Chapter 30 : Hit Refresh

Chapter 30: Chapter 30 : Hit Refresh

It was almost eleven when Derek Mills came across the link.

He was a sophomore at Long Beach State, supposedly finishing a sociology paper due in the morning. A friend from high school had shared a post on Facebook, its title one line long. Is MrPelican a FRAUD? There were over three hundred replies under it, and someone had pasted a YouTube link underneath. The pelican guy had put out a new video.

Derek had no interest in any pelican. He just wanted to see how the guy was going to talk his way out of this.

He clicked.

No intro. No hi-my-name-is. The very first second was a hand slapping down on the roof of a silver BMW. Smack.

"Thirty people. One M3. Last hand on the car drives it home."

Cut to Ethan’s face, square to the lens. "Some people say this whole thing was fake. Watch it first. Then decide."

Derek snorted. Fine. He’d watch.

And then he couldn’t stop.

The video moved unreasonably fast. No shot lasted longer than five seconds. Every pause between sentences had been cut, so each line came crashing in on the heels of the last.

In the top corner of the screen, two numbers never went away: how many people were left, and how many hours had gone by. Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-four. Every time a number ticked, Derek’s chest tightened a little.

The water-gun bit ran under a sportscaster voiceover, and number nine’s beet-red face froze and zoomed in, big white letters underneath. HE WILL NOT LET GO. Derek laughed out loud, clapped a hand over his mouth, and glanced back at his sleeping roommate.

Right before every segment ended, there was always one line that hooked him.

"At 1:17 a.m., a car pulled into the lot." Black. Next segment. Headlights swept across one groggy face after another, and what rolled in was a dusty old Corolla. Derek nearly slid off his chair.

"Will they take the hundred bucks?" Black. Next segment. A stack of bills riffled across the screen, the number in the corner climbing from one hundred to eight, until a big guy in a basketball jersey bent down and planted a loud kiss on the roof.

"Thirty-six hours without sleep, and somebody’s started talking to the car." Black. Next segment.

Derek had figured the sponsor bits would be dead air. The car lot owner bragging into the camera about his six years as association president, a tutoring center’s logo stuck up in the corner, some phone-store guy with gelled hair. He already had his finger on the skip-ahead.

Instead, every one of them was a gag. When the owner got to "half the cars on this street drove out through this gate," the shot crash-zoomed in on his face to the sound of an old-school dramatic sting. Every time the phone-store guy said "Western Avenue, Caruso Wireless," a little counter popped up in the corner, and it climbed all the way to seven. By the fourth time, a girl in a sun hat cracked. "We got it! We really got it!"

Derek was pounding the desk laughing. When he finally caught himself, the ads were over. He even remembered which street the phone store was on.

Derek glanced at the progress bar and realized eight minutes had gone by. He hadn’t flipped back to his paper once.

The last shot was the sun coming up over the roof of the Toyota store, only five hands left on the silver BMW. Ethan stood in front of the car and smiled into the camera.

"That’s it for this episode. See you next time."

The end credits began to roll.

Derek stared at the screen.

"...That’s it?" he hissed. "Are you fucking kidding me? Say something! Is it real or not?"

His hand was already on the mouse, ready to close the tab.

The picture jerked to a stop.

The credits slid backward, the crowd drew back together, and Ethan walked backward into frame. He held up one finger.

"Not yet."

A screenshot. That thread. Every username blurred, the title perfectly clear. Is MrPelican a FRAUD?

"I know some of you are saying this whole thing was fake. Next episode, we clear everything up."

Black.

"Holy shit!" Derek yelled.

His roommate rolled over and mumbled a curse. Derek didn’t care. He copied the link and pasted it onto his own Facebook page, then thought about it and added: WATCH THE ENDING!! Then he opened the fraud thread, scrolled all the way to the bottom, and replied:

he put THIS THREAD in his video. either hes insane or its real

Enter. Refresh. Someone had already replied to him. just finished it too. cant sleep now. WHEN IS THE NEXT ONE???

Further down, people were already talking about something else.

is it just me or is this one on a totally different level from his first two?? looks like actual TV

the audio too. that 3am part you can hear the sleeping bag zippers

Derek thought about it. They had a point. He hadn’t seen the first two, but not once in this one had he felt like he was watching something amateur.

