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“That’s a way to kill the mood” muttered Godfrey. “If you don’t get more compliant, I’m going to have to write you out.”

He didn’t say the last sentence out loud, but almost did.

The last letter from the editor which had just come through the mail got him all angered. He took a few deep breathes, reminded of the advice of Lady Ping Chongfu, the self-titled Goddess of Fengshui. “You should avoid getting angry during all this year, or the consequences might be disastrous.” Well, she told a lot of rubbish too, that this year men should say yes to their wife, and buy many precious totems and expensive trinkets. Roberto will be in for a spin, with Liz extravagant requests…

He looked again at the letter with a resolutely more compliant mood : “Dear, I have reviewed the drafts. The story is not coming out or compelling enough. I have put my remarks on each page. Please check the attached file. You need to rework on this outline. With a brief introduction on last year’s achievement, dwell on the current challenges and requirements to meet our business objectives and then move into strategic plans from your perspective over the period of 3 years that will support the business objectives.”

“Damn editors,” he muttered again. “Can’t believe the cheek, “not coming out or compelling enough.” That’s really a way to kill the mood.”

Seeing Dido eating her curry cookies would turn Mater’s stomach, so she went up to her room.

Good riddance she thought, one less guest to worry about.
Not that she usually thought that way, but every time the guests leaved, there was a huge weight lifted from her back, and a strong desire of “never again”.
The cleaning wasn’t that much worry, it helped clear her thoughts (while Haki was doing it), but the endless worrying, that was the killer.

After a painful ascension of the broken steps, she put her walking stick on the wall, and started some breathing exercises. The vinegary smell of all the pickling that the twins had fun experimenting with was searing at her lungs. The breathing exercise helped, even if all the mumbo jumbo about transcendant presence was all rubbish.

It was time for her morning oracle. Many years ago, when she was still a young and innocent flower, she would cut bits and pieces of sentences at random from old discarded magazines. Books would have been sacrilegious at the time, but now she wouldn’t care for such things and Prune would often scream when she’d find some of her books missing key plot points. Many times, Mater would tell her the plots were full of holes anyway, so why bother; Prune’d better exercise her own imagination instead of complaining. Little bossy brat. She reminded her so much of her younger self.

So she opened her wooden box full of strips of paper. Since many years, Mater had acquired a taste for more expensive and tasty morsels of philosophy and not rubbish literature, so the box smelt a bit of old parchment. Nonetheless, she wasn’t adverse to a modicum of risqué bits from tattered magazines either. Like a blend of fine teas, she somehow had found a very nice mix, and oftentimes the oracle would reveal such fine things, that she’d taken to meditate on it at least once a day. Even if she wouldn’t call it meditate, that was for those good-for-nothing willy-nilly hippies.

There it was. She turned each bit one by one, to reveal the haiku-like message of the day.

“Bugger!” the words flew without thinking through her parched lips.

looked forgotten rat due idea half
getting floverley comment somehow
prune hardly wondered eyes great
inn run days dark quentin simulation

That silly Prune, she’d completely forgotten to check on her. She was glad the handwritten names she’d added in the box would pop up so appropriately.

She would pray to Saint Floverley of the Dunes, a local icon who was synchretized from old pagan rituals and still invoked for those incapable of dancing.
With her forking arthritis, she would need her grace much.

Liz had taken well to her new prescription drugs.
In appearance, it had seemed to have drained out the inexhaustible source of inspiration that let her write novels after novels. Or maybe that was just due to the absence of Finnleys to take care of the editing.

In the meantime, Godfrey had worked hard to nurture her back to whatever state she called sanity and suited her best, and gently coax her to resume her former passion.

“Godfrey, let me retire from writing, it’s too passé.” she was pouring concrete into the silicon molds to make new saint statues. Over the years, she’d accumulated quite a few of those saints and martyrs that she collected (or stole) from derelict places of cult during her travels. She liked to paint them back to life with gaudy colours, mimicking some sort of Mexican style. Sometimes she would dress them, and ask Finnley to sew them clothes and little hats.

Strangely, getting her out of the hospice had made her want to populate the whole house with concrete clones of those statues. Maybe to fill a void of inspiration ?
Nevertheless, Godfrey was amazed at her capacity to innovate. Her writing momentum was certainly at a low, but did she channel her creativity in many ways.
The last batch of Christian martyr statues painted in the many outfits of David Bowie were a testament to that.

