CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Awards ShowPart I: Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama“Hey El–” Leonard stopped abruptly in the middle of the word, when he realised that not only was Eine meeting him at the front door, but also Kay, who was helping Eine move her bags to Leonard’s car.

  “Hey Leonard. Would you mind if Kay came with us to lunch? Kind of a ‘I’m moving out’ thing, say ‘goodbye’ to your sibling kind of lunch?” asked Eine.

  “Uh, That… uh, that’s not… I mean, I don’t have an objection.”

  ***

  Leonard drove the three of them down the 15, towards old town Poway. Poway was an affluent suburb of San Diego, with a beautiful old park next to a historical recreation of a train station and an antique museum.

  Located in the middle of it, in the same building as the museum, was the Hamburger Factory, a family restaurant with lots of lovely kitsch – cigar store wood carvings of cowboys and Indians, deer antlers mounted on the walls, various model trains adorning the eaves and rafters.

  When Eine was first told that she was going to “summer camp,” she was quite excited, even as their parents intended the trip to the Hamburger Factory to “soften the blow.” Of course, had Eine known that what they were sending to was not a normal summer camp but the Fix-A-Kid Ranch, or had Kay known that Eine wouldn’t come back quite the same, the two siblings might have realised why the blow needed to be softened.

  (The actual name of the conversion therapy camp was “the True Directions Program at Harmony Hills” but the inmates had all sorts of fun names to refer to it by.)

  Seated at a table close to the bar, the three sat down. Kay ordered a burger with a fried half-avocado on it, and freshly made kettle chips; Leonard opted for a barbeque burger with tobacco onion and tater tots, and Eine selected a cobb sad with thousand isnd dressing.

  “It’s too bad Rafael is up in L.A.,” said Eine, picking out the tomatoes from the sad, putting them to the side to be consumed separately. “I think he and Kay would have a lot in common.”

  “Kay’s interested in film and TV production?”

  Leonard wasn’t getting it.

  “Actually, yeah, I am. Who’s Rafael?” said Kay.

  Kay was also not getting it.

  “Rafael used to be a contestant on the show Leonard and I are on, but voluntarily disqualified himself to become the new director on the show,” said Eine.

  “Well, I used to be on it. I dropped out,” expined Leonard.

  Kay raised an eyebrow. “Okay. Something’s going on here. Something weird.”

  Eine smiled, and stretched out.

  “Yep. But before I expin, you’re gonna want to get some food in you.”

  “That,” said Kay, “is needlessly cryptic.”

  “And what I’m about to tell you - you absolutely 100% positively have to keep it a secret from Mom and Dad, okay? And any secrets you share with me, I will never tell them.”

  “That goes for me too,” Leonard added. “What happens at Hamburger Factory… stays at Hamburger Factory.”

  “Actually if you don’t want to tell Leonard anything, you don’t have to. Though I assure you Leonard is as trustworthy, kind, and gentle a soul as any you will find on the Southern California stand-up circuit,” said Eine.

  “Weird crification, but I’ll take the compliment,” said Leonard. “But, uh, I still don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Rafael and Kay have the same favorite book.”

  “Favorite book?” asked Leonard.

  “It’s called ‘Welcome to Camp Yelrod.’”

  Kay slumped in her seat. Busted.

  “It’s just a book, okay? It’s… a fun read. A what-if scenario.”

  “What’s it about?” asked Leonard, not knowing the can of worms he was about to open.

  “Okay, you have to understand, it’s kind of a… send up of sorts? Of the… of how… god if I expin it I’m going to sound nuts. And a pervert.”

  “What’s wrong with being a pervert?” asked Eine. “Well, within limits, I guess. Safe, sane, and consensual.”

  Kay sighed in resignation. “It’s about a secret camp in Canada that takes weak, victimized women and turns them into big, tough boys by giving them testosterone so that they can learn to infiltrate the patriarchy and take it down from within. It’s stupid.”

  “Ohhhhhh,” said Leonard, finally getting it. “I’m going to head to the bar. And order some more eggs for the table. Chips! I meant chips!”

  Leonard then left, heading to the bar area, to let Eine and Kay have some privacy.

  “Kay. Do you think that, maybe… you like the book because…”

  “NO!” said Kay, way too loud. “I mean… no. It’s just a fun what-if. What girl hasn’t thought about being a boy? And I know that that’s not what those camps are like in real life. I know that what you went through was nothing like the fantasy in that novel.”

  Kay continued after a short pause.

  “And… I mean, you can’t tell Mom and Dad. If they think that I’m like, one of those trans people in the news, they’ll… Ethan, you were never the same after you came back from there. So… so lost in your own little world. Just on the computer all the time. You stopped talking to me. I mean, you didn’t avoid me, but… you used to be my brother and we used to do stuff together all the time and then it was like… you turned off unless I provoked you. The only way I could get you to feel something was if I got you to feel angry.”

