Chapter 9 Part 1

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 had 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 important 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 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 on 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 work class chimera man, inculcated the values needed 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 clean 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 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 cleaned 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.