She made a fist and put her thumb up, which was so completely wrong for the moment that Josh nearly said something out loud.
That was the plan. That was the whole plan. A thumbs up.
Then she held it there.
Four seconds. Five. The hand steady in frame, and behind it a face he could see from the side and the chat couldn't, and it wasn't stage fright anymore, it was the other thing, the one that had made her ask about trouble.
(Luna:I guess this is it. Isn't it?
Usually she did it where nobody was looking. If somebody saw, she gave them a better explanation afterward. This time they were asking her to do it.)
The chat didn't know any of that, and would not have believed it, and said:
you got this
GO do it do it do it we're not going anywhere take your time queen
IT'S OK IF IT'S BAD. version one is allowed to be bad
I've waited six years I can wait another forty seconds
And Josh, who had by then been bullied so far out of his own chat that he'd stopped reading it, missed all of that.
So she did it.
✦ ✦ ✦
The thumb inflated.
Slowly. That was the first thing, and he wasn't braced for it, because he had somehow been expecting the thing his own hand would have drawn: small, then big, the way a panel does it.
It started at the base, where the skin went tight, and then went the other way and stopped being tight at all: the whole digit filling out along its length, thickening from the knuckle outward in one smooth continuous swell, the surface staying perfectly her the entire way. Not stretching. Not straining. The knuckle smoothed out of existence somewhere around the halfway point. The nail spread and stayed a nail, holding its exact shape at every size, which was somehow the worst detail in the whole thing.
It went past the size of her fist. It kept going. It settled somewhere around the size of a mango, sitting on the end of an ordinary hand, perfectly lit, in focus.
And then she moved it around.
She wobbled it. She turned her wrist and let the weight of it swing, and it had weight, and she tapped it twice against her own palm and the microphone picked up the sound beautifully.
Josh's field of view had two of them in it: the real one, six feet away in a room, and the one on the monitor, which had been shaved one notch off true by a filter he had tuned himself over four nights.
The one on the monitor looked like an incredible piece of work by somebody with a very good machine.
He was, of course, hard. In a chair. At work. At a thumb.
He was going to have to have a serious conversation with himself about that at some point, and it was not going to be tonight.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then the chat went off, and stopped being readable at all.
WHAT
OK
OK WHAT
WHATWHATWHAT
DO IT AGAIN again again again
THE FILTER. THE FILTER IS FOR THIS. THAT'S WHY THERE'S A FILTER oh my god I take it back. LEBU I TAKE IT ALL BACK this guy has been sitting on a real-time rig and let us call it an eyesore it's rough!! it's ROUGH and I don't care!! it's version one!!
the edge lighting when it grew??? that's happening LIVE????
guys be normal. it's obviously ai it's not ai, you can see the whole hand the whole time. ai can't hold a hand whatever it is it's better than 90% of what I scroll past genuinely at this point I don't know what's real on here any more and I've made my peace with it half the internet is fake. this is what I want it used for
LEBU WE'RE SORRY. LEBU WE LOVE YOU don't apologise to him, he still hasn't fixed the filter
Luna read the whole column, which took a while, because it didn't stop.
Nobody asked her what it was. Nobody asked her how. Fifty people watched a girl's thumb become the size of a mango, and every one of them arrived, within seconds, at a better explanation than the real one, and then started arguing with each other about which better explanation it was.
(Luna:It worked.
He'd said it would. She hadn't believed him.
It worked better than the cocaine, and nobody woke up afterward with a hole in their evening.
She did it once more, smaller, while they were still arguing. Just to check.
They explained that one away too.)
Josh wasn't looking.
✦ ✦ ✦
Josh had his phone in both hands and sweat coming down into one eye.
He had not set up donations. It hadn't occurred to him to. It was a test stream: nothing to sell, nothing to donate to, a rig in a bedroom and fifty people invited to look at it for free.
for the filter
FILTER FUND. buy the good one whatever makes the hand bigger, get it more of that please. seriously. more filter budget. do not spend this on food
I don't care what it costs, make it not blurry
Fourteen of them. Then nineteen. They stacked on top of each other faster than the phone could clear them, and he sat behind the lights watching a number climb, in a room he didn't pay rent on, with his thumb hovering over nothing.
And underneath it, arriving whole, the way his bad ideas arrive as well as his good ones:
They were not paying him for what he had made.
They were paying for the next one. Every note attached to that money was an instruction about a version of the filter that didn't exist. He had invented the thing in ninety seconds at three in the morning to solve a girl's employment problem, and it had worked well enough that the richest people in his audience had immediately chipped in for a better one, on the reasonable assumption that the guy who built it knew what he was doing and could improve it if funded.
He had a CS degree he hadn't touched in six years and a GPU he'd bought last Tuesday.
The number went up again.
✦ ✦ ✦
The stream ran another two hours.
It was, in the end, mostly just Luna talking. Somebody asked where she was from and she said "around," and somebody else spent nine minutes trying to place the accent and got as far as Portugal??, and she let them. Somebody asked what her schedule was and she said she didn't know, and fourteen people immediately built her one. Somebody made a claim about how far she could stretch and she disagreed with it, at length, with total confidence, using an argument that had nothing to do with anything, and won, because a chat is not there to be right.
She did the thumb four more times on request. She did a finger once, unasked, and had to sit through a solid wall of pure capital letters.
The rest of it was worship, mostly. Fifty men who had paid for the top tier of a porn comic, looking at the girl out of the porn comic, sitting in a chair, being nice to her about it in the loudest terms available to them. It came in at a volume that would have flattened a normal person.
She adjusted.
She had been looked at like that before: one man at a time, in rooms, for money. This was fifty of them at once, from a distance, with no part of it landing on her body, and all of it aimed at a name.