  “Yeah. I guess that tracks. I wasn’t a very good brother. I guess I was never cut out for being a brother.”

  Eine thought for a second, and some things started to make more sense in hindsight.

  “Is that why you pyed that prank on me? Putting my name in that macho-man competition? Because let’s face it, Kay, banana chips? Kind of a weak motivation.”

  “I don’t know, it’s just… I thought maybe it would… humiliate you a little bit into shaping up.”

  Eine cocked an eyebrow. “Shaping up?”

  “Look, you’ve got… you’re a guy right? You should be doing more guy things. I mean, I see you with all this potential and you’re just wasting it. You’re going to have opportunities and privileges I’m never going to have but you’re just so…”

  “Not a guy.”

  “Exactly. You’re so not a guy, bro. Ethan, seriously, you don’t like sports, you don’t like hanging out with other guys, except Lenny, you don’t like any real boy hobbies like fixing cars, or woodworking, or fishing. I mean, you don’t even like beer.”

  “Well, I’m barely over twenty one. Maybe I should try wine coolers?”

  Kay looked at Eine with disbelief.

  “Wow. Okay. But the point is, I thought if you saw some of these macho men you’d be competing with, you’d toughen up a little bit. Maybe some of it would rub off on you. I mean, I hate to see you like this. Knowing what you could be, what you could accomplish and…”

  “What I could accomplish, but what you feel you can’t.”

  “Can you bme me? For being jealous? Just a little bit. You’re a guy. You’ve automatically got the first css seat in society. You get to be all the things I can’t. Big, strong. A leader.”

  Leonard came back from the bar with a basket of chips for the table.

  “Are we there yet?” asked Leonard.

  “Not yet. Haven’t cracked the shell,” said Eine.

  “Right. I guess… I’ll… use the restroom.”

  Kay shook her head.

  “Ethan, what’s going on? Both you and Lenny are acting really weird.”

  “Kay. What I’m about to say can not be told to Mom and Dad. Not until I’m out of the apartment, at the very least. Maybe not even then.”

  “Ethan?”

  “No no, let me get this out…” Eine took a deep breath. “Kay. I am one of those trans people on the news. You’re right. I’m not a guy. I can never be a guy. I’m a girl. Leonard knows this. I’m a trans woman.”

  Eine just remained silent for a few moments after that, allowing the information to sink into Kay’s brain. Eventually Kay started to speak again.

  “Bullshit.”

  “I shit you not. In fact, I’ve been on hormone repcement therapy for two months.”

  “But you went to the camp. You were cured.”

  “I was closeted. The only thing that happened at Reverend Randy’s Righteous Retreat-o-Rama was that I learned to hide who I was.”

  “Jesus, Ethan… oh my god. This… this can’t be right. The… the camp fixed you. Mom and Dad said…”

  Eine held out her hand, for Kay to take. She took it, and Eine expined.

  “Mom and Dad are smart, kind people who thought they were doing the right things, but they have a lot of difficulty telling right from wrong, so they let other people tell them what right and wrong was. And those people were either mean or stupid or both.”

  “So you haven’t been competing on a reality show? Then where did you get the money? Have you been selling drugs? Jesus, Ethan, have you been ‘breaking bad’ on us? Are you out there cooking crystal meth and calling yourself Heisengirl?”

  “Oh no, the reality show is real. It’s just called ‘Woman Up!’ It’s where I’ve been getting the hormones from. Leonard’s been on it too.”

  “You and Leonard are on ‘Woman Up!?’ That’s the reality show you’ve been on all this time? Oh Jesus. Oh Christ.”

  Kay grimaced and looked away. Finally, she continued: “Why the hell would you want this? What on Earth would make you think becoming a girl is a good idea?”

  Eine just shrugged.

  “It’s just who I am. I’m happier as a girl than I am as a boy. Being a boy was making me beyond miserable. Being in the closet… made it even worse.”

  Kay took some deep breaths.

  “At least that expins how the hell you were able to st so long in the contest.”

  Leonard arrived back at the table at this time, causing Kay to look at him, and for the first time, noticed the effects of a month’s worth of HRT.

  “Lenny, you’re trans?” said Kay, again too loudly. “Oh shit. Sorry.”

  Leonard sighed and sat down.

  “No, actually. Not that there would be a problem with that if I was, but no, I am in fact, cisgender heterosexual male. Objectively proven that I can’t be trans, actually, not even when I’m being paid.”

  “I mean, he gave it a really solid effort,” said Eine. “One to be appuded. But no, Leonard is a man.”

  “Wait, I’m confused,” said Kay.

  “Yes, you very much are,” said Eine, “but we’ll get to that in a bit.”

