Jefferson Metrics Organization didn’t even exist. There was just no plausible reason to believe we could hold on to twenty million viewers and then add another two million—as he’d suggested—and all in the first night of the season. And if missing the numbers was a certainty, then why bother going through the whole demoralizing process of hearing it on the news, along with all the inevitable talk about our cancellation?
So, that morning, with a champagne hangover, I took my usual shower, drank my usual three cups of coffee, left my apartment at the usual time of just after nine o’clock, but in a total information vacuum. NASA could have accidentally blown up Canada a few hours earlier, and I wouldn’t have known any better.
I was off the grid.
I’d gone dark.
Dark or not, however, I was still expected to report to my borrowed cubicle at the global headquarters of Zero Management on Sunset, where I was going to be working until the live shows began, assuming season thirteen ever got that far. So I unlocked my bicycle from the rack outside, and ten minutes later, I was at the office.
And guess what? Everything seemed normal. The lobby was empty aside from Reza, the security guard, who was reading the latest issue of Uzi Enthusiast magazine. The TV was muted and tuned to a finance channel. And from the speakers embedded in the ceiling came the unmistakable chorus of Ernie Bucket’s “Ain’t Pretty, But Sure Can Sing.” I marveled at how it sounded even worse than the first time I’d ever heard it.
Ping.
The elevator arrived.
I stepped inside and hit “PH.”
Ping.
Now I was surging upward to the whine of a distant pulley mechanism. Seconds later, the doors opened with a knock and a clang. I took a breath. I always take a breath when emerging into the Zero Management lobby. I swear, the view is better from up there that it must be from space: San Gabriel Mountains to the north, sunlight mirrored from the snow on the peaks; the giant shards of glass that made up downtown to the east; a great slab of ocean to the west; and of course La Brea Avenue, a glowing lava stream of hot metal, cutting south over the horizon.
But something wasn’t right. It was Stacey, the receptionist. She was nose deep in a tissue. By the looks of things, it wasn’t the first tissue she’d used that morning, nor would it be the last. She was so distraught, in fact, that she didn’t even notice me. So I walked quickly past, hoping this was a romantic problem (her Belgian boyfriend, Fufu, seemed obviously gay to everyone who’d met him) and not related to the Jefferson Metrics Organization. There was something else amiss, though. The cubicles to either side of my own were empty. As were all the others.
Where the hell was everybody?
I tapped awake my computer and reached for my phone—I couldn’t keep it switched off forever. And that’s when I saw it: my browser homepage, which was set (as a matter of company policy) to