Thanks!

That was a great story, well done. It took a little while for me to get into it, but I realize now that you needed the set-up at the beginning. Maybe you should drop more hints at the start, or add some sort of conflict, because you very nearly lost me.

The way it is written is good, no need to change that, except maybe add a few details about the setting, it felt a little claustrophobic at first.

That said, I really liked this one. But it takes a while to get to, so give the reader something more (just a little) to hang on to as we get to the payoff.

Loved this, and was hooked by the life of Starrr. Especially liked the Centipede mechanic, guess I personally felt affinity to it. Your portrayal of a future social TV function was spot on.

I really liked how the reveal of Starrr's true life came gradually and mimiced the gradual realization she felt herself. Very, very well written. 

Top marks! Thumbs up! 

Hi Whammer--great story. It was a blend of The Running Man and A Brave New World. I really love those books, so great job. I too, love those old arcades. There's nothing better than those old greasy joysticks. You blended the old and the new very well.

I don't have any real complaints. There were a few spots that could be smoothed out, but nothing that really stuck out. The interaction with Barnjamin was a little strange with the bolding and formatting of the dialogue, but you might have intended it that way. I liked that everything came full circle for Starrr.  

Overall, you have a great story there. Good job & happy writing. ~Sam

I loved it. It was extremely well written, and thoughtfully constructed. I found the end to be a little anticlimactic, and it felt a bit rushed, but otherwise excellent. I really enjoyed the pacing as well.

There's been discussion, as you've probably seen, over on the Teleport Us discussion board about people cringeing at 3000+ word stories. Someone, I believe Klahol, said, and I'll paraphrase, "I know something is good when I read 4000 words so fast that it didn't feel like I just read 4000 words."

That's what happened here. The pages just flew by. I enjoyed the story and will happily give you a thumbs up.

In fact, possibly the best praise I can give any story is that all I found to write about in these comments was nit-pick stuff. Soooo, here's the nit-pick stuff (plus some random thoughts I had while reading):

Pg 3: Should the line "Mo noted her rise..." be indented? Also, in case it was an accident and not stylistic choice: "She made the transfer[,] then..." or "She made the transfer[, and] then..." [<--the second is what my grammar checker would demand, but I tend to defy it.]

Heh heh: "Barnjammin." I just keep thinking of barnstorming biplanes. Heh.

I like the dissonance where Starrr and Co. talk to other people as if they are on a social media site, while they interactions with their onboard implants is more comfortable, more 'natural.'

Pg 5: There may be too many uses of the word 'but' here--in that there are two. But (heh heh), they're very close together. I'd also recommend using something like, "On Obstacle Course, Flo and her cohort struggled through..." instead of "Flo and her cohort struggled through..." I initially read that section as what Flo had been doing on the office worker show, and, actually, I'm still not quite sure if that isn't the case. Now that I've re-read it, I think it is. However, clearing up the confusion and associating the clean-up clearly with either the earlier show or this one would be, y'know, good. :-)

Pg 7: I'd lose "the" before "...lines appeared on the monitor." I kept thinking you must have mentioned them earlier. Again with "the beating blows"

Pg 14: Instead of "She flinched..." go with "Starrr flinched." Brings it back to the specific from the general.

I did find the addition of the Centipede game a bit serendipitous at the end. I know there are all sorts of reasons for that to have been included that don't break the laws of verisimilitude, but some hints as to what those reasons were might be good. Even better would be if the version of Centipede they chose wasn't the console game, but rather a 'life-size' version. Maybe with real centipedes (although then we are getting very close to the old trope of protag thrown into 'real-life' video game--ah, the memories: the rejection letter for a story featuring that trope, which involved Pac-Man, was my very first rejection letter, back when I was 11). At the very least, having a huge screen with the Centipede game (and electricution feedback, a la James Bond) would make it more, I dunno, futuristic.

