Locums and Lunacy

I've been trying to tell you that there's a Big Business scam raking in BEAUCOUP bucks, making a mess and dumping it on Obamacare.  Here's the scam.
Places - ESPECIALLY THE  WITHHELD, dig - pretend to be hiring doctors.  They post ads.  They collect resumes.  They whine and say that nobody's applying. 
They take these "unfillable" positions and BUNDLE THEM AND SELL THEM to BIG national physician enrollment firms doing "locum tenens" work.  If "your primary care doctor" is changing every six months, that's probably because they use locum tenens warm-bodies to fill the slots.  The locum tenens docs are cheaper - they are on "contract" and have no benefits - not even HEALTHCARE, for God's sake!  And if they don't zip the lip, and complain - they get walked off the premises - problem solved for management.  Henry Ford would be impressed!

Presto!  The WITHHELD gets a 30% discount over hiring someone; everyone gets bonuses.  The WITHHELD gets a guy or gal who's spent the last six months in Vermont or West Virginia; and after this shift, will move on to North Dakota or Nevada.  There are even some "trailer-parks" for the locums.  Campesino medicine, you betcha!  Move along, now, boys, move along!  Locums work is considered to be valuable for newly-divorced doctors who are single moms.  If you can get everyone into a Winnebago, and they're out of diapers, it's Partridge Family Time! (Or Joad family, or Dr. Snopes MD)  No ties to the local medical community; and no 'problems.'

Who owns the physicians?  Well, it's the big national locums companies, of course.  The whole racket probably moves a billion dollars a year through it, and with that sort of money comes friends - Federal friends and local friends.  Some physician becomes incontrollably independent, or just can't keep their yap shut, or goes to some liberal social awareness meeting against the hospital - zam!  That's it for you!  Once you work for locums companies, your "professional references" come from those companies.  Patients don't care for you?  Too bad - bye!  Maybe that's why the suicide rates are up for MD's.  As if anyone cares.
Everyone wins - even the patients; they get death benefits and a burial at the cemetery of their choice.  Box'em up, boys, this is for-profit medical care.

Best of all - answer all the complaints with "Obamacare!"  Now, this slick system's been in place for a dozen years, building and building - and the cost of medical care hasn't been plummeting along with it.  So the next whizbang techo-revolution that's coming to deal with the "pending doctor shortage," remember that it's a PLANNED pending doctor shortage - including at the WITHHELD.  Increased patient autonomy, freedom of choice, app-based self-diagnosis and self-treatment - remember, that's all they have in Guyana and Zimbabwe.  The vast majority of people never will see a doctor in their life.  And maybe, maybe that's the future for you, too.  Do you feel lucky to be an American, modeling our future on Turkish and Kenyan medical care?  I used to think we did things the other way around, were a beacon to the rest of the world.  Oh, well.

On Liberty

It was, of course, impossible to simply erase a concept - such things are not necessary, are intolerable in the world of propaganda.  One needs to jellify the words into having no comfortable meaning. That way, they can be brought forth now and again when necessary to salt their original meanings into the dialogue, but carefully-carefully.
Liberty is such a word.  We insist that we Americans are passionate defenders of liberty; but of course, we are no such thing.  We can barely distinguish between frank tyranny and ordered liberty.  What we so aggressively demand in the name for liberty, is the access to those things that allow us to conform in keeping with our station.  Such things as welcoming Condoleeza Rice into the Augusta Golf Club, that is put forth as progress, somehow meriting the approval of the ghosts of civil rights leaders.  Any Mercedes dealership that would turn away Dexter King or another King child would be roundly booed.  In one's station, one has the right to purchase the symbols of it - that is Liberty.  And so, you see - it is a comfortable elitism, like carrying the SS dagger.  That is Liberty, in the sense we convey the new word order. 

Coffee (continued)

The gazes began to patter onto her face like soft April rain; one, and yet another, and there's another.  They were warm and friendly; she did not mind - they seemed innocent.  Then one boy let out a snicker, quietly and choked-off, sounding like stifled prurience.  That annoyed her.  The gazes continued, onto the Professor and the Priest; now they seemed to have turned cold, unseasonable.  She spoke more with the Priest, appearing absent-minded; she was toying with her iPhone as she spoke.

Abruptly, she stood and told the Priest,

I must go and prepare for class.

In pasing the table, she stopped, and looked at the red-faced boy.  He was smiling wickedly, as though holding a small and dirty secret behind his lips.

Mr. Tromblay, she said.

