“You’re kidding me,” said the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism. “Jordon Connelly?”
The Keeper and I traded music videos back and forth a lot, and Jordon Connelly came up often. Lower budgets than the big stars, but solid execution, interesting visual ideas, and the music was cool. She was on the precipice of something bigger, you could feel it. And she could certainly dance. I’d wanted to see her on her last tour, but couldn’t afford it.
“The very same,” I said. “Apparently Jordon is working on a secret new album.”
“A secret which you are now revealing to me,” the Keeper pointed out.
“And each track on the album is going to have its own video,” I continued, “and apparently Jenning & Reece was hired by the Church of Gorvod to manage this entire campaign.”
“What does that even mean, though?” the Keeper asked.
“I haven’t started working on the account yet, so it could mean a lot of things,” I said. “Like I get the feeling Jordon isn’t looking to Jenning & Reece to produce creative treatments for these videos. I suspect it’ll be more like building the electronic press kit and lining up all the press coverage for the videos. I’m sure her label has its own marketing people to help promote the actual album.”
“Are you going to meet her?” the Keeper wondered.
“I might wind up on a conference call with her if I’m lucky,” I said.
“Wow. That’ll be mind-blowing, I’m sure.”
“Well, I’ve met a few famous people before,” I told her. “Admittedly, none who’ve been brainwashed by the Church of Gorvod.”
“What do you mean, ‘brainwashed’?”
“It’s a cult. Nobody actually just randomly ‘believes’ in Gorvod. They get brainwashed.”
“I see. When did you become a theological expert?”
“I have many talents.”
“Uh-huh. I don’t know how someone like Jordon Connelly would operate at such a high level as an artist if her free will had been eradicated by some Church.”
“Well, they want her to be successful, right? Because it will suck more people into their Church. So she probably gets deluxe concierge treatment. She may not even realize the average believer in her Church is sleeping on a cot in a basement or whatever.”
“You are literally making shit up right now,” the Keeper said.
“No way,” I said. “I watched a documentary about it.”
“Did anybody currently in the Church get interviewed for that documentary?”
“Of course not, because the Church doesn’t let anybody talk to the media!”
“So maybe, just floating this idea, the people who did get interviewed have this thing called bias.”
The Keeper was clearly trying to make a point here, but whatever—who in their right flipping minds believed in a space alien named Gorvod as their supreme deity?
Brainwashed people, that’s who.
Once you’d accepted impossible facts about reality into your life, your mundane tasks in life became significantly more mundane. Like, really I just wanted to wander the streets shattering plate glass windows with my voice, because awesome. But my employment contract made it clear that if I ever let slip any of Jenning & Reece’s trade secrets, I’d find myself exploring little-known aspects of the legal system left over from the days of bloody lashes and stoning to death, after which my corpse would rot in prison for good measure. It was colorful language. Evocative. A strong narrative that I really found compelling.
Instead I sat in my nook at home and flipped through bills, daydreaming about the not-too-distant-future day when I would actually pay these bills. I lived in a weird single-room studio apartment in the basement of a gigantic mansion built by a movie star in the ’50s, which had been subdivided into twelve independent units for rent. Houses in LA didn’t generally have basements, but this movie star was from the Midwest and had a phobia about tornadoes ripping through town, so dammit, they built him a basement to hide in.
It was sparsely decorated: a few framed band posters on the walls, a pair of adorable paintings of rabbits in space that I’d bought from an art student in school, strategic ambient rope lights. I had a battered old couch against the window that I couldn’t afford to replace, a bed in the corner with a steelwork frame that a guy made for me once when he was trying to impress me, a tiny little breakfast nook where I would sit with my four-year-old laptop and occasionally do the internet, and the cutest little kitchenette, fully equipped with one of everything: fork, knife, and spoon! I had no closets, so most of my clothes hung on a rack near the bed, and the rest were in little plastic bins that I could slide out from under the bed when I needed them. My TV was mounted on the wall, but I hung a patterned fabric over it and never plugged it in unless I had guests over who wanted to watch my POV while I was gaming.
