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Double Vision, well down the street.
     
    OUT IN THE PLAZA there were flags fluttering and Eve had the sensation of having forgotten something, like where she’d parked. Or an errand she was supposed to run. But it wasn’t either of those things.
    Across the square, crowds had gathered outside the main doors to Meme Media, and she walked down through the sunken garden, past
the empty band riser, the singing fountain and cubist waterfall until she was close enough to see the anxious queue, the show’s black-clad protesters cordoned off to one side. This was the final procession of contestants in for the filming of another episode of KiddieFame. And even bundled against the fall chill, Eve thought she could decipher plainly enough every ambition. The aspiring soul singers and rappers, the six-year-old actors and models, the stand-up comics and celebrity chefs in waiting.
    The kids moved and corralled, they hived off and re-gathered in front of tents and awnings, past the tables with the sign-up sheets and releases and waivers, onto the switchback ramp that led up the glimmering flanks of the building under the two-story banners that riffled overhead: KiddieFame. You Should Have these Problems. The words imposed over a picture of the cliché spoiled child star, pampered by staff, lounging poolside, tiles under the deck chair littered with twenties and fifties, spent candy wrappers and game controllers.
    They filed inside with their voice and dance coaches, their prompters and image consultants and stuffed animals. Never with their parents, who were craftily banned from tapings. Whose presence, producers had long ago decided, made contestants too sympathetic, too human. Parents who surrendered their children to the KiddieFame machinery weren’t even allowed to sit in the green room. They stayed shivering outside the building, smoking against a bank of outdoor toilets erected for their use.
    Eve watched these parents and imagined their anxieties. The humming cameras inside. The 93 million homes into which their children would soon be streaming. These things would be on their minds. But none more so than the possibility that their children might succumb to what was simply known as a “Kill.”
    KiddieFame had its elimination mechanism, that necessary algorithm of the fame game. You had to kick people off the show in order
to find a winner. KiddieFame was unusual, however, for having two methods. A competitor could simply lose in the voting that followed a set of performances. But then, in the show’s signature moment, they could also be the target of a surprise Kill. These were rare because they followed not bad performances, of which there were many, but perfect ones: performances that received five stars from every voting remote in each of the six hundred seats in the theater.
    Why eliminate a candidate who’d been judged perfect? There were PhDs written about the KiddieFame Kill, including one that received some internet notoriety for asserting that the show was inspired by “archaic sacrificial religions, which always laid the best, most beautiful victims on their altars.” In any case, whether understanding it or not, the audience seemed to sense when a particular performer must go. And how harmonious the rounds immediately following a Kill then seemed to be, as if some sort of peace had been restored. While from the sacrificed, naturally, came snivels, and from their attendants muttered curses, knotted rage, the sense of the existential trapdoor having been sprung. The fall into invisibility begun.
    Eve turned to leave, returning a wave from a traffic cop standing nearby—a touch of a finger to the brim of his hat, a shy grin of recognition—then she crossed back over the plaza and down Jeffers towards her truck.
    She’d parked near the mouth of a narrow alley that ran down the side of the Peavey Block. She had her keys out, but she stepped into the alley, into the cold shadow, remembering the wet-paper smell, the