Episode 9 – the flight home.

I was flying back from Luna on my own. KB was spending a few cycles with some Luna estate agents.  Loony estate agents more like. Bright orange from the dome-filtered sun, and bulked up with lurid weighted suits to keep their bones and muscles strong through long periods in the reduced gravity.

They looked like a bunch of gaudy teddy bears – kind of ironic, as they were all depressed. They said it was because of the parlous state of the Lunexpat property market. The downturn followed recent studies (which they refuted) about the negative effects of long-term one sixth G on brain function – apparently it led to depression. 

The shuttle from LunaPort3 up to the relay hub was uneventful.  Just the usual periods of weightlessness when the acceleration came off, before you adjusted to the hub’s rotation. A couple of kids were being sick, but I’d had my EasyG™ pills an hour before, which would also see me through the midway spin about 3 hours into the flight, when we reversed the ship for deceleration into Terra.

I was looking forward to the six hour flight back to Borri Syland Spaceport, to catch up on some recent HoloVids™. I’d acquired a set of the latest neural projectors and a hooky copy of ‘MoleWars’. I didn’t hold with science fiction, which was becoming increasingly popular. Too far fetched for me.

Only a one hour delay leaving the hub, caused by RoboZaps vaporising a path through scattered debris from an inbound Aurelian ore freighter. Coming back through the outer rim it had apparently been holed by a lost hundred year old survey drone and it was travelling with a cloud of spilled payload.

There had been a lot of that lately. The tree-huggers were worried that we kept colliding with nomadic aliens. I’d seen a news report that clearly showed a weird green mess mashed into tangled wreckage on the nose of a docked Sportship.

I was shown to my couch and was pleased to see I’d been put next to the most attractive (albeit slightly orange) woman that I’d seen on this trip.

As I settled in, primed the couch to my shape and adjusted my straps, I put on what I hoped was my ‘interesting, clever and approachable’ face. “Hi there,”

“Hi there,” she said boredly, without raising her eyes from her iPear™. I noticed she had the latest iPearV8 - probably a designer.

“Art,” I held out my hand, “I see you have the new iPear8 - any good?” She looked at me for the first time. She really was very nice, quite sophisticated, if a bit snooty.

“I guess." She smiled and shook my hand. Expensive scent. "Wanda."

“Hi Wanda. I understand the V8 lets you create your own holos on the fly?”

“It might well do, Art. I just use it for reading novels – you a designer?”

“That’s right, I run Artlie-Saturn. It’s a B2B agency, so you might not have heard of us. We concentrate on making things like waste management, high-tech and security systems exciting – takes a different skill to other design. We get deep into the products and turn technical features into business benefits.  You might have seen our HoloAds for Plop Technologies, BlastM2Bits and TimeTravelTech?”

“No, I don’t think so,” She looked sad for me, sad that she hadn't heard of our biggest clients. I was running out of material that would interest a non-designer.

We detached from the hub with a jolt and about 30 seconds weightlessness, until we cleared our bay. The thrust cut in and G was restored. Automatic shutters dimmed the incoming sunlight, the moon shrinking behind us, I continued...

“Yes, it’s not like designing clothes or interiors. We need design skills of course, but we have to go further, including our brains in the process – we need to understand the product and the needs of the audience and address those needs with product benefits, presented in an interesting way. Our message needs to strike against customer indifference and open their minds to a dynamic sales message. That takes technical knowledge and copywriting ability. It's more than just design.”

“Ahh,” - I was losing her.

“Take a look at the inside of this cabin – yes, it’s been designed, but on a very basic level. There’s no real skill. Just bright colours, lots of leaf patterns - presumably in the naïve belief it will help people forget there’s a vacuum out there -  and a bit of steel on the edges to make it durable. To be honest my 8 year old kid could do it in her lunchbreak.”

“I see,”

I realised I had been doing all the talking, “Anyway Wanda, that’s enough about me. What’s your line?”

She gestured around us with her hands “I design spaceship interiors,”

(to be continued)

Hartley-Stone

Episode 8 – Art takes a break

I’d spent 2 days trying to come up with a campaign for TimeTravelTech. Not only did I have no faith in the product – other than its ability to spread secretaries a little thinly (see episode 7, below) – but it also seemed to have little commercial application.
 
Lee Fyu Choor had reacted badly to my suggestions about branding and marketing his invention as a paté maker.
 
I knew that the techno market wouldn’t thank TTT for mending broken components as it took away their aftersales. (TTT’s solution could send broken items back to a past, i.e. unbroken, state). Anyway, the power usage was so phenomenal you would only use it for repairing expensive Skoda HovaCar parts – and they never broke.
 
