Chapter 43 - 42 : Player 218

Chapter 43: Chapter 42 : Player 218

Less than twelve hours later, the whole wall of Bravias had moved into B14.

The tent was down, the cars were gone, the grass hadn’t been resodded yet, and the footage had already arrived. Twenty-four cameras, thirty security cams, eleven hours. Tapes stacked halfway up one wall, hard drives up to the ceiling.

Dom stood in front of the pile. "We’ll be cutting this till Christmas."

"Wednesday," Rhett said.

He split the work three ways. Dom got Red Light and Hide and Seek, because he’d sat at the switcher all day and knew where every camera was better than anyone. Sam got the gym, thirty tables and thirty stories, which needed somebody patient enough to sit and listen to every one of them. The tug of war and the final, Rhett took himself.

For the next three days, the lights in B14 never went off.

For the first time, Dom finished an entire sequence without asking anyone anything. The bit where Mac turned into a tree, he cut across four cameras, and every cut landed on the beat of the bleachers chanting TREE. Rhett watched it through and didn’t change a single frame.

Dom waited. "That’s it?"

"That’s it."

Dom turned back to his screen. His ears had gone red again.

Sam went slower. He listened to the audio from all thirty tables, all the way through, then pulled off his headphones and said one thing. "311 and 312 go first. That ’third grade’ line hurts worse than anything at Dylan’s table."

Rhett thought about it and nodded. He’d been planning to open with the biggest table himself.

Late Tuesday night, the rough cut was done. Forty-one minutes.

Dom stretched. "Upload it."

"Can’t," Rhett said. "YouTube caps a video at ten minutes."

"Then split it. Four parts? Five?"

"Two," Rhett said. "Under ten minutes each. Split it into five and nobody makes it to part three."

Dom did the math and went pale. "Forty-one down to twenty? Cut half of it?"

"More than half. Twenty minutes is the ceiling, not the goal."

The next ten hours were worse than the three days before them put together. Thirty tables went down to five. Three hours of hide and seek went down to ninety seconds. The vote got forty seconds. Dom fought Rhett for half an hour over the fake tip that sent three pelican heads into a men’s bathroom, and lost. Sam fought for three minutes over the President snitching out his window, and won. Nobody ever suggested cutting Ben Whitaker’s friction.

Part one ended in the gym. Rhett unrolling the forms. "Page seven." Cut to black. Nine fifty-eight. Part two picked up at page seven and ran through Sierra’s last line. Nine fifty-nine.

Sam looked at the huge pile of cut footage on the timeline. "What about the other twenty-one minutes? We just throw it out?"

"It goes on Claire’s site," Rhett said. "Her server doesn’t care how long it runs. Blooper reel. The last shot of part two is the URL, and anybody who wants more comes to us."

"The plants are in the blooper reel." Sam lowered his voice, even though there were only three of them in the room. "You’re putting the plants out yourself?"

"Before word gets out on its own," Rhett said. "Ten plants, ten mouths. Sooner or later one of them talks. If people hear it secondhand and start arguing about it, they get to decide what it means. A fix. Shills. A scam. Take your pick. If we put it out ourselves, we get the first word."

Sam’s face had gone serious. "You don’t even know who the plants are. We don’t have a single frame of them."

In the corner, Kevin, who’d been asleep face-down on a desk, lifted his head. He dug a MiniDV tape out of his backpack and set it on the table.

"I filmed them," he said. "Every one. The day I found them, and again after the game. I figured someday somebody would need it."

Rhett put the tape in the deck. Ten faces came up on the screen, one after another. It was the first time he’d known which ten.

When the sixth face came up, he hit pause.

"603?" he said. "The diver?"

"Theater." Kevin put his head back down on the desk. "He took a three-week stage combat workshop over the summer. Falls."

Dom rubbed his eyes. "So what do we say in the reel? Why there were plants at all?"

"The truth," Rhett said. "No spin. Not one word."

He knew, too, that on this one, the truth was the best spin there was.

At nine on Wednesday morning, both parts went up on YouTube at once. 100 Students. $100,000. 1 Winner. Part One and Part Two. At the same moment, What You Didn’t See went up on Claire’s site.

By noon, part one was the most-viewed video on the whole site that day. Half its comments said the same thing. PART 2 NOW. By night, part two was number two. The two parts held the top two spots on the front page for three straight days.

Two days in, part one had 2.3 million views and part two had 1.9 million. The blooper reel on Claire’s site had played eight hundred thousand times, and her server nearly went down again before they routed it through Sony’s Akamai account one more time.

MrPelican had fifty-one thousand subscribers on Wednesday morning. Thursday afternoon it passed Smosh at sixty-three thousand. At 4:11 a.m. on Friday it passed lonelygirl15 at sixty-eight and became the number one subscribed channel on the site.

By Friday night, the number had six digits. One hundred thousand two hundred.

In the year and a half YouTube had existed, no channel had ever reached six digits. MrPelican was the first.

