Free Feedback by Mira Grant Page A

laughing. Sure, we didn’t get the gig of a lifetime, but it didn’t matter. There would be other gigs, other opportunities to show what we could do. Our collective was getting stronger all the time. One day soon, the world would know what we could do. We would find a way.
    The soup was delicious, and the conversation around the table quickly devolved into the usual post-op chatter: how to cut the reports, how to describe the situation well enough to make it thrilling without making it seem exaggerated or unrealistic. People who’d never been in a field situation were always happy to say it couldn’t have happened that way, even when there was video footage available. Saying the footage hadn’t been doctored didn’t help; unless you got
incredibly
lucky with your raw take, everything was doctored in some way. A good techie would adjust the light levels, filter the sound, even stabilize the camera after the fact to make the action clearer and easier to understand. All good things, except for the part where it meant that digging into the file’s metadata would inevitably find evidence of tampering. There was no clean video in the world anymore. Hell, some cameras tampered as a matter of course, which meant their footage was automatically inadmissible in court.
    Audrey eventually excused herself to go upstairs and get to work on her latest Lethal Jiang adventure. It was my night to do the washing up, and so I tied an apron around my waist and got to work while Mat and Ben kept arguing about the best way to intercut the pan shots of the area that I’d taken while he was inside the funeral home. It was a pleasant backdrop to the slosh of running water and the clatter of silverware. This was what home was meant to sound like.
    Neither of them looked up when I called good night and made for the door. They were sunk in their own little world, the pair of them, and they wouldn’t surface until they’d negotiated the best use of our limited video. I wasn’t concerned. I knew I’d get all the juicy action shots, the man moaning in the field and the hands reaching to pull us down from the statue’s head. I’d even get the jittery, bouncing footage taken during the climb. I could craft a fabulous narrative from that, and let Ben have the dry, boring bits about civic responsibility and crumbling infrastructure—the sort of thing that got the older generation’s engines revving, as they continued to think of the world as something we could reclaim one day, and not just something to survive. He looked at zombies and saw a walking metaphor for man’s inhumanity to man. I saw zombies. I liked it that way.
    Audrey was propped up on pillows in the bed when I slipped into the room. She looked up and smiled, her reading glasses resting on the end of her nose and her tablet balanced on her knee. “They down there burning the house down?”
    â€œNot tonight,” I said, reaching behind me to unzip my sundress. It fell to the floor in a puddle. I stooped to retrieve it and hung it over the edge of the laundry basket, making my motions slow and deliberate, aware of how closely Audrey was watching me.
    By the time I’d finished undressing and pulled my nightgown on, Audrey’s glasses and tablet had somehow found their way to the nightstand. She reached for me, smiling. I came to her, and we came together, and for a little while, the world was reduced to the two of us. Nothing more, nothing less.
    Eventually, we slept.
    Audrey woke before I did, as was her wont; she was sitting up in the bed, glasses back on her nose, tablet back on her knee, when I rolled over and opened my eyes. “Good morning, sleepy girl,” she said. “It is currently eight thirty Pacific Standard Time. It’s Mat’s turn to make breakfast, so I suggest cereal. And Ben is going to drag you out of here by your foot if you don’t get up and get your report online within the