I’d had enough, my brain was full, I needed a holiday. And not a VirtuBreak^™ either. An hour spent on a sun-kissed, scented couch surrounded by whale noises, holos of impossible women, pterodactyls and unicorns always left me feeling slightly deranged.
 
So I accepted KB’s invitation to join him for a few days golf on Luna.
 
It’s different to golf on Earth. The clubs are six times as heavy to compensate for the reduced G but the ball is not, so it travels further and stays in the air forever – pampering already over-inflated golf egos. Which is why it attracts the rich and greedy, who all dress like Gautamalan pimps and develop a weird orange colour from the dome-filtered sun.
 
I hadn’t played golf on Luna, but I’d been there before for a seminar and knew the shuffling, loose kneed walk that helped you stay in proper contact with the ground. And I remembered the dry eyes you got from the processed air.
 
I have to admit though, as I stood lightly on the Tee in one sixthG, looking down the first fairway at the exclusive Copernicus Crater Club, a fertile green oasis under the glittering crystal dome, I actually started to relax.  My MediWrist^™ showed my stress factor was almost down to 5.
 
I turned to KB, “Would you believe, my doctor actually told me I shouldn’t do golf..”
 
“Played with you too, has he?”
 
“Seriously though, I’d move heaven and Earth to play better,”
 
“Well try not to move Luna, its orbit is already wobbly thanks to that shuttle crash last year.”
 
We were teeing off in front of the bar, the orange Lunex-pats and golf groupies were all out on the terrace, sunglasses, shorts and expensive drinks. The odd white face showed recent arrivals and a smattering of VirtuSelfs that were still on Earth, but had Holo’d in for a lunch meeting. I thought I saw Dorid in there too, no doubt bored and seeing what I was up to.
 
We were a bit late to the tee and the hovering starter bot was winking ‘play’. With a gracious smile, KB let me Tee off first.
 
I set my HovaTee^™ to 32mm, turned it on, and once it was set I put my ball on it.  The bar all seemed to be watching me, so I knew I needed to perform. I took a backswing with my driver… and found myself flat onto my back.
 
The bar all howled. “Spinner! Spinner!”
 
KB smiled as he helped me up. “Tsk tsk. Art, you gotta watch your balance, the club weighs more here in relation to you, so it’s easy to pull yourself over on the backswing. Have another go, swing slow, keep your head still and put proportionately more effort into your downswing…”
 
Red-faced, I lined up and took a stance. My next shot, I actually connected, but the ball went straight up, to shouts of “Domer! Domer!” from the bar, and my through-swing tipped me over again.
 
I sat on the ground, and looked up at KB. After a second or so the ball landed (relatively softly) on my head. The bar howled as one. Then we got drenched by a shower of condensation that my ball had dislodged from the dome.
 
I looked down at the pretty little lake, shimmering by the Tee.
 
“I think I’ll drown myself KB,”
 
He grimaced sympathetically, “I don’t think you could hold your head down long enough”

(To be continued)

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Episode 7 - Art learns about time-travel

Lee Fyu Choor, head of TimeTravelTech, was cheerily briefing me for a new campaign and explaining how time travel worked – I’d heard it before…
 

“..so about 2 and a half centuries ago, two folk in Old USA – way before it was BigMex - called Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, observe random static patterns on primitive wave receivers. They surmise these patterns left over radiation from big bang. In a way they right. The patterns are like 3 dimensional pixel images, they run through everything.” He paused for breath and absent-mindedly twirled his pony-tail. – I noticed he had redecorated the building.
 

“What they really are is a kind of flux. The pattern of this flux determine where things are fixed in time. So all you have to do is create a field where you can re-programme this flux to earlier configuration and you effectively return it to an earlier state. You can keep a ‘recording’ of a flux pattern and then jump backward and forwards, like coat peg you saw in reception*. That’s the easy bit,” (*see episode 6)
 

Lee leaned forward suddenly, eyebrows raised, to see if I was paying attention.
 

“So what’s the hard bit?”
 

He sat back,“ If the object not already been monitored in the field, we have major task to calculate, from the seemingly random patterns of flux, what it would have been like in the time we want to go back to. And that takes a lot, a lot, a lot of power.”
 

“Gotcha.” – I hadn’t.
 

“Anyway, we finally work that out too, so we can get any object – as long as it’s relatively simple – and send it back to an earlier state. Importantly, once we have that code, we can extrapolate the pattern and send things forwards too.”
 

I wanted to sound interested, “So what are the commercial applications?”
 

“As long as we have all the bits we can renew and fix broken components. We can genuinely age things, and we can reset chess boards at the end of a game, or replay moves.
 

I thought I should 'add value' -  “But you can use it for medical purposes?”
 

He leaned forward and whispered...
 

