I came home to find Kayla doing the usual; dancing around to a random song from an advert, her aggressive dance moves throwing her thickness around the tiny kitchenette.
It was a good song, one that reminded her of home, of America, and ever since she came to Britain she savoured every drop of that nostalgia. Needless to say I dove straight into the groove, matching her professional quality moves with my best impression of an electrified corpse. It was fun, for the 20 seconds it lasted. We couldn’t even reach the end of the music clip, and ended up half-dead on the sofa seconds later, trying to catch our breath.
“I remember,” I wheezed, “when we used to do this twice a day easy. What happened?”
“We stopped doing this twice a day,” Kay clarified, lying atop me on my back, gesturing at the room. “Been on our butts too long, trapped in this place for too long.”
I wrinkled my nose at the assessment, rolling over to look at the room myself, Kayla wrapped around my side like a koala. It was a cozy little love nest, covered in soft furnishings and warm colours, the lounge area dominated by a big print-out of Kayla’s fursona, and I was proud of it, but it was hard to argue against her. We needed two full time jobs to afford it, and that left us with back pains, and pulled chunks out of our free time and physical health.
We might have had better physical health if we didn't hobble ourselves through bedroom antics, but that ran up against core aspects of our personality. Not only did we have a few naughty interests, we actually had a very naughty interest in each other.
Kayla had started to groom my beard again, watching me as my mind burned over her assessment with a big reassuring smile.
“Maybe we need a little change.” I conceded with a smile, patting her butt. She nodded, smushing into my neck.
That night we discussed the issue in detail, plotting our long road back to good health. It would take a lot of saving, body weight routines, and even more persuading with our managers, but it would be worth it, and it would allow us to do much more stuff together. As we lay in bed I felt a spark of joy building too, excited for the adventure ahead. We were going to struggle together, yes, but we would also fight for it together, going on all kinds of healthy interests! It was gonna be dope, and twenty twenty was going to be our year of grand adventures!
Yeah, bowt that.
Kay and I were furloughed within a day of one another, the news hitting us like a brick on a Thursday night. We watched updates flowing over images of supermarket queues, the new social restrictions killed our plans one after the other. Our offices both told us we would have regular conference calls, and the nerd crew told us we would hang out online daily, but it still left us isolated in that tiny flat. It was a little anxiety inducing, and more than a little heartbreaking.
We ended up googling methods of getting healthy in our own home, snuggled up in a big blanket as we gradually lost faith. Turns out googling ‘couple's home weight loss solutions’ brings up nothing but shady links and a million thinly veiled ads. As we started to drift off I found myself looking down rabbit holes on archaic websites, most of which debated the merits and countermerits of installing something called the ‘Chronivac Kernel,’ named after an infamous device from our childhood. I rolled my eyes at the obvious scam, but with little else left I decided to give it a try anyway.
Thankfully, I was dating the kind of savvy magpie that liked toying with tech. We actually had a weathered old silver S7A, her old phone, resting under the coffee table, one that was sterilized of all internet connectivity. I uploaded the latest Chronivac Kernel (CK-Blyat) onto the phone through my laptop, watching the progress bar for all of a minute before drifting off into sleep.
I woke up on Friday to the sound of a freshly-showered Kay cooking breakfast in our little kitchenette, her hair pick sitting in her hair. I got to watch her jiggle under the glow of the stove light, wearing nothing but some skimpy pyjamas, humming as she vulcanized some eggs. As she noticed me watching a small blush emerged on her face, but she jiggled her butt a little extra for me anyway.
“Were you playing with the S7A last night?” She beamed, pointing a turner at me. She had long wished I shared her passion for software.
“Kinda, I croaked, stretching as I brought it to her. “I downloaded a new OS, I was hoping you could do your magic on it. It's meant to turn your phone into a Chronivac, did they have those in the US?
I handed her the device, giving her a kiss as I took over at the frypan, trying and failing to rescue her eggs, while she got to work on the device.
“Had,” she emphasized, toying with the screen, “they’ve been illegal since ‘04. What do you want me to do again?”
“You know, get it working. I know it's probably BS, but if it works it could be fun to play with.”
She raised her brow, pointing the screen at me.
“It’s already working.” She said. “That makes it either spyware, which is why it installed itself, or…”
“Or…” I said, as we switched over again, and I started pawing through the menu on the screen.
The hot-pink XP-esque visual was loud and sketchy, filled with looping gifs and glitter fonts, drowning out a much cooler feature. Somehow the OS had parsed a fully 3D interface onto the screen, giving the screen a surreal, the menu’s sharp corners gleaming with a bubblegum iridescence. It almost made up for the fact the thing was unresponsive and clunky, poorly optimized for touch-based interaction.
I tapped an anomalous button at the bottom of the screen, but a tooltip popped up to tell me that it was a ‘return to unaltered state function,’ a grand undo button, and we hadn’t changed anything yet. I then tried to adjust the clock in the other corner, but another tip told me that I could only adjust the timer after the change, that it defaulted to an hour for safety reasons. With nothing else left, I tapped on a quick target, and a second later the nearest target popped on the screen.
Kayla T. Billman, ♀, 31, African American.
My jaw nearly dropped off my face. Next to her name was a small pretended 3D model of her head, swaying back and forth on a loop, in sync with the glitter font. Smiling, I showed Kay her deets. Startled, she swiped the phone from my hands.
“Well shit,” she said, swaying her hips over to the sofa, her eggs in a bowl. “We could sell this and get a new flat.”
I looked at her, tapping my hand to emphasize the absence of the phone.
“Oh don’t be like that!” She grinned. “It's my phone to begin with, you can play with our new toy after your shower.”
“Charming,” I laughed, sticking my tongue out as I went for my shower.