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The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy

By Andrew Dana Hudson

“What do you mean you aren’t fucking?” Rocky Cornelius demanded. “That’s terrible! This is going to throw your whole value prop out of whack!”

The trio of button-cute narrative design prodigies glared back at her across the private jet with the anxious entitlement unique to twenty-two-year-old Bosto-Californian private school kids.

“It’s not like it was intentional,” Edna pouted. “It just hasn’t come up.”

Rocky was skeptical. “Is that so?”

With telling hesitation, Tam and Hill nodded.

Rocky Cornelius—creative consultant extraordinaire, veteran uncool hunter, battler of Big Grocery, sworn enemy of the city of Santa Barbara—sighed. Edna, Tam, and Hill were the hot new thing in the race-to-the-bottom world of multiformat franchise publishing. Their magnum opus, Planet Complicated, was one of the most addictive sci-fi love triangle sagas of the platform cycle. Its latest installment, “Brace for Him-pact,” had simultaneously premiered at number one on the Billboard charts, crashed the Nintendo eShop, topped the New New York Times Bestseller List, and busted the block at cinemas around the country. They had it all: money, ideas, and fanatical stans. But all that could change.

“When I agreed to this consult,” Rocky said, “I assumed you were sophisticated parasocial operators. I thought you understood that by trotting around as a threesome the way you do, you were tapping the content-consuming public’s endless appetite for life that imitates art.”

“And we thought you would help us get there,” Edna shot back. “Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of weird metacultural genius? ‘The second coming of Leggy Starlitz’? Isn’t that you?”

“Please, don’t quote my bad press in these sacred halls.” Rocky gestured reverently at the plush jet interior. “And despite the mass hysteria incident in Ibiza, best evidence still suggests Leggy Starlitz was a purely fictional character.”

Rocky downed her mimosa, got up, and paced with stooped intensity in the Cessna Solar Sovereign’s central aisle. Out the window, she spotted an icy stormfront barreling down on North Texas. She had until they touched down at Logan to turn this group therapy sesh into more than a one-time consult.

“Here’s the deal,” she said. “You make love triangles, but what you’re actually selling is a love pyramid. In the eyes of your followers, your characters’ three-way relationship is intriguingly mirrored by your own, creating a three-dimensional fandom hyperobject. For these stans, the point of Planet Complicated isn’t to simply enjoy each episode, but to speculate, to scrutinize these connections, to hold this prism up to the light and see how things refract.

“They want to know, are you, Hill, actually the inspiration for the inscrutable Captain Gorges? Are you, Tam, the sensitive alien bounty hunter Radnar, and you, Edna, the unpredictable masc-femme fatale Silcira? Or have you remixed the dynamics to throw fans off the scent?”

“We’re well aware of the chatter,” Edna said. “But just because we love love triangles, doesn’t mean we have to be one, does it? What we have, creatively, is so special. We don’t want to do anything that’s going to, well, complicate that. Right?”

Edna looked to her colleagues for support, and once again, Rocky sensed a suspicious reticence.

The consultant pointed peace fingers at Tam and Hill. “What’s up with you two squirrely characters?”

“Um,” Hill said, shaking braided bangs out of their eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Edna may have committed to a life of artistic nunnery, but I’m not sold on you two. You got a side-thing going? Or have you admitted, to each other at least, that you’re both secretly after miss volcel here?”

“Why can’t you accept that we’re just friends?” Edna complained. “You sound just like our fans.”

“Exactly!” Rocky said. “Your fans don’t want you to be ‘just friends.’ That would take all the fun out of it. They’ll turn on you if they come to believe you’ve been leading them on all this time.”

“So, what,” Hill asked, “we need to come out as a throuple?”

“Oh, no, that would be almost as bad as not being anything.” Rocky plucked the olive out of Hill’s martini. “What you need to do is keep them guessing. But to do that, you’ve got to make it more real. You’ve got to turn up to events oddly rumpled, and like each other’s posts in messily inconsistent ways, and let your hands briefly touch while passing the mic at cons. And the surest way to make all that convincing is to actually make it complicated.”

Rocky pointed toward the back of the plane.