I see that you are preparing to come to class in a half-hour; refreshed, relaxed, and of course completely prepared.

He jerked up at the call of his name; his eyes widened.  The class was a hundred people, not small; and this was only the second week.  He was not clever enough to realize she was scanning for his photograph on the roster of the iPhone shortly before she visited.  He thought; several thought she was witchy.  She did not correct him.  Witchy, indeed.

As she walked past, the table stirred in discomfort.  A few steps further, they lit out like a frightened flock of pigeons chased by a terrier.  Dirty little minds, she thought; dirty little minds.  Ah, we're early on still in the coursework.  She did not look back at the Priest.

At coffee before the class.

If I may say, Professor (X), you have a bit of the  modus vivendum, perhaps of the teaching orders, no?  Josephines, perhaps?  Admirable.

I'm Jewish.

A blistering volley.

Joan stirred the foam on her coffee indolently.  His air of self-assurance was irritating her.

I thought that you might have been raised Catholic...

She looked up, caught his eyes.

You thought that I thought...?  I'm not interested in your incorrect speculations.  You're pretty arrogant, even for a Jesuit.

He smiled, eyes downcast, complimenting her starchiness.  His thick brushy black mustache lifted at the corners, no contempt there.  There was no uncertanty about her; her black eyes flashed.  A warrior, a thinker; but not bellicose.  Scrupulous, intolerant of mush; she would have been a right bit for a few of his canon law professors to wrangle with.

Wisely, he kept any further speculations to himself.  There was something fascinating about her, mysterious - what was this path that brought her to the Heights?  He sniffed the air - there WAS starched cotton, somewhere.  An order of some sort, definitely.  And the personality to trust.  If they were in the jungle, he would be quite reassured to have her on his side in a firefight, indeed.

A scarf on the neck, he mused - perhaps for tzniut, the miṭpaḥoth covering the raven hair that flowed down from the nape of her neck.  Una delgada chales de pelo sobre los hombros por la modestia, this woman who would seem to have no modesty.  The Spirit was within her, and defended with a raw ferocity.  But there was no malice, or spite.  This was perhaps the most intriguing woman he had spoken with in a long, long time.  Assume nothing; she was quite acclimatized to victory, although she did not seem to covet it. 

Here, no question - she was the master, the Professor; he was the Student.  That structure gave each an easy domain to traverse; she was on the second floor, and he on the first.  he would not challenge her command of the pack; in fact, he was entertained and pleased to see someone so easy and fit at command.

Ran across some interesting Smith...

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, On the Character of Virtue VI.II.42

The "Man of System" is discussed.  It appears that this is a person who does not come up with his worldviews pragmatically or empirically, but according to an ideal - Socialism, Platonism &c.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Another Story Entirely

She rose waning in her majesty, as pure as silver, before the dawn of passing into early Spring, after Eastertide, the moon to regulate the clock, twentynine, twentynine.

As small the silver pendant about grandmother's collar, above her rich low breasts, darkness through crescent her skin.  Crescent?  Is it the waxing moon that sets, or in waning, rises?

A theory, to her.  Their moons were orderly and dull, about the ecliptic of their planet, no declination; staid and ordered, far.  There was no eclipse at her home, but a brief dimmingnowagain, on the equinoxes - only around the equinoxes, staid as rain, placid.

It was only The! Moon! that rare celestial orb, that ran impudently on the solar plane, the Ancients might have riddled out her secrets, were She tame and docile.  Not!

So northers the Sun, so southers the Moon in ripeness when in full; and the ancient solariums, and lunariums thus, saw their oppositeness in course.  How much of humans' nascent thoughts drew towards natural duality, for so did the Moon in her slightness rival the Sun in his thermonuclear might?

Grandmother's mark was hers only.  The Learned had their ranks, numbers; she did not know how rare was a Solitary Mark - it was like a name, a cognomen of which few had and none the same - that mark was not Grandfather's.

"Tell me Grandmother," came back the distant whisper on the predawn wind and rain, "how came it to be that we are Dark?"

"Of the time, the Awakening, of course you know, several hundred years ago, much is held in secret.  What is your rank, then, three?  Little can I tell you."

She blurted out to Grandmother, "Of course I am Three!  You know that!" a bit impudently; for a young girl her age, she was bold; Grandmother smiled.

"Sometimes the decisions during the Awakening were wise, or sometimes foolish.  Nevermind.  We do not change what was in error; they were often fools to us; but we may be fools to the next generation, and the next and next - so when the die is cast, we let it settle."

She frowned, unsatisfied.  There WAS more.

