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  “Fine.Bringherin.”

  Galene fumbled with the lightsaber, and she dropped it on the floor.

  Melpomene came back, glanced at her while she placed the prop back and smiled. “Follow me next door, if you please.”

  “Ahem. Sure.” Galene followed.

  The man was in his forties. To Galene’s eyes, he looked old. Handsome, but old. He had greying sideburns, that detail that made a man super hot for a few years in his lifetime, as if Nature was giving him one last chance to spread his genes before taking away his erection.

  “Hello. Well, the problem is… I don’t really know what it is, George had isolated something… Call me Greg, for short,” he spat out in nonlinear conversation and presented his hand.

  Galene shook it. “Hello. I’m Galene. Call me Gal, for short.”

  “Short is good.”

  She chuckled, “You’re not referring to our height difference, are you?” She was average to short for a woman, and he was 1.80 metres, so he had a good head over her.

  “Hah! No, I was talking about swiftness.” He checked his watch. Not a smartwatch, an actual old-timey digital watch, with buttons and sports thingies on it. Weird. “Well, I’m about to have a phone call, please carry on with your computer troubleshooting.” He pointed at one of the towers in his workstation. He had an enormous set-up, not unusual for analysts, with four splayed out monitors, two towers with separate mechanical keyboards, headphones, surround sound (not holosound, which was again, weird), and a dedicated optic fibre line to one of Hermes’ AIs. That last one Gal knew, because she had worked on the other end, while fixing problems with her colleague George.

  On the screen was a video feed, frozen, with generated subtitles underneath. The program showed a ‘3.0x’ at the corner.

  Gal shrugged and threw her laptop bag on the desk. She crawled underneath the desk and accessed the computer tower. It was funny how nobody told you how much crawling underneath desks an IT worker had to do. It should have been right in the job description: Information Technology, Desk Crawling.

  Oh well, at least this place was clean.

  Greg spoke on the phone at the next room, while Mel hovered around. “Greg mentioned issues with video playback, how they’d be slow to load sometimes.”

  “Okay, let’s see.” Gal checked out the classic issues of troubleshooting, loose cables, a reset of the computer, unplug peripherals. Then she sat on the desk-chair and loaded up some videos. They seemed fine, no dropped frames, no artefacts on the image. She fed the sound into the headset so as not to make noise and listened. The audio was fine, in time with the video.

  If you ignored the fact that everything was played back at 3x times the normal speed, it all worked okay. How could anyone follow that? “I don’t see what the problem is.”

  “Well, there is a five-second delay when switching between the feeds.”

  Gal nodded slowly, pursing her lips. “Five whole seconds? Well, we certainly can’t have that!” Be calm, Gal. Now you know why the boss sent ya.

  “Excellent,” Mel said and left her to work alone.

  Gal sighed and slowly clicked around the settings. She tweaked some of the video program’s settings so it utilised more of the processor, ran some tests and managed to drop the delay when switching down to 1 second.

  Her work practically done, she let the video running and tried to keep up, watching it with all the focus she could muster. It was some newsfeed about natural gas zones south of Cyprus. Gal checked around to see that nobody was watching and squinted her eyes to fight, to manage to keep up with the information running at that speed. She actually tried, she grabbed the ends of the desk as if she was about to leap forward in a race, she fixed her eyes on the screen, she shooed away all thoughts from her mind. She really tried to read the subtitles, match words to their meaning, but the letters simply flashed too fast for her to read, let alone comprehend.

  Un. Fucking. Believable.

  How could anybody watch something this accelerated?

  It couldn’t be done. She stopped herself before she popped a vein on her forehead or something or something more important like her clicking finger.

  Greg came back into the room, ending the phone conversation. “Right, Dan. We need to end this phone call now, think about any issues you want to discuss next time and send them to me in an email. Nope, that was my allotted time for this phone call. Yes, really. Goodbye.”