“There’s a queen size back there, and there will be pap-drones waiting when we land. Are you willing to do what it takes to keep your fandom both fed and hungry? Are you willing to air your sexy laundry in public? Are you willing to engage in the minimum-viable relationship activities necessary to make this situationship pass the sniff test by the bloodhounds in your fanbase?”

“‘The Situation-Ship’ is the name of our next episode,” Tam said helpfully.

“What part of working title don’t you understand, Tamithy?” Edna glowered. “After the leaks we’ve had—”

“What leaks?” Rocky asked.

Before the others could answer, Rocky glanced out the window and clocked the camera-black eye of an intercept drone veering toward the jet’s silent electric engine. Then the aircraft jolted and seemed to twist and contort around them. Oxygen masks jack-in-the-boxed out of overhead compartments. With a wrenching, rattling tear, the starboard wing sheared off and disintegrated into a flutter of photovoltaic confetti.

Hill and Edna, dutifully buckled in, screamed. Tam, unbuckled, clung to a brocade armrest to keep from being flung toward the queen bed in the back. Rocky, still strutting in the aisle, was slammed against the ceiling as the aircraft tipped into a nosedive.

Now, Rocky Cornelius was not exactly a spiritual person. She had no use for the peasant religions of old, nor the megalomaniacal self-worship of the plutocrats. However, she’d had a formative experience with death, while attending a cacao-fueled heart-sharing-slash-networking circle with her mother.

Sitting there under the high, dim lights of the venerable Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, Kim Cornelius beside her learning to let go of fear in the face of uncertain market conditions, eight-year-old Rocky felt a hairy hand come down hard on her shoulder. The middle-aged entrepreneur to her right was clutching his chest and, over the next few minutes, died in what seemed to be tremendous agony.

In those moments, young Rocky had felt intimately connected to her own mortality. She’d made gleeful peace with the fact that she was going to die, including the likely possibility that she would go out loudly thrashing. She might burn/drown in a fire/flood or get trampled at H-E-B in an egg panic or any of the other grisly fates she was used to seeing on her iPad. That would be okay, she’d decided. She could live with death.

But, at the same time—for reasons that emerged from an unspoken objection in the very foundations of her being—she also swore an oath: under no circumstances would she allow herself to die in the state of Texas.

So as the Cessna plummeted and her clients wailed and the pressurized cabin air whistled out of fresh holes in the fuselage, Rocky couldn’t help but lift her head and fixate on the particulars of the geography rushing up toward them. Much was obscured by the grim-gray mass of the polar vortex. To the south, however, was a telltale slate-brown smear of exurbia. That could be Oklahoma, but who was she kidding. That was Dallas. Soul-sick, world-killing Dallas, once the red heart of the American death drive. Which left Rocky no other option.

She’d have to survive.

With great effort and considerable luck, Rocky executed a series of death-defying maneuvers to get herself and her clients buckled into the ejector couch. Then she triggered the explosive bolts and clenched her core as the four of them were flung into the open air. They tumbled once, twice, three times ass-over-crown before the seat’s guidance deployed a wide, Cessna-branded parachute. Shivering quietly together from the wind, the cold, and the adrenaline, they floated down toward the muddy November earth.

Rocky gave silent thanks to the generations of Boeing executives who, in literally and figuratively running their titan of industry into the ground, had brought on a new age of deluxe emergency safety measures. Despite the carbon-juiced turbulence that kicked planes out of the sky with distressing regularity, the fatality rate remained only a few orders of magnitude above that distant Y2K baseline. Private passengers could even expect good odds at surviving a highly kinetic drone impact. So good that Rocky marveled at the sloppiness of her clients’ would-be assassins.

“‘Brace for Him-pact’ indeed,” Rocky said, as they alit on the marshy putting green of a disused former golf course. “Shall we discuss hazard pay now? Or would you prefer I bill you at my usual rates?”

If Rocky had learned one lesson in her years as a consultant, it was to always lock in one’s cut while the client was at their most desperate.

“Whatever you want!” Edna said. She’d clipped out of her harness and was doubled over, hands in the mud, panting through a panic attack. “Just get us out of here.”