Gemeinsamschact, morgens früh um sechs

Morningtide

Caleb awoke refreshed - !scrubbed! - after the night's mental laundry.  He could remember that the detectives had deduced some great truth about magnets.  He stood by the refrigerator, idly pulling a small magnet off the door, and letting it pop back on.  It made him snicker.  "Boum!  Boum! Boum!" chuckling like a toddler.

Syra called out to him from the monitor in the breakfast nook, "Do you want your day's schedule?"

"Shut up and leave me the hell alone.  Turn off while you're at it."

Nag.  Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag.   He didn't give a damn what trivial crisis 'o' the day would be today and unfold to ruin his Thursday.  Syra, thank God, did NOT follow him to work; he had another CGI assistant there.  She didn't have a name.  He liked it that way.  He fired them every couple of weeks, anyhow.  A new face, a new voice would come in, just like the old one.  Bla, bla, bla at the home office.

No chatter from Syra about calling Kathryn -or was it Karen?  Better goddamn NOT!  He buttoned his collar on the way, clenching a piece of toast between his teeth.  Chuckled.  Magnets aren't real!  See what you get for puddling around in the old ways of thought - cogitating, and getting nowhere!  Without a roadmap, it's all hiking through Swampville.

AfterThought.  AfterThought, AfterThought.

Gemeinschaftspraxistraum

As the leaden rain spattered mournfully on the windowglass, the two gentlemen sat in the study, a glass of amber, a glass of burgundy in the hand, fire stoked against the winter's chill.

"I am in the occasional habit of corresponding with a telegrapher, Watson - a fellow of a most keen and inquiring mind.  Late in Denmark, but originally of Camden, he came up with some most cunning inventions in telegraphy.  Heaviside is his name.  Have you heard a bit about him?"

"Yes, a reclusive gent, I hear.  Nephew of Wheatstone, is he not?"

"Indeed, a bit eccentric fellow indeed.  He became intrigued with some writings of James Maxwell about the conductance of electricity, and seemed to become a bit unglued with it, Watson.  At first, in conversation, I could not be certain whether his postulates were adherent in some way to reality, or merely the wanderings of an overly-brilliant mind into whimsy. 

As I understand his meaning, he offers four postulates of Maxwell's thought, as firmly enraptured by them as any new convert to a religion.  The first two postulates, as I understand, involve the inclosures of charges of electricity and magnetism.  These do not intrigue me as much as the latter two,  which involve the whirling of the various fields electric and magnetistic.

 Heaviside postulates that a magnetic field will whirl about a changing current.  This is merely Faraday's law of induction, you may recall.  In a proportionate sense, an electric field will be generated to whirl about a changing magnetic field.  This is only Ampére's circuity law; but with a change that incldues Maxwell's stipulations."

"Holmes, I fear that you have lost me in the whirl of these things.  What is  interesting about this fellow who reformulates what is known?"

"Merely this.   Let us purport that we have a cannon which fires an electrically charged object.  It can be easily designed by the coiling of wires in a clever manner, to fire off the object at a very great velocity."

"Clever, that.  What of it?"

"Well, as any inventor of an impressive and clever invention might have it, our inventor replicates the device, and now has two of them."

"Good show for him.  And now what?"

"He has interconnected each, to fire off two identical charged particles at an extremely great velocity, comparable to the speed of light. Relative to each other, of course, the two have no difference in velocity; therefore, they seem to each other to be at rest.

From the perspective of the objects, being similarly and equally charged, they repel each other with great force.  However, from the perspective of the inventor, the burst of velocity imports a terrific magnetismal whirl around each object.  the whirl acts upon the other to restrain its flight from the other, so much so as they nearly fail to move apart whatsoever!  That's the paradox.  Do they act on each other electrically, or not?"

 I fear, Holmes, that I question the substance of reality itself.  How can one thing happen to one observer, but to another might be absent?

"Here's the interesting part, Watson.  A Dutchman Lorentz, and a certain Swiss physicist have postulated that things that are in motion and things that are at rest, have a different perception of time itself.  Their postulate would claim that the difference in perception can solely be attributed to different time-pieces, as it were, on the observer that is moving, and the inventor's timepiece."

"Clever, then.  A continental explanation, and a good British explanation.  But mutually exclusive.  Good for inquiry, that - keeps the mind sharp."

The man with the pipe jumped out of his chair, energetically.

