Episode Three - December 6th 2211

Dom’s wife (his fourth) was sitting in my office when I got back from lunch. All hair and fingernails. Very pretty, but I don’t think Dom had married her for her insightful conversation. I’d met her once with Dom outside a Skoda showroom – How the other half lives...
 
Today she seemed to be working double speed, probably mixing SynthiCaff with StaySlim, and I noticed she was wearing one of the latest vFrocks^™.
 
You could set vFrocks to show fleeting images of favourite backgrounds, sort of like a chameleon. Most women picked forests, clouds or water scenes, on the right person they looked quite attractive. Unfortunately Mrs Estos shimmered with street scenes of New Dagenham. I wasn’t sure if she was being deliberately ‘out there’ or had just messed up the programming.
 
“So chuffed you liked my slogan, Art,” she chirped, referring to her contribution to our latest Adholo on EVacU8, the public works channel. The ad was intended to promote her husband’s company, Plop Technologies, which had just taken the number two slot in Waste Management. Her slogan was rather imposed upon us.
 
“You really set a new benchmark with that one, Mrs Estos,” I admitted  “’We take crap from all our customers’ was inspired. We’ve actually been tempted to employ it ourselves - and we’re not even in waste management!”
 
She looked sideways at me. I didn’t tell her that our designers had thought it was a typo, had tried to change it to ‘we take carp from all our customers’. I guess that did make more sense with PT’s new Brown Trout^™ logo.
 
“So Dom say’s you’re gonna look at my good idea for me,” she continued.
 
“Shoot,” I said, as a helitruck surged across her chest.
 
Words tumbled out of her, sounding rehearsed, “You know I’m a big fan of VirtuPets^™. Well it struck me that they can’t breed, I mean not like real pets used to, so I thought we could, like, mix their coding and help them make new ones for themselves, actually give virtual birth. We could call them VirtuPuppy, or VirtuChick. Whaddya think?”
 
“Sounds good,” I replied “VirtuChick^™ is already in use for something quite different, but I see where you’re going,”
 
“We could take it further and do a VirtuPet mash-up, - a dog with a cat, I’d call that a ‘Dat-up’ for instance, a goat with a sheep – that would be a ‘Gheep-up’.  And we don’t have to stop at mammals, we could even mix a fish with a duck!”
 
“The possibilities are endless,” I admitted,
 
A traffic light went red near her shoulder, she hardly drew breath… “So Dom tells me you do that. You do that marketing stuff like, that you can draw them up, code them and make the programming?”
 
“Well,” I replied carefully, “We’re largely B2B, so we can certainly help you market to the distribution channel, but to build a prototype like you suggest, you really do need a Reality Simulation expert – what we call an RS?”
 
I flinched involuntarily as a hoverbike drove at me out of her vFrock, “ That’s what I thought”, she replied, “But I remember Dom once said that when it came to marketing, you were really a smart RS?”

(to be continued)

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