Thelma Toovers had been looking for a new assistant and Tami had dropped Joe's 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 fourteen, who also happened to be an old friend of an old friend that Tami went to cooking school with. They 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 Joe nervous. Once again, they’d cited the rumors of his stiff performances. They’d doubled their viewers again, twice, but ratings were also pouring in, and they weren’t always nice. The more he read them, the worse they got until Grace took them away, by order of the Producer AI. Joe would have tried balking, but they all knew where that had gotten him 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 they needed was enough information on Ms. Toovers to confirm that she was not just a bitch, but also an abusive one. Jean and Joe agreed that Thelma’s insistence on renaming Tami’s old friend Candy like some pet was enough, but Tami needed more. Tami had dropped off the groceries with Joe that morning, cooking up a few microwavable casseroles. 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 to only being capable of baby food. It had increased baby food quality. At least people hoped it had. What did anyone really know about a machine that spat out a goo that was flavored cherry and made of spinach and broccoli? Joe's mother hadn’t used one but that was only because they 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 how. Joe wasn’t an engineer, but he was pretty sure they could only exist in VR. 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 canes or those little peppermint candies that you got after dinner at some restaurants. Joe wouldn’t say it was tasteful. It was just expensive and practically monotone. Ms. Toovers was known for color-coding her harem and their abodes. No doubt, 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?” Joe worried silently at Hex, who stood, a stark clashing contrast, on the back of the loveseat blinking her purple eyes at him.
“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,” Joe crossed his eyes at Hex as he walked by her toward the kitchen to put away a bag of groceries, lifting each product up for a two cent commission. It did not escape his attention that Tami had glossed over the downgraded-accommodations part, but he didn’t want to think about it either. He’d been assured that his surprised reactions were much better than the scripted ones where he knew what was coming so he was trying to play ball.
Hex replied with a delicate lift of her front paw for feigned bathing and disinterest in his attention. Joe felt like a bug under a microscope. It was like all the AIs were in on some joke that he didn’t know about it and it was making him antsy.
He reached over and ruffled Hex’s ears as he walked past the couch and headed into the diving room. It wasn’t a dining room, but a diving room that could only exist as a condo in VR. Their 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 1%ers collected something, but Toovers didn’t like cars and wouldn’t allow anyone in her family to own them. Joe's 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 Joe. 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 Joe. Like he needed that. Their whole last episode had been about how Tami and Jean had set up a system to prove that their targets were the diabolical assholes that they were told they were. The husbands weren’t talking, but they’d posed as FBI agents to get a few of the deceased wives’ relatives to tell some tales. Still, they had to back that up with their own eye-witness accounts.
“This décor isn’t enough?” Joe protested, watching Hex hover over the pool as she followed him from room to room. Hex was getting great reviews, especially for how she followed him so lovingly and then didn’t let him pet her. Petting was now reserved for off-screen time and his costars, except where he could sneak a pet in here and there. Joe was getting a lot of sympathy for his pets seeming to like Jean and Tami more than him.
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“If you’re going to do one-liners, you need to do them onscreen,” Tami admonished him, but Joe just rolled his eyes. Ever since they’d agreed to let Tami direct an episode, he’d regretted it. She treated this job as intensely as she did her cooking.
Joe 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 Joe peeked over the top, he 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 Joe not touch any of her electronics and the artist desk was computerized, so he 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. It was like having a gaming table that could electronically reproduce any game in the box. It was currently set up for a DnD game.
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Joe 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,” Joe 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 Joe and then looked behind him where Kodo chased Podo out of a closet-area beyond the desk. Was Podo wearing a white feather boa?
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“Hey!” Joe tried to call out to them, but his eye skipped to and over the desk where he could have sworn for just a moment that a small dungeon-style tarantula was crawling up out of the art desk. Joe blinked and it was gone.
“Did you see that?” Joe asked Hex, who cocked her head at him. Joe looked back at the desk, but there was nothing there. Some part of Joe knew not to look away from sneaky tarantulas, but the rest of him told it to shut up and ignore what shouldn’t be there. Behind Hex, the fish looked out at Joe as if they were judging him, their great grumpy faces like three old men in a small town. “This place is a freak show.”
Hex gave Joe a nod and allowed herself to float down onto the middle of the bed, just far enough away that he couldn’t reach her.
“We don’t even dare to shed,” she purred into Joe's 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 Joe to pet her, but they 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,” Joe grumped at Hex, finding it weird that he 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!” Joe called after the ferrets, but it was no use. Did he really care anyway? Considering that they were just gathering evidence so that they could, in all good conscious, kill Thelma Toovers, Joe wasn’t really worried about keeping his job as her assistant. Still, she’d asked him to keep an eye on the place and stock it with food before Penny returned from their honeymoon to take up residence. It was hard to shrug off his work ethic.
Out of curiosity, and more to distract himself than anything else, Joe put his 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. Joe 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.
They’d been able to pull Glenda back onto their 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 they’d needed her back onscreen to keep that going.
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Joe turned to make a comment to Hex about the two people in the garage, when he 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. Joe had to remind himself that he was in virtual reality, so none of it was really real, but these tigers were as real as the tarantula that had eaten him.
His heart raced even though he knew better. And Joe 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 Joe always knew that. They could try to surprise him, but what did that mean when anything could happen? Joe could practically hear their bated breath as they waited for his face to reflect what his mind was already figuring out.
His 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? Joe knew he wasn’t responding as freaked out as they wanted him to act. Joe wanted to act right, but he was fighting busting out laughing at their obvious ploys. The people he’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 Joe. If two people came tumbling out of that garage in states of half-dressed homicidal emotions, Joe would lose it. He’d laugh.
Joe dashed to the door and put his back to it so that he could keep an eye on both the tigers and what he 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. Joe's hand fumbled behind his back with the deadbolt, but even as he turned it once, it turned back. Joe had to hold it in place and as it slid open, he could feel the door vibrate. Those two lovers had decided to come in here and do something nefarious to him.
“Who’s in there?” came a female voice with the pounding on the door.
“Who’s out there?” Joe called back, twisting the lock closed and holding it in place. Still, the door bucked at him. Joe looked at the ceiling and pressed his lips together to not laugh. It was ludicrous. Joe could imagine that the cameras were panning up to the ceiling to take in the projectors mounted up there. The cameras noticed them as Joe noticed them, and he got it. Joe did. It was just…
“Thelma!”
Had his voice been pitched high enough to mistake for Thelma’s? Her voice was low for a woman but Joe’s wasn’t high for a man. He wasn’t that scared. Joe hadn’t recognized either of the people who were in the garage, which meant that they weren’t any of Thelma’s other spouses. Joe 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!” Joe yelled through the door, trying to keep his voice pitched low. The door surged against him in a way that made him doubt the quality of the lock, the hinges, and the AI Actors in the other room who were absurdly mistaking his low voice for Thelma.
“Thelma!” came a male voice this time and it was aggressive. “I’ll kill you!”
“NO!” Joe 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 Joe 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. Joe couldn’t help it. He laughed as the words “CUT!” rolled across the screen.
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