"Don't you see, Watson - don't you see?  The deuce is, each theory - each explanation is absolutely and incontrovertibly correct!  Both must be occurring - at the same time!  The only credible way to wed the two is that magnetism - that simple movement of the compass, the pull of the magnetite against iron - magnetism  itself is completely and utterly fictional - unreal!" 

,   

.

die Gemeinschaftspraxis, zwei

Brainfart

Brainfarts would sear across the night sky like shooting stars - brilliant, meaningless to the knowledgeable scientist, portending nothing.  The ancients looked for wisdom in their fiery trail - there was none.  You could measure the ionization spectra of atmospheric gases.  If you wanted to. Not phaeton, not phoenix, nor haephestus' rock, brainfarts were simply the stiff wire brushing of the mental dendrites, shaking off the debris of the day. Lift yourselves by your own boobstraps, comrades!

BF-Ekphron

Ekphron, ekphron, the poet of old.

Used to think things so his brain wouldn't mold.

It would dull up the bite of the cruel winter cold,

Sa-something, sa something.  Ba-diddy-dold.  

 Reality

Screw the date, screw the thinking, stop it.  Caleb walked away from the computer screen.  The delight of dealing with Robinsons is never having to say you're sorry.  He went to bed. 

die Gemeinschaftspraxis

Clinic.

Caleb was crabbed.  The Goddamn Little Boss had come in from Corporate, breezing in without announcement, and bitching as usual about the work and production and such.
She hated the coffee.  That was unexpected, but since she didn't have a goddamn clue about what she was talking about, ever, she usually bitched about some witless triviality, just to make him feel cramped and irrelevant.  She fumed about the coffee and made him miserable.  She whined about Dr. Lucius, and carped about Dr. whats'er name, Peggy.

He ran a good clinic.  Screw her!  He had a degree in automated business management, and was certified, and did all the lousy things that the corporate idiots came up with.  It was fifteen more years until retirement; a slow and dense creep of the years, through the seasons, day-by-day.  And was a physician.

CGI had been a fun part of this horrid job, though.  The first halfway deployable CGI clinic heads had come out about five years ago.  Really, they had started during the medical melt-down at the end of the decade.  Everyone was scrambling to do something, and CGI had pretty much saved the day.

Alisha was the first.  Looking at her nowadays was pretty painful, of course.  Artificial something-something.  Around the time that broadscale DNA sequencing was deployed, the amount of information skyrocketed.  Nobody could even find anything in the goddamn medical chart, there was so much obligatory documentation and crap - oh yes, and then!  The videotaping of all encounters, God!  That was supposed to be easy and smooth like every other god-damn adventure, and transcribing!  All that transcript for every encounter was a mandatory part of the medical chart, along with the god-damn videotape as well.  That pretty much started the crisis.

Artificial lexical instruction something-something.  She was initially designed to carp at the meats, instruct them about their followup and their stupid lives.  They could take home the video instructions - so few meats these days could read, at least read anything they could remember.  They were much happier with this setup, than getting some piece of paper they would lose on the bus.

AlishaMD was just a mock-up head with Integrated Best-Practices access capacity, supposedly in real-time; she stuttered and paused, and looked like the Max Headroom videos of fifty years ago.

The meats loved her.  They flocked to her, they bonded, they talked, they wouldn't get out of the goddamn room.  The CGIMD project was nearly canned, until the Big Light Bulb went off - who gives a god-damn how ling the patients take in the room chattering with the electronic head?  Screw them!  Build more rooms - buy more monitors!  The stupid meats can sit in there all day and chat with the talking head!

And they would.  You needed special flow engineering to get the meat out of the seat.  It wasn't like the spin-cycle ten-minute get'em'out of the old days, but they had to be prompted to move along.  The CGIMD was set up to regulate meatflow; prompts to moove on, during the busy days and chatter-on all you want, if it's slow!  Flap that meat!

Caleb stormed into the break room.  The employee meat scattered like quail.  God, that place used to be packed with whining employees and the smell of sour milk and hopelessness.  Only Phyllis remained.  Phyllis would never miss a break, or lunch either.  Something was slowly heating up in the microwave - it smelled like peppermint sauerkraut, with some sort of revolting knuckle spinning slowly on top.  10:15 and that's gonna be the Smell of the Day in the break room.

It used to be jammed; now, even during lunch, it was cavernously empty.  Phyllis sat reading some paper book that was tattered, and looked unclean. 

Phyllis was the Last Problem Doctor.  She was the last doctor left on the staff.  She was aging in a spectacularly unattractive way, with orange hair, thinning on the crown, you could see skin.  She had flabby, fleshy earlobes, and a drab and slow demeanor.  She was from someplace out West.  She trained out West someplace, eons ago.

