Page 6

The First Choice

As the recap finishes at last, the screen recedes and the studio brightens slightly. Box lights glow on the periphery, creating an intimate, quiet halo effect.

Across the table, Talia is sitting perfectly still. She’s a statue, not blinking, not even breathing.

At first, Marsh is nervous for her reaction. But the longer the silence goes on, the less afraid she becomes. She doesn’t like to disappoint, of course. But when you always expect to fail, there’s a comfort in it when it finally comes.

She knew all of this was too good to be true.

“I’m sorry,” Marsh begins, wringing her hands nervously. “I just—”

“Holy mackerel,” Talia finally says, in her trademark adorable way.

She’s grinning now, her eyes sparkling. She looks happy.

No.

Hungry.

“That was quite a recap.”

“Really?” Marsh squeaks.

She waits for Talia to thank her for her time, to wish her the best of luck and point to the door, unable to comprehend that this isn’t the end of her audition, the terminus of her last and only chance, but none of that happens. Talia keeps sitting there, and the cameras keep rolling.

Marsh stares, dumbfounded.

She was prepared for this to be the end. Not the beginning.

For once, she doesn’t know what comes next.

“I’m...” she finally manages. “You really want... me?”

“You don’t agree?” Talia asks. She sticks her bottom lip out a little bit, feigning disbelief that Marsh doesn’t trust her. It’s clearly just some light ribbing, but it’s unbearable, the idea that the most beloved woman on Earth might be even playfully upset with her.

“It’s just, out of all the applications...” Marsh rushes to clarify. She lowers her voice, even though there’s a microphone pinned to her blouse. “Out of the mountain of papers, the millions, the billions, of people begging to star in season three, who would give anything to change their lives...”

She doesn’t know why she has to be like this. Why she has to spend every day wishing for something, only to sabotage herself if she ever gets close. But it’s easier to give up than to want.

“... Why did you call me ?”

“Are you kidding?” Talia gasps. “Marsh, you’re perfect for this—as you’ve just proven. Middle-aged, recently single, desperate for a change. You’re the everywoman that everyone can get behind. And we’ve got a possible path for every facet of your life! Romance! Career! Parenting! The choices are endless. We have so much to work with.”

It shouldn’t be a compliment, but it lands that way anyway for Marsh. She breathes a sigh of relief, perversely happy that her life is pathetic enough to please Talia. That she can see so many things wrong with it. So many things she could help her change.

Talia, however, mistakes her silence for hurt feelings instead of relief. She leans in, like they’re friends sharing a secret.

“Look. I know in the movies, the protagonist is always super unique, super special. But this isn’t the movies. This is reality TV. Normal is good,” she says. “Viewers have to be able to relate. They have to see themselves in you. And they will. They’re going to love you.”

“But—”

Talia puts a gentle hand on Marsh’s.

“Your job is to be the story. Let me and the studio take care of the rest.”

“I’m the story,” Marsh repeats, trying to sound confident.

Talia checks her expensive watch and stands up. “Marsh, are you ready to get this show on the road?” she asks, as Marsh’s heart leaps into her throat. “We’re due in costume and makeup in five. We’ve got to get moving if we’re going to start your first episode on time!”

“Oh!” Marsh cries, scrambling after her. She tugs uncomfortably at her mousy hair, her somewhat-fitting clothes. They don’t stand out, and that’s always been the point. “Do we, I mean, is all that necessary?”

“Of course it is!” Talia replies. “Remember, you’re not just Marsh now. You’re the star of season three of All This and More !”

Marsh nods jerkily as they hurry. Talia walks twice as fast as she does, even in her stilettos. Marsh tries to summon a comfortable expression, but the frantic rustle of her pants makes it clear that her legs are moving twice as fast as Talia’s just to keep up.

“Silly me! We should do the boring fine-print stuff on the way!” Talia exclaims as the two of them lurch abruptly out of the gleaming corridor and into a backstage area—suddenly the lights are warmer, everyone’s wearing all black, and interns carrying clipboards are scurrying everywhere.

“The fine print?” Marsh repeats, trying not to pant.

There apparently was a very slim tablet device in Talia’s folder, which she hands to Marsh now, a slideshow already cued up on its glass screen.

“It’s all right here—everything you could want to know about the Bubble!”

Talia clearly has a speech memorized, which she delivers as Marsh grips the device nervously. They’re walking so fast, she has no idea how she can hold it upright in front of her without dropping it, let alone actually read what’s on the screen.

