*tim boucher says

Fisher walked up the front steps, giving the work order a final glance. It should be a pretty standard job. The inhabitant was operating at around eighty-five percent parity with consensciousness and just needed their signal tweaked a bit. Apparently they were receiving some interference during broadcasts of The Darlings. How anybody could watch that show day in and day out was completely beyond Fisher, but it didn’t matter if he liked it so long as he could trouble-shoot signal fluctuations for inhabitants.

Fisher knocked on the door. It slid open revealing a slim woman in a white linen gown in her early thirties. Blue flowers hung in her hair.

“Hello, I’m with TOTU. I’m here to fix the TV,” Fisher said as cheerfully as possible.

The woman’s image wavered slightly in recognition. “Oh yes, please come in.” She handed him a small clear orb the size of a marble, pressing it into his hand. Fisher glanced at it before inserting it into the reader on his hip. Delicate flecks of color scintillated throughout the orb.

Fisher dropped it into his reader and all at once the orb increased in size until it enveloped his field of vision. The specks of color enlarged into household objects, furniture, a variety of plans, a cat, and a small country home through which a diffuse green light filtered.

“Welcome,” the woman said as she linked hands with Fisher to materialize him fully into her reality. The familiar sensation of increasing solidity filled Fisher’s body. Only through old-fashioned physical contact could someone be instantiated into a personalized reality. It was one of several redundant securacy measures layered on top of the world-key orb system to provide inhabitants with complete control over the sharing of their realities.

The woman smiled and let go of Fisher’s hands. Her cat strolled over and nuzzled against his newly solid legs. Fisher knelt down to stroke its cheek. “What a beautiful home you have here,” Fisher said.

“Thank you so much,” the woman in white said. “I’ve spent a great deal of time getting it just how I want it. It’s actually based on a memory of mine from childhood: my grandmother’s cabin in the woods.”

Fisher feigned enthusiasm, “Oh, how lovely.” He recognized many of the modules she was running from countless other homes he’d been in. The country house was actually patterned after a set from the third season of The Darlings, in which Prosperity Dearest spent several weeks with her aging grandmother before she died. Fisher wondered if the woman really remembered Prosperity’s grandmother as her own, or if she was just playing the part. He decided it didn’t matter. If nothing else, her taking on these consensciousness memories as her own meant he would have an easy job fixing whatever her signal problem was.

“Can you show me your television set?” Fisher asked, hoping to get in and out as soon as possible. He had some fifteen other homes to visit today.

“Oh, of course,” the woman said. Her eyes looked at Fisher distantly. “But wouldn’t you like some apple pie first? I just baked it.”

Fisher groaned internally but didn’t let on. No matter how technologically-connected people might be nowadays, he had long ago discovered that every damned person he visited just wanted to socialize. TOTU policy dictated that he should oblige them – within reason, of course – so that a more complete inhabitant profile could be compiled for the simulations. So he followed the woman into the kitchen and sat down at a small wooden table. The rich scent of warm apple pie hung in the air.

The woman in white busied herself slicing and serving Fisher. She buzzed around the room with nervous energy while Fisher ate.

“So how long have you been working with TOTU?” she asked.

“Ever since the beginning,” Fisher said, between bites. “My parents worked for Sisoris Hoyd before they fused with RSO and OBVO. I was raised in the company since I was a baby.”

It was a story Fisher had told so many times before to inhabitants that it may as well be true. In actual fact though, it was one of several template personal stories crafted by the TOTU culture-people to generate a feeling of rapport and values-propagation among inhabitants and their techs. Fisher doubted any real people actually worked on any of these stock stories anymore though. Maybe in the beginning, but with recent technological increases they probably just harvested social scenarios and emotional reactions out of simulations and re-packaged them into stories like these to placate inhabitants. Whatever their origin though, Fisher didn’t doubt their effectiveness.

“Oh, how exciting!” the woman replied – right on cue. That was one of three culturally-patterned responses that people always gave when he conveyed that information. The other two were, “How historic!” or the less common, “My what a life you’ve lead!”

Her response forked her into a particular neurotype of inhabitants and Fisher began asking the appropriate follow-up questions to fine-tune the data-set being transmitted back through to the simulations running at TOTU.

“Some rain we’ve been having lately, huh?” Fisher said.

“Oh yes, I love the rain. Don’t you?” The woman’s eyes drifted towards the open window as a light drizzle began falling outside.

Fisher nodded. He took another bite as the cat jumped onto the table.

“Swishy, no!” The woman grabbed at the cat as it leaped off the table. “Don’t bother our guest!”

“Oh, it’s no bother,” Fisher said honestly. “I love cats.”

“Me too,” the woman said at almost exactly the same moment as another cat sauntered into the room. Fisher could tell the woman’s environment was very responsive to her desires – never mind that she herself was obviously highly suggestible. In fact, Fisher glanced around and wondered why her parity rating was only eighty-five percent. As far as he could tell, she should be in the upper nineties.

