Infinite Potential

(Excerpt)

The waiting room was full of people. Neva Veelo sheepishly squeezed through the door rather than opening it fully. Everyone still looked up as she gently closed it behind her. She averted her eyes, keeping them on the floor, and skulked over to the last empty chair.

The fluorescent lighting was doing no one in the room any favours. Vintage Hawaiian music played over tinny, poorly mounted speakers. Wires hung haphazardly from the back of each one and draped down the wall. The wobbly slide guitars and thin flute melodies made the room feel like one big elevator. The paint on the walls was an awful shade of beige-y pink. Of all the colours they could have chosen, who went with this one?

Neva wondered how a business that was attracting so many new customers couldn’t afford a nicer space. She had seen these “Infinite Potential Inc.” offices popping up all over town. They must have been snatching whatever real estate was available in order to keep up with demand.

A name was called. It wasn’t Neva. She waited patiently.

And then, at exactly 2:20pm, the pre-booked time of her appointment, a man burst through the same door she’d come in. He wore an expensive-looking suit. He also looked as though he’d watched a tutorial on how to tie a tie before leaving the house this morning. Nothing was hanging quite right. The shoelace bows of his slick shoes were frustratingly uneven. It made Neva grind her teeth. Everything about his first impression made her a little uneasy.

“Here to see Glint?” the man asked, stepping in front of her and holding out a hand. Neva reached up and gave the man a half-hearted handshake.

“I’m Glint. Come on in…”

Glint turned and waltzed straight through the door on the opposite side of the room. Neva stood, nodded to the older woman sat across from her out of an awkward sense of obligation, and then followed Glint.

He led Neva to a small office at the end of a long hallway, which was painted an equally questionable shade of light green. After struggling to unlock the door, Glint fell into the office and threw his satchel in a corner. He started pulling open desk drawers in search of something and then remembered to take off his coat.

“Why didn’t anyone else’s person come in through the front door like you did?” Neva asked hesitantly.

“Oh.” Glint continued searching until he found yesterday’s coffee cup on top of a tall file cabinet in the corner. He took a long gulp. “…That’s because I was late.”

He set the mug back down on top of the filing cabinet, collected himself, and smiled at Neva. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem,” Neva lied. She cautiously pulled a chair out from in front of the desk and sat down.

“So,” Glint followed her lead and took his seat as well. He made a face of deep concentration. “Sorry, remind me of your name again?”

“Neva.”

“Of course, apologies. So, Neva, do you know what we do here?”

“Well, sort of,” Neva replied. “You let me try out different lives.”

“Hmmm…” again Glint thought hard and showed every ounce of that effort on his face. “Not exactly. I wouldn’t call it trying out. We’re more of a matchmaking agency than anything. We’re just a matchmaking agency that has a profoundly diversified reach across nearly all the known galaxies.”

This didn’t seem to clarify things for Neva. She simply shrugged and widened her eyes a little.

Glint tried again. “We are very good at connecting our customers with whatever they are looking for out of life. Want a romantic partner who shares your exact values? No problem. I can find them. Want a career that offers the fulfillment of actively saving lives? I can facilitate that. Want to know the pride of being the most renowned poet in a star system? That depends a lot on your poetry, but if anyone can find you the right audience, in the right star system, anywhere in the known universe—it’s probably me.”

“Right,” Neva said, shrinking a little in her chair at the suggestion of being famous. “And, well, at least my friend told me, if I didn’t end up liking my choices…”

“Oh yes, you can switch. You certainly can. But know that the life we decide on together is very much real. If you want to marry a Xlorbian, you actually marry a Xlorbian. And if you change your mind, that Xlorbian will hate you forever.”

“What’s a Xlorbi…?!”

Glint cut Neva off before she could ask her question. “And of course, there are fees involved. The company is generous. They understand the impulse to try a few options before settling on one. So, we include the first three go-rounds in what you pay today. After that, though, your monthly premium goes up pretty quickly.”

“I see,” Neva replied.

“Also, and I’m obligated to clarify here, changing any one aspect of your life does, in fact, constitute a whole new life. If you like your job choice but decide against the Xlorbian, that’s still a total do-over. I’d still need to re-file all the paperwork.”

“Right. Of course.” Neva said.

“You wouldn’t believe how many people try to pull a fast one on that. Ooohhh, everything is great, but I just wish I lived someplace sunnier. Sorry chum, you’re still asking me to move your entire existence across what could be multiple galaxies…” Glint continued, speaking more to himself than to Neva.

Neva crossed her hands in her lap and tried to digest it all.

“Sorry, kid. What I’m trying to say is, consider all of your choices carefully. I’ll walk you through it. You can change your life, that’s what the commercials say, I know, but unless you’ve got incredibly deep pockets,” Glint paused for a moment and made a skeptical face. “Just don’t be willy-nilly about it.”

