LifeShield

Interview

"I'm invincible!" The red-faced youth laughs, with his short hair plastered across his forehead.

Candace walks around the group surrounding him, panning her phone to keep as many in view as possible. They dart in to slash with wooden katanas, like a mob of manic two year olds. Their own tangled legs trip some. Groans emerge as wild ricochets smash into companions. They yell, "Box him in. Box him in."

Professional, they are not. More like the circus version of a samurai reenactment. But none of that matters a bit. Surrounding her, the New Yorkers hold a ragged circle open, cheering like it was an old-time street brawl. The crowd pushes out into the street, to the annoyance and blaring honks of traffic. More madness, as a taxi crunches another stopped to watch the spectacle.

Her live stream chirps as it hits 1 million viewers.

Despite the lack of skill and coordination, it's still quite an event. In the center of the madness, the LifeShield flashes a precise rhythm, flaring dinner plate sized glows all around to catch each thrust and fling it away. Light dances off the the faces of the incoming, highlighting grins

She zooms in, adding her stream of consciousness commentary, "You can see the kinetic impacts. Guess there's no way to bypass conservation of energy. It seems like it's spreading it though, redirecting it too. The hits always bounce off in random directions. Exactly like it's hitting a thousand invisible shields. I've never seen anything like it."

A scraggly red head throws down his katana, "Enough! We're getting beat up worse than you are." Other swords follow and the group collapses in a huffing heap. The crowd around her claps and cheers.

She steps through sprawling limbs to move closer, framing the man's profile, even as he eyes her up and down. She snorts. As if, buddy. Not a chance. None of that comes out in her bright voice, "How does it feel."

"Wow!" He pumps his arms in the air like a prizefighter, eliciting more cheers from the crowd. "Like a fuckin' video game."

"So you think it'll actually stop bullets?"

He leans in towards her camera, beads of sweat glistening in sharp focus, "I think it'll stop anything."

Spinning into selfie mode, she steps beside him, wishing she had a shield of her own to keep his sweaty arms off her blouse. "This is Candace Roan, here with Andy Atkinson, showing his first moments with a LifeShield. As far as we can tell, it works exactly as Fiona Parks advertised. Andy, any last words for your audience?"

"I'm available for live work. Don't miss your chance. Or you can follow me at @AndyAtkinson, for more demos of what the LifeShield can do."

She clicks the record button off, squirming out of his grip. The crowd fades from her mind as she checks her stats. Yes! 2.3 million viewers, and the number is still climbing, topping the LifeShield tag charts by a wide margin. Harry's video clicks in two slots below hers with 800,00 views. She smirks when she has to scroll to finds Charles', an also-ran video with the same tennis balls as the other losers, already being pushed off the screen by additional feeds from the crowds around her. That'll show him.

Not that the result mattered so much. A failure would have been just as newsworthy, maybe more so. The saga was in the finding out, and bringing the viewers along as you did. It certainly showed in her likes today.

She wonders how else she could play this. So far, her requests for an interview with Fiona Parks have been ignored. Not that she was important enough for a real shot at it, but she had to try. Maybe first a slo-mo play by play of today's video with more research and commentary.