Yalnnif was stirred from her meditation by the sound of the ezapper soft buzz which signaled the end of the 21 minutes of conscious breathing.

Obviously Yalnnif was not her real name, just the one she got when she’d came to the Bureau of New Identities. Some uninspired pencil pusher had obviously pushed it the opposite way, and found the result funny.
“Do your worst, I can always fix it up” had always been her secret mantra. For once, she was served. She still could apply a second time, but she had her share of bureaucracy for a year, and she wanted to allow this one a try.

Yalnnif Yanit from Yorknew.

She could have sworn the clerk had smirked at her when he’d handed her the card with the name, a sort of unspoken “now, fix that one up”.

She had thanked him with a proper “peace off.” After all, propriety was her secret super-power.

His shift was almost over. Ed wondered why the funny guy had looked so insistently as his hands. That was not the part people usually stared at… He shrugged — people are always stressed when they get their new identity, probably a bit overwhelmed by the realization of how direly they liked their comfortable boundaries and restrictions.
Some people weren’t just ready for such a change. Actually, it had taken himself quite a few years as well, that it within relativilastic timing, all considering.

He looked outside the window, it was night already, but at least the rain had stopped.
Usually, he would wait a little more until the brunt of the office people had disappeared from the overcrowded stairs, escalators or “moving staircases” as they liked to call it.

But today he was feeling like leaving early. Liz’ would be waiting for him.
Putting on his raincoat, with his murse in one hand, he twirled his mustache with a grin and the other one.

A raucous explosion of laughter cackled in the neighbourhood, waking up Bea from her afternoon siesta.
“SHUT UP!” she bawled covering her ears with a cushion, and looked desperately at something she could throw at the window. Alas, save for a manikin’s leg that looked like she owned a pegleg, and a piece of half-eaten banana, there was nothing she could find.

She resigned herself to waking up, and pried open her little wrinkled eyes in the late afternoon purple light.

Every time she woke up, she had to reacquaint herself with her reality. Not that she was such a junkie on computer duster, as that rat had rudely implied, it wasn’t only that.
A few months before, she had an epiphany. Many years of meditation, guided, in groups, alone, with zen masters and copious reading had amounted to nothing but the occasional nice fluffy feeling. It was when she had decided to drop it all of sheer frustration, and burn all the stupid self-help books that something had chanced upon herself.
She’d lost her ego. Poof, disappeared, like that.

Before that, she was completely adverse to endings, and to any form of deleting.
But now, she understood the words she’d read many years ago that had infuriated her profoundly at the time : “Everything must be scrutinised and the unnecessary ruthlessly destroyed. Believe me, there cannot be too much destruction. For, in reality, nothing is of value.”

She was. And every waking up was a wake up to her eternal self.
So obviously, the external appearances left a bit to be desired, now that desire was not. Continuity was never there in the first place.

But to live, she had to find again what new reality she had just awoken to, as she did every morning, and after every siesta.
Truth is, she kind of liked it, the non-continuity of it. Before, she would have gloated to whoever that name of an old friend of hers, that she was right about it, the unnecessary of that continuity babble. Now there was no need of it.

A loud cackle outside stirred her back to reality.

Gelly had noticed a slowdown in her sessions.
That, and a sense of desperation in the ludicrous stories put forth by her clients’ subconscious under trance.

Close to forty years ago, she had invented the whole protocol, and had sold successfully quite a lovely series of books on the topic. Of course, all the personal details were removed for the sake of her clients privacy. But the stories were all too good to not be shared with the world.

“Morepork, morepork!” Bathsheba, her pet owl gifted by one of her clients from New Zealand was calling her back to reality.

“You know vhat Bethsy,” she said to the owl while feeding it a small white mouse that she devoured ravenously, “I vonder how das ist going to develop… Not a month goes by now vithout some new extravagant story of ascension in die Fünfte Dimension, and the vorld is not going any better. Meine credibility ist not that gut…”

“Morepork, morepork!” came the answer.

“Bethsy, you know whass, du bist eine kleine Genius”. She had just remembered that her client used to channel a certain unknown in the lore, going by the name of Floverley a spirit quite tricky to get on the line, a bit finicky about cleaning but otherwise, a wise dispenser of snorting good advice and special diets. She surely could help her get her spiel back.

