By Tuesday she had all of them.
The stream was not the half of it. The X account he posted to four times a year to say a page was late. Two dead accounts he'd made years ago and forgotten the passwords to, which she got back into by using the forgot password link, on his phone, with his email open on it, which is not hacking but did feel like something.
And she was posting.
Sable: saturday. put it somewhere you will see it.
Sable: I have been informed that a streamer is supposed to "engage." consider yourselves engaged.
Sable: Lebu says the filters are fixed. we will find out together.
Sable: four days. bring your friends. not the boring ones.
Sable: this stream will be completely unprecedented
Josh read that last one about six times.
He knew what she meant. He knew what she thought it meant. He also knew that in the nine minutes it had been up it had done better than anything he had posted in two years, so he closed the tab and let it stand, and that is the entire story of his week in one decision.
✦ ✦ ✦
She was also, in her way, studying.
He'd catch it in the background whenever he came out of the bedroom for food: a guy with a headset explaining the six mistakes killing your growth, then a girl with better lighting explaining that everything the first guy said was wrong, then forty minutes of somebody's stream from 2021 being analyzed frame by frame by a third person who had never streamed in his life.
Hours of it. She absorbed all of it and checked none of it. By Thursday she was using the word retention in ordinary sentences.
For all of this she was using his phone.
And his tablet.
✦ ✦ ✦
Which left him the two computers.
The drawing machine and the streaming machine, both of them in the bedroom, both of them work, and a guy cannot lie on his back on a sofa at two in the morning and look at a computer. He had spent six years falling asleep with a screen four inches from his face, and for four days running he had come out of a session, gone to the couch, put his hand out for the thing that lives on the arm of it, and found nothing there.
The tablet was under her. She was lying on it. She wasn't even using it at the time.
He didn't say anything, because it was hers now in every sense that mattered, and because the traffic was up, and because my phone is not a sentence a guy wins with.
But he thought it a lot, and it went like this:
She has a phone.
She is on a phone ten hours a day. She has been on a phone since the day she got here. There is a phone in this apartment that belongs to her, and she could log into every one of these accounts from it in about forty seconds, and then I would have my phone.
So why is she using mine?
He never asked. Four days, and he never asked once.
✦ ✦ ✦
Meanwhile, the filters.
He had five days, $512 of other people's money earmarked for the job, and a document with the word FILTER at the top of it.
Days one through three were the grind. He read forums. He watched a guy in Belgium explain color space for fifty minutes. He bought a plugin for sixty dollars, out of the fund, correctly, with a note of it in the ledger, installed it, tested it, and found it did the same thing as the free one except with a subscription attached. The fund went from $512.00 to $452.01.
He sat there on day three at four in the morning with fourteen versions of Luna's face open in a grid, all of them slightly wrong, and stared at them until they stopped meaning anything.
Then, on day four, he got it, and it was so simple that it made him feel unwell.
The filter wasn't making her look rendered.
The filter was making her look bad. Those are not the same thing and he had spent four nights confusing them. Nobody in that test stream had believed the thumb because of the filter. The filter was the thing they complained about for two hours straight. They believed the thumb because it was a thumb, and it was attached to a real hand, and it was in focus.
The only way to improve the filter was to delete the filter.
So he deleted the filter.
✦ ✦ ✦
Except he didn't, quite.
He got as far as the empty stack, looked at a clean picture of the room, and could not do it.
Because the entire business ran on one sentence, that's the CGI glitching out, and that sentence needed something to point at. If the picture is perfect and clean and real, and then a girl's thumb turns into a mango, then there is nothing in the frame doing the lying for him.
So he put a few back.
A skin pass, very light. A sharpen he didn't need. A color curve that made the whites of the room about four percent too cool. Enough that anybody who wanted to say there's obviously something on this feed would be correct, and would say it, and would keep saying it.
It looked bad. Better than the test, enormously better than the test, a different category of picture entirely, and still, objectively, worse than nothing.
He was about to hand a thousand people a picture that had improved and would be described as a downgrade, and he knew that when he saved the preset, and he saved it anyway, because the alibi was now the product.
He was going to get scolded. That was priced in.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then the rest of it, which was the part nobody pays for.
The camera went around so the window wasn't in shot, and then he checked the reflection in the monitor behind her, and then he checked the reflection in the picture frame, and then he took the picture frame down.
