Cleaning Time

“Hey, you promised you’d pick up the place.”

My wife, being my wife. I played dumb and looked up distractedly from my laptop. “Uh?”

She looked sad, annoyed. “The place. While I was working. You said you’d pick it up.”

She gestured around the living room. Plates, bottles, wrappers, dust. The hair of Gunther, our black lab. I’m sure it smelled of me, too. I pretty much lived in this room and didn’t go much of anywhere these days.

“Oh. Right. Sorry. I got caught up in this project.” I gestured at the laptop.

Her face brightened. “Freelance? You got work?”

I nodded. “A little. Not long term. But some cash.”

She leaned in to kiss my forehead. “Cool. Still wish you’d tidied up, though. Maybe while I’m at the gym?”

That’d be about two hours. Perfect. “Sure, no problem. I’ll close up shop here. And get dinner ready.”

She smiled, kissed my forehead again, and went off to get into her workout clothes.

I’d been laid off from my job at the lab about six months earlier. A big company had bought my little company, and fwoosh—consolidation, downsizing. But the tech I’d been developing had been easy to sneak out. My little side project. It was coming in handy, for my freelance work.

I launched the app, checked her biometrics-baseline looked good. A couple keystrokes got her dopamine receptors primed, and a couple more readied her pleasure centers. Memory, personality, will, inhibitions . . . horribly easy, this tech. Where would it be in 10 years? 100 years? I don’t know if I’d want to live in a society with that sort of tech, but I was more than happy to have it right now.

I launched another app and brought the cameras and microphones online. Tiny green lights sprinkled throughout the house came to life. You wouldn’t notice them unless you’d placed the cameras yourself, though.

All right. Let’s earn your keep, hubby.

My wife walked out of the bedroom, ready for the gym in a black sports bra, black yoga pants, and pink workout shoes. She’s short—about five foot and change—and tight-bodied. Slender. Not curveless, exactly, but not curvy, either. Healthy eating, healthy lifestyle. Cute. That was a good word for my wife—she was cute, and appealing. People gravitated to her because she seemed nice, and fun, and spunky, and open, all of which she was. That’s why I was drawn to her. That’s why I fell in love with her.

“All right,” she said. She looked a little flushed—no surprise, there. The dopamine and pleasure centers were priming all her pumps. “Emily is running the class tonight. Expect me to come back nasty.”

“I’m counting on it,” I said, pressing the track pad on my laptop.

“Whhhaaaoooohhh,” she said. She always said that. She shuddered, exhaled, and her eyes glazed over. No, her whole expression glazed over. Her shoulders dropped. A body in control of itself, no matter how relaxed, always has a little self-aware tension about itself. But not my wife’s body. Not now. All the yoga and meditation and other hippie shit in the world couldn’t produce the state she was in.

She smiled a dim and dopey smile, happier than any self-possessed human could be. I smiled at my mouthbreather wife and considered what the market wanted.

“How you feeling, baby? Good?”

“Yeahhh,” she said. She was always a little slurry, like she was tipsy. At first I considered it a bug, but now I liked it as a feature. “Happy.” And, biting her lower lip, she touched her crotch. “Horny.”

“Hands off, baby. You know that doesn’t belong to you right now.”

She pouted, but her hands dropped to her side.

I mulled over our finances. I hadn’t worked for a while. Fuck it, I thought. We need money. Let’s go big.

With a few more keystrokes, I alerted a subset of clients. Shortly, their chat icons began popping up, signaling their paying attendance. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty . . . . finally, 27. Twenty-seven visitors paying $60 for an hour-long show. $1,620. I’d put half of that into my wife’s retirement account. She’s helping me earn it, after all.

Ready to go. I waved at the cameras and smiled, and my wife did the same. My smart, waking wife didn’t know about the cameras and her audience, but this dumb, slurry one did.

“Welcome, all,” I said. “Glad you could make it. We’re ready for you. Right, baby?”

“Yessssss….”

“So, baby, our home’s a mess, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” she said. She looked around dreamily. “S’a fucking pigsty.”

“Well, your guys out there want to see you to clean it up.