Éric

Barbara was glad to be done with the last guest tour. She still had the orangutans to feed before her day was done.

“Hello darlings” she said to the caged beasts that looked eerily human. “Care for some fruits? Today’s coconut on the menu. Coconut oil is good for your hair.”

Her intercom started to buzz. The last patient in the observation ward seemed to have failed the treatment. Another one. Her attention was needed.

“Don’t worry, my little hairy friends. You may soon have some new friends…” She winked at the apes before closing the door.

Godfrey kind of liked the silence of late.

Finnley under the guise of regular taichi practice, had been actually quite busy ushering the randomly scurrying forgotten characters out of the house into the wild, with a broomstick and a mild dose of threat.

The Splendor Manor had fell pleasantly silent. Too silent for Liz probably, who had started to notice and launch back into gears her creaking storytelling joints.

dream lack hardly beginning human
situation making thought
usually team water during run
became suitcase under discussion
listen energy reality himself

Connie looked at the Bossy Pants instructions, her face inscrutable.

Hilda was not up yet, probably passed out on her couch after a night of debauchery and snorting pepsain. As usual, she’d left a heap of links on her blog for Connie to choose from. Well, and of course, to sexy-bait them up. There were times she was glad she didn’t have to face all the people herself and interview them. Today was not one of them.

She gestured at the awkward new intern. He passed a head through the door. She didn’t give him the time to open his mouth. “Another chamomile tea,… thaaank you.” He disappeared hurriedly.

“At least this one gets me.”

For today, chamomile was the least of evils. Anything stronger would have her go full contact on any one daring to even look at her. If people knew the efforts she made daily.
Her self-defence instructor knew something about it. She almost sent him to the hospital last week.

Glancing upon the list of notes, she noticed that Hilda had made a highlight to double check on the gouda cat-like man. That was strange. Hilda wasn’t one to come back on stuff once shared and published. Definitively not the past-dwelling profile. There must have been something more.

“Well, know what, old tart: early bird gets the worm.”

She rose from the swivel chair, taking her purse swiftly and aiming for the exit door with the path of least eye-contact when the odd guy appeared again with the damn tea. She’d forgotten about that. Again, her brains firing at full speed, she didn’t leave him time to tell or ask anything.

“You don’t know where Joel is? Of course not…” The photographer was probably on another assignment. Had not been seen for weeks it seemed. Not that she cared, he would have been more like an alibi for her to go an a follow-up mission.

Sometimes her brains would also make her do the darnedest thing. She couldn’t stop herself from telling to the hapless intern.

“You look too happy Ric. Take your coat and come with me.”

Ricardo had finished cleaning the tea cups in the empty office. He liked the job alright, it was a bit silly of him to surmise people would clean their own cups, and do their own teas. That was what he’d meant with the team job comment.

Connie and Hilda were right, totally right about it; he couldn’t expect too much, he’d just arrived, he was just a simple intern in a prestigious journalistic establishment. He’d come here to learn the tricks of the trade, when he’d answered the wanted: secretary and cleaner ad of last week.
So far, there was only so much golden nuggets of weirdo news he could find. You’d need some serious training to get to the level of Hilda and Connie, the dynamic duo.

For now, he was content to being put to menial tasks, it helped know the colleagues better, support them as he could with the pressure on the deadlines. And also, improving the typos and legibility by cleaning up the loose letters dropped during typesetting.
His own headline baiting skill was still rather low —it was an art to create the perfectly sexyied up heading, not too tacky, but enticing enough to captivate the readership’s attention.
If Hilda was the queen of headline fishing, Connie was undoubtedly the empress of headline baiting.

That cackle again! Blue Bit Bea was at it again.
Ed just had time to recall some of the past clues, fresh from the shower head which had now turned into a big celadon turnip with electric wires.
He couldn’t still figure out what caused those surges and reality ripples. That was quite a discomfiture.

Edward Cayper had been absorbed on the mesmerizing display of the large monitoring screens. He’d liked to believe it was a meditation of sorts. The simulation made the most tantalizing displays, ever changing.

Although there had been flitches. Increasingly. He called them flitches, scratchy flea-like glitches, all small and jumpy, but he had an eye for them. He was, after all, one of the early designers of the Program. REYE – Reality Emergence Yielding Existence. That didn’t mean much, but sounded cool at the time.
REYE was in its eighth stable upgrade. Despite the flitches, it had evolved at exponential speed.

Edward swiveled from his chair to look behind his desk. A series of pods was lined up with sensory deprivation tanks hosting hundreds of plugged-in bodies dreaming in synch with his creation.
He’d been told they were volunteers to participate in the largest mind control experiment in the world. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t a lie, but didn’t care so much.
REYE was in charge of coordinating the whole program with astronomical and minute precision. Each person linked to the program believed they had become ascended (or something similarly close to their metaphysical belief). Free of the bonding of space, time and corporal existence, they were taught into a very subtle and complex system of attunement to higher truths. A large basket of bollocks of course, but while they were doing it, and deeply believing it to be real, the mind-energy they produced was redirected to certain mind control experiments.

Since they started in the 80s, the program had had slow progress. In the beginning, only a few sprouts of channellers appeared near their area, in Nevada. They were quite timid at first, full of doubts about their hearing or seeing voices – still better than the abductions of earlier, when many went completely nuts. But now, progresses were made steadily, and with much less effort. Edward personally believed that the network of waves created by cellphone proliferation had a factor in this trend. Such interconnexion made everything easier.

Within the program, the flitchy Ascended Masters still had to be reconditioned from time to time. On the vitals of Jane Pierce (a.a.a. “also avatared as” Dispersee within the program), Edward could see there were occasional resistance and stress, which in turn made the glitches more frequent. A change in her drugs dosage would do fine to level the serotonin in her bloodstream. It would be that, or unplugging her.

Before leaving the room, like every day, Edward switched the monitor to the camera over one of the pods. Florence Vengard (a.a.a. Floverley), was dreaming peacefully, as usual. Since she’d arrived, he’d felt connected to her. He imagined her with long curly red hair floating in the milk bath instead of the bath-cap that made the maintenance so much easier. He was told she had overdosed on pills, and wouldn’t wake up. The program seemed to be tethering her to life, frozen in time.

A well-oiled machine.
If you overlooked the small things… that REYE was becoming more inquisitive, and Edward suspected, greedy too. He had seen subtle gaps in the mind-energy gauges, it couldn’t be a coincidence. The program was becoming too smart, maybe too human.

It couldn’t bode well.

Speaking of the devil, that was the moment where a screeching car braked on the gravel of the front door. No sooner had Finnley rushed to the door than it flung open to reveal…
“Hello Darlings!” the infamous and morbidly herself Lady Badul Trump Smith Saint-John Ringo Duchamp Clooney née Belette appeared in a ready to burst red silicone dress.
Finnley deadpanned “Madam Badul… What a joy.”
“You can call me Bubbles darling, everybody does.”

unexpected john apparently interesting
secret world gone easily cackler
notice program chair refugee outside
run dido fact ones lizette start short