“I get it,” Neva said.

“Still interested?” Glint asked.

“Still interested.” Neva nodded.

“Great!” Glint clapped his hands together. “Let me get your details, and then we’ll sit down with all your options.”

 

Neva hadn’t considered just how much work it would be to choose an entire life. When they’d initially sat down in front of his computer terminal, Glint had asked her if she’d wanted to pre-populate an approximation of her current life choices before they began. She’d said no, wanting a fresh start. However, while scrolling through the long lists of categories and nested subcategories and subcategories of nested subcategories, she was reconsidering.

Neva moved the mouse around the screen, trying to choose a place to start.

“It’s a lot of decisions to make,” she muttered.

“It certainly is!” Glint replied. “But that’s the beauty of it! We give you the ability to make these choices. You can have whatever life you want.”

• Desires
• Physical Appearance
• Special Aptitudes
• Romance
• Career
• Family
• Friends
• Location

The list continued off the screen. Each of these contained many levels of subcategories. At the end of each subcategory, was an enormous list of options.

The first dropdown from “Location” was “Galaxy”. The only one of these that Neva recognized at all was “Milky Way”. There were over 4,000 entries on the list.

“How am I supposed to choose a galaxy if I’ve never heard of most of them?” Neva asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t really recommend starting there unless you’ve done specific research into it. This system is really quite clever. As you make other choices, it will automatically update all the options. For example, there are no Xlorbians in most of these galaxies, so if you choose romance with a Xlorbian, it will automatically sort the galaxies where they are native to the top. I mean, you could live with a Xlorbian anywhere…”

“I don’t want to romance a Xlorbian,” Neva said matter-of-factly.

Glint shrugged. “Fair enough. My point is, the system makes things easier as you go along… And, of course, I’m here to help.”

Neva moved the mouse around some more, expanding categories and then collapsing them again.

“Most customers start at the top,” Glint suggested. “They are chasing something they can’t find in their current lives. The Desires section covers those more abstract choices: fame, joie de vivre, a glorious death. That sort of thing. Special Aptitudes is good too. If you want to do a flip from a standstill, or hold your breath underwater longer…”

“How do you facilitate my breathing underwater?” Neva asked.

“We managed a very large Rolodex of very talented surgeons. Nearly all painless, though, I can assure you.” Glint answered smugly.

Again, Neva opened and collapsed nested categories in these sections, perusing the end choices.

“Maybe we should do the pre-populate with my current life thing…” she said.

 

One week and multiple appointments later, Neva & Glint had finalized her life. In the end, she had largely focussed her decisions on three primary choices. First, she wanted a loving, supportive partner—anything but a Xlorbian. Second, she’d picked a passionate career in arts administration. Although Glint had re-assured her that there was an audience out there for anything she might create herself, she’d held firm that ‘she wasn’t really a creative-type person, she just enjoyed being around that sort of thing’. Third, she wanted stability. She wanted a marginally above-average household income—to feel as though she always had a safety net.

In the end, Neva chose to stay in the Milky Way galaxy.

Glint had already reviewed the paperwork and done his portion of the regulatory applications.

“Okee dokee. Just the last few things,” Glint said. He picked up the stack of papers on his desk, knocked them on end, and collected them together. “Again, I’m mandated to say all this, but here we go… You understand that, on signing this document, your current life ceases to be yours and from that moment forward, you officially assume the new life that you have outlined above. There are no take-backsies. We can not guarantee any rebuilding of the very particular life you’ve hodge-podged together through decades of untracked choices…”

Neva hesitated but nodded.

“You further acknowledge that, by signing, you accept the competence of the representative of Infinite Potential Inc. who has been assigned to your account. And you accept that you have every confidence in their facilitation of the life you have selected through the selection process.”

Neva looked at Glint.

“I’m famously late, but I am quite good at this job,” he smiled.

She nodded.

“And finally, you accept that, while Infinite Potential Inc. offers you the ability to change your mind. A) Doing so may affect your account premium and B) Infinite Potential Inc. reserves the right to revoke this ability at any time.”

“Wait,” Neva’s head tilted at the last sentence, “I could get stuck with a life I don’t like?”

“Well, either that or the one you’ve got now, kid. I told you, this isn’t trying out lives as though they are flavours of ice cream. This is simply taking your choices into your own hands.”

“But what if they take away my ability to switch while I’m in a really awful life?” Neva said, aghast.

Glint paused a moment and chuckled. “Just don’t pick an awful life.”

Neva sat back in her chair and considered this for a long time. Eventually, she stood and grabbed the papers out of Glint’s hands, reviewing them.

“This looks like a good life to you, right, Glint?”

“It looks like a great life to me, kid.”

Neva nodded slowly, re-assuring herself.

“OK, I agree.”