Thelma Toovers had been looking for a new assistant and Tami had dropped my name into the bucket of barbeque sauce at the ribs cookoff where Tami had gone head-to-head against Thelma’s head chef. Tami had won and that was the way to impress Thelma, the multi-billionaire who was on wife number 14, who also happened to be an old friend of an old friend that Tami went to cooking school with. We had three whole episodes in the can for all that lead up, but the Writer AIs had been tightlipped about this next part and that made me nervous. Once again, they’d cited the rumors of my stiff performances. We’d doubled our viewers again, twice, but ratings were also pouring in, and they weren’t always nice. The more I read them, the worse they got until Grace took them away, by order of the Producer AI. I’d have tried sulking, but we all knew where that got me before.
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White was the overall scheme of the chic townhouse where Ms. Toovers was setting up her latest wife, Penny. What we needed was enough information on Ms. Toovers to confirm that she was not just a bitch, but also an abusive one. Tami had dropped off the groceries with me this morning, cooking up a few microwavable casseroles. Hey, casseroles had come a long way and so had microwaves. Once microwaves had been improved to include browning, deep fry, and steam settings, the world had re-embraced them as better than conventional ovens. They’d have called them food printers, but those had been an abject failure and relegated into only capable of baby food. It had increased baby food quality. At least we hoped they did. What did we know about a machine that spat out a goo that was flavored cherry and made of spinach and broccoli. My mother hadn’t used one but that was only because we couldn’t afford the printer. The moo-verse fed it to their babies. It must have been okay, right?
The living room held a white leather loveseat with bracketing white, furry, hanging chairs made out of live albino willow trees with pots that were level with the floor. They were hanging and potted. Don’t ask me how. I wasn’t an engineer. The rug in the living room was a wavy mix of the furry chairs and leather loveseat in texture. The kitchen appliances were all white against white cabinets, with only small pops of red here and there with a pillow or a drawer handle that had a little swirl of red that was reminiscent of a candy cane. I didn’t say it was tasteful. It was just expensive and practically monotone. Ms. Toovers was known for color-coding her harem and their abodes. Why yes, it was an advertisement for her decorating company.
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“Aren’t you afraid we’ll get flagged for being in too posh of a place?” I worried silently at Hex, who stood, a stark clashing contrast, on the back of the loveseat blinking her purple eyes at me owlishly.
“Not at all,” Tami answered for all of them from offscreen. “First, this is a job and you’re just stocking the fridge, not staying the night yet. Second, by the time you go to ‘sleep,’ the accommodations will be downgraded to within Dr. Phendal’s specified levels. And finally, Dr. Phendal is off duty for the night and won’t get the alert until morning, by which time, we should be through filming. Now focus.”
“I’m focused,” I crossed my eyes at Hex as I walked by her. It did not escape my attention that Tami had glossed over the downgraded accommodations part, but I didn’t want to think about it either.
Hex replied with a delicate lift of her front paw for feigned bathing and disinterest in my attention. I felt watched like a bug under a microscope.
I reached over and ruffled her ears as I walked past the couch and headed into the diving room. That isn’t a typo. Our real client, Penny, was an ex-Olympic diver. There were tiered diving boards and a small, but very deep pool in the center of a room right off the garage, which was oddly rented out to a neighbor who still liked cars. Most one percenters collected something, but Toovers didn’t like cars and wouldn’t allow anyone in her family to own them. My hoverhog wasn’t even allowed to be parked in the garage, which oddly had a peephole in its door. This room was also very white, with tile everywhere except for one focal wall that housed a humongous fish tank containing exactly three giant tropical fish, each with its own grumpy face that just didn’t scream opulence to me. There wasn’t any greenery or tank decorations. It was just three grumpy fish. The set was out of some advertisement for a new town-housing division with just enough adjustments to avoid copyright infringement. This room was part of that customization.
“Our job is just to prove that Thelma Toovers deserves retribution,” Tami reminded me. Like I needed that. Our whole last episode had been about how Tami and Jean had set up a system to prove that our targets were the diabolical assholes that we were told they were. The husbands weren’t talking, but we’d posed as FBI agents to get a few of the deceased wives’ relatives to tell some tales. Still, we had to back that up with our own eye-witness accounts.
“This décor isn’t enough?” I protested, watching Hex hover over the pool as she followed me from room to room. Hex was getting great reviews, especially for how she followed me so lovingly and then didn’t let me pet her. Petting was now reserved for off-screen time and my costars. I was getting a lot of sympathy for my pets seeming to like Jean and Tami more than me.
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“If you’re going to do one-liners, you need to do them onscreen,” Tami admonished me, but I just rolled my eyes. Ever since we’d agreed to let Tami direct an episode, I’d regretted it. She treated this job as intensely as she did her cooking.
I skirted the pool and headed over to the architect’s desk in the other corner of the room. It was unsurprisingly white, simplistic, and looked a lot like a box on a stand. The box was about eight inches deep and only tilted by about ten degrees. As I peeked over the top, I could see that it was an artist’s desk, like maybe Ms. Toovers liked to sit and draw Penny while she was diving. Toovers had been very adamant that I not touch any of her electronics and the artist desk was computerized, so I didn’t pay it much heed except to note that it must have doubled as a gaming table with little figurines of monsters and people in various garb.
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I turned back to the panel of switches on one wall, idly flipping the one that turned the room into the bedroom. The diving boards lowered into the floor and a bed descended from the ceiling like a fluffy cloud to cover the pool in the middle. The bed was round and covered in something that looked almost identical to the rug in the living room. A chandelier of clear dips and swirls of sparkling crystals unfolded itself over the bed and sent rainbows of color across the room.
“If we break anything, Ms. Toovers will lose her mind,” I shook a finger at Hex, who had air-walked around the lowering bed and up into the chandelier to bat at a few tinkling crystals.
