By the third class, we are getting pretty familiar with each other. And today turns out to be a pretty special one for both Miranda and Jaden.
Miranda comes to class beaming, just beaming.
“Good news?” asks Jaden.
“Very good,” she replies. “I got job as an assistant therapist at the Nomad Relief Center in Astoria.”
“Congratulations,” says Jaden in a neutral way. And, in truth, it didn’t sound like much to me, either. These days there is a new twist on that old saying, “If you can’t do, teach.” The new twist is “If you can’t teach, be a therapist.”
“It’s so good because my family and I are now in system,” she says. “We now all have insurance. And my mother now has free membership at the community center. She has place to spend some time other than home, and she can take English classes there.”
“It sounds like a nice first step,” I say, and I mean that. I’d forgotten just how far the Ans had to come now that they were in the US.
“What will you do there?” asks Annette.
“Some of the nomads get pretty discouraged with their lifestyle. When they do, some of them go overboard and get into self-destructive behavior. That gets expensive for them and the community.”
“I’ll say!” grunts Adrian.
“We help them transition into something more sustainable.”
“What will do you do, specifically?”
“Oh, I mostly help patients get to and back from their therapy sessions. I help them be comfortable. It feels much like working in tea house in Laos. There girls help customers lose their stress. Here I do same thing ... but the American way.”
We all laugh at that.
“Welcome to America,” adds Adrian.
Jaden had come into class strutting and beaming too -- something good has definitely happened.
“And what’s your good news?” Annette inquires.
“My students and I just won first prize in the state competition for a video we did.”
We all applaud and cheer. Jaden beams even more.
“It was a science fiction short. Dinosaurs invaded the school! We had the kids running around and screaming, and we added some really neat special-effects dinosaurs chasing them around. One kid did a great job of getting eaten! We ended it with it being just a dream.”
“Sounds like a classic,” I say laughing.
“It was ... and we even got called up on one point in it by a paleontologist geek. He pointed out that in one scene, one of the kids points at a dinosaur off screen and calls him a stegosaurus, but what we put up next was a dimetrodon. I couldn’t find the steg clip, so I punted.”
We all laugh at that.
“It was a lot of fun, and I got a personal congratulations from the state superintendent.”
“So ... are we looking at a future assistant principal?” asks Janet.
Jaden beams back, then adds, “This TMG I got is making quite a difference.”
“TMG? As in “Taj Mahal Girl”? You got one of those? What kind?” asks Ruby.
“Oh, it’s just a virtual one. The state started providing them to selected teachers last year. It’s part of the new contract we negotiated. It’s an experiment to see if we can boost productivity.
“So far, I’ve been pretty happy with mine. I call her Ginger. I can feel that she’s given me a lot more energy. In fact, she’s partly why I’m here.”
“How so?” asks Ruby.
“She’s making me comfortable with my nest-building instincts again,” laughs Jaden.
“Sounds quite useful for this class,” says Ben.
“OK, folks,” I say, bringing the class to order, “let’s get started on today’s lesson.”
Historically the most common sperm producer was the husband in a marriage, and the egg producer was the wife. Although even in pre-history there have been many variations on that theme -- variations such as adoption, infidelity, rape, romantic encounter, and incest -- nowadays there are many more choices available. Sperm banks provide numerous male donor options with the advantage of many choices, and these can be tested and rated in many categories. Egg banks offer eggs, but not with nearly the variety that are available in sperm banks.
Because they are so much harder to acquire from living, breathing females, the eggs in egg banks are mostly either clones of the best eggs from high-profile donors such as Olympic winner Brenda Bonnie or spawned in ovary banks from vat ovaries that have never experienced life in a whole human. In theory, eggs that have never experienced real life are not a problem, but ... this is a topic of much discussion among child raisers these days.
How these translate into personal choices:
You as a baby raiser have three basic choices, then lots of variations on those.
1) Use your own sperm and egg. The variations then come in the form of how much inspection and modifying you want to do on your own legacy source. This can range from a little -- a few choose none at all, trusting in God -- to a whole lot. Most choose some modification, and how much is determined by what a person sees as cost effective and within their budget. The choices are plentiful and widely varied in terms of price, promise, what can be modified, and proven effectiveness.