Tam and Hill were similarly flopped on the torn-up turf. It was clear that, despite the trio’s tendency to put their characters in various intimacy-inducing survival situations, they did not themselves have the stomach for such adventures. They hadn’t had Rocky’s rough-and-tumble career as a freelance consultant, and they didn’t have Little Rocky’s death oath dogging their souls. It would be up to the consultant to lead them to the safety of the nearest charter terminal.

“Okay, situational assessment.” Rocky clapped her hands smartly. “We’ve been shot down and appear to have landed in, I’d guess, Denton County. The good news is, we aren’t far from shelter and possibly transport. The bad news is, it’s Dallas. It all happens here: hurricanes, floods, fires, tornados, heatwaves, cold snaps, you name it. A real hotspot of karmic climate battering. And, bad bad news, we’ve got a freezefront headed right for us.”

“What do we do?” Tam asked, tugging at his paper-thin hoodie. “All my Boston clothes were in the jet. Will help get here in time?”

“Ah, well that’s the other bad news. State capacity is basically nil here. I wouldn’t expect much rescue response, not with heavy weather bearing down and all the forever-holdouts already battening down the hatches. And with possibly more drones out there, I think we may be better off ditching our phones and trackables. We’ll find the crash, grab what we can, then get off this golf course. Now hop to.”

Drained of will by their brush with death, her clients did as they were told. Devices were purged and tossed. The trio lined up behind Rocky like nervous ducklings as they trudged off toward the downed Cessna. Rocky kept a weather eye on the sky to judge how many hours they had before the freeze came down—and to watch out for stalking drones.

Their search led them to the fairway of the eighteenth hole. There they found the Cessna a wreck, but, thanks to the absence of chemical fuels, not a fiery one. They set about picking through the snarls of composite alloy and the shards of wood-grain lining.

“This really is just like ‘Brace for Him-pact,’” Hill said, hauling a suitcase toward the communal supply pile. “Shot down over a hostile landscape, racing to find safety from the onrushing storm. What’s next? Radnar saves Gorges from the tentacle pit?”

Tam gave a nervous laugh, but Edna put on her signature scowl.

“If you two want to go roll around in that gross sand trap over there be my guest,” Edna said. “Get it out of your system, why don’t you?”

“Come on, Ed,” Tam pleaded. “Is this really the time?”

“Actually, it’s the perfect time,” Rocky declared. “If you clam up until you’re safely back home, you’ll just kick the emotional can down the road forever. You’ve got to hash this out here, now, while you’ve got the closing jaws of death to keep you honest.”

A part of Rocky was, like Tam, keen to set aside the job she’d been on that plane to do. As much as she wanted a plump fee out of this terrible situation, she wanted to live even more. But a greater part—the part that always seemed to win out—was sure that she could have both.

She found the crash box and popped it open, then pawed through until she had her hands on several vacuum-sealed packs of cold weather gear. She waved them over her head.

“No one gets these battery-warmed microparkas until they tell the group one true thing about how they’ve been feeling about this partner-dash-ship of yours.”

The trio stared at her, framed as she was by the smashed-up remains of their jet and the advancing stormclouds. Mouths hung agape. Then Hill spoke up.

“I worry that we’re working so hard to avoid polynormativity in our narratives that we actually end up centering some pretty toxic dynamics,” they declared. “Having them fight with beam-whips instead of resolving their feelings with words and spreadsheets like real ‘cules—what kind of message are we sending?”

“Bravo!” Rocky said, and she tossed them a parka. “Who’s next?”

“I’m tired of being bicoastal,” Tam offered, plaintive and defiant. “It plays havoc with my pores, and my mom has been riding me to stay in Cambridge and finish my degree. She says she’ll never get to be senator if she doesn’t get into the Alumni Mamas Brunch Crew.”

“Mother knows best, they often say,” Rocky offered noncommittally. “Edna?”

For a moment Edna seemed to seriously consider the benefits of dying of exposure, but soon the peer pressure became too much.

“Ugh. Fine. I’ve been sleeping with Arnie.”

“Arnie the memecoin producer?” Tam asked, outraged.

“No! Gross. Arnie the game dev. And it’s not sex, if that’s all you care about. It’s literally just sleeping. We matched on that somnobiome enhancement app, and you know what? My digestion has never been better. But that’s why I haven’t been coming to Sunday sprints.”