Dom took a screenshot, printed it, and taped it to the whiteboard in B14, right over the "1" Rhett had drawn there a month before.

The argument started with page seven.

Would you flip SHARE or STEAL? The question burned through the YouTube comments, onto the front page of Digg, and out across college forums everywhere. A philosophy professor wrote three thousand words on her blog calling it the best prisoner’s dilemma teaching video she’d ever seen. A morning show on an LA radio station opened the phone lines, and the callers argued for an hour without settling anything.

The second argument came out of the vote.

Out of that one-minute vote, Sam kept exactly one pair. 388 and 144. Marcus and Becca, together two years. Their lav mics caught every word.

Marcus was the first hand up.

Becca turned and stared at him. "What are you doing?"

"Twenty-four eighty-two." He didn’t look at her. "That’s two months of my car payment."

"We had a deal." Her voice went up. "The night we signed up. In your car. We said we’d go all the way."

"That’s a hundred grand that one person out of twenty-nine gets!"

"That one person could be me!"

Marcus finally turned to look at her. "Becca. You can’t even get the door to our building open."

Everybody around them went quiet.

"It’s a pull door," Becca said, one word at a time. "You’re the one who keeps pushing it."

She reached up and grabbed at his raised arm. Marcus held it higher.

"If that hand doesn’t come down," she said, "we’re done."

The hand didn’t come down.

The vote came out twelve to seventeen. The game went on. Neither of them looked at the other again.

Sam didn’t cut away there. He went straight into the first match of the tug of war.

When the captains picked, the two of them had ended up on different teams. Becca was on Ben Whitaker’s. Marcus was on the other side.

Whistle. Four seconds. Ben’s team, still at forty-five degrees, slid neatly into the mud. Becca was the third one in.

She got up out of the mud, her hair and face caked with it. Marcus had already walked to the edge of the pit. His teammates were cheering behind him. He wasn’t. He crouched down and held out a hand to her.

Becca looked at the hand.

The same hand that wouldn’t come down.

She took it.

"Pull door," she said.

And she yanked with everything she had.

Marcus went face-first into the mud pit.

Somebody clipped the whole thing, slapped captions on it, and it went around half the internet. PULL DOOR became the catchphrase of the week. And another question spread right behind it. Twenty-four hundred dollars sitting right in front of you. Do you raise your hand? Some people were Team Marcus. Some were Team Becca. Some said they should have broken up years ago. Some said they were definitely getting married.

Then came the blooper reel.

What You Didn’t See ran twenty-one minutes. The first five had no music and no jokes.

Black screen. One line of white text. Before anything else, there’s something we have to tell you.

Then Kevin’s own footage. No tripod, the frame a little shaky, ten people saying their names and numbers to the lens one at a time. Seven from theater, two grad students who never left the lab, one freshman. Kevin’s voice-over stayed flat. "The Tuesday before the game, Rhett asked me to find ten people. He never asked who they were, and I never told him."

The sixth face was 603. The one who’d thrown himself across the line at the last second of Red Light and slid two yards on the grass.

Then Rhett. An empty B14, a folding chair, him talking straight to the lens.

"The vote after round three was real. Twenty-nine people, seventy-two thousand dollars sitting right there, one minute to decide. That’s what I wanted to film. What people do when the money’s within reach."

"But I also have to deliver a video. If fifteen hands go up, there’s no tug of war. No final. No Sierra. Everybody who clicked on this would’ve gotten half a show. So I put ten people in the game who were going to vote to keep it going. I did that. Not Kevin. Me."

Black text on white, one line at a time.

The vote: 12 to 17.

Plants still in: 5. All voted to continue.

Without the plants: 12 to 12.

The rule: it takes a majority to stop.

Back to Rhett.

"The plants were insurance I bought," he said. "And that insurance never paid out a cent. Because even without my people, twelve of them stood there that night with twenty-four hundred dollars right in front of them and kept their hands in their pockets."

"That wasn’t me. That was them."

Black. And then, for the first time, music.

The comments blew up first. RIGGED. FAKE. UNSUBSCRIBED. Then people finished watching those five minutes, and slowly the wind turned.

he didnt have to tell us. nobody would have known

12 real people picked the game over the money. THATS the video

the insurance didnt pay out lmao

Some people did unsubscribe. For every one who left, thirty new ones came in.

Once those five minutes were over, the reel finally lightened up. The first bit was Derek and Jenna. The whole tearful scene from the third row of the gym played start to finish, then cut to the parking lot that night. The two of them were sitting in the bed of a pickup, laughing so hard they were doubled over.

"I’ve known him since Tuesday," Jenna said.

"Tuesday afternoon," Derek added.

The back half of the reel was everything that hadn’t fit in the main cut.

Mac, still in the green tracksuit three days later, explained that he now brushed his teeth standing on one foot. "I’m still a tree. A tree doesn’t stop being a tree just because the game’s over."