2) Start with someone else’s sperm or egg. Those who go this route want to buy rich and famous. As soon as you make a name for yourself, you’ll start getting offers from the baby labs to become a donor. If you read any gossip news at all, you’re well aware of how much the top names can make and how much they cost. And there are the soap opera-style scams where people steal germ cells in one way or another, such as the prostitutes who claim they have some of “X” or “Y”‘s sperm from some “sporting” they did with them on a wild weekend.
3) Chimera germ cells. These are heavily modified mixes from many sources. They are used for growing people who will be living in specialized environments such as deep sea habitations.
I will caution you: There is a lot more promise being offered out there than tangible delivery. But baby growing is such a deeply emotional process that paying for “feel-good” sometimes seems to make sense.
One of the main functions of this class will be for us, as a group, to sort through what we find is offered and try to make a reasonable assessment -- how much of an offering is real and how much is feel-good? I freely admit that even though I’m the class teacher and I scored well on the PAT, I don’t have all the answers -- things change too quickly, and each of us will feel different things are important.
So we will research together, and we will make different choices. This is the nature of modern baby making.
As I said earlier, my day job is with DeMuzzy High Fashion. And the yearly high point of that job is Fashion Week.
Fashion Week is living hell, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The rest of the year at DeMuzzy High Fashion is all about Fashion Week, or so it seems the closer we get to it. This is when we strut our stuff. And if we strut it well, we are busy the rest of the year filling orders. If we don’t, we stare across the table at each other, sweating blood, as we prepare for next year’s Fashion Week.
I’ve had it go both ways, and believe me, you really do want to spend the year filling orders!
The first step is researching what went well last year -- which means researching what is selling well this year. This is something you have to watch constantly, and there are always surprises.
Each year, six weeks after Fashion Week ends, Mr. DeMuzzy, our head honcho, calls a meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to declare the theme for next year’s Fashion Week. This is not the first meeting on this topic, it’s the first of the finals -- the choice gets reality-checked twice more before the final push for Fashion Week is mustered.
In the six weeks before the meeting, people are getting out of their warm-fuzzy from completing the last Fashion Week and getting their noses back to the grindstone. The grindstone in this case means figuring out what is trendy.
The creations are constantly tabulating what’s selling and what’s not. They do it for our stuff as well as for the rest of the industry, and they do it by channels -- stores, mobiles, sales categories, by sales and specials -- any way you as a human want to slice it.
We watch sales and we watch people. We each program our bots to track what celebs and other trend-setters are wearing. It’s our job as humans to decide who is trend-setting. Once we do, our bots take up the spy part and keep them under surveillance.
This part used to be tons of fun for me -- I was getting paid to do star-watching! But it’s getting to be more and more of a chore. I’ve seen all this now through a couple of fashion cycles, and I admit it, I’m getting out of touch. It seems these younger generations have their taste all in their mouth! What do they see in these trashy choices they make? Was I really making the same kinds of trashy choices when I was young? (In truth, I find that hard to believe ... until I take a hard, business-like look back at the fashion cycle I grew up in.)
These days instead of playing instinctive, I play smart: I spend my effort on carefully picking who to watch, and I’m pretty cold-blooded about it. My youngest and most enthusiastic compatriots can’t understand how I can watch Virginia La Gnocchi with a yawn instead of a gasp, but I still track her closely. The ones that are a bit older figure I’ve sold out, but they respectfully pay attention to my choices because I seem to get good value from whatever I’ve sold out to.
Once the theme has been hashed out at that first theme meeting, we start mustering people, companies, and creations to support it. The good news is we did this last year and the year before and so on, so the people and creation relations and contacts are all in place. The bad news is each year is different, so there are constant changes in who we have to work with.
One constant is the question of what can we afford? The theme is always a big enough idea that it could suck down ten times our budget and look grander for each dollar spent. The hard, hard question is what is the last dollar we can spend that gets us another dollar in gross profit? That’s what this first theme meeting and the reality-check meetings are all about.
When the meeting is finished, the marshalling begins. The fashion creators and designers start programming their creations -- programming them in the sense of describing to them what they want. They are definitely not nerds! The creations slave over the keyboards, the designers talk and pick from projections. While they are working the designs over, I’m working over the model line-up: Who’s going to be hot this year? Who’s going to be the impressive fresh new face? Who are the cost-effective bargains?