  Gal raised an eyebrow. Had he just blown off an associate? Handsome and cheeky. Still weird, though.

  “So, can something be done for the lag?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I fixed some settings, should be down to a single second.” She paused, hovering her finger over the spacebar. “Or is that not acceptable?”

  He chuckled. “It’s fine. Show me.”

  She started a few video feeds, and the delay was around one second every time.

  “Perfect,” he clapped his hands together, shifting his attention to his papers. Papers! Who had papers anymore, other than the government?

  Feeling dismissed, Gal stood up and threw her laptop bag over her shoulder. She hesitated. “Um…”

  “Yes?” His eyes scanned the documents, flitting fast across the page. He held a pen to guide his attention on each line.

  “I noticed that you have these video feeds with generated subtitles. Which are accelerated at three times normal speed, for some reason.”

  “Yes.”

  “So, I think it would be easier to actually read the subtitles if there was a delay on the screen, and a stacking of the new ones underneath.” Why was she suggesting stuff? Hadn’t she learnt from her year in corporate life that he who suggesteth, was suckereth into worketh?

  He raised his eyes, finally giving her his attention. “Really?” He thought about it. “Yes, I think that might be easier to read. Show me.”

  She sat back down on his desk-chair and he leaned over her. Why was she blushing, dammit? And had she showered that morning? She must have, right? She shook her head and focused on computers. She opened a developer’s kit for the video program and quickly threw together a script that would echo the auto-generated subtitles for a few seconds longer on the screen, and append the new ones underneath. That took her a couple of minutes, during which time she tried really hard to ignore the man leaning over her. She ran the script and tested it.

  The video feed played back at 3 times normal speed, and the subtitles stayed on the screen longer. For a second she tried to keep up with the information flow like before, but gave up. She glanced at Greg, looming over her.

  He focused for a minute, then leaned forward to hit a keyboard shortcut. He smelled fresh and manly. He increased the speed to 3.1x, then 3.2x, then 3.3x. He left it there for a few minutes, watching the experts talking about natural gas. Then he increased the speed to 3.4x, then jumped ahead to 4.0x. He watched for a minute, the words and the information blurring in front of her. He lowered the speed down to 3.3x.

  He watched for a few more seconds and then nodded. “That’s brilliant. A 10% increase. Who did you say you were, again?”

  Chapter 4: Gregoris @ 3.1x nhs

  Greg played around with his new setup. He watched half of a documentary about the New Space Race, then he went back to studying the ads Artemis was showing on the internet. An AI had aggregated all the video ads belonging to Artemis Automotive, and he was watching them chronologically in thematic subgroups.

  They had corporate ads for shipping, directed to Business to Business customers (B2B). They also had pure security ones, directed at millionaires and corporate bigshots. Over the years their tagline evolved, but they seemed to have settled to ‘Getting you safely from A to B.’ It wasn’t exactly a jingle, but the narrator did wobble his voice a bit and it stuck in your mind.

  After hearing it for about six-hundred times across all the variations, Greg had a definite new earworm to shake off. He turned off the research and rested his eyes.

  Leaning back on his comfy couch, he
thought about his project. Artemis herself. An assignment from Hermes himself. Quite simple, in theory. Figure out what she’s up to, Greg.

  Suuure.

  Easy as pie.

  Figure out what the most brilliant woman of the century was up to, Greg. What could she possibly do, with the full might of a self-made megacorp behind her and a pile of money and a deep grudge against the rest of the Olympian CEOs?

  Why did she have that grudge against them, anyway? Greg had asked Hermes directly, but got no clear answer.

  Don’t get me wrong, they all schemed and dealt under the table, forging temporary alliances and shrugging off treason as ‘just business, mate.’ All twelve of the Olympians were pompous, brilliant, infinitely megalomaniacal and purely psychopathic.

  But Artemis was quite different. For starters, she was fair. Fair to competitors, fair to her employees, fair even when she punished somebody in her employ.

