9

Uzine glanced at the clock on the wall in his housing unit. Every chimera had a unique clock. Instead of counting time generally, it displayed how much time he had before the next shift began. Right now, he has 2.5 NUWH or non-unit working hours. It would have been better if these hours had been in Old World Time. The NUWH hours were relatively shorter than those of the Old World Time. Through a process of morphing the holographic nature of the world and genetic programming, it had proven possible to tweak the circadian rhythms of the chimeras such that they perceived time far differently than anyone else.

Uzine relaxed and wondered where his wife was.

Brezine Braten had been introduced to Uzine almost the same day he picked up his first Plasmoid cutter. She was everything he could have asked for where a woman was concerned. Her height was slightly shorter than his, and her disposition was generally bright. The only odd thing that someone might have noticed about her was that she always seemed to overemphasize the importance of work.

One such example of her bizarre fixation on work had come in the form of an argument between them. Uzine had sighed one day when his 2.5 NUWH had expired and said he wished he could spend another ten minutes with Brezine. Brezine became livid and told him that the only reason they enjoyed the life they did was because of his consistent work and dedication. She handed Uzine his lunch allotment and held the house door open for him to leave. Much like the twitch Uzine had at the sight of Hiro, he experienced something similar during this moment. He thought his wife was right, and additionally, all of society seemed to agree with her. Yet, something inside of him seemed not to entirely agree, regardless of all the other indications to the contrary. Whatever the twitch was, Uzine ignored it and figured it best to get to work. After all, he wanted to make his wife happy, and they did enjoy a fairly decent standard of life for chimeras.

Another time his wife had insisted on cleaning the house vigorously while Uzine was on his off hours. When he asked Brezine why it was she was cleaning so intensely now when she could wait until later when Uzine had to go to work, her reply had been snappier than he expected.

"Do you think just because you are off that I should stop working? How would this place stay clean if I took time to myself just because I felt like it? How often does one feel like working, anyway? If I start making decisions on whether I work or how I feel about working, I would never get anything done, and this house would become a mess. I love you, Uzine, but I have a duty to perform, and it is a duty I take especially seriously."

Uzine had stood open-mouthed at this reply. He knew his wife took work seriously, but this seemed extreme even by her standards.

Other than her ardent dedication to work, Brezine was a pretty normal chimera gal in every other regard. Her parents had groomed her to be the perfect wife of a working-class chimera man. From an early age, her mother who was herself a domestic companion of a working-class chimera man, inculcated the values needed to turn a home while living in such an arrangement. One thing she had drilled Brezine on relentlessly were tasks that many women viewed as servile. For example, when it came to cleaning the floors of the house, her mother was a purist that disdained any solution that involved any holonospheric shortcuts. Some women had taken to making the floor have the appearance of cleanliness even when it was not entirely so. Most women and men who relied on this tactic did so on a temporary basis so that when the company arrived they did not appear to be slobs. It was no substitute for actually cleaning what amounted to the Old World floor. There were a lot of ways to make this process quicker. One such way might be to create a holonospheric drain and move it around the house as one cleans the floors to allow the water to drain. People were surprised when this solution actually worked. It was one of the many moments where the holonosphere bent reality to a higher-than-expected degree. Such experimentation usually started with a general feel of "Would it be nice if?", and then someone would try it, and sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. The drain solution was one that had proven to be a consistent hack.

When Brezine had thought of trying this solution to make her task go faster, her mother yelled at her in an extreme way.

"Brezine, WHY are you using that drain? Are you too good to dry the floor yourself? Go get an actual towel and dry the floor. There are no shortcuts if you want something done right, so you might as well get used to working hard. The only thing that will separate you from anyone else is your ability to work hard, and not complain about it. When you are married someday, your husband will work hard, and if you expect him to see you as a woman of worth, you too had better work hard."