PS (post-reading the comments above): I agree with Johann Thorsson--at first, I thought the beginning was too much beginning, too much world-building. However, it is required. It's part of the whole piece, and although there is a tendency in short fiction (and novels) these days to start in the midst of some conflict, I'm not sure that would serve very well here. Perhaps a hint, though. Have her looking forward to getting the 'thing' sooner. Maybe as soon as she gets up, thinking something like, "Had it come yet?" right before Mo sedates her because of her excitement at the prospect.

If the most critical thing I can think off, is that you'd be better off with only the first line of the description, which is such a wonderful tagline and you already KNOW something will go wrong, you can see that I liked it!

You do a good job here - it would be easy to narrate this with a more "now" voice, which would have been heavier and more critical, and spoil the "discovery". But you only hint at it - the comments about not understanding Grandpa, etc.

Some things you MIGHT want to think about - I have no solutions, but these are the thoughts and questions raised as I read :

Centipede game - as we know, these things are their own little reward systems, addictive in nature. Does it say something about Starrr that she needs this, outside of the AFIRMOS system which "does the same thing" (I.e. rewards for particular behaviour?)

Does it also say something about her that she ISN'T in a dating cycle? Or do we need to know more what a dating cycle actually is?

You might need to make it a little clearer - and only a tweak might be needed - that all the people on the gray line bus are domestics. I didn't get that, without a scan back. Maybe "like the Innards on the transport you came out here on" - because I thought for a second that all bus drivers were innards or something! (Me, dense...)

I think I'd like a piece of puzzle answered, which is how do the execs, exec? Via the insets? I.e. they all work remotely? Or do some of them travel into town (the grid) to do their stuff?

I don't think in the end, she made the right choice, do you? I mean, she made the right choice for the story, but it seems like these characters may not have a very long shelf life. The viewers are evil - more emotional charged than you might expect from an affirmed population (1984's minute of hate?). I think you have to be careful about straying into "the games can kill" territory as well, as that might be a step too far, and a step others have travelled before - from Vonnegut to Dr Who... 

I like the messing around with names, to "update" them, but I guess I question if that is something that has evolved, or something only the people on grid get?

And I wasn't quite sure what this was meant to convey - "She turned her attention outward as much as she could" - though I love the last line. Gamer yourself, I suspect, Wendy? :)

Great work. Enjoyed reading it!

Thumbs up!!

I really enjoyed it and you surprised me several times! I think the first part is the one I preferred because I thought there were a lot of great ideas in it, and you obviously put a lot of work into building Starrr's world. Loved the pov choice you made and the reading experience was both pleasant and challenging, which is my favourite combo. I should read it again just to go over the concepts you dropped again. 

Every new 'sections' kept me on edge but the "inciting incident" felt a bit confusing to me. I'm not sure if it went too quickly or if I couldn't visualize it properly, but after that, I definitely felt things were unraveling too fast for me compared to the first part that took its time to set up an atmosphere and the universe. I think maybe without the word count restriction you could elongate the second half and built on the tension. 

The final twist was great although I felt the twins explaining so much to Starrr was convenient for me as a reader but maybe not what I would expect given the context and who Starrr is. (This might just be me, obsessing over characters giving out long explanations at the end of a story :p)

So far the most creative and surprising story I've read, that could easily grow into a bigger and stronger story. 

PS: the ending reminded me a bit of Black Mirror S1E2, if you've seen it? (which is a compliment of course)

This immediately reminded me of a Black Mirror story, so it’s interesting to see Nathalie’s comments (well worth watching all six episodes).  I really enjoyed this, it flows brilliantly, Starrr is great, the idea of the AFIRMOS is superb.  It is a brilliant dystopia – everyone designed with the same average features etc.  It has a decent arc to it, though the ending is perhaps a little too short when compared to the rest of it – Starrr has a huge choice to make with very little time to make it, and there is little sense of peril to the choice.  While it takes time to get moving, that didn’t bother me in the slightest.  It was well written and kept my attention fully from the first sentence.  This is a really good story.

