Later that day, Ronan let himself back into his apartment with the script still in his hand. He couldn’t wait to get to the bottom of this "half-immersion," whatever it turned out to be.
In his hurry he came straight in with his shoes still on. Normally he’d have slipped them off at the door without thinking about it; his mother’s side was Japanese, and she’d raised him to. This time it didn’t even cross his mind.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked the pages over.
"Method Grade A, huh." He turned the letter over in his head. "And they’ve got it marked Lead. This one’s got to be harder than Thomas was, and Thomas was only a Method Grade C." He murmured it, thoughtful, more to himself than to anyone.
The interface was still there too, hovering in the air in front of him. He studied it. It seemed to come alive whenever there was a script in play; or maybe it was the production itself that set it off. He couldn’t say for sure yet.
"So how do I get this half-immersion started?" He looked hard at the script.
He wanted to poke at the system a little while he had the chance. He carried the pages over to the desk, set them down, fixed himself a coffee, and sat. As long as the panels were up in front of him, he meant to make the most of them. Back when he was Thomas he’d had no idea how to reach any of this in the first place, so he wasn’t about to let the opening slip now.
He sipped his coffee and read. Time slipped by him.
"Oh." He sat forward a little. "So the higher this Method Grade goes, the deeper it puts me in? And the rougher it gets on me too, huh." His eyes moved down the readout. "And there’s something sitting above A. An S..."
He read on.
Then there was the other measure, the one for the screenplay itself. The Potential Grade.
Right now «Castaway in Time» sat at Potential Grade B. A Breakout, the system called it, in as many words, which he took to mean a project built to be a hit, the kind of thing that would catch on and do real business, at least somewhere like here in the States.
"Interesting." He tapped a finger against the mug. "How does it even know that, though? How does this Immersion System look at a script and figure out which ones are gonna break out, which ones people are gonna love? Is it reading the quality of the story itself?" The whole thing had him hooked.
There was more above B, as well. A Potential Grade A, as far as he could make out, was a Blockbuster, the sort of massive, career-making project most people in this business chased their whole lives and never touched. And above even that was an S. A Phenomenon. The rare kind that didn’t just do well but moved the whole culture around it.
He kept digging, and after a while it was what he couldn’t find that caught his attention. Nowhere in any of it was there a word about getting hurt. He remembered plainly enough what it had done to him as Thomas, the captain’s fists, the blade shoved through his chest, and every time, some small notice about Pain Resistance flashing up in front of him. Not a trace of that here.
"There’s more to this Immersion System than it’s letting me see, I know that much," he said quietly. "But for now, I’m just glad to be getting to know it a little."
He rubbed at his chin. "Alright. So how do I actually get into this half-immersion?"
He worked his way through the panels, feeling around them, until he found what he was after. When he reached out and tapped it, a new pane opened in front of him.
[Are you sure you want to enter the half-immersion?]
[ Yes / No ]
He tapped Yes without a second’s hesitation.
The moment he did, everything around him changed.
Before he’d caught up with it, the apartment was gone, and he was standing in a room he didn’t know. It creaked all around him, and through the window he could see the sea, vast and open, running out to the horizon.
He took the room in, the slow sway of it, the grey light coming off the water, and then looked down at the sides he still had on him. The scene was set out at sea, they said, his character holed up in a cabin aboard a modern ship.
"Incredible." It came out hushed. "Every bit as real as it was when I was Thomas." He got to his feet and turned a slow circle, taking the place in. "Though... yeah. I can see why they call it a half-immersion."
Because it wasn’t all the way there. Barely any movement to the place, and no smell at all, where a cabin like this should have carried something. It fell short even of the sudden jolt he’d felt as Thomas, and that one, he had a feeling, hadn’t been full immersion either.
He glanced down at himself and found the system had dressed him for the part. Not his own clothes at all. Something military, by the cut of it, a soldier’s uniform.
As he stood there working it over, a panel unfolded in the air before him, dense with text. A rundown of the man he was here to become.
[Elijah — a young soldier, twenty-seven. A traumatic brain injury is the least of what he carries. The war marked him far deeper than that: hallucinations, nightmares, the constant grind of PTSD he can’t set down.]
And under it, a second, laying out the scene itself.
[The brain injury makes flying too dangerous, so Elijah takes the slow way home to the States, by sea. Then a storm catches the ship. He bolts from his cabin, out among the sailors on the pitching deck, and goes over the side into the water. He survives, hauled up onto a passing vessel — but it’s no modern ship. It’s a ship out of 1732. He doesn’t know it yet: he’s washed up in the past.]
Ronan read it through, then read it again, the shape of the part settling into him.
And without quite meaning to, he started sinking into the character, learning him from the inside.
It was nothing like Thomas. As Thomas he’d been shoved out onto that deck cold, no warning, made to be the man on the spot. This was the opposite. This time the system gave him room: time to look, to turn it over, to sit with Elijah and take him apart until he understood him.
He could feel it working now, the character’s feelings rising up as his own.
And Elijah was not a simple man. A soldier before anything else, with all that dragged behind it, the things he’d have seen putting down the rebellion, the ugliness of a battlefield worn into him long before he ever boarded that ship.
The deeper Ronan went, the more it reached into his body. Sweat prickled along his forehead. His breathing pulled shorter, rougher, catching on itself. Before long his chest was damp under his shirt. His fingers began to shake.
His eyes went wide. "This... this is Elijah?" The whole of the man’s state had come over him and hauled him down into it.
It was foreign, every bit of it. And at the same time, somehow, already familiar.
He dragged in a slow breath and thought some water might steady him. His nerves had wound so tight that the smallest sound felt like it could set him off.
* * *
Across the city, up in Mark Kelly’s office at NBS, the afternoon light fell flat through the tall windows, and the producer, for all his standing, was working hard to be charming.
The reason sat across from him. A young woman, no older than twenty-three, and even at rest she filled the room. Creamy, rose-flushed skin, a spill of hair caught somewhere between gold and strawberry, wide blue eyes set in soft, full features the camera had already carried around the world. There was a lush, old-fashioned beauty to her, statuesque, the kind that belonged on a painted poster.
This was Jane Kingsley.
Off to the side sat Hill and Jenny, easy with all of it. They’d been at this long enough, and around stars long enough, that her wattage didn’t rattle them the way it plainly rattled Mark.
Jane took a slow sip of her coffee, legs crossed, every inch the one running the room. "So. When do I finally get to meet the leading man on this thing?" She let it hang a moment. "Word is you swapped him out at the last minute."
"Ha, well, about that..." Mark opened his hands, all smiles. "His agent’s still squaring a few things away with our people, honest truth. But you’ll meet him soon, I promise you that. Won’t be long at all."
The pleasantness slid off her face. "You’re about to tell me this one didn’t get handed the part off the back of somebody he knows, aren’t you? Because I’ve made that picture before. I’d rather not spend another one carrying a lead who never had to work for any of it."
Mark stalled, caught between the truth and the version of it he was allowed to say. "Ah. No, nothing like that. The switch came down to one thing, Jane: the man simply is the lead. Fits it better than anyone else we put in that room. And I’ll answer for what he can do." He nodded toward the pair against the wall. "So will Henry. So will Jenny."
Both of them nodded.