“Well, doesn’t everyone feel better?” Rocky asked.

“No,” Edna pouted, while Hill said, “A little?” and Tam shuffled nervously.

”Wonderful!” Rocky said, though in truth she felt that all three were holding back. They’d offered up low-stakes, sacrificial secrets that wouldn’t change their core dynamic. Still, she knew from her brief tenure as life coach laureate for the state of Delaware that one had to establish an atmosphere of sharing—and shared exposure—before the real confessions could flow. She gave the youths an encouraging smile as they pulled on parkas and caps, and they set off again.

The golf course hadn’t been maintained, but neither had it been rewilded. Its pesticide-fueled grass monoculture had simply bored a golf-course-shaped hole into the local ecosystem that had yet to be filled in. Four-wheeler tracks cut cursive scribbles into the turf.

“You know,” Hill said again, clearly uncomfortable with silence. “We’ve never written a scene like that, trading secrets for supplies. Could be fun to include in ‘Situation-Ship.’ If we ever get to finish it.”

Rocky expected another snap from Edna, but the young creator nodded. “We could finally reveal that Silcira is the parent of Radnar’s quarry.”

“And that Radnar has known this all along,” Tam put in. “And may be trying to use Silcira to get access to the Graylight Syndicate.”

“I knew it!” Edna said, rubbing her mittened hands together, in her element for the first time since Rocky boarded the Cessna back in Burbank.

“Gorges could reveal that they weren’t ever the captain, really,” Hill said. “They were just the only crewmember to survive the Phaedon attack.”

“What?!” Tam and Edna both cried.

“Hold on,” Rocky said, “you mean you don’t all know your characters’ secrets and arcs? You really do keep yourselves creatively partitioned, just like your fans suspect? Those message board freaks are cleverer than I thought.”

Edna shook her head. “No, it’s like we said. We’ve had leaks. For months the fandom has been flush with rumors about our process and our personal lives.”

Rocky hmmed. “And now you’ve been goosed out of the sky by a drone that was clearly lying in wait. I think it’d be wise to assume that the leaker was responsible for that, too.”

The trio shot glances at each other. Glances pregnant with long-held suspicions. Glances that weren’t sure whom to trust.

It was possible, Rocky realized then, that their attacker was not simply part of the larger Planet Complicated fandom industrial complex. Their attacker might be walking with them right now.

In wary silence, they reached the golf course exit. Beyond lay a full court press of latter-day exurbia. Mass-produced, cardboard-walled, micro-mcmansions had filled every cranny of the Greater Dallas Metro in those last, heady years before insurance companies pulled the plug. There was even a gesture at minimum viable mixed-used planning: HOA-colored retail fronts, built to serve as flimsy financial instruments, likely never occupied. Now half were caving in, marred by graffiti, or otherwise dilapidated.

“It’s like the ruins of Radnar’s homeworld,” Tam murmured.

“More like Havendown after the Phaedon raid,” Edna said, with the acid wryness only an overused inside joke could convey.

“Wha-what happened here?” Hill asked.

“Hubris,” Rocky replied. “Every generation believes their zero-interest rate policy good times will last forever. I mean, just look at these shops. ‘Gorp Corp Custom Trail Mixes,’ ‘Lettuce Outta Here! Escape Room and Brunch Salads.’ That disgusting wordplay is zirpy as hell!”

The consultant surveyed the grim tableau.

“I had hoped the golf course would abut a major road, somewhere we could flag down a ride. As it is, we need to get indoors and dig in for the night. Tomorrow, once the freeze has blown through, we’ll find a secure line to my assistant, Amherst, who can get us out of here.”

Even in Texas, with its sudden mid-‘30s dive into spiritual and economic desolation, only a few places were truly abandoned. Thus they had to be careful not to stumble into jerry-rigged home security systems or traps left by, they imagined, cannibal-curious permasquatters. So it was a matter of some minutes to find a house that met their needs, and in those minutes the storm crashed down upon them. Gusts turned to gales. The sky went dark. Humidity congealed into a frigid fog.