(Luna:A name she used to have. Fifty people spent two hours saying it at her actual face.)
Josh stayed banished. He was the mod, and the admin, and the owner, and the guy whose bank the entire thing ran out of, and he typed exactly one more message in two hours, the filter is on the list, and got told to shut up by four separate people, one of whom he was fairly sure had been reading him since chapter 400.
He minded less than he'd expected to.
At the end she said goodnight and got a wall of text so dense the client dropped frames, and Josh leaned over the tape and killed the stream, and the room went very quiet and very bright.
Then he did the math.
Ninety minutes of getting there, two hours of talking, no donations configured, nothing sold, nothing advertised, and no product delivered except one thumb.
SABLE · STREAM ENDED
Live: 3:31:12
Peak watching: 50 / 50
PAYPAL · TONIGHT
Payments: 23
Received: $512.00
He looked at it for a while.
Then he looked over at the girl on the other side of the tape, who hadn't gotten up out of the chair yet.
✦ ✦ ✦
They got as far as the bed and stopped there.
Josh had been tense all evening, and now he had nothing left. Not sleepy. Just done. He lay on top of the covers with his shoes still on for a while, then took them off with his other foot, then gave up on everything else.
Luna was lying next to him, arms flat at her sides, tired.
He'd never seen her tired before. He didn't say anything about it.
"Today was fun," she said, at the ceiling. "It was just a finger, though."
"You introduce more later. Slowly." Josh had his eyes shut. "One thing at a time. That way it looks like you're adding features."
He liked that word as it came out. Features. It made the whole thing sound like a product with a roadmap instead of a girl in a chair doing a thumbs up.
"Next time, I am gonna try elongating my fingers." She thought about it. "Hey, those guys are asking to fix the filters. That's top priority."
"Look at you." He opened one eye. "Already super into this. One stream, and you've got a content plan and a priority list."
He shut the eye again. "Today was just a test run, by the way. I hand-picked all of that. Every single one of them is off the list of people who actually say things — the ones who argue in the comments, the ones who write paragraphs. I picked the loudest people I have."
That had been a good decision, made a week ago, for excellent reasons. It had also been the reason he'd spent two hours being told to shut up in his own bedroom. Both of those were true and he was going to have to sit with it.
"So, how long will the test runs be?" Luna said. "Let's start with the real thing."
Josh turned his head.
"Wow. You can change your mind really fast." He looked at her. "How did you live for eternity?"
"I didn't have to do jobs for eternity."
"...Does this look like a job?"
She actually thought about it, properly, at the ceiling, for long enough that he lifted his head to check she hadn't fallen asleep.
"Nah," she said. "This isn't tedious enough for a job."
"That's the fun in the entertainment industry."
"Okay, but when's the next stream?" She rolled onto her side. "When's the next public stream?"
"Saturday. That gives me plenty of time to tweak the filters."
He said that in the voice of a guy who knows how, which he had been doing all evening, and would be doing for the rest of the week.
"Nice. Saturday." A pause. "So, um. Can I make the announcement instead?"
"Sure." He got the phone out of his pocket without opening his eyes and held it up in the general direction of her voice. "Here."
✦ ✦ ✦
She took it.
Then she reached over and pulled him in, one arm around the back of his head, so he could see the screen while she typed. Which was thoughtful, and correct, and exactly what he'd have asked her to do, because an unsupervised Luna was never going to be allowed to post to sixteen hundred chapters' worth of paying subscribers.
The arm brought his head against her side.
His face landed against the side of her boob and stayed there, because moving it would have meant explaining why he was moving it.
(Luna:She noticed. She noticed within about a second and a half, and she did not adjust her arm, and she typed with her thumb.)
Josh looked at the screen with tremendous focus and managed to read approximately none of it.
✦ ✦ ✦
What she posted was this:
hi. Sable here.
I have taken over this account. Lebu is fine, he is in the other room. He is small.
Announcements are mine now. Next stream is Saturday. The filters will be fixed by then, he said so, we all heard him.
It went up before he'd finished the first line of it.
OH MY GOD
SHE'S ON THE ACCOUNT. SHE'S ON THE MAIN ACCOUNT
"he is small" DESTROYED hold on. this is Lebu typing as Sable. I can tell. this is a bit
^ yeah this reads like him. imposter it's a guy's account. it's always been a guy's account. someone posts in a character's voice and everyone loses their minds. oldest move on the internet, not falling for it
Luna's thumb went.
Sable: you're the imposter what
Sable: you have been reading this comic for six years and you did not recognise me. so which one of us is the fake one
OH
OHHHHH she's got a point she does not have a point shut up. she has a point imagine getting called fake by Sable herself. couldn't be me bro just got hit with the "which one of us is the fake one" and folded instantly mothbite: I'm with her pagefour: I'm with her krill: mods, ban the imposter
Josh, with his face where his face was, worked through the sentence twice.
"That's not..." he said. "That doesn't mean anything. That's not an argument. That's a series of words in the order an argument goes in."
"It worked."
He watched fourteen more people arrive on her side.
"...It worked," he said.
✦ ✦ ✦
So: Saturday.
Public, this time, which meant the whole list instead of the fifty he'd picked, and the announcement was already up, in her voice, promising a thing on his behalf, which his best patrons had already paid for in advance, with instructions attached.
Josh lay there and took stock.
Five days. One filter, currently held together with settings he'd found by dragging a slider until it looked wrong in the right way. A GPU he'd bought last Tuesday. A degree he hadn't opened in six years.
And a girl who had learned what a subscriber was four hours ago and had already taken the account off him.
He was going to have to find out what a shader was.