She managed to misgender me four times in two minutes,” Jules said. Strung together, they resembled an ugly necklace designed by a child, picking out the most garish beads to thread. (c)Įach room was alien and strange relative to the one before it. It was hard to keep up the bullshit facade of industriousness when she felt entirely dead inside. Heartache felt like a persistent hangover: lethargy, a headache, an unshakeable belief in the cruelty of the world, drifting outside of time. She’d been lost for a long time, rudderless. To go where she wanted, she had to get lost, and it seemed almost instinctual to do that now. its cousins Coked-out Divorcée, Parental Basement Dweller, and Massage Therapist Who Lived in Their Studio. These tutorials come equipped with 'the most obnoxiously heterosexual blobs' flirting! They even have tutorials on this: 'Wormholes and You'. Yep, that's a multiverse take on IKEA, the modern corporate slavery, maskhål (aka mareji aka wormholes) and nonbinary ideas. This store comes with a built-in 'creepy Scandinavian Narnia'. My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2021. But I may just want to check out the next novella to see where it leads. In short, a great idea and a middling execution that needed more space. This part would have been better in a longer story, but here it detracted from the tantalizing glimpses of the adventure fantasy too much, and all the plot lines without proper room to develop them ultimately became too thin and too simple - just the bare bones outlines. The worlds were interesting - the plants, the Hive, the ocean steampunk world! - but the glimpses of them were too brief, yielding page time to the relationship struggles of Ava and Jules, who, in addition to being coworkers have also broken up a few days ago and are torn up about that despite the relationship appearing to have been a bit unhealthy. It tried on all those hats, but sadly there was no room in a story this short to adequately develop all of them, and the focus should have been tighter - and, at least in my preference, centered on the weirdness on the other ends of the wormholes. It almost seems that the story couldn’t quite figure out what it wants to be - a parallel universes adventure story, a relationship drama or a capitalism/consumerism critique. I loved the premise and the beginning, but the rest was a bit underwhelming. “Seriously? We find a wrinkle in time and you tell the manager?” After all, they have watched the training video, haven’t they?
“We’re here to tell you what to do if a wormhole opens up on your shift!”Honestly, wormholes into parallel universes may be the most rational explanation of the terrifying geography- and logic-defying stupor-inducing maze that is IKEA layout.Īnd yes, it makes corporate sense to send two low-paid lowest-seniority employees on a mission to rescue a missing elderly customer - a mission through a wormhole, armed with a GPS-type gadget.
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