Ben Whitaker stood at a whiteboard for four full minutes and redid the friction coefficient from scratch, proving that if he’d accounted for wet grass, his team would have won. Nobody had asked him.

The Civic mystery got solved too. The guy who pressed the button wasn’t the owner. He was the owner’s roommate. The owner hadn’t found out his car had been on a live feed until somebody sent him the clip the next morning. The roommate shrugged at the camera. "He owed me forty bucks. Now we’re square."

Hendricks gave the camera three seconds. "Next time, file for lights." The President snitching out his window got played again from another angle, in slow motion, with classical music under it.

The last segment was Derek. Somebody off camera asked him whether that moment in the final had been an act. Derek sighed at the lens.

"Rule one of statue: you never break for the audience," he said. "I broke for a Civic. I’m never going to be able to show my face in acting class again."

The last shot of the reel was a single line of text. Derek and Jenna went to dinner on Sunday. This time it wasn’t an act.

The comments were a full page of screaming.

Right next to the blooper reel was the page where Claire was selling the tracksuits.

The numbered tracksuits went for thirty-five dollars each. They’d bought a thousand back when they were shooting video two, used a hundred in the game, and the other nine hundred had been sitting in a corner of B14. Number 218 sold out within an hour of going up. 506 went second. By Thursday afternoon, all nine hundred were gone.

By the next morning, Claire’s inbox was buried. When’s the restock. Can I get a custom number. Somebody wanted one for their son for Christmas. A gym teacher at a high school in Ohio wanted forty, because his school was going to play Red Light, Green Light on their own field.

Rhett called the factory that had made the tracksuits that same day. Two thousand more, delivered in three weeks. Claire turned the page into a preorder overnight, and by Friday there were fourteen hundred orders on it.

But tracksuits were just one thing. Thursday night, Rhett flipped the whiteboard to a clean side and wrote one word across the top. MERCH.

Everybody had an idea.

Dom wanted pelican heads, the kind the volunteers wore in Hide and Seek. Claire ran the numbers. Foam, huge, light, and it would cost more to ship than to make. Crossed off.

Claire’s own idea was cards. A deck of SHARE and STEAL cards, plus one rules card with the page-seven line printed on it. Costs pennies, sells for ten bucks, ships in an envelope.

Sam wanted a T-shirt that said I READ PAGE SEVEN. Kevin wanted one that said OBSERVER. Nobody acknowledged him.

Rhett circled three things. The cards. The PAGE SEVEN shirt. And the TREE shirt Claire had already thrown up on the site. Everything else stayed on the board.

"Why not more?" Dom asked. "Right now people would buy anything."

Rhett pointed the marker at the corner of the room. Three hundred-some boxes sat there waiting to be taped shut, every one of them packed by hand by Dom and Claire over the last two days.

"Because the entire shipping department is you two."

Dom looked at the boxes, then at his own hands, which had spent two days working as a tape gun, and didn’t say anything else.

Thursday afternoon, Ryan Cho came back to B14. This time he was in a suit with a folder under his arm, and the first thing he looked at when he walked in was the wall of Bravias.

"New York had a meeting," he said. "About the gear."

Dom’s hands stopped on the keyboard. He’d already started thinking of the left-hand Z1U as his.

"The answer is, it’s not coming back." Ryan set the folder on the desk. "Both Z1Us, the whole TV wall, the switcher. On paper it’s a long-term loan. Between us, nobody is ever coming to pick it up."

Dom opened his mouth and closed it again.

Rhett didn’t move. He was looking at the folder. When a big company gives you something for free, there’s always a second page.

"And the catch?" he asked.

Ryan smiled. "They said you’d ask that." He turned the folder to the second page. "Your next project, whatever it is, you call Sony first. They want right of first negotiation."

Right of first negotiation. The most polite rope a big company could hand a college freshman.

"I’ll call you first. Fine." Rhett picked up a pen and added a line under the clause. "If we can’t make a deal in thirty days, I’m free to go somewhere else. Not exclusive. No category lock. If Panasonic shows up someday wanting a video about a rice cooker, you can’t stop me."

Ryan looked at the line, then at Rhett.

"They also said you’d add that." He slid a third page out of the folder. It was already typed up. Thirty days, non-exclusive. "This is the version they had ready for when you did."

Rhett laughed and signed the third page.

After Ryan left, Dom finally got his voice back. "So... this Z1U..."

"It’s yours."

The grass by the gym got resodded on Friday. That same afternoon, on the second floor of Carrington Hall, Pruitt locked a manila envelope into the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. Inside was a stack of photos. A trampled flowerbed. Students on a roof. Beer cans under the bleachers. He locked the drawer and put the key in the inside pocket of his jacket.

Friday night, Rhett was alone in B14, going over the first draft for video four, when the phone on the desk rang.

A 650 number. Not one he knew.

He picked up.

"Is this Rhett Delaney?" A woman’s voice, talking fast, keyboards clicking behind her. "I’m calling from YouTube. In San Bruno."