Mimi placed a blue cartridge into the machine’s receptor drawer and pushed it shut, eliciting a metallic squeal. She put cartridges into three more drawers—each closed with the same protesting shriek.
“Sorry, old girl,” Mimi gave the POR-2X’s exterior a conciliatory pat, then winced when she saw shampoo residue clinging to her fingers. She wiped the gunk on her overalls and turned on her tablet. Today’s quota was 500 bottles of Beachside Sundays, 1520 bottles of Fly Fishing For Trout, and 3000 bottles of First Kiss. Doable, if you had a POR-107X. You’d have more luck reaching infinity if all you had was a selectively-functional POR-2X.
“Piece of junk,” Mimi muttered, but her lips quirked upwards in an affectionate half-smile. She approved the first 200 bottles of Beachside Sundays, and pressed start on the tablet.
The machine grumbled to life, releasing a thick white stream into the bottles that moved below it on a conveyor belt and spitting out the cartridges that Mimi had spent the whole morning slotting in. Liquid immediately pooled around one of the bottles. In a fluid movement, Mimi plucked the defective bottle from the belt and wiped away the spillage. She pulled a roll of tape out of her pocket, glanced around once, then sealed the leak in the bottle and shoved it into her satchel. The top of the fabric poked out a bit, but it passed muster. She smoothed the zip and sat up again.
For a moment, Mimi watched the rest of the bottles file past her and disappear into the black holographic PriviScreen that curtained her workstation on all sides. She imagined the bottles gliding through station after station, where a different machine capped them, and yet another affixed them with labels. Or maybe they were labelled first? Mimi shrugged. It didn’t really matter.
Every once in a while, Mimi would hear a muffled clank of machinery or distorted human-like voice from beyond her PriviScreen, like voices calling from underwater, but mostly the PriviScreens did their jobs and let her focus on hers.
A regular clicking noise like the tick of a metronome sounded behind Mimi’s back, before becoming the distinct tap of heels on tile as somebody passed through Mimi’s PriviScreen.
Phoebe sat beside Mimi and booted up her own tablet, a headset jammed between her head and shoulder. The floral dress she wore draped over the bulge in her stomach. She held up a long, manicured finger at Mimi’s inquisitive look, warning Mimi not to interrupt her stream of words.
“Yes, Mr. Jason, of course we can create a custom MemSham. Did you answer the questionnaire? Yes… in fact, Proli’s promise is delivery within 1.5 hours anywhere, besides the lunar colony… great, could I get your address? Oh, you’re just a few blocks away from us! We’ll have it delivered to you in thirty minutes flat… how does that sound… thank you for calling Proli, we are delighted to serve you,” Phoebe said with a jaunty wink, in character even on a voice line. She ended the call and turned to Mimi, all amusement wiped from her face. “Thirty minutes.” she said.
“Which means we need to do it in five,” Mimi sighed and prepped her POR-2X for a custom order. “Why do you always do this, Phoebe?”
“Well, I want to give quality customer service to Proli’s valued customers,” said Phoebe. At Mimi’s raised eyebrow, she added: “One more five star rating will boost my chances at Employee of the Month, I know it.” She rested her hand across her stomach.
“Is it that time again?” Mimi pulled up Mr. Jason’s profile and set the custom shampoo algorithm to work on his digital footprint. A rapid flurry of news articles, video clips, and websites flashed across the screen. “Done.” Mimi searched through her assortment of cartridges to find the ones the algorithm had specified.
“I don’t understand why you don’t try for Employee of the Month. Everybody does.” Phoebe’s acrylic nails looked like a roiling millipede as she typed in Mr. Jason’s necessary details. “Don’t you want to get out of this cold metal seat and land yourself an admin job upstairs?”
Mimi shrugged, but Phoebe had already moved on.
“What do you think this one is for, then?”
“Remembering a dead partner, I’d guess. I’ve seen similar recipes. Remember the Día de los Muertos special?”
“God, I was dead after that.”