The house they took refuge in had never had wiring, plumbing, or ductwork, but otherwise it was sturdy—or as sturdy as precision notch-fit cardboard could be. They settled into the central room and plugged a web of space heaters into the chunky battery extracted from the crash box. With this reprieve from the falling temps, they assembled a roomy, thermo-reflective tent and hauled everything inside. Once zipped, the tent quickly got toasty, and they shed their parkas. It was top-shelf gear, light and strong and ingenious. Cessna had spared no expense in ensuring that their customers survived to purchase a replacement aircraft.

All this activity had kept them too busy to worry about the potential traitor in their midst, and once the setup was done, no one seemed eager to return to that uncomfortable topic. Instead, Tam, Hill, and Edna started talking over their next-next episode, “Lunar Ex-pedition,” taking inspiration from their present circumstances. Round and round they went, flopping plot points from one format to the next with a practiced mutual ease.

“Game-side we’ll want a new mini to play in the cave, something cozy but social. Jacks clone?”

“Needs to have a betting component. Raise the stakes.”

“You’re always angling for a strip poker scene.”

“The actors have all signed off on it. The fans have been clamoring for it. Maybe it’s time.”

“There’s that alien deckbuilding mechanic we introduced in ep three. Could bring that back.”

“Do they have their Q’zelle decks? I assume those were left on the ship, in the lounge.”

“We can check the continuity database. If they don’t have them, maybe they find decks in the cave?”

“That’s dumb.”

“No, I like it. It’s a good opportunity for world building.”

Rocky listened to this creative churn with waning interest. She’d birded writers rooms before, and unless you were part of the discussion, with the same half-built world spinning in your head, it got repetitive fast. The house thrummed and pattered with wind and freezing rain, lulling her toward drowsiness. As a rule, Rocky never allowed herself to sleep around clients, but these were unique circumstances. It had been a very trying day…

She woke to shouting, voices raised louder than required to be heard over the howling storm. She sat up. The three creatives crouched in the center of the tent, illuminated by the glowing elements of the space heaters, each stripped down to their Planet Complicated-patterned underwear. Had they tried to workshop the strip poker game? Rocky approved of clients that field-tested their own merch, and there was something authentically messy going on. However, this scene was hardly the sexy romp she’d pitched on the Cessna. Hackles were raised and faces were red with anger.

“Admit it!” Tam yelled, spittle flying into Edna’s face. “You’ve been trying to keep us apart for years! You love to use us to do the emotional grunt work, but the moment you spot a hint of connection—anything that doesn’t involve you—you pounce!”

“Another cat metaphor, Tamithy?” Edna shot back. “Without me you’d still be scraping for commissions on the furry-web, and then you’d never have built your precious City on a Hill.”

“Stop fighting, please, I care about both of you,” Hill pleaded. “We can’t fall apart now, or we’re goners. We’re supposed to come together!”

“How can you defend her, when she’s the one who put us in this situation?” Tam said, voice quivering with the injustice of it all. “The leaks and breakdowns—you know it’s her! She’s the saboteur, always has been. And now she’s nearly killed us, all to get us under the thumb of this…this suit!”

Tam gestured with indignation at Rocky’s corner of the tent, only to jump at finding Rocky awake and listening. Edna and Hill similarly startled. All three looked sheepishly at the consultant.

“Actually,” Rocky said. “Hill was the one who hired me.”

For a brief moment, everyone quietly came to their own conclusions about what this meant. Then Hill bolted. With rodent-like quickness, they snatched up their parka, lurched through the tent’s magnet-sealed flaps, and scurried into the darkness.

Edna and Tam exchanged a glance, and with it, it seemed to Rocky, a whole, load-bearing conversation. Then they, too, began to pull on layers.

“As your consultant,” Rocky said, “I feel obligated to tell you that going out into that storm, chasing after a person so dangerous they shot down your jet, is a risky, dare I say low-EV, business decision.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Tam said, eyes welling with tears as he struggled into his parka. “There is no business without Hill, without Captain Gorges. We need them.”

“Long-lasting franchises kill off main characters all the time,” Rocky reasoned. “And successful enterprises ice out partners when necessary. You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes,” Edna said. “We do.”

And with that, they stumbled out into the cold.

Rocky sat on her butt and looked at the limp tent flaps. She was supposed to chase down her clients and set them straight. Instead, she hesitated in the pocket of Cessna-branded survival, Little Rocky’s death oath pinning her heels.