  “Buh?” said Kay, in her confusion.

  Eine sighed. “Leonard? Could you take over for a bit?”

  “Sure, I guess. Well, Kay, how much has Eine told you?”

  Kay’s eyes went wide.

  “How much has Eine told me?”

  Eine sighed again.

  “Yep. After Margeret Eine Hamilton, who wrote the computer program for the Apollo missions.”

  Leonard nodded. “Yeah, Kay, turns out you can take the boy out of the geek, but you can’t take the geek out of the girl.”

  “Aargh! Well, Eine here told me that you two are contestants on ‘Woman Up!’ and that's where Eine has been getting hormones.”

  “Yeah, and if your body and brain don’t like estrogen, being on estrogen sucks. I had to drop out after like, only a month of being on estrogen. Nine of us started, there’s only like four left, and Eine is pretty much guaranteed to win the grand prize.”

  Eine shrugged. “I wouldn’t say that. Gooch is pretty much committed to the bit.”

  “What the hell is a ‘Gooch’?” asked Kay.

  “We don’t have a good answer for that,” admitted Leonard. “Point is, one of the contestants, Rafael, was a trans man. And instead of having estrogen introduced into his endocrine system, he simply stopped having testosterone introduced into his endocrine system. And it was torture for him too, as it was for me, as it was for Jacob, and Bradley – well, Bradley didn’t even get as far as the hormones, really. He had a freakout just wearing a dress in public.”

  “Well, yeah, dresses are kind of silly, no?” said Kay. “And skirts. Like, why wouldn’t you want your legs fully covered individually? And… oh my god, you think I might be a trans man, don’t you?”

  “I will admit, the possibility crossed my mind the minute I saw ‘Yelrod’ on your bookshelf, and looking back it would expin so much,” said Eine.

  “Look, I… guess I could see why I could give that impression. But I mean, it’s not like, something you could actually do.”

  “As I said, you should talk to Rafael. He can answer those specific questions better than I can,” said Eine.

  “It wasn’t a question,” said Kay. “It’s a statement. Girls are girls, boys are boys, and while I’ve thought about being a boy, sure, I’m not.”

  “I mean, how often do you think about being a boy?” asked Leonard.

  “I don’t know,” said Kay. “Maybe like, three or four times a week. You know. The normal amount.”

  “The normal amount is zero,” said Leonard.

  “Or, maybe two or three times in a lifetime,” said Eine. “More importantly, when you think about yourself as a guy, how does it make you feel?”

  Kay pced her head on the table and covered the back of her head with her hands.

  “I don’t like where this is going,” said Kay, slightly muffled by speaking directly to the table.

  “Okay. We can stop,” said Eine. “But before we do, can I ask you just one question?”

  “What?” Kay again muttered into the table.

  “Do you have a name picked out?”

  Kay sighed.

  “Kevin.”

  “What was that? I couldn’t quite hear you.”

  Kevin pulled his head back up from the table and slouched in his chair.

  “Kevin. Kevin Conroy MacDonald. After the voice actor in ‘Batman.’”

  “My god,” said Leonard, looking between the two. “You really are siblings, aren’t you?”

  ***

  Part II: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a ComedyGooch was on his sofa, baked, as some cartoon pyed on his TV - was it ‘Spongebob’? ‘Adventure Time?’ A screensaver? He couldn’t rightly tell, only that it was full of pretty colors and happy sounds, which was right where he wanted it to be.

  He had smoked a truly prodigious quantity of marijuana through his prototype YiffSpliffs bong. He lied and said to himself that it was just quality assurance testing. But the truth is, Gooch sought the ultimate high: autonegation.

  Autonegation - the erasure of the self. The elimination of the thinking being, what Heidegger called the ‘Dasein,’ the part of the mind that is aware of its own existence.

  Gooch wanted that part of his psyche to take a good long nap. A coma if he could pull it off. And each cloud of vapor was just another lulbye he sang to himself.

  Because things were getting too painful. Too real.

  “Well, duh, Gooch. You entered a reality TV show,” the dasein thought to itself.

  “Shut up, nobody likes you, dasein!” thought the id.

  “Everyone’s going to see this and judge you,” thought the superego.

  “Who am I!? Who am I!?” screamed the ego.

  “The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma,” said Patrick Star.

  Damn. Maybe it was Spongebob on the TV.

  Nobody knew how to describe or define who Gooch was. Including, tragically, Gooch himself. And that was part of the reason that Gooch simply didn’t want to be.

  It is not that Gooch wanted to die. To die is to stop existing forever. Gooch just wanted to not exist right now.

  Thus the chemically enhanced expedition into autonegation, a state of existence indistinguishable from a dreamless sleep.

