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about it.”
    That was okay. I wasn’t offering. Now, where the hell was Amber?
     
    ________________
     
    The rest of the job took longer than expected. I spent fifteen minutes looking for Amber only to discover that she wasn’t in the crowd anymore. The public nudity had gotten her so aroused that she made her boyfriend smuggle her back to the boat for a quickie. By the time she re turned, all rosy-cheeked, I had already gotten several good quotes from Lorna Noonan, a comely sophomore who would have just as gladly flown out here to protest world peace.
    After the incident with Deb, Miranda decided to behave herself. The only person she harassed was fellow journalist David Green. She thanked him and his magazine for keeping millions of useless men in their homes, masturbating, instead of bothering real women. David simply apologized on behalf of Maxim for raising the standard of female attractiveness well above Miranda’s head.
    By eleven o’clock, the whole nude thing had gotten stale. Most of the staff had gone inside to work. The protesters complained about hunger and sunburn. The boyfriends were just bored. At 11:15, I called it a wrap but told Amber, Lorna, and a dozen others to stick around in case we needed pickup shots.
    While Miranda wrote up and sent her wire release, and David shot four rolls of the reverse stripdown, I worked with Metropia to cut the final VNR. I annoyed all three of them with my artistic perfectionism. I’ll admit it, I’ve done one too many of these things. I was getting creative just to alleviate my own boredom. Eventually, Gray snapped. “Jesus, man! Who are you, Kubrick? Step back!” I casually relented, then pointed out that Kubrick would have certainly enjoyed a scene like this.
    At high noon, the piece was done. I was happy with it. We launched it into the heavens and announced it through MediaFAX. It was out of my hands. Boy did that feel good. It felt even better to read Miranda’s eight hundred-word submitted draft, which ended up supporting my facts and figures. I knew she’d come around.
    I saluted the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is a wrap.”
    Students and staff alike rejoiced at a job well done. Giddy at the thought of all the press calls he’d soon be fielding, James Dmitriov—executive director of the Fairmont Keoki—offered the demonstrators free lunch, plus full use of the pool and water slide. Within seconds of announcing his offer, poor James was almost trampled by the stampede into the hotel.
    Miranda shook her head. “That was the most pathetic social protest in human history.”
    “You outdid yourself, man,” said David, clapping my back.
    “Thanks, but I’m not going to celebrate until I see how many stations pick us up.”
    I wouldn’t get a sense of that until much later that night. The true count wouldn’t start until Friday, when the first Nielsen SIGMA results came in. It’s an impressive process. Metropia lojacks the VNR with a digitally encoded tag, then Nielsen tracks it all over the broadcast spectrum. They even calculate the comparative ad value of all that free airtime. Anything over two million dollars would officially be a job well done. Over three million would be a gold star on my forehead. If my story got picked up in all top one hundred markets, on multiple affiliates, the ad value could hit six million. That would make me Jesus.
    But I tried not to get too starry-eyed. It was all up to the news directors now. I had to tell myself to loosen up. Out of the many things that could have gone wrong with the production, only one or two did. Silly, insignificant things.
    Mostly.
    Rare is the day that I have more than one moral relapse. For no reason other than self-justification, I felt the need to achieve some kind of closure with Deb. I knew she wouldn’t be dining with her friends, so I looked for her on the boat.
    She leaned against the railing of the bow, staring somberly out at the cool blue waters of the lagoon. She was now