Performance Review

Performance Review, a new novella by Aster Olsen

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Sleep Now. Snap and Forget.

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If only Dra were real. But Dra is Tim, a young man on a CitTech gig contract working a dead-end job at the Southern Free Republic Department of Health for a boss with a rifle across his back. But that's no problem, because the job pays the bills for Tim to spend his evenings entertaining fans of a popular fantasy virtual-reality role playing gameshow as the evasive assassin Dra. Then one day he logs on to play-act from his decaying apartment and discovers his headset’s virtual assistant addressing a stranger, Violet Sisu.

Tim knows it’s a simple case of identity theft and he should ignore it, like he does everything that’s not a simulation. Except Dra’s last name is also Sisu. And Tim keeps remembering a woman he used to love who has all but disappeared. As he investigates, his carefully packaged life begins to spiral out of control as he discovers that CitTech is keeping secrets, and the clues lead inwards towards Dr. Brygfield, the dispassionate innovator of CitTech’s popular psychoviral-therapy, the very therapy Tim does every day.

Binaural beats twist together with polyleather headsets, thundering storms, distant databases, and isopods swarming over decaying infrastructure to explore trans isolation and grief, dissociation and derealization, the fragility of state control, the cyclic nature of progress, and what perseverance means when one’s identity is erased.

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Available as an 84 page 5.5" x 8.5" pdf. Pay what you want (including free).