“Can I get you some more pie?” the woman asked eagerly.

“No, thank you,” Fisher said. “It was quite delicious, but I really should be getting to work on your set.”

“Of course,” the woman said. “It’s out in the parlor, right this way.”

Fisher followed her into a small room with a comfortable old-fashioned couch, across from which was mounted a quaint painting of a modest country home – her home, in fact. She waved a hand in front of the painting and the screen glowed green as an elaborate menu-system appeared. Fisher deftly maneuvered through to the advanced settings and unlocked the technical administration channel. An interactive panel solidified next to the holographic figure of a woman dressed as a classic 1950’s era American housewife: Prosperity Dearest.

“Hello friends,” Prosperity’s syrupy voice intoned. “What can we do for you today?” Next to him, the woman in white smiled in recognition.

“Perform a routine signal test,” Fisher said.

“Friends say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’,” Prosperity said with all the irritating politeness Fisher had come to revile her for. He didn’t bother to re-phrase his request more politely and instead began punching alpha-numeric strings into the interactive panel to bypass her altogether. Prosperity faded and was replaced by the suspended image of a snake encircling a giant egg against the backdrop of infinite black space, the corporate logo of TOTU. Fisher passed his hand through the image and the snake quickly wound itself around his hand, sinking its teeth into the receptor socket on his wrist.

The egg cracked down the middle horizontally and out of it stepped the conjoined figures of Prosperity Dearest and Pricely Darling, dyadic admins of the Trans-Oceanic Technological Union. Pricely had his arms wrapped around the waist of his wife and was kissing her on the cheek. She was dressed in a white apron, her hair in a bun and a rolling pin graced her left hand. Everything seemed normal so far.

Fisher flexed his left index finger and the scene shifted. The cracked egg gave way to a well-apportioned upper-middle class home. Pricely sat in a leather arm chair reading the newspaper, a pipe hanging from his lips. The front door swung open and Prosperity stepped into the house holding grocery bags. Fisher could hear an audience cheering, somewhere.

“Honey, I’m home!” Prosperity said, walking over to her husband, leaning in and puckering her lips to kiss him. Pricely didn’t notice and continued reading the paper. Prosperity made a pouty face and the audience roared in laughter.

“The economy is doing well,” Pricely said.

“That’s good dear,” Prosperity said walking in to the kitchen to unload her groceries. Her husband made no move to help her. “I ran into the Peterson’s at the store today. They invited us over to dinner next Thursday.”

“That’s fine,” Pricely said, puffing on his pipe.

Fisher stifled a yawn and flashed the program forward scene through scene. In rapid succession, Fisher watched as Pricely finished his pipe and paper, and Prosperity cooked and served her husband dinner, then went on a cleaning rampage of the entire house while Pricely went out to the garage to tinker with his car. Night fell, the sprinklers outside their house came on and the couple prepared for bed.

“Ooh, stop here,” the woman in white said to Fisher. “This is my favorite part.”

Fisher wasn’t sure what she meant but slowed down the program enough to hear Pricely saying, “Good night, dear” as he kissed Prosperity on the cheek and tucked her into bed. They slept in separate twin beds in the same room, separated by a night stand and ornate alarm clock. Pricely laid down and Fisher glanced over at the inhabitant of the house to gauge her reaction to the scene. Her eyes were transfixed on the now-sleeping figures.

The scene shimmered and dream-sequence waves smoothly replaced a shot of Prosperity’s sleeping face with an image of her on a beach at sunset wearing a one piece bathing suit that barely contained her ample breasts. She stooped down to pick up a white conch shell from the golden sand. Prosperity lifted it up to her ear, closed her eyes and smiled rapturously.

“The ocean,” said the woman in white at Fisher’s side breathlessly. Her eyes were also closed, mimicking Prosperity on the television. Fisher waved his hand in front of the woman’s face. She didn’t notice. Fisher turned back to the screen and to his surprise the woman in white had replaced the image of Prosperity Dearest altogether. She stood all alone on the golden beach at sunset, her arms out-stretched and began whirling in a slow arc. Fisher realized the woman standing next to him was doing the same thing.

He watched quietly as she whirled. As she did so, the country house she inhabited wavered and morphed into the beach scene from the episode of The Darlings they had just been watching. Fisher looked on in dismay as the television and its interactive panel vanished from view. His TOTU uniform melted away into a pair of swimming trunks and the holographic snake coiled around his arm froze in place.

Fuck, Fisher thought, as he transmitted a revised schedule back to base and to the other inhabitants he was supposed to visit today. This could take a while.

• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] – Sample Chapters [Index]
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] Introduction
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] 06
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] 07
• REPERMANENT [Sci-Fi Novel] 08