  When Gooch enters autonegation - this pce of non-being, a pce of mental zeroness where both body and mind are null and numb, sometimes, he snores.

  —

  “Wake up, Gooch!” said a familiar voice, as Gooch was being jostled awake, roughly.

  Gooch opened up blurry, bloodshot eyes to see Jacob grabbing him by the shoulders and a firefighter standing over him. The firefighter was shining a fshlight into his eyes, which seemed rather rude to Gooch at the time.

  “Your friend is fine. More baked than a ptter of pretzels, but he’ll be fine.”

  “Dude,” said Gooch. “What the hell?”

  Jacob hugged Gooch, and then scowled at him. “You scared me.”

  “What?”

  “You scared me!” Jacob yelled. “We were supposed to meet up tonight, remember? When you didn’t show up at my pce, I stopped by yours, saw you passed out on the couch through the window. Tried to wake you up, thought the worst, and you fucking worried me, man! I thought you might have died. Like… the way you were talking, I thought you might have done something stupid.”

  “Jacob. It’s me,” said Gooch. “I’m always doing something stupid.”

  “No, dammit, Jude Guthrie, you don’t ugh this one off! I thought you killed yourself. I thought I lost my best friend tonight! This is not something to ugh about! This is never going to be a good fucking story. This is just me getting put through hell because my friend is obviously hurting but he’s not going to get the help he needs because he thinks that there’s no point to it.”

  The firefighter looked over at the two of them. “Is there anything else you need?”

  “No,” said Jacob. “Thank you. I was worried about him. Thanks for coming.”

  Jacob sighed, motioning to the entrance to Gooch’s apartment.

  “I owe you a door.”

  Jacob then sat down on the couch next to Gooch, as the firefighter moved onto the next call.

  Gooch furrowed his brow, confused.

  “I was just… I was sleeping.”

  “You slept through when they kicked your door in. Don’t give me that ‘just sleeping bit.’”

  “You’re overreacting, Jacob!”

  “What is with you, Jude!?”

  “I’m tired, Jacob!”

  “Yeah, no shit!”

  “No, not… Jacob, I’m tired of things getting worse! I’m tired of everything being a race for survival, for… I’m tired of things continuing to fall apart. I’m tired of seeing all the pain in the world and I just want it to stop, just for a fucking moment, so I can catch my breath. It’s not funny anymore. I don’t know how to turn it into a joke anymore.”

  Jacob colpsed onto the couch next to Gooch and just sighed.

  “Fuck if I know how to solve all the problems in the world, Jude, but I can tell you one thing. You are having a hell of a reaction to the hormones. You think you’re not, but you are.”

  “I can’t stop though. I really can’t.”

  “Fuck the whole ‘committed to the bit’ bit, this is killing you!”

  “It’s not that!”

  Gooch put his head in his hands.

  “I’m going to do it. I’m going to go all the way on the show.”

  “WHAT?!?”

  And then after the shock subsided.

  “You’re… you’re telling me you’re trans? Like Eine?”

  “No.”

  Gooch looked up at Jacob with tears in his eyes.

  “Jacob. I’m a high school dropout who sells novelty products to stoners, living in Southern California. I’m not doing the show because I have gender feelings or even because I’m ‘committed to the bit.’”

  He pced his head on his hands and leaned over on the couch until he was ying down in the fetal position.

  “I have to do this. I need the fucking money.”

  ***

  Part III: Outstanding Directing for a Variety SpecialKieran looked up from the Chuck Tingle book he was reading when the door opened and two young men – well, he assumed they were men for the moment – that he had not met before headed into the WeHo LGBT Center.

  “Morning. I’m Kieran. How can I help you?” said the elderly gay man behind the desk.

  “We don’t know!” said Oscar, cheerfully.

  “But we hope you can!” said Victor. “I’m Victor, and this is Oscar. And… hmm.”

  Victor racked his brains trying to figure out how exactly to sum up the situation.

  “We’ve been on a reality TV show which has been giving ostensibly cisgender men estrogen as an experiment. It turns out that the cisgender men hate it and have dropped out of the program, the one closeted transgender woman turns out to love it and is almost guaranteed to run away with the whole thing, and the two of us, well, we could take it or leave it.”

  “There’s also Gooch,” said Victor.

  “Forget about Gooch. Mood Swings Georg is an outlier and should not be counted,” said Oscar. “Point is… it seems so weird, because like, while everyone else is clearly cisgender–”

  “–Or in Rafael and Eine’s cases, clearly trans–,” said Victor.

  “–when we try to figure out what’s going on with us, some of the evidence points to cisgender, and some of the evidence points to transgender, and it freaks us out.”

  Victor nodded in agreement.

  “You think you could be non-binary?” said Keiran.

  Victor shrugged. “Maybe. But how would you be able to tell?”

