Earlier that morning, before either of the new Mrs. Richards woke up, their respective 'assistants' were having an early morning meeting over coffee. Tracey rubbed some of the tiredness from her eyes as she sipped her coffee, across the table from her Olivia's facilitator Audrey was nursing a cup of joe of her own. Audrey was a cute if not overly beautiful woman in her early thirties with shoulder length red hair and pale skin. Both she and Tracey were wearing modest, professional outfits, a simple black blouse and slacks for Tracey, and a basic cream cardigan over a collared shirt with a knee length white skirt for Audrey. While they had much more autonomy than their nominal bosses, their wardrobes were also dictated by Femcorp, in this case intended to make sure they faded into the background compared to their more fashionable bosses.
"How's sleeping beauty doing so far?" Audrey asked, her voice betraying a slight Canadian accent. Sleeping Beauty was her nickname for Sierra, since she'd needed to be asleep some time longer than Olivia, who was already two weeks into her reeducation.
"Better than expected actually," Tracey admitted. "Based on the scale of the change I expected more pushback than I'm getting; we go through all her day one lessons without a hiccup, and she even seemed to enjoy herself a bit, though the alcohol might have played a part."
Audrey nodded, "well, it's good she's acclimating well. They were chosen for these roles for a reason after all." The populace of Lakeview's newly assigned roles weren't nearly as random as they first appeared, instead being based on rigorous psychological profiling, at least according to the company. Supposedly they could identify the underlying essential components of a person, divorced from their circumstances, and then project how they'd perform to match them to the necessary roles for the society they intended to build. For instance Athena had been identified as someone with a powerful drive and passion and a high level of intelligence. Unchanged, it likely would have developed into involvement with counter-culture groups and advocacy for social causes later in life, but would instead be repurposed into making her a ruthless corporate shark. Audrey sighed a little, "I wish her lovely wife was so compliant."
"How's that going by the way? Still having trouble with the chanting?" Tracey asked. Apparently Athena/Olivia kept reciting supposed protection charms under her breath during her first days awake, something that was very out of character for the new Olivia. Olivia Richards was no-nonsense and rational, with not time for bogus hocus pocus.
Audrey gave a so-so gesture, "a little bit but it's getting better. Some days she's more Olivia, some days she slips back into old habits but it's trending positive. We've had two days with no mention of the occult, and the more invested she gets in her business education module, the more that seems to be taking her attention. I'm not too worried, it's a process after all."
Tracey nodded encouragingly, glad to hear Olivia was making progress. While the future CEO wasn't her charge, she and Audrey needed to work together very closely due to their subjects' close relationship, especially during this delicate period. As they fleshed out the two new women, details needed to be kept consistent after all. "I saw you had another meeting with Raoul today," Tracey mentioned. Raoul Rivera was a part of the style team overseeing the wardrobes of the new high profile residents of Lakeview.
"Yeah, she's developing well on the work side of things, but I want to push her along on assimilating Olivia's personal life," Audrey explained. "We're going to pick out the rings today, so I'll be sure to CC you on what she picks in case you have any input for the Memory Department." Olivia would be selecting wedding bands along with the engagement ring she would have proposed to Sierra with from a suitable selection. After that had been selected, and a few other details ironed out, the Memory department could start working on a synthetic memory of the proposal for later implantation into Sierra and Olivia.
"Ooh, so exciting," Tracey cooed, "I hope she picks something stunning for the boss lady." Memory alteration under the Femcorp method was done in two primary ways, and could be a delicate process. The first was by changing existing memories, by overwriting details with the details of the subjects new lives, and this happened as a natural result of their subliminal programming. Typically universal stuff like playing games as a kid and so on. They often wouldn't lose the original version of these memories, but the overwritten versions would lay on top so to speak.
The other method was more complicated, and involved the implantation of completely fictitious scenarios through a variant of Femcorp's flash learning technology. With this they could create memories out of whole cloth, depicting events that had never really happened. For Sierra, for instance, the former method could cut and paste a younger Sierra atop Jon in her memories with a few minor details shifting, but the latter method was required for something like a proposal that Jon had nothing comparable to.
Synthetic memories had their downsides; if they felt too foreign to the subject, they'd be rejected, sometimes with disastrous results, and of course details had to be kept consistent if more than one subject was in the scenario. This was why they waited to start implanting memories until the new personalities had already started to take shape. It would probably be at least another week before Sierra was ready.
Speaking of Sierra, a buzzing from her smart watch alerted Tracey that she needed to get going to meet her 'boss' for their morning rundown. She took a sip of her coffee, curious to see what Sierra would pick to wear from her new wardrobe that day.
