CML - Custom Made Lover [Slow Updates]

CML - Custom Made Lover, Chapter 2

All of the hallways and elevators were cleaned and repaired daily. Walking about the Living Unit that housed Caleb's apartment, unit B, one might think they had wandered in to a luxury hotel instead of corporate housing. There were less fancy looking Living Units, like D and E, which were reserved for lower ranking personnel but even those were kept spotless; Ryan Corp had an image to uphold. The trip up to the sixteenth level was a short one as the elevator zoomed up the shoot noiselessly coming to rest gently at the requested floor.

The lights in Caleb's apartment came to life slowly, casting the rooms in a soft yellow glow. He walked about the rooms, considering them. He had spent most of his time elsewhere, at work, at work-related parties or eating out; he had never bothered with cooking and his kitchen showed it, being in virtually pristine condition. It was quite a large apartment for a single male and some of the rooms had never been decorated. They had been used as storage spaces in the years that followed and some of the boxes in them, Caleb was sure, had been placed there on the day of his arrival and never touched since. He prodded at some of them, opening a lid carefully to peek at its contents. A lot of them were filled with his old toys and items from his youth. Some had stacks of actual paper books in them; an inheritance from his grandparents.

Paper books had become obsolete as everyone absorbed their information on the fly in what ever format they so desired. Sitting down with an actual static hard copy which could never be altered or updated seemed very outlandish; books these days were kept as collector's items and some of the more wealthy people would have whole rooms full of them as if to say 'see how rich I am that I can afford to waste so much space'.

Caleb pulled a dusty volume of 'The Old Man and the Sea' from one of the boxes and opened it, feeling the texture of the ink on paper. The last time he had looked at it he had sat on his grandfather's lap as a small child and flipped through the pages, attempting to read it. Nothing on the pages had moved and there was no interaction to be had whatsoever so young Caleb had quickly grown tired of it, much to his grandfather's amusement.

It had surprised him when he learned, after his grandfathers' death, that the old man had left him some of his paper books. Even though their contents did not interest him he kept them as physical reminders of those times spent at his grandparents' house. And, he noted as he stared at the book appreciatively, they would look good on a shelf somewhere as a display of his supposedly great fortune.

He put the book back down carefully and for a moment just stood in silence, looking about the room. Soon it would no longer be just him living here and he might need the rooms for something else. He had never had any interest in such things as exercise equipment or hobbyist things but he would be spending considerably more time here now; perhaps a shopping spree was in order.

He would wait with purchasing anything, though, until after Nathan had come in to being and expressed an interest in some form of entertainment or creative pursuit; they could then go shopping together.

Leaving the empty rooms behind he walked in to the lounge, the only room that saw any real use, and accessed his itinerary from the infoscreen; he had two appointments the next day. The first would be early in the morning at the Rejuvenation Center; the treatment would be intensive as they would reverse thirty odd years of aging in only a few hours. He did not look forward to the procedure as he had been told it could be quite painful, though he could opt to be unconscious during said time. That sounded like a good idea...

His second appointment was at eleven in the morning over at the Numan laboratory to discuss Nathan's creation. He had already forwarded the image to them so they could study it and make a suitable mold out of it. Tomorrow he would get to see their 3D rendition of what his soon-to-be lover would look like. They would also have lots of questions for him to answer regarding such things as Nathan's personality traits, physical qualities and the like. This line of questioning would then be followed up by a short course in handling the Newly Created along with some tips and tricks to help him on his way.