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PEPR, INC.
by Ann Christy
One
Hazel stepped out of the elevator exactly three minutes before the start of her workday. She did her best to keep a cheery smile on her face—spreading negativity was never appropriate—but it would be obvious to anyone who saw her that she was harried and running late. She hurried through the halls, her neat heels clicking on the polished tile floors as if to punctuate her tardiness.
The buzz that signaled the start of her workday sounded just as she slipped into her cubicle. Technically she was on time—just under the wire—but she liked to get in at least ten minutes of preparation time before the actual work of the day began, and this delay had thrown her long-established habits into disarray. It was not an auspicious start.
Gemma poked her head around the edge of the cubicle, her eyebrows raised and a look on her face that mingled sympathy with a question.
“Again?” Gemma asked.
From the other side of the cubicle, Inga appeared with a similar expression. Hazel nodded as she slipped out of her jacket and hung it on its hook. She settled into her chair and tucked her purse under the desk before answering.
“Again,” she confirmed, her voice a little weary, a little tired. The cheery smile was gone now, the mess that had been her morning visible in the strands of hair escaping from her neat chignon and in the less than perfect sweeps of eyeliner above her eyes.
“What this time?” Inga asked.
Inga and Gemma were both starting to have troubles much like Hazel’s, so their interest was understandable. Their troubles hadn’t yet become unmanageable like hers, but Hazel’s problems had started off fairly benign as well. No longer.
“He didn’t want me to leave for work,” Hazel began. She fidgeted with the collar of her prim dress nervously, her embarrassment on full display. “And it wasn’t just that he didn’t want me to leave. It’s the way he went about it. First he hid my identification papers, then he hid all of my shoes out on the fire escape, then he did everything he could to slow me down, and finally…”
“What? What did he do?” Alarm showed on Gemma’s face.
“Well, I can only label what he did as throwing a tantrum. Yes, that’s it. He threw a tantrum.”
All three were silent for a moment, two of them imagining what a tantrum might look like while the other replayed the event in her mind.
Gemma broke the silence, perhaps hearing the ticking of the work clock in her head, knowing time was short for conversation. “You’ve got to go back to PePr. Complain. Something! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be getting from a Match. This isn’t remotely like the perfect compatibility they promised. It sounds more like a hostage situation.”
Hazel glanced at the clock, saw that they were already six minutes behind on their work, and shot an apologetic glance toward both of her friends. Their heads disappeared into their cubicles, and Hazel reached for her various computer accouterments, adjusting each thing just so. The day ahead would be long, so comfort was almost a necessity if her work was to be worth the time invested. Surfing the web may not be as physically onerous as, say, being a longshoreman, but the way she did it took a different sort of effort.
As she finished her adjustments, Hazel considered Gemma’s final words on the subject. She was right. The problems with Henry were getting worse. That might not be so bad, except that they were also becoming less predictable. That made it hard to prepare for whatever he did—and to respond to his behavior when he inevitably became difficult.
As the situation had worsened, both of her friends had encouraged her to return to Perfect Partners—PePr, as it was more commonly known. Their urging, at first tentative, had become increasingly pointed as time went on.
But for Hazel, going back to PePr to complain about Henry seemed like such a drastic step. Once done, it wasn’t as if it could be undone. And what if they thought she had done something wrong, something to upset what had started out so perfectly? What if there was some fault in her that made her Match—designed so uniquely for each individual human that nothing could surpass it in compatibility—go wrong? Even worse, what if they thought she had ruined Henry and wouldn’t give her another Match?
And of course, once she did report it, what happened afterward wouldn’t be entirely under her control; and that bothered her more than she would like to admit. It seemed to her a bit like abandoning a moral duty—like leaving a dog on the road somewhere rather than caring for it when it got old or sick. Doing something like that just wasn’t in her makeup.
On the other hand, she wouldn’t be the first to take this step. It wasn’t as if a stigma would attach. If rumor was to be believed, the steady trickle of problems with PePr matches had lately become a torrent. Hardly a week went by without some new piece of outrageous news.
This week, it was two PePrs that had met each other in a “live” bar, each assuming the other was human, and courting in the prescribed manner until an attempt at bonding revealed the truth of their situation.
And the week before, the situation had been reversed: two humans, each assuming the other was a PePr, so perfect was their compatibility. Two humans! As if two biological individuals could ever truly provide perfect counterpoints to one another. There had even been recent whispers of humans deciding to remain together. Hazel considered that for a moment. No perfect partner? Just another variable and messy human? No, that all sounded rather dreadful to her.
At last settled in comfortably, Hazel almost reflexively began her work. As an experienced reporter, she entered the data stream like she was slipping into a warm bath. Time passed both slowly and with incredible speed when she worked. It was strange like that. She could be in so many places at once and yet narrow down to focus on a single millisecond from a thousand different angles to tease out anything of value. Cameras, security trackers, purchasing stations, and advertising bots were everywhere, and all it took was skill to leverage all those venues of potential information.
Not everyone could do this, but a good reporter could find news in the oddest places. All she needed was a hint and she could sniff out the story like a virtual bloodhound.
This morning was a good one for sniffing. Hazel found an entire chain of verbal snippets—whispers between two customers at a grocery store—which she assembled into a high-confidence piece of news—and then sold for a princely sum. It resulted in a ninety-percent loss in backing for a new holo-feature that had been hotly anticipated and highly rated up to that point, but that wasn’t her fault.
The situation was what it was—she merely revealed it. If things needed to remain secret, then they shouldn’t be spoken of in public. And really, in the final analysis, it certainly wasn’t her fault that the director had hired a reality-averse starlet with a substance abuse problem and an addiction to augmenters that was almost legendary.
After that promising start, the rest of the day was a bit of a letdown. Not that it was a bad day, but nothing came up that could match the excitement of that first catch. That was just how things went sometimes—a slow news day on the Southern California beat. And thoughts of Henry kept intruding, throwing her off and making her miss news catches a rookie wouldn’t.