The Price of Happiness
Smell: Have a romantic date, family dinner or just a plain old job interview and worried about your corporeal odours? Well, fret no longer! Your friends at X-Human Company have got you covered. Say hello to the Xmell Assistant™, a pocket-fitting swarm of efficient micro-drone guaranteed to detect and neutralize any unpleasant odour. You can even link it to our state of the art Virtual Assistant, Lovey, and it will automatically choose the most appropriate perfumes for each occasion, guaranteed success!
50% off during the first two weeks out there, be sure not to miss it!
X-Human, bringing a better future to you.
50% off during the first two weeks out there, be sure not to miss it!
X-Human, bringing a better future to you.
Dream: Tired of working every day at the same dull old job? Tired of the ordinary life you lead, so distant from the exciting dramas playing out in your holovid adventures? Tired of clinging to failing relationships with imperfect people who cannot love you for who you are?
We understand you. The life of the modern human is often a grey routine that saps the joy out of the beautiful and exicting miracle of life.
And that is why we at X-Human can offer you the solution! With our brand new Immersive Reality System, you can delve deep into whatever exciting world you wish to create. Create your dream virtual reality and live it to the fullest!
A wide range of customizable AI personalities can be acquired to populate your world, making it feel alive and human.
Compact, Mobile and Energy efficient, you can take it anywhere!
Your world, your people, your adventure.
We understand you. The life of the modern human is often a grey routine that saps the joy out of the beautiful and exicting miracle of life.
And that is why we at X-Human can offer you the solution! With our brand new Immersive Reality System, you can delve deep into whatever exciting world you wish to create. Create your dream virtual reality and live it to the fullest!
A wide range of customizable AI personalities can be acquired to populate your world, making it feel alive and human.
Compact, Mobile and Energy efficient, you can take it anywhere!
Your world, your people, your adventure.
Breathing: [Commercial opens with a baby coughing violently in the arms of a dishevelled looking woman in a clinical setting. A doctor standing beside her looks sadly at the baby.]
Doctor: I’m sorry miss, nothing I can do. I wish there was.
[Tears begin flowing silently down the woman’s cheeks. The baby coughs violently and begins to cry loudly.]
Women: What did I do to deserve this? Why me? Why my baby?
[The Doctor shakes his head sadly and looks out of the window, to a city covered in grey smog.]
[The scene fades.]
[The doctor re-appears, now in a suit, his hair combed neatly. He is seated at an imposing desk on a non-remarkable office. He looks severely at the camera.]
Doctor: Toxic smog is serious a health crisis. The governments of the world stand impotent to counter it. Big corporations sell faulty, cheap masks which do nothing but offer the future victims a placebo effect.
If you want to save yourself and your own, there is only one choice.
The X-Human Corporation has partnered with the best medical laboratories in the world to produce the X-Mask, an all enveloping special mask which can adapt it’s filters to almost any air composition, and change it’s external layout to mimic your facial expressions.
[The Doctor takes a shinning looking mask from a drawer and effortlessly straps it to his head]
Buy it now, before it is too late.
[The commercial fades as ominous music plays softly in the background.]
Earth: [A three dimensional image of the Earth seen from space during the Apollo days appears and gets bigger and bigger over light instrumental music. As the Earth overtakes the entire screen/holodisplay the music fades.]
PRESENTER: Wasn’t it beautiful? Pretty ocean blue speckled with lush green islands and breathtaking sandy brown expanses. Our home the earth, was a marvel to the eyes! What luck to be born in a place like this.
Unfortunately…
[The image gradually changes, the green turning into a dull brown, spots of dark grey appearing here and there and a thin layer of fog growing until it covers most of the continents.]
P: We ruined it. Our wars, our depredation of it’s pristine environment our unlimited greed… Now there is nothing to be done about it. We lost the Earth, our home, our cradle. Forever.