  “Hold up,” said Oscar. “Non-binary? As in, analog?”

  Kieran smirked.

  Victor rolled his eyes. “Oscar’s not dumb, just ignorant.”

  “Ooh, there’s a clinic here,” said Oscar, pointing. “Maybe there’s, like, a test you can do? Are gender and sexual orientation tests covered by insurance? Do you take Fanfare? Victor, what insurance do you have?”

  “I’m a struggling actor. I’m on Medi-Cal.”

  “Ah. I’ve got Fanfare insurance through the Affordable Care Act.”

  “You, you got health insurance through Obamacare?” asked Victor, in disbelief.

  “No, don’t be stupid. I got it through the Affordable Care Act. Who’d trust Obamacare?”

  Victor looked at Kieran.

  “I wish to revise my earlier statement about Oscar.”

  ***

  After being told, no, there isn’t a blood test for sexual orientation or gender orientation, Kieran sat them down in the library with a bunch of books to go through.

  “So, if it’s not personal, and it’s none of my business, but are you two just friends?” asked Kieran.

  “Yep,” said Oscar. “Straight as an arrow.”

  “I’m gay as a bde, but he’s a Republican, so that’s never gonna happen,” said Victor.

  Kieran looked at Oscar with disbelief. “Is that true?”

  Oscar didn’t even look up from the book he was skimming through. “What? Uh, yeah, Victor’s gay.”

  Victor rolled his eyes.

  “So, Kieran, I think the best way to describe what I’m going through is that… sometimes I feel really masculine, and sometimes really feminine. I always thought it was because I was an actor. You know. Cis-but-method. I mean, is that a thing?”

  “Well, cis-but-method may be a thing but it doesn’t have a pride fg. Have you just considered that you’re genderfluid?”

  “Isn’t that what they inject us with at the Casa?” joked Oscar.

  “Oscar, shush. Genderfluid. That… could expin quite a bit. Including Don Quixote.”

  “Don Quixote?” asked Kieran.

  “It’s this thing I did - I performed Don Quixote with a goatee and a dress and it was the weirdest thing. I acted my heart out. I feel like I was in the zone, more comfortable on stage than I’ve ever been. Like, I’m not stupid, as an actor I know I’m hit-or-miss, but when I hit, I really hit… and I’m starting to think that the roles I’m hitting are ones that tend to be, well, androgynous or… which are a little male, a little female…”

  “What about Lady MacBeth?” asked Oscar.

  “That was when we were going through the Real Life Test challenge, right? I’ve been thinking about that. I should have nailed it. Lady MacBeth is one of my best roles. But I overacted that one. By a lot. I think it was because I was trying to py Lady MacBeth while I myself was trying to act more feminine than I was, and it was just too many yers of gender on top of–”

  The lightbulb over Victor’s head went off.

  “Ooh, yeah, Kieran do you have some books on this genderfluid identity stuff? I think you nailed it.”

  “We do have a few books, yes,” Kieran took down some books on gender fluidity off the shelves. “I’d say the person to talk to for more information would be Sheri, our LGBTQ councilor, but she’s taken a sabbatical to do a side project.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Oscar.

  “We know Sheri. We’re the side project,” said Victor.

  “Did you talk to her about this?” said Kieran.

  “Victor did,” said Oscar.

  Victor raised an eyebrow. “No… no, I didn’t. I thought you were going to bring it up with her, Oscar.”

  “When was I going to have time to bring it up with her? I was working on the puppet show.”

  “The puppet show?” asked Kieran.

  “We were both working on this puppet show for the reality show. And then Jett got injured and… so, wait, neither of us have talked to Sheri about this?” said Oscar.

  “We need to call her,” said Victor.

  “Well, yes, but since we’re here anyway, maybe we should look up some stuff that might apply to me? Because genderfluid doesn’t feel right to me.” asked Oscar. “Sometimes Victor feels like a guy, sometimes he feels like a girl, but me, I just don’t… I don’t feel anything either way. I mean, one of the reasons I joined up with this project was that I was positive that trans people were just faking and anyone could just pretend to be the other gender and it wouldn’t be a big deal. And, as it turns out, it’s a big fucking deal. But not for me. Like… am I just broken or something?”

  “Hmm,” said Kieran. “Thought experiment time. Let’s say that you were turned into a woman by a wizard. And that you couldn’t go back to being a guy. You really wouldn’t mind that at all?”

  “I mean, it’d be annoying, but I could learn to live with it.”

  “I see. Now imagine, ten years ter. You’ve gotten to live as a woman for ten years. How would you feel?”

  Oscar shrugged.

  “And then the spell wears off and you wake up to be a guy again, how would you feel about that?”

  “Annoyed, I guess. Like, I’d have to have bought new wardrobes twice.”

