michiko's life
L.
(Explanatory note on Michiko's Life: This episodic story is an on-going outlet for my inner Tokyo-ite: an idealized super-modern, sleek, intelligent, and perpetually in motion sophisticate who participates in a highly secret government operation that astoundingly benefits the population despite popular cynicsm. Michiko questions herself mercilessly but only on those occasions which truly require it. She is the ultimate non-neurotic).
Sexual Peak Time Reduction in Sector 577 was one of Michiko's least favorite duties as Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion. But implicit in paragraph 3579C, the one hated by all those left-wing rioters, is the mandate for civilian tranquility. Since Edo it has been known that prolongation of stimulation is indubitably the most significant reducer of violence. With the invention of the Thompson Web it became possible to realize this en masse. How anyone could protest this was beyond her. Her lifelong work, since her first days in BureauComm, has been training as the invisible hand, overseer of the daily maintenance of that hairline between desire and satiation. Tactile realization of communal longing through the Thompson Web was simply the culmination of the upper classes' goal for civilian docility.
A tiny shock ran from finger to brain, her skin pinched as the tendrils gripped her hand a little more tightly than usual. Translating the prickly paradox of push and pull to the tricky minutiae of movement which triggered the Thompson Web was exhausting. Every tendon's vibration becoming physical realization in Sector 577. Such responsibility was integral to her sense of self-worth. The requirement of anonymity gave her the air of apparition.
(for previous episodes, go here).