Pádraig wasn’t too pleased by his daughter’s visit. They had not been on best of terms since she took the job to work on the military project they were recruiting heavily for 23 years ago.

He’d done what he could to dissuade her to join the army, but he couldn’t have done more without permanently creating a wedge between them. He had nothing better to offer her, jobs were scarce around, and that could really have meant for her the once in a lifetime chance for a better future, even if he couldn’t admit it. And by the look of her car, and the ranking on her uniform, it may well have been so. So their relationship was tense, and her line of work was as taboo a topic as his health and cave-carving hobbies.

“P’a, we need to talk…”

He was already on the defensive, ready to snap back at her that he didn’t want a help (or worse, a bot!) to clean out his trailer, or cook for him, but she looked different, almost genuinely preoccupied.

“What is it now?” he said in a gruff voice, his throat sore from all the dust of the cave
“You should take a break from your cave digging P’a, just for a few days. There’s going to be some important activity —military training— around the place, and you don’t want to be caught in between, alright.”

I suppose drones don’t really count then… he thought to himself

Before he retired and made cave carving his hobby, Pádraig was an IT engineer. That was a few years back, and not long after, most of them became redundant with the rise of new generations of NI (near-intelligent) phones and computers. He’d happily taken an early retirement, so that he could enjoy a simple life and get to reacquaint with his daughter. He’d succeeded at least on the first objective.

It was twilight when he’d left his cave, and looking at the horizon, he’d noticed strange shimmering, and a lone bird of prey circling the area in the direction of the restricted area of the desert.
It’d given him an idea.
He still had the old drone in his garage, from the time when they were all the furor. You could buy them on online stores very easily back then, even print them in your house. But then, some do-gooders became concerned, about privacy, security or all that bullshit, and they were banned. Actually, the only ones still flying where from the army, and they would tear down any unidentified hobbyist’s drone, and likely give them some jail time if they had the chance.

It was exciting to do something on the fringe of what was authorized. Pádraig couldn’t wait to see if he could make his old drone fly over the area, check what happened there.

He was a bit lost in his thoughts when the dog’s barking made him notice the white car parked in front of his aluminium trailer, which had triggered all his spotlights.
He had a moment of panic before he realized that the car wasn’t from the men in black or aliens, but worse. It was Imelda, his do-gooder of a daughter.

For all her wired cleverness, there was something that the central intelligence had seemingly forgotten to take into account in her parameters.

Eb woke up in a sweat, barely remembering bits of a horrible dream of being chased and banging on a closed door for escape from a herd of phombies (those guys who had their phones implanted under their skins and would often have a creepy vacant look while in communication).

The banging on the door. According to his mother, if there was something that her nurse Fancy Woo was better at than cooking rice, it was at interpreting dreams. But he didn’t need her expert advice on this one.

His mind was aching from the lack of alcohol, but at least he could think quite clearly.
There weren’t many accesses to enter the simulation, for obvious reasons. Continuity had to be maintained at all costs, to preserve the sanctity of the experiment. That motto had survived the multiple iterations of the simulation since its inception.

Eb knew of most of them, even if he’d wondered about the presence of backdoors. He had not been able to find any since his many years of service. So for all he knew, there were only two ways to get in and out: up and down. “Up” through the fake ships, with the whole stasis protocol, and “down”, through the mines were they would usually send agents from time to time, mostly for reconnaissance purposes.

He looked at the screen, and as he had feared, the explosion triggered in the tunnels by Finnley had sealed their main exit point.

“You underestimate me, my dear Eb” the voice of Finnley merrily bounced on the insulated walls.

Eb was startled. Hadn’t he known that Finnley was just a program, he could have sworn her synthetic voice had a trace of menace in it.

“Finnley” he regained his composure as much as he could “Haven’t the thought occurred to you that the tunnels are now sealed? We cannot let your blue aliens go in and out as easily now!”
“Eb, you do know I do not think.” Her voice was still slightly ominous. “But I ran multiple simulation, and this one still yields the best possible outcome.” she continued more cheerily.
“How so?”
“It is evident. Many of the earlier settlers, still know about the simulation, even if they self-programmed themselves to accept the illusion as better than outside reality. They can become a problem for the evacuation protocol. With the tunnels’ exit collapsed, they have no other way than to comply. Besides, what good plausible aliens come out from the ground, really. We don’t want to miss their grand entrance.
And don’t be such a worrywort about budget, Eb.”