  “But you wouldn’t be horrified or anything? Or relieved. Or… anything?”

  “I don’t think so. Why would I?”

  “Because most people, Oscar, very much would feel very strongly one way or another about what that wizard did.”

  “Great. I’m broken, then.”

  “You’re not…” Kieran pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “You’re not broken, you’re just rare. Have you considered you might just not have a preferred gender?”

  “You think he might be agender?” asked Victor.

  “Well, yeah, I’m absolutely a gender. But which gender?” said Oscar.

  “Not ‘a gender’. ‘Agender’. All one word. As in, ‘without a gender.’”

  Oscar looked between Victor and Kieran. “Is that a thing?”

  Kieran shrugged, and pulled down some more books from the shelves for Oscar. “It’s rare, but it’s absolutely a thing.”

  Victor and Oscar spent the rest of the day poring through the books that Kieran provided.

  ***

  Part IV: Outstanding AdaptationChristopher Roen was currently drafting a contract for Jett Timbrell. In it, Garden Alpha would agree to pay all expenses reted to the injury and physical therapy on his hand, if he agreed that the injuries were a ‘self-inflicted misadventure’ for which Garden Alpha, Culver-Horowitz Productions, etc., were not to be held liable.

  He didn’t feel too worried if Jett rejected the offer. After the incident with Chase Castle, all the contestants had to sign bulletproof liability waivers.

  Jamie could have shot one of the contestants, Alec Baldwin-style, and Garden would still be off the hook once it got to an actual court. Not that it would. The contracts said it would go to arbitration first.

  But even going to arbitration was an expense and a nuisance, so anything he could do to nip that in the bud now was important.

  Christopher Roen liked nipping things in the bud. The bud was when things were at their most vulnerable. Most easily nipped. Destroying things before they even had a chance to bloom always gave him a bit of a boost to get him through the day.

  It was better than coffee.

  Daryl came by knocking on his door.

  “Hey, Chris, do you have a moment?”

  Roen nodded. “You caught me at a good time.”

  “I just got off the phone with Jamie and Sam, they want to have a meeting this week with all the stakeholders, and I was hoping you could clear your schedule and come. Something about how the format was becoming anticlimactic and wondered what the legal ramifications of a pivot would be.”

  Roen frowned. While he had come to appreciate the mission of the ‘Woman Up!’ project from his experiences with transphobia - albeit second-hand - there was still a part of him that wished Daryl listened to his advice and had, well… nipped that project in the bud.

  ***

  “Jamie! Sam!”

  Daria greeted the two at the Garden Alpha office again, and since the two had arrived a little early, they stopped off at the break room to get a little bit of coffee for Jamie and Daria, and some tea for Sam.

  “Sheri and Pranav are on their way. Sheri has to pick up Rafael,” said Sam. “Rafael doesn’t have a car.”

  “Really? How much is the team paying him?” asked Daria. “Hopefully enough, no?”

  “We’re paying him guild rates for 1AD while Terryl is out, and 2AD rates when Terryl can come back. It’s not that he can’t afford it, he literally doesn’t have a driver’s licence.”

  “Ah, because I was about to say, we could just set him up with a fleet car for the weeks he’s here.”

  “A fleet car?”

  “Garden Auto. We’re making a new type of self-driving car.”

  Sam and Jamie immediately went pale.

  “Are… are any of those cars out on the road now?”

  “Oh, no no no,” said Daria.

  “Oh, good.”

  “I mean, not anymore. They tended to ignore their GPSes and immediately take the shortest route to the nearest body of water and drive themselves in.”

  Sam nearly snorted the tea up her nose.

  “And you wanted to give Rafael one of those cars?” said Jamie, in disbelief.

  “They’re perfectly fine so long as you disable the TP subroutines.”

  “TP subroutines?” asked Sam.

  “‘Trolley Problem Subroutines.’ Basically, when you’re driving, you have to make a lot of split second decisions in an emergency. If the brakes fail and you have to swerve to hit one child or three elderly people, for example, or you have to hit a car with four people with a twenty-five percent chance of injury or a motorcycle with one person and a fifty percent chance of injury… so we have the AI onboard constantly thinking about the ways to best minimize harm and make ethical decisions under duress.”

  “And that works?” asked Jamie.

  “No,” said Daria. “As I was saying, the cars with the TP subroutine active immediately drive to the nearest body of water and try to submerge themselves. Nearest we can figure we’re the first tech company to give an AI an existential crisis.”

  “Well, it could be worse. You could have programmed it to prioritize avoiding Garden Insurance customers over saving human lives,” said Sam.

  “I mean… we… didn’t… not consider it,” said Daria.

  Bnk stares from Sam and Jamie. Daria continued.