He said hello, but she did not move, and the peppermint stench continued to build slowly. 

"Your DFP's were down last cycle," he offered, "good job."

 She looked at him like a cow looks at a wet gate.

"Keep up the good work!" he repeated, cheerily.

"I was out sick for two days," she replied.  "Probably that was why."

Deviations From Procedure.  Mistakes from the past, bound to become a long-forgotten nuisance in a few years.  With Phyllis, it was always DFP's at least.  Best Practice clearly stated what to do for every class of patients.  For the Robinsons, it was easy.   They could simply crossmatch the patient's DNA sequence and Integrated Best Practices, and tell the patient what they were doing.  It was always correct according to the best practices.

But Phyllis, she went off in every which way and did what she felt like doing.  She must have had a guardian angel - it was always DFP's and not Practice Deficiencies - that was what they called it when a DFP went awry.

DFP's were still a problem; they damaged the database by doing nonstandard procedures, and couldn't be used to bootstrap up the revisions of the IBP.  Phyllis was lucky.  Maybe it was her bovine dullness that made her lucky.  Her DFP's didn't seem to produce bad results.

Her feedback ratings were the worst.  Sometimes, she didn't brush after lunch.  She had a cadre of loyal patients, as happened - but so did the Robinsons, The meats belonging to a Robinson were usually much more sympathetic and worshipful.  The Robinsons were like rock stars to their patients, sometimes.  He forgot why they were called Robinsons, the CGIMD's.  It didn't matter.

 Brainfart.  

Axillary ozochrotia.  Osmidrosis.  ABCC11polymorphism.  The Diné say that Bilga'ana smell like dead people.  Humans stink.  Lamb smells like lamb - you have to eat it with mint to cover up the smell.  Goat meat smells like goats.  And human meat smells like humans - a secret that some doctors learn in the autopsy rooms, if they're paying attention.  It's as classic as the lamb smell of lamb.  Bacon is bacon.  Meat is meat.  Once you learn the smell, it's everywhere.  The Diné must've choked on it.

Interview.

He had to interview one of the Robinsons, Dr. Karen Lucius.  Central reported that she was not polling well with older female patients, and Caleb had to have a talk with her.

He went down the hall to her examination room.  Actually, he could have gone to any examination room - it didn't matter, as he could call up any Robinson to any room.  They had their "own rooms," with suites, so that the help could "assist" if needed with any physical examination details.

The patients seemed to be stubbornly attached to their own Robinsons and their own waiting rooms, soothed by the ritual of care as much as anything else.  The schedulers, in fact, found that the patients gave better ratings if the doctors were ever so slightly late in their visits; it gave them some sense of familiarity, somehow.

Talking Heads, CGI's were everywhere now - they took the unpredictable and unpleasantness out of necessary encounters.  Obsequiousness was the norm - everyone had their own home assistant CGI to handle the details of their lives.

Caleb brought out the controller and pressed in.  He walked into the examination room and sat down.  Dr. Lucius was writing at her desk, the motions and the human movements - the breathing and eyeblinks - showing concentration and alertness.  She did not "know" he was there, as he had entered on observation-only mode.

The desks all had "family pictures," of course - especially for the female doctors with female patients.  This touch improved image management, as did all the other props; an old-fashioned coat rack for the white coats and stethoscope - the whole thing.

He pressed "instruct" and she looked up blankly, awaiting orders.  He smiled slightly, feeling a sense of order and importance wash over him that had fled ever since Little Boss had thrown off his groove.

"New patient visit, 63 year old female with well-controlled hypertension."

Dr. Lucius looked up with a gentle smile.  "Well, hello!" she said.  "I'm Dr. Karen Lucius, and I'll be your primary care doctor.  It's wonderful to meet you!"

Bang.  There it was.

"Before we get started, Dr. Lucius, tell me a little bit about yourself."

She smiled.  "Mrs. Smith, please call me Karen.  Well, I'm a full-time doctor here in this clinic, and I'm also a mom.  I'm thirty-five years old, married with two wonderful children., Ken and Adele...."

He hit the pause button.  It was her cleavage.  Her tits were too high for a thirty-five year old mom, and her cleavage was showing - very pleasant - but too much for an interview with an older female patient. Paydirt and just right for an old codger; but a little too showy for older female patients.  He pressed the instruct button; Lucius halted, stood and rested, breathing subtly.

Caleb watched her breasts gently rise and fall.  Very nice.

