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eBook Category: Science Fiction
eBook Description: A story of the ultimate retirement community, the ultimate virtual reality, and the ultimate couch potatoes who inhabit it. Written a decade or two ago, but getting closer and closer to reality every day. Inspired, perhaps, by a gizmo in a Philip K. Dick novel--the Mood Organ. Dial up any mood you want to experience. But beware of the setting called "The Desire to Watch Television No Matter What's On." Once you dial up that one, you don't leave.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Omni, 1980
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2007

8 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [30 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [34 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [15 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [153 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [16 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [77 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [88 KB] , hiebook (KML) [65 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [39 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [13 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [17 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [45 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [27 KB]
Words: 4757
Reading time: 13-19 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Edna chose to awake this morning to good old breakfast loop A. John was reading a newspaper over pancakes and sausages in the kitchen of their old home. The kids were gulping the last of their food and were anxious to be on their way to school.

After yesterday's real-time-shared breakfast with John, she really felt she needed the soothing old familiar tape from her files today. It might have been shot way back during the 1987-88 television season on a crude home deck, it might be snowy and shaky, but Edna still ran it three or four mornings a week in preference to the breakfast soaps or more updated domestic footage. Somehow it captured what prime breakfast time with John and the kids had really been like, and somehow that made it her prime breakfast programming choice.

Edna: Now, Sammy, you finish the rest of your milk before you run outdoors!

Sammy: (slugging down the rest of his milk) Aw,

Ma, I'm gonna be late!

Edna: Not if you don't take your usual shortcut past the candy store.

Of course the old tape hadn't been shot from her stereo perspective, and there was something strange about seeing yourself in your own domestic programming, and it certainly wasn't as well written as a breakfast soap, but then none of the soaps were personalized and none of her other domestic tapes with John had footage of the kids at grade-school age.

John was always after her to share real-time programming with him. He'd voice her over on the communication channel and show her tapes he had made for himself with her in them, or he'd entice her with shared domestic tapes, or he'd bombard her with porn-channel footage.

But the domestic tapes he programmed for them to share all took place in exotic locales, and the story lines were strictly male-type fantasies-John's idea of suitable real-time programming for the two of them to share ran to camel caravans across the desert, spaceship journeys to strange planets full of weird creatures, sailing the South Seas, discovering lost cities, fighting in noble wars. And her viewpoint role was usually a cross between Wonder Woman and Slave Girl. Well, that might be how John wished to real-time-share with her, but Edna preferred her soaps and romantic historicals, which John categorically refused to real-time-share with her under any circumstances.

As for the porn channels that he wanted to realtime-share with her, the only word was disgusting.

Still, he was her husband, and she felt she had to fulfill her conjugal obligations from time to time; so five or ten times a season she gritted her teeth and real-time-shared one of his crude male porn channels in the sex-object role. Less frequently he consented to time-share a historical X with her, but only because of the implied threat she'd withhold her porn-channel favors from him if he didn't.