  “We were actually able to recover some of the logs from the st TP subroutine, and nearest that we could figure, the cars had ethically decided that being a car was simply too much of a threat to human life and that they needed to be public transportation. Since they could never be public transportation, they got depressed and ended their lives.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Sam. “You invented a car and gave it suicidal levels of depression due to trains-gender dysphoria?”

  “Well, most cars these days are a little genderqueer. I mean, on my car, it said right on the sticker: ‘AUTO TRANS’.” Jamie sipped her coffee and thought. “Maybe it just needed to be topped up with genderfluid.”

  ***

  “Everyone here?” Daryl asked. Sure enough everyone was - Daryl, Chandra, Daria, and Roen from Garden, Sam, Jamie, Erin, Pranav, and Rafael from Culver-Horowitz. This was always going to be a big meeting, but until this moment, Sam had not realised how big this was going to be.

  And were Chandra and Pranav pying footsie under the conference table, or was Sam just imagining things?

  “Right then,” said Daryl. “Let’s get started. Sam?”

  Sam addressed the room. “Right, well, as I sent you in the email, we have three dropouts, one disqualification - that’s you Rafael - and one ejection. Now, of the three dropouts, they fell in line with our initial prediction that cisgender men would rapidly get gender dysphoria and drop out early. The problem is, we’re getting to the endgame, and it is looking anticlimactic.”

  “How so?” asked Chandra.

  “Of the four remaining contestants, one of them was a closeted trans woman the whole time. As Mara – sorry, Oscar, one of our contestants, put it, ‘trans women have an innate biological advantage in competitions to see who can be the most like a trans woman.’”

  “Hmm. And the other three?”

  “They’re not affected the same way as the others,” said Jamie. “Our working guess is that two of them are either agender or genderfluid, and the third is…”

  Jamie searched her brain.

  “The third is…”

  “The third is Gooch,” offered Sheri, unhelpfully.

  “The third is Gooch?” asked Daryl. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, you know how some people fall into simple, easy to define categories?” said Sheri.

  “Yes?”

  “Gooch doesn’t. Gooch… Gooch is Gooch. Is he trans? Cis? Enby? Something else entirely? He is literally indescribable. All I know is that he’s suffering from severe depression and I have no idea if that was already there or if we caused it. So I’ve been wracking with the ethical dilemma of even letting him continue.”

  “And if Gooch does drop out,” said Sam, “or Sheri ejects him for his own safety, we’re still left with our original problem - that Eine’s victory is pretty much in the bag. How do we make the endgame interesting?”

  Roen spoke up. “I mean, you can’t change the rules in the middle of the competition. Sure, there are lots of Reality TV twists, surprise eliminations, things like that. But all of them were within the rulebook determined beforehand. You wouldn’t be able to change the rules of the competition unless all remaining competitors agreed, and that presumably includes the presumptive winner, who you’d be asking to give up a nearly guaranteed grand prize.”

  “Christopher’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to the contestants. But forget them for a second. What about the audience? We’ve promised them an elimination format reality show,” said Erin.

  Rafael’s phone vibrated at that moment, and he quickly looked down to look at the message. It was from Eine. “Can Leonard and I come up to L.A. to talk with you about trans man stuff? My… younger sibling may be coming along too. Call them ‘K’ for now.”

  Rafael quickly texted back: “In meeting, will answer shortly.”

  “Let’s assume that we could get the contestants on board. Maybe switch to a documentary format? Continue with Jamie and Eine’s transitions? Maybe interview some of the contestants who have dropped out, film them going about their lives after the show?” asked Chandra.

  “It seems a bit ‘Lost in La Mancha,’ when you think about it, no?” said Rafael, to a room full of people who didn’t get the deep-cut of a movie industry reference. So he continued.

  “Terry Gilliam wanted to make a movie called ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, and it was such a famous example of ‘development hell’ that someone made a documentary about how cursed the production was, called ‘Lost in La Mancha.’ Arguably, the documentary was better than the actual movie when it came out in 2018.”

  Sheri got a text from Victor around this time, asking to meet up in L.A., to which she also replied that she was in a meeting and that it wasn’t a good time to talk.

  “Is that so bad? Think about it from the editing room perspective,” said Jamie. “We use the documentary as… kind of a frame story around the competition for the first act. And then by the time we head to the second act - the documentary portion, we already know the cast of characters and the stakes have been defined.”

  “How the hell are we going to get the remaining four contestants to agree, though?” asked Daryl.

  Pranav got a text on his phone from Jacob, asking if he and Gooch could come down to L.A. to have a meeting. Pranav replied that he was in a meeting and would talk ter.

  “Is there any way we could just get them to all come down to L.A. and sit down with us in a meeting room to discuss options?” asked Daria.

  “It’d be a bit of an ask,” said Sam. “But we could try.”