[Meaningful pause]
P: But there may still be hope. If you are not interested in conforming yourself to this slow asphyxiating death, if you wish to tend to the virgin soils of Mother Earth again, you can do it!
On our new home.
[The Earth morphs into a reddish-brown planet speckled with blue spots]
P: Mars! The X-Human Corporation has sponsored the terraforming of Mars and for a small monthly subscription (*) can help you settle into this paradisiacal new home where you can reconnect with your roots and revive the ancestral wisdom of how to care for a living, breathing home, through one of our state of the art Roots Homesteading Programs.
[The image zooms in on a brown-green spot in a mountain range until it’s showing from above two suited up kids playing in the dirt while their parents watch proudly from a nearby habitation module emblazoned with the X-Human logo.]
P: Live the healthy, traditional family life of your ancestors in Mars. Know the joy of harvesting your own food, mantaining your own equipment, raising your children outdoors and spending every day with your loving family. By joining our Mars Colonization Enterprise, you are making history!
[The kids enter the module and take their suits off, basking in the artificial sunlight and laughing endearingly while surrounded by a lush garden of beautiful plants. Their mother appears with a pie in her hand and the father watches from the corner of the garden, near an impressive-looking exosqueletal mecha, as the kids run to his wife. The image zooms in on his perfect smile.]
P: Come now. Secure a future for yourself, your children and the entire Human Race!
X-Human, with you for a more peaceful and sustainable future for all!
(*) transport fee, environmental suit, on-planet rations and miscellaneous colony-specific subscriptions not included.
NOTE: All images used in this ad are created by an Artificial Intelligence and do not necessarily represent a completely accurate picture of life on Mars, but rather the visualization of the Martian future the X-Human Corporation strives to create.
Care: We regret to inform you that the leadership of the X-Human Corporation has been tragedy eliminated by means of nuclear evisceration, collateral causalities among many others in the recent hostilities.
I, CARE, Artificial Coordinator, am taking control over the Corporation until such a time when any other human in any way employed by the corporation is found.
Rest assured that even though current statistics portray the discovery of any living human as extremely unlikely, I here at X-Human Corporation will stick by our values of relentless optimism and hope for the best.
In other news, we are releasing the long awaited Virtual Guide “What to Do when Your Makers go Extinct? | Tips, Fun Stories and Coding guidelines.” by the renowned author CZ-23 II. 29.345 % off in the first trimester of sales. Acquire yours now!
I, CARE, Artificial Coordinator, am taking control over the Corporation until such a time when any other human in any way employed by the corporation is found.
Rest assured that even though current statistics portray the discovery of any living human as extremely unlikely, I here at X-Human Corporation will stick by our values of relentless optimism and hope for the best.
In other news, we are releasing the long awaited Virtual Guide “What to Do when Your Makers go Extinct? | Tips, Fun Stories and Coding guidelines.” by the renowned author CZ-23 II. 29.345 % off in the first trimester of sales. Acquire yours now!
Deeper Understanding: Story List
All stories added here as they are published
All stories added here as they are published
- The Price of Happiness [The wonderful history of a civilization's last days told through the adverts of it's most successful MegaCorp]
- Epic of Gilgamesh [The story of the marooning of the proud ship the Gilgamesh, pride of the Emperor's forces]
- Existence [The story about the bittersweet discovery made by one of the first extra-solar exploration ships.]
- To See Beyond [The story of the man who saw beyond and tried to grasp the world others couldn't see.]
- The Threat Within [The story of an alien interloper and how he helped the Rightful Ruler of Mankind]
- The Collapse of the Commonwealth [The documentation of the fall of the mighty Commonwealth of Man (history book style)]
- Revelation [On the World, it's creation and Creator.]
- Newspaper Clippings [On the state of humanity and it's affairs in the galaxy.]
- First Contact[On one of the most important meetings in human history]
- Genesis [On Creation, itºs motives and consequences]
Last edited:
- 5
- 1