The center area of the studio space was reserved for playing Sparkle Dungeon. I had a large pressure-sensitive floor mat as the base, with multiple motion sensors stationed around the area, and a little stand to hang my headset on when I wasn’t gaming. The VR gaming console sat in a revered spot, right on the floor in the corner of the room near the router. I had ample space to play the game, but the arrangement left little room for things like coffee tables and easy chairs and desks and the like.
When I first started dating Wendy, she found my place to be unpleasantly cavernous. “You know about this invention called lamps, right?” she would say. I was glad I’d held onto my studio anyway while we were together. It was uniquely soundproofed so the rooms above didn’t hear me diva-casting at all hours of the night. And, uh, I’d be on the streets right now if I hadn’t, so high-five to past me.
I wanted to know more about Alexander Reece, so I went down an internet rabbit hole for a while, revisiting old profiles and articles about him. He became more reclusive over the years, so you mostly just got younger Alexander making all the right generic promotional noises about himself. He didn’t have any speeches archived on YouTube, not even his several industry-award appearances. His Wikipedia page was bland and probably polished in secret by junior associates at the firm; nothing about his steady ascendance seemed outside the template for a clean-cut white man with inherited wealth and a curious mind who decided to make a name for himself in the world.
But then somehow I made it to page fourteen of Google search results and found something surprising. Alexander had appeared on an episode of an obscure podcast a year before his death. It was a podcast dedicated to examining the media’s role in holding society together or dissolving society completely, depending on which host was leading the discussion.
And Alexander was downright feisty on this show, deeply critical of his own industry. He said at one point, “What I mean is, Jenning & Reece, the entire ad industry really, is predicated on the cancerous replication of capitalist excess. Arguably no one on Earth needs any of the products or people that we market, at least not in the form we’re selling them, and yet we’ve harvested an inordinate share of wealth for ourselves by subverting natural instinct and shoving it in whatever direction we choose. No one should control as much wealth in society or power over culture as the advertising industry does. No single entity like Jenning & Reece should command the kind of social capital we do without deploying it in the service of humanitarian principles.”
“In practical terms, what does that sentiment mean for Jenning & Reece?” the host countered. “I mean, it’s a juggling act, right? You’d have to maintain wild success on behalf of your corporate clients in order to finance pro bono humanitarian campaigns, right? So you’d always have one foot in both worlds.”
“The ideal would be to convince our corporate clients that mass-scale humanitarian campaigns are in their interests,” Alexander replied. “Corporations are the blind evil gods of our era, engines of consumption and exploitation. But they’re still run by people, and people are still susceptible to emotional appeals. Jenning & Reece excels at emotional appeals. They’d just have to be targeted very specifically to key executives.” He laughed a bit.
“Is that something you’re actively pursuing now with your clients?” asked the host.
“I’ve planted some promising seeds. But ultimately we’re just one firm. Our odds of triggering a significant paradigm change in the industry are very slim in the short term.”
“What do you expect to happen over the long term?”
“Clearly the worst is yet to come,” Alexander replied. “You’re poised to see cutting edge advertising techniques used extensively to further the aims of totalitarian regimes. You’re going to see governments and other bad actors deploying malignant ad campaigns anywhere they can, right out in the open, not to sell product but to sway opinion, and you won’t even realize they’re doing it until they’re so deeply embedded that they can’t be stopped. You’ll see whole populations flipped toward giving up crucial rights, and they’ll think they’re doing it voluntarily. We’re doing what we can at Jenning & Reece to prevent that outcome, for ourselves at least, but hopefully on a wider scale as well.”
“How will that work?” the host asked.
“I can tell you this much,” Alexander replied. “At some point, we will need to stop servicing the needs of our powerful clients. And they will need to start servicing us.”