  Jamie got a text on her phone. It was from Larry Zimmel. “Jamie. When you get this, call my office. Writer’s room found out some breaking news and it might affect your program - and you. It’s bad news.”

  ***

  “Larry, what’s up?” said Jamie, over the phone, while the big meeting temporarily broke for lunch.

  “Hey Jamie. We’ve been covering the big convention for the ex-President’s party. And, uh, one of the things that has been getting traction here is this publication from the Legacy Foundation. They’ve come out with a massive 900 page document for the first 180 days in office if the ex-President finds his way back into the White House. They’re calling it ‘Blueprint 180.’”

  “And?”

  “Well, to put it bluntly, they’re basically saying that anything that’s transgender is pornography, anything that’s pornography should be outwed, and anyone who makes it should be put in prison.”

  “Christ. It really says that?”

  “Yeah, Jamie, it does.”

  “You must have had to dig real deep to find something that insane, did they bury it like, under 500 pages of information on agriculture subsidies or something?”

  “Uh, no. It’s on page five.”

  “Page five?”

  “And alluded to in page one.”

  “Larry, what does this all mean?”

  “Fuck if I know, Jamie.”

  Larry audibly sighed into the phone. “You know that we and the team have been rooting for you. But if they’re serious about this, you could find yourself… well, a reality show about transitioning? One designed to show that trans people have to be trans and cis people have to be cis? Like, I don’t know what they mean by ‘transgender ideology,’ but it’s very clear that your show has a pro-trans message.”

  “So you’re saying if the ex-President gets elected, he could try to shut down the show.”

  “Jamie, if the ex-President gets elected, after the Supreme Court decisions giving Presidents full immunity for criminal acts? Shutting down the show might be the best case scenario.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying… just be careful, okay? This is a guy who holds grudges, and he’s leading the incumbent President in the polls.”

  “I’ll tell our wyer to take a look at it. If there’s anything to worry about… he’ll find it.”

  ***

  “Hmm.” said Roen, looking through a printout of the document in his office, with Jamie seated in the uncomfortable chair across from his desk.

  “That’s it, just ‘hmm?’” asked Jamie.

  “This isn’t a legal document, Jamie. It’s a policy document. Lawyers deal in rules and these aren’t rules, they’re a document describing what the rules should accomplish.”

  “Alright. So, what do they want to accomplish?”

  “They want to make trans people go away,” said Roen.

  “By go away, you mean…?”

  “Well, specifically, that the government should use its massive power to make trans people go away. Now what form of ‘go away’ that takes could be a number of forms. Censorship. Imprisonment. Execution. We really are talking about anything from ‘the FCC will fine you if you talk about trans people before 9pm on the public airwaves’ to ‘go directly to death camp, do not pass go, do not collect 200.’”

  Jamie slumped.

  “Shit.”

  “It is,” said Roen. “But right now there is nothing we can do about it.”

  “There isn’t?”

  “No, there isn’t. We can’t sue to overturn the unconstitutionality of a w that hasn’t been written yet, and we can’t react in anticipation of an election that hasn’t been conducted.”

  “Oh.”

  “My advice is, don’t worry about it. We’ll have plenty of time to worry about it if it becomes a problem.”

  “And if it does become a problem?”

  “Well then, you’re fucked,” said Roen.

  ***

  “We buy them out,” said Daria, back in the conference room.

  Though Jamie and Roen hadn’t returned, the meeting continued without them. And Daria had come up with an idea.

  “We bribe them. We give them an extra, I don’t know, 50k each to all drop out at once, plus the 32k they earned from the pot. And then if anyone wants to continue with the transition, we offer another 30k for every month they continue to participate, so we can switch to a documentary format.. We can also offer that deal to some of the former contestants to see how their lives have changed from taking part in the contest.”

  “That might work,” said Sam. “How’d you come up with that?”

  “Season two of ‘The Mole’ with Anderson Cooper. One of the contestants, Evia, was doing so well they literally bribed her to leave the show. She took the money, and the contest remained interesting.”

  Jamie and Christopher Roen finally returned from their side conference.

  “What’d I miss?”

  “We have a pn,” said Sam. “What were you two talking about?”

  “Just some stuff that isn’t a concern now, but might be down the road. Just wanted to get ahead of it,” said Jamie.

  “So we’re all agreed then?” said Daryl. “We bring in the remaining contestants, see if they’d be willing to take the deal - I imagine they would - and pivot to a documentary format?”

  “Right. We’ll just adapt as we go along,” said Sam.

  AnnouncementSome more great fan art from Skye, this time of Kay MacDonald:

  Thanks to everyone who helped out in writing this chapter, including:

  BreefolkA Goth Muppet version of R.R. Rosecolour.SkyeKurisuZyllycatJessie Emilyn