Tales of the Ela-pocalypse – The Clone Saga : Neil

“GooD MoRnInG eMploYEe #77045 – YoUR bReaKFaSt IS rEaDY.”

God damn Apartment.  I spent a month configuring the Milena 3.7 upgrade and the voice glitches out at 80% of the time.  I want my sexy accent in the morning!  I paid a lot of credit for that program.  At least the sun is working today.  Apartment said that it was recorded seven hours ago rising over the hills of Naples, Italy.  Looks nice.  I wonder what people do in the hills of Naples, Italy.

Today’s breakfast was the same as every day’s breakfast.  Soymeal bar infused with “flavor”.  Today’s flavor was bacon.  I’d never be able to afford bacon normally but The Company gave everyone extra credit because carbon levels reached what they were 100 years ago.  There’s no way they know what carbon levels where in 1950.  How could they know that?  The Algorithm must have determined that it was time for all Employees to receive “spontaneous” rewards.  After working double shifts with no lunch or dinner break for 220 days giving people free bacon flavor or a shower must increase productivity.  Or at least keep them from killing themselves.  Which is the same thing I guess.

I had Apartment wake me up 45 minutes early so I could watch the Elas for a while.   Like breakfast that’s the same every day too.  I log those 45 minutes in the system as personal activity needed to comply with Human Resources Directive #07-S: All Employees Hygiene Standards, but I haven’t shaved or washed my clothes in months.  That’s the only good thing about double shifts, they take you off the inspection schedule. 

I hated the Elas when I first found this feed.  There’s something profoundly disturbing about seeing adult women (especially ones that look like that) crawling around acting like babies trying to “catch” images projected by drones.  I thought that it was some twisted porn channel for an Executive. 

I liked it better once they learned to walk and they moved up to the exercise level.  There’s something hypnotically soothing about seeing 97 identical sexy women running on treadmills almost but not quite in unison. 

Their clothes are always clean.  I wonder if they wash them or if the drones do that for them.  I’ve spent a lot of bandwidth trying to figure out when they change clothes but no luck yet.  I have a day off coming up next year so if I can find out when it happens before then I can watch them change. 

Based on the numbers on their shoes (those shoes are so interesting, I wonder if that’s what shoes look like for people that have access to the Park) they started out with a thousand of them.  Now there are just 97.  Sometimes one of the drones takes an Ela away and I never see that one again.  And Ela never comes back when the drones take them.  I hate when that happens.  It hardly ever does anymore thankfully.  There have been 97 of them for almost 2 months.  That happened more back when they were crawling around and playing with foam blocks.  Another reason I’m glad that stage is over.

I had been watching them exercise for about half an hour when Apartment let me know that I had a message.  I figured it was my ten minute warning that my shift was about to begin.  They told us that we were debugging air quality cleaner drones in the Rockies but I found out that were actually cleaning up code for remote temperature sensors.  I guess the Algorithm calculated that people work harder if they think they’re helping fix the environment.  Or least they kill themselves less.  Which is the same thing I guess.

It wasn’t my ten minute warning.  It was a private message.  I figured one it was one of the new guys asking me a question.  It wasn’t that either. 

-We need to talk – ELA1