“Quantum computing is so advanced these days, the small section of reality that we section off is very stable,” Talia trills as Marsh tries to flick through each incomprehensible slide, not even bothering to pretend to read the huge mathematical equations blinking by in between pictures of RealTV’s offices, a high-tech, purple-accented laboratory with a big purple SHARP LABS sign, and scenes from season one, of course. “One hundred percent safe, comfortable, and separate from the actual world. The Bubble constantly streams footage back to the studio from every angle, where we can rewind it, fast-forward it, replay it, tweak it. A completely controlled environment. At the finale, your new life will slot right into the world, with minimal interruption. You might have slightly different hair than before, or have attended another school, but that’s all.” She winks. “No rips in space-time, no collapse of dimensions.”

“That’s... comforting,” Marsh finally replies, trying to look comforted.

“Trust me,” Talia says. “It’s totally safe.”

“I believe you,” Marsh says.

“Wonderful! Sign here.”

She presses Marsh’s hand to the tablet, where a blank signature line is waiting. One smudge of her finger later, a rough squiggle appears and the whole presentation disappears. Congratulations! the screen says, before Talia snaps the tablet away again.

“This is so exciting!” she cheers. “Do you have any other questions, before we go live?”

“Actually, yes,” Marsh replies.

Talia glances sidelong at her without breaking stride.

“Where’s Alexis?”

She means Alexis Quinn, Talia’s producer during season one. All This and More sent her into the Bubble with Talia, to guide the then-timid Miss Cruz through her choices. She was the epitome of a partner—as tireless and dedicated as her star, always ready with advice and encouragement, sometimes before even Talia knew she needed a friendly shoulder to cry on during a tough scene. By the finale, Marsh loved Alexis almost as much as she loved Talia.

But so far, Alexis has been nowhere to be found.

“Alexis isn’t with the show anymore,” Talia answers, with a delicate balance of sadness but optimism for her old friend. “Now that we’re on a new network this season, we’re starting over with a totally new crew.”

“Oh,” Marsh replies. Whatever happened during the second season must have been messy, artistically or legally, for an entirely new crew to be required. “Then who... who’s going into the Bubble with me?”

Talia does a little spin.

“Me, Marsh!” she cries.

“What!” Marsh gasps, stunned. “You’re going back into the Bubble?!”

“I know, right?” Talia says excitedly. “It’s perfect! The veteran season one contestant serving as a guardian angel for the new season three star. I can’t wait!”

“I—whoa! That’s incredible. I’m so grateful,” Marsh stammers.

She can’t believe her luck! If there’s anyone who knows the show better than Alexis, it’s Talia.

“I’ll be with you every step of your journey. Which is good news, because I have one more fun surprise,” Talia continues as a portable wardrobe whizzes past, a dozen different kinds of fabric grazing Marsh’s arm. “ All This and More is airing live this season!”

“Wait, what?” Marsh chokes, horrified. “Everything I do is going to be live?!”

“Yep!” Talia gushes. “Every victory, every obstacle, every choice— everything ! How exciting, right?”

Marsh’s head is spinning. She was already starting to panic from the pressure of revisiting every significant moment in her life, but now she’ll have to do it—and figure out how to fix her past mistakes—with the entire world watching her in real time?

But Talia is hustling her ever onward. “Trust me, it’ll be even better this way!”

As they continue their speed walk toward hair and makeup, they pass a man, dressed not in all black like the backstage crew, but rather in a simple cotton button-down and plain slacks, and who looks vaguely familiar. He’s leaning against the wall and doesn’t make a move to speak to Marsh. He just looks up from his feet and studies her intently as she walks.

When Marsh looks back, he’s gone.

“Who was that guy?” she asks, meekly interrupting whatever Talia was saying.

“Who? Oh. That was our resident physics genius, who will be running your Bubble this season,” Talia answers. “Ezra Hoffman.”

Something pings in Marsh’s brain at that. Didn’t Dylan say he went to school with a Lev Hoffman—one of the two brothers who together helped discover the quantum bubbling concept that made the show possible?

That’s why Ezra looked so familiar!

“Wow, he and Lev could practically be twins,” Marsh says.

“They are, in fact,” Talia replies, smiling.

“Twins who are both physics geniuses,” she muses. “They must really love working together.”

Talia’s flawless face clouds for just a moment. “Unfortunately, the brothers had a bit of a falling-out when All This and More was pitched to Sharp Labs, where they were researchers. One wanted to work on the show, and the other didn’t want to apply quantum bubbling to TV and media. Ezra quit to go into academia, and Lev stayed on at Sharp to help us. But after season two collapsed and Sharp Entertainment folded, Lev resigned with the rest of the old crew, and I guess no one’s heard from him since. That’s why we’ve got Ezra this year. But hey”—she leans in and giggles adorably—“they look so similar, it’s almost like Lev’s still here!”