Mimi remembered the chaos of that day. She and Phoebe had barely been working together for a week when the storm of pre-orders hit them. Of course, the POR-2X chose that day to break down fourteen times; Mimi eventually let the squirted neuro gel harden into an orange crust on her skin. Phoebe, naturally, somehow remained spotless. At the end of their shift, they crawled to a bar and commemorated each time the POR-2X had thrown a fit with a shot.
“I think that was the last time I picked up a headset,” Mimi remarked.
Phoebe shuddered. “And it’s a good thing too. The world can do without your customer service voice.”
“Hey, it wasn’t that bad—”
“It was that bad. I think you actually scared away a few callers.”
“At least we didn’t have to prepare their order.”
Phoebe snorted, then stifled her laugh. “Shh. We should be grateful for their business.”
“It’s hard to be grateful when you look like a human Cheeto.”
Phoebe swatted at Mimi, and they settled into an easy silence.
A few minutes later, Phoebe asked: “How’s your mom, by the way?”
Mimi focused on slotting in cartridges. “She’s doing good.”
An ear-piercing shriek saved Mimi from having to say anything more. The production line in front of her ground to a halt as her POR-2X shuddered and let out steam. Phoebe jabbed at her tablet. When that failed, she swung a frustrated palm at the machine. “Stupid thing,” she hissed.
“Don’t say that,” Mimi leaned forward to check the machine’s control panel.
“Why not?”
“She’s got feelings too.” Having established that no wires were broken, Mimi popped the top of the POR-2X open, ignoring Phoebe’s irritated huff. Mimi quickly spotted the offending piece of equipment: a small gold cap caught in the moving parts, probably a holdover from when the machine had been used to cap bottles instead of fill them. She plucked it out and closed the top. The machine groaned back to life, and the production line started again. They sent the custom bottle off, eleven minutes from when Phoebe had made the promise to Mr. Jason.
Phoebe nibbled her knuckle. “I added a 0.78 credit discount to his profile, so hopefully that balances out.” Her headset trilled, and Phoebe rushed to pick it up.
A few hours later, during a lull in Phoebe’s caller duties, she said, “Do you believe that Oculus is observing us?”
Mimi snorted. “From his uber cruiser? I’m sure he has better things to do than watch two lowly ‘members of the Proli family’ right now.”
“If he did though… I’m not sure he would approve of your hypothetical misconduct.”
Mimi failed to pull her hand away from the closing cartridge drawer fast enough, and the metal nipped at her finger. She uttered a curse.
“Language,” Phoebe placed two protective hands around her stomach.
“They can’t even hear me yet.” Mimi glanced at Phoebe. “What is this about?”
“It’s about upholding company policy, in case employee misappropriation is occurring." Phoebe’s tone remained even, but her gaze flicked to the bulge in Mimi’s bag.
“Really?”
“On an unrelated note, I’ve noticed that you haven’t submitted an employee endorsement this month.”
Mimi lifted her hands from her tablet and turned to face her partner. A few seconds later, a timer started blinking in the corner of her tablet, counting down from two minutes. An animated MemSham bottle sprung into a series of yoga stretches on screen.
“Really, Phoebe.” Mimi said flatly.
Phoebe only shrugged, her eyes fixed on her work.
“You know I don’t participate in that stuff.”
“It’s ridiculous. Everybody endorses—you’re depriving someone from a better job.”
“Oh, someone, eh?” Mimi arched her brow. At Phoebe’s silence, she added softly, “It’s just an illusionary carrot they created to keep us running in place, hoping we’ll get to move up one day if we just work hard enough.”
Phoebe looked sharply at Mimi, then her gaze fell to their tablets. “That’s not true, someone wins every month.”
“Sure, but do you really think they win because of endorsements?” Mimi’s timer went off, and her screen flashed a sequence of decreasing negative numbers. The cartoon bottle clutched its head and wailed silently.
“Mimi, your break is up.” Then, when Mimi didn’t move, she said forcefully, “Mimi, your mom.”
Mimi turned back towards her machine and began slotting in cartridges again. The cartoon bottle winked and disappeared with a happy jingle, and the screen displayed the total number of credits that had been deducted from her pay.
“This hypothetical misconduct,” said Mimi evenly. “Isn’t really ‘misappropriation.’”