  She also didn’t have a skyscraper, nor there was one scheduled for her, despite being in the Olympians.

  She was instrumental in changing the law and making corporate adoption possible, where she became the patron (and mother, Greg supposed, in this expanded meaning), of hundreds of orphan girls.

  The latter ones were very interesting. Grown up now, in their young adult years, forming street gangs and taking control of the streets of Athens. And they didn’t do it in secret. Videos and motovlogs, a portmanteau of moto and video and blog were all the rage, with girls on bikes filming their exploits and showing them to everyone on the net. They weren’t just elbowing into Athens’ nights, they were meticulously crafting their mythology as well.

  Fear and awe. For no one in their right mind would mess with the Amazons.

  So bloody interesting. Greg found it fascinating. He wasn’t a shut-in, but the last few years had been quite a routine for him. He didn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the city. Someone had to assign him a project for him to take note of what was happening beneath his feet, 80 stories down.

  He stood up and looked down from his penthouse window. Athens gleamed, giving way to the nightlife. Apart from the other three skyscrapers next to their own, he felt so high above it all. It was easy to get to your head. That you were somehow above the average people, somehow more than mortal.

  He had access to the best medical care in the world, information from anywhere and any country, an allowance that pretty much let him order whatever his heart desired.

  So why did he feel so empty inside?

  He wasn’t ungrateful, he knew that he was lucky to have all that. He liked pushing the limits of his mind, finding connections, figuring out opportunities where others saw none.

  “Getting you safely from A to B,” he mumbled. Because, in this world of today, you couldn’t just take your car and drive down the street to your favourite restaurant. Not if you were somebody important atop the corporate ladder. No, you had to have drones overhead, a car with bulletproof windows, a driver with training, a convoy of Amazons on bikes, a hacker alongside to stop any hacking attempts that might put you in danger. It was crazy. Then, as added features with the relevant price tag of course, you could add biological protection filters, medical priority evac (Make sure the only light you see is Apollo’s Tripod!), or active agents (meaning heavily armed ones).

  How could anyone live like that? Greg liked to hop on his bike three times a week and go to Romvis Street for his restaurants. He enjoyed the trip, it was part of his routine to decompress. You couldn’t maintain the speeds for long, you needed to relax regularly. He was old enough to know when to pace himself. He might be pushing the limitations of his mind every day, but he knew not to overextend himself.

  Greg stared at the rows of lights below, cars moving around. He liked to watch the patterns. The city was covered in a thin layer of smog, so he could only see directly underneath.

  Mel walked next to him quietly. “That one,” she pointed with a crooked finger. Her proportions were all wrong.

  “Self-driving,” Greg said after a second.

  “Correct,” smiled Mel. “What about that car, the white one?”

  “Human driver. Come on, he’s probably intoxicated.”

  “That red sedan?”

  “Hm. Human, again. He slowed down to check out the girls walking on his right.”

  “Correct.”

  It was a silly game they played. Greg couldn’t remember who came up with it, him or his Muse. It didn’t matter anyway, as long as it still relaxed him.

  “I have one for you,” he said squinting at her.

  “Of course. Tell me.”

  “That girl from IT from earlier, what do you make of her?”

  “She’s human, definitely.”

  Greg chuckled. “Yes, I knew that, thanks. No, I meant, what did you think of her? What was your opinion of her when you saw her today?”

  Mel paused. Greg knew she paused merely for effect, her brain didn’t need any noticeable amount of time to think about stuff. “I think you should ask her out.”

  Greg felt flustered. “No, ahm… That’s not what I-”

  “It is what worries you. And no, I don’t think she will be an obstacle to your projects, that is my official opinion as your Muse. People need social interaction to remain healthy, romantic relationships fall into that category,” she said softly, but her face shifted back to her normal mask-like expression.