I don't know if it was intentional, but rather early on in your story I had this strange idea that you were going to reveal Starr as some sort of rodent, particularly a hamster or guinea pig, going through her paces and being trained/rewarded by an owner for proper behavior. I think it started with "bubbler" which made me picture one of those cage mounted water bottles.

In reality I did not believe for one second you would be doing something so hackneyed, but I found it rather amusing. It does speak to how well you created a mundane, static world that's familiar (cubicle farms, bland suburbia, reality TV) yet odd and unsettling when seen from the outside. It's the perfect type of dystopia, where the primary character initially sees it as utopia.

My only issue with the work is, oddly enough, very similar to your primary complaint about mine: I kept waiting for things to start happening. 

I think it may just be a stylistic difference between us since your world-building and character development was very effective and set the proper tone for Starr's entire existence but it wasn't until the halfway point, right after the electrocution, that I really got interested. From that point on things start rushing towards the end, which is not a complaint since once life starts going downhill things tend to pick up speed in that same direction if there is nothing there to stop it. To continue the metaphor, I do think the ending was a little abrupt as I couldn't quite tell if we were at the bottom and Starr was about to start the struggle up the next hill or not.

All in all I really enjoyed reading your story and would definitely do so again given the choice so don't think I am in any way complaining about it. Well done.

C.

Hey there. You get a thumbs up from me. I've seen some great first lines in this competition, and yours is no exception: "Starrr awoke to the faint but undeniably funky slap of a bass guitar and a lively horn section." Really great (and it's hard to make the 'waking up at the beginning of the story' thing work, so extra bonus points to you). 

You've got excellent pacing in this story. I was particularly impressed by the way you dropped the hint that she wanted to spend her money on "something else," then moved forward without telling us -- very intriguing! I also really enjoyed how subtle all the manipulations were, in particular the bit about being "kissed" with dopamine, and how her 13-hour day flew by. ::Shudder:: By the time Mo starts to manfunction, even I felt a little uneasy at his silence. Really good work.

It was fun to read another story that features a machine that "helps" the human race, since that's what my story is about to. It's here, if you're interested. I'd really appreciate any thoughts you have :)

Great story, not perfect but very good - the seven uses of 'she' in the paragraph starting with "A tiny pulse of stimulant was released from her infusion pump" distracted me briefly, as did similar issues elsewhere, however these would be fixed by an editor and the general story was good.

I didn't like the reappearance of the Centipede game at the end; it seemed a little overly fortuitous, however I liked that it appeared earlier in the story (since it was a nice link to the past, adding substance).  Thumbs up overall, well done.

Meh. It's OK, I guess, but I really can't see what all the rave is about.

The opening is slow. It's all setup for the first half, and nothing that really stood out to grab my interest. Then there's the reveal of the Evil Overlords... which rather gets wasted by being dismissed in favour of an equally well-used "deadly games" meme. But even then the risk is muted and I didn't feel it. The return of the centipede game at the end is way too fortuitous, and unexplained. Finally some plot is happening and... it ends.

On the plus side, the opening sentence is good, although I wonder if you could have made even stronger use of the wake-up to show the AFFIRMOS in action.

Hi Wendy,

I really enjoyed your story, I wrote one of my own about dystopian reality TV, but it's nowhere near as good as this. 

I enjoyed the introduction -- amusing and lots of vibrancy in its appeal to the senses. The free stimulants to wake you up make me wonder if this future was all that bad! Stimulants, euphoria and dopamine may have kept me sane as a lawyer! Hehe. The pre-averaging surgery is quite chilling, too. All the drugs were, really, in a Brave New World sort of way where the people are all constantly a bit dopey, but happy. 

I thought the paragraph about the clothing being replaced was cool for world bulding, but probably not necessary and you could jump straight into the exposition on AFIRMOS. By the way, I thought your exposition was done really well - you trod the perfect line between world building and not creating an info-dump.

Really enjoyable story, thumbs up from me.

Jess