“I beg to differ.”
“It’s trash. The company would just eject it on the next lunar delivery anyways.”
“It’s still company property. They could recycle it and sell it again.”
After a few minutes, Mimi swiped a finger across her tablet, then flipped it to show Phoebe the endorsement confirmation screen.
Phoebe smiled in relief. “Thanks Mimi, I knew—”
“It’s really nothing.” Mimi swivelled to face her POR-2X.
An hour passed, with only the occasional tap of Phoebe’s nails to break the silence. Mimi’s timer went off again, signaling the end of her shift. Mimi stood up and shouldered her satchel. “You doing OT again?”
“Just for a few hours.”
“You know, people actually used to get paid extra for OT.”
“It’s just a few hours.”
Mimi left, the black ink-like surface of the PriviScreen swallowing all sounds from her departure. Behind her, Phoebe clicked onwards.
•••
A couple hours later, Mimi shut the apartment door firmly behind her—container homes were drafty enough as they were.
“I’m home, Ma,” she called as she walked through the narrow hall, her toes sinking into the carpet. She found her mother dozing in the living room, her wheelchair pointed towards the city outside the window, while the TV droned on softly in the background.
The little robot that took care of her mom during the day stood guard beside the wheelchair. It registered her presence and hummed a quiet tune. Mimi gave its head a quick pat while she waited for the day’s data to transfer from the robot’s memory to her phone. She made a mental note to pay the rental company this weekend, then gently shook her mom’s shoulder.
Ma woke slowly, her consciousness rising through whatever deep waters it had been submerged in. She smiled up at Mimi, and the white tufts of hair on her head trembled like windblown cloudlets.
“You eaten, Mimi?” Ma said.
“No, but I’ll eat after you shower. Sorry to keep you waiting.” Mimi grasped the wheelchair handles and headed towards the bathroom. Her phone vibrated, and she automatically checked it. The notification banner announced the Employee of the Month. A tiny picture of Phoebe’s beaming face was displayed next to the banner.
“How was your day?”
“Good, good. I got you something from work.” Mimi placed a plastic bottle on her mother’s lap, its slitted corner carefully taped shut.
Ma’s face lit up. “Pretty pictures?”
“Mmhm. This time, at the beach.”
In the bathroom, Mimi settled her mother onto a plastic stool in the small bathtub. Mimi perched herself on the lip of the tub and squeezed out some of the creamy white liquid from the bottle. She lathered it onto Ma’s hair, taking care to not let the soap touch her mother’s brows. Ma closed her eyes and sighed in contentment.
“What do you see, Ma?”
“I see… the beach I used to go to when I was a little girl.” Ma slipped into the dialect of her youth. Mimi quietly inserted an earbud into her ear, and Ma’s melodic words unfolded into the common tongue. “Wah, me and my brothers had to climb a mountain for half the day just to get there, but it was worth it for this beach. We used to play in the waves for hours, even when it thundered.”
“That’s not safe, Ma,” Mimi smiled.
“We didn’t care,” Ma chuckled, then breathed out deeply. “Wah, the water is so blue.” Twin drops traced miniature rivers down Ma’s cheeks as she sat there, her mouth half open, her lips curved in a youthful smile.
•••
Later that night, after Mimi had put her mother to bed, she contemplated the plastic bottle that held the remainder of Proli's proprietary MemSham. She wondered if this time it would work.
Drawing the filmy shower curtain closed behind her, Mimi squeezed the liquid into her hands, then rubbed it into her own black hair. She closed her eyes and thought of the times her father had brought her to West Beach when she was a girl, before drifting trash had gunked up the waters. She pictured the pristine sand bars in the pre-modern nature docs she’d loved as a kid.
Somehow, the memories didn’t take hold, never crossed the boundary from reminiscence to immersion. Maybe it was from her near constant exposure to the pre-treated neuro sludge. Maybe her brain was just broken. But tonight, like every other night, the MemSham failed to let Mimi escape into the fog of her childhood, or a woodland cabin, or a traveling circus, or a cross-country train. All she smelled, as always, was the artificial scent of shampoo.