  Greg turned back to the city below. “Okay. How should I ask her? I mean, it’s been so long…”

  “I can’t help you with that,” his Muse said. “Actually I can, but I think it will go smoother if I don’t.”

  “Some friend you are,” he joked.

  “I am your friend, Greg. Also, I am in charge of your physical and mental health. Bringing you a girlfriend on a platter like the call girls you order from a catalogue will not help you in the long term.”

  “Alright, alright!” He shooed her away.

  She didn’t move. “It’s time for your sleep reset. You know you can’t maintain the polyphasic sleep so long.”

  “Yes, I’m going. Leave me alone for a minute, will you?”

  “Kalinixta,” Mel said in Greek for goodnight and left.

  Chapter 5: Galene @ 0.6x nhs

  “Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead,” Gal fumbled with her keys and got into her apartment. She ran to her balcony and looked around for Simba. Yes, she had named her orange cat, Simba. He meowled and came up to her, rubbing his fur on her shoes.

  “Oh, there you are. Sorry I forgot to pour your food this morning, Simba. I didn’t hear the alarm, and then I didn’t have time to dress and there was traffic, like always…”

  The cat ignored her. Thankfully, he still had his instincts and had turned practically feral, hunting birds and rats, feeding himself. Otherwise he’d have starved a long time ago.

  She stared a moment at her flower pots. Or, more accurately, her pots with dried up dirt and dead plants in them. She wanted to have some nice flowers but…

  Galene threw her keys and bag on the kitchen table and sagged on the chair. The smartfridge sent her a message on her veil with all the things she was supposed to shop and bring home.

  “Gee, thanks for that timely reminder.”

  She slowly stretched her leg and opened the fridge with her toes. She slapped her forehead. She had forgotten to buy milk, again. And pasta. And anything else that might even resemble some sort of food. She checked the time, it was 8 at night. The stores were closed by now.

  Jeez. Where had the day gone?

  Slipped right through her fingers.

  She was still holding Simba’s dry cat food, so she shrugged and ate a chunk of whatever it was.

  Huh. Fishy. Not bad.

  Chapter 6: Galene @ 0.7x nhs

  Galene woke up and darted to the bathroom. What she considered as ‘darting,’ others would call ‘took her damn well time.’

  A mere forty-five minutes later she was waiting for her metro to get to work.<
br />
  Sitting on her seat, she slapped her forehead. “She’s the Muse!” The lady next to her started. “Sorry,” she said awkwardly.

  How could she not recognise an android when she saw one? They were made and operated by Hermes after all, but her job was too low-level for that. Plus, the nerds who worked in the departments in charge of the Muse program could handle their own computer issues just fine. It was rare for one of the IT to go there, they usually just called and handled things on their end with cooperation from Gal’s department.

  But everyone knew about the Muses. The boys even ranked the gynoids as if they were calendar girls.

  Of course, the gynoids themselves weren’t made to be sexy. That would defeat their purpose by making them a constant distraction. They were more like… the girl next door.

  Like Galene, actually.

  She pinched her cheeks in realisation.

  The train showed up, and she headed to work.

  Back in the IT department, underneath the tower of glass and metasteel was her desk. The boys greeted her as she strolled in, late as always. The boss gave her a glance that said ‘You’re late, again,’ but she gave back a glance that said, ‘Hey Mister, I stayed late yesterday, get off my back,’ so he drank some coffee and glanced back something like, ‘Okay Gal, but don’t make a habit out of it.’

  So, all was well.

  She found it funny that in the old movies she enjoyed watching, people punched cards to work. This was a technology firm, the smartbuilding simply logged your presence as soon as you showed up to work.

  Gal was one of the three women in the department. It’s not that there weren’t any women in computers, it was just that they had the brains to get to more high-paying jobs. This job was grunt work. Pulling cables and kneeling under desks. Remember the kneeling under the desks? That was practically the whole career path ahead of her, on her knees, leery executives casually glancing at her butt.