The hardest part is deciding who to cut bait on and how to ease them out. Sometimes those going over the hill make it easy: If they start gaining weight, or a new career, or become part of a juicy scandal, my job gets easier. That happens sometimes ... other times I just have to be harsh with them, and that’s no fun. I explain that their style just isn’t part of this year’s theme. If they’ve been good to work with, I will try to kick them upstairs in some fashion -- something which will give them more work to do, but less profile. I try ... but if the girl has no skills but walking a runway and smiling for a camera, it’s tough. And some are that way: They’ve dedicated their whole lives to this lifestyle, and their parents have backed them one hundred percent on that choice.
Another issue is just how artificial a girl can look and still be acceptable? Some years and themes, the girls can look as artificial as android creations and do just fine ... as long as they look young, too. Other years and themes the natural look is in. Then they have to look natural ... and young. Of course, natural-looking is in the eye of the beholder -- I’ve seen as much “plastic” under the skin of some of those natural beauties as those toy Barbie dolls had in their whole bodies a hundred years ago.
Whatever ... it’s my job to pick and choose. Then I pick and choose the creations who will do the tending, wardrobe fitting, and cosmetics of these young beauties.
There is so much at stake here, but these really are young girls! They are human, young human. As Fashion Week approaches and commitments are made, it gets truly spooky how much is riding on these girls strutting their stuff in a polished and professional way. Their chaperone creations are there to keep stupid things from happening.
But some have been so bred, primped, and trained for this lifestyle by their success-driven parents that they are God-like stunning on the outside, but psycho babe-monsters on the inside, and even the best chaperone creation can’t stop a catastrophe. Part of my job is keeping those out of our line-up, but it’s hard because those driven parents are often quite cunning and persuasive.
We’re at the meeting, and this year the grand theme is ... Shit! Boys!
Not only are we going to have hot women and girls working the runway, we will have to find sweet-looking boy escorts for them! HOLY HANNA! It’s been looming in the pre-meetings, and I’ve been voting against this from paragraph one. But fashion is fashion ... sigh. I can see clearly where this theme is coming from, and it’s clearly a hot trend this year.
It appears I’m going to have to do some big time selling out for Fashion Week this year!
It looks like it, but halfway through the meeting I get a reprieve -- harsh reality strikes. It’s not a facilities issue, it’s a legal issue: If we’re going to mix boys and girls backstage and onstage, we will need sex predator insurance. It doesn’t take five minutes to look up the rates on that, and that idea goes out the window, fast!
After a bit more mulling, the acceptable compromise comes to life: We replace the boys with avatars built to look like sweet-boy manikins. They will be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the insurance. The discussion now centers on what they should look like, what they should be able to do, and how to make them into quick change artists.
Whew! This is a theme I can buy into, and the rest of this theme meeting goes as smoothly as these things ever do.
After our third class session, I get a message from Rubyzin inviting me to an afternoon face-to-face. “Let’s get a bit more acquainted, if you have an hour?” says the text. We set up a time and met at the Starscents near the school.
Ruby is quite gracious. “I’ve checked out your resume, and I’m impressed, Dahlia. You’ve had a lot of experience getting things organized. I was wondering if you could help me out with a small favor?”
“I’d be happy to try,” I reply.
“I’ve just written a new children’s book and want to put some illustrations -- photos actually -- in it of girls wearing my Rubyzin’s Fashions. Is this something your company -- and you specifically -- could help out with? The money I make on the book itself will go to charity.”
The money from any fashion sales she would keep, of course, but this is a common marketing model these days.
The only curious part is ... she is schmoozing me? It should be the other way around. She is much more of a powerhouse in entertainment and business than I am. But odd as it is, it sounds like opportunity knocking.
“Sure. I can put some time into this,” I say.
“Excellent!” she says, and she sounds like she means it. “I hope this is the start of a couple of mutually beneficial projects.”
We spend the rest of the hour chatting and going over preliminary details.
The project goes well. It is straightforward and there are no surprises. The book starts selling well and raises both Ruby’s profile and mine. And while the shoot is happening, Ruby and I get to spend some face-to-face time together, too.
We do some workouts at the gym together. I’m mostly a naturalist. I huff and puff and do whatever my body can do unassisted -- other than the nanobots, of course. Ruby is an augmenter, body plus some subtle equipment -- not surprising considering dance is part of her performance. She works out with augmentation so that her dance routines get better. Compared to what dancers could do even ten years ago, she looks supernatural in ability, but quite natural while she’s doing it.
In the process we become friends as well as class associates. It’s a nice feeling. I like Ruby’s no-nonsense attitude about getting things done. For her, and me, artistic is nice but accomplishment is nicer.