Marsh chuckles for Talia’s sake, but even as she’s whisked onward, she remains curious about the physicist. What a chance to get some answers! She wants to go back and ask Ezra about how it all works, not that she’d understand, but then two more women appear in front of her and cry, “Three minutes!” Then she’s in a chair, and there are hands in her hair and a soft brush flitting across her face. “Hold still! We’re going for something casual and fun.”

Talia gives Marsh an excited thumbs-up. “I know this is a lot, but you’re going to do great,” she says to her, as if able to see that Marsh’s heart is racing in her chest.

“Places!” a woman sporting a head mic shouts, and Marsh lurches out of the chair. The adrenaline is hitting her now, cutting through the shock.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she admits. She’s trembling, her throat so tight she can barely speak.

“Stage fright?” Talia asks.

Marsh nods.

There it is again, the briefest flash. The musty dark of a school auditorium, the itch of gauzy fabric costuming. The shrill, raucous laughter of her classmates that night. The humiliated burn on her cheeks. That day she’d meant to finally break out of her shell, to leave her mark on the world. The first time she’d tried, and the only one.

“Always had it,” she manages to eke out. “Ever since I was a kid.”

“Well, don’t you worry!” her host purrs. “We’ll fix that. By the finale, you’ll be a star. I promise!”

It was true for Talia , Marsh tries to tell herself. Who she was at the start of her season and who she was by the end was like apples to rocket ships.

But Marsh is not Talia.

Talia winks. “Not yet.”

“I’m afraid,” Marsh whispers, ashamed.

“It’s okay,” she replies. “So was I.”

“What if I make it worse?”

Talia waits until Marsh meets her gaze again.

“What if you make it better?”

“Places!” the woman demands again, but Talia holds up a finger, and instantly, an intern appears at a dead sprint to deposit a three-ring binder in her hands. It’s only about a fourth of the way full, a neat stack of printed papers hole-punched and fed onto the massive metal loops.

“This will help,” Talia says.

“What is it?” Marsh asks.

“Have you heard of a Show Bible?”

Marsh shakes her head.

“This is how we track everything that happens in the show,” she explains. “Character backstories, key scenes. That’s why we call it a bible! Stranger Things, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead —all shows have one, to help the writers stay consistent across episodes and seasons.”

She flips to the first page, a list of names and bios. Next to Marsh’s, it reads, “Get that popcorn and those tissues ready, viewers! You’ll be rooting for our star from the very first minute. Marsh is forty-five, smart, sweet, funny, and trying to figure out where it all went wrong...”

“Uh,” Marsh says.

“Do you remember those old kids’ books, where you found your way through the story by making choices?”

Marsh nods, thrilled to know what they’re talking about, for once. Those old paperbacks were all the rage when she was young. Endless scenarios in which you would start on page one as a generic kid with no backstory, and then depending on the choices you made, you’d end up saving your middle school from vampires, fighting zombies on a pirate ship, searching for lost treasure in a jungle while outrunning aliens, or something else just as impossible.

Talia grins and holds the binder a little higher.

“This is nothing like that,” she says.

Marsh chuckles despite her nerves.

“The kids’ books were fun, but the point was to get as zany as possible, even if it didn’t always make sense,” Talia continues. “Our Show Bible is exactly the opposite. There are no random options, no unrelated paths. Every choice here will be a real possibility from your actual life, Marsh.”

Marsh swallows hard at that thought, exhilarated and terrified. It already had been impossible to read the old books as she was supposed to—she’d constantly second-guessed her choices, dog-earing every page where her path split so she could go back if she got a bad ending—and those choices didn’t even matter .

This is her actual life she’s about to play with!

“Don’t worry,” Talia assures her. “Think of the Show Bible more like a map or a guidebook. Each time we make a choice, I’ll write down everything important here, so we won’t forget a single thing. That way, if we need to change course, or even rewind, we’ll have a perfect record.”

“We can do that?” Marsh asks. “We can go back, if we need to? That’s not cheating?”

“Not at all! With the Show Bible, we can do anything.” She smiles. “Feel better?”

Marsh, grateful, touches the cover.

“Places, please !” the woman yells again, and Talia gently pushes Marsh forward.

Suddenly, the stage is even more chaotic than it already was. Everyone is moving, getting into place, getting ready, and she’s swallowed up.

“Right here, love,” another tech says, and tugs her toward a red X on the floor. Marsh spins around, but Talia is already there, right beside her.

“Remember to breathe,” she says as she checks Marsh’s clothes, looking serene even though billions of people all over the world are about to be staring at their faces on live TV.

“Talia,” Marsh begs. “I have to know. Tell me the truth. Why me?”

“I already told you!” Talia says. “You’re perfect for this! Your relatability is off the charts. You’re the modern everywoman.”