Of course it had started with her mother. Kim Cornelius had dragged her kids to every MLM meetup and investment inspo seminar from Laredo to Amarillo, always dreaming that the next speaker would get her spiritually sorted and thus financially set for life. Little Rocky had intently watched the gurus and grifters that Kim worshipped, and she had noticed with burning envy that, at the end of each session, these peddlers of hustle culture would rush off to the airport. Unlike all the people they advised, they got to leave.

For Kim wasn’t alone at these get-rich-revivals. Countless Texans had tried to fill the hole left gaping as modernity turned inexorably away from the three things that had made the state loom so large: big oil, big meat, and big church. Meanwhile, everyone Little Rocky knew was underwater, sucker-scammers trying to collateralize and coinify their uninsurable real estate before someone else pulled the rug. Staying in Texas meant being left holding that bag. Dying in Texas meant dying a mark.

But—deep breaths—Rocky had gotten out. She had a consultancy to run and a reputation to maintain. She’d never live it down if she lost three clients in one day, especially three tender-cheeked creatives with bright futures and rich parents. Was not-dying in Texas worth throwing away all she’d built everywhere else?

So, with great reluctance, Rocky donned her parka, activated its warming system, and followed.

Outside, sleet slapped Rocky’s face and swiftly froze to her cheeks. She flicked on a headlamp and saw the trail left in the slush by Edna and Tam, who were in turn following the trail of Hill. She bent against the wind and pushed into the night.

They were in the thick of it now. Hundred-mph gusts picked up chunks of the flimsy subdivision and sent them heaving through the air—sheets of wet, icy cardboard that made for dangerous projectiles. The whole scene was hell, exactly the kind of hell that had convinced Rocky’s generation that the state had been damned by nature, God, and/or the planetary worldsoul.

But also, it looked like an alien planet. As she shuffled, headbent, eyes on the slippery ground, she tried to commune with the narrative universe of Planet Complicated. This wasn’t the Dallas Metro, it was Castula 7. The phantoms flickering in the visual chaos of the sleet were incorporeal Phaedon shock troops, not squatters or holdouts—and definitely not the ghosts of her own Texan past.

Thus haunted, Rocky wended through the arcing streets. Soon her destination became clear: Hill was retracing their steps, back to the golf course, and back to the crash. Back to where, in narrative at least, it all began.

She found the trio perched in epic struggle atop the wreckage of the Cessna. This had taken some doing, as the plane had pretty much crumpled and embedded itself into the soft, flat fairway. Nonetheless, Hill had clambered up to the highest bit. With one hand they waved a small object—an unditched phone?—high in the air. Their other hand wielded a long and nasty fragment of fuselage, swinging it this way and that to fend off Edna and Tam, who were circling them like bobcats, just out of reach. All three were literally steamy, their parkas burning away the falling snow.

Such was the scene when Rocky jogged up. As she did, the wind and snow miraculously calmed. Rocky looked up. Above she could see an oblong blotch of starry Texan sky. They were in the malformed eye of the storm.

Hill noticed the consultant first, and pointed their stick in her direction.

“Don’t come any closer!” they shouted. “You’re too late, anyway. The Phaedons will be here soon.”

“Phaedons?” Rocky said, alarmed. “Surely you don’t mean more drone nonsense.”

“It’s what we call the fandom,” Tam explained, frustration dripping from his words like sleetmelt. “The metaphor was too tempting. They swarm invisibly, picking at everything we try to do. You can’t ever beat them, only avoid them. Except now Hill has posted our location.”

“Well,” Rocky managed a nervous laugh, “how many Planet Complicated superfans can there really be in the ruins of Dallas?”

“Hill, you’re so fucking stupid!” Edna said. “We came to work this out, as actual people. We could have kept this whole mess quiet. But noooo! You refuse to separate reality from fiction—again!”

“Didn’t you listen on the plane?” Hill said to Edna, pointing at Rocky. “They aren’t separate, not to the Phaedons, which means they can’t be to us either. We’re a love pyramid, whether you like it or not!”

“That’s crazy! You got us blown out of the sky,” Edna shot back. “That’s not love! How can we love someone who’d do that to us?”