“We working on that, but it take time, and very, very tricky,”
 

I thought I was being clever… “You could fix bones, cure cancer…”
 

He held up a hand, his happy smile disappeared “Yes, indeed you could.” He went on,
 

“You know my PA, Doreen?"

"She's very pretty"

"Yes, she very smart lady. She smart, but not clever. So, she watch as we fix small components, she see how it’s done and R&D let her have a go now and again.”
 

“Anyway, she on her own, it lunchtime and she break fingernail, opening Ho-Fun ready-heat pack of instant Peking noodles with crayfish and lobster tail.”
 

“She think ‘I know, I stick finger in field and send it back to earlier state,’”
 

He looked at the floor.
 

“But she not know you gotta have finite edge to field, or flux pattern escape, set up resonance in surrounding cells and they all fight to get away from one another….”
 

He looked me in the eye
 

“I get back from lunch and she all over the place,”
 

“What, she was crying?”
 

“No, she really all over the place, she one cell thick on every surface in building.”
 

(to be continued)

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Episode 6 - January 18th 2212

“Nice of you to join us Art.” said Nepty with a wink. Her new HoloJumper™ glowed with slowly shifting snow scenes. Shame WeatherTech™ had screwed up again (or been bribed) and it was 20 degrees C outside.
 

I’d been early to the gym - trying to lose those last few GreedFest kilos.  I could hardly walk, but very smug because I’d beaten my avatar ‘training buddy’ on the VirtuTrack™ by a good ten metres. I’d set him to 2207 image and fitness levels. Not smug that he seemed a good bit thinner than me, and what was I thinking of back in 2207 with that Mohican and the black body suit?
 

Walking past Dorid’s office I saw he was just signing off from an impromptu vMeet with Lee Fyu Choor from TimeTravelTech. Lee’s cheery face was just shimmering out of sight, right hand raised in some kind of dodgy lodge salute.
 

Dorid leaned out of his office, beaming.
 

“Hi Art. Told Lee about your four ducks concept.”
 

2212 was the ‘Year of Three Little Ducks’. I’d flippantly suggested TimeTravelTech did an AdHolo with four ducks and the copy line “Waddle you do in 2222?” as a way of convincing people they had a credible product. It was meant to be a joke, I don’t think Dorid really understood.
 

“He hated it,” Dorid went on, “But he wants to brief you on a new campaign. He wants you to go in and meet him with his R&D team. You can’t go virtual because he wants you to touch things and press buttons.”
 

“Can I call in yesterday?” I wondered if I could get out of it – Nice happy guy, but Lee was constantly showing off clever, but useless products that never got to market, and TTT was based in one of the nastier parts of Old Kensington.
 

Dorid continued blithely “He doesn’t have much time, and your diary for tomorrow is empty. His PA seems to have vanished - some kind of accident - so can you get back to Lee Fyu Choor and confirm a time?”
 

“...and when you get there, see if you can get him to pay up - he still owes us for July’s ‘TimeTravellers do it last week’ campaign.”
 

------------ January 18th 2212
 

It’s not quite a Skoda, but I didn’t want to leave my car anywhere near Old Kensington, so I got a RoboCab. Obviously programmed to protect itself, it dropped me half a click from TTTs unit, and I had to actually walk.
 

I got there without incident, other than being scrutinised by HoloCops on every street corner. Occasionally they put a real cop in, so you can’t be rude. The DoorBot™ read my retina and swung open.
 

Asked by the HoloSec™ to hang up my coat, I went to put it on the peg. There was a deep hum and the peg moved. And it did it again. Every time I went for the peg it moved somewhere else.
 

I heard Lee laugh behind me. “Ha! Good innit! Scanner read action, send peg split second back in time - you can never catch it up!”
 

I let my coat slip to the floor. “That’s very amusing Lee, did you apply the same technology to our July invoice?”
 

“Ha!” he replied with a wink, “I will pay that last June!”

(To be continued)

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Episode Five - January 10th 2212.

So GreedFest was over, the office seemed stark without the HoloDecs™ exploding into life every few seconds, but I really didn’t miss; “So here it is, Merry GreedFest”, or “Santa - put your sleigh on RoboDrive!” hammering out across the office.

I also didn’t miss HoloChocks™ that vanished when you opened the wrappers, or “PartyPloppers” that covered you in virtual phosphorescent slime.

And some media wag had christened 2200 the “Two Little Ducks Century”, so we now had “The Year of Three Little Ducks” for the second time in a decade. Everywhere you went there was an infernal trio of quacks.

Dorid frowned at me across the office. He looked tanned, but fatter, from 2 weeks GreedFest vacation on Lunar.  “What PGFP gimmicks you got in mind Art?”