“No,” Marsh insists. She makes Talia stop moving for a moment. “Please. Don’t feed me the network line. Billions of applicants entered the lottery. There are people in jail for crimes they didn’t commit. Parents who have lost their children. Patients dying of terminal illnesses. Why was I chosen over someone like that?”

For just a moment, Talia looks at Marsh as if she’s really seeing her, as a person and not a fun project. Suddenly, Marsh gets the sense there might be something Talia’s not telling her—about the show, or about why she was somehow miraculously selected—but she doesn’t know what it is. Maybe Talia doesn’t even know what it is.

Or maybe it’s nothing at all.

But she can’t shake the ominous feeling that there was something there, in that instant.

“Mic check!” a tech says suddenly.

Then Talia is off again, dancing gracefully around Marsh as she gives her hair one last delicate fluff and pats her back in a hug that won’t wrinkle her blouse.

“Marsh, honey, sometimes we just get lucky,” she says as she swoops into position beside her, on a little green X on the floor. “When it happens, you don’t question it. You just grab it.” She winks. “That’s what this show is going to help teach you, remember?”

Marsh takes a deep breath.

Talia’s right. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how she got here—it only matters where she goes. And she’s not going to let this last chance slip through her fingers. Not this time.

She is going to live .

“Ready to be a star?” Talia cries as the lights flare, and a red ON AIR sign blinks on and off a few times, warning. “You’re going to be fantastic! Look at that smile!”

Marsh knows she isn’t so much smiling as just baring her teeth like some kind of trapped prey animal about to be devoured, but Talia is saying to leave everything to her, she’ll do all the talking, Marsh just has to keep standing there until it’s her cue.

“My cue?” Marsh whimpers.

“Your first choice!” Talia replies. She’s handed the Show Bible to an intern, who’s standing just off camera, at the ready.

“I don’t know how to even begin —”

“Don’t worry! I know it’s a little overwhelming at first, so I’ve already selected two options for you to help us get started.”

A huge robotic arm swings low across the front of the sound stage like a swooping vulture, then does a circle around Marsh.

“But—” she starts, but a mic screech cuts her off amid the chaos.

“We’re a go in sixty seconds!” the sound engineer blares over the intercom.

Marsh’s heart lurches into her throat.

“Look at me,” Talia says to her. “I’ll be right here. As soon as you get going, you’ll see how easy it is. You’ll know what to do.”

“Fifty seconds!” the intercom yells.

“What’s my first choice, then?” Marsh splutters. She realizes she’s clutching Talia’s arm, but Talia’s still smiling patiently at her.

“We’ll start really general,” Talia says. She motions quickly for the Show Bible, and holds it open to the first new page, where two lines are scrawled in neat, Sharp Purple ink.

Ren didn’t break up with Marsh last night

Marsh never dropped out of law school

Marsh looks up at her, a deer in headlights. “This is starting general?” she shrieks.

Talia grabs her shoulder with her free hand to steady her. “It’s all right, Marsh. You’re going to be great! And remember, we can even backtrack and redo your choices in some cases, so nothing is set in stone until the finale.”

“Ready for the countdown!”

Marsh stares at her two options desperately—waiting for one of them to reveal itself to her as the correct choice. But the game is different now, and none of the old rules apply. The only person who can choose is her, this time.

“Wait, what about Dylan?” she asks. “Shouldn’t he also be an option?”

Talia shrugs, a little jump of her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Marsh!” she chirps. “All in good time. We’ll get to him, I promise. But let’s take it one step at a time.”

She puts a hand on Marsh’s arm.

“You can do this.”

Finally, Marsh nods.

The intercom shrieks. “Okay people, we’re on in ten! Nine!”

The set begins to freeze, black-clad tech crew fading away to shadow, crane mics and light diffusers floating into place. The spotlights get even brighter, the music even louder. The main camera’s lens fidgets into focus, a bottomless black eye, and little light on the front of the rig turns yellow for standby.

This is it. It’s happening. Marsh’s pulse is racing so fast that she might faint.

“Just go with your gut. The first choice that springs to your mind,” her host says confidently—but she’s not looking at Marsh. She’s looking directly at the camera now.

“Lights!” someone shouts. “Camera!”

“Hey, Marsh,” Talia whispers as a familiar tune rings out across the studio, and winks.

Marsh knows how this moment goes from Talia’s own season. It’s how every choice happens. First that musical jingle, and then Alexis would singsong the first half of the show’s title to Talia, and Talia would always answer with the second half.

But this time—somehow, impossibly—it’s happening for Marsh.

“You could have All This ...” Talia begins, just like Alexis used to.

Marsh swallows hard, knowing that’s her cue, and tries to look brave.

“ And More, ” she manages at last.

“Action!”

If Ren didn’t break up with Marsh last night:

Turn the page

If Marsh never dropped out of law school:

Go to Episode 1