The mail came off the counter. The package with the label on it went in a drawer. He thought about disconnecting the doorbell, got a screwdriver out for it, actually got as far as the plate, and then put the screwdriver down, because they were expecting nothing and nobody, and he had already spent most of the week on a slider.
And he wrote a list, and taped it to the side of the monitor where the camera couldn't see it.
DON'T SAY:
my name the building the street the store the city
Rodey
She read it and said "Rodey?" and he said "especially Rodey," and she agreed, because she had no strong feelings about it.
That list was, he thought, pretty thorough.
Then the channel itself. Twitch, this time, in public. He switched on subs and Bits. Those would start adding up from the first minute, but Twitch wouldn't pay out a cent until the channel made Affiliate, and the Discord test didn't count toward that:
PATH TO AFFILIATE
Followers: 1,973 / 25 ✓
Hours streamed: 0 / 4
Broadcast days: 0 / 4
Average viewers: 0 / 3
The followers had taken care of themselves during the week. The rest would take four separate days of streaming.
Saturday.
She went live at eight, and at ten past eight there were a thousand people in the room.
Josh sat outside the tape and watched the counter do it, and it did it in the manner of a number that isn't climbing so much as arriving: two hundred, then four, then a plateau at six that lasted forty seconds and made him briefly certain that six was the answer, then a thousand and forty-one.
SABLE · LIVE 0:10:04
Viewers: 1,041
Followers: 2,214
He read the chat for a minute to see who they were.
They were his.
Every third handle was somebody who had been in his comments since before the comic paid for anything. mothbite was in there, first minute, telling everyone to be normal. pagefour.ch1287, who had once fought his whole comment section about anatomy. krill, who had volunteered to mod for free and, Josh noted, had turned up early enough to have been waiting.
He opened the private channel and typed.
He'd set that up on Thursday: a whisper thread, his messages straight to her second monitor, not into the flood. It had taken him a few minutes and it was the single best thing he built all week.
LEBU:you know a random debut stream gets maybe ten viewers
LEBU:ten. and one of them is the streamer's mother
LEBU:you have a thousand because someone drew pornography every night for six years. just so we're clear about where the thousand came from
LEBU:anyway. don't look at the counter, it makes people weird
Luna did not look at the counter, and did not answer, and did not, in fact, notice the private channel at any point in the entire evening.
She was busy.
✦ ✦ ✦
And she was good at it.
She was not polished. She talked over herself, she read out the wrong name twice, and she had no idea what any of the buttons on her own stream did. But six days ago she had been a shoe in a display case, and tonight she was leaning back in the chair with one foot up on it, arguing with a thousand people about whether the word snack had been ruined, and she had not once looked at the lens like it was a lens.
She had gotten used to it. In six days.
He watched that from six feet away and thought, without any particular feeling attached to it, that she had adapted faster to this than she had to a fridge.
✦ ✦ ✦
It went half an hour before the filter came up, which was longer than he'd expected.
ok so are we going to talk about the picture it's better!! it's so much better it's still bad tho. why is it still like this pagefour: it's WAY better. you people did not see the first one mothbite: I was in the test stream. this is a miracle. this is the sistine chapel compared to what he had on sunday it looks like a videocall from 2011 ch1287: he had a WEEK and this is what he did bro genuinely just turn it off
^^^ this. delete it. we want to see her fourdollarsamonth: leave lebu alone he's doing his best fourdollarsamonth: (it is not enough)
ANYWAY. can we get a shapeshift shapeshift
SHAPESHIFT
I have been here thirty minutes and I have not seen one hand do one thing
Josh, outside the tape, took it in the face for a while and made a note in a document, which is what he does with things.
"Alright," Luna said. "Alright, alright. Sit down."
And she put her hand up into the light.
✦ ✦ ✦
The fingers went out.
Not stretched. He'd have drawn stretched, a finger like pulled taffy, and it wasn't that, and every time he saw it he got a little furious at his own back catalog.
They came apart. The tips opening into something finer and finer, like a teased thread, and then that finer thing traveling out, and down, past where a hand ends, unhurried, glossy the whole way, finding the air like water finds a gap in a floor. The nails traveled out with them and stayed nails. The knuckles kept coming, evenly spaced, so that halfway through you could still count where each joint was, and then they were eight inches past her palm and still going.