"Appearance and movement change.  Demographic, older female.  Let's take the breasts down about an inch or two.  Leave the cleavage alone but soften the highlights.  Mole to the upper left chest about two inches from base of cleavage; more sun damage on upper chest."

 That did it.  A little less noticeable for Granny.

"Save that.  Interview, Dr. Coflin.  Performance rating."  then as an afterthought, "revert changes temporarily during interview."  He really enjoyed looking at her cleavage.

Her face grew more serious, a bit pensive, still smiling.

"Karen, I've got to talk with you about your performance rating with older female patients.  Do you know any reason that you might not be keeping up with their expectations?"

She looked worried.  Perfect method acting, these Robinsons.  Her smile dropped.

"I don't know, sir.  Perhaps I've been showing a little strain recently.  I promise that I'll try harder to engage and support my older female patients."

"Well, you just do that.  I don't want to come back here one more time to deal with this problem."  He scowled and leaned across the desk."

That was perfect.  It got all of the bad feelings that the Little Boss left behind, out of his head.

"I'm sorry, sir.  I'll try to perform a little better."  Smile gone, crestfallen downward gaze.

He pressed the instruct button.  "Interview over. Resume.  Observation-only."  Karen returned to her imaginary note-taking.  Caleb sat and watched her.

One benefit of having Robinsons in your clinic was that you could do absolutely anything you want with them.  No employees with hurt feelings sobbing in the break room; no bad days, no dysmenorrhea, no back-talk.  No bitching.

Keeping a distance is one of the big matters in working with the meat.  The heads didn't need to be handled with kid gloves - go ahead, yell at them!  Belittle them!  Insult them!  They're Robinsons, it's therapeutic!

Hitting on the Robinsons was not a big deal - you can get fired for doing that with the meat.  In fact, the leadership encouraged having "relationships" with the staff, if you wished.  Anything!

CGI sex had improved so much that it was getting blurry to tell what was real and what was virtual.  Some clinic leaders had relations with all their staff; who cared?!  It just evoked the same "bonding" feelings with the Robinsons as though they were somehow real humans - and that trick was the secret of running a CGI clinic.

Caleb hadn't slept with a Robinson since his divorce, a year ago.  He'd mixed it up a little afterwards with one of his Robinsons, a feisty little Mexicana doctor named Lupe.  Anger issues got the best of him, though.  He'd gotten in an argument with her - yest, you can even argue with them, if you have a relationship!  But he 'beat her to death with a hammer', which surprised him.

Central doesn't mind, of course - the Robinson shows up right as rain the next morning at work.  Domestic violence doesn't lead to absenteeism, another benefit of employing heads.  But everything you do is watched, and Corporate figured out he was pretty stressed from his divorce.  Lupe 'went to another clinic,' Caleb got some treatment for depression - which really helped! And he had sworn off sex for a while, with meats or Robinsons, not having any sex drive for a long time anyhow.

Dr. Lucius' cleavage brought up a long-forgotten tickle, and he was bored, so he thought he'd flirt with her a little.

"Instruct.  Resume discussion.  Private."  Not part of the performance interview.

She looked up from her paperwork, and then back down, suddenly crestfallen.

"Karen.  I hope I didn't hurt your feelings.  I hope you know that was just business.  I really like the way you do your job."

She responded with a smile.  "I'm sorry, Caleb.  I've just had a lot on my mind."

"Do you have some time free after work?  I thought we could maybe get a drink."

 "Sure.  My family's out of town for a week, visiting the in-laws."

"That sounds great, Karen."  He got up to leave.  "See you after work."

Brainfart

 

Turing's tensor is simple.  T=⟨Q,Γ,b,Σ,δ,q0,F⟩ in the archaic formulation, or ⟨Λn⟩ in an ordered septuple.  Λ1 is topologically intransitive after the space is defined.  Neither manifold nor diffeomorphism, Turing space cannot be mapped smoothly onto realspace-seven.

 Apartment

 Of course, one doesn't take a Robinson from work to a bar, or dinner, or home - they're CGI's after all.  But a clinic supervisor has all the freedom he wants to play with them at home.

He could do all sorts of things, even more than one can with a meat - change them down, make them talk dirty, make them dress up - whatever!  What happens on the home computer, stays on the home computer!

He once gave a CGI date a 'breast growth medicine' only known to CGI world.  Her breasts grew slowly, to the size of softballs, bursting her blouse and bra - the size of soccer balls, and firm!  The look of astonishment on her face was priceless!

He called up Karen on his home computer.

......