This seemed like a frankly reasonable objection to Rocky, but Tam disagreed.

“Don’t tell me who I can love! I’m tired of you speaking for me. But, Hill, this consultant, the drones—why did you do it?”

“Why?” Hill laughed. “To save us! We were creatively stuck, and drifting apart. We needed to reconnect with each other, and with the emotional core of Planet Complicated. So I searched the dangerous fan watchlist that security prepped for us, and I found someone who knew how to do aerostructure hits. He was just supposed to do minor damage, enough that we would have to make an emergency landing. I admit, the crash was…worse than I had planned. But that’s why I hired her—” They indicated Rocky again. “To make sure you two understood the assignment, and to help us if things went off script.

“And it worked! Back in the tent, we were really jamming together, for the first time in months. And we were so close to being more. You can think I’m crazy if you want, but we all know that if nothing changed, we were doomed. So I took action. I did what had to be done.”

In that moment, Hill, framed by the roiling cloudwall, looked every bit the part of the tragiheroic Captain Gorges. Below them, Edna, too, seemed to embody the coiled vulnerability and menace of Silcira, while Tam stood as though burdened by the weighty judgements that always fell to Radnar.

Then, in the distance, came a lilting series of tones. Was that? Could it be? Yes, Rocky was sure of it: they were hearing the opening notes of Planet Complicated’s theme music, played with surprising deftness on a suped-up car horn. The storm lit up with headlights. The Phaedons were approaching.

“This is it!” Hill called, crooning with triumph and pleading all at once. “It’s time we face them. When those vehicles get here, we’re either going to be a team, together, united by love, or we’re going to be nothing. The choice is up to you.”

It was a line that would no doubt have fans screaming at the climactic moments of a future Planet Complicated episode. At this moment, however, Rocky wasn’t sure it would have the desired effect. Edna seethed with anger. Tam seemed ready to give it all up and return to Harvard. Rocky had to think fast.

“I was wrong about the love pyramid!” she said, approaching the wreck. “I mean, look at you three. You’ve bickered and sniped all day. You were seconds from tearing each other apart when I showed up. Maybe you love each other, I don’t know. But you definitely hate each other!

“Which,” she paused a beat, “we can work with.”

The Phaedons were getting closer, rolling over the slush-covered golf course with a slow, predatory inevitability. Rocky could make out the details of the hulking pickups and SUVs, vintage from when the majors still produced extra-large variations just to market in Texas. All had been heavily customized, not only with the Planet Complicated musical horn, but with Planet Complicated paint jobs and accessories in the style of Silcira’s stealthcraft or the Freeship Heartless. They also sported various defensive modifications, no doubt standard for those who survived in lawless, weatherbeaten Dallas. Rocky instantly understood that these stans, who in a previous era might have sported longhorns or truck nuts, had used Planet Complicated to fill the spiritual void left by their state’s mythopoetic collapse.

“Listen,” Rocky continued with paced urgency. “Enemies to lovers, lovers to enemies—those tropes are your bread and butter, and they’re as much about hate as love. After all, nothing kills a franchise like having the characters settle down happily ever after. Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t see it clearly before. Of course you shouldn’t pretend to be some secret, happy throuple! You need to steer into your obvious love-hate animosity toward each other. Use it to fuel both your narratives and your fans’ obsession. Let them wonder, who hates whom? Are they going to break up? Will there even be a next episode? Will they get so angry they kiss? Nothing drives engagement like that kind of uncertainty.”

The three creatives stared at Rocky, then looked at each other.

“You mean, we don’t have to fuck?” Edna asked.

“Not unless it’s hate fucking,” Rocky reassured.

“Wait a second,” Hill said. “You guys aren’t serious, are you? We don’t actually hate each other, right?”

“Well, Hill,” Rocky chuckled, “you’ll just have to stick around and find out.”

And with that, the Phaedons were upon them. The caravan encircled, and out jumped a handful of bubbly, geeky Texans. All were windblown and ill-dressed; no doubt they hadn’t planned to launch a fandom-based rescue mission in the middle of the freezefront. But their faces glowed to see the creators of their obsession arrayed in such an evocative tableau.