It took me a while to get his latest acronym. He meant ‘Post GreedFest Promotions’. We didn’t do consumer, which was rife with hunger-suppressing implant diets, SlimSims™ and the latest SythiHales™ that were so benign they may as well have been tubes of fresh air. Generally as a B2B agency we stayed away from “PGFP’s”

“Dunno Dorid, I was wondering if we might do an ad for BlastM2Bits Security, showing three little ducks getting fried by a LectroGrid™. Copy line ‘What’s cooking in modern security?’”

“Like it!”

“Or one for HoloCorp saying “How can you do three ducks without 3D?”

“Brill!”

“And we could do an AdHolo for TimeTravelTech showing four ducks in a row with the tagline "Why wait?" – might convince some people that TTT have still got a credible product.”

“…nope, don’t get it…”

“Waddle you be doing in 2222?”

“Sorry?”

“Anyway, most of our customers won’t wear the duck stuff. Why don’t we do an in-house promo and just say ‘Happy New Year from all at Artlie-Saturn?’"

“Where’s the ducks?”

“At the top. We’ll call them the Three Wise Advertising Ducks. One for an agency that doesn’t duck the issue, one because we're always happy to float new ideas, and another because our bills are never too big.”

“Cheesy.”

“Quacked it.”

(To be continued - for earlier blogs, scroll down)

And a Happy New Year from all at Hartley-Stone!  

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Episode Four - December 13th 2211.

9.30 am.  Almost GreedFest and surprisingly most of the team were there in phis. Maybe because they expected me to take them for a GreedFest lunchtime drink.
 

Loda sputtered into view virtually, on an empty chair. Allegedly she had Birmingham Flu, and she looked slightly green. It was unlike her not to set a really glamorous vSelf, so I thought she was trying to make a point.
 

Dorid shimmered in a second later in shorts - he’d taken an early break on Lunar, so was also appearing virtual. His signal was out of phase, delayed at least a second, and his vSelf hovered a good metre above the table. Apparently Lunar had shifted on its axis because of a recent high-velocity robotruck re-entry crash and the vMeet™ tech hadn’t quite caught up yet.
 

I’d called the meeting. “Hi everyone,”
 

“Hi Art” they chorused in a sing-song way.
 

I paused for dramatic effect “OK guys, we need to get with the new gimmicks in 2212 – We’re going to do print.”
I watched their mixed expressions.
 

(“Hi everyone” said Dorid)
 

“Jeez Art, Print? Aren’t we the trendy one!” said Nepty coyly, with one raised eyebrow.
 

I spread my hands. “Yes we are trendy. And I also understand we'll need to get the latest static apps; our 3D and holo rendering won't work, because the output will be completely different. But if it’s good enough for OggleV, it’s good enough for us.”
 

(“Hi everyone,” said Dorid, his elevated vSelf now with sunglasses – I noticed the rest of the crew had started phasing him out)
 

“But OggleV are top 10 consumer, and we’re mid range B2B?” reasoned Jupe.
 

“Granted, ” I replied, “And there’s no point doing what I believe they call a ‘brochure’ for companies like Plop Technologies who only market to local buyers working for the utilities. But BlastM2bits Security Solutions have a high-expectation corporate client base. Their customers would be excited by turning over glossy pictures of BM2B holoscarers™, vGuards™ and eShock™ grids on real bound pages made of Piper.”
 

“I believe it’s called ‘Paper’ ” corrected Striton.
 

“Whatever, it’s still better than screen grabs or a cheap liser.”
 

“Laser,” corrected Striton.
 

“Anyway, it means we need to find a good ‘lotho-printer’?”
 

Striton crossed his arms and sighed patronisingly, like technical people often do.

“You mean a Litho-printer. - Printing plates are treated to carry an image, in relief, on their surfaces. The printing plates are kept dampened. Coloured ink is applied to the plates, usually 4 of them, but it is repelled from the dampened surfaces, which are the non-image areas.”

He paused, holding a finger in the air for silence, as he drank from his “Tekkies-do-it-on-their-own” SynthiCaff mug. He took a breath and continued,

“As the printing cylinders rotate, the ink is transferred to rubber blanket cylinders. The ink, now on the rubber blanket cylinders, is pressed onto the paper as it passes through the machine. The paper is trapped between the blanket cylinder and the impression cylinder - these pull the paper through the machine, through all the other coloured rollers, until it’s stacked for finishing and binding, which can include embossing, foil blocking or varnishing. - It’s really very simple.”

By now we were all talking among ourselves, Jupe was looking at 3D pictures of hoverbikes and Nepty was picking out decorated GreedFest pies. I was thinking about lunch.

(What’s Lotho Printing? Asked Dorid)

(to be continued)

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©Hartley-Stone 2011

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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©Hartley-Stone 2011