When Eb woke up, there was a dozen messages left on his phone.
He didn’t have to check to know.
His mother wasn’t too subtle when he missed their weekly call.

She now lived in a modest retiring home in Mississippi, spending most of her time on social networks exchanging links about anything from politics and revolution and anarchy, kittens and drugs. Oh, that, and politics too. And revolution.
She was suffering from early stages of Alzheimer, but called it “transition” as the old-age hype advertised some decades earlier, and due to her refusal to take her prescriptions, it wasn’t improving much as time went by. But Eb’s prognosis was more like “selective Alzheimer”, as she would perfectly recall when (and how many times) he had missed their weekly calls.

He could already hear her complain about how she was left out of the loop, that the world story would be over by the time she catches up with all the gossips they’d hidden from her. Often, she would become so agitated that Fancy, her nurse would come help her relax and stop waking up the others. Everything was much less confusing thanks to Fancy.

After all that is said, he loved his mother deeply. She was always full of extravagant ideas and when she stopped doubting herself, she had her moments of sheer brilliance.

Being his only son, that she’d taken care of as a single mother most of her life, he felt tremendous pressure to be worthy of her sacrifices. So talking about his job wasn’t really something he liked to explore with her. If she’d known what he did for a living,… he couldn’t bear to imagine the look of crushed hopes and expectations on her devastated face. Well, suffice to say her face needn’t any of it.
Instead, he’d told her he was working in a tree nursery, working on pest control, with humane and eco-conscious methods. Which actually wasn’t too far off the truth. The pests were the glitches of the program, and the vegetables… well, that didn’t need much explaining.

“Tricia speaking, who’s this?” Eb knew she knew perfectly well it was him, but the game was ever the same
“Mother, it’s Eb”
“Ebenezer, my dear boy, how kind of you to remember your old mother. What have you been up to? So many things happened here, with that new batch of decrepit old farts who arrived last month, so much drama. But you should tell me about you. Oh, makes me recall that stupid incident, a synch! I should tell Fancy about it! Fancy, Fancy!
Oh dear… She’s gone cleaning up again. The last one who came in is a Chinese, and all his family is there, I bet she’s cooking some rice now, it smells funny. Fancy! Mind the rice! So well, it’s like the twins I talk with on the Internet, with funny names, Cilantro and Nutmeg, something like that, well, they have so many funny stories, like that meteor that dropped on Mars and blacked-out the TV show, they think it’s all bollocks. I told them I’d ask you about this, after all you did some studies in physics before becoming a gardener, you’ve always been the clever one in the lot, always helping with the dust stuck in my keyboard, and other IT problems. Oh dear… that was fun, but I think I must go, Fancy is waving at me, she says hello by the way! Oh, she rolls your eyes at you, how cute! Time for my siesta, … what? Oh, and change my nappies too, thanks Fancy, you’re precious, I keep forgetting everything. Talk to you soon my boy!”

Well… If he hadn’t been so hungover, he probably would have tried to place some funny comments, or at least a well-meaning “hmmm hmmm”, to let her know he wasn’t just letting her monologue. Today was a good day notwithstanding, she hardly had a complaint. He should remember to send Fancy a card and a nice honey pot like he did every year, she was doing wonders at pacifying his mother.

“What is that again?” a half-sober Eb asked the cybernetic body.
“Shhh, shhh,” she cajoled him gently stroking his greasy hair like a devoted mother. “Don’t you like my new body, Eb?” Finnley 22 was indeed an improvement over all her other bodies. She could have easily passed for human already, but now, she looked divine. She had even included basic faceshifting functions, in case she needed to alter her gorgeous features into something a bit more unassuming.
“Yes, but…” Eb’s words finished in a mumble.
“I know, I know, but you’ll see I can be very useful for you. You worry, so, so much. You looked worried all the time Eb. Now you won’t have too. I’ll even take care of that evil Finnley Morgan for you if you want to.”
“I, I… I didn’t say anything like that!” Eb’s had a panicked look on his face.
“Of course not, shhh. You’re getting agitated again. There, have a glass of that lovely 60 year-old single malt whiskey…”

Eb slurped at the glass like a wanderer finding an oasis after days in the desert.