Brezine had seen her mother's words be true in action when it came to her father. her father was a chimera miner. Often when her father would come home, he would say little and expect the house to be in order. Some nights not more than four words would pass between him and Bezine's mother. Their relationship was more functional than romantic. Her father would only interact directly with Brezine and went from having virtually infinite potential to having a very narrowly defined focus in a relatively short amount of time. This was viewed favorably by the genetic programmers. The quicker that a chimera would assume their role, the better.

Brezine had never shared most of these memories with Uzine. She simply lived them out. Uzine knew a little about her father being a miner, and she also knew her mother had trained her exhaustively on how to be a domestic partner, and Uzine was grateful for that.

One thing that Uzine was less than happy with though was his sex life with Brezine. The issue that made him the most unhappy was that it was practically non-existent. Once every four months, he might be able to persuade Brezine to make love. Even on the relatively scant occasions he was able to do this, it was as though Brezine was there in body but not in heart. Her breasts would heave, and her body would respond to his touch, but there was something vacant that he could not quite comprehend. Perhaps it was because, in her training to hold this domestic role, there was not much instruction on love-making. Her mother could teach her about a lot of things, but probably not much about that.

Brezine would have disagreed with Uzine's conclusion. Her mother had told her that a woman's duties included, to the best of her ability, pleasing her husband sexually. The conversation had happened when Brezine was older, naturally, and Brezine wondered exactly what her mother had meant about pleasing her husband. She had been bold enough that day to ask her mother.

"There are things, Brezine, that women have and men do not. When men and women come together, particularly husband and wife, they can give each other that which they do not each have to the mutual pleasure of both of them."

Brezine knew enough to infer that her mother was speaking in part about anatomy. So, Brezine figured that was all. She had noticed, somewhat to her distaste, that her body would respond to certain touches. If Brezine's duty was to make sure the house was clean and to work, what need did she have for the ability of her body to sense pleasure? At least now she understood it in the context that it was her body's job to feel pleasure for her husband's benefit. In the sense that she understood the world in shades of duty and work, then sex was just one more duty to be performed in the service of holding a house together.

Yet, even if she had told Uzine this, he still would not have been entirely satisfied with her explanation. What Uzine could not escape noticing was it was almost as though Brezine simply was not there, which was the problem Uzine was facing today, come to think of it, except in a different form.

What puzzled Uzine was that Brezine hardly ever left the house. She was so dedicated to the work of cleaning it, that she usually did not feel the need to leave it as that would have been wasted time.

Uzine kept his eye on the clock. He only had about an hour left. He figured he should take a glance outside the housing unit to check out the surrounding grounds. A chimera was expected to be aware of their surroundings although most of the maintenance was taken care of by the companies that employed them. Indeed, other chimeras that were trained for the kind of work needed were dispatched when an issue was reported.

The housing units that chimeras stayed in were what is best termed "barely adequate.". They consisted of an upright structure that was mobile as they were meant for re-use. the downstairs consisted of a small kitchen area and what amounted to a living room which is where Uzine had been lounging as he kept his eye on the clock. The surrounding outside was petite, but big enough for a small garden. Uzine went upstairs to get his boots so he could go outside and make a visual inspection. As he climbed the stairs and rounded the corner to enter the bedroom, it was then that he caught sight of Brezine--except something was unusual about her. She was flickering.

"Hi, Hi, Uzineee Uzineee Uzineeee," her speech stammered. "Are work well, floors."

The image of her flickered as her body assumed different poses that Uzine had known all too well. None of these states were connected but were disconcertingly disjointed. Whatever was happening here was something that was categorically not his wife. It sounded like her. The images looked like photos of her, but the visual states mashed together indicated something else--this was a glitchy representation of her. This, despite whatever else might be the case, was not Brezine. Who or what would want to make a glitchy representation of his wife?

Uzine didn't know it, but Brezine Braten as a chimera had never existed. Chimeras were not allowed to breed unless it was arranged previously. Brezine was simply a holonospheric construction designed to, in the words of chimera programmers, "Allow a natural channel for the needs of companionship and mating that we cannot successfully eliminate."