There were a lot of Dereks that night.

?

"...Wow."

Noah stared at the number on the screen, rubbed his eyes, and leaned in for another look.

"Four hours." His voice had gone a little floaty. "A hundred and forty thousand. The first video only did twenty-something thousand its first night..."

Ethan leaned over for a look and scrolled down to the comments. He read fast, and a grin slowly spread across his face.

NOT YET??? I SCREAMED

real or fake just TELL ME

bro put the fraud thread in his own video lmao

im not sleeping till part 2

"Half of them are cursing me, and half of them are waiting on me," Ethan said. "Either way, when the next one drops, they’ll all come back."

An audience wanted the answer, sure. What kept them around was the few seconds of waiting for it. The exact second people started to drift off, the exact second they got hooked back in: Ethan had studied thousands of retention curves once upon a time, and he could have drawn them with his eyes closed.

Noah turned to look at him. "You knew this was going to happen?"

Ethan didn’t answer. He just clapped him on the shoulder. "Go to sleep. We’ve still got episode two to cut tomorrow." He was out the second his head hit the pillow. Noah curled up under the covers with his laptop and kept refreshing until three in the morning, sucking in a little breath every time the page reloaded.

When Ethan walked into the editing room the next day, the first thing he saw was the to-go box on the corner of the desk. Washed clean, lid snapped shut, not a speck of grease left on it.

Maya was at her computer compressing footage. She didn’t look up.

"Any good?" Ethan asked.

"It was fine."

"Come along next time we go out," Ethan said. "There’s only a handful of us in this company. A wrap party without you doesn’t really count."

Maya’s fingers went still on the keyboard for half a beat. She hesitated, but she still didn’t look up. "...We’ll see. I’ve been pretty busy lately."

Then the keyboard started clacking again.

Ethan looked at the spotless box, then at the dark circles under her eyes. The website, the back end, the voting system, compressing all that footage: every bit of it was on her alone. The next video was only going to be bigger, and if this kept up, she was going to burn out sooner or later. The tech side needed more hands.

With episode two half cut, Ethan flipped the whiteboard to its clean side and waved everyone over.

"Meeting."

Noah and Maya came over. Sam leaned in the doorway with his coffee, settling in for the show.

"Once episode two is up, this whole thing’s behind us," Ethan said. "But the heat won’t wait around for us."

He started ticking them off. "Look at how many people have popped up on YouTube in the last few months."

"Smosh lip-syncing their way onto the front page one video after another."

"Ask a Ninja putting out an episode every single week."

"lonelygirl15 got exposed as an actress a couple of weeks ago, and the whole internet’s furious about it. "

"But the angrier people get, the more they watch. The number one spot on the subscriber chart has changed hands a bunch of times since summer. Nobody’s locked it down yet."

He uncapped a marker, wrote a big 1 at the top of the board, and circled it.

"We’re taking it. Now, in one shot."

Noah swallowed. "You... already know what we’re shooting?"

Ethan nodded, turned, and started writing.

HDV cameras × 6. Security cameras × 16, plus a DVR. Wireless lav mics × 8. Editing workstations × 2. Server × 1. Numbered tracksuits × 100.

With every line he wrote, Noah’s eyes got a little wider. By the last one, Maya’s pen had clattered to the floor.

"Wait, wait, wait." Noah held up both hands. "Do we... have the money for this?"

"We do." Ethan capped the marker. "Bob’s already moved seven cars on the promo code in the last few days, and this week’s only going to be bigger. Count the commission, and we’re fine."

"But..." Noah stared at the board, counting down it line by line. "I know you said the next one would be bigger, but six HD cameras? Sixteen security cameras? Are we opening a bank? Editing workstations, a server..." His finger stopped on the last line. "And a hundred tracksuits?! You’re going to blow every cent we have! What are the tracksuits even for? Are we throwing a track meet for a hundred people?"

Maya was looking at him too, waiting.

Ethan smiled.

"Pretty much," he said.

"We’re getting a hundred people together to play Red Light, Green Light."