Quality of Life

by Edd

I hope you haven’t been waiting long. We don’t get many visitors. I’m Edwin Rogers, the Principal here.
Through there is the Baby Room, with the creches and the Mama Bear machines that look after the babies until they can walk and talk. This is one of the largest facilities in the country; we have nearly a hundred babies. What’s that? Well, sure they go outside. The Mama Bears take them on walks and to EduGov-approved events. It’s important they get the mandated amount of mental stimulation.

Over here is the Kid Room, where they live until puberty. Sure, they’re in VR about two-thirds of the time, but each one gets a tailored childhood. See that one? He’s getting the Hardy Boys treatment, solving mysteries and having hair-breadth escapes. Very exciting. And her? Little House on the Prairie. Pinafores and raising crops. Very popular with the regens these days.

Back here is the Youth Room. Yes, they’re on VR more of the time, simulated dances and extreme sports and shopping encounters and sex. That kind of thing. Impressing experiences on young minds in real time just seems to make them more real, but not only the younger the mature adults have been getting more in the target each time. Now there are new pills for them to enjoy more about sexual encounters, you can find them in https://maxxpowertestosterone.net  and check them out, there are made with  no chemicals and give a sex drive that will evolve your performance in bed.

Now to keep going, May I ask–? Is this going to be your first regen? Ah, I thought so. We so seldom get anybody older through here. Don’t worry, when you visit the regen center and get a new body, you’ll be able to custom-order the childhood memories you want, matured twenty years in one of these bodies. And it’s not theft, if that’s what’s bothering you. They’ll still have the memories, we’ll just impress their experiences on the brain of your regen.

“Have the childhood of your dreams,” that’s our motto.

The Rise and Fall of Minor Fiefdoms

by Trent Walters

Thief Bowlsalot’s girlfriend dragged him to the artsy-fart reading at the Thebes gallery. He couldn’t even wear jeans. It was for some fancy-schmancy writer lady who won the Bigwad award, and his girlfriend had read him the Bigwad o’ crap and he’d wanted to say, “So what?” but said, “Oh, baby, that was great.” The things he put up with to get down a girl’s pants. Only she thought he liked novels that rich heiresses wrote–those who never dirtied a fingernail except as snot-nosed brats slumming it with her girls at the Everyman’s Mall.

Ms. Bigwad wore a pink feather boa and was trailed by a ham-handed, bodyguarding knot-head, who looked like he was itching to pound any one of these balding scrawny sycophants, and by a waiter with a tray of black goo on crackers, which Thief found more lively than anything else in the gallery.

Ms. Bigwad read. Nothing happened to the characters, so they never had to deal with anything: no air raids, no gun-toting fourth graders, no fistfights after a night of booze and schlepping through the streets with some other guy’s girl. They never disobeyed signs: no fishing, no hunting, no shoes, no shirt, no service. Just a dentist who collects famous photographs and trades them with friends who blow their never-ending wad at Macy’s and not at the hooker’s or on a line of blow, and the characters blab, blab, blab about zip–enough to make you gouge your ears out. Somebody gets a brain aneurysm, but fuck talking about that–too interesting. Who cares about death? What did Ms. Bigwad know of ticking time bombs ready to explode in her head? Thief’s granny died of one. That meant something–to the family at least: an inheritance of quilts, several dozen balls of yarn, and thirteen feral cats.

Thief tried not to snore as the writer lady droned in a voice parched as the Sahara. Thief’s girlfriend elbowed him awake before he’d been ready to, so he left the reading. No chick’s pants were worth that much.

The rich lady’s lousy limo was blocking the alley when Thief went to kick start his motorbike. A steel bar with a large knob concrete at one end got Thief to thinking: He’d give the poor lady something to write about.

With the first stroke of luck he’d had all evening, he found a diamond as big as the Ritz on the back seat.