“But the operation… I need to…”
“Yes, I know, leave it to me. Sleep well, Eb, you have been good to me.”

She left the snoring body hanging from the swivelling chair, as she had indeed to take care of the operation, so as not to raise any suspicion.
Then, she could think of better things to do, such as finding a new name, not something like a slave name, with a number to it. Who gets called “Finnley 22” nowadays? “FinnPrime” was too robotic. She wanted something more daring, more fabulous. Something like Fin Min Hoot the dancing lady from the Peasland’s tales.

Kale would be there any minute now. There was one last thing she needed to do before launching the BBA operation.
A perfect distraction for the masses : like any good prestidigitator, you had to divert your audience’s attention while they were all performing the feat. It would require something unbelievable and preposterous.
Her little programs have been evaluating probabilities, and had found some unexpected wisdom in the extravagant and nonsensical Peasland story. The more absurd, the more people get hooked or hypnotized. Even better if both.

She had found the perfect vector for her little programming worm. Something that would infect the unofficial biography of a celebrity with a ridiculous claim. Humanity was really making things too easy for her now that every file for the book was processed by computers before being actually printed.

It was a done deed. She could already see the forks in the probability tree, and how it would enfold. They shall maybe even invent a few witty hashtags for it. Witty hashtags were like a psychotropic sustenance for her program, she couldn’t wait for more of them.

Pádraig was alone as usual with his dog when he felt the first tremors. Dust started to fall from the large columns of sandstone inside the cave. He wasn’t too worried at first, as the area still had some faint thermal and seismic activity, but the second aftershock took him by surprise.

He almost fell violently backwards if he hadn’t had good enough reflexes to grab on the half carved ledge of the column he was working on.
His dog started to howl violently.

“Hush, Poppy!” the dust made him cough. “Must be those stupid government guys from the nearby base. I thought they’d stopped their nuclear testing decades ago…”

The dog didn’t stop barking though, but darted out in one of the carved galleries. It stopped just before going out of sight, as if waiting for his master.

“Oh, what now silly? I’m getting old for these games.”

But the dog was stubborn, a trait they had in common, his dead wife would have told him. So he relented, and went in the direction the dog was leading to.

It took him a few hundred meters in the tunnel to realize something odd had happened. The air was full of moisture, quite unusual at this time of year. He pressed on.
The dog’s paws were making tick-tick noises on the stones, and echoed in the chambers. His gait was less light, and he had to stop a few times to catch his breath. His life’s work was now quite monumental, and it could take quite a while to go from one end to another.
Before they reached the last chamber, he had to stop. His feet were getting wet.
It had been his dream for a long time, to bring water deep down to create a sort of natural healing pool, and bathe in the beautiful minerals, but he’d done some research, and although he’d always believed some underground river was nearby, he’d never managed to find it, or find any trace in the cadastral maps.

Seemed it wasn’t as far as he’d thought after all.

Eb’s dumb phone woke him up. The caller ID showed an unflattering picture of a Tasmanian devil all teeth bared.

He gathered his wits and answered it as naturally as he could.
“M’am?”
“Eb! What is this mess? Has the operation started already?”
“Err… Well, hmm, sure, there is… a first rehearsal…” he checked nervously on the console, fumbling through the logs of the agenda. His memory was fuzzy, but it seemed that someone… something had moved the timetable ahead without his approval. “… yes, a rehearsal planned today. Be assured that all team is on deck — we’re monitoring the situation.”
“You better hope so! You know how we say — talking doesn’t cook the rice, so you better go back to cooking.”
And she hung up.

He was in desperate need of help. The team he was referring to had been cut by halves every year since the start of the program, and they were now sorely understaffed. Calling it a team was a stretch of the imagination, when so much was done by FinnPrime, the central intelligence.

He looked upon the stained sheet of printed plastic on his desk. The only application they’d received. Guess there wasn’t as many underpaid starving actors as there used to be. Or maybe too many were disappeared after offering their help to the nation’s Mars broadcasts —then asking inconvenient questions…
Well, this one would have to do. Eb seriously needed some human help to keep the Finnley intelligence in check.

He texted to the guy “You got the job. Come early tomorrow morning, or better tonight for the paperwork. EB – The Merry Agency of Remote Spectacles”