Rocky had expected any Texans they encountered to have the strung-out countenances of those who’d experienced a total narrative breakdown, but that wasn’t the case here. These holdouts appeared rugged and lean, possibly dangerous, but noble, too. When their society had unmoored itself, they had found an affinity group to give life meaning. Possibly the Planet Complicated tattoos and apparel marked their band of sacrifice zone survivalists apart from rival fandoms. They didn’t look like marks at all.

Putting oneself in the hands of one’s stans was always a risky move. The expectation differential was too great. But given the storm closing in again, going with Phaedons seemed the least-worst option by a Texas mile.

Rocky allowed the trio and herself to be hustled into one of the vehicles. The driver apologized for showing up ‘sans cosplay’ and then began to pepper the creatives with questions about the Byzantine cross-platform minutiae of Planet Complicated. Edna, Tam, and Hill answered as best they could, all the while tossing barbs and sullen pouts at each other. Rocky smiled. These kids would be alright.

They rode out the rest of the storm in a bunker that had, like the cars, been done up in full fandom-themed decor. For 36 hours they marathoned Planet Complicated’s shows, games, and audiodramas, their hosts demanding a live director commentary. It was kind of a hostage situation, but pleasant enough. When the storm passed and the sun returned, the Phaedons gave them a ride to DFW, where a few dubiously licensed pilots could fly them as far as Tulsa, Albuquerque, or Memphis.

“So, about your next-next episode, ‘Lunar Ex-pedition,’” Rocky said, once they were finally airborne again. “How about a producer credit?”

“I suppose you’ve earned it,” Edna said. She, Tam, and Hill all looked down at the now-icy landscape below.

“This place really is like an alien moon,” Tam said.

“Any chance you’d want to come back here with us on a research trip?” Hill asked. “We’d like to learn more about designing content for the Texas bunker market.”

Rocky gazed out her own window and saw the scribbled state line of the Red River pass beneath them. She released a long-held breath.

There was something interesting here, she admitted. Beautiful, hard-bitten people, eager for new meaning and new media. A prime, undertapped consumer demographic.

Now that she was out, she felt a little silly for letting her childhood hangups get to her so much. What was the difference, really, between dying in Oklahoma and dying in Texas? What mattered was the fans you made along the way.

---

Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

And that was “The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy” by Andrew Dana Hudson.

Here at Escape Pod, it’s obvious we have a soft spot for the Rocky Cornelius stories. This is the third one we’ve published, so make sure you check out the first two, EP894: “The Uncool Hunters” and EP941: “The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy.” Rocky shows us a future turned up to eleven, a world where, as said in “The Uncool Hunters,” ‘what nobody was looking at was the stuff everyone was looking at.’ I’ve started looking at stories like this with a nervous laugh, as we’ve seen countless corporations look at science fiction stories as guidebooks instead of warnings, but they’re still fun stories.

Not gonna lie, I went searching for quotes on celebrities and privacy and then ended up reading dirt about the royals in the UK for fifteen minutes. Even when you staunchly support privacy, the lure of gossip can get to you. As Weird Al says, celebrities are fascinating!

Why we love their sex lives, I have no idea. I guess it’s dirt, any dirt, you can find out, and sex is the dirtiest, of course. I just watched a Game Changers episode on Dropout where a couple had revealed the number of times they had sex in a month. And all I have to say is, when do they find time to do anything else? Some of us have to work, you know? There’s something about finding out others’ sex details that is delicious, but also can make folks squirm. If someone says they have sex 33 times in one month, the rest of us are left not looking at each other, thinking about our numbers, and wondering if we are lacking.

While we will always be a free publication, it does cost some money to keep the lights on and the editors fueled with coffee. There are several ways to support us, but the best way is via a subscription either at Patreon or Paypal. Supporting us monthly helps us stay funded and be able to plan for the future. We will of course accept any one time donation, or any Twitch subscription, too. There are several ways to support us, and if you can’t do it with money, we’d love a review to spread the word!

Find all the donation links in our show notes at Escapepod.org or contact donations@escapeartists.net

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Escape Pod is distributed on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.  Share it, but don’t change it or charge for it. All other rights are reserved by our authors.

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That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from Justin Timberlake: “You think a lot about the lives that me and my wife lead, but I wonder what privacy’s going to mean in 20 years?”