Staring absent-mindedly into the eastern horizon, Jeff spoke into the air: "OK Alice, let's see the last backup of the engineering transaction digraph."
Tiny specks appeared in the air before him, growing into a thousand dull red spheres of varying sizes. Between them sprouted a nest of rigid pipework, forming an impossible floating tinkertoy knot.
"Digraph contains twelve-hundred eighty-three nodes and is fully connected," replied an invisible female speaker.
"Thanks, Alice," Jeff returned "And could you change your voice a little, something sexier? It's been a long day."
"How's this?" said the invisible speaker again, its voice now deep and airy, provocative and inhuman.
Jeff approved. "That's nice... Oh, and Cape Cod has no palm trees."
With that thought, the palm trees vanished.
"Right," Jeff said, free of distractions once again, "back to work. Can you color nodes by time of --"
"Ping!" Another voice, a masculine one, had chimed in. Unlike the unseen Alice, this voice had a body, or, at very least a head. It hovered beneath the sun, a few yards to Jeff's side, completely inert like a photograph. Without looking in the head's direction, Jeff knew the face the voice belonged to. From its tone he could glean the same information conveyed by the floating head's patient expression. It was Tom, and it wasn't urgent. Jeff had time, though, and without straying his eyes from the mass of pipes and spheres, he answered into the air.
"Go ahead, Tom."
The head awoke, and spoke again: "Did you get the tools I ordered?" It was patient once more.
"Sure did. Came in this morning. I'll send them to your space."
Without another word, the head vanished; it hadn't really been listening, just waiting to return the reply to its master.
Jeff sighed, and returned his attention to work. "Resume. Color nodes by last access time. Log scale. T-naught is now."
"O.K." came the voice of the ethereal femme fatale. Several of the spheres took on a yellowish-orange hue. A handful of others turned green and blue. No sign of the anomaly Jeff expected. Time for a different tactic.
"Rewind the transaction log to the nearest point of minimum entropy," he commanded.
"Are you sure?" inquired the unseen Alice. The voice alone was enough to give him second thoughts about most things.
He raised his thumb in approval. "Confirmed."
The knot before him began to twist and writhe, pipework vanishing and reconnecting. Spheres blushed and then blued and then blushed again. Some shriveled while others swelled; new spheres emerged and old ones withered away. Eventually, the transformation came to a halt. The voice in the air announced its completion:
"Time of last minimum entropy: seventy-eight hours ago. Digraph is one thousand thirty eight nodes and is fully connected."
"Planarize!" came Jeff's next command.
"Graph is non-planar," the voice replied, as if deflecting the command.
"Best fit," Jeff retorted.
"Solving..." the voice complied.
The tangled mass teased itself into a larger, looser form, suddenly becoming flat before his eyes, as if squished like an insect behind a giant plate of glass. A single errant sphere survived the flattening. It hovered in front of the rest, still connected by pipework to one of the spheres-now-circles in the squished structure behind it. There was a long silence.
"I see we've been working on our self image," said another, new voice. It was also female.
Walking along the beach towards him was the voice's owner, a woman Jeff's own age, clothed in a plain-looking blue business ensemble. In a small concession to individuality, a colorful, paisley-patterned scarf covered her shoulders. Her comment was about his icon. In the hard world, Jeff was much shorter and heavier than the bronzed demigod that stood on the beach.
Preferring to keep his eyes on his work, Jeff tended not to make eye contact with the voices he recognized. And though he rarely spoke with her in the soft world, Jeff could recognize his sig-other's voice anywhere.
"Hi Deb," he said cheerfully, eyes still straight ahead as she approached his left side. "How about a quick skinny-dip!"
She laughed with disgust. "I'm not here to help you jerk off with your soft toys. I--"
"Solution complete," chimed the long-silent Alice voice.
Deb smirked devilishly. "Oh Jeff," she said in her best mockery of the customized Alice voice, "you've gone so soft that you need a simulated fluff-bunny like me to keep you going."
Finally, Jeff turned his eyes to Deb, noticing her icon for the first time. The body was her hard self, but the Deb he knew hated wearing those clothes. Must be PMS, he thought. Why did she have to be so damn organic?
Her voice became more serious. "You were supposed to have come out already. We missed each other yesterday."
"Sorry Deb," he said sincerely, "I wanted to, but the work piled up."
"The work always piles up," she said angrily, "and I'm tired of waiting." She started to vanish, and as she faded she turned and walked away, adding emphasis to her departure. "Goodbye, Jeff!" she shouted.
"Oh, you'll be back," he replied incredulously. Jeff has been in the soft world too much of his life. He's a terrible judge of character.
"Alice," he asked, "what's a 'fluff-bunny?'"