She stopped at about two feet, and flexed them, and they moved like fingers.
The chat didn't survive it.
Josh sat in the wrong-height chair, professionally fascinated and also hard, and didn't move.
✦ ✦ ✦
Then she picked up the controller.
This was the bit. She'd planned it, actually planned it, on Thursday, out loud, and he'd heard her practicing the sentence, because she had worked out that a stream needs a thing, and her thing was going to be playing the game with hands that were the wrong length.
It was an interesting challenge. The thumbsticks were four inches away from where her thumbs now were. She had to fold two fingers back on themselves to reach the buttons at all, and the folding was, mechanically, incredible.
Nobody watched the game.
the FINGERS forget the game. do the fingers again can you do one longer than the others wait do them one at a time
I'm not being weird about this I'm being NORMAL about this the way the joints are still there????? how that's not a filter. no filter does that bigcatt: it's a mesh. it's a good mesh. it's the best mesh I've ever seen and it's on a webcam feed from 2011 Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
do it again
"I'm playing the game," Luna said.
do it again
"I am playing the game."
She did it again, one hand off the controller, fingers out and back and out, showing the wrist, turning it over so they could see the palm side, entirely absorbed in the response she was getting.
Then she died.
She died because she was looking at the chat and doing a trick with her left hand while something on screen was walking toward her, and she took the death completely personally, and blamed the fingers, and the chat had the time of its life.
SHE DIED she died doing a bit. rest in peace that's the most human thing I've ever seen a render do mothbite: skill issue
"It's the fingers."
skill issue
"They're two feet long."
skill issue
✦ ✦ ✦
She kept them out.
Josh noticed it in the middle of everything else, and filed it as a business observation: she'd stopped putting them away between bits. She played for another twenty minutes with two-foot fingers because it was funnier, and she'd worked that out on her own, in about an hour, having never done this before in her life.
And she'd found a use for them.
The tablet was propped on the desk to her left, running the chat, and a thousand people is not a chat, it's weather. So she was reading it with a finger: reaching over, scrolling it, holding a line still with one fingertip while the rest of the column kept moving under it, pinning a comment she wanted to answer and coming back to it later.
She wasn't performing that. That was just the fastest way to do it.
(Luna:The problem was that there was too much of it to read.
That was a good problem.)
Then she hit a stretch she wanted read out and her hands were both busy and the tablet was at the wrong angle, and she turned her head and said, in the voice you use at home:
"Lebu. Come read these for me."
✦ ✦ ✦
The chat stopped.
A thousand people, and for about one full second nothing moved, and Josh, who had been reaching for his water, watched the column go completely still and felt his stomach drop.
Then it went off.
WHAT
"COME READ THESE"
COME. FROM WHERE. COME FROM WHERE
HE'S THERE????
HE IS IN THE ROOM bro is IN THE ROOM ok everyone be normal. maybe it's a call. maybe he's on a call mothbite: she said COME you don't say "come read these" to a guy on a call
IT IS SATURDAY NIGHT so what, he just goes over to her house on a saturday? he's at HER HOUSE?
ch1287: he's at her house on a saturday night and she's got her hand out like that. I'm going to be sick
I have been paying this guy four dollars a month for six years to draw and he is over there burn him burn Lebu alive
LEBU COME OUT HERE AND EXPLAIN YOURSELF guys. GUYS. it's a work thing. he built the rig. he's her tech guy
"tech guy" ON A SATURDAY krill: I would have done it for free. I SAID I would do it for free
I volunteered. I volunteered publicly this is the worst day of my life and I'm not even joking
Josh read it with his mouth slightly open.
It kept going. It got faster. Somewhere in there a guy wrote four paragraphs about how he was fine with it, actually, and it was fine, and he was happy for them, and then wrote a fifth.
His face was doing something. He was aware of that and could not spare the attention to fix it.
And Luna, in the chair, had turned to look at him.
She was not looking at the screen. She was looking at him, watching his face while he read, because his face was the fastest instrument in the room for finding out how bad a thing was.
(Luna:She could not read the chat and read him at the same time, and he was the better source.
He looked like a guy watching a car reverse into another car.)
She was about to ask.
Then the doorbell rang.