Gloria turned off the television and sighed. Dane's second day of testimony had been a repeat of day one. Senators making speeches more than asking questions. They already knew what they wanted to say, what they wanted to happen. Having Dane in the room had just been for show. It had been so frustrating to watch she was sure it must have been infuriating for Dane to have to go through.
If only they had gone in with open minds. If only they had really wanted to understand what they did. What Dane created. It was almost miraculous really.
Gloria knew that people in the company made fun of her for being so relentlessly positive about what they did but she really did feel like it was a gift they were offering the world. A gift that could make positive changes if people would just let it.
When she was in school a teacher lecturing on social norms in society had said that books, television and movies were drivers of change. Because reading, watching, seeing a different experience was often the first step in making changes in the world. If you only lived in one town, only knew one set of people, only saw one outcome for your life you didn't realize there were more options. But books? Well you could go anywhere, do anything, live any life. Television and movies gave the same experience, though not as immersive, Gloria always felt. She thought imagining the scenes in books made them more real than passively watching them on a screen.
But what they did at Memory Lane? That was a step beyond. It was as immersive as a book but as visual as a movie. It was as close to real as you could get without having done it yourself. And yes, most people chose things like seeing Niagara Falls, but even that could broaden your life she felt. If for no other reason than seeing the other faces around you at Niagara Falls. The variety of people in the world.
Imagine if people chose to experience what it was like to be there when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke? They had 6 experiences from different speeches for that one. Or what if you chose to experience what it was like to be a Drag Queen at Stonewall? Or just to spend a day as a man instead of a woman or a woman instead of a man or a person who was a different color than you are? Just to feel the world from their perspective? That could bring so much change to the world. Positive change. She really believed it.
Though it was hard to hold on to her optimism when you had people who were only interested in the specialty catalog. She had argued against that until she was hoarse. Why would you want to experience being the victim of a brutal crime? Or worse committing one? But the amount of money that could be made from that area meant she lost. Though the ethical argument on harvesting the criminal experiences gave her at least a partial win. They would only use experiences from people who were caught and punished and part of the experience had to be the moment they were caught or when they were sentenced. There had to be a repercussion experience as well. It wasn't much of a victory but it was something.
Dane would be back in the office tomorrow afternoon and they would discuss what he thought about the hearings then. She was uncharacteristically pessimistic. Even if they wanted to give their technology over to law enforcement she was sure they wouldn't want to go through the weeks and weeks of training that even their entry level employees did. She knew they wanted to be able to open a mind and read it like a cheap paperback. If they had taken even a moment to listen to Dane's testimony they would understand it doesn't work that way. And as far as regulation went, they were great at handling that themselves. Hundreds of locations, thousands of experiences cloned and thousands of satisfied experiencers. But they were only interested in the California case. Which was definitely tragic but it wasn't even their company. They had a pristine track record. Of course they didn't want to talk about the successes.
Grandstanders.
That's all they were. A bunch of grandstanders. She'd like to make them all sit down and experience what it was like to watch them, to see themselves preening and posturing through the eyes of their constituents. To see how disgusted people were with that particular show! Maybe then they'd stop. But she had a feeling if she could get them in to the store most of them would want to be specialty catalog experiencers.
She shivered a little.
Weirdos.
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