Mike Finnigan stirred in his sleeping pod and opened his eyes to a low lumen count of pearl gray flushed with cyclamen.
Two meters off, a twin cocoon was the only other object on the set. A pale brown, neatly turned arm hanging over its rim reminded him that he was not alone in his pastel limbo. He sat up and the pod reacted to the shift of gravity and floated down to the deck to give him out.
It was another day in the endless succession of similar days and he reckoned anybody could have it who wanted it.
That came under the heading of maladjustment and he knew he could alter it by turning the dial of his mood-control disk, a permanent fixture on his left wrist. Its needle was edging into the red quadrant and maybe already it was sending out a signal to the nearest monitor.
With conscious and determined effort he set himself to thinking optimistically. He even whistled a few bars of a popular tune.
The needle crept bark from its crisis sector and stabilized on no affective tone.
Once he was up and about, the room had more definition and was small at that, seven meters either way, with one wall half taken up by an elaborate console which had pushed itself forward when his weight came onto the sprung floor, ready and eager to oblige with all reasonable services. Curiosity, evolution's handmaid, moved him to pad first to the floating pod and check out the sleeper.
She was a refined Nordic job, 914-610-914 at a guess, with a fragment of pink foam plastic lodged in her navel and moving up and down to a gentle rhythm. Valerie? Moira? Sandra? Babette? Names of recent partners flipped through his head. Then he got a neck-lock on total recall. It was Lindsay. Lindsay Avison. WC/LA/4392/18. Drafted in by random selection on yesterday's quarterly exchange and due to share his niche in time for the next three months to the winter solstice.
Her left hand deployed on the lower abdomen made her mood disk easy to read. It was set fair. The needle was nudging zero. No stress or complication. She liked what she did and was fixed to go on doing it.
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