Life\Options: Customize

- Augment Responsibly! – Disembodied, annoying voice came up with every new sequence. Mia grunted, frustrated.

With a Jedi force-push worthy gesture, the most intricate porcelain teacup went flying against the wall and disintegrated into digital dust, before disappearing completely.

- 156 - Said a soft, soothing voice - Log entry. - It prompted. An icon of a tea set appeared hovering just above the eye level.

- Utterly annoyed by a tedious voice that I just can't get rid of! - Mia started the log record - I've tried to disable it or to find a sort of a workaround, but to no avail. It just frustrates me to no end. And with the scale of augmenting I have in mind, it'll drive me nuts in no time. I have to figure something out. –

She wondered how all the magicians, showmen and bards dealt with this particular annoyance. Did they have a kind of crack they used?

- Maybe.., - she continued the log entry, - I could try to.., say, tweak it a bit? –

A tiny bug appeared with the prompt and the audio warning was set to a squeaky little voice that seemed as if coming from the bug:

- Augment Responsibly! - Squealed the little thing.

- Ta-daa! – Tiny jazz band unveils the changes to the default settings with a poof of even tinier confetti.

- There, much better. Add the satisfaction of smashing it creatively, and the whole thing becomes hilarity instead of a nuisance. Save log entry. – Mia smiled, satisfied with the solution.

- Log entry 156. Saved. – Stated the kind, motherly voice.

A new cup showed up in the originals' place, just as intricately detailed, but with a slightly different colour scheme. Mia opened up the list under the icon. There were they - the complete list of all the 156 smashed teacups. All the same size and style, yet each unique in pattern and colouring.

Mia could easily remember most of them even without opening up the log record for each. Sometimes she spent a whole lot of time going over them, trying to take note of any patterns of what had thrown her over the edge. It was with the high school psychologists encouragement that Mia had set up this emotion management system. It was that one session after the psychologist had insisted that Mia should be, or rather even that she is feeling anger, that Mia had finally gotten mad and in an orderly manner stated that the insistence of feeling anger IS what makes her feel the anger, as ridiculously ironic as it was.

The girl had lived her life, convinced that anger is not something that concerned her at all. She thought that to her it was like a water that rolls of the ducks back, but having admitted to her psychologist of feeling anger, she had realized that, in fact, she was indeed bottling up all that resentment, pain and rage towards mother for leaving dad and her. She was equally as mad at dad for his strict, despotic, as mom would put it, no augmenting rule in the house that eventually drew mom away.

Asked, how it made her feel, Mia had replied – like wanting to smash the most beautiful teacup against the wall. That had settled it, this was to be the tool for Mia to cope with her anger and allow her to act it out in a way that did not bottle up the emotions and didn't harm anyone either. Mia wasn't sure if it worked as it was supposed to, psychology wise, but she really enjoyed it and had already gotten used to it so much so that she considered it a part of who she was now. Mia had spent hours trying to find the right tone and pitch for the voice prompt so that it sounded as close to the voice of the psychologist as possible.

Dad proximity warning went off with a beep. - Oh, snap! - There was no way Mia could let dad see what she had been up to. That one time, when he had suspected Mia of augmenting, he had only dropped this one line - I will not lose you to these digital drugs.- And with that, the conversation was over. He did not have to say anything more. Mia knew his stance on this. After all, it was the root cause of her parents' separation.

He considered augmentation a substance abuse. Ment for the weak minded to soothe the masses after the whole shift from having to slave away at nine to five work and then at the drop of the hat being laid off. Whole 95% of the population, jobless within a decade or so. Society wasn’t emotionally ready for that and thus something had to be made up to fill that void and replace the necessity for something, anything to fill their lives.

Augmentation along with the Wizard age tech came as the answer. It created a new sense of purpose. And suddenly the ones with the most vivid imagination were the popular ones, everybody flocked to them and wanted to have a peek at their magnificent view of the world. The term worldview got a whole lot different, more literal meaning, as anything could have been augmented to the liking of the individual.

Dad called it for what it was – delusions. But, no matter how important his opinion was to Mia, she just couldn't stay away from it all. She would lie if she had to say she could live her life without any augmenting. And so she was. Living the lie, in order not to disappoint dad.

She quickly closed up all the evidence of any non-school related augmenting and opened up the Global Knowledge Database to make it look as if she had been studying. This needed to be believable. A bit chaotic and all over the place. But not too chaotic, otherwise she'll get told off. Just enough to sell it. A bit of historic energy sources and their practical applications. Fusion reactors, fission reactors, nuclear power plant accidents, nuclear submarines, and, last but not least, u-boats, just to give the sense of getting ever so slightly distracted and off track.

Now the important part was not to get jumpy or oversell it. Mia tried to scan over as much of the content as possible, just to be on the safe side, in case she would get interrogated about the subject matter. Dads footsteps were now audible and closing in. Mia didn’t even realize that something she noticed in the U-boat content had dragged her on to dirigibles now. She did get distracted that easily, especially with something she was interested in, like history.

The door swooshed open, startling the girl. Darn, so much for not being jumpy, she thought to herself.

- Show me what you got there! - Dad was suspicious. Of course, he was. - Come on now, I don’t have all day. -

Mia shared her view, as she quickly closed the dirigible content. Smiling nervously.

- Getting distracted again? - A tinge of judgement in his voice. - So, looking at some historic steam engines, I see. -

Mia looked utterly confused and immediately searched up a content on steam engines, something completely prehistoric if you asked her. She did not see the relation. - What do you mean? -

- Well, you're looking at the fusion and fission reactors and cannot see that they too are merely steam engines as opposed to the free magnetic energy we use today? - Dad asked.

- What? No! Realy? - Mia couldn’t hide the disbelief. The implied offence on her observation skills flew past her, there was no time to worry about that. She wanted to understand. - Do explain! -

- Well, pull up a simulation. - He didn’t have to say twice, Mia was so excited about the idea of understanding this steam engine concept and how it related to nuclear energy reactors, that she didn’t give it a second thought.

- Augment Responsibly! - Squeaked a tiny bug, getting smashed by an equally tiny anvil.