Hex turned to blink at me and then looked behind me where Kodo chased Podo out of a closet-area beyond the desk. Was Podo wearing a white feather boa?
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“Hey!” I tried to call out to them, but my eye skipped to and over the desk where I could have sworn for just a moment that a small dungeon-sized tarantula was crawling up out of the artist desk. I blinked and it was gone.
“Did you see that?” I asked Hex, who cocked her head at me. I looked back at the desk, but there was nothing there. Some part of me knew not to look away from sneaky tarantulas, but the rest of me told it to shut up and ignore what shouldn’t be there. Behind Hex, the fish looked out at me as if they were judging me, their great grumpy faces like three old men in a small town. “This place is a freak show.”
Hex gave me a nod and allowed herself to float down onto the middle of the bed, just far enough away that I couldn’t reach her.
“We don’t even dare to shed,” she purred into my mind. “That’s why you can’t pet me in here. There would be black fur everywhere in a second.” That was not why she didn’t allow me to pet her, but we had figured out how to allow her communication to be scrolled across the bottom of the screen when she toggled her comments to be on-air.
Kodo came skittering back in, sliding over the white tile floor to duck back into the closet, the white feather boa stretched out behind him and Podo now hot on his heels.
“I think shedding is the least of our worries,” I grumped at Hex, finding it weird that I worried over having to clean up whatever mess those two were making in there before Toovers or Penny showed up. “You should probably stay out of there!” I called after the ferrets, but it was no use. Did I really care anyway? Considering that we were just gathering evidence so that we could, in all good conscience, kill Thelma Toovers, I wasn’t really worried about keeping my job as her assistant. Still, she’d asked me to keep an eye on the place and stock it with food before Penny returned from their honeymoon to take up residence.
Out of curiosity, and more to distract myself than anything else, I put my eye to the peephole in the door to the garage and nearly did a doubletake. On the other side of the door was an empty garage, except that it wasn’t empty. There were two people in the garage. It wasn’t the wife, Penny, who’d been forced to change her name to Candy before the wedding. I refused to call her Candy. On the surface, Penny was sweet, bubbly, and a little airheaded. Beneath that, she had gone to the police academy with one of the dead husbands. Ms. Toovers liked cops of all sorts. What she really liked, according to Penny, was breaking their arrogant minds into tiny little pieces.
We’d been able to pull Glenda back onto our show, ostensibly because her husband had a friend of a friend of someone who was one of Toovers’ old husbands and he’d asked her, as a favor to him, to go take care of the nasty woman. All this was in that FBI episode and really quite convoluted. Glenda had come clean with her new husband on the honeymoon and instead of being upset, he’d been excited to send her off against some old enemies of his. Glenda liked it. All that was the thinnest of covers for the fact that Glenda had gotten amazing ratings and we’d needed her back onscreen to keep that going.
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I turned to make a comment to Hex about the two people in the garage, when I noticed that the fish tank wasn’t a fish tank anymore. It was a tiger’s cage, complete with one orange and one white tiger. Just like with the fish, there weren’t any plants or decorations in the cage, just the two animals. They looked real. They looked really real. I had to remind myself that I was in virtual reality, so none of it was really real, but these tigers were as real as the tarantula that had eaten me.
My heart raced even though I knew better. And I did know better. This was VR. They’d gone to a great deal of trouble to make it all seem real, but it was a set, and I always knew that. They could try to surprise me, but what did that mean when anything could happen? I could practically hear their bated breath as they waited for my face to reflect what my mind was already figuring out.
My gaze went from the door to the garage to the cage of tigers and even flitted over to the desk. The door to the garage rattled. Was it locked? I knew I wasn’t responding as freaked out as they wanted me to act. I wanted to act right, but I was fighting busting out laughing at their obvious ploys. The people I’d seen through that peephole had looked rather more interested in each other than they’d be for a person who might be looking through the peephole, but the knob was turning and that wasn’t good for me. If two people came tumbling out of that garage in states of half-dressed homicidal emotions, I’d lose it. I’d laugh.
I dashed to the door and put my back to it so that I could keep an eye on both the tigers and what I knew to be a small tarantula crawling out of the desk. They were getting the fear they wanted, even if it wasn’t for the reason they wanted. Hex curled up in the center of the bed as if none of this was happening at all. My hand fumbled behind my back with the deadbolt, but even as I turned it once, it turned back. I had to hold it in place and as it slid open, I could feel the door vibrate. Those two lovers had decided to come in here and do something nefarious to me.
“Who’s in there?” came a female voice with the pounding on the door.
“Who’s out there?” I called back, twisting the lock closed and holding it in place. Still, the door bucked at me. I looked at the ceiling and pressed my lips together to not laugh. It was ludicrous. I could imagine that the cameras were panning up to the ceiling to take in the projectors mounted up there. The cameras noticed them as I noticed them, and I got it. I did. It was just…
“Thelma!”
I hadn’t recognized either of the people who were in the garage, which meant that they weren’t any of Thelma’s other spouses. I knew all of them. Whatever plotline they were working with was beyond crazy.
“I’m supposed to be here, but I don’t think you are, so you answer the questions first!” I yelled through the door, which replied by surging against me in a way that made me doubt the quality of the lock and the hinges.
“Thelma!” came a male voice this time and it was aggressive. “I’ll kill you!”
“NO!” I cried out, trying to be mad or scared or something appropriate. “I’m not Thelma!”
The rattling of the door stopped, the tarantula disappeared, and I was left to stare at the mounted projectors on the ceiling that pointed at the fish-turned-tigers and at the artist desk with the tarantula that really wasn’t fair. I couldn’t help it. I laughed as the words “CUT!” rolled across the screen.
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