Mother. Wife. Wholesale Artificial Intelligence jobber. Employer. Born, Septober 42, 2145 in Surrey-on-Tine, Congo. Died, Janualy 21, 2199 in Mumbai, of what doctors called “natural causes,” but those around her knew was too much happiness, aged 54.
When Esther Rorschach interviewed me for the job of nanny for her two children, Zoe and Moonbat, I asked her why she wanted a human being for the job. As somebody who dealt in robots and androids, she would have had access to the latest models of childcare technology.
“Are you kidding?” I remember her responding between puffs of her Niconana (genetically engineered banana laced with nicotine). “I know the jerks who programme the Nannybots – I’d rather my children lived in the wild than be subjected to that!”
Ms. Rorschach was a very unhappy woman.
She suspected Mr. Rorschach of cheating on her with one or more of the cleanerbots in his office. Her daughter Zoe was suspected of being the hacker behind the VR disruption of 2173. Her son Moonbat wanted to be a poet. Business was slow due to the economic crisis of 2171 that was started when it was revealed that strawberry future derivatives were being manipulated by Chinese architecture farmers.
Long after the fact, Ms. Rorschach, who by then saw me more as a confidante than the housecleaner I had become after the children had grown up and left home, told me that she was considering killing herself when the family bought an Alternate Reality News Service Home Universe GeneratorTM.
Unbeknownst to her family, Ms. Rorschach used the Home Universe GeneratorTM to research methods of suicide. What she found was that most were painful and many wouldn’t even kill her, just leave her with various missing limbs and/or malfunctioning body parts.
This was the low point in her life. If you can’t believe in killing yourself, what can you believe in?
As it turned out, the Home Universe GeneratorTM gave Ms. Rorschach a way out of her misery. A couple of months after she rejected suicide as an option, she realized that she could use the technology to find ways of solving the problems that she was facing in her life. Using Google MultiverseTM, Ms. Rorschach searched for realities in which she was happy, then tried to figure out how that had happened.
She started with her relationship with Mr. Rorschach. In many of the alternative universes, Ms. Rorschach had been a stay at home mother. “Eww!” she shivered at the thought. Clearly, this was not an option.
In other universes, she was a sexual vixen who satisfied her husband’s every desire. “Are you kidding me?” she asked as I dusted some kitchen cutlery. “Look at her! She must be at least 30 pounds lighter than I am! Can you imagine me trying to fit into that latex catsuit!”
After weeks of searching, she finally found what she was looking for. Although she never suspected it, Mr. Rorschach had a passion for Bob Dylan/Bonzo Dog Doodah Band mashups. One evening, she casually let slip at the dinner table that she had been developing an interest in this obscure musical form, and, before she knew it, she and her husband were spending long hours together exploring his passion.
No more late nights at the office with the mechanized cleaning staff!
When the FBI started asking their neighbours about Zoe, Ms. Rorschach knew she had to do something about her daughter. In many of the universes she searched through, Zoe fell head over heels in love with a high school football star named Buckminster Stang. Ms. Rorschach started inviting Buckminster to the house on the pretext that, “I need a big, strong young man to help me…move…things. You know, move things around the house.” When it became obvious that Buckminster was doing poorly in school, Ms. Rorschach suggested that Zoe tutor him in computer programming.
A year later, Zoe Rorschach and Buckminster Stang were married and expecting their first child. Not the best outcome, perhaps, but better, Ms. Rorschach reasoned, than having her spend most of her life in jail for disrupting proprietary computer gaming networks.
Moonbat’s desire to become a poet turned out to be Ms. Rorschach’s most intractable problem. She spent months and months looking for ways to divert him onto a different life path. After a year and half, she decided it might be easier to accept him for what he was and try to make his life as easy as possible.
Of course, problems arose in her later life, as they do in all our lives. However, Esther Rorschach had found a way of dealing with them. She turned out to be the happiest person I have ever known.
Rachel Lamumba
Rachel Lamumba was a nanny and housekeeper for the Rorschach family.